San Diego Objectivist Study Group

I found it. If there was ever a time when you bought awfully cheap, used, and tattered books for your college courses such that no one would even want to buy them back, and that you were too sentimental to throw them away afterward but kept them on your shelves to collect dust, this one-time look-up justifies it! Here is the secondary source I mentioned at the meeting, which credits the first, contemptuous reference of “capitalism” qua social system to Karl Marx. It is from a textbook for my Western Civ. class:

     Throughout history, said Marx, there has been a class struggle between those who own the means of production and those whose labor has been exploited to provide wealth for this upper class. This opposing tension between classes has pushed history forward into higher stages. In the ancient world, when wealth was based on land, the struggle was between master and slave, patrician and plebeian; during the Middle Ages, when land was still the predominant mode of production, the struggle was between lord and serf. In the modern industrial world, two sharply opposed classes were confronting each other—the capitalists owning the factories, mines, banks, and transportation systems, and the exploited wage earners (the proletariat).
     The class with economic power also controlled the state, said Marx and Engels. That class used political power to protect and increase its property and to hold down the laboring class. “Thus the ancient State was above all the slaveowners’ state for holding down the slaves,” said Engels, “as a feudal State was the organ of the nobles for holding down the … serfs, and the modern representative State is the instrument of the exploitation of wage-labor by capital.”⁹
     Marx and Engels said, too, that the class that controlled material production also controlled mental production, that is, the ideas held by the ruling class became the dominant ideas of society. These ideas, presented as laws of nature or moral and religious standards, were regarded as the truth by oppressor and oppressed alike. In reality, however, these ideas merely reflected the special economic interests of the ruling class. Thus, said Marx, bourgeois ideologists would insit that natural rights and laissez-faire were laws of nature having universal validity. But these “laws” were born of the bourgeoisies’ needs in their struggle to wrest power from an obsolete feudal regime and to protect their property from the state. Similarly, nineteenth-century slaveholders convinced themselves that slavery was morally right—that it had God’s approval and was good for the slave. Slaveowners and capitalist employers alike may have defended their labor systems by citing universal principles that they thought were true, but in reality their systems rested on a single economic consideration—slave labor was good for the pocketbook of the slaveowner and wage labor was good in the same way for the capitalist.
     Under capitalism, said Marx, the worker knew only poverty. He worked long hours for low wages, suffered from periodic unemployment, and lived in squalid overcrowded apartments. Most monstrous of all, he was forced to send his young children into the factories.

Children of nine or ten years are dragged from their squalid beds at two, three, or four o’clock in the morning and compelled to work for a bare subsistence until ten, eleven, or twelve at night, their limbs wearing away, their frames dwindling, their faces whitening, and their humanity absolutely sinking into a stone-like torpor, utterly horrible to contemplate.¹⁰

     Capitalism also produced another kind of poverty, said Marx—poverty of the human spirit. Under capitalism the factory worker was reduced to a laboring beast, performing tedious and repetitive tasks in a dark, dreary, dirty cave, an altogether inhuman environment that deprived people of their human sensibilities. Unlike the artisans in their own shops, factory workers found no pleasure and took no pride in their work; they did not have the satisfaction of creating a finished product that expressed their skills. Work, said Marx, should be a source of fulfillment for people. It should enable people to affirm their personalities and develop their potential. Capitalism, by treating people not as human beings, but as cogs in the production process, alientated people from their work, themselves, and one another.
     Marx believed that capitalist control of the economy and the government would not endure forever. The capitalist system would perish just as the feudal society of the Middle Ages and the slave society of the ancient world had perished. From the ruins of a dead capitalist society a new economic-social system, socialism, would emerge.
     Marx predicted how capitalism would be destroyed. Periodic unemployment would increase the misery of the workers and intensify their hatred of capitalists. Small businessmen and shopkeepers, unable to compete with the great capitalists, would sink into the ranks of the working class, greatly expanding its numbers. Society would become polarized into a small group of immensely wealthy capitalists and a vast proletariat, poor, embittered, and desperate. This monopoloy of capital by the few would become a brake on the productive process. Growing increasingly conscious of their misery, the workers—aroused, educated, and organized by communist intellectuals—would revolt. They would smash the government that helped the capitalists maintain their dominance. Then they would confiscate the property of the capitalists, abolish private property, place the means of production in the workers’ hands, and organize a new society. The Communist Manifesto ends with a ringing call for revolution:

The Communists … openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communist revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
     Workingmen of all countries, unite!¹¹

     Marx did not say a great deal about the new society that would be ushered in by the socialist revolution. With the destruction of capitalism, the distinction between capitalist and work would cease and with it the class conflict. No longer would society be divided into haves and have-nots, oppressor and oppressed. Since this classless society would contain no exploiters, there would be no need for a state, which was merely an instrument for maintaining and protecting the power of the exploiting class. Thus, the state would eventually wither away. The production and distribution of goods would be carried out through community planning and communal sharing, replacing the capitalist system of competition. People would work at varied tasks, rather than being confined to one form of employment, just as Fourier had advocated. No longer factory slaves, people would be free to fulfill their human potential, to improve their relationships on a basis of equality with others, and to work together for the common good.
[Western Civilization: Ideas, Politics & Society; Volume II From the 1600s; 2nd edition - Perry, Chase, Jacob, Jacob, Laue, (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1995), pp. 551b-553b.]

My conclusion, on reading this passage, is that, for Karl Marx, capitalism means the social ruling by the propertied class for the oppression of the propertiedless, just as feudalism is the social ruling of the land-lords for the oppression of the serfs, and just as socialism is the classless society with everybody being both/neither oppressor and/nor oppressed. Supposedly, capitalist societies are to be reorganized into new societies, and the triumphant socialist societies have state institutions that eventually wither away. Capitalism, feudalism, and socialism are therefore social systems—with “social system” taken to mean an integration of ethical, political, and economic principles (principles in the weak sense) being embodied in man-made institutions for the service of individuals living in some geographical area.

Properly speaking, these ‘isms’ may be said to be attributes of the society as a whole, not attributes of its parts. Attribution to the parts at best is metaphorical. And speaking of a part, an economy is either free or controlled, with “controlled” being either totally or mixedly. Only under capitalism is the economy free. Under capitalism, the word “free,” as in “the free economy” or “the free market,” is redundant.

My own answer to Qs. 14 and 17: Someone who believes capitalism as merely an economic system cannot be said to be its defender. If capitalism were merely an economic system, as Fortune magazine once declared, as cited in Rand’s “Requiem for Man” (CTUI 318c), it would indeed be only an instrument—a morally neutral instrument, like a plow, or a gun. But while the economy can be said to be a separate system from, say, the political system, it is only analytically separable, for purposes of learning and reasoning, not causally independent from other integrated systems in a society. (309a) When understood in this sense, an economy can in no way be said to be amoral. It is peopled and is an integrated part of a society. By contrast, a social system as a whole can indeed be judged moral or immoral, based on an objective standard—the standard being whether it protects individual rights and whether it bans physical force from all human relationships. (CTUI “What Is Capitalism?” 18d) Thus, capitalism can be defended morally, politically, and economically only if it is taken to be a social system, one that is conducive to human survival. And it is. On the moral defense of capitalism, I quote Ayn Rand:

The moral justification of capitalism does not lie in the altruist claim that it represents the best way to achieve the “common good.” It is true that capitalism does—if that catch-phrase has any meaning—but this is merely a secondary consequence. The moral justification of capitalism lies in the fact that it is the only system consonant with man’s rational nature, that it protects man’s survival qua man, and that its ruling principle is justice. (20c)

The study group will read next a treatise on economics in which the author takes capitalism to mean an entire social system and not merely an economic system. As Rand et al. have done to address the ethical objections to capitalism, this treatise promises to address its economic objections and, more, to extend positive truths about the science of economics.

During the discussion of CTUI’s Chapter 24 “Requiem for Man” this past Sunday, I heard two related comments about Ayn Rand’s peculiar use of those words that allegedly already have established meanings. The words being referred were “faith” and “sacred.” The first comment was a reaction to my statement that mysticism as an epistemological doctrine can be classified under emotionalism. The reaction was that the basis of “faith” isn’t a matter of emotion, but that it is an appeal to a mystical/divine realm that is beyond this natural world. The second comment was a reaction against Rand’s redefinition of the conventionally religious word “sacred” into one with a secular meaning. It was to the effect that her penchant for doing so opens her philosophical ideas to be misunderstood by the unawares. Both comments have at their roots one common error. Let me explain.

The common error lies in allowing invalid definitions of valid concepts of things in reality. We normally hear the prescription to avoid using invalid concepts. That is, we should take care as rational beings not to refer to “ghosts,” “unicorns,” “gods,” etc. in our daily lives, as if they are real. They may be fine in imaginative literature, but not in nonfiction. They may fine in hypothetical discourse, but not in explanations. They may be said in the negative, as in their denials, but never in the positive. Because they don’t refer to anything in reality, they are invalid concepts. But there is another prescription, one that we rarely hear: that we should disallow invalid definitions of valid concepts.

What facts of reality give rise to this prescription? Definitions secure “identity” to concepts in the mind. They serve three functions: 1) they give us “membership rules” to let in or keep out referents of concepts; 2) they interrelate concepts to one another; and 3) they condense our knowledge of the referents–giving us the highlight, the summary, the essence. When we have a malformed definition, we don’t have a clear idea in mind when we think or communicate. And if thinking is a form of awareness of reality, with awareness being a primary means of survival, then invalid definitions impair our thinking, long-term living, and ultimately our survival.

There are many ways to form definitions that don’t serve their actual functions. In one sense, invalid definitions are useless to us; in another, dangerous. Yet, following the philosophy of science that theirs is strictly a descriptive science, writers of conventional logic textbooks actually promote bad techniques of definitions. They strive to be agnostic about whether there is one best technique. Thus logic textbooks list an array of known ways to form definitions without a prescription for ranking them or preferring one over another. For example, in my copy of the Copi and Cohen textbook Introduction to Logic (10th ed., 1998), the professors list no less than six techniques: definitions by example, ostensive definitions, semi-descriptive definitions, synonymous definitions, operational definitions, definitions by genus and difference. (p. 147, 158) Objectivism of course recommends the last for nearly all practical purposes.

There is no guarantee even with the right technique that a definition is adequate and true of reality. (That is another negative about conventional logic. Definitions for logicians and semanticists cannot ever be said to be true or false. They are all stipulative.) This is the occasion when the above prescription comes into play. Definitions need to be evaluated for validity. Said in another way, once we have determined that there are some things in reality to be conceptualized–that is, once we have determined that a concept is needed–and once we have formulated a definition, via a proper technique, for that concept, we need to verify and validate it against reality. One could say that this is an extension to the proper technique; or, as some Objectivists (e.g., Peikoff, Kelley, Rand) have observed, this is an essential part of the proper technique. Either way, it is erroneous to leave a definition of any concept unexamined. And if a definition is found to be invalid, it is doubly erroneous to continue relying on it in thinking and discourse.

This brings us back to last Sunday’s discussion. If mysticism is an epistemological doctrine that posits certain means of acquiring knowledge, with the means being faith in a supernatural realm; then the doctrine is false. It is false because the supernatural does not exist. Is there a valid concept anywhere in the doctrine? Sure. “Faith” is one. People do rely on some means to arrive at knowledge. “Mystic” is another; it names a class of people who claim to have acquired knowledge by means of faith. One can refer to an actual mystic, as opposed to a “ghost, which one cannot. Likewise, one can refer to the means called “faith” since people do rely on it. But what is it in reality when people do refer to it. “Faith” as a concept to refer to something in reality, therefore, needs to be defined properly if it is to help us stay in contact with reality. The conventional definition is inadequate, for it fails to serve both the function of delimiting the referents of the concept and the function of interrelating the concept to other concepts of consciousness. So although there is reality to the concept “faith,” its conventional definition is invalid. A rational person thus needs to redefine it in order to see through it to reality.

As it happens, Ayn Rand has redefined the concept “faith” to refer to the reliance of emotion to arrive at truth. Mystics can claim to be logical, and most theologians are. The Medieval scholastics were great at logical demonstrations. But at the beginnings of all their chains of deductions are the articles of faith, which they never question but only accepted. And if once in a while they have doubts about them, the prescription was to wait it out and let the “spirits” move them into acceptance. “Spirit,” by the way, as Rand redefines it, is one’s consciousness in relation to one’s personal identity. When a mystic shuts out the physical world and waits out for the “spirits” to move him, he is waiting for some other processes of consciousness to remove his doubts. He is waiting to be ruled by his emotions. Faith then is the reliance on his emotional processes to negate facts and doubts.

Similarly, Rand defines “sacred” to be the quality of “the best, the highest possible to man.” (CTUI “Requiem for Man” 303d) In contrast, the invalid definition held conventionally has been that the sacred is an exclusive attribute of some holy divinity, of some deity. If there is such a concept pertaining to reality, it has to have a definition referring to some aspect of reality and not to nothing. People do worship, and they do feel the object of their worship as sacred. Such feelings exist, and the emotional experience needs to be conceptualized. While the conventional definition misplaces its reference, Rand’s redirects it properly toward man.

But what about the charge that she is being contrarian for the sake of notoriety. Why doesn’t she just invent different words for her concepts and let be the existing ones to the existing words? The underlying premise here is that words and concepts are somehow separable. Indeed, some facts do suggest such seeming separations, as in the fact of multiple languages. The German word “Hund,” the French word “chien,” and the English word “dog” all mean the same thing, namely, the class of dogs in reality. When meaning is the same, the concept is the same. Another fact is that within the same language, multiple words refer to the same one concept, also known as synonyms, for example, “liberty” and “freedom.” Still another fact is that the same word may have many different meanings. For example, “bat” may mean either a short-tailed flying rodent or a piece of sports equipment. In this last case, “bat” is deemed not problematic since the meaning is unambiguous and depends on the different contexts. So it seems, the argument goes, that a word and a concept does not have any connection of necessity. It’s all conventional. Thus, when Rand overloads existing words with her concepts within the same context, she opens herself to be misunderstood, because their definitions are so different from the conventional ones. Therefore, the argument concludes, she should have invented her own words for her concepts.

My counterargument is this. In all these cases, Rand is not positing a different concept and co-opting the same word for it; she is in fact identifying the concept properly. She takes reality as primary. Starting with reality, a rational person forms concepts in order to conform to reality. Concepts are products of consciousness. Once identified they are absolute and eternally permanent. (She defines “eternal” to mean the absence of the measurement of time.) One does not start with words and work backward to things in reality; this approach relies on the primacy of consciousness. While it is true that a concept is not yet a concept without being concretized in some visual-auditory symbol, i.e., a word; so too, such a concrete symbol cannot be a word without having been fixed to a product of consciousness. In other words, every concept has been and must have been discovered by some mind and given some concrete visual-auditory form. The link between word and concept therefore is a link of necessity, as necessary as a man-made fact; that is, once made, a fact is a fact of reality, an identity that is absolute and eternally unchanging. A valid concept must have a valid definition if its identity is to be fixed in the mind and to be distinguished from all other concepts. It is no exaggeration to conclude then that to a mystic, “words are mere approximations.” (CTUI 297c)

When a definition to a valid definition is discovered to be invalid, it needs to be corrected systematically. The urgency of its correction is on the same par has having discovered that one has all these years memorized wrong that ‘9 x 9 = 83′. It would be senseless to then say, let’s keep the sentence as it is but rememorize the correction via some other thought process. Rand’s razor applies here, of course.

Let Rand herself contribute to the explanation, and let it suffice as my conclusion. In a passage in the introduction to the 25th anniversary edition of The Fountainhead, Rand writes:

     This leads me to a wider issue which is involved in every line of The Fountainhead and which has to be understood if one wants to understand the causes of its lasting appeal.
     Religion’s monopoly in the field of ethics has made it extremely difficult to communicate the emotional meaning and connotations of a rational view of life. Just as religion has pre-empted the field of ethics, turning morality against man, so it has usurped the highest moral concepts of our language, placing them outside this earth and beyond man’s reach. “Exaltation” is usually taken to mean an emotional state evoked by contemplating the supernatural. “Worship” means the emotional experience of loyalty and dedication to something higher than man. “Reverence” means the emotion of a sacred respect, to be experienced on one’s knees. “Sacred” means superior to and not-to-be-touched-by any concerns of man or of this earth. Etc.
     But such concepts do name actual emotions, even though no supernatural dimension exists; and these emotions are experienced as uplifting or ennobling, without the self-abasement required by religious definitions. What, then, is their source or referent in reality? It is the entire emotional realm of man’s dedication to a moral ideal. Yet apart from the man-degrading aspects introduced by religion, that emotional realm is left unidentified, without concepts, words or recognition.
     It is this highest level of man’s emotions that has to be redeemed from the murk of mysticism and redirected at its proper object: man.
     It is in this sense, with this meaning and intention, that I would identify the sense of life dramatized in The Fountainhead as man worship. (p. ix)

It has been a hectic semester, but  I am glad we finished Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal in time to enjoy the rest of the Memorial weekend. Now get ready to begin CATOE this summer.