Yves Smith on Clinton

Why Some of the Smartest Progressives I Know Will Vote for Trump over Hillary: Even on Wall Street, a powerful Sanders contingent so hates what Clinton stands for—the status quo—they’ll pull the lever for almost anyone else.

One of Smith's Naked Capitalism commenters says, "I have reached the point where I feel like voting for Trump against Clinton would be doing my patriotic duty. . . . If the only way to escape a trap is to gnaw off my leg, I’d like to think I’d have the guts to do it."

Smith says,

[T]he Democratic Party in the Clinton and Obama administrations has consistently embraced and implemented policies that strip workers of economic and legal rights to benefit investors and the elite professionals that serve them. Over time, the “neoliberal” economic order—which sees only good, never bad, in the relentless untrammeling of capital and the deregulation of markets—has created an unacceptable level of economic insecurity and distress for those outside the 1 percent and the elite professionals who serve them.

. . .

The Sanders voters in Naked Capitalism’s active commentariat also explicitly reject lesser-evilism, the cudgel that has previously kept true lefties somewhat in line. They are willing to gamble, given that outsider presidents like Jimmy Carter and celebrity governors like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura didn’t get much done, that a Trump presidency represents an acceptable cost of inflicting punishment on the Democratic Party for 20 years of selling out ordinary Americans.

Clinton vs. Trump

Looks like Clinton will be the Democratic Party nominee for President; we already know Trump is the Republican nominee.

I won't vote for Clinton in the general election.

• She voted for and supported the Iraq War
• She supported Bill Clinton's mass incarceration of poor and black people
• She supported Bill Clinton's destruction of welfare
• She's openly in the pocket of Wall Street and the parasitic banks

Maybe she will be less bad than Trump. Maybe Sanders will use his popularity to move the party platform to the "left". It doesn't matter. I will not and cannot vote for her. If enough people feel that way, Trump will win. So be it. I didn't offer a Devil's bargain to the voters.

The Democratic Party lost my support in 2007. They have done nothing to try to win it back. They won't do anything to win it back. Fair enough. I'm marginalized from the political process: the Democrats do not want my vote, so they won't have it. Their choice, not mine.

Socialism and central planning

I've written earlier about the necessity of strong democracy for socialism. Socialism being run by a self-selected Party with real state authority is no socialism: at worst it's just dressing capitalism up in socialist clothing; at best it's just a novel form of elitism. So when I talk about democratically deciding things, I mean real democracy, not just an "elected" elite. I've written on this topic earlier, so I won't elaborate further here.

One alternative to market socialism is strong central planning. We start with a lot of civil servants, a lot of computers (as many as Google has), a good internet connection. People go on the website, pick what they want to consume, and where and how much they want to work. Given this information and a lot of information about the technology of production, the civil servants crunch the numbers, tell everyone where to go to work and what they can consume. People report to work as specified, and go to the local warehouse to pick up their stuff.

We have the technology to make this work. We would have to work out a lot of implementation details, but systems engineers are pretty clever.

We have to worry about ordinary corruption, i.e. the civil servants and their friends and family rigging the system to give themselves extra stuff. But we always have to worry about ordinary corruption, so central planning in this sense is not (necessarily) worse. If the civil servants operate transparently, and they can, and if the people exercise strong democratic oversight, which they can, we could contain corruption. And, absent corruption, there are no incentives to try to game the system: there really isn't a system to game.

The pure central planning system is not, I think, the best way to operate a socialist economy, and I'll talk about some alternatives later. However, the alternatives have similar philosophical and political implications and elicits similar objections, so I can just address the implications as if we had pure central planning.

I'll deal with more detailed issues in later posts, right now I want to address some general issues.

First, I'm presuming the system is constructed by reasonably intelligent systems engineers and operated by reasonably intelligent civil servants. If the system is engineered or operated by idiots, it won't work. That's true of any system we use every day. What if the airplane were engineered or piloted by idiots? It would crash and everyone aboard would die. That's just how systems are.

As noted above, we have to have and exercise democratic control over both the construction and operation of the system: if there are idiots in the process, we fire them and get smart people.

If you have some specific objection, but a few minutes of thought would reveal a solution, the objection is not valid. For example, "How do the planners know what I want to consume, or what jobs I want to do?" Well, you tell them. Try and think of the simple stuff.

Second, socialism in general entails that privilege is usually absent, at least strongly restricted. If you're worried that your own privilege would be restricted, well, you're right, and this feature is by design.

Finally, capitalism creates a lot of illusions. Socialism strips these illusions and lays bare the reality. Again, the lack of illusions is by design. For example, under capitalism we have the illusion that we are free to not work, and free to choose our line of work. But of course if we choose not to work we will starve and die; those without privilege are just as coerced they would be if we had police enforcing the obligation to work. Again, the lack of illusion is by design.

Dictionary atheism and social justice

I adore PZ Myers, but I think he's tilting at a windmill. Yes, dictionary atheism is boring and reductive, but just being boring and reductive doesn't mean it's not a thing. I think it takes a degree of stupidity to be both an atheist and against social justice, but stupidity is sadly common. (If you complain in the comments that you are an atheist, not for social justice, and not stupid, I will simply reply that you're mistaken about one of those assertions, probably the last.)

Social justice is about... well... social justice. You're either for social justice, in which case you're a good person, or trying to be one, or you're not for social justice, in which case you're a bad person. To be honest, I really don't care whether you're an atheist, a Christian, a Muslim, a Satanist, a Zoroastrian: you're either for social justice or against it. If you're for social justice, you're on my side; if you're not for it, you're not on my side. (This is a moral issue, not an analytic issue. I'm sure you think you're a good person — everyone thinks they are — but I really don't care what you think about yourself.)

Trying to pummel the "atheist community" into focusing on social justice is a mistake, precisely because the atheist polemic against religion has largely succeeded. It no longer takes unusual perspicacity or courage to become an atheist: any old doofus can be an atheist, and many of them are. And even the religious people — except for a few nutjobs that most everyone, even the doofuses, knows are nutjobs — are defensive about their religion.

I don't believe any gods exist, but I'm no longer an "atheist" in the political sense. I'm not a member of the atheist community, but that's because atheism has become so ubiquitous that an atheist community makes about as much sense as a community of people under six feet tall: we have nothing in common but a triviality.

Instead, I just straight up self-identify as a member of the social justice community. If you want to be for social justice, I'm not going to ask about your religion or lack thereof, any more than I'm going to ask about your sexual orientation or taste in literature.

Monty Hall Trolley Problem

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Sorry Zach, but I enjoyed this joke twice: as an philosopher and as a statistician!

Rent seeking

Lobbyists Are Behind the Rise in Corporate Profits.

This is a phenomenon that is not peculiar to capitalism: a worker-owned firm has just as much incentive to lobby for favorable (in one sense or another) regulations as a capitalist-owned firm.

Just another reason why I don't like "market socialism."

Economics and moral philosophy

I'm on record as not liking market socialism. To clarify a bit, market socialism is probably a barely tolerable transitional stopgap in the move away from capitalism, but we should push quickly for an alternative. Furthermore, I do not think "central planning" — even if such a concept were coherent, which it's not, as I will discuss later — is the only alternative to markets. But before I talk about alternatives, Let me digress and talk about moral philosophy.

Markets are as much a moral social construction as they are a technical economic social construction; indeed the supposed pragmatic technical benefits are a post hoc rationalization; markets really rest on a moral foundation. And the morality of markets is clear: there are people who are industrious, thrifty, clever, people who take initiative, people who conform to corporate culture, people who follow certain rules (and break others): these people are good, and society should reward them just because* rewarding is what we do for good people. Similarly, there are people who are indolent, profligate, dull, etc.: these people are bad, and society should punish them just because punishing is what we do for bad people.

*i.e. we do not reward them to encourage people to be good; if rewards do act as incentives, that's all well and good, but the moral function of reward is not as an incentive, but as something intrinsic to goodness.

As Corey Robin has often argued, there is also the moral status of power. People do not want to be good (else there would be no difference between the desirable and the good), so they must be forced to be good. Since ordinary people must be forced to virtue, there must be a ruling class of people who do the forcing. This class is comprised not necessarily of people who are themselves good (although they might be good), but rather those who are energetic and effective at forcing virtue on the general population. Indeed, although the ruling class will often judge its own members (often on arbitrary or sometimes sadistic standards), the ruling class must be above the judgment of the people. If we hold that the desirable and the good are fundamentally in conflict, then it is difficult to imagine a different social organization to promote virtue and discourage vice.

Markets entail both of these moral views. Among the people, those who are industrious, thrifty, etc., i.e. good, are economically rewarded, while those who are indolent, profligate, etc., i.e. bad, are economically punished with poverty and deprivation. Moreover, entry into the ruling class is possible for a person with the forceful and effective personality necessary to gain great wealth, and exit from the ruling class is possible for those who fail to maintain their monetary or economic wealth, especially from the depredations of their peers.

I will go so far as to argue that if we are going to hold these two ideas, that we should reward virtue and punish vice, again just because that's what we do about virtue and vice, and that virtue and desire are fundamentally in conflict, capitalism, not only the market but the private ownership of the means of production, is the best way of having a virtuous society.

Thus there are two broad classes of arguments against capitalism: first to controvert the previous paragraph and say that while we should reward virtue and punish vice, and that there must be a de facto ruling class to compel virtue, but that capitalism is not the best way to do that. As noted above, I don't buy that argument, but if you want to make it, good luck to you; I'd love to hear it.

The second class is to reject these ideas, that we should not reward virtue and punish vice or that desirability and virtue are not fundamentally in conflict, that the most virtuous society is also the most desirable, and thus people do not have to be fundamentally forced to be good.

Such a view necessarily entails that we hold ideas like "lazy people deserve as much of the social product as industrious people," and like "people are 'naturally'* good." This is a big philosophical bullet to bite, but I think we must bite it.

*Before you get your knickers in a knot, please note the scare quotes around 'naturally'.

Thoughts on market socialism

The first challenge in talking about market socialism is determining what precisely we mean by "market." In one sense, any time individuals have choices, and the exercise of those individual choices in the present has an effect on the options available in the future, we have a market. Since every kind of socialism worthy (IMnsHO) of the name wants to maximize human freedom, and an essential part of the maximization of freedom is that the exercise of that freedom should have an effect on society, all forms of socialism include markets. Thus, to be non-vacuous, market socialism must embed a more specific definition of "market."

We could define markets thus: We have firms and households. Households give tokens (money) to firms and receive goods and services; firms give tokens to households in return for labor. Firms that are more or less "efficient" at collecting tokens grow or decline; households that are more or less "efficient" at collecting tokens consume more or less of the social product.

We can add a lot more moving parts, but I think this definition captures an important sense of the market. (The above, of course, is not the only logically possible definition of markets. If you have an alternative definition, feel free to offer it in comments.)

At the social level, we don't have to micromanage everything: all we need to do is measure and manage the tokens. The whole point of markets is let the system "self-manage."

But just the broad definition above fails to resolve the fundamental contradiction of markets: at the individual level, markets entail that households and firms have an incentive to maximize "profits"*; at the social level, we want to use competition to minimize profits. Every household and firm wants to maximize its own profit and minimize everyone else's. This contradiction is not just perversity: it seems built into the whole concept of the market at the most basic level.

*We can broadly define "profit" and "efficiency" as the ratio of goods and services consumed to labor provided. Only households are profit-seeking in this sense; a firm is just a collection of households (or representatives of those households); these households use the firm to maximize their own profit. Depending on the social system, there might or might not be within-firm competition for profits, but by definition there is always between-firm competition for profits.

If we could impose market competition completely exogenously, markets might work. But, as Lenin argued in The State and Revolution, politics is endogenous. The households at firms that are "profitable" gain more economic power, which inevitably translates to power not only over the production of goods and services, but also power over the social systems in which firms produce goods and services. And if we structure the market give people an incentivize profit maximization, we are by definition giving people an incentive to avoid the competition that would reduce their profits.

This is not just me saying that no system is immune to perversity: the perversity is built right into the market model: the individual and social goals are exactly the opposite. And it's not really a "dialectical" relationship, because the individual profit-maximization incentive creates intentional action, whereas no individual has an incentive to encourage competition.

Radical democracy (as opposed to capitalist republicanism, which is at best weak tea and at worst a sham) might create some individual incentive to impose competition and make markets work. But still we have the collective action problem. A profitable firm, regardless of how it's run, has a concentrated incentive, its profits, can can act with unity to preserve those profits. In contrast, the incentives for maintaining competition are diffuse: no individual voter has very much at stake. A democracy is harder to hack than a republic, but nothing is unhackable, and where there's an incentive to hack, hacking will happen.

Worse yet, I'm just talking about setting prices for goods and services: things get even more dicey when we try to use markets for capital allocation.

I would have to see a much more detailed exposition (more detailed and thorough than the Wikipedia article) to buy market socialism.

The hammer of the state

Perhaps the word "rant" in the title of A rant on socialism, authoritarianism, and welfare was not enough of a clue, but the post was not intended as a thorough exploration of the role of the state and the obligation to work. Since the post has been cited by LK (On the Value of Work in a Social Democracy) and has attracted a couple of comments, let me be a little more expository.

First, by "the hammer of the state," I simply mean ordinary state coercion, with "state" in the Weberian sense of the institution with a monopoly on the use of coercion. I've lifted the colorful metaphor from Nathan Burney's The Illustrated Guide to Law. I don't like to sugarcoat ideas or use too many euphemisms (unless they're funny or ironic): when the state uses force, it's force, i.e. violence. I don't like to bury the use of violent force under layers of abstraction, until it takes on the character of natural law. Violence is always a choice actual human beings make in actual, concrete social situations. If we're going to use violence, let us look it squarely in the face.

Second, I didn't mean that literally everyone must work. As noted in the post, people should retire, and people who are completely disabled shouldn't work. We can add to that list small children: based on my cursory and intermittent amateur reading on educational science, we should not try to push children to learn to read before about age 7. Of course, after about age 7, school is a child's work, and they should work. And finally, if someone wants to live in the forest and live on roots and bark and berries, well, good for them; we don't have to force such people to take paying, socially useful jobs.

Also, most people want to work, both because when it is not forcibly degrading or pointless, most people enjoy working, and because it is rational to work in a cooperative society and gain the benefits of cooperation.

Finally, I am directing my ire not so much at lazy slackers, but rentiers, people who live off the work of others by virtue of ownership of the means of production. Those people are the ones who should really fear the hammer of the state.

What is Marxism?

Chris Dillon has an interesting article: Bad Arguments against Marxism. Quite aside from the actual content, Dillon says, "You might object here that my Marxism is idiosyncratic. Certainly, it owes more to the Marx described by Jon Elster than to the one portrayed by Leszek Kolakowski. But frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn." But Dillon misses a crucial point: everyone's Marxism is in some sense idiosyncratic.

The problem with "Marxism" (and similar terms such as socialist or communist) is that there really isn't anything that actually "is" Marxism. Marxism is a genetic or self-identifying label: if your work or ideas derive from Marx's, then you're a Marxist; if you call yourself a Marxist, then you are a Marxist. Pretty much every mainstream sociologist and anthropologist is a Marxist. There are some restrictions: if you want to call yourself a Marxist, and almost all other people who call themselves Marxists don't buy it, then the label probably won't stick. But people who call themselves Marxists (which I myself do only with great reluctance) are a pretty pluralistic group.

In a sense, calling yourself a Marxist is like calling yourself an American: I call myself an American because I was born here, I've lived here all my life, and my beliefs and preferences were shaped in no small part by the predominant culture. But the label does not constrain my beliefs: I can believe literally anything at all (save that I don't want to call myself an American) and I would still be an American. The label refers to nothing ideologically essential.

One could create statistical measures of what Marxists believe, as one could create statistical measures of what Americans believe, but those measures would not define Marxism: they would be posterior measures, not prior definitions.

First, it is more useful to talk about socialism rather than Marxism for the same reason that nobody calls physicists "Newtonists," and evolutionary biologists don't like being called "Darwinists": the label encourages an undue reliance on the work of a single author, however seminal. Although they offered groundbreaking insights that are still in use today, Newton was mistaken on many points, Darwin was mistaken, and similarly, Marx was mistaken (or some now disagree with him). But so what? Newton, Darwin, and Marx were not prophets. Moreover, people who follow in Newton's, Darwin's, and Marx's tradition, who employ their insights, disagree about many important points. This is as it should be.

Second, it is not just pointless but pernicious to talk about socialism as some political-economic system with a particular essential (but arbitrarily designated) definition. To do so creates a false dichotomy: all we have is capitalism and socialism (if you're neither capitalist nor socialist, you're nothing at all), and socialism is bad because reasons, therefore capitalism. It's a move designed to defend capitalism without actually defending capitalism.

It is more useful to talk about socialism not as some specific system but as a project. Socialism is first a project to engage in radical criticism of capitalism, i.e. to carefully and ruthlessly (i.e. without sentimentality or fear) examine capitalism at its roots, at the private ownership of the means of production. Socialism is second a project to imagine a society that functions for the benefit of the people, all the people, and not for the benefit of some elite. The rest is commentary.

But, oh! what commentary! Just within the above constraints, there is vast disagreement. Do we impose socialism from above with a vanguard party seizing state power? Do we let it "bubble up" from below? Is socialism inevitable — all we have to do is wait, and it will spontaneously emerge — or does socialism require definite, intentional action? Given that capitalists will defend capitalism to the death, how far should we go to oppose it?

How do we deal with macroeconomic issues in a national and global economy? Should we industrialize further or deindustrialize? What importance should we place on specifically material well-being? Are washing machines, air-conditioners, computers, synthetic insulin, and (relatively) painless dentistry worth having in the first place? Should all live in small self-sufficient rural communes?

How do we deal with discrimination based on race, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, and religion discrimination? How about religious extremism? How do we deal with ordinary crimes, such as rape and murder?

All we can do is engage in the social process of criticism and argumentation to wrap our heads around all these issues. People will disagree, dominant ideas will change, and if we finally do end capitalism, at least our grandchildren will have a rich, albeit internally contradictory, body of thought to employ in solving concrete problems.