After the dead horses

No, revolutionary socialism does not at all amount to defeatism. There are defeatist tendencies on the radical left – strands of postmodern leftism fetishising hegemony come to mind – as well as tendencies given to magical thinking like the various kinds of anarchism sadly ascendant on the US left – but revolutionary marxism isn’t one of them. Its ideological concepts and strategies of struggle are still vibrant in much of the world, even if we are currently abominably weak in most Western countries.

Not to sound like a broken record on this, but don’t you want some praxis to go with your theory?

The failure of Obama and the Democrats to “produce a coherent response to the Iraq war or the Bush assault on civil liberties” (which is an awfully polite way to describe their adoption of the Bush administration’s positions on these issues) is not an intellectual failure, but a political one.

Yes, the left could–and should–work on producing a larger, coherent political vision, but on a number of the most vital issues we face–e.g. healthcare, climate change, civil liberties, torture–the more pressing problem isn’t that we don’t have solutions, but that those solutions are systematically marginalized by our political system and our political culture.

We already have better ideas. But we can’t even get the supposed party of the left to take them seriously. Though refining those ideas can’t hurt, how do you propose to get those ideas to make any difference whatsoever in the real world of power and politics?

I think that there are certain difficulties talking about this on this blog. Since it is, in general, a place where engagement with the right is narcististically demanded, because otherwise the moderates just wouldn’t feel right.

But let’s assume for a moment that a conversation can be had without the civility brigade. In general, I agree with the above comment by Ben Alpers. There are plenty of suggested solutions that appear to be physically and economically possible, from transitioning to a non-carbon-based economy to universal health care to income supports that actually support the people that our system supposedly demands must remain unemployed to, well, civilization, in the form of peace of various kinds, including peace in the drug war. If people can’t buy in to a positive program of peace, prosperity, and a healthy world for their children, I don’t know what sort of positive program could possibly be offered.

Are the political mechanisms that could get us there healthy? No. Emphatically no. I don’t really know enough about non-U.S. systems to comment, but the U.S. system is broken, from a Supreme Court that everyone knows is purely a political instrument, to an outdated Constitution that locks out majority decision-making almost mathematically, to a President who is as “liberal” as we can reasonably expect to get who has just ratified an assassination program and more or less adopted the Bush executive system. The entire thing is rotten from top to bottom.

Everyone I know who works in vaguely left politics is working as hard as they can right now. And we’ll see what we can get. But really, the overall task of the left-of-center in America right now appears to me to be trying to influence the course of decline of the American Empire so the aftermath looks more like Britain post-Empire and less like Rome. The left in other countries is going to have to take the lead.

Ben Alpers posted while I was typing away. While I’m in sympathy with his suggestions–there are surely obvious practical steps that need to be taken–I’m rather pessimistic. Thing is, the political classes in the U.S. and Europe are so mingled that no new administration can prosecute the crimes of a previous administration without implicating itself. How does the Obama administration go after Goldman Sachs and the rest when so many of its members used to be on the boards of these companies? And since Clinton’s people began the practice of rendition and originated or continued other abuses, how could a prosecution of Bush era war criminals focus on them solely without being merely partisan and unfair? Again, there are real differences between Democrats and Republicans, but the two parties are equally hostile to democracy. Technocrats or plutocrats, nobody is interested in actually consulting the people in any meaningful sense.

Very well-put, esp. points 4 and 5 – but in so doing, indicating the depth and breadth of the problem, both intellectual and practical, in moving anywhere.

And @4 – capitalism seems to be doing very well, latest reports indicate that the UK’s richest people are up to 1/3 richer than before the recession…

I don’t think 5 is well put. There are other possibilities between technocratic social democracy and revolution; namely grass-roots organizing.

‘But if the left is going to seriously consider things like organic growth and Hayek’s planning criticism’.

The Left has always considered these issues, especially if one considers the Anarchist tradition as being part of the mainstream of the radical left (if that’s not a contradiction in terms), as I think we should.

Also, one shouldn’t be fooled that the Stalinist version of Marxism that got developed in the 1930s bore any real relationship to what Marx actually did or said. Cyril Smith, amongst others, has done important work to show (for example) that Marx owed a lot more to Hegel (I mean a lot more) than is commonly assumed, and shared his concerns and interests. For example, Marx (to the best of my knowledge) never proposed a fully ‘planned economy’ (which is what Hayek was attacking). Some people did back in the day, but have not for many decades. Certainly one could peruse many recent back issues of the New Statesman, the New Left Review, Red Pepper etc. for the last few years (or decades) and I would be surprised if you would find even one article proposing that the economy of advanced capitalist states should be ‘centrally managed’ by technocrats. Nor do many people nowadays propose violent revolution as the solution to capitalism’s ills.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/index.htm

Well said, Henri. Renewal on the left cannot depend on its supposed champions in the capitalo-parliamentarian system; and we all know what happens when a vanguard takes over and tries to impose socialism from above. Equality is never in the interests of an elite.

Mr. Quiggin,
As a libertarian-ish person (increasingly skeptical of ideological certainty, but moved to libertarian sympathies for liberal reasons), I’ve found your critiques of libertarianism thought provoking and often of considerable merit. I do wonder, however, whether it’s really constructive to mock people. One should, of course, happily point out absurdities and bad faith where one, in good faith, sees them, but it does seem to me that the tone you and other ideologically motivated writers occasionally take mainly serves the purpose of asserting higher status in a rather tribalistic way.

I think I and many others like me are fairly open to persuasion on many points by those on the left. I’ve learned a lot from lefties about foreign policy and racial politics, just to name two. But I think many are put off by the tone some progressives take, often equating skepticism of government intervention with moral callousness or worse. Conservatives nowadays are much worse, but that isn’t enough to drive some of us to total solidarity with the left. I think if lefties presented their ideas in the spirit of humanity and intellectual generosity, many people would be open for a fruitful dialog and even alliance on many issues. I think we’re already seeing the beginning of this, but everyone might do better to cool off and be a bit more generous with each other. It seems like this ought to flow naturally from the liberal spirit. Am I missing something? Am I being naive?

Joshua I can’t easily imagine a conception of politics that is not intimately concerned with what it means for individual human beings to live a good life, but you may view it differently.

Your point from Burke, that change must be organic, suggests that culture wars are where the good fight is. The political focus should then be on issues that will create structural advantages for promoting the cultural values of the left (freedom, self-reliance, diversity, voluntary cooperation, equality of opportunity). The left should focus on activities/industries/lifeways that both embody those cultural values and have a good chance of competing with their prevailing counterparts on their own terms. Socialism in action, one aspect of society at a time.

The free culture and free software movements–in which civil society is retraining itself to create, share and enjoy its own art, entertainment and informational products rather than looking to industry to provide them–are maybe the lowest hanging fruit. And obviously that struggle would go a lot easier, and further weaken the competitive position of old culture industries, with some IP law reforms that give people back some of the freedom that modern patent and copyright law have taken from them.

Hackerspaces and the “maker” ethic are making some headway in bringing those ideals into more concrete arenas. And combine hackerspaces (broadly construed) with the argument of “Shop Class as Soulcraft” and you’ve got a compelling formula for promoting the cultural values of the left in forms that seem benign even to tea partiers–while systematically pushing back against big business.

Also, socialists need to pry the rallying cry of “Freedom!” from the cold, intellectually dead hands of the right. Socialism seems to me primarily a political philosophy of freedom–much more so than right-libertarianism, anyhow.

(Three links is OK, then? Who knew?)

Phil – first time I’d seen that you’re using my “review”:https://crookedtimber.org/2009/05/15/historic-compromises/ to blurb the book. Feel free to change “This is a valuable little book … recommended” to “This is a valuable book … recommended” if you like (in case someone mistakenly takes the ‘little’ bit as damning with faint praise). On the substantive issue of this post – I’ll try to get a follow up written for Monday.

Hidari — sorry to go off-topic, but pls send me an email. I lost your name & address and need a word with you.

So 1st, if Quiggin and anybody else who posts here is interested, I would ask them to stop paying any attention to the first two on my list of four and link and engage what leftist blogs are out there. Scialabba is still writing, possibly foolish or brilliant stuff.

bob mcmanus @30 writes:

So 1st, if Quiggin and anybody else who posts here is interested, I would ask them to stop paying any attention to the first two on my list of four and link and engage what leftist blogs are out there.

But, bob mcmanus @29 writes:

3) Spend much less time talking to yourself and each other.

FWIW, I think the ten-minutes-earlier version of bob mcmanus had it right:

4) Find a (metaphorical) soapbox or street corner. Be annoying to most and a revelation to a few.

A serious conversation about how to practically go about doing that (or some alternative organizational vision) still seems to me to me a more pressing concern than looking for the most interesting leftist blogs and reading them. Not that there’s anything wrong with reading interesting leftist blogs. But doing so is just talking to each other.

It’s bit hard to take part in the conversation since after years of commenting here still every post of mine lands in moderation. And no, every post of mine does not contain the s-word. Anyway a couple points:

“We all know what happens when the vanguard takes over…” (Joshua): this seems like lazy history to me. There was nothing pre-ordained about the descent of Soviet Russia into bureaucratic dictatorship. (Also let’s not forget what happens when the vanguard does not take over – the Onion captured it well with “US flag recalled for causing 143 million deaths”.)

“Change has to happen organically…”: Not sure what this even means. But if it means slowly that’s just wrong. Social change is often fast, revolution is (historically) the common way for it to occur. Societies can get into a potentially revolutionary situation quickly (or at least it appears to be quick – after the fact it may be easier to notice the subtle changes that happened earlier). And yes, such massive change often goes along with violent upheaval. I think the Spart-style call for “violent revolution” and “workers’ militias now” are absurd, but let’s not kid ourselves that the ruling class will give up their privilege peacefully.

“The comfort to which you refer is bought directly at the expense of exploitation in the Third World”

That frankly isn’t true. It is an unhappy fact that if the Third World suddenly became inacessible (with the exception of Saudi Arabia) the 1st World would barely notice. If Africa, for example, suddenly vanished, it would change the economic course of the 1st World almost not at all. Which should not be seen as a laudable moral fact, but it argues strongly against the idea that the comfort is bought at the expense of exploitation in the Third World.

Sebastian: I have a question about your last comment, but don’t want to risk taking this excellent thread off-topic. Would you mind emailing me (scialabb@fas.harvard.edu)?

PS – I’ll understand, though, if you’d rather not.

38: I am gently reproved? Not about me, unless I make it so.

Apologies, if necessary, for a possibly undesired association.

I think America needs a remedial lesson in math. Literal and metaphorical. And it needs to relocate its idea of “freedom” and “liberty” in the real world. We have finite resources. If the few have unchecked powers to hoard the vast majority of those resources, obviously, the rest of humankind is not “free” and does not enjoy “liberty” to do the same, much less partake of those resources in any semblance of a fair or rational manner.

Math.

Marxist theory is great in this regard, because it points out the obvious. The entire point of capitalism is to push surplus value up to the very top of the food chain and keep it there. That means very, very few people “win” and most everyone else “loses”. There is no capitalist transaction that occurs without a winner and many losers. It’s actually impossible to ever get a win/win, if “profit” is a part of the deal.

I recently had a conversation with two coworkers, both of whom identify themselves as “libertarians.” I suggested that there should be a cap on how much CEOs and owners can keep for themselves when it comes to ratio between owners and rank and file. They understand that that ratio has exploded since the 60s, and is now more than 430 to 1, when it used to be roughly 26 to 1. I also told them that Orwell suggested 10 to 1 as a “fair” range.

(I’d probably go with 25 to 1)

They were against the cap, and didn’t really get that the ability of the owner or the CEO to have unlimited wages acts as a cap on rank and file wages (and hiring in and of itself), which have been stagnant since 1973. Why would Americans be okay with a cap on their wages, but find a cap on the rich somehow “unfair”? They see restraints on the rich as unfair, but seem to miss the fact that the rich restrain rank and file wages and freedom and liberty without restraints.

Our current system is a mess, and one of the reasons I’m not very hopeful is because our political conservation is now basically limited to centrist and right wing points of view. We have a centrist president, who would have been a Republican in the 70s, given his policies, and we now have a Republican party that would have been rejected in the past for being the rough equivalent of the Birchers. Market fundamentalism has been embraced by both parties, and it’s now accepted “wisdom” that the government should help spur business growth with more and more tax breaks and more and more deregulation, even though we got into this mess primarily because of voodoo economic theories and Reaganite/Thatcherite deregulation binges. It’s now conventional wisdom to use failed policies to counter the effects of failed policies.

Even in the age of Obama (when we thought things would be different), no one on the MSM could possibly put forth a truly socialist/Marxist POV, even though that is so obviously what is needed. Keynesianism isn’t even given much favor, though Obama did a little bit of it with the Stim package. Too little, of course. We live in a bizarre time when a centrist president, who espouses conservative policies often, is seen as the second coming of Mao by all too many Americans. How can the left fight back when we so clearly see someone to our right being pilloried as a far left radical? When did the center become the radical far left? How is that even possible in a sane nation?

Judging from the tea party/GOP movement, this is not a sane nation at all.

I think our only hope is to play some massive judo. As in, we need super-wealthy lefties — wherever they are — to sacrifice some of their wealth to build left-wing infrastructure on a grand scale. In our age, money talks. No way around that. That money would go toward Media, think tanks, and a third party. We need to use the system to get a foothold and then radically change it. My own desire is for Democratic Socialism, with a mixed economy to fund social justice change. A much larger public sector, and a private sector that, while vibrant, no longer controls the public sector in any way, shape or form. A public sector that ensures a rational distribution of goods and services that meet the fundamental needs of all citizens, from clean air and water, to health care, to education. A dismantling of our empire, an end to the war on drugs, an end to the surveillance regime, a government that gets out of the lives of individuals (is great on civil liberties), but protects the level playing field. It helps create the environment for all of us to achieve our highest heights, regardless of economic status. It sets the table, then gets out of the way, and stays out, as long as the folks at the table can meet and eat on equal terms.

But I don’t think any of that is possible with our two party system. The Dems and the Republicans are committed to inequality. We have to radically alter that dynamic.

Bob McManus @ 29: I think your list is great. Engage with the people who want to hear. At least don’t spend all your time talking to people who don’t want to hear.

Obama is a corporate tool. Else explain why he ordered his grassroots organization to stand aside while he went behind closed doors to -what’s the word for the way the health care bill was handled – to take just one example of corporate tooling.

But the people who voted for him are a majority, assuming the election wasn’t fixed like the last two.

The MSM and the political parties mitigate against any way into the public discussion from the left. Just one example: poll questions tend to ask a simple yes or no on an issue, the health care bill, for example. So those who oppose the bill because it doesn’t go far enough are lumped in with those who are worried about ‘death panels’. We have no voice in a media market where the Dems are the far left. Come on!

We have to change that, but not through the corporate games; we can’t win there, because we don’t own it.

That’s really the problem. They own everything, and they’ve got nukes.

I also agree with not watching the MSM; they never tell you what you need to know.
Some better news sources:

counterpunch. org
informationclearinghouse.org
counterspin.org
fair.org

What he said. #46 Thank you!

Well written post, Mr. Quiggan, and a good follow-up on your previous post, “Hope”. I find the elements layed out in the current post useful in guiding my thoughts, too, about a vision that can inspire hope and, by extension, be a call to constuctive action and problem solving. I only wish I could be, at this time, of greater assistance to you in acomplishing your objective, for I have definite notions and strong feelings on how to proceed. However, I am not, yet, very good at articulating my own intuitions and ideas into a program or set of goals. Your post reminds us all that the left, too, needs to reflect upon it’s ideas in light of recent events. It is not only the Right who’s underlying political and philosophical assumptions need clarification. Beyond that, points 3 and 4, remind us that the way we think about a new program of ideas and actions should be pragmatic and sceptical of “systems”, and open to ideas from opposing camps. I could not agree with you more.

Some of us view current events as fertile ground and as a stimulating opportunity to move towards a more promising future. Some of us feel that the responses by the Obama administration are mostly appropriate in terms of scale in regard to immediate and inherited events, but we are frustrated and saddened that this tremendous investment of resources is employed absent of a as yet unrealized vision of hope. Ideally, efforts to re-employ millions, to reform economic, political, and societal institutions would be done within some definite and hope-inspiring new context. However, the old context is still coming undone(“loosening”), assumptions are surfacing, and appropriate questions are beginning to be formulated. I am not a prophet, but this could be a watershed for all of us. One senses that this, in part, is the work that Mr. Quiggan wishes to address in some way, beginning with his last two posts–a prolegomenon of sorts.

If I am being to presumptive, I apologize. Either way, I’ll continue to monitor this post, continue to feel my way forward on this issue, and hopefully next time I’ll be able to be more specific and constructive in my contribution to this conversation.

Sebastion,

Americans do not really see how their wages have been restrained for nearly forty years, primarily because we have access to cheap goods from the so-called third world. If we lost access to it, that would end. Aside from all of those cheap goods, the bulk of mineral, metal, spice and a host of other commodities comes from there. That was the main reason for European colonization of those areas. Their resource-rich and previously un-exploited lands.

Take all of that away, and all of our expenses instantly skyrocket, and we wouldn’t be able to continue many of our modern practices, because energy sources would be off limits.

We need to face facts. We depend on the third world far more than it depends on us. It’s not even close. It’s always gotten the raw end of the deal. And when a capitalist in the West makes money off the backs of workers in Asia, he or she steals from them in every sense of that word. We all benefit from that theft, from their dirt poor wages, from that colonization going back centuries, and from every single economic transaction that touches the non-white world.

It works by extension. Capitalists rip off American workers and consumers. They rip off foreign workers. We in the West benefit from that ripping off, when we remain inside that equation, even while we’re being ripped off by the same people.

There is no gain without a loss, and workers and the non-rich carry the vast majority of the loss. Within the subset of workers and the non-rich, third worlders carry an inordinate load.

It’s pretty incredible that in 2010, there are still people who don’t see that.

I should have said many leftists.

“There is no gain without a loss, and workers and the non-rich carry the vast majority of the loss. Within the subset of workers and the non-rich, third worlders carry an inordinate load.”

That is perhaps the deadest horse thats been flogged on this thread so far; the paradigmatic zero-sum fallacy. It is wrong on its face because it implies there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world, but we know that people have got much wealthier and live materially better lives than they have done in the past, from a position in which no one had much wealth at all: http://oxlib.blogspot.com/2008/12/tom-palmers-talk.html

As a matter of fact, your story about depredation has plenty of factual accuracy to it. Special and poweful interests both in the West and elsewhere conspire to impose costs and rents on ordinary populations everywhere, but people in the West at least have relatively powerful democratic Governments that pursue some of their materal interests just so long as they don’t get in the way of their own rent seeking. Hence, they are exploited but in turn get to exploit. But: that exploitation and depredation doesn’t explain much at all about how that wealth is created, only how it is seized and distributed by the powerful.

Nick, comparing current levels of overall material “wealth” to the past is bogus. It’s a very old right wing trick to distract people from current realities. It doesn’t matter that we now can buy cell phones when once we couldn’t. What matters is the growing gap between rich and poor and all economic strata today. What matters is the level of inequality we face now, here and now. We can’t do anything about the gap between today and yesterday. We can’t go back and help people in the past catch up to us. But we can make changes today to move toward egalitarian outcomes today and for the future, and we should.

To me, it’s a cheap and cowardly move when the rich try to brainwash the poor and the middle by trumpeting their access to “stuff.” Stuff isn’t wealth in the first place. Stuff doesn’t bring about true freedom and independence. And all of our stuff won’t prevent us falling through the cracks if we get sick and lose our job and our insurance. We may have more material goods now than ever before, but we’re actually more dependent than ever on our paychecks from week to week, and our bosses are racing much further ahead of us all the time in material and physical well being.

The rich live longer, healthier lives in general. They keep taking a larger and larger share of the pie.

And our gains in material goods come at a price. As Norman Mailer wrote in the pages of Dissent in 1959, workers in the 19th century, while exploited more and paid less, at least could go home and not have capitalism follow them there. We can’t today, if we also buy all of that “stuff” you seem to think makes us “wealthy.” Capitalism follows us home. It gets into our house through the TV, the radio, the Internet our cell phones, and all our gadgets. We are collectivized at work and collectivized at home by capitalism. It’s getting harder and harder to escape. Pretty soon, we’ll all be walking with our personalized advertisements wherever we go, like that scene in “Minority Report.”

There is a huge difference between real wealth and “stuff.” I think you’re confusing the two, badly.

I think the number of people likely to be persuaded by the Rich Puchalskys of the world could be counted on the fingers of one hand, with a strict definition of “thumb.”

If the Left is not going to be a self-satisfied club of internet super friends, I think there’s going to have to be a little more caring and a little less self-satisfaction. I have seen Sebastian’s comments here and there for years, and if *he* is finding a mature leftism worthy of attention, then that is a very good sign. Not, I contend, an opportunity for territorial pissing.

The fact is that, for various reasons (n.b. the remarks about the media above), very few people in America, at least, have any clue what “the Left” really thinks or has to offer, so that its spot in our mental space is filled with ideological caricatures. One can always say “oh, use the internet,” but there are obvious difficulties in educating oneself on such a subject from a position of near-total ignorance, and most of us — this should be a valid point in any discussion of leftist politics, I trust — have day jobs. Some (apocryphal?) materialist critic once remarked that Tom Jones is inescapably bourgeois simply because the average person has no time to read anything that long. Leaving the merits of his aesthetics aside, it would surely be a valuable leftist goal to descend from the mountaintop?

That’s why I’m happy to see this post & thread, and looking forward to more posts on this topic (esp. Henry’s post on relevant reading). If the entire blog starts to move in this direction, it will have a great potential to offer something, AFAIK, “materially” different. Tho heaven knows, don’t lose the snark entirely. Keeps us sane in an insane world, some days.

Yes, the left could—and should—work on producing a larger, coherent political vision, but on a number of the most vital issues we face—e.g. healthcare, climate change, civil liberties, torture—the more pressing problem isn’t that we don’t have solutions, but that those solutions are systematically marginalized by our political system and our political culture.

Got it in one. That’s why this meme “I was wrong but for the right reasons” is so nasty. I recall that McArdle at one point magnanimously admitted that she and others like her were wrong (for all the right reasons of course) about Saddam having WMD’s . . . and then she was quite obviously and genuinely taken aback that, rather than acknowledge her generostiy, a good chunk of the readers were outright peeved. We ignorantly thought that to the victor went the spoils (that’s what the right had been saying for years at any rate), and that being right about something so visible and so high stakes would – ha ha – entitle us to having a seat at the table with the grownups. Didn’t happen, of course.

Because, after all, politics is just about who gets how much of what (sound familiar?) And that is where you make pragmatic connections. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs. When you can connect “liberalism” with that simple mantra, you’ll get a lot of the little people on your side.

“….the left has no coherent vision or program of action, incremental, organic, or otherwise (cf. Brown’s Labour, Obama’s Democrats).

Obama and the Democrats are not The Left. They aren’t even ‘left.’ They only seem that way because, as some have pointed out above, this country is so reactionary, and the public sphere is dominated by the right. The Congress is a bad joke, a wholly-owned subdidiary of multi-national corporations. Barack Obama works for Goldman Sachs. They’ve backed him from his first campaign for the Senate, and they gave him at least a million dollars for his presidential campaign.

The statement excerpted above, isn’t true. There are people working every day to implement a coherent vision that is incremental, organic and otherwise. They just can’t get much traction in this mess.

I agree with Alice here, but I’d like to add to what she says. What kind of “coherent vision or program of action” is the left supposed to have that is more coherent than what it does have? I see another two-sided trap here — either the left is going to be described as hopelessly vague, or as some kind of vanguard party working off of doctrine.

Remember, the electoral rules in the U.S. effectively mean that there can only be two parties, and the one that wins has to get something near 50% of the vote. (In years, unlike Clinton’s, when there isn’t a third party in the process of flaming out.) Obama won. Therefore, he appealed to people somewhere near the 50% line. Unless he’s a rare President who actually willing to lead, which he decidedly is not, he can’t be the leader for “the left”. What he does can not be what “the left” does.

Personally, I’m very much in favor of the lesser of evils, because people suffer whenever the lesser of evils is rejected in favor of some long shot, or, worse, in favor of disengagement. (If the long shot isn’t really long — well, then, it becomes the lesser evil.) I voted for Obama as the lesser evil, and would do so again. Although I wouldn’t vote for him in the primary over Clinton again: I don’t think she would have issued an assassination order. But whatever: “the left” has to support Obama in some fashion, because the alternatives are worse. That does not make Obama’s Democrats the left in America.

The media are multinational corporations. Last I looked, something like 20 companies own 90% of all mass media in the USA. This may have something to do why so many reactionaries can make a career out of spouting lies and nonsense. And why almost no leftists appear on it. So I’m not sure where productive debates between leftists and liberals will occur.

Pr Q said:

there is very little remaining on the political right (particularly in the US, but this point applies to most of the English-speaking countries, and to a large extent elsewhere) that is worth engaging with in terms other than the derision employed here…The same goes for the thinktanks and quasi-academic institutions…

and the various other elements that have emerged or re-emerged as forces on the right – Christianism, aggressive nationalism, anti-feminism and so on – amount to little more than a tribalist set of hatreds of various others.

…Practitioners of this kind of managerialist quasi-social democracy have found themselves unable to handle the challenge posed by the irrationalist right, whether in the form of Tea Parties and militias in the US, or slick advocates of xenophobia like Pim Fortuyn in Europe.

You were going along quite nicely until you lost me with the knee-jerk liberal reaction to “the various other elements that have re-emerged as forces on the Right”. If you want to seriously engage with the non-liberal side you will need to honestly appraise the faults, falsities and fallacies the Left-liberal side. “Practioners of managerialist quasi-social democracy” bear some of the responsibility for these policy failures.

Lumping every criticism of the failed/stalled Left-liberal cultural agenda into the “tribalist hatred of others” nut-job grab-bag just won’t wash any more, either amongst competent life scientists or the general public. Left-liberals need to improve their own scientific and political game or the attempt to kick start progressive politics will suffer “failure to launch”.

Shorter summary of the Culture War: dumb Left-wing cultural minority policy calls forth nasty Right-wing cultural majority politics. Longer summary to follow:

Its a bit rich to accuse people like Pim Fortuyn or Theo van Gogh of “slick advocacy of xenophobia” when they wound up being killed (!) for their beliefs by assorted diversity celebrants. Exactly who is guilty of “tribalist hatred of others” here? Their ghosts might plausibly claim that assassination is grounds for “phobia” about some “xenos”.

More generally, if one wants a progressive polity then one needs to immigrate or inculcate progressive-minded people – and firmly oblige them to conform to civilised community standards. Thats obviously not working out in many parts of EU, for any one bothering to observe at mean street level.

Its pretty lame to put up some flimsy contrivance called “Christianism” as morally equivalent with Islamism. Apart from the contained (and now answered) “Irish Question”, modern Christians have not practised fundamentalist religious terrorism, not counting the occasional odd-balls running around American forests in cam suits. Who have not yet gone through the formality of actually blowing anything up.

There are some devout Christians who are guilty of having an old-fashioned view on personal morality. They include many of the readers grand-parents, who perhaps know a thing or two about bringing up children. Perhaps they “hate others”. More likely they just yearn for a quiet time, which does not seem too much to ask at their stage of life.

Likewise, “anti-feminism” is an ideological offence whose prosecution will cause more hate than it will cure. It will also keep the thought-police busy rounding up most of the pre-menopausal female gender, going by the allergic reaction that girls-about-town and child-less career women have to being designated as “feminists”.

Second-wave feminism more or less ran out of useful things to do around the mid-eighties, once child-care centres, domestic violence safe-houses and work-place anti-harassment programs were up and running. Since then “feminism” presents as the degenerating farce of womyn’s studies, “raunch culture”, “riot grrl” and palimony bonanzas. Its tendentious to brand as “misogynous” those tactless enough to point out that “feminism” has now gone beyond the point of diminishing returns, as biological clocks began their race against time during the endless “[Alpha] man drought”.

Pr Q seems to have overlooked indigenous affairs and gay rights. He was wise to not open the former can of worms, which was “tribalist” alright but not the sort he was referring to. As to the latter, as a self-appointed spokesman for cultural conservatism I will come out for gay marriage. Marriage certainly keeps formerly single men on the straight and narrow. Logically that goes double for two gay bachelors.

Have we missed anything? Oh yes, “aggressive nationalism”. I guess this is a liberal code word for those citizens who favour strict “border protection” by the authorities legally entrusted with this job. That demographic encompasses 55-75% of the voting population, depending on the porousness of borders at any stage and the latest outrages by illegal aliens. Undoubtedly some “tribalist other-haters” there.

But there are some painfully re-constructed liberals who are looking to un-recontructed liberals for some sign that recent lessons have been learned. Especially the old one that national citizenship is still the foundation of civil statehood. Until that is forthcoming I suggest that “defensive nationalists” would be a fairer nomenclature.

No one is suggesting we roll back the cultural clock to 1965. But nudging it a lot closer to 1985 would be a start. Otherwise there will “be little point” in treating Left-liberal pretensions to progressivism “in terms other than…derision”.

“and of course the infamous coltan…”

Moving deftly off topic…..not really. While coltan (“columbo-tantalite”) is important to the feeding of the violence in Eastern Congo/Rwanda etc in terms of global availability of either tantalum or niobium it’s irrelevant. The vast majority of supply comes from Brazil, Australia (from the delightfully named mineral wodginite) and Quebec. The global metals industry would hardly notice the lack of supply from central Africa.

About the only people who would would be the people fingerprinting the stuff (analysing the residual elements in the coltan to see where it comes from) to try and stop the so called “blood coltan” entering the supply chain.

Anarcho, I think you’re right in argueing that anarchism is not a dead horse and that the left is wrong in not engaging in that thinking (if anything it is a good path towards some of what John had in his point 4). But I think you’re wrong to stress the revolutionary and moralizing element out of that tradition as examples. This anti-authoritarian (and hence anti-democratic-nations) feeling is quite compatible with the optimism of breaking down power institutions (mainly now big multi-national firms and some non-wellfare state agencies) and leaving a remainder for the administration (e.g. regulation of finance industries) on the principle that no organization is to be big enough to pay for the lobbying that is required to remove restrictions to it growing. The insistence on localization, grass roots movements and participative democracy inhibits a sane, and global, administration of what we have grown to see as minimal elements of the free human society: individual rights, social protection, limitation of working hours, …. and the temporary nature of any position of power. On most of these things there is such a general agreement that it is no longer a part of election campaigns (in the rich West, admittedly), which means that the election campaigns or more and more just a selection of a temporary administrator.

Anyway, probably most of what I said is wrong, but at least it would be good to leave the basic framework of political discussion of the XXth century – proposing something really new is the only function of the left. It all went downhill when the focus became the protection of the old.

Its pretty lame to put up some flimsy contrivance called “Christianism” as morally equivalent with Islamism. Apart from the contained (and now answered) ”Irish Question”, modern Christians have not practised fundamentalist religious terrorism, not counting the occasional odd-balls running around American forests in cam suits. Who have not yet gone through the formality of actually blowing anything up.

You may well be interested to know that Eric Rudolph a) was a modern Christian b) was an odd-ball c) ran around American forests and d) blew things up. (I am unaware of his state of dress while doing so.)
You may also have heard of the Ku Klux Klan and its views on Catholics and Jews. Or you may not.

In the full knowledge of OT-ness, @69 – but the chocolate, think about the chocolate!

And if Africa is so unimportant, why is China buying so much of it, eh, eh?

Meanwhile, I thought I’d come back to something Rich Pulasky said above; if “this isn’t a thread about convincing people”, what is it about? because the only alternative to convincing people is forcing them. And how the hell are you going to do that?

Right now the “Left”, in any meaningful actually-proposing-structural-change sense, is an electoral force so insignificant that it barely registers. There are a lot of European social-democratic types that talk a good game, but generally turn out to be more interested in safeguarding the sweetheart deals of a powerfully-unionised minority than actually challenging capitalism. In the Anglosphere, nothing but the proverbial groupuscules.

(I’m not exactly sure what symbolic role careful reading plays in Rich’s politics of the dickish-civil spectrum, but the alex and the Alex who post regularly on CT are different people with rather different politics: Alex hasn’t posted so far on this thread…)

Couldn’t Burke also be considered one of the founding figures of modern agnotology, in his mystifications about the nature of revolutionary “Jacobinism”? Burke may be “historicist,” but his “history” is not to be taken at face value.

“It means that any mention of this observable fact means that they are arrogant.”

No. You being arrogant is observable by other means. And additionally “You: wrong about everything. DFHs: oh they’re so mean—right about everything” is pretty much as fundamentalist/arrogant as it gets.

pretty much as fundamentalist/arrogant as it gets

“Ressentiment,” Nietzsche called it. Beautifully exemplified here.

(I’m still boggling at the idea of a political movement whose slogan is, “it’s not our job to educate you.” Only on the internet!)

5) If you feel compelled to visit the right or center, do so with middle finger extended.

So after a week of harping on the Right for “epistemic closure,” the trend of this thread is to copy them?

On the media platform front, one striking difference about Canada is our Rupert Murdoch, Izzy Asper, is a Liberal. A right-leaning, libertarian Liberal, but a Liberal nonetheless.

I’m no American historian (so feel free to angrily correct me and disparage my mother) but looking at how the great liberal achievements were accomplished is more depressing than not. The New Deal came at a time when an actual Communist revolution was not unthinkable. I can be less glib about the Civil Rights Act/Great Society, but it was certainly a time of social unrest. (And it did include top-bracket tax cuts.)

I read such comments as expressing merely a lack of interest in the (hopeless) task of educating right-wing ideologues

The comment I criticized was in response to a comment by a right-winger who was sounding rather disenchanted with right-wing ideology, and who was pleasantly surprised to hear that any points by Burke or Hayek are taken seriously by the left. Perhaps because, as I and others have noted, not many people actually know what’s happening on the left. Maybe that’s because of this quaint notion that leftists write only for fellow leftists, and that any curious person coming from a different political persuasion had better bugger off.

Unfortunately, I think that Mr. Puchalsky and his cohort are only too successful at discouraging interest in leftist politics, and may well have scored another success here.

Since both Anarcho and I have mentioned Bakunin now, it may be worth while to look back and see what part of his project is salvageable. I agree with JoB that “it would be good to leave the basic framework of political discussion of the XXth century” — the left, at least as I understand it, is not about rehashing old ideas — but Bakunin in his conflict with Marx was pretty much right, wasn’t he? Anything that helps the left jettison the relic of Marxism is all to the good, as far as I’m concerned. There’s nothing worse than a historical science of human development that is not a science.

Going back to “God and the State”, it’s useful — although Bakunin writes like someone writing in a comment thread, which to me is a point in his favor — because it really is a coherent attack on technocratic liberalism as well as the right. There are all sorts of problems with it, of course. He’s writing in the 19th century, and the piece has the standard ration (well, less than some) of 19th century racism. More troublingly, it also has a 19th century belief in a sort of evolutionary progress that is not supported by actual evolution as a model. When people evolved out of other hominids, that wasn’t part of a natural progression upwards to a more perfect state. This implicitly does a lot of work, for Bakunin, in implying a degree of basic agreement among the people in an anarchy that avoids some of the difficult questions about how disagreements are going to be resolved.

What’s useful about it? Well, it’s an optimistic view of individual human potential. If we manage to avoid some kind of global ecological catastrophe, the future course of civilization in general is going to be something like as described in Hirsch’s _Social Limits To Growth_. Physical wealth is going to be less and less of a limiting factor. (Well, people in the U.S. are attempting to keep it so, in order to keep people working at crap jobs, but they have to go through more and more absurd contortions in order to do so.) Relative social rewards are really going to preoccupy more people.

And that’s a very bad situation for a technocracy in which the basic purpose of people with specialized knowledge is to tell other people what to do. The ideals from something like Bakunin would usefully inform the left, I think, as we try to transition to a society in which everyone has an empowered life.

“(I’m still boggling at the idea of a political movement whose slogan is, “it’s not our job to educate you.” Only on the internet!)”

Anderson’s view here is that the individuals posting on this thread constitute a political movement, and that their reluctance to be concern-trolled is a perfect reflection of the public relations of that movement.

Anderson, you’ve contributed nothing to this thread, except for repeatedly trying to derail it. If you want to try to turn it into yet another rendition of “Oh yeah people would totally consider leftist ideas if they weren’t so mean”, then you can, of course, but other people can judge you by the evident results of what you write rather than by your stated intent.

Rich, I was pointing away from Bakunin for the very reasons you highlight. It is optimism that’s needed (yes, progress) not some kind of nostalgia for ‘pure’ original feelings (with an associated tendency to be rather uncivilized about, well, about anything really).

(and now this is going to become one of those Rich/Steve/Barry threads, quite apt in a thread in which title the concept ‘dead horses’ appears ;-) – so I’m outta here!)

Just starting Tony Judt’s new book, Ill Fares the Land, and he puts things so well, I find my own writings on the subject quite inadequate in comparison.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/apr/08/ill-fares-the-land/?pagination=false

An excerpt:

Something is profoundly wrong with the way we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling or a legislative act: Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society or a better world? Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them.

The materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life is not inherent in the human condition. Much of what appears “natural” today dates from the 1980s: the obsession with wealth creation, the cult of privatization and the private sector, the growing disparities of rich and poor. And above all, the rhetoric that accompanies these: uncritical admiration for unfettered markets, disdain for the public sector, the delusion of endless growth.

We cannot go on living like this. The little crash of 2008 was a reminder that unregulated capitalism is its own worst enemy: sooner or later it must fall prey to its own excesses and turn again to the state for rescue. But if we do no more than pick up the pieces and carry on as before, we can look forward to greater upheavals in years to come.

And yet we seem unable to conceive of alternatives. This too is something new. Until quite recently, public life in liberal societies was conducted in the shadow of a debate between defenders of “capitalism” and its critics: usually identified with one or another form of “socialism.” By the 1970s this debate had lost much of its meaning for both sides; all the same, the “left–right” distinction served a useful purpose. It provided a peg on which to hang critical commentary about contemporary affairs.

A key finding in his book so far is that inequality itself produces terrible things, like increased crime, murder, reduced longevity, ill health overall, etc. etc. He takes much of his factual data from a recent book by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level. Right now, the united States, the UK and Ireland have far higher levels of inequality and much poorer records regarding health, longevity, crime, etc, etc,. than nations with less inequality like Norway, Sweden and Japan. The correlation is inescapable.

I’m tired of having every such discussion immediately turned into “But how will we convince people? If we can’t convince people, then all of this is useless.” Rather than being an isolated idealist, I’ve spent some parts of my working career working with DC-based nonprofits. Not as a public spokesperson, of course; I don’t have the right temperament for it.

As a famous dead person once said, “Grab them by the balls and their hearts and minds will follow.” I have no reason to disbelieve this nor the ever-applicable “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Depressing how often someone’s co-worker who is an absolute bastard suddenly becomes a great guy when they’re promoted to a position of authority over the person making the former criticisms.

Iow, reason will only get you so far. Even emotive sloganeering palls after a while. What you need to do is appeal people’s survival instincts with respect to their livelihood. If you can somehow convince people that your program will put a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage, you’re 90% there.

Socialism is freedom. That people see it as the opposite continues to puzzle me.

Our current system breeds massive inequality. How is a person born into poverty free in the same sense as someone born into wealth? How is a person who sees nothing but poverty around him or her, from the day they were born, free? Their environment locks in that unfreedom. Their schools are the worst in the land. Their access to health care and good nutrition the worst in the land. Their “prospects” the worst in the land. How is that person “free”?

We can create an environment of freedom by ensuring that everyone starts out with the necessary tools to make the most of their individual gifts. They are then much further along the road to freedom than if they receive no aid, despite their massive handicaps.

Socialism, basically, should get all kids up to the same starting line. I don’t believe in forcing equal results. I think that is bound to create new inequalities. But I do believe we need to force equal opportunities as much as possible, through providing the same tools for all Americans from birth, and there is no faster or more efficient way of doing that than through education and health care. Clean environments, access to safe, fast transportation, access to great museums, libraries and cultural centers follow closely upon that.

Socialism has great potential for increasing real “freedom” throughout the world. Unchecked capitalism has no such potential. It guarantees inequality, which means unfreedom for most people and freedom for a few.

“…there is very little remaining on the political right (particularly in the US, but this point applies to most of the English-speaking countries, and to a large extent elsewhere) that is worth engaging with in terms other than the derision employed here….”

The unfettered arrogance of Americans and their worldview…

“He takes much of his factual data from a recent book by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level.”

That probably isn’t a great place to take much of your factual data from. The book strongly critiqued:

Andrew Leigh

Lane Kenworthy

Tino Sanandaji

The most interesting critique being that Wilkinson and Pickett are right in their initial diagnosis (that it involves stress levels which changes eating habits and metabolic reactions to eating) but wrong about what causes the differences in stress (their thesis is that it is inequality but numerous other possibilities exist).

Well said, John, especially on defeatism. A defining example, it seems to me, is that in the United States, much of the left has surrendered to its opponents the ownership claim to freedom. I don’t see how you avoid a contest over the meaning of the word, given its place in the American vernacular. But contesting “freedom” will require some form of positive vision.

Perhaps there should be some posts on the varieties of left defeatism?

Cuchulain, sometimes I forget your point that the obvious is also helpful (hanging sometimes with the wrong crowd, is my excuse). And the basic openness and seeking-out all those other parts of the world.

What I also feel about a fundamental alteration in our world, where knowledge and familiarity with another culture and a strange language will be a mark of pride and prestige, and the narrowness we see in academia today will be nothing but an unpleasant reminder of a barbaric past–this is all utopian, I realize that. Better to put it the way you did, but I guess the point is the same.

“Facts are facts. Countries with less inequality produce healthier societies, individuals with longer lives, less crime and more social cohesion. Those are the facts.”

Those aren’t the facts. You clearly didn’t read the links. They were straight up statistical analysis of the facts.

See for example:

Blogger Danne Nordling pointed out a strange fact about the book. Its measure of inequality, the most important factor in the book, is not gini, the standard inequality result. They seem to use 20/20 richest and poorest ratio. Why make this strange choice, when their source (UN Human Development Index) has gini? I smell data mining.

First for fun I did a simple regression of life expectancy on income inequality and per capita GDP for all countries the UN has data for. The correlation between inequality and health is not statistically significant.

Second I approximately redid the exercise in their book, I did a regression of inequality as measures by Gini and life expectancy for 28 OECD countries, again from the UN HDI. The result is not only that it again is not statistically significat, income inequality is positively correlated with life expectancy!

and

I’m about as anti-inequality an economist as you’ll find. But my own empirical work on the issue has convinced me that when you look at within-country changes, the picture that emerges is very different to what you see when you look at a snapshot across countries over time. For example, it’s certainly true that in unequal countries, lifespans are shorter and infant mortality is higher. But here’s what you get if you compare changes in inequality with changes in mortality (from a paper with Tim Smeeding and Christopher Jencks).

Yup, the graph slopes up. In other words, countries that experienced big increases in inequality saw bigger improvements in health than those where inequality stayed stable or fell. In most cases, the effect isn’t significant, but the data certainly don’t support the hypothesis that rising inequality harms population health.

From a policy standpoint, specifications based on changes must surely be more compelling than specifications based on cross-country snapshots at a point in time. Australia can never literally become the Netherlands, but we can see what happens when our level of inequality rises and theirs falls.

After working on inequality and mortality, I have had similar experiences in looking at data on inequality and savings with Alberto Posso (we find no relationship), and in looking at inequality and growth with Dan Andrews and Christopher Jencks (we find that inequality has no impact on growth over the period 1905-2000, and conclude that inequality is good for growth over the period 1960-2000). In both cases, I had begun the project secretly hoping to find that inequality was bad, and wound up reluctantly reporting no such thing.

Those are straight up, factual criticisms of the book.

@Nico

Nico asked, “I think if lefties presented their ideas in the spirit of humanity and intellectual generosity, many people would be open for a fruitful dialog and even alliance on many issues. ..Am I missing something? Am I being naive?”

Answer: Yes.

Reading Sebastian’s links I notice one viewpoint they seem to share is that it is only Wilkinson who is making these claims, that it’s some staggeringly original and novel viewpoint (one author even describes it as an ‘extraordinary claim’ requiring ‘extraordinary evidence’ (!)), and that the only source of information backing up the claims is Wilkinson and Pickett’s book.

But none of these claims are true. In fact, people have been making the ‘inequality is bad for you’ argument for years (if not decades). For example, cf Marmot’s The Status Syndrome. And both these books have bibliographies, drawing on numerous papers in peer-reviewed journals. And that’s because it’s simply common sense. The ‘extraordinary claim’ requiring ‘extraordinary evidence’ is not that inequality is bad for ‘us’, it’s that inequality is good for ‘us’. Now that might be true. But the burden of proof lies on the ‘pro-inequality’ side, not the ‘other’ side.

And I should add that it’s almost always a popularization that’s chosen for such treatment, because that makes it easy to pretend that the scholarly work underlying the popular book doesn’t exist.

“Yes, the tiny leftist minority can spend time and effort deciding what it ought to do, but if one of its priorities isn’t to come up with a meaningful plan for making the other 99.9% of the population give a damn, you really are wasting your time. What might be the plan for making people care about the information Cuchulain cites enough to do something about it? And why do you think that is not a good question to ask […]”

So, unless we can come up with a plan within this comment thread, we should just be quiet?

I think that you aren’t getting it, alex. Some people work on politics 9-5, every workday. It’s real work. If you want people to make plans for how to convince a broad base of people that the left should be listened to in this media environment, well, that is what those people are hired to do, or supported by their comrades (ooh, bad word I know) to do. Who has shifted the media environment, even slightly? Well, let’s take Duncan Black for example. Sure, he started out blogging on his own time, but once he proved he could do it, he got a job doing it.

The responsibility of the people commenting here is not to come up with a plan. That’s sort of like saying “Hey, you think something should be done about global warming? Then you have to come up with a plan for how the economy is going to be converted, because without that, it’s never going to happen.” Well, no. An economist like John Quiggin can work on that. Telling Jane Blog Commenter that she has to do it doesn’t do anything.

What it does do is close down the only thing that blog commenters as blog commenters reasonably have to offer — their opinions and ideas about where the movement should be going, about what it should be.

Sean G. I’m very skeptical of the state as well. But I view the private sector with alarm. The state at least has the potential to respond to the wishes of the public. A real democracy at least has the potential to “socialize” our collective dreams, goals and aspirations. There is no such chance for capitalism. Its goal is purely selfish. Its goal is to maximize profit for ownership. Workers are just means to that end. There is no democracy in capitalism, and few entities are more authoritarian or hierarchical than a business.

From Tony Judt’s new book: The CEO of Walmart makes 900 times as much as the rank and file there. The Walton family is now worth roughly 90 billion dollars. That’s as much as the total holdings of the bottom 40% of Americans. As in, the Walton family is worth as much as 120 MILLION Americans combined.

We as a nation have no say in what Walmart does, or the rich in general, and they have far too much say in our lives. In a real democracy, the state would negate that radical inequality of power and wealth. Rather than letting a tiny portion of the nation call all the shots, it would ensure that everyone had an equal voice. The many would rule, instead of the few.

Another interesting comparison. Our government has, by far, the most egalitarian wage structure in the nation. The top end is roughly in the 250K range, and rank and file government workers make in the 50 or 60K range. Overall, the ratio is roughly 5 to 1, management to rank and file.

In the largest 100 corporations, it’s more than 1000 to 1 and 430 to 1 overall.

It makes sense to be skeptical of the state, definitely. But I think the evidence tells us we should be far more skeptical of unchecked capitalism. I think the smartest setup is a mixed economy, with Democratic Socialism being the frame. Nationalization of certain big ticket sectors, a bigger Commons overall, and set of sensible guidelines and laws to govern the private sector. A vibrant public and private mix.

I also think the government, in that case, should never spend one penny of public money unless it is in the direct and explicit interest of that public. Our vote. Our decision. And I would also keep as much as I could in house, when it came to goods and services. If outside contracts were necessary and desirable, I would give first dibs to non-profits, because it’s never made a lick of sense to me why we taxpayers should be supporting the lavish lifestyles of billionaires. The government should maximize its investment by not paying for mega-salaries and massive profits in the deal. Do what is right for the public in every single case, and do so efficiently and rationally.

What you need to do is appeal people’s survival instincts with respect to their livelihood. If you can somehow convince people that your program will put a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage, you’re 90% there.

Not if you’re trying to agitate within a relatively prosperous developed economy, it won’t.

Where we would disagree, perhaps, is whether we (Americans) are living in a prosperous economy. Right now, conservatives and fear rule the day and people are keeping their heads down during this economic storm because while they’re taking on water right now and aren’t exactly happy about it, they’re terrified of being capsized outright. If “liberals” could run ahead of that and say that while they can’t promise that anyone can become a millionaire under their program, they can at least promise that voters will find and retain good jobs. That’s the problem with these get-rich-quick schemes the Republicans keep coming up with: yeah, when things are safe, people feel like taking risks. But the reality is that most people will trade a shot at the brass ring for sleepy security in a second. I’m employed in academia, for example, and friends who were crowing about their great jobs in the private sector just five years ago now look at me with envy and ask how they can get on the gravy train too. Oh, and they frankly admit they were idiots too.

From Tony Judt’s new book: The CEO of Walmart makes 900 times as much as the rank and file there. The Walton family is now worth roughly 90 billion dollars. That’s as much as the total holdings of the bottom 40% of Americans. As in, the Walton family is worth as much as 120 MILLION Americans combined.

We as a nation have no say in what Walmart does, or the rich in general, and they have far too much say in our lives. In a real democracy, the state would negate that radical inequality of power and wealth. Rather than letting a tiny portion of the nation call all the shots, it would ensure that everyone had an equal voice. The many would rule, instead of the few.

Yeah, that’s the problem with “capitalism” as practiced in the United States: I have absolutely no objection to anyone earning millions or hundreds of millions of dollars (provided that they actually earn it.) The problem is that instead of confining themselves to toys and concerns like funding museums, these people will turn around and use their wealth to leverage political influence.

Not cool.

I have absolutely no objection to anyone earning millions or hundreds of millions of dollars (provided that they actually earn it.)

I have no objection to people eating meat, as long as it doesn’t come from an animal.

That’s right – Angelo Mozilo and Dicky Fuld earned every penny of their compensation despite presiding over companies that lost billions during their tenure. And of course, rent seeking never happens – the free market prevents it ;-)

“If Africa, for example, suddenly vanished, it would change the economic course of the 1st World almost not at all.”

Except for the oil. And the metals. And the diamonds.

Oil, depends on whether you’re talking about Africa or the Third World, and how you define that. Diamonds, I think Russia and Canada could meet the demand for industrial use. Metals? No.

“zero-sum fallacy”
You have heard of the laws of thermodynamics, no?

And for your next trick, will you be applying Kepler’s laws to the Three Estates?

The Raven,

Stalin wasn’t a socialist. At least not a Democratic Socialist, which is what I mean when I use the word.

I think people associate the word, as you did, with its worst examples, which aren’t really examples of socialism at all. Totalitarianism can grow out of anything, and it actually has more fertile ground in capitalism than in real socialism, IMO. I think we Americans are a strange lot in that we only fear authoritarianism from one root, basically. And I think that’s a part of our conditioning. Our society has conditioned people to choose a team, rather than choose our own personal and collective best interests. Capitalism is perhaps unique in that it pushes us into missing the connection between the personal and the collective, and how important they are to each other. Throw in our American sense of “self-reliance” and exceptionalism, and you have a recipe for blindness all the way round.
The other team then becomes the source of all that is wrong with the world, and we are blinded by that.

To me, from a logical and rational POV, socialism provides the best framework for freedom and liberty and far better results along a host of metrics. Health, education, etc. etc. It fits in far more naturally with the natural connection between the personal and the public.

It’s all in how it’s done, of course. I think a mixed economy brings us the best of both worlds. A lopsidedness toward one team or the other creates far too many contradictions, disharmonies and inequalities. I think that lopsidedness is where all the trouble starts . . . and right now, the United States, the UK and Ireland, especially, are tilting way too far to the right, to market fundamentalism, and toward collapse. Again.

I don’t want to get involved in a spat with Rich and others on whether Bakunin was right (he wasn’t ;)) or whatever, so let me just post a link to a very good analysis in the new International Socialism

Raven @123: Improvements in information technology have vitiated Hayek’s critique of comprehensive planning. Information is no longer local any more, except in some very special cases.

Hayek’s critique is certainly much weaker than often supposed, but it does have some force, in the absence of some actual concrete illustration of how such planning is to be carried out in a way that takes proper account of individuals’ changing needs and preferences, (and, so far as this is actually applicable, avoids the supposed complacency etc that is supposed to accompany the absence of market ‘discipline’).

Not that this is necessarily a very difficult task, it’s just that it doesn’t (so far as my unfocussed and sporadic research can tell) get done very much, or in much detail.

In “An idea of justice”, Amartya Sen contrasts two ideas of justice: (a) just institutions (“let the world perish so long as justice is done”); and (b) just outcomes (“how does the world go?”).

Perhaps a similar comparison applies to capitalism. Much of modern capitalism is concerned with promoting good institutions, regardless of outcomes. But capitalism has an older tradition (of which Adam Smith is an early founding member) which is concerned with promoting good outcomes.

I’d like to see a version of capitalism that cares about outcomes, and engages in a reasoned debate on which outcomes are “more just” than other outcomes, accepting that we are unlikely to achieve perfectly just outcomes.

I think Hayek’s point about local information is important, but there is a place for centralization. Otherwise, there are too many opportunities for arbitrage on a variety of levels. Perfect centralization may be impossible, but that doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time to try.

Tim W., I think, emphasizes getting financing at the expense of the other factors involved in setting up a new firm, and overemphasizes the centralized nature of financing. There are plenty of local VC firms, for example, who can invest using more local information (at least there were plenty until a couple of years ago).

Coming in rather late, but I got a lot out of the discussion so far.

Comments by Puchalsky, that politics is a real kind of work and we need to acknowledge this, and by jdw @100, that we are looking too narrowly at a Euro-American-Australian framework, especially struck me. In fact, even if you don’t read any non-European languages, just paying a lot more attention to the affairs of the day outside of Europe would, I think, drastically change the picture that I see people painting here. An awful lot is published in English (see: http://www.juancole.com ).

So far I think the discussion has remained too much at the level of abstraction and concern with economic issues in an overly narrow sense, and too disengaged from other issues, especially cultural issues. I think people here have mostly, implicitly, subscribed to the idea that what the left has to offer the public (American public especially) is prosperity, and progress on cultural issues is a kind of payoff we get for delivering prosperity. Instead, why not think of our main goal as creating a kind of cultural ideal? If there is anything that the left has an advantage in, it’s cultural capital, and we’ve been winning a lot of those fights, at least we have when we’re united. In the same way that conservatives deliver “family values” and “freedom” as a brand that signifies (among other things) white privilege and a comfortable, patriarchal social order, we need to have the confidence to assert our own vision and expect that people will be drawn to it. Because they often have, and they will.

Inflaming the culture war has been a main strategy of right-wing politics, but it is a strategy that is slowly but surely getting weaker, at least in its current incarnation in the US. Homophobia is increasingly becoming unacceptable, and Latinos are a growing demographic, which the right is increasingly alienating. Not to say that racism and misogyny are disappearing, but the specific position which the right has been, and for some time will still be forced to maintain by the Christianist far-right, are increasingly out of touch with majority opinion. Time is on our side, here.

One of the main culture war strategies that is still effective is the GWOT. What about that? That has been a main force pushing the whole US political spectrum to the right in the past decade and more, and it remains important. I think most people seriously underestimate how much of the construction of the GWOT in the media and in the cultural sphere it is actually driven by a very particular set of interests (at least in the US): the Israel lobby (or lobbies). While large corporations who benefit from wars are a major funding source for neoconservative think tanks that have had such prominence in the public discourse on Islam and the Muslim world, they would be crippled without the social capital provided by the large number of both influential and not-so-influential, but motivated, people who feel a strong connection to the state of Israel, and are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Philip Weiss, journalist-blogger at http://www.mondoweiss.net and his colleagues have been writing on how special concern for Israel has dominated coverage of the Middle East in the New York Times. Weiss’ tone is often quite confrontational, and reading the blog often has the feel of eavesdropping on an old family quarrel (sometimes I think Weiss intends, actually), but I think he’s confronting a very important inconvenient truth. The consistent deference to Israeli views by many writers has extremely far-reaching effects for how foreign policy is discussed in the US. All the recent concern with Iran’s nuclear program is one case that is prominent and visible, but it goes beyond this one issue. Making serious progress towards peace between Israelis and Palestinians, and towards a viable Palestinian state (or coming to terms with eventually having a binational state), or at least taking a lot of steam out of the Israel-right-or-wrong cause by achieving a greater general awareness of the issue, would take away a huge source of Islamophobia and anti-Middle East hysteria in the American press, and really hurt the war party as we know it in a fundamental way.

Here too I think there’s a constitutional defect in the left, where we promote this ideal of “liberty”, according to which the goal is to make government into something like a machine that requires as little intervention from the public as possible, so we are free to go on living our lives. This is strictly-speaking more of a libertarian mentality than a liberal or leftist one, but I think we on the left often (unwittingly?) subscribe to it too. Instead of making simply “free collaboration” our goal, as Sage Ross @22 put it, we should come to terms with social obligation and recognition of our social obligations, whatever the larger social and economic situation of people around us is, as a thing we value, and not a necessary evil by which we ameliorate the deleterious effect of concentration of wealth on the politics of liberal democracies. We should make it a keystone of our political strategy to promote a culture of engagement and responsibility. People want to like their neighbors, I think, and we can use this to our advantage. My sense among American leftists is that most at least believe or accept this as a principle, but I don’t think it’s been mentioned here, instead there is lots of talk of freedom. Freedom means both more and less than I think we want it to, and accepting the near-exclusive emphasis on freedom as a cultural value is to capitulate in an important framing struggle.

bianca steele @139:
I think Hayek’s point about local information is important, but there is a place for centralization.
Coordination, planning, yes.

Otherwise, there are too many opportunities for arbitrage on a variety of levels. What does this mean?

Perfect centralization may be impossible, but that doesn’t mean it’s a waste of time to try. But that’s not much of a manifesto, is it.

Tim W., I think, emphasizes getting financing at the expense of the other factors involved in setting up a new firm
No: investment – resource allocation – not necessarily in the form of what we recognise as ‘financing’. I’d like to see financial markets eliminated altogether if feasible. They have no intrinsic value (except of course the negligible benefit of the kick that a lot of people get from participating in them). Likewise it’s not necessarily a matter of setting up a new firm.

…and overemphasizes the centralized nature of financing. There are plenty of local VC firms, for example, who can invest using more local information (at least there were plenty until a couple of years ago).

No, VC firms come under ‘those who happen to be rich’. If they are any good at picking winners, then a collective system of investment could employ them in that capacity. If their success is more to do with being rich enough to benefit from the ambient rate of viability of startups, then in my utopia they will have to do without the honorific ‘wealth creator’ title and get some other job (if they aren’t happy with a basic income…).

Some discussion of this kind of thing here ff.

What, Sebastian is evidently still listening in, but can’t tell us, precisely, on just what substantive issues the “liberals” were wrong during the eight years of the Bush administration? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you . . . Sebastian just doesn’t do that sort of thing! I must confess to being curious about his technique, but I don’t think he’ll post the details here. I would guess that if the times were picked right, you could get something like China, where inequality is rising but is matched with a general rising affluence both at the individual level and on the level of the state which thus ensures better medical care and hence rising life expectancy. Say Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain in mid-decade ;-)

Tim:

I take your point about VCs. I was thinking about your putting “pension funds” up front as the driver of most investment, which seemed surprising.

I don’t see a difference between “investment” and “resource allocation” if what you’re talking about is pension funds, VCs, and so forth. They don’t decide who will be hired, which vendors will be used, or to whom the product will be marketed. They don’t decide how resources will be allocated within the firm, for the most part, as long as the balance sheet looks good. They only decide who will have the cash backing to do all this.

By “arbitrage” I mean a difference in price, or in something analogous to price, in two different locations, which is unknown to the people in each of those two locations, but is known to some small number of people who use their knowledge to make a profit.

Scent of Violets, yes, I think in in a generation or two the children of the right will be very much ashamed of the current outburst of authoritarianism. There already are people who regret–John Cole was mentioned above, and the editor of Little Green Footballs has broken with the radicals. And, I’m sorry, no–the popularity of Stalinism with socialists in the 1930s was not a minor matter, not a matter of a quixotic desperate minority convinced against its own interests. People who by and large could have known better just…didn’t. And didn’t speak out when it might have made a difference. The anarchists can claim some cred here: they did know better. But the mainstream of the movement was heavily influenced by Stalinism.

“Sebastian, you argue like one of those people trying to make all the deaths the USA caused in Iraq just…go away. For shame!”

So I take it you have a problem with the UN figures then? Maybe the UN is on a secret mission to make inequality look better?

I sort of think that the zombie ideas are not only not zombies, but will be walking around and high fiving once the GOP takes the House – as they certainly look like they are going to.

In my own admittedly Marx influenced view, as long as capital is international and labor power – unions – are national, capital will mostly win. Of course, capital can be scared into concessions – as during the Cold War – and surely there is still a lot alliances of social movements and political parties can do to make for some increase in fairness – but in fact, Obama – the Dems – and the GOP – have just restored the financial services sector to the grossly exaggerated position they had in 2006, when they accounted for 40 percent of gross corporate profits. What I think we have learned is, if there is no organized resistance to the state working to make the richest people even richer, even at the expense of throwing millions out of work and allowing them to be victimized by the worst system of debt peonage since the British Raj in India – then there will be no resistance to it. We do seem set to replay the 00s at the moment, with the exception that this time, there is not even a pretense that something else – expanded credit, assets rising in value – can substitute for the shrinking wage. What will happen, as is happening with the popular targeting of teachers by the GOP, is the general attack on middle class (working class) incomes, which, we will soon learn, we can’t afford if we want to remain competitive. This, I think, will be the idea of the 2010s. How can we make the middle class accomplices in the third act of its immiseration? Divide and conquer. It is a fairly easy procedure.

The crisis proved that, throughout the world, we do not have the resources to support an oligarchy that is as wealthy, percentage wise, as the oligarchy of 1900, and at the same time support a welfare state built between the 30s and the 60s. There is no deficit crisis and no social insurance crisis – there is only the crisis that an incredibly few number of people have accrued an incredibly high percentage of the globe’s wealth. But those few have the will to defend it, and the means. They face nothing that should be too difficult not to roll over. That is pretty much it. One can intellectually deconstruct the system that led to this situation, but there is no social mechanism, right now, that will take it down by so much as a cubit.

Since the discussion on political theory mentioned only in passing trends in other countries I would suggest a broader look at the Muslim world, where trends still allow for a functional alternative to Western capitalist-socialist paradigm (distinctive from modern ideas of a theocratic state which can be said to only mask the same dilemmas of post-Modern society by employing different rhetoric). While there are to argument to be made for a tendencies bordering on a welfare state (public dispersal of war spoils subsidised society in general and for many was the main if not sole source of income), government is generally desired to be limited and decentralised with the goals that it provide for courts, security, and tax collection — while the communitarian spirit of Muslim society (2.5% income tax collected solely towards poverty relief as a religious obligation) is endemic to it so long as religious sentiments are preserved in the society.

Of course other traditional (pre-WWI) models of society are also applicable to this category of unconventional alternatives, but there important lessons to be had: personal convictions and socially-enforced standards of conduct are perhaps more efficient means of regulating society to prevent social ills than government enforcement of contrived policies. Focusing on traditional family modules eases the burden the elderly, ill, & disabled have on society.

Of course it is beyond naive to assume that pre-modern social models can be easily replicated (if they are even desirable): there are many modern issues that demand new solutions (environmentalism, population sizes, resource strains, expectations of full employment), but in the quest for new ideas there may be something in rethinking the entire focus and foundation of our social constructs in a more coherent fashion that is currently attempted by some modern movements.

Ken Lovell – the most politics can do is to look after people’s animal needs – to think we can second-guess their human needs is to cross the line into paternalism.

“I wasn’t making a point, except that the majority of the world’s supply of base and precious metals don’t come from Africa.”

It depends upon which metal. Platinum, yes, S Africa is the dominant supplier. In gold it’s the swing supplier (the costs of deep mining, where they really are coming up against the laws of thermodynamics in the energy required to bring ore up from x miles down, means that the deep mines gear up again when the price rises). But for most of the others even Africa as a whole isn’t a major nor important supplier.

Bianca: I don’t see a difference between “investment” and “resource allocation” if what you’re talking about is pension funds, VCs, and so forth.

The point was just to make it clear I didn’t mean investment in the sense of getting hold of private money, or necessarily any money.

They don’t decide who will be hired, which vendors will be used, or to whom the product will be marketed. They don’t decide how resources will be allocated within the firm All these are things decided in a straightforward way by employees – it doesn’t make any difference whose employees. If necessary you have the same people, doing the same jobs, possibly in the same place as you would have had under a private market system. You might even have local small-scale ‘startups’ (pilot schemes). The essential difference is that they are not financed by bank loans or venture capital, but get their resources from the collective scheme.

I think this may reflect a slight problem with the use of the term ‘centralised’ – which can be taken to cover quite a few different things:

1. The element of local information – bureaucrats are physically remote in location – this is not essential to a collective scheme, as adumb’d above, and as the Raven mentions, not an issue with current technology – but also not the main point of Hayek’s criticisms of Soviet-style planning (I’m not sure if Hayek is assuming that there would be far fewer people involved in a ‘centralised’ system of planning – if so he’s not comparing like with like.

2. the fact that they are not diverse actors with differing ideas – again, not a problem if say the collective scheme has a range of (possibly competing) units making investment decisions – the penalties and rewards for succes and failure don’t need to be big to get the benefits of a bit of healthy competition. This is really the point of mentioning the allocation issues currently dealt with by finance: a distinctive mechanism of the market is the brutal method of letting whole firms go to the wall – which on an analogy with Darwinian selection, is fine if you are interested only in having a well-adapted population, but not so clever if you are concerned about the horrible effects on those eliminated. (And trial and error is also a rather slow way of getting anywhere).

3. the absence of ‘price signals’. This is Hayek’s key point I think – again, based on criticism of the Soviet system. The idea is I think that there is no way of judging the efficient level of production of the various goods without assessing demand on the basis of consumer uptake at various price-quantity levels (on Planet Free Market, there is only one price, set at marginal cost IIRC, because competition). Again, this isn’t really a problem given current technology – and assuming the collective scheme isnlt undermanned relative to its market counterpart, never was since such decisions are taken are taken by employees in advance, then adjusted reactively. The really indispensable function of price ‘signals’ is that you can’t tell how socially valuable an inessential product is relative to other products unless people are forced to budget and choose what products they want at various prices. There is something in this – not because people would misrepreesent their preferences given only market research questionnaires but because those preferences may well be inchoate until the point of actual choice.

But I guess people would have some kind of budget, not just be allowed to have whatever they want – or think they might want, etc – and there’s no reason why the same kinds of production decisions wouldn’t react to consumption patterns much as they do now (except without the rich having their preferences given undue weight).

(not sure quite how Hayekian all this is – there’s probably some Popper, Nozick, et al in there – but this is not a history thread).

I donlt know to what extent arbitrage based on difference in price, or in something analogous to price, in two different locations (that doesn’t reflect the costs of transporting it) is a big problem, but that kind of price discrimination would indeed presumably be eliminated in a non-profit-driven system. Such elements of competition as were adjudged useful in providing incentives to those making investment decisions would just be based on quantity ‘sold’ at some ‘price’ based on marginal ‘cost’. There would be quantities corresponding to those: accounting and measures of value by some numeraire needn’t be eliminated, I don’t think.

That’s the kind of thing I had in mind anyway. Obviously one or two details to be worked out before the scheme is ready to be rolled out across the world.

Anarcho – Yes, so far as the economic dimension is concerned, libertarianism uses a highly moralised (and tendentious) definition of ‘liberty’.

And ‘Property is theft’ – when printing those election leaflets, important to make clear that abolition of Property does not mean an end to personal property in the sense of stable possession of objects for one’s own use.

Not clear on the ‘decentralisation’ stuff though – what happens to economies of scale, interpersonal division of labour, etc? I’m not clear what Anarchism actually involves here. So far as local institutions are coordinated, isn’t the the resulting system a state of some kind? Or is this about the ‘right’ to punish? I’d like to see an end to punishment (and the threat thereof) but how realistic is this? More democracy good, but still has ‘cracy’ at the end.

The arbitrage, as it’s called, is the extraction of profit resulting from a localised scarcity causing high prices – which results from consumers’ ignorance of the possibility of getting the same stuff cheaper – or practical inability to make the purchase – isn’t it? The supposed elimination (or reduction!) of the price difference would be done – much to the annoyance of the middleman- in your story by competition, not arbitrage per se.

But surely you have some better criticisms of my vague and exploratory ideas than that?

Why bother to go through the extra effort and grief (and there certainly is some) of getting stuff from the Urals to Japan if there’s no higher profit in it?

Gains offsetting ‘effort and grief’ aren’t profit though are they. And the answer would presumably be (assuming there actually is a greater need for the stuff in Japan than in the Urals): because it’s your job.

“Gains offsetting ‘effort and grief’ aren’t profit though are they. And the answer would presumably be (assuming there actually is a greater need for the stuff in Japan than in the Urals): because it’s your job.”

Profits *are* the gain from doing something. and whether we call it my job, my profit or a commission for undertaking an action doesn’t change the substance of what I’m doing,. Exploiting a price difference between two different places to trade and thus add value.

Tim,

Profit isn’t what you get paid in wages. It’s what is leftover after you account for expenses, take your salary, pay your workers, etc.

A worker doesn’t make a profit. He or she makes profits for their employer. This happens through underpaying those workers, overworking them, charging more for goods and services than they cost that employer . . . and, since the latter part of the 20th century, through financializing the whole process.

Profits are theft. I think that actually works better than “property is theft.” I don’t really have a problem with property per se.

But the way profits are created, especially in a nation that already has an exorbitant employer to employee wage ratio, is theft by definition. It’s really all a matter of how tolerant we are regarding that theft, and how we’ve been conditioned to thinking it’s actually normal and even virtuous.

A business can’t create profit without ripping someone off. It’s impossible. That’s just math. Creating “surplus value” involves some part of, or some combination of, paying workers less than their labor is worth; charging too much for products and services; cheating suppliers; cheating buyers and consumers; using debt and asset management to create artificial surplus value; using stocks to create artificial surplus value; speculating to create artificial surplus value; or speculating about speculation to create truly phony, artificial and dangerously volatile surplus value.

To me, about the only way to avoid all of that is to go back to one on one exchange. As in, I build a chair. I factor in my time and my costs and sell you that chair, directly. My “profit” is very close to “virtuous” in that case, because it’s very close to a one to one exchange of value for value. But once I hire an employee, and calculate how much I have to pay him or her to “profit” from their work, I’ve left the realm of the virtuous and am now in the realm of exploitation.

Individual artisans, artists, musicians, writers, etc. etc. can come very close to the virtuous (at least from an economic perspective), when they sell their creations. But I think business itself is always already a form of exploitation. That we in America seem to worship it and even admire business owners who makes huge profits has always baffled me.

Worstall: Profits are the gain from doing something. and whether we call it my job, my profit or a commission for undertaking an action doesn’t change the substance of what I’m doing,. Exploiting a price difference between two different places to trade and thus add value.

Profits are the gain in excess of the costs, including ‘grief’. Getting a wage for organising resource allocations is not the same the same as making a profit. In the former case, you are not exploiting a price difference, nor trading. Entertaining that your conception of the substance of what you’re doing includes the notion of exploiting a price difference.

Having to just skim here, it seems that Kaveh’s post is outstandingly good. No one seems to have picked up on it, though. Don’t know why that is.

“Not clear on the ‘decentralisation’ stuff though – what happens to economies of scale, interpersonal division of labour, etc? I’m not clear what Anarchism actually involves here…

A big subject which cannot be covered here, but section I of An Anarchist FAQ does cover these issues (including decision making, crime, etc.) in some detail. There is also The Economics of Anarchy which summarises the main points.

There is, of course, the problem of local governments being oppressive and intrusive. That can happen as well. Decentralization isn’t automatically the answer.

The Civil Rights movement would never have gotten anywhere if power had been decentralized to the states and localities. Obviously.

A mining company in West Virginia can so own local governments that mountain top removal is guaranteed there. If the Feds don’t step in, the people suffer.

Of course, that works the other way as well. The Feds could push for something that obviously hurts localities. Unfortunately, there is no easy answer for any of this, and it really comes down to putting the right people of office in all cases. It really comes down to eternal vigilance and an active polity, on all levels. We may want automatic governments, or automatic markets, so we can do our own thing, but when we take all of that granted, we’re going to pay for it.

States could push for slavery, and the Feds could fight it, so we would side with Federal power in that case. Or, localities could push for clean rivers and organic farming, but the state wants Smithfield Farms there. Or the Feds could push for some massive deregulation that hurts everyone, so you’d want to fight that power.

But power can’t be effectively defeated with far less power. We eventually have to decide where we want to throw our support, our weight. If we let “the markets” decide, and limit government in that area, we lose autonomy there. The markets have no interest in your interests. At least with government, there is the potential for participation and shaping our collective destinies. There is no such potential when it comes to markets. They are essential indifferent to your needs.

Or to put it more simply, to the extent that you’re paying uncompetitive (in the idealized sense) wages but not having to face the actual competition because of market imperfections, your profit is unfair and doesn’t morally belong to you. (I think it is technically an oligopsony rent extracted from the labor market.)

That’s quite a leap, it seems to me (and it’s libertarians who get accused of unduly idealizing perfect competition!). And anyway, if that logic were correct, surely the employer would have just the same kind of claim to any surplus that the employee received from the exchange (over and above the minimum reserve price for which they would be prepared to carry out the job).

That usually makes such a reserve price higher than the actual price of most labor, because a large amount of labor is done by people who can’t choose to change to different jobs that are both more pleasant and higher-paid.

What? Nothing in the theory of perfect competition says that alternative jobs have to be “more pleasant” or “higher paid”. Suppose my job pays £10 and that if it paid £5 I would be indifferent between it and the next best alternative. Then by your logic in #181, the surplus of £5 that I pocket is “unfair, and doesn’t morally belong to me” – after all, under PC, that surplus wouldn’t exist.

Nothing in the theory of perfect competition says that alternative jobs have to be “more pleasant” or “higher paid”.

Indeed, just the opposite — in perfect competition, a more pleasant job is *lower* paid because people have to trade off the economic and noneconomic rewards. (Actually, people have different ideas of what is pleasant, but I think that’s usually assumed away in idealized models.)

However, in the real world we observe the opposite of what happens in the ideal world — people who scrub toilets make *less* money than CEOs, surgeons, or lawyers, even though the latter also get lots of noneconomic compensation such as status. This suggests that the dynamic is driven primarily by inefficient allocation of labor — people in low-paying jobs are there because they *can’t* effectively move into a different segment of the labor market, not because they prefer the jobs they have or are indifferent between them and another job.

This is where the economic Calvinism usually enters the picture. I can move into better segments of the labor market and they can’t because I’m better than them in some way and therefore deserve the better outcome. (This doesn’t hold up to close examination of the actual drivers of economic success, but economically successful people are *very* eager to believe it uncritically.)

Suppose my job pays £10 and that if it paid £5 I would be indifferent between it and the next best alternative.

Ok — then, assuming the noneconomic factors aren’t that different, the alternative is paying about 5 GBP (I don’t know how to make the pound sign here). Probably this means that someone else is actually working that other job (or one substantially similar to it) and pulling in that 5 GBP. So why *do* you deserve to make double what he makes? He doesn’t have your job, in substantial part, *because* you have it. You keep other people out of it by filling it yourself. (This is most obvious with *really* scarce jobs like CEO.)

Then by your logic in #181, the surplus of £5 that I pocket is “unfair, and doesn’t morally belong to me” – after all, under PC, that surplus wouldn’t exist.

Technically, you and the poor sod getting 5 GBP would engage in a bidding war for your job, which would probably end up with both of you getting somewhere in the middle (the other guy’s employer would have to bid to keep him or hire a replacement).

But because of the existing distribution of job compensation in real economies, if this kind of job-desirability-leveling were to actually take place, almost all workers would be net gainers — it’s just that the few rock stars, CEOs, people with “Mellon” as their middle name, etc. would find that many people would love to take over their jobs for 1/10 of their current salary or even less.

Ultimately, I think the whole exercise shows the folly of trying to derive *anything* from idealized models. The idea of an economy where anyone can change to *any* job is just too alien to have any usefulness. But it does at least serve to rebut the idea that the current market-clearing price of (a particular variety of) labor is its “true” value in some objective and unassailable sense.

Value comes from an evaluator. There’s no honest way to wash your hands of that.