Truths of reason and truths of fact

There are two kinds of truths: those of reasoning and those of fact. The truths of reasoning are necessary and their opposite is impossible; the truths of fact are contingent and their opposite is possible.
Gottfried Leibniz, La monadologie (1714)

For those immersed in the day to day functions of commerce, the idea of questioning whether its tenets are true seems impertinent, irrelevant, perhaps even impossible. Commerce and the ideologies it engenders are an established fact. It is here that Leibniz’s distinction might help us see that, while commercial society is indeed an established fact, it was established not by reason but by historically contingent circumstances, and its opposite remains possible.

The most fundamental tenet of commerce is that the demands of customers must be fulfilled, whether they are reasonable or not. The architect might consider it unreasonable to build a hundred million dollar mansion for the latest billionaire while the poor remain unhoused. But her employer will tell her such reasoning is irrelevant. The reasoning of commerce, in which no opportunity for profit may be neglected, is what rules her profession, whether she likes it or not.

The idea that workers should simply stop work when the demands of their rulers become unreasonable is what animated the labor movement in the first half of the twentieth century. This idea is what gave us Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society. Today’s rulers are eviscerating these programs, and unfortunately there is no longer a significant labor movement to oppose them. As wages fall and profits rise, as they did in the first half of the twentieth century, and are now doing in the first decades of the twenty-first, the only real power the working class has to oppose these unjust power grabs is the power to simply stop working. We will never exercise this power so long as we treat the ideologies of commerce as if they were sacrosanct and inviolable. A vibrant labor movement demands minds brave enough to question the justice and wisdom of the system that rules us, minds that can distinguish truths of reason from ideologies corrupt rulers have dinned into our ears so loudly and incessantly that they have become truths of fact.