Answer to Prof. Wolff on inequality

The loathsome leftist loser Leiter links to (Marxist/museum piece) Robert Paul Wolff critiquing what he takes to be standard lines of justification for income/wealth inequality used by defenders of capitalism.  I've addressed the essential point in this blog fairly recently using the example of Amazon/Bezos, but I elaborate on my argument further below.  First, Wolff:

In order to focus our attention and make the argument concrete, let me take as an example the Columbia University Sociology Department in which I shall again be teaching this fall.  There are upwards of forty members of the department, including many distinguished scholars, and a support staff of four.  Since Columbia, unlike UMass, is a private university, it is of course impossible to find out easily how much each of these folks makes [whereas at UMass this is public knowledge], but I think we can assume that there is a considerable pay gap between the senior professors and the departmental secretaries – maybe three hundred percent or more.  How can this be explained and justified?

The standard answer is that it takes both long preparation and really rare talent to be a Columbia Sociology Professor, and the big bucks are needed to get the right people into those jobs.  I freely grant that being a Columbia Sociology Professor requires long preparation and really rare talent.  But do you need to pay big salaries to get the best people into those jobs.  [Alert:  I am going to ignore the effect of competition among universities in all of this.  I trust it is obvious that that consideration can be bracketed for the purposes of this analysis.  If it isn’t obvious, sit and think about it for a bit before you rush to comment.]

Well, think about it.  Setting to one side the cost of job preparation and the foregone income [see above], suppose we ask Shamus Kahn [currently Department Chair] whether he would prefer to remain as a Professor of Sociology or take over the job of Winston Gordon III [one of the support staff.]  Leave aside being Department Chair, which Shamus, like any sensible academic, could do without [or so he told me.]  As a Professor, he would be expected to be on campus 32 weeks out of the year, two or three days a week.  He would be in class 4 or 5 hours a week, would hold office hours 2 hours a week, would prepare lectures, and [ugh] would grade papers once or twice a semester.  He would also be encouraged [but not required] to do any independent research he wished and every so often to publish the results.  Contrariwise, as a departmental staff member, he would be expected to be on campus 48 weeks a year, five days a week, seven hours a day.  He would answer the phone, file papers, respond to student inquiries, assist professors with secretarial tasks, run errands, and perhaps manage the finances of the department.

In order to explain why it is necessary to pay Shamus three or four time as much as Winston, we must assume that if Shamus were to be offered the same salary as Winston, he would respond, “If it is all the same, I would just as soon do Winston’s job.”  Since the excellence of the Columbia University enterprise really requires that Shamus agree to be a Professor, we may suppose that a negotiation would ensue, with Shamus offered more and more money until finally, he replies, “Weeell, all right, but only if every seventh year you give me six months off from the grind; call it a sabbatical.”

Seriously?  You can do the same thought experiment for a corporate manager and the man who cleans the toilets in the home office.  To get the right people into the right jobs, you need to test them and sort them and sift them.  But do you also have to pay the suits so much more than the shirts?

Now, if you're a leftist/anticapitalist with limited understanding of how (pro-)capitalists think - especially the most intellectually challenging/formidable capitalists - you might find this an impressive counter to the supposed defender of capitalism.  (The loathsome Leiter says it's "sensible commentary.")  Heck, one of the Marxists in Wolff's comments section links to this imbecilic strawman of Rand and capitalist thought at Existential Comics, "making Wolff's very serious, and not silly, point."  (In what cannot be but an irony, the main Achilles Heel of EC is its ignorant anticapitalism.  The same Marxist linking to EC's imbecilic strawman later complains about how Marx is widely, ignorantly caricatured.  Gee, it's like dialectic has broken down, or something.  On a completely unrelated note, why isn't Ferrarin's Hegel and Aristotle all the rage?  And when you do hear from leftists about philosophy you might hear quite a bit about Marx, and then some Hegel, maybe some Nietzsche, Foucault, Deleuze (& Guattari), Frankfurt School . . . but what about the greatest philosopher of all, Aristotle?  I mean, Marx is reacting to Hegel, who is reacting to Aristotle and developing Aristotelian-teleological themes which aren't exactly superseded by anything after Aristotle.  Here I was told the left is really woke and advanced?  And what about philosophy for children/everybody?  How did they manage to miss that one, pray tell?  Misplaced priorities, perhaps?)

Here's my reply to Wolff, reproduced from the comments section and with some links added:

Ultimate Philosopher said... 

I'm not following. I assume you're all familiar with Nozick's example of Wilt Chamberlain, and the $100K salary. Well, today, the top sports stars (think Mike Trout, Tom Brady, LeBron James) make upwards of $40M a year, an even greater cause of disparity compared to what, oh, say, the concessions workers make. 

Concessions workers are readily replaceable. Mike Trout could do concessions work, but there's comparative advantage. The concessions workers can't do what Trout does. 

True, if Trout were offered the same wage or salary as the concessions worker makes for playing baseball, his love of playing baseball would still lead him to prefer the baseball playing. 

Heck, we're talking about people who play a game for a living, and have fun much of the time doing it. Many of the concessions workers are stuck doing whatever their skill set qualifies them for, and they're likely not having much fun much of the time. They have to deal with lots of stupid and crappy customers, for example. They're perhaps acutely aware that they don't have the talents that the customers are coming to pay the most money to see. Etc. 

But Trout is commanding what the market will bear, enjoying a big surplus over what he *would* be willing to play baseball for. (And on top of that, there are performance metrics these days tied to the concept of "Value Above Replacement Player," and Trout is shooting up the career leaders list there at almost astonishing speed. And even a replacement-level player, ready to be knocked down to AAA, has talents that are in-demand enough to make several hundred thousand a year. [We can bracket for now baseball's antitrust exemption, particularly given that the customers prefer to watch as undiluted a talent pool on the field as is consistent with a few dozen big cities, but not many more, having teams.]) 

And so, I ask along with Nozick, where is the injustice exactly? Is commanding what the market will bear unjust, or lacking in justification? (Of course, you should all know Nozick's justification by now: it's what people choose to do with their holdings.) (There's also Robin Hanson's rather mangled attempt to apply leftist reasoning about justice to the market for sexual and/or romantic partners. Guess what: a lot of people are SOL there no matter what they do, while a select few can get "10" partners even if they *would* settle for 7s. [Hanson's "creepy" in-jest proposal to force the more fortunate to have sex/romance with the less fortunate can be toned down to something more like a system of tax incentives/disincentives, something much more to the liking of statists who insist on separating human rights from property rights.] The point being, life isn't fair, but you sure get a lot of selective outrage about that from anticapitalists who, to a lot of procapitalists, appear to be rationalizing envy. A retort along Rawlsian lines is that what is fair is not nature but how we as a society respond to such natural unfairness, e.g., to maximize as much as possible the opportunity set of the least advantaged. Nozick's rebuttal is something to the effect that what's fair is when I dispose of my life as I choose, i.e., that it isn't others' to dispose of [and that otherwise nice-sounding ideas about maximin should be left to people to implement voluntarily {for which a good place to start might be philosophy for children, for which see the SEP entry there}]. Oh wait, that's originally Hospers/Rand....) 

UP/CRC  

Does Bezos exploit Bezos?

Does Bezos exploit Bezos, according to Marxist exploitation theories and generally leftist notions about the relationship between labor and capital?  Does Bezos stand over and against Bezos in a condition of alienation?  Bezos has labored and labored and labored with his intellect, as CEO (this guy runs the company at the behest of the capitalist owners) to create a company approaching one trillion dollars in market value, and yet, what does he have to show for it?  Only about $120 billion of that.  Bezos owns, like, one-fifth of Amazon, a publicly-held company.  I guess in effect his one-fifth of the shares is the main form of compensation he takes from the capitalists.  But he's also one-fifth of the capitalist ownership here, so apparently capital (Bezos) is extracting an unjust share of the proceeds from labor (Bezos)?

If socialists and their ilk don't get this example right down to the economic foundations of value-added, they simply can't and won't characterize the nature of the capitalist system properly.  Or maybe they're just somehow a lot more clever than the defenders of capitalism?

[Addendum: Perhaps the exploitation is that it's all Bezos's creation, value-added-wise, and it's the owners of 4/5th of Amazon who have exploited him.  So we have Bezos being exploited to the tune of having a net worth of only $150B.  But certainly he didn't do all the creating himself, there were other minds involved that had to implement subordinate-level work and they create value-added in their own way, and what if the owners of 4/5th of Amazon stock are being compensated directly or indirectly for the labor, intellectual or otherwise, that they do?  But then when you carry out that analysis to the very end, isn't it more or less plausible to say that everyone does in the end get roughly the proportion of value-added they created in return.  Does this ever occur to socialists?  Could you tell based on the things they say?]

The Economic Left: Irrational Bigots?

[See here for context re: this blog entry's headline title.]

It's no secret that left-liberals fancy themselves more intellectual, more informed, more enlightened, etc. than the population at large. Just look at the makeup of university faculties, after all. The people who spend the most time thinking about things just have this inevitable tendency to lean "left." (The illustrious thinker, Robert Nozick, thinks through why this is, and comes up with a fine explanation: there are plenty of thinkers out there who are also doers, namely, business-creators. You'd be hard-pressed to find Marxists teaching at business schools or running Fortune 500 companies. That requires a kind of smarts and skill-set that Marxists and the rest of their left-wing academic ilk either don't possess or don't much approve of. [I take an example like George Soros to be roughly like a Glenn Greenwaldian "voice of conscience" with extreme financial smarts. An example like Warren Buffett, I don't think would really reflect the left-ward bent in the academic humanities. You'd have to look to the economics departments to get a much closer match.] Of course, to be fair, it does cut both ways; I don't much admire, say, Wall Street philistines who are conspicuously out of touch with the more plausible grievances of the "Occupy" movement, or - put more generally - those who've allowed their own circumstances to bias them and blind them to certain realities.)

I just bracketed-parenthetically mentioned the economics departments. There, you don't see much of a left-ward bent at all; it's a very pragmatic - which is to say, quite centrist - profession. Several Nobel Laureates come from the "right." Many economists are out in the business world. There's this old adage, "those who can't do, teach." According to that adage, the ones who don't go out into the business world, can't do. Teaching is a kind of doing, though, and the adage over-generalizes anyway; it's intended to be partly humorous. But there is a ring of truth to it as well, because it applies to at least some academics - and if employment out in "the real world" is any indication of this, the hard sciences have the greatest number of "doers," the social sciences presumably less so (with economics among the social sciences boldly standing out as the least left-wing), and the humanities presumably even less so. I don't know the percentages, but it just intuitively rings true and Nozick's explanation makes plenty of sense.

This is all preface to the following observation: left-wing teachings when it comes to economic matters tend to be toxic. There's quite a lot of it that not even "mainstream liberals" in the economics profession would endorse. But certain memes get out there among left-wing thinkers and the connection between these memes and (a responsible reading of) the facts is tenuous. Now, take your typical liberal college student, place him or her in a large online social gathering to partake in meme-spreading, and what do you get? The reddit.com politics site. (I count this site as among my daily reads among several others, including the Wall Street Journal editorial pages.) This site is particularly a breeding-ground for "Occupy"-movement memes. The thing with the "Occupy" movement is there are some worthwhile or semi-worthwhile memes all mixed-up with some really toxic ones. I'd like to focus on a very toxic meme in particular, one based on shady numbers, having to do with wealth and income inequality.

The very Marx-inspired narrative feeding this toxic meme is one of continuous impoverishment and immiseration of "the working classes" and, seemingly, of ever-widening inequality, absent the democratically-controlled state stepping in to correct the problem. "Democracy before capitalism" is the basic political ethic going on here. Democracy, properly practiced, will work in the best interests of the People, while capitalism tends to devolve into plutocracy.

We've been bitten once already by Marx's prediction of the collapse of capitalism. (How many times do we need to be bitten before we figure out the real problem here?) Needing some theoretical modifications and looking for some semblance of intellectual leadership, the left these days has latched onto (most prominently) Noam Chomsky. While Chomsky is brilliant and authoritative on many things, and serves as a voice of conscience in the face of American wrong-doings and double-standards, that doesn't mean he's got his economic narrative correct. But he's a darling of the left in any event, and his pronouncements are treated accordingly. Taking his lead, the Economic Left - and its representative end-result on the politics reddit - filters and interprets economic data to fit its narrative-worldview.

Now, to throw a wrench into that whole inequality/immiseration narrative.

(I mean, shouldn't they have known better? Shouldn't they have seen this coming? Shouldn't they have been more objective and fact-oriented?)

Here it is:

(Clickable link in the image. To play the academic-credentialism game: the article is written by Maxim Pinkovskiy, Department of Economics, MIT, and Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Professor of Economics, Columbia University.)

The really "weird" (read: "counter-intuitive," with special emphasis on the scare qoutes) part about this is that world-scale inequality has fallen as globalization has expanded, and this fall has accelerated after 1990, i.e., after the fall of Communism and after NAFTA and GATT.

Now, why aren't international data on inequality in wealth and income ever cited by the Occupy crowd and their academic enablers? Is it because they're unaware of it? Is it because they've ignored it? Do they consider it irrelevant? Do they consider the data flawed? What might account for the Economic Left's failure to address the most comprehensive and global data set available?

The favorite data of the Economic Left concern wealth and inequality here in the United States, which by all indications is increasing. There seems at least to be an awareness that globalization has something to do with it: many lower-skilled and manufacturing jobs have gone oversees. There's also the effects of illegal immigration taking American jerbs, though that's more of a right-wing meme. While the rich Americans retain residence here, their capital goes more and more abroad, they get the returns from that while the middle-class and poor do not, hence the widening income and wealth gap among Americans.

Left out of the intra-American discussions about the growing wealth and income gap is the effect of globalization on global wealth and income inequalities. It's probably of little consolation to Americans that their now-outsourced jobs improve the quality of lives of foreign workers, but it is nonetheless a fact that needs to be taken into account if we're to build a narrative, correct? If the narrative is "widening inequality in wealth and income," then you'd need to have the data to back that up, right? Some philosopher-level amount of intellectual curiosity should lead people to seek out and consider global data and not just data about Americans, yes?

From the way Chomsky and the reddit-hive-mind tell it, the multinational corporations, seeking Profit over People, ship the jobs oversees where people are exploitatively paid 15 cents an hour, pretty much a deadweight loss for all concerned except for the Evil Corporations/Stockholders. From the way they tell it, you'd expect inequality and immiseration on the world scale to be exacerbated by these turns of events. I mean, isn't that what capitalism without democratic intervention, is all about? That is, after all, the very narrative they push about the American historical experience prior to the New Deal. (Presumably, so the narrative goes, it's what's supposed to happen in any industrially-developing nation.) I strongly suspect we've already been bitten there, too.

The reality of the matter is that while many Americans have it tough and things might well get even worse in the future for them, a global-scale perspective will shed light on the reality of the matter: there are some billions of people around the world who are dirt poor, by American standards, willing to work for improved wages but still dirt cheap, by American standards. If enlightened cosmopolitanism and altruism are supposed to be our motives, we should be welcoming these developments. There seems to be something quite toxic here at work, though: a rejection of economic reality, a rejection driven by fear, envy, prejudice, what have you. Much the same as what happens on the Right when it comes to the Right's pet anti-reality issues.

That being said, there is something to the "Occupy" narrative that all pro-reality people should acknowledge: our government is bought by moneyed interests, and is corrupted accordingly. The People have a large part in letting this happen by electing unenlightened and cynical representatives. So, e.g., while budgetary reality says that deficit reduction will require (in part) raising taxes on the only people who have the money these days, the political reality is the insanity that this isn't even on the table at present (due to the Republicans, who have their own anti-reality narratives on fiscal matters. I.e., supply-side tax cuts make a lot more fiscal and economic sense when marginal tax rates are 70% than when they're in the 30s; and the deceptive "only 50 percent of the people pay taxes" meme should have been dead long ago).

A pox on both of their houses.

[ADDENDUM: A case in point of shady numbers, even applied to the "global" scale. ("On Monday the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development released a massive 400-page report surveying the state of inequality around the world. The report, United We Stand: Why Inequality Keeps Rising reaffirms that inequality is now rising not just in the United States, but globally." Bold emphasis mine.) The study in this case involves the 34 OECD member countries - which doesn't include China or India (which make up more than a third of the world population) much less more than a hundred other nations. How exactly is that "global"?]

Marxism, Rand, and Dialectics

I anticipate in the not-too-distant future a grand showdown between Marxists and/or other leftists (on the one hand) and advocates of capitalism (on the other) over who has best mastered the art of "dialetic." Sciabarra gives the most complete and comprehensive treatment to date of the subject of dialectics (comprehensiveness being arguably the chief virtue in dialectics - as it is in Perfectivism), and it's one that ought to just make died-in-the-wool Marxists go apeshit - that is, if they have the intellectual curiosity to enter into an, ahem, dialectic with this treatment. It really hinges on just how deep-seated their hatred of capitalism is.

If there's one group of people I absolutely refuse to go easy on, it's Marxists. The Marxist tradition proudly upholds "dialectics" as its methodological core, but one thing the Marxists haven't done to any remotely respectable extent, is to engage in the activity of dialectic with advocates of capitalism, Mises and Rand in particular. The failure to do so actually goes against the very grain of their professed ethos.

Let's keep in mind, as we proceed, that, as Sciabarra points out, Aristotle is the original grandmaster of dialectics, the greatest synthetic mind of the ancient world. Anyone with a clue about the history of philosophy notices the pattern that has emerged whenever the subject gets around to Aristotle and his influence.

Aristotle's greatness was certainly not lost on Hegel, and it is through Hegel that Aristotle has any influence on Marx or Marxists. (This makes sense of Trotsky's religious prophecy that under communism the average man will rise to the level of "an Aristotle, a Goethe, a Marx," and that above this new average "new peaks will rise.") The question, then, is just how much the Marxian tradition has failed to actually, ahem, integrate Aristotle into its ethos.

If we want to take the concept of dialectic seriously, then we have to see how Rand and Mises represent the next "dialectical" stage in history after Marx. The next step in the dialectic would be a "synthesis," but if we want to be Aristotelian about this, the "synthesis" could not consist in the uniting of contradictory opposites, but rather in considering opposed viewpoints, showing how at least one of them represents only a partial or incomplete "stage" of the emerging totality, and then come up not with a "synthesis" or even a reconciliation, but with a resolution to the "dialectical tension" that exists at any given stage of history. (And any Aristotelian dialectic worthy of the name takes the step of comparing the resolution with sensory observation of reality, the ultimate arbiter.)

The Marxist intellectuals have failed to do the remotely respectable task of even attempting to resolve the "dialectical tension" between themselves and the leading advocates of capitalism. As far as I'm concerned, this makes their pretense to being dialectical a massive fraud. (Don't worry, the "liberal" intellectuals will be having their own massive fraud exposed soon enough. That's for another time/posting.)

Anyone who respects the process of dialectic has to know that you simply cannot let opposing views go unanswered; the whole point is to be able to soundly refute and/or incorporate all the competing answers, to reach the most complete resolution available at any given stage/context. Real dialectic is supposed to be perfective in that way; fake dialectic - e.g., Marxism - doesn't respect this.

It's difficult to say just how much this failure is the product of extreme bad faith, or of some combination of other factors. It's no secret that Marxism has been likened to a religion - most especially by political "conservatives" who have only their own (non-materialist) religion to offer as an alternative. The "religion" charge carries bite because you have here a systematic world-picture that adherents say must be accepted and understood in its totality before you can rightly understand what makes everything tick. Outsiders just won't have the context to "see" the Truth of the matter. (A similar charge has been leveled against Objectivism on many an occasion, but come on. The people who level that charge need to get with it.)

As best as I understand it, that's how you end up with the notion of the non-Enlightened using an "outside" logic as against the full-context-keeping "dialectics" in use by Marxists. That's how one might end up with a doctrine of polylogism, something which Mises apparently had to contend with at nearly every turn back in his day, but which has presumably gone by the wayside given the obvious corruptions involved.

The reason the "religion" charge seems to stick with Marxism is this idea - in conjunction with the "you have to grasp the whole system first" notion above - that the "dialectic" essentially makes Marxism immune from criticism. If dialectic is the central essence and core of Marxian inquiry into the world (distinguished from, say, Hegelian dialectic by its materialist interpretation of history - a dogma which I don't think can be extricated from Marxism), then it contains within it what one might call an "irrefutable" status. In principle you couldn't attempt any refutation of Marxism without implicitly presupposing and adopting the dialectic it recommends. The (apparent) problem is that a doctrine claiming "irrefutability" sounds, on its face, to most people like a religion. (That, plus religious prophecies of a coming Communist Paradise, as per Trotsky above. Gee, who wouldn't imprison and kill dissenters if they were obstructing the path to a collective-ownership Paradise? The delicious irony here is that one person who lived through the early years of the Soviet Revolution did rise to the level of an Aristotle - but not while living under the bloody Soviet dictatorship, of course.)

This problem is further compounded in a country like America, which has been steeped in pragmatism and an accompanying skepticism-cum-cynicism regarding abstract theories ("ideology") and system-building, a contempt for intellectuals who build systems that don't correspond to commonsensically-grasped reality, etc. This also explains much about the state of the intellectual culture of America in the mid-20th century: you had system-building Marxists running a dictatorship halfway around the world, and an intellectually-defanged America offering next to nothing in the realm of ideas to answer it. (The "liberals" were defanged by pragmatism; the conservatives package-dealt America, freedom, and morality with religion.)

There is a further skepticism-cynicism toward the notion of "irrefutability" fostered by the pragmatic intellectuals' implicit (or often explicit) scientism. According to those with a scientistic mindset, the notion of "irrefutability" is a red flag because an idea is supposed to be in some sense falsifiable. (To further integrate things here, this last link is to the wikipedia page for Karl Popper, who also didn't have nice things to say about what he saw as the illiberal tradition represented by Plato, Hegel, and Marx. Also, Popper was, with Mises, a chief influence on Hayek. Ain't integration fun?) This gets into a whole area of study regarding epistemic justification and "the apriori." (This has further relevance to Mises, who argued for putting economics on an "aprioristic" praxeological footing - and who was met with opposition by the scientistic mentalities of his day. The whole context of all of this is the lack of a highly-robust Aristotelianism to counter this fallacy and that.) Scientism and pragmatism being so closely related, we have had in America's intellectual classes an opposition to system-building of whatever kind, be it religious or philosophical. That helps explain the resistance to both Marxism and Randism.

The upshot is that you have this religious-seeming worldview basically requiring agreement with its fundamentals to be adequately discussed, and doctrines like polylogism emerging to counter the "bourgeois" backlash. It seems on its face to involve willful evasion so as to justify ignoring counter-evidence or counter-argument, but doctrinaire sorts of thinking can do weird things to people. They can become deluded that they have grasped the Truth of things when they have not; it's a complicated matter whether this delusion is the product of evasion or of other things (or a combination).

So, back to "dialectic." It's supposed to make Marxism immune to criticism, refutation, or falsification, just given what dialectic is. While it certainly would make any rigorously neo-Aristotelian philosophy immune from refutation, that raises the question: is Marxism a genuinely neo-Aristotelian philosophy? The ancients spoke in terms of fixed and eternal categories (or universals), whereas the Hegelian and Marxian traditions incorporate a philosophy of history, and then speak of the dialectic as working "its" course through history. The particular appeal of this to many intellectuals - apparently much moreso in Europe than in America - is the notion that history represents long-term progress, and that socialism represents a progression over capitalism.

The whole theory goes bust if socialism is not, in fact, a progression over capitalism.

The biggest lesson of political economy of the 20th century is that socialism cannot work, and that its intellectual adherents are deficient in understanding the ways of the world. (Isn't this just common sense? Of course socialism sucks, economically and morally.) So in beating up on Marxists, am I beating a dead horse? No. Absolutely not. The underlying phenomenon remains. Off the top of my head, my over-arching name for this phenomenon is "the separation of philosophy from reality and life." It's the phenomenon that has to be wiped out intellectually if we are going to have genuine progress toward humanity's moral and intellectual maturity.

If the Marxists were Aristotelians, they would have been much more reality-oriented, instead of being beholden to a dialectic which projects socialism as the future for humanity. What's more, they would have undertaken the effort to answer Mises and Rand - and they have not. By not doing so, they have violated the spirit of dialectic. From this vantage point, they had a grasp on a good concept, and distorted and abused it by putting it into the service of socialist politics. For Marxism, politics ends up being the tail wagging the whole systematic dog. Marxism therefore fails, on its own (dialectical) terms.

Rand, meanwhile, did not advocate capitalism as a primary, nor was her system beholden to her advocacy of capitalism. She was primarily an advocate of reason:

I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows.

This—the supremacy of reason—was, is and will be the primary concern of my work, and the essence of Objectivism. (For a definition of reason, see Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology.) Reason in epistemology leads to egoism in ethics, which leads to capitalism in politics.

(One thing to note in connection with this is just how politics-bound the mentality of so many of Rand's critics is. They dislike capitalism, and end up rejecting Rand as a philosopher basically because of that, thereby cutting off their own noses and spiting their own faces. Their hatred of capitalism is so deep-seated that they can't see past it to her eudaemonist ethics or neo-Aristotelian epistemology. It's fucking sad, it what it is, in addition to being intellectually lazy and just downright pathetic.)

"Every philosopher claims to be an advocate of reason," the cynic might sneer. Oh, yeah? So when a David Hume is reduced to the level of saying "Reason is, and ought [?] only to be a slave of the passions," is that advocacy of reason? Methinks the sneering cynic misses the whole point. Anyway, Rand more than anyone since Aristotle advocated reason heroically, passionately, and non-contradictorily. She did affirm that egoism and capitalism follow from the consistent application of reason, but she did not hold them as primaries. She did not make her advocacy of egoism and capitalism immune from the evidence - but she did nonetheless hold egoism and capitalism to be true in virtue of all the abundant evidence. (Of course, reason itself is immune from refutation - by what means would only possibly purport to refute it?) I can't begin to fathom how the same could be said on behalf of socialism, collectivism, and anti-individualism.

If we're going to follow the "rules" of Marxian dialectic itself, shouldn't we say that Rand effectively supersedes Marx? (In the language of dialectics, the term "subsume" might be used in place of or in addition to "supersede," but the notion that Rand "subsumed" Marx is about as sense-making as the idea that Aristotle "subsumed" Plato despite their fundamental differences. "Accounted for" or "trumps" would be much better.) As best as I understand it, any Marxism worthy of the label is socialistic, and holds that any "dialectical process" ends up reaffirming socialism. If that aspect of Marxism is considered unfalsifiable by Marxists, then we have nothing other than a highly toxic and dangerous (read: DEADLY) dogma, made all the more toxic and deadly by its tightly-integrated package-deal.

(Peikoff might recognize Marxism as a form of mis-integration, as it fits well with his theme concerning the special toxicity and deadliness of fully-integrated but false worldviews. This is why he prefers the pragmatic dis-integration of the "liberals" over the dogmatic mis-integration of the "conservatives." If there ever was a false dichotomy that's undermining America's strength, it's the presented alternatives of pragmatism and dogmatism. (Meanwhile, the best that passes for "system" and "synthesis" to American mainstream Humanities-academics is Rawls's A Theory of Justice. Rawls-groupie Thomas Nagel chides Robert Nozick for his "libertarianism without foundations." For Nagel's idea of what counts as foundations, there's A Theory of Justice - but not the works of Ayn Rand or David L. Norton. Really nice, huh? By the way, Nozick demonstrates way more "dialectical" sensibility than Rawls does - as evidenced by his willingness to actually look at the pro-capitalist literature and thereby reach much more sensible conclusions. As an added bonus, he also tears Marxism a new gaping you-know-what. Just because he wasn't going to entertain the bullshit rationalistic contrivance of the "Original Position" that has had academics wanking all over one another - in many cases, at taxpayer expense - for decades, doesn't mean he isn't as concerned with foundations, or that he wasn't a much better philosopher than Rawls. But then again, Rand was a much better philosopher than Nozick, which makes the academic Humanities look like a pretty sorry state of affairs, doesn't it? By the way, here's what the Stanford Encyclopedia - as representative of the interests and concerns of the academic mainstream as any, as the entry on the "Original Position" above indicates - has to say about the very Americentric concept of individualism. And there you have it. Oh, and don't worry, I'll be getting around to a full-on treatment of Rawls's bullshit anti-eudaemonistic Original Position in due course.))

If, however, intellectual honesty trumps socialism in the dialectical hierarchy, then any Marxism worthy of the name is always and forever fucked.

Any neo-Marxian figure, to be true to dialectics, has to confront Rand (and Mises) and reach the new harmonious resolution to the "dialectical tension." All evidence points to them having defaulted in this task, to have left this tension unresolved, to have (imperfectively) left things hanging, leaving it up to real (neo-Aristotelian, pro-capitalist) dialecticians to do the work. While this reaffirms the validity of (neo-Aristotelian) dialectic, Marxism can be said to be a resounding failure by the standards of dialectic.

And that's how Marxism is undermined from within.

Next stage: Perfectivism.

(Ain't integration fun? :-) )