Reality dawns on (some) lefties

In a world of echo-chamber opinion-forming, it's always important to keep up with What The Other Side Thinks.  My go-to for what is sometimes called the 'Movement Left'** is Novara Media, a fairly businesslike collective containing its rag-bag share of humourless, mulish identitarians but also some very intelligent people, occasionally with sufficient of an empirical bent to pay attention when it really becomes obvious they are barking up the wrong tree, doctrine or no doctrine.  The recent US election can have that effect on people.

By way of an end-of-year review, their three leading lights (Bastani, Sarkar & Walker) put out this video which I commend to you.  Note in particular the second main section - "Did 'Woke' Die in 2024?" - starting around 25 minutes in.  It contains some pretty trenchant critique of a lot of stuff their general political tendencies would have strongly inclined them towards fairly unreflectively in the past, as they pretty much admit.  Marks the (grudging) acknowledgement of a lost battle in the culture war, I'd say.

The best critiques of those baleful leftist manifestations often come from the more intelligent & reflective corners of the Left itself.  I can also suggest Brian Leiter and Adolph Reed (both American) for more of the same.  Self-professed Marxists all - but smart with it, and contemptuous of what richly deserves contempt.  (Kathleen Stock ditto, but I'm not sure she's a Marxist.)

ND

UPDATE - here's an infinitely more verbose capitulation from the same stable.  Much less honest (1,000 fancy words on "well, of course I never fell for it"), and much funnier, albeit unintentional.  But boy, some of these lefties can't half go on.  You'll pick up some new words, too - if you can struggle through it. 

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** Roughly speaking, comfortably elitist middle-class leftists outside of regular party politics, mostly youngish & protest-oriented, generally woke and prone to 'language-/ thought-policing' - and thus also inevitably further left than anything as boring as Labour itself. 

Great times for the Great Man Theory of History

We should define our terms here, and personally I don't choose to go the whole hog with Carlyle, who claims that the whole of history can be written in terms of the stories of Great Men.  But that overlooks important 'materialistic' or 'economic' insights - such as those of Marx (someone else we won't be going the whole distance with, either ...).  I shall stick to something far more difficult to shoot down, and go with: at certain key points the course of human history is (sometimes) fundamentally determined by the purposeful actions of individuals.

In 2024, what more do we need to say?!  Whether Biden steps down is a decision he seems to have reserved to himself: I see no "economic" factors at work, just a painful case of very human personal vanity.  Whether Trump survived was a matter of chance (it seems), but a Trump presidency will - I think we might agree - set the USA and most probably the world** on a different course than any plausible Democrat victory this year.  (American isolationism has always been there, for more than 200 years, and its triumph over pragmatic internationalism has often been possible but never guaranteed.)  Neither is it a given that Russia would be in the hands of a dictatorial, brooding, fretful revanchist at this hour: nor that China would be in the hands of an all-powerful monomaniac nationalist. 

It seems to me that if one wants to argue against any of this, one has to have a thesis that requires stepping back to so distant a perspective (1,000 years?  5,000 years?) that all meaningful granularity is lost for any but anthropological, almost biological purposes.

ND

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** Some, though not I, hold that a Trump presidency will result in the US being withdrawn from global cooperation on actions related to climate change - with globally damaging consequences.  Interestingly, those folks are often highly materialistic lefty-greens.  If they couple their theoretical materialism with their fear of Trump, it must give them some uncomfortable ideological pangs.  (Of course, the whole of Reality ought to be fairly painful for them at frequent intervals ... ) 

Trouble at t'campus: where is this going?

I was a teenager when the anti-war protests hit US universities (and Grosvenor Square) and there was one of those historically quite frequent Paris uprisings.  It all seemed fairly apocalyptic at the time, with an undercurrent of Marxism & Trotskyism and something of a 'radicalisation' of a cohort of youth.  University-educated youth, that is, which in the UK at that time was a fairly modest percentage of the whole.  Large books are written on the impact this had - which wasn't nearly as much as its instigators hoped; certainly not as radical or instantaneous as they expected, even if it might have set off some kind of decades-long Gramscian process.

When I was at the university myself in the '70s, things were still fairly 'robust'.  There were pro-IRA meetings in pubs (with the occasional actual IRA man in attendance) and a readiness to resort to occupations of buildings, street-skirmishing, fist-fights etc on a fairly frequent basis.  I recall a spectacular (and very well-organised) pitch battle between the Trots and a visiting band of National Front: a set-piece medieval contest.  The 1980s seemed to put an end to this, and a curiously placid thirty-year period has ensued where very little campus violence has happened at all**.

Well, if the USA is its usual harbinger of trends, this might all be about to end.  In America there's no mainstream political outlet for pro-Palestinian sentiment (not even Bernie Sanders), absent which something ad hoc is bound to occur.  And there's a fairly violent anti-anti reaction, seemingly from off campus.  As happened in the '60s, it falls to an out-of-touch Democrat to preside over this, so a statesmanlike resolution seems unlikely and matters will fall to the frequently less-than-impressive local authorities.  The university authorities also seem fairly clueless as to what to do.  And elections loom.

Any lessons for us?  Well, Starmer is dead set against having the 'official' Labour Party offer any sort of mainstream political outlet for pro-Palestinian sentiment; and the university authorities are fairly clueless ... so we're also in a position where revolting students - in a vastly bigger overall student population than 50-60 years ago - are left to their own devices++.  Oh, and yes, elections loom here, too.

There are many dimensions to this but one that interests me particularly is: how does it play out in the GE?  Will the malcontents all vote for Galloway's party?  The Greens?  I just can't see a political pressure-valve for pro-Palestinian students, or indeed anyone with those sympathies.  Or maybe we find there aren't so many malcontents at all.

The 'traditional' student rebel never wanted a mainstream political outlet anyway, as a matter of pride.  They wanted to hate The Man in all his besuited manifestations.  Maybe, then, they are quietly happy at their rebellious work today, and will just graduate in due course to get on with the rest of their lives.  Could be a few smashed windows in the meantime, however.  Oh, and no statesmanlike resolution from Prime Minister "DPP" Starmer, either.

ND 

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** Oddly, though, the little dears are so permanently petrified (of whom?) that there are key-pad locks on every door, where once everyone came and went as they pleased.  I have various fairly regular contacts with undergraduates and sometimes over a drink they will say - it seems your generation had more fun than we do ..?   I think they are right.  It's sad.

++ I haven't been to Germany for a while but from a distance it looks like many of the same factors are at work there, too.  France?

How does capitalism end?

 We know the answer Marx gave:

1. capital becomes concentrated in the hands of a small number of people;
2. advances in technology, and the drive for profit, leads capitalists to shove ever more of the proletariat into unfulfilling jobs or outright unemployment, and consequently "immiserated";
3. at the same time, advances in technology lead to extraordinary surpluses of material produce;
4. at a certain point (the "extraordinary surpluses" play a very big role in determining the timing), the global proletariat spontaneously and universally intuits that any change whatsoever in political structures would leave them better off ("things can only get better", © N.Kinnock 1992), and this popular mood indeed results in a "revolutionary" end to the (capitalist) political edifice.

Several aspects of this don't meet basic plausibility tests - in particular, why the resulting new political "settlement" would be at all, err, comfortable for anyone, i.e. whether the universal proletarian intuition is in fact correct - but as a sci-fi narrative it stacks up as well as most. 

Well, here's another answer to the 'end of capitalism' question, and it claims rather better scientific credentials than poor old Marx, limited as he was to what he gathered from 1848 Germany, Engels' take on England, and what he could find in the Reading Room at the BM.   They both do claim to have made something scientific out of history.  And, like Marx's version, this narrative reckons to have taken into account various earlier "revolutions" or upheavals - except it claims a vastly greater database.  My precis:

1. some sort of seismic upheaval (think Black Death / massive technological breakthrough) results in a "money-pump" effect: a heretofore middling sector of the community that has been outside the ruling elite suddenly gets very rich, and/or very "qualified" (e.g. they can now all read, or all get university degrees) ;
2. said nouveau riche are now "credentialled" to join the ruling elite - at least, that's how they see it.  But the existing elite doesn't consider there are any vacancies, thank you very much.  So there's "overproduction of elite", an Elite Surplus;
3. the ES, a capable and confident bunch, are pretty pissed off about their being kept away from what they see as their entitlement to get hands on the levers of power, so they work to seize them by Other Means;
4. for this purpose they naturally light upon two strategies, potentially complementary: (a) take over an existing political party; (b) enlist (by way of cannon fodder) the immiserated lower classes, of which there will always be plenty in almost any regime, though their degree of restiveness will clearly vary from time to time;
5. this may sometimes result in a fairly painless transfer of power, but on other occasions will result in something much bloodier. 

Where does this come from?  It's an erudite bloke of Russian extraction called Peter Turchin, who's peddling a new book.  A good interview here, by the redoubtable Aaron Bastani.  

Worth pondering.  I recall discussions we've had here following the 2011 riots, along the lines of: the stroppy British mob has no political leadership - but wait for an officer-class to emerge from the ranks of disaffected, over-educated graduates who can't find the kind of work or wealth they feel they are entitled to.  The Turchin thesis seems to fit this nicely - rather better than Marx's, anyhow.  

Personally, I can take Turchin's as a compelling narrative approach to all manner of historical upheavals, with some genuine explanatory value: BUT without definitive predictive capability.  The difference is, unlike Marx, this guy doesn't seem to be claiming any - which speaks well for him.  (Even better, he's also a big fan of constructive competition.)  Marx, along with most economic forecasters, is all too easily ridiculed for his forecasting failure.  The real reason for laughing at Marx, however, is his claim to have come up with a new Science.

What do the rest of the capitalists here think?  Does Turchin define our imminent demise?  

ND

Political Meltdown

As a political package, Marxism is of course rubbish: but Marx does offer one or two insights that are useful in the abstract.  One of these is the idea that in certain circumstances (we needn't press Marx too hard on what he thought those were) people intuitively grasp that any political change whatsoever would be better than the way things are.

I'd say Liz 'Teenage Tantrum' Truss is entering that territory now.  

It's a tremendous irony that we Conservatives used to say of Corbyn: you can't be having a government like wot he'd have, because the markets would take it down within days.

They'd opened the books on 'next PM' even before KK got the boot.  Oh well, first things first: a new Chancellor.  The idea that Chris Philp should be on anyone's list [Guido] just shows we'd be wrong if we thought one of those Marx moments was already upon us.

ND 

Economics is B.S., and Clever People Haven't a Clue

I'm sorry, but macro economics just ain't a respectable discipline.

Read this long piece from the highly regarded Chris Dillow - manifestly a very smart guy** and admirably balanced in his pronouncements - and tell me any politician has a hope in Hell of figuring out from it what to do next, by way of some kind of logical conclusion.  One the one hand.  On the other.  Maybe.  But, but, but.  Maybe not.

Nope, there's no chance that intelligent people can be expected to agree on how to interpret a given set of facts by the lights of macro economics.

The human condition.  Outside of the hard sciences, smart people see no reason to agree on very much at all.  And then they wonder why people like Corbyn and Johnson get to the top.

ND

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**OK, he says he's a marxist, I know.

Jack Ma & China's Capitalist "Regulatory" Regime

There are several ways of looking at the mighty hiccup just suffered by the great Jack Ma's corporate empire as the Chinese authorities thwart the epic IPO he had scheduled for Ant Financial Services.

 

1.  One in the eye for Chinese dreams of FinTech domination

Not really.  Theirs is a specialist domestic financial sector, and it doesn't depend on Ant, or Ma's other corporate vehicles having free rein.  Word is, the authorities are toying with transition 100% to a virtual currency.  Now that's the big development to be watching for.  (Can it be done?  Much like Xi's Social Credit dream: easy to conjure up over a beer, and to recognise the advantages that would accrue to the CCP - if they could make them happen.  The practical difficulties, however, are legion, and they advantages almost certainly not what they think.  Law of Unintended Consequences looms very large.)

2.  See, the Chinese can't do Due Process

Errr, I think we knew that.  The CCP is quite explicit: it recognises no higher authority, in this world or the next.   So (a) there will always be a lot of business China will never get, for this very reason.  

Then again (b) neither can several other countries do Anglo-style Due Process, e.g. Germany! - as we've discussed here before.  HOWEVER, no end of western companies "who should know better" kow-tow for Chinese business like there's no tomorrow (and I chose that simile with precision).  Marxists always scoff at this: the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will string them up!  Haha.  Yeah, always gets a laugh.

3.  So it's just like Russia, then?

Sort-of, but slicker.  Yes, after a few nervous years in office, Putin got to the point where his terms for the oligarchs were - remember, мои друзья, you cannot overstep the mark I lay down.  The CCP built the whole of its capitalist regime - or rather, stood back and watched its capitalist regime develop spontaneously under the freedoms they rather prudently granted - on the same clear understanding from the very start.  Mr Ma may have been wondering whether he might just be big enough to think otherwise; but ... 

4.  At least no blood was spilled

Now we're getting closer.  How much more civilised, how virtual (virtuous?) to put a spoke in the wheel of an IPO, than to put a bullet in the back of the head.  (But we do know that's in the toolkit too.) 

5.  OK, but not a proper capitalist regime at all

Can't agree.  Capitalism is the human economic activity that thrives whenever and wherever there is space for the ordinary person to profit personally from their own ideas and keep enough of the proceeds to represent personal capital.  No implication whatsoever of unlimited licence.  Works best with Due Process, but works pretty well in less 'formal' frameworks, too.  As the Chinese have proved magnificently over the past 30 years.

6.  Any lessons for us?

Not really; because in both the paradigm economies of the Anglo capitalist model (US and UK), private businesses ultimately operate under the possibility of direct governmental intervention, often with very little resemblance to Due Process.  A brief engagement with the history of the nuclear power sector since it was supposedly 'privatised' will leave you in no doubt on that one: and very many more examples could be adduced.

Oh, and many folk heartily wish our government would also intervene against Due Process earlier and more often.  When it suits them, naturally ...

ND

Capitalist Weekend Reading: China as Capitalist Power

Gotta keep up with what's going down.  Chinese capitalism is a common theme in these two pieces.

1)  Here's a long review of Capitalism on Edge, a book about 'precarity capitalism' (inter alia).  Extract:

... Capitalism itself has moved on, leaving its neoliberal phase behind and the global left-neoliberal critique and prescriptions largely dangling in mid-air ... the large Chinese state-owned corporations and China’s presence on the world stage are unquestionably Galbraithian, focused on market share, learning, new technologies, and improvement of the national capital stock. And so, in important respects, has been the Chinese state, which prizes above all autonomy, predictability, and social stability, and if not always firm control of its banking sector, the willingness to override that sector’s autonomy whenever necessary. China is no democracy, and modern China was built on many epic disasters, including the famine and Cultural Revolution, none of which appeal as models. But that it is a functioning society capable of mobilizing to meet vast challenges has never been clearer than in recent days. And one can say the same of South Korea, and perhaps of Japan, while in Europe Germany is, so far, the best prepared to handle the corona crisis.

What is the source of this resilience? It is not, of course the leadership of a Communist Party, which does not exist in Korea or Japan or Germany. What these societies share is that over four neoliberal decades they maintained their large industrial corporations as going concerns in line with national strategies, along with their productive base and social organization; they did not give everything over to the market. And over those decades, put to the test against the neoliberal corporation dominated by Wall Street, there is no doubt which side won out. The Galbraithian firm fostered and protected by a vigilant state now dominates world markets in most advanced sectors and many that are more modest but no less basic. It is also capable of meeting the challenge of mobilization facing the world in this pandemic...

2)  And here's an article specifically about China, aka 'authoritarian capitalism', coupled with some nervous glances at the EU.  Extract:

... Amidst the turmoil in global financial markets in recent weeks, something unusual has happened. Investors, seeking shelter from the coronavirus-linked sell-off, have piled into Chinese government bonds on an unprecedented scale. These purchases have increased the total foreign ownership of Beijing’s bonds to record highs, even as much of the country is still emerging from lockdown after the viral outbreak. In an ironic twist, the country where the pandemic originated has become an unlikely safe haven for investors – a shift that one prominent trader has described as “the single largest change in capital markets in anybody’s lifetime” ... it would be naïve to assume that China is content to live under dollar dominance forever.

... But those who have spent years dreaming about a world beyond neoliberalism should think twice before popping the champagne. While some may celebrate the arrival of policies that, on the surface at least, involve a greater role for the state in the economy, there remains one problem: there is no evidence that state action inherently leads to progressive social outcomes ... For progressives across the West, the task ahead is enormous. Not only is there a need to respond to the growing dynamism of China’s authoritarian political-economic system, there is a need to do so in a way that strengthens democracy and protects civil liberties at a time when both are increasingly under threat. When economies eventually open up again, the urgency of the climate crisis means that we cannot afford to return to business as usual ... Following the global financial crisis however, it was the authoritarian right, not the progressive left, that managed to gain a foothold in many countries. The same can be said of the Great Depression in the 1930s. As governments struggle to deal with an economic crisis on a scale that could easily surpass both, there are signs that authoritarian forces could stand to benefit once again. In 1848 Karl Marx wrote that ‘A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.’ Today another spectre is haunting the West: its name is authoritarian capitalism.

Enjoy

ND

Boris as Maoist: It's Been Misunderstood

Search on Boris / Maoist and there are plenty of results over several years.  You eventually discover it stems from a David Cameron aside, accusing Gove of being an adherent to the great Chinese variant of Leninism.  Somehow Boris has been swept up in the opprobrium (which is retailed by the Toynbees and Cohens of the Graun-world) and of course now he qualifies as Maoist-in-chief.

It's taken to signify a love of permanent revolution and creative destruction; and maybe that's what Cameron intended, as a colourful label for Gove.  But that's entirely the wrong way to understand Boris-as-Maoist.

Mao was a passable amateur philosopher.  As a Marxist he was in the materialist / naturalist tradition (recognisably Western, by the way) and he was clear that our conceptual, abstract thinking (which he calls 'the subjective') had better correspond with objective reality - a correspondence to be tested in the school of hard knocks - or we are in trouble: liable to bang our heads against brick walls, and (worse) to embrace political heresy.  

This eminently practical (not to say mundane) insistence notwithstanding, he also embraced what some have called 'revolutionary romanticism', a key feature of which is the idea that the subjective can become the objective.  In other words, a conceptual notion (maybe a 'vision') that is compelling enough, and embraced enthusiastically by the masses who then put their shoulders wholeheartedly to the wheel, can thereby alter the conditions of objective reality**. 

Further theorising need not detain us, because my point will be immediately obvious:  Boris pretty much holds the same view.  He's trying it out on us right now! - and in this regard I'd say it's entirely fair to label him a Maoist.

With what chances of success?  The Sino-precedents are mixed.  Beyond a doubt, some of Mao's strategic ventures fall into the category of near-miracles of material transformation being achieved by force of vision, will and large-scale commitment.  The defeat of Chiang Kai-Shek's tanks and aircraft with "rifles and millet" alone; the elimination of endemic starvation across the whole of China; the advance from poor peasant economy to hydrogen bomb-equipped superpower in a very few year spring to mind.  Unfortunately, he also essayed some crackpot notions with equal fervour and mass application, with catastrophic consequences for his own people - innocent deaths numbered in millions.

Perhaps we'd best not dwell on that ...  Go Chairman Boris!

ND

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**There are passages in Lenin which prefigure this: and of course Marx himself said that the point of history was not to understand the world, but to change it.

Lenin Stirs

Not that I'm obsessed with Lenin - just making sure we keep a sensible eye out for relevant historical precedents.

The story so far: the Brexit vote convinced the semi-dormant UK Marxist-Leninist tendency that perhaps the Revolution was just around the corner.  This is because Marx teaches that the Big R comes when the masses intuitively understand that things are so bad for the 99% that Any Change Whatsoever in the political disposition must be for the better.  The referendum, they think, signalled just such a phenomenon.  (We must of course skate lightly over the complete absence of a whole slew of other preconditions stipulated by Marx.  But that's no problem: they've been doing that for 150 years now.)

By dint of the decay of the People's Party, and boosted by May's criminally crass GE campaign of 2017, it happens that a bunch of actual Marxists rule the roost in Labour.  Corbs himself is an idle bastard but there are several, McDonnell being the most prominent, who would seriously fancy their chances as Leninists, the energetic midwives of Revolution, Paul to Marx's Christ.

What signs are we looking for?  Lenin was a tactician of genius, with Wellington's eye for an accurate assessment of a situation, both overall and as things developed dynamically.  Fortune favours the prepared mind - most specifically, when that mind is allied to the ability to identify the moment, seize the moment and execute decisively.  

Lenin prescribed "the strictest loyalty to the ideas of communism [plus] an ability to make all the necessary practical compromises - to tack, make agreements, zigzags, retreats, and so on".  In the run-up to October 1917, he also insisted that the bolsheviks promise the masses everything they wanted - the big stuff: food, land, peace - however undeliverable.  At that very moment (April 1917) the mensheviks and the 'social revolutionaries' (the peasant party) were involving themselves with the first post-Tsar government and were accordingly much more concerned about the practicalities and responsibilities of actually delivering.  Their promises were modest.  Come October and the bolsheviks swept all before them.

We don't need to stretch the facts too much to draw the parallels.  In their first outing in the 2017 manifesto, the Corbynites tried a Big Promise - tuition fees - with evident success; and even bigger ones are presumably in the pipeline, doubtless including the fatuous "zero carbon by 2025".  No shortage of tacking and zigzagging either, with the government on a piece of string over the "Brexit deal negotiations".  (And what are the Tories doing?  Publishing Damian Green's earnest report on financing old-age care with an "old age tax"!)

If this thesis is correct we can expect some truly boggling broad-brush promises in Labour's euro-manifesto, plus of course what everyone has long predicted for the "negotiations" - i.e. complete bad faith.  There might also be some 'agreements' with various of the other greenish-reddish players, but only of the most limited, short-lived, expedient kind.  I'd also guess, though, that the real Leninists (Milne et al) will continue to fortify Corbyn's refusal to back R2, whether or not this does them any good in other respects.

That's the great thing about Leninists.  Once they lock in on whatever they consider really important, they are unwavering.  For all the zig and zag on the periperals and the trivia, there will be some things on which they won't be moved.  They love a good piece of devious treachery; but they also love a good bit of utter intransigence.  "Strictest loyalty."  For good or ill.  Can be a strength: but not always ... 

ND

Who Knows What's Going On?

First of all: if the headline reads like an open invitation to anyone who thinks they do, the BTL Comments section is truly at your disposal!  (And if, after you've survived a few challenges from the C@W readership, you still think you know - you should apply for a job as MSM leader-writer, because they haven't the faintest idea.  Even Guido is just dealing in trivia.) 

Here's how I'd stake out the landscape:

• everyone keeps having the excellent excuse of waiting for the Next Scheduled Event - after which, presumably, they'll understand everything and will doubtless let us know.  Right now that's the Euro Elections and maybe also the Locals.  Who bothers trying to call them?  The only game being played is to tell your own party: "if we don't do X [get rid of May, promise R2, commit to revoking A50, fill in your own heartfelt disideratum here] we'll be wiped out ..."
• there is no sign of leadership.  Anywhere, really.  OK, Starmer and Farage are being a bit more purposeful than most.  But that's about it
• there is no sign of coalition-building.  Around anything.  Every faction seems to think the best tactic is to retain its own purity of position.  (For Corbyn, of course, this means high-principled fence-sitting, which must eventually start to affect the flow of blood to those bollocks of his that the Momentumites so admire)
• rather against my own views on How Things Happen, there isn't much sign of the grown-ups seizing control.  Quite the reverse: the children are happily blocking the streets, metaphorically-speaking on quite a wide scale, as well as at Marble Arch  

Incidentally, for those of the Marxist disposition - or more specifically, Marxist-Leninist - none of this comes as a surprise.  As we've mentioned before, to many of them the current state of affairs closely resembles the backdrop they'd expect to presage the Revolution.  And, famously, Marx offered precious little guidance as to what to do in these circumstances, not least because (a) ultimately he was a library-bound tosser, and (b) he reckoned that the Hand of History would be doing its blind and baleful dialectical thing: no need to be too specific.  It was Lenin who started theorising - and, more importantly, doing something - about What Happens Next.  And, because what he faced in 1917 et seq bore scant relationship in detail to anything Marx had predicted, he was making it up as he ruthlessly went along.

Do we see any candidiates for the role of Lenin?  I am quite sure McDonnell dreams about this - but he doesn't look he part to me.

Have at it in the comments, chaps.

ND

How Does It All End? Weekend Reading

Apocalypse:  SethPDA

Here's something readers of this blog may well wish to grapple with: an intelligent vision of the end of capitalism. by one Wolfgang Streeck.  And he's not giving just the usual 1st-year undergraduate PPE Marxist guff:  as he concludes -

The demise of capitalism is unlikely to follow anyone’s blueprint.

Not for the first time, our recommended reading material comes from the New Left Review.  This one isn't new (it's 4 years old) but I only just came upon it and it's good enough to merit a weekend read.  Some choice extracts: 

Capitalism, as a social order held together by a promise of boundless collective progress, is in critical condition.  Growth is giving way to secular stagnation; what economic progress remains is less and less shared; and confidence in the capitalist money economy is leveraged on a rising mountain of promises that are ever less likely to be kept. On the three frontiers of commodification—labour, nature and money—regulatory institutions restraining the advance of capitalism for its own good have collapsed, and after the final victory of capitalism over its enemies no political agency capable of rebuilding them is in sight ... Capitalism without opposition is left to its own devices, which do not include self-restraint. The capitalist pursuit of profit is open-ended, and cannot be otherwise. The idea that less could be more is not a principle a capitalist society could honour; it must be imposed upon it, or else there will be no end to its progress, self-consuming as it may ultimately be...

Finance is an ‘industry’ where innovation is hard to distinguish from rule-bending or rule-breaking; where the payoffs from semi-legal and illegal activities are particularly high; where the gradient in expertise and pay between firms and regulatory authorities is extreme; where revolving doors between the two offer unending possibilities for subtle and not-so-subtle corruption ... After Enron and WorldCom, it was observed that fraud and corruption had reached all-time highs in the US economy. But what came to light after 2008 beat everything: rating agencies being paid by the producers of toxic securities to award them top grades; offshore shadow banking, money laundering and assistance in large-scale tax evasion as the normal business of the biggest banks with the best addresses; the sale to unsuspecting customers of securities constructed so that other customers could bet against them; the leading banks worldwide fraudulently fixing interest rates and the gold price, and so on. In recent years, several large banks have had to pay billions of dollars in fines for activities of this sort ... minuscule when compared to the banks’ balance sheets—not to mention the fact that all of these were out-of-court settlements of cases that governments didn’t want or dare to prosecute...

What is to be expected, on the basis of capitalism’s recent historical record, is a long and painful period of cumulative decay: of intensifying frictions, of fragility and uncertainty, and of a steady succession of ‘normal accidents’—not necessarily but quite possibly on the scale of the global breakdown of the 1930s.

That'll cheer up your weekend - since there's *ahem* nothing on the telly.  Enjoy.

ND

Marx @ 200: Concluded

So now for an assessment of anything we can salvage from Marx**.

Firstly, he is clearly right that capitalists often seek to establish monopolies.  Maybe all capitalists dream of cornering their markets.  But this is hardly unique to capitalism.  Monarchs since time immemorial have either maintained for themselves, or sold to others, monopolies on all manner of goods, generally with serious profit in mind.  Any intelligent ‘capitalist’ government - and indeed intelligent business people themselves – know this and, for the long-term good of the system, resist it.  (On a personal note I have spent a large part of my commercial career fighting monopolies in the energy sector, and the constant threat of their re-emergence.)  We may agree that, on a cyclical basis perhaps, there are periods in the history of the last 200 years when some pretty baleful monopolies have taken root – often in newly-hatched industries when governments and regulators were not on their guard (e.g petroleum in the Rockefeller era; and various aspects of IT more recently).   But it’s a big stretch to say that capitalism (or any other system harbouring greedy people) moves inevitably towards its own destruction because of this ‘tendency’.

Secondly, Marx’s colourful account of how the Revolution comes about has an exciting narrative flow, with some obvious points of contact with the here-and-now.  With some fairly extreme (though hardly unprecedented) concentrations of wealth forming after a period of relative egalitarianism, and plenty of dramatic developments in automation to be cited, several of the revolutionary preconditions Marx listed could be seen as starting to stack up.  Given the seriousness of what's at stake - and with John McDonnell waiting in the wings, Heaven help us - it behoves us to do a bit more than dismiss it all outright.

But, frankly, Marx's 'decline and fall' prediction has the ring to it of one of the more grandiose science-fiction plots set in a galaxy some little distance away.  One can certainly see some localized issues that may be described under the headings of his preconditions for Revolution – particularly in ‘the west’; and, yes, there’s political turmoil aplenty.  But there have been several even more scary periods of political crisis in the past 150 years.  Technology and automation have been steadily marching forward for centuries, without any manifest self-destructive end-game in sight.  ("Drones predicted to give British economy a £42bn lift by 2030" - from today's Grauniad!)  And – gigantic surpluses?  Wholesale unemployment among the 99%?  Worsening immiseration on a global scale?  Elevate your gaze from parochial worries, you western lefties: a large part of the globe is getting steadily better off!

We are no more compelled to accept Marx’s prediction for how all this ‘inevitably’ plays out, than we are to buy Plato’s account of how “tyranny naturally arises from democracy”.  We can, in the spirit of heeding the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come, find the respective accounts salutary, and hopefully recognize the potential dangers being described - so as to avoid them by adroit political actions.  But there is no obvious reason to accept any of Marx’s forecasts as being preordained.  (Quite the reverse: the history of capitalism has been one of endless surprises, mutations and adaptability, to the dismay of embittered lefties. As the more-or-less-marxist American philosopher Brian Leiter acknowledges: “Marx misjudged the smarts of the capitalist class”.  It’s worth noting also that marxists’ belief that history is on their side can be a major psychological weakness, since it gives them an excuse for taking their feet off the pedal just when they may be in danger of nosing ahead.  I have long thought that one of the reasons the Soviets didn’t come across the IGB at their point of maximum pre-Reagan military advantage – pace Mr BQ - was that the risk seemed altogether disproportionate when they ‘knew’ it would all come their way eventually in any case.)

Finally, and for me the most interesting, we come to Marx’s thesis that wage-slaves can be (and maybe mostly are) fundamentally deluded about what’s really going on as regards both their own exploitation and their best economic and human interests.  In this, he is adding to a characteristically C19th strand of new(ish) thinking emanating most notably from Nietzsche, Marx himself and Freud.  These Germanic gentlemen all surmised that in important ways we have reasons to be systematically suspicious about what people say – and indeed what they actually believe - about themselves and their own feelings, drivers, reasons, motives etc.  Each thinker has a different angle, and they are all well worth considering.  Freud emphasizes the importance of ‘suppressed’ sexual drives and childhood experiences.  Nietzsche is difficult to summarise but, in just a few words, reckons that what we might term the articulated conscious is, for complex reasons he discusses at great length, a systematically warped version of what is ‘really going on inside’.

And Marx, of course, thinks that the ‘false’ consciousness of the proletariat has been systematically moulded to suit the economic and survival interests of a manipulative capitalist class, aimed in particular towards a compliant quietism amongst the workers in the face of their own growing misery.  (Personally, I suggest that underpinning all of these three accounts in their Victorian context is the work of Darwin, establishing the idea of blind, unconscious processes affecting the fates of organisms and species, ‘whatever they think is happening’.  Marx explicitly acknowledged Darwin’s contribution to his own thinking: his work “is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle”.)

Darwin aside, though, just how new is Marx’s economic determinism as it impacts subliminally on individuals and classes?  There are clear pre-echoes in Adam Smith (another authority recognized by Marx), for example when he writes that “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest” – however much the butcher may protest to his customers, or indeed to himself, of a higher purpose (or “mission”, as so many companies these days fatuously term their commercial motivation) behind his business endeavours. 

We can accept Marx’s far-ranging social-psychological insight on these matters at face value, without imagining he has come up with the most profound, innovative or definitive contribution on the subject.  It isn't the preserve of lefties to be caustic about Rupert Murdoch, or the BBC, or any other agency seeking to throw a warm suffocating blanket over honest efforts to see the truth prevail, whether those efforts be directed towards economic relationships or anything else an ‘establishment’ would choose to deflect attention from.

So: an interesting thinker, is old Karl - but the aspects of his voluminous output that survive critical review are not particularly, ahem, revolutionary.  Nor does his fame rest upon those; but rather, on the overblown 'scientific' political predictions he makes that are such tosh, so gratifying and stimulating for all manner of bitter social malcontents, and that have made him a quasi-religous cult figure. 

We may yet, however, have to suffer once more from his baleful cult.   

ND 

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**If it seems a bit rich to summarise in a few paragraphs the work of a man that some spend their whole lives studying - then take a look at Don Cox's comment on yesterday's thread ...

Weekend Essay: Marx @ 200

May 2018 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Karl Marx.   Not so many years ago, just about the only mention you’d find of the man was in Marxism Today edited for decades by Martin Jacques. Nowadays of course Marx has a serious revival, nay, a positive vogue.   Lefties from John McDonnell, Paul Mason, Little Owen Jones, all the way to Brian Leiter and Chris Dillow – are pleased to associate themselves to a greater or lesser extent with the bearded one. 

So – given C@W’s declared interest in Kapital, what do we think?  Marx 1.01 starts nicely with his opening paean to capitalism.   “What did the capitalists ever do for us?”  He had a fulsome answer for that and credited capitalism with relieving the western world from the horrors of the peasant way of life.  Plus a whole lot more achievements and public goods besides – science, technology, enlightenment, the lot. 

From this perceptive and auspicious start, he headed off in two directions: some absolute dead-ends, and some useful insights. It’s not hard to be dismissive of several of his most famous themes: the ‘labour theory of value’; his historical determinism and belief in ‘dialectical materialism’ as a science (taken from Hegel, always a risky move); and of course his view on the timing of the Revolution - like early Christians and the Second Coming, he saw it as being pretty imminent. (This latter error indicates in turn that he was not at all capable of good judgement regarding the implications and outworkings of his own theories: he should have recognised that the pre-conditions he laid down were nowhere near being met in C19th.) 

For all his overblown theorizing and system-building, there is no merit in throwing the insights out with the turgid bathwater. I would highlight two, before getting back to the good old Revolution again.  

The first is a matter of social psychology.  Marx identified the phenomenon whereby capitalism’s wage-slaves fundamentally fail to recognize what’s really going on as regards both their own exploitation and their best interests.  There could be a lot of factors at work here but the main interest for Marx is how the ruling class reinforces its own interests by instituting a popular culture to mislead the workers systematically, and neutralize discontent.  “Religion is the opiate of the people” is perhaps the simplest way of summarizing a diagnosis that extends more broadly than religion, of course.  Another important coinage is “false consciousness” which bears reading up on, and to which we will return.  And, bridging the first and second insights, he also describes the “alienation” of the worker from his true humanity and potential.  

The second interesting strand of observation, then, is a view on how capitalism evolves in terms of a cluster of market dynamics. Capitalism tends to foster monopolies and concentrations of ownership.  At the same time, it leads to ever greater technological advances, not least in the means of production and, importantly, automation; so that it is capable of generating the most extraordinary surpluses of goods with an ever smaller workforce.  But the flipside of this impressive coin is that the 99% become ever more alienated, immiserated and – perhaps most problematically for the 1% - impoverished, so that ultimately there is no-one left to sell all that superabundant stuff to.  Capitalism sows the seeds of its own downfall.

So where does Marx think this all ends – and how?  Well, Revolution of course: but the precise answer is quite important.  Recall that, thanks to religion, false consciousness etc, the workers don’t actually have a good grasp of what’s really going on.  Nevertheless, driven by their increasing misery, they eventually intuit - I think we are invited to see this in a Darwinian kind of way as a broadly unconscious evolutionary process - that (i) the 1%-99% split of ownership is so extreme, and (ii) the surplus of productive capacity and stuff is so great, that (iii) any change whatsoever in the socio-political set-up must leave them better off than they are at that point in time.  With the added rider that Marx anticipated this would happen globally all at the same time, this folks is the Revolution. 

The final Marxist kicker is that all this is absolutely inevitable under his supposed ‘science’ of the direction of human history.  It’s not difficult to see how attractive this is to a certain kind of Murdoch-despising malcontent, and how easily it translates into an ideology for a bitter, revanchist political programme. 

Tomorrow, assuming the Revolution isn't set for the Bank Holiday, I’ll come back with some thoughts towards putting all this heady stuff into context, and offer my own humble evaluation.  In the meantime, with the caveat that Blogger has changed some of its functions post GDPR - Comments is open …

ND

Tory Trainwreck: A Modest Insight

Much as I try to banish negative thoughts at the weekend, it is pretty hard not to catch oneself musing on the unedifying spectacle of senior Tories participating in the slow-motion trainwreck that is Theresa May's decline and fall.  What good do they imagine will come of their bitching and backstabbing?  Is it not weakening the Brexit negotiations?  Are they not conscious of the prospect of handing over the whole shop to the marxists-in-waiting?  Can they not imagine what irreversible damage could be wreaked by McDonnell in just a year?  Who would wish to go down in history as being instrumental in that?

Then something came back to me: perhaps obvious, but (IMHO) enlightening in its stark simplicity.  Years ago I came across a quotation - that inevitably I now can't find** - from a senior politician of the 19th(?) Century which ran roughly as follow:  to be Prime Minister of Great Britain for even a single day!  Did ever a Roman emperor of old wield even one tenth of the power? 

That captures a particular world-view rather neatly, and it occurs to me that the problem resolves to this: there are enough shameless politicos for whom it is their one and only guiding light, so that they will risk any amount of collateral damage to achieve it.  So what if it lasts only a month?  That it ends in utter catastrophe?  That their name will be dirt forever?  They will have had their 'single day'; and that reviled name will at least forever be on the roll of Prime Ministers of Great Britain.

It's even better (or worse) than that.  There is so much time before the putative 2022 GE, they might get hundreds of days!  And in such a long time, Something May Turn Up!  It's a no-brainer - what's not to like?!

The will to power (© F.Nietzsche 1883) is so powerful that for people like this, no further details are required.  As Robert Redford's newly-elected President asks in the closing sequence of The Candidate:

"What do we do now?"  Then the media throng arrives to drag them out, and he never receives an answer.

ND

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 ** a small prize for anyone who can turn it up


UPDATE:  reader Carl Edman has turned up the quotation
  - it was Melbourne,  see comments below.  Good man! - he can come again.

Energy Price Cap. *Sighs*

We begin in History Corner.

I started my career in energy when of all the great sources of energy, only oil was broadly a free-market commodity - in between price-interventions by OPEC.  Gas and electricity were produced & sold under various monopsony/monopoly arrangements around the world (with the honourable, and at the time rather quirky exception of Norway, where plentiful hydro-power made wholesale trading easy).  Nobody gave this much thought: and, interestingly, there were academic accounts of why gas and electricity couldn't - as a purely technical matter - be traded in open, competitive markets.

Well, as with much a priori reasoning, this sounded logical but was utterly wrong.  Propelled mostly by the vision (+ willpower + implementational skills) of the mighty Enron, *ahem*, it was triumphantly proved that you can trade natural gas (it's much more difficult than for 'conventional' commodities, but still possible) and electricity (staggeringly difficult, but still possible).  

Resistance to this movement was universal across the globe - there were a lot of very powerful vested interests defending the extremely comfortable status quo, and the sums of money involved are stupendous.  All the way through the nay-sayers declared that not only was competition in gas and electricity a Bad Thing, it was (contrary to the ever-growing body of evidence) technically impossible.  The Germans and the French were prominent in this resistance; but the European Commission, completely captive in this instance to British policy (sic), ground them into submission as only the EC can and, twenty years on and many tantrums later, there we have it.  Even the collapse of Enron along the way didn't halt the remorseless spread of energy market opening - gas, power, coal, carbon, wood pellets, ... (Incidentally, the Chinese have seen all this and want the efficiency gains it brings: they now plan to break the entrenched regional electricity monopolies in their country, too - but let's not hold our breath on this one.)   

*  *  *  *  *

Having been active in both gas and electricity for the whole of the epic transition to competitive markets (which, incidentally, has very successfully shaken vast amounts of wasted capital out of the system), I confidently assumed we were on a one-way trip to global market opening, and that it would see out my career.  Little Ed Miliband's silly idea of throwing a price-cap into the works was, surely, a passing stupidity.  And although the old, unreconstructed CEGB types (and their friends in the unions) were still there in the shadows dreaming of nationalisation and monopolistic glories, well they could safely be ignored.  Hey, it'd be against the Lisbon Treaty!

Well.  What did I know?  Roll on 2017 and a 'Conservative' PM is limbering up for a price cap, and our Marxists-in-waiting plan to exploit Brexit by nationalising everything in sight, most specifically including gas and electricity - moves, we are told, which would be popular! 

We haven't got time for the Marxists here.  Let's just say on the price cap:  hey, remember the university fees cap?  How £9,000 p.a. was to be top whack which only a handful of the very most exalted establishments would be able to charge?  And how there'd be a great and imaginative diversity of different, cheaper uni-packages on offer below that level?  

And what happened?  Yup: the maximum becomes the universal.  There is no competition on price whatsoever.

The rot is truly setting in.  We'll no doubt be returning to the rest of the coughing and spluttering from the Manchester podium over the coming days: but this particular piece of nonsense will serve as a neat exemplar of the tremendous shifting in the terms of political discourse that has only just started.  It comes to something when I start pining for the Lisbon Treaty ...

ND

MasonWatch

I haven't suddenly developed a paranoia about the denizens of Great Queen Street.

Nor a fixation with Paul of that ilk.  But I do find him a very interesting character with a lot of fascinating stuff to offer, re-hashed marxism and all.  He's clearly wrestling mightily and imaginatively with the 21st century in all its turbulent novelty: and he's also (like George Monbiot / unlike Polly Toynbee) the sort of leftie who cannot dodge the need to admit when some thesis he's adopted has clashed with the Facts and is plain wrong.

And now he's joined Momentum! (another phenomenon that interests me a lot).  This may be a mixed blessing for them, because he's already telling them exactly what to do, at some length.

Well, that's their problem, I am sure they will enjoy the dialectic process.  However, for anyone disagreeing with the above assessment of the man, have a read of Postcapitalism and the city.  Or Find each other and act! 12 principles for a neo-Bevanite left.**  When you get a minute.  Or two.

ND 
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**he does rather enjoy telling people what to do ...

UPDATE:  someone else is interested in Mason, too 

Jeremy, Karl and their Little Friends

Some more musings over just how potentially revolutionary is the situation that may be brewing in the triumphant Corbyn / McDonnell / Momentum camp, as clearly lots of their fan-base believe it is.

Let's start with little Paul Mason, tipped to be a major force in the renewed Corbyn leadership team.  An unabashed marxist, Mason has spent much of the post-2008 period eagerly spotting revolutionary straws in the wind all over the northern hemisphere - but at the same time, as a good journo with at least some regard for the facts, he's been fairly honest in reporting just how disappointing it often turns out to be.  In his more sober moments he even thinks modern youth movements don't actually have what it takes - stamina, attention, focus, discipline, commitment etc - which must indeed be pretty disappointing (particuarly for an old stalinist like McDonnell).   Still, hope springs eternal and Mason's hoping.

So.  Let's rehearse what Marx actually said.  Drawing a kindly veil over his labour theory of value, we should recall he gave a cracking account of the superiority of capitalism over all that went before and, in socio-political terms, warned of the potential dangers of gross and accelerating inequalities in society: inequalities which, he reckoned, were an inevitable long-term outworking of capitalism.  There are plenty today, including many who are not remotely marxist in outlook, who'd agree with him on the dangers, if not the inevitability.

Marx then went on to blow his credibility for most people by concluding that the conditions he asserted were necessary and sufficient for the Revolution to happen, were already present in the 19th century.  That, coupled with the history of the century that followed (when the only instances of 'communist revolution' occurred in agrarian societies! - not at all what Marx envisaged) pretty much scuppered him in polite society long before the 21st century came around.

His conditions for revolution?  That the working class becomes so impoverished - not just relative to the "1%" but in absolute, subsistence-level, on-the-breadline terms - and, at the same time, capitalism becomes so dramatically productive and generates so much surplus wealth, that the workers grasp intuitively that any change in political power whatsoever would leave them better off.  Oh, and that this will happen at the global, not national level.

There are one or two compelling reasons why we ain't there just yet - not while the workshop of capitalism is managed by the Chinese 'Communist' Party! - whatever the average Momentum supporter hopes or believes.  Their own theory, for those that have any political theory, condemns them as bourgeois dilletantes.  Coincidentally, many less theoretically-inclined observers have reached the same conclusion: idle middle-class w*nk*rs.

Which brings us to little Owen Jones who, to do him credit, is also showing signs of Monbiot-Mason syndrome, i.e. on a good day he feels obliged to notice the truth.  He wants to believe: oh, how he wants to believe!  From the Graun:

After his victory last year, Corbyn’s acceptance speech was criticised for having little to say about reaching out to the country as a whole. Not this time. He was passionate in his calls for unity: “We’re part of the same Labour family,” as he put it. No retribution, no bitterness. He made it clear that Labour was in it to win, would take it to the Tories and focus on developing a compelling alternative. He looked like a leader.

But 

The Labour movement now brims with anger, mutual distrust and looming internecine warfare ... if this fury is unchecked, then Labour will implode as a political force. 

  What can be done to keep the show on the road? 

Hope for the future lies with critical friends of the Labour leadership. They will be attacked by all sides. The uncompromising anti-Corbyn wing will see them as naive accomplices of electoral oblivion. The most ardent leadership loyalists will see them as naive capitulators to saboteurs who will never accept a left-led Labour party. In such a polarised atmosphere, nuance is regarded as flip-flopping, fence-sitting, standing in the middle of the road and being hit by traffic in both directions, to paraphrase Nye Bevan. But whatever derision they face, critical friends are pivotal to both the survival and success of the left in general, and Labour in particular ... Critical friends are critical not because they want the left to fail. They are desperate for it to succeed. Ignoring challenges and problems, and pretending when things go wrong that it is always the media and the parliamentary party to blame, will lead to terrible defeat.

I think we may safely guess who's volunteering to be the critical-friend-in-chief.  Well, the way you put it, it sounds like a really tough gig Owen - but someone has to do it, eh?  But that does rather imply he's no longer to be counted among the ranks of the faithful.  And it's only been going a year.  Maybe not the revolution, after all.

ND