There's not a single commonly used political term today which is useful in either one of the following two ways: its contemporary usage connects back to its intellectual roots; its contemporary meaning possesses some intellectual cogency (with a logical relationship between the etymology of the term and the doctrines of its contemporary adopters). Here are several examples in support of this claim:
Whatever "liberal" means in the modern day, it has nothing to do with the doctrines of any of the Liberals of the Enlightenment (in the literature, it is generally said that the "Liberal tradition" is that which links Locke to Madison to Montesquieu to Bentham to Mill (although, for what it's worth, Chomsky claims that someone like Wilhelm von Humboldt was a Classical Liberal)).The group known as "liberals" today are basically all those people who accept the economic status quo, are passionately socially progressive, and vote for the left-of-centre or centre party in their country. There's not really any direct connection there to the Classical Liberal ideas (certainly not Lockeian ideas about the primacy of private property). The only connection I can discern is the extremely tortured one that the political system we have today is in large part the legacy of the ideas of these thinkers, and modern-day "liberals" accept and promote this political system ("The West is great," liberals can be heard saying, "Because of our grand tradition of "liberal democracies""). Meanwhile, people who call themselves "classical liberals" today (a group that strongly overlaps with "liberals" simpliciter) seem typically to see the "free-market" advocacy of Mill and believe that this directly 'maps on' to modern Neoliberalism (one thing that deceives them is the fact that Mill was influenced by Smith and Ricardo, and these guys also influence modern-day "market fundamentalists" (even if the reason this is the case is again largely the result of sloppy ahistorical exegesis)). Anyhow, this is a childish mistake. Mill's support of free markets was radically egalitarian for his day: bound up in his concept of a free market was the principle that all participants ought to *earn* their income, not be in the business of extracting it from others (like usurers or landlords (or Wall St, which acts as a usurer and a landlord)). He sought, by this advocacy, to eliminate the "unearned income" of the idle aristocracy -- the major rentiers of his day -- and create a far more fair and equal social order. This was a pretty revolutionary stance, as was his backing of an anachronistically strong version of democracy (if you really want to compare it to the contemporary era, we're talking Bernie Sanders kind of shit, or perhaps more radical). And the bigger point is that the world was just fucking fundamentally different then: Mill was in an era before welfare, before state-funded healthcare, before massive multinational corporations, before massive corporate monopoly power, and before Wall St, whose denizens are the parasitic rentiers of the modern day. This was a world without "markets" anything like ours. So saying that you are the intellectual heir to J.S. Mill because you support Neoliberal policies of privatisation, deregulation, dropping of capital controls, union crushing, permission of corporate tax evasion, and support for "free trade" is just bizarre. Political ideologies are inherently temporal and contingent; they belong to particular times and places. The reality is that the political, economic and social conditions of the world are constantly changing, and ideologies change along with them. What's radical in one era is reactionary in another, et cetera. Politics and economics are not like the natural sciences. .
Modern-day "conservatives" do not generally conserve. Sure, they often want to take us back to the social arrangements of the 50s, and in that way they're "conserving" (or regressing), and they also seem to want to take us back to the more obedient culture of the 50s, and in that way they're "conserving" (or regressing), but, except for a few rare free thinkers like Peter Hitchens, modern-day conservatives since Thatcher have been extremely unconservative in so many ways: they seek to wreck the great tradition of the welfare state, they seek to wreck public assets and utilities, they seek to wreck regulations and regulatory institutions, they seek to wreck the grand Liberal Arts tradition of education by corporatising universities, they seek to wreck social cohesion and civic-mindedness by destroying public spaces and increasing inequality, they seek to destroy democracy by fostering inequality and enabling massive political donations and abject corporatism, they seek to wreck the free press by suppressing public news organisations and supporting Murdoch corporate hegemony, they seek to wreck the environment and the planet by not putting any impediments in the way of industrial pollution and degradation, and they seek to destroy Western manufacturing and industry in favour of an internationalist regime of technocrats and financial traders (in other words, they seek to wreck the nation state in favour of "small government"). The people who most deserve the label "conservatives" in my opinion are Keynesian social democrats. Indeed, it is, I think, no accident that Keynes was a big admirer of Edmund Burke -- the man whom modern-day conservatives typically claim as their intellectual inspiration.
Libertarians do not care about freedom for all; indeed, their ideology is about securing the exact opposite, as I have written again and again, at length. And, as leftists are wont to point out, the very word "libertarianism" was exclusively used by the radical left and by socialists until Murray Rothbard hijacked it.
Socialism is a word that has been thoroughly poisoned by modern-day right-wing loonies. Until Austrian-school lunatics and toothless hicks started calling regulation and progressive tax "socialism", socialism actually meant one of two things: state control or oversight over all production and industry (as in the USSR), or libertarian socialism (which has only existed in tiny pockets of the world for short periods of time), which entails a system whereby workers reap the fruits of their own labour by having a democratic stake in their own workplaces or corporations (corporations which are non-hierarchial or democratic, not islands of Soviet-style tyranny). Sure, there's also this tradition called "Fabian socialism", which is basically the ideology that obtains in Scandinavia (or did a few decades ago), and which does roughly correspond to what Bernie Sanders calls "democratic socialism" -- but Fabian socialists are still capitalists... That is, if you understand capitalism properly, as (simply) the economic system where the means of production are privately held by hierarchial profit-making machines with managers (business owners, boardmembers, CEOs, CFOs, major stockholders) who make much more money than the workers (the people doing most of the labour). (The extent to which the state regulates or extracts taxes from these hierarchical profit-making machines doesn't affect whether the society is capitalist or socialist, because regulation is not owning.)
24 August
Whatever "liberal" means in the modern day, it has nothing to do with the doctrines of any of the Liberals of the Enlightenment (in the literature, it is generally said that the "Liberal tradition" is that which links Locke to Madison to Montesquieu to Bentham to Mill (although, for what it's worth, Chomsky claims that someone like Wilhelm von Humboldt was a Classical Liberal)).The group known as "liberals" today are basically all those people who accept the economic status quo, are passionately socially progressive, and vote for the left-of-centre or centre party in their country. There's not really any direct connection there to the Classical Liberal ideas (certainly not Lockeian ideas about the primacy of private property). The only connection I can discern is the extremely tortured one that the political system we have today is in large part the legacy of the ideas of these thinkers, and modern-day "liberals" accept and promote this political system ("The West is great," liberals can be heard saying, "Because of our grand tradition of "liberal democracies""). Meanwhile, people who call themselves "classical liberals" today (a group that strongly overlaps with "liberals" simpliciter) seem typically to see the "free-market" advocacy of Mill and believe that this directly 'maps on' to modern Neoliberalism (one thing that deceives them is the fact that Mill was influenced by Smith and Ricardo, and these guys also influence modern-day "market fundamentalists" (even if the reason this is the case is again largely the result of sloppy ahistorical exegesis)). Anyhow, this is a childish mistake. Mill's support of free markets was radically egalitarian for his day: bound up in his concept of a free market was the principle that all participants ought to *earn* their income, not be in the business of extracting it from others (like usurers or landlords (or Wall St, which acts as a usurer and a landlord)). He sought, by this advocacy, to eliminate the "unearned income" of the idle aristocracy -- the major rentiers of his day -- and create a far more fair and equal social order. This was a pretty revolutionary stance, as was his backing of an anachronistically strong version of democracy (if you really want to compare it to the contemporary era, we're talking Bernie Sanders kind of shit, or perhaps more radical). And the bigger point is that the world was just fucking fundamentally different then: Mill was in an era before welfare, before state-funded healthcare, before massive multinational corporations, before massive corporate monopoly power, and before Wall St, whose denizens are the parasitic rentiers of the modern day. This was a world without "markets" anything like ours. So saying that you are the intellectual heir to J.S. Mill because you support Neoliberal policies of privatisation, deregulation, dropping of capital controls, union crushing, permission of corporate tax evasion, and support for "free trade" is just bizarre. Political ideologies are inherently temporal and contingent; they belong to particular times and places. The reality is that the political, economic and social conditions of the world are constantly changing, and ideologies change along with them. What's radical in one era is reactionary in another, et cetera. Politics and economics are not like the natural sciences. .
Modern-day "conservatives" do not generally conserve. Sure, they often want to take us back to the social arrangements of the 50s, and in that way they're "conserving" (or regressing), and they also seem to want to take us back to the more obedient culture of the 50s, and in that way they're "conserving" (or regressing), but, except for a few rare free thinkers like Peter Hitchens, modern-day conservatives since Thatcher have been extremely unconservative in so many ways: they seek to wreck the great tradition of the welfare state, they seek to wreck public assets and utilities, they seek to wreck regulations and regulatory institutions, they seek to wreck the grand Liberal Arts tradition of education by corporatising universities, they seek to wreck social cohesion and civic-mindedness by destroying public spaces and increasing inequality, they seek to destroy democracy by fostering inequality and enabling massive political donations and abject corporatism, they seek to wreck the free press by suppressing public news organisations and supporting Murdoch corporate hegemony, they seek to wreck the environment and the planet by not putting any impediments in the way of industrial pollution and degradation, and they seek to destroy Western manufacturing and industry in favour of an internationalist regime of technocrats and financial traders (in other words, they seek to wreck the nation state in favour of "small government"). The people who most deserve the label "conservatives" in my opinion are Keynesian social democrats. Indeed, it is, I think, no accident that Keynes was a big admirer of Edmund Burke -- the man whom modern-day conservatives typically claim as their intellectual inspiration.
Libertarians do not care about freedom for all; indeed, their ideology is about securing the exact opposite, as I have written again and again, at length. And, as leftists are wont to point out, the very word "libertarianism" was exclusively used by the radical left and by socialists until Murray Rothbard hijacked it.
Socialism is a word that has been thoroughly poisoned by modern-day right-wing loonies. Until Austrian-school lunatics and toothless hicks started calling regulation and progressive tax "socialism", socialism actually meant one of two things: state control or oversight over all production and industry (as in the USSR), or libertarian socialism (which has only existed in tiny pockets of the world for short periods of time), which entails a system whereby workers reap the fruits of their own labour by having a democratic stake in their own workplaces or corporations (corporations which are non-hierarchial or democratic, not islands of Soviet-style tyranny). Sure, there's also this tradition called "Fabian socialism", which is basically the ideology that obtains in Scandinavia (or did a few decades ago), and which does roughly correspond to what Bernie Sanders calls "democratic socialism" -- but Fabian socialists are still capitalists... That is, if you understand capitalism properly, as (simply) the economic system where the means of production are privately held by hierarchial profit-making machines with managers (business owners, boardmembers, CEOs, CFOs, major stockholders) who make much more money than the workers (the people doing most of the labour). (The extent to which the state regulates or extracts taxes from these hierarchical profit-making machines doesn't affect whether the society is capitalist or socialist, because regulation is not owning.)
24 August
I thought very hard about my last status on the train to Warrawee Station tonight and on my long walk home in the rain, and I decided that my rough-and-ready taxonomy of the different kinds of socialism and their relation to "capitalism" is very deficient. I realise that it is necessary to give a much more precise and rigorous analysis -- and so that is what I have decided to do. Here it is:
I believe "capitalism" and "socialism", and the different types of socialism, all need to be defined interdependently.
Observing this principle, I have decided that the best taxonomy of the different types of "socialism" is as follows:
Observing this principle, I have decided that the best taxonomy of the different types of "socialism" is as follows:
State socialism: this is any political system where the state fully owns the major "means of production" where "production" is understood to encompass all major industrial, technological and agricultural production [the phrase "major means of production" will continue to have this meaning every time I use it in the rest of this monograph]. This full state ownership of the major means of production secondarily entails (necessarily) state control over a vast number of assets, (necessarily) a state legal and prison system, (probably inevitably) a fully public system of healthcare and education, and (probably inevitably) a nationalised financial and banking system. Commerce (by which I understand all kinds of buying and selling of goods and services), along with more minor kinds of production, are still (in an important sense) private in such a system -- it's just that the state has a massive role in orchestrating basically all of this private (non-state-managed-but-state-enabled) economic activity, because of its control over major resources and major production (except for artisanal and luxury goods, the state would be creating almost all of the things that get sold in private shops), and it is guaranteed that the only large commercial corporations in such a society would be public, government-owned ones (if there was a supermarket franchise, it would necessarily be a government one)). In principle, a state socialist society can be representative-democratic, oligarchical or dictatorial. In theory, a representative-democratic state socialist society with a very strong representative-democratic system might be able to develop a relatively free, uncensored media (thus bolstering the "democratic" part of their representative-democratic system). Nevertheless, since this would require the people of such a society to apply massive pressure on a very powerful state, the existence of a state socialist society with a relatively free, uncensored media is unlikely in practice. The following are some examples of state socialist societies: the USSR (dictatorial/oligarchical), China before Deng Xiaoping (dictatorial/oligarchical), and Chile under Allende (representative-democratic (short-lived because of what Chomsky calls "the first 9/11" -- the CIA military coup which installed the murderous dictator Pinochet (friend of M. Friedman and R. Reagan))).
Command economies (also known as a "mixed economies"): this is any political system in which the state partly owns the major means of production (there is a degree of vagueness here deliberately, and I make no mention of banking because banking may or may not be nationalised in a command economy), and allows for a restricted capitalist "market system" in which the state nevertheless has massive control over assets, imposes heavy regulations and capital controls, and engages in massive planning. It is likely that education and healthcare will be fully public in such a system. In principle, a command economy can be oligarchical or representative-democratic (but probably not dictatorial like state socialism). The following are some examples of command economies: China since Deng Xiaoping, Venezuela under Chavez, Britain in World War I and World War II, and Nazi Germany.
Libertarian socialism: this is a purely theoretical political ideology, in the sense that there are no examples of large-scale Libertarian socialist societies, and it is highly unlikely that there ever will be (though not, I believe, for any facile reason like, "Such societies are inherently at odds with human nature"). I define Libertarian socialism to encompass any society in which the major means of production are not held by any centralised authority or state (indeed, as I will shortly explain, a Libertarian socialist society can in principle be stateless), but by corporations (like Mondragon in Spain) which are "worker-controlled" -- democratically organised, and run in the interests of all the employees. A Libertarian socialist society can in principle be of two kinds: stateless (though I think it highly unlikely that a large-scale society could exist without a centralised authority) or statist. A stateless Libertarian socialist society could only mean a "federated" (but not centralised) system of directly democratic (Classical-Greek-style), mostly collectivist polities. Each of these polities would, I would think, be large enough to have a few different local councils (perhaps each polity would be roughly the size of Periclean Athens)), and they would have to be significantly self-sufficient (probably having their own industrial, technological and agricultural production, banking system, justice system (including a police force (hopefully minimal), judiciary, and prison system), healthcare, education, media, etc), but they could trade with the other directly democratic, Periclean-Athens-sized collectivist polities within their federation to enjoy a (perhaps significant) degree of specialisation and "comparative advantage". [On the issue of currency, I suppose it is possible that each polity would have its own, yet it would seemingly make more sense (and facilitate trade) if all of the polities within a given federation used the same currency -- and yet you need a state (or something like it) to mint a general currency of this kind)]. A Libertarian socialist society with a state is not hard to imagine once you have imagined a Libertarian socialist society without a state like the one I just sketched. The essential difference between the two versions would, of course, be that the federation of directly democratic polities in the statist society would be a *centralised* federation (also known as a government) which would mint currency for all the polities and collect taxes in that currency . Each polity would have to elect (or perhaps choose by lot) a number of representatives to head to the central parliament of the federation (in one of the bigger polities, presumably) to make administrative decisions for the federation at large. This central parliament would then perform most of the functions of our own governments in the modern West -- though the nature of each polity (its mostly collectivist and directly democratic economic and social arrangements) would, in theory, guarantee that they wouldn't be funding social security (they might, very plausibly, be forced to assist one polity if it was struggling with healthcare or education or something, however). Obviously, if a Libertarian socialist federation was under military threat from another society (a non-Libertarian socialist one, we can assume), it would *need* a central government in order to organise a large enough military to fight off the attackers.
Fabian socialism: this is any political system with a representative democratic government that does not own the major means of production -- which are instead controlled by hierarchical, internally tyrannical profit-making entities (that is to say, companies and corporations operating under the capitalist model), which compete with each other in a capitalist "market system" -- but that has a progressive tax regime (including strong corporate tax), that has more public assets than just utilities (e.g. railways), that has strong corporate and financial regulation (and environmental protections), that has a strong welfare and pension system, that has free or heavily subsidised education and healthcare, that significantly invests in science and technology, that nontrivially invests in the arts, and that practises expansive fiscal policy and deficit spending. It may or may not be a society with a nationalised banking system, it may or may not be a society with a domestic manufacturing base, it may or may not have porous borders (though having less porous borders does, of course, help to protect the welfare state, which poses a serious dilemma for leftists (and few of them recognise it)), and it may or may not have a regulated press. The examples of such societies are the Scandinavian countries -- but they were, of course, more perfect examples of Fabian socialism before the 80s.
A capitalist society is any society where the major means of production are owned privately by hierarchical, internally tyrannical profit-making entities. That is why I say Fabian socialist societies are still capitalist (but command economies are not well-described as capitalist, unless the state only owns a tiny slice of the major means of production). A capitalist society, on this conception, can have a progressive or regressive tax regime, it can have a nationalised banking system or a fully liberalised one, it can have a big financial sector and a highly financialised economy or it can have the more productive and limited financial sector like that of post-WWII Europe and America, it can have public education or fully private education, it can have socialised healthcare or fully privatised healthcare, it can have a strong welfare system or none at all, it can have one or several public media services or none at all, it can have a strong manufacturing base or none at all, it can have a state which pours money into scientific and technological development whose fruits eventually get fed into the private sector (a la the US) or it can have a state that makes no scientific or technological investments, it can be representative-democratic with fairly equal distribution of power and influence (a la the Fabian socialist societies) or completely oligarchical, it can have a big military or no military, it can have open borders or very little immigration, it can be multicultural or monocultural, and it can be highly economically protectionist or highly economically 'liberal'. So capitalism, in my book, covers *everything* from Libertarianism to Fabian socialism.
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