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The news of the Supreme Court
decision on Walmart — declining to approve a
massive lawsuit against an amazing company — was reported as if it
amounted to some devastating blow to American life. Nonsense: the decision
actually permits normalcy in economic development to proceed without a new
round of destruction of wealth. Some lawyers might be sad, but it is great
for the rest of us.
The lawsuit grouped the interests
of 1.6 million women who had worked for 3,400 stores since 1998. One can only
imagine the looting that would have commenced had the decision gone the other
way. It would have been catastrophic. What the Supreme Court did was narrowly
decline to wreck even more American labor markets and the gears of free
enterprise. It is a small favor, but thank goodness
for it.
The lawsuit that was turned back
was called a "class-action lawsuit." The word "class" is
the English lexicon is usually used in two ways.
The first is the popular sense that
refers to social standing. A person can be from the "working class."
A person can be part of the "middle class." In American society,
there is by tradition no such thing as an "upper class." There
might be a "leisure class" or an "upper middle class" or
an "upper crust" but no "upper class" — and that
probably stems from the charming myth that we abolished such a thing with the
elimination of lords and dukes. (A derivative sense is more colloquial. We
say that a person "has class," which means that he or she acts and
behaves in ways that are generally higher on the social strata than the norm.
We might say something is "classy," meaning pretty, beautiful,
impressive, or suggestive of wealth and opulence.) This is not the sense in
which the term "class" is used for these lawsuits.
The second definition is the
relevant one, and it is mostly drawn from academia and the Marxist tradition
in particular: The Marxist theory is that all of society is constantly
seething in conflicting and exploitative social relationships that pit group
against group.
In Marx's view, the core economic
conflict was labor versus capital. The idea is that capitalists exploit the
workers by sucking the surplus value of production from them such that
capital grows ever richer and labor ever poorer. The guy built an entire
system of thought based on this idea, and it has inspired revolutions around
the world.
It's all a bit strange, because it
is so obviously untrue. If I hire you to mow my grass, you are not being
exploited. We are cooperating in mutually beneficial exchange. No one has a
gun to your head, and we both are free to negotiate the terms of the deal.
You can work for anyone who wants to hire you and I can hire anyone who is
willing to work for me. This is called peace and exchange; there is nothing
exploitative about it.
Marx was just brewing buckets of
envy in a time when people were confused about the accumulation of capital
and confused about demographic movements and the like. His theory explained
nothing and was based on nothing, but somehow it stuck and it still festers,
inspiring governments and theorists around the world to try to reinvent
Marxism.
One reinvention of Marxist theory
is the idea that the gains of whites come at the expense of blacks, or that
the gains of men come at the expense of women, or that the gains of abled
people come at the expense of the disabled, or that the gains of people in
general come at the expense of the environment. They all assume that there is
something like a class of people whose interests and outlook are homogeneous
in every sense that matters.
This is obviously not the case with
the people who joined — or who were joined without their permission, in
the usual way — the "class-action lawsuit" against Walmart. First, there is no such thing as the interests
of women — or of men, or blacks, or disabled people, or the
environment. Interests are always radically heterogeneous because the world
is filled with unique individuals with subjective perspectives, ideas, and
experiences.
Second, there was no class
"acting" in this case. It was a bunch of lawyers using some former Walmart employees — let's just say
that these people were being exploited by attorneys — in the attempt to
pick the deepest pockets around. Had the lawsuit been won, the women would
have received settlements that would pay a day of parking meter fees. The
lawyers would have looted it all.
The American legal system should
never let such a ridiculous lawsuit make any headway in the court system at
all. If we had strict property rights, freedom of association and exchange,
and freedom of contract, there would be no such thing as a class-action suit.
If we had a real free market, we would be spared that massive social waste
that was involved in this preposterous lawsuit.
But then what about discrimination?
It comes down to this. If Walmart systematically
discriminated against women, there is a wonderful market opportunity open for
some other company to hire up all these millions of downtrodden people and
make a great killing in the market. It is for this reason that irrational and
invidious discrimination is not a feature of the market economy.
There is no such thing as class in
a free market. Its members are fluid and based on a huge range of economic
conditions that are mostly left to human choice. Class is fluid and nonconflicting. Peace prevails.
As for the Marxist idea of class,
yes, its appearance can be created but only by legislation and lawsuits that
pit one group against another group. It is wholly artificial and a good
example of how the state creates the very problem it purports to solve.
The Supreme Court should never be
asked to decide this sort of matter, but its majority opinion grants us a
temporary reprieve from more looting of the capitalist class (in the best
sense of that term).
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr
LewRockwell.com
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