Many philosophers, from Kant and Marx to Rawls and Angela Davis, take the nature of the economy to be central to the justification of the democratic state. Inequalities of income and wealth, they say, corrupt democratic institutions not only indirectly, through their influence on human psychology, elections, government agendas but also directly through the kind of control the rich can exert of the working lives of the vast majority.
One argument for the direct corruption idea goes as follows. To be subject to the private will of another person is tantamount to domination; to be subject to self-given laws as an equal, by contrast, is freedom. Equal citizenship, of this variety, presupposes an ability to exercise your powers to set and pursue your own conception of the good independently of permission by other private wills. But poverty, the condition of not owning any productive assets, makes you dependent on the private wills of those who control such assets. Poverty is therefore a condition of domination. It follows that the blacksmith who lacks iron and must work iron for various iron owners is unfree, whereas the blacksmith who owns iron and can therefore produce and sell her own hammers is free. This is Kant’s go-to example of economic independence, foreshadowing Hegel’s discussion of poverty and Marx’s discussion of the subsumption of labour to capital.
Now consider the following analogy with musical production. Suppose you control the musical instrument I need in order to perform as an equal member of the orchestra, such that you can, by legal right, deprive me of it at will and at any time. It follows that I cannot exercise my music-making powers as an orchestra member by playing that instrument, except through your unilateral permission. That way my music-making, if realized at all, serves two masters: you and the orchestra. The domination objection to this predicament is not that my dependence on you might make me fearful, obsequious or servile in my music-making, inclined to pursue your ends as opposed to mine, and so on. Rather, I am dominated because I depend for the realization of my music-making ends on your private will: even if I were to perform, the exercise of my agency would only be permissionally conditional on yours.
Contrast the case where I or the orchestra itself control(s) my instrument. The orchestra has elaborate public rules meant to serve the goal of music-making: who can occupy the office of violinist, pianist, and cellist, who can use the instruments under what conditions, and so on. Then, in setting the instrument as a means to the realization of my orchestra-conferred music-making powers, the exercise of these powers is subject to nothing but the end of music-making. I therefore no longer serve two masters and my agency is no longer alienated. As an orchestra member, I am dependent on you, just as you are on me, for nothing but the mutual exercise of our orchestra-conferred musical powers, that is, for carrying out our respective parts in the division of musical labor. The orchestra’s powers are now only the musicians’ interdependent powers, independently exercised.
This image of a just society as an orchestra of free and equal cooperators united by the end of equal freedom recurs in philosophical writing since Kant. Marx, for example, uses it to argue that capitalism begets its own gravediggers. The gravediggers are the capitalists themselves, who become obsolete once the division of labor develops to the point of separation between ownership and control: “a musical conductor need in no way be the owner of the instruments in his orchestra, nor does it form part of his function as conductor that he should have any part in paying the ’wages’ of the other musicians.” Once the joint stock company comes onto the historical scene, the owner is no longer the manager. Hence the functions of the capitalist can be separated from her ownership of productive instruments, just as the functions of the conductor can be separated from her ownership of musical instruments. It follows, says Marx, that socialism—the socialization of the means of production under a democratic state—is compatible with economic efficiency and a complex division of labor.
Weaving together these strands of argument from the history of philosophy, John Rawls enlists the orchestra analogy to illustrate his own idea of a classless post-capitalist society under a social union of social unions: “we may consider a group of musicians every one of whom could have trained himself to play equally as well as the others any instrument in the orchestra, but who each have by a kind of tacit agreement set out to perfect their skills on the one they have chosen so as to realize the powers of all in their joint performances.” Rawls explicitly contrasts this description with the Lockean picture of a “private society”, in which law is seen as a vast fence-making machine geared towards the protection of private property and social cooperation is seen as a global gladiatorial contest for the entertainment of its previous winners.
But whereas Kant, Marx, and the subsequent Marxist tradition think of the orchestra as illustrating a classless division of labou, that is, one that a democratic socialist society could justifiably enforce, Rawls and the liberal tradition think it illustrates the “highest good,” that is, the congruence between public justice and the lowest common denominator among private conceptions of the good life: “Th[e] idea is that by a division of labor we can cooperate in realizing one another’s full range of human powers and moreover enjoy together, in one joint activity, its realization.” So this is a description of a post-capitalist society in which just institutions and the good life overlap sufficiently to stabilize each other, such that citizens embrace such institutions as a realization of their own good.
On both the Marxian and the liberal picture, many questions remain. I will mention two: the perfection problem and the janitor problem. The perfection problem is that a theory of equal freedom should not, in principle, depend on any thick conception of excellence or of the good life. For since the good cannot by itself determine what people can justifiably demand of each other as free and equals and given that Marx and Rawls were overoptimistic about the possibility of congruence between these demands and the private good, the challenge is to construct a theory of justice without appealing to perfection in the way they do.
The janitor problem is about the stability of democratic institutions. Consider the janitor in a society where class inequalities of income and wealth have largely been abolished, but the material division of labor remains. Suppose she lacks access to the kind of meaningful work that others perform, whether by dint of inferior education, talent, or effort. The janitor is unjustly disadvantaged, indeed dominated. How do we deal with her disadvantage? One solution might be to abolish the material division of labor. But this is both impossible and undesirable. If you think—with Marx, Rawls, Angela Davis, and many others—that the division of labor should not be abolished, then the question becomes one about sharing necessary toil, consistently with everyone’s freedom. This applies equally to housework, care work and social reproduction, more broadly. The question of how to share necessary toil, possibly through its public provision, is one of the most urgent questions in contemporary political philosophy.
