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'.
Monday, May 30, 2016
Sunday, May 29, 2016
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.
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.
Saturday, May 28, 2016
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.
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.
Friday, May 27, 2016
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.
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.
Sunday, May 22, 2016
Seven Rules for Running a Real Left-Wing Government
Seven Rules for Running a Real Left-Wing Government
There are actually more than seven rules:
The last is the most important. On the one hand, the bourgeoisie will do anything to maintain or regain power: murder, torture, slavery, rape: no atrocity is beyond them. This utter amorality is not license for revolutionaries to emulate it: brutality cannot be defeated by brutality. However, the power of the bourgeoisie can be utterly broken without atrocity, in part by simply making their atrocities clear. For example,
Destroy them utterly, but with justice. No murder, no torture, not even show trials. One critical weakness of the bourgeoisie is that they depend on popular legitimacy, so the letter of the their own law, interpreted reasonably, can be used against them. Were the bourgeoisie were to write their interests explicitly and directly into law, they would compromise their legitimacy. They must depend on extra-legal measures to maintain their power under their own legal system.
(Note that the bourgeoisie is actually working to make the law more explicitly in line with their own interests, and they are making substantial progress: the Trans Pacific Partnership is a notable example. But this project is self-defeating: as the law becomes more explicitly protective of bourgeois power, the bourgeoisie, and the concept of law itself, loses popular legitimacy.)
The first law of purges is to do it all at once and then stop; otherwise, you risk creating a climate of fear and paranoia, which will undermine your project. Hard to do. You have to get it almost exactly right the first time. Still, it's doable: the first purge is basically political; any subsequent adjustments can be traditionally legal.
There are actually more than seven rules:
- It’s Not You, It’s China (or, the World System)
- Don’t Run Your Economy on Resources
- Your First Act Must Be a Media Law
- Take Control of the Banking Sector
- Who Is Your Administrative Class?
- Take Control of Distribution and Utilities
- Reduce Your Vulnerability to the World Trade System
- Be Satisfied with What You Can Grow and Make
- Obey the Laws of Purges
The last is the most important. On the one hand, the bourgeoisie will do anything to maintain or regain power: murder, torture, slavery, rape: no atrocity is beyond them. This utter amorality is not license for revolutionaries to emulate it: brutality cannot be defeated by brutality. However, the power of the bourgeoisie can be utterly broken without atrocity, in part by simply making their atrocities clear. For example,
Assume Obama was really a left-winger. He gets into power in 2009, and he really wants to change things. He needs to take out the financial elite: Wall Street and the Big Banks.
They’ve handed him the opportunity. Here’s part of how he does it: He declares all banks involved in the sub-prime fraud racket (all of the big ones most of the small ones) conspiracies under RICO.
He then says that all the individual executives’ money are proceeds from crime and confiscates it. (This is 100 percent legal under laws as they exist). He charges them, and they are forced to use public defenders.
They are now powerless. This is the second law of purges: Anyone you damage, you must destroy utterly. If you take away half their power, and leave them half, they will hate you forever and use their remaining power to destroy you.
Destroy them utterly, but with justice. No murder, no torture, not even show trials. One critical weakness of the bourgeoisie is that they depend on popular legitimacy, so the letter of the their own law, interpreted reasonably, can be used against them. Were the bourgeoisie were to write their interests explicitly and directly into law, they would compromise their legitimacy. They must depend on extra-legal measures to maintain their power under their own legal system.
(Note that the bourgeoisie is actually working to make the law more explicitly in line with their own interests, and they are making substantial progress: the Trans Pacific Partnership is a notable example. But this project is self-defeating: as the law becomes more explicitly protective of bourgeois power, the bourgeoisie, and the concept of law itself, loses popular legitimacy.)
The first law of purges is to do it all at once and then stop; otherwise, you risk creating a climate of fear and paranoia, which will undermine your project. Hard to do. You have to get it almost exactly right the first time. Still, it's doable: the first purge is basically political; any subsequent adjustments can be traditionally legal.
All of this will make many readers uneasy. It seems “mean.”
Get out of the game. You aren’t fit for it. This is all mean. Millions of people die every year and millions more are ruined by the current system. If you’re in this game to win it, rather than feel good about yourself, you will have to play real power politics by the actual rules of the game.
Too many left-wingers try to play by what they think the rules are. “We have a fair election every X years and the losers accept the result and don’t sabotage the winner (or do a coup).”
Those aren’t the real rules. If the right is really losing, they will cheat and cheat massively. They will think nothing of running death squads, making a deal with the US to support guerrillas, and so on.
Friday, May 13, 2016
Thursday, May 12, 2016
The Democratic party cannot be reformed
I see a lot of people looking at Bernie Sanders' campaign and thinking that his support shows the Democratic party might be reformed to become a true (or at least better) progressive, pro-worker party.
Ain't gonna happen.
Bernie Sanders won't win the nomination, If Sanders wins the nomination, he won't beat Trump: the neoliberal elite would rather have Trump than Sanders. And even if Sanders were somehow to become President, he wouldn't be able to actually do anything. (None of these arguments are reasons not to vote for Sanders.)
The retribution will be obviously facilitated if Clinton wins, and especially severe if Clinton loses to Trump: Sanders and his supporters will be blamed for the loss.
In 2019 and 2023, no one of Sanders' caliber will run against Trump or Clinton. The neoliberal wing of the Democratic party will get its shit together and make damn sure that no Sanders can even run, much less win. Anyone who supports Sanders now will be squeezed out of any meaningful role in the Democratic party. The neoliberal elite has too much power, and they're not going to give it up without a fight.
The only way to defeat neoliberalism is to defeat it all at once worldwide. It is certainly possible to defeat neoliberalism locally, but if a locality makes inroads against neoliberalism, it will be co-opted (Podemos) or brutally crushed (Syriza).
The neoliberal elite will retain its grip until the system fails catastrophically. The question is not how to defeat or even ameliorate neoliberalism politically: that train left the station in 1980. The question is: when neoliberalism fails catastrophically, who will pick up the pieces? The race is on between fascism and communism, and fascism is winning.
Happily, I don't expect to live until 2024.
Ain't gonna happen.
Bernie Sanders won't win the nomination, If Sanders wins the nomination, he won't beat Trump: the neoliberal elite would rather have Trump than Sanders. And even if Sanders were somehow to become President, he wouldn't be able to actually do anything. (None of these arguments are reasons not to vote for Sanders.)
The retribution will be obviously facilitated if Clinton wins, and especially severe if Clinton loses to Trump: Sanders and his supporters will be blamed for the loss.
In 2019 and 2023, no one of Sanders' caliber will run against Trump or Clinton. The neoliberal wing of the Democratic party will get its shit together and make damn sure that no Sanders can even run, much less win. Anyone who supports Sanders now will be squeezed out of any meaningful role in the Democratic party. The neoliberal elite has too much power, and they're not going to give it up without a fight.
The only way to defeat neoliberalism is to defeat it all at once worldwide. It is certainly possible to defeat neoliberalism locally, but if a locality makes inroads against neoliberalism, it will be co-opted (Podemos) or brutally crushed (Syriza).
The neoliberal elite will retain its grip until the system fails catastrophically. The question is not how to defeat or even ameliorate neoliberalism politically: that train left the station in 1980. The question is: when neoliberalism fails catastrophically, who will pick up the pieces? The race is on between fascism and communism, and fascism is winning.
Happily, I don't expect to live until 2024.
Friday, April 22, 2016
The secret shame of middle-class americans
The Secret Shame of Middle-Class Americans by Neal Gabler
Since 2013, the federal reserve board has conducted a survey to “monitor the financial and economic status of American consumers.” Most of the data in the latest survey, frankly, are less than earth-shattering: 49 percent of part-time workers would prefer to work more hours at their current wage; 29 percent of Americans expect to earn a higher income in the coming year; 43 percent of homeowners who have owned their home for at least a year believe its value has increased. But the answer to one question was astonishing. The Fed asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. The answer: 47 percent of respondents said that either they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something, or they would not be able to come up with the $400 at all. Four hundred dollars! Who knew?
Well, I knew. I knew because I am in that 47 percent.
A spoonful of stupidity
The first problem with Saurabh Jha's essay, "A Spoonful of Inequality Helps the Medicine Go Down," is the title. If we really had a spoonful of inequality, he might be talking about something meaningful; however, we presently face inequality in industrial quantities. And the comparison is deeply confused: the original metaphor is "a spoonful of sugar..." Inequality is sugar? Economic growth is the bitter medicine? Jha's title makes no sense.
Jha begins his essay by blatantly poisoning the well: people worried about inequality are "pro-Hillary, morally conscious, happy bunnies who pretend to specially enjoy French wine, and opera"; they treat economists as religious figures" "Pope St. John Paul Piketty" and "Bishop Paul Krugman." Clearly, anyone thinking about inequality must be shallow and irrational, right? We don't have to engage their arguments, just show that the whole concept of worrying about inequality
Jha attempts to rebut worries about inequality by masterfully demolishing an obvious straw man, using a "thought experiment" of breathtaking inanity. In his eople starving during the Bengali famine were all equal — equally starving — but Capitalism (and presumably only capitalism), personified by Mukesh Ambani (presumably referring to this man) will swoop in and save the day. Never mind that India, including Bengal, was already capitalist, a possession of the arch-capitalist British Empire, hardly the epitome of egalitarianism. And never mind that Ambani's company, Reliance Industries Limited, has a Wikipedia page devoted to the company's corruption and The Economist calls Reliance "a rotten role model for corporate India . . . not a national champion but an embarrassment." No, the real problem is that no one argues for equality of starvation. No one argues for a Harrison Bergeron caricature of equality. No one argues that we want absolute equality of everything, and that a world of equal suffering is preferable to a world with the smallest inequality but abundance and prosperity. The (left capitalist) argument is that we have too much inequality, and we have the wrong kind of inequality. But Jha cannot be bothered to engage to know even what the argument actually is. No, to Jha, all arguments about inequality are just the vacuous religious platitudes of latte-sipping moochers.
Jha tries to enlist science to his argument, citing The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014* (2016) by Raj Chetty et al. According to Jha, the authors "found that the life expectancy of the poor depended on where the poor lived, not the degree of income inequality per se." Well, no. Jha cannot employ basic logic. The first part is correct: Chetty et al. (2016) do find that poor people who live in high income areas (e.g. New York) live longer than poor people in low income areas (e.g. Detroit). But the second part is not correct: holding income constant (comparing poor people against poor people) means that we are ignoring variation in income; it absolutely does not mean that the authors find variation in income is not correlated with variation in mortality, holding location constant. According to Chetty et al. (2016), there is, for example, a 4.5 to 5.0 difference in mean life expectancy between the richest and poorest quartiles in New York, the wealthiest area in the study. Yes, where you live affects how long you live, but it is also true that even holding location constant, how much income you have affects how long you live. Indeed Jha actually admits this fact: "he richest 1 % men live, on average, 15 years longer than the poorest 1 %" but there is a "difference in life expectancy for men of 5 years" between the richest and poorest areas. Fifteen minus five is ten, which is not zero.
*What an awesome study. 1.5 billion tax records? I would kill for that kind of data.
Jha claims that the study "finds that life expectancy doesn’t correlate with amount of medical care. Which means that the poor aren’t dying sooner, en masse, because they can’t access the emergency rooms on time, or because they lack insurance. Sorry Obamacare." Even the first part is suspect, because the primary data that makes
Technically correct, but Jha overstates this conclusions. First, the "Sorry Obamacare" dig is utterly specious: The PPACA has been in effect only since 2010; it is far to early to asses its impact.
Second, there's a huge problem with the external validity of the study: it is probably an accurate picture of the United States from the mid-twentieth century to the early twenty-first, but the United States is a highly developed nation, and there are differences between the United States and other countries that affect the relationship between access to medical care and mortality rates. This study (awesome and valuable as it is) tells us literally nothing at all about the impact of and means to alleviate global inequality. Jha is clearly talking about global inequality — otherwise why mention Bengal — but Chetty et al. (2016) are talking about inequality in the United States.
Jha lists "a few things which won’t help the poor: hospitals, bicycle helmets, screening, millennials fretting about names associated with historical wrongdoing, and occupying Wall Street. Sorry social justice warriors – all of that righteous rage may be for naught." Jha does not even try to justify this statement; it certainly doesn't follow at all from Chetty et al. (2016). And really nothing on Jha's list except occupying Wall Street has anything to do with inequality. These items are (to take the quotation egregiously out of context) just Jha's "personal prejudice[s]."
I kind of agree with Jha on one point: the poor need "schools with top quality teachers who care. They need public parks. They need the government to invest in public works to revive jobs." Fair enough. Who is going to provide those things? The rich? Well, we've been waiting, a long time. Indeed, we've been waiting too long. The rich are not going to provide schools, parks, public works, jobs out of charity or altruism. The rich are "segregated in enclaves where they self-flagellate about inequality drinking Dom Perignon" for a reason: they don't want to actually help the poor, or even see them, but they don't want to feel bad about not helping them. And that's just the few rich people who will hang out with areligious apologist propagandist like Jha. Most of the rich are just "segregated in enclaves . . . drinking Dom Perignon," without the self-flagellation: they don't care about the poor at all. Why should they? They're not poor. No, we don't want to wait on the capitalist class to grow a heart. If we want to stop dying young, being oppressed and exploited, so that the rich can drink their Dom Perignon and spit on us, the working class will have to take back what the rich have stolen. I nominate Jha for first donor.
Jha begins his essay by blatantly poisoning the well: people worried about inequality are "pro-Hillary, morally conscious, happy bunnies who pretend to specially enjoy French wine, and opera"; they treat economists as religious figures" "Pope St. John Paul Piketty" and "Bishop Paul Krugman." Clearly, anyone thinking about inequality must be shallow and irrational, right? We don't have to engage their arguments, just show that the whole concept of worrying about inequality
Jha attempts to rebut worries about inequality by masterfully demolishing an obvious straw man, using a "thought experiment" of breathtaking inanity. In his eople starving during the Bengali famine were all equal — equally starving — but Capitalism (and presumably only capitalism), personified by Mukesh Ambani (presumably referring to this man) will swoop in and save the day. Never mind that India, including Bengal, was already capitalist, a possession of the arch-capitalist British Empire, hardly the epitome of egalitarianism. And never mind that Ambani's company, Reliance Industries Limited, has a Wikipedia page devoted to the company's corruption and The Economist calls Reliance "a rotten role model for corporate India . . . not a national champion but an embarrassment." No, the real problem is that no one argues for equality of starvation. No one argues for a Harrison Bergeron caricature of equality. No one argues that we want absolute equality of everything, and that a world of equal suffering is preferable to a world with the smallest inequality but abundance and prosperity. The (left capitalist) argument is that we have too much inequality, and we have the wrong kind of inequality. But Jha cannot be bothered to engage to know even what the argument actually is. No, to Jha, all arguments about inequality are just the vacuous religious platitudes of latte-sipping moochers.
Jha tries to enlist science to his argument, citing The Association Between Income and Life Expectancy in the United States, 2001-2014* (2016) by Raj Chetty et al. According to Jha, the authors "found that the life expectancy of the poor depended on where the poor lived, not the degree of income inequality per se." Well, no. Jha cannot employ basic logic. The first part is correct: Chetty et al. (2016) do find that poor people who live in high income areas (e.g. New York) live longer than poor people in low income areas (e.g. Detroit). But the second part is not correct: holding income constant (comparing poor people against poor people) means that we are ignoring variation in income; it absolutely does not mean that the authors find variation in income is not correlated with variation in mortality, holding location constant. According to Chetty et al. (2016), there is, for example, a 4.5 to 5.0 difference in mean life expectancy between the richest and poorest quartiles in New York, the wealthiest area in the study. Yes, where you live affects how long you live, but it is also true that even holding location constant, how much income you have affects how long you live. Indeed Jha actually admits this fact: "he richest 1 % men live, on average, 15 years longer than the poorest 1 %" but there is a "difference in life expectancy for men of 5 years" between the richest and poorest areas. Fifteen minus five is ten, which is not zero.
*What an awesome study. 1.5 billion tax records? I would kill for that kind of data.
Jha claims that the study "finds that life expectancy doesn’t correlate with amount of medical care. Which means that the poor aren’t dying sooner, en masse, because they can’t access the emergency rooms on time, or because they lack insurance. Sorry Obamacare." Even the first part is suspect, because the primary data that makes
Technically correct, but Jha overstates this conclusions. First, the "Sorry Obamacare" dig is utterly specious: The PPACA has been in effect only since 2010; it is far to early to asses its impact.
Second, there's a huge problem with the external validity of the study: it is probably an accurate picture of the United States from the mid-twentieth century to the early twenty-first, but the United States is a highly developed nation, and there are differences between the United States and other countries that affect the relationship between access to medical care and mortality rates. This study (awesome and valuable as it is) tells us literally nothing at all about the impact of and means to alleviate global inequality. Jha is clearly talking about global inequality — otherwise why mention Bengal — but Chetty et al. (2016) are talking about inequality in the United States.
Jha lists "a few things which won’t help the poor: hospitals, bicycle helmets, screening, millennials fretting about names associated with historical wrongdoing, and occupying Wall Street. Sorry social justice warriors – all of that righteous rage may be for naught." Jha does not even try to justify this statement; it certainly doesn't follow at all from Chetty et al. (2016). And really nothing on Jha's list except occupying Wall Street has anything to do with inequality. These items are (to take the quotation egregiously out of context) just Jha's "personal prejudice[s]."
I kind of agree with Jha on one point: the poor need "schools with top quality teachers who care. They need public parks. They need the government to invest in public works to revive jobs." Fair enough. Who is going to provide those things? The rich? Well, we've been waiting, a long time. Indeed, we've been waiting too long. The rich are not going to provide schools, parks, public works, jobs out of charity or altruism. The rich are "segregated in enclaves where they self-flagellate about inequality drinking Dom Perignon" for a reason: they don't want to actually help the poor, or even see them, but they don't want to feel bad about not helping them. And that's just the few rich people who will hang out with a
Sunday, April 17, 2016
Against the universal basic income
I am not in favor of the universal basic income as advocated by Philippe van Parijs in Basic Income And Social Democracy. Within a couple of years, a universal basic income will just be sucked up in land rent and profit, and, since it will be offset by taxes on middle-income workers, it will result in a net upwards redistribution of real spending power, as rents and profits will come from the middle deciles to the top 10 percent of landlords, stockholders, and CEOs. (Much is true also of the $15 minimum wage.)
To have any lasting effect, a universal basic income must be complemented by public ownership of most housing (with some owner-occupied housing) as well as public ownership of basic necessities: electricity generation, water distribution, food, and education.
More importantly, as charity (and charity it will be) from the bourgeoisie, a universal basic income should be morally repugnant to the working class: it is the working class, those who make what money buys, who should be in a position to be charitable (or uncharitable) to the parasitic bourgeoisie.
The only way we're going to have a reasonable standard of living for the working class is to take political and economic power. The bourgeoisie will not, and indeed because of the structure of capitalism, cannot do otherwise than to exploit the working class to the maximum extent politically possible, and to always try to make as politically possible as much exploitation as is materially possible. There is no middle ground.
I'm pleased, however, that bourgeois intellectuals are starting to talk about things like universal basic income and a higher minimum wage. This means they're scared, and the bourgeoisie is nothing if not cowardly. If the bourgeoisie offers a universal basic income, a $15 minimum wage, the working people should take it and demand more. And when the bourgeoisie offers more, take it and demand yet more. And more again, until the working class has it all.
To have any lasting effect, a universal basic income must be complemented by public ownership of most housing (with some owner-occupied housing) as well as public ownership of basic necessities: electricity generation, water distribution, food, and education.
More importantly, as charity (and charity it will be) from the bourgeoisie, a universal basic income should be morally repugnant to the working class: it is the working class, those who make what money buys, who should be in a position to be charitable (or uncharitable) to the parasitic bourgeoisie.
The only way we're going to have a reasonable standard of living for the working class is to take political and economic power. The bourgeoisie will not, and indeed because of the structure of capitalism, cannot do otherwise than to exploit the working class to the maximum extent politically possible, and to always try to make as politically possible as much exploitation as is materially possible. There is no middle ground.
I'm pleased, however, that bourgeois intellectuals are starting to talk about things like universal basic income and a higher minimum wage. This means they're scared, and the bourgeoisie is nothing if not cowardly. If the bourgeoisie offers a universal basic income, a $15 minimum wage, the working people should take it and demand more. And when the bourgeoisie offers more, take it and demand yet more. And more again, until the working class has it all.
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