The Return of the Baffler

Saw this in a small bookstore recently and picked it up. Haven’t read too much of it yet, but agreed that the Perlstein piece is “unsurprisingly excellent”. Also, and again unsurprisingly, I thought Ehrenreich’s piece on the “animal cure” was great.

Yeah, I’m happy that it’s back, but Tom Frank still owes me for three issues he never put out. I told Graeber on twitter to cool it with the flying cars but it’s right there on the cover (My idea of techno-utopia is a smooth bike path along a tree-lined canal). I still bought it.

Isn’t the Kindle destroying the republic of letters through DRM, not because it’s an e-reader?

Kim Stanley Robinson provides an excerpt from 2312 that makes me really want to read the book – but while the solution to late capitalism may lie in quantum computers solving the socialist calculation problem (again: Red Plenty – Robinson has a joke about the “Spuffordized Soviet cybernetic model”) we probably can’t count on this happening in the near-to-immediate future.

Computers solving the socialist calculation problem was part of the background for Ken MacLeod’s The Cassini Division. But of course the space socialists had to do it with mechanical (nanotech?) computers, because the space libertarians polluted Jupiter with dangerous virus spewing remnants of the AI they used to build the stargate they fled through.

…and I don’t know what DRM means, though I’m guessing the D stands for “digital.”

You are correct!

Debord on traffic (from 1959) is still relevant, I think:

A mistake made by all the city planners is to consider the private automobile (and its by-products, such as the motorcycle) as essentially a means of transportation. In reality, it is the most notable material symbol of the notion of happiness that developed capitalism tends to spread throughout the society.

*Flying* cars would be, if anything, the same only more so. If there’s a symbol of the leisure & plenty which both capitalism and Communism failed to deliver, flying cars aren’t it. (Bikes and tow-paths sound good to me. Acoustic music in pubs. Quiet libraries with lots of people using them. Open seminars. Proper bread, proper cheese. The future is in fact here, it’s just not evenly distributed.)

Everybody laughs at the silly prognosticators, but they got the bit about massive increase in productivity per person right. They just didn’t realise that the mildly social-democratic societies of Nixon’s America, Wilson’s Britain, and the European countries would not continue on their trend of passing the wealth of the workers increasingly to the workers, but that the rich would stage a successful coup (Reagan, Thatcher) that saw productivity going back into their pockets again. History is hard, especially about the future.

Anytime CT wants to host a debate between me and Geo, I’m there!

But I think Summers is right that the Baffler is primarily a forum for critique, and I would feel very out of place arguing “that technological innovation could be a lever for [positive] change in current society” in its pages. Negative change, though…

Perhaps ironically in light of the Baffler’s position, my theory has been that it’s not so much the infrastructure/technostructure of capitalism that has killed imaginative innovation, as a cultural shift.

(Though, to be fair, I think there are problems with the infrastructure of capitalism too.)

That cultural shift might be termed the triumph of the Hayekians (followers of Hayek, rather than the man himself) who have raised the notion of local knowledge into a fetish that leads to a learned helplessness. Effectively “no good trying to innovate, no-one can make anything that makes an impact, knowledge is too distributed/fragmented.”

Notably, several people involved in what should be the next technology of human organisation, propelling us forward (complex adaptive systems) have basically thrown in the towel and just preach minimalism (Paul Ormerod is a particular culprit here.)

Effectively “no good trying to innovate, no-one can make anything that makes an impact, knowledge is too distributed/fragmented.”

Is that a consequence of Hayekian thinking because believers in local knowledge are too stupid to simply hire somebody who does have that local knowledge?

Then again, perhaps it’s the link between Hayek and the claim that “[ it’s] no good trying to innovate” that has zero value.

[Hayek] assumes that local knowledge trumps everything, and that local knowledge is mostly tacit and incommunicable – hence, the need for the market, as a way of producing an index that can make this knowledge actionable without otherwise having to render it explicit.

Once we differentiate between what Hayek says and the strongest form in which Hayek’s argument can be made, your criticism becomes inadequate.

Local knowledge does not need to be tacit or incommunicable in order to be a unassailable hurdle for a central planner. It’s enough that there are barriers to that communication — for instance: you might need years of living in a community before you understand even important aspects of that community’s needs and habits; you might need years of studying math before you understand Perelman’s proof of the Poincaire Conjecture; you might need years of practice in writing compilers before you understand all the quirks of the trade, etc. All of this is communicable information.

In the case of the market, an extra hurdle comes from the transitory nature of the usefulness of some information: a guild may hold a hard to communicate knowledge about what works in a given context, but once that context changes (because of technology, changes in social mores etc.) that knowledge may become worthless. So the speed with which the knowledge can be communicated becomes important.

Good knowledge is usually based on social forms of discovery, which require explicit argument between human beings, not simple coordination through the price mechanism. And ways of organizing society which emphasize the Hayekian virtues of markets are ipso facto likely to skimp on the actual processes of social and often democratic communication, through which the discovery of good knowledge, especially about complex social problems, proceeds.

But this form of communication 1) usually happens within a certain guild, a guild that is not accessible without extra years of study; and 2) it has only indirect effects on the actual makers and sellers of widgets: on the road between a general and easily communicable idea and the actual practical application of that idea, you find many pockets of specialized local knowledge that is hard to communicate.

Also, Hayek can be improved in that it is not just prices that the market communicates: it also communicates stories of failure and success, indicating what to copy and what to avoid.

“to discover better and more attractive optima will proceed best when it harnesses appropriate mechanisms of communication (i.e. democracy) that maximize exposure to diverse points of view”

I think Hayek would agree 100% with that quote, once you exclude the parenthetical remark. He would just say that the market is the best mechanism for communicating obscure knowledge, for which we can get only partial information, like prices and failure and success stories.

Also, unless by democracy you intend to say something really idiosyncratic, I just don’t see how democracy is a good mechanism for communication. Southpark put it best when it described large scale democracy as the choice between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. Of course, compared to cowering for fear of a tyrant’s whim, choosing between a giant douche and a turd sandwich is a right to be cherished and a right worth fighting for — but a great mechanism of communication it is not.

Southpark put it best

This is a priori very unlikely. The Sayings of Southpark would be an unbeatable compendium of glib asininity. In this case, the silliness is in taking our current plutocracy as a plausible basis for issuing mindless snark about the hopeless stupidity of “large-scale democracy.” Our version of electoral oligarchy bears roughly the same relation to democracy as “really existing socialism” did to socialism. Not a thought within the compass of the ten-year-old mind, however.

Our version of electoral oligarchy bears roughly the same relation to democracy as “really existing socialism” did to socialism.

What would an ideal large scale democracy look like?

“However, in the world we live in, where many resources sit in large organisations, they do affect the propensity to invest in breakthrough ideas.”

That large, bureaucratic entities –including corporations– tend to stifle unorthodox ideas is a phenomenon quite independent of Hayek’s popularity. The attractiveness of the culture of covering one’s ass is to blame here.

But as long as the corporation makes efforts to avoid cover-assism, they do invest in possibly breakthrough ideas: Google invests in self-driving cars, virtual reality goggles and apparently in robotics.

What would an ideal large scale democracy look like?

Excellent question. It’s remarkable how seldom public figures, political scientists, eminent pundits, passionate libertarians, or anyone else addresses him/herself to it.

In a large-scale democracy worthy of the name, there would be continuous discussion, in small groups, in living rooms, church halls, school buildings, workplace lounges, libraries, municipal buildings, and other venues of current political issues, organized by ordinary citizens, employees, neighbors, etc. These groups would make use of information about these issues collected by public agencies and made available on the Web, information equal in quality and depth to the information available to policymakers and industry lobbyists. The meetings of these groups would be regularly attended by public officials, including elected officials, who would have plenty of time to do so because they would be released from the time-consuming obligations of fund-raising by sensible campaign-finance reform.

The local discussion groups would communicate regularly with one another, sharing information and conclusions, and would join in formulating plans to instruct officials and make demands both on current legislators and on political candidates seeking their support. They would also send delegates to state and regional citizens’ groups, which would conduct many of the negotiations with groups from other regions or industries (unions would have a parallel structure of member involvement, unlike today) and with national policymakers. These delegates would be in continual contact with the smaller bodies that sent them, and would be readily recallable, as would elected officials at all levels.

The groups at all levels, particularly the higher-level ones, would also monitor and criticize media coverage of issues that interest them, exactly as industry and other (eg, religious) interest groups do today. They would commission, and in some cases, write, articles for the media — which, unlike the continuous stream of corporate propaganda that largely constitutes present-day “reporting” in many local and regional newspapers, would be openly acknowledged — and would propose guests on radio and television discussions of contentious issues. And just as advertisers boycott publications or media programs considered ideologically unsound, the citizen/worker groups would orchestrate pressure, including boycotts, of chronically biased outlets.

This is a bare framework. Other notions can be found in Ralph Nader’s excellent (though widely and foolishly dismissed) Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us, in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, and in the practice of current activist groups. The fundamental principles are citizen involvement, accountability, adequate resources for all sides of a debate to make their case, and broad economic equality in the society at large. And, of course, freedom for those who don’t give a damn to blow it all off, though their neighbors will be equally free to call them what the Greeks did: idiotes.

Must we wait until everyone is wise … ?

By no means. As Henry has been arguing above, democracy will make us smarter. Stupid people (usually defined as people who disagree with whoever’s doing the defining) are welcome to the discussion. As long as all sides have roughly equal resources to make their case, then the best arguments will eventually win. (By definition, actually, if you’re a philosophical pragmatist, as I am.)

Sorry, Alex, but I don’t see your objections. No central control of resources is remotely implied. We have some idea of how to achieve greater society-wide equality of resources: unionization, progressive taxation, universal education and health-care, financial and other regulations imposed by democratically elected legislatures insulated from lobbying and campaign-finance pressures. Nothing remotely threatening here, I should think. Nor is any central control of mass media implied. (Do you have any objection, by the way, to the extreme concentration of ownership in newspapers, radio, and television at present, with all the possibilities — fully realized — for censorship and ideological homogenization that implies?) What you mean by local forms of organization aggregating into larger ones, over which they nevertheless retain control, being “alien to any form of self-empowerment,” I can’t begin to understand.

So, sorry, I think my outline was quite sufficiently detailed and that your refusal to discuss it in detail, while at the same time professing interest in exploring the nature of “ideal large-scale democracy,” signifies either plain incomprehension or bad faith.

I don’t see anything substantial in it that can not be done today

At the end of my account I wrote: “The fundamental principles are citizen involvement, accountability, adequate resources for all sides of a debate to make their case, and broad economic equality in the society at large.” You think the last two conditions are satisfied today?

In any case, why should it be an objection to a model of democracy that there’s nothing stopping people from beginning to implement it now, if they wished?

To follow up: in case my original comment didn’t make it clear enough to others beside Alex, I’d like to triple underline the dependence of genuine democracy on broad economic equality, meaning by the latter that 1) minimum economic security is universal, so that no one’s economic welfare can be jeopardized by political activism that may be anathema to his/her economic or political superiors; 2) gross inequality of resources does not give some political opinions vastly greater possibilities of publicity or promotion (ie, lobbying) than others, as at present; 3) the material prerequisites of political activity — leisure, education, at least modest disposable income — are universally available, if one is serious about universal participation (among those who care to).

What this means is that severe economic inequality is incompatible with substantive democracy, as opposed to the debased, largely symbolic form prevailing in the US today, which is more properly called plutocracy or electoral oligarchy. Those who don’t understand this — eg, the Republican Party en bloc, the Supreme Court, those who appointed and approved them, and all too many libertarians — have only the most superficial understanding of democracy.

” His notion that ordinary, unorganized citizens have adequate resources to make their case either to legislators or to other citizens”

But why talk about “unorganized citizens”? A substantial majority of the population _does_ have the means to participate in supporting various lobbying efforts, as they also have the means to get their information from non-mainstream channels. Yet they don’t do it.

In fact, it is a common place of the public choice critique of democracy that special interest groups who benefit vastly from a given policy will out-lobby the thinly distributed interests of the majority of the population.

Giving people minimum economic security does not change the logic of this criticism — it would just add to the already vast mass of people who could benefit from such lobbying but who don’t do it.

Alex @ 41: it is a common place of the public choice critique of democracy

Ah, if I’d only known I was in conversation with someone who took public choice theory seriously, I would have made the appropriate adjustment, ie, kept my mouth shut. Really, Alex, it’s only fair to let people know up front if one is a creationist, or a climate-change denialist, or sympathetic to public choice theory.

But why talk about “unorganized citizens”? A substantial majority of the population does have the means to participate in supporting various lobbying efforts, as they also have the means to get their information from non-mainstream channels. Yet they don’t do it.

But … oh, never mind. Thanks for the workout, though.

“Ah, if I’d only known I was in conversation with someone who took public choice theory seriously”

I made a specific argument (that special interest groups generally out-lobby the general population, if the losses from a given policy are thinly distributed among the voting population). Seems like a perfectly sensible explanation for why people who do have the means, in the aggregate, to lobby, do not do so.

Just as you don’t have to believe in homo economicus in order to believe that competition exists, you don’t have to believe in the entire corpus of assumptions of public choice theory in order to find some arguments convincing.

But I guess imagining that democracy does not work because of Chomsky-esque reasons is just too fundamental to your worldview to challenge it. A bit like how the people watching mainstream channels don’t challenge their worldview too much — it may create indigestion.

Geo,

I’m not saying “Well, so what? That’s as it should be, because business cares so much more about the issues that it’s willing to spend more” — that’s _not_ how it should be, it is just how it will be. And special interests will exist even if you manage somehow to get your broadly egalitarian society.

I am perfectly willing to discuss ways of ameliorating the plight of the poor — I just don’t agree that lack of resources on the part of the population is the reason democracy does not work well.

I am saying that the defects you see in the current democracy are mostly defects in democracy itself, and I’m bringing the present behavior of the middle class as Exhibit A in my argument. (This does not deny that you can make marginal improvements, like campaign finance reform)

Civic participation is not compulsory , ajay. You’re perfectly free to leave the determination of social and economic policy to the tender mercies and sublime wisdom of the people Matt Taibbi writes about in the Rolling Stone article I cited above.

Luis, Alex’s perfectly invalid point was this: the fact that people face what I’ve been pointing out (and common sense points out) are near-insuperable entry costs to full political participation — stress, lack of time, economic insecurity, and lack of relevant skills/training/experience or the resources to hire people who can supply them, as business routinely does — has no effect on their reluctance to participate, and that supplying them (through social-democratic social policies) with more of those resources and that security would not significantly increase their participation. Their preferences are straightforwardly revealed by their actions — no need to give the matter any more thought.

And look: you think people are happy to be continually screwed by elites and powerless to do anything about it? I think they’re seething. Not everyone, of course, but quite a few people.

And of course, Ralph Nader’s organization survived, and produced some good, entirely out of citizen donations.

You can either have your public choice account of the different propensities to organize of diffuse and concentrated interests. Or you can have your pluralist account of how donation-fueled representation is teh awesome. But you can’t have both, without contradicting yourself.

No. I can simply refute an argument (that all democracy needs is more resources for the people) by pointing out that there are enough resources for participating in the current democracy, it just does not happen.

I’m sure the reason why it does not happen is fairly complex, having to do both with the difference between diffuse and concentrated interests and with the difficulty of aggregating the preferences of millions of people in a political program.

But lack of resources does not appear to be a serious reason.

bq. No. I can simply refute an argument (that all democracy needs is more resources for the people) by pointing out that there are enough resources for participating in the current democracy, it just does not happen.

In the first instance, you don’t seem to understand the public choice theory that you would like to use. The point that public choice scholars are making is that the costs of representation are vastly lower for concentrated interests than for diffuse interests. Ergo, concentrated interests get more representation. This simply is incompatible with the genially pluralist picture that you present of a world where everyone could be represented if only they were bothered to get up off their arses (and the fact that they don’t get up off their arses demonstrates that they don’t care). These are fundamentally contradictory ways of understanding politics. In the second instance, people _do_, as George rightly emphasizes, lack resources – not only material resources, but educational resources (understanding how to represent your interests in a complicated system requires understanding the system in the first place, a level of understanding which is, to put it mildly, asymmetrically distributed in ways that correlate with income etc).

Even more importantly, you seem, rather oddly, to view ‘representation’ as being something that everyone can have, once they have more than a minimal threshold of resources. That isn’t how politics works. Actors are only properly ‘represented’ when they have some reasonable degree of persuading political actors that they, rather than actors with competing interests should prevail. Rather obviously, if actors with substantially greater resources tend systematically to win out over actors with very few resources, the latter can only be said to have been ‘represented’ in a nugatory, even derisory, sense of that term. To say that “lack of resources” is not a problem in US politics, is to suggest that you don’t understand (perhaps don’t _want_ to understand???) how US politics actually works

Alex, the full-scale lobbying war launched by Wall Street on Dodd-Frank (described by Matt Taibbi in the article I cited) is absolutely typical of the day-in, day-out operation of the legislative process. Corporate money — billions of dollars yearly, from energy, defense, agribusiness, chemical, pharma, insurance, entertainment, and many, many other business lobbies — seduces, harasses, obfuscates, and intimidates. For every one-decibel message a Nader-type organization gets to whisper into a legislator’s ear (more likely an aide’s), the business lobbies inundate the legislator with hundreds, at vastly higher decibel levels. This is the basic fact of American politics. If you don’t know this, you don’t know anything about the subject.

And you say , notwithstanding the above, that for an ordinary American (median income $50,000 for a family of four), sending $50 or $100 a year to one’s favorite non-profit advocacy group counts as “full political participation”? And you wonder why Henry and I are exasperated with you?

Otto: If the US government had somehow nullified student debt, guaranteed employment at good wages, and provided universal health care do you think there would have been any OWS demonstrations?

Excellent point, Otto. I think that definitely would have taken the wind out of their sails.

interest = interests

Many right wingers seem genuinely blind to the fact that one dollar one vote is not an acceptable democratic principle.

I think their eyes are open.

Or a squid’s.

A most fascinating turn in the thread…

Okay, I’ve thought for some time that capital D democracy is dead as an attractive political structure. There are even reasons I think would appeal to various masses, and has done so for smaller city-statish polities…

The biggest elephant in the room that goes without discussion is the topic of griefers. People who want their profit in other people’s misery. People who expect the state to subsidize their specific notions of supremacy. People who bargain within the system, using every hypocritical, work to rulism, and passive aggressive tactics to work a democratic system such that democratic participation and redress are unavailable to their enemies. The on-going war on women is a classic example. Griefer teahadists bargain with big business to trade state infrastructure for punishing women, by removing access to things women need, or by destroying jobs that are predominantly held by women, so forth and on. They put up state amendments, lie like hell about it, and get them passed in an environment where people don’t quite grasp that they shouldn’t vote for things they don’t understand.

In this sort of environment, I am extremely, and deeply unsympathetic to *Salient* et al, about the labor expected of people who want to participate in a democracy. You all can go live in post-Tito Yugoslavia, with the worst right ahead of you, for all I care about those sentiments. Democracy does not work without informed consent. It hasn’t been an issue in the US so far because the US is so fabulously wealthy (for now), but long run? Dipshit idiots will destroy us all, and all of our children in the name of some completely insane ideology (whether that be only Romans gets to be citizens or something else). Just as they did the Gracci Brothers, before and since. Without informed consent, the elites will do the same thing they did back then, a whole bunch of temporary measures while they poison the crowd and dismember the organization. When the job’s done, the “liberal” measures are ended. If you think about it, that’s what happened when the US system was challenged by International Communism. Walkback happening now… Never mind that these measures are cut out of simple non-barbaric cloth. Those people shouldn’t have crap. The elites and their doofus suckers agree!

Alex: if your question is “Will people who are incapable (perhaps from some genetic defect) of taking an interest in politics and self-government take any more interest in those things if their disposable income is tripled (actually far more than tripled, since as should be obvious, the cost of subsistence doesn’t rise in strict proportion to income — so say, “increased by 500 or 1000 percent)?” then my answer is “By definition, no.” If your question is “Will people who are now struggling in an environment of radical economic insecurity, often staggering under debt, with a fragile and threatened safety net, no political experience, few and dwindling voluntary civic associations like unions and political clubs, their sources of information limited to mass media owned by a small number of multinational conglomerates, have a better chance (no guarantees, of course) of at least beginning the long and painful process of breaking out of apathy and helplessness if their disposable income is increased by 500 or 1000 percent?” then my answer is “Yes, and I can’t believe you’re serious in asking such a question. Do you have no imagination, no power of empathy? Do you have no glimmer of understanding of what it’s like to be a disempowered, isolated citizen in a plutocracy dominated by ruthless, unscrupulous business lobbies with unlimited funding?”

Alex: sorry if I’ve persistently misunderstood you. In any case, I seem to have been repeating myself for a while on this thread, boring everyone else and probably boring you too, by now. So I’ll leave you the last word.