Are you sure you are the 99%?

Catchy and socially beneficial as it might be, I have a bit of a problem with this slogan.

It certainly seems that society benefits a tiny minority far more than the rest, though the real situation is probably a bit more complicated than harming 99% of people while benefitting 1%. Still, this lack of detail is forgivable: almost by definition you can't expect slogans to be nuanced, and it is probably doing enough movement-galvanising good to offset its misleadingness.

My issue is with student activists who identify as members of the harmed group rather than the benefitters: by and large I think they are wrong. It seems to me that, if you are a student at a high-prestige university, either in the UK or in America, then you are probably not in the bottom 99% for society's impact on your overall life prospects.

For one thing, you have the option of quite easily joining the financial benefitters by following some fairly simple and googleable steps. Most of the activists I know are clever, sociable and non-disabled etc enough that, with the help of their pieces of paper, they could (and who knows, maybe will) secure top-income-percentile jobs if they really wanted. In my opinion, possessing this option puts you in the top 1% whatever your actual lifetime earnings: most people don't get the luxury of choosing between tremendous incomes and fulfilling lives.

On a global level, the idea that a significant number of top-university students in the UK/USA are in the losing 99% is just silly, and when you think about countries with wars and famines, or where large numbers of people can't even afford running water or mosquito nets, it is actually a bit perverse.

More generally, I think there is a quite deep effectiveness vs beauty issue here. It is far more effective sales tactics for the spokespeople for an oppressed group to be members of it themselves, but often it just isn't the case. Being a spokesperson and a genuinely oppressed person at the same time is quite difficult as it requires lots of free time, education, charisma-development opportunities, powerful friends and other things that tend not to be available to the genuinely oppressed. This problem can be overcome by pretending to be oppressed in the style of Gandhi, but there is something really ugly about doing that I think.

Then there is the whole animal rights thing...

activism vs autonomy

Here is the amazon link to 'The Making of Pro-Life Activists: How Social Movement Mobilization Works', a book whose review I just found really insightful. It's by a sociologist who interviewed about 100 committed anti-abortion activists to try to find out about how they got involved and what keeps them going.

The gist is, activism is more often the cause of the pro-lifers' beliefs than the result:

their beliefs about abortion became solidified, important, and fully developed during interactions with other activists after initial activism.

 Three sub things:

1) There are surprising parallels between right wing religious pro-life activism and left wing secular anti-fees activism. For example:

 Activists are also not uniform about how to end abortion; these beliefs create what Munson calls “social movement streams” of mutually exclusive individuals and organizations demarcated by their focus on how to end abortion—whether through formal politics (e.g., lobbying elected officials), direct action (protesting outside abortion clinics), individual outreach (providing counseling through crisis pregnancy centers), or public outreach (trying to teach the general public why abortion is wrong)...These streams structure and cause conflict within the movement, and activists tend to belong to the streams where their initial activism began.

2) Whether or not people join a cause seems to depend less on their pre-activism beliefs than on accidents: happening to attend a meeting, being at a vulnerable point in their life etc:

Rather than being drawn to the movement by strong beliefs about the morality of abortion, many activists’ careers began through direct and often coincidental contact with movement participants at turning points in their lives, or times of transition such as geographical relocation or assuming new roles ... Many of Munson's participants actually held pro-choice beliefs or were indifferent to the issue of abortion before becoming activists ... Even activists who were initially sympathetic to the pro-life movement only had vague and undeveloped ideas about abortion before becoming highly involved in the movement

Activism is often a really good thing - it has caused and is currently causing lots of beneficial political changes, maybe even most of them - but it also predictably reduces your autonomy to such an extent that, whatever your prior views, it is a fair bet that if you turn up at a few pro-life protests you will end up believing abortion is wrong. This strikes me as quite a big issue for movements like anarchism that encourage both activism and autonomy. Also a reason not to demonise EDL members I think: it could have been you!

Anyway I'm fascinated by the whole topic and am now reading the book on google books. Surprisingly enough LSE library doesn't seem to have it...

Also I heard about the book via Rortybomb, which is an incredible blog

organised labour good, freedom fetishism bad

Here is a typically fascinating historical post by Rortybomb about an excellent thing that organised labour has caused but which due to some historical optical illusion it has not really received credit for: the ability to quit a job without being sent to prison or losing pay for work already done.

The interesting thing is that we have this ability because of a ban on certain types of contracts: by state decree you cannot agree to be punished for quitting, no matter how clear-headed and un-coerced you feel or are. As mr. Konczal explains, it was a bit illiberal, both conceptually and historically:

You may think that the sweeping away of feudal policies of detention, criminality and pecuniary punishments against workers were part of a 19th century movement of laissez-faire liberalism reworking the marketplace.  But you’d be wrong – the rhetoric of free contracts actually reinforced these arrangements.  For if a contract that has these punishment features are voluntarily entered into how can the state get in the way?  Judges and intellectuals emphasizing laissez-faire markets and free contracts couldn’t see a problem with these arrangements, as long as they were entered into freely.  Anything entered into freely and without coercion couldn’t be unfree.

Here's what that paragraph made me slightly tangentially think about:

It is complicated at best to explain why the post-ban situation was so much better if you restrict yourself to talking about 'freedom'. You need some way to explain how removing things people can legally do can make the same people freer. Maybe you need to distinguish freedoms from abilities somehow, or legal freedoms from other kinds. I'm not saying it can't be done - in fact I'm sure it has been tried and I'd love to see how - but it is definitely going to be complicated.

If, on the other hand, you talk in a 'better off' kind of way, the situation is incredibly simple: obviously the post-ban situation was better because loads of people had been made better off. There is perhaps the issue of saying why exactly the bosses being made worse off didn't matter as much, and that of saying why we can be so confident before factoring in the unforeseen butterfly-effect consequences of the ban in the year 4000, but those problems seem easier to ignore than the previous ones.

P.S I generally quite like coming at morality issues from this (ergh 'case-based') point of view, starting with 'everyone knows...' and then trying to make sense of that, because it allows you to have an opinion about moral issues as far as practical matters are concerned while quietly being a closet moral skeptic.

retrospective electioneering: vote yes to AV!

Really neat way of expressing quite a complicated point. Can't seem to find who made it but I found it here. Here are mathematician Tim Gowers and philosopher Antony Eagle discussing the issue at (considerably in Gowers's case) greater length.