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Mark Alexander Jul. 26, 2017

Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition. Thomas Jefferson (1781)

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), still reeling from the electoral thrashing put on them by Donald Trump and the Republicans last November, announced a major charade this week. Their Democrat Party is, once again, attempting to reboot and rebrand itself into something its not.

The party is adopting a new slogan for its policy props, A Better Deal. Yes, its a cheap knock-off of Franklin Roosevelts 1933 New Deal slogan and is an updated do-over of FDRs failed socialist policies while cloaking them in the language of Donald Trumps middle class appeal.

Barack Obama used FDRs model to buy two presidential elections, so why not try it again? So what if the Democrats last grand national experiment with centralized statist policies, the so-called Great Society, was also an abysmal failure. All thats important to Pelosi, Schumer and the rest of their party is a return to power. And if they can fool enough people at the ballot box with false promises based on economic centralization and wealth redistribution, theyll accomplish their mission.

Of course, the best contemporary case study in the failure of Democrat regulatory schemes is the so-called Affordable Care Act ObamaCare or whats left of it today.

According to Schumer, When you lose an election with someone who has 40% popularity, you look in the mirror and say, What did we do wrong? And the number one thing that we did wrong is we didnt tell people what we stood for. A bold, sharp-edged message, platform [and] policy that talks about working people and how the system is rigged against them is going to resonate.

Actually, Id argue that the number one thing the Democrats got wrong was Hillary Clinton. And Id also argue that people knew exactly what her party stood for.

Schumer hopes the new message will resonate because it will include some proposals (plagiarized from language in Trumps playbook) that are quite different than the Democratic Party you heard in the past [when] we were too namby-pamby. (I suspect the last Democrat leader to use the term namby-pamby was FDR.)

The full focus-grouped slogan is A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future, and it includes a list of 26 populist promises. However, no Better Deal list can be found on the Democrat Party website because not all Democrats are on board.

Talking about 26 separate issues before an election to an electorate is overwhelming, said Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-CA), vice chair of the House Democratic Caucus. You have to punch through the clutter of what everyone else is saying.

Fact is, the new and improved Better Deal will prove to be nothing more than all the previous Democrats socialist Raw Deals over the past century.

How do I know?

The first clue is that its being promoted by Democrats. Dead giveaway.

But the second clue, the more substantive one, would be a century of failed socialism that has left hundreds of millions of victims in its worldwide wake of devastation and destruction.

On November 7th, Sen. Bernie Sanders and his socialist legions of misinformed millennial serfs across the nation, who were all sandbagged by the Democrat Party in 2016 to clear a path for Hillary Clinton, will be celebrating the 100-year anniversary of the Great Socialist Revolution of 1917.

Thats the date when Vladimir Lenins band of Bolsheviks overtook the Russian Provisional Government in Petrograd, which led to the establishment of the Soviet Union in 1922 and the vision for the spread of socialist communism worldwide. And indeed it did metastasize.

The USSRs horrific Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist state endured until the mid 1980s, when the last of its socialist dictators, Mikhail Gorbachev, implemented dramatic economic reforms through his free-enterprise glasnost and perestroika policies. It was an effort to avert a complete socialist meltdown.

Gorbachev attempted to head off the total collapse of the Soviet Union after Ronald Reagan helped him see the light. But it was too little, too late, and as President Reagan was leaving office in 1989, the Soviets Eastern European satellite states were being overthrown by democracy movements. When Gorbachev resigned from what was left of the USSR in 1991, it reconstituted itself as the Russian Federation.

(Begin Sarcasm) Notably, the Federation is now headed by Donald Trumps best buddy and biggest campaign booster, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. According to socialist Democrats in our country, in collusion with their mainstream media propaganda machine, Putin managed to win the 2016 election for Trump. (End Sarcasm)

More than 25 years since the USSRs collapse, the Federations economy is largely dependent on energy exports, antiquated industry and struggling service sectors. It will take many more years to build a healthy economy on the toxic trash heap of Soviet socialism.

For those of us who were on the ground in the former USSR, and then again after 1990 assisting early Federation reformers, the devastation of 70 years of socialism was and remains apparent in every corner of every quarter of the former Soviet states.

But the socialists now heading the Democrat Party here in the U.S. are either in complete denial about the consequences of the state-planned and regulated economy they seek to implement, or blinded by their own insatiable quest for power.

These party leaders, who label anyone questioning their socialist climate change agenda science deniers, are themselves socialism deniers.

While Sovietologists and Sinologists can explain the historic consequences of socialism in Russia and China (and its puppet state, North Korea) in great detail, any amateur observer with an ounce of acumen can discern those consequences unfolding in real time in what was once the most prosperous nation on the South American continent, Venezuela.

Three short years ago, the Leftmedia proclaimed that Venezuela was socialist Hugo Chavezs economic miracle.

Recall how Bernie Sanders proclaimed, The American dream is more apt to be realized in Venezuela, adding, Whos the banana republic now?

Well, while I appreciate the fact that Bernie is the only Democrat honest enough to call himself a socialist, he is now eating heaping helpings of crow as more than 30 million Venezuelan men, women and children starve while Feelin the Bern of the unfettered socialism he advocated.

I dare Bernie, or any of his mindless millennials who embrace the profoundly ignorant opinion that socialism works, to vacation in Venezuelas now-imploding capital of Caracas. (Travel tip: Bring your own toilet paper.) And while there, they might want to try the newest weight-loss fad, the Venezuelan diet! If they hurry, maybe they can get there by Sunday, in time for Chavezs socialist successor, Nicolas Maduro, to impanel his fake constituent assembly for rubber-stamping his socialist policy directives.

Ignorance is bliss at least until you run out of toilet paper.

Make no mistake, Democratic Socialism, like Nationalist Socialism, is nothing more than Marxist Socialism repackaged. It seeks a centrally planned economy directed by a dominant-party state that controls economic production by way of taxation, regulation and income redistribution, and control of public opinion by way of its mainstream media propaganda machine. The rise of Democratic Socialism therefore depends upon supplanting Liberty the rights endowed by our Creator primarily by denying that such an endowment even exists.

After the defeat of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi (National Socialist German Workers Party) regime, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill observed, Socialism is the philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy. Its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.

Four decades later, as the USSR was on the verge of collapse, Ronald Reagan observed, Throughout the developing world, people are rejecting socialism because they see that it doesnt empower people, it impoverishes them.

His contemporary, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, keenly summed up the problem with socialism: Socialist governments always run out of other peoples money.

Sound familiar?

(Footnote: On the subject of socialist problems, I invite you to listen to an interview with my friend, noted economist Thomas DiLorenzo, on his new book, The Problem with Socialism.)

Semper Vigilans Fortis Paratus et Fidelis Pro Deo et Libertate 1776

More:
The Socialism Deniers and the 'Better Deal' - Patriot Post

The New York Times reported at the beginning of 2017 that George Orwells 1984 is suddenly a best-seller. Prof. Stefan Collini, of the University of Cambridge, explained to the NYT that readers saw a natural parallel between the book and the way Mr. Trump and his staff have distorted facts.

Since Orwell is back en vogue, its appropriate to remind readers that he liked socialism a lot more than he liked the common run of socialists. In The Road to Wigan Pier Orwell writes, there is the horriblethe really disquietingprevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words Socialism and Communism draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, Nature Cure quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

I had no opportunity to examine members of the Socialist Party of Maine during its founding convention on July 16, so I have no idea how closely the cranks meeting in Augustas Viles Arboretum corresponded to Orwells distressed description. Almost fifty years of associating with socialists of one variety or another, however, inclines me to suspect some resemblances. The vegetarians, sandal-wearers, nudists, and birth-control fanatics have pretty much fused with the climate-control fanatics and associated eco-weirdos. And, when we substitute Democratic Party grafters for those Labour Party crawlers, we see there hasnt been much change across eighty years of history and three thousand miles of ocean.

Despite this, their meeting was a success. The Socialist Party of Eastern Maine was officially amalgamated with the Socialist Party of Southern Maine, creating the Socialist Party of Maine. I must leave it to the entomologists to distinguish the Socialist Party of Maine from the Maine Democratic Socialists of America, the Working Families Party, the Loafing Families Party, Millennials for Revolution, the Communist Party of Maine, the Green Independent Party, the Trotskyist Party, the Trotskyite Party, the Maine Peoples Alliance, the Progressive Alliance and all the other progressive sectarians, living or dead. Ive gotten too old and slow to keep up myself.

Tom MacMillan, who helped organize the convention, explained the Socialist hopes and dreams. Because we believe in democratic socialism, we take both the democratic and the socialism very seriously. In their workplaces that means promoting worker-owned cooperatives. Thats a good example. Democracy at work, democracy at the ballot box, and democracy in society. We think that regular people can control their lives better than their bosses can or by the owners of big companies.

With a little help from cryptanalysis and free-ranging intuition, Ive deduced from MacMillans remarks that regular people will use their democratic power to give themselves fair wages, affordable health care, education, food and housing for all, and ranked-choice voting. The Regulars will pay for these beautiful things by taxing irregular people (also known as the wealthy).

I cant say whether MacMillan is addicted to fruit juice and sandals, but he seems to fit the socialist profile in other important respects. His works and days have run along lines remote from those of most Regulars. Theres no evidence that he has ever contributed to the material wealth he wants to redistribute. Although he learned how to run Americas economy, culture and society in college, he has no record of running anything.

Despite MacMillans thin resume, hes worth a paragraph or two. He equipped himself to transform American society by earning a B.A. in International Development and Social Change eight years ago. He served as Secretary of the Maine Green Independent Party Steering Committee. He ran on the Green ticket for the Maine House of Representatives in 2012 and 2014. He was endorsed for election by the Maine Peoples Alliance (MPA), the New Progressive Alliance, and the Maine Education Association (MEA).

The connections are more interesting than the man. The Socialist Party of Maine may back candidates against Democratic Party nominees and incumbents, and the MPA and MEA may choose to back the occasional socialist while reserving almost all of their endorsements for Democrats. All these factions and fractions have one unifying project: The enlargement of government power.

All these varieties of big government cultists are surely sincere when they praise democracy, but they all harbor a covert conviction that democracy is too important to be left to the people.

Continued here:
What do Maine's socialists know about working Maine? - The Maine Wire

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Izquierda Revolucionaria, the Socialist Party's co-thinkers in Spain, joined half a million others to march in Madrid on International Women's Day, photo CWI (Click to enlarge)

This historic unification has a clear material basis in the profound change in the class struggle internationally opened up by the world capitalist crisis which began in 2008 and which still rages today.

Such periods of sharp change and turmoil are invariably also reflected in developments in the workers' movement and the left, including the revolutionary left - resulting in splits, realignments and fusions - as ideas, organisations and tendencies are put to the test.

It is our common understanding of, and response to this new period and agreement on the method of how to intervene in it and the central tasks it poses for the working class and Marxism, which is the basis for our unification.

The capitalist crisis is deep and intractable. None of the attempts of the world's ruling classes to deal with it have brought a solution any closer or re-established the system's lost equilibrium. On the contrary, they have stored up the potential for new crises and conflicts.

The world economic crisis of over-production, characterised by a crisis of investment and chronic lack of demand in the world economy, is no closer to being resolved than at the moment of its outbreak.

The trillions of dollars injected into the world economy in the form of 'quantitative easing' have not had anywhere near the desired results, in resuscitating either investment or demand.

Far from representing a new motor for world growth as hoped for by many capitalist commentators, the last phase of the crisis has seen the so-called 'emerging' economies - with China at the head - drawn into the maelstrom of the world crisis.

The global strike of capital investment paints a clear picture of the obstacle which private ownership of wealth and means of production, together with the nation state, represents for the development of the world economy.

The crisis has already resulted in profound changes in the moods and outlook of all classes, most significantly among the working class, young and oppressed peoples around the world.

Marxists predicted at the onset of the crisis that it would usher in a period of revolution and counter-revolution, and this has been the tenor of events since then. From the revolutionary upheavals of the "Arab Spring" in 2011, to mass movements against austerity and the current social rebellion against Trumpism in the USA's urban centres, the period has been marked by the increasing entry of the masses onto the scene of history.

This has been accompanied by a polarisation in society with a shift to the left in political consciousness and also, as a result of the bankruptcy of reformism and the traditional bourgeois parties, an electoral growth of the far right.

Socialist Party general secretary Peter Taaffe addressing the unity congress, photo by JB (Click to enlarge)

The development of new left parties and formations, like Podemos in Spain, France Insoumise (led by Jean Luc Melenchon) etc, together with the mass left movements around Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, are powerful - though complex and unfinished - expressions of this.

These new left formations and movements are contradictory and volatile, reflecting the nature of the period which has given birth to them.

Our role is to intervene energetically in these processes, while at the same time audaciously and openly defending a socialist, class-struggle based programme.

While building our own revolutionary organisation, we work to assist the development of these formations into new mass parties of the working class armed with a revolutionary alternative to capitalism.

A new era of opportunities for revolutionary change has opened up. CWI sections in the USA and Ireland have already played leading roles in mass working class movements which have won important victories (water charges in Ireland and $15 Now in US). The members of Izquierda Revolucionaria, in the leadership of the Sindicato de Estudiantes (students union - SE) waged a victorious battle against the "revalidas" (education counter-reforms) in the Spanish state which has consolidated the SE as a fighting point of reference in the struggle against austerity.

These victories show our ability to engage with the masses and, in certain circumstances, to become a real factor in the situation, which sets our organisations apart from other Marxist organisations.

Our unification is rooted in a broad agreement on the perspectives for world capitalism and the tasks which arise for Marxists. However, it is reflected in much more than this.

Our mutual experience of discussing and fighting side-by-side has revealed an agreement not only in ideas and perspectives, but in strategy, tactics, programme and orientation. As Lenin said, without revolutionary ideas there is no revolutionary movement. But equally, ideas and theory without practice are blind.

Our revolutionary international and sections have a clear orientation to intervene in the mass struggles, trade union and political organisations of the working class. We also maintain the principle of the political and organisational independence of the revolutionary party.

Flexibility in tactics, coupled with principled political and programmatic firmness, is a hallmark of our shared political roots and method.

We fight to occupy the front line in the struggle against all forms of oppression, uniting the working class and all the oppressed around a perspective of socialist change.

The CWI, together with our new comrades in IR, is an international Marxist force with a real base among workers and youth in a number of key countries.

Juan Ignacio Ramos, IR general secretary, speaking at the rally, photo Natalia Medina (Click to enlarge)

The international rally on 19 July organised by IR and the CWI was a huge success. More than 600 workers, youth and activists from both organisations and the wider left packed the main hall of the Cocheras de Sants, Barcelona. There was an electric atmosphere, in defence of the October 1917 revolution and Marxist internationalism.

Speakers were: Ana Garcia the general secretary of the Sindicato de Estudiantes (SE - students union), Paul Murphy, Solidarity TD (MP) in the Irish Republic; Juan Ignacio Ramos general secretary of Izquierda Revolucionaria; Peter Taaffe, general secretary of the Socialist Party and Kshama Sawant, Socialist Alternative councillor in Seattle, USA.

In two hours they covered a broad scope of issues from the October revolution to the class struggle today. All of the speakers emphasised the extraordinary legacy of Bolshevism, the ideas of Lenin and Trotsky and their relevance in the fight for a socialist world today.

The banner of the October revolution is for us a guide to action. When the workers and youth of Russia took power they showed in deeds and not only in speeches that it really is possible to change reality and bring down capitalism.

There were also references to the collapse of the USSR and the Stalinist regimes in eastern Europe, which gave way to a vicious capitalist counterrevolution.

At that time, capitalists internationally cried victory and the leaderships of the traditional left organisations, the old communist parties and social democracy, as well as the trade unions, turned sharply to the right and accepted the creed of neoliberalism.

But in the middle of the storm of reaction and of abandonment of struggle, Marxists resisted. We knew that the apparent triumph of capitalism would be temporary and that a new crisis would dispel all illusions

All speakers underlined how, starting ten years ago, world capitalism is living through its worst recession since 1929.

Conditions determine consciousness, as Karl Marx said. The crisis accelerated all the processes of the class struggle and led to an upturn in struggle.

The consciousness of millions of workers and especially youth has advanced, together with social polarisation. Capitalism has been thrown into a period of uncertainty and pessimism.

But the experience of these years has also shown that if we want real change, rhetoric and speeches are not enough.

The example of Greece is conclusive. Left party Syriza and its leader Tsipras had the backing of the working people. But Tsipras lacked a revolutionary policy, accepted the logic of the capitalist system and capitulated shamelessly to the 'Troika' (group of capitalists), applying its austerity.

Kshama Sawant speaking in Barcelona, 19.7.17, photo by JB (Click to enlarge)

Kshama Sawant explained the work of Socialist Alternative in Seattle - the successful campaign for $15 an hour, and the big mobilisations built, together with others, against Trump's reactionary policies.

Kshama explained how to use an elected position to raise the level of organisation and consciousness. The same applies to Paul Murphy in the struggle against water charges - which provoked a brutal response by the state.

However, the Socialist Party (CWI in Ireland) organised with others a mass campaign against the criminalisation of protest, which managed to defeat this attack and achieve a 'not guilty' verdict for all defendants in the biggest political trial for a generation.

Peter Taaffe explained the main ideas of Bolshevism, underlining the importance of the existence of a revolutionary party to transform society completely. This is the central task of the epoch: building revolutionary parties all over the world, through patient intervention in the class struggle and in the new political phenomena which arise as a consequence of the crisis of the system and of social democracy.

Ana Garcia focussed on the key role of young people in all the events we have seen in Spain. The children of the crisis see that this system has nothing to offer them. They have been the spinal column of the social rebellion which has held the minority Popular Party government in check.

Ana explained how the Sindicato de Estudiantes has played a leading role in this battle with 25 general strikes in schools and universities against the government which is the inheritor of Francoism.

Millions of youth want a deep and radical change but this change cannot be achieved by respecting the logic of capitalism. This is why the SE defends the ideas of Marxism and Bolshevism.

Borja Latorre and Juan Ignacio Ramos both spoke in defence of the right of self-determination in Catalonia. For IR, the Catalan people have the right to decide, and this should not be conditional on the state accepting it. This right must be won by mobilisation and mass struggle.

We cannot subordinate ourselves to the Catalan bourgeoisie, right-wing nationalists like PDeCat, who are champions of cuts and repression. We fight for a socialist Catalonia, a socialist republic, to unite the forces of the workers and youth of Catalonia with those of the rest of the Spanish state, to win real democracy which can only be socialism.

The rally finished with an emotional singing of the Internationale in various languages by more than 600 people, ending a deeply red and internationalist event.

Originally posted here:
Building workers' struggle and the forces of international socialism - Socialist Party

We think of capitalism as being locked in an ideological battle with socialism, but we never really saw that capitalism might be defeated by its own child technology.

This is how Eric Weinstein, a mathematician and a managing director of Peter Thiels investment firm, Thiel Capital, began a recent video for BigThink.com. In it he argues that technology has so transformed our world that we may need a hybrid model in the future which is paradoxically more capitalistic than our capitalism today and perhaps even more socialistic than our communism of yesteryear.

Which is another way of saying that socialist principles might be the only thing that can save capitalism.

Weinsteins thinking reflects a growing awareness in Silicon Valley of the challenges faced by capitalist society. Technology will continue to upend careers, workers across fields will be increasingly displaced, and its likely that many jobs lost will not be replaced.

Hence many technologists and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are converging on ideas like universal basic income as a way to mitigate the adverse effects of technological innovation.

The greatest danger, he told me, is that, the truly rich are increasingly separated from the lives of the rest of us so that they become largely insensitive to the concerns of those who still earn by the hour. If that happens, he warns, they will probably not anticipate many of the changes, and we will see the beginning stirrings of revolution as the cost for this insensitivity.

You can read our lightly edited conversation below.

The phrase late capitalism is in vogue these days. Do you find it analytically useful?

I find it linguistically accurate and politically provocative. I don't think that what is to follow is going to be an absence of markets. I don't think the implications are that capitalism is failing and will be replaced by anarchy or socialism. I think it's possible that this is merely the end of the beginning of capitalism, and that its next stage will continue many of its basic tenets, but in an almost unrecognizable form.

I want to ask you about what that next stage might look like, but first I wonder if you think market capitalism has outlived its utility?

I believe that market capitalism, as we've come to understand it, was actually tied to a particular period of time where certain coincidences were present. There's a coincidence between the marginal product of one's labor and one's marginal needs to consume at a socially appropriate level. There's also the match between an economy mostly consisting of private goods and services that can be taxed to pay for the minority of public goods and services, where the market price of those public goods would be far below the collective value of those goods.

Beyond that, there's also a coincidence between the ability to train briefly in one's youth so as to acquire a reliable skill that can be repeated consistently with small variance throughout a lifetime, leading to what we've typically called a career or profession, and I believe that many of those coincidences are now breaking, because they were actually never tied together by any fundamental law.

A big part of this breakdown is technology, which you rightly describe as a child of capitalism. Is it possible the child of capitalism might also become its destroyer?

Its an important question. Since the Industrial Revolution, technology has been a helpful pursuer, chasing workers from the activities of lowest value into repetitive behaviors of far higher value. The problem with computer technology is that it would appear to target all repetitive behaviors. If you break up all human activity into behaviors that happen only once and do not reset themselves, together with those that cycle on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis, you see that technology is in danger of removing the cyclic behaviors rather than chasing us from cyclic behaviors of low importance to ones of high value.

That trend seems objectively bad for most people, whose work consists largely of routinized actions.

I think this means we have an advantage over the computers, specifically in the region of the economy which is based on one-off opportunities. Typically, this is the province of hedge fund managers, creatives, engineers, anyone who's actually trying to do something that they've never done before. What we've never considered is how to move an entire society, dominated by routine, on to a one-off economy in which we compete, where we have a specific advantage over the machines, and our ability to do what has never been done.

This raises a thorny question: The kinds of skills this technological economy rewards are not skills that a majority of the population possesses. Perhaps a significant number of people simply cant thrive in this space, no matter how much training or education we provide.

I think that's an interesting question, and it depends a lot on your view of education. Buckminster Fuller (a prominent American author and architect who died in 1983) said something to the effect of, "We're all born geniuses, but something in the process of living de-geniuses us." I think with several years more hindsight, we can see that the thing that de-geniuses us is actually our education.

The problem is that we have an educational system that's based on taking our natural penchant for exploration and fashioning it into a willingness to take on mind-numbing routine. This is because our educational system was designed to produce employable products suitable for jobs, but it is jobs that are precisely going to give way to an economy increasingly based on one-off opportunities.

Thats a problem with a definable but immensely complicated solution.

Part of the question is, how do we disable an educational system that is uniformizing people across the socioeconomic spectrum in order to remind ourselves that the hotel maid who makes up our bed may in fact be an amateur painter? The accountant who does our taxes may well have a screenplay that he works on after the midnight hour? I think what is less clear to many of our bureaucrats in Washington is just how much talent and creativity exists through all walks of life.

What we don't know yet is how to pay people for those behaviors, because many of those screenplays and books and inventions will not be able to command a sufficiently high market price, but this is where the issue of some kind of hybridization of hypercapitalism and hypersocialism must enter the discussion.

We will see the beginning stirrings of revolution as the cost for this continuing insensitivity

Let's talk about that. What does a hybrid of capitalism and socialism look like?

I don't think we know what it looks like. I believe capitalism will need to be much more unfettered. Certain fields will need to undergo a process of radical deregulation in order to give the minority of minds that are capable of our greatest feats of creation the leeway to experiment and to play, as they deliver us the wonders on which our future economy will be based.

By the same token, we have to understand that our population is not a collection of workers to be input to the machine of capitalism, but rather a nation of souls whose dignity, well-being, and health must be considered on independent, humanitarian terms. Now, that does not mean we can afford to indulge in national welfare of a kind that would rob our most vulnerable of a dignity that has previously been supplied by the workplace.

People will have to be engaged in socially positive activities, but not all of those socially positive activities may be able to command a sufficient share of the market to consume at an appropriate level, and so I think we're going to have to augment the hypercapitalism which will provide the growth of the hypersocialism based on both dignity and need.

I agree with most of that, but Im not sure were prepared to adapt to these new circumstances quickly enough to matter. What youre describing is a near-revolutionary shift in politics and culture, and thats not something we can do on command.

I believe that once our top creative class is unshackled from those impediments which are socially negative, they will be able to choose whether capitalism proceeds by evolution or revolution, and I am hopeful that the enlightened self-interest of the billionaire class will cause them to take the enlightened path toward finding a rethinking of work that honors the vast majority of fellow citizens and humans on which their country depends.

Are you confident that the billionaire class is so enlightened? Because I'm not. All of these changes were perceptible years ago, and yet the billionaire class failed to take any of this seriously enough. The impulse to innovate and profit subsumes all other concerns as far as I can tell.

That's curious. There was a quiet shift several years ago where the smoke-filled rooms stopped laughing about inequality concerns and started taking them on as their own even in private. I wish I could say that change was mediated out of the goodness of the hearts of the most successful, but I think it was actually a recognition that we had gone from a world in which people were complaining about inequality that should be present based on differential success to an economy which cannot possibly defend the level of inequality based on human souls and their needs.

I think it's a combination of both embarrassment and enlightened self-interest that this class several rungs above my own is trying to make sure it does not sow the seeds of a highly destructive societal collapse, and I believe I have seen an actual personal transformation in many of the leading thinkers among the technologists, where they have come to care deeply about the effects of their work. Few of them want to be remembered as job killers who destroyed the gains that have accumulated since the Industrial Revolution.

So I think that in terms of wanting to leave a socially positive legacy, many of them are motivated to innovate through concepts like universal basic income, finding that Washington is as bereft of new ideas in social terms as it is of new technological ones.

But how did we allow things to get so bad? Weve known for a long time that political systems tend to collapse without a robust middle class acting as a buffer between the poor and the rich, and yet weve rushed headlong into this unsustainable climate.

I reached a bizarre stage of my life in which I am equally likely to fly either economy or private. As such, I have a unique lens on this question. A friend of mine said to me, "The modern airport is the perfect metaphor for the class warfare to come." And I asked, "How do you see it that way?" He said, "The rich in first and business class are seated first so that the poor may be paraded past them into economy to note their privilege." I said, "I think the metaphor is better than you give it credit for, because those people in first and business are actually the fake rich. The real rich are in another terminal or in another airport altogether."

It seems to me that the greatest danger is that the truly rich, Im talking nine and 10 figures rich, are increasingly separated from the lives of the rest of us so that they become largely insensitive to the concerns of those who still earn by the hour. As such, they will probably not anticipate many of the changes, and we will see the beginning stirrings of revolution as the cost for this insensitivity.

However, I am hopeful that as social unrest grows, the current political system of throwing the upper middle class and lower rungs of the rich to the resentful lower middle class and poor will come to an end if only for the desire of the truly well-off to avoid a genuine threat to the stability on which they depend, and the social stability on which they depend.

I suppose thats my point. If the people with the power to change things are sufficiently cocooned that they fail to realize the emergency while theres still time to act, where does that leave us?

Well, the claim there is that there will be no warning shots across the bow. I guarantee you that when the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators left the confines of Zuccotti Park and came to visit the Upper East Side homes of Manhattan, it had an immediate focusing on the mind of those who could deploy a great deal of capital. Thankfully, those protesters were smart enough to realize that a peaceful demonstration is the best way to advertise the potential for instability to those who have yet to do the computation.

We have a system-wide problem with embedded growth hypotheses that is turning us all into scoundrels and liars

But if you're one of those Occupy Wall Street protesters who fired off that peaceful warning shot across the bow six years ago, and you reflect on whats happened since, do have any reason to think the message was received? Do you not look around and say, Nothing much has changed? The casino economy on Wall Street is still humming along. What lesson is to be drawn in that case?

Well, that's putting too much blame on the bankers. I mean, the problem is that the Occupy Wall Street protesters and the bankers share a common delusion. Both of them believe the bankers are more powerful in the story than they actually are. The real problem, which our society has yet to face up to, is that sometime around 1970, we ended several periods of legitimate exponential growth in science, technology, and economics. Since that time, we have struggled with the fact that almost all of our institutions that thrived during the post-World War II period of growth have embedded growth hypotheses into their very foundation.

What does that mean, exactly?

That means that all of those institutions, whether they're law firms or universities or the military, have to reckon with steady state [meaning an economy with mild fluctuations in growth and productivity] by admitting that growth cannot be sustained, by running a Ponzi scheme, or by attempting to cannibalize others to achieve a kind of fake growth to keep those particular institutions running. This is the big story that nobody reports. We have a system-wide problem with embedded growth hypotheses that is turning us all into scoundrels and liars.

Could you expound on that, because this is a foundational problem and I want to make sure the reader knows exactly what you mean when you say embedded growth hypotheses are turning us into scoundrels and liars.

Sure. Let's say, for example, that I have a growing law firm in which there are five associates at any given time supporting every partner, and those associates hope to become partners so that they can hire five associates in turn. That formula of hierarchical labor works well while the law firm is growing, but as soon as the law firm hits steady state, each partner can really only have one associate, who must wait many years before becoming partner for that partner to retire. That economic model doesn't work, because the long hours and decreased pay that one is willing to accept at an entry-level position is predicated on taking over a higher-lever position in short order. That's repeated with professors and their graduate students. It's often repeated in military hierarchies.

It takes place just about everywhere, and when exponential growth ran out, each of these institutions had to find some way of either owning up to a new business model or continuing the old one with smoke mirrors and the cannibalization of someone else's source of income.

So our entire economy is essentially a house of cards, built on outdated assumptions and pushed along with gimmicks like quantitative easing. It seems weve gotten quite good at avoiding facing up to the contradictions of our civilization.

Well, this is the problem. I sometimes call this the Wile E. Coyote effect because as long as Wile E. Coyote doesn't look down, he's suspended in air, even if he has just run off a cliff. But the great danger is understanding that everything is flipped. During the 2008 crisis, many commentators said the markets have suddenly gone crazy, and it was exactly the reverse. The so-called great moderation that was pushed by Alan Greenspan, Timothy Geithner, and others was in fact a kind of madness, and the 2008 crisis represented a rare break in the insanity, where the market suddenly woke up to see what was actually going on. So the acute danger is not madness but sanity.

The problem is that prolonged madness simply compounds the disaster to come when sanity finally sets in.

Original post:
Why capitalism needs socialism to survive - Vox

By Robert Higgs Monday July 24, 2017 5:10 PM PDT

Socialism with Chinese characteristics = Chinese fascism American capitalism = American fascism Post-Communism in Russia = Russian fascism Scandinavian Third Way = Scandinavian fascism Italian fascism = Italian fascism German fascism = German fascismSpanish fascism = Spanish fascism European corporatism = European fascism

Are you starting to see a pattern?

Many people continue to perceive the presence or impending advent of socialism here, there, and everywhere and to lament the prospect. But full-fledged socialism is almost extinct. Aside from North Korea, hardly any country now has socialisms essential attributes: government ownership, management, and direct control of all the major means of production; central planning of resource allocation and income distribution; and an almost complete absence of private property rights except for very small properties and some personal items. Almost all countries on earth now permit major elements of private property, combined with extensive government intervention and regulation of private property use and extensive taxation, subsidization, and government provision of a variety of public goods, welfare, infrastructure, and many other types of goods and services.

Moreover, almost all countries have elections of public officials; hence the term Ive used for more than 30 years (borrowed from my Ph.D. student and friend Charlotte Twight), participatory fascism. (Never mind that the elections are often rigged and fraudulent.) Moreover, many countries have established institutions for permitting aggrieved citizens a measure of due process in contesting the governments treatment of their persons and property and allowing them a public voice in expressing their preferences for government action. (Never mind that this ostensible due process is largely spurious.)

This type of regime, amigos mios, is clearly the wave of the future. Unlike full-fledged socialism, which leads to totalitarian rule, mass poverty and economic decay, participatory fascism not only placates peoples wish to participate in the formal process of government decision-making, but also permits private entrepreneurs enough room for maneuver that they can in some cases get rich; also enough that they can keep national output at a tolerably high level and in some cases even generate positive economic growth. Hence this system, even if it contains the seeds of its own destruction, does not destroy itself nearly as quickly as full-fledged socialism does. And meanwhile the politicians and their cronies who dominate the system smile all the way to the bank.

Tags: central planning, cronyism, Elections, Fascism, income distribution, Socialism

Continued here:
Socialism Is Dead; Participatory Fascism Has Triumphed - The Beacon (blog)