On the Left

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2016/06/04/On-the-Left

by zdw • 10 years ago

96 17 10 years ago

pastProlog• 10 years ago

Marx didn’t say much useful about how to fix the problem

Nor did he intend to say much. He famously said "I don't write recipes for the kitchens of the future". He gave advice to organizers in his day, and left the future for those in the future, with the material conditions and relations of production they would have.

there isn’t a proletariat any more

In the world of 1867, the proletariat was rather small. The world just shifted from majority rural to majority urban/suburban a few years ago. The proletariat is larger than it ever was. You can argue if it will ever be a vanguard revolutionary class or not, but it has not disappeared.

One point Marx and Engels made is the world has seen several economic systems over the past 10,000 years - primitive communism, slavery, feudalism and capitalism. The last three systems all collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions. Marx and Engels believed capitalism would run its course and eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions just like the previous economic systems. Capitalism has only become predominant relatively recently historically.

mafribe• 10 years ago

    He gave advice to organizers in his day,

Yes, and terrible advice it was: in the Communist Manifesto [1] Marx & Engels gave concrete recommendations what is to be done to bring about a transition from capitalism to communism via a revolution and an intermediate phase of socialism.

Lenin and Stalin implemented those points to a T. Didn't exactly bring about the predicted benefits.

The core of the problem was that Marx really didn't have a meaningful concept of state and of political change. He could only conceive of a state as an oppressive tool of capitalist control, that would whither away together with capitalism after the revolution. And he thought political systems can only change in revolutionary change. The latter, while false, is kind-of understandable from the myopic view of Marx's times where revolution was more or less the only way governments changed. The former was simply naive. Marx's main teacher (Hegel) already had a much more sophisticated theory of the state in society, but Marx was so blinded by naive economism that he was unable to grasp the productive function of a state structure in any large-scale society.

[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Man...

sievebrain3• 10 years ago

Indeed. It's too bad that so many leftist intellectuals try to defend Marx as merely a product of his time, or worse, as someone misunderstood.

The reality is that Marx's ideas were bad, and were understood to be bad at the time by contemporaries like Bakunin who swiftly identified the obvious flaw in the plan: no state powerful enough to perform massive redistribution of wealth from the bourgeois to the proles would ever simply say "job done" and dissolve itself. To argue for the Marxist plan was inherently to argue for totalitarian dictatorship of a vast and powerful bureaucratic state.

tezza• 10 years ago

Interesting piece. There's so much broken in the world.

We don't inhabit a true Capitalist society any more ( my term for the current system is Crapitalism )

Further it is unclear if our current machine can survive

* peak stuff ( we don't need to consume as much any more ) why would companies invest in new jobs and infrastructure when they are not going to recoup the cost through growing sales ?

* population still on the rise . Where do jobs come from for 10 billion when we've hit peak stuff

* robber barons control the laws, courts and media ( a constant over human existence)

* massive debt load ( unfunded pensions, national debts, private mortgage debts )

But I would ask Tim Bray what I ask everyone else who says radical measures are required. Namely, how is the transition made without mass cleansing and warfare in the interim.

Often ( Viet Cong, Khmer Rouge, Mao, Stalin ) the middle class and educated are unfairly lumped in with the elite and exterminated.

Is the current brokenness worth millions dead, and proportionally lots of HNers ?

sievebrain3• 10 years ago

I would say unfunded pensions and "peak stuff" are contradictions. We clearly need/want to consume more than is readily available due to investments not paying off sufficiently well.

eli_gottlieb3• 10 years ago

* peak stuff ( we don't need to consume as much any more ) why would companies invest in new jobs and infrastructure when they are not going to recoup the cost through growing sales ?

We currently have a glut of consumer goods, but they're mostly consumer goods with low marginal desirability, and we actually have a shortage of physical capital, collective infrastructure, and equipment for personal empowerment.

To wit: it's better to have affordable, high-quality education and public transit, at the margins, than the N+1st craft brewery.

chroma2• 10 years ago

I'm wondering where this "overwhelming evidence" is. If you look at the stats, the US economy is doing fine. Over the past 25 years, inflation-adjusted income for non-supervisory employment (aka workers, not managers) has remained stable or increased.[1] Inflation-adjusted household income has remained stable over that same time.[2] Unemployment is at 4.7%. If these are signs of "extreme problems", then every developed economy on the planet is coming apart.

So as interesting as Tim Bray's five point plan sounds, I'd prefer to be in the control group. Of course the status quo has problems (don't get me started). But big changes (especially ones that increase state control of the economy) tend to be catastrophic.

1. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/on-income-stagna...

2. See the chart halfway down: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/upshot/the-great-wage-slow...

internaut3• 10 years ago

Hello. Attack!

Over the past 25 years, inflation-adjusted income for non-supervisory employment (aka workers, not managers) has remained stable or increased.

That sounds great except that it is not. Zero growth or slight increases are not good enough. Not when real inflation including education, health and property (i.e. things people must do) is growing faster than real incomes.

Our grandparents wage grew in real terms by 10x. Is that going to happen for their grandchildren? If not, why not?

Outside of the SV, I see diminished expectations everywhere.

Unemployment is at 4.7%. If these are signs of "extreme problems", then every developed economy on the planet is coming apart.

This is much more plausible than you appear to think. Tens of millions of workers are just dropping out of the workforce because they don't see the point in competing anymore and welfare + modest income produces a 'good enough state'. This isn't true of those making > 75k per year but below that it's endemic. It's not just about money, it's about purpose. You can't push people up Maslow's pyramid and then be surprised they don't find life satisfaction in plucking chickens.

On the point that 'revolutions' tend to be a worse cure than the disease I tend to agree but it depends on how long the stagnation goes on for.

blahi• 10 years ago

You can't push people up Maslow's pyramid and then be surprised they don't find life satisfaction in plucking chickens.

So we are supposed to give people purpose in life? At best this is futile. Purpose cannot be given. In reality this is false. Purpose can be given. For a short period of time. You can take those miserable people and ride their wave of misguided contempt to a revolution and grab the power. Then kill everyone who challenges your power. The first thing that disappears amidst civil war is justice.

Those people who feel unfulfilled better find a way to find their meaning of life for themselves instead of nursing jealousy and hatred towards people who did.

internaut3• 10 years ago

I see no interesting ideas on the left. You need to reinvent yourselves. Since the fall of communism it has been very boring and I blame you for that.

Is it just a little pension increase there, a little distribution here?

Please tell me I'm only seeing the mainstream left and there exists interesting innovators out there I've overlooked.

chroma2• 10 years ago

If you're wondering why there's been so little innovation related to the ideas of Marx and Engels, it's probably because most people decided those ideas weren't useful.

Over the past century, a lot of people tried to implement the ideas of Marx and Engels. People tried different versions of communism in different cultures, different geographical regions, and different levels of technological development. On two occasions, people even split a country in half and ran one side communist and the other side capitalist. In every case, the citizens of the communist regimes ended up worse-off.

If we've learned anything from these experiments, it's that Marx's ideas reliably create failed states. There are probably better systems than what we have today, but they're not close relatives to communism.

Fortunately, many far leftists have understood this and gone searching for other ways to improve the lives of the poorest. For example, basic income seems to be growing in popularity.

metaphorm• 10 years ago

I'm in your camp. The mainstream left seems deeply misguided to me.

On the one hand they are self-satisfied and smug that limited scope progress in the culture war means they are succeeding. In fact, it is a distraction that makes them complacent and focused ever more narrowly on identity politics.

On the other hand the more radical factions on the left seem to be descending into a form of victim culture driven social Maoism, where they seek to purge their community bubbles of "anti-revolutionary" ideas.

I see no factions on the left that are achieving meaningful results against the permanent global war that has become official policy of the U.S. government. I see no factions on the left that are winning policy battles over civil liberties and fair government. I see no factions on the left that are winning significant numbers of elections. In the U.S. all we have is Democrats. they are fully captured by the global corporate elite and they are a hawkish war party as well. the token gestures they make towards social justice (this year its advocating for Trans-persons, what will it be next year?) is much too little for us to settle for.

I find myself in the position now of actively seeking out alternative political movements. Nothing I have interacted with so far is appealing to me.

eli_gottlieb3• 10 years ago

Please tell me I'm only seeing the mainstream left and there exists interesting innovators out there I've overlooked.

Yes, they're called anarchists.

sievebrain3• 10 years ago

Bray claims he's not a Marxist. I'm less convinced. Putting aside the jargon for a moment, the core theory of Marxism was that capitalism would collapse due to its own contradictions, and that would open the possibility of creating a fully equal society through the destruction of the ruling capitalist class and massive redistribution of wealth. Marx thought that once that was done the state would disappear (doh).

Brayism, for want of a better name, seems to have the following features:

1) A conviction that capitalism is going to ruin everything good unless it's destroyed.

2) A belief in massive redistribution of wealth (taxing the crap out of the 1%) in order to benefit the poor.

3) Totalitarian state surveillance in which financial privacy is forbidden.

4) A vague desire to whack business people and other capitalists much more severely than today, and generally crack down on anything that smells capitalist (like financial transactions).

5) An uncosted UBI i.e. more massive wealth redistribution.

That all sounds like a rather classically Marxist agenda to me, just with updated terminology. Bray claims the proletariat no longer exists whilst spending the rest of his post talking about the plight of the non-1% and how awful well paid bankers and CEOs are. Instead of "handing the means of production to the proletariat" it's "a universal basic income funded by taxing the 1%", but that's a relatively trivial matter of wording compared to the massive implications.

Bray ends his post by asking which parties have ideas like the ones he listed. I think he'll find the communist party is a good fit.

nikdaheratik• 10 years ago

Well, it's good to see someone putting their own opinion out there, in an election year no less, instead of parroting whatever party nonsense is being spread around. But I don't feel like these are really solving for anything, other than maybe trying to deal with inequality by hammering down the top end.

1. Tax the crap out of the 1%

I don't think we need to go back to the 1950s levels. A move back to the late 1990s would be okay by me. But then again we're not going to get that through Congress and alot of nitwit legislators will use that to justify their reelection so it's not worth the cost as far as I'm concerned.

2. stamp out most forms of high-leverage financial speculation

IMO, a "War on Speculators" would be just like the drug war. Only less costly, and less effective since it's much easier to move massive amounts of money to a country with less lax regulations than it is the comparable amount of drugs. Better enforcement of some of the existing anti-fraud/insider trader rules would be welcome. But this isn't going to help prosperity for the average worker. Just give nitwit legislators something to argue over.

3. introduce ruthless transparency such that any asset whose beneficial ownership cannot be established where legally appropriate is subject to summary confiscation

Not even sure what this means? Is this going to pass the 5th amendment even if it can be translated into law? Considering the use of confiscation to fund the Drug war policies, can you maybe see some potential for conflicts of interest here?

4. adopt a zero-tolerance posture on business crime, with jail time regularly administered for significant financial misdeeds, in rough proportion to the size of the takings.

Again, "War on finance" vs. "Drug war" potential for abuse and the same lack of effectiveness. I agree that many of the people involved in the collapse in 2008 should have been hammered more than they were. However, this feels more like a case of getting better people in DoJ and other agencies rather than more legislation.

5. roll out a universal basic income to deal with the inevitable decline in the proportion of humans “enjoying” full employment.

Could work, but maybe just start with raising the minimum wage, increasing overtime protections, and just getting the work week and vacation time closer to Europe, Japan, and/or Australia levels rather than going "full basic income" to start. I also don't know if this will all help the "average unemployed" but it may help make things less miserable for the average worker.

[Edited for typos]

On the Left

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