Oligarchy 9

Two faces of property

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

We’ve been discussing a series of deep and pervasive factual errors about the structure of our oligarchical political system. While it’s certainly not without its flaws, I think what is called critical realism can help here. This tradition gives us a set of claims about how we apprehend our social reality:

Archer et al. state that a basic premise of critical realism is that “Ontological realism asserts that much of reality exists and operates independently of our awareness or knowledge of it.” Critical realism presumes that there is always a gap between reality and what we know about reality. This lack of knowledge is more than the fact that our understanding of the world is fallible and influenced by our theories, norms and values. It is a statement that there will always be “unknown unknowns.” We often assume that subject to our research methods, we are able to know everything. This false belief is known as the epistemic fallacy.

I have in the past criticized statistical-utilitarian styles of liberalism and right-libertarianism for ignoring these and similar insights. From the critical realists, I tend to think there are many social structures and mechanisms operating in the background that aren’t necessarily empirically quantifiable, but that are nonetheless generative. This suggests that social (and thus political and economic) reality is stratified and often hiding exploitative dynamics in abstract symbolism and language. Within this framework and as we’ve discussed through the lens of Adorno and Horkheimer among others, my view is that technocratic-utilitarian liberalism as we find it in the U.S. elite is beginning to turn on itself and invert. From Proudhon and others, we learned that when actions speak, words are nothing, and that we should judge political economy in this way too. If we evaluated the oligarchical system based on what it does, rather than, for example, our feelings about it, our symbolic volleys in a literally immaterial economy, our acceptance of incoherent stories and ridiculing roles, and other such confused clownery, we would see immediately that the ruling class is not on our team in any way.