[PEN-L:32560] John Rawls

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, Nov. 26, 2002

John Rawls, Theorist on Justice, Is Dead at 82
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

John Rawls, the American political theorist whose work gave new meaning
and resonance to the concepts of justice and liberalism, died on Sunday
at his home in Lexington, Mass. He was 82.

The cause was heart failure, his wife, Margaret, said. She said he had
been incapacitated in varying degrees since suffering a stroke in 1995.

The publication of his book "A Theory of Justice" in 1971 was perceived
as a watershed moment in modern philosophy and came at a time of furious
national debate over the Vietnam War and the fight for racial equality.
Not only did it veer from the main current of philosophical thought,
which was then logic and linguistic analysis, it also stimulated a
revival of attention to moral philosophy. Dr. Rawls made a sophisticated
argument for a new concept of justice, based on simple fairness.

Before Dr. Rawls, the concept of utilitarianism, meaning that a society
ought to work for the greatest good of the greatest number of people,
held sway as the standard for social justice. He wrote that this
approach could ride roughshod over the rights of minorities. Moreover,
the liberty of an individual is of only secondary importance compared
with the majority's interests.

His new theory began with two principles. The first was that each
individual has a right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible
with the same liberty for others. The second was that social and
economic inequalities are just only to the extent that they serve to
promote the well-being of the least advantaged.

But how could people agree to structure a society in accordance with
these two principles? Dr. Rawls's response was to revive the concept of
the social contract developed earlier by thinkers like Thomas Hobbes,
John Locke and Jean Jacques Rousseau.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/26/obituaries/26RAWL.html

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It should be obvious that any philosopher who tried to revive the
concept of the social contract would have little in common with Marxism,
which posits social class as the fundamental unit of analysis. What is
not so obvious is the degree to which a subvariant of Marxism, namely
Analytical Marxism (AM), adapted to this rather individualistic
framework. This is from my critique of John Roemer, one such AM'er:

"Egalitarian Perspectives" is a collection of John Roemer's articles
from the years 1981 and 1992. We learn in the introduction that Roemer
made a pilgrimage to G.A. Cohen in 1981, like Luke Skywalker to the
Jeddi Master, where he learned "the range of questions addressed by
modern political philosophy." The visit emboldened the young acolyte to
launch an assault against classical Marxism's "wrong-headed" surplus
value approach to exploitation. Roemer knew what Marx "really meant,"
and this was captured by his own property-relations theory.

Roemer states that the purpose of the book is to answer the question of
"what egalitarians seek to equalize." Those who are trailblazers on this
question are Richard Arneson, G.A. Cohen, Ronald Dworkin, Amartya Sen
and John Rawls. If some of you are scratching your heads trying to
recall where you last heard these names, trust me that it was not at a
trade union conference or a rally for political prisoners. The topic of
"egalitarianism" within this circle of professional philosophers is an
entirely abstract matter. They chat about it in the same dry and
intellectual way that aesthetic philosophers discuss "beauty".

This collection of thinkers treat question of "egalitarianism" as a
subject within the rarefied world of Anglophone political philosophy. It
arises out of a debate between disciples of the utilitarian John Stuart
Mill on one side and John Rawls on the other, who proposes a "primary
goods theory of justice. A just society according to Rawls is one in
which society maximizes the "primary goods" of the worst off members.
Roemer enters the fray by trying to adapt Marxist solutions to the
problem of "distributive justice." In essence he is trying to blend
liberal and socialist themes. From liberalism he appropriates the
concern with welfare, from Marxism he hopes to find a theory that will
reveal the underlying economic forces that explain inequality. Somewhere
along the line Roemer drops the connection with Marxism, as tenuous as
it is.

There is precious little in Roemer's book that has any relation to the
sorts of topics that preoccupy Marxists. Mostly it can be found in the
section "Socially necessary exploitation and historical materialism."
Roemer's definition of exploitation in this section is as follows: "were
a coalition able to preserve the same incentive structure, and, by
withdrawing with its per capita share of produced assets thereby improve
the lot of its members, then it is capitalistically exploited in the
current allocation."

Yeah, I know. This is virtually impossible to understand at first
glance. I have been knocking my head against Roemer's shitty prose for a
couple of weeks now, so I think I can provide a translation. He is
saying that if a group of workers dropped out of capitalist society and
improved their situation, then the situation they dropped out of was
exploitative. Now you may ask yourself why I chose the words "dropped
out." Does this mean the same as Timothy Leary's "Turn on, tune in and
drop out"?

Yes, it does and this is exactly what Roemer is talking about in so many
words:

"Assuming capitalist property relations were necessary to bring about
accumulation and technical innovation in the early period of capitalism,
then the coalition which has withdrawn will soon fall behind the
capitalist society because of the incentives to innovate. Even the
proletarians under capitalism will eventually enjoy an income-leisure
bundle superior to the bundle of independent utopian socialists who have
retired into the hills with their share of the capital, assuming enough
of the benefits of increased productivity pass down to the proletarians,
as has historically been the case."

Translation from the Roemer-ese: When some workers "drop out" of
bourgeois society and go to Vermont with their tools and set up a
commune like a bunch of lazy grasshoppers, they will eventually fall
behind the industrious ant workers who remain in bourgeois society, and
who keep their hair short and drive their cars to their factory job each
day where foremen yell in their face and where assembly lines keep
speeding up and where they keep losing fingers... The criteria for
Roemer is not lost fingers or alienation, it is the bundle of goods you
can take home. (What was John Roemer doing in 1967 anyhow? Somebody
should have slipped him some acid.)

full: http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/analytical_marxism/roemer.htm

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