Comments Elsewhere

sailorman:

I think there’s a lot of non-overlap (not everything illegal is immoral, and not everything legal is moral, and so on…) but to a large degree, don’t you think that laws reflect society’s attempt to codify morality?

Not really, for two different reasons. First, because the province of law is more narrow than the province of morality. (Not everything that’s widely considered wrong can or ought to be legally punishable. For example, it’s widely considered wrong to stiff a delivery worker on a tip if you have the money and there was nothing wrong with the delivery. But it isn’t, and certainly shouldn’t be, either civilly or criminally actionable. That’s just not the government’s job.) Secondly, because “societies” don’t make laws in the first place; governments do. Provided that the people in government come from roughly the same culture as the private citizens, there will tend to be some overlap between what the people in government and what the people out of government widely consider right or wrong. But if the internal culture of the government is skewed towards certain views, or if the people who enter the government tend to be skewed towards specific sub-cultures within the larger culture, then you can expect that skew to be reflected in a similar skew between the laws that are in place and the laws that most people think ought to be in place. (In fact all of these conditions apply, which is why there are many unpopular laws that governments nevertheless insist on trying to enforce, and why many laws that are widely considered good ideas have not yet been enacted.)

That said, I think that you misunderstood the point I was trying to make in the first place. The point that I was trying to make didn’t have to do with attempts to “codify” morality, or with what people in a given society widely consider to be moral or immoral. My point had to do with what it is actually right to do, or actually wrong to do, or what people do or do not actually have a right to do. That’s an independent question; there are lots of cases where something was widely considered right even though it was wrong — say, slavery or witch-burning — and lots of cases where something was widely considered wrong even though there wasn’t anything wrong with it — say, interracial marriage or homosexual sex.

The point I was trying to make, then, is that something being legal or illegal has precisely nothing to do with whether it’s right or wrong to do it. Pointing to something and saying “That’s against the law” tells you something about what might happen to you if you do it and get caught, but it tells you nothing about whether you ought or ought not to do it. And pointing at an order and saying “That’s a legal order” tells you nothing about whether you ought to obey it, to ignore it, or to defy it. This is just an application of the principle set out by Dr. King in his letter from Birmingham jail:

You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: There are just and there are unjust laws. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with Saint Augustine that “An unjust law is no law at all”.

FormerlyLarry:

Every right to not comply with a legal order?

Your remark presupposes that the legality of an order has any moral significance. Actually it doesn’t. The cops who, in earlier times, turned firehoses on peaceful marchers, dragged black students out of segregated lunch-counters, forced Japanese-Americans into internment camps, opened fire on striking workers, and enforced the Fugitive Slave Act against innocent people, were all issuing “legal” orders, too. And so what? They had no right to act that way, whatever the law said. And the people being thus targeted had every right not to comply with the orders.

Let us know how all that works out for you.

Of course it’s true that caving in to an abusive dickhead will often make things go better for you, for the time being, than insisting on your rights. But that has exactly nothing to do with what your rights in that situation are. That’s a question of power, not a question of right.

IMHO really good cops are rare. It takes a special kind of person that can handle the authority over the general public without it changing them in negative ways.

If the power that cops are given over ordinary badgeless people is so morally corrosive then maybe we ought to be talking about ways to reduce or to check that power, rather than looking down our nose at the behavior of the people victimized by it.

Radfem:

But that’s policy issues. In my opinion, tasing a passive resister is akin to torturing them.

Precisely. Except that it’s not even “akin to.” It just is torture.

Using powerful electric shocks to inflict disabling pain on someone whose actions pose absolutely no physical threat, in order to coerce compliance with the officer’s demands, just is using torture to try to get what you want. Using repeated shocks on someone who is lying helpless on the ground is precisely the kind of official sadism that we’re familiar with from authoritarian regimes like Augusto Pinochet’s or or Saddam Hussein’s.

Incidentally, how much you want to bet that here, as elsewhere, the campus cops will “review” the incident and decide that the problem is that they equipped the cops with tasers? Because, you know, out-of-control cops sure wouldn’t brutalize people by low-tech means like beating them or shooting them. Ha ha ha.

Robert,

O.K., but I don’t think that that very well explains the decline in union membership and union influence over the past 30 years. Average real wages are substantially lower now than they were in the 1960s and early 1970s, and despite several years of modest increases during the late 1990s, the steady trend since 1973 has been the erosion of workers’ wealth, not an increase in the baseline.

Constant,

The I.W.W. was founded in 1905. Its membership peaked in the early 1920s at about 100,000 workers. During the first couple decades of its existence its most numerous constituents were timber workers and miners in the American West. You may think that the logging towns and mining camps of the 1900s-1920s were hotbeds of “left-wing intellectuals” playing at working-class solidarity, but you can hardly expect most people to agree with you.

You may note that it also predated the Communist Party U.S.A. by about a decade and a half. The economic ideas they promoted were generally not communist, but rather syndicalist. The immigrant members who were deported to Russia after the Palmer Raids usually found themselves jailed, exiled, or shot.

The membership of the I.W.W. today is about 1% of what it was in the early 1920s, and due to the impact of the Wagner Act and similar measures most workers find it more advantageous to join conservative, NLRB-recognized unions. However, I’d suggest that a balanced view of the IWW’s role in labor history would require looking back a bit further than 2007 and it would also require a bit more detailed of a discussion than you’ll find from a WikiPedia article.

Brandon,

What I’m suggesting is that different unions have different organizing models just as different firms have different business models. Excluding politically, economically, or culturally vulnerable segments of the labor market from your organizing is a model that some of them have adopted, but others adopted a model of trying to organize all workers everywhere to the extent that they could. The exclusionist organizing model is usually unstable in a free market, because unions depend on membership to get anything done, and excluding large segments of the working population creates an entrepreneurial opportunity for inclusive unions to pick up membership.

I think the fragility of their position is part of the reason why conservative union bosses actively aided the government in its efforts to violently suppress the radicals. The government in turn liked and supported the conservative unions because they drew workers away from radical unions, which during the 1900s-1920s tended to be more or less explicitly anarchist.

Aaron,

I doubt she’d be surprised. What she expresses in her article about the role of male-dominated unions in excluding women and marginalizing their concerns is not surprise, but rather anger. In any case, there is a very similar history within the AFL (the “American Separation of Labor,” as A. Philip Randolph liked to say) and its role in propping up Jim Crow in the American South. As well as the long history of nativism and anti-immigrant politics throughout the history of the AFL.

Half Sigma,

Neither all workers, nor all unionized workers, are men. Do everyone a favor and get Sam Gompers out of your head before you start thinking about the characteristics of the labor movement broadly.

Dave,

SDS isn’t a union. It’s a student organization. (That’s what the first “S” is for.)

Making more money is not the primary goal of joining a union—any kind of union. The primary goal is for workers to gain more autonomous power in the workplace. One way such power can be exercised is by bargaining for higher wages. (Most conservative unions today use it to bargain for job security and generous benefits for senior employees, more than for higher wages.) But there are lots of other ways that workers might exercise it.

And I don’t care what kind of unions conservatives can live with. I am a free marketeer, not a conservative. Thus I prefer anti-statist radical unions to establishmentarian conservative unions that have spent the past 70 years selling out workers in the name of maintaining their positions of influence within the liberal corporate state.

Brandon,

I guess that explains why radical unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World made active efforts to organize all workers, and fiercely criticized folks like the American Separation of Labor for their exclusionist organizing models, right?

Or perhaps not all unions are actively described by an economic model that was designed to explain the behavior of one specific tendency within a labor movement that used to be very diverse and used to have very vigorous internal debates over tactics, strategy, vision, etc. before the government got involved.

In a free market, exclusionist unions create market opportunities for their own competitors. One source of competition is the non-unionized labor market. But another source of competition is more inclusive unions which have goals other than shoring up the collective bargaining power of the aristocracy of labor. Thus the active alliance between big business, big government, and the establishment labor unions to destroy the IWW and similar unions, especially during crises such as World War I. Sometimes by passing extensive labor regulations that favor conservative, centralized unions; sometimes by sending out the goon squad to shoot or deport them.

As far as unions acting against their own interests goes, I expect what she’s referring to is the fact that when unions act to benefit one limited sector of the working class, at the expense of the rest of the working class, they undermine the long-term interests of all workers, including their own. The idea is that short-term gains are usually bought at the expense of destroying potential allies and making the fortunes of the union dependent on appeasing the powers that be. Since destroying potential allies strengthens the hand of your establishment patrons, it’s likely that eventually they will decide they don’t need you any more.

Judging what’s happened lately to big establishment unions (take the UAW—please!) over the past 40 years or so, I’d say that that claim is probably well-supported by the empirical evidence.

Maia,

Thanks for this post. It’s an important topic that all too often gets ignored or whitewashed in labor history.

In America, at least, there are two really distinct periods of history to consider — the labor movement up to the establishment of government-sponsored unionism by the Wagner Act in 1935, and then the labor movement after the establishment of government sponsorship. Before 1935 there were many different strands of the labor movement, who were often vigorously competing with one another over the vision of organized labor — conservative unions, especially those affiliated with the American Federation of Labor, either actively excluded workers on the basis of sex, race, nationality, and class, or else tolerated and supported their union brothers [sic] who did so. Their strategy was, generally, to shore up the bargaining power of male, white, American-born, skilled tradesmen within the system of Gilded Age state capitalism, by shoving women, blacks, Asians, immigrants, and industrial workers out of the labor market. But other unions, especially radical unions such as the Industrial Workers of the World, explicitly aimed at inclusion of all workers and worked actively to organize across lines of sex, race, nationality, class, etc. They aimed not to shore up the position of unionized workers within the state capitalist system, but rather to organize against the state capitalist system as such and replace it with worker ownership of the means of production. The conservative unions thus effectively became the junior partners of the bosses in trying to protect capitalist labor relations from the organizing of the radical unionists; meanwhile the radical unionists gained strength by organizing precisely those workers who were excluded by the conservative unions.

What happened in 1935 is that the Wagner Act created an extensive system of government privileges for unions that met the conditions for government recognition. Not surprisingly, the system was designed to favor the conservative unions’ organizing models and to focus union energies as much as possible on collective bargaining over wages and conditions with the sitting boss. Thus the explosive growth of the American Separation of Labor and its younger cousin, the CIO, through the new government-sponsored privileges, which “subversive organizations” like the IWW had no access to. The big union bosses flourished as they were inducted into the establishment alongside Big Government and Big Business. The bosses screamed bloody murder but then happily settled down to business with compliant, easy-to-coopt unions. The politicians celebrated their success in incorporating a new organized “base” into the system of political patronage and vote-buying. The radical unions dwindled in membership, or else were bought off by the other new big player in town — the Communist Party and its financial backers in Stalinist Russia. And the privileged, educated professionals who fancied themselves “Progressives” shouted “Hallelujah” and passed off the evisceration of domestic labor radicalism as the great triumph of labor history.

What’s happening now is that, with neither Soviet Communism nor autonomous domestic labor radicalism being considered a serious threat to the stability of the state capitalist system, Big Business and Big Government no longer have as much need for keeping Big Labor at the table. With less of a perceived threat, there is less of a perceived need for co-opting a buffer against that threat. It has served its purpose and now can be scaled back like any other obsolete resource. Thus, the current situation and the decaying prospects of the establishment unions. And since the establishment unions have spent the last half century selling out workers at large in order to protect the short-term interests of their own membership and especially their own union bosses, they have nobody but themselves to blame for that situation.

Anonymous,

I have no objection to a government protecting you from injustice, if you willingly pay for it to do that on your behalf. I do have an objection to a government forcing me to subscribe to its protection, if I would prefer to make arrangements with a different agency, or to fend for myself. Any government which forcibly suppresses responsible and non-aggressive competitors is initiating force against innocent people, and thus illegitimate on the Objectivist theory of justice. Any “government” which does not suppress responsible and non-aggressive competitors has forfeited any claim to sovereign authority over the legitimate use of force, and thus has ceased to be a government in Rand’s sense of the word. For more, cf. Roy Childs’ “Open Letter to Ayn Rand.”

I now plead for Natural Society against Politicians, and for Natural Reason against all three. When the World is in a fitter Temper than it is at present to hear Truth, or when I shall be more indifferent about its Temper; my Thoughts may become more publick. In the mean time, let them repose in my own Bosom, and in the Bosoms of such Men as are fit to be initiated in the sober Mysteries of Truth and Reason. My Antagonists have already done as much as I could desire. Parties in Religion and Politics make sufficient Discoveries concerning each other, to give a sober Man a proper Caution against them all. The Monarchic, Aristocratical, and Popular Partizans have been jointly laying their Axes to the Root of all Government, and have in their Turns proved each other absurd and inconvenient. In vain you tell me that Artificial Government is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! the Thing itself is the Abuse! —Edmund Burke (1757): A Vindication of Natural Society

Here as elsewhere, half of decent political thinking is just learning to keep your personal pronouns straight.

Sheldon,

Thanks for this series. I’m sorry that being out of town for a while has kept me from taking much note of it until now.

The conversation reminded me a lot of the controversy between the disunionist abolitionists and the Liberty Party faction in the mid-1840s, when folks such as James Birney, Salmon Chase, and Alvan Stewart were arguing that the Constitution already forbade slavery, if you read the right clauses in the right way. Here’s a paragraph from Henry Mayer’s excellent biography All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, on the Liberator circle’s take on the controversy (boldface added):

‘Such readings Garrison dismissed as naive wordplay or deceptive political contrivance. He insisted that the courts and the public had so uniformly accepted the proslavery protections of the Constitution for half a century that individuals could not dextrously conjure them out of existence. Frederick Douglass made a keen summary of the argument: “They looked at slavery as a creature of law; we regarded it as a creature of public opinion.” Even if the document could be read as the Liberty men suggested, Garrison stressed, “such construction is not to be tolerated against the wishes of either party.” Certainly the South would never agree that the three-fifths clause had to defer to some vague emanations that the preamble embraced anti-slavery philosophy, and the Prigg and Latimer [fugitive slave] cases demonstrated that stern New England jurists would not substitute natural law for a strict construction of the fugitive slave clause. Political realism, he insisted, required people to recognize the Constitution as a corrupt “bargain and compromise” of which “no just or honest use … can be made, in opposition to the plain intention of its framers, except to declare the contract at an end, and to refuse to serve under it.”’ —Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery, p. 326.

Those who want to end a legalized injustice would be better off challenging the climate of acceptance that sustains it, not the textual or procedural mumbo-jumbo that formalizes it. And that is far better achieved by appealing to conscience and common morality than it is by pseudo-legalistic grandstanding in the futile attempt to out-lawyer the whole American judicial-regulatory apparatus and the authors of the United States tax code.