Me:

It’s also not clear that the specifically “socialist” element in statist unionism was any worse, at this point than the nativist, pro-war “state capitalist” element.

Kennedy:

Stalin made it clear enough for me.

Kennedy, I’m no export in labor history, but the general impression that I got is that the Stalinist influence on Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926) and the ST&LA (1895-1899) was pretty minimal.

In any case, the “at this point” is a clear reference to the later paragraph in which I distinguish the period in which the dominant force among American state socialists in the labor movement were electioneering Social Democrats, and the later period in which they were Communists in the direct service of Moscow. You can complain that even “social democracy” means a steadily growing and increasingly ravenous State, and that the SDs paved the way for echt Bolshevism in the statist Left, and that’d be fair, but if you’re basing your complaints on the more resolute versions of statism that came after, then it would be just as far to cite Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, and Tojo as the end result of nativist, war-mongerng state capitalism of the sort practiced by “anti-socialist” statist labor “conservatives.”

Maybe we shouldn’t invest too much in picking sides in spats between warring statists.

REALITY CHECK:

Unionism is based on violence. It’s a criminal activity, which only exists because of the State. This exists in both theory and fact.

The Knights of Labor were founded in 1869, predating the Wagner Act (1935) by six and a half decades. Given that half of organized labor’s history in the United States was carried on without any grant of government recognition or privileges, and in fact in the face of massive police and military violence against organizers, strikers, and people who just happened to be in the wrong crowd at the wrong time, I conclude that your claim that “Unionism … only exists because of the State” is what we colloquially call “making shit up.”

Kennedy: I have no problem in principle with unions in a free market. In historical practice though unions have often tended to be dominated by out and out socialists.

What Holmes said.

Also, you need to distinguish at least three different kinds of socialists within organized labor. Early on, there were the electoral socialists (such as Eugene Debs or the ST&LA), on the one hand, and the anti-statist socialists (such as Benjamin Tucker, the International Working People’s Association, and the Wobblies), on the other. Both of them were considered the radical opposition (from different directions) of the mainline conservative unionism and “state capitalism” endorsed by Gompers and his cronies. But while it’s clear that there are objections from libertarian principle against the social democrats, it’s not nearly so clear that there are against the anarchists. (It’s also not clear that the specifically “socialist” element in statist unionism was any worse, at this point than the nativist, pro-war “state capitalist” element.)

After the Bolshevik conquest of international socialism, and the State colonization of the labor movement through the Wagner Act, the main ideological debate within leadership ended up between “anti-socialist” corporatist union bosses backed by Washington, and communist union bosses backed by Moscow. So much the worse for the labor movement, and the world, but there’s no reason to do these bandits the honor of giving them a monopoly on the names “socialism” or “unions,” any more than the rampant Mussolinism of the owning class over the past 70 years justifies giving them a monopoly on “markets” or “business.”

If you’re going to complain (rightly so) about the media’s language when it arrogates the term “locals” for violent white racists and “Muslims” for their victims, shouldn’t you also be a bit more careful than to talk about “the working class,” “the Australian working class,” et cetera as if it were composed entirely of young white men? Lots of working class folks in Australia are suffering on the business end of the bashing at the moment.

Fontwell, the question here is what you mean by the “wrongness” of a statement. If you mean that the statement is ill-formed or meaningless, many if not most philosophers in the 20th and 21st centuries would agree with you. (In fact, I would too.) But the question is what sort of principled and motivated account we can give to explain why it is ill-formed or meaningless. Just pointing out a problem doesn’t solve it; the question is how you can have a language that allows you to make assertions of the form “A is true,” where A is a name or description that designates a particular sentence, while avoiding the awkward consequence that one of the sentences you might deny is the very sentence by which you deny it. Just banning sentences that lead to contradictions, solely on the basis of their leading to contradictions, has a couple of awkward effects: (1) it seems to be nothing more than linguistic gerrymandering; if I write “Johnson’s thesis is false,” then why should I be able to name it “Jackson’s thesis” but not “Johnson’s thesis”? What’s to stop me? (2) There are in fact self-referential sentences that don’t result in logical contradictions, but do cause philosophical headaches in other ways. Sentences of the form “If this sentence is true, then P” don’t directly result in any contradiction, but do allow you to prove absolutly any proposition whatsoever that you care to substitute for P. M, as discussed above, seems to be a part of our ordinary language, but it also seems to allow for the possibility of the bizarre disagreement between the normal believer and the perverse skeptic. And T, as discussed by Blar, is logically completely compliant — if it’s true, it’s true, and if it’s false, it’s false. But its semantics seem to shrink to a vanishing point; there seems to be nothing even in principle that could make it true, or make it false.

Blar, I think you’re right to show interest in T (in my essay I talk about it as an essential part of understanding what’s wrong with L) but I don’t think that M can be reduced to it. The simple reason being that T can’t meaningfully be asserted but M can (and was, by Marco Polo). I think that part of what a theory has to do in accounting for the “data,” as it were, is to account for the fact that Polo wrote M (or rather, wrote its equivalent in Italian) and we understood what he wrote.

One way to think about this is that when we evaluate M (and so, if we try to evaluate your looped case of M1, M2, M*, in such a way as to capture what M said) there seems to be a right order to do the evaluation in. First you figure out whether the normal believer or the normal skeptic is right about all the other statements in the book, then you count the assurance as false only if that’s entailed by the falsity of one of the other conjuncts. And that’s how you get the truth-value of M.

You could say, “O.K., well, that gives us a convention for calling M true or false and so also a convention for calling T true or false.” But of course if that is the convention, then we don’t have one for T, since T doesn’t have any “conjuncts” besides itself. There doesn’t seem to be any point at all at which it could be tied down to anything in logical space. So it does seem to me that there has to be an important difference between M and T; the question is how to spell out what that difference is.

As for the suggestion that we can translate M simply as M2, and so get the truth-conditions that we want, well, I agree that we can, but I’m not at all sympathetic to the claim that that’s how we should understand what Polo said. Because, well, that’s not what Polo said, and there are also technical problems that surface in most of the accounts that would give you some motivation for making the translation. I don’t know about you, but it certainly seems true to me that if Polo lied when he said, “This book contains nothing but the truth,” then his book contains at least two counterexamples to his claim: first, whatever it was he was lying about as far as his journey is concerned, and second, the assurance that he was telling the truth.

The difference is brought out by imagining a case of memory manipulation. You have a false belief about the way things actually seemed at the time, but it nevertheless truly seems actual to you now.

Well, you needn’t invoke sci-fi memory manipulation; faulty memory happens all the time, in small ways. But isn’t this just a case of distinguishing a difference in scope, rather than any kind of burly objective-subjective distinction? “It seems to me that I did in fact tell you ‘Happy anniversary’” [= S(P(T(i,u, h)))] and “It did in fact seem to me that I told you ‘Happy anniversary’” [= P(S(T(i, u, h)))] are just two different propositions on the face of it, because the scope of the past-tense qualifier is different. (Indeed, it’s not hard to see how different the conditions for their appropriate use are.) I think pretty much everyone who’s discussed the seeming infallibility of first-personal mental ascriptions has then limited it to first-personal present mental ascriptions, haven’t they?

Excellent post, Amanda. This is part of the reason that I very quickly came to hate the way that University panels on rape would always feel obliged to invite a campus cop as one of the “experts” on rape. Their (that is, his) talk would inevitably consist of a bunch of know-nothing hectoring of young women to keep to well-lit areas (there was very little talk of the University shelling out to improve the lighting of course), to keep their keys out for slashing an attacker and jog without headphones on. I’m sure that’s decent advice, but it’s not like they haven’t already posted this all over campus, it makes stopping rape a matter of constraint on individual women rather than working together for the freedom of all women, and it generally wasn’t even the point of the damn panel. (They were almost always convened by the sexual assault counseling center to talk about acquaintance rape. But, of course, the campus counseling center is hostage to campus bureaucratic politics, so they have to invite a cop to make sure that everyone feels like their “expertise” is being respected.)

Anyway, this post reminded me of the passage in Susan Brownmiller’s chapter on “the police-blotter rapist,” i.e. men who rape or gang-rape relative strangers in everyday circumstances:

The Greek warrior Achilles used a swarm of men descended from ants, the Myrmidons, to do his bidding as hired henchmen in battle. Loyal and unquestioning, the Myrmidons served their master well, functioning in anonymity as effective agents of terror. Police-blotter rapists in a very real sense perform a myrmidon function for all men in our society. Cloaked in myths that obscure their identity, they, too, function as anonymous agents of terror. Although they are the ones who do the dirty work, the actual attentat, to other men, their superiors in class and station, the lasting benefits of their simple-minded evil have always accrued.

A world without rapists would be a world in which women moved freely without fear of men. That some men rape provides a sufficient threat to keep all women in a constant state of intimidation, forever conscious of the knowledge that the biological tool must be held in awe for it may turn to a weapon with sudden swiftness borne of harmful intent. Myrmidons to the cause of male dominance, police-blotter rapists have performed their duty well, so well in fact that the true meaning of their act has largely gone unnoticed. Rather than society’s aberrants or “spoilers of purity,” men who commit rape have served in effect as front-line masculine shock troops, terrorist guerrillas in the longest sustained battle the world has ever known.

— Against Our Will (1975), p. 209.

Me:

It’s well known that habitual practice can change our beliefs, attitudes, dispositions, desires, pleasures, and behavior

mythago:

Then why are we complaining about porn?

Because the fact that men habitually use pornography for sexual arousal, sexual pleasure, and orgasm during masturbation makes reactionary content in pornography importantly different from reactionary content in other media. Both are objectionable and both ought to be analyzed and criticized. But it does not make sense to go around, quote Treating Porn Like Every Other Media unquote, when the consumption of pornography in our society has specific characteristics that give special reasons for interest and concern by people who are worried about (among other things) the fusion between sex and aggression in many men’s minds and actions. I already spent quite a bit of time explaining this above in explanatory comments to Amp, an attempt at saying it more concisely, and an attempt at explaining at greater length for reddecca.

mythago:

It’s ridiculous to pretend that boys grow up in a media culture that treats women as empowered, intelligent, fully equal beings, and suddenly when a boy picks up a copy of Penthouse, for the FIRST TIME he is exposed to the idea that women are inferior, fit only for sex, and the magazine will create a Pavlovian conditioning whereby masturbation will cement sexism in his impressionable male mind.

I agree. That is ridiculous.

Shulamite, “This sentence is false” does not attempt to ascribe falsity to the words “This sentence,” any more than “The first sentence written by Plato was false” attempts to ascribe falsity to the words “The first sentence written by Plato.” Both of them attempt to ascribe falsity to the sentence picked out by the denoting phrase.

Even setting that issue to one side, though, I don’t think your solution is even materially adequate. Among other things, it would require us to dismiss statements such as (M) for precisely the same reasons that we dismiss (L). But (M) is a perfectly ordinary bit of understood language. I think any theory that discards it is, for exactly that reason, not a good theory.

Shulamite: If “this statement is false” refers to some other statement (like “paradoxes are fun”), then the whole paradox disappears from the very beginning, and there is simply nothing to explain or even puzzle about.

This is not so. There are what are called “looped liar” paradoxes. Consider:

(P1) P2 is true.

(P2) P1 is false.

If P1 is true, then it follows that P2 is true; thus that what P2 says obtains; thus that P1 is false. But if P1 is false, then it follows that P2 is not true; thus what P2 says does not obtain; thus P1 is true. Similarly, if P2 is true then P2 is provably false, and if P2 is false then P2 is provably true. Any theory of truth that ascribes either truth or falsity to both P1 and P2 is therefore false, because internally contradictory.

There are also cases where we simply don’t know the contents of the sentence to which we are referring. For example, you might say, “the first assertive sentence Plato ever wrote was true,” or “the first assertive sentence Plato ever wrote was false.” Provided that Plato existed and did write one or more assertive sentences, one of these is true (although we will probably never know which one of them is). But allowing these kind of descriptions can be risky. For example, suppose that the first thing I say on Tuesday was, “The first thing Shulamite said today is false.” And the first thing you said on Tuesday — not knowing that I had said this — was “The first thing Rad Geek said today is true.”

Andrew Rogers: Then, because they’ve been “forced” to bear the weight of all these “free riders,” they demand the power to extract forced dues from employees who didn’t choose to join the union in the first place.

Unions do not extract forced dues from anybody. You don’t have a natural right to work in open shops. Sorry.

The legal and regulatory structure that legally forces business-owners to negotiate with NLRB-recognized unions is a form of coercion. The legal enforcement of the terms of union shop or closed shop contracts is not. (You might say that there’d be a lot fewer union shops if it weren’t for government intervention. Maybe that’s true and maybe it’s not. But if it is, so what? There’d be a lot fewer HMOs if it weren’t for government intervention, too, but that doesn’t mean that you are forced to patronize an HMO, or that the fees you pay them are “extracted” from you.) The distinction is a matter of some practical importance, since systematic attempts to blank it out are the usual justification for the so-called “right to work” (i.e., anti-union shop) laws that are on the books in many states. Those laws have absolutely no justification from a libertarian standpoint, but anti-union conservatives almost universally trot out phoney libertarian rhetoric about “forcing workers to join unions” in order to justify them.

Michael Giesbrecht: I don’t know of any reason to be pro union even in a free market scenerio where unions have no legal means of using violence to acheive their goals. What service would they provide to their members to justify their dues?

This is frankly silly. You may as well ask what services business or professional associations would provide to their members to justify their (much higher) dues, in a free market scenario where they have no legal means of using violence to achieve their goals. The answer is, all kinds of things; and what things are in question depends in part on the organization you’re thinking of.

Different kinds of unions have historically provided different kinds of services. Coordinating strikes or slow-downs with demands (for better wages and conditions, for more autonomy, or whatever), providing a forum for workers to talk with each other, providing a forum for airing grievances against management, providing representation for the worker’s interests in grievances against management, keeping and publishing information about which employers treat workers well and which treat them poorly (for example, this is one of the primary functions of unions that are uncomfortable with admitting that they’re unions, such as the AAUP), offering venues in which workers can get to know each other and socialize, providing a cooperative organization for services like education or health insurance or funeral benefits or any number of other kinds of mutual aid, providing hiring halls where new workers can find a job, or even serving as a cooperative structure for coordinating direct ownership and management of shops by the workers themselves, have all been stated goals and actual practices of historical labor unions. (Labor unions have often disagreed vigorously with one another over the best ways to achieve this — for example whether to organize by shop, by craft, by industry, or by region; whether to form unions that are racially, nationally, or gender segregated; the level of solidarity to practice with other unions; what kind of goals to set; what kind of dues to charge; how to pick people for positions of executive authority, for how long, under what conditions, and with what powers; whether to actively bargain with employers or just to set demands; who should do the bargaining if bargaining is done; etc. etc. etc. Also, not to put too fine a point on it, but whether or not to try to exercise political control through the State in order to achieve demands. Before the Wagner Act gave a massive government subsidy to one particular variety of unionism — conservative AFL-line unionism, focused on collective bargaining for wage and benefit improvements — there were many significant unions, such as the Wobblies, that spurned electioneering and lobbying in principle, and stated explicitly anarchist goals.)

Lopez: The major media’s usual bias is “business bad, unions good”, so I judge it just natural that these types take the opposite tack.

Lopez, I’m familiar with plenty of examples of major media bias against businesses as such, but I can’t think of very many examples of major media bias in favor of unions, at least in the past couple decades or so. (Actually, it’s rare enough to find any mention of unions at all, other than pro sports players’ unions.) What did you have in mind here?