Capitalism, The Sole System That Rules The World

The fact that the entire globe now operates according to the same economic principles— production organized for profit using legally free wage labor and mostly privately owned capital, with decentralized coordination—is without historical precedent.

In the past, capitalism, whether in the Roman Empire, sixth-century Mesopotamia, medieval Italian city-states, or the Low Countries in the modern era, always had to coexist—at times within the same political unit—with other ways of organizing production. These included hunting and gathering, slavery of various kinds, serfdom (with workers legally tied to the land and banned from offering their labor to others), and petty-commodity production carried out by independent craftspeople or small-scale farmers. Even as recently as one hundred years ago, when the first incarnation of globalized capitalism appeared, the world still included all of these modes of production. Following the Russian Revolution, capitalism shared the world with communism, which reigned in countries that contained about one-third of the human population. None but capitalism remain today, except in very marginal areas with no influence on global developments.

The global victory of capitalism has many implications that were anticipated by Marx and Engels in 1848. Capitalism facilitates—and when foreign profits are higher than domestic, even craves—the cross-border exchange of goods, the movement of capital, and in some cases the movement of labor.

It is thus not an accident that globalization developed the most in the period between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I, when capitalism largely held sway. And it is no accident that today’s globalization coincides with the even more absolute triumph of capitalism. Had communism triumphed over capitalism, there is little doubt that despite the internationalist creed professed by its founders, it would not have led to globalization. Communist societies were overwhelmingly autarkic and nationalistic, and there was minimal movement of goods, capital, and labor across borders. Even within the Soviet bloc, trade was carried out only to sell surplus goods or according to mercantilist principles of bilateral bargaining. This is entirely different from capitalism, which, as Marx and Engels noted, has an inherent tendency to expand.

The uncontested dominion of the capitalist mode of production has its counterpart in the similarly uncontested ideological view that money-making not only is respectable but is the most important objective in people’s lives, an incentive understood by people from all parts of the world and all classes. It may be difficult to convince a person who differs from us in life experience, gender, race, or background of some of our beliefs, concerns, and motivations. But that same person will easily understand the language of money and profit; if we explain that our objective is to get the best possible deal, they will be able to readily figure out whether cooperation or competition is the best economic strategy to pursue.

The fact that (to use Marxist terms) the infrastructure (the economic base) and superstructure (political and judicial institutions) are so well aligned in today’s world not only helps global capitalism maintain its dominion but also makes people’s objectives more compatible and their communication clearer and easier, since they all know what the other side is after. We live in a world where everybody follows the same rules and understands the same language of profit-making.

Such a sweeping statement does need some qualification. There are indeed some small communities scattered around the world that shun money-making, and there are some individuals who disdain it. But they do not influence the shape of things and the movement of history. The claim that individual beliefs and value systems are aligned with capitalism’s objectives should not be taken to imply that all of our actions are entirely and always driven by profit. People sometimes perform actions that are genuinely altruistic or are driven by other objectives. But for most of us, if we assess these actions by time spent or money forgone, they play only a small role in our lives. Just as it is wrong to call billionaires “philanthropists” if they acquire an enormous fortune through unsavory practices and then give away a small fraction of their wealth, so it is wrong to zero in on a small subset of our altruistic actions and ignore the fact that perhaps 90 percent of our waking lives is spent in purposeful activities whose objective is improving our standard of living, chiefly through money-making.

This alignment of individual and systemic objectives is a major success achieved by capitalism. Unconditional supporters of capitalism explain this success as resulting from capitalism’s “naturalness,” that is, the alleged fact that it perfectly reflects our innate selves—our desire to trade, to gain, to strive for better economic conditions and a more pleasant life. But I do not think that, beyond some primary functions, it is accurate to speak of innate desires as if they existed independently of the societies we live in. Many of these desires are the product of socialization within the societies where we live—and in this case within capitalist societies, which are the only ones that exist.

It is an old idea, argued by writers as distinguished as Plato, Aristotle, and Montesquieu, that a political or economic system stands in harmonious relation with a society’s prevailing values and behaviors. This is certainly true of present-day capitalism. Capitalism has been remarkably successful in imparting its objectives to people, prompting or persuading them to adopt its goals and thus achieving an extraordinary concordance between what capitalism requires for its expansion and people’s ideas, desires, and values. Capitalism has been much more successful than its competitors in creating the conditions that, according to the political philosopher John Rawls, are necessary for the stability of any system: namely, that individuals in their daily actions manifest and thus reinforce the broader values upon which the social system is based.

Capitalism’s mastery of the world has been achieved, however, with two different types of capitalism: the liberal meritocratic capitalism that has developed incrementally in the West over the past two hundred years, and the state-led political, or authoritarian, capitalism that is exemplified by China but also exists in other parts of Asia (Singapore, Vietnam, Burma) and parts of Europe and Africa (Russia and the Caucasian countries, Central Asia, Ethiopia, Algeria, Rwanda).

 As has occurred so often in human history, the rise and apparent triumph of one system or religion is soon followed by some sort of schism between different variants of the same credo. After Christianity triumphed across the Mediterranean and the Near East, it experienced ferocious ideological disputes and divisions (the one between Orthodoxy and Arianism being the most notable), and eventually it produced the first big schism between the Western and Eastern churches. No different was the fate of Islam, which almost immediately after its dizzying conquest split into Sunni and Shia branches. And finally, communism, capitalism’s twentieth-century rival, did not long remain a monolith, splitting into Soviet-led and Chinese versions.

The worldwide victory of capitalism is, in that respect, no different: we are presented with two models of capitalism that differ not only in the political but also economic and, to a much lesser degree, social spheres. And it is, I think, rather unlikely that whatever happens in the competition between liberal and political capitalisms, one system will come to rule the entire globe.

The economic success of political capitalism is the force behind the second remarkable development mentioned above: the rise of Asia. It is true that the rise of Asia is not solely due to political capitalism; liberal capitalist countries like India and Indonesia are also growing very fast. But the historical transformation of Asia is without question being led by China.

  

This change, unlike the rise of capitalism to global supremacy, has a historical precedent in that it returns the distribution of economic activity in Eurasia to roughly the position that existed before the Industrial Revolution. But it does it with a twist. While levels of economic development of western Europe and Asia (China) were roughly the same in, for example, the first and second centuries, or the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the two parts of the world barely interacted at the time and generally lacked knowledge about each other. Indeed, we know much more about their relative development levels now than contemporaries knew at the time.

Today, in contrast, interactions are intense and continuous. Income levels in both regions are also many times greater. These two parts of the world, western Europe and its North American offshoots, and Asia, which are together home to 70 percent of world population and 80 percent of world output, are in constant contact through trade, investment, movement of people, transfer of technology, and exchange of ideas. The resulting competition between these regions is keener than it would be otherwise because the systems, while similar, are not identical. This is the case whether competition takes place by design, with one system trying to impose itself on the other and on the rest of the world, or simply by example, with one system being copied more readily by the rest of the world than the other.

This geographical rebalancing is putting an end to the military, political, and economic superiority of the West, which has been taken for granted during the past two centuries. Never in history had the superiority of one part of the world over another been as great as was the superiority of Europe over Africa and Asia in the nineteenth century.

That superiority was most evident in colonial conquests, but it was also reflected in income gaps between the two parts of the world and thus in global income inequality among all citizens of the world, which we can estimate with relative precision from 1820 onward, as illustrated in Figure 1.1.

In this graph, and throughout the book, inequality is measured using an index called the Gini coefficient, which ranges in value from 0 (no inequality) to 1 (maximum inequality). (The index is often expressed as a percentage, ranging from 0 to 100, where each percentage point is called a Gini point.) Before the Industrial Revolution in the West, global inequality was moderate, and nearly as much of it was due to differences among individuals living in the same nations as among the mean incomes of individuals in different nations. This changed dramatically with the rise of the West. Global inequality increased almost continuously from 1820 to the eve of World War I, rising from 55 Gini points (roughly the level of inequality that currently exists in Latin American countries) to just under 70 (a level of inequality higher than that in South Africa today).

The rise of income levels in Europe, North America, and later Japan (coupled with the stagnation of China and India) drove most of this increase, though rising income inequality within the nations of what was becoming the First World also played a role. After 1918, there was a short drop in global inequality caused by what—on the broad canvas on which we operate—appear as the blips of World War I and the Great Depression, when Western incomes failed to grow.

After the end of World War II, global inequality stood at its highest level ever, at about 75 Gini points, and it remained at that high plateau until the last decade of the twentieth century. During this time the gap between the West and Asia—China and India in particular—did not grow any further, as Indian independence and Chinese revolution were setting the stage for the growth of these two giants. These two countries thus maintained their relative positions vis-a-vis the West from the late 1940s to the early 1980s. But those positions were highly skewed in favor of the rich countries: the GDP per capita of both India and China was less than one-tenth that of Western countries.

   

That income gap began to change, and dramatically so, after the 1980s. Reforms in China led to growth of approximately 8 percent per capita per annum over the next forty years, sharply narrowing the country’s distance from the West. Today, China’s GDP per capita is at approximately 30–35 percent of the Western level, the same point where it was around 1820, and shows a clear tendency to keep on rising (relative to the West); it will probably continue to do so until the time when incomes become very similar. The economic revolution in China was followed by similar accelerations of growth in India, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, and elsewhere in Asia. Although this growth has been accompanied by rising inequality within each of the countries (especially in China), the closing of the gap with the West has helped reduce global income inequality.

 This is what lies behind the recent drop in global Gini. The convergence of Asian incomes with those in the West took place during another technological revolution, that of information and communication technologies (ICT)—a revolution in production that this time favored Asia. The ICT revolution contributed not only to the much faster growth of Asia but also to the deindustrialization of the West, which, in turn, is not dissimilar to the deindustrialization that happened in India during the Industrial Revolution. We thus have two periods of rapid technological change bookmarking the evolution of global inequality (see Figure 1.1). The effects of the ICT revolution are not over yet, but they are, in many respects, similar to those of the Industrial Revolution: a large reshuffle in worldwide income ranking as some groups advance and others decline, along with significant geographical concentration of such winners and losers.

It is useful to think of these two technological revolutions as mirror images of each other. One led to an increase of global inequality through the enrichment of the West; the other has led to income convergence among large swaths of the globe through the enrichment of Asia. We should expect that income levels will eventually be similar across the entire Eurasian continent and North America, thus helping reduce global inequality even further. (A big unknown, however, is the fate of Africa, which, so far, is not catching up with the rich world and whose population is rising the fastest.)

The economic rebalancing of the world is not only geographical; it is also political. China’s economic success undermines the West’s claim that there is a necessary link between capitalism and liberal democracy. Indeed, this claim is being undermined in the West itself by populist and plutocratic challenges to liberal democracy. The rebalancing of the world brings the Asian experience to the forefront of thinking regarding economic development. Asia’s economic success will make its model more attractive to others and may inform our views about economic development and growth, in a fashion not dissimilar to that in which the B ritish experience and Adam Smith, who drew on that experience, influenced our thinking during the past two centuries.

For the past forty years, the five largest countries in Asia combined (excluding China) have had higher per capita growth rates than the Western economies in all but two years, and this trend is unlikely to change. In 1970, the West produced 56 percent of world output and Asia (including Japan) only 19 percent. Today, those proportions are 37 percent and 43 percent. We can see this trend clearly by comparing the United States with China, and Germany with India (Figure 1.2). The remarkable rise of Asia during the era of globalization is reflected in popular support for globalization, which is the strongest in Asia, and notably in Vietnam (91 percent of people interviewed think globalization is a force for the good), and weakest in Europe, notably in France (where only 37 percent support globalization).

Malaise in the West about globalization is in part caused by the gap between elites, who have done very well, and significant numbers of people who have seen little benefit from globalization, resent it, and, accurately or not, regard global trade and migration as the cause of their ills. This situation eerily resembles the Third World societies of the 1970s, which also exhibited this dualistic character—with the bourgeoisie plugged into the global economic system and most of the hinterland left behind.

The “disease” that was supposed to affect only developing countries (what was called “disarticulation” in neo-Marxist literature) seems to have now moved north and struck the rich world. At the same time, somewhat ironically, the dualistic character of many developing economies is being diminished by their full inclusion in the globalized system of supply chains.

The two types of capitalism, liberal meritocratic and political, now seem to be competing with each other. They are led, respectively, by the United States and China. But even independently of China’s willingness to make available and to “export” an alternative political and, to some extent, economic version of capitalism, political capitalism itself has certain features that make it attractive to the political elites in the rest of the world and not only in Asia: the system provides greater autonomy to political elites. It is also attractive to many ordinary people because of the high growth rates that it seems to promise.

On the other hand, liberal capitalism has many well-known advantages, the most important being that democracy and the rule of law are values in themselves and both, arguably, can be credited with encouraging faster economic development through promoting innovation and allowing social mobility, and thus providing approximately equal chances of success for all. It is the reneging on some crucial aspects of this implicit value system, namely a movement toward the creation of a self perpetuating upper class and polarization between the elites and the rest, that represents the most important threat to the longer-term viability of liberal capitalism. This threat is a danger both to the system’s own survival and to the general attractiveness of the model to the rest of the world.

Excerpted from Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic, published by Harvard University Press, 2019.

With the US and China, Two Types of Capitalism Are Competing With Each Other. By Branko Milanovic.   ProMarket, September 25,  2019

It may be useful to open this topic with an anecdote. Some ten years ago, I found myself in an after-dinner conversation, lubricated by wine, with an American who had been educated at an Ivy League college and was then teaching in Europe. As our conversation drifted toward matters of life, marriage and children, I was initially surprised by his statement that whoever he had married, the outcome in terms of where they lived, what type of house they owned, what kind of holidays and entertainment they would enjoy, and even what colleges their children would attend would be practically the same. His reasoning was as follows: “When I went to [Ivy League institution], I knew that I would marry a woman I met there. Women also knew the same thing. We all knew that our pool of desirable marriage candidates would never be as vast again. And then whomever I married would be a specimen of the same genre: They were all well-educated, smart women who came from the same social class, read the same novels and newspapers, dressed the same, had the same preferences about restaurants, hiking, places to live, cars to drive and people to see, as well about how to take care of the kids and what schools they should attend. It really made almost no difference socially whom among them I married.”

And then he added, “I was not aware of that at the time, but I can surely see it now.”

The story struck me then and stayed in my mind for a long time. It contradicted the cherished myths that we are all deeply different, unique individuals, and that personal decisions such as marriage, which have to do with love and preferences, matter a lot and have a big effect on the rest of our lives. What my friend was saying was precisely the opposite: He could have fallen in love with A, or B, or C, or D, and ultimately would have ended up in virtually the same house, in the same affluent neighborhood—whether in Washington, D.C., Chicago or Los Angeles—with a similar set of friends and interests, and with children going to similar schools and playing the same games. And his story made a lot of sense.

Of course, this scenario assumed that people who attended the same college would couple up. Had he dropped out of college, or not found anyone suitable to marry there, the outcome might have been different (say, a house in a less affluent neighborhood). His story dramatically illustrates the power of socialization: Almost everyone at the top schools comes from more or less equally affluent families, and almost everyone adopts more or less the same values and tastes. And such mutually indistinguishable people marry each other.

Recent research has documented a clear increase in the prevalence of homogamy, or assortative mating (people of the same or similar education status and income level marrying each other). A study based on a literature review combined with decennial data from the American Community Survey showed that the association between partners’ level of education was close to zero in 1970; in every other decade through 2010, the coefficient was positive, and it kept on rising. A different database provides another perspective on this trend; it looks at marriage statistics for American women and men who married when they were “young,” that is, between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. In 1970, only 13 percent of young American men who were in the top decile of male earners married young women who were in the top decile of female earners. By 2017, that figure had risen to almost 29 percent.

Percentage of U.S. men aged 20 to 35 in the top male decile of labor earnings who married women aged 20 to 35 in the top and bottom female deciles by labor earnings, 1970–2017

At the same time, the top decile of young male earners have been much less likely to marry young women who are in the bottom decile of female earners. The rate has declined steadily from 13.4 percent to under 11 percent. In other words, high-earning young American men who in the 1970s were just as likely to marry high-earning as low-earning young women now display an almost three-to- one preference in favor of high-earning women. An even more dramatic change happened for women: the percentage of young high-earning women marrying young high-earning men increased from just under 13 percent to 26.4 percent, while the percentage of rich young women marrying poor young men halved. From having no preference between rich and poor men in the 1970s, women currently prefer rich men by a ratio of almost five to one.

Percentage of women aged 20 to 35 in the top female decile by labor earnings who married men aged 20 to 35 in the top and bottom male deciles by labor earnings, 1970–2017.

In a very ambitious 2017 paper, Pierre-André Chiappori, Bernard Salanié and Yoram Weisstried tried to explain both the rise of assortative mating and the increasing level of education among women (which contrasts with a lack of increase in educational attainment for men). They argued that highly educated women have better marriage prospects, and thus, there is a “marriage education premium,” which is perhaps as important as the usual skill premium that education provides. While the skill premium is, in principle, gender neutral, the marriage education premium is, the authors argue, much higher for women. Underlying this must be greater “pure preference” for homogamy among men because if that did not exist, the rising education level of women might be as much of a deterrence in the marriage market as an attraction.

There is a further link between, on the one hand, assortative mating, and, on the other hand, increasing returns to investment in children, which only more educated couples are able to provide. They can, for example, expose their children to a learning-conducive atmosphere at home and introduce them to cultural experiences that less-educated parents may have little interest in (concerts, libraries, ballet), as well as to elite sports. The importance of linking these seemingly unrelated developments—women’s education, greater work participation by women, assortative marriage patterns, and the increasing importance of early childhood learning—is that it illuminates one of the key mechanisms of within-generation creation of inequality and its intergenerational transmission. If educated, highly skilled, and affluent people tend to marry each other, that by itself will tend to increase inequality. About one-third of the inequality increase in the United States between 1967 and 2007 can be explained by assortative mating, according to research by Koen Decancq, Andreas Peichl and Philippe Van Kerm. For countries in the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), assortative mating accounted for an average of 11 percent of increased inequality between the early 1980s and early 2000s.

But if, in addition, the returns to children’s early education and learning are sharply rising, and if these early advantages can be provided only by very educated parents, who, as the data show, spend much more time with their children than less educated parents, then the road to a strong intergenerational transmission of advantages and inequality is wide open. This is true even if—and it is important to underline this—there is high taxation of inheritance, because inheritance of financial resources is merely one of the advantages that the children of educated and rich parents enjoy. And in many cases, it may not even be the most important part. (Although, as I argue elsewhere, taxation of inheritance is a particularly good policy for leveling the playing field and increasing equality of opportunity, it is an illusion to believe that such taxation will by itself be sufficient to equalize the life chances of children born to rich and poor parents.)

High income and wealth inequality in the United States used to be justified by the claim that everyone had the opportunity to climb up the ladder of success, regardless of family background. This idea became known as the American Dream. The emphasis was on equality of opportunity rather than equality of outcome. It was a dynamic, future-oriented concept. Joseph Schumpeter used a nice metaphor to explain it when he discussed income inequality: We can see the distribution of incomes in any one year as being like the distribution of occupants who are staying on different floors of a hotel, where the higher the floor, the more luxurious the room. If the occupants move around between the floors, and if their children likewise do not stay on the floor where they were born, then a snapshot of which families are living on which floors will not tell us much about which floor those families will be inhabiting in the future, or their long-term position. Similarly, inequality of income or wealth measured at one point in time may give us a misleading or exaggerated idea of true levels of inequality and can fail to account for intergenerational mobility.

The American Dream has remained powerful both in the popular imagination and among economists. But it has begun to be seriously questioned during the past ten years or so, when relevant data have become available for the first time. Looking at twenty-two countries around the world, Miles Corak showed in 2013 that there was a positive correlation between high inequality in any one year and a strong correlation between parents’ and children’s incomes (i.e., low income mobility). This result makes sense, because high inequality today implies that the children of the rich will have, compared to the children of the poor, much greater opportunities. Not only can they count on greater inheritance, but they will also benefit from better education, better social capital obtained through their parents, and many other intangible advantages of wealth. None of those things are available to the children of the poor. But while the American Dream thus was somewhat deflated by the realization that income mobility is greater in more egalitarian countries than in the United States, these results did not imply that intergenerational mobility had actually gotten any worse over time.

Yet recent research shows that intergenerational mobility has in fact been declining. Using a sample of parent-son and parent-daughter pairs, and comparing a cohort born between 1949 and 1953 to one born between 1961 and 1964, Jonathan Davis and Bhashkar Mazumder found significantly lower intergenerational mobility for the latter cohort. They used two common indicators of relative intergenerational mobility: rank to rank (the correlation between the relative income positions of parents and children) and intergenerational income elasticity (the correlation between parents’ and children’s incomes). Both indicators showed an increase in correlation between parents’ and children’s incomes over time (rank to rank increased from 0.22 to 0.37 for daughters and from 0.17 to 0.36 for sons, and intergenerational income elasticity increased from 0.28 to 0.52 for daughters and from 0.13 to 0.43 for sons). For both indicators, the turning point occurred during the 1980s—the same period when U.S. income inequality began to rise. In fact, three changes happened simultaneously: increase in inequality, increase in the returns to education, and increase in the correlation between parents’ and children’s incomes. Thus, we see that not only across countries, but also across time, higher income inequality and lower intergenerational mobility tend go together.

So far, we have only looked at relative mobility. We should also consider absolute intergenerational mobility, that is, the change in real income between generations. Here, too, we see a decline: absolute mobility in the United States declined significantly between 1940 and the 2000s, as a result of a slowdown in economic growth combined with increased inequality. We should keep in mind that absolute mobility is very different from relative mobility, since it depends largely on what happens to the growth rate. For example, absolute mobility can be positive for everyone if the income of every child exceeds the income of their parents, even if the parents’ and children’s positions in the income distribution are exactly the same. In this example, complete intergenerational absolute mobility would coincide with a complete lack of intergenerational relative mobility.

Excerpted from Capitalism, Alone: The Future Of The System That Rules The World, by Branko Milanovic, published by Harvard University Press, 2019.

Rich Like Me: How Assortative Mating Is Driving Income Inequality. By Branko Milanovic.

Quilette, October 18, 2019

Liberal meritocratic capitalism can be best understood by contrasting its distinguishing features with those of nineteenth-century classical capitalism and with social-democratic capitalism, as it existed between approximately the end of the World War II and the early 1980s in Western Europe and North America. We are dealing here with “ideal-typical” features of the systems and ignoring details that varied among countries and across time. But in the following sections, where I focus on liberal meritocratic capitalism alone, I discuss these features in detail for a country that can be taken as prototypical, namely the United States.

Table 2.1 summarizes the differences between the three historical types of capitalism through which Western economies have passed. For simplicity, I take the United Kingdom before 1914 as representative of classical capitalism, Western Europe and the United States from the end of World War II through the early 1980s as representative of social-democratic capitalism, and the twenty-first- century United States as representative of liberal meritocratic capitalism. Note that because the two key features that differentiate liberal from meritocratic capitalism, taxation of inheritance and broadly available public education, have weakened in the United States over the past thirty years, the country may have shifted toward a model of capitalism that is more “meritocratic” and less “liberal.” However, since I am using the United States as an example of all rich capitalist countries, I think it is still acceptable to speak of liberal meritocratic capitalism as a single model.

We start with the key characteristic of every capitalist system—the division of net income between the two factors of production: owners of capital (owners of property more generally) and workers. This division need not coincide with two distinct classes of individuals. It will do so only when one class of individuals receives income only from capital, and a different class receives income only from labor. As we shall see, whether or not these classes overlap is what distinguishes different types of capitalism.

Data on the division of total net income between capital and labor is murky for the period before 1914, since the first estimates for the United Kingdom, which were made by the economist Arthur Bowley, were not done until 1920. Based on this work, it has been argued that the income shares of capital and labor are more or less constant—a trend that came to be called Bowley’s Law. Data produced by Thomas Piketty (2014, 200– 201) for the United Kingdom and France have cast severe doubt on that conclusion, even for the past. For the United Kingdom in the period 1770– 2010, Piketty found that the share of capital oscillated between 20 and 40 percent of national income. In France, between 1820 and 2010, it varied even more widely: from less than 15 percent in the 1940s to more than 45 percent in the 1860s. The percentages became more stable after World War II, however, reinforcing belief in Bowley’s Law. Paul Samuelson, for example, in his influential Economics, included Bowley’s Law among the six basic trends of economic development in advanced countries (although he did allow for some “edging upward of labor’s share”) (Samuelson 1976, 740). However, since the late twentieth century, the share of capital income in total income has been rising. While this tendency has been quite strong in the United States, it has also been documented in most developed countries, as well as developing countries, although the data for the latter must be taken with a strong dose of caution (Karabarbounis and Neiman 2013).

A rising share of capital income in total income implies that capital and capitalists are becoming more important than labor and workers—and thus acquiring more economic and political power. This trend occurred in both classical and liberal meritocratic capitalism, but not in the social-democratic variety (Table 2.1). A rising share of capital in total income also affects interpersonal income distribution because typically, (1) people who draw a large share of income from capital are rich, and (2) capital income is concentrated in relatively few hands. These two factors result almost automatically in greater income inequality between individuals.

To see why both (1) and (2) are indispensable for the automatic translation of higher capital share into greater interpersonal inequality, make the following mental experiment: assume that the share of capital in net income goes up, but that every individual receives the same proportion of income from capital and labor as every other individual. A rising aggregate share of capital income will increase every individual income in the same proportion, and inequality will not change. (Measures of inequality are relative.) In other words, if we do not have a high positive correlation between being “capital-abundant” (that is, deriving a large percentage of one’s income from capital) and being rich, a rising aggregate share of capital does not lead to higher interpersonal inequality. Note that in this example there are still rich and poor people, but there is no correlation between the percentage of income that a person draws from capital and that person’s position in the overall income distribution.

Now, imagine a situation where poor people draw a higher proportion of their income from capital than rich people do. As before, let the overall share of capital in net income increase. But this time, the rising share of capital will reduce income inequality because it will increase proportionately more the incomes of the people at the low end of the income distribution.

But neither of these two mental exercises reflects what is happening in reality in capitalist societies: rather, there is a strong positive association between being capital-abundant and being rich. The richer a person is, the more likely they are to have a high share of their income coming from capital. This has been the case in all types of capitalism (see Table 2.1, rows 2 and 3). This particular characteristic—that capital-abundant people are also rich—may be taken as an immutable characteristic of capitalism, at least in the forms that we have experienced it so far.

The next feature to consider is the link between being well-off in terms of capital (that is, being capital-income- rich within the distribution of capital incomes) and being well-off in terms of earnings (that is, being labor-income- rich within the distribution of labor incomes). One might think that people who are capital-abundant rich are unlikely to be rich in terms of their labor income. But this is not the case at all. A simple example with two groups of people, the “poor” and the “rich,” makes this clear. The poor have overall low income, and most of their income comes from labor; the rich are the opposite. Consider situation 1: The poor have 4 units of income from labor and 1 unit of income from capital; the rich have 4 units of income from labor and 16 units from capital. Here the capital abundant are indeed rich, but the amount of their labor income is the same as that of the poor. Now consider situation 2: Everything stays the same as in situation 1 except that the labor income of the rich increases to 8 units. They are still capital abundant, since they receive a larger share of their total income from capital (16 out of 24 units = 2/3) than the poor do, but now they are also labor-rich (8 units versus only 4 for the poor).

Situation 2 is when the capital-abundant individuals are not only rich but also relatively well off in terms of labor income. Everything else being the same, situation 2 is more unequal than situation 1. This is indeed one of the important differences between, on the one hand, classical and social-democratic capitalisms, and on the other, liberal meritocratic capitalism (see Table 2.1, row 4). The perception and reality of classical capitalism was that capitalists (what I call here capital-abundant individuals) were all very rich but typically did not receive much income from labor; in the extreme case, they received no income from labor at all. It is no accident that Thorstein Veblen labeled them the “leisure class.” Correspondingly, laborers received no income from capital at all. Their income came entirely from labor.  In this case there was a perfect division of society into capitalists and workers, with both sides receiving zero income from the other factor of production. (If we add landlords, who received 100 percent of their income from land, we have the tripartite classification of classes introduced by Adam Smith.) Inequality was high in such fragmented societies because capitalists tended to have lots of capital, and the return on capital was (often) high, but inequality was not compounded by these same individuals also having high labor incomes.

The situation is different in liberal meritocratic capitalism, as found in the United States today. People who are capital-rich now tend also to be labor-rich (or to put it in more contemporary terms, they tend to be individuals with high “human capital”). Whereas the people at the top of the income distribution under classical capitalism were financiers, rentiers, and owners of large industrial holdings (who are not hired by anyone and hence have no labor income), today a significant percentage of the people at the top are highly paid managers, web designers, physicians, investment bankers, and other elite professionals. These people are wage workers who need to work in order to draw their large salaries. But these same people, whether through inheritance or because they have saved enough money through their working lives, also possess large financial assets and draw a significant amount of income from them.

The rising share of labor income in the top 1 percent (or even more select groups, like the top 0.1 percent) has been well documented by Thomas Piketty, in Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014), and other authors. What is important to realize here is that the presence of high labor income at the top of the income distribution, if associated with high capital income received by the same individuals, deepens inequality. This is a peculiarity of liberal meritocratic capitalism, something that has never before been seen to this extent.

Excerpted from Capitalism Alone : the future of the system that rules the world by Branko Milanovic, published by Harvard University Press, 2019.

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Capitalism(s), Alone.   By Branko Milanovíc.  Evonomics, November 16, 2019.

We are all capitalists now. For the first time in human history, the globe is dominated by one economic system. In his book Capitalism, Alone, which he will discuss in this lecture, economist Branko Milanovic explains the reasons for this decisive historical shift since the days of feudalism and, later, communism.

Surveying the varieties of capitalism, he asks: What are the prospects for a fairer world now that capitalism is the only game in town? His conclusions are sobering, but not fatalistic. Branko Milanovic explains how capitalism gets much wrong, but also much right—and it is not going anywhere. Our task is to improve it.

Capitalism, Alone: the future of the system that rules the world. London School of Economics,  October 23, 2019.

Capitalism, Alone by Branko Milanovic is a remarkable book, possibly the author’s most comprehensive opus so far. For economists working on inequality measurement, often accused of dealing with ‘measurement without theory’, Capitalism, Alone provides a novel paradigm within which analysis of distributional issues in different economies and social systems can be placed. The overall thesis of the book is that, for the first time in global history excluding a few country cases, capitalism (referring to production organised for profit using wage labour and mostly privately owned capital) is currently the ‘sole socio-economic system in the world’ (2).

This does not entail the end of history however, since a set of typologies of capitalism are sketched by Milanovic in the book – although the author does this in a more stylised manner than usually provided in the academic literature on varieties of capitalism. In my view, the main contribution of the book lies precisely in the neat way Milanovic categorises these ideal-typical social and economic systems, as I explain in the following.

Liberal Meritocratic Capitalism represents the typology of capitalism embraced by the core economies of the West, with the US being its most paradigmatic example. Individuals in liberal meritocratic capitalist states receive positive shares of both capital and labour incomes, whilst tax and transfers redistribute a fraction of those incomes. The moderate degree of redistribution does not, however, erase ‘social separatism’ (215), entailing that the rich consume more private education and health services than the middle class and the poor. Due to this, intergenerational mobility under liberal meritocratic capitalism is not necessarily high. Last but not least, democracy is one of the main strengths of liberal meritocratic capitalism, since the feedback of voters ensures, in principle, that the system does not end up failing in the provision of basic liberties (defined as a primary good by John Rawls, 208), although at the cost of lower growth rates of income than liberal meritocratic capitalism could achieve by retrenching these rights.

Up to this point, not much novelty. However, Milanovic reaches further than other scholars working on capitalism by defining a novel phenomenon that alone encompasses several challenges that liberal meritocratic capitalism has been facing in recent decades: homoploutia (34). Namely, the rising share of the population earning both high labour and capital income (hence owning the same – homo, wealth – ploutia). Although the association of high labour and capital income at the top of the income distribution has been studied by economists before (by Tony Atkinson, among others), it is in Capitalism, Alone that this concept is embedded for the first time within a thorough analysis of the underlying socio-economic system. Why is a rising degree of homoploutia dangerous within liberal meritocratic capitalism? Because it allows economic elites to become more autonomous from the rest of society, and to overlap to a higher extent with political elites, introducing plutocratic features. If this distortion expands, the danger is that liberal meritocratic capitalism would assume the contours of the other main typology of capitalism analysed in the book: Political Capitalism.

Milanovic defines political capitalism, through the historical example of Deng Xiaoping’s China, as an ideal-typical socio-economic system in which the autocratic and technocratic bureaucracy in power has the duty of delivering high economic growth (possibly higher than liberal meritocratic capitalism), both to justify its leading role and the absence of a binding (that is, selective application of) rule of law (91). The main danger for a country picking this ideal-typical system is that endemic inequality due to corruption and the discretionary power of the political elite might not be tolerated by the population, especially whenever economic growth slows down. In other words, high and widespread income growth is the necessary glue for a system where endemic corruption and rising inequality might lead to disruption. The selective application of the rule of law is also important, since a rule of law without exceptions would allow competition between different economic elites, which could eventually overturn the power of the political elite in charge.

The above, although it represents the central thesis, is only a fraction of the material that the reader will find in Capitalism, Alone by Milanovic as an analyst of the different types of capitalism. Among other topics, I would like to mention the detailed historical review of economic and political development in China, within which Milanovic empirically demonstrates how fast the share of fixed investment and industrial output by privately-owned firms has risen in the Chinese economy. At least as interesting is the analysis the author delivers on the unsettled role of communism within global twentieth-century history, claiming that ‘communism enabled backward and colonized societies to abolish feudalism […], and build endogenous capitalism’ (75).

The last part of this review focuses instead on the policymaker Milanovic. Imagine the author joins the hypothetical council of advisors of the political elite in a country under liberal meritocratic capitalism. What should be done to move towards People’s Capitalism – with individuals earning equal shares of income sources, inequality under control and high intergenerational mobility – while avoiding the potential divergence into political capitalism? Milanovic provides readers with a set of economic and social policies, among which I will highlight the two most substantial ones.

First, the author proposes the introduction of tax advantages for the poor and the middle class in order to increase their endowments of financial capital with respect to the richer deciles of the income distribution. This would reduce concentration of wealth in liberal meritocratic capitalism, lowering the dangers that come with homoploutia, though whether this would be sufficient is not analysed in detail by Milanovic. As an interesting example, this would be similar to the recent scheme of a ‘Share Savings Account’ introduced in Norway in 2017.

Second, and possibly more controversially, Milanovic proposes the introduction of ‘Citizenship light’, giving incremental access to welfare benefits and other social and economic rights for immigrants, ending the strictly binary division between citizens and non-citizens (217). The objective would be to make immigration more palatable politically. Milanovic defines citizenship as ‘a joint monopoly exercised by a group of people […] that gives rise to the citizenship rent’ (133), leading to higher income streams than those of non-citizens. In sum, native citizens are more likely to accept migrants, the less migrants are granted the benefits annexed to citizenship. The author qualifies this proposal as a realistic solution in order to allow migration to happen, migration being one of the key variables to reduce global income inequality (see Milanovic, 2016). In my view, the statement that access to welfare benefits in rich countries is based mainly on citizenship is only true to some extent (156). Social insurance systems in many welfare state countries are mainly based on residence (for example, Norwegian National Insurance Scheme, 2019), in combination with employment and with the amount of years one has contributed to the system with tax payments. In other words, if citizenship does not play the role assigned to it by Milanovic in countries with generous welfare states, the worst-case scenario depicted by the author – that the welfare state in the era of globalisation has to be dismantled in order to allow migration without backlashes (156-57) – becomes a more remote possibility.

Let us switch to the specific topic of the challenges faced by welfare states in a globalised world, touched upon in the book in Sections 2.3b (50) and 4.3 (155). Milanovic claims that ‘it has become a truism that the welfare state is under stress from the effects of globalization’ (50). In my view, this claim is not robust depending on how one defines the costs and benefits (or added value) of a welfare state economy. If globalisation increases income volatility and entails unemployment shocks, then the visible costs of welfare benefits in terms of national income increase. These costs are publicly discussed, as they entail higher taxes to be covered. However, the hidden gains of these measures provide economic value that does not show up in the national accounts, as they avoid even higher income reduction. The costs in terms of lost productivity and income when large shares of the population are not protected by social insurance might in the long run be even higher than the short-run costs of paying for services and transfers in times of recession (Kalle Moene, 2018).

Ultimately, I highly recommend Capitalism, Alone to all readers and scholars interested in challenging their understanding of the (supposed) sole socio-economic system we live in, including how Milanovic advocates to change it for the better and move towards the ideal-type People’s Capitalism outlined in the book.

Book Review: Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World by Branko Milanovic. By Robert Iacono. LSE Review of Books , November 11, 2019.

Just because capitalism defeated communism at the end of the Cold War does not mean that Western “liberal capitalism” will automatically triumph over China’s “political capitalism”. That’s the provocative argument of Branko Milanovic’s new book, Capitalism, Alone. Executive Editor Damir Marusic and Assistant Editor Aaron Sibarium recently sat down with Milanovic to talk about the future of the system  that runs the world.

The Future of Global Prosperity, with Branko Milanovic. The Amercan Interest, January 8, 2020. 

More interesting articles here. Harvard University Press.

Judith Butler on Equality and the Philosophy of Non-Violence

Judith Butler is arguably the most influential critical theorist of our era. Her early books, such as Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies That Matter (1993), anticipated a profound social and intellectual upheaval around sex, sexuality, gender norms, and power. Like many readers of my generation, I was introduced to Butler’s work just as these changes began to accelerate, and her ideas became part of mainstream discourse. In recent years, Butler has turned her insights about norms and exceptions, the psychic life of power, and the politics of resistance toward political ethics. In December Butler and I discussed her latest book, The Force of Nonviolence, which explores “nonviolence” as a project capable not simply of disclosing structural and repressive forms of violence, but also of productively channeling the tensions of social life away from retribution and resentment toward a radical and redemptive notion of equality.

Brandon Terry: You begin The Force of Nonviolence with a problem that hangs heavily over contemporary debates within social movements and in some corners of academia: How does an apparently moral argument about whether to be for or against violence quickly turn into a debate about how violence is defined and who is called “violent”? For example, activists in the Movement for Black Lives have described a wide range of social phenomena, from mass incarceration to dominant norms around gender and sexuality, as state violence. Their critics meanwhile have accused them of promoting or inciting violence, especially against police officers. And as you point out, these attributions have real consequences, as we can see with DeRay McKesson, the Black Lives Matter leader being sued by a police officer injured at a protest McKesson organized.

Some worry that the idea of violence today has become an unsustainable inflation of the concept that renders it incapable of doing the normative or analytical work that some activists and scholars are asking it to perform. They worry that without a clear and constrained definition of violence, one on which we could get some consensus, our uses of the term are going to lead our moral judgment astray. It will make public debate even more acrimonious. You seem to be skeptical about these criticisms, and you even charge them with a bit of political and critical naivete. How do you see the link between the ethical critique of violence and the interrogation of how and why we name certain practices or phenomena violent?

Judith Butler: The Force of Nonviolence is not primarily about violence, it’s about nonviolence, and whether it can still be defended, given all the realistic and strategic arguments against it. And yet, in order to make an argument for nonviolence, one needs to know what violence is; if the book’s general claim is that we ought to be refraining from violence, we still need to be able to identify violence. That’s where this complex question arises: How do we identify violence? What forms does violence take?

There’s no easy answer to that question, but I would say that very often moral arguments about nonviolence tend to imagine an individual making a decision about whether or not to engage in an act of violence, either to hit someone, or to use an instrument to injure somebody, to use a gun or some military weapon, and yet violence cannot be restricted to the form of the single blow. We know that there are forms of violence that don’t involve inflicting a blow on another person. The minute we accept that there is such a thing as institutional violence, or indeed symbolic violence, we are in a much more complex field. But I don’t think we should throw up our hands and say, “Oh well this is all too fuzzy, we can’t make our way here.” Michel Foucault distinguished between forms of sovereign violence, whereby a king, a monarch, or someone vested with a sovereign power, decides who should live and who should die. And there’s a form of violence that he called biopolitical and that Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe calls necropolitics: violence that leaves a set of people to die, abandons them to death, or refuses to offer the assistance that is necessary in order to save their lives.

Those policies and institutions that let people die—that take away food stamps, or take away health care, or take away shelter—are not only exposing people to mortality, they’re exposing people to mortality at differential rates. In the United States, we see that black and brown people, who are disproportionately poor in this country, are differentially exposed to that kind of violence and that kind of mortality rate. So maybe nobody is hitting them with a stick, or shooting them in the head, but there is an institutional violence at work, one which distinguishes between lives worth preserving and lives regarded as not worth preserving. So a differential calculus is at work, and it’s an implicit feature of policies and institutions like that. That’s one way of understanding institutional violence.

We could also look at the violence of carceral institutions in the ways that Ruth Gilmore, or Angela Davis, or Michelle Alexander have done. Violent criminals are sent to prison to punish their violence, and yet what they enter into is another form of violence, one that is understood as legally justified. It’s not called violence, it’s called “necessary coercion,” or “necessary containment,” or incarceration, but it is often a form of violence, especially in the way people are treated and how their lives are regarded, and the kind of violence to which they are subjected—daily, psychically—within the prison facility. So we can start to think about institutions as violent. But they’re not just inflicting institutional violence. They are themselves violent institutions.

When we say we’re opposed to violence, or we are seeking to embrace a philosophy and a politics of nonviolence, we are obligated to distinguish among those kinds of violence, to rely on our colleagues who have been doing important empirical and sociological work and cultural analysis to show us when and how violence happens and to whom—to whom does it happen more than others, and what radical thesis about the inequality of lives pervades these disparities.

BT: I am reminded of the essay you contributed to Robert Gooding-Williams’s volume Reading Rodney King (1993), where you focus on racial fantasies, or “racial phantasms” as you call them, following Frantz Fanon. What do you think makes race-thinking so amenable to our judgments about who or what is violent?

 JB: You’re right. In this book I’m elaborating and revising the thesis I put forward in that essay. But in this context, I’m trying to understand why certain actions are called violent when there’s no empirical, or visual, or testimonial evidence to corroborate that claim. As you know, the Rodney King beating was already pretty outrageous, although certainly not unusual for black people, who live in worlds where police violence is constant. King was on the ground. He was not sitting up, he was not standing up. He was barely moving a limb, and somehow that video could be pointed to in a trial, and the defense attorney for the police could claim that King was a threat. And it’s really hard to understand how a black man lying on the ground, or indeed a black man running away, or a black man in a full chokehold, could still threaten the life of a policeman. And I think we could say that those are primarily states of the black body—social and political states of paralysis, threat, fear—none of which are arguably threatening, that are nevertheless cast, phantasmagorically, as states of imminent danger: as if those bodies are about to spring, to kill, to inflict mortal danger on the police who are, in fact, inflicting mortal danger.

We could point to that and just say, “Well, that’s absurd,” or we could say, “That’s unjust,” and we would be right. But we need to look a little bit more closely at what I call a “phantasmagoric inversion.” It is not uncommon for the forces that inflict violence to point to their victims and say, “Look, this is the victim who’s actually inflicting violence on me.” And that’s a trick of the mind, it’s a trick of the culture, and it’s a fantasy that gets shared when judges and juries look at the same evidence and decide that the policeman was just doing his job, or had good reason to think he was in trouble, or that a black man could have turned around and shot him at any moment. They are living in a panicked racial phantasm. They are in a war against black people in which they constantly imagine that those upon whom they inflict violence are the true source of violence.

BT: How do we find our way out? I’m thinking about a powerful point in the book where you contrast your approach with a methodological and ethical individualism. We’re often given a genealogy of nonviolence that emphasizes individualism and a personal conscience, sometimes conscripting people such as Henry David Thoreau into this genealogy, and often treating nonviolence as kind of a retreat from the storm and stress of politics into a pacific region of the soul. In the book you say forcefully that this is a profound misdescription of the ethics and politics of nonviolence. You write, “an ethics of nonviolence cannot be predicated on individualism and must take the lead in critiquing individualism as the basis of ethics and politics.” Can you say more about what you see as the real connective tissue between this critique of individualism and nonviolence?

JB: If I am to understand myself as interconnected with other living beings and with life processes more generally, including all those that sustain the planet, I have to understand that when I destroy another person, or when I destroy a set of living processes, I also destroy something of myself, because the self that I am is not just this bounded and discrete ego, it’s a set of relationships. I generally hold to the importance of psychosocial studies and believe my book probably belongs to that field. None of us exist or survive without a set of relationships that sustain us. That ideal might be maddening to a fierce individualist who wants to understand themself as completely self-sufficient, but the ideal of self-sufficiency is a bit destructive. We live in families and communities, and we’re also, as we know from climate change, interconnected across the entire globe. We know forms of interdependency throughout the economic world through the ravaging effects of globalization. We need to come up with another notion of the global that would avow, affirm, and strengthen our interdependency, and also the fact that we’re equally dependent on the Earth. We should strive to be equally dependent upon one another.

So for me, the idea of equality is not, “Oh, this individual’s equal to another,” although sometimes we must speak that way and have policies that reflect that truth. To shift the way we think about equality to help us address violence—and possibly also climate preservation—we need to move away from the ego and moral ideals of self-sufficiency. That is one reason I don’t stress the virtue of equanimity that many classical philosophers in the West have approved. One finds it in Buddhism and other religions as well. I’m not opposed to equanimity—it’s great to be calm and pacific and be able to handle life with some equanimity. I just don’t believe it can be the basis of nonviolence. We have every reason to be absolutely enraged by the systemic and local injustices in our world. Not a day goes by under the present regime when I’m not seized with rage of one kind or another. The question is: What can be done with rage? We don’t always think about that, because we view rage as an uncontrollable impulse that needs to come out in unmediated forms. But people craft rage, they cultivate rage, and not just as individuals. Communities craft their rage. Artists craft rage all the time. Collective forms of crafting rage are important. They don’t deny rage, but they also choose not to enter into the cycle of violence. They seek to expose violence and counter it. We could have an angry and rageful art practice that exposes and counters violence without being violent. Being contaminated by violence is not the same as reproducing the systemic or institutional violence that we’re seeking to oppose.

For me, the bottom line is that if I destroy another life, I also destroy myself to some degree, because relations compose who I am, and I am nothing without them. My life is not sustainable without others, and theirs is not sustainable without me. We’re attacking the social bond that holds us together when we attack each other. And I believe we need to cultivate that kind of ethos in order to support a broader global philosophy and politics that is committed to radical equality and affirms the equal grievability of lives—the equal value of lives.

BT: Climate change seems to play for you the role that nuclear war played for a lot of the sixties theorists of nonviolence—the invention of nuclear weapons and the threat of extinction-level events forced them to think about interconnection, interdependency at the level of ontology, social ontology. Climate change has now superseded that in some ways and gives a kind of heft to the sort of thing you’d hear Martin Luther King, Jr., say often, about being in “an inescapable network of mutuality,” or a “single garment of destiny.”

But in response, as King’s Black Power critics might say: “Well sure, people are interdependent, nobody is sufficient in and of themselves, we need communities to survive, we just don’t want to be in a community with these people who have oppressed us any longer. We find living in social bonds with them to be something that is mutilating to our cultural vitality, and our self-respect.” What do you think is wrong with the longing to reconstitute mutuality in more restricted terms in pursuit of these goods?

JB: All relations among humans are vexed, and difficult, and even relations of love are structured by ambivalence. They carry within them destructive potential, and those of us who work to acknowledge the destructive potential in our relationships are better equipped to avoid acting destructively than those who pretend that there is no destructive potential. One reason I don’t hold to the notion that we need to reside in the pacific rooms of the soul at the expense of other or different rooms is that we need to struggle with our anger, our destructiveness, even our murderous impulse. We need to accept that we have all of that. Now I think among people who agree to cohabit Earth—as Hannah Arendt put it in her theorizations, among other places, about the state of Israel in relationship to the emergent state of Palestine—there does not have to be love or harmony or even high levels of integration for there to be a basic respect for the lives of others and as a premise for any kind of collaboration or integration, an acceptance of the radical equality of lives. Without those, any other form of social belonging or cohabitation reproduces inequality. And who wants that? People don’t want to live with others who despise them, or mutilate them, or regard their lives as dispensable, or who are willing to adopt and implement policies that have that effect. So there has to be a radical agreement to this equality for a kind of cohabitation to take place that would be worthy of the name.

BT: Let’s explore this question of equality. As somebody who’s followed your work for a long time, I think that the book develops some long-standing themes: your interrogation of the fraught relationship of norm and exception in politics, and your linkage—especially in your work on Antigone and the series of books beginning with Frames of War (2009)—between questions of equality and questions of grief and mourning. You’ve done a lot to show us how certain populations and groups are figured as beyond the reach of humane concern and solidarity by interrogating practices of mourning and grieving as points of access, places where we might know what and whom we value, whom we imagine our lives entangle with and are enriched by, and even who counts as human. In The Force of Nonviolence you talk not just about equality but what you call “the radical equality of grievability.” That is such a poignant phrase. What might such an ideal entail in practice, and why connect it to the politics of nonviolence, instead of just making it, say, a principle of justice?

JB: Some people don’t like this word, “grievable.” It’s an awkward word. “Grievability” may be even worse, but I’m trying to get at a quality of life. We say certain deaths aren’t grievable, or haven’t been properly grieved. We talk that way all the time. But I’m referring to people who are living in this world, and who feel themselves to be living a life that will not be mourned when it is lost, or who look at others and regard them as lives that will not be mourned if they are lost.

When we talk that way about ourselves or others, what we’re really saying is that while these are lives that can pass without a trace—one could think, for example, of those who fell or were thrown into the ocean during the Middle Passage—how do we mourn them, and what does it mean that those lives were considered ungrievable? There would be no one to grieve them, there’s nothing in them to be grieved. There’s not value to be grieved. And I think that’s another way of getting to what some would call dehumanization, a term that we could talk about, but I’m not sure it grasps everything.

Grievability is a way of thinking about value. I remember Claudia Rankine published an article in the New York Times in 2015 called “‘The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning.’” She talks about the sense of anxiety and fear that mothers have—though not just mothers—that bringing African American men and women into the world is bringing them into a place of potential mourning. They may be lost. They may be extinguished. They may not survive. And she writes about what it means to have a sense that lives may be lost at any moment, or that the world does not have to seek to sustain those lives and does not recognize the value of those lives. Of course, this is not a totalizing claim, but this risk is higher for some than for others.

Equal grievability would mean that each life has a value and is regarded as a life worthy of living, to be lived, deserving to be lived. There can be no inequality there. Now, that’s an ideal, a norm, a principle, and that’s what I mean by the notion of radical equality. If we had it and we had our understanding of ourselves as socially interdependent creatures, we would have a broader understanding of what it means to oppose violence. And I’m not interested in establishing nonviolence as an absolute moral principle that has to be applied to every instance. I’m interested in cultivating a new sense of who we are as human beings and how we treat each other on the basis of an interdependent ontology, if you will, with a historical, political mindfulness about the unequal grievability of lives in our contemporary world. Justice is great, but it would be more probable in a world in which we’d learned to think clearly about who suffers violence disproportionately and who inflicts it disproportionately.

BT: What’s always drawn me to this line of inquiry is that it makes so much sense of a lot of African American protest and African American mourning practices. The civil rights movement is shot through with all of these concerns. Why didn’t President Lyndon Johnson meet with the parents of slain African American activist James Chaney, but did meet with the parents of Chaney’s slain white colleagues, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner? Why were Memphis sanitation workers Echol Cole and Robert Walker allowed to die in the back of a garbage truck, launching that protest movement that would ultimately bring King to the place where he would be assassinated? Even W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) dwells on this question, from his mentor to his own dying infant son: If you’re born in a society like this, will your life be grievable? Will anyone mourn your passing? Will you have any potential or possibility or standing as a cocreator of the society? Or are you already diminished?

JB: The question is also linked with whether your life will be liveable? Will you survive, will you persist, and will the conditions of life allow you to flourish? Some populations dispossess those who are subject to racism, to economic marginalization, or genocidal violence. They live with that question or have given up on that question.

BT: What is so striking about the language of equal grievability is that it also makes sense of King’s intervention. He said many of the same things you’re saying, but in his embodied performance, he also tried to disrupt that systemic violence without inviting the destruction of the lives of either the authors or ignoble spectators of oppression. He wanted to preserve his enemies’ lives as well.

To me that is the most dramatic demonstration of somebody who really believes in the equal grievability of lives. Should we read you as endorsing, or at least having a family resemblance with, King’s judgment that it is better to take on more suffering than you dispense?

JB: I don’t know, but I do think that there are a lot of people who have every reason to feel enormous rage, to imagine scenes of destruction, and to even be overwhelmed with murderous feelings or impulse. The question is: To what community do we turn in such moments so that we don’t reproduce and heighten a violent world? I think of the idea of preserving the life of the one you want to kill as preserving the world you want to fight for, the world in which this kind of violence is lessened rather than heightened. And so it’s for the world, for a very difficult social bond, one that is full of passion, ecstatic and wonderful, but is also destructive and horrid. I guess I’m willing to take that point from Sigmund Freud; I think Fanon got it. Our relationships with others have this vexed quality. They can lift us and they can debase us, and we have to find our way. I think that those have to be collective practices; I’m not as interested in acts of individual heroism. I worry sometimes that the civil rights movement, or at least the story that gets told about it in the United States, focuses on individual heroes and heroines.

I don’t want it to be a model of an individual, I want it to be a different kind of sociality that we’re trying to build, and I do see it in some of the social movements today, in some of the ways that people are working on housing projects, and climate preservation, and climate activism. I see it in many different parts of the world. In the feminist movement, in the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s not always easy. We struggle, we fight, we disagree, but we come back somehow to continue to build a world that is less violent and more free and more equal. And I think if we want to talk about justice, it would have to have all those components.

BT: You end the book with reference to some of these movements —Ni Una Menos, the protests at the European refugee camps, the Standing Man protest in Turkey. I, like you, take a lot of hope from these practices. But as a scholar of black protest movements, I wonder if maybe the long-term threat to nonviolent action is not that it would be falsely characterized as violent, but that it gets absorbed into our sense of the everyday and becomes what King called “a merely transitory drama.” That it becomes ritualized or folded into our sense of, “That’s what these kinds of people do.” What if it becomes a spectacle that fails to unsettle or even register as spectacle, and that might be in part because it’s not considered violence or violent enough. What do you think might break through our existing attention economy and media environment that are arguably fascinated with violence above all else?

JB: You’re right to name the media, because I think more and more what we see happening, especially with violence in schools, is that kids, you know, even when they commit suicide, say, “Well, this was the only way to get my name in the newspaper, this was my only way to get attention.” What are they responding to? They’re on social media, they’re on the internet, and they see that an act of violence appears to break through quotidian life and grab worldwide attention. Now, the problem with that media rhythm—and there is a pattern that social media and conventional media have developed—is that it suggests that quotidian life is not violent, even though there are huge amounts of domestic violence, violence in prison, violence on the street, and violence in the workplace all the time. Actual quotidian violence gets repainted as nonviolent, and then the very dramatic violence catches attention, but only for a moment because the next one is on its way, and the next one is in competition with the last one.

We need to think more clearly about a media presence that counters that particular rhythm, which propagates a certain kind of lie about what violence is. It becomes a sensationalist moment, rather than part of the structure of life. We need to turn a lens on the forms of violence that are part of the structure of life for women, for minorities, for the dispossessed, for the poor. Until we do that, we will continue to think that violence is this extraordinary thing that captures attention for a minute and is then dispensed with. So we have a broader problem in thinking about how the media covers violence, and how it tends to define it, which means that cultural workers and academics and artists who are really concerned with this issue need to develop a stronger media presence, or maybe even a counter-media presence, to shift the terms.

BT: A profoundly difficult challenge, indeed, but with the proliferation of cameras, the low barrier of entry to social media distribution, and the increasingly sophisticated popular criticism of media frames and narrative strategies, perhaps we might yet see our way out. Another set of crucial questions, from an exciting book full of them.

JB: That’s very kind, thank you so much.

The Radical Equality of Lives.  By Brandon M. Terry and Judith Butler. Boston Review ,  January 7, 2020. 

I reached out to the philosopher Judith Butler last year, not long after I wrote an article titled “I Am A Sexist,” as the #MeToo movement was in full swing. I hoped to get an unvarnished critique of the essay. I got much more: A bracing and profound exchange that led to this interview and the reminder that violence against women, in its many forms, is a global tragedy.

Judith Butler is known for her decades of work in philosophy, feminism and activism worldwide. A professor in the department of comparative literature and the program of critical theory at the University of California, Berkeley, she is the author of numerous influential books, including “Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly” and the forthcoming book, “The Force of Non-Violence.” The interview was conducted by email.

George Yancy: I know you are familiar with the multinational activist movement Ni Una Menos. The movement, which spans several countries in Latin America, is fighting many forms of violence, in particular femicide, which is the intentional killing of women and girls because of their gender. (One example: In Argentina, one woman is said to be murdered every 30 hours.) In the United States, of course, we have the #MeToo movement. What do you make of these different but similar mobilizations?

Judith Butler: It is important to underscore that there are many feminisms right now (as there have always been) and they differ in regard to their focus and framework. Ni Una Menos is a movement that has brought millions of women into the street across Latin America to fight violence against women, trans people and the indigenous. The slogan “not one less” means that not one more woman will be lost to violence.

Importantly, this is a call that is uttered by a collective: “Not another one will be lost from the class of women, this expanding collective that resists the violence directed against them.” But also: “As women, we will not lose another life.” The movement is not based on a narrow idea of identity, but is a strong and intensifying coalition that draws support from women and trans people who are workers, who belong to unions and churches, who may or may not have any relation to universities.

The fierce collective opposition to the killing of women is paramount, but this is also violence against trans people, especially trans women, and “las travestis” (who do not always identify as trans). That is why it is sometimes referred to as a movement against “feminicidio” — all those who are feminized or regarded as feminine. This is important because it is not just that murder is committed on the basis of gender; violence against women is one way of establishing the femininity of the victim. The violence seeks to secure the class of women as killable, dispensable; it is an attempt to define the very existence of women’s lives as something decided by men, as a masculine prerogative.

The movement is equally a struggle for freedom and equality, and it struggles for the right to abortion, the right to equal pay and the struggle against neoliberal economics that is intensifying precarity, especially for women, the indigenous and the poor. The right to abortion is based on the right of every individual woman to assert freedom over her own body, but follows from the collective demands of women to be able to live their desires freely without state intervention and without the fear of violence, retribution and imprisonment.

The movement has distinguished itself from individualist modes of feminism that are based on personal liberty and the rights of the individual subject. That does not mean that individual histories and stories do not matter. They do, but forms of feminism that do not engage a critique of capitalism tend to reproduce individualism as a matter of course. Collectives are formed through a realization of a common social condition and a social bond, one that recognizes that what is happening to one life, whether it is violence, debt or subjection to patriarchal authority, is also happening for others. And though they may happen in different ways, the patterns are there, and so also are the grounds for solidarity.

In the United States, “#MeToo” has been very powerful in exposing the pervasive character of sexual harassment and assault across every kind of workplace. There is no way to shut our eyes to how long women have suffered with harassment, retaliation, and the loss of their careers — the loss of trust in those upon whom they often depend for work. But the “me” in #metoo is not the same as the collective we, and a collective is not just a sequence of the stories of individuals. The basis for solidarity, for collective action, requires that we depart from the presumption of individualism; in the United States, the tendency is to reaffirm that tenet of political liberalism at the expense of strong and enduring collective bonds. In Argentina, Ni Una Menos is in some ways taking up the ethical and political obligation of “Nunca Mas!” or “Never Again!” forged in the aftermath of the dictatorship. The destruction and disappearance of the lives of thousands of students and activists on the left has led to a sharp opposition to state censorship, repression and violence. The killing of women is equally horrific, very often aided and abetted by police and courts who fail to acknowledge the crime and by a government that refuses to assert the equal rights of women to live their lives in freedom and without the fear of death.

Yancy: The reasons for these two movements are linked to political and economic structures that marginalize and oppress women. Political and economic structures are inextricably linked to machismo, the toxic sense of male identity that translates into male entitlement to women’s bodies; indeed, tied into whether or not women live or die. Talk about the performative dimensions of machismo.

Butler: I am no longer sure what counts as performative, but my view is that one reason that men feel free to dispose of women’s life as they see fit is because they are bound to one another through a silent (or not-so-silent) pact of brotherhood. They look the other way; they give each other permission and grant each other impunity. In so many places, the violence done to women, including murder, are not even conceptualized as crimes. They are “the way of the world” or “acts of passion” and these phrases disclose deep-seated attitudes that have naturalized violence against women, that is, made it seem as if this violence is a natural or normal part of ordinary life. When feminist men break that pact of solidarity, they risk exclusion by some communities, and yet that kind of defection from the ranks is exactly what is needed.

In Barcelona, a well-meaning man told me he was not entitled to join in a feminist demonstration against violence. But I disagreed with him. Well, maybe I agree with him: participation is not an entitlement; it is an obligation. But men who join that important fight against violence against women and trans people need to follow the leadership of women. If they stand together against the lethal pact of brotherhood that permits, deflects and exonerates, they do it first and foremost by confronting other men, and by forming groups that reject violence and affirm radical equality. After all, when the lives of women and minorities of all kinds are taken, that is a sign that those lives are not treated as equally valuable. The struggle against violence and the struggle for equality are linked.

Yancy: In what ways does your new book on nonviolence speak to questions regarding the vulnerability of women?

Butler: The new book, “The Force of Non-Violence,” is concerned with women, for sure, but with all people who are considered to be more or less ungrievable. I work with the feminist idea of “relationality” in order to show not only how lives are interdependent, but also how our ethical obligations to sustain each other’s lives follow from that interdependency. The interdiction against violence is a way of asserting and honoring that bond based on the equal value of lives, but this is not an abstract or formal principle. We require each other to live and that is as true of familial or kinship ties as it is of transnational and global bonds. The critique of individualism has been an important component of both feminist and Marxist thought, and it now becomes urgent as we seek to understand ourselves as living creatures bound to human and nonhuman creatures, to entire systems and networks of life. The various threats of destruction can take the form of state violence, feminicidio, abandonment of migrants, global warming. We have to rethink the ties of life to know why we are obligated to oppose violence even when, or precisely when, hostilities escalate.

Yancy: In what ways does your discussion of nonviolence address our pervasive cultural practice of specifically male violence?

Butler: That is a good question. For me, violence is not male or masculine. I don’t think that it comes from the recesses of men or is built into a necessary definition of masculinity. We can talk about structures of masculine domination, or patriarchy, and in those cases it is the social structures and their histories that call to be dismantled. It is difficult to know how to understand individual acts of violence within social structures that encourage, permit and exonerate such acts. It may be that we are social creatures whose lives are lived out in social structures that we have some power to change. So I don’t think individual men can point to “social structures” as an excuse, i.e. “the social structure of masculine domination made me commit this act of violence.”

At the same time, it is all of our responsibility to ask ourselves how we are living out, reproducing or resisting these structures. So though change can happen at an individual level, restorative justice models tell us that individuals change in the context of communities and relationships, and that is how new structures of relating are built and older ones are dismantled. In turn, this means that ethics has to become more than an individual project of self-renewal, since lives are renewed in the company of others. Those relations are what sustain us and, as such, deserve our collective attention and commitment.

Judith Butler: When Killing Women Isn’t a Crime. By George Yancy.  The New York Times,  July 10, 2019.

My Life, Your Life: Equality and the Philosophy of Non-Violence.

The Gifford Lectures, Glasgow, 2018. 1,2,3 October

‘What does inequality have to do with non-violence?’ These lectures will suggest that a philosophy of non-violence has to take into account forms of inequality that value certain lives more highly than others. So the task is to develop a philosophy of non-violence that allows the moral questions usually associated with non-violent practice to be seen as bearing on questions of political inequality as well. The purpose would be to show that the defence of non-violence cannot be successful if it does not take this kind of differential valuing of life into account, which means that a philosophy of non-violence is only possible within a broader commitment to equality. These questions bear as well on the concepts of grievable and ungrievable life that Professor Butler has developed elsewhere as well as a conception of livable life at work in her critique of precarity.

The Gifford Lectures

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