[Peace-discuss] Ibn Khaldun - 14th century Tea Party Guy

[C. G. Estabrook]

Of course it's better to have a benevolent boss (or slavemaster).  But the 
feelings of the participants are irrelevant to the working of capitalism. 
Unless workers give up control over their purposeful human activity to someone 
else (an "owner"), in order to receive back their means of subsistence, the 
system can't work -- "surplus value" can't be extracted from them.

In a capitalist system labor must be alienated, which is not necessarily a 
psychological category: it means that work is not under the workers' democratic 
control.  (And why, incidentally, capitalism and democracy are contradictory.) A 
"*just* economic system" (perhaps summarized by the phrase "from each according 
to his means, to each according to his needs") cannot be capitalist, which 
depends on the division of owners and workers.

That's why for several hundred years the common-sense alternative to capitalism 
-- possible only once it became clear what capitalism was -- proposed by the 
socialist tradition has been some form of free association of producers. (And 
thus the 20th century polities that proclaimed themselves socialist and 
democratic were neither.) --CGE


E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
> But this item seems to do away with the irresponsibility of capitalism at its
> worst
>> l)  The collective responsibility and internal feeling for the setting up
>> of a just system to encourage good deeds and prevent vice.
> and points one back to sharing blessings such that those who gathered much
> had nothing left over and those who gathered little had no lack, and really
> makes no place for the selfishness of the fortunate and the abusers of
> mankind.  A sense of benevolence motivated by a good heart is much more
> desirable than forced tribute with an unkept promise of a 'good cause', by a
> government that is bound to do injustice as Khaldun points out, among many
> other things.
> 
> 
> 
> C. G. Estabrook wrote:
>> Of course we, poor souls, have to read Ibn Khaldun's most interesting 
>> reflections through the lens of the Great Transformation -- the coming of
>> the capitalist era, which he did not imagine and of which he would not have
>> approved.
>> 
>> He did not foresee a society in which human life was controlled by vast
>> organizations that enriched themselves by extracting wealth from the direct
>> producers by means of the wage contract -- and were then thought to have no
>> further responsibility ("the free market").  Of course no society could
>> ever actually exist according to "free market principles" -- it would
>> immediately destroy itself -- but that remains the theory of modern
>> exploitation, necessarily mitigated in practice. It insists that no one has
>> a right to live unless they give up control of what makes them human, their
>> work of head and hands.
>> 
>> Thomas More, Khaldun's rough contemporary (i.e., roughly in the way that
>> I'm a contemporary of Karl Marx') wrote of similar matters in the Utopia
>> (1516) and had his character conclude as follows:
>> 
>> "Therefore I must say that, as I hope for mercy, I can have no other notion
>> of all the other governments that I see or know, than that they are a
>> conspiracy of the rich, who, on pretence of managing the public, only
>> pursue their private ends, and devise all the ways and arts they can find
>> out; first, that they may, without danger, preserve all that they have so
>> ill-acquired, and then, that they may engage the poor to toil and labour
>> for them at as low rates as possible, and oppress them as much as they
>> please; and if they can but prevail to get these contrivances established
>> by the show of public authority, which is considered as the representative
>> of the whole people, then they are accounted laws...”
>> 
>> More, a lawyer and a government official, perhaps saw hazily the new 
>> arrangement of society (the transition to which would be bloody), as a 
>> result of which "All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is 
>> profaned, and people are at last compelled to face with sober senses, their
>> real conditions of life, and their relations with their kind."
>> 
>> I first encountered Khaldun in the now terribly unfashionable work of 
>> Arnold Toynbee, which led me to Marx (and to which I'd been led by the 
>> novels of Isaac Asimov...). Toynbee said that his work was inspired by the
>> Moqaddimah, "a philosophy of history which is undoubtedly the greatest work
>> of its kind that has ever yet been created by any mind in any time or
>> place."
>> 
>> And the philosopher Ernest Gellner (d. 1995) -- who pointed out that one of
>> the better observations on class society came from the Prophet: "subjection
>> enters the house with the plow" -- praised Khaldun's definition of
>> government: "an institution which prevents injustice other than such as it
>> commits itself."
>> 
>> 
>> E. Wayne Johnson wrote:
>>> One of the great ancient writers was the North African Arab historian Ibn
>>>  Khaldun [or Khaldoun], full name: Abdu r-Rahman bin Muhammad bin Khaldun
>>>  Al-Hadrami,(1332-1406) who is considered to be one of the founders of 
>>> the study of Economics.  Note that Khaldun was a "historian" and he drew
>>>  from texts already considered ancient.   His perhaps most famous work is
>>> his "Moqaddimah", the "Introduction" to Khaldun's History of the World.
>>> 
>>> Selim Karatas summarizes Ibn Khaldun's ECONOMIC PRESCRIPTIONS FOR A 
>>> CIVILIZED SOCIETY -
>>> 
>>> Given political stability and solidarity, for the rise of the nations,
>>> there must be:
>>> 
>>> a)  A firm establishment of private property rights and freedom of 
>>> enterprise
>>> 
>>> 
>>> b)  Rule of law and the reliability of judicial system for the 
>>> establishment of justice
>>> 
>>> c)  The security of peace and the security of trade routes
>>> 
>>> d)  Lower and less taxation in order to increase employment, production
>>> and revenues
>>> 
>>> e)  Less bureaucracy and much smaller efficient army
>>> 
>>> f)  No government involvement in trade, production and commercial affairs
>>> 
>>> 
>>> g)  No fixation of prices by the government
>>> 
>>> h)  A rule that does not give monopoly power to anyone in the market
>>> 
>>> i)  Stable monetary policy and independent monetary authority that does
>>> not play with the value of money
>>> 
>>> j)  A larger population and a larger market for greater specialization
>>> 
>>> k)  A creative education system for independent thinking and behavior
>>> 
>>> l)  The collective responsibility and internal feeling for the setting up
>>> of a just system to encourage good deeds and prevent vice.
>>> 
>>> http://www.liberty4urbana.com/drupal-6.8/node/176
>> 
>> 
>> 
> 
> _______________________________________________ Peace-discuss mailing list 
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net 
> http://lists.chambana.net/cgi-bin/listinfo/peace-discuss