Political Investigations
On the Development of my Evaluation of the Political Doctrines of Noam
Chomsky, On the Little Understood but Highly Significant Contrast between the
Chomskyan Meaning of Anarchism, which I call “Moral Anarchism”, and the Quarter-Baked
Political ‘Ideas’ of most Radical Leftists, who are Usually Very Irrational, like
most Human Beings, On the Details of how a Viable “Libertarian Socialist”
Society might have looked, in Another Possible World, On the Various Meanings
of the Terms “Capitalism” and “Socialism” and the General Uselessness of
Conventional Political Labels and Terminology, On Karl Popper and Marxist
Utopianism and Social Democracy and how this relates to “Moral Anarchism”, and
On the Terrifying and Uncertain Future in which, whatever happens, the Human
Species as we know it will probably Cease to Exist, Meaning that there is No
Hope
Part I: On the Development of my Evaluation of the
Political Doctrines of Noam Chomsky, and On the Little Understood but Highly
Significant Contrast between the Chomskyan Meaning of Anarchism, which I call
“Moral Anarchism”, and the Quarter-Baked Political ‘Ideas’ of most Radical
Leftists, who are Usually Very Irrational, like most Human Beings:
In a short space of time at the beginning of 2015, Noam Chomsky
significantly re-moulded my political beliefs and my ‘worldview’[1]: he simultaneously
filled out and transformed my understanding major global political and economic
institutions (for example, the IMF and the World Bank, which, it turned out,
were servants of US global power and economic interests, with the US possessing
veto power in both these major economic organisations, and the upper echelons
of both these institutions being filled with Western financial elites and Wall
St crooks educated into pseudoscientific neoclassical economic theory at Ivy
League universities (Chomsky was also probably an inspiration for my reading Globalization and its Discontents by
Joseph Stiglitz, which, though much less rhetorically radical than Chomsky and
praising the World Bank (for which Stiglitz worked) made very clear that
Chomsky wasn’t just making shit up, and allowed me to understand Chomsky’s own
claims and historical references better)); he made me realise that (many
features of) the design of our political and economic institutions creates massive
selection pressures for certain bad characteristics
(like servility to power and ruthless pursuit of institution-serving
objectives) and for the adoption of certain opinions and attitudes which serve
elite interests, and that the selection pressures of this institutional
structure helps to explain why the more florid and ideologically extreme
statements that Chomsky makes are not nearly so crazy as they seem (“America is
not a democracy”, “You can’t have a capitalist democracy”, etc), and also helps
to explain his deeply hostile view of US foreign policy and his total dismissal
of state-professed ‘motives’ (why should we listen to claims about humanitarian
impulses when there is an entire military-industrial complex which profits from
adventurism and weapons sales to Saudi Arabia and Israel?); similarly, by
drawing attention to the research of other academics, like Thomas Ferguson
(with his Investment Theory of Party Competition) and Martin Gilens (with his
2014 paper “Affluence and Influence”), he made me realise the power of
corporate and financial elites to exert pressure on political decision-making
(that is, the incredible influence of money in all political systems,
especially America’s); similarly, although I was initially quite wary about the
kinds of highly dramatic, seemingly simplistic or hyperbolic claims he made about
propaganda in American media and “the doctrinal system”, he transformed my
understanding of the way the media functions to reinforce elite (state and
corporate) interests and marginalise dissident voices and opinions by drawing
my attention to the five “filters” operative (the most significant of which are
the first three), and (more generally) the fundamentally corporate and
therefore profit-seeking, rather than truth-seeking,
character of all major media organisations (this obviously relates to the
insight about institutional design creating selection pressures that serve
elite interests); and (unsurprisingly) he had more direct effects on my
political beliefs and attitudes, for example, strengthening a kind of weak
impression that the United States has been a tremendous cause of suffering in
the world since it rose to empire status and became world hegemon following
World War II, and making me far more pessimistic and cynical about ‘change
within the system’, and even more contemptuous
and contumelious about politicians
than I already was, intensifying my repugnation of their everpresent spin and
doublespeak, their everpresent unctuous P.R. inauthenticity, and (more
generally) the ethical and philosophical hollowness typical of politicians (that
is, lack of principle or earnest vision, or serious political/economic
commitments) which commonly manifests itself in flagrant girouettism (conforming themselves rhetorically to whatever they
take away from focus groups, although usually not changing their policies to
meet this rhetoric).
Now, I should say that I did think
(and still do think) that Chomsky’s rhetoric
on indoctrination by means of the education system and the media, and on
intellectual conformity and obedience, was often rather extreme, and did often sound a little conspiracy-theoretic
(although I knew it was not in actuality, especially since the writing in the
book Manufacturing Consent is very
muted), which reflected a general tendency of Chomsky to espouse reductive or even simplistic explanations
for political events or phenomena,[2]
and to exclude certain complexities or nuances (Chomsky often talks as if
everyone who disagrees with him is either a victim of brainwashing or some kind
of mindless servant of state power (a “commissar” or “mandarin”), and a lot of
his radical rhetoric does seem to imply an underestimation of the stupidity of
the average human, and an overestimation of human goodness (that is, a
generally excessively romantic picture of human beings, who are mostly
corrupted by “systems”)))). Now, I did (and do) largely forgive this, believing (with good grounds, judging from
other comments he has made about epistemology and so on) that Chomsky is
usually aware of nuances or complexities he is omitting (it is probably silly
to hedge every big claim you make with a multitude of caveats when you are
delivering a political speech, although in writing it is somewhat less
acceptable) – but it did give me reason to believe that the man, although
freakishly intelligent (as even his sternest critics typically acknowledge),
often wavers from the sober, extremely careful rationality that his main
intellectual hero, Bertrand Russell, always
practised (of course, if Chomsky really was as persistently intellectually
sober as Russell, he could never have written all those scorching polemics and
had as big an impact as a political activist as he has had).[3]
Another thing that has occasionally
troubled me about Chomsky, along with most far left-wing radicals, is his total
failure to discuss the incredible advances in terms of health (lifespan, freedom from disease, leisure) and security (absence of crime and war) that
have been made by our civilisation since the end of the World War II (marking
the start of what Pinker calls “The Long Peace”). At least on conventional ways
of thinking, these advances would seem to give one very good reason not to subscribe to any kind of ideology
which states as its aim as ‘destroying the system’, especially given the almost
uniformly horrific historical precedent for such ideologies, once they begin to
actually ‘succeed’ (and we’re not just thinking back to the French Revolution
here, but back to the Western Roman Empire, or perhaps beyond)[4].
Even if Naomi Klein is right that capitalism is preventing us from averting
ecological (and ultimately political) disaster, and even if Chomsky is right that
we have been extremely lucky just to escape nuclear annihilation to get to this
point (https://chomsky.info/06122016/),
an anti-radical could just say, “However bad climate change is going to get and
whatever risk still remains from nuclear weapons, as long as you’re not sure
that ‘civilisation is doomed’, then you do not have grounds to become a
revolutionary; that is just shitty epistemology, because it assumes that a
revolution is highly unlikely to fuck things up even worse, which is really unfounded”.[5] I
know I myself have a nontrivial
degree of epistemic respect for very intelligent political centrists (who often
call themselves “classical liberals”) like Steven Pinker who are strong
supporters of the liberal-democratic, capitalist ‘status quo’[6]
and believe that the overarching political priority of rational people should
be to maintain the stable and (in historical terms) anomalously just global
political and economic system under which we live, because such people are
right that things have improved a lot under “capitalism”. As they love to point
out, since World War II, we have seen a constant steady rise in the standard of
living across the world (infant mortality, life expectancy, general quality of
life (in terms of leisure)), a fairly steady decline in the rate of citizen
violence, a historically anomalous paucity of wars (which Pinker calls “The
Long Peace”), a tremendous decline in abject poverty (overall, even if poverty
has risen in the West since the start of the Neoliberal period), an incredible
rise in literacy and education (overall, even if the quality of education might
also have declined in the West since the start of the Neoliberal period),
stupendous technological advances which have transformed our lives, a wonderful
expansion of the ‘moral circle’ (huge leaps forward in women’s rights, civil
rights, and gay rights), and so on. I will return to this point much later,
when I bring in Karl Popper.
Probably the biggest thing that
troubled me about Noam Chomsky’s politics, even a few months after he had begun
to change my beliefs in the ways just outlined, was his self-identification as
an anarcho-syndicalist/ libertarian
socialist/ anarchist. Although I constantly second-guessed myself on this
point, it did seem to me, when I thought hard about it, that calling oneself any
one of these labels was probably silly, and that anyone who did give themselves
such a Utopian political label was probably not ideally rational. Of course, I
did also come to recognise that Chomsky’s personal species of anarchism, at its core, just involves a
commitment to the (eminently reasonable, almost truistic) ethical principle
that all forms of hierarchy and subordination have a burden of justification (that is, they are
unjustified by default) and ought to be dismantled if they can’t meet it. As he
puts it himself:
“Anarchism is, in my view, basically
a kind of tendency in human thought which shows up in different forms in
different circumstances, and has some leading characteristics. Primarily
it is a tendency that is suspicious and skeptical of domination, authority, and
hierarchy. It seeks structures of hierarchy and domination in human life
over the whole range, extending from, say, patriarchal families to, say,
imperial systems, and it asks whether those systems are justified” [http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/noam-chomsky-kind-anarchism-i-believe-and-whats-wrong-libertarians].
But whilst this may be truly how
Chomsky views his commitment to anarchism, I think I also realised that the
principle itself is oddly permissive, in the sense that pretty much everyone, right across the political spectrum,
would accept it. In fact, this definition of anarchism would seemingly permit
even Thomas Hobbes to regard himself as an anarchist, since the whole point of The Leviathan is a justification of the ethical
necessity of a particular kind of hierarchy – absolute monarchical authority.[7] Likewise,
since it’s impossible to find any political philosopher who claims that we
should accept or make do with x kind
of authority or y kind of hierarchy
without at least trying to justify
this, it would seem that all political philosophers ought to regard themselves
as anarchists, too. I’m not exaggerating on this point: you’d be hard-pressed
to find any political philosopher who
would say that we ought not to dismantle forms of hierarchy and subordination
that are unjustified, since working
out what kinds of authority and power are justified is pretty much the central
task of political philosophy.
With that said, the reason that
one would (obviously) be crazy to infer from this that political philosophy is
a fundamentally anarchist discipline, is that what really distinguishes anarchists (like Chomsky) from statists
(the vast majority of people) is that anarchists have a larger inventory of unjustified forms of hierarchy and
subordination than statists do. So whilst Chomsky’s anarchism can indeed be
summed up in that simple principle about unjustified forms of hierarchy and
subordination, what actually makes his political position unique are the more
specific doctrines to which he is committed.
Anyhow, to return to what I was
saying earlier, I did a lot of thinking about Chomsky’s anarchism in the months
after I became obsessed about him, and I did usually find myself opining that,
whatever else he got right, he was
somewhat of a Utopian. Reading The Better
Angels of our Nature by Steven Pinker last year (a really terrific read,
though I do have several points of disagreement (this is my favourite review, https://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2011/12/16/the-better-angels-of-our-nature-steven-pinker-a-left-enlightenment-review/, and this one, though extremely hostile, correctly points out that there's a massive amount of statistical massaging to fit Pinker's thesis and ideology, http://www.globalresearch.ca/reality-denial-apologetics-for-western-imperial-violence/32066)) induced in me very strong scepticism about Chomsky’s radicalism,
which eventually led to what is arguably the best long essay I have written,
“Are Things Overall Good or Bad in the Modern World?” (basically, a synthesis
of the thesis of Chomsky and the antithesis of Pinker). However, just before I started
writing the essay “What is the best possible society for our wretched species?”,
I came to discover that Chomsky’s self-identification as an anarchist really wasn’t
nearly as Utopian, irrational or ‘romantic’ as I thought. More precisely, by
watching yet more Youtube videos of Chomsky, I learnt that, unlike most of the extremists
and Irrationalists who adopt such labels, his anarchism only really denotes the
following above the core moral principle I mentioned before:
a.)
His conviction that wage labour, that is, the “renting” of human beings by wealthy
people with the means to do so (which, on the original definition of capitalism
(it may surprise you to learn that Marx is the figure most responsible for bringing
the word “capitalism” into use, not Smith or Ricardo who never used the word)
if we want to say there is a defining feature of “capitalism”, is generally
held to be the defining feature of “capitalism”), is morally intolerable.[8]
b.)
His conviction that the existence of states,
that is, central administrative bodies which rule over a large territory by
monopolising violence, justice, and the supply of money (with the currency they
distribute being kept in demand primarily by the mandatory extraction of
taxes), is morally intolerable.
c.)
His belief that a morally tolerable world would have to be one without a state, where
people are equal and run their own lives (that is, an anarcho-syndicalist world,
where people work in minimally hierarchical, democratic organisations, without
bosses or managers who take a significantly greater share of the profits of
such organisations than others).
d.)
His belief that such a morally tolerable world
would be viable in the sense that, if the social and economic institutions were
established in the right way and the conditions were right, it wouldn’t necessarily
devolve into anarchy in the more conventional, idiomatic sense, and would lead
to a greater wellbeing for all than our current system.[9]
Although such doctrines are still
very radical (and I think most people would disagree with the extreme morality
of a) and b) (and therefore have a problem with c), and be highly sceptical of
d), the key point is that they are not at all revolutionary doctrines. And it is this fact about Chomsky’s
anarchism that explains why he is not like the millions of those delusional, utterly irrational radical leftists (and there are really way too
many of them) who think that “the system” is so bad that anything at all would
be better, that there’s no point ever voting for the mainstream parties, that
social democracy and Neoliberalism are almost as bad as each other (since the problem
is ‘capitalism’), and that all right-thinking people should therefore be
organising in radical groups with the goal of bringing down the state and capitalism in some grand, rapturous,
purifying revolution which will usher in a new Utopia of peace, tolerance, love
and prosperity.[10]
Chomsky is violently against any kind of “accelerationist” lunacy (that is, he
thinks it’s always better to make the world better, even if it’s ‘within the
system’), unreservedly endorses so-called “Lesser Evil” voting, and unreservedly
supports and endorses social democratic policy (and clearly affirms (eg in Requiem for the American Dream) that the
inclusive capitalism of the Golden Age was far superior to the Neoliberal
capitalism that we’ve had since the 80s). The reasons for Chomsky’s practical
subscription to social democracy are not hard to grasp: he realises, like any
reasonable person, that you can’t possibly get people organising in unions and
trying to make their workplaces more democratic – let alone get anywhere near destroying the state(!) – without massively
bolstering the power of labour, and raising
consciousness, ‘within the system’ [see this for yourself by looking up
videos where Chomsky is answering questions about anarchism]. He realises that
one can’t create a new, better world through a violent revolution, but that instead
one must slowly begin to create new possibilities within the existing system,
through labour organising and the establishment of small islands of workplace
ownership and participatory democracy [same as above]. In other words, he
realises that we can only create a new world ‘in the shell of the old’ – and
gradually (presumably over decades or centuries, rather than in one
transformative revolution). As he puts it in this 1998 interview [https://chomsky.info/199808__-2/]:
"I’m not in favour of people being in cages. On the other hand I think people ought to be in cages if there’s a sabre-toothed tiger wandering around outside and if they go out of the cage the sabre-toothed tiger will kill them. So sometimes there’s a justification for cages. That doesn’t mean cages are good things. State power is a good example of a necessary cage. There are sabre-toothed tigers outside; they are called transnational corporations which are among the most tyrannical totalitarian institutions that human society has devised. And there is a cage, namely the state, which to some extent is under popular control. The cage is protecting people from predatory tyrannies so there is a temporary need to maintain the cage, and even to extend the cage."
"I’m not in favour of people being in cages. On the other hand I think people ought to be in cages if there’s a sabre-toothed tiger wandering around outside and if they go out of the cage the sabre-toothed tiger will kill them. So sometimes there’s a justification for cages. That doesn’t mean cages are good things. State power is a good example of a necessary cage. There are sabre-toothed tigers outside; they are called transnational corporations which are among the most tyrannical totalitarian institutions that human society has devised. And there is a cage, namely the state, which to some extent is under popular control. The cage is protecting people from predatory tyrannies so there is a temporary need to maintain the cage, and even to extend the cage."
I personally call this doctrine “moral anarchism”, to distinguish it from
lunatic doctrines that take the anarchist name (it’s sad that one has to make
such compromises, but, in politics, strategy (pragmatism) is key).[11] I
think that to qualify as a moral anarchist, one probably has to adopt highly
radical rhetoric and a highly radical posture, and to engage in serious
activism, while strongly supporting the welfare state, and accepting some kind
of Keynesian, deficit-spending economics. This is exactly what Chomsky does. I
don’t really know what percentage of people who call themselves anarchists are
moral anarchists; I suspect it might be disturbingly low (almost certainly
<50%[12]))
, because if you are a moral anarchist (meaning you almost certainly don’t
believe that your society will be significantly restructured, and that change
must be very gradual), it would, it seems to me, be rather foolish to call
yourself an anarchist in any setting where you don’t get to explain yourself, since
“anarchism” sounds to most people like a form of childish extremism which
involves dressing like a goth, disobeying your parents, listening to Rage
Against the Machine, and going out late at night with your goth anarchist
friends to spray anti-authoritarian graffiti on walls (“Stop buying the
propaganda… THEY don’t care about you”) and throw bricks through old
buildings. Of course, for Chomsky himself, it’s fine, for the most part,
because people know he is not like this – but it is probably still true that
people misunderstand Chomsky’s politics in the way I originally did because of the
connotations of the labels he has applied to himself.
I like to call myself a “moral
anarchist” primarily because of my radical Chomskyan opposition to power: my
Chomsky-influenced views on the fundamental problems with our political system,
on the massive corporate and elite biases of the media (and the mendacious language
and rhetoric used to discuss policy), on the vicious, elite-serving Neoliberal
policies of (for example) the IMF and the EU, on the evils committed by the
world hegemon, the US, and my generalised contempt for politicians. I also
believe in activism and ‘organisation’, although, as yet, I haven’t joined any
radical organisations and certainly don’t want to join the ones at my
university (I generally fear groups because of the danger of groupthink and
confirmation bias, and the near-impossibility, in a radical political group, of
the slightest approximation of rationality (I also have an outsize ego, a love
for public speaking and logorrhoea, which means that I would inevitably become
a Lenin)).
The big question, though, is
whether I believe, like Chomsky, that a well-functioning anarcho-syndicalist
society is possible, and that it would result in greater wellbeing for all
humans. This is the subject of part two.
Part II: On how a Viable Libertarian Socialist Society
might have Looked, in Another Possible World:
One of the things that prevented me from even taking
anarcho-syndicalism fully seriously until roughly the beginning of this year is
that, above the broadest details, I didn’t really
know what it was. Clearly, there are massive constraints on any human’s ability to imagine an entire
society structured in a way totally unlike the way our own society is
structured – but it’s a lot worse when you don’t even have an idea of the basic
political structure of the society, and I didn’t, because I was really only going
off Chomsky and Chomsky (like Marx) doesn’t believe
in trying to present detailed blueprints for his ideal society. All I really
had to inform me was the slogan that anarcho-syndicalism is about “worker
ownership of workplaces” (and that there are modern economic institutions, like
Spain’s Mondragon Corporation which realise this principle), and Chomsky’s
description of his ideal society in the Foucault debate as “a federated,
decentralised system of free associations, incorporating economic as well as other
social institutions […] the appropriate form of social organisation for an
advanced technological society in which human beings do not have
to be forced into the position of tools, of cogs in the machine […] a society
of freedom and free association, in which the creative urge that [is] intrinsic
to human nature will in fact be able to realize itself in whatever way it will.”
A number of months ago, as a
result of my desire to eliminate this uncertainty, I started thinking really
hard about how an anarcho-syndicalist, fully democratic, stateless,
technologically advanced (NOT PRIMITIVIST)
society would have to be structured, to have a chance at viability (there’s
obviously a limit to the kind of thinking we can do about such things, but
you’ll see that I ended up with a surprisingly detailed picture). Although a
lot of anarcho-communists on the internet seem to think it would be a good idea
if we “abolished money”, I realised that that could only work in a tiny
collectivist community, and thus that, whether or not they realise it, people
who say such things are really endorsing anarcho-primitivism (it is not an
accident that all large-scale societies have had a form of money (lol)).[13]
Needless to say, I am not very keen on anarcho-primitvism. More importantly, my thinking, inspired by
both my experience and some perfunctory research on the Spanish Revolution, led
to some important realisations about the importance of scale in political possibility. My conclusion was that there’s no
doubt that communistic or collectivist relations are perfectly possible (and
have successfully materialised in innumerable human societies) on scales small
enough that everyone regards everyone else as kin, however, on larger scales,
as Bruno would say, Ich don’t think so![14]
My thinking also led to a silly email to Chomsky himself, to which he replied
with a summary dismissal.[15] A
couple of months ago, I, as it were, ‘completed’ my thinking by writing a long
post about anarcho-syndicalism (calling it “libertarian socialism”), as part of
a longer Facebook post (on this blog) in which I laid out my taxonomy of the
four types of socialism. The following is a heavily edited, massively extended
version of that original post, in which I lay out a detailed, carefully
considered vision of what a viable Libertarian socialist society would look
like:
I define Libertarian socialism to encompass any industrial or post-industrial society[16] in
which the major means of production (where "production" is understood
to encompass all major industrial, technological and agricultural 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 –
which exist within a larger social system of participatory democracy. Such a
society would have a non-capitalist “market system”,[17]
with (internally democratic) corporations and (internally democratic) smaller businesses
competing with each other to sell their goods to make profits, which would be
used only to purchase more capital (that is, machines, equipment, factories,
etc) and to hire more workers.[18] A
Libertarian socialist society could, in
principle, be of two kinds: centralised or decentralised. I will discuss
the decentralised version first.
A decentralised Libertarian
socialist society could only mean a "federated" system of directly
democratic, highly egalitarian polities (it will gradually become clear why the
political and economic structure would necessitate a high level of
egalitarianism, despite the system not being collectivist or communistic).[19] Each
of these polities would, I would think, be large enough to have a few
different, directly democratic local councils (each council overseeing at most
20,000 people, in order to ensure the possibility of directly democratic
administration), which, when convened,[20]
would make very local administrative decisions and (more importantly) elect temporary representatives from within
their own number[21] for
the polity’s central administrative council. This central administrative
council would (in a decentralised
Libertarian socialist society, without an overall federal treasury) supply
currency, collect taxes in that currency, oversee trade with other polities
(which I’ll discuss in a couple of paragraphs) and carry out whatever actions
it is necessary to carry out for the wellbeing of the polity (as in our own
society, this would no doubt involve creating and maintaining public spaces,
maintaining public amenities, regulating immigration into the polity and
emigration out of it, organising garbage collection and sanitation, supporting
schools and hospitals, and distributing social security to those incapable of
work and the retired (if there are any)).
Since scale is inherently a major
danger for both social cohesion (because the larger the community the fewer
kinship connections and personal ties) and democracy (because the larger the
society the more the administration becomes removed from people’s daily lives
and protected from scrutiny, and the more power it wields), there would ideally
be a cap on each polity’s population size – somewhere, I posit, in the region
of 100,000.[22] As
we will see, there would be immigration and emigration between polities in a
Libertarian socialist society, but it would have to be very well co-ordinated.
People would have to have polity passports, which they would also use to go on
holidays. This population cap would have the effect of putting a natural limit
on the growth of any one corporation, since the number of staff they could hire
would be strictly limited, and, at this point of maximum growth, they would be
forced (by law) to divert their profits to the community in a fully
collectivist process (this explains footnote 15). There could be no franchises spanning
multiple polities, or corporations with multiple factories in different
polities, because both these structures necessitate a significant degree of
hierarchy and bureaucratisation which cannot exist in a Libertarian socialist
society (such organisations will necessarily have a central, air-conditioned
office with executives controlling the whole show in a completely
non-democratic (authoritarian) fashion).
Each polity would be far more
self-sufficient than a city of the same size in our own society (that’s why I
chose the word “polity” (meaning “city state”) rather than city): each one
would have to have its own banking system (ideally, the banking system would either
be public or heavily regulated by the central administrative council, and
therefore devoted entirely to productive investment rather than usury and rent-extraction)
and justice system (including a police force (hopefully minimal, and with a
better institutional structure than our own police force)[23], judiciary,
and prison system), along with strong healthcare and education, and hopefully a
strong local media. However, crucially, each
polity could trade with the other directly democratic, Libertarian socialist polities
within their federation – and we can imagine such a federation consisting of
only five polities or we can imagine it consisting of 100 polities across the
planet – to enjoy a significant degree of specialisation and "comparative
advantage".[24] One
imagines polities in fertile territories specialising in agriculture, polities
specialising in household goods, polities specialising in high-tech gadgetry
(not totally unlike Silicon Valley), polities specialising in transport
technology, polities specialising in entertainment (not totally unlike
Hollywood), and so on. One also imagines that each of these polities would have
tertiary institutions catered to these specialties, which young people from all
over the federation who had interests in the relevant line of work could
attend. If there were widespread trade between the polities, the power of
specialisation would guarantee a considerable rate of technological advance, and
the wider the trade, and the more polities participating in the trade network (if
one wants maximum technological advancement, one would probably want the whole
word to be part of a gigantic Libertarian socialist federation), the more the
rate of technological advancement would resemble that of our current society.
Of course, if the trading network became big enough, that would very possibly force
the emergence of major economic institutions to co-ordinate and regulate
activity – and, once again, scale is coming back to bite our dreams of freedom from powerful institutions.[25]
On the subject of education, the
schools in a Libertarian socialist society would be unconstrained by a
state-imposed curriculum (although there would have to be some kind of federation-wide uniform examination system, in order
that universities could impose certain entry standards), and would be Deweyite
in nature, to prepare the children for a life in a direct democracy. There
would thus be minimal educational authority, hierarchy and regimentation, and
this would help foster creativity and free thought. Since there would be no
“bullshit jobs” (as David Graeber calls them) in a Libertarian socialist
society – no investment bankers, no hedge-fund managers, many fewer corporate
and commercial lawyers, possibly no P.R. agents and advertisers,[26]
etc – there would also be no bullshit degrees at the universities. There would
be accounting degrees but not finance degrees, and there would likely be no
need whatsoever for business degrees, seeing as no person would ever be
managing a business on their own but instead always making decisions with
others.
A centralised Libertarian socialist society 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, in a centralised Libertarian socialist society, there would
be, for every collection of ten or so polities (whether or not these polities
belong to a complete federation or a sub-federation), a central bureaucracy or
government located in one of these polities (or some middle location, as in Canberra
in Australia) which would be responsible for supplying the currency for all the
polities, collecting taxes from all the polities in that currency, performing
some redistributive functions, perhaps funding (at least part of the) social
security for some or all of the polities, probably overseeing immigration and
emigration, probably helping to co-ordinate trade, probably creating some kind
of federal police force, and, if the region was under attack from a
non-Libertarian socialist society, creating a military.[27]
Each polity would probably hold a general election to elect a number of presumably
self-nominated representatives to head to the central parliament. Over the
course of several years, it may be that political parties form in each polity
(I have no idea if that’s ultimately desirable or not). If we’re again deciding
to imagine a world where there’s a massive Libertarian socialist federation
spanning a large chunk of, or most of, the planet, then there would probably
end up being trade directly between the central governments within the overall
federation. From there, one can’t help thinking that an overall global
government might develop. This may sound completely antithetical to the
principles and anti-state ideology that motivates Libertarian socialism – it
may sound as if such a society has strayed too far from the original vision –
but it is also true that one crucial feature of the society has not been
abandoned, even once these greater and greater institutions have been imagined:
the anarcho-syndicalist idea of workers owning their workplaces. This is
preserved because the corporations are democratically structured. Moreover,
there is still a pretty strong “Libertarian” element because of the strength of
the democracy within each polity, and the smallness of each polity (within a
giant fucking network). Even if political parties did arise, they hopefully
wouldn’t be allowed to become corporate agglomerations like they are in today’s
society, because the institutional structure of the corporations would make the
purchasing of favours much less likely (and there could also be laws put in
place against corporate donations to political parties (I do keep returning to
laws because I am not a Utopian idiot (a polity of even 100,000 is too big for
people to feel strong social obligations to their fellow citizens; it just seems
to me a good compromise (size is, of course, very important for industrial and
technological progress, which is why the ideal compromise on the population
figure might be higher than 100,000, perhaps significantly higher))).
Ignoring, just for the moment,
the massive problem of how to bring this vision about, and ignoring every
single possible “externality” (by which I mean all the complicating factors I
haven’t included, which are infinite in number (climate is a big one)) – instead
just adopting the unrealistic synchronic and idealised perspective of the theorist (basically
imagining that this aforedescribed society just ‘popped’ into existence one day
fully formed) – it is my opinion that such a society would indeed ‘work’[28]. It
certainly doesn’t seem insane to think that both the centralised and
decentralised versions of such a society could function quite well (clearly, I have to be vague, though), as long as the
institutions were established in the right way (again, vague). Of course, we
probably should talk about the “externalities”. Disaster could afflict this
society in the same way that disaster can afflict any society; there would have
to be no environmental or ecological disasters, and no military conquest from a
league of powerful capitalist states, and no epidemics of disease, and so on.
But here’s the thing:
·
I am not imagining a society without law and
order; it is nowhere near anarchy in the conventional sense (I included a
police force, and I imagine the legal system to be extremely similar to the one
we currently have (I think it’s only possible to dispense with these things if
the scale of the community is very small)).
·
The society I’m imagining is a dynamic one,
because it is a market system which allows firms to fail and new ones to rise
up (with the only constraint for a new firm the principle of democratic
ownership). Now, you might worry that really undesirable work wouldn’t get done
in such a society, because, to put it simply, who’s going to set up a co-op
corporation to do garbage collection, waste treatment, mining (and all the
tricky or unpleasant stuff like that)? But the solution to this is not very
difficult: the public sector (the local councils and the central council) would
set up (internally democratic) organisations for all these things, and they
would entice workers by offering high wages.
Of course, you might be surprised that I just lumped together “garbage
collection” and “mining” there (only one of which is publicly overseen in our
own societies). I do think that resource-extraction would be one tricky area
for a Libertarian socialist world because resource-extraction needs to happen
on a massive scale to be profitable, and scale, as we keep finding, is inimical
to democracy and the central anarcho-syndicalist principle of worker ownership.
However, I think that democratic resource-extraction could work if polities
collaborated on it – and perhaps the same would be true of agriculture (that
is, assuming it was hard to find people willing to become farmers of their own
accord in a Libertarian socialist world). As we will see, I think that if we
imagine a more automated Libertarian socialist world, this ‘resource-extraction
problem’ would become trivial.
·
To head off another foreseeable objection, we
know that internally democratic corporations can work, because there are
examples of them in the world today (the best example in the West is the one I
keep mentioning, Mondragon).
·
The direct democracy that I have imagined is
also not too ‘excessive’, and the general political structure I have imagined seems
exceptionally resistant to despotic devolution, because of the temporality of
the power I have granted the decision-makers in the local councils and the
central administrative council.
All in all, therefore, it really
doesn’t seem insane to me to think that a society structured following something
like this blueprint really would, as it were, ‘have a chance’. There are about
a million details that I haven’t worked out, and couldn’t possibly work out,
and wouldn’t come to pass even if I did work them out – but the blueprint
itself seems at least non-harebrained,
in my humble opinion.
Admittedly, there is one
objection that seems quite serious, namely, that the rate of technological
advance would be a fair bit slower in a society where, by capping the
populations of polities to 100,000, you put strict limits on the maximum size
of firms. I think this is a correct objection, so I’m going to segue straight
from this objection to a discussion of something I keep hinting at: how our
vision of a Libertarian socialist world could be made yet more beautiful if we inject
into it more advanced technology.
If we imagine a world with the
same kind of political structure that I elaborated above, but also envision
that the technology has got to such a point that there now exist highly
efficient, versatile industrial robots,[29]
we can make the world into a veritable Utopia. Basically, the idea is simple:
the robots are like the slaves of Periclean Athens who worked in the hellish silver
mines; the robots do all the shit jobs, while
the humans are free to explore their creative urges, debate philosophy, and
generally enjoy the finer pleasures of life (to use an insufferable cliché!). Maybe
it does help if we assume that the humans are cognitively enhanced in this
scenario, because I know that most humans today, if they lived in an
egalitarian society with robots doing all the shit jobs, would just waste their
time wanking to violent pornography, watching trash TV, drinking themselves
into oblivion: in sum, contributing nothing whatsoever to human civilisation, merely
exploiting it to carry out their disgusting, animalistic urges (the reason I
recently renamed this blog “Human Dignity” is essentially because I see the
idea that all humans have an essential dignity as a really beautiful and
beautifully irrational idea, an unreasonable, quixotic hope that I sometimes find
myself clinging to when trying to motivate myself to a higher plane of morality
and philanthropy, in the strictest
Greek sense (love of humankind)).
Interestingly, at the end of
Yanis Varoufakis’ Ted talk, he basically outlines exactly this robot-assisted
Utopian vision for “Libertarian Marxism”, which he sees as the telos we must all fight for against the
neo-Feudal dystopia that seems far more likely to be our future (I’ll spend the
last part of this essay worrying about this myself).
You may have noticed that there
are some interesting syntactical features in the title of this section of my
essay. I used the epistemic modal verb “might”, and the Kripkean-modal-logic
phrase “in another possible world”. You might be wondering why. Well, the
answer is grimly simple: I am pretty confident that there will never be such a
society. I’m not going to present an extended justification for this; in fact,
I think it’s almost obvious (that the generation of such a society would be
extremely unlikely). How would it start? How does it ever get to happen that we
make polities with only 100,000 citizens and set up all these wonderful
institutions? On current projections, the Earth’s major cities are only going
to get bigger and bigger over the next few decades as fewer and fewer people
live in rural or isolated regions; there’s no way in hell it could ever come to
pass that a significant chunk of the Earth’s population decides to set up the
kind of polities that I’ve described.
Now, it is both logically and
practically possible that workplace democracy could start taking over our
societies even as they are now (workplace
democracy is perfectly compatible with big cities), and once the vast majority
of firms in our society were internally democratic, it would be bizarre to
still call this society “capitalist”. Despite the necessary persistence of states
and parliamentary democracy in a world with massive cities, perhaps it really
would be justified to call such a society an anarcho-syndicalist or Libertarian
socialist society, just by virtue of the near-ubiquitous or ubiquitous
workplace democracy. But anarchists don’t like states, so this is clearly not
what Chomsky is imagining when he imagines his Utopia (although I think my Utopia is probably just a social
democracy where there’s lots of workplace democracy).
Of course, I don’t think the
purer vision is quite a Platonic vision; that’s why I claimed the society could
‘work’. But what I’m saying is that I
don’t think it will come about. We’ll
either become an interplanetary civilisation before this happens (and fuck, I
haven’t talked about space travel – although I think that space travel could be
another thing on which lots of polities could co-operate together to realise),
or Enlightenment civilisation will end (climate change will fuck things up
completely, or some other awful shit will happen, like nuclear Armageddon or a
catastrophic AI explosion).
Optimism, strictly speaking, is just a systemic bias.
Part III: On the Various Meanings of the Terms
“Capitalism” and “Socialism” and the General Uselessness of Conventional
Political Labels and Terminology:
I mentioned in the last part how Marx is probably the main
person responsible for inventing the idea of “capitalism” as a distinct economic
‘system’. This is one of the reasons why I think it makes most sense to define
capitalism not as the economic system of markets, but as the economic system
defined by the existence of capitalists and wage labour. Near the beginning of
Part II, I mentioned a Facebook post I made on Post-Keynesian Moral Anarchism a couple of months ago where I
outlined my rough, crude, simplistic taxonomy of how I understand types of
“socialism” and how they relate to “capitalism”, which I defined in exactly
this Marxist way (no doubt there are similar and far superior political-system taxonomies
to my taxonomy of four socialisms and capitalism, but I can’t be bothered to
find them). My ‘exposition’ of Libertarian socialism was derived from this
post, which, as I parenthetically mentioned, is on this blog already. But since
it’s useful here, here is an edited version of the taxonomy (excluding my
definition of Libertarian socialism, obviously):
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,
(inevitably) a fully public system of healthcare and education, and
(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[30]:
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, Vietnam since the mid-1980s, Venezuela
under Chavez, and perhaps Britain in World War I and World War II, along with Nazi
Germany.
Fabian socialism (or
social democracy): 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 (Ã 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
(Ã 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.
I am now going to post an edited and extended version of
another Facebook post I made a couple of months ago, which is also on this blog
(as part of a composite entry with the previous Facebook post). It is basically
just a short rant on, as the title of this Part III implies, “the general
uselessness of conventional political labels and terminology”. As with a lot of
my political writings, it bears the mark of Chomsky.
There's not a single
commonly used political term today which is useful in either one of the
following (related but distinct) two ways: its contemporary usage connects back
to the roots claimed for the term in the political philosophy academy; its
contemporary meaning possesses some intellectual cogency, with a logical
relationship between the actual etymology of the term and the doctrines of its
contemporary adopters. I will now give several examples in support of this
claim. The first example (“liberal”/“classical liberal”) will be an example of
the contemporary usage not connecting back to the roots claimed for the term in
the political philosophy academy, and the next two (“conservative” and
“libertarian”) will be examples of words without intellectual cogency in the
above defined sense (I will also discuss the term “socialist”, whose usage is
more complex).
Liberal: Whatever
"liberal" means in the modern day, it has nothing to do with the
doctrines of the figures known as the ‘Liberals of the Enlightenment’ in the
political philosophy literature (in the literature, it is generally said that
the "Liberal tradition" is that which links Locke to Madison to
Montesquieu to Bentham to J.S. 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 either accept
the Neoliberal economic status quo or ‘don’t know any economics’ (deferring to Neoliberal
“experts”), are either passionately or vaguely 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), and, as much as we like to
celebrate the democratic instincts of the “Liberal” Founding Fathers, as best
expressed in The Federalist Papers, the
“democracy” that aforesaid Founding Fathers actually implemented was really a
patriarchal, racist oligarchy or aristocracy (I, of course, mean these terms in
the most literal sense possible, not in some diluted Postmodern sense). Madison
(who of course called himself a “Republican”, not a “Liberal”, although he is one
of the paradigmatic “Liberals” in the literature) is held up as one of the
great proponents of democracy, but he said things like this:
“In England, at this day, if
elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed
proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these
observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of
the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in
the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check
the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the
opulent against the majority” [from
the Secret Debates on the Federal
Constitution of 1787, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/James_Madison (& Chomsky
often uses the last part of this quote)].
The only connection I can discern
between modern-day “liberals” and the Englightenment Liberals (as defined in
the political philosophy literature) 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 are
the fathers of neoclassical and Austrian economics and all other forms of
market funadmentalism (even if they (especially Smith) don’t deserve it,
because they were living in a world radically different from our own)). Anyhow,
this is a childish mistake. Mill's support of free markets was radically
egalitarian for his day: as Michael Hudson explains in one of the most earth-shattering
books I’ve ever read, Killing the Host:
How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy (2014), bound up in J.S. Mill’s 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, in our
own economy, the entirely destructive, pointless parasites of the tumescent
tumour that is Wall St, the epicentre of our own parasitised rentier economy, whose too-big-to-fail mega-banks do nothing
but expropriate more and more land and resources to extract more and more rent,
indebting the real economy more and more, and securitising loans to trade
around (along with “engineering” various other financial “products” and
“instruments”, and engaging in entirely destructive “corporate raiding”) to
create obscene fortunes for themselves in an entirely non-productive fantasy, all of which then gets fed into
GDP figures as if it is genuine production, even though it is just a oneiric,
virtual charade helping to make rentiers rich and the rest of us debt paeons)). Mill 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 (the distinction between earned and unearned income was central in
classical economics but has been expunged from neoclassical economics). 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). It’s not an accident that J.S. Mill is one of the central figures
associated with Ricardian socialism (and
he became gradually more socialistic over his lifetime, in a sense that I won’t
try to define (unsurprisingly, Mill’s socialism corresponds best to what I
called “Fabian socialism” in my taxonomy)).
And the bigger point is that the world was just fucking fundamentally different
then (which is why the Sanders comparison was itself facile): Mill was in an
era before modern corporations, before state-funded healthcare, before welfare,
and before Wall St, whose denizens are the parasitic rentiers of the modern day
(as I just made clear). This was a world without "markets" anything
like ours. It was a world without most of the institutions we tend to take for
granted. 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 (especially
since Neoliberal policies have the cumulative effect of atomising society
(turning us into the utility-maximising consumers modelled by neoclassical
economists), which is in radical conflict with Mill’s vision of a society with
a high degree of civic democratic participation, where everyone (even
labourers) are made to cultivate their faculties of reason). 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.
Conservative: 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 Roger Scruton or 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 (democracy as
epistemic populism rather than democracy as elite competition) 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.
Libertarian: 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 (another example
of etymology not matching reality). 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.
Socialist: Socialism
is problematic for different reasons – reasons implied by the fact that I
needed to make a taxonomy distinguishing four types. Basically, it 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). And once upon a time (roughly
speaking, before Stalin and the start of the Cold War), socialism had no
authoritarian connotations whatsoever, so the first usage didn’t exist.
It is because of the massive
ambiguity and lack of cogency of all these terms that I don’t use any one of
them to describe myself. Instead, I invented a new term to describe myself: Post-Keynesian
Moral Anarchism. The Post-Keynesian part is pretty obvious: economically, I
belong to the Post-Keynesian school; my current main influences are Steve Keen
and Michael Hudson, whom I read before reading any of the original literature,
but I am also now reading The General
Theory and Marc Lavoie’s Foundations
of Post-Keynesian Economics, and I have (naturally) read up a fair bit on
“Modern Monetary Theory” (neo-chartalism), mainly through L. Randall Wray. I
hope to eventually get to read Sraffa, Robinson, Kalecki and Kaldor, and I have
Minsky on Keynes in my bedroom, along with all three volumes of Das Kapital. I’ve also already given a
bit of a hint about the “Moral Anarchist” part, but there’s much more to say.
I’ll only say a little of this now. One thing that’s important to point out is
that, although I also called Chomsky a “moral anarchist”, I think I have fairly
significant disagreements with him (I did already make this clear in Part I). I
believe I could encapsulate my fairly significant disagreements with Chomsky in
the following two sentences:
I’m more or less happy, when
explaining myself, to call myself a “social democrat”, because, in conventional
terminology, that is probably the best description for me. Chomsky could not,
and would not (I believe), accept this designation; he’s been an
anarcho-syndicalist or anarchist from the age of 10, and he will stay one until
he dies.
Perhaps another way of putting
this is to say that I’m really not sure about doctrine no. 4 that I attributed
to Chomsky, whereas I attributed this doctrine to Chomsky because I think he is
very confident about it (you probably don’t remember what doctrine no. 4 was,
so why don’t you scroll up to remind yourself?).
Part IV: On Karl Popper and Marxist Utopianism and Social
Democracy and how this relates to “Moral Anarchism”:
Karl Popper’s major political work, The Open Society and its Enemies, is a rather excellent book, in my
view. It was apparently strongly
criticised at the time of its publication for sloppy exegesis of many of the
philosophers it cites, but, even if true, that doesn’t bother me (and the
exegesis of Marx is excellent). I haven’t read it all (and I’ve only ever
accessed it from online PDFs), but, in what I’ve read, he does make some very
good points, and he makes them pretty well. Just like Alan Haworth in this
article (https://philosophynow.org/issues/38/The_Open_Society_Revisited),
I think that many left-wing people have Popper somewhat misplaced: they know
about his strident criticisms of the historicism of historical materialism and of
the dangerous irrationality of forms of left-wing idealism and socialism, and they
see that modern-day conservatives often profess their love for Popper, and,
without reading the work, they infer that he’s more reactionary than he
actually is. The reality is that Popper presents a highly nuanced, ambivalent view of Marx himself in The Open Society and its Enemies, and
most (if not all) of his points about left-wing idealism are, in my opinion, very good ones (they certainly don’t
enrage me, and I am, of course, a “leftist” of some kind or other).
As will become clear, however, I
do have a couple of criticisms to make of the book. These criticisms stem from what
I call the problem of time-blindness: as
with pretty much all of the great political philosophers from history, many of Popper’s
arguments are exclusively a product of his terrifying and turbulent,
extremism-darkened, existentially jeopardised time and place (and, as far as I
know, he didn’t change his tune much, if at all, as society changed post-war). The
deeply pessimistic mood of the book, the vigour and acid of his opposition to
socialism, and the extremely conservative attitude (in a literal and
non-pejorative sense) it takes towards the system of representative democracy
of Popper’s day status does, to me, make the book somewhat dated as a guide to
today, and (as I will argue) had already made the book somewhat dated as early
as the 1950s, when the relative solidity and harmony of the new post-war social
democratic order established the conditions for the significant, positive social
change of the 60s and 70s (civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, animal
rights), which did not damage Popper’s beloved, falsification-compatible system
of Western democracy, but instead made the society more just. Now, it should be
said that this in itself is by no means a contradiction of Popper’s ‘conservative’
attitude towards capitalist representative democracy, however, it is certainly
a contradiction of some of Popper’s corollary claims and doctrines. As we will
see, much of The Open Society
consists of acerbic critique of political idealism (or “romanticism”) and grand
political visions in all their forms, yet these 60s ‘rights’ movements couldn’t
have achieved any success without a high degree of political idealism and lots
of bitter anti-establishment sentiment.
I also think there’s one really
crucial “collective action dilemma” pertaining to left-wing zeal that Popper ought
to take account of in the book but never does – and I’ll explain what this collective
action dilemma is later, because I think it’s an extremely important insight of
mine.
Since I think context is very
important to Popper’s views, I’ll start my discussion of Popper by quickly
going through his biographical background:
Popper was born in Vienna in
1902, a Jew by birth. As all non-ignoramuses would know, early 20th
Century Austria was a place of tremendous political and economic turmoil, and
his youth would have been passed in an extremely unstable and politically
charged world. Vienna at that time was
the sort of place where demagogues lurked around every street corner, each
preaching their own remedy for society’s ills. As a teenager, Popper rode the
zeitgeist somewhat, joining the Association of Socialist School Students and
later the Social Democratic Workers’ Party of Austria, which at that time was a
fully-fledged Marxian organisation. However, after a street battle in the
Horglasse on 15 June 1919, when the police shot eight of his unarmed comrades
from the party, he began to question his trust in Marxist doctrine. Soon after,
he completely abandoned Marx’s “pseudoscientific” historical materialism. In
1928, he earned a doctorate of psychology. After that, he became a secondary
school teacher in maths and physics. In his early 30s, while still working as a
teacher, a new worry entered Popper’s life: the rise of Hitler and the threat
of Anschluss. Popper was so worried by Hitler it motivated him to begin writing
his first book, The Two Fundamental
Problems of the Theory of Knowledge, recognising that a published book
would give him a chance of getting an academic position in a country where Jews
could live safely. In 1935, he took unpaid leave for a study visit to the
United Kingdom, and in 1937 he secured a post as a philosophy lecturer in a
total backwater, far away from Europe and Fascism: the University of New
Zealand in Christchurch. It was here that he wrote Open Society and its Enemies [all of this can be discovered on
Wikipedia].
It’s no surprise that all of this
turmoil in his formative years left a lasting impression on poor old Popper.
More than anything else, it left him with a deep suspicion of political
idealism in all its forms. His personal development in this direction is
strongly reflected in the book. In chapter 7 of the work, “Principle of
Leadership”, he famously writes:
“It is my conviction that by
expressing the problem of politics in the form ‘Who should rule?’ or ‘Whose
will should be supreme?’, etc., Plato created a lasting confusion in political
philosophy. […] It is clear that once the question ‘Who should rule?’ is asked,
it is hard to avoid some such reply as ‘the best’ or ‘the wisest’ or ‘the born
ruler’ or ‘he who masters the art of ruling’ (or, perhaps, ‘The General Will’
or ‘The Master Race’ or ‘The Industrial Workers’ or ‘The People’). But such a
reply, convincing as it may sound—for who would advocate the rule of ‘the
worst’ or ‘the greatest fool’ or ‘the born slave’?—is, as I shall try to show,
quite useless. First of all, such a reply is liable to persuade us that some
fundamental problem of political theory has been solved. But if we approach
political theory from a different angle, then we find that far from solving any
fundamental problems, we have merely skipped over them, by assuming that the
question ‘Who should rule?’ is fundamental. For even those who share this
assumption of Plato’s admit that political rulers are not always sufficiently
‘good’ or ‘wise’ (we need not worry about the precise meaning of these terms),
and that it is not at all easy to get a government on whose goodness and wisdom
one can implicitly rely. If that is granted, then we must ask whether political
thought should not face from the beginning the possibility of bad government;
whether we should not prepare for the worst leaders, and hope for the best. But
this leads to a new approach to the problem of politics, for it forces us to
replace the question: Who should rule? by the new question: How can we so
organize political institutions that bad or incompetent rulers can be prevented
from doing too much damage?”
As this passage
shows, Popper believes, like I believe, “that we are all frail”: that there are
no really “great men” (or even great women, though of course nobody ever talks
about them), and that those most attracted to power will most likely be ruthless,
callous, narcissistic, megalomaniacal, zealous, unphilosophical, glib,
mendacious, greedy and venal. It is on this basis that he supports democracy –
not because it has any intrinsic value (or because it is a system that promotes
equality), but simply because it provides a nonviolent, institutionalised and
regular way to get rid of bad rulers. In this way, democracy mirrors the
trial-and-error process that he held up as the scientific ideal in all his
books and used as the basis for his famous epistemological theory, Falsificationism. More specifically, the
democracy that he supports is orthodox Western capitalist ‘liberal’
‘democracy’. The reasoning is that democracies like England (at least as they
were in the late 30s and very early 40s) are “the best of all political worlds
of whose existence we have any historical knowledge” [admittedly, this quote is
from a later collection of lectures/speeches/interviews called All Life is Problem Solving, but this is
an assumption crucial in The Open Society].
Another major justification he has for being quite conservative (in this literal sense) is his belief
that we should only ever seek change through “piecemeal engineering” of
concrete social problems (for example, poverty, violence, unemployment,
environmental degradation, income inequality). He regards piecemeal engineering
as a far more ‘scientific’, rational and safe process than lofty utopian
engineering according to abstract ideals, because of the way it also leaves
room for experimentation and takes proper heed of uncertainty. In Chapter 9,
“Aestheticism, Perfectionism and Utopianism”, he writes, “This—and no Utopian
planning or historical prophecy—would mean the introduction of scientific
method into politics, since the whole secret of scientific method is a
readiness to learn from mistakes”. Finally, the basis on which piecemeal social
engineers should assess the urgency of problems is something Popper called
“negative utilitarianism”, meaning a utilitarianism where the concern is not
maximising happiness but minimising
suffering. He defends this both on the ground that it offers clearer policy
objectives and because this kind of negative telos is a corrective to the slide into the overweening ambition of
utopianism or romanticism.
It’s worth
quoting some of what Popper says about utopianism and romanticism in Chapter 9,
because it’s really rather good (mostly hard to disagree with), and very
relevant to the beliefs and attitudes of probably the vast majority of radical
leftists. Of course, in my view, the best
points are not highly relevant to Chomsky, who, as a critical, scientific
rationalist himself, basically shares Popper’s epistemology. This is certainly
not to say that Popper ‘approved of’ Chomsky’s politics when he was alive; he
probably didn’t, if he was aware of Chomsky’s politics (I imagine he had some
awareness). Nevertheless, I don’t think Popper’s harsh critique of dangerous
idealism is addressed to leftists like Chomsky (who, on top of having never
been a revolutionary, has never been a historicist (eg a doctrinaire Marxist or
historical materialist), and never supported Lenin or Stalin or Mao, like many
Marxists (particularly those French Marxists Chomsky has himself so often
vituperated)). The more important point, which I’ll properly examine after I
finish laying out the quotes, is that, while Popper’s worries about Utopian
fanaticism are certainly not irrelevant today, I happen to think that the left-wing, socialist utopianism that he incorporates
under this general category of Utopian fanaticism does not actually pose any
danger to civil society in today’s world, because the kind of radical left that
Popper worried about simply does not
exist today, while the radical left that does exist seems to be made up
primarily of middle-class university students who don’t (and shouldn’t) scare
anyone.
(A brief
digression where I elaborate the claim I just made about the contemporary
radical Left.) In Marxist language, “Labour” in today’s society is atomised,
fragmented and, most importantly, impotent.
It is this very fact that helps explain why the Marxist vocabulary used to
describe the fact sounds so silly. Although most still seem to agree that there
is an identifiable category of “working-class” people (as one might say, a proletariat), this is only because
working-class has been re-defined from “factory workers” (who were always
unionised) to “people who have low incomes or no income” (who usually, in
today’s society, belong to no union). And, crucially, of the political radicals
in this “working-class”, the vast majority seem to be right-wing (Fascist) extremists: supporters of UKIP/Front National/Trump/Alternative Fuer Deutschland/Jobbik/Golden Dawn/Freedom Party of
Austria/Party for Freedom (in the
Netherlands)/One Nation (in
Australia).
Naturally, the
rise of these right-wing extremist parties since the GFC itself testifies to
the importance of Popper’s indictment of Utopian fanaticism – but my point is
that the critique suffers in today’s context in its aggregation of left-wing
and right-wing extremisms into this one category of Utopian fanaticism, because
the left-wing version today is flaccid.[31]
Anyhow, here
are the quotes:
Popper on utopian design:
“Social life is
so complicated that few men, or none at all, could judge a blueprint for social
engineering on the grand scale; whether it be practicable; whether it would
result in a real improvement; what kind of suffering it may involve; and what
may be the means for its realization.” (Funnily enough, Chomsky expresses
exactly this view near the end of Requiem
for the American Dream, as I cursorily mentioned in Part I. Although it seems to contradict my own
attempt at a ‘final-stage blueprint’ in Part I of this document, I also completely
agree with the thrust of this passage: I don’t believe in creating a blueprint
for the “social engineering” per se (only the ‘final stage’), and, in any case,
my blueprint of the ‘final stage’ is schematic,
and in several areas, tentative. I
already implicitly acknowledged that I don’t know “what may be the means for
its realisation” and I will freely admit that I have no idea “what kind of
suffering it may involve”.)
Popper on the crucial importance of the ‘time
factor’ that I myself brought up in Part I, along with some extra insights:
“The very sweep
of such a Utopian undertaking makes it improbable that it will realize its ends
during the lifetime of one social engineer, or group of engineers. And if the successors
do not pursue the same ideal, then all the sufferings of the people for the
sake of the ideal may have been in vain. A generalization of this argument
leads to a further criticism of the Utopian approach. This approach, it is
clear, can be of practical value only if we assume that the original blueprint,
perhaps with certain adjustments, remains the basis of the work until it is
completed. But that will take some time. It will be a time of revolutions, both
political and spiritual, and of new experiments and experience in the political
field. It is therefore to be expected that ideas and ideals will change. What
had appeared the ideal state to the people who made the original blueprint, may
not appear so to their successors. If that is granted, then the whole approach
breaks down. The method of first establishing an ultimate political aim and
then beginning to move towards it is futile if we admit that the aim may be
considerably changed during the process of its realization. It may at any
moment turn out that the steps so far taken actually lead away from the
realization of the new aim. And if we change our direction according to the new
aim, then we expose ourselves to the same risk again. In spite of all the
sacrifices made, we may never get anywhere at all.”
Popper on the (historically well-supported)
danger of factional violence among revolutionaries:
“Since there is
no rational method for determining the ultimate aim […] any difference of
opinion between Utopian engineers must therefore lead, in the absence of
rational methods, to the use of power instead of reason, i.e. to violence.”
Popper on the latent danger of Utopian
fanaticism:
“The Utopian
method must lead to a dangerous dogmatic attachment to a blueprint for which
countless sacrifices have been made. Powerful interests must become linked up
with the success of the experiment. All this does not contribute to the
rationality, or to the scientific value, of the experiment”.
Popper on the irrational psychology of excessive
political idealism:
“This sweep,
this extreme radicalism of the Platonic approach (and of the Marxian as well)
is, I believe, connected with its aestheticism, i.e. with the desire to build a
world which is not only a little better and more rational than ours, but which
is free from all its ugliness: not a crazy quilt, an old garment badly patched,
but an entirely new gown, a really beautiful new world. This aestheticism is a
very understandable attitude; in fact, I believe most of us suffer a little
from such dreams of perfection. (Some reasons why we do so will, I hope, emerge
from the next chapter.) But this aesthetic enthusiasm becomes valuable only if
it is bridled by reason, by a feeling of responsibility, and by a humanitarian
urge to help. Otherwise it is a dangerous enthusiasm, liable to develop into a
form of neurosis or hysteria”.
“Aestheticism
and radicalism must lead us to jettison reason, and to replace it by a
desperate hope for political miracles. This irrational attitude which springs
from an intoxication with dreams of a beautiful world is what I call
Romanticism. It may seek its heavenly city in the past or in the future; it may
preach ‘back to nature’ or ‘forward to a world of love and beauty’; but its
appeal is always to our emotions rather than to reason. Even with the best
intentions of making heaven on earth it only succeeds in making it a hell—that
hell which man alone prepares for his fellow-men.”
Anyway, that’s
enough of Popper on political romanticism (and note that he sees this as a
tendency on both the Left and the Right). Now I will include some quotes which
show that rational left-wing people have no grounds for reviling Popper (most
of them are illustrative of his sympathy to Marx, and his strong criticisms of Marxism).
Popper against laissez-faire and for social
democracy:
“We must
construct social institutions, enforced by the power of the state, for the
protection of the economically weak from the economically strong. The state
must see to it that nobody need enter into an inequitable arrangement out of
fear of starvation, or economic ruin. This, of course, means that the principle
of laissez-faire has to be given up; if we wish freedom to be safeguarded, then
we must demand that the policy of unlimited economic freedom be replaced by the
planned economic intervention by the state. We must demand that laissez-faire
capitalism give way to an economic interventionism. (This is precisely what has
happened. Laissez faire, the economic system described and criticized by Marx,
has everywhere ceased to exist. It has been replaced, not by a system in which
the state begins to lose its functions and consequently to ‘wither away,' but
by various interventionist systems, in which the functions of the state in the
economic realm are extended beyond the protection of property and of 'free
contracts'.” [Chapter 17: “The Social System”.]
Popper making his best critique of Marxists
but in sympathy with Marx, focussing on their own time-blindness (failure to
recognise gradual progress):
“Neither Marx nor anybody else
has ever shown that socialism, in the sense of a classless society, of 'an
association in which the free development of each is the warrant for the free
development of all,' is the only possible alternative to the ruthless
exploitation of the laissez-faire economic system which he first described
nearly a century ago (in 1845), and to which he gave the name 'capitalism'. And
indeed, if anybody were attempting to prove that socialism is the only possible
successor to Marx's laissez-faire 'capitalism,' then we could simply refute him
by pointing to historical facts. For laissez faire has disappeared from the
face of the earth, but it has not been replaced by a socialist or communist
system as Marx understood it. Only in the Russian sixth of the earth do we find
an economic system where, in accordance with Marx's prophecy, the means of
production are owned by the state, whose political might however shows, in
opposition to Marx's prophecy, no inclination to wither away. But all over the
earth, organized political power has begun to perform far-reaching economic
functions. Laissez-faire capitalism has given way to a new historical period,
to our own period of political interventionism, of the economic interference of
the state. Interventionism has assumed various forms. There is the Russian
variety; there is the fascist form of totalitarianism; and there is the
democratic interventionism of England, of the United States, and of the
so-called Smaller Democracies, led by Sweden, where the technology of democratic
intervention has reached its highest level so far. The development which led to
this intervention started in Marx's own day, with British factory legislation.
It made its first decisive advances with the introduction of the 48-hour week,
and later with the introduction of unemployment insurance and other forms of
social insurance.
How utterly absurd it is to
identify the economic system of the modern democracies with the system Marx
called 'capitalism' can be seen at a glance, by comparing it with his 10-point
programme for the communist revolution. If we omit the rather insignificant
points of this programme (for instance, ‘4. Confiscation of the property of all
emigrants and rebels'), then we can say that in the democracies most of these
points have been put into practice, either completely, or to a considerable
degree; and with them, many more important steps, which Marx had never thought
of, have been made in the direction of social security. I mention only the following
points in his programme: 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
(Achieved.) 3. Abolition of all right of inheritance. (Partly realized by heavy
death duties. Whether more would be desirable is at least doubtful.) 6. Central
control by the state of the means of communication and transport. (For military
reasons this was largely achieved in Central Europe before the war of 1914,
without very beneficial results. It has also been achieved by most of the
Smaller Democracies.) 7. Increase in the number and size of factories and
instruments of production owned by the state. (Achieved in the Smaller
Democracies ; whether this is always very beneficial is at least doubtful.) 10.
Free education for all children in public (i.e. state) schools. Abolition of
children's factory labour in its present form. (The first demand is fulfilled
in the Smaller Democracies, and to some extent practically everywhere; the
second has been exceeded.)
A number of points in Marx's
programme (for instance: ‘i. Abolition of all property in land') have not been
realized in the democratic countries. This is why Marxists rightly claim that
these countries have not established 'socialism'. But if they infer from this that
these countries are still 'capitalist' in Marx's sense, then they only
demonstrate the dogmatic character of their presupposition that there is no
further alternative. This shows how it is possible to be blinded by the glare
of a preconceived system. Not only is Marxism a bad guide to the future, but it
also renders its followers incapable of seeing what is happening before their
own eyes, in their own historical period, and sometimes even with their own
co-operation.” [Chapter 18: “Socialism”.]
Popper against those vulgar critics of Marx who claim that he inspired
everything that has happened in his name:
“In Marx's
view, it is vain to expect that any important change can be achieved by the use
of legal or political means; a political revolution can only lead to one set of
rulers giving way to another set a mere exchange of the persons who act as
rulers. Only the evolution of the underlying essence, the economic reality can
produce any essential or real change a social revolution. And only when such a
social revolution has become a reality, only then can a political revolution be
of any significance. But even in this case, the political revolution is only
the outward expression of the essential or real change that has occurred
before. In accordance with this theory, Marx asserts that every social
revolution develops in the following way. The material conditions of production
grow and mature until they begin to conflict with the social and legal
relations, outgrowing them like clothes, until they burst. ‘Then an epoch of
social revolution opens,’ Marx writes. 'With the change in the economic foundation,
the whole vast superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. New, more highly
productive relationships' (within the superstructure) ‘never come into being
before the material conditions for their existence have been brought to
maturity within the womb of the old society itself.' In view of this statement,
it is, I believe, impossible to identify the Russian revolution with the social
revolution prophesied by Marx; it has, in fact, no similarity with it whatever.”
[Chapter 15: Economic Historicism.]
Popper expressing admiration for Marx’s profound moral critique:
“The task which Marx set himself
in Capital was to discover inexorable laws of social development. It was thus
not the discovery of economic laws which would be useful to the social technologist.
Neither was it the analysis of the economic conditions which would permit the
realization of such socialist aims as just prices, equal distribution of
wealth, security, reasonable planning of production and above all, freedom. Nor
was it an attempt to analyse and to clarify these aims. But although Marx was
strongly opposed to Utopian technology as well as to any attempt at a moral
justification of socialist aims, his writings contained, by implication, an
ethical theory. This he expressed mainly by moral evaluations of social
institutions. After all, Marx's condemnation of capitalism is fundamentally a
moral condemnation. The system is condemned, for the cruel injustice inherent
in it which is combined with full ' formal ' justice and righteousness. The
system is condemned, because by forcing the exploiter to enslave the exploited
it robs both of their freedom. Marx did not combat wealth, nor did he praise
poverty. He hated capitalism, not for its accumulation of wealth, but for its
oligarchical character; he hated it because in this system wealth means
political power in the sense of power over other men. Labour power is made a
commodity; that means that men must sell themselves on the market. Marx hated
the system because it resembled slavery. By laying such stress on the moral
aspect of social institutions, Marx emphasized our responsibility for the more
remote social repercussions of our actions; for instance, of such actions as
may help to prolong the life of socially unjust institutions. But although
Capital is, in fact, largely a treatise on social ethics, these ethical ideas
are never represented as such. They are expressed only by implication, but not
the less forcibly on that account, since the implications are very obvious.
Marx, I believe, avoided an explicit moral theory, because he hated preaching.
Deeply distrustful of the moralist who usually preaches water and drinks wine,
Marx was reluctant to formulate his ethical convictions explicitly. The
principles of humanity and decency were for him matters that needed no
discussion, matters to be taken for granted. (In this field, too, he was an
optimist.) He attacked the moralists because he saw them as the sycophantic
apologists of a social order which he felt to be immoral; he attacked laissez-faire
liberalism for its self-satisfaction, and for its identification of freedom
with the formal liberty then existing within a social system which destroyed
freedom. Thus, by implication, he admitted his love for freedom; and in spite
of his bias, as a philosopher, for holism, he was certainly not a collectivist,
for he hoped that the state would ‘wither away’. Marx's faith, I believe, was
fundamentally a faith in the open society.” [Chapter 22: “Marx: Historicist
Moral Theory”.]
I said much
earlier I was going to criticise Popper for a major collective action problem
that he overlooks. I will do this presently – first I have to lay some more
groundwork.
I believe that
Popper was right that pre-Neoliberal, Western constitutional parliamentary
(capitalist) "liberal democracy" (social democracy) was the most just
and liberal governing system for a complex society that us humans have yet been
able to develop and sustain (especially in its Scandinavian incarnation). In
saying this, I do not mean to give the impression, of course, that I imagine
this “Keynesian” “Golden Age” in the West as a kind of Utopia. I certainly don’t ignore the fact that
the world’s biggest social democratic
country, the US, spent the entire period carrying out brutal military adventures
to serve its national and economic interests, in Korea, in Central and South
America, and finally in Vietnam and Cambodia (resulting in millions of deaths
and untold misery and despair). I certainly don’t ignore the fact that the US
was an extremely unfree and unopen society in the McCarthyist 1950s (as were
many of its allies). I certainly don’t ignore the fact that the culture
encouraged by ‘Keynesian’ capitalism was one of sterile, mind-numbing,
soul-deadening consumerism and moral emptiness. I certainly don’t ignore the
fact that, in this period of population explosion and massive industrial growth
in the West, we massively accelerated the rate of carbon emissions and
inflicted massive ecological degradation – a reality which may ultimately spell
the downfall of civilisation as we know it as, over the next few decades,
entire cities become submerged, tens of millions of climate refugees appear,
and extreme weather destroys our key agricultural regions. Finally – and most
importantly – I certainly don’t ignore the fact that the world almost ended in
this period as a result of Cold War hostilities inflamed mostly by that
same social democratic superpower, the United States.
But none of
this affects the truth of the specific claim made. Furthermore, the reason that
we saw such tremendous social progress in the sixties and early seventies was
probably the mass public education provided during the Golden Age (young people
were, for really the first time in history, almost universally literate) and
the relative economic stability of the period (they had enough time and
opportunity to question prevailing social norms and the institutions which
ruled them). One certainly can’t ignore that.
That was
basically the “groundwork”, so I can now introduce the collective-action
problem. Truth be told, it’s fairly simple and goes as follows: I believe that
Popper didn’t realise (or properly assimilate) the fact that the existence of strong
radical left and labour movements in the 1930s and extreme Labour movement was
actually key in forcing the essential ‘class-compromise’ that characterised the
Western social democracy of 1945-1970[32],
and that such a system cannot be maintained without the persistence of such strong radical left and labour movements – no
matter how irrational or delusional these movements may be in their stated
goals and ambitions. In other words, I think Popper didn’t realise that it is
impossible to maintain his beloved “open society” if too many people adopt a
Popperian attitude towards this society. If too many people begin to accept
that any major attempt at radical change is highly dangerous, and too many
people stop being radical activists and flee from unions and the like – instead
embracing “negative utilitarianism” and Popper’s doctrine of “piecemeal change”
– then the elites will begin to take the upper hand again and make the society
worse.
(Explication of
this claim.) All forms of capitalism are inherently unstable in their own way,
and the state capitalist social democratic system that characterised the Golden
Age was the result of a very delicate balance of popular pressures for
democracy (+ the pressure of domestic capital to support domestic manufacturing)
and elite, internationalist-capitalist and finance-sector pressures to just
fuck it all up – deregulate, slash taxes, privatise everything, and completely
offshore manufacturing. The collapse of the Bretton-Woods system with Nixon’s
floating of the dollar in 1971 (the “Nixon shock”) set off a chain of events in
the global political and economic system that would eventually usher in the Neoliberal era,[33]
characterised structurally (in the West) by deregulation (financial and
other), privatisation, offshoring of manufacturing (facilitated by the role of
the IMF and World Bank as facilitators of Western capital movement into Third
World countries and brutal opponents and repressors of sui generis Third World industrial development), tax-slashing for
the wealthy, the repression of unions, inflation-targeting monetary policy
(abandonment of real-economy deficit-spending in pursuit of “full employment”),
and characterised in consequence by stagnant wages, growing inequality, the
corporatisation of the university, a significant rise in “bullshit jobs”, an
explosion of private debt (facilitated by the introduction of credit cards),
and the general financialisation and ‘bubble’-isation of Western economies,
which created the higher financial instability which culminated in the GFC. If
there were enough radical leftists around in the late 1960s to bring an early halt
to the Vietnam War and thereby prevent the bloating of the government deficit
which led Nixon to abandon the gold standard, then this whole thing could have
been prevented. Similarly, if there was a sufficiently powerful labour movement
around after “stagflation” had been brought under control to fight the ascendancy
of Milton Friedman and Chicago School economics (seemingly powerfully
vindicated by stagflation) and to fight the rise of Reagan in the US and
Thatcher in the UK, then the Neoliberal rise could have been largely thwarted.
But this obviously did not happen.
The crucial
point is that the problem here was exactly the opposite of the kind of problem
Popper worried about: instead of there being too many people with irrational
Utopian fantasies, there weren’t enough irrational
people. That is, there weren’t enough
zealous leftist activists – not enough impassioned warriors for lofty, romantic,
aesthetic ideals like Justice, Freedom and Absolute Democracy. The new era of
financialisation and inequality thus became inevitable, and this further
attenuated radical left and labour movements, and thereby further strengthened
itself. The reason for this, of course, is that increasing inequality inevitably creates a vicious cycle. As
Chomsky says, "Inequality is, by its very nature, corrosive to
democracy" [from Requiem for the
American Dream]. Once you have one increase in inequality, this disparity
between rich and power then makes it easier for the wealthy elites to maintain
and strengthen their power through donations, through regulatory capture (which
leads to rules benefitting these elites, eg financial deregulation or Citizens
United), through corporate-media propaganda and so on.
So Popper
overlooked the fact that strong social democratic system requires that the
populace constantly push back against elite powergrabs and attempts at wrecking
democracy. That is, he overlooked the constant ‘tug-of-war’ between the
proletariat and the bourgeois (he overlooked Marx).
Ultimately,
this huge oversight Popper means Popper's political philosophy cannot deal with
the following meta-problem (more precisely, meta-collective action problem):
Say lots of
people accept Popper's argument: because of their historically unprecedented
checks and balances on tyranny, war and chaos – because of their unprecedented
capacity to prevent reckless rulers from doing truly major damage – the
majority of the population (or even just a large chunk of the population) takes
a more Popperian-conservative (literal conservative) view on Western
parliamentary democracies. They all say, "Western parliamentary democracy,
though imperfect, is the best system us humans have been able to develop and
now that we are in one, all we should do is aim for piecemeal change
-- after all, history tells us that rapid change and revolutions are
highly risky, and things are better than they've ever been." The great
irony is that we're now suddenly in trouble. If the populace stops applying
democratic pressure on the capitalists (if people stop protesting, and the
population starts voting increasingly for the
If the populace stops applying democratic pressure on the capitalists
(if people stop protesting, and the population starts voting increasingly for
the Tories/Conservatives/Republicans or favouring Right Labour/Labor/Democrat
members) – the wealthy elites, the CEOs, the Wall St kings, etc – suddenly have
much more freedom to move, buying elections, causing deregulation, tax
slashing, privatisation (neoliberal policies).
This all leads
us to a convenient punchline. I think that a self-respecting Popperian critical
rationalist about politics could, for this reason, also be a moral anarchist (Oh no he didn’t). The reasoning is not
hard to grasp: we should organise as far leftists, socialists and anarchists –
spread radical ideology, try to convince people to protest and stand up to
power – not because we are idealists, but because
we are conservatives. That is, because we love the paltry freedoms we have
now, and we don't want to see them lost.
Part V: On the Terrifying and
Uncertain Future in which, whatever happens, the Human Species as we know it
will probably Cease to Exist, Meaning that there is No Hope
I think the future of civilisation is extremely bleak
indeed. We need immediate, unified, decisive action on climate change (https://newrepublic.com/article/136987/recalculating-climate-math;
https://www.theguardian.com/profile/georgemonbiot+environment/climate-change)
to avoid a Biblical disaster within
the next few decades. If we don’t move away from fossil fuels and transition as
rapidly as possible into a clean-energy future, we face, in the next few
decades, a colossal, literally existential crisis. As sea levels rise,
settlements are submerged, and environments that are currently barely
hospitable become completely inhospitable, we can rest assured that there will
be a massive increase in the number of climate refugees. It seems highly likely
that within only the next couple of decades, we will be seeing literally millions, even tens of millions, of such climate refugees – either cramming into already
over-burdened refugee camps, or simply wandering the ravaged Earth in (most
likely futile) search for a place to live. In any case, such refugees will be starving,
miserable and probably diseased. It is certain that many thousands will die,
and probable that many hundreds of thousands will. If one thinks this is
hyperbole, simple consider what will happen to a country like Bangladesh over
the next few decades – already a nation afflicted by flooding due to its
extremely flat terrain, with a massive population who will have nowhere else to
go but India (not exactly a country
well-equipped to cope with such an influx of refugees).
This mass movement of people will
lead to a humanitarian crisis for the fortunate countries far greater than any
humanitarian crisis such countries would have dealt with before – far greater,
for example, than the crisis the West has been facing over the last couple of
years with refugees fleeing the horror in Syria. It will inevitably create an
immense moral dilemma in the fortunate countries, of a kind unprecedented in
human history. How will we react? I really do not know.
But this isn’t even half of it. Crucial
agricultural regions will also be – in fact, have already been (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/drought)
– affected by an increasingly volatile and unpredictable climate. Ethiopia has
recently endured its worst drought in decades, resulting in mass starvation and
thousands of deaths, and East Africa, in general, seems in a particularly dire
situation as the globe warms. Various other agricultural regions across the
world are in danger of becoming increasingly infertile or in-arable as the
climate changes (either through drought, as in Africa (and probably Australia),
or just other kinds of extreme weather). This might well lead to a severe food
crisis – perhaps so severe that it affects even the West (what a thought,
Western children with malnutrition instead of obesity).
One of the scariest prospects of
all is that the rising sea levels will begin to cause serious damage to major
coastal cities, eventually submerging
entire districts. Of course, rising sea levels have already begun to destroy
entire communities and towns in the Pacific Islands, and it is not too long
before major coastal cities throughout the world – New York, Sydney, Miami, Los
Angeles, Tokyo, etc – start facing massive damage from flooding in their more
coastal regions. This will have a colossal cost, both human and literal, and
will again lead to more migration.
I remarked at the beginning that
we need urgent and decisive action to combat climate change and transition to a
new clean economy, but the simple fact is that this is not happening. The official
line of the Republican Party is that climate change is a liberal conspiracy,
and Trump’s line is that it is a Chinese conspiracy. This insane denialism is
coming from one of the most powerful organisations in the world. Chomsky has
not been hyperbolic in his recent statements that the Republican party “the
most dangerous organisation in human history” [easily accessible from the
internet]. Conservative governments from other places around the world are
barely different - for example, my own government in Australia is doing almost
literally nothing, and many members or ex-members of the Australian government are, in my friend Hector Ramage's words, "in fact abetting the deplorable pleonexia of mining company executives" [https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2016/november/1477918800/richard-denniss/feeding-beast]). Meanwhile, the Dakota Access pipeline looks set to go ahead
despite the inspiring protests of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, under the watch of the Democratic Party.
It should, of course, not be surprising that the Democratic Party is also being
recklessly recalcitrant on climate change; after all the Democratic Party is
just one other faction of the Business Party, and therefore basically a giant
corporate agglomeration (in the pockets of fossil fuel companies just as they
are in the pockets of Big Pharma or other major corporate sectors).
Naomi Klein is right: our entire
political and economic system militates against protecting the planet for
future generations and the long-term viability of our civilisation. We fucked
up as humans.
The destruction of the Amazon
continues unabated, and the Great Barrier Reef has just undergone its worst
bleaching event in recorded history. More and more species go extinct every
day. Environments everywhere are poisoned, polluted, ravaged.
And in the final presidential debate, climate change wasn’t mentioned
once.
Another thing to worry about is
the threat of war. As Einstein famously remarked, “I know not with what weapons
World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and
stone”. And as Scott Atran writes, “Steve Pinker, in The Better Angels
of Our Nature, documents how everyday violence between people has declined
markedly since the Stone Age. But this underplays another well-documented trend
(known as a “power law distribution”) that big wars (as well as large terrorist
attacks) over the last couple of centuries, though increasingly infrequent, are
very many times more murderous and catastrophic than those preceding. Each
bigger event generates more world-shaking consequences than the last:
politically, economically and socially. Lacking the will and means to
consistently impose a universal moral code across all peoples (and the human
evolution and history of intergroup rivalry says “Don’t hold your breath” on
this score), perhaps the only way to ultimately outwit the bad beast of our
nature from doing all in all of us in the Space Age is to ignore how nice or
not are the guys who prepare the killing, or how good or not may be the guys
who do it, and focus mainly on treating the consequences of killing” [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/scott-atran/robert-bales-afghanistan-shootings_b_1355651.html].
The growing neo-Cold War tensions
over Syria are a cause for serious concern currently, as is the general
disintegration of Europe and the rise of Fascist parties across that continent.
It’s the fault of the Neoliberal design of the EU, of course, (the Maastricht
Treaty’s injunction against budget deficits of over 3% of GDP is the main
thing), but that doesn’t change the fact that the disintegration we’re
currently witnessing is terrifying.
Then there’s also the threat of
AI. God knows why anyone thinks that it’s likely
that we’ll program AIs which have a high degree of general learning ability
and which can alter their own code (which is, when it comes down to it, what
the entire Bostrom argument for being scared of an AI takeover is based on)[34],
but, you know, certainly there are some scary things about AI. Mostly, in my
view, they have to do with the threat of massive inequality and neo-Feudalism
as tech companies become increasingly powerful over the next few decades. I
wrote about this in my essay, “More VERY dark thoughts on Automation”, which I
would recommend reading as a nice finish to this epic.
I have finished investigating
now.
[1]
The start of my Chomsky obsession can be pinned roughly to the Christmas of
2014, when I started reading The Science
of Language, his conversations with James McGilvray, although I had first
become interested in him (watching one or two Youtube videos) at least a year
earlier, and I think I had read my first article on him when I was a kid.
[2] One
classic is Chomsky’s claim that critical thinkers in the educational system are the ones
said to have “behavioural problems” (as if there are no kids with actual behavioural
problems); another is that the “function” of sport is to foster irrational
attitudes of “jingoism” [both of these can be found in multiple sources easily
accessible on the internet]. In Requiem
for the American Dream, he also appears to explain the entire Neoliberal
transformation of the late 70s and 80s in terms of the desire of the “elites”
to crush the democratic uprising of the 1960s.
Incidentally, I am not
completely sold often on Chomsky’s complete nihilism about the possibility of
benign US military intentions in the Middle East. At least the Americans are
funding the Kurds, even if they also help Saudi Arabia to bomb Yemen into
rubble and Obama assassinates people at will.
[3] To
clarify, when I talk about “rationality” here, I’m not assuming that there are
intrinsically valuable ends (I’m not referring to “moral rationality”), but (roughly)
to the following: successful avoidance of massive
bias and blatant motivated reasoning,
the successful practice of a (vaguely) ‘Bayesian’ attitude (that is, in Hume’s
terms, the proportioning of one’s beliefs to the evidence), scrupulous acknowledgement
of complexity and nuance in analysis, and the defence of all one’s claims and
arguments with requisite evidence from reliable sources (not cherry-picked).
[4] Of course, the anarchist revolution
in Catalonia wasn’t horrific, but it probably ended up being pointless (because
it was crushed and so many died).
[5] Don’t worry: we will much later deal
with the ambiguity of the word “revolutionary” here.
[6] I think the (mainstream,
neoclassical) economic theory these people assume is decisively wrong on just
about everything – I think neoclassical macroeconomics is total pseudoscience –
but I can see at least the logic of
this so-called ‘classical liberal’ position if you don’t realise this. When I
say “nontrivial degree of epistemic respect”, I mean I don’t think they’re
highly irrational in the way that many far leftists are (and I don’t include
Chomsky in this, obviously).
[7] Incidentally,
Hobbes makes a mistake that’s fucking endemic to political philosophy: he
treated what was not an unreasonable conclusion in his own super-turbulent
political context as some kind of timeless, transcendent truth about politics.
The reality is that different forms of authority are justified in different
periods of history. This tendency of political theorists throughout the ages to
ignore the inherent temporality (that is, contingency) of what is possible in a
given era is a theme I will return to again and again.
[8] For those not schooled in Marxist
doctrine, when I say wage labour is defined as the “renting” of human beings by
wealthy people with the means to do so, I mean that wage labour is defined as
just work for the majority of people
in a capitalist economy. If you’re not a
manager, or boss, or CEO, or CFO, or entrepreneur, or investor, and you’re not
working for yourself – if there’s someone “above you” to whom you must submit
completely to earn your living – you’re a wage labourer on this definition.
[9] To be clear, I’m not claiming that
these four bulletpoints completely encompass everything bound up in Chomsky’s
identification as an anarchist. What these bulletpoints are, I believe, are
just the key tenets.
One element of his politics not covered in
those points which is nevertheless explicitly related to his anarchism is his
(rather Ghandian) stated opposition to “persuasion”: in particular, his belief
that, irrespective of one’s rhetorical gifts, one should always try to speak in
a boring, unexciting way, because appealing to the emotions and base instincts
of one’s audience is just a kind of manipulation, and one should be trying to
make one’s audience think critically.a, b
a At this point I should apologise for my lack
of citations of the propositional attitudes I have attributed to Chomsky; I can
only assure you that, as someone who has spent tens of hours listening to his
voice, and read three of his books, and read several of his articles, I know my
shit (I have been careful to use close paraphrases too). I am 90% confident
that Chomksy would not have yet accused me of any distortion, although no doubt
he would disapprove of my intellectual slovenliness.
b Also worth (regretfully) observing that, even
if Chomsky often or always tries to follow this rhetorical principle, most
still seem to find him really compelling and impressive speaker (eg me), which
is part of the reason why he inspires literally millions, and part of the
reason why he is the object of a cult of personality (needless to say, being
the object of a cult of personality is extremely awkward for an anarchist). I
don’t think that he wants to be the object of a cult of personality, by the
way, although it is (as technocratic as this may sound) actually a very good
thing strategically.
[10] Whilst
this obviously a Straw Man in the sense that no-one has ever expressed belief
in all those things in those words, I can assure you that there are really lots
of people who think in exactly this way. Of course, to be fair, many of them
are teenagers, and teenagers are idiots (I say this as a 19-year-old).
[11] Incidentally,
one of the things that made J.M. Keynes such a great (efficacious) activist was
that he was a master of compromise – the ultimate pragmatist. Radical leftists
tend to hate the word “pragmatism” (rightly, because it is so often abused),
but we really can thank Keynes for a lot of shit. If Keynes wasn’t
well-respected within the economics profession and the political establishment,
it literally might have been the case that the Golden Age of Capitalism never
happened (which, to be clear, is certainly not to say that the policies Western
govs followed between circa 1945 and 1971 were following the letter of The General Theory).
Today’s world desperately
needs a Keynes. Today’s media is unfortunately an immense obstacle to this,
however, because corporate journalists seem to start frothing at the mouth
whenever anyone proposes any anti-neoliberal economic policy, decrying the
person as a “mad socialist” etc, as if social democracy is Soviet socialism and
Keynes was a socialist. Two good candidates for our modern-day Keynes are
Joseph Stiglitz and Yanis Varoufakis, but (to illustrate my point about our
fucked oligarchical media) they’re tarred as socialist loonies.
[12] The
only other prominent self-described “anarchist” I know is David Graeber. Reading
his most recent book (The Utopia of Rules)
has given me the distinct impression that he is not quite a moral anarchist in
the sense that I’ve outlined. I really loved Debt: The First 5000 Years, which I completed only a couple of
weeks before I started The Utopia of
Rules, but this latter work is not nearly as good (though it certainly has
its moments, and many really wonderful insights).
One example of Graeber’s
irrationality in this latter book is, funnily enough, precisely his discussion
of “rationality” in the third essay, “The Utopia of Rules, or Why We Really
Love Bureaucracy After All”. Graeber spends several pages in this essay arguing
that it is silly to say that you base your politics on “rationality” or that
other people’s political beliefs are “irrational” because, given that you
clearly don’t mean a Platonic conception of rationality (a conception of
reality which encompasses moral rationality, or rationality applied to ‘ends’, which
assumes that there are objectively valuable ends and that you’re irrational if
you don’t value them), then you must be using rationality to just mean logical
coherence + vague correspondence of beliefs to empirical reality. And this
means, Graeber says, that you’re really claiming that everyone who has
different political views to you is insane.
But this is an atrocious argument. People who are not clinically insane often
hold inconsistent beliefs, people who are not clinically insane often hold
political beliefs that are completely untethered from the available evidence, people
who aren’t clinically insane often engage in highly motivated reasoning when it comes to politics (clinging to
dogmas in the face of all evidence), and so on. Furthermore, it is perfectly
clear that some people are better at
avoiding cognitive biases and motivated reasoning than others (Popper and
Russell are better than any Libertarian, for example), and have, as a result, more
‘reality-based’ political beliefs. It is evidently justified for these more
careful political thinkers to say that they try to base their politics on
“rationality” and to accuse others of being irrational, if those others are not
meeting their own standards. That’s why I can justifiably say, for example,
that I think Graeber is less rational than Chomsky.
[13] The fact that people believe such
things is why I believe in eugenics (no, seriously, I do believe in eugenics; I
think that, if and when we know enough about genetics to do gene-editing
relatively safely, we should have no reservations about designing babies for
greater intelligence).
[14]
This is, by the way, a very standard and widely recognised conclusion among
people interested in such things.
[15]
Basically, I started out the email, which I titled something like “Questions
about what an Anarcho-Syndicalist Society would “look like””, by asking Chomsky
why, unlike Marx, he hadn’t tried to expound a vision of his ideal society. I
then presented a brief bullet-point sketch of what I thought would be the basic
institutional structures in an anarcho-syndicalist society, and asked him what
he thought. Chomsky replied to me by pointing out (in one sentence) that I was
wrong about Marx (who basically never talked about the Communist utopia, except
elliptically, and was more preoccupied with presenting an account of the moral
failings of his current society). There was nothing else to Chomsky’s email,
and no mention of my blueprint. I was hideously embarrassed.
[16] I
make this stipulation (which I won’t attempt to disambiguate – at least not
now) because my point is to try to imagine a society that is as technologically
advanced as our own society, but without the systems of hierarchy and
concentrations of power. As I said before, I’m not interested in
anarcho-primitivism, and (more generally) I don’t believe in the desirability
of any society significantly less technologically advanced than our current
one.
Before we go any further, I
should also point out that my initial description of this Libertarian socialist
world will be ‘conditionalised on’ the level of technology we had in the West
circa. 2000. In other words, I will assume minimal industrial automation and no
service sector automation. Fortunately, I will later explore the question of
how automation and robots might be integrated into the vision, which I think is
very important, given the direction
we’re heading in in 2016, an examination of which will make up the last part of
this essay.
[17]
Yes, there is such a thing as a non-capitalist market system. It’s just a
market system, where, because of the internally democratic nature of the firms,
there are no “capitalists”. There would be no lone entrepreneurs in such a
system, but groups of people (entrepreneur-groups) setting up new co-operative
corporations.
(Ironically, neoclassical
economists model the ‘capitalist economy’ (and Neoliberals/Libertarians think
of the capitalist economy) in a way that better matches this vision than the
actual world.)
[18]
As I will later explain, crucial features of the immigration policy in a
Libertarian socialist society will mean that none of these corporations will be
able to become as large as corporations are in our own society, and when they
do reach ‘peak-growth’ (a hard limit), they will be forced to perpetually
channel their profits to the community.
[19]
Yes, believe it or not, the society I’m describing is not communist or capitalist.
[20]
In a not dissimilar fashion to democracy in 5th Century Athens, I
imagine that about 500 adult citizens from within the council’s jurisdiction
would be chosen by lot at some suitable fixed interval to decide questions for
their 20,000-strong local community. Either these 500 citizens would set their
own agenda, or perhaps academics from a nearby (democratically organised)
university would. I am, of course, completely alive to the possibly (in fact, probability) that there is a better
set-up for the direct democracy than this.
[21]
Temporary because that temporality is a check on power and a good way of ensuring
that incompetents don’t linger too long.
[22] As we will see, there are reasons to
think that it might be better to make a compromise at a higher number –say,
250,000 or higher still – even if this will likely negatively impact the
anarchist/direct democratic element of the polity.
[23]
Ideally, the police force would be set up in such a way that it didn’t
primarily attract authoritarian personalities the way it does in our current
society.
[24]
Of course, Ricardo’s beautiful idea of “comparative advantage” doesn’t usually
apply to the world we actually live in, for the main reason that countries
specialising in manufacturing have a huge advantage over those specialising in
agricultural goods (and often those countries who are specialising in
agricultural goods are being prevented from becoming manufacturing centres by
the wealthier and more powerful industrial countries who benefit from the
current arrangement of almost entirely one-sided advantage). http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com.au/2011/01/mises-on-ricardian-law-of-association.html.
http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com.au/2016/07/the-cult-of-free-trade-in-nutshell.html.
http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com.au/2016/07/erik-reinert-versus-ricardo-on-free.html.
http://socialdemocracy21stcentury.blogspot.com.au/2016/08/ha-joon-chang-on-history-of.html.
As a result of these
truths, it is likely that some polities would quickly gain an advantage over
others, based on the nature of their specialisation. This, as I will discuss,
is one motivation for a centralised Libertarian socialist society, since a
central body (or state) could perform a redistributive function, ensuring that
each polity has a similar quality of public amenities, healthcare, education,
etc. It is also part of the explanation as to why one wouldn’t want
specialisation becoming too total; the other part is that overly specialised
polities would be very boring places, and for young people, unless their dream
was to do the kind of work in which their own polity of birth specialised in,
it would induce a massive desire for emigration to the polities most concordant
with their respective ambitions. This mass movement of young people would be
hard to co-ordinate.
[25]
Does one want to bite the bullet on this?
[26]
This depends on whether the internally democratic corporations are allowed, by
the legal system, to use some of their profits to advertise. There would
obviously be no point once they reached the point of peak expansion.
[27] Of course, this is kind of a
confusing thought because it’s hard to imagine how a Libertarian socialist
society could get to the point that I’m imagining except by the world becoming
almost entirely peaceful.
[28] At
least to the extent that our own society ‘works’
[29] Without simultaneously imagining
that people have cognitive enhancements, or cyborg bodies, or live forever, or
spend their whole time in virtual reality, because that’s too scary and too
difficult (even if it seems extremely plausible that if our own society gets to
a ‘robot stage’, it will be simultaneous with exactly these kinds of things).
[30] The term “command economy” is often
used synonymously with “mixed economy”, but “mixed economy” also seems to be
commonly used to describe Keynesian-type, robustly regulated but definitely
capitalist economies like those of the Scandinavian countries. As will be very
clear, I am not using “command economy” to refer to such societies.
[31] But what about Jeremy Corbyn and Momentum? I categorically deny that Jeremy
Corbyn is an ideological extremist, or in any way a threat to any democratic
institutions in England, which means that he is not the kind of figure Popper
is talking about. Corbyn is not a highly intelligent man, which causes
problems, but if I were in England, I’d be supporting him.
[32]
Obviously, the very existence of the 8-hour working day is the work of unions
early in the 20th Century. Similarly, F.D.R’s New Deal probably
couldn’t have occurred without massive working-class pressure either. Most
pertinently, it does appear that the design of the equitable economic
arrangements of the 50s and 60s (high wages, pensions, cheap healthcare and
education) was largely compelled by the elite fear of labour movements and the
working classes turning communist. And there wouldn’t have been such a fear if
there weren’t at least some left-wing radicals around – which illustrates their
importance.
[33]
In his work Super-imperialism, Michael
Hudson explains how the abandonment of the gold standard meant that the US
dollar became the world’s reserve currency, which meant that developing
countries had massive incentives to buy US bonds and securities (especially
since they wanted to compete with US exports), which basically serviced US
military deficits as well as keeping the value of the dollar high, which played
a major role in causing manufacturing to move offshore to the very Third World
countries who were trapped in this pernicious cycle of servicing US deficits by
accumulating US dollars. The US desire to limit the ability of these countries
to compete with its own experts began the Washington Consensus (market
liberalisation for you (our banks and multinationals invade your country and
become the main rentiers, preventing any sovereign economic development) and
protectionism for us).
[34]
We should only worry about an intelligence explosion, if you think there's more than a minuscule chance that we'll make genuinely creative and
autonomous machines (or creative machines explicitly programmed to alter their
own code or make other intelligent machines) in the relatively near future
(I don't think there's more than minuscule chance of this).
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