More VERY Dark Thoughts on Automation

More VERY Dark Thoughts on Automation

In March of this year, I made this post, http://writingsoftclaitken.blogspot.com.au/2016/03/an-extremely-pessimistic-prediction.html, inspired (or rather, intrigued and terrified) by three articles in the MIT Technology Review by a man named David Rotman about the dangers of the immense job loss from increased automation over the next few decades and the highly probable concomitant acceleration of the inequality that has been growing in the West since 1980, as well as a very polished Youtube video about cutting-edge robotic technologies being developed around the world and the millions of job losses these will inevitably bring about very soon in a whole range of professions – with the transport and retail sectors most in danger right now. After a brief meditation on the facts provided by these materials, I had come to an extremely dramatic conclusion: I had decided that there was genuine reason to fear the potential eventual development (in as soon as twenty or thirty years) of an entirely dystopian world: a world divided between an oligarchy of technological overlords, mostly composed of Silicon Valley geeks and their family and connections (perhaps along with other financial and political elites from before the transformed world), and an immense underclass of unemployed exclus and serfs living in poverty and disease in sprawling shanty towns and slums who spend their lives gazing up in primitive, superstitious awe at the magnificent, palatial cliffs on which sits the sparkling, porcelain-white technological utopia of the new oligarchs, who sit in porcelain-white rooms wearing Oculus Rifts, perpetually fed through tubes into their half-human, immortal cyborg bodies as they have fully realistic experiences of virtual sex with beautiful women, winning the Olympics to the cheers and adulation of millions of adoring fans, and living as heroic, manly Roman emperors and majestic warriors, venerated as Gods everywhere they go – this whole oneiric, atemporal, Huxleyesque fantasy sustained by the endless toiling of thousands of self-sufficient, self-repairing robot slaves, ceaselessly working to enhance the virtual reality technology for their human masters as the human ‘masters’ themselves sink further and further into the neverending ecstasy of their Experience Machines, wandering endlessly through the narcotic hinterland of the  H Y P E R R E A L like a delirious backpacker stumbling about in the blazing desert sun (strings of saliva hanging from his cracked lips and straggly beard), hallucinating oceans as he slowly dies of dehydration.

Immediately after I wrote this brief post, however, I suddenly realised (or so I thought) that things couldn’t possibly quite become so dystopian, because, at the point that millions of people start to get laid off as a result of the corporate automation revolution, spending power in the economy will dramatically decline, and this will massively reduce corporate profits by reducing consumption, and thereby give all the major business elites huge incentive to assist the state in implementing a Universal Basic Income in order to maintain consumer capitalism by giving the millions of newly unemployed people the means to continue buying the products that the corporations want people to buy (with unprecedentedly massive advertising campaigns (exploiting new technologies) likely implemented to try to get these unemployed people to spend as much as their Basic Income as possible on luxury goods). Even though this would still be a dystopian world, I figured that it would be a dystopian world that would allow people to live materially comfortable lives, and hopefully pursue worthy goals. It was even possible, I thought, that it would turn out really well in some ways: without any vocational burdens to worry about, perhaps we might even get thousands more people practising science and philosophy! Of course, the more likely possibility is that the vast majority of the unemployed people would spend their lives playing increasingly advanced, increasingly immerse, increasingly real video games – gradually adopting Functionalism about space and time, and discarding the idea of one true reality (which is a very disturbing idea). And if pretty much everyone did start spending all their time entertaining themselves with virtual-reality video-game technology, it may well be that the entire Western intellectual and literary canon disappears, and Western science is left to either machine intelligence or a select few elites. But while this is a very disturbing thought, at least such a world would be a world without poverty, since the UBI would prevent it.

It might have been after I had this series of thoughts (but I’m not sure) that I learned that Universal Basic Income is currently actually a popular idea among Silicon Valley Libertarians, and for the reason I came to on my own (to maintain consumer capitalism in the face of colossal unemployment). The Silicon Valley supporters of UBI do indeed believe that unemployment will dramatically rise over the next few decades, and getting the state to use its corporate tax revenues to give all these unemployed people a stipend for consumption will be a good way of keeping their profits high as earned incomes slide.

Anyhow, once I had this epiphany, my worries about our automated future decreased somewhat. Of course, on top of worries about mass descent into H Y P E R R E A L I T Y, I did still have reason to fear the continuing rise in inequality, and the growing power of the major tech companies today, which I realised could have the potential, once the mass robot manufacture begins, to become nearly as powerful as states, or even supplant nation states entirely (which I knew is another thing that many Silicon Valley Libertarians dream about).

The reason I am updating my old post is that I had some new thoughts on these issues a couple of days ago, and I have decided that there are big reasons to worry about this last problem (as well as a few very good reasons to think that the Universal Basic Income, if really given to a large chunk of the population who were fully idle (not generating new economic activity by participating in production and not acting as entrepreneurs, but simply consuming), could cause dangerous inflation).

Here are my new thoughts:

Contra Marx (with his false "labour theory of value"), it is extremely judicious, from a profit-making perspective, for a company or corporation to introduce efficient automation to replace the labour of wage-draining, inefficient, lazy humans. The reasons are fairly straightforward: machines, computers and robots only have to be purchased once (they don’t have to to be paid wages), they can most likely work all day and all night 7 days a week 52 weeks a year (no weekend breaks, no holiday leave and no parental leave), and, whilst they may need maintenance or occasional repair, they don’t get sick and they don’t suffer variable performance because of emotions. The initial investment in such technologies will almost certainly cost a lot, and your electricity bill may be higher (certainly with current automation), but these costs pale in insignificance to the continued costs of paying wages for humans. It is thus no surprise, with recent technological developments, that factories are no longer the only type of productive enterprise replacing workers with robots (a process that has been going on since at least the 1980s); now the retail and hospitality industries are being automated, and soon the transport industry will be also.

First, a discussion of automation in the retail and hospitality industries.

As anyone who has left their house in the past couple of years would know, supermarkets, airlines and now fast food chains have been, for the last couple of years, steadily replacing vast numbers of employees at checkouts and counters with shiny, touch-screen, easy-to-use machines that can process the same tasks instead. This development makes extremely good business sense because the massive reduction in wage payments and nontrivial increase in efficiency delivered to the companies by this change far outweighs the temporary cost of installing the technology, the cost of the more eerie and inhuman atmosphere of the outlets, and the cost of alienating older customers who struggle with the new technology. Because of the massive benefit of this transformation, it is essentially certain that this trend of retail and hospitality automation will continue to grow bigger and bigger over the next few years. Indeed, I think it extremely likely that – certainly within the next decade, if not within the next five years – we will see even relatively small companies deciding to invest in order-processing computers in order to reduce the number of staff they have to hire. There are already robots that could do the same job as a barista, and it’s not hard to imagine mobile robots soon being developed that can do menial work like sorting items at retail stores (putting clothes back on racks, stacking video games and books, and so on), or even waiting tables (though the majority of cafes, if they want to automate, will probably just install a few machines like the McDonalds ones, rather than getting robot waiters (which will probably by seen as an impractical gimmick until the robots become highly proficient at understanding natural language)). Obviously, most counter- and till-jobs could be replaced quite easily by payment machines.

Of course, many local, artisanal and indie businesses, restaurants and cafes will likely resist the movement in order to preserve a warm and human atmosphere which will distinguish them from the big franchises and chains. And naturally, as I suggested before, most people do prefer talking to a real human to touching a screen, which might tempt one to the conclusion that this automation of the retail and hospitality industries will be necessarily constrained – but I personally highly doubt that the retail industry’s automation will be significantly constrained. As I said, for a manager or business owner, as long as the number of customers coming in your door isn't too adversely affected by the cold, technologised atmosphere in your store, the reduced wage payments and improved efficiency enabled by the new technology are going to significantly increase your overall profit margin. Perhaps if we got to the point where shopping malls were full of touch-screen computers, and the average store had only one or two humans milling about (there would, of course, need to be a few security guards around to prevent shoplifting), the massively increased coldness of the overall atmosphere of such malls would help accelerate their decline – helping to complete the transition, begun more than a decade ago now, from real-world shopping to online shopping. In fact, it doesn't seem completely out of the question that shopping malls might completely die in the not too distant future, with probably a significant number of retail companies going under in the process (the ones slower to develop a major online presence). But, even if online shopping does just completely take over, the constant is that millions of retail jobs will be disappearing over the next few years.  

The transport industry is an industry in a similar position to the retail industry, and workers within it probably have even worse prospects. Indeed, it seems likely that the transport industry faces cataclysmic job losses within only the next three or four years. With highly reliable self-driving cars now already on the market, it will only be a matter of time before truck and freight companies start replacing unreliable, sleep-requiring, holiday-breaking, money-draining truckies with computers (as long as governments don’t impose laws to prevent this). Similarly, human taxi services will very likely become totally unviable once self-driving taxis become cheap. Indeed, just as pilots no longer fly planes (now they only control take-off and landing), it may be only a matter of time before only a tiny number of humans drive cars at all.

The print media industry is, of course, an example of an industry that has already been destroyed by technological change, and I believe it is also an example of an industry that will continue to be hurt by automation, now that computer programs are capable of writing articles of not awful quality (look this up). I think people doing journalism degrees at university in the current age are extremely, extremely imprudent, because there truly are almost no jobs available now, and the openings will be even slimmer in a few years’ time. Even the most esteemed publications in the world (like The New York Times) don’t have anywhere near the profit margin they had when they could sell millions of paper copies, because far fewer people bother to subscribe to the online edition than subscribed to the paper edition when there was no accessible content otherwise (also, in the case of The New York Times and The New Yorker, one can circumvent the paywall simply by going into incognito mode on Google Chrome). And while the popular media organisations that were created in this new era (Buzzfeed, The Huffington Post, etc) aren’t facing any new threats, it is very likely that these organisations will gradually shed more writing staff as automated-writing technology improves (especially Buzzfeed (one would think), given how little creativity and intelligence is required to create a listicle).

Furthermore, investigative journalism is gravely moribund – in fact, gasping for its last breaths on life support – and serious, non-investigative journalism has been largely democratised (people like me try to do it, without any expectation of remuneration).

There’s no doubt that old publications like The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall St Journal, The Guardian, The Sun, The Daily Mirror and The Daily Telegraph will be around for several years, and possibly decades, to come. There are also more minor noteworthy publications managing to get by on donations (one very good one is the left-wing journal, The Baffler, and another is the science and philosophy mag, Aeon). But these publications are few and far between, and their subsistence is dependent on the sustenance of a literary culture that is, I believe, largely atrophying, largely due to technological changes (in particular, the creation of the smartphone, which chews up the majority of the leisure time of the vast majority of people under the age of 35, and the majority of the leisure time of the majority of people under 60, leaving, for most of those afflicted, almost no time for reading).

As for the other sections of the media industry (TV, film, music, video games, radio, advertising), they are in less immediate danger, and, except for the music industry, technological change has hardly put a dent in their current respective business models and profits. The reason the music industry is the exception is, of course, that the increasing dominance of streaming apps like Spotify at the expense of CD and record sales has created a situation where only the most successful musicians are able to even make a living without performing live, which has probably jeopardised the career prospects of literally tens of thousands of young musicians. But even though the music industry is somewhat of an exception, it is also true that far fewer people are watching live TV than only a few years ago, and far fewer are bothering to go to the cinema. Meanwhile, though radio seems like a true technological stalwart (as permanent as the wheel), it may be that it, too, suffers immensely over the next few decades (especially if people stop driving). And while one might be tempted to think that people in the business of creating these various forms of entertainment couldn’t have their jobs automated any time soon (not until artificial intelligence becomes genuinely creative), the date that this does begin to happen may not be as distant as we think, since there are even now programs that can write original music of passable quality and compose original poetry that is better than that of the average untutored human (look this up). Of course, it is very likely that consumers will still value ‘raw’ human creativity over machine-produced entertainment – at least for the time being, until the intellectual productions of machines begin to convince people that they are genuinely creative. Nevertheless, the threat remains.

Abstracting from any one particular industry, one sees an immense threat from automation to the several classes of jobs that involve essentially zero physical effort and don’t require any great cognitive skill, ingenuity or creativity, or those that require serious physical effort but don’t require any complicated physical performance. That is to say, all those jobs that might be fairly assigned the descriptors menial, administrative, secretarial or bureaucratic (involving simple procedures of searching, filing, tabling, sorting, organising, accounting and calculating), all reception- and call-centre- type jobs, and all manual-labour jobs that don’t involve any versatility of performance, are extremely vulnerable to automation within the next decade and a half. Truth be told, there are even many scientists vulnerable to automation within the next decade and a half – in particular, those chemists and bio-chemists who spend most of their time in laboratories.

Of course, if we manage to create machines or robots with true general intelligence within the next few decades (“AI-complete” machines, with capacities directly analogous to those of human thought, expression and ‘creativity’), these robots could, by definition, do anything a human can do, including putting forward revolutionary scientific theories about the nature of the cosmos, the nature of the mind, the nature of time and space, or whatever else, as well as philosophising about all kinds of deep things, and creating great works of art and literature (and doing historical analysis, and so on). They could thus replace humans in any job at all.

Now, I’m not saying that we will develop “AI-complete” robots within the next few decades – in fact, I think “AI-complete” robots (and I believe that the machines would have to be embodied, and to interact fully with the world, to be intelligent and conscious in the way we are) – are extremely far off indeed. Not just that: I think that the research and engineering that’s currently going on at Google is not even the right kind for general intelligence (Deep Learning is not a path to anything like human cognition or consciousness – though, to be fair, I don’t think anyone thinks that it is (in itself)).

But, as I’ve explained, this fact about the difficulty of reaching general intelligence will not in any way impede the massive juggernaut of job automation that will crush much of humanity over the next couple of decades.

Let us now focus on what will happen to companies like Apple and Google over the next few decades, and consider why there might be reasons to seriously worry about the possible trajectory of these companies, and the power they will wield over humanity.

In order to facilitate this focus, we will imagine a world where massive job losses have occurred in the retail and hospitality industries, in the transport industry, and, increasingly, in all those jobs that don’t require any great skill or ingenuity, as well as significant job losses in the media industry. Automation is ubiquitous in this world, and the vast majority of people still working work alongside machine intelligence (mostly non-embodied, some robotic). We are assuming that some kind of functioning representative democracy still persists (despite the fact that democracy has been increasingly corroded in the West since the beginning of the Neoliberal era, and is most decrepit in the US – where the work of the Princeton political scientist Martin Gilens seems to suggest that the bottom 70% of the population has essentially no say in government policy at all (due to the effects of money, donations, Super-Pacs, lobbying and the corporate media, all very skilfully synthesised by Thomas Ferguson in his Investment Theory of Party Competition) – and despite the fact that the decline of Western democracy seems set to continue). Since unemployment would have shot up over the years preceding the state of affairs we are currently in, with automation dominant, we can imagine that there would be significant popular pressure, as well as capitalist pressure (for the reasons outlined much earlier), to implement the UBI. So it is likely that a large number of people would be living on state welfare, with the majority of these people likely using this time to waste their lives on virtual reality gaming.

Now we face a problem: as I suggested earlier, giving a huge chunk of the population money to simply be indolent would probably create dangerous inflationary pressures, because, in order to avoid inflation, the government needs to spend money in a way that creates more productive activity in the economy, so that money doesn’t become disconnected from ‘value’. This is certainly not the case if everyone is lazing around (and spending their money on the same things – food, entertainment, accommodation and the like)). This massive risk of inflation is, in itself, obviously an extremely serious problem, and one that seems to me to admit of no obvious solution (it will just make things worse if you keep raising the amount doled out). And yet it is a problem that, I think, pales in insignificance to the set of problems I’m about to explicate, directly pertaining to the development of companies like Apple and Google.

What will happen when big multinational corporations begin massively automating their production? The main thing that will happen is that they will save a lot of money, and, while people are still consuming their products, they will make far bigger profits. Meanwhile, while they make bigger profits, the big Silicon Valley tech corporations will be working to develop machines and robots of ever greater capabilities – possibly even robots that can make other robots. This might seem fairly benign, but it is not, and I’m about to explain why.

If the UBI fails to create a satisfactory solution to the problem of unprecedented unemployment (and it almost certainly will fail because of the inflation problem), then inequality, already at levels without parallel in a hundred years, will be at levels never before seen in the history of humanity. The reason is that, at the same time as the big CEOs and Wall St banksters continue to increase their already obscene salaries and bonuses, large and increasing segments of the population will be sliding into abject poverty and squalor. This complete collapse of consumption and demand in the economy will inevitably bring down the entire political and economic system, and millions of people will be forced to resort to looting and violence just to survive, as cities descend into anarchy and infrastructure decays. The scenario is truly dystopian.

But the most scary fact of all is that corporations like Apple and Google won’t collapse along with the political and economic system, and for one simple reason: they will have massive infrastructure at their disposal, and they will have armies of slave workers, meaning that the collapse of the economic system will likely just spur them on to refashion themselves into the new states of this brave new world, with their own private infrastructure, healthcare, education and armies. Their robots will be able to repair and build other robots, and so their power will continue to increase, as technology continues to improve. The whole world could become polarised between an anarchist chaos of poverty, squalor and misery – a Hobbesian inferno too nightmarish to wish upon your worst enemy – and a few small Edenic oases of technological splendour and opulence. In this world, democracy would be entirely dead, and civilisation would be effectively dead, too. All would be in ruins, even as technology continues to improve within the magnificent, fortified palaces of the tech geeks who won out, and now get to spend eternity in virtual reality, wilfully oblivious to the hellscape they created. So the ultimate result of the automation, even with the UBI, would be exactly the one that I imagined originally, without the UBI.

So I think we should be worried.   

                                       

A Facebook Post on the Disturbing Pomo Relativism of Philosophically Stupid Lefties, and what is the True Epistemology of Politics

Post-Keynesian Moral Anarchism

Published by Tom Aitken · 8 mins ·  · Politics

Some of the most unsavoury people are young left-wing Pomo truth relativists like Sam Kriss. They are very lazy thinkers and they annoy me: "Politics is something strange, however: It’s far closer to literature than it is to science—disagreements over political principle can’t be settled through a practical experiment—but for nearly two and a half thousand years it’s faced the criticism that it should be something different from what it is." This is one of the most facile sentences I've ever read. Extremely lazy thinking. This is what happens when you only read French philosophy; you don't even know HOW to think.
Let us now briefly explore the epistemology of politics, to clean the stain placed upon the world by this stupid sentence.
Ok, let's start with ethics, because politics is (I accept) fundamentally normative (political debates are about which policies are good and which are bad, which people are good and bad, which institutions are good and which are bad, which systems are good and which are bad, and so on).
No, ethics has very little to do with science (contra Harris), but there is clearly such a thing as rational moral discourse. Why? Because, though the starting point is our moral 'faculty' (our emotions, our strong belief in values like fairness, equality and freedom), which was programmed by evolution by our utterly contingent evolutionary history, there are extremely strong constraints placed upon rational moral discourse by /consistency/ (do you really apply your values, and your moral criteria, in a maximally consistent way, or do you often contradict your professed commitments?), and bulwarks placed against extreme or excessively demanding (even if consistent) ethical views or ethical systems by our intuitions and emotions (Benthamian utilitarianism fails for this reason). Moreover, the starting point itself (the moral faculty), though contingent upon our own evolutionary history, also has some non-contingent elements. What do I mean by this? Well, unlike the majority of contemporary meta-ethicists, I am actually quite happy to say that there are such things as "ethical truths", because I think there are some ethical "propositions" or judgments that are, undoubtedly, SUPER-ANTHROPIC. Take the following three 'atomic' or 'axiomatic' ethical judgments: Suffering is bad; Co-operation is good; Killing is wrong. If we encountered another intelligent alien species, it seems to me a near certainty that they would have beliefs of this kind (it doesn't matter if they were expressed through a completely different modality -- even if they transmitted mental content through gamma rays or whatever). Why would they have analogous beliefs? Because any intelligent species would have to have something akin to a strong moral faculty to reach civilisation, because civilisation requires co-operation, co-ordination and altruism. Simple.
Once you accept that there's such a thing as rational moral discourse, that immediately has implications for the epistemology of politics. Racists and sexists aren't applying moral values consistently, and usually don't have the facts right (which they use to justify their prejudices). So a self-respecting rational person can't be one of those. Right-wing Libertarianism and Anarcho-capitalism assume a value of "freedom" that isn't universalised, which means they are not even willing to engage in rational moral discourse. So a self-respecting rational person can't be one of those. Strong imperialist patriots -- people who think their home country should be allowed to invade another country to impose its will on that country -- are also not applying moral values like justice and freedom consistently (or, to put it another way, not treating all humans as ends in themselves). So a self-respecting rational person can't be one of those.
Now, of course, the epistemology of politics gets a lot trickier than this once you start talking about how ethics interacts with descriptive beliefs about the world (facts about poverty, about GDP, about debt and deficits, about death tolls in wars), and theories of economics and so on. I think one is forced to be somewhat of a "permissivist" about many political debates: accept that two rational, morally engaged agents could come to different views, even when exposed to the same evidence. However, let me just give some examples of political issues on which I think permissivism is incorrect (some of these are more normative than others):
- The Iraq War was bad. (All rational, morally engaged agents who have some idea of the number of Iraqi civilians who died in this war, how much destruction was unleashed on Iraq, and the utterly counter-productive effects of the war on terrorism will come to the conclusion that the war was bad (with a subset coming to the conclusion that it was repugnant, horrific, nightmarish, etc)). [That the Vietnam War was bad is even more clear-cut, and there are plenty of other clear-cut cases in which the US was involved.]
- Israel has repeatedly committed war crimes. (War crimes has a technical definition which is easily met by Israel. Now, as for debates on, say, what should be done about the Israel-Palestine conflict, well, certainly for a lot of these debates, different opinions could be had by rational, morally engaged people.)
- Deregulation and regulatory capture contributed in some way to the causation of the GFC.
- Neoliberal policies (as I defined them in other places) have utterly failed to deliver growth and have exacerbated inequality (inequality and growth admit of fairly precise definitions, so this is a mere fact).
- Private debt has an extremely important role to play in the causation of all financial crises.
- What the IMF calls "free-trade" and "free-market policies" (letting Western corporations and banks colonise these countries, and prevent them from developing their own manufacturing and industry) have had disastrous effects for the poor in Third-world countries. "Free-trade" has also had very bad effects for working people in the West.
- QE failed.
- The bank bailouts after the GFC were deeply wrong.
- Endogenous money is correct: banks effectively create money by originating loans, they don't need reserves to originate loans, and money has an effect on financial dynamics.
- Women still face significant injustice in the West.

The question of whether a single person can be "objective" on politics is different. On the conventional understanding of objective, I think the answer has to be a decisive NO. There are many reasons for this, which I have gone into in my project on Chomsky:
"One way of phrasing the question is the following: Is it possible for a human being to be ideally, optimally, deifically objective about politics and human affairs? Taking this extreme formulation, my answer would be No, it is not – and you don’t need any high-falutin’ PoMo vocabulary to say why. Here are the reasons:
• The available sources for any given event or set of events are always going to be patchy and less-than-fully-reliable.
• No matter your level of expertise, or the time you spend researching, a selection bias of some kind will inevitably affect which of these (patchy and less-than-fully-reliable) sources you scrutinise, which of them you carefully scrutinise, which of them you include in your actual analysis, and which details from them you include in your analysis.
• No matter how intelligent you are, the availability heuristic will likely cause you to hone in on certain non-crucial details or issues, and probably colour your perception of the event or events in general (nobody can hold all the details they know and all the images they have seen in their head at once, and weigh them up simultaneously). This becomes especially important when you are actually writing things down (though one does, of course, have an opportunity to revise).
• Every time one writes a sentence, one is framing. There are innumerable different ways of capturing a ‘state of affairs’ (say, a bombing attack) in language, and each of them colours that state of affairs in a different way. Different framings have the power to create the impression that there’s not even one ‘state of affairs’ after all ( clearly, a bombing attack is a very different thing when described from the perspective of those in the sky and described from the perspective of those on the ground). On a more fundamental level, it is a truism of semantics that no two formulations of the same ‘gist’ ever have the exact same meaning and connotations (compare “Sally played with the ball” to “Sally engaged in japes with the globular plaything”). Even merely changing a sentence from the passive to the active mood can completely change the impression (“The leader of the labour union was assassinated by US forces” versus “US forces assassinated the leader of the labour union”), as can subtly changing the diction (“The bombing caused some regrettable collateral damage, with seven civilian casualties reported at the scene” versus “The bombing blew up several innocent civilians, with seven charred and mangled bodies found at the blast-site”). Several well-known psychology studies have shown that “framing effects” can be disturbingly large, and can totally distort people’s perception of what should just be ‘data’ (if we were ideally rational) (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology)).
One could, of course, argue that framing is irrelevant to the question of objectivity, because the way you put things has no effect on the reality behind them – but this is facile. If it is simply not possible to avoid putting a spin on everything you write, that means that you can never quite be telling it “as it is”, but always with significant interpretation (and this does become a kind of PoMo point (or a Putnamian point about the collapse of the “fact-value distinction”)). Naturally, one worthy goal would be to try to be as consistent with your ‘spin’ as possible – for example, not describing atrocities in vivid detail for one side and talking about “unfortunate casualties” for the other. But one must also recognise that reality is vastly more complicated than anything that can be put down on paper (even in a very long book). In effect, therefore, every time you omit a fact, or a detail, you are omitting a slice of reality.
And even if you did get down every single relevant “fact” about, say, the Israel-Palestine conflict (including the details of every single bombing attack (from both sides), the names and backstories of all the people killed in the conflict overall, all the things the politicians on both sides have ever said, etc), you would still have the problem that no human could satisfactorily digest this data and compute an appropriate response (not even the person who had laid out all the facts). Instead, it is highly likely that anyone who chose to wade into this colossal factsheet would simply have their prejudices reinforced (and note that believing that “both sides are ultimately equally culpable” is itself a prejudice).
• No political analyst has the time, resources or knowledge to “criticise all sides equally” or identify and lament the “worst things” currently happening in the world – and yet this seems to be part of our intuitive conception of “objectivity” (as can be seen in the criticisms of Chomsky we’ll explore later). Most people seem to think it’s necessary for a good political writer to apportion her attention, and her moral judgments, in a way that’s almost exactly commensurate with the state of the world. This makes it unreasonable – for example – to spend all one’s time criticising evils committed by one nation or group, if there are other evils, some of greater magnitude, constantly going on in other places. And yet no-one can even approximate this ideal of bird’s-eye-view proportionality – not on the left or the right. Whereas the lefties focus on American and Israeli imperialism and military aggression (not bothering to talk at all about anti-Semitism and misogyny in Islamic culture), the righties completely downplay American and Israeli military aggression, and talk only about the evils and barbarity of “Islam”. In a sense, all polemics are exercises in tunnel-vision, since a polemic always focusses on a narrow slice of reality to the exclusion of everything else [of course, there are ways of justifying what one focusses on, and Chomsky does give a very strong ethical justification for what he focusses on (he has a chance of changing it).]
• Since politics is much more complicated than physics, involving lots of highly complicated, unpredictable organisms interacting with each other in complex human-created entities called institutions, and those institutions interacting with other institutions and other groups, all of which are situated within an extremely complicated economic structure with yet more complex, unpredictable organisms and institutions, there are no well-tested scientific theories of politics that make useful, novel predictions, and there are no scientific laws of politics. Human societies are complex systems – more complex than even the weather (in fact, the weather is one of the innumerable variables affecting human societies). Yes, it may be true that f (the use of force by a state) equals m (military might) × a (aggression)… but that’s actually a proposition of immense complexity (the aggression of a state is a highly abstract notion, for example), and it really isn’t that useful (it doesn’t enable you to make any specific predictions).
Of course, is also true that, in another sense, politics is much easier than physics, because you don’t actually have to understand what’s really going on in any deep sense in order to understand pretty well what’s going on the macropolitical and macroeconomic level of abstraction – the level of abstraction where the entities are what John Searle would call intentional entities (entities created by consciousness and language), like “states”, “politicians”, “parties”, “corporations”, “the profit motive”, “banks”, “Central Banks”, “Wall Street”, “the stock market”, “money”, “credit”, “debt”, “public debt”, “private debt”, “the military”, “the military-industrial complex” “financial interests”, “regulation”, “demand”, “supply”, “interest”, “inflation”, “deflation”, “GDP”, “capital controls”, “trade agreements”, “the national mood” etc. Whereas a physicist does try to predict things (for example, the path of a rocket through the atmosphere) and make exact calculations, no political scientist is trying to predict what will next happen in the US (beyond the vaguest details), or how the conflicts in Syria will play out, or what will become of the European Union. Instead, they just need to understand well enough how states generally work, how institutions (like corporations, or the UN) generally work, and some basic principles of economics (though they will make a mistake if they take mainstream, neoclassical economics too seriously, which, despite its pretences to “science”, is about as scientific as Ptolemaic astronomy).
Nevertheless, when it comes to investigating the causes of political events, or evaluating the significance of certain developments, this approach can still lead to trouble. What was the secret to the Golden Age of Capitalism, lasting from the 50s to the 70s? Did the abolition of Glass-Steagall contribute to the GFC? Did the War on Terror actually foster terrorism? What are the factors involved in Donald Trump’s rise? Such questions are roughly tractable, but they must be scrutinised very carefully, with an eye for all the evidence, and a wariness of glibness and simplicity (as any academic historians will tell you). Even then, the answers to these questions are not going to be nearly as precise or objective as the answers scientists can give to questions like “How many stars are there in the Milky Way galaxy?” or “What’s the chemical structure of ethanol?” or “How did the eye evolve?” The fundamental reason for this is that historical, political and sociological explanations are always explanations in terms of human intentions and intentional entities (the chemistry and physics underlying all of human cognition is taken for granted), so they are intrinsically airy and imprecise compared with naturalistic explanations of discrete events in the natural world. It is (of course) conceivable that a superintelligent species that had made massive advances in complexity theory and advanced mathematics (but otherwise strongly resembled us) could predict political events like we predict the weather or better, by plugging colossal amounts of physical and chemical data (including lots of neurobiological data, presumably) into a computer model consisting set of supercomplicated, multi-multi-multi-variable differential equations and then simulating this model on an immensely powerful computer. They could probably also use their superior understanding of complex systems to provide far more precise explanations of events (though it would obviously make no sense to discuss political and historical events in terms of physics and chemistry, because that is impossible – political and historical events are 100% emergent from physics and chemistry (and 90% emergent from biology)).
But, even though this is conceivable, such abilities are nowhere near actual for us. Our explanations for political and historical events are normally exceptionally vague, invoking general “interests” of entire groups of people, and “moods” of entire demographic groups or nations. It is impossible to analyse these explanations in terms of the entities of the natural sciences.
• We, as humans, are attracted to grand metanarratives that help us give a shape to the facts and, in the process, systematically distort our impression of what’s actually going on in the world (once you have a narrative, confirmation bias kicks into overdrive, and you lose the sense that there is any complexity). A left-wing buzzword like “neoliberalism” can indeed be characterised in various ways (it’s certainly not meaningless), capturing important developments in economic policy since Reagan and Thatcher (privatisation of state assets, lowering taxes for the wealthy, financial deregulation, regulatory capture, permission of corporate rent-seeking, lowering of capital controls, which all conform to an ideology of “market fundamentalism” (actually, a mendacious label)) which have had various, empirically identifiable consequences (the financialisation of western economies, a large increase in inequality, a quantifiable reduction in democracy, the rapid growth of massive private debt bubbles (such as the one that led to the GFC), the weakening of public services and infrastructure, a massive rise in the price of tertiary education, the decline of university Arts faculties, the mass exploitation of workers in the third world, the degradation of the environment, the exacerbation of climate change, an increase in the stupidity and propagandism of the media, a proliferation of shopping malls) – and yet, as you can see, it is also extremely vague. It is undeniable that, in using this word “neoliberalism” to encompass all these aspects of our society, we make the world look much simpler than it is.
Of course, centrists and right-wing people have far weirder and stupider metanarratives than the metanarrative of neoliberalism (which isn’t actually weird or stupid, and I use the word constantly). For example, that neoclassical economics is theoretically sound, empirically well-tested science (not an aesthetically-pleasing, non-empirical, non-reality-based catechism), that ‘liberalisation’ is always good, that privatising is always good, that conservative governments are better economic managers, that austerity makes any sense as an economic policy, that capitalism inherently tends towards equilibrium (barring “externalities”), that we live in a perfectly free and democratic society, that everyone deserves their place in society because our world is ‘meritocratic’, that Western interventions are about bringing freedom and democracy to the barbarians, that the corporate media is biased towards the left, that patriotism makes any sense, that "free-trade" agreements are actually about free trade, that it’s somehow ‘traitorous’ to criticise the genocidal past of your nation, that free speech is under attack by “cultural Marxists”, that Islam is a totalitarian ideology that’s going to destroy the west unless we stop it, that multiculturalism is a poison destroying the fabric of our society, that Bernie Sanders is a socialist (and that invocations of the USSR in relation to Bernie are uninsane), that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy, that Christianity is the foundation of the morality of our society, that modern-day conservatives are not going to look really bad in the history books for opposing gay marriage and deriding vegetarians, and so on."

Anyhow, that goes some way towards getting at a TRUER epistemology of politics.
Fact: RELATIVISTS ARE LAZY

A Brief Discourse on the Shame that Attends Previous Works

One of the odd things about being an intellectually protean young person is that reading practically anything I wrote more than two months ago induces in me massive, debilitating fits of cringeing -- and this pattern has obtained essentially since I first started writing for leisure, at the age of 15 and 9 months (I have, sensibly, put nothing from that very earliest period on this blog). Take my "formal" (political-economic) defence of feminism, for example, one of the "featured posts" on this blog (I made it one of the featured posts because it's very long, and I took weeks to write it (with the pornography section having been crafted, incrementally, over a process of several months)). While I remain impressed by own labours in constructing this long work, I now find that this document to be utterly infested with cringeworthy claims and pronouncements (I was always aware that the whole thing was a shameless exercise in "mansplaining" but I didn't care, because I hadn't yet encountered a political-economic defence of feminism written by a woman (and this is still the case)). The experience of re-reading it last night was like going to the pantry to grab a jar of honey only to find that the jar you seek is covered in crawling black ants and that the liquid itself is abundantly populated with formic corpses and live ants desperately trying to stay afloat above the deadly viscosity. No, you don't really want to put it on your toast, and making it appetising again will require lots of knifework, jar-banging and honey-waste (analogous to editorial excision, addition, alteration, etc); all you can think is, "Fuck".
      It's rather funny (if a little disquieting) to think that, when I was writing about sex differences in this work, I had believed that I was being highly nuanced about the subject, and that all the caveats and clarifications I was including were hallmarks of high intellectual integrity. I say it's rather funny because I now believe that I was being way too simplistic, and that I completely failed to acknowledge the immense complexity of the issue and the impossibility of rigorously establishing "innate" sex differences -- which is really a folk, biological-essentialist concept after all: http://philpapers.org/rec/GRIWII. It's a little embarrassing. I suppose I can partly blame it on Steven Pinker, who was really my main influence on the topic of sex differences, and who, in hindsight, also talked in a far too simplistic way about it in How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate (especially the latter, which is, in hindsight, a mediocre book (Pinker's logic: ideology has poisoned science, so I'm going to compensate by filling a book with my own, presenting only those results that support my political views as if they are the consensus, even though they are often marginal conjectures, and creating an incredibly tendentious and distortionary historical narrative of Marxist bias in the scientific academy)). 
    Of course, I haven't completely changed heart on this particular matter: I don't now believe that sex chromosomes and sex hormones have no effect on people, and I don't believe that human beings are an anomaly in the animal kingdom among sexually dimorphic species. I still think that the claim, "Gender is a total social construct" is a silly dogma when gender is defined as everything that isn't sex, where sex is defined merely as physical features (and not any psychological features). Are there decisive empirical reasons to believe this claim, taken fully literally? No, there are not. Gender is incredibly complex, and I don't think it is optimally described as merely a "social construct" (this way of phrasing things appears to imply belief in the false dichotomy between biology and society). I think it is better just to say what we know: that most humans are born with either the XX or the XY sex chromosome and that these chromosomes have an effect on various aspects of human development, that the gender binary is pan-cultural in Homo sapiens, that there do seem to be many cross-cultural commonalities (and some pan-cultural commonalities) in the distribution of personality-types and behaviour-types between the genders, that we are a mildly sexually dimorphic species, and that these latter three facts suggest that there were probably selection pressures to engineer some sexual differences in our evolution (but it's not to say that there are innate sexual differences, which is an excessively folk-essentialist claim, based on a teleological understanding of human biological development (natural selection is teleonomic, and it is disingenuous to say that whatever is adapted is innate, because development is so complex, and there are different strengths of adaptation (different levels of developmental fixity and environmental insensitivity in adapted traits)). A simplified way of putting the dilemma face in trying to identity "innate sex differences" is that we will never be able to test the development of men and women in a de-socialised environment, and the reason that we will never be able to do that is because there is no such thing as a de-socialised society, and a human raised in isolation is not going to be more 'natural' either; they will just be different, manifesting (phenotypically) far fewer of our species' adaptive traits to do with sociality and cognition than someone raised in a social environment, because many or most or all of these adaptive traits to do with sociality and cognition are still environmentally sensitive to a nontrivial degree (and everything is environmentally sensitive to at least some degree). This poses problems for anyone with an excessively strong view on psychological sex difference -- on either side of the divide.
     Of course, one might suggest (as I did in my essay) that we can draw serious conclusions about sex differences from anthropology, because anthropology allows us to compare the ways men and women have existed in an very wide range of social, cultural and physical environments, and therefore should, in theory, help to delineate the boundaries of gender possibility, which should, in theory, tell us something about 'innate' tendencies of maleness and femaleness. One might suggest, in particular, that if you see a certain pattern in enough societies, then you have good reason to think that it's "innate". However, that's not quite right. Indeed, this brings us to the issues that Griffiths raises. The truth is that when you understand the complexity of gene-environment interactions, and the shockingly-counter-to-our-folk-intuitions relationship between the genotype and phenotype -- along with our uniqueness as the one species with highly complex culture and a social world created by consciousness -- you suddenly realise that it is very foolish to say something like, "Oh, well, men must be more innately predisposed to being leaders" just because most societies documented in anthropology have patriarchal structures with the political sphere dominated by males. The world is a lot more complicated than that. Even if there weren't a single direct counter-example in anthropology (even if all societies had a patriarchal structure), it wouldn't be at all scientifically justified to talk about an "innate" complex psychological/behavioural predisposition on analogy to our innate predisposition to grow arms (it's certainly not the case that, just as the kidney excretes blood, the "male brain" (which is not a real thing (though there do seem to be some sex-related, average neuro-architectural tendencies)) 'produces aggression'). And just as long as there's even one counterexample to such a claim -- one society where the women are the major political leaders -- you begin to lose a grip on what innateness means here. Yes, it could mean, 'It's far more likely, because of testosterone (let's say), that there will be societies where most or all of the leaders are male, than that there will be societies where most or all of the leaders are female', but that's not what most people mean by innate, and even in that hedged form, the claim is not suddenly much more solid, because rigorously verifying this biological claim is impossible (how can you isolate the effect of testosterone on something as complicated and 'high-level' as gender differences in a culture?). (To be clear, if I had to state my position on sex differences, I would now say that I am less of a philosophical sceptic about them than Cordelia Fine and slightly more of one than Simon Baron-Cohen.)
     Another thing that I didn't mention in that essay is the very real possibility that the bodies of males and females help to shape their minds in a gendered way. It is a very real possibility (in fact, I think it's a probability) that the very fact of men's being taller, more muscular  and having deeper voices than the other, softer and smaller sex, affects male psychology to a nontrivial extent -- subtly encouraging males (or some of them) to feel more confident and act in a more dominant way -- and affects female psychology to a nontrivial extent also -- subtly encouraging females (or some of them) to feel less confident and act in a more meek way. This is another subtle point that is worth considering before you to hastily jump in to make claims about "innateness".
       As for my comments about rap and racism in the explication of the second mechanism of the Patriarchy Model ("Reinforcing the Paradigm") they are perhaps the most cringeworthy of them all. When I suggested that it is essentially reverse racism that explains why Kendrick Lamar is compared to Shakespeare and Macklemore is not (and that they both deserve no accolades), I was being, well, er, kind of stupid, and, well, I mean -- it does look rather reactionary, doesn't it? I mean, I am still not keen on any rap; my tastes have not really changed (the one recent development in my music listening habits since I wrote that essay is that I have got into Aphex Twin, but this has nothing to do with rap). And, of course, I still can't stand the misogyny that dominates popular music, and there's still no denying the fact that the colonisation of the popular music industry by hip-hop and rap in the 90s did increase the sexism and misogyny of the content of the average lyrics of pop music, and probably led to a rise in the amount of blatantly objectifying videos. But my strident suggestion that white uni students only exalt rappers like Kendrick Lamar and artists like Kanye West for affirmative-action-type reasons was absurd, and does seem, well, somewhat racist. I was projecting my own tastes onto others, and expecting them to view the sexism of these artists as irredeemable. I mean, I still think the sexism of these artists, and most rappers, is  indeed irredeemable, and I still find most rap music emotionally cold and corrosive to the soul, and I still think West's lyrics are puerile and empty, and I still find that a lot of the white guys who are fans of artists like Lamar, like them for extremely childish reasons that are themselves rather racist (they listen to these artists because they are rough, ruthless, primal, aggressive, violent, misogynistic black men, an attitude which fundamentally relies on a repugnant kind of Afro-fetishism and an embrace of the stereotype of black men as animalistic) -- but that doesn't mean that people who like these artists have no valid reasons for doing so.
    Another problem with the preliminary section of my defence of feminism (the section where I amateurishly discuss sex differences) is that it is too tendentious on "Postmodernism", which actually refers to a fairly wide landscape of different traditions and intellectual movements. I know it is a mistake to lump everyone who might fall under the label "Postmodernist" in the same group (and no doubt the work of people like Butler is not worthless, even if, from what I've read, her prose can be turgid and opaque, and she may not be a scientific naturalist (I don't know because I'm ignorant)).
     Yet another problem with the work is all of mechanism 3, "The Disproportionate...". I was far too strident here, because there is actually some evidence that the number of women in parliament can make a difference to policy.
     This work also generally evinces an extreme righteousness that is really smarmy and, truth be told, at odds with the facts about my own character (I am no perfect moral saint).
      One thing I would say is that I still stand by my unusual, ostensibly Theological views on pornography. Fortunately, I think this perspective is in popularity among young people these days, because more of them are recognising the damage being wreaked by addiction to porn, and the dangers of prolonged habitation in its sordid, unreal and amoral world.
     The other "featured post" on my blog, what I call my economic manifesto, is also cringeworthy in some ways (the main problem is that it is a little too dogmatic (with excessively strident phraseology)). Moreover, my exegesis of important chapters from Steve Keen's Debunking Economics is probably inscrutable to those who haven't read the book, or aren't familiar with Neoclassical economics. That said, I beleive there is still a hell of a lot of important stuff in there, and my views haven't really changed on anything of substance.
     Another fairly long non-fiction piece I am now quite strongly dissatisfied with is my essay called "What is the best possible society for our wretched species?", which I am planning to significantly revise and improve very soon. My revisions will make clear the aspects of that essay with which I am displeased.
     The one long non-fiction piece I am still pretty happy with is "Are Things Overall Good or Bad in the Modern World?"
     While I still retain a fondness for most of the old fiction I have posted on this blog, one thing I noticed a couple of months ago, upon reading the first few installments "Bleak Memoirs" for the first time in a while, was that these memoirs are essentially a total artistic failure. I didn't realise this until I read them recently, because it has only been for a little while that I have able to appraise them from a more detached perspective. I had previously thought, with cloudy eyes, that my autobiographical writings might have some aesthetic merit, despite (or perhaps because of) their eccentricity of construction, narration and general content. Indeed, I thought my amusing, mercurial and highly lexically diverse writing style might have been enough to make the disjointed anecdotes from my childhood very aesthetically interesting. But what I learned was that this was definitely not the case.
      I will not be updating my memoirs for quite a while now, and I feel zero compulsion to, both because I no longer think the project is of any real value and because, since about February or March of this year, I have become noticeably less narcissistic (narcissistically nostalgic and narcissistically retrospective) than I used to be. (Partly it's just been that I've been much more obsessed with politics and world affairs.) This is, of course, healthy, so I am glad.
     As for my early essays on ethics, well, they are rubbish. The one called "Deep Moral Dilemmas and the Futility of Formalisation" isn't terrible, and makes some very important points (although I fail completely to mention "average utility" utilitarianism), but its brief summary of developments in ethics during "the Enlightenment" is nauseatingly bad.
     I continue to learn and grow, although usually I think I've grown much more than I actually have.

A Facebook post on Australia's recession threat, and the Liberal Party's terrible ideas on how to eliminate it

Post-Keynesian Moral Anarchism

Published by Tom Aitken · 1 min · 

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/aust…/households-debt-to-gdp (look at long-term comparison -- unprecedentedly high)
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/australia/balance-of-trade (look at long-term comparison -- essentially unprecedentedly high right now, and significantly higher than it was during the mining boom, when it was, for a few short periods, almost unprecedentedly low)

Both these deficits mean that the government basically can't run a surplus. Like, it just can't. If it really tried to massively slash funding and massively bump up taxes, that would guarantee a recession pretty much straight away. It is not hard to understand why: when the government takes money out of the economy (which is what it means to reduce a deficit), the only thing that can compensate is, of course, extra private sector activity. But private debt is too high, interest rates are already really low, and when you've got a big trade deficit as well, there's just *no way* the private sector can save us. What we all really need, of course, is a debt jubilee -- also known as "QE for the people". But, sadly, I don't think that's really on Morrison's agenda.
And don't say, "But Howard ran a surplus". When Howard ran his famous surpluses, the trade deficit was very significantly lower and house-hold debt was very significantly lower, which meant that the latter had significant 'room to move'. This room to move fueled the continuing inflation of asset bubbles, and this property boom was a major driver of the economy, along with the beginning of the mining boom (which really dropped the trade deficit).
These are the facts. They are important, and we should take notice of them.

Two very Important Facebook Posts about Political Terminology, and Types of Societies (clearing away thickets)

23 August
Post-Keynesian Moral Anarchism

Published by Tom Aitken · 22 mins ·  · Politics

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 

Post-Keynesian Moral Anarchism

Published by Tom Aitken · 5 mins ·  · Politics

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:

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.