> The problem rather sugests that there is no such thing
> as "the will of the majority," if that is taken to be
> an aggregate of individual preferences. That of
> course is an interpretation, not a result. It's
> embraced by right wing, market-oriented public choice
> theorists like James Buchanan who want to take
> everything out of the public realm and make choices by
> buying and selling instead. So it is even more
> troubling for the left.
How does the problem arise if rational preferences are conceived as Marx conceives them? His conception embodies an idea of "human being" radically different from Arrow's, an idea implicit in the following account of how we would produce if we "carried out production as human beings."
> Let us suppose that we had carried out production as human beings.
> Each of us would have in two ways affirmed himself and the other
> person. 1) In my production I would have objectified my individuality,
> its specific character, and therefore enjoyed not only an individual
> manifestation of my life during the activity, but also when looking at
> the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing my
> personality to be objective, visible to the senses and hence a power
> beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my product I would
> have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having satisfied
> a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man's
> essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding
> to the need of another man's essential nature. 3) I would have been
> for you the mediator between you and the species, and therefore would
> become recognised and felt by you yourself as a completion of your own
> essential nature and as a necessary part of yourself, and consequently
> would know myself to be confirmed both in your thought and your love.
> 4) In the individual expression of my life I would have directly
> created your expression of your life, and therefore in my individual
> activity I would have directly confirmed and realised my true nature,
> my human nature, my communal nature.
>
> Our products would be so many mirrors in which we saw reflected our
> essential nature.
>
> This relationship would moreover be reciprocal; what occurs on my side
> has also to occur on yours.
>
> Let us review the various factors as seen in our supposition:
>
> My work would be a free manifestation of life, hence an enjoyment of
> life. Presupposing private property, my work is an alienation of life,
> for I work in order to live, in order to obtain for myself the means
> of life. My work is not my life.
>
> Secondly, the specific nature of my individuality, therefore, would be
> affirmed in my labour, since the latter would be an affirmation of my
> individual life. Labour therefore would be true, active property.
> Presupposing private property, my individuality is alienated to such a
> degree that this activity is instead hateful to me, a torment, and
> rather the semblance of an activity. Hence, too, it is only a forced
> activity and one imposed on me only through an external fortuitous
> need, not through an inner, essential one.
>
> My labour can appear in my object only as what it is. It cannot appear
> as something which by its nature it is not. Hence it appears only as
> the expression of my loss of self and of my powerlessness that is
> objective, sensuously perceptible, obvious and therefore put beyond
> all doubt.
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/
The idea of "human being" implicit here also underpins the ideal distribution rule Marx claims would be universally embraced in a community where we actually "carried out production as human beings," a community actualizing "a higher phase of communist society".
> In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving
> subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and
> therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has
> vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's
> prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the
> all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of
> co-operative wealth flow more abundantly -- only then then can the
> narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and
> society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability,
> to each according to his needs!
> <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm>
Ted