Trolling Alone?

The one populist note Trump is hitting that REALLY resonates with all those blue collar types is “Your jobs went away because of NAFTA and her offspring. I will unilaterally take us out of NAFTA and renegociate all these ‘free trade’ deals. I will institute 35% tariffs.” That is the proverbial red meat, right there. All that chin music about walls and suing everybody gets passed off as campaign rhetoric and Trump’s usual bombast and hyperbole. But challenging the orthodoxy of free trade is what’s going to make Mitch McConnell and his establishment Republican ilk vote for Clinton before this is done. Savor the irony while it’s hot.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/03/trump-voters-are-not-angry-about-economy-really

“Now suppose, additionally, this candidate is obviously a charlatan.”

I don’t think he’s “obviously” a charlatan at all ie his supporters don’t interpret him that way. Trump almost certainly sees himself as an “awesome, amazing” Steve Jobs style entrepreneur-titan who can achieve things others can’t; this is suggested by studies of his business practices, he was confidently promising results in Atlantic city that were derided as utterly unfeasible by the knowledgeable & said derision deterred him not a bit. He obviously is not Jobs, but such appears to be his self-image. He may well believe that he can negotiate “incredible, yuuuge” trade deals or whatever it is he’s promising to do.
In other words, his self-belief & bombastic podium manner may have convinced his fans that he can deliver on his bs. It may not all be ressentiment on their part.

I’m not sure why you would say that Trump obviously won’t get things done.

We’ve reached democracy as described in the latter part of The Republic, the sump that lies at the end of the decline from any sort of order, the perspectival vortex in which the attraction to all the different sources of order are all at work in equal strength, so they cancel each other out, so no movement is possible. Nothing can happen as long as we stay in the sump, the absence of any sort of order. The only way out is a dictatorship. A dictator will get things done.

Sure, just because that’s the way it’s laid out in the The Republic hardly means that Plato or Socrates believed that. But it wouldn’t be in the Republic unless it was a credible way of looking at the world. Why shouldn’t people in a democracy believe that a dictator, and only a dictator, can get us out of our present rut?

The US has a massive military, which it maintains at great expense on a permanent war footing, yet which it puts to no profitable end. Why wouldn’t people believe that we could use it to make Mexico build that wall, or China pay us tribute? We maintain a huge secret police apparatus (I refuse to call it an “intelligence” apparatus, as that designation insults my intelligence). Why wouldn’t people believe that we could put it to great and good use domestically? We go to vast expense to maintain it, and why would we do that if a secret police were not of immense value? And what would that value be if not that a secret police is power, that it can control a society?

We have all this power, all this ability to get things done, lying around unused, and you doubt that Trump could get things done if we finally put that power in the hands of someone who would actually use it?

part second: micro

Always there are individual fears and resentments that coalesce into tribalisms and their associated narratives. These are all psychic allergies, conditioned into us by a hundred minor and persistent traumas.

We are a freakish evolutionary experiment: a mosaic of predatory ambitions emerging from a chaos of prey-inspired sensitivities, experiencing consciousness practically blinded by a ceaseless kind of dreaming.

The very moment that disturbed notions of the world arise in thought and are then animated with obsessive fixations on other and self, shame and pride, or safety and danger, there is barely any capacity to understand. Only more of this dreaming.

In this dreaming they say: “We don’t win anymore. There’s a simple solution to our problems, and it comes from the strength of a person, not fooled or distracted by doubt and corruption.” Whoever can think this so readily must know it intimately. They read and think of the world imagining that they are escaping themselves.

Or, in this dreaming, we say: “Trumps supporters are seeking illusive refuge from their own psychic burdens, seeking distraction at best and courting violence at worst”. Whoever can think this so readily must know it intimately. We read and think of the world imagining we escape ourselves. Illusions indeed.

But there is no choice of escaping illusions and there is no escaping politics: our dreaming is our wakefulness. So politics must have a vision: a good dream that gives psyche a chance to re-fixate out of its attraction to disturbances.

Trump can remind us of the necessity of a Utopian politics. The practical has to be in balance with the ideal, or irrational less-conscious drives will take precedence.

In support of your thesis: Trump’s support is found in the South and amongst Republicans in the Northeast. These are communities that appreciate trolling.

Yeah but is it really true that Trump voters are ‘not bothered’ about the economy? I like Kevin Drum and his stuff about ‘lead causes crime’ is very interesting but he is (pardon my language) what used to be called, back in the day, a ‘bourgeois liberal’ so certain things aren’t clear to him.

To begin with, the theme Trump goes on about, again and again, is not the economy per se (he is hardly anti-capitalist) but ‘free trade’. DMC @2 gets it. Trump represents two right wing tropes that we haven’t heard from for a long time and liberals simply don’t recognise them for what they are, and assume that ‘he doesn’t really mean it’ or that he must be talking about something else.

Trump is a protectionist and an isolationist.

Drum wonders why people could possibly be against immigration. Is it racism? Is it cultural? Who can say. But in reality if you listen to anti-immigration politicians they make one argument and one only (the not openly racist or neo-Nazi politicians that is): immigration costs jobs. Especially ‘lower class’ jobs.

So his anti-immigration stance is ultimately about ‘the economy’ in the broadest possible interpretation of that phrase. Don’t get me wrong. I am sure that a lot of Trump voters are racist as well . But you can be concerned about jobs and racist. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Also, why is Trump so ‘left wing’ on foreign policy and so ‘right wing’ on domestic policy? There is no contradiction here. If ‘they’ should not be coming ‘over here’ ‘we’ should not be going ‘over there’.

As I say, we haven’t heard these arguments since the ’30s and so most liberals simply don’t understand where Trump is coming from and assume that he is a secret KKKer or something.

In case you don’t believe me, here’s what Trump says:

“Decades of disastrous trade deals and immigration policies have destroyed our middle class,” Trump writes in his latest policy manifesto. This “influx of foreign workers,” he continues, “holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high and makes it difficult for poor and working class Americans — including immigrants themselves and their children — to earn a middle-class wage.”

Most liberals are inconsistent protectionists: they approve of the free movement of capital, but approve (de jure) in some form of limitation on the freedom of labour to move (i.e. they approve of some form of anti-immigration strategy, however much they spin it). Some libertarians are consistent anti-protectionists: they are against tariffs and other limitations on free trade but are also in favour of the free movement of labour (i.e. the abolition of limits on immigration). Most ‘mainstream’ Republicans are inconsistent protectionists: they want strict controls on labour* (immigration) but complete freedom for capital (i.e. free trade deals).

Trump is a consistent protectionist: he wants restrictions on both capital and labour.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/08/26/donald_trump_a_21st_century_protectionist_herbert_hoover_127893.html

*and ‘internally’ of course they want strict restrictions on the right of labour to organise, in the form of trade unions. Most liberals also want this, or at least, don’t care too much about it one way or the other: few Democrats are genuinely passionate about the trade union movement, although they might pretend otherwise when they are short of money.

It’s also arguable that Trump shows that trolling can be a strategy. Not an end itself, “outrage ” not just the objective but the path to success. The list of supposed transgressions that would doom his campaign is so long at this point. Does anyone even remember him being mean to McCain? The press corpse was sure he was gone after that.

The reason that people are dubious is that these allegedly angry people didn’t seem to support such things up until Trump started saying them. Before that, almost everything that I heard from the right was reiterations of Econ 101.

This is just like the Bush administration; the right was all fine and dandy with it right up until Trump (the new alpha male) started dissing the previous alpha males.

It’s also like the Tea Party, a bunch of Republicans who suddenly in 2009 started protesting government policies that they supported from 2001-2008.

Why shouldn’t people in a democracy believe that a dictator, and only a dictator, can get us out of our present rut?

Particularly given that we just been very firmly reminded (via the Lawrence-Obergefell line of cases) that in the end, democratic control over the government is an empty form–if you have the Supreme Court and the army, the law doesn’t matter.

Trump supporters want “clarity”.

I strike up conversations with strangers as often as I can, almost everyday.

It’s very easy to talk politics with strangers, now. Of course you yourself had better not be a triggerable emotionalist — which would eliminate about half the Crooked Timber commenters for example, and all of the most frequent & voluble ones.

The Trump phenomenon has got almost everybody wanting to talk about politics, and to give their opinion to others. There is a general rule AGAINST that with strangers, and so I often hear, “I know we shouldn’t talk about politics, but…” Then it will go on for 10 to 40 minutes! I have the time.

They respond readily to questions that I begin with, “Do you think…” Perhaps because they are so unused to this gambit — and this courtesy, since almost all of their conversations, public and private, are usually conducted otherwise: each one pressing one’s own opinions, and not listening to the other, and insisting upon one’s own righteousness.

Basic findings. The Trump supporters are angry that the US isn’t taking care of its own. They want someone who isn’t bought-off like all the other candidates. They don’t understand economics & don’t understand foreign policy. They do understand that economics and foreign policy are quite complicated. When I pose further questions (gently and circuitously), they readily and very explicitly acknowledge the existence of those complications.

Their underlying emotions of the Trump supporters are anger and frustration, though the conversations are quite jovial. They are not primarily fearful or resentful. There is no envy. They don’t like free-riders whether rich or poor: that is offensive. They are concerned about terrorists of course, but they do not fear the outcome of the “war on terror”.

I repeat: this is NOT primarily about fear & resentment.

If I can think of one word to describe them, it goes back to a old description of early Mussolini supporters, before things went bad: They want clarity.

They want a return to the simple rules of US freedom, opportunity, just rewards. They want everybody on “the same page”. And — a big “and” — where it isn’t simple, they think it’s pretty clear that things have gone so far wrong, that we need someone strong to draw the lines.

Thus, “clarity”.

I am not sure this rises to the complete definition of “trolling”, since they are not insincere. Nor goading. Nor inattentive.

I like Kevin Drum a lot, but he has sometimes gotten politics terribly wrong, and the idea that exit polls show that Trump supporters don’t have the economy as a “primary” concern is a misleading definition of that word. People don’t always prioritize their political concerns as the quick opinion polls would suggest, and their immediate answers come from individual circumstances.

Those things are mostly good for telling candidates what not to miss in stump speeches. If there were a huge disparity between two numbers, then yes, that might tell you something else. But right now, nobody leaves “the economy” out of the conversation for long, and a politician who omitted it would be a fool indeed.

Drum’s final comment at that linked post is, “People aren’t more angry, or more bigoted, or more scared than usual. It’s just that we didn’t have a guy like Trump fanning these flames quite so crudely in past elections. This year we do.”

This reminds me precisely of his prediction 7 or 8 years ago that the Tea Party wasn’t important, and wasn’t going anywhere! I immediately pointed out in comments how untrue this was likely to be. But he didn’t see the light until they started to win elections a few years later.

Drum is much, much better on the stuff he really knows about, which is US business and entrepreneurial activity + the mainstream psychology related to that, + the associated economic policy and tax questions. Really I think he’s unequaled: required reading.

John, to your question: “Do you think the post-Trump future of US politics is increasingly a function of economic class divisions?”

I would answer, “Why not, it’s been going that way, for years already.” But the course of progression will not be about the emotions, as your post discusses, it will be about the jobs.

High-tech tends to “winner-take-all” incomes, and ubiquitous application. There are no jobs to “get back” from Mexico and China because the highest-paying factory jobs are disappearing there, too.

That means that an increasing proportion of workers will be remanded or seconded to lower-productivity and thus lower-income professions. Service-sector & hands-on jobs are quite honorable, but they don’t make as much money.

So how will all of these people keep buying houses, raising families, securing retirements? The System can’t deal with this question without broaching the validity of some basic assumptions (about money, redistribution, etc.) Therefore this politics is likely to continue for a decade or two, at least.

Hidari @16
we haven’t heard these arguments since the ’30s

Not so. Pat Buchanan’s ’92 campaign, which Corey R. mentioned here in an earlier Trump-related thread, hit the same basic themes of protectionism plus (some form of) ‘isolationism’, if anything more coherently. But Buchanan didn’t attract the same level of support; CR’s explanation for that, which one may or may not find convincing, was laid out in his Salon column that he linked in that earlier OP.

Holbo in the OP:
Trump as expression of populist economic desperation. We need food and shelter.

It’s worth keeping in mind that economic desperation in a country like the U.S., while very real, mostly (not exclusively, but mostly) involves relative as opposed to absolute poverty. The general indifference of most parts of the U.S. electorate to absolute poverty in the rest of the world (e.g., approx. 18,000 young children die every day from preventable, often poverty-related causes) is regrettable (if not altogether surprising).

You can’t promise everything to everybody and deliver, and no one thinks so. Trump is the Dealmaker and his campaign a negotiating tactic, telling us not where we will go but the direction he will take and what is important to him.

= = =”Their underlying emotions of the Trump supporters are anger and frustration, though the conversations are quite jovial. They are not primarily fearful or resentful. There is no envy. They don’t like free-riders whether rich or poor: that is offensive. They are concerned about terrorists of course, but they do not fear the outcome of the “war on terror” ” = = =

Can’t really agree with you there. I sit quietly in the break room of small/mid-sized manufacturing firms around the Midwest, listening to the Brett Brettmores and their less articulate fellow travelers. After 4-6 months they’ll start talking to me, and if I’m there 12 months or more they’ll start telling me what they really think (they know I’m a city guy but my South Side background lets me pass). Racism, fear, and hatred of the ‘other’ are a large part of their belief system. Along with a big dose of Limbaugh/Breitbart memes involving thugs, ragheads, hippies, and dirty others who are simultaneously lying around in hammocks on government “relief” AND preparing to come kill them and rape (or just date, which amounts to the same thing) their womenfolk. And oh yeah, foreign aid makes up 30% of the federal budget; 40% is welfare.

As I said, it takes 6-12 months before this stuff is discussed openly in front of an outsider, so I wouldn’t expect to get it based on a random conversation.

or “any of these as a necessary characteristic”, sorry terrible grammar

Reply to main post:

“I’m sure Sanders supporters don’t feel like nihilists just because, seriously, there’s no chance we’re getting that ‘revolution’ of his this season”

This sentiment is the reason for Trump’s rise to prominence and the Republican Party’s move to the extreme right.

The Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party moved to the right (under the poor disguise of the ‘centre left’) in the same way that Tony Blair’s New Labour did; once this happened the corresponding opposition parties had no choice but to move to even further in that direction. Combine that with the Republicans gerrymandering more districts than the Democrats (according to Sam Wang’s analysis at least) and you’ve got the current situation of an extremist being the most popular right wing candidate.

Clinton moved to the right because of the same sentiment as the quote above, as it was (and by some still is) taken as a ‘given’ that left wing politics cannot win votes. Once this bias has taken hold it leads to a feedback loop of strategic voting; since most people think that most _other_ people think left wing politicians can’t win then they will go with that option rather than the one that they truly believe in, lest they take the chance of ending up with a candidate they hate instead of their second preference.

The idea of ‘givens’ like Sanders not being able to win is the most powerful factor in systems that are susceptible to strategic voting and, as researchers such as Gibbard, Satterthwaite, and Arrow have described in detail, the Presidential and House systems are of exactly that kind.

It’s difficult to tell from this one post if you agree with that sentiment or not, but the former seems more likely given the context. If that is the case then you need to admit to a great deal of responsibility for the rise of Trump, and even more so you need to show more humility when it comes to predicting the future. None of us know if Sanders can win or not; it is not a ‘given’ that he will lose, and even the general discussion that such a given is true could actually be the main factor that leads to him winning since the press loves to promote a surprise story.

What we do know is that the future is dependent on how we talk about it and how we discuss it, and that voting outcomes are heavily dependent on what we in our general conversations either accept or reject as a ‘given’.

If you are an economy voter, wouldn’t you want equal pay for equal work, paid family leave and a higher minimum wage

Not likely. Not if your goal is “a person should be able to earn enough to support a family.”

= = = “If you are an economy voter, wouldn’t you want equal pay for equal work, paid family leave and a higher minimum wage? ” = = =

Paid family leave? You mean taking hard earned money out of my profit sharing check so those lazy [people if wrong skin color] can stay home and breed? They have too many children already.

@RNB, it should occur to you that people have different belief systems; that some people want better economic conditions for themselves without believing that the way to achieve that is a higher minimum wage, equal pay for equal work, or paid family leave; and that politicians will pander to those people if there are enough of them. Thus, they are ‘economy voters’ supporting a politician who doesn’t look to you like s/he’s focused on ‘economic issues’.

One man’s clarity is another man’s sophistry. So our institutions have failed — I think there is nearly universal agreement on that much, but, if you disagree, call it a thought experiment. Very well, then: shall they be (A) repaired, (B) captured, (C) replaced, or (D) destroyed? Those are the choices. That is clarity. But none of Lee Arnold’s people @ 27 would call it clarity. It would make their brains hurt.

Cruz (along with most of the Congressional Republican Party) says capture. Rubio said, and Clinton still says, repair — not the same kind of repair, obviously. Kasich seems to say repair, but all he really cares about is giving his cronies jobs, which is tantamount to capture.

Sanders says replace: but Yahweh alone knows with what?

Trump says destroy. Some of his people are with him on that. Others think that destruction would somehow automatically be followed by replacement — which it wouldn’t.

@44 Yes of course people have different belief systems. For example, women may have different beliefs about what the economic issues are. But leave that aside. Say your issue is globalization in the form of trade and immigration.

On trade, too few people have actually been impacted to account for much of Trump’s support. And Sanders actually has a record against trade deals, plus he wants affordable health care. So if you’re an economics voter, and trade is the biggest issue for you, you go with Sanders unless you are after something else altogether–the reassertion of fu white male power which, if anything, Sanders the actually lovely guy that he is would further erode.

Now if immigration is your issue or rather scapegoating immigrants doing things you don’t want to do is your big issue. Sure Trump may be your guy. But this is transparently not about the economics of wage competition. It’s about the reassertion of who actually belongs here and deserves deference and respect, an ethnic form of nationalism.

And if you’re a racist sadist, then you support Trump on the foreign policy issues.

Altogether Trump is not an economic candidate.

Consumatopia @28

“But Drum’s reductionist understanding of what “economy” means to voters is flawed, even setting aside issues like low wage growth and workforce participation rate. Your satisfaction with the economy isn’t just a function of how you are doing right now, it also depends on how well you think you, and the rest of the country, should be doing right now.”

I think you are erroneously leaving out the longitudinal analysis that Drum is doing here: he’s also saying that there’s no evidence that voters’ concern about the economy vs. other priorities has changed significantly from other, earlier elections. Voter concern about “the economy” has varied over past elections; its variance now does not correlate to support for Trump.

Thus we can’t argue from the evidence that today’s (Trump) voters are uniquely “fed up” with stagnant wage growth, underemployment, etc…

side note: If I were a stand up comic, I’d do a bit about “they took our jobs”: What are u guys talking about. You hated your jobs!

Plume,
I’d be curious if you have any survey data on that. Brett Bellmore was certainly obsessed with Occupy and whether or not it had enough porta-potties, but I never heard much from the Teabag types I listened to. If anything a little admiration for sticking it to the banks (while acknowledging that in the end hippies always deserve a good beating/smashing). It didn’t seem to be a big thing other than the very small set who ‘always click the links’ on Breitbart. That’s anecdotal though; perhaps you have data?

@52Plume

Trump’s base of support has seen income basically flat for 35 years. And rightfully see that many the really successful folks have gamed the system at their expense. And the data shows the middle class is hollowing out with movement both up and down. It scares the crap out of these voters that they’re headed down, along with their kids.

There are a lot shared interests between the Trump and Sanders supporters but, in my view, race blocks the coalition. The New Deal was NE progs and white Southerners. The white Southerners had no problem with redistributionist policies, financial regulation, a social safety net and massive jobs programs. The progs had no problem with limiting immigration and keeping their foot on the neck of the Southern blacks. That time has passed. That’s why it’s such a shame that Warren didn’t run. She’s from Oklahoma and it shows.

= = = “scares the crap out of these voters that they’re headed down, along with their kids” = = =

Can’t disagree with your analysis but your ecplanation has to account for Kansas in there somehow: voters in KS are now on their 3rd round of votes they are visibly (literally) making things worse for themselves. Chopping off you foot to cure a fungal itch that an ACA plan would have cured for a $10 copay doesn’t sound like a good cure for being scared.

@Ze K
Well, just limiting it to U.S. examples for the time being, Woodrow Wilson was an intellectual, JFK was an intellectual (of sorts) or at least liked to surround himself w them, TR was, Gingrich (yuk) was, and Jefferson and Adams definitely were intellectuals. All successful, to one degree or another, politicians. So that explanation (intellectuals can’t be successful politicians) can’t be right. (An intellectual image can sometimes be a liability, cf. Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaigns for ex., but that’s a slightly different point.)

“dealing with the obsolescence of mass employment”

A hundred years ago people had to “deal with” the obsolescence of child labor. Over a few decades we eliminated about eight years of an ordinary person’s working life – 12% of the total number of available person-years. Then the 40-hour week (including the two-day weekend knocked off another 30%. These changes weren’t cause for dismay.

In the US today, we could reduce the amount of available labor by 4% with mandatory 4-weeks of vacation, cut 12% more by requiring double time for over 35 hours a week, and cut another 6% by raising social security payments and having them kick in at full payment at age 62. A reduction in available person-hours by over 20% would go a long way toward reducing the threat of “the obsolescence of mass employment.” If those changes didn’t lead to full employment, we could go to a true 4-day week and give people three-month vacations every five years. And all we would be doing, really, would be restoring the hours of waged labor per family to the amount of paid work that kept people in modest prosperity fifty years ago.

It’s a political problem, not a technological one.

Seconding Bloix @ 61

It’s a political problem, not a technological one.

Right, that’s why I’m concerned. In my lifetime Americans have been much better at coming up with technological advances than at making “obvious” political reforms. The rest of the developed world’s politics seems to be learning bad habits from Americans faster than Americans learn good lessons from abroad. Is that excessively cynical?

The major source of hope I see if we get a rapid transition to a “robots do most productive work” state of affairs and vested interests resist change is actually the Global South. Why not use robots in Bolivia to ignore intellectual property and build unlicensed copies of other robots and productive machinery? Why not skip the long-promised, seldom-seen export driven industrialization phase of development — which frankly only a few countries were ever going to ride to prosperity in the first place — and run straight toward domesticated prosperity? It’s kind of like trying to get poor nations to respect rich-world intellectual property conventions for antiretroviral drugs: there is no local power base of people who are rich from developing/licensing HIV drugs, a lot of extra cost if you play by foreigners’ rules, and few incentives to offset the cost.

Reforms that started in poor nations might percolate back toward richer polities, after a few years of seeing that unemployed residents of Bolivia are living better than unemployed residents of Appalachia.

Quickly a heterodox perspective on working time–see Pietro Basso.

Marx, Grundrisse:
“The larger the surplus value of capital before the increase of productive force, the larger the amount of presupposed surplus labour or surplus value of capital; or, the smaller the fractional part of the working day which forms the equivalent of the worker, which expresses necessary labour, the smaller is the increase in surplus value which capital obtains from the increase of productive force. Its surplus value rises, but in an ever smaller relation to the development of the productive force. Thus the more developed capital already is, the more surplus labour it has created, the more terribly must it develop the productive force in order to realize itself in only smaller proportion, i.e. to add surplus value – because its barrier always remains the relation between the fractional part of the day which expresses necessary labour, and the entire working day. It can move only within these boundaries. The smaller already the fractional part falling to necessary labour, the greater the surplus labour, the less can any increase in productive force perceptibly diminish necessary labour; since the denominator has grown enormously. The self-realization of capital becomes more difficult to the extent that it has already been realized. The increase of productive force would become irrelevant to capital; realization itself would become irrelevant, because its proportions have become minimal, and it would have ceased to be capital. If necessary labour were 1/1,000 and the productive force tripled, then it would fall to only 1/3,000 or surplus labour would have increased by only 2/3,000. But this happens not because wages have increased or the share of labour in the product, but because it has already fallen so low, regarded in its relation to the product of labour or to the living work day. *”

So for some time rises in productivity are compatible with the worker enjoying a rising real wage even as the necessary part of the working day is reduced. Workers can redefine greater leisure time as part of the necessary costs for the reproduction of labor power. They can thus make a higher wage in real terms during the times that they work that can they afford to take time off. Working time over the course of a day or year of both is reduced even as the surplus part of the working day (or the rate of exploitation) rises.

However, for Marx the whole process hits an economic–not technological or political limit. As Marx lays out above, the higher productivity has already been raised and the necessary part of the working day already reduced, the less further increases in productivity can further reduce the necessary part of the working day.

In effect, facing a declining marginal efficiency of capital due to the accumulation of capital, capitalists come to need to appropriate all the possible gains from rising productivity since those gains make possible ever smaller increases in the rate of surplus value.

In short, capitalists prove less willing over time to share the gains from rising productivity. Workers find that their demands for better wages and more leisure time face an economic limit and that this is the reason that their struggle becomes political.

At any rate, this is how Marx saw it, I believe.

Rising productivity no longer opens up the possibility for rising real wages that could underwrite expanded leisure time. The system has hit an economic limit; the struggle over wages and working time will necessarily have to become political.

CO @57
I think a lot of the KS voters believe that gov’t helps the poor much more than the working class. I think the race issue is part and parcel of that calculation. Also, see Wisc. Wallace did very well in Wisc esp the Milwaukee ‘burbs.
Plume@56
The folks voting for Trump hate Bush. Millions of manufacturing jobs were lost under Bush while the number of man. jobs at least stayed flat under Clinton. Bush was pro-trade and immigration, they’re opposed. Imports w/China tripled under Bush. And they blame Bush for completely screwing up the war, a war which many of them now view as a mistake. A lot changes in 10 years. In the sense that Occupy was against Wall St., they already were. The split in the party should be compared to McKinley vs. WJB. (And, btw, this is where Corey imho mucks up his conservative analysis.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1896

As long as we are talking about reducing working time as a way of dealing with technological unemployment, we could talk about another part of working time: paid leave. Looking forward to learning about Clinton’s and Sander’s proposals here. Also will be comparing them to what the policies are in Japan.

“. . .the liberal class as a corpse. It fights for nothing. It stands for nothing. It is a useless appendage to the corporate state. It exists not to make possible incremental or piecemeal reform, as it originally did in a functional capitalist democracy; instead it has devolved into an instrument of personal vanity, burnishing the hollow morality of its adherents.” Chris Hedges
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/once_again_–_death_of_the_liberal_class_20121112

Why wouldn’t they give it the middle finger?

@59 If industrial civilization doesn’t blow itself apart or collapse from environmental overshoot, dealing with the obsolescence of mass employment will be a defining issue of the 21st century.

This is exactly right, although I think there’s plenty of room for some truly horrific wars anytime over the next 80 odd years, and I do mean odd.

I’ve long argued that the biggest crisis we face regarding the catastrophic global warming catastrophe that doesn’t take place. The challenge is catastrophic loss of live, it’s catastrophic vibrancy of life. Want to see the future for the young and less advantage? Think Egypt, or perhaps the West Bank. No work. I’m old enough to remember that those two little words envelop any universe. In my own family, one grand-parent had no work for 5 years during the thirties. Guess how he spent his free time? Hint, it wasn’t volunteering down at the local community center. There will be I’d guess, a number of new cults, some charitable-religious orders, and a whole lot of drugs for those self-selecting for no/limited posterity. The end result – nobody will know how to do anything, and should the system tank, we’ve no manual back-up.

I’m on a research trip right now in a European country normally famous for its accomplished civil service. I see a lot of new faces and people unable to answer the simplest questions. Every time a full-time worker is replaced by a lower-paid short-contract part-time employee, or three, the institutional memory of the organization takes a huge hit. Nobody sticks around long enough to know the job well, unless it’s a very, very easy job.

Fun times!

Thus we can’t argue from the evidence that today’s (Trump) voters are uniquely “fed up” with stagnant wage growth, underemployment, etc…

Drum is doing a bit-and-switch between two claims. One is that economic dissatisfaction isn’t part of Trump’s support (“Trump Voters Are Not Angry About the Economy”), the other is that Trump voters, or 2016 voters, aren’t uniquely economically dissatisfied. In between those two claims is the truth that Trump is finding a way to channel economic anxiety (and, yes, racism) that’s been with us for a while now.

Note that Drum’s claim that “the number of people affected by globalization (lost jobs, reduced wages) isn’t that large in absolute terms” is just wrong. Manufacturing employment held steady until about 2000, then suddenly millions of jobs disappeared. http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/a-few-more-reflections-on-the-current-trade-debate/ This did not just affect the particular workers who lost jobs, or even just all manufacturing workers–it was ultimately a blow to all blue collar workers, as workers who would have worked in factories ended up working in other fields instead, bidding for the same jobs. Even more than that, we seemed to have given up on the idea that workers without a college degree should have a path into the middle class. What workers lost in the 2000s wasn’t just a matter of sluggish wages or workforce participation–it was a narrative. That loss of narrative is something that both parties have been ignoring for some time now, but the discontent was always there–like those protectionist GOP voters that could be observed in polls but GOP politicians had no interest in.

It may even be that as the immediate economic pain of unemployment eases, people start to ask deeper economic questions about their future. People might be doing better than they were a couple years ago. So now they ask–are they doing as well as they expected they would be a decade ago? Is this where they saw themselves ending up?

https://eh.net/encyclopedia/hours-of-work-in-u-s-history/
Looking at Whaples data, I don’t think it supports his conclusion. It sure seems that the dramatic reductions in working time that came by the end of the first half of the twentieth century has slowed to crawl for many groups of workers since the 1950s.
So I ask Bloix and Matt “why” (slow down in productivity growth, cultural changes, changing balance of class power, global competition, intensifcation of class contradictions a la Marx?). Would love to read your comments but won’t be able to get to them until next week.

Sounds like good old-fashioned looting.

It sure seems that the dramatic reductions in working time that came by the end of the first half of the twentieth century has slowed to crawl for many groups of workers since the 1950s.
So I ask Bloix and Matt “why” (slow down in productivity growth, cultural changes, changing balance of class power, global competition, intensifcation of class contradictions a la Marx?).

I don’t know why American working hours reduced so significantly in the first half of the 20th century and then froze near 40 hours per week (or more, particularly when workers are exempt or precarious and encouraged to work off the clock).

American coal production reached its peak in 2008. Between January 1988 and January 2008 American coal miner employment went from 147,000 workers to 77,000 as annual production per worker increased from 6463 tons to 14506 tons. The annualized increase in productivity per miner (measured in tons of coal) over this period is about 4.1%, significantly above the 2.8% average annual productivity growth in the USA during the 1947-1973 postwar golden age. I still don’t know why working hours stopped dropping, but “slowdown in productivity growth” does not seem like a likely culprit. Here we see strong productivity growth in a sector but it translates into job loss for half of the miners instead of shorter hours for all.

Part of the working hours puzzle is that machinery has become a larger part of production, and much more reliable. So 24 hour operation becomes the norm, as firms seek to pay off investment in machinery as quickly as possible. Working a small crew long hours (12 hour shifts are the norm in mining and related industries) is cheaper than employing a larger workforce.

Bruce’s simple example of disinvestment is fair enough, but I’d argue that a large part of the disinvestment of the last 30 years comes from monetising public or semi-public functions and then taking off with the money. This has the advantage of adding to the pool of money, so disguising the loss of real functionality and convincing many economists that there must somehow have been a net gain. If the switch can be financed with debt you are even better off – you have exchanged a boring old public amenity for a greater share in the income of the lower orders.

The thing about automation and jobs is that the number of people who can be profitably employed is not the same as the number of people who can be usefully employed. Profitable employment implies a closed loop of money going out, paid in wages and facilities, and producing some tangible good or service that can be sold for more money than went in.

The set of things for which that second half of the chain is present is limited; you can’t, by the free market alone, charge back a child for an amount greater than the cost of their education, a citizen for more then the cost of their defense, a homeowner for more than the cost of picking up litter, and so on.

Useful employment only requires that the overall benefit to society be greater than the cost, not that those benefits can be captured by a single specific employer. The set of such things is indefinitely large; until such time as computers become better at 100% of them, there will be no shortage of things to do.

As a tangible example, automated asteroid mining is starting to hit the window of technical feasibility. But it won’t be economically feasible (i.e. profitable) for the for-seeable future precisely because it would deliver rare metals in unbounded quantities that would thoroughly crash the market. So the benefits to society of practically free catalysts, electronics etc don’t return to the investors. So they don’t invest, so it doesn’t happen.

Similarly with nuclear power – it is not profitable precisely because it produces electricity too cheaply to meter; there is no way of getting back the investment.

The simplest way to square the circle of only X% of people being capable of being profitably employed is to tax those people and use the money to pay for the useful employment of everyone else. It is a simple system that worked for decades of high growth.

Until Reagan broke it by failing to raise taxes to the level necessary to sustain a growing economy.

RNB 03.19.16 at 5:12 am @ 82 —
About working hours. People who have power generally desire to maintain and increase it. The people who have power in a capitalist state are capitalists. In the 20th century, capitalists had power because (1) production-distribution-consumption were seen as critical concerns, and (2) they and only they were supposed to be the ones who knew how to manage everything so that production-distribution-consumption would be maximized. As the forces of production began to defeat natural scarcities, it was necessary to destroy surpluses and to create artificial scarcities (in order to maintain the critical need to constantly increase p-d-c). Among the methods which can be used to destroy surpluses are war, imperialism, waste (of both substance and utility), and consumerism. In consumerism, the workers are haled from the office and the factory to the mall to buy and use up the stuff they have produced. But to do this they need time and energy for shopping and using. The maximizing balance must have been about 40 hours per week per worker.

When capitalist could not increase p-d-c, they got depressed and punished everyone else. This was called a ‘depression’. Various solutions were employed, like having a war or printing a lot of money. Then Growth occurred (that is, increase of p-d-c, which made the capitalists happy) until the next depression.

None of this is necessarily true today because we have new sources of production (artificial intelligence, cybernation, automation) and new sinks for the surplus, like climate change, total eternal war, and gross environmental destruction and collapse. Correspondingly we observe an increase in the variability of work time, from zero to over a hundred hours per week, as the old system falls apart and a new one comes into being.

Propelling Trump to the White House one act of hijacking at a time:

“Donald Trump, shut it down, Phoenix is the people’s town.” On the topic who belongs where: They were carrying a message they want Trump to hear.“We don’t want you here in Arizona, said protester Salvador Reza.

Free speech and right to assemble for me, but not for thee.

http://www.azfamily.com/story/31516829/trump-protesters-block-streets-in-fountain-hills

Peter T: I’d argue that a large part of the disinvestment of the last 30 years comes from monetising public or semi-public functions and then taking off with the money.

Quantitatively, I would think the big driver centered on the wild escalation in CEO compensation in the 1980’s and the associated changes in corporate governance. The Piketty & Saez data highlight the historical salience of the change. Schleifer & Summers in their famous paper on hostile takeovers explained how the disinvestment in implicit contracts with stakeholders worked. As the incomes available to that small but powerful class increased, their time in the C-suite shortened. They had strong incentives to undermine the integrity of accounting controls. Etc.

Over here in the UK, the Monster Raving Loony Party is an actual political party. And in the U.S., Pigasus was a candidate for president in 1968.

The concept of the protest vote is well established. If you think none of the candidates are fit to hold political office, not voting for any of them is not rhetorically effective. Non voting will be interpreted as apathy, or being OK with any of them. Certainly, a candidate will act like they have a mandate to govern if elected on less than 50% turn out, even if some proportion of the electorate who didn’t turn out despise them. On the other hand, if Pigasus actually wins, that will get the elites’ attention.

BW: “Maybe. But, who do Cossacks work for again?”

Going completely off-topic, is a trust funder who really has no control over the trust fund a “capitalist”? Are the millions who own stock in one way or another? I don’t see a remaining distinction between CEOs and people of vast wealth who actively manage their investments. You see overpaid CEOs aligned with shareholder interest, but I don’t — I see CEOs aligned with those shareholders who actually have enough of a stake to be effective managers in their own right, and who actively exercise that form of control. The smaller stakeholders routinely have their interests not considered or worked against.

“The capitalist class” also runs into the unfortunate equivocations about state capitalism. A whole lot of global productive capacity is in China, for instance. The people there are perhaps state capitalists or crony capitalists, but really the essential similarity seems to me to be that they are managers. And they are a seamless part of the world system because they come together with multinational CEOs and EU bureaucrats and so on in a distinctive form of international cooperation.

I think “capital” or “capitalist/ism” carry too much baggage to be useful analytically. I prefer, for any given time and place, to look at the mix of ways elites derive their incomes. For C18 Britain, for instance, it was primarily rents on land, supplemented by government office, shares in tax revenue and direct ownership/management of various enterprises (in C18 France it was charges levied through local monopolies (“banal seigneurie”) and government office etc; in India and the Ottoman Empire it was shares in tax revenue and so on..). In the late C19 Britain and the US it was through direct ownership of corporations, in the mid C20 indirect ownership of corporations. In the late C20 it shifted to shares in financial streams, sometimes taken as “salary”.

One advantage of looking at it this way is it highlights the varying role of government. It can be simply a guarantor of the socio-economic order, or a vital intermediary collecting and apportioning income. In the US it has moved towards the latter, and politics has therefore become more contentious.

Plume.
That’s way to simplistic. The workers don’t just get together along with productive equipment, supply chains, and a distribution channel. Some effort has to be made to bring capital, and engineering, and workers together into a productive enterprise. Some of the value added is in the management, some is in the design, some is in the marketing, and some in operating the actual machinery. How this gets divvied up among the different types of people that all contribute to the whole enterprise, now that’s the tricky part.

Omega Centauri @105,

Anarcissie said it a lot better than I could, and more concisely.

I would add: all the functions which now are slotted to that “managerial class” could easily be done by workers accorded equal say, equal pay, equal voice in decision-making, equal value, etc. etc. — along with stripping out a massive amount of bureaucracy devoted solely to the reproduction of hierarchy and profit. We could all work far fewer hours, with far less red-tape, and far more efficiently, if we didn’t have fictional hierarchies as overhead . . . and if we no longer worked to make a few people very rich.

Anarcissie is also spot on with her call to Nature. There are no pyramids there. There are no neck-breaking hierarchies there. Capitalism, along with religion, nation states, money . . . these are all human inventions, imagined orders, imaginery orders, and given the fact that these fictions work primarily to benefit the tiny few at the expense of the many . . . . the many should reject them outright. We need to replace them with newer, better fictions, of course, because fictions are generally necessary in order to extend collective action beyond small tribes. But they need to be beneficial fictions for all of us, not just the top of the pyramid — that pyramid which is itself a fiction.

@107, @108 — One must consider that modern levels of productivity are destroying the Earth — or more exactly, those niches of the Earth which human beings can occupy. The Earth will roll on its way regardless.

The problem I see is not that management is superfluous, but that so many people want someone else to manage them instead of managing themselves. I hope that is a cultural problem and not a genetic one.

BW @110,

I completely agree with you here. It is how it’s done. The desire for self-management and self-governing, however, assumes that we won’t have the same frame any longer, once we F-disk and install new software. That we will be moving toward a completely different form of economics, one that draws the best lessons from all previous forms, updates them, and shifts to a cooperative, rather than a competitive OS.

So, if your argument is — and I may be misreading you — that the left (or parts thereof) is crazy not to recognize economic realities the right constantly seeks to obscure or gloss over, my answer would be that we’re seeking to build completely different realities. Rather than trying to use alternative rules from an alternative reality as if the status quo didn’t exist, we would change the status quo itself to that alternative — acknowledging the massive difficulties and time requirements, etc. As in, a shift from the game of Risk to that of Chess. Not the use of Chess rules in the context of the currently existing game of Risk, but the use of Chess rules in the context of the newly established Chess paradigm, etc.

It would need to sync up, in short. But prior to that, within cooperative enclaves, we could keep experimenting, refining, building movements, etc. . . . as well as push for our existing public sector to help this process by offering more and more non-profit, public goods and services.

Plume @ 111: I completely agree with you here.

No, you don’t.

I think hierarchy is problematic, precisely because it can be and often is effective, and there is no substitute. Two cheers for effective bureaucracy, as the title of a clever essay once had it, with one cheer reserved for what Anarcissie wrote @ 106.

The Left, today, is ineffective, because it has no idea about how to design and run the modern world. The radical left wants to talk about a post-modernist transformation of thinking, and the centre-left wants to preserve what it can and deny its own hypocrisy in collaborating.

“Now for something completely different” is a title for a Monty Python movie, not a practical political program.

I’m not trying to provoke you, and I don’t have time or energy by a prolonged back-and-forth. We’ve done it before, and it seems like enough to establish that we do not agree on important points, without repeating the exercise.

Plume

There’s a deep yearning for Eden, and that’s a good thing (if we never thought it possible, we wouldn’t try). But we have to pay attention to the world we actually live in – how it operates, how it might best be improved. It’s not Eden. For one thing, suffering is built in (wild kangaroos die from slow starvation when their front teeth wear out; hyenas get their living from eating wildebeest calves and so on. Lions will never live with lambs unless they agree to starve. And we humans are part of that cycle). So the practical issue is how best to ameliorate it, not abolish it.

Hierarchy is the only form that scales – that let’s large numbers of people (or anything else) cooperate closely. The key word is not cooperate, it’s :”closely”. Any study of a forager band will tell you that cooperation on practical matters is fairly loose (foragers are often very tight on non-practical matters). Don’t feel like hunting? Don’t go. Want to gather by the stream instead of in the forest? Suit yourself. It mostly doesn’t matter, and when it does, a little discussion will sort things out. But we have built enormous networks that deliver food, shelter and the rest that depend on constant monitoring, close cooperation, regular flows of information predictably recorded, filtered and displayed, hierarchies of decision and response…When they decay or are disrupted, people die (see Soviet Union post 89, Appalachia…) as the system cannot support them. So the job, in the face of the tightening environmental noose, is to downsize fast enough to ease the pressure, slowly enough to avoid disruption. And a hierarchy of decision and control will be needed to do this, run by competent people (so not the ones we have).

Does this mean we are doomed to the patriarchy? Not at all. We don’t have to behave in our families or friendship nets or local communities the same way we have to run our countries. Indeed, it would be odd if we did. But we can’t pretend that we can run a country in the same way we would run a backyard barbecue.

Oh, and lest people jump on the part about raising kids in an egalitarian manner as some kind of “indoctrination,” how do you think society started believing in the necessity of steep hierarchies and that capitalism was the only possible way to organize an economy?

Indoctrination. Manufactured consent. Brainwashing.

Educating our children to believe in an alternative, in actual self-govenance, self-reliance, self-provisioning, egalitarian worth, egalitarian value for everyone, cooperative, instead of competitive economics . . . . at least that has the benefit of helping everyone achieve their fullest potential. Our current system, OTOH, blocks most people from that, or we couldn’t maintain our hierarchies of privilege, wealth and power. Only so many get to enter through the doors of the Club in our current system, and our current indoctrination teaches us that this is “natural” and good and normal.

Answering this with an alternative that says, no, this is wrong. You shouldn’t have any obstacles in your way of achieving your fullest potential, and No, you are worth just as much as anyone else, and are just as valuable and valued as a human . . . . . that’s the kind of “indoctrination” that rises to moral and ethical heights we’ve never seen before. It actually touches on the sublime.

But we have built enormous networks that deliver food, shelter and the rest that depend on constant monitoring, close cooperation, regular flows of information predictably recorded, filtered and displayed, hierarchies of decision and response…When they decay or are disrupted, people die

I am willing to concede that an advanced economy will always need robots, drones and computers to follow orders

Peter T: “We don’t have to behave in our families or friendship nets or local communities the same way we have to run our countries. Indeed, it would be odd if we did. But we can’t pretend that we can run a country in the same way we would run a backyard barbecue.”

This is a little bit odd. Not to say that it’s wrong a priori, but it posits two spheres, one of them in which w can be non-hierarchical because it’s not important, the other one in which we need to be hierarchical because it’s important. It begins to look something like a work / leisure division. But the purpose of leisure is to support work in our society. And I don’t think that there’s an easy division between the two: the habits of one tend to get carried over to the other.

Let’s say that hierarchy is needed in order to support contemporary production and distribution networks. OK, then why do people do hierarchy? Is the backyard barbecue really non-hierarchical, or is there one person who thinks of themself as the grillmaster and who organizes production? Is everyone there of equal social status and social function?

People generally say that you do contemporary hierarchies because people are bribed into them under the threat of miserable lives on the dole. Everyone has to work for a wage, and this coerces them to work in the hierarchical order. People think that if you took the wage away, there would be chaos: no one would go to work. “Who would work in the sewers”, who would be the bosses. There has never, ever in any society that I’m familiar with been a shortage of people who want to be bosses for the social status. And there never has been a society in which people don’t want to feel useful according to the rules of that society.

Moving towards a left society requires high productivity (for most versions of the left) and it’s always been a puzzle, for honest leftists, how to keep the productivity without the coercive arrangements that produce it in our societies. But I basically think that the reason why people currently do the hierarchy that they do does not require the monetary carrot and stick that currently obtains.

<iWhose orders? Anyone’s?

I agree there’s then an question about how to take decisions about what, how to produce, etc in the absence of hierarchy (I’m inclined to think there are democratic answers) but it seems separate from the issue of how production can be organised in its absence.

Plume 03.21.16 at 7:39 pm @ 112 —
I am not too worried about the wildlife. Most of the wildlife consists of microorganisms, especially bacteria. They are far older than we are, more numerous, weigh more, are larger in the aggregate, are more widely distributed. They are constantly and endlessly creative. Above all, they are smarter. They do not perceive, learn, and think as we do, but they have learned to defeat most of our antibiotics and have communicated their learning to one another. They are learning to eat our garbage and pollutants, as they have learned to eat heat, light, electricity, rocks, metals, and larger organisms. People worry about rogue AI or extraterrestrial aliens, when we have right on the planet with us a community of beings, more powerful than we, which may, one of these days, brush us aside. I’m not worried about them; I’m worried about us. We should at least try to stop destroying the niches where we live.

The first law of the jungle is ‘Get along.’

I can’t speak for anyone else, but I’m not saying “Oh let’s forget about current food production and distribution and make a huge leap of faith into doing it without organization and management.” I don’t think that the left as a whole is really big on sweeping high modernist plans at this point (see, again, Seeing Like a State) and in any case there is no-one with the power to carry this out. It’s a matter of tendencies, and which people want to encourage, and which they can stop talking up as if they are necessary. I’ve observed that no matter where I go there is no shortage of people who want to be farmers if they can have the use of their own fairly stable plot of land. I’ve observed that no matter where I go there are people who really like to drive from place to place and not settle down. Ditto with people who really like to sit behind a desk and et.c etc. Attitudes to all of this need to change, and will change, before and instead of people suddenly saying “well let’s have everyone try a new system and if people starve oh well.”

A new working paper from researchers at Oxford University poses an important question: “The Future of Employment: How Susceptible Are Jobs to Computerization?”

The answer? A lot.

“According to our estimate, 47 percent of total US employment is in the high risk category, meaning that associated occupations are potentially automatable over some unspecified number of years, perhaps a decade or two…

@Rich Puchalsky

But I basically think that the reason why people currently do the hierarchy that they do does not require the monetary carrot and stick that currently obtains.

Hierarchy is natural, meaning every group, everywhere, always, has a leader. You may not know it, but your subconscious does. Those men on that hijacked plane that was going to crash into the White House? They led all the passengers to a certain death. Every time we are in a group – at a restaurant, theater, classroom – we scan the room and determine who the leader is and most everybody settles on the same person. Children do this also. Teachers determine who the leader of her class is and controls him (in the vast majority of cases it is a boy) instead of going crazy trying to control each individual student. Leaders also have a shorter life span and suffer higher levels of stress.

There is only so much we can rationalize. We must also remember that we are social beings and part of the natural world.

Anarcissie @126,

The study found half of all wildlife wiped out in the last 40 years, including mammals. I realize microorganisms are included, but a massive number of species were very close to us in DNA overall. The study’s authors’ chief concern, actually, was animal life.

I am not a scientist, and haven’t stayed in a Holiday Inn Express, but it seems like one of those canary in the coal mine things, screaming at us . . . along with the profound tragedy of losing so many beautiful, majestic animals along the way. Actual extinction of millions of animals on earth, due to human pollution and habitat destruction. We really have the highest moral obligation to stop this destruction.

Who’s leading this discussion?

Rich

So, what if we taught everyone from Day One that we don’t need to be dependent on the “authority” of others?

We do not teach it, we are. What we do teach children, is how to be good, responsible leaders. We are all leaders at one time or another, it just depends on what group we happen to be in at the moment.

Lupita @138,

“We do not teach it, we are. What we do teach children, is how to be good, responsible leaders. We are all leaders at one time or another, it just depends on what group we happen to be in at the moment.”

I don’t think this is true. I think, right now, we teach children how to follow orders and to be good, subservient little creatures. And as they get older, we teach them what they’ll need to know to be good, subservient followers in the business world, in some narrow way, in some narrow field, to make good, subservient cogs in the machine.

And if we ever do teach them “leadership,” it is with the idea of subservient followers in mind.

I’m saying we break with this entirely. We teach that we are all in this together, that we are all equals, that no one is set above us, no gods, no masters, none. Not “the state.” Not private enterprise. Zero autocracy of any kind, public or private.

That we will work together and take turns “leading,” and that there are no classes and no permanent hierarchies and no need for them. We can do what we need to do together, as teams, as teams with members of equal value. Rotational. We will be taught, from Day One, that we can self-provide, self-provision, become self-sufficient, to the degree possible, and most of what we need beyond that can come from local production, which we all share in. And if there is any remainder beyond that, we can get it from other, linked and federated local production nearby, or further away. And so on.

A brand new paradigm. No permanent leadership or hierarchy. We share these burdens, and we share the fruits.

What we do teach children, is how to be good, responsible leaders. ..

I don’t think this is true. I think, right now, we teach children how to follow orders and to be good, subservient little creatures.

A good opportunity to plug Schooling in Capitalist America

Have any of you all read about holacracy? It sounds to me kind of like an attempt at the sort of hierarchy-less organization being described but it’s been hard to grasp exactly what it looks like in reality. It also sounds a little creepy but maybe that’s just the social conditioning talking.

@Plume

That we will work together and take turns “leading,” and that there are no classes and no permanent hierarchies and no need for them. We can do what we need to do together, as teams, as teams with members of equal value. Rotational.

This is what I meant by teaching leadership. Take turns. Rotational. But to be able to do this, one must first acknowledge and respect the existence of societies, hierarchies and leaders as part of the natural order and not pretend that we are merely atomized, disconnected individuals or regard hierarchy as intrinsically evil.

@engels

I don’t think this is true. I think, right now, we teach children how to follow orders and to be good, subservient little creatures.

I meant good teachers. Good teachers and parents teach children to take care of others and do what is best for the group. Obviously, leadership should be taught within a framework of ethics.

Lupita and Plume are pushing different sides of the same coin. Plume says everyone should decide freely, but in practice this will probably mean everybody “freely” chooses some restrictive, uncriticizable set of rules, which probably involves an invisible hierarchy inside or outside the group. Lupita says everyone should be a leader (though there is always one secretly acknowledged leader in the group) but seems to mean that everybody should model automatic obedience to the rules and unobtrusive deference to the leader (while “doing what needs to be done” without fuss).

I’m curious whether Bruce’s idea of hierarchy is this kind, or the kind that can be criticized and improved.

Lupita, sorry, that was a quote from Plume. I was pointing to both to a book that makes the argument that – crudely- some schools teach ‘leadership’ and other s ‘followership’

Bianca @148,

I’m talking about a constitution and rules derived from the democratic process. Rules at the local level derived from localities hashing things out and coming up with those laws/rules — and mechanisms to change them, refine, reform them, etc. Participatory democracy, and participatory economics (parecon) — ongoing. And ongoing process.

So, going in, we’re agreeing to a set of rules; they aren’t being thrust on us from outside . . . and no one is bashing us over the head with them from above. We start out with equal value, an equal voice, an equal say. We decide on our own structures, within a framework of human rights/civil rights, to protect minorities, etc.

This can definitely be “criticized and improved.” That’s a given. That’s a part of the ongoing process of participation.

Lupita – sorry – that was a quote from Plume. I was pointing you both to a book that argues – crudely – that some schools teacb ‘leadership’ and others ‘followership’. So you could both be right – sort of.

Jake: “Have any of you all read about holacracy? It sounds to me kind of like an attempt at the sort of hierarchy-less organization being described but it’s been hard to grasp exactly what it looks like in reality. It also sounds a little creepy […]”

What, just because it’s a business protocol set up by HolocracyOne, LLC?

If I were writing a Paranoia RPG module then HolocracyOne, LLC would be a perfect organization name. But let’s not shoot fish in a barrel but instead look at what underlies a lot of current capitalist relationships. People have a tendency to, as I’ve written here before, see the appropriation of profits part and not what the worker gets out of it.

Think of a society without a lot of money transactions but with informal, social means of social control. Like, say, some kinds of small towns that have existed. Are those less oppressive? Maybe! Maybe not. A lot of what a worker under capitalism gets under capitalism is a kind of relationship that goes “You take the profits that I generate, you get to give me orders within a certain range of areas, otherwise I don’t have to pretend to be planning this thing and you stay out of my life.” The horror stories that people tell about capitalism are the cases where the unrestrained capitalist takes more and more and the worker has no other life. This pretty much goes by “immiseration” (along with starvation wages) and it’s what the left has depended on in one way or another to motivate people to think that the radical left is a good idea.

But if immiseration — or it’s even newer equivalent, capitalist environmental calamity — isn’t inevitable, then yes, people often prefer a formalized boss-and-worker arrangement to one in which they are “in charge” and have to negotiate everyone else also being in charge, or one in which social sanction in unofficial and very, very heavy.

Rich @156,

“The horror stories that people tell about capitalism are the cases where the unrestrained capitalist takes more and more and the worker has no other life. This pretty much goes by “immiseration” (along with starvation wages) and it’s what the left has depended on in one way or another to motivate people to think that the radical left is a good idea.”

It should be a huge tell that whenever no one is looking, capitalism reverts back to slavery. This is happening around the world today, in 2016. That’s its history and its present. It’s not just a “horror story.” It’s the natural tendency of the capitalist system itself. It’s the first economic system with (Grow or Die) imperialism built in. Without constant vigilance, constant democratic brakes on its power, it will revert back to slavery and it will always seek new territories to conquer.

So the obvious response to that is, Why keep a system that requires endless vigilance and endless democratic checks and balances? . . . and, if one is an anarchist, why would they want an economic system that requires a massive state? Capitalism does. And it also requires massive state coordination with other massive states.

Beyond that:

You have kids. They want you to get a dog for them. Does it make sense for you to get one that you’d have to forever keep on a leash, for fear it might tear your kids apart? Or just find one that is naturally good with kids, lovable, loving, etc. etc. etc. and requires no leash at all?

bianca @157,

Following rules that we create ourselves and agree to . . . yeah, that would be “freedom.” At least in the Kantian sense, and definitely in the Parecon and the participatory democracy sense. Again, this is all about ongoing participation.

I’ve already mentioned sources above, but will repeat them:

William Morris, Elisee Reclus, Peter Kropotkin (especially his Mutual Aid), Richard D. Wolff (especially his work on WSDE), and Gar Alperovitz . . . to name just a few. And I need to add Chomsky here, as someone who has pulled much of this together in his discussions about anarchism.

We’re limited with our ability to link here, so will just pick two:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_economics

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB9rp_SAp2U)

Plume @ 161

I can elaborate but I will not.

bianca @162,

Um. Okay. So I respond to your criticisms honestly, and answer your request for sources, but you won’t elaborate on your assertion when asked?

There is no hidden agenda on my part, if that’s what you’re worried about. I just want to understand what you’re getting at.

158: the HolacracyOne LLC, their biggest adopting organization having a messianic leader who built a huge compound in Las Vegas, the “all these criticisms come from people who have never seen how it’s supposed to work”, etc.

There’s a definite checks-and-balances thing happening; the New Deal was probably the worst thing that could have happened to Left in America because it undercut the argument for revolution. And the capitalists got much more aggressive in the West once it became clear that the communist nations were rapidly falling behind and no longer a threat.

It’d be nice if people were as afraid environmental catastrophe as they were of immiseration, do you see anything to indicate that they are?

Plume: “So the obvious response to that is, Why keep a system that requires endless vigilance and endless democratic checks and balances?”

Well, generic American political theory is the response to that. Why keep a system that requires endless checks and balances? Because when socialism was tried, it died for lack of those same checks and balances. When left anarchy briefly controlled territory, it was quickly wiped out by more organized foes such as our beloved Marxists. Getting wiped out is a lot worse than having endless vigilance and democratic checks and balances.

If immiseration was really happening everywhere, then left uprisings would be happening everywhere. Workers, you have nothing to lose but your chains, etc. But it isn’t, and they’re not. Thus the turn to predictions of environmental catastrophe due to capitalism, which kind of ignore that there are no non-capitalist industrialized societies doing any better.

This is the point, previously, where you start to think that I’m “supporting capitalism” or something like that. I’m really not. It’s just that these kinds of claims don’t convince because they’re basically not true.

Lupita: “Another way to look at hierarchy is when a father leaves the house and whispers to his eldest, “Take care of your mother while I’m gone”. Why is this?”

Is this a Trump quote? If not, I’m afraid the sarcasm here is too subtle for me.

Btw Bianca 149, I didn’t feel such a disconnect. The funniness in Dilbert cartoons is quite frequently rooted in reactionary instincts.

“Why keep a system that requires endless vigilance and endless democratic checks and balances? ”

Because there are no human social systems that don’t require endless vigilance and democratic checks and balances? Because it’s human nature that some humans will inevitably try to take advantage of social systems, to their own gain and the loss of others? Because some people will object to obeying the rules, even if the rules were arrived at by democratic processes?

Rich @173,

There is a huge difference between saying that capitalism reverts to slavery when no one is looking, and that immiseration exists everywhere. It exists whenever and wherever societies lack the legal framework and institutional power to restrain its natural tendency toward naked aggression against workers, consumers and the earth. That is happening today, right now, in places like Foxconn, the Thai fishing industry, in Burma, where hopefully the new government will end this, in Bangladesh, in Malaysia, etc. etc. And it happened in America and the West in general before we restrained it via institutional and democratic checks and balances.

It happened as a part of our own Westward expansion and the genocide of Native Americans. It happened in our colonies, and in the colonies of European “great powers.” Whenever and wherever capitalism was set free to do as it wanted, you got slavery or, at best, slave-like conditions. That is its history and its present. This doesn’t stop until legal force is applied to counter it. Set it “free” and you get slavery and/or slave-like conditions.

Layman @172,

“Because there are no human social systems that don’t require endless vigilance and democratic checks and balances? Because it’s human nature that some humans will inevitably try to take advantage of social systems, to their own gain and the loss of others? Because some people will object to obeying the rules, even if the rules were arrived at by democratic processes?”

The system we’ve been discussing has democracy built into the economy itself, which is not currently the way things work. In fact, in the modern world, no nation state has ever democratized the economy.

There is also the obvious matter of the inherent danger of what is under vigilant watch. It’s not the same thing to want to make sure your kid doesn’t watch too much Netflix, versus making sure he or she doesn’t jump into a car after getting blind drunk.

What is the nature of the system we’re busy watching? Does it work for all of us, on our behalf, with our say so being an equal and integrated part of the whole, and is the continuation of that one of the reasons why we remain vigilant? Or is it set up to work for only a tiny few, with that tiny few in charge, so that our vigilance is necessary to prevent widespread predatory behavior?

Again, if you have a choice between bringing a killer dog home to your kids, or a lovable, loving, gentle dog, which would you choose? “Vigilance” of what? We have control over the “what” part.

One of the many lessons of Occupy was how difficult it was to escape leadership

Fine, but they – naturally and rightly – assumed it was a worthwhile goal, unlike 9/10 CT comments section “radicals”. It might be worth reflecting on that

Plume @ 176, this entire ‘response’ is non-responsive to my point. All of human history tells us that we must be vigilant and build social systems with democratic checks and balances. Otherwise, some people will ultimately use the social system to take advantage of the others. So, ‘that system requires vigilance and democratic checks and balances’ is not a useful criticism of a social system.

Rich @177,

Not “problem solved” at all, and I’m really not sure where you’re getting that. Not from what I’ve written, certainly. And I’m not coming close to making a “liberal” critique here — which I reject.

A legal framework to avert (temporarily, perhaps) a return to slavery here doesn’t solve the ongoing slavery that capitalism creates elsewhere. And America is the chief exporter, protector, defender and source of bailouts for global capitalism. So while we may have solved certain issues here, for our population — like the prevention of capitalism as slavery — that by no means comes close to solving a host of other problem even here, much less where capitalism as slavery is being maintained to this day.

For instance, capitalism here, even in the absence of actual slavery, is still highly autocratic, highly anti-democratic. It still reproduces endless hierarchies of power, privilege and wealth. While we don’t have capitalism as actual slavery, we do have capitalism as creator and distributor of obscene inequality, as exemplified by the fact that the richest 20 Americans now hold as much wealth as the bottom half of the nation combined. The richest 0.1% holds as much as the bottom 90%, etc.

In no way can anyone claim “problem solved” when inequality like that exists and is endlessly reproduced.

“Not “problem solved” at all, and I’m really not sure where you’re getting that. ”

It’s how statements like “And it happened in America and the West in general before we restrained it via institutional and democratic checks and balances.” are read. That statement pretty much sounds like: first something happened, then we restrained it. In other words, problem solved.

I was a left-liberal for a long time, and I basically didn’t know any liberals who thought unrestrained capitalism would lead to good results. On the contrary, U.S. left-liberals generally like labor unions, democracy, a nonprofit advocacy sector, health, safety, workplace and financial regulation, anti-trust laws, breaking up “too big to fail” banks, and so on. Left-liberals generally have a version of the U.S. domestic century that goes pretty much like Jake mentioned above: unrestrained capitalism leads to a strong left which leads to the New Deal which restrains capitalism and that more or less works economically until people forget why we needed the New Deal and the cycle starts over.

Even Brett will go on about democracy and low corruption. Pretty much no one believes in unrestrained capitalism except a few people who are paid to say they believe in it to shift the Overton Window. So pretty much everyone has come to terms with the necessity for restraining it. Saying that we need to continually restrain it or it will do bad things generally leads to a big shrug.

Rich @184,

You must have skipped everything before and after that sentence, because it was all in reference to capitalism reverting to slavery. Which I reiterated in 182. It sounds like you skipped that post, too.

The prevention of capitalism reverting to slavery here is a far cry from the “liberal” critique of unrestrained capitalism and its effects being tempered via the New Deal, etc. It’s really not on the same map. I don’t think any “liberal” views capitalism in that way, as naturally tending toward slavery when no one’s looking.

Again, not sure where you’re getting any of this from, other than from the absence of reading.

“I never even remotely suggested that we can “exist without the danger of some people oppressing others.” I’m talking about setting up a much better system that will radically minimize this threat in comparison with the current system.”

I think you did remotely suggest that, but never mind. I get now that you want to scrap this system because it needs ‘endless vigilance and democratic checks and balances’, in order to replace it with another system which requires somewhat less ‘endless vigilance and democratic checks and balances’. And something about dogs.

Plume @ 186

“I don’t think any “liberal” views capitalism in that way, as naturally tending toward slavery when no one’s looking.”

I do. And I know a lot of other liberals who feel the same way. Even more so, my boyfriend is a libertarian, and if pressed, he’ll admit that unregulated capitalism is a nightmare.

Extexan @190,

Does he think unregulated capitalism will revert to slavery? I do. I see it as always doing this, if no one is looking, historically.

Does he think capitalism — regulated or not — should be abolished and replaced with a fully democratic economic system? Again, I do.

When I say “anticapitalist,” I mean someone who is against capitalism, period, in any form, regulated, Golden Age of Keynes, whatever . . . and does not think it’s worth saving or reforming. He or she just wants it absolutely gone and replaced with an alternative. I’ve never met a liberal with those views. I’ve never met a liberal who didn’t believe capitalism could be reformed enough to “work for everyone” and was worth saving.

An anticapitalist, OTOH, is waaay beyond all of that, and likely passed through that reformist stage long ago to get there. For those of us who are anticapitalists — been there, done that. We see it as far too destructive — regulated or not — and ecologically unsustainable to bother with at all. Its shelf life is long past the curdled date. Time for a brand new paradigm.

Fixed link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LG4hOjJ9tEs

If you want control over who responds to your comments you might want to consider starting your own blog.

Plume, I’ve read and commented Crooked Timber for years. When you make half of the comments on the blog, why should I not respond to them?

I’m not supporting capitalism as I’m a winner. I’m not. I’m autistic and apparently unemployable. However as an economic system it is so much more productive than any alternative that as a long term unemployed person I’m still richer than much of the world population. As I depend on the state I’m rather understandably hostile to the whole concept of a stateless society.

Slavery and capitalism do not go well together. Forced labour violates one of the essential requirements of a labour market, that the employee be free to accept or reject an offer. If you have forced labour then the market is unable to operate to raise wages in growing areas of the economy suffering a labour shortage and thereby move employment to more productive areas.

Forced labour was commonplace in pre-capitalist economies and caused a severe inflexibility that was a major obstacle to industrialisation in, for example, Tsarist Russia. The serfs couldn’t move to the cities so the available labour force was limited to the free peasants so wages in industry were higher making Russia a less attractive place to establish industry. Command economies have similar problems with re-distribution of labour to the most productive areas the bureaucratic process is slow and inflexible. In a market individuals re-distribute their labour to where it attracts the best pay; which is where there is the greatest scarcity of labour.

I do not think that it is a coincidence that capitalism developed first in Britain where there had already been a substantially free market in labour for centuries.

Brett Dunbar 03.23.16 at 12:46 am @ 179, 198 —
But class kills. And you can’t have capitalism without classes.

One might say that liberalism and capitalism were once on the Left (that is, more favorable to freedom and equality than their opponents and competitors). But that was a long time ago, before they achieved world domination, became that for which there was no respectable alternative, and set about destroying the habitable portions of the planet. Libcap won, and victory is death.

“that as a long term unemployed person I’m still richer than much of the world population.”

This is what I meant when I said you were a lottery winner. You were born in the right place, so of course the free market capitalist system looks best to you.

Brett @198: one of the essential requirements of a labour market [is] that the employee be free to accept or reject an offer

A full employment policy and a strong social safety net would greatly increase an employee’s freedom to accept or reject an offer. And yet contemporary American conservatives are fanatically opposed to them.

Plume, I’m not trying to describe what you believe. I’m trying to describe how I think most liberals interpret your argument. From grade school on, American political theory is all about checks and balances and the need for eternal vigilance because people basically aren’t trustworthy. And so no argument that goes “but if we don’t get rid of X we’ll need eternal vigilance” is really going to have any force.

engels, I see that you’re continuing the Marxist role of classifying everyone’s tendency in terms of Marxist ideas. It’s good to see that the last function of traditional Marxism remains in place even as any other function that you might have had has long since been lost.

@ Plume, there is a demand for paper in Plumistan, so that more people can pen screeds to the glory of The Revolution. Describe how the democratic system meets this demand. Start from the beginning, e.g. there is no paper factory, and no one owns the land or the trees, and no one has wealth.

Brett @198: I’m autistic and apparently unemployable.

I hope you won’t mind my saying so, but for a (self-described) autistic person, you are wonderfully, astonishingly articulate and thoughtful. This comment may, of course, simply reflect my ignorance about the capabilities of autistic persons. But your example gives me hope for a couple of young persons I know who are on the spectrum.

Oh, stop baiting, Layman.

I’ll take the opportunity of this Temporary Autonomous Zone to say, again, that democratic checks and balances really kind of suck. And I don’t think that they would any less under some kind of economic democracy. Democracy is a way of reconciling many different people’s desires, interests, policy programs — however you like to describe it — but it’s really not a very good one. It involves first the designation of a group of people to make the decision, usually vastly oversizing but sometimes undersizing the group involved. Then there’s some kind of discussion, actual or implicit, and people become attached to one of a few possibilities that are pushed by interests with the resources to propagandize them. And then they vote, and at least 50% of the people are mildly pleased, and some number under 50% are screwed.

And all of the restraints on democracy — supermajorities, rules on what you can and can’t do, constitutions or systems of rights — must themselves be created by democracy. And there’s no magical end run around them. If people no longer believe, the rules lose force. If they don’t agree in the first place, they never make the rules in the first place.

If people don’t have the ability to make themselves be considered as having a claim on society, they starve, as Amartya Sen points out. So democracy has been assigned this role. If you have a vote, you supposedly matter. But this is the most nominal, theoretical version of actually mattering that’s it’s possible to invent.

Brett @ 198

I don’t think there’s anything inherent to capitalism that is opposed to slavery. Currently, labor is bought and sold in what is basically a spot market. There’s no economic reason, though, why we couldn’t buy and sell binding future labor contracts, which would be indistinguishable from debt bondage. And even more directly, there’s no economic reason people shouldn’t be able to buy and sell themselves. And once you allow buying and selling, there’s no reason not to create trading markets, create corporations to buy, hold, improve, and sell, securitize ownership instruments, trade derivatives, use as collateral, and so own. It’s a horrible distopian future, but there’s nothing is capitalism that’s opposed to it. It’s what we do with farm animals and cars.

Of course, we choose to prohibit this because of human right and ethics — and because it would lead to uprisings and revolutions.

Plume @ 211: ” It’s pretty obvious that your main interest here is to mock and belittle alternatives and perhaps refine your snark game a bit.”

Actually, my main interest here is learning, and your posts get in the way of that. By responding I’m trying to help you understand that you can’t actually articulate your vision or describe a way to achieve it, in the hopes that you’ll think about it more and post about it less. I admit the snark, which emerges in response to things like analogizing the choosing of a social and economic system by comparing it to choosing a pet for one’s kids, which is a thoroughly asinine analogy. But I apologize for it, and will try to avoid it in the future.

If you can provide a clear answer to the questions I asked in 208, without nonsense about pets, I’m happy to read those answers. If you can’t, please consider the possibility that you don’t actually have the answer; and the possibility that when people react to you as if you don’t have the answer, as if you can’t explain what it is you think you have, as if you go on at length about it without actually answering any of the obvious questions about it, they’re right to do so.

Layman @216,

I’ve already articulated my vision with more than enough clarity for any reasonably intelligent person to understand. It’s more than apparent that you’re just too stupid to ever grasp any of this, and none of it is complicated. And, please. There aren’t enough LOLs in the world to come close to expressing the laughter that welled up inside me when I read this:

“By responding I’m trying to help you understand that you can’t actually articulate your vision or describe a way to achieve it, in the hopes that you’ll think about it more and post about it less.”

Aside from the obvious lie, that you would try to “help” anyone discuss alternatives to capitalism here, it’s also patently absurd to suggest that by asking me more and more questions, this would convince me to post less often. It’s similar to the ridiculous logic on display when people complain about someone posting too much, and do so with insults and obvious provocations for further back and forths.

Let’s just be honest with each other. I think you’re a know-nothing asshole. You obviously don’t like me either. So why don’t we just avoid each other completely from now on? But whether you agree to this or not, I won’t be reading your posts in the future, including your response to this one.

Layman, the pet analogy makes much more sense when you realize that the “loving, peaceful dog” he’s offering is actually a hibernating grizzly bear.

Yes, the dog barks when you get close and the bear just lies there. Yes, no children have ever been killed by their family’s pet grizzly bear. Yes, teddy bears are technically bears and children do love teddy bears. Yes, the bear exhibit at the zoo is very popular. No, this does not mean that replacing your family’s dog with a grizzly bear is a good idea.

@ Jake

No, it’s a useless analogy because they are not similar choices. ‘Choosing’ the organizing principle of human society is not like choosing pets.

It didn’t exist for any commercial reason, the reasons were nationalistic and political. The costs vastly exceeded the benefits. Some businesses made money but the costs in taxes to others was greater.

While the colonies acquired Britain’s well developed commercial law and became far more accessible to investment that wasn’t enough to justify acquiring colonies. More businesses lost money due to increases in tax to pay for for the colonies than benefited from them. The Empire was acquired for nationalistic and emotional purposes, it looked pretty impressive on the map. Some territories e.g. Zanzibar were acquired as a direct consequence of suppressing slavery.

There were also struggles within Britain (and within in other colonial powers) over what it took to extract a profit and over the value, if any, of pride of ownership (so to speak).

The idea that the colonies cost more than they were worth was the embodiment of a political compromise of sorts, a way to rationalize the policy of withdrawal, a policy that was the culmination of a long struggle over colonial policy between those who found the colonies very profitable business indeed, and those who could not stomach the methods and means that made colonies sources of great wealth. For Britain, the Commonwealth was a way to reconcile the pride of empire — a powerful political force — with the new reality.

Historically, though, the Empire was a source of enormous wealth, especially for the British landed aristocracy and landed gentry. Driving slaves on sugar islands and stealing treasure from India, along with commercial colonial trade, the terms of which were deliberately slanted, were important sources of wealth. A distinct segment of the British aristocracy and gentry formed the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland and drew their sustenance from starving and draining that benighted isle. They weren’t very nice to the Highlanders of Scotland either, as sentimental as a later generation became about tartans and romantic stories. For generations, especially the second and third sons made careers in the Navy or Army or colonial civil service (and before that in the East India Company). Warren Hastings’ Empire was no financial sink. Cecil Rhodes’ empire was no financial sink.

The English would rather hear that the colonies were unprofitable and that they were self-sacrificially giving the world the benefit of English law and probity than that their looting of impoverished peoples destroyed the possibility of competent institutions. They don’t want to think their selfishness caused famine.

To their credit, authoritarian colonial policy was at least somewhat controversial in England — rumors of the worst abuses in Jamaica or Calcutta, China or Sudan could get some feeble response back home. The British opposed slavery (though with more hypocrisy than is commonly admitted). Gladstone pressed Home Rule for Ireland. The American Revolution would not have succeeded without the sympathy of prominent Whigs and many common people. But, the National Liberals repaired the electoral deficits of reactionary Tory governments, fighting colonial independence from Ireland to India.

While I have no doubt that modern empires extracted a great deal of wealth from their colonies (or destroyed it) I can’t think of one that did not bankrupt its central state, except for one that is still working on its bankruptcy. (I include total military defeat and satellitization as kinds of bankruptcy.) So I take it empire is a bad business, yet the power-hungry who congregate in governments are drawn to it like moths to the flame.

Anarcissie @ 228

Empires have life cycles. If you are going to have a life, the cycle comes with it. You’re not going to last, either.

The East India Company acquired control of India due to having the most effective army there when the Mogul state collapsed in the early eighteenth century. The company also had the advantage that unlike the earlier empires it didn’t have repeated civil wars with almost every succession.

The imperial regimes tended to be more stable and better governed than what they had replaced. Chronic warfare destroys wealth and the legal and economic structure of primitive tribal regimes hinders wealth creation.

One state actually went bankrupt due to its colonial ambitions, namely Egypt.