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dailyanarchistposts · 4 months ago

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J.4.4 What is the “economic structural crisis”?

There is an ongoing structural crisis in the global capitalist economy. Compared to the post-war “Golden Age” of 1950 to 1973, the period from 1974 has seen a continual worsening in economic performance in the West and for Japan. For example, growth is lower, unemployment is far higher, labour productivity lower as is investment. Average rates of unemployment in the major industrialised countries have risen sharply since 1973, especially after 1979. Unemployment “in the advanced capitalist countries … increased by 56 per cent between 1973 and 1980 (from an average 3.4 per cent to 5.3 per cent of the labour force) and by another 50 per cent since then (from 5.3 per cent of the labour force in 1980 to 8.0 per cent in 1994).” Job insecurity has increased with, for example, the USA, having the worse job insecurity since the depression of the 1930s. [Takis Fotopoulos, Towards and Inclusive Democracy, p. 35 and p. 141] In addition, the world economy have become far less stable with regular financial crises sweeping the world of de-regulated capitalism every few years or so.

This crisis is not confined to the economy. It extends into the ecological and the social, with the quality of life and well-being decreasing as GDP grows (as we noted in section C.10, economic factors cannot, and do not, indicate human happiness). However, here we discuss economic factors. This does not imply that the social and ecological crises are unimportant or are reducible to the economy. Far from it. We concentrate on the economic factor simply because this is the factor usually stressed by the establishment and it is useful to indicate the divergence of reality and hype we are currently being subjected to.

Ironically enough, as Marxist Robert Brenner points out, “as the neo-classical medicine has been administered in even stronger doses, the economy has performed steadily less well. The 1970s were worse than the 1960s, the 1980s worse than the 1970s, and the 1990s have been worse than the 1980s.” [“The Economics of Global Turbulence”, New Left Review, no. 229, p. 236] This is ironic because during the crisis of Keynesianism in the 1970s the right argued that too much equality and democracy harmed the economy, and so us all worse-of in the long run (due to lower growth, sluggish investment and so on). However, after decades of pro-capitalist governments, rising inequality, increased freedom for capital and its owners and managers, the weakening of trade unions and so on, economic growth has become worse!

If we look at the USA in the 1990s (usually presented as an economy that “got it right”) we find that the “cyclical upturn of the 1990s has, in terms of the main macro-economic indicators of growth — output, investment, productivity, and real compensation — has been even less dynamic than its relatively weak predecessors of the 1980s and the 1970s (not to mention those of the 1950s and 1960s).” [Brenner, Op. Cit., p. 5] Of course, the economy is presented as a success — inequality is growing, the rich are getting richer and wealth is concentrating into fewer and fewer hands and so for the rich and finance capital, it can be considered a “Golden Age” and so is presented as such by the media. As economist Paul Krugman summarises, in America while the bulk of the population are working longer and harder to make ends meet “the really big gains went to the really, really rich.” In fact, “only the top 1 percent has done better since the 1970s than it did in the generation after World War II. Once you get way up the scale, however, the gains have been spectacular — the top tenth of a percent saw its income rise fivefold, and the top .01 percent of American is seven times richer than they were in 1973.” Significantly, the top 0.1% of Americans, a class with a minimum income of about $1.3 million and an average of about $3.5 million, receives more than 7 percent of all income — up from just 2.2 percent in 1979.” [The Conscience of a Liberal, p. 129 and p. 259]

So it is for this reason that it may be wrong to term this slow rot a “crisis” as it is hardly one for the ruling elite as their share in social wealth, power and income has steadily increased over this period. However, for the majority it is undoubtedly a crisis (the term “silent depression” has been accurately used to describe this). Unsurprisingly, when the chickens came home to roost under the Bush Junta and the elite faced economic collapse, the state bailed them out.

The only countries which saw substantial and dynamic growth after 1973 where those which used state intervention to violate the eternal “laws” of neo-classical economics, namely the South East Asian countries (in this they followed the example of Japan which had used state intervention to grow at massive rates after the war). Of course, before the economic crisis of 1997, capitalist ideologues argued that these countries were classic examples of “free market” economies. Right-wing icon F.A von Hayek asserted that “South Korea and other newcomers” had “discovered the benefits of free markets.” [1980s Unemployment and the Unions, p. 113] In 1995, the Heritage Foundation (a right-wing think-tank) released its index of economic freedom. Four of the top seven countries were Asian, including Japan and Taiwan. All the Asian countries struggling just a few years later qualified as “free.” Yet, as mentioned in section C.10.1, such claims were manifestly false: “it was not laissez-faire policies that induced their spectacular growth. As a number of studies have shown, the expansion of the Asian Tigers was based on massive state intervention that boosted their export sectors, by public policies involving not only heavy protectionism but even deliberate distortion of market prices to stimulate investment and trade.” [Fotopoulos, Op. Cit., p. 115] Moreover, for a long period these countries also banned unions and protest, but then for the right “free markets” always seem compatible with lack of freedom for workers to organise.

Needless to say, after the crisis of the late 1990s, the free-marketeers discovered the statism that had always been there and danced happily on the grave of what used to be called “the Asian miracle”. It was perverse to see the supporters of “free-market” capitalism concluding that history was rendering its verdict on the Asian model of capitalism while placing into the Memory Hole the awkward fact that until the crisis they themselves had taken great pains to deny that such a model existed! Such hypocrisy is not only truly sickening, it also undermines their own case for the wonders of “the market.” For until the crisis appeared, the world’s investors — which is to say “the market” — saw nothing but golden opportunities ahead for these “free” economies. They showed their faith by shoving billions into Asian equity markets, while foreign banks contentedly handed out billions in loans. If Asia’s problems were systemic and the result of these countries’ statist policies, then investors’ failure to recognise this earlier is a blow against the market, not for it.

So, as can be seen, the global economy has been marked by an increasing stagnation, the slowing down of growth, weak (and jobless) recoveries, speculative bubbles driving what growth there is and increasing financial instability producing regular and deepening crisis. This is despite (or, more likely, because of) the free market reforms imposed and the deregulation of finance capital (we say “because of” simply because neo-classical economics argue that pro-market reforms would increase growth and improve the economy, but as we noted in section C.1 such economics has little basis in reality and so their recommendations are hardly going to produce positive results). Of course as the ruling class have been doing well this underlying slowdown has been ignored and obviously claims of crisis are only raised when economic distress reach the elite.

Crisis (particularly financial crisis) has become increasingly visible, reflecting the underlying weakness of the global economy (rising inequality, lack of investment in producing real goods in favour of speculation in finance, etc.). This underlying weakness has been hidden by the speculator performance of the world’s stock markets, which, ironically enough, has helped create that weakness to begin with! As one expert on Wall Street argues, “Bond markets … hate economic strength … Stocks generally behave badly just as the real economy is at its strongest … Stocks thrive on a cool economy, and wither in a hot one.” In other words, real economic weakness is reflected in financial strength. Unsurprisingly, then, ”[w]hat might be called the rentier share of the corporate surplus — dividends plus interest as a percentage of pre-tax profits and interest — has risen sharply, from 20–30% in the 1950s to 60% in the 1990s.” [Doug Henwood, Wall Street, p. 124 and p. 73]

This helps explain the stagnation which has afflicted the economies of the west. The rich have been placing more of their ever-expanding wealth in stocks, allowing this market to rise in the face of general economic torpor. Rather than being used for investment, surplus is being funnelled into the finance market (retained earnings in the US have decreased as interest and dividend payments have increased [Brenner, Op. Cit., p. 210]). However, such markets do concentrate wealth very successfully even if “the US financial system performs dismally at its advertised task, that of efficiently directing society’s savings towards their optimal investment pursuits. The system is stupefyingly expensive, gives terrible signals for the allocation of capital, and has surprisingly little to do with real investment.” [Henwood, Op. Cit., p. 3] As most investment comes from internal funds, the rise in the rentiers share of the surplus has meant less investment and so the stagnation of the economy. The weakening economy has increased financial strength, which in turn leads to a weakening in the real economy. A vicious circle, and one reflected in the slowing of economic growth over the last 30 years.

The increasing dominance of finance capital has, in effect, created a market for government policies. As finance capital has become increasingly global in nature governments must secure, protect and expand the field of profit-making for financial capital and transnational corporations, otherwise they will be punished by dis-investment by global markets (i.e. finance capital). These policies have been at the expense of the underlying economy in general, and of the working class in particular:

“Rentier power was directed at labour, both organised and unorganised ranks of wage earners, because it regarded rising wages as a principal threat to the stable order. For obvious reasons, this goal was never stated very clearly, but financial markets understood the centrality of the struggle: protecting the value of their capital required the suppression of labour incomes.” [William Greider, One World, Ready or Not, p. 302]

For example, “the practical effect of finance capital’s hegemony was to lock the advanced economies and their governments in a malignant spiral, restricting them to bad choices. Like bondholders in general, the new governing consensus explicitly assumed that faster economic growth was dangerous — threatening to the stable financial order — so nations were effectively blocked from measures that might reduce permanent unemployment or ameliorate the decline in wages … The reality of slow growth, in turn, drove the governments into their deepening indebtedness, since the disappointing growth inevitably undermined tax revenues while it expanded the public welfare costs. The rentier regime repeatedly instructed governments to reform their spending priorities — that is, withdraw benefits from dependent citizens.” [Greider, Op. Cit., pp. 297–8]

Of course, industrial capital also hates labour, so there is a basis of an alliance between the two sides of capital, even if they do disagree over the specifics of the economic policies implemented. Given that a key aspect of the neo-liberal reforms was the transformation of the labour market from a post-war sellers’ market to a nineteenth century buyers’ market with its related effects on workplace discipline, wage claims and proneness to strike, industrial capital could not but be happy even if its members quibbled over details. Doug Henwood correctly argues that “Liberals and populists often search for potential allies among industrialists, reasoning that even if financial interests suffer in a boom, firms that trade in real, rather than fictitious, products would thrive when growth is strong. In general, industrialists are less sympathetic to these arguments. Employers in any industry like slack in the labour market; it makes for a pliant workforce, one unlikely to make demands or resist speedups.” In addition, “many non-financial corporations have heavy financial interests.” [Op. Cit., p. 123 and p. 135]

Thus the general stagnation afflicting much of the world, a stagnation which regularly develop into open crisis as the needs of finance undermine the real economy which, ultimately, it is dependent upon. The contradiction between short term profits and long term survival inherent in capitalism strikes again.

Crisis, as we have noted above, has appeared in areas previously considered as strong economies and it has been spreading. An important aspect of this crisis is the tendency for productive capacity to outstrip effective demand, which arises in large part from the imbalance between capitalists’ need for a high rate of profit and their simultaneous need to ensure that workers have enough wealth and income so that they can keep buying the products on which those profits depend. Inequality has been increasing particularly in neo-liberal countries like the UK and USA, which means that the economy faces as realisation crisis (see section C.7), a crisis which was avoided in the short-term by deepening debt for working people (debt levels more than doubled between the 1950s to the 1990s, from 25% to over 60%). In 2007, the chickens came hole to roost with a global credit crunch much worse than the previous finance crises of the neo-liberal era.

Over-investment has been magnified due to the East-Asian Tigers and China which, thanks to their intervention in the market (and repressive regimes against labour), ensured they were a more profitable place to invest than elsewhere. Capital flooded into the area, ensuring a relative over-investment was inevitable. As we argued in section C.7.2, crisis is possible simply due to the lack of information provided by the price mechanism — economic agents can react in such a way that the collective result of individually rational decisions is irrational. Thus the desire to reap profits in the Tiger economies resulted in a squeeze in profits as the aggregate investment decisions resulted in over-investment, and so over-production and falling profits.

In effect, the South East Asian economies suffered from the “fallacy of composition.” When you are the first Asian export-driven economy, you are competing with high-cost Western producers and so your cheap workers, low taxes and lax environmental laws allow you to under-cut your competitors and make profits. However, as more tigers joined into the market, they end up competing against each other and so their profit margins would decrease towards their actual cost price rather than that of Western firms. With the decrease in profits, the capital that flowed into the region flowed back out, thus creating a crisis (and proving, incidentally, that free markets are destabilising and do not secure the best of all possible outcomes). Thus, the rentier regime, after weakening the Western economies, helped destabilise the Eastern ones too.

So, in the short-run, many large corporations and financial companies solved their profit problems by expanding production into “underdeveloped” countries so as to take advantage of the cheap labour there (and the state repression which ensured that cheapness) along with weaker environmental laws and lower taxes. Yet gradually they are running out of third-world populations to exploit. For the very process of “development” stimulated by the presence of Transnational Corporations in third-world nations increases competition and so, potentially, over-investment and, even more importantly, produces resistance in the form of unions, rebellions and so on, which tend to exert a downward pressure on the level of exploitation and profits.

This process reflects, in many ways, the rise of finance capital in the 1970s. In the 1950s and 1960s, existing industrialised nations experienced increased competition from Japan and Germany. As these nations re-industrialised, they placed increased pressure on the USA and other nations, reducing the global “degree of monopoly” and forcing them to compete with lower cost producers. In addition, full employment produced increasing resistance on the shop floor and in society as a whole (see section C.7.1), squeezing profits even more. Thus a combination of class struggle and global over-capacity resulted in the 1970s crisis. With the inability of the real economy, especially the manufacturing sector, to provide an adequate return, capital shifted into finance. In effect, it ran away from the success of working people asserting their rights at the point of production and elsewhere. This, combined with increased international competition, ensured the rise of finance capital which in return ensured the current stagnationist tendencies in the economy (tendencies made worse by the rise of the Asian Tiger economies in the 1980s).

From the contradictions between finance capital and the real economy, between capitalists’ need for profit and human needs, between over-capacity and demand, and others, there has emerged what appears to be a long-term trend toward permanent stagnation of the capitalist economy with what growth spurts which do exist being fuelled by speculative bubbles as well as its benefits being monopolised by the few (so refuting the notion of “trickle down” economics). This trend has been apparent for several decades, as evidenced by the continuous upward adjustment of the rate of unemployment officially considered to be “normal” or “acceptable” during those decades, and by other symptoms as well such as falling growth, lower rates of profit and so on.

This stagnation has became even more obvious by the development of deep crisis in many countries at the end of the 2000s. This caused central banks to intervene in order to try and revive the real economies that have suffered under their rentier inspired policies since the 1970s. Such action may just ensure continued stagnation and reflated bubbles rather than a real-up turn. One thing is true, however, and that is the working class will pay the price of any “solution” — unless they organise and get rid of capitalism and the state. Ultimately, capitalism need profits to survive and such profits came from the fact that workers do not have economic liberty. Thus any “solution” within a capitalist framework means the increased oppression and exploitation of working class people.

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mariacallous · 7 months ago

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In the summer of 2022, when Liz Truss was about to become prime minister, I noticed that she was an admirer of Rick Perlstein, one of the great historians of modern America.

Aspiring politicians like to tell the media about their favourite writers, even if they barely look at a book from one year to the next. It gives them a touch of class.

But there was no doubt in this case that Truss was sincere, and knew Perlstein’s work intimately.

She told journalists from the Times that she read “anything” Perlstein wrote. An interviewer from the Atlantic magazine saw a copy of Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge on her shelf, the third of his four-volume series on the rise of the radical right in the United States between 1960 and 1980, and said it was just the kind of book you’d expect her to read.

Then there was a weird moment in an interview with the Spectator when an anonymous spokeswoman for the Truss campaign, who sounded very like Truss herself, explained that her rival Rishi Sunak was failing to win over Tory members because he refused to pander to their prejudices.

“If people think there is an imaginary river,” the source said, “you don’t tell them there isn’t, you build them an imaginary bridge.”

You can find that quote at the beginning of the Perlstein history of the US right in the mid-1970s that was on Liz Truss’s bookcase. And it is highly revealing. Perlstein picked it from a meeting between Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon in the late 1950s. The Soviet leader told the then US vice-president that politicians must create their own reality by pandering to the fear in their supporters’ minds.

“If the people believe there is an imaginary river out there,” Khrushchev said, “you don’t tell them there’s no river out there. You build an imaginary bridge over the imaginary river.”

Truss, or someone close to her was saying that Tories did not want to face facts. They wanted their fantasies confirmed, which is exactly what she did — at enormous cost to the country.

I contacted Perlstein and asked what he thought of having the UK’s next prime minister as a fan.

Let me put it like this: he may have been her favourite historian, but she was not his favourite politician. Not even close. Not even in the top 1,000. He found her astonishingly stupid.

”Liz. Can’t. Read,” he replied, and began a long – and for British readers frightening – account of how and why our new government of wannabe Reaganites would crash the economy.

As they went on to do.

Truss’s notion that tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves had been developed in the 1970s. The new wealth of the already wealthy was meant to boost the economy and tax base and trickle down to the rest of society.

In the fourth volume of his series, Perlstein covered the grifters who sold the idea of self-funding tax cuts and explained how dubious they were.

And yet here, 50-years on, was his devoted reader Liz Truss reading his history as a guidebook rather than a warning.

Why do terrible ideas refuse to die?

You could say in this case that Truss was so stupid she did not understand the past. This was Perlstein’s point.

Then there’s greed. If you want to proselytise for tax cuts for the rich, you will never be short of a paying audience, as the Tufton Street think tanks well know.

Finally, there’s deceit. Conservatives don’t necessarily believe that they will raise money for public services. The enterprise of pretending tax cuts are self-financing is a con designed to weaken state provision.

All three played their part in the voodoo economics of US conservatism and the disastrous reign of Liz Truss.

Here’s how…

Neo-liberalism was forged in the 1970s as the post-war Keynesian or New Deal consensus fell apart.

One of the new ideas that emerged was trickle-down economics. Until then, the traditional conservative argument was that you needed to reduce spending or increase growth if you wanted to reduce taxes.

This was the case that Rishi Sunak put in his failed attempt to defeat Truss in the 2022 leadership contest.

But in the mid-1970s hucksters and ideologues maintained that there was no need to cut spending. The growth tax cuts inspired would more than cover the cost.

The Laffer curve suggested that there was a point where tax rises were counterproductive. People would turn down work if the state took too much of their income, although where that point was is always disputed.

Getting into these practical arguments misses the point, however. There was an exuberant eruption of voodoo economics in the mid-1970s, which had no concern for technical accuracy.

Perlstein put it to me like this

“[With] conventional Keynesian – ‘liberal’ – solutions failing, all sorts of intellectual entrepreneurs on the right came forth with their solutions to the problem, as I narrate in Reaganland, a volume Liz claims to have read. [Of the] many solutions on the table, the one that prevailed was the one that all the actually half-way qualified experts on the right knew was nothing but a fairy tale on a par with Jack in the Beanstalk. [It was] devised by a dude whose only economic training, in his own description, came from learning to count cards at the blackjack tables in Las Vegas. I wish I were making this up, but I am not.”

Perlstein was referring to Jude Wanniski, a journalist who did indeed coin the term “supply-side economics” in the 1970s after a spell working in Las Vegas. He attracted the attention of Reagan, Jack Kemp and Steve Forbes with his promise that the Laffer curve guaranteed that, if conservative politicians cut taxes, the economy would boom.

As Perlstein notes, Wanniski’s first piece promoting the idea in a 1975 issue of the Conservative journal Public Interest “lacked almost everything that made economic arguments convincing to other economists”. There were only four footnotes. No data. No formal models. Economists thought supply-side economics was a joke. It would take decades to recoup the money lost in tax cuts to wealthy people, they argued.

Milton Friedman, who was hardly a socialist, said the inflation that unfunded tax cuts would produce meant that supply-side economics was merely a “proposal to change the form of taxes” rather than lower them. They would generate price and interest rates rises as indeed happened during the Truss debacle.

Alan Greenspan, who once again was a man of the right, who hung out with Ayn Rand no less, nevertheless said he knew of no one who believed that Arthur Laffer’s curve would magically turn tax cuts into increased government revenues.

And so it has proved again and again. Ronald Reagan’s administration provided the classic example. It cut taxes but the promised surge in tax revenues did not happen. All that happened was the national debt increased.

David Stockman, Reagan’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget admitted that "none of us really understands what's going on with all these numbers," as the experiment played out. He rapidly came to the conclusion that the administration needed to cut spending to balance the books. But as he said in his The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed Conservative politicians preferred large deficits and an increasing national debt to cutting programmes their constituents liked.

Under Reagan, Bush and Trump they were happy to keep cutting. One of the features of US politics is that the national debt is as likely to rise under right-wing as left-wing governments,

Obviously, arguing that cutting the wealthy’s taxes was virtuous in itself pleased the wealthy. It pleased Republican party donors in the 1970s, and it pleased the Tory donors who poured money into Liz Truss’s campaign in 2022.

But there is more to it than that.

In an article for the Wall Street Journal in 1976, Wanniski said the problem with the old right with its insistence on saving money was that it wanted to be Scrooge when it should be Santa Claus.

It should deliver tax cuts, forget about the national debt, and sit back as a grateful citizenry showed their gratitude at polling stations. Left-wingers wanted to give taxpayer-funded goodies to their supporters. Very well, right-wingers should want to give tax cuts to theirs.

In the 1970s, Irving Kristol, the editor of Public Interest, was explicit that politics must trump economics. The political advantage tax cuts would provide to the Republicans was so historically imperative they should be blasted through whatever the effect on the budget.

“The neo-Conservative is willing to leave those problems to be coped with by liberal interregnums,’ he wrote in the Wall Street Journal. “He wants to shape the future and will leave it to his opponents to tidy up afterwards.”

We are now in a moment like the 1970s. Taxes keep rising and Conservatives and indeed the rest of us have yet to come to terms with the cost of an ageing society. As anger grows, I doubt that Truss will be the last Tory to try to magic away reality and build an invisible bridge to a fantastical future.

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communistkenobi · 1 year ago

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Hi, you tend to have well-thought-out political opinions (I don't always agree with you, but your reading liveblog were the kick in the ass to make me read Orientalism, and you have managed to change my mind more than once), maybe might have a better answer here than me.

Is there an ideological reason that American (b/c it typically is, god help me) left-of-center types love electoralism so much online (and offline too, tbh. College continues to deal new and fun kinds of psychic damage), but only in the context of the general national elections? I so often receive various extensive breakdowns of reasons that I MUST vote for Biden in 2024, but less about the benefits of, like, getting really invested in my city council elections or the school board.

We have so many freaking elections for goddamn everything because the US/Canada are fuck-off huge that it's super easy to argue for the importance of participating in electoralism and instead I (especially recently) see so many people picking the worst hill to die on, that I really struggle to. Well. Understand why.

I’ll speak mostly to Canada since that’s where most of my formal knowledge comes from and also because I live here lol. Also a lot of what I’m talking about is coming from books I’ve read - Still Renovating by Greg Suttor for example is a pretty in depth history of social policy (primarily housing) in Canada, it’s very dry but is useful for this conversation. This is off the dome and not meant as a PSA or anything, it’s my own perspective, if people want sources for what I’m discussing I can go dig those up, but I’m just putting this disclaimer at the top in case this post leaves my circle.

To answer your question, my instinct is that it’s because north american democracy is increasingly necrotic and disconnected from the general public (with the usual list of caveats about how much liberal capitalist democracies have ever been “for the people”). Reading up on social policy in Canada directly post-WWII is pretty bleak when comparing it to today - social housing used to be a robust part of the housing market, people were paid far better and had far more economic security, our healthcare was freshly socialised and invigorated, the promises of the Keynesian welfare state were generally being met (for a predominantly white middle class electorate, of course), and so on. Even conservatives were basically on board with these things in the 60s, at least in Canada, although that obviously did not last long. And over the decades we have become entrenched in neoliberal cutbacks, the gutting of public institutions, the sale of public space and utilities, the downloading of responsibility for social welfare onto provincial and then municipal governments who have smaller budgets and more limited institutional power, the massive expansion in public-private partnerships, the militarisation of the police - these things really kicked off in the 80s/90s in Canada and have showed little signs of stopping or even really slowing down since (something that also obviously happened in the US). People make the joke that if libraries were suggested as a policy goal today it would be called a communist plot, but it’s true - all of the shit the government offered us forty years ago is unthinkable to even suggest now. Life in general has gotten more difficult as private wealth and deregulation has taken a progressively stronger hold on domestic affairs. This happened slowly over the course of decades, and as political horizons shrunk in terms of what you could expect/demand of your government, there was a real air of this being inevitable, not a result of conscious political decisions but just some organic outcome that no one had control over (“the invisible hand of the market”). Democratic civic responsibility demands we vote as citizens of our country, but for all the reasons outlined above plus a bunch of others I’m sure I’m forgetting, the liberal conception of democratic participation shrunk to the ballot box alone.

And while we all joke about everyone having the historical memory of a goldfish, I think the pandemic made this a deeply dissonant position to hold onto - we saw the government seemingly awake from a long slumber to exercise its might. It placed eviction bans on landlords, enforced mass quarantines and social distancing measures, provided economic relief to people who lost their jobs, stationed itself inside every building and public space to enforce mask mandates, rolled-out universal vaccination programs that were mandatory if you wanted to keep your job - we saw the government flex its power in labour, in housing, in healthcare, in civic life, and at the border in a way previously unheard of, particularly for people who were not alive to experience the welfare state of the 50s and 60s and even 70s. The state revealed itself as the life-structuring force it always had been before receding again, telling everyone to go back to normal as if nothing had happened, as if millions of people had not died in a global plague, as if it had not just demonstrated to everyone in the country that the state can at the drop of a hat order your landlord to stop evicting you and your boss to give you paid time off. This of course didn’t really happen in the US, or at least not nearly to this degree, which resulted in the deaths of over a million people.

So now when politicians perform this same incapacity to do anything, when they trot out hyper-specific policies that might benefit a couple thousand people at most, when they make stupid non-promises and shrink away from even mild forms of social democracy (eg Sanders-style campaign promises), I don’t know how much people buy it. I’m not particularly optimistic about the pandemic radicalising large amounts of people, but I think even if it doesn’t, we saw what happened! And we’ve all seen a million fucking articles about how people don’t want to go to work anymore, about labour shortages, we’ve seen essentially every sector of labour go on some kind of strike in the past two or three years - there is popular organised political participation happening far away from the ballot box, and is only growing in power by the day. Socialism is now a word that exists in the national consciousness, something that was unthinkable even a decade ago. Currently right now we are seeing an international conversation about (and global popular support for) indigenous sovereignty, we are seeing a full-throated articulation of what a LandBack policy would look like, and this comes on the heels of the national Canadian conversation of residential schools and missing and murdered indigenous women. Decolonisation is now a household term. In the case of the US, we are seeing people make the very obvious point that America can conjure billions of dollars to bomb hospitals and civilians, but any social policy to help its own citizens is too expensive, pie in the sky fantasy nonsense.

And by the same token, there is organised right-wing and fascist violence happening in the streets, massive increases in hate crimes, insane political stunts and demonstrations like the Freedom Convoy and 1 Million March 4 Children (inspired by the Capitol Hill storming in the US), Qanon plots to kidnap and execute elected officials - things that right wing parties are actively encouraging, particularly the PPC and CPC. More and more we see that electoral politics is the domain of the far-right, whose culture war issues have the best chance of being realised through the sacred portal of the ballot box. Democrats can’t even offer people legalised abortion now!

I think this is why liberals are in a state of hysteria. A healthy liberal democracy does not require constant, unrelenting reminders to “vote your ass off.” Liberals are very much aware, even unconsciously, that voting does less and less of what they want every single day - you see this openly admitted to by American liberals, who are now doing Hitler % meter calculations about which fascist to vote for come the next federal election. Voting itself is what matters, even as they openly, frantically admit it will do nothing but slightly delay the inevitable.

So to like directly answer your question: I think it has less to do with federal elections as a specific political strategy and more just an expression of anxiety about the fact that voting does not do what you want it to do, or what it once did - perhaps encouraging larger questions if voting does anything at all. If national federal elections don’t do anything, if you voting for the most powerful position on the planet doesn’t really change very much regardless of who’s in power, what is the point of voting at all? So I don’t think they are articulating an actual political strategy or way of doing politics, because by their own admission it’s not going to do much of anything (while at the same time being an existential crisis). I’m in a similar boat to you, I vote in smaller elections where I feel they will do some measure of good (in part because municipalities are responsible for so much more of civic life than they were a few decades ago), I have engaged with the Ontario NDP for several years (although that has come to an end now because of their position on Palestine). Electoralism is a compromise, it is an avenue for potential good, but not always, or even most of the time.

Thankfully there are other avenues for politics - labour organising, protesting, mutual aid support networks, getting involved with community work, even something like local neighbourhood councils. Those are places of political potential, and a single person’s presence in them can make a legitimate noticeable difference (speaking from several years of heavy involvement in community orgs). I have never really felt like I was making a change while voting, but I have felt that way helping community members not get evicted, or offering them free daycare a few times a week, or running programs from lgbtq kids who don’t want to go home after school. Those things legit save peoples’ lives, a lot of them are low stakes relative to their benefit, and they help stave off the alienation and loneliness I know everyone feels. Obviously you run into the same structural problems you would everywhere else, it’s not a paradise by any stretch of the imagination, but they are so many avenues outside of voting that do actually help people around you.

And I think if liberals admit that these actions are more powerful, more effective than voting, they are admitting to themselves that their core beliefs are wrong, that the communists and anarchists are correct and have been correct long before their dumbass was born. They can no longer point to any institution that gives a fuck about them as a defense against left-wing critiques of liberal electoralism. I think that is part of what animates their hysteria, their temper tantrums, their screaming about the only thing to do is do nothing at all. It is a full-throated defense of self-defeat. They are wailing as everything they believe in dies. I’d be pretty upset too if that were me! Luckily I grew out of that when I was like 19

#asks #and thank u!!! super happy you’re reading orientalism it rules

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alfgifu · 19 days ago

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Fic analysis 7. Hands to the wheel

Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/47188921/chapters/118896205

Word count: 70,497

Chapters: 16

First posted: 16th May 2023

Last chapter up: 6th July 2023

Summary:

The Last Emperor of Astandalas asked for peace. Cliopher Mdang travelled half way round the world of Zunidh to broker a ceasefire for him.

He may have, just slightly, exceeded his remit.

How and why this came about

The list of short follow up stories with a ‘where are they now’ theme included one for Lady Angusta and Lord Oriaz, a pair of bosses I had invented entirely to be bad at communicating with one another. I had in mind that this would be the Examination Scandal that’s referred to in the books, and I had also mentally joined the dots to a reference to Cliopher firing the entire Upper Secretariat.

Originally I’d planned to do a very short piece from Lady Angusta’s pov of her being fired. I thought I could keep it to one chapter, tick it off, and get on with my life.

By the time I got the blank page in front of me, though, I found that I was more interested in Cliopher’s view on the Examination Scandal. And Cliopher’s view on the aftermath of Littleridge. And also, how do you go from being the emperor’s new secretary to effectively running his government? That’s a big leap!

As an aside, the head of the UK civil service is the Chief Secretary to the Cabinet, and those appointed to it often have worked as Principal Private Secretary (PPS) and head of the PM’s Private Office before they get the appointment, but these are distinct roles. Victoria Goddard’s reference points would presumably be Canadian, where the head of the civil service is the Clerk of the Privy Council and is also described as secretary to the Cabinet. I’ve just been down a wee rabbit hole of recent post holders’ career histories and it looks like the pattern is a little different there. They’ve more frequently had ambassadorial and foreign policy experience.

Cliopher, Sayo Normal Man, seems to take on all these jobs at once.

Anyway the question of what might lead him to fire all of the Upper Secretariat - to even be in a position to fire all of the Upper Secretariat - was the real spur for this fic.

Then of course I went back to figure out how that started. I did at least this time have a reason for backtracking to do more build up - I really wanted to show how big the shift in power and authority was, and to fit in some of the early moments of recognition that must have happened between him and HR.

This was also written before Game of Courts which gives Conju’s perspective on some of these events, so like all of Embers it’s somewhat AU now on the friendship between Cliopher and Conju.

What worked and what didn’t

I was finally beginning to lose faith in my ability to judge how many chapters remained in a longer fic, in that I was still saying ‘probably three more to go’ but by this stage I was saying it with some uncertainty.

I made a list at the start again, this time of all the things that needed to happen or be resolved over the course of the fic. That was much better than a list of jobs Cliopher could have that I made at the start of Embers, because from the start I could think about how all those things related to one another and how I could bring them in together.

It wasn’t long before I realised that the real shape of the fic had to be everything hitting Cliopher at once until he cracked and took charge. I also realised fairly early on what the major twist would be, and I was pleased with how it landed.

I wasn’t expecting this to be so much fic-as-therapy but it worked.

It was also fun including little bureaucratic in-jokes like Inkstone (tip o’the hat to UK government cat Gladstone) or naming a chapter after an economics treatise (Cliopher is a Keynesian, bite me).

There was definitely a stressful point mid-story where I wasn’t sure what shape would come out of all the pieces I was wrangling, but the experience of writing Embers gave me the confidence to push ahead anyway and it did all come together despite the total lack of a plan.

What I learned from writing it

This is a better fic in every way than Embers was - better titled, better shaped, tauter and punchier and more structured. What’s interesting is that so little of that was intentional. Perhaps the lesson should be that if you pile enough things on top of a character and work a way through them, the plot weaves itself.

I also found that things that felt self-indulgent to me often added depth and were worth including. Again, having the confidence to relax and write what I wanted was rewarding. It was important to me to show the shape of the achievements Cliopher would need to land before he could practically run the government, be the emperor never so enamoured with him, etc. But it was also important to show that relationship developing too and the growing trust between them, while staying true to the level of uncertainty Cliopher still canonically has several hundred years later. Having all of these things in the back of my mind actually made it easier to write each scene - I didn’t think each time ‘how will this fit into those narratives?’ but the themes naturally came through in the way they informed the progression of events and the characters’ reactions each time I asked myself ‘what happens next?’

I also reached the end of Hands to the wheel entirely done with grinding out two updates a week to build out the Embers narrative. This was where I finally felt confident enough to start picking things up on a whim and writing what I wanted to write - which would include a couple more Embers pieces but would also include a lot more experimentation and [jazz hands] drama from this point on.

#fic analysis #hands of the emperor #nine worlds #fanfic #cliopher mdang #artorin damara

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pregnantseinfeld · 10 months ago

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Stream of consciousness political rambling. Because this is not fully thought through I'm putting it under a read more.

Something that bothers me about the typical social democrat 'tax the rich' suggestion (not that I'm outright opposed) is that it would make the most sense in a scenario where the wealth of the owning class is derived from their own countries proletariat, right? If you cannot overthrow that class, then reforms that attempt to squeeze some of that wealth back out into programs that could benefit the working class isn't an entirely bad idea.

But in a country like the US (UK, Canada, etc.), where is the wealth of our ruling class actually derived? What percent exactly is our labor versus that of other countries? You can't just fold your arms and tell capitalists they really should pay their fair share everywhere they do business. That they don't have to do that is kind of the point of this whole imperialism thing. But it certainly feels like 'how do we treat the loot of empire?' isn't being interrogated enough.

And I can already hear "Why talk reforms?! Tear it all down!" As much as I hate the way -progressive- liberals pull the covers up over themselves and mutter "But today isn't the revolution..." every morning to excuse their sloth, most of us know by now we can't will a revolution into being. So how do we reckon with all this if we're still attempting to engage with politics outside of the revolutionary moment?

And all types of chauvinists that don't like difficult questions will paint this as 'guilt' of course. But do we stand for anything at all if we don't have international solidarity? Can those who desire to get back that slashed welfare at any price actually call themselves Marxists? I'm reminded of how Marx and Engels talked of the English unions, or even Lenin on economism, etc... But it's so especially rotten here since, well, haven't you just wound up a Keynesian if your aim is reliving unsustainable post-war capitalist glory days?

On the one hand its dishonest to go about our business pretending none of this matters, but on the other "American lives (under the current order) should not get better" is not a political position with any legs here, for obvious reasons. It's tougher than the banana discourse because there you only had to put cheap year-round bananas on one side of the scale and all the rewards that could only be gained from liberation in the third world and the victory of the working class on the other and the banana defenders look super silly. But outside those hypotheticals, when we are organizing here and now, how does this factor in? Can it? AM I just moralizing over everything being blood money? Am I up my own ass?

So I'm left just bitterly rubbing my chin about it, like this is a crossword that I'm definitely going to figure out by myself if I ponder long enough.

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probablyasocialecologist · 1 year ago

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Economic statistics should be taken critically as the shaky constructions they are, but they do tell you something. Industrial policy has made its worldwide comeback within an equally worldwide exhaustion of the global economic system, the slow-motion expiration of the US-based configuration of capitalism inaugurated at the close of the Second World War. On the surface, Bidenomics seems to represent a decisive break with neoliberal dogma, and so it is in some respects; but more fundamentally, it is smoothly continuous with the deeper trend, starting in the 1940s, of fading growth prospects and rising state involvement in the private economy. If anything, it is an intensification of this trend. Its official adoption represents the belated recognition by “policymakers” that still greater state action is needed to sustain the already meager growth rates of the national economy, crushed beneath the dead weight of an expiring system.

#economics #joe biden #keynesian economics #industrial policy

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pattern-recognition · 2 years ago

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ok class, for today’s discussion we’ll be talking about the implications of post war Keynesian economics in Girls und Panzer and what it means from the perspective of the world systems theory

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burningarchitecture · 1 year ago

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#reblog for bigger sample (if you want)#economics #politics #polls #tumblr polls

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shituationist · 1 year ago

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Do you have any good sources/links critiquing market socialism? I’m thinking C4SS in particular.

I think the best book critiquing market liberalism in general is John O'Neill's the Market: Ethics, Knowledge and Politics, which comprehensively addresses major arguments in favor of markets or against socialist planning. O'Neill examines the Weber/von Mises "calculation problem," the von Hayek "knowledge problem," as well as critiques of planning from public choice theory and neoclassical welfare theory. O'Neill does this by contrasting the philosophies and underlying philosophical assumptions of pro-market thinkers to those of Otto Neurath, who was a partisan of non-monetary socialist planning up until his death, and whose contributions to the debate are often underpublicized (usually in favor of making Oskar Lange, himself a market socialist, the primary interlocuter with the Austrians).

Otto Neurath himself is worth reading because he provides an epistemological defense of economic planning. You can find his collected economic writings on libgen pretty easily. It's worth perusing in tandem with O'Neill's book.

Honorable mention to Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell's essay "Anti-Hayek", which is a decent materialist counter to the esoteric epistemology von Hayek uses to suggest socialist planning is ineffective. Their essay on Leonid Kantoravich's linear programming and in-kind planning is also worth reading as a critique of the Weber/von Mises position on economic calculation. Cockshott has unfortunately sullied his legacy via his 70s Maoist sex politics, but his essays critiquing the Austrian positions in the socialist planning debates are still worthy of consideration.

William Kapp was a critic of market liberalism whose book the Social Costs of Private Enterprise prefigured a lot of critiques of laissez-faire markets that later ecological economists like Georgescu-Roegen and Herman Daly (who were not exactly "anti-market" but whose critiques do underline how the neoclassical idealization of markets is not... ideal) would make more famous. Kapp focuses on the non-monetary and unmonetizable effects of private enterprise, which by definition can not enter into the strictly monetary accounting that informs the decision-making of any commercial enterprise, and which empirically cut against the pretensions of theoretical/rationalistic market liberal utopias.

The Parecon guys, Robin Hahnel and Michel Albert, provide both an institutional framework for planning and several critiques of market liberalism which are applicable to market socialism and market anarchism. Robin Hahnel's Milton's Myths series on socialisteconomist is really good and intended for a popular audience. Pat Devine is a thinker of a similar type who is less of a marginalist, unfortunately I can't name any essays or books of his off the top of my head, but he seems of interest.

Paul Mattick's "Limits of the Mixed Economy" I think would be relevant to Keynesian and post-Keynesian policy recommendations, since Keynesianism is of enduring interest to social democrats. I've never finished it though, so I don't really know. I do know it's talked about a lot in that way. Would be interesting to come back to that book some day myself.

As far as mutualism goes, I think Marx's critique of Proudhon's mutualism and similar schemes in the Poverty of Philosophy is definitive, even if Marx was not entirely honest w/r/t his object of critique. Engels's additions to this critique in his late prefaces to the Poverty of Philosophy and his debates with German Proudhonists over the housing question provide a sound enough basis for rejecting those kinds of schemes in favor of common ownership (i.e. communism).

With regards to C4SS, it's harder to say, b/c C4SS's moment seems to have passed, their moment was not that long in the first place, and they've always been defined politically more by their break from right-wing libertarianism than their antagonism to, say, Marxists, who are antagonistic intellectually but don't really have neo-mutualists on their radar, or anarchist-communists, who either just side with the Marxists, gesture vaguely in the direction of "the commons", or otherwise don't care enough about the topic to argue about it. As such I don't think C4SS itself has ever been singled out by anyone in an important way, but insofar as market anarchism is just market liberalism taken to its logical conclusions, critiques of the latter apply just as much to the former, and the sources above all provide compelling arguments against market liberalism and in favor of socialist planning.

Groups like C4SS thrived (relatively - C4SS has never had that large of a following) in a political atmosphere where the word "socialism" was still a very dirty one, where there was a lot of enthusiasm around p2p filesharing networks and p2p networks in general, where the overarching political consensus was that there was no alternative to markets and commerce, and where acephalous and amorphous political movements (that were seemingly structurally analogous to markets) had not yet exposed their limitations but seemed to be a genuine threat to state power (and not just a particular state power, but state power in general). Under those conditions, where leftists felt embarrassed to be proponents of what in the popular imagination had just been discredited with the fall of the Soviet bloc, C4SS style p2p utopianism was something you could gesture vaguely towards as an alternative, since those p2p schemes avoided the "centralized," "monolithic," and "sclerotic" epithets so often applied to central planning regimes, and fit well within the American political imaginary which has long treated decentralization as a virtue (the list of American endorsers of decentralism includes such diverse names as Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, John C. Calhoun, Lysander Spooner, George Wallace, Murray Bookchin and Bob Black). That atmosphere has given way to one where the left once again favors more traditionally structured organizations, especially after the fizzle-out of the 2020 uprisings and the abject failure that was decentralist-anarchist (non-/anti-)leadership in places like Seattle and Portland, which resulted in no lasting victories and which frankly embarrassed the anarchist movement in North America (reminiscent of the numerous embarrassments for anarchists recounted in Engels's the Bakuninists at Work). There are still true believers, but right-wing libertarianism no longer funnels people in their direction as much now that the Libertarian Party has more or less successfully been merged into the network of miscellaneous reactionary movements. Self-identifying "left-libertarians" seem to me to be an increasingly rare breed.

Genuine market liberalism is also increasingly unpopular on the left and right. Liberals under Biden have embraced "industrial policy" which is ill-defined but seems to involve the state playing an active role in economic development, especially fostering domestic industries to reduce dependence on what the state identifies as its foreign rivals. Given how the libertarian movement continues to shed a lot of its left-wing cultural sympathies (not that there aren't holdouts), an SEK3 type is hard to imagine emerging from today's libertarian milieu, especially the libertarians below the age of 25.

I guess shameless self-promotion here for my own article for a "Mutual Exchange" series where I critiqued anarchist decentralism and the "decentralization/centralization" dichotomy that C4SS-ites are so endeared to: https://c4ss.org/content/53124

I know I've gone off a bit here, so I'll stop pontificating, but I hope this is helpful to anyone who's interested in these debates or in a potentially unreliable narrative developed primarily through online interactions.

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mesetacadre · 4 months ago

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tell me about uhhhhh. hm. what you'd like the education system to be like ideally. sorry my mind is wiped so this is all I have

Post-revolution it should serve a dual purpose, primarily to facilitate the intellectual and personal developmemt of all workers. Once education is decoupled from the economic pressures placed on it by the capitalist mode of production, that demand education, as a part of the superstructure, be a factory of educated employees, educational institutions can place as many resources as are needed into subjects that don't generate any direct economic growth. Of course, we can't forget that socialism exists in a context, and the freedom of education from economic demands is necessarily limited by the finite resources on hand. Still, the capacity of education to serve workers will, almost in every case, be greater than that of education in capitalism, due to the more efficient and democratic administration.

Secondarily, education can also serve to promote communist theory and principles. The mother of my Cuban comrade told me that in university she had to have a subject in political economy, even though she studied engineering. This is analogous to how we have to study bourgeois economic theory (very basic keynesianism and other concepts) in highschool here, for example. I do think this is less effective in its objective than promoting participation in the Party and in democracy, for example.

#ask #chainsaw-dick #seriousposting

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dailyanarchistposts · 1 month ago

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Bibliography for FAQ

Non-Anarchist Works

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mariacallous · 6 months ago

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Sergey Shoigu’s nearly 12-year tenure as Russia’s defense minister ended unexpectedly on Sunday when President Vladimir Putin removed him from his post and reassigned him to the country’s Security Council. Then, in a move that surprised even government insiders, Putin nominated Andrey Belousov, a longtime presidential economic advisor, as Shoigu’s successor. Belousov is a civilian with no direct military ties, raising questions about the rationale behind his appointment. Some observers have speculated that he may have been brought in to overhaul military spending and ensure the Russian army is adequately resourced for the ongoing war in Ukraine. The independent outlet Verstka spoke with government insiders and political scientists to get their take on what Belousov’s appointment could mean for the future of the Russian military. Meduza shares an English-language summary of Verstka’s findings.

On May 12, Vladimir Putin nominated Andrey Belousov as Russia’s new defense minister, replacing Sergey Shoigu who had held the job since 2012. The appointment came as a surprise to many government insiders since Belousov, often described as Putin’s protégé, has no direct ties to the security forces. Often referred to as an “economic ideologue,” he served as Russia’s economic development minister and later as a presidential aid; sources once described him to Verstka as Putin’s strategic counterweight to Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin. One member of Russia’s parliament characterized Belousov as “subtle, intelligent, and diplomatic” and expressed shock at his new post.

Only one source, a member of Russia’s Federal Assembly, didn’t seem surprised by the choice. “Well, what were you expecting?” he asked. “We have something akin to military Keynesianism in our economy, right? Here’s someone with a Doctor of Sciences who’ll be in charge of the economy of the ‘special military operation,’ not moving pins on a map. Let the General Staff handle the front. Besides, someone needs to watch the rear. [Rostec head Sergey] Chemezov and [Deputy Prime Minister Denis] Manturov were already wielding full control of the military-industrial complex, and now [the new head of Russia’s Industry and Trade Ministry Anton] Alikhanov has been brought on board. A true Putin loyalist will keep an eye on them.”

“Belousov is a proponent of the mobilization model,” said political scientist Konstantin Kalachev. “He has [the president’s] trust. He knows how to manage money. He’s perfectly suited for that position.” According to Kalachev, the new defense minister’s priority will be “optimizing expenditures and aligning them with achievements,” as well as making sure that “for every ruble spent, another square meter of territory is added.”

At the same time, Kalachev continued, Belousov’s appointment is a “bombshell” and a “break from convention.” In his view, the reshuffle lends credence to the speculation that followed the arrest of Shoigu’s deputy Timur Ivanov on corruption charges in April and suggests that Shoigu “really was under suspicion.” One government insider commented that “Shoigu’s ambitions, not just his wastefulness, played a role against him.” Political analyst Tatiana Stanovaya said that with Shoigu’s move to the Security Council, it’s become something of “a reservoir for Putin’s ‘former’ key figures — people who can’t be let go but also can’t be placed anywhere else.”

Political scientist Ilya Grashchenkov also called Belousov’s appointment unexpected. “It was assumed that Belousov would move somewhere quieter, perhaps become the rector of Moscow State University or head some kind of development institute. As an ideologue of state economics, this would have aligned well with Belousov’s strategic interests, because Belousov is undoubtedly an economist,” he noted. He added that Belousov was greatly influenced by his father, Rem Belousov, who was a champion of Alexey Kosygin. “Belousov has incorporated these concepts of state and market symbiosis into the Russian economy,” explained Grashchenkov. “This has undoubtedly injected a distinct economic influence into what was once considered solely the domain of the [Defense Ministry].”

According to Grashchenkov, the Russian Defense Ministry is currently focused solely on military operations in Ukraine, rather than the financial aspect of war. “Belousov can now concentrate on fundamentally changing the methods used to manage all ministerial executive agencies, particularly everything related to front-line support, logistics, and so forth,” Grashchenkov added. However, it remains to be seen how much this unexpected appointment will alter the Defense Ministry’s structure or improve its functionality. Meanwhile, there’s still the question of whether or not Belousov will be liked in the army. “Mostly likely, he won’t be,” Grashchenkov surmised. “But Putin doesn’t need [him to be]. He needs an effective manager, which Belousov is.”

When Putin announced that Belousov would take over as head of Russia’s Defense Ministry, many Russian pro-war bloggers lauded the decision, saying that a military outsider and Putin loyalist might be just the person needed to reform the Defense Ministry. However, comments from readers left under these posts have been less optimistic. Many followers wrote that they were having “Serdyukovian flashbacks” — a reference to another civilian defense minister, Anatoly Serdyukov, whose tenure from 2007 to 2012 involved radical reforms and reductions in military numbers that led to widespread discontent within the Russian Armed Forces.

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straightlightyagami · 2 years ago

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Political Ideology Tier List

if I ever get a callout it will be because of this. anon clearly wants me dead. uhh ok I'll try. I'm sure I don't have to say that this is Very subjective. please don't kill me, I'm neurodivergent and a minor.

Note that this is not about specific countries or instances of implementation of these ideologies!! If I were to discuss every variation, this would take forever. This is more like rating the philosophical basis of them. Factors determining the ranking include how much I agree with it, whether I think it's consistent and well-founded philosophically, whether the underlying philosophical ideas are interesting, and whether the aesthetics are good. Meaning a higher rating does not necessarily indicate I agree with it. if you cannot understand this sentence please do not continue reading.

I will go through the main "groups" of ideologies and then rank the sort of subtypes of them. I'm not going to explain all of them in detail here but I will do that in a similar format in response to another ask that asked me to do that.

Neoliberalism: almost nobody uses this to refer to themself, it's more of a descriptor applied to either the modern-day version of liberal ideas or the "state ideology" of the US. tbh seems more like post-hoc justification of existing policy. aesthetics are... most people would say they're not there but that's not actually true. maybe bonus points for the influence it has. C-.

"Classical" liberalism: anyone who calls themself nowadays that is guaranteed to be insufferable but also imo it has very interesting historical philosophical contributions, even if I disagree with them. obviously I think there are inherent contradictions in it if you take everything at face value, but for what it's trying to achieve, it's actually pretty solid. the old timey version's aesthetics are ok. B for the old version mainly for the philosophy reasons, C- for the Reagan version because it's the same as the previous. F when the socially conservative ones call themselves libertarians because it's inconsistent as hell. C+ for consistency if they are normal about queer people and other "social issues."

Social/left/progressive liberalism and social democracy: Keynesian economics is an interesting contribution to liberal theory, which adds a few points in itself. in the historical context (eg New Deal in the US, the nordic model) obviously it exists basically as an "option" to appease labor movements. which is bad if you're a socialist but that's not the view we're taking right now. It is more contradicting than the previous ones because of claiming to care about individual rights but yk all the imperialism etc. C. F if they call it socialism because now people have weird ideas of the definition of it, and words don't have meaning anymore.

Conservatism: Based on normal human instincts of "when stuff is good for me I don't want it to change" but does not have a sound philosophical basis as an ideology in itself. Makes more sense as a secondary feature of another ideology (ie added on to liberalism or socialism). I rate it a D.

Nationalism: Kind of makes sense when used as a temporary propaganda tool but as an ideology it's generally kind of cringe and not interesting and basically cope. D.

Fascism: The essence of trying to substitute a lack of ideology with aesthetics (which works, somehow). The aesthetics are like, ok, and that's the only thing they've got going for them. Nobody can agree what it means but everyone uses it as an insult for each other, which is telling for the tier it goes into. F-.

Authoritarianism: This is actually different from fascism. I would generally dispute overestimating the value of this descriptor, and it's pretty overused and most people would say it does not count as an ideology. Instead of the typical definition, here I am using it to mean those people whose political beliefs are just "follow whoever is in power because any kind of stability is better than disorder." Which is ridiculous and frustrating and prevents anything from being done but does make some sense ideologically. C-.

Anarchism: Actually includes a bunch of different ideologies.

Illegalism and anarcho-individualism: Interesting ideas. kinda shit aesthetics ngl but that's just me. combination of a bunch of stuff I dislike about anarchism. C-.

Anarcho-capitalism: even worse aesthetics, somehow. ideas I cannot even call interesting. it's like if you took liberalism and made it stupid and added anarchism with everything cool removed from it. it's a funny ideology though. F.

Anarcho-primitivism/anti-civ: would be kind of interesting but same reasons as previous. Would be funny but apparently people on this site unironically believe it which makes it annoying. F.

Anarcho-syndicalism: I'm not an anarchist and this is not like, my version of socialism, but it's cool and major respect actually. A.

Democratic socialism: basically what social democrat used to mean, wanting to achieve socialism through electoralism. it's an ok idea and it might work, who am I to know. but they all just become socdems. ok aesthetics. B.

Left communism: what if you took the leftism and just made it all about infighting. political ideology minus the politics. C.

Marxism: solid philosophical foundation. used as part of most of the other socialisms, and sometimes in part for other ideologies. A.

Marxism-Leninism: tricky one. great aesthetics. may be used to mean Lenin's development of Marxism or the state ideology as established under Stalin (btw I do not endorse stalinism or whatever in case this is like something you need to know) and as adapted to most other actually existing socialist countries. modern MLs vary from some of the most reasonable people to intolerably annoying. a lot of variation in historical implementations too. depending on what is meant specifically may be anywhere from D to A.

Libertarian socialism: "I promise we are not like those guys." ok I guess. btw I didn't include capitalist libertarianism because it's literally the same thing as liberalism. B.

Market socialism: bunch of different ones like this. it's a very interesting concept, interesting development of an existing idea and an alternative way of implementing socialism. B+.

sorry if I missed your obscure ideology

#asks

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autolenaphilia · 2 years ago

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The fact that the recently elected Swedish government is a right-wing one that relies on a neo-/postfascist party, the Sweden democrats, to govern has really radicalized me. Or at least strongly reinforced my conviction that we need to abolish capitalism. I live in Sweden and I’m honestly afraid what might happen. So I started thinking a lot, about what lead up to this point. So here is a history lesson.

The fact this happened in Sweden is illustrative of social democracy’s failure to control capitalism. The Swedish social democratic party governed the country uninterrupted from 1932 to 1976. Sweden stands out even in the social democratic dominated nordic countries because of this. Probably no other state is as thoroughly formed by the idea of social democracy. And social democracy in the modern sense that notion capitalism can be reformed to be more humane. Social democratic parties started as marxist and socialist, but gradually abandoned the idea of abolishing capitalism in favour of reforming it. Instead they turned to Keynesianism. Keynes agreed with Marx that capitalism tended towards crisis, but argued that state intervention could correct for the boom and bust cycle of the free capitalist market. And this enabled social democrats to reject the marxist idea that capitalism was doomed to failure. Instead capitalism should work to provide shared prosperity.

Instead of class struggle, the social democrats advocated class collaboration, between workers and capitalists. And in Sweden this sort of inter-class agreement was literally formalized in the famous Saltsjöbaden agreement of 1938 in which the government created an accord between the association of the major labour unions and the employers association.

Part of the reason Sweden and the other nordic countries became a role model for social democracy was that they started implementing such reforms early in comparison to the rest of Europe. Particularly interesting is that Swedish economists in the Stockholm school had ideas that anticipated Keynes’s 1936 General Theory by several years. This inspired Ernst Wigforss, the social democratic finance minister of Sweden in the 1930s and 40s, to suggest and implement proto-keynesian ideas as early as 1932. He argued that state deficit spending could save Sweden from the great depression. And it worked, up to a point.

The emerging nordic model became a subject of international discussion. Yet Sweden for some reason stood among the other nordic countries, as exemplified by American Journalist Marquis Childs who wrote a book called Sweden: The Middle Way, published in 1936. It was widely read, including by FDR. Childs saw Sweden as presenting an ideal middle way between the laissez-faire capitalism that caused the great depression and soviet-state socialism. Of course his analysis was wrong, Sweden was and is still capitalist, workers don’t control the means of production. Any meaningful definition of socialism isn’t “when the government does stuff”. Yet Childs was a major influence on the foreign and American views of Sweden.

And in the post-war world, the ideals of social democracy and keynesian economics spread far beyond Scandinavia and even the social democratic parties. People had lived through the great depression, the rise of fascism and the resulting world war, and wanted at all cost to avoid repeating that experience. This was fertile ground for keynesian economics and the social democratic welfare state to become dominant ideas. It was thought that with keynesian economic policies and the welfare state, we wouldn’t have major crises causing massive poverty and a collapse into fascism. This view extended far beyond formal social democrats, and these policies were adopted by liberals and conservatives as well. There existed a kind of post-war consensus that this was the best way to govern capitalism.

And during the 1945-1973 boom period for the western world, it seemed to work. The western economy went through a sustained growth period recovering from the Great Depression and WWII. Strong labour unions, full employment, progressive taxation and the welfare state did ensure that the wealth created was shared by the wider population to an unprecedented degree.

Yet that period of recovery growth would eventually naturally exhaust itself. Furthermore, the growth was based on oil, and the 1973 oil crisis brought it to an end. An economic crisis begun. Keynesianism proved unable to prevent this crisis, and the mix of inflation and recession that the 1970s crisis showed seemed to contradict its ideas.

By 1973, the old spectre of class struggle had reasserted itself, from both sides.

As proto-keynesian economist Michal Kalecki had predicted in 1943, the long period of full employment did remove the fear of unemployment among workers, making them more bold in demanding and fighting for higher wages and better conditions. So a new period of labour strife started in the late 1960s, including in Sweden, with the wild miners strike of 1969-70 being the beginning. Capitalism is traditionally dependent on a "reserve army of labour" and the threat of unemployment to keep workers disciplined, to make workers do what capitalists tell them to do. And with full employment that threat is gone, leading to labour making bolder demands.

And capitalists don't like that loss of their power. When the crisis of the 1970s happened, capitalists were no longer content to share their profits with the workers in the same way they had since 1945, since those profits were no longer growing. Capitalists are and were a small part of the population, but despite democracy their wealth enables them to influence society to further their own interests at the disadvantage of the majority. The rich used their wealth to fund and promote media and politicians and think thanks to create a new neoliberal policy regime to replace the keynesian welfare state one. And with modern technology (such as containerization) and loosened capital controls allowing for an unprecedented mobility of capital, capitalists were now able to punish governments who had too high taxes and strict labour laws for their liking by simply moving their capital somewhere else.

So the welfare state in western states were rolled back, and now is a shadow of its old self. The benefits still exist, but degrading means testing and meagre payments make getting on them a kafkaesque nightmare. Employment is often precarious and unemployment is deliberately kept high via monetarist means to keep workers disciplined.

People feel naturally discontent with this situation. And the right-wing is able to exploit by blaming immigrants or other minority groups (like trans people) for these problems, while it’s capitalism and their own neoliberal policies that have created them.

In Sweden specifically, the period of renewed labour struggle starting around 1969 actually led the Social Democratic government of Olof Palme to implement a wave of new reforms in an effort to placate the labour movement. The welfare state was strengthened as were labour rights.

Yet workers grew more radical. And in 1976 the main confederation of trade unions, LO, adopted a plan by social democratic economist Rudolf Meidner for the socialization of the means of production via "wage-earners funds". Basically capitalist profits would be taxed by the governments and put into funds controlled by the trade unions to buy shares of corporations. It was a gradualist means of achieving socialism. These ideas did not come from any outside radical forces, but were deeply rooted in the social democratic movement. LO was staunchly social democratic, the party viewed itself as its political wing and Meidner had designed the social democratic wage policy decades before. They had just moved back to the original idea of social democracy, of a reformist path to socialism.

The wage-earners funds created a massive debate. Even within the social democratic party it was opposed by the party's right-wing. Yet the party felt obligation towards the trade unions which it was meant to represent.

Outside the party, the reaction to the funds idea was even worse. Capitalists, themselves organized in an employers association (SAF), naturally saw the idea as a threat. The capitalists decided to use their wealth to conduct a massive political and advertising campaign against the Meidner funds plan, socialism and trade unions, and instead promote neoliberal ideas. The methods used were basically the same as in the neoliberal reaction in the western world as a whole. They used their money to fund politicians, media and even created a neoliberal think-thank (Timbro), all to promote policies which would be in their interest.

And it worked. The social democrats finally lost power in the 1976 election. While the resulting liberal-conservative government did not reallly do much neoliberal reforming of the economy it meant the end of social democratic political hegemony.

The Social democrats returned to power in 1982, but times had changed, the party was much less radical. They implemented a neutered version of the wage-earners funds that wouldn't socialize the economy. And the general economic policy was set by finance minister Kjell-Olof Feldt, who was on the right of the party and did some deregulations inspired by neoliberal economics.The social democrats lost power again in 1991, and the right-wing government really put the country on the same neoliberal path followed by the rest of the western world. Something that was largely continued by the social democrats when they again ruled in 1994-2006.

And the consequences of neoliberalism again were the same as in the western world. this created the conditions for the recent Swedish election, where the post-fascist party got 20 % of the votes.

Sweden is not alone in this development, but it’s a powerful illustration because it is idealized so often as a role model for social democracy. You can still see echoes of Marquis Childs in the recent rhetoric of Bernie Sanders about the nordic countries. Now it illustrates its failures. The social democratic reformers did meaningfully improve lives, and we should fight for those reforms, but they were not able to tame capitalism as they claimed. The capitalists still had their capital, their wealth and were thus able to strike back against those reforms, as the neoliberal revolutions from the 70s on proved. And while Swedish Social Democrats to their credit tried to move beyond capitalism, the Meidner plan also proves how gradualist and reformist attempt to achieve socialism give capitalists time to organize against them. The 1970-73 Allende Government's attempt in Chile is a darker example, as it lead to a right-wing coup and dictatorship.

Those reforms were only won by class struggle from the workers in the first place. Sweden is a very good example for that. It had a strong and highly organized working class, and labour relations were very volatile prior to the Saltsjöbaden agreement. In fact, the strong 1932 election result for the social democrats was partly due to popular outrage at the 1931 Ådalen shootings, when the military fired on striking demonstrating workers. It was this background of labour struggle that enabled the reforms in the first place. The same thing was true of the 1970s reforms.

Those contradictions in interest between workers and capitalists started to reassert themselves once the 1945-1973 growth period exhausted itself and such contradictions were apparent even before then, with a more militant working class in the years leading up to that moment.

When the old-school marxian economist Paul Mattick wrote in his classic book Marx and Keynes from 1969 that “the Keynesian solution to the economic problems that beset the capitalist world can be of only temporary avail, and that the conditions under which it can be effective are in the process of dissolution.” he was proven completely right only a few years later.

It’s sad that the left has not fully taken that to heart. It’s depressing that even supposed radical socialist politicians like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn ran on mid-century social democratic platform where the basis is keynesian mixed-economy policies. Even the Left Party here in Sweden (that I’m a member of for lack of anything more viable) advocates what is basically mid-century social democracy.

We already know from experience that it doesn’t work, just like we know that soviet-style Stalinist “socialism” doesn’t work. If the flaws of the Soviet model are evident in Stalin and now Putin (and for that matter Mao and Deng), we can similarly judge social democracy by its present day results.

When even the social democratic model country of Sweden is in the beginning stages of a fascist revival, you can no longer argue that it’s a model that fixed capitalism’s problems."The Middle way" has reached its end.

And Sweden is just a particularly telling example. The pattern of neoliberal reversals of social democratic reforms leading to poverty and insecurity particularly in times of economic crisis and in turn inspires fascist revivals is common all over the western world. When your model leads to that kind of results, it’s proven to not work. The modern day social democrat is stuck arguing that we should turn back the clock to a time when their proposed solution hadn’t yet lead to these results.

And our ability to turn the clock back is limited. The material conditions, such as limited mobility of capital, that sustained social democracy’s glory days of 1945-73 doesn’t exist anymore. Why should we with our modern awareness of climate change even want to recreate the oil-driven growth of mid 20th century Europe?

The larger ecological crisis and climate change is further evidence that capitalism is unsustainable. And I think the only realistic solution at this point in time is the radical one: abolishing capitalism.

#my writings

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