Yves here. A terse and important take of where ever-more-extractive capitalism is heading.
Mind you, I am not sure it had to wind up this way. Michael Hudson has argued, such as in his paper From Marx to Goldman Sachs, that Marx recognized the competition between manufacturing and financial capitalism. But it was inconceivable to Marx that the forces that represented the productive side of the economy would not dominate, since even then it was obvious to him that financial capitalism would over time distort the economy and social/power relations. But here we are.
By Tom Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
Whom the gods would destroy: A lesson in three acts.
1. Poverty exists because we cannot satisfy the rich.
Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor, but because we cannot satisfy the rich.
2. Crime is a social construct.
When we say “crime is a social construct,” what we mean is that you, as an individual, can go to jail for littering, but executives of a corporation can poison the air and water of an entire town, can profit from deaths they’re happy to cause themselves, and no one will lose so much as a year-end bonus.
3. Fascism is capitalism in decay.
Fascism is capitalism in decay, revealing its core function: maintaining the dominion of wealth through physical force. When consent can no longer be manufactured for capitalist crimes, repression takes over. Fascism is the system functioning as intended: forcing consent when consent is no longer given.
The Rich and the Rest
Ultimately, the rule of the rest of us depends on force. In gentler societies, the rich pacify the rest by surrendering enough so that no one comes for their heads. In these societies, there is still extraction and pain, but not so much that the victim is moved to rebel.
In societies like these, the rich are unhubristic; they possess what the Greeks call sophrosyne (σωφροσύνη) — soundness and prudence of mind, which hubris is not. Such a society was the U.S. in the 1950s. Yet while sometimes tamed, the rich don’t sit still for long; desire for great wealth is a poison that dissolves their humanity and produces hubristic monsters. Thus every state of extremes sees eventual collapse.
That’s where we are now, ruled by monstrous men using both political parties to work their will. From this there are only two outcomes, centrifugally opposed: the people rebel and the rich lock down control (think the Stasi and their DDR), or the people rebel and tumbrels start coming out (think Luigi Mangione).
Friedman on steroids; Ron with a howitzer. Unless the monsters stand down, we could well see a crash. If so, we won’t be the first. Whom the gods would destroy…
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One of the reasons financial capitalism prevails is our perception of money. As linear, goal oriented creatures in this cyclical, circular, reciprocal, feedback generated reality, people see money as signal to save and store, while markets need it to circulate, so Economics considers it both medium of exchange and store of value.
In your body blood is the medium, fat is the store. Mix them up and you are dead.
Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. If we treated roads like we treat money, everything would be paved over, but we would still be fighting over the lots.
As a medium money is a public utility. You own it like you own the section of road you are on, or the air and water flowing through your body. It’s not your picture on it, you don’t hold the copyright and, most importantly, are not responsible for its value, like a personal check.
Modern economics and bacteria operate on the same infinite growth formula. The problem is when they reach the edge of the petri dish, or resources, they collapse.
The advantage of multicellular organisms is being able to sense and navigate the surroundings.
To extent societies function as super organisms, they develop government as a nervous system, along with forms of money and banking as blood and the circulation system.
We have evolved enough to understand that as the purpose of government is the viability of the entire society, not just the accumulation of power by those at the top, that it is a public utility. We haven’t yet understood the same principle applies to banking and so the banks are having their let them eat cake moment.
Bacteria have more sense than “growth without limits” capitalists. In their crowded biofilm state, they down-regulate metabolism to adapt to the limits of the environment.
———–
I have wondered whether there is some analogue to bacterial “quorum sensing” in humans that could account for things like declining sperm counts, but it’s probably mostly a consequence of pollution.
The idea that millions and billions of people can work collectively, then save individually, is certainly one of the greatest hustles of all time.
That the one thing the flunkies in DC are really good at is running up the debt and the financial system needs this debt to grow metastatically is probably not a coincidence.
It would seem the secret sauce of capitalism is public debt backing private wealth.
Quorum sensing in bacteria. For those of you with curiosity.
So basically people are more autistic than bacteria.
Ignatio, this is fascinating, and it fits with the conclusions of Philip Ball, “How Life Works”.
Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, though I found his writing style almost unbearable, helped me formulate this problem.
Trump and Musk are heuristic “geniuses” at social domination. This genius for manipulation has led them to the pinnacles of “success” in mature Neoliberalism, without any understanding whatsoever of the complex interplay of multilayered, tightly coupled, interconnected and interdependent subsystems that Neoliberalism inherited from a multi-century period of competitive State management of economic development.
Because they can socially dominate what shadow of “leadership” Neoliberalism tolerates, they believe their System 1, fast, heuristic genius is all there is and apply its “insights” into System 2, slow, organizational milieu of which they have no understanding, or more likely, firmly held delusions, with what I anticipate will be catastrophic effects.
Capitalism is cancer, it demands perpetual growth to above all else. Just as cancer cells go through multiple mutations to become increasingly malignant, so we find that late stage capitalism and capitalists that compose Trump 2.0 cabinet, to be particularly malignant.
The defensive cells that were thought we had to fight it is barely able to put up a response so far and the late capitalism is… Everywhere.
Excellent. Handy images for sharing. Thank you, Yves, and I gave Neuburger’s Substack post a like too.
Solutions? How do we overcome?
We have reached the point in our society where we either destroy wholesale or we suffer encompassingly.
The Capitalist class are acting as parasites upon the body of society. Most parasites lack moderation and thus destroy their hosts and, then themselves.
One lesson to be taken from observing the progress of social and political revolutions is that the primary group to be “liquidated” is the cadres of “true believer” PMCs. I will not be at all surprised to see all this degenerate into ad hoc firing squads before it is all over.
Rhetorical answer, like the question. Not intended as personal advice …
Clone Luigi Mangione and train the replicants to aim higher.
I didn’t intend it as a rhetorical question, sorry!
I see a path forward, wondered if others had ideas. I see mass homelessness and the housing crisis giving rise to “off grid” self-sufficient communities outside the wherewithal of the state. Currently we have homeless camps. These will become villages. Before long, cities. Of people with no money – therefore fiat currency won’t be in use. Corporate services won’t be provided. And the mindset of these communities will be people who help each other, provide from nothing. Trading on goodwill, all debts and promises on word of mouth. True communities. Outside the reach of capitalism?
Could that be a solution?
It’s all patches over the tears in the previous patches. Consider democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic cultures. To the Ancients gods were metaphors. Monotheism equated with monoculture. One people, one rule, one god. Ancient Israel was a monarchy. The Catholic Church was the eschatological basis for European monarchy.
When the West went back to popular forms of government, it required separation of church and state, culture and civics, morality and law.
So now it’s might is right and money rules.
Separation did not mean elimination. As the ruling elites have spent most of a century deliberately eliminating religion, morality, and most of the public institutions that bound our civilization together as that is left is the worship of money and power.
There is nowhere, in the West at least, “outside the wherewithal of the state” or “Outside the reach of Capitalism”.
As soon as any community like that got big enough to attract attention and inspire others it would be violently crushed.
There will be no escaping like that. It will have to be a violent revolution one way or the other. I can’t think of another way. The Oligarchs will not voluntarily give up all that wealth.
Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Poverty exists because human beings are scum, full stop.
Also Americans revolting? ROFL, apparently the author has never heard the classic Jay Gould quote: “I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.”
Ultimately, the rule of the rest of us depends on force. In gentler societies, the rich pacify the rest by surrendering enough so that no one comes for their heads. In these societies, there is still extraction and pain, but not so much that the victim is moved to rebel
Orwell’s Obrien on one side and Huxely’s Mustapha Mond on the other…
“you, as an individual, can go to jail for littering”
Why is something this silly part of the article? Perhaps dumping a pickup load trash in a gated community might get you arrested, but not many other places. Go to any major city and look at the trash strewn streets and roadsides. Or the open air drug sales and use. Antisocial behavior is tolerated, if not encouraged. There is more than a grain of truth to the theory of broken windows. When government cannot be bothered with providing safe, clean neighborhoods or downtowns degenerate behavior follows. Isn’t the utter failure of blue cities and states a good part of why people embrace Fascism-Lite?
“the people rebel and the rich lock down control”
Where is this happening? Was BLM ™ an example of this? There are plenty of Brian Thompsons walking around. There is no substantive collective action. How could it ever happen here? The time and populace came close 50 years ago, but nothing I see today heads in a collective direction (unless you count the NYS prison guards wildcat strike, well into the third week now).
The favelas in Brazil and shantytowns in Africa have been around for a very long time. The rich live very comfortably in such countries. Why not here? We’re halfway there.
Yeah, I didn’t quite get the “crime is a social construct” thing either. As a slogan, it rivals the infamous “defund the police” when it come to lack of clarity. What does it really mean?
I remember with “defund the police”, some people were merely looking to “demilitarize” the police, which I actually though was a worthwhile goal. [Though they should have called it “demilitarize the police”.] Others wanted to replace a significant percentage of police with social workers who would respond to mental health and substance abuse crises. I thought this terribly naïve, as it would only take the death of one social worker (caused by an unwitting decision to send them into a situation more violent than expected) to bring the whole thing crashing down. And there there were the hard-core activities who wanted to eliminate the police entirely. This was beyond stupid, made even worse by the use of an ambiguous “defund the police” slogan rather than a more direct (and honest) “disband the police” or “completely defund the police”.
So what do we do with “crime is a social construct” thing? Eliminate crime by “deconstructing the social construct”? Reading further, it sounds like Neuburger is actually arguing for more laws (and enforcement thereof) against actions that cause “distributed harm”. Which is entirely reasonable. But I don’t at all see how the slogan “crime is a social construct” gets us there.
Huh?
1. How many shoplifting teen kids of affluent parents do you know who were never prosecuted or even charged?
2. How many hard-drug using college kids at elite schools do you know were never prosecuted? I know one personally who paid for his tuition via dealing at college.
3. Surely you heard of the death of Mary Jo Kopechne? You are seriously trying to tell me that the failure to charge Teddy Kennedy was not a class issue?
That is before the fact that executives who pursue and execute policies that kill others (the Sacklers at Purdue Pharma, for starters, or the Ford execs in the Pinto saga, for two of many example) confirms that what is crime is a class matter.
Shame you can’t begin to see that.
To answer your questions.
[1] None. But I only know a handful of teen kids with affluent parents. And if they shoplifted and got away with it, I wouldn’t expect to ever hear about it.
[2] None. But I didn’t go to an elite school and stayed firmly away from the drug scene during my educational years.
[3] Oh, yes. It was a travesty that Kennedy didn’t do time for calling his lawyer rather than 911.
And please note… I’ve very much in agreement that the wealthy people who cause cause real harm should be held to account. And I agree that they frequently aren’t, which is a true injustice. But I don’t see how the slogan “crime is a social construct” gets us to an improvement.
The reason I’m fussing about it is that I feel that some genuinely useful social movements (like demilitarizing the police) get hampered by bad slogans that are vague and easily subject to misinterpretation. [Or worse yet, get adopted by other activists with less realistic views on things.] For the situations that you and Neuburger describe, I can think of some better ones:
“Distributed harms are still real harm.”
“Laws should apply to the rich just like they do the poor.”
Or, to quote from your comment: “What is crime is a class matter.“
You seem to imply that I hung out with the drug crowd. I didn’t. Not that there was one except the stoners, and everyone knew who they were. You are telling me you DIDN’T know any stoners in college? Marijuana was illegal then, and if you were a city kid of color, you’d be busted if caught, unlike college users on a campus.
The one who dealt drugs in college went to a different school and on the other coast; I met him via the famous investor Jim Rogers. He had a very rich father who cut him off so he had to put himself through college on his own. Serious dealers are not users. He also worked as a janitor, which gave him keys to all the buildings. Very useful in his more lucrative line of employ.
“You seem to imply that I hung out with the drug crowd.” That was not at all my intent, and I apologize for the poor phrasing.
Anyway, I truly only knew two drug users in college. Both were guys from my high school graduating class, and both got booted halfway through their freshman year because they missed too many classes. Most of what I saw was excess drinking. I saw a lot of that.
But as for why I knew so few… To be honest, I’m not sure. I have zero doubt that significant drug use was happening in various places, but I never directly saw it. I suspect there’s something about my personality that says to drug dealers, “don’t even bother,” and I never knew who they were. My social circle consisted mostly of engineering students who were very serious about their educations.
Heck, now that I think about it, I was similarly clueless about drug use in my high school. I didn’t find out until they had a major drug bust and arrested over 20 students one day. Alas, I’m a classic math/science/engineering geek with limited social clue. Even today, I miss stuff all the time.
You could tell the heavy weed smokers by behavior. The stoners included some applied math students, so your assumption that math and engineering types did not use weed was also off.
FYI Grumpy … I knew and was friends with BSD white collar drug people like in the movie Blow. Add on to that the military/merc life and how that rolls since the late 60s.
None of this happens in a vacuum as people make money and the social dramas are reflected back on the users full stop.
Just like with probation mate.
I was much the same. I thought I didn’t know a single drug user in high school. I realized that probably wasn’t true after an anti-drug campaigner asked the class how many of them had tried marijuana. Maybe a third raised their hands. He then asked who would know how and where to get some if they wanted to try it. About three-quarters of the class raised their hands. In the follow-up discussion, one of the students expressed the opinion that the other quarter had been lying.
I hadn’t been lying. It was quite a surprise to me at the time. I had few close friends at the school, and the small number I did have were coincidentally the born-again Christian types who wouldn’t even touch alcohol, and were prone to things like destroying their rock music collections in a fit of pious zeal. The others obviously didn’t trust me enough to let me in on what it seems everyone else knew. Probably there were signs all around and I overlooked all of them.
Do you even know that probation was a family formation issue Grumpy. Cheap cane sugar and part payment in Rum devastated famialys, mothers and kids suffered due to it. Mothers banded together as they had no income and completely vulnerable to this economic business practice, same for MADD.
And you have the cheek to make it out as an individualistic drama which is of choice and broader social dynamics like family formation and its long term social consistences are moot you say due to anecdotal individual observations – really?
Engineers- Everything can be broken down into one little problem to solve, discreetly. Lends it self very well to the economic unit of neoliberalism. “You didn’t do it right!”
“something about my personality that says to drug dealers, “don’t even bother,””
This is funny, but also demonstrates another bad premise- Drug Pushers. As many before me have pointed out, you don’t need to push drugs, they sell themselves very well.
Engineers what? Some random guy with random username says random things on the Internet, and you make some “smart” conclusions about engineers. You must be a lawyer, or economist, or politician, or an astrologist, not that I can tell the difference.
I think he means which harmful acts qualify as “crimes” is socially constructed, but you are correct — the ambiguity is unhelpful to his argument.
Just saying, I found no ambiguity. Yves pointed out the obvious.
I found the simplicity of the statement, crime is a social construct, as mind opening. It gave me a new way to think about crime under a rubric I’m already familiar with, a social construct. I thought Yve’s follow up commentary within the original post was sufficient for me to understand. The original commenter seems to just have a tic, by which I mean no insult, that’s most of us have a few.
Rather than littering as a crime, HH might have used the real life example of reselling cigarettes, while poor and Black. Resulting in not jail, but in death-by-cop.
Smoking- induced cancer killed both my parents (along with 4 million others in the 1965-1999 period), in the post-WW2 boom years, when cartons of Camels were sent to wounded soldiers recuperating in military hospitals. How many tobacco company executives, or the heads of PR firms who convinced the public that smoking was ‘cool,’ were charged with a crime and jailed?
in colorado defund the police means that they get no immunity, and when the police break the law, the state will no longer fully fund the fine, the first $25,000 dollars of the fine comes right out of the pockets of the criminals.
today’s system of immunity means the cops no longer have to learn the law, nor enforce it humanely and correctly.
immunity has made them a elite, and elites view us with contempt, they intimidate, dominate, humiliate, terrorize, and are lazy and sloppy, no need to be anything else, because we are immune, and the state fully funds us.
Sorry, you need a link about Colorado. This is just a claim with no backing whatsoever.
On top of that, even if you can support your statement, you have proven Grumpy Engineer’s point: that “defund the police” is so vague that no one knows what it really means and it therefore is unfit as a basis for rallying support for policy changed. You have to define what it means, and only for Colorado? Seriously?
i have posted this before. but i guess i need it again.
https://www.kxlf.com/news/national/an-inside-look-at-colorados-year-old-qualified-immunity-ban
An inside look at Colorado’s year-old qualified immunity ban
By: Newsy Staff
Posted 6:13 PM, Jul 22, 2021
and last updated 6:13 PM, Jul 22, 2021
“From the beginning of negotiations to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a major sticking point has been qualified immunity — the broad legal protection that shields officers from lawsuits.
But in Colorado, police have been living with a qualified immunity ban for more than a year now.
In the weeks following the May 2020 death of George Floyd and the unrest that followed, Colorado’s governor signed arguably the most sweeping statewide police reform bill in the country.
SB217 includes several popular reforms, like banning chokeholds, requiring body cameras and tracking use of force incidents. But it also features more controversial measures, like a ban on qualified immunity.
The qualified immunity ban allows citizens to bring individual lawsuits against Colorado police officers for alleged civil rights violations but places a $25,000 cap on potential judgments against them.
Brittney Gilliam filed the first lawsuit in the state since the qualified immunity ban took effect.
A video of Gilliam and four young girls in her family being handcuffed and held at gunpoint went viral back in August. Aurora police believed Gilliam was driving a stolen car. She wasn’t.
LANE: “There is abundant case law standing for the proposition that you don’t point loaded guns at small children if you’re a cop. Very simple,” said David Lane, a civil rights attorney representing Gilliam’s family.
“So hey, if the cop doesn’t have the 25,000 bucks, oh, well, I guess they keep their job and we garnish their paychecks, you know, till it’s satisfied, just like any other person who gets sued, and has to pay the bills. So it does, it causes cops to feel some pain,” Lane added”
“There has not been some rash of frivolous lawsuits brought. In fact, the sky hasn’t fallen at all,” said Mari Newman.
Newman is a civil rights attorney representing the family of Elijah McClain. McClain was killed by the Aurora Police Department in 2019.
“If there are officers who don’t want to continue to work in law enforcement because they’ll be accountable for their actions, those are not officers we need,” Newman added.
Just this June, the Colorado legislature expanded its ban on qualified immunity to include Highway Patrol troopers and Colorado Bureau of Investigation officers.”
This citation is useful but does even remotely substantiate your original claim, that the effort to end or limit qualified immunity was presented to the public as a “defund the police” initiative plan as opposed to a common-sense civil rights matter.
Litter may have been a poorly chosen example there. The point was we little people follow rules, living in fear of getting a speeding citation or tax audit, while the ruling classes run free, secure in the knowledge a squadron of lawyers will handle any trouble that comes up because of their fraud or wrongdoing of any kind.
The prosecutors choose who to bring charges against, and they do it freely against the poor and middle class cohorts of criminals, but very reluctantly against the monied. Some have a growing concern that in our surveillance state, a protestor could easily be up on bogus charges just because they have triggered the attention of a corrupt politician who has a prosecutor friend.
Well, there are some anomalies: Hunter Biden had squadrons of attorneys and still got convicted–until the ultimate power gave him a pardon. The games people play.
I don’t see this as an anomaly, Hunter Biden was convicted for gun charges. Hunter Biden was not even charged for dealing the influence of the vice President of the United States in foreign countries. The story was suppressed by the papers of record at the time of discovery of the laptop.
As to the pardons given by President Biden, I would like to understand how the man is unfit to be judged by a jury and yet we are to consider his pardons as lawfully dispensed? All through the last 7 months of his presidency it was an open secret that somebody else was running the government. Since the pardons were given in the last days, it’s obvious that somebody else gave them, somebody that doesn’t have the power to pardon. It seems to me that any of those people could be prosecuted, once the illegality of the pardon is recognized.
Aphorisms attributed to Voltaire. “The comfort of the rich depends upon the abundance of the poor.” I would make it more ironic and change an article and rephrase “The comfort of the rich depends on the abundance of the poor.” Another is “Don’t think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money.” And ” The essence of governing is to transfer as much wealth as possible from form one class to another.” And finally, “With great power comes great responsibility.” To complain about the very wealthy is to complain about gravity. Mass (money) bends space and distorts everything around it. My concern is that our finance economy is as in Hudson’s view, feudal rentier extraction and creates little that sustains the community. The pre-revolution French economy has lessons for us now.
Capitalism may be too far down the rabbit hole to save itself. Just the other day I came across a quote by Mark Blyth from back in 2016 illustrating this. For those who have heard Mark Blyth, I am sure that you will read this quote in his distinct accent-
‘And I’ll leave you with one set of numbers that I found today, which is just an absolute for this whole thing. In 2015, Wall Street Bonuses, not regular compensation, bonuses, seven years after they were bailed out with the public purse, totaled $29.4 billion dollars. Total compensation paid to every single person in this country who makes minimum wage totaled $14 billion. The era of neo-liberalism is over. The era of neo-nationalism has just begun.’
Foreign Affairs, November 15, 2016
They cannot stop. They will continue to take everything that they can as enabled by their allies in Washington but when they have taken too much will realize their mistake. That when you take everything from a people, then they have nothing left to lose and will act. Luigi was just a scout.
centrifugally opposed -> diametrically opposed
Thanks for the Hudson piece:
> That at least was the hope of the financial class: to capitalize the entire surplus into debt service
Capitalism is like fire. Properly and judiciously controlled it can help you cook your food, heat your home and work metals; unconstrained it will burn down your house along with all your neighbours’ houses.
This is what I take to be Kalecki’s message about “embededness” — our oligarchs are busily working to dis-embed capitalism from the social constraints operative in the polities responsible for its own creation, much as our business class lionizes Adam Smith without realizing that he was first and foremost a moral philosopher who considered his greatest work to be The Theory of Moral Sentiments
Which is to say that they are fools busily sawing away at the branch upon which they are perched …
PRC lifted 1,000,000,000 of people from the constituent ’50’ nations out of poverty. Their Empire is no miracle.
Restraint.
Confucianism.
The barrel of a gun.
Economic theory is a mess designed to trap intellectuals. The fields await you tender ministrations! Let a thousand flowers bloom.
The dogmatism, it burns.
While China’s accomplishments are impressive, it would have taken China much longer to increase incomes had the US not arranged for China’s entry into the WTO when China did not qualify and then had big and mid-sized US companies offshoring or sourcing components there. As Yves sometimes says, the US was exporting demand and with it, jobs.
Moreover, China’s industrialization depended on tools, techniques, and processes developed and improved since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Please tell me what Confucianism had to do with, say, the invention of the assembly line or the development of machine tools.
What do machine tools and assembly lines have to do with ethics?
Did you manage to miss that Donnelly invoked Confucianism? Or address reporbate’s point, how China could have gotten where it is without the >200 years of the non-Confucian Industrial Revolution? We do expect commenters to follow the thread and require that they not straw man or talk past the point at issue.
Yves, I’m going out on a limb here, with full recognition that it may be chopped off at the trunk. I am here to learn, not just about everything that’s going on in the world around us, but also how to look at an argument, see the flaws, and debate its merits. I saw Donnelly’s first statement as his main point, which I think should have had a supporting link. However, since I’ve seen similar information posted here at NC, I took it at face value. I saw reprobate’s comment as talking past Donnelly’s main point. It seems to me that how the Chinese accomplished that reduction in poverty is a side issue and doesn’t negate the fact that they did it. Where am I going wrong? Comments from the commentariat are welcome.
Not my specific wheelhouse but it seem this kind of “oh yeah” rhetoric can go on forever, you could argue the Industrial Revolution couldn’t have happened without Chinese demand for silver creating incentives for colonial expansion or paper and printing which were pioneered in China as were intensive farming techniques, the compass and so on (and to flip the argument, Marxism is of course another product of the West’s industrial age)…
There is an argument that America had to become a consumer economy, destroy it’s own industrial capacity, to create global demand for the dollar, that this was essentially baked into the global economic machinations that facilitate having the dollar as the global reserve currency. You undermine labour power in your own country by exporting it to somewhere else, but China it turns out was able to leverage that power in a way the American proletariat never could. PCC reforms meant China had a mass-educated, relatively healthy proletariat capable of doing the work. The US post their ‘defeat’ of the USSR perhaps had an overly optimistic view of the supremacy of their own ideology.
I’ve seen it argued in the comments here that China’s rise is really a return to historical norm, the tech the peculiar machinations of the PCC gives is that an organised revolutionary party is extremely resilient to the corrupting influence of foreign powers, far better than soft, isolated emperors and courtiers.
Also Confucian ideals emphasise respect for hierarchy, hard work etc. to a greater degree than comparable dogmatic western theology (the Protestant work ethic could be somewhat equivalent -though I am unaware of anything resembling the Confucian equivalent of the siege of Munster-, Marxism can be seen as a kind of offshoot of Calvinism), that in theory could have assisted in the rapid adaptation of industrial techniques.
Thank you, JMH. reprobate’s short sentence, “The dogmatism, it burns,” is a good example of what John Michael Greer, in this essay linked in NC yesterday, calls a thoughtstopper (see essay for definition). None of reprobate’s comment refutes Patrick’s statement that “PRC lifted 1,000,000,000 of people from the constituent ’50’ nations out of poverty.”
Sure. The atteniton Thorstein Veblen paid to the “machine process” in his writings ca. 1900, like The Theory of Business Enterprise. The machine process is a core idea in running assembly lines. It puts a strong emphasis on rigorous standardization and scaling-up or -down with no particular limits.
Applying this ethos to the people working on the line defines them as anonymous cogs in the process, who are important chiefly by their quantity.
We saw this ourselves after they took Bernie Sanders out of action in time for the 2016 election. The feeling in the press was that all the Sanders supporters were now Clinton supporters, as though they had been loaded into a dump truck, driven over and dumped on Hillary’s lawn, and they were now hers.
– –
“She called me a gear.” — Joseph Heller, Catch-22
https://gordonhahn.com/2023/10/30/the-self-isolation-of-the-west/
The Self-Isolation of the West
Gordonhahnby
Gordonhahn
October 30, 2023
13 Comments
“The West’s isolation is largely an accidental self-isolation brought about by a series of radical policy choices and a disturbing inability, even unwillingness to make compromises not just with foes but increasingly with friends.”
“US economic buildup of China, fueling her rise, was perhaps an even greater geostragic failure than driving Moscow into Beijing’s arms by expanding NATO to Russia’s borders. Together these two miscalculations represent perhaps the greatest foreign policy cluster blunder in all modern history, out-failing Hitler’s ‘excellent’ two-front war and Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign to expand the community of ‘liberte, fraternite, egalia (series of blunders by bill clinton, free trade and nato expansion has led to americas isolation)
US economic buildup of China, fueling her rise, was perhaps an even greater geostragic failure than driving Moscow into Beijing’s arms by expanding NATO to Russia’s borders. Together these two miscalculations represent perhaps the greatest foreign policy cluster blunder in all modern history, out-failing Hitler’s ‘excellent’ two-front war and Napoleon’s disastrous Russian campaign to expand the community of ‘liberte, fraternite, egalite.’
————
https://compactmag.com/article/the-deglobalization-we-need
“hyper-globalization truly started with Bill Clinton in the ’90s. That’s when a series of trade deals, culminating in the entry of China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, took the guardrails off the global economy. “It’s amazing but true,” Foroohar writes, “that when it came to trade, Democrats in the ’90s were far less protectionist than the Republicans who came before them. Indeed, they supported the WTO rules that, by 2000, made it nearly impossible for countries to craft their own trade policies.”
Many US manufacturers went out of business during this period. About 80 percent of the decline in private-economy employment between 2000 and 2003 can be traced to factory job losses related to what academics have called “the China shock”—the process by which a seemingly unlimited supply of low-wage Chinese workers became available to multinational corporations following that country’s entry into the WTO. Research shows that “job losses from rising Chinese import competition” between 1999 and 2011 were “in the range of 2 to 2.4 million.”
Foroohar goes beyond the standard mainstream framing by recognizing that hyper-globalization wasn’t just an economic project, but a political one, as well: It wasn’t just about giving more power to corporations, but also taking power away from the people, by surrendering national prerogatives to international and supranational institutions and super-state bureaucracies, such as the WTO and the European Union. These institutions completely untethered capital from national democracy. What we ended up with was an increasingly hollowed out democracy—more akin to a plutocracy or corporatocracy.”
As Friedman approvingly predicted, “policy choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke—to slight nuances of taste, slight nuances of policy, slight alterations in design to account for local traditions, but never any major deviations from the core golden rules.”
Yes, it takes two to dance. US really, really wanted to put lots of daylight between USSR/Russia and China and yes, the American capitalists wanted to kneecap the working class in the US, atomize it as much as possible, and make supermax container levels of money. And China obliged. I have not seen any instance of China putting a gun at the head of US or of any business person.
From what I hear, Wall Street spnsored federal legislation that rewarded business that moved production overseas and punished those that didn’t…
>>>>From what I hear, Wall Street spnsored federal legislation that rewarded business that moved production overseas and punished those that didn’t…
As I remember, it was tax breaks to cover the cost of moving the production overseas.
I don’t think our society is moving towards fascism. There was a strong socialist base in pre-war Italy, Germany and Spain that put the capitalists in an existential crisis. And the success of the Russian Revolution showed that a workers state was not a pipe dream. That is why the capitalists needed Fascists, Nazis and Falangists.
Today, however, no ideological group is strong enough to oppose capitalism, and it is unlikely that workers will ever unite to overthrow the capitalists. The modern capitalists do not need the help of the fascists. Yes, capitalism is at a dead end, but that is all.
@ciroc, 9:03 am
I totally agree with you. Fascism was not the capitalists’ first choice in Italy and Germany. They went there when their power was seriously threatened by working class organisation. Beside crushing workers the fascists turned all kinds of public goods over to private capital. In the US at any rate worker organisation is very weak and most profitable economic opportunities are in the hands of private capital: sick care (18% of GDP – an outrage), finance, most insurance, industry and military production, tech. I don’t believe capitalists would support fascist extremes to acquire the remaining few unexploited profit centres (some power production, social security, national parks, others?).
I also take issue with the term “fascism”. In today’s world what does it mean? The accusation is thrown around with abandon. The fascists in 1930s Italy and Germany had hundreds of thousands of supporters prepared to fight in the streets for their cause. As did the communists. Do we see that anywhere today? George Orwell wrote an article entitled “What is Fascism?” written in 1944 that still applies today (with thanks to Aurélien for pointing this out).
https://www.orwell.ru/library/articles/As_I_Please/english/efasc
Good points, most political (and economic) terms are thrown around without any working definitions.
“liberalism” “conservatism”, “democracy” “freedom” “fascism” “tyranny” “socialism” “communism” “capitalism” etc.
These are loaded terms and can mean very different things to different people, of course.
They’ve mostly become what Chomsky calls “terms of abuse”, labels we put on somebody else’s ideas that we don’t like.
Keith, the U.S. Army defined and described Fascism in 1945 in a pamphlet that can be found here:
https://archive.org/stream/ArmyTalkOrientationFactSheet64-Fascism/Fascism64_djvu.txt
The pamphlet begins like this:
“Fascism is not the easiest thing to identify and analyze; nor, once in power, is it easy to destroy. It is important for our future and that of the world that as many of us as possible understand the causes and practices of fascism, in order to combat it. Points to stress are: (1) Fascism is more apt to come to power at a time of economic crisis; (2) fascism inevitably leads to war; (3) it can come to any country; (4) we can best combat it by making our democracy work.”
I think hubris is the correct description. The yahoo’s in Washington right now are so hubristic in their belief in their own superior intellect and so sure of themselves can’t even see the fire they are playing with. They honestly think (their dream goals) that firing ½ of the government’s employees, cutting trillions from the budget and raising taxes on workers (tariffs) will yield them a booming economy and fund another round of massive tax cuts for them.
For so called smart businessmen they obviously can’t do the national accounting (more likely can’t bring themselves to care enough to honestly think deeply about it) to see that it doesn’t add up. They really could end up starting a massive recession that could quickly light fire to a massive financial crisis. And their hubris just leads them to ignore this real possibility.
And for me, this hubris is the essence of fascism in its darkest sense: the citzens’ belief that they, like their rulers, are members of a master race.
The definition of ‘race’, like ‘meritocracy’, gets bent by expediency, yielding faux alliances like the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, but as the post says, in the end hubris is insatiable.
On which note, I must challenge the post’s ritualistic demonization of the Stasi. Unlike the West, the Stasi never celebrated Hitler’s genocide against the slavs, the communists, and the pacifists, some 25 million Russians among them.
All that Adolf offered Germans in 1932 was bread and work on campaign posters, whereas yesterday glorious leader was crowing about all the jobs he axed, a different flavor from fascism as we knew it.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.
– Edward Abbey, 1927-1989.
Gone but not forgotten, the firm of Hayduke Sarvis Abbzug & Smith LLC.
I don’t “collect” books, or autographs, but in ’85 I had the opportunity to acquire a newly published and illustrated copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang, autographed by both Edward Abbey and illustrator R. Crumb. It is a jewel among the books in our library, along with a 1931 edition of The Time Machine with ethereal tipped in illustrations by W.A. Dwiggins.
The last paragraph concludes all of this perfectly.
I’ve heard Michael Hudson say “Marx was too optimistic” several times over the years, and he explains in his books how this is so. Most economists still do not differentiate between industrial capital, and finance capital. Even so-called Marxist economists often ignore vols. 2 and 3 of Capital.
Yanis Varoufakis, for example, says that capitalism is dead. We have techno-totalitarian neo-Feudalism (I modified his term a bit). I have heard others say it as well, especially since the TBTF era. Of course, the terms may mean different things to different people, so working definitions to clarify are helpful.
On the politics side, as David in Friday Harbor has pointed out: We have “inverted totalitarianism” (a concept developed by the late prof. Sheldon Wolin in the now classic: Democracy Inc.). It’s not like the old-school Fascism of Mussolini et al. it’s more sophisticated with much more sophisticated propaganda, marketing and PR.
One thing that might be different now is that the electronic mass media has millions of people believing in falsehoods, tilting at windmills and otherwise distracted. (or “electronically lobotomized”) This is effective and the plebs are artificially divided, distracted and instructed to act against their own interests.
Electronics is the thing, you’re right. I was reading today that our media succeeds in allowing pols to come across totally and only like their personas, no flaws. Chas Freeman’s utube “The West Fell for its Own Propaganda.” Why, because huge numbers have been programmed to think guys like Adam Schiff are credible? Then you have Palantir making buku dough, and the records of all phones having passed each and every cell tower going back 5 yrs? Records of what I chose to click on and how long it took me to make the decision. I used to think cruise missiles that could “see” landmarks were amazing. Now there’s a missile that travels at 7K mph but doesn’t overshoot its target at all (Oreshnik).
Jacques Ellul said technology is the new capital [around the 80s IIRC], so I guess the US has cooked its goose? But that in itself to me seems arbitrary; just as was the case with tulips once upon a time. I mean in light of any environmental disaster that could come along today the way things are. More liquid water roll’n with the tides over faults twice a day. Bioweapons leaking hither and thither. Plague hatched out of factory farms. DOGE reduced staff at nuclear power plants. Flock of geese sets off WWIII, or some hothead sets it off in the midst of any number of wars or proxy wars. One thing Alfred McCoy wrote I think real likely is that the rat race might not slow down until some big ports are covered with enough water.
But right now that propaganda thing is really worrisome.
Those amassing immense wealth (credit from anonymous) impose massive debt (obligations from anonymous). These obligations are fraudulently imposed: while pretending their credits were freely extended, they devise more cruel means of extracting obligation. I doubt “fascism” captures the barbarity and insanity of their religion.
From my perspective as a socialist, capitalism is decay. It was always and inevitably coming here. I love this website because it exposes the flaw of selfishness as a creative driver of progress and in my perspective it is worthwhile (and for many other reasons).
But what it does seldom is question the very root ideology of capitalism, especially that of endless growth.
I always thought that any political ideology — and make no mistake capitalism is a political ideology — could stand to always have something questioning it and NC has tried to serve that role.
Ideologically it sometimes tries to approach the concept of endless growth but “growth” is embedded in the very center of its economic mission. Certainly for example pensioners should receive multiples of their inputs (“growth”). I certainly expect Social Security, which I’ve paid into my entire life, to give multiple of what I put into it, even if I’m not uncertain that anything I put into will matter at all.
Growth has been equated to prosperity. It’s almost as if people who have grown up with capitalism, even if they hate it, cannot imagine any other way. It’s built in.
But as a way of living, I cannot see endless growth having a model anywhere in nature, except cancer or rot or other disease.
I firmly believe it’s because of the entire notional model that growth is an essential feature, and that it has been foisted above. But in no real world model, except an exploitative one, can I see that it’s somehow necessary or essential.
TL;DR Prosperity without growth is demonstrable, possible and for most acceptable, absent the mottos that are without real foundation (like, that without growth, dies). No, life without growth is pleasurable, acceptable and for most containable.
And a charitable socialist/communist would defer to the notion that, for some people, what some people would call “stagnation” and others would call “art and music and living as human beings, just living and enjoying and loving” is not enough.
For those, I salute them. I just say, they should not run human existence, but rather be subject to it.
TL;DR In that world, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel would be beggars, not rulers, not because of any edict or anger, but because it simply works out that way.