#it was of course neoliberalism and the global free market it created that was the nail in the coffin of wool as affortable fabric

[dresshistorynerd]

Yes I feel the struggle in my bones. And you're absolutely right, wool wasn't this expensive historically compared to other materials. For a long time in Europe wool was the cheapest option. Wool was less expensive than cotton. Cotton was in fact a very expensive fabric in Europe particularly before industrialization of cotton which happened over the course of a century from very late 1700s to late 1800s. Cotton is a sensitive plant, which doesn't grow well outside specific conditions, and it's production from plant to fabric is notoriously labour intensive (hence all the slavery used for it to this day). So naturally cotton was an expensive fabric especially in Europe, where it can't grow at all, but to lesser extend in South and East Asia too where it grows naturally. Wool was comparatively cheap for very natural reasons. Woolen animals strive in most climates, including in Europe, so wool is easily available. Wool is also comparatively easy to process. Growing woolen animals does require land and resources, so that's what causes most of the cost, but compared to other fabrics making wool fabric is not very labour intensive even without industrial production.

There's several reasons why wool is now comparatively so expensive. You can't automize the most costly part of the wool process, growing the animals. This means that while mechanization has made wool production cheaper, it's never going to be lucrative business as turning oil to fabric or producing cotton with which you can cut the costs of the most costly part (picking cotton) by using slavery. So producers will prefer the materials with which there's room to cut costs and grow profits still a bit more. This also makes wool more profitable, so it's a win-win situation for them. Because there's less wool on the market, it has higher demand compared to the supply, meaning they can ask higher prices. It's not a bug, it's a feature.

It's true that across the board clothes are less expensive. The prices have been dropping for decades. And people also own more clothing that before. But comparatively wool is more expensive than it was before. Even after cotton became very cheap and the standard fabric, it took a while before wool was turned fully into luxury. I have inherited several vintage clothing from my grandmother, mostly from 1960s-70s. One of them is a gorgeous circle skirt made from a very fine and light tightly woven wool, that's almost sheer. You don't see that kind of wool today anywhere, I'm not sure if anything like that is even produced anymore. But it wasn't an expensive dress when it was bought, it was a made by a local Finnish clothing factory, which had affortable prices that most working class people could afford. That was of course different then that what it's now. Now it would probably be fairly expensive, certainly not fast fashion prices, but people could afford that since the clothing would last and they didn't need to buy new clothing to replace the old so often. People also knew how to mend clothing and how to properly take care of them.

I hate how doing any kind of yarn craft basically means you can only produce plastic clothes or it's going to be 300$ in yarn minimum. Every yarn has some acrylic and the natural stuff is so wildly expensive. I would love to use 100% natural fibers but the options are limited

God, yeah. The price of natural-fiber materials is insane.

My average budget for like a full silk gown, trim and notions included, is around $200- and that's ONLY because I live near a discount fabric store that gets bolt-ends from big fashion houses and sells silk for like $10/yard. Wool is insane, for some reason- that place only has coating (heavyweight) and suiting (lighter but feels like plastic even though it's not), so making a dress or anything not outerwear from wool involves shopping online and some painful spending.

I just bought 6 yards of wool to make my Dream Dressing-Gown. It was $210 for JUST the wool- I still have to get lining fabric, possibly an embroidery machine pattern, embroidery thread (because my friend who's generously letting me use her machine only has polyester and rayon). Part of that was shipping from freaking Poland because finding a website that has non-stretch, dark green wool at any weight below "snow gear" in the States is nigh impossible.

(Or that actually discloses the weight in a meaningful way; that's another problem I've encountered. "Brushed wool!" Great, but how heavy is it? "It's wool!" Not helpful. It's like they can't fathom wanting to use wool for anything besides heavy outerwear. Which they probably can't, because that's all we're accustomed to seeing it as nowadays.)

Like I'm tempted to blame militant v*gans for the inaccessibility of silk and wool, but honestly, capitalism was probably just waiting for the excuse to turn all our clothes to crap. I doubt there's been enough outcry about them to push those fabrics out of reach, the way there has been for fur and leather (to clarify: pro-treating animals humanely, anti-plastic clothing, not opposed to the use of aforesaid materials if those animals are properly cared-for and humanely killed).

At least you can still find cotton and some linen things in stores- for now. They're still more expensive, though, and limited in what weaves are often seen. Cotton velvet, for example? Forget it.

It's so disturbing and frustrating.

[houseofbrat]

Bernie Would Have Won

By Krystal Ball

There are a million surface-level reasons for Kamala Harris’s loss and systematic underperformance in pretty much every county and among nearly every demographic group. She is part of a deeply unpopular administration. Voters believe the economy is bad and that the country is on the wrong track. She is a woman and we still have some work to do as a nation to overcome long-held biases. 

But the real problems for the Democrats go much deeper and require a dramatic course correction of a sort that, I suspect, Democrats are unlikely to embark upon. The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right.

Let’s think a little bit about how we got here. The combination of the Iraq War and the housing collapse exposed the failures and rot that were the inevitable result of letting the needs of capital predominate over the needs of human beings. The neoliberal ideology which was haltingly introduced by Jimmy Carter, embraced fully by Ronald Reagan, and solidified across both parties with Bill Clinton embraced a laissez-faire market logic that would supplant market will for national will or human rights, but also raise incomes enough overall and create enough dynamism that the other problems were in theory, worth the trade off. Clinton after all ran with Reagan era tax cutting, social safety net slashing and free trade radicalism with NAFTA being the most prominent example. 

Ultimately, of course, this strategy fueled extreme wealth inequality. But for a while this logic seemed to be working out. The Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. Incomes did indeed rise and the internet fueled tech advances contributing to a sense of cosmopolitan dynamism. America had a swaggering confidence that these events really did represent a sort of end of history. We believed that our brand of privatization, capitalism, and liberal democracy would take over the world. We confidently wielded institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO to realize this global vision. We gave China most-favored nation trade status.

Underneath the surface, the unchecked market forces we had unleashed were devastating communities in the industrial Midwest and across the country. By the neoliberal definition NAFTA was a roaring success contributing to GDP growth. But if your job was shipped overseas and your town was shoved into economic oblivion, the tradeoff didn’t seem like such a great deal.

The underlying forces of destruction came to a head with two major catastrophes, the Iraq War and the housing collapse/Great Recession. The lie that fueled the Iraq war destroyed confidence in the institutions that were the bedrock of this neoliberal order and in the idea that the U.S. could or should remake the world in our image. Even more devastating, the financial crisis left home owners destitute while banks were bailed out, revealing that there was something deeply unjust in a system that placed capital over people. How could it be that the greedy villains who triggered a global economic calamity were made whole while regular people were left to wither on the vine?

These events sparked social movements on both the right and the left. The Tea Party churned out populist-sounding politicians like Sarah Palin and birtherist conspiracies about Barack Obama, paving the way for the rise of Donald Trump. The Tea Party and Trumpism are not identical, of course, but they share a cast of villains: The corrupt bureaucrats or deep state. The immigrants supposedly changing your community. The cultural elites telling you your beliefs are toxic. Trump’s version of this program is also explicitly authoritarian. This authoritarianism is a feature not a bug for some portion of the Trump coalition which has been persuaded that democracy left to its own devices could pose an existential threat to their way of life. 

On the left, the organic response to the financial crisis was Occupy Wall Street, which directly fueled the Bernie Sanders movement. Here, too, the villains were clear. In the language of Occupy it was the 1% or as Bernie put it the millionaires and billionaires. It was the economic elite and unfettered capitalism that had made it so hard to get by. Turning homes into assets of financial speculation. Wildly profiteering off of every element of our healthcare system. Busting unions so that working people had no collective power. This movement was, in contrast to the right, was explicitly pro-democracy, with a foundational view that in a contest between the 99% and the 1%, the 99% would prevail. And that a win would lead to universal programs like Medicare for All, free college, workplace democracy, and a significant hike in the minimum wage.  

These two movements traveled on separate tracks within their respective party alliances and met wildly different fates. On the Republican side, Donald Trump emerged as a political juggernaut at a time when the party was devastated and rudderless, having lost to Obama twice in a row. This weakened state—and the fact that the Trump alternatives were uncharismatic drips like Jeb Bush—created a path for Trump to successfully execute a hostile takeover of the party.

Plus, right-wing populism embraces capital, and so it posed no real threat to the monied interests that are so influential within the party structures. The uber-rich are not among the villains of the populist right (see: Elon Musk, Bill Ackman, and so on), except in so much as they overlap with cultural leftism. The Republican donor class was not thrilled with Trump’s chaos and lack of decorum but they did not view him as an existential threat to their class interests. This comfort with him was affirmed after he cut their taxes and prioritized union busting and deregulation in his first term in office.

Meanwhile, the Democratic Party put its thumb on the scales and marshaled every bit of power they could, legitimate and illegitimate, to block Bernie Sanders from a similar party takeover. The difference was that Bernie’s party takeover did pose an existential threat—both to party elites who he openly antagonized and to the party’s big money backers. The bottom line of the Wall Street financiers and corporate titans was explicitly threatened. His rise would simply not be allowed. Not in 2016 and not in 2020.

What’s more, Hillary Clinton and her allies launched a propaganda campaign to posture as if they were actually to the left of Bernie by labeling him and his supporters sexist and racist for centering class politics over identity politics. This in turn spawned a hell cycle of woke word-policing and demographic slicing and dicing and antagonism towards working class whites that only made the Democratic party more repugnant to basically everyone.

This identity politics sword has also been wielded within the Democratic Party to crush any possibility of a Bernie-inspired class focused movement in Congress attempted by the Justice Democrats and the Squad in 2018. My colleague Ryan Grim has written an entire book on this subject so I won’t belabor the point here. But suffice it to say, the threat of the Squad to the Democratic Party’s ideology and order has been thoroughly neutralized. The Squad members themselves, perhaps out of ideology and perhaps out of fear of being smeared as racist, leaned into identitarian politics which rendered them non-threatening in terms of national popular appeal. They were also relentlessly attacked from within the party, predominately by pro-Israel groups that an unprecedented tens of millions of dollars in House primaries, which has led to the defeat of several members and has served as a warning and threat to the rest.

That brings us to today where the Democratic Party stands in the ashes of a Republican landslide which will sweep Donald Trumpback into the White House. The path not taken in 2016 looms larger than ever. Bernie’s coalition was filled with the exact type of voters who are now flocking to Donald Trump: Working class voters of all races, young people, and, critically, the much-derided bros. The top contributors to Bernie’s campaign often held jobs at places like Amazon and Walmart. The unions loved him. And—never forget—he earned the coveted Joe Rogan endorsement that Trump also received the day before the election this year. It turns out, the Bernie-to-Trump pipeline is real! While that has always been used as an epithet to smear Bernie and his movement, with the implication that social democracy is just a cover for or gateway drug to right wing authoritarianism, the truth is that this pipeline speaks to the power and appeal of Bernie’s vision as an effective antidote to Trumpism. When these voters had a choice between Trump and Bernie, they chose Bernie. For many of them now that the choice is between Trump and the dried out husk of neoliberalism, they’re going Trump.

I have always believed that Bernie would have defeated Trump in 2016, though of course there is no way to know for sure. What we can say for sure is that the brand of class-first social democracy Bernie ran on in 2016 has proven successful in other countries because of course the crisis of neoliberalism is a global phenomenon. Most notably, Bernie’s basic political ideology was wildly successful electorally with Andrés Manuel López Obrador and now his successor Claudia Sheinbaum in Mexico, Lula Da Silva in Brazil, and Evo Morales in Bolivia. AMLO, in fact, was one of the most popular leaders in the entire world and dramatically improved the livelihoods of a majority of his countrymen. Bernie’s basic ideology was also successful in our own history.

In the end, I got this election dead wrong. I thought between January 6th and the roll back of human rights for women, it would be enough. I thought that the overtly fascist tendencies of Donald Trump and the spectacle of the world’s richest man bankrolling him would be enough strikes against him to overcome the problems of the Democratic Party which I have spoken out about for years now–problems Kamala Harris decided to lean into rather than confront. Elevating Liz Cheney as a top surrogate was not just a slap in the face to all the victims of American imperialism—past and ongoing; it was a broad signal to voters that Democrats were the party of elites, playing directly into right-wing populist tropes. While the media talked about it as a “tack to the center,” author and organizer Jonathan Smucker more aptly described it as “a tack to the top.” And as I write this now, I have zero hope or expectation that Democrats will look at the Bernie bro coalition and realize why they screwed up. Cable news pundits are already blaming the left once again for the failures of a party that has little to do with the actual left and certainly not the populist left. 

Instead, Trump’s victory represents a defeat of social democratic class-first politics in America—not quite final, but not temporary either. The Democrats have successfully smothered the movement, blocked the entranceways, salted the earth. Instead they will, as Bill Clinton did in the ‘90s, embrace the fundamental tenets of the Trumpist worldview. 

They already are, in fact. Democrats have dropped their resistance to Trump’s mass deportation policies and immigrant scapegoating. The most ambitious politician in the Democratic coalition, Gavin Newsom, is making a big show of being tough-on-crime and dehumanizing the homeless. Democrat-leaning billionaires like Jeff Bezos who not only owns Amazon but the Washington Post have already abandoned their resistance.

Maybe I will be just as wrong as I was about the election but it is my sense that with this Trump victory, authoritarian right politics have won the ideological battle for what will replace the neoliberal order in America. And yes, I think it will be ugly, mean, and harmful—because it already is.

[mariacallous]

Global governance, never really settled, has recently been having an especially hard time. Everyone believes in a rules-based system, but everyone wants to make the rules and dislikes it when the rules work against them, saying that they infringe on their sovereignty and their freedom. There are deep asymmetries, with the powerful countries not only making the rules but also breaking them almost at will, which raises the question: Do we even have a rules-based system, or is it just a facade? Of course, in such circumstances, those who break the rules say they only do so because others are, too.

The current moment is a good illustration. It is the product of longstanding beliefs and power relations. Under this system, industrial subsidies were a no-no, forbidden (so it was thought) not just by World Trade Organization rules, but also by the dictates of what was considered sound economics. “Sound economics” was that set of doctrines known as neoliberal economics, which promised growth and prosperity through, mostly, supposedly freeing the economy by allowing so-called free enterprise to flourish. The “liberal” in neoliberalism stood for freedom and “neo” for new, suggesting that it was a different and updated version of 19th-century liberalism.

In fact, it was neither really new nor really liberating. True, it gave firms more rights to pollute, but in doing so, it took away the freedom to breathe clean air—or in the case of those with asthma, sometimes even the most fundamental of all freedoms, the freedom to live.

“Freedom” meant freedom for the monopolists to exploit consumers, for the monopsonists (the large number of firms that have market power over labor) to exploit workers, and freedom for the banks to exploit all of us—engineering the most massive financial crisis in history, which required taxpayers to fork out trillions of dollars in bailouts, often hidden, to ensure that the so-called free enterprise system could survive.

The promise that this liberalization would lead to faster growth from which all would benefit never materialized. Under these doctrines that have prevailed for more than four decades, growth has actually slowed in most advanced countries. For instance, real growth in GDP per capita (average percent increase per annum) according to data compiled by the St. Louis Fed, was 2.5% from 1960 to 1990, but slowed to 1.5% from 1990 to 2018. Instead of trickle-down economics, where everyone would benefit, we had trickle-up economics, where the top 1 percent and especially the top 0.1 percent, got a larger and larger slice of the pie.

These are illustrations of British political theorist Isaiah Berlin’s dictum that “total liberty for wolves is death to the lambs”; or, as I have sometimes put it less gracefully, freedom for some has meant the unfreedom of others—their loss of freedom.

Just as individuals rightly cherish their freedom, countries do, too, often under the name “sovereignty.” But while these words are easily uttered, there is too little thought about their deeper meanings. Economics has weighed into the debate about what freedom and sovereignty mean, with John Stuart Mill’s contribution in the 19th century (On Liberty), and Milton Friedman’s and Friedrich Hayek’s works in the mid-20th (Capitalism and Freedom and The Road to Serfdom).

But contrary to what Hayek and Friedman asserted, free and unfettered markets do not lead to efficiency and the well-being of society; that should be obvious to anyone looking around. Just think of the inequality crisis, the climate crisis, the opioid crisis, the childhood diabetes crisis, or the 2008 financial crisis.  These are crises created by the market, exacerbated by the market, and/or crises which the market hasn’t been able to deal with adequately.

Economic theorists (including me) have shown that whenever there is imperfect information or imperfect markets (that is to say, always), there is a presumption that markets are not efficient. Even a very little bit of imperfection can have big effects.

The problem is that much of the global economic architecture designed over recent decades has been based on neoliberalism—the kinds of ideas that Hayek and Friedman put forward. The system of rules that evolved from there must be fundamentally rethought.

From an economist’s perspective, freedom is the “freedom to do,” meaning the size of the opportunity set of what a person can do, or the range of the choices that are available.

Someone on the verge of starvation has no real freedom—she does what she must to survive. A rich person obviously has more freedom to choose. “Freedom to do” is also constrained when an individual is harmed. Obviously, if an individual is killed by a gunman or a virus, or even hospitalized by COVID-19, he has lost freedom in a meaningful sense, and we then have a dramatic illustration of Berlin’s dictum: Freedom for some—the freedom to carry guns, or to not be masked, or to be unvaccinated—may entail a large loss of freedom for others.

The same principle applies to the international arena. The rules-based trade system consists of a set of rules intended to expand the freedoms of all in a meaningful way by imposing constraints. The idea that constraints can be freeing, while seemingly self-contradictory, is obvious: Stoplights force us to take turns going through intersections, but without this seeming constraint, there would be gridlock and no one would be able to move.

All contracts are agreements about constraints—with one party agreeing to do or not do something in return for another person making other promises—with the belief that in doing so, all parties will be better off. Of course, if one party cheats and doesn’t deliver on its promise, then that party gains at the expense of others. And there is always the temptation to do so, which is why we require governments to enforce contracts, so that promises mean something. No government could enforce all contracts, and the so-called free market would crash if all participants were grifters.

But while there are similarities between discussions of freedom at the individual level and the country level, there are also a couple of big differences. Most importantly, there is no global government to ensure that the powerful countries obey an agreement, as we are seeing today in the case of U.S. industrial subsidies. The World Trade Organization (WTO) generally forbids such subsidies and especially disapproves of some of the provisions—such as requiring domestic manufacturing (“Made in America”)—in legislation passed recently by the U.S. Congress, including the CHIPS and Science Act.

Moreover, within democratic countries, the role of power in the making and enforcement of the rules is often obscure; we know that inequalities in wealth and income get translated into inequalities in political power, which determines who gets to design the rules and how they are enforced. An imbalance of power means that the powerful within a country determine the rules in ways that benefit them, often at the expense of the weak.

Still, the democratic context means that every once in a while, power is checked—as it was when the antitrust laws were passed in the United States in the latter part of the 19th century, or the Wagner Act was passed during the New Deal of the 1930s, giving workers more power.

In an international setting, power is even more concentrated, and democratic forces are even weaker. What has happened in the past few years illustrates this. The United States was at the center in constructing the rules-based system, in both designing the rules and how they were to be enforced, including dispute resolutions through the WTO’s Appellate Body.  But when the rules—such as those concerning industrial subsidies—were inconvenient, it decided to ignore them, knowing that there was little, if anything, that any country could or would do about it. So much for the rules-based system.

And the United States’ confidence that nothing could or would be done was reinforced by the fact that it had effectively defenestrated the Appellate Body, because that Body had made decisions it didn’t like, and the U.S. thought that the Body was guilty of overreaching, going beyond what it was entitled to do. But rather than going back to the WTO and clarifying what the Body’s role should be, the U.S. simply hamstrung any adjudication within the WTO. The situation would be like suspending the U.S. Supreme Court while figuring out how to bring the justices back to a reasonable theory of jurisprudence.

This imbalance of power has played out repeatedly in recent years. When developed countries attempted to implement industrial policies—even mild policies, such as Brazil’s effort to provide capital to aerospace corporation Embraer at reasonable interest rates through that country’s development bank (as opposed to the outlandishly high rates then prevailing in its financial markets)—they were attacked. When Indonesia tried to ensure that more of the added value associated with its rich nickel deposits remained in Indonesia, it was attacked.

To win the hearts and minds in the new cold war brewing between the United States and China, the United States needs to do more. Washington needs to use the money it has to provide assistance to the poor, and the power that it possesses to construct rules that are fair. Nowhere is that more evident than in response to the debt crisis that the United States faces today and the recent pandemic, another of which the world will almost surely face in the future.

With most sovereign debt contracts written in the United States, Washington has the power to change the legal framework governing these contracts in ways that make the resolution of crises—where countries can’t pay back what they owe—faster and better. This approach would address the “too little, too late” problem by which one crisis is followed by another, which has plagued the world for so long. With more creditors entering the field, debt resolution is becoming ever more difficult. There are important proposals currently before the New York legislature (where most of the money is raised), but support from the Biden administration would be enormously helpful.

The world has just gone through a terrible pandemic, and the recognition that there will be another has spurred work on a proposed pandemic preparedness treaty. Unfortunately, under the influence of Big Pharma, there are no provisions in the treaty for the kind of intellectual property waiver that the world so badly needs, let alone the technology transfer that would allow the production of all the products—protective gear, vaccines, and therapeutics—necessary to fight the next disease that strikes.

The freedom to live is the most important freedom that we have. Our global agreements have not balanced our freedoms in the way they should. Better global agreements can benefit all countries, though not necessarily all people within them: Such agreements would constrain the power of the exploiters to exploit the rest of us, thereby making a dent on their bottom line, but they would benefit society more generally.

Striving to create global agreements that are fair and generous to the poor would, I believe, be in the United States’ self-interest—in its “enlightened” self-interest, taking into account the new geoeconomics and geopolitics. It was never in the United States’ self-interest to pursue a corporatist global agenda, even when it was the hegemon. But it is especially not so today.

[thoughtlessarse]

There are a million surface-level reasons for Kamala Harris’s loss and systematic underperformance in pretty much every county and among nearly every demographic group. She is part of a deeply unpopular administration. Voters believe the economy is bad and that the country is on the wrong track. She is a woman and we still have some work to do as a nation to overcome long-held biases.  But the real problems for the Democrats go much deeper and require a dramatic course correction of a sort that, I suspect, Democrats are unlikely to embark upon. The bottom line is this: Democrats are still trying to run a neoliberal campaign in a post-neoliberal era. In other words, 2016 Bernie was right. Let’s think a little bit about how we got here. The combination of the Iraq War and the housing collapse exposed the failures and rot that were the inevitable result of letting the needs of capital predominate over the needs of human beings. The neoliberal ideology which was haltingly introduced by Jimmy Carter, embraced fully by Ronald Reagan, and solidified across both parties with Bill Clinton embraced a laissez-faire market logic that would supplant market will for national will or human rights, but also raise incomes enough overall and create enough dynamism that the other problems were in theory, worth the trade off. Clinton after all ran with Reagan era tax cutting, social safety net slashing and free trade radicalism with NAFTA being the most prominent example. Ultimately, of course, this strategy fueled extreme wealth inequality. But for a while this logic seemed to be working out. The Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended. Incomes did indeed rise and the internet fueled tech advances contributing to a sense of cosmopolitan dynamism. America had a swaggering confidence that these events really did represent a sort of end of history. We believed that our brand of privatization, capitalism, and liberal democracy would take over the world. We confidently wielded institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and WTO to realize this global vision. We gave China most-favored nation trade status. Underneath the surface, the unchecked market forces we had unleashed were devastating communities in the industrial Midwest and across the country. By the neoliberal definition NAFTA was a roaring success contributing to GDP growth. But if your job was shipped overseas and your town was shoved into economic oblivion, the tradeoff didn’t seem like such a great deal.

continue reading

[fr-economics]

A Brief History of Neoliberalism #1

This is the first post in my series in which I interpret and discuss David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism. This fantastic book is one of my favorites because it neatly explains with historical facts as well as analysis why we currently live in Hellworld™ and how it came to be.

I strongly believe that understanding what neoliberalism is and how it manifests in all aspects of human life is integral to imagining how to better improve our world. It is a pervasive ideology that must be unlearned, much like racism or patriarchal attitudes, and in order to do that, we must first thoroughly understand it.

NOTE: This series will assume that readers share my basic values of being pretty left, eg: socialism is cool and good. I don't have the energy to debate people who disagree on top of writing this series, so I won't be responding to comments in that vein. However, I welcome ALL questions, no matter how dumb you think they are, because this is a complex topic and there's a lot to digest.

A Brief History of Neoliberalism: Introduction

A series of specific events mark the rise of neoliberalism as the dominant global economic ideology. The details of these events will be discussed later, but these are the main ones which mark the beginning of the neoliberal era, even though the theory itself was created decades before.

1978 - Deng Xiaoping comes into power in China.

1979 - Paul Volcker takes command at the US Federal Reserve.

1979 - Margaret Thatcher is elected PM of Britain.

1980 - Ronald Reagan is elected President of the US.

What is neoliberalism?

A theory of political economic practices that proposes that "human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms"

Holds that "the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions"

Seeks “to bring all human action into the domain of the market"

Requires "an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade"

Requires "technologies of information creation and capacities to accumulate, store, transfer, analyse, and use massive databases to guide decisions in the global marketplace", AKA why Big Data is such a thing these days

What is the state's role under neoliberalism?

Guarantee "the quality and integrity of money", ie: making sure your currency is actually worth something

Create "military, defense, police, and legal structures in order to secure private property rights and guarantee the proper functioning of markets" by force, if necessary

Create markets if necessary in areas where they do not exist, eg: "land, water, education, health care, social security, or environmental pollution"

Do absolutely nothing else to interfere with the functioning of the free market! Why? Because, according to the theory...

A) the market will always have more information than the state in the form of market signals (ie: prices) and can thus better advance human well-being

B) "powerful interest groups will distort and bias state interventions for their own benefit (especially in democracies)"

The dominance of neoliberalism

Nearly all states in the present day have implemented neoliberal theory, whether voluntarily or through coercion (*cough* CIA, Central America, overthrowing democratically-elected socialist leaders... *cough*)

Neoliberalism has "become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world"

The essence of neoliberalism is turning literally everything into a market. This can happen in a literal sense, as with the privatization of water or other natural resources. But it can also happen in a metaphorical sense. Think of dating apps, for example. It's literally a marketplace for people in which users try to sell themselves.

Have you ever heard someone refer to public school students as "consumers" or "customers"? Those words signal that the speaker is thinking of public school as a business, when it is in fact a taxpayer-funded public institution. The main goal of business is profit. The main goal of public institutions is the well-being of citizens. Of course, a public school can't turn a profit because it doesn't even sell anything. But neoliberal ideology's pervasiveness means people implement it even where it doesn't belong.

FURTHER READING...

These articles provide good explanations of what neoliberalism is, if you'd like to understand more before we get to Chapter 1.

Neoliberalism – the ideology at the root of all our problems

Dissent magazine: What Exactly Is Neoliberalism?

Neoliberalism's Dark Path to Fascism

[antoine-roquentin]

Weber’s book is about state engagement in the market, most immediately through price controls. It focuses on debates among Chinese economists in the 1980s under CCP leader Deng Xiaoping that steered China’s economy away from radical price liberalization and helped construct a political economy that facilitates productive state-market relations. Weber details the process by which Chinese reforms and leaders grappled with—and ultimately resisted—the neoliberal prescription of a sudden freeing of prices meant to “shock” the economy out of planning. She shows that rather than adopt the reform advice of the World Bank and Western economists, reformers pursed a path of gradual change by slowly liberalizing markets and ownership and relaxing price controls in stages.

This process unfolded over the long 1980s and was akin to “groping for stones to cross a river,” as key reformer Chen Yun put it at the time. Reformers worked to identify the best practices for economic growth and forged ahead “seeking truth from facts,” in the words of Deng Xiaoping, rather than following orthodox economic theory on marketization. Although the reforms began with the simple aim to improve the economy and living conditions of Chinese peasants, the piecemeal, gradualist approach—as opposed to a complete overhaul of all economic institutions and practices, as international organizations and neoclassical economists such as Milton Friedman recommended—resulted in a dramatic transformation of the Chinese economy. In 1978 China had a centralized command economy with controlled prices, state-run markets, and no private enterprise; by 1993 markets were open, prices were liberalized, entrepreneurship boomed, and Deng Xiaoping had toured southern China, touting Shenzhen as one of the world’s most successful free trade zones.

The resulting political economy is certainly not neoliberal, however—at least not in any simple sense. As Weber points out, the economic orientation is not a “full-fledged institutional convergence with neoliberalism” but rather a mixed arrangement whereby the state actively engages in the market to fulfill developmental goals. Like the industrializing economies of the nineteenth century and the East Asian and Latin American developmental states after World War II, the Chinese state participates in the market by creating favorable conditions for its firms through investment incentives and developmental practices. Beijing’s recent intervention in the commodity market is one exhibit of the continuing legacy of this economic model, where the state engages the market through the release of built-up commodity stock and price-lowering among state firms, rather than subsuming the market and forcing desired price controls. Neoclassical economics would have us believe that state action in the market is an aberration, and almost always harmful. But there is significant historical precedent for state-market relations—including in the United States—and Weber reminds us that state engagement in markets has been the norm rather than the exception for much of human history.

The book opens with a chapter on the Guanzi, a Warring States treatise (475��221 BCE) advising a ruler on how to run his state in an age of warfare and economic transition. The message is to actively manage supply-and-demand conditions by controlling the “heavy,” or important, essential goods, and releasing the “light,” or unimportant, unessential goods. This counsel was put into practice in the grain market, whereby the state purchased surplus grain from the peasants at the time of the autumn harvest when prices were low, or light, and money was heavy, thereby propping up the price of grain on the market and protecting peasants from selling too low to merchants. In the spring, when supplies dwindled and grain prices rose the state released grain and balanced the market. Institutionalized in the “ever normal granaries,” the practice was most effectively used by the Qing state, facilitating the prosperity of the Qianlong period.

A more recent example is that of the United States during World War II. Drawing out the universal character of market engagement for state identified ends, Weber shows how the United States instituted prices controls to balance wartime production needs with consumer demand. In 1941 the newly formed Office of Price Administration created constraints on 40 percent of wholesale goods and then moved to set a ceiling on prices. At the same time, wages were frozen and public stocks of grain and cotton were put on the market to stabilize agricultural prices. The result was low inflation, stable prices, and exponentially high production output. So successful was this practice that the United States instituted a similar system of price controls during the Korean War and the Vietnam War. Of course, none of it was specific to the United States. As economist and politician John Kenneth Galbraith put it, “Controls over prices and wages were the rule.”

It is unclear whether the Chinese reformers at the heart of Weber’s book were aware of these practices and history, but it serves as herbackdrop. In 1949, for example, many of the people who would become key actors in the 1980s reforms cut their teeth grappling with the problem of runaway inflation in the new People’s Republic of China. Having inherited an economy in tatters, where the population had no trust in the currency and was prone to panic buying and hoarding, CCP policymakers moved not to assert political command over the economy but rather to intervene in the market to shore up prices and restore financial trust. Drawing on CIA files from the time, Weber shows that they did this by issuing price lists to state retailers for essential goods but not imposing these prices on private firms or other sellers. State traders would then distribute goods at list prices through the state retailers. Once the public began to see consistent price stability and have faith in the currency, the government gradually released prices back to the market. “This practice prefigured the dual-track price system of the 1980s,” Weber writes.

from the book:

Besides recognizing grain as the “people’s Master of Destiny” (ibid., 384, 77), the progression of the seasons is another condition that qingzhong economic policies take as a starting point. We read in the Guanzi that “the climatic changes of the four seasons and the rotation of day and night were objective laws. They could not be decreased if they were oversupplied and could not be increased if undersupplied” (as in Hu, 2009, 105). From this, the following problem arises: qingzhong suggests that the price depends on whether something is oversupplied or undersupplied. Depending on the season, grain is oversupplied (harvest) or undersupplied (spring). As a result, the price fluctuates—which is bad both for peasants and for urban consumers. Thus, the ruler faced the question of how to balance the price of grain throughout the year.

According to the Guanzi, “states that adhere to the way of a true king act in accordance with the seasons” (ibid., 1998, 365). This suggests that, in general, the state must “make use of what is valued to acquire what is not valued and what has been acquired cheaply to ease the price of what has become too expensive” (ibid., 381–382). Furthermore, “when the prince mints coins to establish a money supply, the people all accept them as a medium of exchange” (ibid., 380). Hence, the prince can issue money. “Therefore those who are skilled in government manage mediums of exchange in order to control the Masters of Destiny” (ibid., 378). The government has a responsibility to stabilize the price of grain in order to stabilize the overall price level and the value of money.

This principle manifested as government purchase of surplus grain from the peasants in autumn, at harvest time, when it was oversupplied and its price was low—in other words, grain was “light” and money was “heavy.” By demanding relatively large amounts, the government drove up the price of grain. It thereby balanced the relative quantities of money and grain in the market, prevented the downward movement of the grain price, and protected the peasants from selling their grain at overly low prices to private merchants. In each locality, the government established public granaries to store the grain. In spring, when the farmers were plowing and sowing, and in summer, when they were weeding, their grain reserves would run low. The supply of grain on the market was short, and the grain price was high. At that time, the government used parts of the grain stored away to increase the supply in the market. The government balanced the upshot in the price of grain and protected the peasants from having to buy grain at very high prices from private merchants.9

This scheme stabilized both the price for grain and the general price level. First, we have seen that in the Guanzi, the prices of all things depended on that of grain. Second, by participating in the market for grain, the state adjusted the money supply. Since the value of money, like that of all other commodities, was found to depend on its quantity, a change in the money supply would affect its value in relation to all other goods. In other words, it would change the overall price level.10 According to the Guanzi, “When grain is cheap, he [the prince] exchanges money for food” (Guanzi as in Rickett, 1998, 377–378). In such a situation, money would be “heavy” and would buy a relatively great amount of grain, hence the price level is low. As the state bought a considerable amount of grain, the price of grain rose, but the value of money also fell, and hence a deflationary tendency was balanced. The opposite occurred in spring and summer, when grain was expensive. The state balanced the price of grain in money and the price of money in grain by balancing the quantities of money and grain in circulation. This is how the Guanzi envisioned the government to “manage mediums of exchange in order to control the Masters of Destiny” (Guanzi as in Rickett, 1998, 377–378). Beyond the immediate effects on prices, this scheme of grain price balancing had important implications for state revenues, inequality, and famine prevention through countercyclical policies.

First of all, although the state balanced the price movements, it did not aim for complete stability—“When water is perfectly level, it will not flow” (ibid., 308). The price of grain in autumn would still be higher than in spring and summer, but the price difference would be smaller than it had been without the state’s participation in the market. As a result of the price difference, the state participation in the grain market generated government revenues. The state did not have to impose any direct taxes: “By taking advantage of government orders to move goods and money back and forth, there is no need to make any demands on the people in the form of special taxes and levies” (ibid., 392). The rulers of Western Zhou had fixed prices by decree and extracted surpluses from the people by direct taxation. In contrast, the new art of government was to use price fluctuations to enrich the country without undermining the enthusiasm of the peasants. Mastering this new “art of planned fiscal management” was “not something to create resentment among the people or ruin their aspirations” (ibid., 362). Instead of taking away from the people by command, the state sold grain to the people when they needed it, thereby lowering the price, and bought grain from the people when they had it to sell, thereby raising the price. Instead of being subjected to direct taxation, the people would experience the state as a benevolent government. In sum, this approach would create “stability similar to placing a square object on the ground” (ibid., 367).

Furthermore, the policy of balancing grain prices prevented the most severe forms of inequalities without making all people equal.11 At the time, a class of private merchants was rising. In fact, the government learned the techniques of market participation from the merchants. As prices were not directly controlled by the state any longer, it became apparent that “[a]s the harvest is bad or good, grain will be expensive or cheap” (Guanzi as in Rickett, 1998, 379). If the government did not utilize these price movements to generate public profit, private merchants would do so: “if the prince is not able to control the situation, it will lead to large-scale traders roaming the markets and taking advantage of the people’s lack of things to increase their capital a hundredfold” (ibid.).12

The pursuit of profits was not condemned in the Guanzi but was taken as a given reality: “it is the nature of men that whenever they see profit, they cannot help chasing after it” (Guanzi as in Rickett, 1998, 219). The task of the ruler was hence not to appeal to the morality of the people but to use the prevailing interests and “regulate the people’s profits” (ibid., 379). In order to do this, the state had to “maintain control over policies affecting prices” (ibid., 366). Land reform was not enough to prevent inequalities: “Even though the land may have been divided equally, the strong will be able to gain control of it; even though wealth has been distributed equally, the clever will be able to accumulate it” (ibid., 379). If the government failed to balance the grain price, “it will only result in the people below enslaving each other.” When such “great inequality exists between rich and poor,” the “multitude is not well governed” (ibid., 380). Hence, “[s]hould the prince fail to maintain control over policies affecting prices … the economic policy of the state becomes meaningless” (ibid., 366).

Finally, and most essentially, the participation in the grain market allowed the state to accumulate grain in each locality and protect people from the consequences of natural disasters. An elaborate system of famine prevention worked hand in hand with a countercyclical fiscal policy. The government’s task was to protect the people from the changes of the seasons, climate, and the market and to ensure their access to daily necessities at all times. The state employed the people when the seasons did not require them to work in the field. In this way, the state prevented the source of wealth from drying up. The ruler was to practice frugality in normal times so as not to divert too much of the people’s time from the fundamental occupation of agriculture. However, “prodigality should be adopted in a special situation” (Hu, 2009, 116). If the people lost the foundation of their livelihood and could not work their land because of natural disasters, the state should offer them employment. At such times, the state should also encourage the rich to create work—for example, by encouraging them to have lavish funerals (Guanzi as in Rickett, 1998, 319). In sum, the Guanzi holds that those “who are good at ruling a state simply depend upon the situation to relax or intensify their demands” (ibid., 415).13

9 The basic principles of this policy of grain price stabilization are repeated in almost all the qingzhong dialogues in the Guanzi. This is a summary of the basic principles by the present authors. Variations on this scheme include (1) the use of loans to the peasants paid out in spring in grain and pegged to the high money price to be paid back when the price of grain is low in the fall (Guanzi as in Rickett, 1998, 343–344, 377–380), as well as (2) the state purchase of clothes when they are cheap because grain is expensive; they are then sold by the state when clothes become expensive in the fall, at a time when grain is cheap (Guanzi as in Rickett, 1998, 362, 367, 384, 391). Similar, yet less encompassing, policy proposals had previously been put forward by Fan Li (Chen, 1911b, 568; Hu, 2009, 35–41; von Glahn, 2016, 64) and Li Kui (Chen, 1911b, 568; Hu, 2009, 179–184; Li, 2013, 190; Spengler, 1964, 228; von Glahn, 2016, 55).

10 In the light of this insight, the Guanzi is found to be one of the earliest articulations of the quantity theory of money (Hu, 2009, 131; Nolan, 2004, 129; Rickett, 1998, 4). If we consider the suggestions for countercyclical government spending, discussed later in this section, and the elaborations on hoarding, together with the grouping of different types of money according to their liquidity, a question for further research emerges: Might we find not only the earliest articulation of the quantity theory of money in the Guanzi but also, thanks to its focus on transitional effects, a precursor to the breaking of a pure quantity theory as in Keynes’s (1936) General Theory?

11 Or, as Hu (2009) puts it, “The writer of Guanzi asserted that this inequality between rich and poor was an objective social reality, but his solution to the problem was merely to mitigate the antagonism, not to wipe it out entirely” (111).

12 Such great inequalities are, for example, reported in the Han Shu to have occurred in the period 246–207 BCE. After the selling and buying of land was allowed, some individuals became very rich and brought both land and natural resources under their control. The poor had to cultivate the land of the rich and “had to give five-tenths [of the crop] for rent (shui)” (Han Shu as in Swann, 1950, 182, insertion in original). “In profligacy and dissipation they [the rich] overrode government institutions; and they overstepped extravagance in order to outdo one another” (Han Shu as in Swann, 1950, 181). “Consequently the poor people wore at all times [garments in quality fit only] to be covering for cattle and horses. They ate, moreover food [of a standard suitable only] for feeding dogs and swine. … The people, brought to grief, had no means of livelihood; and they became thieves and robbers” (Han Shu as in Swann, 1950, 182, insertion in original).

13 This proposal for a countercyclical policy of government spending clearly anticipates, by 2000 years, Mandeville’s (1970 [1724]) Fable of the Bees, Malthus’s letters to Ricardo (as in Keynes, 1936, 362–363), and Keynes’s theory of effective demand. In light of Keynes’s 1912 review of Chen Huan-Chang (1911b), which contains a treatment of grain price policies (568–85), the question emerges whether Keynes might in fact have been inspired by ancient Chinese economic thinking.

turns out that socialism with chinese characteristics was invented 2000 years ago

[thevividgreenmoss]

The more I see from Mark Fisher the more fruitless his writing seems in terms of actual implications for theoretical/practical future movement of any anti-capitalist politics...like for all his talk of the impotent paralyzed state of a left unable to escape or meaningfully able to learn from its past, beset by circular patterns of discourse and movement it's tied itself up in as a result of cultural fixations/conflicts and stifling insular academic and/or online intellectual developments that are often completely detached from the actual political sphere, unable to formulate an actionable political programme that can genuinely confront power, have no relevance to the social base of a potential anti-capitalist movement, etc, like for all the talk of that shit his own critiques of those things tend to essentialize them as inextricable, even inevitable features of capitalism itself and as a result cultural or intellectual trends that are not intrinsic to but symptomatic of a system based on this particular mode of production, and that develop as a result of the interplay between societal elements existing within and formed by that system in a given time and place, are posited instead as defining features of that system (for example the insistence that regurgitation of past cultural forms must be seen as inevitable features or tendencies of capitalism - and that that alleged fact has some fundamental explanatory power - rather than being seen as trends that have come to prominence, and cyclically have become prominent before as well, due to the ebbs and flows of accumulation of intellectual property & consolidation of productive/investment capital etc and that at times have given way to or existed alongside dominant cultural/artistic movements outside of that retrofetishistic lane. Which like even when that was the case capitalism was still bad...like the problem is not encapsulated by the culture's perceived failure to find the next jungle music, nor would it be solved or meaningfully altered were the next jungle music to be found). And in that process you're bestowing an undue sense of significance upon and giving a completely misplaced centrality to things that you're purporting to be criticizing on the grounds that they distract from and are unproductive when it comes to dealing with the pressing core issues by which we're actually faced, while completely failing to incorporate the breadth of actual political & economic shifts, movements, conflicts, etc both against and in favor of the expansion of capital within your analysis in the same way that the individuals/organizations/institutions that you started out critiquing are guilty of. And that related failure to genuinely consider political reality as it exists outside of certain insular left spaces & discourses as well as the left spaces & discourses being used as the basis for the critique being advanced largely neglects anything that might be going on outside of metropolitan centers within advanced western states (and even then it seems mostly confined to the anglosphere) that might complicate or even outright contradict the narratives being advanced, which idk may also contribute to the tendency to grossly generalize and even essentialize specific aspects of society or culture that have taken shape in the first-world as being endemic to capitalism itself as it exists and must exist everywhere at all times...and even if that's being done based on the view one sometimes sees that as capitalism advances then the societal condition of the global south will come to resemble that of the current north then it's still bullshit because while of course that does and will still continue to happen in some respects, there's no broad convergence of that sort in sight at all and given increased pauperization already in motion as a result of ongoing economic trends and mass migrations as a result of accelerating climate change the future of LA or Berlin might look more like the present in Rio de Janeiro or Mumbai than vice versa...idk like there are genuinely interesting discussions of music and evocative (though by no means novel on the level or either tone or content) descriptions of a certain kind of prevalent malaise and ennui peppered throughout Fisher's work but his analyses of the way those things reflect and/or are produced by capitalism itself either fall off the mark or, again, aren't advancing any ideas that haven't long been circulating either in the marxist critical tradition or in any others that have in differing ways been in some form of dialogue with or have to some degree been influenced by it (even those that either explicitly/self-consciously or not find themselves in opposition to marxism, poststructuralism being probably the most obvious/notorious example) right down to the concept of capitalist realism itself, which as elaborated by Fisher offers nothing that isn't present in the diverse and even divergent analyses & conceptual frameworks surrounding ideology, consciousness, hegemony, the ~real~, etc that were already there in the work of everyone from Marx himself to Lukacs to Gramsci to Althusser, Baudrillard, Jameson, Eagleton or numerous other notable figures even just within the western intellectual realm. Like the only distinguishing feature of Fisher's capitalist realism is his contention that in the aftermath of the USSR's collapse, not only has the social reality generated by capital successfully naturalized itself in various pervasive ways as it has been doing for the past five hundred years, but now there's been a crucial turn in that since 1991 there's been an additionally ingrained negation of our ability to conceive of or pursue alternatives to neoliberal capitalism on a collective level, which allegedly wasn't there before...which like I'm sorry but that's a ridiculous fucking claim to make especially in light of the fact that shortly before his death Fisher said that the movements behind/supporting the rise of Jeremy Corbyn to labour party leadership & the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign represented breaks in and the beginning of the end of the era of capitalist realism, which like. If that's the standard then how does the latin american pink tide of the late 90s-late 00s, which involved much larger popular movements that were much more firmly rooted in and directed by the working classes and peasantry and that pursued much more radical goals and even in the face of counter-revolutionary forces that have been ascendant in recent years still succeeded in attaining significant tangible gains for themselves, especially when compared to the negligible results that revived new deal democratic or midcentury labour agendas have had so far in the US & UK, like how did that shit not contradict capitalist realism well beforehand...or the fact that in Cuba the first post-Soviet decade entailed a renewal of genuine socialist energy & societal transformation of a kind not seen since the first 10-15 years immediately following the revolution, or on the other end of things, the clerical authoritarianism that existed in iran already at the time, or the terrifying rate at which the genuinely fascist RSS consolidated popular support and came to have an increasing hold over the various institutions governing Indian society, especially since the early 90s, until at this point there's no significant challenge to their power within the second most populous country in the world...like all those things seem to be much greater refutations from so-called capitalist realism to the point that the concept seems to have no meaning or utility at all...like whether intentionally or not,  Fisher's ~acid communism~ basically leads to the same endpoint, perhaps with different aesthetic trappings, as FALC bullshit, where residents of the first world are freed of the labor and alienation of the past by a super expanded version of the welfare states created by postwar european social democracies and can both go to raves and consume as often as we want. The problem wasn't the violent abstraction of commodified life, the value form, whatever it was that we couldn't pursue and indulge in the thrills and pleasures that per my mans Lyotard & Nick Land are undeniably present in capitalist consumer society except now we can, thanks to those beefed up fully automated welfare states, those indulgences are no longer simultaneously a source of malaise and depression as they previously were when the free market barred the masses from partaking of them with the freedom and reckless abandon that are necessary in order to give us that truly liberated libidinal fulfillment. What the effects of the magically automated extraction of the natural resources necessary to maintain that steady flow of goods and resources to the fully automated luxury acid communists might be on the environment, how that might impact the people that live in the places where extractive industries tend to be based, how they might fit into this acid FALC utopia, whether they'd be forced into ever more menial forms or labor building or providing upkeep for the robots that replaced their former fellow proletarians in the first world, whether their labor might itself be the supposedly 'automated' part of fully automated luxury communism, whether they might legally be recategorized as robots so as to prevent that seeming contradiction from shaking things up, no need to trouble ourselves with that

[hogtown-socialist-alternative]

A Socialist Plan for Green Jobs

By Calvin Priest -March 24, 2017

Trump vowed he would bring good jobs back to the U.S. Perhaps more than any other part of his campaign, this cynical promise tapped into the real anger and desperation felt by millions of working people, after watching their living standards stagnate and fall over decades.

But the new president’s first months in office, along with his recent pro-corporate budget proposals, give few hints as to where those jobs will come from.

Instead, the administration’s planned attacks on the public sector, including deep cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, clean energy, and mass transit funding, will lead to the loss of tens of thousands of federal jobs. At the same time, these cuts and the gutting of environmental regulation promise to further exacerbate the crisis of climate change.

Infrastructure and Jobs

Trump’s job promises were linked to his signature pledge of a trillion dollar infrastructure plan.

But instead of including an infrastructure plan in his current budget outline, Trump’s administration has postponed it, with reports that it may be pushed back until 2018 (MarketWatch.com, 3/20/2017). While Trump will almost certainly at some point present details of his infrastructure proposals, there is a fundamental contradiction at the heart of his plan. With major tax cuts for the rich and corporations built into his budget and overall agenda, the net effect is less revenue. Where will the trillion in funding come from to create jobs rebuilding crumbling infrastructure?

Trump has so far skirted this question, insisting projects will be “profitable.” Certainly we have no reason to doubt that big corporations will profit under Trump’s plan. But the question remains: who will pay? “There is no transit system in the world that makes money,” said Rep. Peter DeFazio, ranking Democrat on the House transportation committee (CNN.com, 3/16/2017).

Meanwhile, Trump’s budget makes deep cuts to transportation spending, from Amtrak to state mass-transit plans, and jeopardizes 56 public transit projects in their early development stages.

Certainly a major program of infrastructure repair and transit expansion is needed. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates $4.59 trillion in costs just to repair existing infrastructure and bring it from it’s current D+ grade to a B grade (Time.com, 3/9/2017). On top of this, a major expansion of bus and light-rail services is critical to move away from the disastrous car-based transportation system.

None of these problems are new under Trump of course. Failing infrastructure and grossly underfunded public transit are the result of bipartisan policies carried out over many decades.

A Renewable Energy Based Economy

As Socialist Alternative has long argued, a massive expansion of renewable energy, mass transit, and energy conservation programs is urgently needed.

The kind of large-scale projects required to end the use of fossil fuels could create millions of family-wage, union jobs. Further, renewables generate “more jobs per dollar invested–more than double the jobs created from investing in fossil fuels” (IEEE Spectrum, 1/27/2017).

But this desperately needed transition to a renewable energy economy must not and does not need to be based on abandoning the hundreds of thousands of workers in coal, oil, or other fossil fuel industries. We need to build working-class unity around a program rooted in the needs of both workers and the environment. A just transition for all fossil-fuel energy workers with free retraining programs will be essential in this process, or else the ruling class will continue to play divide-and-rule politics between workers and environmentalists.

Renewable energy technology has improved dramatically in recent years, with solar in particular becoming far more affordable (Renewable Energy World, 9/27/2016).

But affordability improvements will not be enough because the market will never make a rapid transition away from fossil fuels on its own. Oil corporations make up 4 of the top 10 wealthiest corporations in the world, and they have a vested interest in drilling every last drop from the ground. Meanwhile, the urgency of the environmental crisis is underscored by every new climate report.

While new innovations can assist the transition to renewables, technology is not the problem. Studies show that renewables can provide the energy needed to fuel the global economy.

There are precedents for the kind of rapid retooling needed for a renewable energy economy. In the run up to World War II, the U.S. economy was transformed to rapidly produce armaments and supplies needed for the war.

A massive public intervention will be needed for a sustainable economy, but the political will is completely lacking, with corporate politicians joined at the hip to Big Oil. Further, the conflict of interests between corporations based in different countries under capitalism undermines the global cooperation needed to accomplish the transition.

Socialist Policies Needed

The stagnation of living standards and loss of middle class jobs is the result of a process drawn out over many decades since the end of the post-World War II economic expansion in the 1970s. Capitalism since then has been unable to restore the levels of growth generated by post-war reconstruction. Wages, benefits, and public services have been continuously undermined, as corporate parties around the world have sought to restore profitability through neoliberal policies.

Trump’s protectionist “America First” approach also offers no way out for the loss of jobs which is largely linked to these global economic factors along with increased automation.

Capitalism is a crisis-ridden system that has reached its limits and is unable to provide decent living standards for all, or a sustainable economy.

While Trump and many Republican leaders openly reject climate change, the Democratic Party also has deep ties to the fossil fuel industry. Federal subsidies for fossil fuels have long far exceeded those spent on renewables. This includes Obama, even during his first two years in office when he had Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate.

Moving rapidly toward renewable energy will require that we get organized. Hundreds of thousands of young people are being radicalized in the fight against Trump, and there is growing interest in socialist ideas. We must build on this to create powerful movements and a new mass party independent of corporate money that will fight to carry out democratic socialist policies.

We can’t control what we don’t own. The Big Oil corporations and big banks have the resources necessary to make a clean energy transformation. But they will need to be taken into democratic public ownership to retool for clean energy, mass transit, and a sustainable economy.

On top of the jobs created by a clean energy expansion and mass transit, a socialist plan for jobs would include providing high quality health care for all including free reproductive care, fully funded public services, and well maintained infrastructure – paid for by taxing the rich.

The capitalist system is unable to fully harness technology, resources, or human creativity. Improvements in agricultural production under capitalism lead to food rotting in granaries and rural poverty for farmers, while under socialism they would mean abundant healthy food. Under capitalism, the boom in automation exacerbates unemployment and low wages. Under socialism it would be used to shorten the workweek, while providing full employment.

The struggle for a society based on human needs and environmental sustainability is inseparable from the struggle for socialism.

[myfriendpokey]

subterranean modern

1. Modernism as a concern with being modern.

Which on the face of it is a weird and trivial thing to be concerned about. Who cares? Is the modern good, bad, does it have any specific qualities or objectives whatsoever? If it does, then why not address yourself to those goals directly, rather than having to fret about the merely temporal? The neoclassical and romantic don't strictly speaking have to worry about being modern, they  could always be justified on the basis of the eternal human verities, like such-and-such, or the other thing. The postmodern doesn't need to worry about being modern as "modernity" is something which has already happened, and which is inescapable, which is why we can safely afford to engage in pastiche. So what was the moment in between - when art could neither justify itself as something safely outside of history nor as something already contained within one which had already occured? A period of art trying to deal directly with historicism itself?

To be anxious to be modern is to see your life, beliefs, status and role in the context of a history where any of these things could abruptly or violently be changed by forces out of your control - it involves a sharp awareness of how poorly "history" will treat or has always treated those deemed to have been left behind. And it's an anxiety with no necessarily fixed political expression, which helps to explain why modernism itself could be so various (and sometimes dubious) in this regard. The Martian attack in War Of The Worlds is famously an extrapolation of the West's own colonial history,  turned back on itself: now we are the victims of genocidal, technologically accomplished marauders. But if this is a critique of the colonial mind it's also a kind of paranoid extension of it, imagining faceless alien hordes just waiting to swamp europe if we ever get lax or fall behind in the arms race: the common cold which eventually undermines and destroys the space invaders also mirrors western anxieties about foreign contamination (as syphilis had historically been viewed), or miscegenation. The awareness that a change in "history" could mean death or diaspora might just lead to trying to punch first and most brutally in the name of preserving some advantage, or trying to hold on to your spoils another few generations – but it could also mean trying to find another way of thinking, acting, writing which would break out of the cycle itself.

Literary modernism drew on and tried to position itself within a range of competing historicisms (Marx, Freud, Spengler, Carlyle, Darwin, etc) and in the process tried creating new ones. The results are in general not inspiring: Yeats’s gyres and cycles; Shaw’s mysterious “life force”; Joyce’s Vico-inspired circular history; Ezra Pound’s doggedly stupid efforts to construct a new theory of fascist political economy by crossing John Adams with dynastic China. But I think we also have to see these as scaffolding, to some extent, around a larger project: which is the idea of art as an intervention in history, an apparition of the future (or the uncanny past) which would burst in on the present with a set of new demands for everyday life. We currently live in an economic system in which the blood of the present is continuously drained to artificially prolong a possible, impossible future: one which attempts to pre-emptively shut any political act which would infringe on the right of rentiers to generate constantly increasing returns on their investments until the heat death of the universe. The avant-garde is the reverse – something which would take its energy from the future in order to extend the range of action in the present. When the neoclassical emphasis on the merely aesthetic (or the merely moral, the improving) palls into kitsch, when the postmodern emphasis on “challenging narratives” becomes a purely ritual form of defusing tensions so that business can go on as usual, the concept of the modern as an unsettled question still has capacity to startle.

2. Are videogames modern?

Emilie Reed has already explored this question from the perspective of visual modernism. But i think if we ask it using the definition that I started out with earlier in this post, the answer has to be: no, absolutely not. Videogames aren't anxious about modernity, not because they're so formally advanced (the whole videogame industry is largely an anachronism) but because they never had a sense of history to begin with. History in videogames is at most the history of the stylistic signifiers of videogames themselves - from 8bit to 16bit and so forth - but even then, there's no real sense of that transition being historical in nature, in being linked to some specific change in how people lived or worked or thought about their lives.

To some extent this is because videogames emerged and were propogated across a strangely uniform historical moment – the moment of neoliberalism, from the mid-70s to present, of a supposedly vindicated free market capitalism re-emerging throughout globalized economies worldwide. Videogames are up there with the IMF in terms of historical signs that you're living in this state of affairs: luxury commodities, consumer-grade electronic toys which take advantage of a busy tech sector, cheap manufacturing and shipping, and of course a progressive slackening of regulations around marketing to children. Videogames mean leisure as well as novelty - every videogame is an excess, a kind of portent of the easy abundance and constant progress that the market had to offer. They emerged without anybody much ever wanting them to, part and parcel of the range of spontaneously occuring new conveniences and devices that accompany consumer society.Twenty years too late, they nevertheless would have fit right into the famous “kitchen debates” of the 1950s, in which a model house filled with brand new appliances and recreational devices acted as showcase for a way of life that “anyone in America could afford” (start saving those pennies!!)

[The history of Atari is an interesting time capsule of videogames as aimless luxury doohickey rather than anything as essentialist as a “medium”. Atari’s other products from this time included a sort of proto-winamp skin, a music visualizer that plugged into a tv to display a limited range of soothing animations. It cost $170, which i believe would be over $600 in 2019 dollars – shades of the Oculus Rift, but also an interesting indication of the kind of commodity Atari thought they were making in general]

Videogames are “futuristic” but it’s in a sort of vague, unwilled way – nobody asked for these things to be invented. People behind the scenes were certainly struggling to produce and advance on them but the public representation is, as the Housers say, that videogames are made by elves. The famous “end of history” was still a few years off, but the sort of passive, ambient futuricity of videogames were part of the pitch, part of the idea that if history hadn’t yet ENDED it could at least be something that happened far enough away that you never felt the tremors.

3.

Why is videogame culture so hospitable to the far right?

Postmodernism is haunted by the notion of conspiracy, the idea that history lingers on in some subterranean way, continuing to exert a baleful influence upon the present; officially denied, but still working behind the scenes, a secret society of postal workers here, an albino papist assassin there... so perhaps it’s not surprising that something of the same paranoia would hang around videogames, or some of the specific targets it would end up revolving around. One weird thing is that the people paranoid about keeping politics out of the format never seem to be all that vocal when it’s, say, the US military working with these companies for explicit propaganda purposes, or weapon manufacturers looking for free advertising, or large companies involved with weird shady review practices, etc.... but it also makes sense when we consider that these things, the military, industry, big tech, are what have always supported the supposedly ahistorical  bubble that videogames exist within. If the US army does it, it can’t be political – because that army is exactly why we’ve been able to keep a certain form of “politics” at arm’s length.

If fascists find a home within these circles it’s partly because fascism is itself anti-political, or at least anti- the discursive and constructed nature of the political, anti-having to be political. It addresses itself instead to the inchoate realm of pre-existing essences and “natural”, i.e. historically unexamined, identities, posited as seperate from and superior to the ebb and flow of any given discourse. Which in fact is not dissimilar to how videogames have also presented themselves, and the affluent 1970s american middle class leisure patterns that they continue to preserve in  aspic through their design assumptions although they’ve dissolved nearly everywhere else.  To talk about the specific political meanings implied by such-and-such mechanics is not wrong per se but i think it does miss a broader picture: these things were sold, not as an artform or a medium of communication to begin with, but as the simple birthright of those lucky enough to have been included in the winner’s circle of 20th century globalization. And insofar as the gruesome escalating culture war around these objects is not really about them but about that birthright, about the right to not have to think about these things or what they cost or how they’re made or what they even really do, they will retain some character of the horrible idiot Boy’s Adventure rhetoric of fascist thought – traitors within, invaders without, take back what’s ours etc.

4.

It’s not like modernism proper was lacking in antisemites, misogynists, imperialists, fascists of every stripe. Although the real connection between the two has tended to be overemphasised: it doesn’t include, say, the painters exhibited as “degenerate art” under the nazis, or murdered jewish artists like Bruno Schulz, or the feminists, socialists, anarchists, homosexuals, etc etc (and even the most ignominous cases like that of the futurists don’t feel quite conclusive, unless you think Mussolini really was keen on abstract sound poems as the new and vigorous art of the future). But maybe the gruesomeness of that list is the point: everything bad about modernism is already here. We have the weird cultish adoration of a strictly pro forma version of “difficulty”, we have the idiot jingoism and “provocative” chauvinism, we have lots of dumb schlock about saving western civilisation and masculinity and etc. Like the scrapmetal cars in Mad Max all-new unified theories of history are or have already been constructed from the flotsam, junk science and vague prejudice of the previous century. At a point where gamer cults are watching youtube explainers of Carl Jung while drinking brain-enhancing nutrient paste i think we have officially lost the right to make fun of W.B. Yeats for hanging out with Rosicrucians and injecting ape glands into his scrotum to restore male vigour. It was good while it lasted.

But given that we’re here already, is there anything worth taking from modernism the first go round? I can think of a few different things. The internationalist qualities of the artist’s magazine and manifesto, both cheap and portable forms which could easily be adopted or changed, which served as hubs for local action and also as ways to exchange findings and ideas with other groups doing the same. Compare this to videogames where “local scenes” surely do exist but for the most part do so as ancillaries to a generic industry pipeline, making games for the same carefully featureless, anglocentric audience that this entails. Relatedly, how central translation was to modernism, not just as a way to introduce more works to the existing market but as a form of creative estrangement and of getting out of a limited market-based parochialism – a way to engage not just with singular decontextualised works but also with criticism, theory, arguments. Given how much more capitalised even alternative videogames still seem to be than alt comics, literature, etc, it’d be nice if we could achieve at least parity with those forms.

I could also point towards the modernist interest in material and the new working methods this opened up – the interest in what mass production could mean and what new relations to art it could entail – attempts to create new forms of audience, of public and public speech, and to imagine forms of popular art which didn’t necessarily abide by the gloopy poptimist ethos of the popular always equalling the profitable always equalling the ubiquitous (there were many false starts, but i believe poptimism finally died forever with the advent of the funko pop). And I could also point at the interest in combining the critical and the aesthetic – in the argument that style is itself a combination of the critical and the aesthetic, is also a way of thinking about history, rather than just being what gets swapped in over the programmer art when it’s time to show a build, or treated as the meaningless expression of some changeless pre-existing taste. Is taste changeless? Or to what extent? What does this mean for forms of public speech, like art, which themselves exist within the constraints of taste? Unfortunately, we will probably not be helped in our thinking on these questions if we only ever write about Red Dead Redemption 2.

***

Part of the reason videogames have tried pointing themselves away from the modern is to try to establish their own lasting importance; instead of a provisional tangle of different incongruous traditions and materials designed to fit a peculiar historical or economic context, these things are a medium, which is imagined as a sort of mysterious Stargate portal onto the realms of Systems or Empathy or Play or whatever other Panglossian catch-all helps get you some of that californian venture capital, or possibly a book deal. But part of the consequence has been a stunted dogshit format where art is downgraded for being anything other than an advertisement for itself and which acts as a haven for fascists looking to also naturalise their tiny bubble of seigneurial rights away from any consequence or critique. Videogames might not be modern but by now they’re part of our image of what modernity looks like, and as that modernity continues revealing itself to be frayed, collapsing, incoherent or wildly unsustainable these things will like it or not become another part of that stock heap of broken images pulled from at random to build the futures that you may or may not ever want to live in. We can start thinking about the past as a way to find alternatives within it; or we can outselves become that past, and have our bones incorporated into the deathmobiles of the new age. History is back baby! it’s still a sewer!! awooo!!! Get ready to die historicist, on the fury road!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Leax63ullPE

[images: Modernism(1995), World History Quiz, My First Amazing History Explorer, Smart Mouse for Sega Megadrive]

[thomasword-blog]

M13U1A1 Globalization and Education

INTRO

There was a phrase that my middle-school self promised to never utter, “I am a middle-school teacher.” Well, I am a middle school teacher and have been for the last four years. The school I work at, Pride Prep, was founded under a vision of project and action based learning with an emphasis on relationship based teaching. It was understood that we would not unionize because the school would take care of us. Though we would be required by state law to participate in standardized tests, as an organization we would not pay attention to the results. There we stood, a public charter school, free from the restraints of the system, able to focus only on the well being of the students. 

Given my background in construction, graphic design, and CNC operation I been hired run the school’s maker-space. However, the school was short on math teacher, so instead of helping kids build projects I found myself in the classroom teaching math. I had no formal mathematics background, had never taught before so I didn’t know enough to know better. I tailored my curriculum around my construction, design, and business background.  The students built board games, chairs, and copper art pieces. Each build was a different iteration of scaling, fractions/decimals, perimeter/area, addition, subtraction, multiplication, unit rate and so on. The students would then cost and price the products for resale so that we could use the profit to buy new supplies. For me it was a blur of a year; a trial by fire of classroom management. For the kids it was an illumination of the power of math as a real world tool.

TESTING

As a public school we where required to participate in state testing. We went in with our chins up, knowing the growth our student’s had made, hopeful that we would score on par with other public schools in our district. Our CEO (also acting as principal) reassured us that the test scores did not matter but when the test scores came out changes started happening in the school. We had performed on par with schools of similar demographics but it turned out the public scrutiny of the tests had more sway than was originally anticipated (see https://create.piktochart.com/output/20093013-u2m3a1-sps-and-pride-prep).  As was discussed in Minori Nagahra’s (2011, p.375) review of Globalizing Education Policy, our school was about to start, “implement[ing] policies set elsewhere and have [our] school achieve according to various league tables of performance indicators.”

The following year, in response to the test score, we created our schedule around the needs of the math department on the premise that math is very linear and sequential and requires a solid foundation of concepts before progressing. The problem with this was the unintentional ‘tracking’ of students in other classes. Tracking, or the leveling of students based on demonstrated abilities, is a very controversial topic. Research has shown that tracking sets the stage for a student’s self expectations such that when they are in what is perceived to be a ‘dumb’ class they have a very hard time breaking the mold. While students in mixed level classes have a much easier time stepping up to greater challenges. In addition, “Data shows minority and low-income students are few and far between in high level and Advanced Placement courses,” (Brindley, 2015, p.4). Our admin was aware of the problems with tracking and has since done their best to juggle students schedules so that they can have a leveled math class while maintaining mixed abilities in other disciplines.

This year, however, I was not on the math team. I had signed up for my teacher certificate training with Teach Now and was on track to becoming a science teacher. As such I was given a science class and joined up with the science team to develop curriculum. In silent response to the test scores we aligned the curriculum with The Next Generation Science Standards. We used them to develop projects that ensured students had exposure to a more mainstream science curriculum. The past year science was run as an inquiry based workshop where students led their lines of inquiry based on their areas of interest. The core standards were addressed by means of the online platform Summit PLP. 

As a result of the curriculum change, science projects became more like simulations than actual inquiries. We incorporated more practice and rote skill building into class time without a solid demonstration of the need for the skills. This diminished engagement thus begged the question of how do we keep up engagement while also giving students the tools they need to do well on a standardized test. We answered this question by incorporating design into the science curriculum. If we where studying keystone species we would have the students do a deep dive into one species, make a custom t-shirt and then sell them at venues to make money to be donated to conservation and preservation organizations. We also made backstories for the different experiments and workshops we did so the students had a colorful notion of why they where doing what they where doing. This payed off as our test scores in science where 74% passing while the state average was 63%.

RIGOR, CITICENSHIP & CAPITOL

The increase in test scores was not enough for our parents. There was a large cry out for more rigor in our school. The implementation of design in science and the remnants of inquiry based learning gave the parents the impression that we more of an arts and crafts school than an academic institution. Some wanted more ditto work others wanted more instruction. And while the school was founded on internationalist principles as defined in the article, Internationalism and Globalization as a Context for International Education, We would need to take on more of a globalist (as defined in the same article) approach to making our school a more desirable, thus competitive, institution (Cambridge & Thompson, 2004, p.164). A school school needs money to operate. Our first two years we had money from Bill Gates to fall back on but we made a choice as an institution to not use it unless we had no other options. Gates is an avid supporter of charter schools and even though ours is a public charter school, it is a step in the direction of public money for private charter schools. Our school was not founded on the neoliberal idea that schools should be part of a Laze Faire, free market (Nagahra, 2011, p.373). Instead it was conceived of as a dynamic institution that could defy union norms in the interest of a rich education. We hoped to be a school that students wanted to be at because we where doing the right things. 

The parents, however, had a hard time swallowing such an optimistic pill.  Naturally they wanted their kids to go out into the world and be successful and more often than not this involved attending college.  Even though we where using a vetted program to ensure students where getting their required standards, Summit PLP, we had to respond to the call. Since we are a public school we are allocated dollars by the number of students we have. If the numbers go down the budget goes down. If the budget goes down we loose the resources to implement great projects. If we loose the great projects we loose more students. Eventually we loose the school.

As a response to the call, our CEO decided to begin the acceptance process into the International Baccalaureate  program. This would lend credibility to our program and give us a framework to steer our projects. There are ivy league schools on the east coast that look at students with IB diplomas as their first draft (J. Ewan, personal communication, 2014)*. And what a way to level the playing field. Our school has around 50% free and reduced lunch. And students come from all walks of life. The only other school in our city to offer IB is a private school that charges over $30,000 a year in tuition and recruits wealthy students from china as a staple source of income. This does make the school more international but it also perpetuates the schism between the haves and have nots. 

Ans so it was, for the next two years we steeped ourselves in ATL’s, Global Contexts, and Statements of Inquiry. We tried very hard to balance the rigorous academic expectations of IB, with the original project based philosophies of our school. When things became too academic parents again stepped up with complaints. Only this time the complaints where that the school had lost its focus on project based learning. The drive to compete to be an institution that creates college candidates had overridden the desire to make well rounded, experienced, and thoughtful citizens capable of solving alien problems. On the down side we finished last year, our fourth year, with a higher than average attrition rate. We lost teachers mid year because they could not handle the pressure of balancing the IB with meeting the social emotional needs of kids from all walks of life. However, we are a resilient and dynamic (sometimes too dynamic) institution. And while we never will find a perfect solution to balance out the requirements of a free market competitive system with that of creating global citizens and stewards, we will continue to work creatively within the parameters we are given to maintain the first with the true aim of creating the latter.

Resources:

Nagahara, M. (2011). Fazal Rizvi and Bob Lingard: Globalizing education policy. Journal of Educational Change, 12(3), 377–383. doi: 10.1007/s10833-011-9170-1

*, J. C., & Thompson, J. (2004). Internationalism and globalization as contexts for international education. Compare: A Journal of Comparative and International Education, 34(2), 161–175. doi: 10.1080/0305792042000213994

Brindley, M. 'Leveling' Raises Questions About Educational Inequality. Retrieved from https://www.nhpr.org/post/leveling-raises-questions-about-educational-inequality#stream/0

*J. Ewan is a 14 year veteran teacher who spent several years teaching in public and private schools on the east coast.

[berniesrevolution]

JACOBIN MAGAZINE

For all its economic might, Germany’s main centrist parties are in crisis. If barely a decade ago the Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats (SPD) conquered over three-quarters of the vote, in polling today they represent under half of the electorate. But as the main parties lose their hold over Germans, the Left does not seem well-placed to take advantage. The Die Linke party formed by postcommunists and a split from the SPD in 2007 has secured a respectable vote nationally and at the regional level, becoming the country’s fourth-largest political force, and yet has consistently failed to rise above 10 percent of the vote. Indeed, the real upstarts in German politics today are the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD, the first such party to reach parliament since 1952) and the liberal-ecologist Green Party.

Seeking to break out of this strategic impasse, some leading figures in Die Linke have created a new populist movement designed to reinsert the language of class and poverty into German politics and split the AfD’s own base. However, this remains controversial within Die Linke, with figures loyal to party co-chair Katja Kipping accusing Aufstehen’s frontwoman Sahra Wagenknecht of kowtowing to anti-immigration sentiment.

In this second part of an interview originally conducted for Novosti, Jerko Bakotin spoke with researcher Ingar Solty about the decline of social democracy, Die Linke’s strategic dilemma, and the possibility of building a counter-hegemonic force able to challenge for power.

Jerko Bakotin:

The German Social Democrats (SPD) are at a historic low. The Greens are on the rise, but critics claim that this is now a solidly pro-business party. And to their left, Die Linke is unable to break into double figures in the polls. If there has often been talk of a future “red-red-green” government uniting all three parties, this is today arithmetically impossible. So how would you describe the Left’s perspectives today?

INGAR SOLTY:

Ever since the creation of Die Linke [in 2007, uniting the postcommunist Party of Democratic Socialism with a split from the SPD] the spoken or unspoken aim of the German left was to create an anti-neoliberal reform government together with the Greens and SPD. If for these other parties forming a government is itself the end goal, for Die Linke this would be what Rosa Luxemburg called a transitional goal of revolutionary realpolitik. That is, a move that improved conditions in the fight for a postcapitalist society. Such a coalition would of course require that the SPD broke with its Third Way, market-oriented neoliberal policies; the Greens, similarly, would have to turn away from market-based pseudo-“solutions” to the ecological crisis like carbon emission trading, and indeed their complete surrender to the car industry in the state of Baden-Württemberg, where they are the dominant political force.

Today “red-red-green” is impossible — for political reasons and, with the erosion of social democracy and the rise of the far right, even arithmetically. The SPD is incapable of renewing itself. Its leaders simply cannot turn around and say “Look, everything we ourselves did since at least 2002 was a total mistake and we will have to undo everything that we have done ever since.”

Yet while they cannot say this, doing so — and following up on it with concrete policies significantly improving workers’ lives — is a necessary step toward regaining some credibility.

Jerko Bakotin:

What chance is there for a radical shift within the SPD, like in the cases of Jeremy Corbyn’sLabour Party or indeed Bernie Sanders’s 2016 primary campaign?

INGAR SOLTY:

There are no such leaders on the horizon — and there will not be a Sanders or Corbyn within the SPD. This first owes to Germany’s different political economy. In the US and UK we see deindustrialization, the decline of labor unions, and tuition fees being offloaded onto workers, whereas Germany still does have a strong industrial base with relatively strong labor unions. Taken together with the existence of a vocational training system for manual laborers and the fact that higher education for intellectual workers is tuition-free, these factors still guarantee “middle class” status for a significant share of the professional working class. This major difference makes the US and Great Britain politically more comparable to Spain, Italy, even Greece and Portugal, in the sense that while in all those countries, the erosion of the working “middle“ classes is already a fact; in Germany it is merely feared.

It seems that real immiseration facilitates left-wing responses, whereas the fear of immiseration produces conditions for right-wing ones. And that’s why, so far, the richer, more industrialized northern European countries have seen the far right benefitting more from the global financial and eurozone crisis than the Left, while the opposite is true in the European Union’s (southern) periphery, in Britain and, at least potentially, in the US, where Sanders would probably have won against Trump, had it not been for the Democratic establishment’s machinations, and in Britain where we’re close to a Corbyn government. (Italy could be a counterargument to this thesis, but the Five Star Movement predominantly received its votes with left-wing demands and from former left-wing voters.)

The second reason why there is not going to be a Sanders or Corbyn type in the SPD is that it has been in government for sixteen of the last twenty years. Germany has proportional representation instead of a US- or UK-style first-past-the-post electoral system, and this has allowed smaller, more consistently left-wing parties like Die Linke to establish themselves electorally. For sure, there are still some really well-meaning social-democratic leftists inside the union movement and even the SPD’s formally independent Friedrich Ebert Foundation and such like, but all the Corbyn and Sanders-types were already shed to Die Linke years ago.

There are no left-wing backbenchers in the SPD like Corbyn in Britain, who voted against pretty much everything New Labour did, in domestic as well as foreign policy. If some did remain, they left recently, like Marco Bülow, who described himself as completely isolated among SPD parliamentarians, or the young party intellectual Nils Heisterhagen who was ousted from his position after he had demanded a stronger class-based political orientation in his book The Liberal Illusion. And of course, what kind of sane anti-neoliberal and peace-oriented leftist would have joined or stuck with a hawkish neoliberal and imperialist SPD even over the last twenty years?

All the new cadres the SPD has attracted over that period have an utterly technocratic understanding of politics. While the ongoing class war from above demands massive social mobilizations from below, akin to the yellow vest protests in France or the kind of movements that Bernie Sanders is promoting, these SPD leaders do not know any form of politics other than working pragmatically within institutions that have long turned against the interests of their party’s former working-class base. They do not know how to do anything except governing under and with the powers-that-be. There is no reason to take cheer from this; the erosion of social democracy is a tragedy, because it is largely the far right and not the Left filling the vacuum.

(Continue Reading)

[fycanadianpolitics]

Prime Minister Trudeau tweeted today in response to the recent decision by Kinder Morgan that “Canada is a country of the rule of law, and the federal government will act in the national interest. Access to world markets for Canadian resources is a core national interest. The Trans Mountain expansion will be built.” Many progressives will argue that the national interest is instead in protecting the country from the impacts of climate change. But arguing about what is in the national interest isn’t really getting us anywhere.  

What are we to do instead? Before we can discuss solutions to the problem of climate change, we need to ask how we got ourselves  into this mess in the first place. Sociologist Andreas Malm notes, “The spiral of climate change is set in motion by the act of identifying, digging up, and setting fire to fossil fuels: … For most of human history, the deposits were left untouched, safely locked out from the active carbon cycle. Then a qualitatively novel type of economy interrupted into them.” In the 19th century,  deposits of the resources were extracted on an unprecedented, massive scale by cheap labour commanded by an elite class of wealthy British landowners.

The first capitalists can be credited as the engineers of the climate crisis, but their extractivist nature was merely a reflection of their class interests; to acquire as much capital as possible regardless of the social and ecological consequence--something that has not remotely changed in the contemporary era (see former CEO of ExxonMobile and Secrectary of State, Rex Tillerson who says “My philosophy is to make money. If I can drill and make money, then that’s what I want to do.”). The British capitalists of the 19th century desperately sought out more coal to propel their steam boats to new, distant lands to acquire more land, where more resources could be extracted. However, much of this land was already occupied by indigenous peoples, who had to be violently dispossessed in order for their land to be acquired for further production of capital.

This is because the logic of capital is predicated on infinite growth and expansion.  The surplus profit generated by private firms is perpetually reinvested into new production, which requires more land, and land, historically, was acquired through any means necessary. This is why capitalism, colonialism, and climate change are inexorably bound up with one another: the three faces of a mutually reinforcing system of violence that is killing our planet. This continues in the  21st century through the violation of indigenous land rights as pipelines and other carbon infrastructure are created on ancestral lands without the consent of the first peoples. It is then fair to say that the climate crisis can be attributed to capitalism, an economic order that engenders imperialism and colonial land theft in pursuance of feeding the infinite appetite of the capitalist class.

It’s not uncommon to hear from self-professed liberals that “green capitalism,” can solve the climate crisis. That we can shop our way to a stable and clean environment, a prospect that appears to be increasingly untenable as the exponential increase in availability of “green” consumer goods has done little to prevent 2017 from being a record high year for global CO2 emissions. The reality is that the kind of radical, paradigm changing climate policy we need to protect the planet would also be a direct threat to the economic profits of corporations and the national GDP which politicians of every nation fetishize.

Capitalism, as it exists today, has no way of contending with the climate change crisis. World renowned climate scientist, Kevin Anderson, has spoken at length about how the economic growth imperative of capitalism is not compatible with reaching our Paris commitments. A recent study has stated that we have a 5% chance of reaching these goals under the economic statis quo. Anderson's research indicates that we must radically change our economic paradigm to save our existence on the planet. The mainstream economic orthodoxy of economic growth cannot be reconciled with the most up to date climate projections, which say, in very clear terms, that we are on course to rocket past our 2 degree Celsius commitment outlined in the Paris agreement and on towards 4 then 5 degrees, creating a very dire situation for humanity to say the least.

Our current economic situation has proven to be untenable in the long run. Global food insecurity is on the rise for the first time in decades due to climate change, global water pollution is steadily increasing, global air pollution is getting worse, there have been dramatic increases in exposure to toxic chemicals, the worlds slums are growing, there are record levels of coral bleaching, we are facing unprecedented levels of biodiversity loss. Pollution kills nearly 15 times more people than all the world's wars and violence combined, and is three times as deadly as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis all put together.

The ruling class has decided that any threat to their economic hegemony is unacceptable, therefore it would be better to have the world become a scorched hell rather than to have their profits jeopardized. Even liberal leaders like Obama and Trudeau, who have paid plenty lip-service to climate change, only support climate initiatives insofar as they won’t disrupt the economic status quo, but sadly it is the economic status-quo that is  accelerating climate change to begin with. While the Republican party seems to deny the scientific reality of climate change, the liberal elite denies the economic and sociological realities of climate change. They want to have their cake and eat it too;  to advocate for environmental sustainability while also promoting economic growth and unregulated free trade, unaware or indifferent to the fact  that these things exist in contradiction. Neoliberalism and climate justice are mutually exclusive, as the former precludes the latter.

Here in Canada, the pseudo-progressiveness of Justin Trudeau is farcical; he puts on a great show of apologizing to various marginalized groups with teary eyes and feigned concern, while approving the construction of disastrous pipelines (Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline, Enbridge Line 3) to the outrage of indigenous land defenders and environmentalists throughout the nation. Apologists for the Liberal party propagate the fairy tale that the government can still construct pipelines, and  “balance,” environmental goals with economic ones.

This appeal to moderation cannot be substantiated based on what we know about oil emissions. Many studies have shown (here and here) that constructing new carbon infrastructure is incompatible with reaching the  Paris accord commitments of 2 degrees C. Pipelines have lifespans of decades and we simply cannot afford to be pumping oil for decades. This is why Trudeau’s tweet today is so unsurprising. With Trudeau’s pipeline endeavours, he is merely continuing Canada’s long-held tradition, which started with John A. Macdonald, of appropriating indigenous land to consolidate Canada’s colonial power.

Trudeau's politics of reconciliation is incredibly deceptive, obscuring indigenous demands for land restitution with the spectacle of televised, performative repentance, which, in material terms, does nothing to address stolen land. The reality is that it doesn’t matter which empty suit any of the political parties puts forward; it doesn’t matter how sad or guilty they might seem about past national transgressions; they will always be subordinated to the logic of the colonial-capitalist state: dispossession, accumulation, and expansion. That “rule of law,” that Trudeau refers to, is the colonial legal framework that has been designed to facilitate the extraction of natural resources from stolen land. It is this framework that needs to be dismantled.

This is why reformism is entirely inadequate in addressing the climate crisis; it is the socio-economic structure itself that is producing climate change. Therefore the changes we need have to be systematic, sweeping, and ultimately anti-capitalist in nature. But how can we get there? Only mass social movements can challenge the hegemony of neoliberal governments and corporations. Only through mass organization and mobilization can we begin to bring about a society organised along ecological principles. While the statistics may seem grim, there are reasons to be hopeful.

In the last few decades there have been several awe-inspiring, grassroots movements that we can draw inspiration from moving forward. For instance, the Ogoni protests in the 90s are a stunning example of collective, direct action that kicked out Shell oil out of their country. In collusion with the Nigerian government, Shell oil was responsible for the displacements of tens of thousands of Ogoni people, which gave birth to the Ogoni Peoples Movement, a grassroots social movements that succeeded in dismantling Shell’s corporate stranglehold over the region. Without receiving any help from their  failing and corrupt government, the Ogoni people used militant, non-violent direct action to shut down oil operations. The movement continues to battle a corrupt government while facing the environmental catastrophe of degraded and leaking carbon infrastructure left in Shell’s wake, and although their struggle continues, there is a commendable victory here.

Like the Ogoni, Indigenous people all over the world have been at the forefront of environmental protection. This was seen with the recent Dakota Access Pipeline protests, where the Standing Rock Tribe and other indigenous groups came together to protect water and ancestral burial grounds. This was perhaps the single most monumental environmental social movement in recent history, dominating the headlines at the time.  In October 2017, several energy activists dubbed the “valve turners,” shut down five separate pipeline in a coordinated act of fossil fuel resistance, a sophisticated and flawlessly executed example of the kind of direct action we need on an even larger scale.

It is necessary that we build upon these movements and work together in creating the kind of mass social movement that can challenge the capitalist system itself and replace it with a new kind of economic arrangement that is based on ecological sustainability and social equity, not private profit.  Without system change, climate change will continue to ravage our planet.

[canchewread]

Unfortunately, I’ve spent the past couple of days fighting off a winter cold while lying in bed and yelling on Twitter; please forgive my absence.

As I mentioned in my most recent prior post, we’re currently examining Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi’s breakout 2010 non-fiction work “Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History“ - you can find the first and second image blogs from Griftopia here and here, respectively.

This quotation comes from Gritopia’s second chapter, devoted entirely to the role of Alan Greenspan in helping to create and finance what Taibbi calls “the Grifter Archipelago - and appropriately titled “the Biggest Asshole in the Universe.” Truthfully, if I had planned this series of posts out a little better we probably should have started with this passage, especially since it ties in nicely to our previously-discussed quotation from Owen Jones’ “The Establishment and how they get away with it.” The simple truth is that understanding the fraud economy and the 2008 global financial meltdown requires understanding the now-sacrosanct ideology that inspired all this open criminality and theft.

So just who is Ayn Rand, how did her philosophy affect Alan Greenspan and why does any of this still matter today?

Interpreted charitably, Ayn Rand was a libertarian author and philosopher of dubious quality and questionable ideological consistency; you can find a more detailed examination of Taibbi’s critique of her work here. I’m not really interested in wasting a lot of time dissecting Rand’s “ideology” such as it is, but I think it’s fair to say that calling it “Objectivism” and releasing a book entitled “The Virtue of Selfishness” says a lot about how absolutely full of sh*t her movement is.

Despite this, or perhaps rather because of it, the works of Ayn Rand (who died in 1982, while receiving meager U.S. government assistance) have formed the “ethical” background behind the hyper-capitalist, right wing libertarian movement that has come to define establishment ideology (on both sides of the political divide) in much of the western world. When soon-to-be former Congressman Paul Ryan takes on new staffers, he infamously gives each of them a copy of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” and Friedrich Hayek’s “Road to Serfdom”  - two of the foundational texts of the surprisingly dodgy libertarian, market-worshiping, deregulated capitalist “insurgency” that represents the idealized ethos behind our modern rule-by-the-rich system in “the West.”

I say “idealized” because as both Taibbi and Jones explore in their respective books, these dashing laissez faire economic idealists are more than happy to throw away the “free market” when it comes time to give the rich and powerful another handout, or in the case of 2008 - prevent the ruling class from destroying itself and taking the global economy with it. In simpler terms, it’s socialism for the rich and powerful, backed by harsh capitalist realities for everyone else, especially the poor.

This “Randian” ideology then represents the front-end picture fed to the public by well spoken media propagandists, while on the back end the real “Masters of the Universe” are looting the public coffers like there’s no tomorrow - perhaps because there might not be one at the rate we’re going ecologically.

Understanding this discrepancy between what the elite establishment claims to believe, and how it behaves in practice is pretty important in this case because this inherent contradiction seemed to embody itself in the form of Alan Greenspan; a former friend and disciple of Rand who nevertheless found himself working in government and eventually became Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 1987. You can find more about Greenspan’s effect on the 2008 Financial Crisis in my previous “Griftopia” post but needless to say, Taibbi didn’t call him “the biggest asshole in the universe” because he was great at his job. In practice, Greenspan was a free-market, anti-regulation zealot when it came to refusing to restrict the behavior of investment bankers and rich speculators in any way, and a neoliberal stimulus messiah when it came time for those same gamblers to pay the price for their reckless behavior.

All of which brings us to the simple question, “why does this still matter today?”

Truthfully of course, it shouldn’t; after nearly four decades of increasingly rigid adherence to supply-side economics in the United States, and decades worth of Austerity in Europe, it’s more than fair to say that deregulated globalized capitalism has been a complete and utter failure for the vast majority of people in the west - a failure that literally represents an imminent threat to all life on earth. Of course, the “vast majority” of people does not mean “all” of the people and this ideology/economic policy has allowed a very small number of plutocrats to accumulate wealth beyond the wildest dreams of any Sultan, Czar or Emperor in human history and therein, lies the problem.

The very same ethics, ideology and economic policies that lead to the 2008 worldwide financial crisis remain in place primarily because they were quite effective for the rich and powerful elites who now completely dominate our politics, media and societal discourse. What’s more, these same elites are now rumbling about the possibility of yet another global financial crisis on the very-near horizon and already the “usual suspects” are lining up for public money to solve the banking/financial sector’s very private problems.

Those who do not learn from history, are indeed doomed to repeat it; and as a society, it would seem that the so-called western world has learned very little from the 2008 financial crisis. 

- Nina Illingworth

[mariacallous]

In case you hadn’t noticed, the world economy’s gone rather topsy-turvy.

Japan is up while China is down—and in danger of Japan-like deflation. The United States is practicing Japanese-style protectionism and industrial policy, while Japan is championing what Washington used to promote: newer, better open trade rules.

These trends represent a virtual reversal of the neoliberal narrative we had grown used to since the end of the Cold War, when the disintegration of Soviet communism appeared to discredit the whole idea of government-directed economic growth. This was followed by the collapse of Japan’s bubble economy in the early 1990s, which in turn touched off a long period of slow, geriatric growth in the granddaddy of the East Asian “miracle.” But the economics profession, having made so many bad calls since this long, strange trip of globalization began, can’t keep up. That’s because most mainstream economists still have trouble admitting that their model of free-market fundamentalism—the “Washington Consensus”—has failed catastrophically, and in several dimensions.

While Brexit has proved a disaster for Britain and the U.S. is floundering with ever-worsening inequality, Japan may well have entered a new chapter of its extraordinary postwar story. It is enjoying a new spurt of activity, including annualized growth of nearly 5 percent in the second quarter and some price and wage increases. These indicators “suggest the economy is reaching a turning point in its 25-year battle with deflation,” as the government said in its annual white paper. Japan also remains socially stable to a degree that should make Americans envious, since it doesn’t suffer the huge income inequality problem that bedevils the United States, though Japan is, of course, far less ethnically diverse. Japan is hardly a perfect model—it is still backward, for example, in recognizing women’s rights—but its Human Development Index is rising among the rich countries. Whether measured by equality, life expectancy, or its stellar jobless rate of 2.7 percent, Japan is today in the “top rung of the most affluent and most successful societies in the world—and now seven and a half years longer than for America,” as economics historian Adam Tooze puts it.

Other economists who have long invoked the Japanese and East Asian “middle way” of market-sensitive government industrial support agree. “I wouldn’t attribute too much to Japan’s quarterly growth rate—but I would give them some credit for not leaving as many people behind,” said Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz of Columbia University. “The big advantage they had was that before their malaise set in, they had achieved a far more egalitarian state.” Or as International Monetary Fund (IMF) economists Fuad Hasanov and Reda Cherif conclude in one recent paper, the Asian miracles’ economic models—mainly the ones used in Hong Kong, South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan—“resulted in much lower market income inequality than that in most advanced countries.”

How did East Asia do it? By focusing on export competitiveness and forcing subsidized firms to compete in global markets, these countries created good jobs for the middle class and avoided the pitfalls of failed “import substitution” policies that have characterized bad industry policy in the past across countries from Latin America to Africa. Building upon that, they also imposed progressive tax systems.

By contrast, there is also some agreement that one reason for China’s slowdown is that its dictatorial leader, Xi Jinping, has cracked down too harshly on the market part of the economy, disturbing the delicate balance of government-vs.-market control that began in the late 1970s. Xi “doesn’t seem to know how to use the levers of government with subtlety or within a market framework,” Stiglitz said.

All this is surprising, because in the policy debate with advocates of East Asian-style market intervention, the Washington Consensus had until fairly recently been winning, hands down. “Industrial policy” of the kind practiced by Japan and other East Asian nations was toxic and had to be practiced, at best, below the radar, especially in the United States. Capital flows were heedlessly unleashed around the world and market barriers eliminated at the insistence of both Democrats and Republicans in Washington. When the Asian financial crisis hit in the late 1990s, the neoliberals at first claimed vindication, saying corrupt crony capitalism and heavy government interference were to blame. But after the 2008 crash sank Wall Street—and nearly the entire U.S. financial system—it was clear that the crisis was, in fact, one of global capitalism and the excesses of neoliberalism. The problem in both the U.S. and Asia wasn’t the heavy hand of government so much as its opposite: totally unregulated capital flows and financial markets, not to mention (in the United States) regressive tax policies that favored Wall Street and capital gains earners.

As Eisuke Sakakibara, Japan’s former vice minister of finance and international affairs and one of Asia’s intellectual champions for an alternative model, told me presciently back then: “Global capital markets are responsible to a substantial degree. If you look at the so-called Asia crisis, the root cause has been the huge inflow of capital into Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, and China. And all of a sudden … all of that has [fled] from those countries. Borrowers have been borrowing recklessly, and lenders have been lending recklessly. And not just Japanese banks. American banks and European banks as well.” Sakakibara proved to be correct, and something similar—indeed, much worse—struck the U.S. economy nearly 10 years later.

Beyond that, it was also clear during this three-decade period that China was paying scant attention to trade rules, deploying among other systematic violations industrial espionage, investment controls, currency manipulation, and intellectual property theft. During the same period, American confidence was badly misplaced that the nation’s high-tech advantages would automatically translate into a new manufacturing age for the middle class. It wasn’t just American capital that was fleeing abroad: By the mid-1990s, it was obvious that Silicon Valley-style startups don’t take one’s economy very far when most of the scale-ups—the manufacturing and downstream jobs, in other words—are happening overseas in low-wage countries.

So neoliberalism’s been dying ever since, and Donald Trump and Joe Biden have delivered the death blows. The most significant failure, perhaps, was not purely economic but social and political. It has become clear that in the United States, as well as in other major Western economies such as Great Britain, deepening inequality brought about by an almost religious devotion to neoliberal thinking has generated jarring social instability and populism on the right and left. Trump and former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson turned the two democracies that built the postwar global economic system into anti-globalist, inward-looking confederacies. Trump focused his ire on starting a trade war and crippling the World Trade Organization (WTO), and Johnson stormed out of the European Union. How did we get to this topsy-turvy place? A little historical perspective might help.

What’s been playing out on the global stage all this time has been nothing less than a historic test of alternative approaches to economic development—and an unprecedented test of social stability, too.

It began about three decades ago, when U.S. President Bill Clinton rolled into office in the triumphalist aftermath of the collapse of the USSR and decided that markets and globalization were the answer—even for formerly progressive Democrats like him. Command economies were utterly discredited. So was big government in the United States. And in the developing world, government intervention—so-called import substitution, meaning the support of domestic industry and the closing of trade barriers to foreigners—had also been an abysmal failure, especially in Africa and Latin America, leading to corruption and endemic poverty.

But then there was that strange outlier, East Asia. The East Asian “Tigers,” inspired by the postwar champion of managed economies, Japan, had dared to tinker with market forces like demiurges playing with elemental fire, and they had largely succeeded. Around that time, Masaki Shiratori, Japan’s executive director at the World Bank, lobbied passionately for a study of East Asia’s unusual success, its unique and savvy combination of deft government promotion of markets.

The World Bank came up with one—350 pages long—that hesitantly concluded that “market-friendly state intervention” might sometimes work. But it was so heavily hedged that it had little impact. Washington didn’t want to risk turning countries like India into government-supported export giants with East Asian-style policies, especially when U.S. markets were already seen as being under assault and Clinton was preaching “jobs, jobs, jobs.” And U.S. policymakers didn’t want countries like Russia to find excuses for only half-reforming their way out of command economics.

Mainstream economists rolled out their big guns against the idea that East Asia had a viable alternative. In a 1994 Foreign Affairs article, “The Myth of Asia’s Miracle,” Paul Krugman argued that pouring all that capital into industry at home was only going to yield “diminishing returns” and compared the Asians to the Soviet Union, saying that people forget “how impressive and terrifying the Soviet empire’s economic performance once seemed.” Krugman cited in particular the work of economists Alwyn Young and Lawrence Lau, who argued that East Asia’s “total factor productivity” numbers showed East Asian economic growth was entirely based on “inputs” such as rapid labor force increases, not on improved efficiency. It was merely “economic growth on steroids,” Young told me in an interview for Institutional Investor magazine in 1993. “You look impressive, but inside you’re rotting.”

Young and others pointed to Japan’s slow-growth period as evidence of this, but he and other economists failed to take into account the ultra-long time frame of the East Asian model—the fact that these countries were laying the institutional groundwork for later improvements in productivity and efficiency. And all the while neoliberalism was being slowly undermined by the departure of U.S. capital for foreign shores, along with cheaper labor. What the Clintonites and their advocates failed to see was that “[a]s capital becomes internationally mobile, its owners and managers have less interest in making long-term investments in any specific national economy—including their home base,” Robert Wade—then a renegade World Bank economist—argued at the time.

Wade and others were, of course, ignored. The historical tide of neoliberalism was too powerful, and the Japanese too meek about asserting their views. Japan, as ever, was bad about “forming universal theories from the economic success of Japan,” Naohiro Amaya, one of the country’s legendary bureaucrats, told me in 1992 when I lived there. It was a culture of pragmatism; the Japanese had no Keynes or Marx of their own. And frankly, few bureaucracies were as savvy as those of the East Asians, with their agile technocratic class and Confucian tradition of service. India, for example, which had grown up with Nehru socialism, had suffered for decades under the “license raj,” which involved a bureaucratic tangle every time someone wanted to start a business.

Yet much of this long-entrenched economic “wisdom” is now cracking—much like the melting glaciers that neoliberal capitalism, during its rampage across the planet, has helped to promote. As Cherif and Hasanov write in “The Return of the Policy That Shall Not Be Named”: “Our summary of 50 years of development showed that only a few countries made it from relative or absolute poverty to advanced economy status,” giving rise to the idea that government can’t make much of a difference. East Asia proved that it could, but “until recently, the experiences of the Asian miracles have been mostly considered as ‘accidents’ that cannot and should not be emulated, at least from the point of view of standard development economics.”

That is no longer the case. For better or worse, a new global economic consensus is being born, if rather painfully. As John Maynard Keynes wrote in the preface to The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money: “The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones…”

The new look in economics is being driven by two related factors. One is the anger of the Western middle class—which has been hammered by globalization and the spread of technological advances around the world—and the other is the rise of China. As if awakened collectively from a Pollyannaish, post-Cold War dream, the U.S. political class has, in the space of a few years and across both political parties, cast off Reagan-era free-market thinking and re-embraced the mindset of the early Cold War. In particular, the China threat has reawakened memories—so long buried—of how successful industrial policy was back then.

As Wade—author of one of the original East Asia studies, Governing the Market—has pointed out, the U.S. remains by far the most innovative economy in the world due in no small part to an ongoing, if stealthy, industrial policy. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Institutes of Health, and several other federal agencies have helped produce U.S. breakthroughs in “general purpose technologies.” Among them, the National Science Foundation funded the algorithm behind Google’s search engine, and early funding for Apple came from the Small Business Innovation Research program. In her 2013 book, The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, economist Mariana Mazzucato notes that all the technologies that make the iPhone “smart” are also state-funded, including the internet, wireless networks, the global positioning system, microelectronics, touchscreen displays, and the voice-activated SIRI personal assistant.

Hence a new conventional wisdom has come out of the closet, economically speaking—at least among policymakers. This fresh approach amounts to what one critic, Douglas Irwin, a Dartmouth College economist and nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, disapprovingly calls “the new Washington-Beijing-Brussels Consensus of building up certain national industries through government subsidies and trade restrictions.” Instead of the Washington Consensus, we are seeing the rise of what some are calling the “Washington Constellation,” a collection of many disparate growth theory concepts.

But the economics profession itself is still not sure it ought to abandon its neoliberal convictions. “Prominent people in the profession still have convictions against this,” said Nathan Lane, a young economist at Oxford who wrote a pathbreaking paper that employed neoclassical economics to explain the success of South Korea’s state investment in heavy industry. “It’s a very uncomfortable thing that’s going on, which is economics made this empirical turn the past couple of decades, and people like myself, who are not attached ideologically to the Washington Consensus, said, ‘We’re just empiricists. Let’s explore this.’ People said, ‘Don’t do that.’ People get extremely reactive to even asking the question of whether it works.”

At the IMF, once the face and voice of the Washington Consensus, acceptance of industrial policy has been an uphill battle over the past few decades. That’s why, in 2019, Hasanov and Cherif were forced to coyly title that working paper “The Return of the Policy That Shall Not Be Named.” A year later, they followed with a higher-ranking departmental paper, “The Principles of Industrial Policy.” But the IMF still published a rebuttal from Irwin this past June.

“The debate over industrial policy has long been locked in a stalemate,” Irwin wrote. “Some see it as essential to productivity growth and structural transformation, while others see it as abetting corruption and fostering inefficiency.” Irwin echoed generations of neoliberal thinking in concluding that “quantitative models suggest that the gains from even optimally designed industrial policies are small and unlikely to be transformative.”

Yet new empirical data from the last few years indicates that many of East Asia’s industrial policy investments from decades ago have paid off big time. Younger economists such as Ernest Liu of Princeton University have debunked some of the old biases against industrial policy—mainly that it lacks the reliable information necessary to target appropriate sectors—by showing that new measures of market distortions can supply just that.

Even as the Biden administration has fully adopted industrial policy, it uses, instead, the term “industrial strategy.” As IMF First Deputy Managing Director Gita Gopinath said in a speech earlier this month, the fund’s advice is “to tread carefully. History is replete with examples of IPs [industrial policies] that were not only costly, but also hindered the emergence of more dynamic and efficient companies.”

Nowhere does the success of industrial policy play a greater role in the world today than in Taiwan. One of the reasons Taiwan has become such a hot issue geopolitically—as the U.S. and China vie over its future as a state—is because of its world-beating semiconductor industry, which produces an astonishing 60 percent or more of the world’s chips. This was not the work of the private sector alone but the creation, in 1987, of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which received at least half of its initial funding from the government and over subsequent decades emerged as the preeminent maker of advanced chips. In South Korea, the World Bank once advised against setting up an integrated steel company, saying it wasn’t in Korea’s comparative advantage. But what became POSCO (formerly Pohang Iron and Steel Company) “fairly soon became the most efficient steel plant in the world,” Wade said.

So it’s unavoidable to conclude that a subject that was once taboo—the idea of government-directed industrial subsidies, along with semi-closed markets and economic nationalism of the kind practiced by Taiwan—is being embraced on all sides. A paper summing up these effects, “The New Economics of Industrial Policy,” by economists Réka Juhász, Nathan Lane, and Dani Rodrik, is slated for publication early next year by the mainstream Annual Review of Economics. And the chairman of Biden’s Council of Economic Advisors, longtime progressive economist Jared Bernstein, has invited the co-authors to speak to the council later this month, according to Lane.

In the last two and a half years, Biden has enacted what his former National Economic Council director, Brian Deese, calls its “modern American industrial strategy” based mainly on “four foundational laws”: the American Rescue Plan, which brought our economy back from the brink, and more recently the Bipartisan Infrastructure Deal, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act (under which Washington is subsidizing low-carbon technologies and prioritizing homemade technological leadership).

What this means, Deese said, is that rather than “accepting as fate that the individualized decisions of those looking only at their private bottom lines will put us behind in key sectors,” the government plans a long-term strategic investment “in those areas that will form the backbone of our economy’s growth over the coming decades, areas where we need to expand the nation’s productive capacity.” There have been some promising early results: U.S. manufacturing employment has hit its highest levels since the early 2000s, and the White House boasted in June that nearly 800,000 new manufacturing jobs have been created under Biden, while private-sector companies have announced more than $480 billion in manufacturing and clean energy investments since he took office.

The key factors: building sophisticated industrial sectors with government seeding, export orientation, competition, and accountability for the support received. While the policy is not yet fully articulated, the administration is seeking to emulate some of the key principles of the Asian miracle’s success—and at the same time recognize the deficiencies of neoliberalism.

“If neoliberalism is going to generate inequality, then you need government to compensate the losers,” said former World Bank economist Nancy Birdsall, referring to education, retraining, and other major investments. “That didn’t happen in the U.S. The government came up with sort of pathetic little programs that did not come close to dealing with the China shock” of jobs moving there in the last two decades.

In a recent essay in Foreign Policy, Adam Posen, president of the Peterson Institute, argued that while industrial policy is occasionally useful, the “zero-sum” economics it embraces is bound to backfire based on “four profound analytic fallacies: that self-dealing is smart; that self-sufficiency is attainable; that more subsidies are better; and that local production is what matters.”

Deese has sought to address these common neoliberal objections to industrial policy, arguing the administration is not cherry-picking winners and crowding out private investment but instead seeking to use “public investment to crowd in more private investment, and make sure that the cumulative benefits of this investment strengthen our national bottom line.” By this he means transportation infrastructure, which “literally lays the groundwork for private investment”; government-funded technological innovation; and government investing in STEM education and training at schools and universities nationwide. Harking back to the glory days of the Cold War, Deese said Biden is “making a larger investment in innovation than even President [John F.] Kennedy and the Apollo program that took us to the moon.”

Another major area for industrial policy is clean energy, Deese said. “We know the climate crisis cannot be addressed by market forces alone. We know public leadership and investment is key to the solution. And yet for decades, our country stood by. But now, with our industrial strategy, we’re making the largest investment in clean energy ever in our nation’s history” so as to “encourage the private sector to invest at massive scale.”

And yet aspects of the new policy scheme remain incoherent. One such area in Biden’s plan is his embrace of Trump’s tariffs: Economists such as Hasanov say the East Asian model works much better if there is a vibrant export market around the world to sustain competition.

These inconsistencies arise partly “because the mainstream is still coming up with bogus arguments about crowding out other ‘good’ investments,” Stiglitz said. “It’s an embarrassment. The U.S. is all over the place. The Republicans have no coherent framework for thinking about the role of industrial policies—other than the market can’t compete with China. The Democrats can’t come up with the kind of coherent approach that is needed because of the politics of [Sen. Joe] Manchin—the policy is whatever we can get through Congress.”

Today, ironically, Japan is one of the countries carrying the banner of free trade in the absence of Washington. During the Trump administration, Tokyo helped resurrect the Trans-Pacific Partnership after Trump pulled out by joining with other members such as Canada to renegotiate the successor Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. In a 2019 interview, James Carr, Canada’s then-international trade minister, told me that “the Japanese position, attitude, and support for the rule-based multilateral trading system and fair trade has been exemplary and very important.” This year, Japan sought to rescue the WTO by joining the Multi-Party Interim Appeal Arbitration Arrangement, a multilateral framework that duplicates the Appellate Body by enabling members to resolve WTO disputes among themselves.

The European Union is also embracing industrial policy, launching the Green Deal Industrial Plan and Net-Zero Industry Act—which emulates Biden’s IRA by giving member states greater flexibility to incentivize private investors and match foreign subsidies such as those available under the IRA. The European Commission also recently launched a European Critical Raw Materials Act, to aid in identifying and securing access to those raw materials that are critical across various sectors of the European economy, and is leading multiple initiatives in artificial intelligence and digital technologies. Today, it is the policymakers who are surging ahead, while economists straggle behind.

[patriotsnet]

How Did The Democrats And Republicans Switch

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/how-did-the-democrats-and-republicans-switch/

How Did The Democrats And Republicans Switch

The Fifth Party System And American Liberalism And Conservatism

In more modern times we can to look at the Fifth Party System in which race, social justice, the currency debate, religious issues like Temperance and Prohibition, and other issues of modernization seen in earlier systems had already split the parties into many factions. In this era, we can see a telling split by comparing the socially conservative anti-communist classical liberal Republican Hoover to the big government pro-worker social liberal Democrat FDR .

To fully grasp what happens from Hoover and FDR on, itll help to quickly discuss American liberalism and conservatism and how they relate to other ideologies like progressivism.

Although we can see shadows of most modern political ideologies in any age of recorded history by looking to old nation-states like , , and  or to revolutionary Britain, America, and France, American liberalism and conservatism undergo a noticeable change in the Gilded Age and Progressive era. Given this, the general tension over social issues, and thus the use of government, can be described in modern times as being between a few general political ideologies:

NOTE: Many elites are classical liberals and/or conservatives, yet most issues discussed in politics between voters are social issues . For example, almost everyone on K street and Wall Street are neoliberals and neoconservatives, yet the average voter votes on social justice issues. Think about it.

With That Said It Is More Complex Than We Can Just Say

With everything thus far said, we have only skimmed the surface.

The truth is, be we talking about the South or not, not every faction changes, and we have to account for more history than can fit in any essay. We have to account for changing platforms, changing voter bases, congressional changes over decades, battles between factions within states and parties, the changing ideologies of factions and parties, technological changes of automation and modernization, business interested elites in both parties who tend to organize better and dominate, populists in both parties who cant always agree on divisive social issues, the general rift between key voter issues and social issues vs. economic issues, arguments over the size of state within parties, voter issues taking on new importances, single issue third parties, global politics, and so much else to fully tell this story.

This is to say, the history of the major U.S. political parties if of course more complex than can just be said which is why we use like parties switched and party systems to preface this long in depth essay.

Three Factions Of Modern Republicans To Oppose This

Although conservatism is complex, it is defined well as an opposition philosophy to liberalism. Through this lens, there is a type of conservatism that stands against for brand of liberalism. Modern American conservatism wants to conserve, which means not being progressive on a given issue and which by its nature is not conservative. Thus we get modern social conservatism which says no to social programs and federal power, except when it upholds conservative social values. There is also a more liberal version that we call libertarianism. It is against all uses of state power for any reason and is a form of radical classical liberalism, combined with traditional classical conservatism, which is willing to use federal power to keep order, but not inherently against social programs. These factions can be said to become allies the conservative coalition mentioned above, although the establishment of both parties tends to favor aspects of traditional classical conservatism.

TIP: When either party uses government power, they are traditional conservatives, when either party deregulates and lets the private market and individuals handle it, they are classically liberal. More than one ideology uses classical liberalism, and more than one uses classical conservatism, as all political ideologies grow out of these foundational ideologies.

An Overview Of The Platform Switching By Party System And President From The Founders To Eisenhower

The First and Second Party Systems included some important changes and debates. Examples included the argument over the favored , and the Anti-Federalist favored Articles of Confederation and Bill of Rights and debates over slavery, , and  Major changes began at the end of the Second Party System.

The Second Party system ended with the Whig Party dissolving in 1854. They were critically divided by the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the related debate over manifest destiny and popular sovereignty . The heated battle over whether Kansas should be a slave state, and the debate over whether the south could keep expanding southward creating slave states, resulted in the country being split. This had happened in the Mexican-American war. One faction became the Northern Republicans and their allies the Union, who wanted to hold together the Union under a strong central government. The other became the Southern ex-Democrats and their allies the Confederacy, who wanted independence and wanted to expand southward, to for instance Cuba, creating new slave states. By the time Lincoln took office in 1861, the division was inescapable

FACT: The tension was so great the Democratic party ceased to exist from 1861 1865 as the Confederacy rejected the concept of party systems; which is why we refer to them ex-Democrats above.

The post-Reconstruction Gilded Age and Third Party System resulted in a progressive populist era aptly known as the Fourth Party progressive era 1890s 1932 .

Democratic And Republican Ideologies Undergo Dramatic Role Reversal

The Democratic and Republican Parties have undergone a long transition from their founding ideological principles. The started out as the conservative party but are now the liberal party, and the were once the liberal party but are now the conservative party.

The Democratic Party we know today evolved from the conservative Democratic-Republican Party of the 1790s. The first contested Presidential election was in 1796. The Democratic-Republican Party nominated the conservative Thomas Jefferson as their first presidential nominee. Party members were anti-federalists who favored state sovereignty, free markets, a decentralized federal government, and an originalist interpretation of the U.S. Constitution and the attendant Bill of Rights. The Democratic-Republican Party also supported the institution of slavery.

Democratic President Martin Van Buren presided over the panic of 1837, and during that time he was steadfastly opposed to using the government as a means of employing workers on public works projects. In fact, during this economic depression Van Buren literally sold the federal governments tool supply so that the government could not use the tools for public works projects. This ideological mindset is diametrically opposite of the economic stimulus proposals that contemporary Democrats now support and advocate for, especially during periods of economic morass.

Legislative Seats Lost Under Obama

Between the time of World War II and the end of the second term of President George W. Bush in January 2009, the political party of an outgoing two-term president or consecutive political party administration lost an average of 450 state legislative seats. During President Obama’s two terms in office, Democrats experienced a net loss of 968 state legislative seats, the largest net loss of state legislative seats in this category since World War II. The second-largest loss occurred following Dwight D. Eisenhower’s two terms in office, when were handed a net loss of 843 state legislative seats. President Ronald Reagan was the only president to increase his party’s number of state legislative seats over his two terms in office, gaining six total seats across all 50 state legislatures.

How The Republicans Became Socially Conservative

The Fourth Party Republicans began to change when the Progressive Republican Theodore Teddy Roosevelt broke from the party in 1912 . Following the break, the Republicans increasingly embraced social conservatism and opposed social progressivism . From Harding to Hoover, to Nixon, to Bush they increasingly favored classical liberalism regarding individual and states rights over central authority. This attracted some socially conservative Democrats like states rights Dixiecrat Strom Thurmon. It resulted in a of the Republican party and drove some progressive Republicans from the party over time.

TIP: See History of the United States Republican Party.

How Republicans Made Common Cause With Southern Democrats On Economic Matters

Map: Vox. Data: Barry Hirsch, David Macpherson, Wayne Vroman, “Estimates of Union Density by State.”

Roosevelts reforms also brought tensions in the Democratic coalition to the surface, as the solidly Democratic South wasnt too thrilled with the expansion of unions or federal power generally. As the years went on, Southern Democrats increasingly made common cause with the Republican Party to try to block any further significant expansions of government or worker power.

“In 1947, confirming a new alliance that would recast American politics for the next two generations, Taft men began to work with wealthy southern Democrats who hated the New Deals civil rights legislation and taxes,” Cox Richardson writes. This new alliance was cemented with the Taft-Hartley bill, which permitted states to pass right-to-work laws preventing mandatory union membership among employees and many did.

Taft-Hartley “stopped labor dead in its tracks at a point where unions were large, growing, and confident in their economic and political power,” Rich Yeselson has written. You can see the eventual effects above pro-Democratic unions were effectively blocked from gaining a foothold in the South and interior West, and the absence of their power made those regions more promising for Republicans’ electoral prospects.

Those Racist Dixiecrats Create Mainstream Republican Policy

But their ideas formed modern GOPs core platform.

In a campaign ad, Democrat-turned-Republican Jesse Helms said racial quotas prevented white people from getting jobs. The lie of racial quotas persists in the GOPs rejection of affirmative action. Racial quotas are illegal.

Take the idea of special interests. Heres Helms view, as a Republican:

Are civil rights only for Negroes? While women in Washington who have been raped and mugged on the streets in broad daylight have experienced the most revolting sort of violation of their civil rights. The hundreds of others who have had their purses snatched by Negro hoodlums may understandably insist that their right to walk the street unmolested was violated. Television commentary, 1963, quoted in The Charlotte Observer.

But you would think that Ted Cruz would have a clearer understanding of the connections between the Dixiecrats and the Republican Party.

He loves Jesse Helms.

Looking to do your part? One way to get involved is to read the Indivisible Guide, which is written by former congressional staffers and is loaded with best practices for making Congress listen. Or follow this publication, connect with us on , and join us on Facebook.

A General Summary Of The Party Switching And Party Systems

Above I offered summaries in the for of bullet  pointed lists. Below Ill try to weave everything together into a story to offer another perspective:

As America became increasingly progressive over time, from 1776 forward, different socially conservative and socially liberal movements banded together to create the parties of each of the 6-7 Party Systems .

This caused different social-minded factions to align with different business-minded factions over time , and this changed the parties .

Oddly enough, this resulted in the previously Small Government Populist Democratic Party becoming the party of Big Government, Neoliberalism, Progressivism, Globalization, and Social Liberalism, and the previously Big Government Aristocratic party Republican Party becoming the party of Small Government , Nativism, and Social Conservatism. Oddly again, despite the changes the Republicans have always been Protectionist, Nationalist, and Stricter on immigration . On that note, it is very important to understand that immigration changed the Democratic Party as they embraced new non-Anglo Protestant immigrants over time.

The tricky thing to grasp is that some conservatives want to conserve back to a time that they feel they had more freedom and that progressive social liberalism requires Big Government to implement.

How the Republican Party went from Lincoln to Trump.

An Introduction To The Different Types Of Democrats And Republicans: This Is A Story Of Factions Switching And Parties Changing

I cant stress this enough, a major thing that changes in history is the Southern Social Conservative one-party voting bloc .

This is the easy thing to explain given the conservative Souths historically documented support of figures like , John Breckenridge and his Socially Conservative Confederates of the Southern Democratic Party, , the other Byrd who ran for President, , C. Wallace, , and later conservative figures like Reagan, Bush, and Trump .

The problem isnt showing the changes related to this, or showing the progressive southerners like LBJ, the Gores, and Bill Clinton arent of the same exact breed as the socially conservative south, the problem is that the party loyalty of the conservative south is hardly the only thing that changes, nor is it the only thing going on in American history .

Not only that, but here we have to note that the north and south have its own factions, Democrats and Republicans have their own factions, and each region and state has its own factions and that gives us many different types of Democrats and Republicans.

Consider, Lindsey Graham essentially inherited Strom Thurmonds seat, becoming the next generation of solid south South Carolina conservative, now solidly in the Republican party.

was all about a Democrat spraying a at a Democrats, while the Democrats sent in the national guard to stop the protestors, while a Democrat told the guard to stand down.

The Claim: The Democratic Party Started The Civil War To Preserve Slavery And Later The Kkk

As America marks a month of protests against systemic racism and many people draw comparisons between current events and the Civil Rights Movement, an oversimplified trope about the Democratic Partys racist past has been resurrected online.

Many Instagram users read between the lines for the tweets implication about the modern Democratic and Republican parties. Some argued this past action discredited current liberal policies, while others said it did not matter.

Historians agree that although factions of the Democratic Party did majorly contribute to the Civil War’s start and the KKK’s founding, it is inaccurate to say the party is responsible for either.

When Did The Democratic And Republican Platforms Switch

As noted above, the planks, platforms, ideologies and even the names of the American political parties switched often, and at many different points. We call these changes: the first party system, second party system, third party system, fourth party system, and todays fifth party system .

Some changes stick out like a sore thumb, but most of the changes between party systems happened slowly over time. Its hard to summarize or detail every issue, but the keys are names like Free Soil, Free Silver, Bourbon Democrats, anti-slavery Republicans, Stalwarts, Half-Breeds, American Independent, and other telling titles of factions or third parties whose members inevitably have gravitated toward a major party over time.

When we cant cut through the rhetoric, we can look at voting records to see which party favored what.

Its important to note, that the current parties werent established until the 1850s . From this point forward is when the major switching happens, but it is also when issues we consider important today take center stage for the first time. When Lincoln takes office, the Republican party is only a few years old, prior to this the ideology is roughly the same and they are called Federalists, and then Whigs. The same is true for anti-Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, and Jacksonian Democrats.

Perhaps the best answer to, when did the platforms switch, is: under Lincoln, the Roosevelts, and LBJ.

The Myth Of The Republican

When faced with the sobering reality that Democrats supported slavery, started the Civil War when the abolitionist Republican Party won the Presidency, established the Ku Klux Klan to brutalize newly freed slaves and keep them from voting, opposed the Civil Rights Movement, modern-day liberals reflexively perpetuate rather pernicious myth–that the racist southern Democrats of the 1950s and 1960s became Republicans, leading to the so-called “switch” of the parties.

This is as ridiculous as it is easily debunked.   

The Republican Party, of course, was founded in 1848 with the abolition of slavery as its core mission. Almost immediately after its second presidential candidate, Abraham Lincoln, won the 1860 election, Democrat-controlled southern states seceded on the assumption that Lincoln would destroy their slave-based economies.

Once the Civil War ended, the newly freed slaves as expected flocked to the Republican Party, but Democrat control of the South from Reconstruction until the Civil Rights Era was near total.  In 1960, Democrats held every Senate seat south of the Mason-Dixon line.  In the 13 states that made up the Confederacy a century earlier, Democrats held a staggering 117-8 advantage in the House of Representatives.  The Democratic Party was so strong in the south that those 117 House members made up a full 41% of Democrats’ 283-153 advantage in the Chamber.

So how did this myth of a sudden “switch” get started?

It would not be the last time they used it.

How Republicans Gave Up On Reforming The South

University of North Carolina

As mentioned above, Republicans had done a lot to help former slaves in the South, but many of the gains they had made existed more on paper than in practice, and others were in danger of being rolled back.

And indeed, the backlash soon arrived. In the South, whites were dead set against what Radicals had done, and were willing to use violence to fight it.

In the North, whites essentially thought they’d done more than enough for black Southerners at this point. Businessmen wanted their own interests to take center stage. Some intellectuals worried about the federal government squelching states rights.

And public opinion turned there was little appetite among white Northerners for an indefinite violent federal occupation of the South.

But most Republicans no longer cared. The party had achieved its founding aim and had gone quite a bit further, since the Slave Power was now a thing of the past, and that provided a handy rationalization for not doing more. The cause of equal rights for black citizens would now essentially vanish from national American politics for decades.

Never Trumpers Will Want To Read This History Lesson

In the 1850s, disaffected Democrats made the wrenching choice to leave their party to save American democracy. Hereâs what happened.

âI was educated a Democrat from my boyhood,â a Republican delegate confided to his colleagues at Iowaâs constitutional convention in 1857. âFaithfully, I did adhere to that party until I could no longer act with it. Many things did I condemn ere I left that party, for my love of party was strong. And when I did, at last, feel compelled to separate from my old Democratic friends, it was like tearing myself away from old home associations.â

As often seems the case today, American politics in the 1850s were nearly all-consuming and stubbornly tribal. So it was hardâand bitterly soâfor hundreds of thousands of Northern Democrats to abandon the political organization that had long formed the backbone of their civic identity. Yet they came over the course of a decade to believe that the Jacksonian Democratic Party had degenerated into something thoroughly autocratic and corrupt. It had fallen so deeply in the thrall of the Slave Power that it posed an existential threat to American democracy.

Placing the sanctity of the nation above the narrow bonds of party, these Democrats joined in common cause with former Whig antagonists in the epic struggle to save the United States from its own darker instincts.

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But history offers them some consolation.

After The War Radical Republicans Fight For Rights For Black Americans

When states ratified the 14th Amendment. Republicans required some Southern states to ratify it to be readmitted to the Union.

For a very brief period after the end of the Civil War, Republicans truly fought for the rights of black Americans. Frustrated by reports of abuses of and violence against former slaves in the postwar South, and by the inaction of Lincolns successor, Andrew Johnson, a faction known as the Radicals gained increasing sway in Congress.

The Radicals drove Republicans to pass the countrys first civil rights bill in 1866, and to fight for voting rights for black men at a time when such an idea was still controversial even in the North.

Furthermore, Republicans twice managed to amend the Constitution, so that it now stated that everyone born in the United States is a citizen, that all citizens should have equal protection of the law, and that the right to vote couldnt be denied because of race. And they required Southern states to legally enact many of these ideas at least in principle to be readmitted to the Union.

These are basic bedrocks of our society today, but at the time they were truly radical. Just a few years earlier, the idea that a major party would fight for the rights of black citizens to vote in state elections would have been unthinkable.

Unfortunately, however, this newfound commitment wouldnt last for much longer.

The Solid South Switch And Southern Strategy

Although it is hardly the only switch that happens in American political history, the Solid South Switch , is both one of the easiest to spot, easiest to prove, and one of the most impactful switches.

The Deep South, unlike most of the country, has often had a one-party system at the state level , and that makes them an easy place to look for changes .

To prove the switch, we can first confirm southern political history up to the 1950s via works like V.O. Keys Southern Politics in State and Nation .

In his classic work of political realism, Key documents the history of the South to explain that what we might describe as Progressive Reformist Populists, Southern Socially Conservative Populists, Small Government Libertarians, agrarian Southern Conservative business people, and Bourbon Liberal Pro-Business  were all Solidly in the Democratic Party in the South from the Gilded Age to the start of the 1950s.

This isnt to say there werent progressive Republican factions, Gilded Age small business pro-Gold Libertarian-like Republicans, or America-First Know-Nothing Republicans in the North and South, this is to say, we are talking about the dominate solid south factions who vote in lock-step here .

From the start of the 1950s on, we can then confirm the consequent changes via the Republican southern strategies .

Then we can show how, even though not everything changes, this led to a switch over party stances on key voter issues.

The South And The House Go Republican

Jonathan Davis, Arizona State University

“I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come,” President Johnson said shortly after signing the Civil Rights Act, according to his aide . And indeed, Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina switched his party affiliation from Democratic to Republican specifically for this reason.

Yet party loyalties take a long time to shake off, and the shift of white Southerners from being solid Democrats to solid Republicans was in reality more gradual.

And while race played an important role in this shift, other issues played roles too. White evangelical Christians became newly mobilized to oppose abortion and take stands on other “culture war” issues, and felt more at home with the conservative party. There was that suspicion of big government and lack of union organization that permeated the region. And talented politicians like Ronald Reagan promised to defend traditional values.

Still, Democrats continued to maintain control of the House of Representatives for some time, in large part because of continued support from Southerners, as shown in this map by Jonathan Davis at Arizona State University. But in 1994, the revolution finally arrived, as Republicans took the House for the first time since 1955. And many of the crucial pickups that made that possible came in the South.

Democratic Losses In State Legislative Seats

During Obama’s tenure, Democrats lost members in 82 of the 99 state legislative chambers across the country. These losses were most visible in both chambers of the and West Virginia state legislatures as well as the state senate chambers in and .

The following table illustrates five largest losses in state legislative seats during President Obama’s two terms in office. Rankings were adjusted to account for varying sizes of legislative chambers.

Top five Democratic losses in state legislative seats, 2009-2017 Chamber

A Summary Of Party Systems Realigning Elections And Switching Factions In The Major Us Political Parties

Now that we have the essential basics down, lets do an overview of all the changes .

Historians refer to the eras the changes resulted in as party systems.

Each party system is defined by realigning elections or otherwise important elections like the elections of , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and , key voter issues of the day like states rights, workers rights, social welfare, equal rights, central banking, and currency debates, and which factions were in which parties at the time like the New Deal Coalition and Conservative Coalition .

To make things simple , we can say the red and blue statesflipped between the Third and Sixth Party Systems  as the battle between the Union and Confederacy during the Civil War gave way to ,  , and the Gilded Age, which gave way to the Democratic Party   William Jennings Bryan and the Fourth Party Progressive Era, which led to Theodore Roosevelts split from the Conservative Taft and exit from the Republicans along with his progressives, which led to the Republicans becoming increasingly classically liberal and conservative starting in the 1920s under figures like Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, which led to the the Democrats becoming increasingly socially progressive under FDR in the 1930s at the start of the Fifth Party System, which led to the solid south conservative states rights faction of the Democratic party favoring the Republicans in the post-64 Sixth Party system by the  election .

[thevividgreenmoss]

By any reasonable measure, the neoliberal dream lies in tatters. In 2008 poorly regulated financial markets yielded a world-historic financial collapse. One generation, weaned on reveries of home ownership as the coveted badge of economic independence and old-fashioned American striving, has been plunged into foreclosure, bankruptcy, and worse. And a successor generation of aspiring college students is now discovering that their equally toxic student-loan dossiers are condemning them to lifetimes of debt. Both before and after 2008, ours has been an economic order that, largely designed to reward paper speculation and penalize work, produces neither significant job growth nor wages that keep pace with productivity. Meanwhile, the only feints at resurrecting our nation’s crumbling civic life that have gained any traction are putatively market-based reforms in education, transportation, health care, and environmental policy, which have been, reliably as ever, riddled with corruption, fraud, incompetence, and (at best) inefficiency. The Grand Guignol of deregulation continues apace.

In one dismal week this past spring, for example, a virtually unregulated fertilizer facility immolated several blocks of West, Texas, claiming at least fourteen lives (a number that would have been much higher had the junior high school adjoining the site been in session at the time of the explosion), while a shoddily constructed and militantly unregulated complex of textile factories collapsed in Savar, Bangladesh, with a death toll of more than 1,100 workers.

In the face of all this catastrophism, the placid certainties of neoliberal ideology rattle on as though nothing has happened. Remarkably, our governing elites have decided to greet a moment of existential reckoning for most of their guiding dogmas by incanting with redoubled force the basic catechism of the neoliberal faith: reduced government spending, full privatization of social goods formerly administered by the public sphere, and a socialization of risk for the upper class. When the jobs economy ground to a functional halt, our leadership class first adopted an anemic stimulus plan, and then embarked on a death spiral of austerity-minded bids to decommission government spending at the very moment it was most urgently required—measures seemingly designed to undo whatever prospective gains the stimulus might have yielded. It’s a bit as though the board of directors of the Fukushima nuclear facility in the tsunami-ravaged Japanese interior decided to go on a reactor-building spree on a floodplain, or on the lip of an active volcano.

So now, five years into a crippling economic downturn without even the conceptual framework for a genuine, broad-based, jobs-driven recovery shored up by boosts in federal spending and public services, the public legacy of these times appears to be a long series of metaphoric euphemisms for brain-locked policy inertia: the debt ceiling, the fiscal cliff, the sequestration, the shutdown, the grand bargain. Laid side by side, all these coinages bring to mind the claustrophobic imagery of a kidnapping montage from a noir gangster film—and it is, indeed, no great exaggeration to say that the imaginative heart of our public life is now hostage to a grinding, miniaturizing agenda of neoliberal market idolatry. As our pundit class has tirelessly flogged the non-dramas surrounding the official government’s non-confrontations over the degree and depth of the inevitable brokered deal to bring yet more austerity to the flailing American economy, we civilian observers can be forgiven for suspecting that there is, in fact, no “there” there. For all their sound and fury, these set-tos proceed from the same basic premises on both sides, and produce the same outcome: studied retreat from any sense of official economic accountability for, well, anything.

...You’d think that our recent bruising encounters with the devastating fallout from the deregulators’ handiwork in the housing market of the early aughts should, by rights, render Friedman’s complaints about the public sector’s assaults on market virtue the deadest of dead letters. But, if anything, the ritual defense of the market’s sovereign prerogative has dug in that much more intractably as its basic coordinates have been discredited. As critics such as Dean Baker routinely point out, the stalled recovery out of the Great Recession is almost exclusively a function of the failure of our neoliberal economic establishment to speak honestly about a collapsed housing bubble that created a yawning shortfall in demand—a shortfall that, amid the paralysis of credit markets in the same recession, could be jumpstarted only by government stimulus.

All sorts of absurdities have flowed from this magisterial breakdown in comprehension. Since the neoliberal catechism holds that stimulative government spending can never be justified in the long run, much of our debate over the recovery’s prospective course has been given over to speculative nonsense. Chief among these talismanic invocations of free-market faith is the great question of how to placate the jittery job creators. At virtually every turn in the course of debate over how steeply to cut government spending in this recession, our sachems of neoliberal orthodoxy have insisted that any revenue-enhancing move the government so much as contemplated would spook business leaders into mothballing plans to expand operations and add jobs. It became the all-purpose worst-case scenario of first resort. If health care reform passed, if federal deficits expanded, or if marginal tax rates were permitted to rise for the vapors-prone investor class, why, then the whole prospect of a broad-based economic recovery was as good as shot.[*]

And since neoliberalism is most notably a global—or properly speaking, the globalizing—ideology, such pat distortions of economic reality are no longer confined to the Anglo-American political economy. Nor are they confined to strictly cognitive errors in policymaking. The collapse of the Rana Plaza garment factory in Bangladesh has yielded commentary from neoliberals that might well merit entry into the psychiatric profession’s DSM-5 as textbook illustrations of moral aphasia. Here, after all, was a tragedy that would appall even the darkest Victorian imaginings of a Charles Dickens or a Karl Marx: factory workers earning a monthly wage of $38 crowded into a structurally unsound multistory facility built on a foundation of sand above a drained pond. Three stories of the factory had been hastily erected on top of an already unsound existing structure just to house the fresh battalions of underpaid workers demanded by bottom-feeding international textile contractors.

Government inspectors repeatedly demanded that the facility be shuttered on safety grounds, but the plant’s proprietors ignored their citations, reckoning that the short-term gains of maintaining peak production outweighed the negligible threat of a fine or safety citation. Nor was there likely to be any pressure from Western bastions of enlightenment and human rights. The ceremonial stream of Astroturf labor-and-safety-inspecting delegations from Western nations made zero note of the cracked and teetering foundations of the Rana Plaza structure. Lorenz Berzau, the managing director of one such industry consortium (the Business Social Compliance Initiative), primly told the Wall Street Journal that the group isn’t an engineering concern—and what’s more, “it’s very important not to expect too much from the social audit” that his group and other Western overseers conduct on production facilities. And, as Dave Jamieson and Emran Hossain reported in the Huffington Post, labor organizers have long since learned that the auditing groups serve largely as pro forma conduits of impression management for consumer markets in the West. The auditing of manufacturing facilities in the developing world “ends up catering more to the brands involved than the workers toiling on the line,” Jamieson and Hossain write.

Yes, factory owners and managers well understand the permissible bounds of discourse in such Potemkin-style inquiries—and instruct their workforce accordingly. “What to say to the auditors always comes from the owners,” a Bangladeshi line worker named Suruj Miah told the two reporters. “The owners in most cases would warn workers not to say negative things about the factories. Workers are left without a choice.” Sumi Abedin, one of the survivors of an earlier disaster—a factory fire in the nearby Tazreen plant that claimed the lives of 112 workers in November 2012—told the Huffington Post that on the day of an international audit team’s visit, management compelled workers to wear T-shirts designating them as members of a nonexistent fire safety committee, and had them brandishing prop fire-extinguishing equipment that plant managers had procured only for the duration of the audit.

What this disaster ought to have driven through the neoliberal consensus’s collective solar plexus is something close to the polar opposite of its cherished, evidence-proof theory of the captive regulator: a largely cosmetic global watchdog effort funded overwhelmingly by private-sector concerns, far from delivering oversight and accountability, has incentivized fraud and negligence. And conveniently enough, it’s the race-to-the-bottom competitive forces unleashed by the global workplace that ritually sanctify all of this routine dishonesty. In their malignant neglect of worker safety measures, local factory managers are able to cite the same market pressures to maximize production and profit that have prevented the ornamental Western groups conducting audits of workplace safety practices from releasing their findings to the workers at risk of being killed by the neoliberal regime of global manufacturing.

Still, the dogmas of neoliberal market prerogative are far sturdier than a collapsing factory or a raging fire on the production line. If the dogmatists have thrown overboard Hayek-era intellectual values like experimentation and skepticism, at least they can stave off their inevitable extinction by shoring up Friedman-era platitudes and, from the mantles of the nation’s most prestigious universities and op-ed shops, try to pass them off as the nation’s highest common sense. So former University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein, who helped found the influential law and economics movement that essentially transposed the shibboleths of public choice theory into legal doctrine, has patiently explained that the just and measured response to the collapse of Rana Plaza is to seek enforcement of preexisting building codes across the Bangladeshi private sector. Writing on the heels of the disaster, in the Hoover Institution’s web journal, Defining Ideas, Epstein takes pains to rule out the passage of any “new laws” to improve worker-safety standards or international monitoring efforts.In other words: Bangladeshi workers can either be more safe or starve more rapidly.But lest even this minimal recourse to regulation sound like too heady a plunge into statist remedies, Professor Epstein also cautions that the aggrieved and grieving workers in the Bangladeshi garment trade must not veer recklessly into unionism or other non-market-approved modes of worker self-determination. After all, he reasons, “in order to stave a shutdown off by improving factory safety, the savvy firm will have to raise its asking price from foreign purchasers . . . and may have to lower wages to remain competitive.” (This is another classic myth of the neoliberal faith—the rational “trade-off” between personal safety and wages that the independent broker makes when he or she contracts with an employer to freely exchange time and skills for wages. Only, of course, the notion of such rational choice has been reduced to a bitter farce in workplaces such as Rana Plaza, where the basic human rights of workers are only acknowledged theatrically, for the purposes of Potemkin auditing tours.) A more activist approach to the crisis in global worker safety would create intolerable distress to Epstein’s utopian vision of the carefully calibrated relations of global market production. Sure, the EU might ban exports of clothes bearing the taint of labor exploitation—but such a measure would just perversely create “undeserved economic protection” for EU economies that are net clothing exporters (and by implication, would deprive consumers of the sacred right to the cheapest possible attire that bullied and undercompensated labor can provide).

Neoliberalism, the Revolution in Reverse