“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.” A. Lincoln, unpublished fragment (ca. 1857)
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I gave nothing yesterday. Not to anybody, not even Bernie, in whose 2020 campaign I wisely invested 2,000 bucks. (He refunded the requisite “overpayment.”)
Why not?
Call it benevolence, call it charity, call it philanthropy, call it altruism, effective or otherwise—it’s a worthless vocation, an empty idea, an illegitimate cause, and/or a bad joke. It is at the very least a profoundly immoral enterprise that robs the present of needed resources and the future of genuine possibilities. For it is in keeping with the “somewhat disgusting morbidity” (Keynes) that still mutilates our personalities by convincing us that the highest conceivable morality is the result of repressing our desires in the name of reason—more familiarly, in favor of abstinence, thrift, saving for a rainy day, and assorted other idiocies.
Marx famously said that workers spend what they get in the form of wages, while capitalists get what they spend as returns on their investments. Workers are consumers, in other words, not savers, because their incomes pay for the basics of food, clothing, and shelter, and that’s about it—unless, of course, they work for Walmart, where food stamps are part of the “compensation package,” or as adjunct professors, museum curators, musicians, and assistant editors, in lines of work that require second and third jobs just to pay the rent, or at Starbucks and Amazon, where the right to bargain collectively in good faith offends their CEOs, or, most obviously, in the “hospitality industry,” where servers still get paid a pittance and have no health benefits. (You can read all about these apparent anomalies at “Fuck Work,” Aeon, November 25, 2016, and/or my “What Now, After Work?” in three parts here at jameslivingston@substack.com, and/or Alissa Quart’s recent piece at The New Republic, November 29, 2022, and/or Jacobin’s ongoing coverage of labor’s current reawakening.)
As Bernie keeps reminding us, at least half of all working people in the US live paycheck to paycheck, and the overwhelming majority of them has saved little or nothing for retirement. “Thrift” is not a choice they can consider and make—it’s imposed on them by a distribution of income and a fixed menu of fiscal/monetary policies that reward property (capital) at the expense of persons (labor), and, not incidentally, that tighten the grip of the past (accumulated wealth, dead labor) on the present (wage income, living labor).
The Nobel Prize-winning economist W. Arthur Lewis explained this coercive asymmetry in The Theory of Economic Growth (1955), sixty years before Thomas Piketty’s more exciting alarm bell in the night:
“At any level of income, people can consume only the quantity of consumer goods which exists. Since their incomes derive from producing consumer goods and [capital] goods, it follows that they must save a part of their income equal to the value of the [capital] goods which have been produced. . . . What they are thus forced to save may not, however, correspond to what they would like to save at that level of income.”
Translation: What workers are forced to save—what they do not receive in the form of wages to be spent on consumer goods—is equal to the value of the income withheld from circulation as (a) profits, (b) retained earnings (e.g., Apple’s billions of idle cash on hand), (c) maintenance expenditures on plant and equipment out of depreciation funds, (d) stock buy-backs and dividends (capital gains), or (e) high-end expenditures on yachts, mansions, artwork, and other insignia of leisure class release from the rigors of work. (Elon Musk’s pantomime of “hard-core” work, or rather entrepreneurial energy, is laughable precisely because everyone knows that he mistakes long hours for hard work, and great wealth for high intelligence.)
And now comes Effective Altruism to attach ethical significance to the get-rich-quick schemes of Silicon Valley wiz-kids like Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried—that is, to define their ugly, anal-compulsive drive to accumulate wealth as the necessary preface to moral improvement in the future. Once upon a time, a century ago, when serious economists like John Bates Clark were asking themselves how to justify capital’s share of national income in terms of its contribution to the sum of value created by work, they wrote about the marginal productivity of entrepreneurial energy in the here and now. These days, pseudo-philosophers like William MacAskill and Peter Singer justify it by a strictly utilitarian accounting that postpones the benefits of profits, saving, and investment—”earning to give,” they call it—to a distant future, where freedom, equality, property, and Bentham finally rule, unbound by obligation to any principle except “the greatest good of the greatest number” as they, the rich kids and the cosseted servants of power, have calculated that quality and this quantity.
Utilitarianism is a joke, of course, especially in the hands of well-educated twits like Singer and MacAskill, thinkers who make the addled Freddy Ayer and his antecedents (Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, Bertrand Russell) sound like philosopher kings. Marx’s ridicule of Bentham should have been the last word on that earnest old fool, but Russell and Ayer (god sons, believe it or not, of Mill and Russell, respectively) kept the faith that now animates Effective Altruism. (Perhaps Singer and MacAskill now participate in the annual celebration of Oxbridge utilitarians which includes the unveiling of Bentham’s skull.) In Volume 1 of Capital (1867), Marx put it approximately like this. To ascertain what is good for the majority of human beings, you have to be able to say what their purpose on earth is—that is, you have to deduce ought from is, from what you posit as human nature. Otherwise you’ve decided that the bourgeois proprieties, and the anal-compulsive behaviors that enact and enforce them, are trans-historical properties of the species which infallibly designate what is good for most of us.
It’s a ludicrous proposition at best, and not just because these proprieties and behaviors have long outlived their, uh, utility, having turned western civilization into a Hobbesian nightmare. The young John Dewey was cautious to a fault in criticizing Bentham and Mill in his first big book, Outlines of a Theory of Ethics, which he wrote while collaborating with Franklin Ford, a radical syndicalist, in launching a popular little magazine, “Thought News.” But his verdict on utilitarianism was as damning as Marx’s: it offered no way, Dewey insisted, to translate the individual pursuit of happiness into a regard for, or a commitment to, the common good, the general welfare:
“Mill is guilty of the fallacy known logically as the fallacy of division—arguing from a collective whole to the distributed units. Because all men want to be happy, it hardly follows that every man wants all to be happy. There is, accordingly, no direct road from individualistic hedonism—private pleasure—to universalistic—general pleasure.” Or again: “Universalistic hedonism thus, more or less expressly, takes for granted a social order, or community of persons, of which the agent is is simply one member like any other. This is the ideal which it proposes to realize. In this way—although at the cost of logical suicide—the ideal gets a content and a definiteness upon which it is possible to have judgments.”
It is in this context, his analysis of utilitarianism, that Dewey sets fire to the claims of charity, altruism, philanthropy, and “giving back,” suggesting that these are the means by which wealthy individuals assert their social control over people less fortunate :
“There is a tendency in the present emphasis of altruism to erect the principle of charity, in a sense which implies continued social inequality, and social slavery, or undue dependence of one upon another, into a fundamental moral principle. It is well to ‘do good’ to others, but it is much better to do this by securing for them the freedom which makes it possible for them to get along in the future without such ‘altruism’ from others. There is what has been well termed an ‘egoism of renunciation’; a desire to do for others which, at bottom, is simply an attempt to regulate their conduct.”
Just so, I’d say. Jeff Bezos says he’s going to give away (most of) his money at some point, in an obvious bid to temper the criticism of his insanely outsized fortune. Fuck that. His money controls the labor time of lawyers who are billing thousands of hours in devising anti-union propaganda and anti-worker policies. It is better spent now on higher wages and better working conditions for employees in the Amazon warehouses (and that expenditure won’t affect the company’s monopoly power). For it will make it possible for them to get along in the future without any altruism from on high—to live better lives in the here and now, and, accordingly, to give their own children opportunities they never had.
Shared it Twitter, Jim. Let's see if it gets any more traction.