The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is one of the most famous essays in history. Like Marx and Engels’ other work, it discusses the power imbalance between the capital owning class, such as landlords and corporate employers, and the working class, whose labor they exploit for rents and profits. Individual workers have little power against capital owners, who would merely replace them with another worker desperate for sustenance enough to accept exploitation. The Communist movement called for the working class to unite and use their power as the majority to bring about a Communist society. It was first published in 1848 and is pretty long, so this is a lightly edited simple modern English version of the second section, with the very last few paragraphs of the whole text at the end. The first section is here. I didn’t include most of the third and fourth sections about Communist literature and the relationship of the Communists to other parties.

II. The Working Class and Communists

In what relation do the Communists stand to the working class as a whole?

The Communists do not form a separate party against to other working-class parties.

They have no interests separate and apart from those of the working class as a whole.

They do not set up any group-based principles of their own, by which to shape and mold the working class movement.

The Communists are distinguished from the other working-class parties by only these things: (1) In the national struggles of the working class of the different countries, they point out and bring to the front the shared interests of entire working class, not related to nationality. (2) In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the capital owners has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole.

The Communists, therefore, are on the one hand, practically, the most advanced and resolute section of the working-class parties of every country, that section which pushes forward all others; on the other hand, theoretically, they have over the great mass of the working class the advantage of clearly understanding the situation.

The immediate goal of the Communism is the same as that of all the other working class parties: formation of the working class into a class, overthrow of the capitalist rule, conquest of political power by the working class.

The theoretical conclusions of the Communists are in no way based on ideas or principles that have been invented, or discovered, by this or that would-be universal reformer. They simply express, in general terms, actual relationships springing from an existing class struggle, from a historical movement going on under our very eyes. Getting rid of existing property concepts is not at all a distinctive feature of Communism.

All property relations in the past have always been changed as a result of change in historical conditions.

The French Revolution, for example, got rid of feudal property in favor of capitalist property.

The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the getting rid of property in general, but the getting rid of capitalist property. But modern capitalist private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and deciding ownership products; that is based on the exploitation of the many by the few.

In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.

We Communists have been criticized wanting to abolish the right of personally acquiring property as the fruit of a man’s own labor, which property is said to be the groundwork of all personal freedom, activity and independence.

Hard-won, self-acquired, self-earned property! Do you mean the property of the minor artisan and of the small peasant, a form of property that came before the capitalist form? There is no need to abolish that; the development of industry has mostly already destroyed it, and is still destroying it daily.

Or do you mean modern capitalist private property?

But does wage-labor create any property for the laborer? Not a bit. It creates capital, i.e. that kind of property which exploits wage-labor, and which cannot increase except by creating a new supply of wage-labor for fresh exploitation. Property, in its current form, is based on capital and wage-labor being enemies. Let us examine both sides of this antagonism.

To be a capitalist is to have not only a purely personal, but also a social status in production. Capital is a collective product, and only by the united action of many members can it be set in motion.

Capital is, therefore, not a personal, it is a social power. Owning capital gives you the social power to control workers.

So when capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property. It is only the social character of the property that is changed. It loses its class-character.

Let us now take wage-labor.

The average price of wage-labor is the minimum wage, i.e., the means of subsistence, which is absolutely required in bare existence as a laborer. What, therefore, the wage-laborer manages to get through his labor is just enough to keep going and reproduce a bare existence. We by no means intend to abolish this personal share of the products of labor, an appropriation that is made for the maintenance and reproduction of human life, and that leaves no surplus to use to command the labor of others. All that we want to do away with is the miserable nature of this, where the laborer lives just to increase capital for the wealthy capitalists, and is allowed to live only in so far as the interest of the ruling class requires it.

In capitalist society, living labor is nothing but a way to increase accumulated labor. In Communist society, accumulated labor is a way to widen, to enrich, to promote the existence of the laborer.

In capitalist society, those with power in the past dominate the present; in Communist society, the present dominates the past. In capitalist society capital is independent and has individuality, while the living person is dependent and has no individuality.

And the abolition of this state of things is called by the capitalist, abolition of individuality and freedom! And rightly so. The abolition of capitalist individuality, capitalist independence, and capitalist freedom is undoubtedly aimed for.

By freedom is meant, under the present capitalist conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other “brave words” of our capital owners about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the restricted traders of the Middle Ages, but have no meaning when opposed to the Communistic abolition of buying and selling, of the capitalist conditions of production, and of the capital owners itself.

You are horrified at our intending get rid of private property. But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for 90 percent of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of that 90 percent. You criticize us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property that only exists because the immense majority of society cannot have it.

Simply put, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Yes, that is just what we intend.

From the moment when labor can no longer be converted into capital, money, or rent, into a social power capable of being monopolized, so from the moment when individual property can no longer be transformed into capitalist property, into capital, from that moment, you say individuality vanishes.

You must, therefore, confess that by “individual” you mean no other person than the capitalist, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible.

Communism deprives no man of the power to gain a share of the products of society; all that it does is to deprive him of the power to control the labor of others using what they own.

It has been objected that upon the abolition of private property all work will cease, and universal laziness will overtake us.

According to this, capitalist society should long ago have been destroyed through idleness. Those of its members who work make nothing, and those who make the wealth do not work. The whole of this objection is just another expression of the obvious statement: that there can no longer be any wage-labor when there is no longer any capital.

All objections urged against the Communistic mode of producing and sharing material products, have, in the same way, been urged against the Communistic modes of producing and sharing intellectual products. Just as, to the capitalist, the disappearance of class property is the disappearance of production itself, so the disappearance of class culture is to him identical with the disappearance of all culture.

That culture, the loss of which he laments, is, for the enormous majority, a mere training to act as a machine.

It makes no sense to respond to our intended abolition of capitalist property, with your capitalist notions of freedom, culture, law, etc. Your ideas are just the outgrowth of the conditions of your capitalist production and capitalist property, just as your wisdom is but the will of your class made into a law for all. The essential character and direction of what we consider wisdom or the way things are, is determined by the economic conditions of existence of your wealthy class.

It is a selfish delusion to think that the social and cultural forms that come from our capitalist economic system and the capital-labor power relationships in that system, which is just one of many economic systems that have existed in history from feudalism to the present. This selfish delusion is something you share with every ruling class that has come before you. What you see clearly in the case of ancient property, what you admit in the case of feudal property, you are of course forbidden to admit in the case of your own capitalist form of property.

Abolition of the modern view of family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists.

Do you charge us with wanting to stop the exploitation of children by their parents? To this crime we plead guilty.

But, you will say, we destroy the most sacred of relations, when we replace home education by social.

And your education! Is not that also social, and determined by the social conditions under which you educate, by what we teach in schools, etc.? The Communists have not invented education being used for the purposes of society. They only want to change the nature of the values taught to children by the education system, and to rescue education from the influence of the ruling class.

The capitalist clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed relation of parent and child, becomes all the more disgusting when, by the action of Modern Industry, all family ties among the working class are torn asunder. The poor do not get to have the comfortable family unit that the middle-class and wealthy do. Their social relationships with their family are warped by how their labor and time is controlled by the capitalists. To survive in these families, even the children have to be thought of as means to make money in present or future.

But you Communists would introduce a community of women, screams the whole capital owners in chorus.

The capitalist sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common. So he believes that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He does not suspect that the real point is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.

Nothing is more ridiculous than the self-righteous anger of our capitalists at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce community of women; it has existed almost from since before we can remember.

The capitalists use their own wives and daughters for labor. They use the wives and daughters of the working class for their labor. Communists want an openly legalized community of women that will not be exploited for the use of capitalists. Women will no longer have to follow the whims of the capitalists to survive.

The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality.

The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got. Since the working class must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation, it is, so far, itself national, though not in the capitalist sense of the word.

National differences and conflict between peoples are daily more and more vanishing. The supremacy of the working class will cause them to vanish even faster. United action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the freedom of the working class.

As we end the exploitation of individuals by others, we will also end the exploitation of countries by other countries. As conflict between classes in a nation vanishes, the hostility of one nation to another will come to an end.

The charges against Communism made from a religious, a philosophical, and, generally, from an ideological standpoint, are not deserving of serious examination.

Does it require deep understanding to comprehend that man’s ideas, views and conceptions, in one word, man’s consciousness, changes with every change in the conditions of his material existence, in his social relations and in his social life?

What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its nature as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have always been the ideas of its ruling class.

When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they only express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolving of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

One fact is common to all past ages: the exploitation of one part of society by the other. No wonder, then, that the social consciousness of past ages, despite all of its variety, moves within certain common forms, or general ideas, which cannot completely vanish except with the total disappearance of class struggle.

The Communist revolution is the most radical rupture with traditional property relations; no wonder that its development involves the most radical rupture with traditional ideas.

But enough with the capitalist objections to Communism.

We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the working class to the position of ruling as to win the battle of democracy.

The working class will use its political supremacy to take control, by degrees, of all capital from the capital owners, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the State, i.e., of the working class organized as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible. Of course, in the beginning, this cannot be done except by force, as the ruling class will resist change.

These measures will of course be different in different countries.

Nevertheless in the most advanced countries, the following will be pretty generally applicable.

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of wastelands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equal distribution of the population over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character.

Political power, properly so called, is just the organized power of one class for oppressing another. If the working class during its contest with the capital owners is compelled, by the force of circumstances, to organize itself as a class by means of a revolution, it makes itself the ruling class.

In place of the old capitalist society, with its classes and class struggle, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.

The relationship of the Communists with other working-class parties

Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.

In all these movements they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time.

Finally, they work everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.

The Communists don’t want to hide their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The working class have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

WORKING MEN OF ALL COUNTRIES, UNITE!

The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels is one of the most famous essays in history. Like Marx and Engels’ other work, it discusses the power imbalance between the capital owning class, such as landlords and corporate employers, and the working class, whose labor they exploit for rents and profits. Individual workers have little power against capital owners, who would merely replace them with another worker desperate for sustenance enough to accept exploitation. The Communist movement called for the working class to unite and use their power as the majority to bring about a Communist society. It was first published in 1848 and is pretty long, so this is a simple modern English version of just the first section of the Communist Manifesto. The second section is here.

Introduction

A demon is haunting Europe — the demon of Communism. All the Powers of old Europe have formed an alliance to chase out this demon. Where is the underdog political party that has not been labeled Communistic by its rivals in power? Where the opposition that has not thrown back the name-calling of Communism, against its own competitors?

Two things happen as a result.

1. Communism is already treated and realized by all European Powers as itself a Power.
2. It is time that Communists should openly, in front of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies, and meet this fairytale of the Demon of Communism with a manifesto of the Communist movement itself.

To do this, Communists of various nationalities have assembled in London and made a draft of the following Manifesto, to be published in the English, French, German, Italian, Flemish and Danish languages.

Part I. Capital Owners and the Working Class

The history of societies up until now is the history of struggles between social classes.

Free man and slave, lord and serf, ruler and the ruled, in a word: oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant fighting against each another, carried on an uninterrupted, sometimes hidden, sometimes open fight – a fight that each time ended either in a revolutionary reorganization of society, or in everyone losing.

In earlier periods of history, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into several sections, all sorts of divisions in wealth and power. In ancient Rome we have patricians, knights, plebeians, slaves; in the Middle Ages, feudal lords, vassals, guild-masters, journeymen, apprentices, serfs; in almost all of these classes, again, even more specific categories.

The modern capitalist society that has grown out of the ruins of feudal society has not gotten rid of class rivalry. It has simply established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones. Our time period, the era of the capital owners, has, however, this distinctive feature: it has simplified the class enemies. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two huge hostile camps, into two great classes, directly facing each other: capital owners and the working class.

From the peasants of the Middle Ages came the contract workers of the earliest towns. From these towns the first elements of the capital owners were developed.

The discovery of America and the first sailing around the Cape opened up fresh ground for the rising capital owners. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonization of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the ways to go about exchanging goods and services, and in goods in general, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The medieval system of industry, under which industrial production was monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer sufficed for the growing wants of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The guild-masters were pushed on one side by the manufacturing middle class; division of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished when faced with division of labor in each single workshop.

Meanwhile the markets kept growing, the demand always rising. Even the assembly line was no longer enough. As a result, steam and machinery revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry, the place of the industrial middle class, by industrial millionaires, the leaders of whole industrial armies, the modern capitalist.

Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America made possible. This market has given a huge development to trade, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its time, depended on industry expanding; and has grown in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended – in the same proportion the capital owners developed, increased its resources, and pushed into the background every social class handed down from the Middle Ages.

We see, therefore, how the modern capital owning class is itself the product of a long history of development, of a series of revolutions in the methods of production and of exchange.

Each step in the development of the capital owning class was accompanied by a connected political advance of that class. Having been an oppressed class under the rule of the medieval nobility, an armed and self-governing group in the medieval town; afterwards, in the actual period of manufacture, serving either the semi-feudal or the absolute monarchy as a balance against the nobility, and as an essential part of the great monarchies, capital owners have at last, since the establishment of Modern Industry and of the world-market, conquered for itself, in the modern representative State, exclusive political control. The executive branch of the modern State is simply a committee for managing the shared business of the whole capital owners.

The capital owners, historically, has played a very revolutionary part.

The capital owners, wherever it has gotten the advantage, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has without mercy torn apart the various feudal ties that connected man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other connection between man and man than basic self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the heavenly joys of religious enthusiasm, of chivalry, of sentiment, in the icy water of self-interested calculation. It has turned personal worth into exchange value. And in place of the numberless and doable freedoms that were once considered sacred, has set up that single, impossible freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, poorly hidden by religious and political illusions: naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The capital owners have stripped of its halo every occupation once honored and looked up to with reverent respect. It has turned the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage laborers.

The capital owners has torn away from the family its emotional layer, and has reduced the family relation to just a money relation. Capitalist society sees women in the family as a mere instrument of production to be exploited for unpaid labor.

The capital owners have revealed how it happened that the brutal display of energy in the Middle Ages, which Conservatives admire so much, found its suitable partner in the worst laziness. It has been the first to show what man’s activity can make happen. It has accomplished wonders even more amazing than Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, and Gothic cathedrals; it has sent out expeditions that are even more impressive than all former exoduses of nations and crusades.

The capital owners cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the tools of production, and therefore the processes of production, and with them the whole processes of society. Preserving the old method of production in unaltered form, was, instead, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, eternal uncertainty and unrest – these distinguish the capitalist period from all earlier ones. All fixed, frozen relations, with their associations of ancient and esteemed prejudices and opinions, are swept away; all newly formed ones become old-fashioned before they can fossilize. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is made unclean, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the capital owners over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere.

The capital owners have through their exploitation of the world market given a urban character to production and consumption in every country. To the great distress of Conservatives, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old, established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are pushed aside by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life-and-death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up local raw material, but raw material drawn from most faraway places; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every portion of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climates. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have interaction in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the  many national and local literatures, there comes a world literature.

The capital owners, by the rapid improvement of all tools of production, by the methods of communication being made so much easier, brings all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its products are the heavy artillery it uses to batter down all Chinese walls, with which it forces their intense hatred of foreigners to give in. It requires all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the capitalist mode of production; it requires them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become capitalist themselves. In short, it creates a world after its own image.

The capital owners have put the country under the rule of the cities. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has in this way taken a considerable part of the population away from rural life. Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made poorer countries dependent on the wealthy ones, nations of peasants on nations of capitalist, the East on the West.

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We probably can’t make a perfectly objective and perfectly fair set of laws, but the Veil of Ignorance thought experiment by John Rawls points a way towards coming close. Farnam Street has this explanation of the Veil of Ignorance, which is a really cool way to think about what fairness is and what kind of laws would exist in a fair society:

If you could redesign society from scratch, what would it look like? How would you distribute wealth and power? Would you make everyone equal or not? How would you define fairness and equality? And — here’s the kicker — what if you had to make those decisions without knowing who you would be in this new society?

Philosopher John Rawls asked just that in a thought experiment known as “the Veil of Ignorance” in his 1971 book, Theory of Justice. Like many thought experiments, the Veil of Ignorance could never be carried out in the literal sense, nor should it be. Its purpose is to explore ideas about justice, morality, equality, and social status in a structured manner.

The Veil of Ignorance, a component of social contract theory, allows us to test ideas for fairness. Behind the Veil of Ignorance, no one knows who they are. They lack clues as to their class, their privileges, their disadvantages, or even their personality. They exist as an impartial group, tasked with designing a new society with its own conception of justice.

Imagine that you have set for yourself the task of developing a totally new social contract for today’s society. How could you do so fairly?

Although you could never actually eliminate all of your personal biases and prejudices, you would need to take steps at least to minimize them. Rawls suggests that you imagine yourself in an original position behind a veil of ignorance. Behind this veil, you know nothing of yourself and your natural abilities, or your position in society. You know nothing of your sex, race, nationality, or individual tastes. Behind such a veil of ignorance all individuals are simply specified as rational, free, and morally equal beings. You do know that in the “real world,” however, there will be a wide variety in the natural distribution of natural assets and abilities, and that there will be differences of sex, race, and culture that will distinguish groups of people from each other. Without any knowledge of your current position in society, what laws would you want in that society?

As a thought experiment, the Veil of Ignorance is powerful because our usual opinions regarding what is just and unjust are informed by our own experiences. We are shaped by our race, gender, class, education, appearance, sexuality, career, family, and so on. On the other side of the Veil of Ignorance, none of that exists. Technically, the resulting society should be a fair one.

“The Fairness Principle: When contemplating a moral action, imagine that you do not know if you will be the moral doer or receiver, and when in doubt err on the side of the other person.” — Michael Shermer, The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity Toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom

The Purpose of the Veil of Ignorance

Because people behind the Veil of Ignorance do not know who they will be in this new society, any choice they make in structuring that society could either harm them or benefit them.

If they decide men will be superior, for example, they must face the risk that they will be women. If they decide that 10% of the population will be slaves to the others, they cannot be surprised if they find themselves to be slaves. No one wants to be part of a disadvantaged group, so the logical belief is that the Veil of Ignorance would produce a fair, egalitarian society.

Behind the Veil of Ignorance, cognitive biases melt away. The hypothetical people are rational thinkers. They use probabilistic thinking to assess the likelihood of their being affected by any chosen measure. They possess no opinions for which to seek confirmation. Nor do they have any recently learned information to pay undue attention to. The sole incentive they are biased towards is their own self-preservation, which is equivalent to the preservation of the entire group. They cannot stereotype any particular group as they could be members of it. They lack commitment to their prior selves as they do not know who they are.

So, what would these people decide on? According to Rawls, in a fair society all individuals must possess the following:

• Rights and liberties (including the right to vote, the right to hold public office, free speech, free thought, and fair legal treatment)
• Power and opportunities
• Income and wealth sufficient for a good quality of life (Not everyone needs to be rich, but everyone must have enough money to live a comfortable life.)
• The conditions necessary for self-respect

For these conditions to occur, the people behind the Veil of Ignorance must figure out how to achieve what Rawls regards as the two key components of justice:

• Everyone must have the best possible life which does not cause harm to others.
• Everyone must be able to improve their position, and any inequalities must be present solely if they benefit everyone.

Ways of Understanding the Veil of Ignorance

One way to understand the Veil of Ignorance is to imagine that you are tasked with cutting up a pizza to share with friends. You will be the last person to take a slice. Being of sound mind, you want to get the largest possible share, and the only way to ensure this is to make all the slices the same size. You could cut one huge slice for yourself and a few tiny ones for your friends, but one of them might take the large slice and leave you with a meager share. (Not to mention, your friends won’t think very highly of you.)

We can also consider the Tragedy of the Commons. Introduced by ecologist Garrett Hardin, this mental model states that shared resources will be exploited if no system for fair distribution is implemented. Individuals have no incentive to leave a share of free resources for others. Hardin’s classic example is an area of land which everyone in a village is free to use for their cattle. Each person wants to maximize the usefulness of the land, so they put more and more cattle out to graze. Yet the land is finite and at some point will become too depleted to support livestock. If the people behind the Veil of Ignorance had to choose how the common land should be shared, the logical decision would be to give each person an equal part and forbid them from introducing too many cattle.

As N. Gregory Mankiw writes in Principles of Microeconomics:

“The Tragedy of the Commons is a story with a general lesson: when one person uses a common resource, he diminishes other people’s enjoyment of it. Because of this negative externality, common resources tend to be used excessively. The government can solve the problem by reducing use of the common resource through regulation or taxes. Alternatively, the government can sometimes turn the common resource into a private good.”

This lesson has been known for thousands of years. The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle pointed out the problem with common resources: “What is common to many is taken least care of, for all men have greater regard for what is their own than for what they possess in common with others.”

In The Case for Meritocracy, Michael Faust uses other thought experiments to support the Veil of Ignorance:

“Let’s imagine another version of the thought experiment. If inheritance is so inherently wonderful — such an intrinsic good — then let’s collect together all of the inheritable money in the world. We shall now distribute this money in exactly the same way it would be distributed in today’s world… but with one radical difference. We are going to distribute it by lottery rather than by family inheritance, i.e, anyone in the world can receive it. So, in these circumstances, how many people who support inheritance would go on supporting it? Note that the government wouldn’t be getting the money… just lucky strangers. Would the advocates of inheritance remain as fiercely committed to their cherished principle? Or would the entire concept instantly be exposed for the nonsense it is?”

If inheritance were treated as the lottery it is, no one would stand by it. In the world of the 1% versus the 99%, no one in the 1% would ever accept a lottery to decide inheritance because there would be a 99% chance they would end up as schmucks, exactly like the rest of us.

And a further surrealistic thought experiment:

Imagine that on a certain day of the year, each person in the world randomly swaps bodies with another person, living anywhere on earth. Well, for the 1%, there’s a 99% chance that they will be swapped from heaven to hell. For the 99%, 1% might be swapped from hell to heaven, while the other 98% will stay the same as before. What kind of constitution would the human race adopt if annual body swapping were a compulsory event?! They would of course choose a fair one.

How We Can Apply This Concept

We can use the Veil of Ignorance to test whether a certain issue is fair.

When my kids are fighting over the last cookie, which happens more often than you’d imagine, I ask them to determine who will split the cookie. The other person picks. This is the old playground rule, “you split, I pick.” Without this rule, one of them would surely give the other a smaller portion. With it, the halves are as equal as they would be with sensible adults.

When considering whether we should endorse a proposed law or policy, we can ask: if I did not know if this would affect me or not, would I still support it? Those who make big decisions that shape the lives of large numbers of people are almost always those in positions of power. And those in positions of power are almost always members of privileged groups. As Benjamin Franklin once wrote: “Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are.”

When we have to make decisions that will affect other people, especially disadvantaged groups (such as when a politician decides to cut benefits or a CEO decides to outsource manufacturing to a low-income country), we can use the Veil of Ignorance as a tool for making fair choices.

As Robert F. Kennedy (the younger brother of John F. Kennedy) said in the 1960s:

“Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

When we choose to position ourselves behind the Veil of Ignorance, we have a better chance of creating one of those all-important ripples.

Power dynamics matter. Insisting on viewing any instance of social confrontation as happening in a vacuum is ignoring that they happen in a society and are subject to the dynamics present in that society. It’s hard to sometimes explain how power works sociologically and how the concept of power isn’t limited to just direct political or military power. This is one of the best explainers of power I could find:

At the close of another hotly contested campaign season, politics seems to me like a sport. We have been inundated with commercials, bumper stickers, debates, and speeches. Fans have flaunted their allegiances while those at the top tried to carve out stances that would best appeal to particular demographics. Is it worth it? Does it really matter? What, if anything, really changes because of all this?

These, of course, are abstract, big-thinking, sociological kinds of questions. But if I remain uncertain about the answers, there is one thing that is clearly at stake in all of this: power. So, what is power? How is it achieved, exercised, and legitimated?

We in the social sciences typically think of power as persuasiveness, the ability to get what one wants—this is the essence of the classic definition attributed to Max Weber, and it’s commonly applied across a host of institutional spheres and interactions, from political parties to the power of consumers. But this view is a bit too simplistic—it obscures power’s fundamentally structural, cultural, and relational nature. This is to say, power is too often thought of as something that a particular leader or party has, rather than something rooted in institutional practices, cultural supports, and alternative pathways outside the usual political apparatus.

Sociology offers a unique glimpse through the myths that veil power’s resilience, uses, and limits.

The problem of power, then, is a prime blind spot; the core, lower-level topics of political science—like individual voting behavior, party politics and alignments, and election outcomes—can direct us away from larger questions about the ends toward which political influence is directed. Sociology is uniquely equipped to look beyond the usual veneer of power, unpack the myths that reinforce it, and see the relational foundations upon which it ultimately rests. A sociological view indeed provides a much-needed corrective, offering a unique glimpse through the myths that veil power’s resilience, uses, and limits.

 The Structured Nature of Power

Power can derive from historically and culturally proscribed statuses (such as race and gender) and organizational and institutional positioning (e.g., manager, politician, school administrator). Power is more complex than that, though, as institutional, organizational, and bureaucratic structures confer greater or lesser leverage depending on position. Those of lower status are constrained to playing by the rules much of the time, while those in higher positions might be able to create or use even seemingly neutral rules in self-beneficial ways. Consider how tax codes, exam criteria for college admissions, penalties for white-collar and blue-collar crimes, and a bifurcated health care system benefit the already powerful while creating vulnerabilities and diminishing the power of others. Such arrangements highlight a key sociological insight: Culturally proscribed statuses and positions shape power and how that power is enabled or constrained by structure.

Politics and elections, even in an ostensibly democratic system, are not impervious to the structural dynamics of power. One commonly hears, for instance, of the ways in which citizens wield their power through votes. Yet, voting is defined by the structural dictates of law and can be subject to legal or informational manipulation—for instance, gerrymandering might dissipate electoral power or misinformation might create real or perceived limitations to exercising the vote. Perhaps more importantly, the very political options we have—the candidates, parties, and political agendas we choose from—are considerably limited by, even beholden to, wider interests and influences. Structure clearly constrains access, choices, agendas, and actual political decision making and policy, regardless of citizens’ desires. Further, those in privileged positions will, by and large, hold the structural and institutional tools to reinforce prevailing power hierarchies.

The role of structure in bolstering power differentials is equally true of other institutional realms. Employees, for instance, are typically bound to procedural manuals, existing technological controls, or the speed of machinery, and they have fewer protections than they’ve had in the past. Supervisors can invoke (or not invoke) elements of authority and sanctioning like hiring, firing, demoting, and promoting, often with little repercussion. This is particularly true when shielded by legal precedence and financial advantage (that is, laws like corporate personhood protect many in powerful positions in the corporate world and, if they are challenged, money can allow for a great advantage in the courtroom). A similar case can be made for medical access, where power to obtain treatment is conditioned by resources, rules, and social safety nets dictated from by government officials, insurance companies, and the pharmaceutical industry. Even medical practitioners are increasingly constrained by structures leveraged by even more influential actors and entities. In these regards, power is vested in the system—or, to be more precise, in how social relations are structured and maintained within institutional and organizational contexts.

That powerful actors have the capacity to create or invoke structure in their own interests while the less powerful are more constrained is an important sociological point, yet it is typically hidden by our everyday understandings of how organizations and institutions operate. Indeed, we tend to see contemporary structures and rules as more or less bureaucratic, rational, and neutral. And, to be sure, they are presented that way. Yet, significant inequalities exist across most institutional domains, including politics. Consider, for instance, who is represented, who has voice, who benefits from policies, and which agendas reach the table.

In one clear example, in recent years, agents of large and powerful financial institutions manipulated the stock market and gambled on high-risk mortgages for the sake of massive personal and institutional financial gains. To prevent more devastating losses to shareholders and the public, these companies were “bailed out” by the federal government, with some bailout money going toward financial bonuses for CEOs. Few were prosecuted for mismanagement, and fewer still were characterized as criminals, to the outrage of an electorate that has seen its social safety nets evaporate, housing values deteriorate, retirement accounts dwindle, reproductive rights attacked, job prospects collapse, and the possibility of universal health care taken off the table. “Power begets power” rings apparent; the less powerful were left paying the bill.

Such a disconnect, I would submit, is due to the fact that we tend not to see large-scale abuses as unjust exercises of power so much as the unfortunate results of an amorphous “bad social system.” What we forget—or choose to overlook—is that this “unfortunately bad system” benefits those who constructed and control it in the first place. Equally misguided is a focus on the micro level: equating misconduct with “a few bad apples.” That view ascribes abuses of power to individual defect, obfuscating its structural and systemic character. Instead, we must return to the fact that structure bolsters power for some and mitigates it for others.

Cultural Scaffolding and the Legitimation of Power

Power relations and the structures that support them are typically buttressed by “cultural scaffolding”—that is, values and belief systems that portray power and its use as reasonable and legitimate. Popular portrayals, in fact, remain largely loyal to neutral assumptions about how power operates, rarely question the legitimacy of those in power or the cultural symbolism they invoke, and often seem unaware of the cultural foundations that reinforce unequal power relations in organizational, institutional, and political life. The sociological focus on cultural scaffolding forces attention toward the ways in which power differentials and the exercise of power itself are legitimated—made to seem reasonable, just, rational, and even natural.

Language and symbolism are important in these regards, especially when it comes to symbolic vilification. Symbolic vilification is the process whereby the powerful scapegoat opponents or less powerful actors by deeming them less worthy, problematic, or even dangerous. When this occurs, it is easier to maintain power by creating fear, reify inequality through exclusion, apply punitive sanctions and control policies, or even invoke violence toward subordinated groups. A second, often simultaneous process entails symbolic amplification, which occurs when actors imbue and elevate certain elements of cultural, institutional/organizational, and political life to a place of almost sacred reverence. One might consider broadly constructed cultural values (say, freedom, democracy, and equality) in this light, but also more institutionally and organizationally specific processes like educational choice, religious piety, or “family values.”

All actors, of course, can invoke such symbols. Social movements typically do so in an effort to galvanize commitment, participation, and public support, find scholars like David A. Snow and Robert D. Benford. Importantly, though, symbolic amplification is also commonly mobilized in defense of institutional power, practices, and privilege. That is, symbolic amplification can be used in conservative ways that defend the status quo.

Sociologists may seem unique in our emphasis on culture and the dynamics of “legitimation,” but political parties and candidates are well aware of the effects. They work incredibly hard to frame issues in a manner consistent with the identities and value systems of their targeted demographic voting groups. This is easily witnessed in, for example, the political use of the terms democracy and freedom relative to the vilification of immigrants, minorities, and labor unions.

In the years I spent examining workplace discrimination. In that research, I did find some examples of “bad apples” in otherwise good environments, yet in the vast majority of cases, employers used otherwise neutral bureaucratic rules and procedures to systematically fire, demote, not promote, and harass minority, female, and aging employees. These employers defended their actions by simultaneously amplifying claims of merit, business interest, and neutrality (often pointing to official bureaucratic rules) while also vilifying victims as unstable, unreliable, and problematic. The use of ostensibly neutral rules and structure by powerful actors was clear, as was the cultural scaffolding that legitimated their discriminatory conduct.

Culture and legitimation are undoubtedly elemental to understanding power within any institutional or organizational context. Cultural values and symbolism are invoked by those in power or vying for power, sometimes to manipulate, sometimes to blur complex issues, and certainly to bolster allegiance and an image of fairness, neutrality, and trustworthiness. Such processes also reduce the chances that less powerful actors, be they in politics or some other institutional domain, will recognize or act upon alternatives, abuses, or the inequalities that often result.

This is an excerpt from the first chapter of Amartya Sen’s seminal book, Development as Freedom. I’ve always really liked the way it articulates a much stronger reading of human rights and development:

Development can be seen, it is argued here, as a process of expanding the real freedoms that people enjoy. Focusing on human freedoms contrasts with narrower views of development, such as identifying development with the growth of gross national product, or with the rise in personal incomes, or with industrialization, or with technological advance, or with social modernization. Growth of GNP or of individual incomes can, of course, be very important as means to expanding the freedoms enjoyed by the members of the society. But freedoms depend also on other determinants, such as special and economic arrangements (for example, facilities for education and health care) as well as political and civil rights (for example, the liberty to participate in public discussion and voting). Similarly, industrialization or technological progress or social modernization can substantially contribute to expanding human freedom, but freedom depends on other influences as well. If freedom is what development advances, then there is a major argument for concentrating on that overarching objective, rather than on some particular means, or some specially chosen list of instruments.

Viewing development in terms of expanding substantive freedoms directs attention to the ends that make development important, rather that merely some of the means that play a prominent part in the process. Development requires the removal of major sources of unfreedom: poverty as well as tyranny, poor economic opportunities as well as systematic social deprivation, neglect of public facilities as well as intolerance or overactivity of repressive states.

Despite unprecedented increases in overall opulence, the contemporary world denies. What people can positively achieve is influenced by economic opportunities, political liberties, social powers, and the enabling conditions of good health, basic education, and the encouragement and cultivation of initiative. The institutional arrangements for these opportunities are also influenced by the exercise of people’s freedoms, through the liberty to participate in social choice and in the making of public decisions that impel the progress of these opportunities. These interconnections are also investigated here.

POLITICAL FREEDOM AND QUALITY OF LIFE: The difference that is made by seeing freedom as the principal ends of development can be illustrated with a few simple examples. Even though the full reach of this perspective can only emerge from a much more extensive analysis (attempted in the chapters to follow), the radical nature of the idea of “development as freedom” can easily be illustrated with some elementary examples.

First, in the context of the narrower views of development in terms of GNP growth or industrialization, it is often asked whether certain political or social freedoms, such as the liberty of political participation and dissent, or opportunities to receive basic education, are or are not conducive to development. In the light of the more foundational view of development as freedom, this way of posing the question tends to miss the important understanding that these substantive freedoms (that is, the liberty of political participation or the opportunity to receive basic education or health care) are among the constitutive components of development. Their relevance for development does not have to be freshly established through their indirect contribution to the growth of GNP or to the promotion of industrialization.

As it happens, the freedoms and rights are also very effective in contributing to economic progress: this connection will receive extensive attention in this book. But while the causal relation is indeed significant, the vindication of freedoms and rights provided by this causal linkage is over and above the directly constitutive role of these freedoms in development. A second illustration relates to the dissonance between income per head (even after correction for price variations) and the freedom of individuals to live long and live well. For example, the citizens of Gabon or South Africa or Namibia or Brazil nay be much richer in terms of per capita GNP than the citizens of Sri Lanka or China or the state of Kerala in India, bur the latter have very substantially higher life expectancy than do the former.

To take a different type of example, the point is often made that African Americans in the United States are relatively poor compared with American whites, though much richer than people in the third world. It is, however important to recognize that African Americans have an absolutely lower chance of reaching mature age than do people of many third world societies, such as China, or Sri Lanka, or part, of India (with different arrangements of health care, education, and community relations). If development analysis is relevant even for richer countries (it is argued in this work that it is indeed so), the presence of such inter-group contrasts within the richer countries can be seen to be an important aspect of the understanding of development and underdevelopment.