Poison for the soul

Review of David Lay Williams’s “The Greatest of All Plagues”

Around the same time and independently were published three books on the history of views of inequality, two of which begin with Greek philosophers and early Christians, and the third (mine) with Physiocrats or the Age of Enlightenment. My Visions of Inequality was published in October 2023, Darrin McMahon Equality: An Elusive Idea was published a month later and David Lay Williams’s The Greatest of All Plagues: How Economic Inequality Shaped Political Thought from Plato to Marx was published in September 2024. I was unaware of their work until it was about to be published and I received McMahon ‘s draft copy and later Williams's book.

The three books take different approaches to the study of inequality throughout history. McMahon and Williams look at income and wealth inequality from the political, and more importantly political philosophy or even moral philosophy, point of view. The authors who had strong normative views about inequality (Plato, the Gospels, Rousseau), and in the case of McMahon also Rawls, are included. Visions of Inequality looks at inequality from an economic perspective only, asking what forces, in the opinion of different authors, determine income distribution. I explicitly reject looking at the normative side.

Yet, despite that, there are significant overlaps in the authors we study, especially when we come to the period of Enlightenment and later. All three books include Adam Smith and Karl Marx. The chapter on Marx is the longest individual chapter in both Visions of Inequality and The Greatest of All Plagues. I have already reviewed the brilliant book by Darril McMahon (see the link here), and I would like now to say a few words about the equally splendid book by David Lay Williams.

I would recommend reading the two of them one after another: they are not substitutes despite covering lots of the same ground. They are complementary because we see different authors from slightly different angles: McMahon’s perhaps being more political, Williams’ more philosophical. As I mentioned, Williams and McMahon cover practically same period since both of them begin with Greek philosophers and end with the modern times: McMahon goes all the way to the present, including even the DEI movement, whereas Williams's book ends with Marx.

William opens the book by discussing two great enemies of inequality: Solon in Athens and Lycurgus in Sparta (for the citizens only though). Unequal enemies indeed since Lycurgus practically expunged inequality from Sparta while Solon achieved a class compromise. Williams then moves to Plato who (through Socrates’ voice of course) discusses both attempts to reduce inequality. Going back to Plato presents a significant advantage for the rest of the book, and especially so when it comes to the discussions of Rousseau and Marx, and even Smith, as there are clear similarities between these four thinkers.

In my opinion the chapter on Rousseau is the most disturbing because of the selection of the extraordinarily strong statements made by Rousseau. When one reads Rousseau integrally, his attacks on inequality, however individually powerful, do not come in such a concentrated form as in Williams’s book. Whoever reads that chapter cannot but feel extraordinarily shaken by Rousseau’s uniformly blistering attacks on any departure from perfect equality.

Here however I would like to discuss Marx. At a rather superficial level one can divide people who interpret Marx as an egalitarian economist and philosopher from people who do not. I was a little bit in touch on that issue with Williams and at first sight it may seem that we take different positions. In my Visions… (as well as, for example, here) I argue that Marx was not an egalitarian thinker because for him achievement of lower inequality under capitalism was not an ultimate goal; it was, as he writes, “like discussing political equality under the system of slavery”. At best, the slogan of more equality could be used to mobilize laborers, to increase their class consciousness etc. but it can never be the final objective. The final objective under capitalism was always the abolition of classes. These points are at their most obvious and explicit in The Critique of the Gotha Program.

Williams takes a different tack which, in my opinion, is quite acceptable as well. His position is that Marx was an egalitarian thinker. To do so Williams does not look at the distinction between desired equality under capitalism and desired equality in a society without class antagonism; he looks at Marx's descriptions of what inequality does morally to the poor and the rich in a capitalist society. It demeans both. The discussion of the morally deadening effects of inequality brings Marx very close to Rousseau and Plato, and indeed allows Williams to claim Marx for the “egalitarian camp”.

The key point is the moral decadence or turpitude that inequality creates both among the poor and among the rich. The poor become hardly different from animals as they spend their entire lives working at monotonous tasks; they have no time for any other pursuits except for the most primordial ones linked to survival: eating, drinking, sleeping and procreating. Marx there follows closely Smith’s views on the devastating effects of the division of labor. (It is revealing that in economics as taught nowadays Smith’s claims regarding economic effects of the division of labor are always mentioned, but almost never his equally strong condemnation of what division of labor does to workers’ intellect.) Both the division of labor and the length of the working day make it impossible to think or learn anything new. Workers become intellectually dull and physically debauched. The division of labor makes workers able to perform one task only and leaves them incapable—or even worse—indifferent to doing anything else.

The moral decrepitude is not limited to the poor though. That is where Marx’s critique rejoins Plato and Greek authors. (Marx himself freely highlights that lineage because his knowledge of ancient philosophy and Greek and Roman authors was excellent: after all, he did his dissertation on Epicurus.) Wealth destroys the soul of the rich because it leads them to think of themselves as different from the rest. Smith similarly thought that wealth leads the rich first to vanity and then to pride; the latter being the same as Rousseau’s self-love. The rich become dependent on the permanent acquisition of wealth (“absolute drive for self-enrichment” in Marx’s words) because of the fear that if they were ever to become less wealthy their position in society would plummet and never recover. That leads them to pleonexia (the term used by Plato) or an all-consuming and never assuageable greed. While every need whose objective is a use-value can in principle be satisfied (a multi-millionaire can buy a private airplane), the need to have more and more of wealth as such (gold in the past, electronically inscripted certificates today) is boundless. It has no objective nor goal nor limit. Lycurgus and Plato saw it reflected in the accumulation of precious metals. Marx saw it in the accumulation of money. His passage from Grundrisse is worth quoting in full:

Greed as such, as a particular form of a drive, i.e., as distinct from a craving for a particular form of wealth, e.g. for clothes, weapons, jewels, women, wine is possible only when general wealth…has become individualized in a particular thing….money. Money is therefore not only the object but the fountainhead of greed. The mania for possession is possible without money; but greed itself is a product of a particular social development, not natural, as opposed to historical….Hedonism in its general form and miserliness are the two particular forms of monetary greed. Hedonism in the abstract presupposed an object which possesses all pleasures in potentiality. Abstract hedonism realizes that function… which it is the material representative of wealth…In order to maintain it as such, it must sacrifice all relationship to the objects of particular needs, must abstain, in order to satisfy the need of greed for money as such. (Grundrisse…pp. 222-223).

We see it today in an even more abstract form because the wealth that knows no bounds is wealth that exists in the number of electronic figures on one’s bank account, or in the worth of electronic certificates exchanged on the bourses. Wealth has become entirely dematerialized. Lycurgus banned gold and replaced it with iron because an equally valuable quantity of iron is much heavier, harder to carry around or display in one’s home, and thus boundless demand for more and more iron shows its absurdity more glaringly and quickly. In today’s world where wealth is dematerialized, the absurdity of accumulation is more difficult to see.

While for Plato, pleonexia is the problem of the soul, for Marx it is the problem caused by the social system. The point at which the Prussian economist (as Marx is called by Williams) parts ways with his Greek antecedents is that he sees greed, a defect of an individual, to be caused by the capitalist system. Marx’s critique is not as much directed against the individual vice as it is a critique of the social system which requires that such moral defects be hailed as praiseworthy. (“So under capitalism, the character trait that Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, and Mill lament is absolutely necessary and indeed ‘rational’ from the bourgeois point of view”, writes Williams, p. 288).

Using Kant’s distinction between noumenal and phenomenal, Williams treats Marx’s critique of greed as phenomenal, i.e. not the product of individual choice but determined by external forces. Individuals in the capitalist system cannot stop being greedy; by ceasing to be so they run their companies aground, disappoint shareholders, are fired from their positions of power, and ultimately end their lives in oblivion, solitude, pain and poverty. In order for the system to grow and prosper, greed must be exercised by every capitalist. It is in that light that capitalism is seen as destructive both for the poor (the destructiveness that is the subject of half-a-dozen of chapters of Capital, volume 1), but also for rich, the beneficiaries of the system. Greed in such a system is not only necessary, but, Marx writes, is seen as the epitome of rationality.

Going back to my original point I think that both claims, namely, first, that Marx was hardly concerned with reduction of observable or measurable inequality (in the way we study it today) within the capitalist system and thus with the meliorative policies, and second, that he saw capitalism as uniquely and imperviously requiring pleonexia and thus productive of moral decrepitude among both the poor and the rich, can be reconciled.

PS. One may wonder what, given their negative views of the effects of division of labor, Smith and Marx might have thought would be the effects of artificial intelligence (AI). On the one hand, it could deepen “the cashier effect”. Everyone who is old enough or has travelled to poor countries knows that cashiers in less developed economies do perform an intellectual job: they at least have to know the four arithmetic operations. In developed economies and especially with the expansion of electronic payment, their only job is to be packers of products. It is a huge de-skilling. On the other hand, “the accountant effect” liberates people from boring and unform operations that are now done automatically by computers and perhaps frees them to do something intellectually or physically more challenging.