Lixing at Auckland conference on social change

Domination, fair play and obligation in the capitalist state.

December 2, Lixing Miao presents "Structural Domination, Fair Play, and Political Obligation in the Capitalist State" at Rethinking Tomorrow: Emerging Research for Social Change, a conference hosted by the Auckland University of Technology (AUT). The paper is abstracted below.

Recent socialist political philosophers criticize capitalism for its structural inequality of class power — more specifically, the wrongful structural domination over the workers. Since the capitalist state contributes to sustaining the structural domination of capitalism, the question arises concerning the political authority of the capitalist state and the political obligation of the dominated working-class citizens. Are the dominated workers obligated to reciprocate the benefits that the capitalist state provides them with by complying with its cooperative scheme? Based on the fair play account of political obligation, the duty to reciprocate in the cooperative scheme of the capitalist state is weakened because the capitalist state’s provision of benefits lives off the wealth generated by dominated labour. Accordingly, the duty of reciprocity to the capitalist state does not undercut the workers’ right to resist the unjust structural domination by disobeying the directives of the capitalist state that constitutively rely on and sustain the structural domination over wage labour. I will defend the permissibility of an anti-capitalist strategy of social change, which Erik Olim Wright calls “escaping capitalism”. Using the example of La Polvorilla, an autonomous housing cooperative with more than 4,000 residents in Mexico City’s neglected periphery where working class Indigenous people form the majority, I argue for the permissibility to fulfill our duty of reciprocity outside of the capitalist state’s cooperative scheme, which points to the ethical possibility to resist and overcome the capitalist structural domination.