Brother, that’s socialism. You know it is.

‘He goes on a nice riff about how the real end of history is the mixed economy. It’s not something we can all rally around, exactly, but it works; its provisional and limited triumphs are what make life just about bearable.’

It’s social democracy, and it doesn’t work, because Capital retain the power, and when Capital doesn’t think Welfare and regulation serve its interests any more, they are rescinded.

Yeah, I just meant IP as an example. Group insurance isn’t quite the same thing as working together in a private firm, but if banding together as a group is “socialism” regardless of what the group is and how it’s connected into larger wholes, . . . you’re in “how many legs does a dog have?” territory.

It’s amazing how smart and crafty you people are! Low life people like me can never figure out which side of your face you are speaking from. Do you think this guy has any point at all and if not why not, but to jump on a minor point to make your hay is falling into snidedom.

Barry, if it helps, I’d guess shorter Carlos is more or less, “You CT commenters are snarky.”

I love The Wire, but this piece isn’t very good, IMO. Marxism – and social compact? C’mon, brother.

Most companies aren’t socialist because they don’t answer to the people (either in general, or the people of the company, ie employees, in particular). They answer to the owners. That’s not at all the same thing as socialism or democracy.

A great read from Mr Wire – I enthusiastically agree with about 98% of it . I would add that once basic needs are met money is almost unrelated at all to happiness levels, and, that (for you Americans) if the sh*t hits the fan I am more worried about the amount of bullets, not bricks, that will end up flying about.

The New Deal social compact is colored significantly by the high degree of political solidarity achieved in WWII and continued under the Cold War threat. The elites of the immediate post-WWII period felt their interests coincided with the interests of the mass middle-class, and they had an interest in seeing that institutions performed well as positive-sum games.

Now, the historical reality is that the New Deal of the Great Depression was fashioned with a high degree of class hostility and suspicion of the motivations of the wealthy and powerful. But, that well-founded suspicion was quieted by the often selfless efforts of prominent and highly competent executives in the war effort, as well as by the marked reduction in income and wealth inequality that the war brought about, and kept in motion, with the GI Bill and the highly progressive rates of taxation put into place to pay down war debt.

Now, it seems to me, that political solidarity is at a low ebb. There’s very little mass-membership organization in American society. We are propagandized into a culture of the self, which Simon alludes to. And, the globalized elite feel detached from nationality and have lost a sense of dependence on the masses.

The Left is not going to get anywhere in these circumstances without accepting class warfare as a fact, and without accepting the necessity of destroying individuals and institutions on the Right. Conflict is costly, but without a credible threat to their lives and fortunes, the elite will continue on their self-serving sociopathic path. As things stand, there’s not even a threat of serious prosecution for crimes, nor is there much threat of labor strike, let alone an effective liberal vote in a Democratic primary.

The lesson of all human history is that there’s no such thing as a stable point.

Social Democracy and Stalinism are both dead ends, but, frankly, something along the lines of Anarchist Catalonia or the Parisian Commune has not been tried for a sustained period of time without being crushed by hostile armies. It might still be worth a sustained experiment.

Well, I hardly think you would call “democracy” a failed system because of what happened to France early in World War 2.

The prevalence of nearby hostile armies might properly occasion the designation “historically premature”.

I actually don’t think Social Democracy is a dead end and that it is the most likely starting point for a successful evolution in the post-capitalist direction (I just don’t know any other plausible scenarios). The social democratic tradition is really the only tradition on the left with real experience governing, developing policy, etc. Not that the contemporary parties are much of an inspiration these days.

What does “social democratic” mean, exactly. My understanding is that it denotes the concept of centrist ‘Third Way’. As opposed to “democratic socialism” that actually postulates some principles, regardless of where ‘the center’ might shift tomorrow. My feeling is that the Third Way is a really bad, self-defeating idea, especially when it gets identified as ‘the left’, with nothing to the left of it.

It seems a little odd to me to declare social democracy a failure because it is currently being rolled back. This is a system that provided a good life for the bulk of the people under it for decades and did so without police states or atrocities. And it hasn’t collapsed in failure or been overthrown by the angry masses. It was betrayed by its own elites. Why? In part, perhaps, because it was getting harder to maintain in a neoliberal global system, but primarily because those elites were more concerned with overcoming tribalism and were willing to trade social democracy for it, though not to say so out loud. Therefore, they bought into a neoliberal Europe for the sake of a unified Europe. For those who think the results of this have not been good, the logical response would be to rethink anti-tribalism, at least at this extreme, which has created the problem, rather than social democracy, the loss of which is the problem. The technocratic elitism of Europe was also a factor. If the elites had not felt they had the right to overrule the ignorant masses – if they had been more committed to democracy – the Euro would never have happened, or never on the same terms, which would have very much for the better. However, the victory of Maastricht was a closely-fought thing, and relied on Europe’s aversion to its nationalist past among other things. It is hard to see as an unavoidable consequence of social democracy itself.

Yet on that basis we are to conclude that social democracy is an “inevitable” failure? And Marxism? Also defeated, and much more decisively, with a vastly-worse track record. But here we hear about how “contingent” history is, and therefore it could have been different. But if Stalin (and Mao, and Pot, and Hoxha, and the rest) are not baked into the Marxist pie just because that is what happened, how are Maastricht and the other sellouts baked into the social democratic pie?

“Brother, that’s socialism. You know it is.”

Brother, that’s not socialism, and you know it isn’t. That is just voluntary co-operation – within the scope of a contractual relationship, no less! – and I’m amazed to see this quoted approvingly in the OP.

If that is socialism, what’s the difference between socialism and libertarianism?

Social Democracy and Stalinism are both dead ends, but, frankly, something along the lines of Anarchist Catalonia or the Parisian Commune has not been tried for a sustained period of time without being crushed by hostile armies. It might still be worth a sustained experiment.

Quite – and where anarchism was tried it was strangled at birth by Marxist-Leninists as much as by capitalists and fascists.

Marxism is a barrier to socialism.

bob mcmanus @ 32

The solution, the necessary pre-condition for democracy, is the creation of a large commons, not ideological or philosophical like a Constitution or an abhorrence of the State, but a material and concrete Commons that limits the resources available to private or corporate actors.

Aye, there’s the rub…. (Nicely put, by the way, the whole précis. 1, 2, 3 and most of what passes for economic analysis these days is seen for the blather it is.)

Martin Bento @38:

Precisely.

aussie sunshine, more money does actually still result in more happiness at higher levels, there’s just diminishing returns.

@ 37: “Citizens! One more step if you want to be SDs! [to paraphrase the Marquis]”

Bingo. Only this time, it’ll be different. Really.

I find all those cries about how Social Democracy doesnt work very tiresome.

By the same logic, Socialism doesnt work. Because when you try to do your Socialist thing the reactionaries make a counterrevolution and voila, you dont have it anymore. See, cant work.

Nothing can work if you assume it will be destroyed, replaced, ignored, etc. Nothing gets you to a final state of eternal bliss where history has ended and the perfect system works, forever. Everything can be destroyed, subverted, changed, betrayed, etc.

So far what we have is that when it has been in place, Social Democracy delivered a lot of good for a lot of people. Better track record than Socialist/Communist systems, in fact. So yes, the people that didnt like it did not like it and worked hard to have it undone. That doesnt mean it doesnt work. It means we failed at defending it, and need to work as hard as “Capital” did to undo it, but in the other direction.

Or you can try and convince me the solution is more to the left – but in any case, at this juncture, nothing “worked” if your definition is “for ever and without any need to protect it from its enemies”.

It might be a good thing that has run its course. Like an old antibiotic neutralized by new resistant bacteria.

Social Democracy is not something that can be merely willed into existence. History seems to show that the existence of an extreme left threat was a major catalyst for the creation of Welfare states. You probably can’t have your Sweden without your USSR, at least not for any real length of time.

MPA Victoria @41: “By what right do you expropriate anything without democratic legitimacy?”

Speaking only for myself here: You must, indeed, have democratic legitimacy, and you expropriate without expropriating (“appropriate” [verb] might be the more appropriate term).

Unlike the really hard-core, lefty, anarcho-marxist types (is that you, bob m?) I don’t think you have to be all that ideological about this – It’s about politics, and that’s about doing things, not philosophizing. As (ahem) someone said: “What is to be done?”

The process I envision could operate somewhere on a spectrum that covers the territory between a left-liberal like Elizabeth Warren and pro-democracy, “soft” anarchists, like Chomsky and Albert. A democratic, non-authoritarian socialism sounds good to me, but that is an ideal end-point, not about to happen overnight, if ever, and we shouldn’t kid ourselves about that. (We can close our eyes and dream, but we shouldn’t waste too much time doing that.) Social Democracy, like the dictatorship of the proletariat, is an advanced way-station on the route.

How do we begin to get there?

As Chomsky, Occupy, et al, never tire of pointing out, democratization is a necessary pre-condition of any successful program (this esp. involves the dismantling of the “manufacturing consent” machine of the capitalist-controlled SCLMSM).

I would start with the government assuming control (ownership, quasi-public non-profit entity, as e.g. the USPS, whatever works, with reasonable compensation of the original share-holders) of all utility distribution nets. Literally any would-be producer could join these nets. Let a thousand flowers bloom. Private citizens and small operators of all kinds could put their own surplus electricity, for example, into the power grid, selling it back at the same, or nearly the same, rate as the purchase price. Public fiber-optic networks would have to carry any provider with something to sell. You’d still have capitalism, but it would be entrepreneurial, free-enterprise capitalism, with real competition, and not a privately owned, “public” monopoly in sight. Needless to say, other public services would, by law, be publicly owned and operated; there would be no private prisons, public sanitation, water and sewer, ambulance services, fire protection and the like, whatsoever.

My favorite kooky little gem would be having governments (at any level, but especially the national level) going into business as competitors of private business. Key areas of re-industrialization (consumer electronics, clothing and textiles, etc.) would be targeted by chartering, and initially capitalizing, co-operative, employee/ government-owned, manufacturing entities of various kinds, with an eye to moving gradually toward worker-ownership and operation of virtually all industry – possibly something along the lines of Michael Albert’s PARECON.

Stronger anti-trust laws, vigorously enforced. Would love to see the giant chains that have destroyed small business taken down. How to do that realistically (i.e., without sending prices through the roof, or ruining quality)? Partly by banning exclusive producer contracts and exclusive pricing agreements. Producers can sell to anyone, but at the same price for every buyer, and buyers can buy from any producer so long as they have the legal tender.

Free government banking.

Sixteen years of free, public education.

A free University of the United States: all online course-work, but no course-work required to qualify for degrees. A system of exams and/ or writing assignments, similar to the old NYS Regent’s Degrees program (how I earned much of my own college credit some decades ago) but harder, and hence more competitively prestigious.

Massive tax and fee reform: wealth tax, a serious financial transactions tax, capital gains = income, top rate of at least 50%, all public fees and fines at all levels of government graduated according to income level.

Increase taxable base for SSI to 500g and means test.

Single-payer health based on medicare.

As a labor activist, my own list for Santa: ban on at-will employment with guaranteed right of 3rd party representation all the way up to arbitration, work-place access and guaranteed equal time for union organizers, card check organizing, no forced overtime except for contracted schedule (rotating shift) overtime, ban on contract labor, etc., etc.

Lots and lots more! I mean, it is Xmas, innit?

Yeah, I know, some of those might exclude each other, but it’s a process, and maybe a pipe-dream, but a good start.

@Mao, the big social democratic parties might have been more ambitious in the past, more willing to see the current state as flawed and in need of improvement. In particular with respect to the power of the wealthy. I think this was good. But were they then really on a straight path to achieve much more?

My impression is that social democracy is about as strong as it has been over the last half century. Just still not strong enough, not unified enough, not supported enough, not clear enough for much more. Like it never was, nor were its alternatives.

So I think we need a better and stronger social democracy like there never was, not to return it to a golden age, nor abandon it for alternatives without track records.

Zamfir, I’m still not sure what we’re talking about here. Is ‘social democracy’ a path to socialism (collective ownership of the industries), or is it a way to mitigate the excesses, or is it a way to keep capitalism from destroying itself (which is kind of the opposite of a path to socialism)? It’s hard to tell.

I agree with the point above about finlandization of Scandinavia and the current rollback/deterioration there. I understand the union density has been going down in Sweden for a while. Or take the New Deal: wasn’t it really a way to avert a collapse, rather than a deliberate step towards socialism? I know, he announced the “economic bill of rights” later, but that was probably just to keep the soldiers and factory workers happy in the wartime.

JCF @42 ” … the people that didnt like it did not like it and worked hard to have it undone. That doesnt mean it doesnt work. It means we failed at defending it, and need to work as hard as “Capital” did to undo it, but in the other direction.”

Nicely put together, but the same could be said for the State Socialist system that got dismantled in the early 1990s; it was not allowed to evolve, it just got replaced with restoration of the old regime.

I think some people are getting a bit confused with the ideology and practice of social democracy. The ideology sounds great, social equality achieved relatively painlessly through the bourgeois liberal democratic system, just by taxing the wealthy a bit more, running budget deficits and surpluses when the time is right, and setting up national welfare systems.
It is forgotten that, even at its height, social democracy in practice had the downsides of extensive paternalism, bureaucratic elitism, and excessive respect for many traditional institutions of the capitalist state. Yet the main problem was that social democracy was established country-by-country and tied to the nation state. When the global economy began to change in ways that left national governments with less power to cope, social democracy was left managing decline in the absence of any ability to mount a political or social counter-mobilisation or establish social democratic methods on an international scale. Where political culture has been favourable (Scandinavia) social democracy has managed to slow its decline, which has been dramatic in other countries (the UK). Ultimately it no longer represents a solution, merely an amelioration.

“From Jeremy Gilbert’s Intro, “What is This Thing Called Neoliberalism,” ”

Yeah, something like this (in a more polemical form) I heard last week on Doug Henwood’s show. Here it is: http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=11299

@William Berry, mark me down for the news letter too. Fucking hell. And thanks for that PARECON thing.

What Igor said is the theory, but it doesn’t resemble reality much, unfortunately. There is a significant layer of underclass pretty much everywhere; if not officially then undocumented workers anyway. The wealthy are hardly taxed at all. In the States a hedge fund manager makes a billion in a year and he is taxed 15%, if that. Swedish IKEA founder moves to Switzerland and negotiates his own personal tax rate. The entire distribution takes place below, among the middle class. The top layer is is beyond the reach. Maybe it’s all fine, the best of what’s possible, I don’t know. Every system has an overhead. But it’s not surprising that some are not happy with this overhead: it’s large and kind of ugly.

As far as the neoliberalism thing goes…

I think there needs to be some understanding that at core, governing neoliberalism is a pro-urban, anti-rural phenomenon. It’s based on raping the countryside, making small transfers to urban areas (for the residing petite bourgeois, of course, like those of Caracas), and extracting big profits to those that see themselves as masters. I think this understanding is important because I think the limits of the policies are being reached, hence a wave of real anti-neoliberalism has a pretty good chance of happening. Think about what is happening in Thailand, with the Yellows and the Reds. Compare with slow, groaning, gradual, rural-based push left in Columbia. The instability in Peoria-type areas in Argentina, or the grinding pace of the TPP negotiation… Doesn’t mean that these processes would lead to a good thing, but…things are definitely happening, and I truly believe that the next slump, if it happens too soon, will be blowing the current nature of geopolitics.

Bruce Wilder remarks:

The Left is not going to get anywhere in these circumstances without accepting class warfare as a fact, and without accepting the necessity of destroying individuals and institutions on the Right.

According to current laws in America, such a leftist is know identified as an Enemy Combatant and subject to indefinite detention according to the NDAA.

After 9/11, union organizers = terrorists. Game over.

Bob

So the revolution must begin with a crime, and the members of the new community will be those complicit in the crime. And if the crime is to create revolution, to overthrow the existing order, it will have to be something more serious than failure to disperse. So then there is a community defined by this crime. But it is not everyone – how could it be? – it is not even most people. It is a self-selected group acting putatively on behalf of the majority – the vanguard if you will. So now this vanguard has to create a society. What about those not part of the crime? Are they part of the revolution or against it? To be part of the new society, they must be part of the transgression that defined it. And so there must be more crimes, so that all can be complicit. All must commit revolutionary acts to be part of the revolution. And expropriation has to be against someone, so, if the regime has no obvious opponents it can access (i.e., domestic opponents), it will manufacture them. Without a utopian vision, it is the revolutionary act that defines the society, so this act must be prolonged. It can be and has been prolonged for decades.

We have seen this movie. It ends in atrocity.

Anarcissie, largely software is eating the world. Means of production? If you work at Google, your means of production are a computer, a desk, a chair, and Internet access. And you have those things at home. In the industries that are shaping the world, the workers already have the means of production and it makes little difference. With 3D printing, even manufacturing will be largely decentralized, and the products that are sold will be abstract plans from which concrete goods are spewed – those plans will be drawn on computer. This does or at least can logically lead to a sort of socialism, but not a Marxian sort and not for Marxian reasons. The market is highly effective at dealing with scarcity, but without scarcity, it cannot function. Therefore, scarcity must be imposed (through IP primarily), which is inefficient. If the question of what to fund can be answered well, there is no net benefit to selling the information as opposed to giving it away.

“one can say that social democracy was good while it lasted, but state socialism was not”

One could also say that perhaps social democracy was a response to state socialism in the cold war against it, in which case state socialism should, in a sense, get credit for it. Dialectics.

it doesn’t seem to me that any existing current of political thought captures enough of our real situation to offer much guidance. In brief, we have three major problems: a crisis of ecological sustainability that largely demands careful local limitation and remediation; the problem that our most productive material technologies (manufacture of most kinds) have enormous economies of scale; and the problem that our technologies of communication and transport make demands for standardisation, universal access and central management that are at odds with our current political frameworks. Contra Martin Bento, 3D printing is not going to replace a car plant any time soon. Contra the economic policy wonks, a set of prices and taxes is not going to restore our battered environment, and contra the neo-liberals, the market is not going to run the internet (and does not do a good job of running ports, airlines, electricity grids and much else of our infrastructure). I expect, as resource shortages, system overloads and local failures sharpen the contradictions over the next few decades, a new politics will emerge. What it will look like I have not the fainest idea.

Yes, let’s not think! Let’s just blandly attitudinize.

Martin Bento @68:

That first paragraph is an excellent summation of the Camus argument (The Rebel) against the totalitarian revolutionary state.

The real revolution has no choice but “to assemble, one by one, throughout the years, the solitary [persons] who fight their way toward unity.”

Real rebellion begins and ends in acts of renunciation. It begins with the renunciation of the master by the slave (Camus’s example), the individual rebel. It culminates in the renunciation, by a community, of the primal urge for vengeance, of that “dark victory in which heaven and earth are annihilated”.

Bob is right, though, to a point. There will and must be crime, even if it is nothing more than illegal strikes and mass demonstrations and occupations of property and public spaces (and who can question, really, the legitimacy of the outbursts of spontaneous rage that can seize whole communities?). The question is always: How much crime, and how much, if any, violence? That is the nut, and it’s a hard one.

Meetings (steward and safety) and grievances today, as well as some actual work— “America needs aluminum!”— so I’m out.

Carry on.

74

I didn’t say “let’s not think.” I am saying, let’s not over-think. Let’s not fall in love with systems of thought at the expense of developing our social skills, political knowledge (awareness of how things actually work in practice) and compassion for people in general.

WT @ 75

Power, unfortunately, is perfectly self-aggregating, and, as a consequence, almost as perfectly self-aggrandizing.

Yes, but power is a mere abstraction. Let’s look closer and watch how laws get made, etc. You know who does yeoman work here? David Cay Johnston provides a wonderful example. Krugman linked him yesterday.

I think that Bruce Wilder is right to maintain that it’ll have to be embodied in institutions, and actively defended in perpetuity.

Yes. But the institutions are effects more than causes. Bruce is quite right that nothing in history is stable and every gain must be defended. I take some comfort in the fact that we are at the dawn of the internet age. Information flow is only going to get better.

persuasion alone can’t provide an antithesis strong enough to crack a system-wide preference for control

I think I disagree here. Persuasion is at the root of the best kinds of progress. Sometimes violence precedes the persuasion, unfortunately, but when gains become consolidated it is usually because interested parties have become persuaded. As for the “preference for control,” this is human nature you’re talking about.

“Of the gods we believe, and of man we know, that by a fundamental law of their nature they rule whenever they can.”

mattski @ 78

I think you’re waffling. Sorry, but look around you and ask yourself cui bono. I give you full marks for your admirably civilized behavior, but in truth, your drawing room is shrinking. The slouching of rough beasts may be deplorable, but sooner or later their hour will come round at last. History suggests that what you call human nature is in fact mutable. Deny that at your peril.

“Means of production? If you work at Google, your means of production are a computer, a desk, a chair, and Internet access. ”

This is amazing – looking at an incredibly complex world and seeing only what it physicially in front of one’s eyes.

Yanis Varoufakis “Confessions of an Erratic Marxist”

YV’s economic reputation is in game theory, and he explains why in a very long confessional calling for subsidence of the current European system with all it’s faults, IOW, taking a Menshevik position.

“If my prognosis is correct, and the European crisis is not just another cyclical slump soon to be overcome as the rate of profit picks up following the inevitable wage squeeze, the question that arises for radicals is this: Should we welcome this wholesale subsidence of European capitalism, as an opportunity to replace capitalism with a better system? Or should we be so worried about it as to embark upon a campaign for stabilising European capitalism? My answer has been unequivocal over the past three year and its nature is betrayed by the above-mentioned list of diverse audiences that I sought to influence. Europe’s crisis is, as I see it, pregnant not with a progressive alternative but with radically regressive forces that have the capacity to cause a humanitarian bloodbath while extinguishing the hope for any progressive moves for generations to come.

For these views I have been accused, by well meaning radical voices, as ‘defeatist’; as a latter-day Menshevik who tirelessly strives in favour of schemas the purpose of which is to save the current indefensible European socio-economic system. A system representing everything a radical should admonish and struggle against: an anti-democratic, irreversibly neoliberal, highly irrational, transnational European Union that has next to no capacity to evolve into a genuinely humanist community within which Europe’s nations can breathe, live and develop. This criticism, I confess, hurts. And it hurts because it contains more than a kernel of truth.”

Smart, and kinda beautiful, I love this guy.

@73:

“Our common delusion is to believe we can think our way to a better world. On the left the word ‘neo-liberal’ is a totem, a magic explanation of why society fails to meet our expectations. Except it isn’t an explanation at all.”

That’s a weirdly inverted account of where the “magical thinking” lies. Do you even know what the term “neo-liberalism” means? DOoyou know who first invented the term and put it into general circulation?

Bob you wrote:

“A:There’s been a flood, and half the farmers will starve. Let’s pool our rice, and share it out.
B: All very nice, and I am sad for the starvers, but I had a great crop, and I planned to build a new addition. Since this is all voluntary, charitable, and generous and stuff. I think I’ll pass on the pooling.
A: Umm, no. You won’t.
B: Wait a minute. My crop is my property, and I have the law on my side. You try to take my rice, I’ll go to the cops.
A: Umm. No. You won’t.
Expropriation is an attitude, a recognition that there is no private property or personal rights.
”

1. This is advocacy of violence. Forcibly taking people’s possessions and forcibly denying them access to law enforcement, essentially becoming your own law and your own enforcement. In the situation you have stipulated, this would be justified (in my view), but it is still advocacy of violence and to speak of me projecting my internal violence is a howler. You have already placed yourself at the head of a mob announcing to a farmer that his goods will be taken, and the police can’t do anything to help him.
2. This has little to do with anything Snowden, anonymous, the Tahrir square protesters etc. did or advocated. It is what Stalin and Mao did. That is the company you put yourself in with your own example.
3. Most of all of the movements or people you are claiming to align yourself with are founded explicitly on the notion of personal rights: privacy for Snowden and for anonymous, freedom from arbitrary police power for the Tahrir square protesters. The denial of personal rights puts you in very dark company.
4. In situations like you describe, people do typically spontaneously share. But of course the rhetoric of the emergency is routinely used by revolutionaries to justify actions they take at will. In the midst of class struggle, and especially in the revolution, it is always an emergency.

You have already placed yourself at the head of a mob announcing to a farmer that his goods will be taken, and the police can’t do anything to help him.

What sort of assistance do you think the police might offer?

Collin, the police would stop the farmer from having his crops taken. Or that’s what they’re supposed to do; Bob is stipulating an extreme situation. Whether you think it is a good thing or bad, taking someone’s possessions by force and telling them you will not let them call the police is an act of violence.

With violence. It’s called “the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence”, and, if you accept the state, you accept it. If you don’t accept the state – in principle or this particular one – then you don’t accept it, but the fact that the state would be using violence to stop you doesn’t change the fact that you are being violent. If it did, there would be no such thing as violent crime – since crime is something the state can, legitimately for those who recognize the legitimacy of the state, combat with violence.

‘Bog-standard’? Is that a reference to my Irish ancestry?

I thought I alluded (lightly) to the fork where capitalist production runs away with itself. I’d like to be optimistic about this. Knowledge is power, and enough knowledge might be able to produce apples in your basement, or whatever else you want. However, I am pretty sure that the cap lords are going to try to stay in power by whatever means appear necessary, so things might get pretty rough before basement-apple paradise breaks out.

William,

I give you full marks for your admirably civilized behavior

I give YOU full marks!

History suggests that what you call human nature is in fact mutable. Deny that at your peril.

I wouldn’t deny it for a second! Indeed, it is another reason for my (moments of) optimism. But, I was taking issue with your choice of words. “A system wide preference for control.” Because I don’t think it is helpful to view basic human impulses as manifestations of external ‘systems’ or ‘institutions.’

geo,

Wait. When I make a happy you make a sad, and when I make a sad you make a happy? But really, as I said to William, I wasn’t quoting Thucydides in despair. Human nature is where I pin my hopes, because it does change, and it is changing. It is as beautiful as it is horrible, but we’re improving it when we cultivate our own behavior, when we practice patience with people we consider difficult, when we practice listening to people we don’t necessarily trust.

I don’t think human nature is improved when we adopt an attitude that we know best and those who disagree should be steamrolled. (Though I readily admit I am prepared to say “tough shit” to rich people squealing about having their taxes raised.) But, you know, when Joe Conservative says, “I have a problem with the government taking my money and giving it to some lazy slob,” we should be prepared to grant at least some degree of merit to that pov. There is no way around shades of gray here.

There was a bitter joke that made the rounds in 2008 about neoliberal policy privatizing the gains and socializing the losses.

Martin Bento makes some useful points, but seems curiously reluctant to confront that one.

To mattski, I would suggest progress is a product of the times power finds reason and factual evidence to be useful as a means to its ends. I fear we have entered upon an era, where power doesn’t want to open the door to persuasion, and reason becomes a potential threat. Power will not converse.

“Oracle doesn’t have infrastructure like this”

Martin, I’m not nearly as optimistic as you are. Yes, there was a wild-west period in the 1990s when a craftsman could play the game. But it’s gone. Oracle certainly does have plenty of infrastructure (servers, labs, hosting centers, etc), and more importantly: patents.

One can still roll his own cigarets in his living room, and perhaps even sell them, but that doesn’t make Philip Morris a paper tiger.

“The google worker has capital in his brain.”

I don’t know. A google worker is trained, like a Henry Ford’s worker was trained. It’s not a start-up anymore, and I’m pretty sure very few are creative ‘evangelists’. I imagine most just get the specs and type lines of code that are about as meaningful to them as an assembly-line worker pulling the lever (or whatever). Division of labor is the source of all this, the blessing and the curse.

“Disappointed in you, Bruce, that you don’t recognize Locke and Nozick when you see it”

Why do all the male commenters think they have the privilege of using Wilder’s first name? Are they all close personal friends or family? Are the rest of us more distant or excluded?

Maybe my head’s been in Japan too long.

4 appended

I honestly don’t even understand, and never have, what “state monopoly on violence” or ” natural or transcendental (property) rights” can possibly mean. They are simple nonsense to me.

Bruce Wilder @ 100

Power will not converse.>/i>

I remember a cartoon from 45 years ago. My self-congratulatory memory tells me that it appeared in the Berkeley Barb, or the Daily Cal, but the New Yorker is probably more likely.

Anyway, the scene is a university administrator’s office, identified by his title in reverse on the glass window of the door. A delegation of student protestors is standing in front of his desk, the young men in suits, the young women in skirts below the knee. The administrator is looking up over the top of his glasses from a sheaf of papers. The caption reads something like: I want to congratulate you on your respectful behavior, and on the reasonableness of your petition. Now get the hell out of my office.

This doesn’t just sound like Nozick. It also sounds like pretty much anyone you can think of in a modern administrative position, from corporate Human Resources flacks to that great Democrat, Rahm Emanuel. Our police are armed by with the best that the military-industrial complex has to offer. We dare you to pursue this beyond our refusal to negotiate.

I have property. Even though I don’t believe in natural or transcendental property rights, I would strongly prefer my records in the county registry of deeds and the state RMV to remain the social construct that it is. Many people in the industrialized world have property. Most people. For this violent liberation to materialize, first, most people would have to be turned into proletarians. Perhaps it’ll happen some day, but perhaps ‘social democracy’ (whatever the hell it is) will manage to prevent it. In which case, most likely nothing interesting will ever happen here, in the first world. You need to look in other places, where people sweat in mines and factories for $3/day.

@ 113 ” I think we are learning that the civility of the liberal consensus is our enemy in achieving or maintaining this non-utopia of the second-best.”

I’d buy that. My concern is with what the alternative to ‘civility’ actually is.

I’d challenge the notion that ‘power won’t negotiate.’ It negotiates all the time. What it tries to do is set the agenda, to define the limits of ‘reasonable’ public discourse. If being ‘uncivil’ means forcing that agenda to open, i.e., being ‘unreasonable,’ that makes sense to me. Maybe meeting ‘reason’ with ‘soul power’ is not naïfish at all. Gandhi accomplished much with non violent public action.

Lawrence Stuart 12.13.13 at 5:24 pm

“I’d challenge the notion that ‘power won’t negotiate.’ It negotiates all the time. What it tries to do is set the agenda, to define the limits of ‘reasonable’ public discourse. If being ‘uncivil’ means forcing that agenda to open, i.e., being ‘unreasonable,’ that makes sense to me. Maybe meeting ‘reason’ with ‘soul power’ is not naïfish at all. Gandhi accomplished much with non violent public action.”

I like that.

.

116

I like that.

Me too.

Finally, a chance to get back to this thread:

Bob,

History will never give you a blank slate to work with. Any society in which you come to power will have existing relationships of power, prestige, and property (since ownership is socially-constructed, property is a social relationship), These will be largely unequal and unjust because they are so in every society of non-trivial complexity (the caveat is just to leave aside the tangent of whether, e.g., small tribes in the rain forest are egalitarian and just). They will however be very deeply entwined both with how the society functions practically and the emotional relationships that exist among people. To destroy them utterly, you will have to destroy the society.

Which, I gather, is fine with you. The revolutionary act defines a new society that will create wholly new relationships based on true egalitarianism and on collective decisions regarding the whole, or at least the bulk, of the resources available. But everything that ties them to their old unequal relationships will have to be destroyed or those will reproduce themselves. How can you equally allocate a city? Some housing is squalid; some splendorous. Everything exists in complicated relationship to everything else, both physically and in social terms. The USSR itself ran into serious problems with rural/urban conflict in the early days, did it not? Take the people from the cities; from their private farms too, since those too presuppose existing relationships of “private property”, place them all in agricultural cooperatives, randomly, so their existing unequal power relationships are disrupted and they can form new ones on a equal basis. Now true democracy will be possible.

Welcome to Democratic Kampuchea.

The demand for a blank slate is a great deal of what led the previous Marxist societies to ruin. It had to. Such a project demanded the ruination of existing society, but the Marxists proved much worse at creating better societies from the ashes than they imagined. You can’t hold this definition of democracy and claim these precedents are none of yours.

That is not to say existing arrangements are sacred. They never are. They are always being renegotiated. They are being renegotiated now. They can be renegotiated to further benefit the many or the few, lately, mostly the few. But the status quo has its inertia, and without that inertia, there is bloody chaos. Social democracy is about renegotiating social arrangements without demanding an impossible blank slate. And the premise is that if the majority are in control, the majority interest will generally be served; that is the direction things will move over time. The track record of this approach is quite good. The track record of the blank slate approach is horrendous.

And, no, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were not democracies, nor liberal, nor social democratic. They shared with you a contempt for personal rights, and, in the case of the Nazis, for established arrangements. After all, the status quo ante was that Jews could live among others pretty much, own property, have “rights” recognized in court, etc. Now they all had to be utterly dispossessed and herded onto reservations. The Party was committing a crime that created a new society that did not need to respect the commitments of the old. And that’s before we even get to the Holocaust per se; that’s just sticking to what was officially happening. To send Jews and others who previously had been part of society to camps required thorough contempt for the existing arrangements of society and for any notion of personal rights. And, yes, the Nazis were happy to preserve the wealth of wealthy “Aryans”, but retaining the wealth only of your friends is not respecting existing arrangements, it is helping your friends. But you have characterized excessive deference to existing arrangements as the fatal flaw in the liberal and social democratic regimes you despise and have also expressed contempt for personal rights. On both those points, the Nazis are right with you. They are your people, not mine.

Bruce, first of all, I haven’t criticized neoliberalism because I haven’t been discussing it in this thread. I’ve been discussing social democracy and the like, communism (or state socialism or whatever you want to call it), and the ways in technology is changing the game and should change our understanding of it. The last, I contend, is primarily because of the nature of the technology itself – at least the aspects I’ve been discussing – not because of the neoliberal context in which it has emerged.

When civility is appropriate is a matter of context, but, in general, decorum will favor the weak. Take it away completely, and what is left is violence, and the virtuous will not win in that field. The state will, usually, or the gun nuts, or the mafias. I think the Left is still thinking in this mold that there is an elite that wants to maintain the status quo and grassroots forces that seek to disrupt it. The insight of Naomi Klein is very important: it is often the powerful who seek to upset the apple cart, because they are the best positioned to exploit the chaos.

Do Democrats defer to Wall Street out of politeness? I don’t think so. It is venal or it is ideological (or both), but it is not just manners.

As you pointed out, for several decades, in Western countries, the elite seemed to behave in a manner that was not totally selfish, and this was one of the factors that enable social democracy, New Deal liberalism, and such to move the bulk of the population into the middle class and give them decent and secure lives. There was resistance from the elite to be sure, but it was not unlimited.

Mao suggested that this compromise was due to pressure from communism. I have been sympathetic to this view, and still think there is a bit to it – the communists were horrible in power, but could be constructive in opposition. Even if true, primary credit for social democracy would have to go to those who created it, not to second order causes. But the fatal flaw in this theory is that the dramatic turn away from the postwar consensus did not follow the fall of communism; it preceded it. The seeds were laid in the 60s with Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom and Ayn Rand’s salon, then comes the Powell memo, then the building of an actual political organization and alliances with other types of conservatives in the 70s, at the end of which Thatcher and Reagan are elected, changing the game. The fall of the communist world did not seem at all in the cards at this time. Their economies were stagnant, but apparently in a stable state, and it was difficult to see how the major powers would fall, or how the minor ones would if they did not. There have been retrospective attempts to pretend brilliant Ronnie was pulling the strings to make this happen all along, but they lack credibility. The whole thing hinged too crucially on Gorbachev, and it would have been very easy for the next Soviet leader to be another Brezhnev.

So what did make the difference? Well, that’s another long and complicated discussion, but I’m out of time right now, so I’ll just stop here. I’ll try to respond to a couple of other comments later.

Martin @ 120

I am impressed with your patience (and much more.) I do not mean this casually or disrespectfully but do you think it is possible to have a productive discussion with bob mcmanus?

I mean, I am new to this stuff but it seems to me the larger problem going back at least to the murder of Rosa and Karl is the the social democrats apparently tend to think the communists and socialists are their deadly enemies and the right is the loyal opposition. This is inherent to the accommodation with capitalism.

As in the title of Judt’s Last book:Oh My God Is It Too Late What Have I Done With My Life’s Work

So what we get from Martin Bento is a Burkean Whiggishness. Yes, extant societies are based on injustice and violence, even with the dim recognition that “property” is always a collective institutionalization of rules, not a pre-given reality, (though undifferentiated property is still somehow the foundation of “rights”), but order must be maintained, else that injustice and violence might be unleashed, since the lower orders lack the intelligence, discipline and sensitivity to form adequate ruling judgments, having long since become attached and conditioned by their subaltern status, (though, of course, they are still fully deserving of our condescension and (self-)pity). No recognition here that societies might enter into crisis and structural disintegration, (which isn’t to be brought about by some sort of revolutionary voluntarism), and that it is rather a matter of reconstructing a new institutional order rather than simply abolishing the old and starting from a “blank slate”. And then there is the “ideas have consequences”, slippery slope argument, as if ideas had autonomous “force”, entirely separate from material conditions and institutional constraints, (since, from the POV of such rank idealism, the only alternative would be a reductionist-determinist materialism), therefore historical catastrophes must be traced to the ideas that allegedly given rise to them. (The idea that what happened in Kampuchea might have more to do with a military coup and an American invasion and carpet-bombing than anything to due with Marxism, is strangely forgotten). But certainly Marxian LTV must be bad, because it can’t account for technology, QED. (When the point is that if capital were ever to fully replace labor, automating it entirely, then what would become of the “value” of capital? The issue of the selection, development and implementation of technology, “the forces of production”, is never “value-neutral”, nor pre-given, but always bound up in the prevailing “relations of production”, in the contemporary instance, highly financialized corporate oligopolies).

Ho hum.

And then the internet/IT sector is the source of new economic dynamism, when, in fact, what is most notable is the extent to which it has rapidly developed such a high degree of monopolistic concentration. (What took Carnegie, Rockefeller, Sloan and the like a generation to achieve has fallen to a few geeks who imagine themselves world-bestriding geniuses, often less than a decade). Such is apparently the power of network effects, but still, is such a utility-like technical infrastructure to be entirely supported by advertizing revenues, data-mining, and price-gouging in its subsequent development forever?

And then the question, actually relevant in current terms, is not to be the failure of social democracy, but really its temporary success, (rather than the process of its self-betrayal). True, it wasn’t simply the fall of the Soviet bloc that began that process, but rather the dissolution of the Bretton Woods arrangement leading to the stagflationary crisis of the 1970’s, (by which time, the Soviet Union, after ’56 and ’68, was widely recognized to be a stagnant, static, status quo power, not the expansionary revolutionary power bent on world domination it never was, except in in the projective imagination of Cold War ideology.) Hence the rising threat of working-class expectations and militancy became more of a threat, for which the stagflation was to be blamed, rather than the declining profitability and increasing competition of increasingly concentrated global capitalism. And the social democratic projects and tendencies, which never could quite deal with the realities of power and governance, once they have forsworn interfering with the power and prerogatives of capital, began their slide into self-betrayal and irrelevancy, culminating abjectly in the surrender of PM Jr. to the Troika in Greece, because it was the only “responsible” thing to do. (If you want to date the point of failure of the peaceful social democratic project, it would be with the complete rejection of the Meidner plan in the mid ’70’s). But rather than facing the contemporary facts, we get pious moralizing and nostaglia on the part of Cold War liberals.

So I personally don’t mind it when Bob Mc. goes all Badiou on your bad asses, and think it much more “productive” than the contributions of some. At least it brings to light the tired, lame and non-committal presuppositions of self-satisfied centrist liberals around here. Besides which he’s more well-read than most.

@129:

“Well, if people aren’t your thing then books will have to do.”

Spoken like a true philistine!

Bob McM: Judt, Scheslinger, Hofstadter and probably Hirschman and Furet oh EP Thompson Stuart Hall and the gyres of the Party in France

What is Thompson doing in that list?

130

I guess lack of culture accounts for my failure to appreciate refinements like the guillotine. You’re right, mcmanus has me there.

geo,

Smartypants.

Mao,

Patents! Now we are getting somewhere. Strictly speaking, patents are not a means of production. They are a claim on rent. But the knowledge they gatekeep is a means of production. Now that Marxist argument is that the means of production too are products of abstract labor power. That does not just mean someone worked on them. The premise is that the diverse forms of human labor used to make things for market are all commensurate in value – not necessarily equal in value, there can be differences in productivity – but commensurate, meaning the values are all equal in some ratio (not necessarily one to one), and that this value is determined by the average time socially-necessary to perform the labor. This is what enables one to say that all the people performing these diverse sorts of labor are unified as a class; fundamentally, they are all generating abstract labor power, and this what what is creating all the value in the commodity – it is not only contributing the direct labor, but it is contributing the labor that went into the means of production themselves, and all are ultimately forms of the same things – human labor power, whose value varies directly with the time it is applied.

This does not apply to patentable ideas. The value of an idea is not even approximately a function of the time needed to generate it. Even for a specific person, this can vary greatly. The latter is not even necessarily a well-defined entity. The material that goes into an idea can germinate over a lifetime, and ideas can come instantly. Or not. Of course, the software patent game has become enormously silly, and a lot of patented ideas are actually fairly trivial – but even for trivial ideas, the time necessary to germinate them is undefined, and the value of the idea is in no sense a function of it. And different people have different ideas; the labor of various workers in this domain is not interchangeable, at any ratio, even with others in the domain, much less with human labor in some generic sense. This is why, even in the Marxist sense, the value canotn be reduced to the average time socially-necessary to produce it.

And much of Marxist analysis hinges of this. The notion of the proletariat as a class unified in interest relies on the notion that all, despite the fact that the types of work they do vary and their immediate interests may not coincide, are engaged in a single project – the creation of value through the provision of abstract labor power. The notion of the proletariat as exploited by definition relies on the notion that abstract labor power is producing all of the value, which would include the means of production.

Now, I’m not saying Marx ever thought intellectual labor ever was reducible to some common denominator of general labor like this. He seemed to assume knowledge would propagate efficiently, and therefore not provide lasting advantage. Obviously, IP deliberately impedes this. But so does the rate at which knowledge now advances. All the current patents will expire, but by that time, there will be many new patents in place, partly because of the extent of contemporary knowledge and partly because of the corrupt stupidity of the patent system. Therefore, the advantage of owning a body of patents does not expire, even as particular patents are developed and age out, although the complexity of knowing which patents to own makes it an unstable advantage.

So I’m not saying everything is just peachy, that there is no danger of monopoly, that Silicon Valley is an unambiguously benign force in the world. But we need to understand it differently.

John,

“though undifferentiated property is still somehow the foundation of “rights” ” Nope. I never said property was the foundation of rights in any sense.

”since the lower orders lack the intelligence, discipline and sensitivity to form adequate ruling judgments, having long since become attached and conditioned by their subaltern status, (though, of course, they are still fully deserving of our condescension and (self-)pity) ” Strike 2. I never attributed any qualities specifically to the “lower orders”.

“No recognition here that societies might enter into crisis and structural disintegration, (which isn’t to be brought about by some sort of revolutionary voluntarism), and that it is rather a matter of reconstructing a new institutional order rather than simply abolishing the old and starting from a “blank slate”. ”

Well, if you think society is going to fall apart to the extent that one can say the old institutional order is already entirely abolished, and you are just going to pick up the pieces, then you are suggesting history will pretty much hand you a blank slate (although you are giving yourself a lot of wiggle room by speaking of “reconstructing” a “new” institutional order. If it is new, I would say it is being constructed for the first time). I recognized that, but I ruled it out, as I don’t think it is really going to happen.

“The idea that what happened in Kampuchea might have more to do with a military coup and an American invasion and carpet-bombing than anything to due with Marxism, is strangely forgotten ”

Because it makes little sense. True, the US bombing destabilized the country, giving the KR their opening. But does it make sense to move everyone to agricultural communes, and break everyone’s existing social networks because the US bombed us? No, but it does if you want to remake society. Does it make sense to empty the cities because the US bombed you? It might if the cities were the major targets, but the US was primarily trying to ashtray jungle areas used by the Vietnamese. Does it make sense to kill intellectuals and suppress technology because the US bombed you? No, but it makes a sort of sense if part of your analysis of the failure of the USSR is that it let intellectuals become an elite class, and your entire purpose is to eradicate class distinctions. Then there is the fact that the US in fact militarily and diplomatically supported the KR in their conflict with Vietnam.

“When the point is that if capital were ever to fully replace labor, automating it entirely, then what would become of the “value” of capital? ” That’s begging the question, as this is only an issue if one buys the LTV.

“And then the internet/IT sector is the source of new economic dynamism, when, in fact, what is most notable is the extent to which it has rapidly developed such a high degree of monopolistic concentration. (What took Carnegie, Rockefeller, Sloan and the like a generation to achieve has fallen to a few geeks who imagine themselves world-bestriding geniuses, often less than a decade). ”

Actually, I’ve emphasized its technology, rather than its economic dynamism, but I think people who are going to effectively claim that there can never be another Twitter should have some argument why not. Monopoly is a serious danger in this industry, and I’ve already discussed it. None of that changes the fact that IT is changing the game – the industrial game, the political game, the social game – in ways the old paradigms do not enable us to understand.

Chaz, just quickly, I don’t have much more time. You are measuring Marxism by setting aside what actually happened, and looking at what you think may be possible, and social democracy by actual messy history. Two very different yardsticks. Pick one.

Although you left aside the next sentence of my “suggestion” – the complex interrelationships of everything in the city. It is also interesting that your solution is a market.

As for the Nazi’s – the election where they gained their plurality was very dirty. They had a private army of thugs attacking voting places. But if your quarrel really is with the voters as such – well, now we’re in elect a new people territory.

Martin B: I never said property was the foundation of rights in any sense.

Well, maybe not, but you did accept at face value bob mcm’s assertion @55 that Expropriation is an attitude, a recognition that there is no private property or personal rights. That is not the case – expropriation of capital such as a farm is not a matter of personal rights, but of economic property rights. But you seem inclined to conflate the two, e.g. @88: This is advocacy of violence. Forcibly taking people’s possessions and forcibly denying them access to law enforcement…

Admittedly b.m.’s choice of what can be construed as a typically Nozickian folksy example – if we suppose the farmer to be a homesteader whose farm is is home – tends to blur the distinction between capitalist property and personal possssions, but if you don’t think that personal rights are at least continuous with property, you should be able to spot and resist this conflation, rather than asserting – as you seem to – that taking property is tantamount to violence (i.e. violence against the person). It isn’t. If my farm (or factory, etc) is occupied and overrun by expropriators, there need be no violence unless I – or, as you recommend, the police – initiate it.

Even if my home is overrun, this might still be the case – criticism of the expropriators must then be based on their depriving me of the enjoyment of my personal possessions, rather than on supposed violence. However, the smaller and more personally cherished the possession in question, the more likely it is that I can and will literally take possession of it and stand my ground, in such a way that it can only be confiscated by actual violence of some kind. But that is not at all what happens when a factory owner calls in the police to defend their economic property rights.

144 see 55 quoted material and/or follow link. Another quote:

“Do not demand of politics that it restore the “rights” of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to “de-individualize’ by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generation of de-individualization.” Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Oedipus.

I am not eager to expouse or commit here to a meta-ethical position on personal or individual rights, but in a crowd like this one that would already get me trouble. Let us say I am working on it.

One easy example is closed-shops and right-to-work laws. Another is the right to bear arms. Another more questionable which relates to the above thread on vehicular manslaughter is the Korean and Japanese quasi-legal practices of compensation, atonement, and the ostracism of perpetrators’ families in an ethos of collective responsibility and guilt.

Let’s just say for now that I am open to understandings of a social construction of identity and a social negotiation of roles and possibilities, and am slower to impose abstract principles on existing or future communities.

So I don’t stop at “Capital”

There remain material realities like a hungry child, and I won’t twist myself in knots worrying about whether it is better to hand the kid a fishing pole or if society will collapse if I grab some dinner rolls off the banquet table.

I’m open to a reframing of personal rights, and don’t necessarily stop at “Capital” – nor other commercial property such as ‘inventory” – either. But I’m not expecting to see, in the near future, a situation in which people don’t need some form of protection against, e.g., violence to the person. That, and not banqueting rights, was the main ‘personal right’ I was alluding to, and the usual Libertarian-style conflation of which with property rights I was complaining about. But I do also see a need for some kind of safeguard against, e.g., arbitrary incarceration, or even people taking one’s basic personal possessions.

In extremis, yes, take the rolls from the banqueting table, even the ordinary dining table or the plate. But that kind of ad hoc single-case redistribution is obviously not a useful paradigm for organising society. For one thing, in the absence of usable criteria to decide when it’s permissible (rather than excusable) to grab the food off someone else’s plate, things are likely to get pretty uncomfortable for most of us. The dissolution of personality as we know it and broadly have done throughout recorded history would change things, no doubt – but in the mean time, some transitional provisions would seem to be required.

Martin Bento:

I was only slightly caricaturing your expressed views. As I said, your argument is basically Burkean. Old hat.

Marx was, of course, writing 150 years ago, and the sort of economy he was innovatively analyzing and criticizing is much different than what prevails today, not least in the level of technical development that would have boggled his imagination. Nonetheless the sort of knowledge, skill, and technical know-how that you insist on, (as deriving from “ideas”, somehow free-floating and unaccountable), as if disproving LTV, (which is an account of economic *value*), was well known to him. He referred to it as “the general intellect” and assumed, perhaps too simply, that it was the common “property” of humankind, born from the practical experience of human engagement with the world, especially of the laboring kind. (And, of course, the “class struggle” didn’t just concern the distribution of output/income, but control over the production process itself and the social and natural ends it should serve). Why it should then take the form of “intellectual property” and “human capital” is the question not to be begged. And, indeed, historians of science and technology have shown that cases of simultaneous independent discovery, (such as famously, Newton/Leibniz, Darwin/Wallace, or Keynes/Kalecki), are widespread, not the exception, but more the rule. But why you would want to cite Twitter as a genuine technical advance and proof of the openness and innovative potential of the capitalist system is beyond me.

And again, your “ideas have consequences”, -(actually that should be implications),- argument is feeble, ridiculously overblown, ungrounded in its application and highly selective in its “evidence”. As the intellectual historian of pragmatism, Louis Menand, put it, ideas have contexts, and their implications based on some sort of “logical” deduction don’t necessarily extend all that far. What’s more, ideas have sources and they are always more than just ideas, being embedded in the practical experiences and pressures that they respond to, (something Marx and many other thinkers have emphasized). Nor can thinkers be held entirely responsible for the future effective history of their ideas and the (ab)uses that others might have made of them. By that criterion, you might as well blame Darwin for Nazi racial theory. The notion that Marx or Marxism could credibly be blamed for the Khmer Rouge is utterly stupid and belongs to Cold War propaganda. (What on earth does Marx have to do with restoring the ancient Cambodian kingdom)?

Now one can examine the inadequacy of ideas with respect to their vulnerability for abuse. Personally, I think Marx slightly misread Hegel and underplays the role of the state and the political, which leaves certain gaps in his thinking, and failures to anticipate future developments. World wars, Leninist vanguardism, the rise of fascism and even the Keynesian/welfare state compromise were not quite dreamed of in his philosophy, which remained still too wedded to an Enlightenment outlook. And there is no use denying that the Archimedean lever he sought to devise failed about 100 years ago, not least because he retained a certain residue of Hegelian quasi-metaphysical “identities”. But that is also precisely why he remains immune to your “blank slate” charge. The new order was to be built out of the very ruins of the old order, the death-throes of the one being the birth-pangs of the other, because through successive crises, the working-class would undergo a process of self-organization, a kind of collective Bildung, by which it would become capable of assuming control in the “final” crisis. It’s not a matter of wiping out capitalism, but of its Umfunktionierung. You might disagree with such a prospect and certainly history has proven less that cooperative. But then I think you’re just denying the extent and severity of the current collapse and its contradictions, even if they are occurring at a much more high tech level than Marx would have projected. Nostalgia for social democracy, (which scarcely existed in the U.S.), or even a restoration of Keynesian demand management simply won’t do.

As to the limits of individuation and the inevitably collective “nature” of human existence, I would prefer to start out and address those issue from Wittgenstein, rather than the sort of neo-Nietzschean parodic critique that Bob Mc. favors. But no one here is really suggesting the collectivization of toothbrushes, (except perhaps under the sort of circumstance which would render toothbrushes irrelevant)!

149

It is basically completely meaningless,

I read what Martin Bento wrote. I didn’t think it was at all meaningless. Quite the contrary. OTOH, if you have a forgone conclusion in your mind about what a just society must look like then perhaps you see anything that does not ratify your prejudices as ‘meaningless.’

Martin at 142:

“It is also interesting that your solution is a market.”

Socialism does not preclude markets. Cuba has markets.

“As for the Nazi’s – the election where they gained their plurality was very dirty. They had a private army of thugs attacking voting places. But if your quarrel really is with the voters as such – well, now we’re in elect a new people territory.”

Yes. In actually existing social democracies dirty elections are very common. Mexico’s last election had a lot of vote-buying for example. As for the mob violence at voting places, I’m pretty certain that one of the duties of the social democratic state is to protect its citizens from mob violence. They failed at this because they accepted the conservative establishment as loyal opposition–as Bob observed above–and the conservative establishment (courts, police) saw the Nazis as ideological allies and refused to crack down on them. Greece is now suffering an uncannily similar repeat of this.

By the way, I do not make these comments to say that social democracy is awful and we should all switch to socialism. I am simply standing up for Bob’s declaration that if one wishes to condemn the failed attempts at socialism he must also acknowledge the failures of social democracy. These include the Nazi atrocities, genocide against native Americans, slavery, US colonial atrocities in the Philippines, French atrocities in Indochina and Algeria, British colonial atrocities almost everywhere, the various American wars, coups, death squads, and miscellaneous intimidation of the Cold War (bonus: these were done to protect the lucky victims from evil socialism!), Israeli subjugation of Palestine, and so on. I’ll spot you Imperial Japan; they were capitalist but I’m not sure why Bob feels they were social democratic.

As far as the political repression goes, and God knows Meiji-Taisho-Showa Japan was brutal, well, Louis Napoleon’s France was both politically repressive and a functional democracy, a point British opponents to suffrage expansion enjoyed pointing out.

The Left, as we know it, never had much of a shot in Japan, but there were several alternate forms of conservatism or corporatism. Marx was studied a lot for instance, for the purpose of finding ways to mute or manage the class struggle and labor unions.

See, I have a pretty tough time moving late Victorian/Edwardian England, Bismarck’s Germany, or Progressive-era United States out of the “social democracy” category. They weren’t military dictatorships although militaristic and imperialist. Frankly I think too many people take too much “credit” away from capitalism, which requires a high level and complicating forms of social reproduction (education, social protection) in order to thrive and deter crisis.

We can also contrast “social democracy” with Democratic Socialism

“… Stalinism and social democracy, variants of authoritarian state socialism…”

John, Regardless of whether ideas “should” be the common property of humankind, in the system we have, they are not. To start your analysis with the way things are is not begging a normative question; it is simply acknowledging that your subject is the world before you. To analyze a modern economy “assuming” that ideas are the common property of all is like analyzing one “assuming” that land is the common property of all. The notion that the Earth should belong to all in common is defensible, but any analysis of modern Western economies based on the premise would be seriously distorted because the economies are not based on that premise. And intellectual property existed in Marx’s day.

And I didn’t cite Twitter as an example of technical advance or as a general proof of the openness of the capitalist system. Ed’s claim was that it was “obvious” that there was no reason to see the future of IT as “anything other than one of smaller opportunities for new markets, with smaller rewards hanging in the balance, at the same time that we can expect an increasing about (sic) of these opportunities and rewards to be sucked up by existing players. “. Clearly, this was not true 7 years ago when Twitter launched, unless all he means by smaller is “smaller than Google” (in which case, it is actually too soon to say, though I personally don’t see Twitter as having the potential to outgrow Google). So what has changed? It doesn’t mean Twitter is brilliant. It doesn’t mean much conclusion can be drawn from this outside the world of IT. It does mean new major players in IT can emerge as of 7 years ago, and it is difficult to see the difference between then and now.

“And again, your “ideas have consequences”, -(actually that should be implications),- argument ”

Again, you’re hearing voices in your head. I never said “ideas have consequences” – you did. It was your hostile paraphrase of my position, but now you are nitpicking your own words and pretending it’s an objection to something I said. That’s pretty desperate.

“What on Earth does Marx have to do with restoring the ancient Cambodian kingdom?”

Nothing, but the KR’s rhetorical use of their national past is hardly the most objectionable thing about them. I pointed out some of the more objectionable ones, which were deeply rooted, as they themselves said, in their understanding of Marxist theory.

“You might disagree with such a prospect and certainly history has proven less that cooperative. But then I think you’re just denying the extent and severity of the current collapse and its contradictions “

This is a non-sequitur because, even if I granted for argument your estimation of the extent and severity of the current collapse, this doesn’t commit me to a belief that a “Bildung” of the sort you describe is occurring or will occur. I see no evidence of it at all. Therefore my disagreeing with such a prospect does not imply a denial of such severity.

And perhaps the fact that history has proven uncooperative should give you pause. After all, you hold that ideas have no motive force aside from context, which viewed broadly is history. But the particular idea you are espousing is not what has occurred, nor apparently what is occurring. So how do you expect this to happen? History is not cooperating, and the idea isn’t going to make anything happen.

Bento, we have been over this. I think you contract your violence to the state, and then claim your hands are clean. Somebody you are not at all responsible for droned that wedding caravan in Yemen last week.

I do seriously connect your sorts of arguments, worshiping state violence and attempting to smother individual autonomy, to fierce, profound, and intense authoritarian and hierarchical feelings and inclinations justified by transcendental or mystical ontologies.

153

Very few people are going to come up with a utopia that they consider to be nasty and unjust. When taken out of any socio-economic context social democratic ideology is just as utopian as any other.

I don’t understand what you are trying to say, Igor. As near as I can tell you are suggesting that only utopian ideas have meaning, whereas looking at the world as it is and trying to build upon what is good while minimizing what is not so good is not a worthwhile endeavor.

bob mcmanus,

I do seriously connect your sorts of arguments, worshiping state violence and attempting to smother individual autonomy, to fierce, profound, and intense authoritarian and hierarchical feelings and inclinations justified by transcendental or mystical ontologies.

Reductio. QED.

Everything you put forth has as its premise: If I were a dictator, then…

But even if you were a dictator, your results would not obtain. Because you reject facts–the way the world actually works–in favor of your personal, faith based fantasies.

166: How the hell do I imagine myself as dictator…

…while simultaneously arguing against my monopoly on violence?

Do you guys even listen to yourselves?

‘The unreal struggles with the real to come into existence; thus is becomes and is part of the real.’

State monopoly on violence is a funny thing. You wouldn’t want to give Hitler a monopoly on violence. So the monopoly only holds when the state is legitimate, and when its actions are just. But no state is perfectly legitimate and just.

I don’t view state monopoly on violence as a moral principle. It’s more like an agreement we make. As long as I view the state as mostly legitimate and just, I will mostly refrain from violence. And I will support the state in using violence against you, as long as I view the state as more legitimate and just than you. But when I think the state is unjust, and I feel that I can make things more just through violence (or just disobedience), then I reserve the right to deploy that violence. Provided, of course, that I am strong enough and brave enough to actually do so; I suspect I am not.

Unfortunately we all have different ideas about justice and even just different factual knowledge, which means that you may go on a very just (in your eyes) violent crusade even as I support the state in justly (in my eyes and the king’s eyes) destroying you. Morality is a matter of perspective, but I nevertheless hold firmly to my moral perspective and demand that you embrace my perspective as well.

The liberalism runs deeper here than any of us dared to believe.

175

Of course there is a state.

So you are not opposed to states. You agree that states are necessary?

To repeat: 1) In your revolutionary state how are disputes adjudicated?

2) In your revolutionary state how is the use of violence regulated?

How are disputes adjudicated? Who the hell put me in charge?

So, there could be courts? There could be police? You don’t know because,

You have no idea what you are talking about.

Actually, mattski hasn’t been contributing much, if anything, here, other than his own implicit argument from incredulity, which bob is only too pleased to feed.

Far out!

Unkillable zombie thread!

What was the OP about, again?

I know something that is pure, and true, and real: i.e., none of us really know what we’re talking about.

Jaquewould back me up on that (just don’t tell Holbo that I mentioned Jacques!).