What Is A "Special Interest"?

I do not want to compare and contrast analytically precise definitions that answer the question in the post title. (Socrates, as reported by Plato, always asked for a definition after being given examples.) Instead, I give two lists, where I trust the reader to see family resemblances among the items on each list:

• Ethnic groups like African-Americans; women; the poor; organized labor; and lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgenders.
• Corporations, especially those operating in specific industries (e.g., big oil); Corporate Executive Officers; and owners of small businesses.

I suggest that the policies and culture of a country would be quite different, when the dominant understanding of the phrase, "special interests" was consistent with one or another list.

I think somewhere or other Noam Chomsky has asserted that the second understanding reflects the true meaning or the term, or at least a meaning consistent with what the Founding Fathers of the United States wrote. This quote does not have the look back to classical liberals:

"...these questions have been asked for a long time in polls, a little differently worded so you get some different numbers, but for a long time about half the population was saying, when asked a bunch of open questions - like, Who do you think the government is run for? would say something like that: the few, the special interests, not the people. Now it's 82%, which is unprecedented. It means that 82% of the population don't even think we have a political system, not a small number.

What do they mean by special interests? Here you've got to start looking a little more closely. Chances are, judging by other polls and other sources of information, that if people are asked, Who are the special interests? they will probably say, welfare mothers, government bureaucrats, elitists professionals, liberals who run the media, unions. These things would be listed. How many would say, Fortune 500, I don't know. Probably not too many. We have a fantastic propaganda system in this country. There's been nothing like it in history. It's the whole public relations industry and the entertainment industry. The media, which everybody talks about, including me, are a small part of it. I talk about mostly that sector of the media that goes to a small part of the population, the educated sector. But if you look at the whole system, it's just vast. And it is dedicated to certain principles. It wants to destroy democracy. That's its main goal. That means destroy every form of organization and association that might lead to democracy. So you have to demonize unions. And you have to isolate people and atomize them and separate them and make them hate and fear one another and create illusions about where power is. A major goal of this whole doctrinal system for fifty years has been to create the mood of what is now called anti-politics." -- Noam Chomsky, Class Warfare: Interviews with David Barsamian Common Courage Press (1966): p. 138.

But there is another literature, a post modern literature, that also looks at how people come to associate examples with words. People generally do not think logically, following the rules of predicate calculus. One trying to understand culture should realize this. One might talk about the The politics of the signifier. How does one or another definition, or set of examples, become hegemonic? (For what it is worth, I think Slavoj Zizek is a very intelligent, very well-read, self-aware clown.)

Zizek and Others

Like D-Squared, I'm dubious about some responses to continential philosophy, cultural criticism as put forth by the Frankfort school, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and other doctrines to which Alan Sokal might object. I feel that there are many blog posts and blogs that show more understanding of this stuff than I can.

I generally get whatever understanding I have of anti-foundationalism from Wittgenstein, analytical philosophers like Goodman, Putnam, American pragmatism, and even Rorty. I am not at all sure that these views are needed to effect social change. Nor do I take them as tied in necessarily with any very radical views. This may because in my random reading, I have read a limited amount of Rorty.

I am amused that this latest go around concentrates on Zizek. I have quoted bits from Zizek here before. My general impression of Zizek is that he is amusing. I feel that I am following along when I read him, but I distrust my ability to summarize what he is saying. Except, strangely enough, I think I can give some impression of his views on Lenin, if I felt like it.

I realize that not all these "post-modern" writers are doing the same thing. I think I'd get more out of my copy of one of Baudrillard's books if I hollowed it out and used it to store valuables.

I don't think I got much out of the extremely limited amount of Derrida that I have read. (I also like some of the Austin and Searle I have read - in the case of Searle, I also attended a guest lecture where he expounded his well-practiced views on strong AI.) I think I'd like to understand Foucault better, even though he can write a long time on sex without it coming close to being a turn-on.

I am interested in the history of ideas. I see the point of telling a history forward. In this case, the participants in the story may both point at measures of what they take to be the outside world as an argument for contending views. I can see the point of bracketing out how we have come to understand the world in trying to understand what participants in the story found convincing. I take this to be the strong program.

And I also understand that divisions between academic subjects, genres, etc. are not given. How some of us might group texts today may be very different from how others elsewhere and elsewhen grouped the same texts. Furthermore, on what time-scale continuity and discontinuity occurs may vary with how you look at texts. I take this to be part of Foucault's point in talking about "discursive formations."

Selected References

• Jean Baudrillard (1994). Simulacra and Simulation (Trans. by Sheila Faria Glaser), University of Michigan Press
• Fernand Braudel (1967). Capitalism and Material Life: 1400-1800 (Trans. by Miriam Kochan), Harper Colophon
• Jacques Derrida (1988). Limited, Inc. (Trans. by Samuel Weber), Northwestern University Press
• Michel Foucault (1972). The Archaeology of Knowledge (Trans. by A. M. Sheridan Smith), New York: Pantheon Books
• Richard Rorty (1991). Objectivism, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Volume 1, Cambridge University Press
• Ricard Rorty (1998). Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, Harvard University Press
• Slavoj Zizek (2001). On Belief, Routledge

The Unconscious Is Structured Like A Language

I find Zizek difficult to read in large doses. For instance, I did not even make it all the way through this. I don't think I retain much from the book containing the following:

"So what is hegemony? Those who still remember the good old days of Socialist Realism are well aware of the key role played by the notion of the 'typical' in its theoretical edifice: truly progressive Socialist literature should depict 'typical' heroes in 'typical' situations. Writers who, for example, presented a predominately bleak picture of the Soviet reality were not accused simply of lying - the accusation was that they provided a distorted reflection of social reality by focusing on phenomena which were not 'typical', which were sad remainders of the past, instead of focusing on phenomena which were 'typical' in the precise sense of expressing the deeper underlying historical tendency of the progress towards Communism. A novel which presented a new Socialist type of man who dedicated his life to the happiness of all the people, of course, depicted a minority phenomenon (the majority of people were not yet like that), but none the less a phenomenon which enabled us to identify the truly progressive forces active in the social situation.

Ridiculous as this notion of the 'typical' may sound, there is a grain of truth in it - it lies in the fact that each apparently universal ideological notion is always hegemonized by some particular content which colours its very universality and accounts for its efficiency. In the present rejection of the social welfare system by the New Right in the USA, for example, the very universal notion of the present welfare system as inefficient is contaminated by the more concrete representation of the notorious single African-American mother, as if social welfare were, in the last resort, a programme for single black mothers - the particular case of 'the single black mother' is silently conceived of as 'typical' of the universal notion of social welfare, and what is wrong with it... The same goes for every universal ideological notion: one always has to look for the particular content which accounts for the specific efficiency of an ideological notion. In the case of the Moral Majority campaign against abortion, for example, the 'typical' case is the exact opposite of the (jobless) black mother: a successful and sexually promiscuous career woman who gives priority to her professional life over her 'natural' assignment of motherhood (in blatant contradiction to the facts, which tell us that the great majority of abortions occur in lower-class families with several children).

The specific 'twist', the particular content which is promulgated as 'typical' of the universal notion, is the element of fantasy, of the phantasmic background/support of the universal ideological notion - in Kant's terms, it plays the role of 'transcendental schematism', translating the empty universal notion into a notion which directly relates and applies to our 'actual experience'. As such, this phantasmic specification is by no means a mere insignificant illustration of exemplification: it is on this of which particular content will count as 'typical' that ideological battles are won or lost. To go back to our example of abortion: the moment we perceive as 'typical' the case of abortion in a large lower-class family unable to cope economically with another child, the perspective changes radically...

[Footnote] Another name for this short circut between the Universal and the Particular, by means of which a particular content hegemonizes the Universal, is, of course, suture, the operation of hegemony 'sutures' the empty Universal to a particular content. For that reason, F.W.J. Schelling must be considered the originator of the modern notion of critique of ideology: he was the first to elaborate the notion of 'false' unity and/or universality. For him, 'evil' lies not in the split (between the Universal and the Particular) as such but, rather, in their 'false'/distorted unity, that is, in a Universality that effectively privileges some narrow particular content and is impenetrably 'anchored' in it. Schelling was thus the first to elaborate the elementary procedure of the critique of ideology: the gesture of discerning beneath the appearance of neutral universality (say, of 'human rights'), the privileged particular content (say, white upper-middle-class males) which 'hegemonizes' it...[End Footnote]

'Single unemployed mother' is thus a sinthome in the strict Lacanian sense: a knot, a point at which all the lines of the predominant ideological argumentation (the return to family values, the rejection of the welfare state and its 'uncontrolled' spending, etc.) meet. For that reason, if we 'untie' this sinthome, the efficiency of its entire ideological edifice is suspended. We can see now in what sense the psychoanalytic sinthome is to be opposed to the medical sympton: the latter is a sign of some more fundamental process taking place on another level. When one claims, say, that fever is a symptom, the implication is that we should not cure only the sympton, but attack its causes directly. (Or, in the social sciences, when one claims that adolescent violence is a sympton of the global crisis of values and the work ethic, the implication is that one should attack the problem 'at its root', by directly addressing problems of the family, employment, etc., not only by punishing the offenders.) The sinthome, in contrast, is not a 'mere sympton', but that which holds together the 'thing itself' - if one unties it, the 'thing itself' disintegrates. For that reason, psychoanalysis actually does cure by addressing the sinthome.

This example makes it clear in what sense 'the universal results from a constitutive split in which the negation of a particular identity transforms this identity into the symbol of identity and fullness as such': the Universal emerges from the Particular when some particular content starts to function as the stand-in for the absent Universal - that is to say, the universal is operative only through the split in the particular. A couple of years ago, the English yellow press focused on single mothers as the source of all the evils of modern society, from the budget crisis to juvenile delinquency - in this ideological space, the universality of the 'modern social Evil' was operative only through the split of the figure of 'single mother' into itself in its particularity and itself as the stand-in for the 'modern social Evil'. Owing to the contingent character of this link between the Universal and the particular content which functions as its stand-in (i.e. that fact that this link is the outcome of a political strugle for hegemony), the existence of the Universal always relies on an empty signifier: 'Politics is possible because the constitutive impossibility of society can only represent itself through the production of empty signifiers.' Since 'society doesn't exist', its ultimate unity can be symbolized only in the guise of an empty signifier hegemonized by some particular content - the struggle for this content is the political struggle. In other words, politics exists because 'society doesn't exist': politics is the struggle for the content of the empty signifier which represents the impossibility of Society. The worn-out phrase 'the politics of the signifier' is thus fully justified: the order of the signifier as such is political and, vice versa, there is no politics outside the order of the signifier. The space of politics is the gap between the series of 'ordinary' signifiers (S2) and the empty Master-Signifier (S1)..." -- Slavoj Zizek (1999), The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, Verso: 174-177, 180.

Sicklied O'er With The Pale Cast Of Thought

"'In truth, however, value is here [in capital] the active factor in a process, in which, while constantly assuming the form in turn of money and commodities, it at the same time changes in magnitude, differentiates itself by throwing off surplus-vaule from itself; the original value, in other words, expands spontaneously. For the movement, in the course of which it adds surplus-value, is its own movement, its expansion, therefore, is automatic expansion. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at the least, lays golden eggs...

In simple circulation, C-M-C, the value of commodities attained at the most a form independent of their use-values, i.e., the form of money; but the same value now in the circulation M-C-M, or the circulation of capital, suddenly presents itself as an independent substance, endowed with a motion of its own, in which money and commodities are mere forms which it assumes and casts off in turn. Nay, more: instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, it enters now, so to say, into private relations with itself. It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus value; as the father differentiates himself from himself qua the son, yet both are one and of one age: for only by the surplus-value of 10 pounds does the 100 pounds originally advanced become capital, and so on as this takes place, so soon as the son, and by the son, the father is begotton, so soon does their difference vanish, and they again become one, 110 pounds.' [Marx, Capital, V. 1, 171-173]

...Is capital, then, the true Subject/Substance? Yes and no: for Marx, this self-engendering circular movement is - to put it in Freudian terms - precisely the capitalist 'unconscious fantasy' which parasitizes upon the proletariat as the 'pure substanceless subjectivity'; for this reason, capital's speculative self-generating dance has a limit, and it brings about the conditions of its own collapse. This insight allows us to solve the key interpretative problem of the quote above: how are we to read its first three words, 'In truth, however'? First, of course, they imply that this truth has to be asserted against some false appearance or experience: the everyday experience that the ultimate goal of capital's circulation is still the satisfaction of human needs, that capital is just a means to bring this satisfaction about in a more efficient way. This 'truth', however, is not the reality of capitalism: in reality, capital does not engender itself, but exploits the worker's surplus-value. There is thus a necessary third level to be added to the simple opposition of subjective experience (of capital as a simple means of efficiently satisfying people's needs) and objective social reality (of exploitation): the 'objective deception', the disavowed 'unconscious' fantasy (of the mysterious self-generating circular movement of capital), which is the truth (although not the reality) of the capitalist process. Again - to quote Lacan - truth has the structure of a fiction: the only way to formulate the truth of capital is to present this fiction of its 'immaculate' self-generating movement. And this insight also enables us to locate the weakness of the 'deconstructionist' appropriation of Marx's analysis of capitalism: although it emphasizes the endless process of deferral which characterizes this movement, as well as its fundamental inconclusiveness, its self-blockade, the 'deconstructionist' retelling still describes the 'fantasy' of capital - it describes what individuals believe, although they don't know it." -- Slavoj Zizek (2006). The Parallax View, MIT Press: 59-60.

Marx And Commentators On Marx On The Justice Of Capitalism (Part 2 Of 3)

In part 1, I quote Marx, showing that one can read his complaints about capitalism as claiming something other than that capitalism is unfair or unjust in its logic. This is no novelty to those who have studied the post-1960s flowering of interest in Marx.

Some have argued that Marx is ambiguious on whether he thinks exploitation is unjust. I only know about Norman Geras (1985 and 1992) second-hand:

"Norman Geras poses the issue of whether the condemnation of capitalism in Marx is rooted in a principle of justice. He begins by itemizing arguments contrary to this hypothesis:

• In good contractual logic (including the purchase and sale of labour-power), 'sold' labour-power belongs to the capitalist, who is henceforth legally entitled to use it without any restrictions other than those prescribed by law. The capacity to generate a surplus-value possessed by this remarkable commodity is simply a 'windfall' for the buyer, not an injustice to the 'seller'.
• The wage relation cannot be deemed 'just' or 'unjust'. Conceptions of justice are, in fact, historical - that is to say, relative to a particular mode of production. Just as slavery is not 'unjust' from the standpoint of a slave society, exploitation is not 'unjust' by the contractual rules specific to general commodity production.
• The notion of distributive justice, which is theoretically questionable, fosters the practical illusion that exploitation can be corrected or eliminated by reforming income distribution. But it would be as absurd to demand fair renumeration on the basis of the wage system as to claim freedom on the basis of slavery.
• Invoking principles of justice inevitably entails a formalism that is inconceivable in the absence of the state and institutions that are, in fact, condemned to wither away. Communist society is firmly located 'beyond justice'. 'Equal right' thus remains a bourgeois right by virtue of the fact that it is inscribed in the horizon of justice. By contrast, the needs principle, which is opposed to the abstract equivalence of the commodity order, is no longer a principle of distributive justice.

Geras offers a symmetrical refutation of this set of arguments, likewise grounded in a reading of Marx... Having expounded thesis and antithesis, Geras proposes his own synthesis..." -- Daniel Bensaïd (2002).

Bensaïd argues that the logic of Capital doesn't support those who claim Marx took the exploitation of the proletariat to be unjust.

Zizek is one of the most famous "postmodern" cultural critics writing today. And he knows of the reading of Marx I am discussing:

"Let us recall the gist of Marx's notion of exploitation: exploitation is not simply opposed to justice - Marx's point is not that workers are exploited because they are not paid the full value of their work. The central thesis of Marx's notion of 'surplus-value' is that a worker is exploited even when he is 'fully paid'; exploitation is thus not opposed to the 'just' equivalent exchange; it functions, rather, as its point of inherent exception - there is one commodity (the workforce) which is exploited precisely when it is 'paid its full value'. (The further point not to be missed is that the production of this excess is strictly equivalent to the universalization of the exchange-function: the moment the exchange-function is universalized - that is, the moment it becomes the structuring principle of the whole of economic life - the exception emerges, since at this point the workforce itself becomes a commodity exchanged on the market. Marx in effect announces here the Lacanian notion of the Universal which involves a constitutive exception.) The basic premise of symptomal reading is thus that every ideological universality necessarily gives rise to a particular 'extimate' element, to an element which - precisely as an inherent, necessary product of the process designated by the universality - simultaneously undermines it: the symptom is an example which subverts the Universal whose example it is." -- Slavoj Zizek (1999), p. 180

Those hard-headed, "no bullshit" analytical Marxists have similar findings:

"The riddle was, how could expropriation of labor come about - for come about it must to explain the huge difference between class fortunes under capitalism - in the absence of a coercive institution for the exchange of labor? Marx constructed an answer to this question with his version of the labor theory of value, surplus value, and exploitation. What is important for our purposes is just this: The task of the theory was to show that the coerciveness of the institution of labor exchange was not a necessary condition for the existence of exploitation of one class by another.

Marx believed that the conditions for the existence of the wage labor market were themselves coercive - that is, workers had no choice but to sell their labor power, as they had been separated from the means of production, and had no alternative for survival. In a precise sense, however, this simply sets certain initial conditions on the bargaining strength of the two parties in the market; it does not obviate the fact, juridically, that participation in the labor market is voluntary, at least in a model of pure capitalism. This is one example of Marx's 'scientific', as opposed to 'utopian', approach to capitalism. He wished to explain the existence of exploitation in a noncoercive model, in the sense described. This is obviously more difficult than appealing simply to the omnipotence of the capitalist class." -- John Roemer (1981), p. 146 - 147

And one of Sraffa's colleagues wrote along the same lines:

"It is in the same context that we must understand the importance which Marx attached to his distinction between 'labour' and 'labour-power': an importance essential for the context of exploitation as a key to understanding the bourgeois (or capitalist) mode of production. The role of the labour theory of value in relation to the theory of surplus value is frequently misunderstood. Often this is interpreted as embodying a Lockean 'natural right' principle, to the effect that the product of a man's labour belongs 'of right' to the labourer; whence it is held to follow that the appropriation of part of this product by the capitalist is 'unnatural' and unethical. Hence exploitation is interpreted as a quasi-legal or ethical ethical concept rather than a realistic economic description. If what we have said about labour and the labour process has been appreciated, it should be clear that this is an incorrect interpretation. What could be said, of course, is that the notion of labour as productive activity implicitly afforded the definition of exploitation as an appropriation of the fruits of activity by others - appropriation of these fruits by those who provided no productive activity of their own. But far from being an arbitrary or unusual definition of 'productive' and 'unproductive', this would, surely, meet with general agreement as normal usage of these words. The problem for Marx was not to prove the existence of surplus value and exploitation by means of a theory of value: it was, indeed, to reconcile the existence of surplus value with the reign of market competition and of exchange of value equivalents. As he himself expressed it: 'To explain the general nature of profits, you must start from the theorem that, on an average, commodities are sold at their real values, and that profits are derived from selling them at their real values... If you cannot explain profit upon this supposition, you cannot explain it at all.'"

...The importance which Marx attached to the distinction between labour and labour-power lay precisely in its enabling him to show how there could be inequality and nonequivalence in 'equivalent exchange' - or exploitation and appropriation of what was created by the producers consistently with the theory of value (i.e., by demonstrating how 'profits are derived by selling them at their values')." -- Maurice Dobb, Introduction to Marx (1970a)

• Bensaïd, Daniel (2002). Marx for Our Times: Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique New York: Verso
• Geras, Norman (1985). "The Controversy About Marx And Justice", New Left Review, N. 150 (Mar./Apr.)
• Geras, Norman (1992). "Bringing Marx To Justice: An Addendum and Rejoinder", New Left Review, N. 195 (Sep./Oct.)
• Marx, Karl (1970a). A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Moscow: Progress Publishers
• Roemer, John E. (1981). Analytical Foundations of Marxian Economic Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Zizek, Slavoj (1999). The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London and New York: Verso.