The transformation of left neoliberalism

I tend to favor direct public provision of goods and services that we’ve deemed necessary regardless of private income ability to pay, but I don’t see that as exclusive to market provision of those as well. Having public schools open to any students has not made it impossible to have private schools, nor did the Post Office make it impossible to have private carriers of mail. Some things you might want a monopoly of state power on, but mostly not.

Second, at the global level, where the soi-disant liberal order is in decay, and it is not clear that there is very much that is going to replace it.

The US still has a lot of room to act unilaterally, if it wishes to do so. But that is rapidly diminishing, and the Chinese leadership at least seems ambivalent at best about the existing order (and absolutely against anything that would impinge on authoritarian control at home).

As always, of course, in the streets with the self-conscious power to make demands.

In the streets does not only mean Paris 1871 or whatever. It does mean mass action beyond existing institutions, parties, and liberal processes. Riots not strikes, meaning extralegal and non-hierarchal.

I like the marijuana movements as an example, although BLM and MeToo also work, if not yet as effectively. In Oklahoma the movement wanted medical, so the PtB wrote an absurdly permissive medical regime, thinking it would lose. It passed. Then the Right used institutional means to contravert the written language, and the Movement said Eff you, referendum to full recreational now. The right capitulated.

Women and minorities still feel vulnerable, and also opportunistic. They can still use the status quo, and think it protects them and can enable them. This is the story of the Democratic Party, but Harris and Gillibrand are still Clintonite neoliberals and will fail and disappoint. Warren and Booker might change to meet the challenge.

It should be Sanders, and the tragedy of 2020 will be the final straw. I hope like hell Sanders and the DSA walk out of the convention (which can only nominate a candidate acceptable to Bloomberg and Howard Schultz, and lose). The Democratic Party needs to die.

Then we must get the charismatic populist hard-left Woman of Color this country needs to go LEFT. Wait. We have her. We know her name.

I used to be reluctantly skeptical of minimum wage policies (for the usual dumb econ major reasons), but fifteen years ago or so Brad had a reassuring post saying they were great actually for exactly the sustainability reasons you’re talking about. No, I’m not going to spend all day looking for it, because his blog is a mess.

Left and Right are both national movements and it turns out the American nation (among others) is too large and too evolved to have an orderly discourse either by party (either/any party) or as a nation alone or as a nation among nations. It’s a fight to the finish and all sides must sacrifice and hold on for the win. So it goes! Time to look not up or sideways but down. Time to get small and fade away. Come back later, maybe.

https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/eg-surge-in-us-economists-support-for-carbon-tax-to-tackle-emissions-financial-times.html :

Let me say that I am extremely disappointed that Janet Yellen, Marty Feldstein, and Ted Halstead did not insist that this Financial Times story say that, while they believe that their proposal is much stronger than “Green New Deal” proposals, that the “Green New Deal” proposals would be a vast improvement over current policy. Extremely disappointed. Extremely: Leslie Hook: Surge in US Economists’ Support for Carbon Tax to Tackle Emissions…

My biggest objection to “neoliberalism” is their obsession with deregulation. Their emphasis on privatization is bad enough (if any “public-private partnership” ever actually delivered benefits to citizens and did not end up stealing from them I would love to hear about it), but the insistence that government regulation is ALWAYS bad for entrepreneurs and ALWAYS produces inefficiencies is insane. Many “natural monopolies” exist where introducing private actors always has bad results. The earliest writing we know about includes codes of law that invariably include regulation of markets. Since some of these codes go back four or five thousand years, and are based on millennia of daily experience, the claim that markets will regulate themselves is delusion. I hate Milton Friedman, Wossisname von Hayek, all “libertarians,” and Phil Gramm.

Why should the neoliberals who have infiltrated social democracy and liberalism wish to abandon neoliberalism? Their first allegiance, surely, should always be to plutocracy.

I would suspect that they are not abandoning neoliberalism, but rather are recognising that a) what little remains of social democracy and liberalism is heartily sick of their thuggery and corruption, and b) the right wing, which remains wholly committed to neoliberalism, has an oversupply of crooks and thugs of its own and doesn’t need them. Hence, in order to survive, they must pretend to abandon neoliberalism. (Perhaps, too, they feel that they are more effective agents of plutocracy where they are in a position to undermine social democracy and liberalism and thus prevent these movements from making any kind of comeback.)

If so, then the answer to henry’s first question (by the way, this is one of the few posts from henry which I heartily agree with) is “the people whom you call neoliberal leftists espouse policies which clash with the values of the social democrats and liberals right now, always have done so, and always will do so, and any attempt to bring them into a social democrat or liberal coalition undermines that coalition by definition”.

DeLong, the unrepentent NeoLiberal free trader, is on record defending policies making people in other countries richer, and his neighbors in his brutalist high-rise (Berkeley’s version of an Ivy tower) are Piketty’s partners, so inequality is in contention; in this respect hes’s more global than most. It would appear that his priorities have shifted, as well they might, given that the most catastrophic projections of climate change now appear to be the likeliest.

To be sure, economic inequality and climate change are orthogonal issues, but so are racism and sexism and [your issue here]. We need to fix everything as we go along, using every tool in the box and fashioning others as the need arises. I suppose this is a pitch for the Green New Deal: if you’re going to roll up your sleeves, you might as well take care of this or that. And what is else not to be overcome?

@Henry But one key lesson of the last couple of decades is that market provision of benefits makes it harder to build and sustain coalitions

That’s a very thought-provoking observation, but I think it is not quite correct, and I think that can be seen from the immediate continuation (my emphasis) “private gain and public solidarity are at best uncomfortable bedfellows”. It is not that market mechanisms of provision of benefits make it in themselves harder to build and sustain coalitions, what makes it harder to build and sustain coalitions is when inappropriate mechanisms of provision of benefits are employed (whether markets, when they are inappropriate, or central planning, when it is inappropriate, or philosophers kings rule, when it is inappropriate), because it is hard to cooperate in an enterprise whose rules, aims and mechanisms are skewed – indeed, it is even unclear what “cooperate” means in such an environment. So the problem is not with markets in and on themselves, the problem is with the monetary evaluation of things which are not meant to be evaluated in this way, or more bluntly the problem is not that private gain and public solidarity are uneasy partners, it is that when it comes to environmental regulations, or education, or healthcare, or labor and safety laws… private gain (especially in its implicit economical understanding) is not an appropriate evaluative tool or analytical category (and here I’m back to uninstalling Hayek).

So indeed there will be inevitable disputes, indeed, but not on whether markets should be employed, but on who will win between those who benefit from the power of wielding markets onto others, and those upon which which markets are used. Left-neoliberal must make this choice: loose some of their current social power (and accompanying advantages) or abandon the pretense of favoring markets because they are efficient, and not because they are useful as tools of social control (become Right-neoliberal, in effect). Left-neoliberal in France have made their choice. In the US, this election cycle will surely bring an answer.

MFB hits the nail on the head, and there are any number of ways to make the obvious point that so-called “left” neoliberalism was never anything but an annexation and hollowing-out of social democratic politics by a form of political and economic reason that has always been inherently of, by, and for the right. Seeing as how Slobodian’s Globalists is the trendy new take on the origins and objectives of the neoliberal movement, an interesting way to make that point is to note that one of the strongest running threads throughout Slobodian’s account is the connection between each successive development of neoliberal politics, and the ever-vigilant defense of global distributions of wealth, property, and class power inherited from previous eras of direct colonial annexation and appropriation. Whether it’s the early neoliberals’ interwar nostalgia for the imperial economic order of central Europe under the Habsburgs, the postwar neoliberals’ opposition to Rostow “stages of growth” developmentalism as an alarming concession to colonized nations’ potential demands for social-democratic baseline affluence, or the post-Bretton Woods elevation of the Washington Consensus model specifically as an alternative to the NIEO model championed by the anticolonial Third World, Slobodian’s account makes almost too perfect sense if we read the history of neoliberalism from top to bottom as a means of legitimation for the global ethnonationally-based economic disparities of European colonialism.

When we put it that way, especially if we also view the modern origins of white racism itself as similarly grounded in the ideological legitimation for colonialism, it seems absurd to imagine any fundamental incompatibility between neoliberal capitalist politics and Trumpian ethnonationalist politics — which perfectly explains why the self-conceived “left” establishment neoliberals of the hashtag-Resistance are now a rump technocracy without a constituency, because the global finance-capitalist “Davos people” with whom they’ve been trying to curry favor since the ’90s have more or less made peace with the modern wave of “populist” ethnonationalists including figures Modi, Bolsonaro, and even Trump himself. This exact issue has been the focus of Slobodian’s recent ongoing work since publishing the book, and the more you look into the deeply interconnected histories of neoliberalism and the racist/fascist far right, the more the historical moment of “left” neoliberalism seems like a flukish aberration from neoliberalism’s natural right-wing racist state.

Looking forward to Delong retracting his blog posts calling David Harvey an ‘intellectual masturbator’, Noam Chomsky a liar, Paul Sweezy a Stalinist hack, …

DeLong, the unrepentent NeoLiberal free trader, is on record defending policies making people in other countries richer,

Is this a bad thing, now? If you want to make people in other countries poorer, you could go back to old-school colonialism, I guess.

The left is enjoying a resurgence in the US (not so much elsewhere).

The most resurgent left is right across the US border. López Obrador in Mexico has almost a 90% approval rate, the highest of any head of state in the world.

I have noticed that he is practically banned from the US media, both legacy and social. Out of sight, out of mind. Meanwhile, Sanders and Ocasio trip all over themselves regarding the recent Jussie Smollett level coup-by-tweet attempt in Venezuela. Any left asking itself whether or not to invade a country that poses no threat is not resurgent. It is not even left.

The real left, López Obrador , respected the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Venezuela and offered to mediate if both parts agreed. That is the left: non-interventionist, an advocate for peaceful solutions, anti-imperialist.

It seems to me that a very necessary pre-condition for this move away from neo-liberalism by Brad Delong etc is that the left/neo-liberals won, decisively, against the working class; they won to the point where the Democratic Socialists are dominated by the same finance-friendly college grads that the neo-liberals are, and not by working class activists. I somehow think that if the “left” were heavy on private sector unions and represented their interests, Brad Delong would be distinctly unenthusiastic about moving in that direction–and most of the other commenters on this board would share his disinterest.

Who commenting here would be enthusiastic about a left/DS movement that was dominated by the concerns and interests of LIUNA, the UMWA, IBEW, and the Teamsters? This used to be a significant chunk of the left; at this point, it isn’t.

Glad to read that Prof DeLong (& other Rubinstas?) will not be playing neoliberal school marm to the GND.

Gareth Wilson @11: “I’ve worked as a private tutor. How would you have punished me for that?”

there will be consequences

The Slobodian book sounds interesting, and points to something that remains depressing in Britain: left neoliberals persuing “legitimate concerns” ethnonationalism and their continued insistence on the greatness of neoconservatism, with the Labour right continuing to insist on the greatness of the Iraq War (“only the hard left opposed it”) whilst their hero, Saint Anthony, shakes hands with Bolsonaro. Who is any of this supposed to appeal to?

Here’s my problem with the neoliberals – summed up in two separate response from Brad himself. Early on he does something I should give him credit for because it is an incredible rarity from neoliberals. He admits error. Here are his words:

We were certainly wrong, 100 percent, on the politics.

They most certainly were. And the entire time the dirty hippies were telling them that siding with the mythical unicorn of moderate and reasonable conservatives was a bad move. So on the basic question of understanding of the politics, the “art of the possible”, neoliberals were self-admittedly 100% wrong and their “hard left” critics were 100% right. In people with a modicum of self-awareness, this might result in a bit of introspection and maybe less overwhelming confidence of their superior understanding of the world. And yet this is what he says about the left a little later on in the interview (emphasis mine:

Our current bunch of leftists are wonderful people, as far as leftists in the past are concerned. They’re social democrats, they’re very strong believers in democracy. They’re very strong believers in fair distribution of wealth. They could use a little more education about what is likely to work and what is not. But they’re people who we’re very, very lucky to have on our side.

No Brad. You’re projecting again. No one can use more education about what will and will not work from people who thought that appealing to the Iraq Invasion era Republican Party was a winning move. Here is DeLong’s argument “we neoliberals might have been totally wrong and the dirty hippies were right, but you should still punch them hippies. It’s only the current batch of leftists that are okay, not the older ones who called us mean names. Sure those dirty hippies were just stating what we know now to be true – that us neoliberals were acting like stupid idiots – that doesn’t change the fact that we’re better than them.”

Okay, rant done. Sure it’s not a kindness, especially considering that this is a prominent neoliberal admitting error and trying to adjust their behaviour to account for that fact. But really – even in this mea culpa and shift to the left, it still looks like he’s kicking hippies and cozying up to the “new” progressive movement because they have influence.

@b9n10nt an ethic of “there are goods we must possess equally for them to fully qualify as goods.” Legal representation, voting. But also, I would argue under ideal conditions, education, health care.

I think that is an important and correct point, as these goods underlie one’s ability to intervene in the polity (not to mention their moral and humanist dimension, but I would argue that these two dimensions are ultimately the same).

@Gareth Wilson I’ve worked as a private tutor. How would you have punished me for that?

Serious or not, that’s in fact quite a profound question.

The deepest line of fracture running through contemporary prosperous democracies is not material, it is educative. This means that deep down, the ultimate source of the woes that plague these societies (the inhumane inequalities, the crippling social stupidity, the creeping authoritarianism and the breathtaking collective tetany in face of those …) is, well in first approximation, not quite private tutors but definitely people who pay private tutors for their children (an uncomfortable conclusion for the crowd of commenters in an academic blog). Yet education seems to me to be both an individual unconditional good (contrary for instance to material prosperity) and not readily amenable to redistribution (ditto).

I have no real idea to solve this conundrum, except to point out that the more you disconnect educational achievements from basic welfare provisions, the more you mitigate the problem (UBI+Job Guarantee+universal healthcare+universal education, and if the question is how to pay for all this, the answer is by taxes on people who can afford private tutors) and vice-versa. The alternative chosen in my country is open warfare of one side against the other, and that is not pretty to see.

I think SamChevre may hit the nail on the head @27, which is echoed by, eg, Louis Proyect @19 comment on the lack of option for revolutionary socialism. In the US, at least, too many union or union membership had a hard time embracing gender and racial equality. This vulnerability has existed in US politics for a long time and the conservatives were able to take advantage from the 70s on.

But I think you could be too quick to dismiss the neoliberals on this one. I think they’re comfortable with finance, but they are not strictly opposed to greater worker power. I don’t know where Delong stands, but there are plenty of neoliberals willing to support Warren’s proposal for worker representation on corporate boards.

Louis Proyect:
There is no difference between Brad DeLong’s social democracy and Bhaskar Sunkara’s democratic socialism. Both of them are pushing for a Swedish style welfare state in which the economic lynchpin is the private ownership of the means of production, not whether there are markets.

Regardless of what you think of their politics, this is a profoundly stupid comment. Brad DeLong does not want a traditional Swedish style welfare state, while Bhaskar sees a Swedish welfare state as a step towards his ultimate goal.

In fact there’s evidence for this in the next statement that you make: “In Sunkara’s latest Jacobin article, he admits that the Swedish model is not even viable since the big capitalists will subvert it just as they subverted Allende in Chile.” Gosh, maybe he understands the basic flaw in Social Democracy.

Z: the more you disconnect educational achievements from basic welfare provisions, the more you mitigate the problem [of needing equal education to support an egalitarian society]

& we can hope that, in a situation where public education is equitable and sufficiently funded, the economic elite of an egalitarian society would sense the futility of consuming private educational resources as a future investment in furthering their kids social status.

Thx for giving Gareth Wilson the more thoughtful response he likely deserved.

Henry, two big things wrong with this post…

1. Mike writes in his response that Obama has “romney’s Healthcare policy.” This is wrong, he didn’t, and you shouldn’t be taking advice on politics from someone who doesn’t understand this. This is important because mike isn’t trying to say the republicans opposed Obama on partisan grounds but they didn’t – they opposed him because his policies helped poor people. If he had run on Romney’s policies they would have quietly stopped opposing them after he left. This is particularly cute since you’re using mikes response as a springboard to say that left neoliberals failed but it’s basically just wrong. Here’s a tip: anyone who thinks Obama could have introduced Medicare for all either doesn’t understand healthcare policy in the us or thinks the only successful left wing politics is revolutionary. It’s funny that you use an article that misses the class war being waged in the us as a springboard for a commentary on how the world needs more class war!

2. The reason the left is becoming popular in the USA is that the USA is a uniquely right wing country in desperate trouble, and political shifts in the USA are not reflective of the rest of the world. Yes we are all waiting for Americans to grow up, but their process of growing up is irrelevant to what is going on elsewhere. Too many people on the internet mistake the us for the world (I see this shockingly on twitter), and you all need to stop. In particular there are things happening in Asia and Africa that American commentators just ignore in their assessment of global political trends. Lupita also makes this point above about her neck of the woods.

Americans are confused and lost in their racist class war nation. Don’t make the mistake of thinking the rest of us are lost with them.

Bob McManus @4

Anyway, best laid plans agley, etc.
I think Sanders will be ready to retire after a first term. Omar 2024, what do you say?

JD: “And if the answer to that question was ‘No, I don’t’, then the interviewer should have said…”

Shouldn’t you find something better to do with your life than writing fake DeLong fanfic?

Kabaservice and Perlstein have a lot good to say. It’s not clear to me that they are 100% right. However, it is clear to me that they know more than me on this and are much more worth listening to.

The lefty resurgence should get away from academic theorizing about the virtues of social democracy, and concentrate instead on the SPECIFIC attributes of SPECIFIC goods and services, in order to decide whether the market, or else government monopsony, should provide it. (We will even find within standard economics itself some of the tools to characterize these problems, such as the insurmountable market failures and market inefficiencies in healthcare on the supply side, on the demand side, and in the private insurance intermediaries.)

The left might also take the fight to the right, and continually hammer on the facts: that the free market turn of the last 40 years has been half-a-disaster. It is hurting people, and we should all be a lot further on in our lives.

All this back-and-forth about first getting a “social welfare state” that is going to solve problems is a big waste of time. First, not everyone is on the same page, and after a couple of hundred years of this talk already, they may not be for a long while more. Second and pursuant to the first, even the brightest bulbs on the left, as on the right, don’t appear to know that much economics and are going to fuck it up royally. Third, the real way to transform the majority’s social preferences — which is THE central issue we should be thinking about — is by making piecemeal improvements that help people find the future for themselves.

Look: In the U.S., corporate plutocrats have been doing their darnedest for decades to curb Social Security and Medicare but haven’t made a dent in the majority’s social expectations about those goods. So: pick another good or service which MUST be provided, and make the plan to provide it!

Don’t worry about the blowback from the plutocrats who will undermine all your good deeds so why even bother. CHANGE the majority’s social preference about another specific good or service, instead. Let’s “cut to the chase”, people!

It will be a mind-numbing political disaster to continue with endless discussions about whether lefty neoliberals or neoliberal leftists have the tools to get to social democracy or democratic socialism, and all the rest of this erudite hairsplitting as on Jacobin.

If you still want to go theoretical instead, then SHOW how government is another form of cost-saving and is analogous to physical capital, only it is placed at a higher, social level. Government reduces transaction costs and environmental costs; physical capital reduces production-transformation costs.

It follows that for some goods or services the future is monopoly, whether private monopoly or government monopoly, because that means less physical effort. Is this neoliberalism or socialism? Can you even tell the difference?

Markets allow freedom of choice and quicker innovation, but (and it’s a big but), if the good or service in question has been transformed from scarcity into satiety, or else, the good or service should be provided to all despite an inability to pay money for it (e.g. healthcare), then it is ridiculous NOT to have a government monopsony for that particular good or service, still allowing private ownership and innovation on the provider side (e.g. “Medicare for All”). The government monopsony should follow Ostrom’s rules for common-pool resources, i.e. narrowly focused on that good or service; simple rules; easy process; lots of transparency; etc.

A preamble:

I used to read BDL’s blog (“Grasping Reality”) daily, although it has always been one of the hardest blogs for me to read due to html and organization issues it has on my browser. I wonder if his critics here know things such as he was loudly against the Iraq invasion in 2003, loudly against the return of John Yoo to a teaching position at Berkley, loudly for a stimulus package twice the size of the one the Obama administration proposed, and loudly supported Piketty’s work on inequality; and that he regularly publishes a “smackdown” post of opinions critical of his own, and regularly publishes a “mark to market” post explaining where and why his opinions have changed. I think he remains a supporter of NAFTA, which he worked on in the Clinton administration, however, but acknowledges that it has had some unintended consequences (which should have been ameliorated legislatively had the votes been available).

On the evidence of the Internet, I’ve thought for a long time that the real coming conflict/polarization was is going to be between secular liberals (including religious people who honor the secular sphere), who value science and communicative reason, and conservatives or reactionaries, who are acutely aware of the losses Marx and Bob M. refer to and will accept nothing less than to reverse them. The real debates seem to be about who can capture the narratives, and the votes, on either side. On the Republican side, the conservatives have clearly beat out the liberals among voters. The only way moderates can regain the Republican Party is to make reaction taboo among most voters, yet still gain the trust of reactionary elites on the right. That seems not in the cards. On the left, reflexive animus toward “neoliberals” seems to me to reflect the absorption of the same, essentially conservative, critique. I wonder how stable such a left can be once it’s in power. A fair proportion of Europe’s social democracies are monarchies, in which the left can hold power without threatening the power structure. All liberals seem to have to answer the lack of similar safeguards in the US is attacks on Evangelicals as inherently legitimate.

“There is inevitable inefficiency involved in the public sector.”

First, there’s inevitable inefficiency (how do you define that term anyway?) in any sector.
Second – nothing is forever. No institution is even close to perfect for any length of time.
Third – it may have escaped your empirical test, but French, German, British, Australian etc bureaucracies have been dealing efficiently with health, education, transport, banking, social security and so on for a century or more. Not perfectly, but better than the private attempts they superseded. Heck, the British admiralty has been dealing efficiently with all the intricacies of naval power for three centuries.

It may be that the US, with its embedded patronage, ongoing racial cleavages, size, archaic constitution and regional disparities is unable to develop and maintain an efficient national bureaucracy, but that is a different matter from theoretical musings about inherent limitations.

JD: “Brad DeLong: ‘Kabaservice and Perlstein have a lot good to say. It’s not clear to me that they are 100% right. However, it is clear to me that they know more than me on this and are much more worth listening to.’ It’s curious, then, that they weren’t mentioned in the interview.”

No, it isn’t. I’m sure that Zack Beauchamp will or has done a piece on how and why the Republican Party now dwells at the Tophet in Gehenna. But that was not what he wanted to interview me about. That you find it strange that Zack and I talk about what we want to talk about rather than what you want is to talk about is far stranger…

Brad DeLong

Your allegedly having got something 100% wrong is not a topic I chose to bring up, it’s a topic you (in the interview) chose to bring up. As far as anything I know goes, or anything I would be prepared to assert, maybe you didn’t get it 100% wrong. I can read that you said you did, but that doesn’t make it a guaranteed 100% correct assertion. For all I know, you didn’t get things as far wrong as you say you did, especially as I don’t pretend to know just what it is that you’re supposed to have got wrong, or just how it is that you’re supposed to have got it wrong.

What I do know is that if I were interviewing anybody about anything and that person said ‘I got the politics 100% wrong’, it is something I would want to follow up on, and that’s why it seems curious to me that the interviewer in this case did not follow up on it.

Now, if the interviewee, in the course of the interview, referred to a good analysis of the alleged error appearing somewhere else (and possibly written by other people), that would help me to understand why the interviewer didn’t follow up on the point; or, if the interviewer, in the course of the interview, referred to having read such an analysis, that would help me to understand; or, if the interviewer, in the course of the interview, referred to a past or planned interview with other people with an analysis of the alleged error–anything like that would have made me think, ‘Ah, that’s why the point wasn’t followed up in this interview’. But I find nothing like that in the interview, and so I remain curious about why the point wasn’t followed up in the interview, not even by a reference to an analysis of the alleged error existing elsewhere; being told now, after the fact, that such analyses exist doesn’t answer my question.

Since my question is ‘Why did the interviewer not follow up on that point?’, there’s no particular reason why you should have any better idea of the answer to it than anybody else and I don’t expect you to. The question is interesting to me. But if it’s not interesting to you, of course there’s no reason why you should discuss it.

Yeah, I’ve wondered that myself. According to my father the figure is accurate but let’s put it this way: my grandparents owned 1000 acres of farm and pasture land outright for many many years and had saved a very significant sum of money by the time my grandfather retired in the early 80’s- not a dime or acre of that was inherited. So whatever the exact number, my grandparents did all of the above and more on that unionized boilermaker’s wage.