My team and I knew the president’s comments could trigger a backlash against the idea of UV light as a treatment, which might hinder our ability to get the word out. We decided to create a YouTube account, upload a video animation we had created, and tweet it out. It received some 50,000 views in 24 hours.
Then YouTube took it down. So did Vimeo. Twitter suspended our account. The narrative changed from whether UV light can be used to treat Covid-19 to “Aytu is being censored”.
These days, politics seems to dictate that if one party says, “The sky is blue,” the other party is obligated to reply, “No, it’s not, and you’re a terrible human being for thinking that.” That leaves no room for science, in which the data speak for themselves, regardless of ideology, and only when they’re ready.
(Quoted from a Wall Street Journal article – paywalled, but relevant quotes are on instapundit.)
I read an article that mentioned Aytu yesterday.
In fact, the president’s reference was to Ultraviolet catheter technology. It was recently in the news and Dr Birx was unfamiliar with it. Here’s how it works.
The first link still works because it goes to Aytu’s own website. The second no longer does because it goes to Vimeo; today, it shows the VimeUhOh page.
One of the great questions of our time is whether the left is innately inferior to the right, innately more intolerant of all thought but its own, innately determined to live in its bubble and make others do the same, or else it is not and its current state is wholly an artefact of its current media power.
One view is that there is no such superiority in either approaches or statistics, that too dominating a control of the megaphone makes any group live in an ever-narrowing bubble. If Donald (in some alternative world that is so not this) could do more than just drain the swamp a bit, could actually transform its denizens into people as fervent for making America great again as they now are for cancel culture, then (according to this view) the right would take no more time than the left did to establish a mirror culture of censoring freedom-hatred, and would not generate significantly greater internal resistance than the left’s mavericks currently offer to those the left empower.
A rival view is that the innate vice of the left is lying but the innate vice of the right is violence. Hitler lied a lot and Stalin murdered (and tortured) a lot (arguably more than Hitler in his longer period of rule) but the most fundamental law of Hitler’s land was “Thou shalt kill” and the most fundamental law of Stalin’s land was “Thou shalt bear false witness”.
– Stalin killed like a gangland lawyer: if the inconvenient witness can’t be made to stutter out the prepared story in court then he’d better be fitted with concrete overshoes at the bottom of Lake Michigan, but the court case, not his death, is what matters. When the story is that socialist agriculture works, that means there are a lot of peasants to kill, but it doesn’t matter which individuals get shot, which die of starvation, which die of slave labour in the gulag, and which survive, so long as the useful idiots can go on thinking socialism is wonderful on the farm. It does not matter which of the “two traditions, as a dark age historian would say, about the death in modern times of the vice premier of the soviet state” are true – was he shot at once or left to die years later in a camp – because the story of his confession is what matters. The lie matters and to protect it communists replaced an encyclopaedia article on Beria with one on the Bering Sea, they scrubbed Beria’s image from a Metropole Hotel corridor’s photograph in the early hours of the morning after he died, they painted a smiling young man (or sometimes a woman in a large hat) over Beria’s image on giant posters of the ruling group in cities and towns across Russia. The lie is everything.
– Hitler lied like a general – pretend you won’t attack then do attack, pretend to attack on the right then actually attack on the left – but once the lie had achieved its practical effect, once the enemy were surprised and routed, he spent less time maintaining the lie. What mattered was maximising enemy casualties, tracking and killing every last one of the fleeing foe, treating “the flight of a few Jews from torture and slow death as a matter of the gravest concern”. (Although left-wing lying has much to do with it and also honest debaters may honestly debate, this difference in focus between the communist and nazi regimes is a part of why, although nazi is short for National Socialist, Hitler is perceived as right-wing.)
A third view is that the right is simply better than the left: more anchored in reality, applying principles more likely to produce good outcomes and better able to protect those who hold them from corruption. The right is to the left as capitalism is to communism. In a capitalist state, you will find some who are unworthily rich and some who are unworthily poor. In a communist state, you’ll find a lot more of both and a lot less wealth overall. Likewise with right and left (if your focus is the last century or two; most holders of this view would concede that, as you go further back in time, opportunities to make debating points that challenge it increase).
My own opinion, FWIW, is that all three are true. I think the right compared to the left would resemble capitalism compared to socialism even if the MSM and the tech oligarchs were more balanced. I think that a degenerate-right culture will typically manifest more in a trend to violence than to lying, while a degenerate-left culture’s stereotypical indicators will be the reverse. And I support free speech because I think that while some political movements, like some people, have stronger characters than others, the power to silence criticism is a very dangerous temptation to any.
What definitions of “Left” and “Right” are we using here?
There are lots of different axes of political thought that have been identified with “Left” and “Right”. The Nolan chart identified economic freedom and personal freedom varying independently – the left was identified with high personal freedom and low economic freedom, while the right vice versa. Another axis is the traditionalist (keeping society the same) associated with the right versus reformist (improving and advancing society) with the left. A third axis is is the hierarchical (right) and egalitarian (left) model, originally associated with preservation of the monarchy, respect for traditional institutions and authorities, versus overthrow of the monarchy and ruling elites, with everyone “created equal” and no deference required. A fourth axis is the moral one, rooted in religious traditionalism: harsh measures against ‘sin’ and ‘immorality’ – drinking, gambling, prostitution, homosexuality, perversion, obscenity, blasphemy, etc. – being perceived as characteristic of the ‘Right’, while liberalisation is associated with the ‘Left’. There’s the purely economic view – free markets versus welfare socialism.
Different people use different terminology, and the terms shift over time and depending on context. For example, is Fundamentalist Islam ‘left wing’ or ‘right wing’? It’s hierarchical, traditionalist, morality-enforcing, with more emphasis on restricting personal freedom than economic. It would appear on a lot of views to be ‘right wing’, despite the modern left having bizarrely decided to support it. How about the Christian Church – from Catholic to Puritan to the Westboro Baptists? Or Moses? Left or right? If we go back 60 years, to when homosexuality, obscenity, and blasphemy were illegal here, and the BBC ran in fear of Mary Whitehouse, when ‘Life of Brian’ was censored, was that censorious culture ‘left wing’ or ‘right wing’?
I think it would be useful to make it clear what we mean by the terms up front, in a (no doubt futile) attempt to avoid misunderstanding. 🙂
President Trump mentioned a malaria drug, he was not the first, and the media fell over themselves to mock the idea, and most people who listen to the media consider the idea absurd by extension.
However, there are 300 clinical trials planned involving that malaria drug globally, so thats at least 300 medical institutions and their medical and scientific staff who are willing to take that suggestion seriously.
The credibility that is being eroded is the credibility of the main stream media, who have been grinding ideological axes because they can no longer distinguish the limits of their ideology, the silent majority are willing to let the medical scientists answer, a process they know takes time.
Did not expect to find myself in broad agreement with Nullius on this issue — but i do! 🙂
Broadly speaking, i think that the “traditional” understandings of “the right” can be reduced to 2: authority and tradition.
(Vice versa, “the left” can be understood as opposition to authority and/or to tradition.)
Note also Mussolini’s implicit definition of “the right” in The Doctrine of Fascism: the “right” is authority, the collective, and the State; its opposite is individualism and (classical) liberalism.
The fact is that authority and tradition are not always on the same side. Nowadays, authority is claimed mostly by “the left” while “the right” defends tradition.
If we take “the right” to be the party of authority, then we have to accept that all the ideologies listed in my previous comment today are “of the right”:
Divine Right of Kings;
Social Contract;
General Will;
Class Struggle;
Social Justice.
If we base our definition on tradition, then only the Divine Right of Kings is unambiguously an ideology “of the right”.
But that does not make me any more inclined to accept it.
Nullius in Verba (April 28, 2020 at 3:02 pm), I invite commenters to use their own definitions (explicitly or implicitly) to express whatever opinion my post raises in them.
1) Plenty can be said about the incident that prompted my post without bothering with the particular reflection it raised in me. Commenters are most welcome to give their own reactions about the abrupt deadening of links, the “party of science” or many another aspect I chose to pass over.
2) The title asks whether having too much power over the megaphone merely exposes the left’s leaders’ innate vices, or worsens those vices, or alone causes those vices in a not innately corrupt movement. A related idea is whether some political attitudes have a stronger character than others (e.g. as capitalism makes for a better economy than socialism) or whether inability to silence dissent is the whole explanation of why one party at one time is a better ally of freedom than at another.
A commenter with something to say about that – either as regards left and right or some quite different distinction – will have their own opinion of what degree of definition their comment does or does not need in order to be understood by the average reader.
3) I’d rather read what commenters say, and then comment myself well on in a developing thread, than leap in early with more than I’ve posted. So bye for now.
What do you mean when you say ‘right’ and ‘left’. As you admit – Hitler was as left-wing. In fact, fascism was a reaction to people thinking socialism didn’t go far enough.
Its not that ‘right-wingers’ are more prone to violence – look a the current violence in America, Canada, and Europe – who is throwing bricks and hitting people with bike locks? Who is throwing firebombs? Who is calling for the murder of their political rivals? Not the ‘right’.
In any case, it really isn’t a ‘left-vs-right’ ‘lie-vs-violence’ divide. Both the left and the right are perfectly willing to use lies and violence. Its a POWER thing. Both sides are willing to use whatever tools are available. The modern left is just become more comfortable because the right has assumed certain tolerances that were hard fought for – we may hate Nazis but we’ve shown that we’ll let them have their say. The Left is breaking that down because they assume that since they don’t fly the swastika that they’re not Nazis and therefore must have the moral high ground and having that ground means they can do anything they want.
That thinking leads to purges, genocides, suicide bombers, throwing people out of helicopters, concentration camps, whatever. Left/right has nothing to do with it. Its all about amoral people willing to do whatever it takes to amass personal power. They’ll do anything, say anything.
IMO its an innate problem in *humanity*, not in their ideology or who has control of the megaphone (though the latter can certainly sharpen it).
I think that is a very bad definition of left-v-right. Maybe tradition versus opposition to tradition. But both sides are amazingly authoritarian. Both sides are opposed to any authority that isn’t their own.
There is a Times headline: “Coronavirus tracing app will be ready within weeks, MPs told”
Sounds to me like the USA gun lobby sarcasm: “When seconds count, the police will be there in minutes!”
Keep safe and best regards
“The title asks whether having too much power over the megaphone merely exposes the left’s leaders’ innate vices, or worsens those vices, or alone causes those vices in a not innately corrupt movement.”
In other words: ‘does power corrupt, or merely attract the corrupted?’?
I’d tend to turn the question around, and ask what it is that leads people to oppose authoritarian measures, since I’d consider authoritarianism to be the historic human instinctive default, and liberal ideas had to be invented or learnt. People learn their attitudes from the culture around them. In a liberal culture, all people to some degree learn their liberal beliefs from the traditions of the society they live in. In an authoritarian culture, some people learn to be authoritarians from that culture, including many of its victims (who aim simply to switch places with their ruling class), while others of their victims come to advocate freedom. It’s not that those in power are corrupted by power, but that they have less opportunity and motivation to learn the lesson needed to oppose that corruption. Freedom always makes much more sense to the downtrodden.
On the concept of a “not innately corrupt movement”, I consider the specific political goals to be independent of the methods, in the manner of the Nolan chart. People have different sets of norms and beliefs about the right way to live, and separately from that, they can believe those norms should be adhered to voluntarily or that people should be compelled to conform. For any given movement, you can separate the two components, and imagine a movement with the same norms for proper behaviour but a liberal attitude to enforcing them. If this counts as ‘the same’ movement, then it can be described as not innately corrupt. If the methods are part of the definition, then the corrupt version is a different movement from the non-corrupt one, and the distinction is innate. There is a sort of Nolan chart for each issue – one axis the norm in question, the other axis whether it should be voluntary or compulsory.
Authoritarians (on either side of any issue) seek power to use it – to be able to enforce their norms. So power certainly attracts the corrupted. The pressure to seek power so it cannot be used is much rarer. But the equilibrium between being authoritarian or liberal is maintained by how likely you are to be a victim of it, so those in power experience less pressure to be liberal and so become more authoritarian, and as society becomes more authoritarian, so does everyone in it. Power corrupts – and not just those with power, but the victims too. But it doesn’t have to be so. If your cause is freedom itself, then the exercise of power to defend freedom can both shield against authoritarian challenges and make those challenges less likely to arise. But it’s important not to get that mixed up with these orthogonal issues. Left and right is irrelevant. It distracts, divides, and weakens the cause of freedom. The only fight that matters (until it’s won) is authoritarian versus libertarian.
I don’t wholly agree, but then I’m an optimist about human nature. I think the instinct is otherwise (I’ll avoid the word liberal, since it has different a meaning here to our friends across the water in the US), and I’d venture that the growth of spontaneous mutual aid groups in the past few weeks would back me up. I would say that we’ve been cowed (which may be a *measure* of agreement with you) into accepting authoritarianism, to the point where it’s really scary to venture outside of it – but that it’s not a default, nor a natural position. Just one that we’ve been indoctrinated into.
The Nolan Chart is a good starting point for Keep It Simple Stupid primer to a more nuanced belief in politics as opposed to pure left vs right, definitely, but it’s not the end. Snorri is correct to note that *traditionally*, right was pro-monarchy and granted-privilege, but that it no longer necessarily means that in popular usage. And you of course are right to note that left can mean *opposition* to entrenched social norms that are leveraged to keep vulnerable groups under the boot. So in that sense, the 2 axis system makes sense.
But people conflate top-right (for clarity: top being authoritarian, although I’ve seen it reversed) with bottom right – they think that capitalism as it exists today under all of the state-granted protections is a free-market – or they conflate top-left with bottom-left – they think that the general upswell in support for people with previously criminalised attributes, and associated negativity towards those who don’t agree with that support, as equivalent to living under Stalin’s USSR.
The ONLY thing that matters is: are you in favour of authoritarianism? Whether that’s direct (law) or indirect (state-granted-privilege)?
A lot of people say no to the first, and then prevaricate (or don’t understand, or just deny) the second.
I think your post is interesting to talk about, but here is where it goes off the rails a bit. Hitler is the eponymous bad guy, the generic villain. Stalin is in a sort of quasi-land where leftists will admit he made some mistakes but still think his actual policies were pretty good.
This is why Hitler is re-written as “right-wing”, which is absurd on its face – modern political propaganda from the left-controlled educational system and media. They need Hitler to be a right-wing bogeyman.
The notion that Nazi-ism is a right-wing philosophy is not the end product of some kind of thoughtful taxonomy of politico-economic analyses … it is a straightforward propaganda effort some 70 years in the works. The leftist media needs Hitler to be right-wing so that they can classify him (and by extension them) as the Enemy. And they are embarrassed to no end that he was a Socialist. But let’s be clear, the only people to the left of Hitler were waving red flags around and actually talking about the abolition of all private property with a straight face.
Also, whatever the situation might have been historically, in the USA today the left is by far the more violent wing. It’s not even close.
That’s the point, though. Did Hitler give the means of production to the workers? No. So he’s not a socialist (under one definition). He killed the socialists, and consolidated power under the state (so he’s right wing).
Did he consolidate the means of production under the state? Yes, arguably. So he IS a socialist, under another definition; one that says socialism is state ownership of the means of production.
They’re both valid.
Was he an authoritarian? Oh. Right, yeah. Yeah, he was a twat. As was Stalin. STATISM IS THE ENEMY.
Dunno about the USA. Stats-wise, it’s certainly a close call over here.
All of you shootings in the US, they were all leftwing, were they? Look like alt-right to me.
But, as I said. Left and right are fluid, and can be redescribed to suit.
“Did Hitler give the means of production to the workers? No. So he’s not a socialist”
So he’s not a Communist.
Communism was the end state of the workers owning the means of production. Socialism was an intermediate state on the way to Communism, in which a dictatorship of the proletariat (the state) owned the means of production on behalf of the workers. Under Hitler, the original owners often still owned the companies (and hence the risk), but the state controlled them.
But in a sense, both National Socialism and Fascism were modified successors to Communism, created when it became apparent that Communism wasn’t working as Marx had predicted. Marx said that Capitalism would collapse under its own contradictions, as it drove the poor ever deeper into poverty and exploitation, and out of the ashes a new revolution of the workers would arise. But instead, Capitalism was making the poor richer and more prosperous, and the collapse and revolution seemed to be getting ever further away. As with all cults when their prophecies of the end times fail to come true, beliefs shifted to ‘reinterpret’ the prophecies to make them true again. Hitler argued that Marx and the Communists had got it wrong, but his variety of leftism was only a modified version of the same. A close relative and successor, just as the modern day Labour party is an even more distant descendant and successor. It depends how purist you want to get.
It’s arguable that Germany did pretty well economically – you don’t take on the rest of Europe and nearly win if you’re an economic basket case. The issue with the Nazis was not their economics, or where they were on the left-right spectrum, it wasn’t even their racism and anti-semitism and homophobia and so forth, much as people have tried to make it about that since. That’s to confuse the orthogonal issue with the real problem, which is that they were authoritarian. People spend so much time shouting about the evils of the specific policies they wanted to enforce – racial purity, socialist economics, nationalism – and see any modern echoes of those policies as the danger, and never recognise that it is authoritarianism in *any* cause that is the real danger.
Authoritarianism in a racist cause was the danger then, but authoritarianism in the anti-racist cause is the danger now. But people don’t see it that way. They identify Hitler primarily as racist, so see racism as the problem. They don’t identify him as an authoritarian, and thus don’t see authoritarianism as the problem. It’s not the norms you want to enforce that are the issue, but the fact you want to enforce them. Same with those who identify him as a socialist, a leftist, a statist, or whatever your beef of preference is. The axes orthogonal to the libertarian-authoritarian axis are all a distraction.
We have people living in cities, and people living outside of cities. At least recently, cities have definite Democratic majorities, and farms definite Republican tendencies. These seem to read as “left” and “right”, and considering most of the Marxists are Democrats, that’s a reasonable definition. (“Left” correlates pretty well with Marxists.)
Now people who live in cities tend to think in terms of groups, and are convinced fast talk, intelligence, and going with the zeitgeist is the way to happiness.
People in the country can’t believe that. They know you can only prepare for a storm, you can’t sweet-talk or bluster it into going away. Crudely, the Left thinks that talk can get you what you want. The right knows what happens usually doesn’t care what you want. They’ve lived with nature long enough to know it’s bigger and stronger than they are.
Over here in the U.S., there’s no sign of a violent right. The KKK, often said to be on the Right, was always a Democratic Party brown shirt movement, only with white sheets instead of brown shirts. The thankfully few self-avowed white supremacists sometimes try to act like they’re Republicans, but invariably there comes a point when it becomes clear that actually, no, they’re Democrats. There are some militias here and there, but McVeigh basically destroyed their reputations — no sane person with a job wants anything to do with them, thank goodness. (Though nowadays there’s a lot of jobless, but hopefully that won’t last and we won’t see a revival of right-wing militias.)
Of course, Republicans are said (by Democrats) to be right-wing. Is that the sort of lying the left engages in? I suppose those who want to see a pox on both houses won’t care, because a pox on both houses yo.
Maybe in Europe there’s a real, violence-prone right wing?
Meanwhile antifa is on the violent side. And economical with the truth.
I’d never link any hitlerian right wing to capitalism. I suppose I’d accept “liking capitalism” as “right wing” if we have to accept a left/right dichotomy — a binary. But I don’t accept that there’s only left vs. right. The racist “right wing” fanatics certainly aren’t in it for capitalism. Hitler and Mussolini were not capitalists or for capitalism (State capitalists, surely they were, but that’s not the same as capitalism). Hitler was ostensibly a socialist, but of the sort that hated communism — very confusing, and perhaps that was a lie meant to attract the less-lefty? Almost certainly — the only leftist aspect of Hitlerian policy was unyielding authoritarianism.
This reminds me of Peron. Was it Marquez who said that Peron was on the left, the center, and the right? As I understand it the Peronist movement, via its sub-movements, has spanned the spectrum and literally fought each other on the streets, though all Peronists have been authoritarian, Peron himself especially.
It seems to me that the real split is not between left and right, but between authoritarianism and… not-authoritarianism. Is there a name for the latter? I don’t like “libertarian”: it carries too much ideological baggage. Perhaps even libertarians on this blog might agree to that. “Libertine”, perhaps? Most people tend to have some authoritarian impulses, sadly.
Well, as I said, under one definition of Socialism. The term “socialism” predates Marx by some time (I *think*, but am not certain, that it can be traced back to Henri de Saint-Simon), who died when Marx was 7 years old. Several competing theories of socialism were developed, both state- and non-state, but the one most popularly used now is, of course, state-socialism in the sense you used it.
(I myself use it in that sense when I’m with people I’m not familiar with, as it saves time).
But then there is the competing form of socialism, espoused by such luminaries as Proudhon, Kropotkin, Lysander Spooner, Josiah Warren, Benjamin Tucker, and so on – all of whom vehemently opposed Marxism, statism and stereotypically “socialist” policies such as the command economy (just as an example).
Definitions can be twisted to suit.
A bit like when someone says “Property is theft!” and someone says “Property is freedom!” 😉
Nico,
And “Libertine” doesn’t carry baggage? Sorry, no dice. If I call myself a libertine people will think I’m into snorting cocaine off of schoolboy buttocks*. “Libertarian” kinda works because it refs the now thoroughly (esp. in the USA) corrupted “liberal” but is sufficiently different to not mean “socialist” which is what (esp. in the USA what “liberal” is taken to mean). How this came to pass is beyond me.
*I’m not BTW. I much prefer the Colombian from the tits of a sybarite. But that’s just me 😉
I dunno where I heard this, but:
“There is always a left. It’s the political manifestation of people with cluster-B personality disorders.”
The question whether Hitler was socialist or not, needs to be kept sharply distinct from the question whether Hitler was “”right-wing”” or “”left-wing””.
The second question hinges on definitions which change with time and place, in fact from one election to the next.
As for the first question, there is little doubt in my mind that Hitler was a socialist in the sense in which “socialist” was understood in the Weimar Republic.
Why? because i cannot imagine large numbers of Germans supporting a party with a name that misrepresents the party policies. If it were a British or American or even Italian party, i could believe it 🙂 but i cannot imagine it happening in Germany.
Not even that. When the English Stuart Kings promulgated the Divine Right of Kings here, it was not regarded as backward by their critics but as a dangerous Continental innovation. Contemporary criticism of the Stuarts based their arguments not in modern democratic rationalism, but in appeals to the ancient traditions of English liberty.
It can be argued that those so-called ancient traditions so referred to were in fact largely mythical – there are reasonable points for and against such a contention. But those like Sir Edward Coke, for example, certainly considered themselves on the side of tradition.
Agammamon, in reply to me:
It all depends on what you mean by “both sides”. In what time and place? The “left” in the UK during the Winter of Discontent definitely was not authoritarian. That was an ideal time to declare a state of emergency and assume dictatorial power, and they did not take it.
And btw fascism was not “a reaction to people thinking socialism didn’t go far enough”, unless Hayek has been deceiving us. Fascism was a reaction to street violence by socialists.
Mary Contrary, in reply to yours truly:
Excellent point, and Dan Hannan made much the same point in a blog post, a long time ago!
In retrospect, i should not have written “unambiguously”: there is room for debate on whether the Divine Right of Kings is really in keeping with tradition.
In my defense, one could say that the ur-Right, the Right at the time of the French Revolution, did advocate the Divine Right of Kings; and also that it is a tradition that goes back to the earliest civilizations.
ONS figures for England and Wales for the week ending 17th April.
They have obligingly broken out those where COVID-19 has been mentioned on the death certificate.
Week 16,
22,351 (18,516) Total deaths, all ages. ( Prior week )
1,776 (1,757) All respiratory conditions. ( Prior week )
8,758 (6,213) COVID-19 related as the primary or a contributory CoD ( Prior week )
Note: Deaths could possibly be counted in both causes presented. If a death had an underlying respiratory cause and a mention of COVID-19 then it would appear in both.
It does seem that a lot of animosity could be avoided if we could move past using an outdated French seating plan to label one another, to be fair.
🙂
But remember that, once we have avoided the animosity, we’ll still have to figure out what people meant by writing “left” and “right” in outdated texts.
Though i cannot think of any major political thinker who made much use of the terms.
Except for Lenin perhaps? see his 1920 book:
“Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder.
Yeah, if you say so, Snorri.
Put it on the list of books I’ve not read, and (not being a Marxist-Leninist), am not likely to read.
I didn’t read it either, though i am curious about it.
BTW by ‘major’ political thinker, i meant: thinker with a major influence. For better or for worse, Lenin had a major influence.
Mostly for worse.
The thread now has enough comments that I feel I can safely start commenting on them.
The Nolan chart, by its very form, assigns equal areas to each subdivision in the cross-product of its axes, like a UN general assembly seating plan assigning one equal-size seat to each country in the world. Compare that with a a map that scales countries by their wealth or by their relative military prowess. In our adult lifetimes, there would be great and persistent differences. Even on a longer timescale than that, some countries would always loom large and others would always look small.
Consider two ways of scaling diagrams like the Nolan chart. Firstly, by mere population: e.g. how many people would self-identify in each pocket, or how many would you guestimate actually belong there (e.g. in the anglosphere in our lifetimes or some longer time period). Secondly, by who naturally rises to the power of defining the larger aggregations like right or left.
– In ‘The Wild Swans’, Jung Chang’s father emerges as a Chinese communist official – and an honest principled man. But it was people like Mao, not people like him, who rose to rule the party, so Mao defined what Chinese communism meant in practice, not him. The argument is strong that communism naturally causes that.
– I feel sure there are people identifying as feminists who were contemptuous from the first of the Ford/Kavanaugh versus Reade/Biden double standard. But they very clearly do not rise to control those public pressure groups that define modern feminism in the anglosphere. Reading feminist literature decades ago made me sure it would tend to that outcome.
– This post is about the speed with which a video on UV disinfecting was cancel-cultured when the left decided it unhelped the narrative. There are also people like Stephen Pinker who identify as left, support Heterodox Academy and would doubtless have wished it left up – but they appear not to decide these matters.
To sum up: analyses like the Nolan chart imply an answer by the equal-area form, as the UN general assembly does in its voting structure. My question was: what do people think the real world looks like?
Ferox (April 28, 2020 at 7:53 pm) is absolutely right that – as my post said (with italics and bolding) – Hitler was a National Socialist, head of the National Socialist German Workers party – and a lot of left-wing lying was performed in the years before and during, not just after, his rule to convert him into a National-er-ist, head of the National (cough) German (cough) party.
BUT THIS IMMEDIATELY RAISES TWO QUESTIONS – questions relevant to my post.
Firstly, why did the left turn against him so soon, instead of initially welcoming the rise to power of this fellow socialist? It wasn’t because they disliked killing. Stalin was always their love, and Stalin was already a mass-murderer when Adolf came to power. The first months of Nazi rule were also the very climax of the murderous Ukraine holodomor. In the late 30s, after a brief period of relaxation (that probably still left the communist murder rate ahead of the nazi during the mid-30s), Stalin embarked on a fresh killing spree: the great purge. Whatever distanced the left of his day from Hitler, it was not concentration camps – Stalin had them and early show trial victims were explicitly sentenced to ‘koncentratsionlager’ (excuse my probably misspelled-from-memory German) in the German translation of the proceedings. (The term was changed to ‘forced labour camp’ a few months after Hitler came to power.)
Yet they were distant from the start, not just after he failed. The hard left did turn to Hitler in 1939-41 at the time of his greatest successes – and some previously very highly-thought-of socialist intellectuals stayed there (e.g. Henrik de Man), but for the movement as a whole, it comes across as a slightly awkward uneasy turn, mediated far more by communists than by actual nazis, reminding me of the left’s alliance today with Islam, whereas there was never any such reluctance with Stalin.
Secondly, just as folk beliefs about witchcraft differed greatly from the theories of puritan or catholic intellectuals back in the day, so popular ideas of right and left tyranny differ from those of intellectuals. Show someone a state in which everyone is denouncing everyone else, in which “The Computer is your Friend“ gets drummed in your ears till The Computer kills you, in which every hideous reality is covered by a dare-not-question-it lie, and they will call it left-wing – and show an iron resistance to intellectuals explaining it was “not real socialism”. Show them a world in which the equivalent of the Jews are murdered but no-one bothers to beat confessions out of them beforehand, in which cruel arrogant rulers make no pretence of being ‘comrades’ of their slaves, and they will call it right-wing. Snorri Godhi (April 29, 2020 at 2:30 pm) is absolutely right that the nazis would never have won elections in Germany if their name had been the mere fraud that lefties pretend, but the success of the left in their goal of rewriting nazism as a purely right-wing movement was helped by the way this folk-idea matched the experience of conquered people ruled by the nazis.
I’m not sure I’ve understood you properly. Are you saying that within (say), Authoritarian Left, there’s no gradation? Eg. that Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin, Mugabe etc don’t have any differences? And that on the other side of the Y axis, Blair, Thatcher and Pinochet are all the same?
To answer your question, I think most people sit on the Authoritarian side, but in varying gradations (mostly NOT hard-Auth, more towards the middle), and then form a broad swathe from left to right depending on whether they think the government should spend money on individual welfare and universal healthcare on the left; or on police (with the implied belief that lots of laws are necessary) and military on the right. I don’t think the majority of people want command economies and central planning (Hard Auth-Left), nor do they want lots of laws around moral behaviour (Hard Auth-Right) – but I’m making incredibly broad and sweeping generalisations.
—-
A more interesting question (to me) would be what people actually think Libertarian Left vs Libertarian Right actually means – I don’t think the Nolan chart does a good job of explaining it (which is why I think it’s a good starter to get people out of the idea that there’s only left and right, but it doesn’t cover the nitty-gritty)
Most of the quizzes assume that “the left to right” axis is determined by what you want the government to do, and “top to bottom” by how hard you want them to do it. In which case it would seem almost impossible to even assume a left and right on the libertarian side of the axis.
This might serve to illustrate – where do you think you sit on the Nolan chart (and why), and where do you think I sit (and why)?
“The Nolan chart, by its very form, assigns equal areas to each subdivision in the cross-product of its axes, like a UN general assembly seating plan assigning one equal-size seat to each country in the world.”
Are you complaining about the choice of origin?
The location of the origin, and hence the number in each quadrant, is arbitrary. A common choice is to use the median of the distribution of some characteristic (number of followers, political or economic power, etc.) along each axis. That results in equal halves, of whatever measure you choose to emphasise, but that’s just an arbitrary convention.
For that matter, even the direction of the axes is an arbitrary choice. Some people choose the axes to be ‘economic freedom’ and ‘personal freedom’ instead, at 45 degrees to the left/right and libertarian/authoritarian axes.
The important point is that the Nolan chart is two-dimensional, not one-dimensional. What coordinate system you choose to use for that is secondary.
The problem with that approach is that it ignores any movements over times, and assumes that the median is centrist (it’s not, it’s auth-right)
It’s more useful, to my mind, to fix the origin, so that we can honestly appraise the movement over the last 50 years towards the authoritarian right. I think that shifting the base point, the origin, is really, really dangerous, in that it pretends that our current situation is more centrist than it is.
if you cluster it, we’re (in the UK), largely in the the Auth-Right box.
If we’re not careful, and if we allow the definitions to slip, or to be ceded to people who don’t understand the definitions, or who will re-define them to their own ends, we’re in danger of allowing people to define Nazism as Socialism.
It should be obvious that it’s a disgusting perversion (one that should be laughed at), as much as the idea of anarcho-capitalism is a perversion of libertarianism, but we’re letting definitions slide – obviously for political reasons. It suits people to redefine Nazism as Socialism, despite it being nothing of the sort, in order to discredit the anti-Nazis, and bolster support for state-supported capitalism (ie. that which favours existing owners, by which) I mean the aristocracy/landowners/white people/choose your privileged group based on your country)
But stop with this Nazis were Socialists bollocks.
THEY DID NOT HAND CONTROL OF PRODUCTION TO THE WORKERS.
Ergo, not Socialists.
This comment is strange. I assume you know that Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Kim Whatever, Chavez, Mugabe and etc. also did not hand control of production to the workers – on the contrary, the workers had less control over their own lives, let alone production, than before. So either this is another ‘it was not real socialism’ claim – and that certainly excludes Adolf too, along with all I’ve just named – or your argument fails.
(For the record, although it is appropriate to write of the National Socialist German Workers party when discussing an attempt to portray the Nazis as simply a right-wing movement, I think it just as appropriate to mention the National Socialist German Workers party if ever in the less common context of someone claiming the exact reverse. They were a somewhat complex amalgam, painted as simply right-wing by left-wingers for reasons that did not include concern for truth, but also perceived as more right than left by folk-wisdom that I have more time for and have tried to analyse above.)
“The problem with that approach is that it ignores any movements over times, and assumes that the median is centrist (it’s not, it’s auth-right)”
If you want to compare views over the last 50 years, then you would use the median of views over the last 50 years, and keep it fixed. Auth-right relative to who? You?
“If we’re not careful, and if we allow the definitions to slip, or to be ceded to people who don’t understand the definitions, or who will re-define them to their own ends, we’re in danger of allowing people to define Nazism as Socialism.”
Ah! But that’s exactly why I started this conversation by asking about definitions! 🙂
So, welfare state, national health service, public state-run education, profit sharing, communalisation of private property, “The good of the community before the good of the individual”… But that’s not ‘socialist’?
“THEY DID NOT HAND CONTROL OF PRODUCTION TO THE WORKERS. Ergo, not Socialists.”
Neither have most of the modern day Labour Party. Whose definition are we using? And why?
🙂
That’s an *incredibly fucking weird* thing to say, to someone who has already *explicitly disavowed* all of those people, in favour of Kropotkin, Bakunin, Tucker and so on.
ROFL!
I mean, honestly, what a totally weird thing to say to someone (me) who is clearly anti-Marxist-Leninist.
That’s a really bizarre comment.
Ah, NiV. You want to, genuinely, cherry-pick the 25 Point Programme and present it as something that the mainstream should get behind?
LOL
Look, if that’s what you want to do, then, look, you do you, brother. I really have nothing.
Sorry, I’m trying really hard not to laugh. And failing. Um. I got nothing.
Yeah, I’m just gonna carry on as I am.
I really hope that isolation has got to me, and I’ve misunderstood.
Yes, our Labour party are not Socialists.
And?
“Ah, NiV. You want to, genuinely, cherry-pick the 25 Point Programme and present it as something that the mainstream should get behind?”
Where did I say anything about the mainstream getting behind anything?
All I’m saying is it fits the modern definition of Socialism. I’m still not clear on where you got your definition from, or why you’re sticking with it.
“I really hope that isolation has got to me…”
(To be honest, I did wonder with some of your comments whether you’d been drinking a lot more with the lockdown. But I didn’t want to assume.)
I’m using the definition, because that’s what socialism actually is – workers owning the means of production. That’s the “necessary” part, in order that something be called socialism.
Other things – welfare, healthcare, redistribution of wealth etc are characteristics, but are not necessary, and certainly not sufficient.
As I said up thread, using the commonly-held definition that “the government controlling things” is socialism can sometimes be helpful, particularly in more casual conversations. But in a thread about actual definitions, I think it’s important to be more rigorous.
The Nazi thing is just tiring. I thought it was well-known that they used Socialist rhetoric to get elected (including the 25 Point Programme, amongst other things), and then went in a largely different direction. I mean, that’s partly the point of Niemöller’s poem.
“I’m using the definition, because that’s what socialism actually is – workers owning the means of production.”
It is because it is because it is. Oh, well. I guess it’s not important anyway.
“The Nazi thing is just tiring. I thought it was well-known that they used Socialist rhetoric to get elected (including the 25 Point Programme, amongst other things), and then went in a largely different direction.”
Don’t they all?
By that definition, has there ever been a socialist? Every example I can think of promised and then failed to deliver. It’s a neat way to evade accountability. It’s not socialism’s failure, because they were never socialists.
“I mean, that’s partly the point of Niemöller’s poem.”
Is it? That’s not how I read it. It sounds like an interesting interpretation though – what do you mean?
I’m genuinely getting a bit baffled here. This isn’t me trying to be difficult, or argumentative. I honestly don’t understand what you think socialism is, if it’s not that?
“Socialism is a political, social and economic philosophy encompassing a range of economic and social systems characterised by social ownership of the means of production and workers’ self-management of enterprises.”
“While no single definition encapsulates many types of socialism, social ownership is the one common element.”
From here
Is it because I didn’t further explain that “workers owning” can mean directly OR indirectly owning the means of production? Indirectly meaning nationalised enterprises (where in theory that means that society as a whole owns them)?
Socialism existed as a concept before Marx re-defined it to mean state-socialism, and the 19th (and indeed 20th) Century saw many a ferocious argument between the state-socialists and the non-state-socialists of the age.
I agree, expecting a government to whither away of it’s own accord, especially (but not only) if it’s a single-party state, is naive (…at best). I, too, cannot think of a single example that delivered. Instead they delivered…something…and that something tended to be misery and famine. The “it wasn’t real communism” argument, while technically true, misses the point. The point is that next time probably (I mean, never say never…but I’m 99.9% sure) won’t “be different, pinky swear”.
Depending on which version you’re looking at, the first groups are the communists, then the socialists, then the trade unionists. It’s the theme of “Oh, they won’t come for me, they’re on the same side as me” – until they did come for you, because they really weren’t on your side.
Another brick in the wall.
Meanwhile in the real world, the hysteria has had very real impact
But at least sextillions won’t die after all. Yet.
Nullius – I think you know what the left is, but I will go through the matter anyway.
Although a few pro freedom people, most notably Frederick Bastiat, have sat on the left hand side of legislatures – the left is correctly associated with being anti private property and anti individual freedom, in the name of the collective “freedom” of “the people”.
This was clear even in the 1790s – when it was obvious that the new regime in France was worse (more hostile to private property and individual liberty) than the Ancient Regime had been. As Edmund Burke pointed out – the most popular philosopher among the Revolutionaries was Rousseau – and anyone who thinks that Rousseau was a friend of individual liberty is horribly mistaken.
As Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn explained (at great length) – neither the Italian Fascists or the German National Socialists were traditionalist conservative movements, on the contrary they were Radical and Progressive – very much on the left (regardless of where they sat in Parliaments). They killed other leftists because that is how leftists behave – the various factions of Marxist have a long history of killing each other (they are all still leftists).
Now we know what the left is (if we really did not know already) we can say that Niall is quite correct (“quite right” – no pun intended) in calling Google (Yootube) lefitsts.
They are leftists because they believe “the people” are more important than the private rights (liberties) of individual persons.
The “lockdown” is only part of it – and the virus is being used as an excuse for the power grab the left (the Progressive forces) have been working towards for many years.
What is the defining feature of the left? It is to justify tyranny in the name of “the people” (the great enemy of the liberty of individual persons) and to wish to destroy everything that could act as a shield against the state – traditional families, independent churches, private estates, anything that could stand as a shield of individual persons against “the people” meaning the state.
Everything is to be planned from above (by a small educated elite – acting in the name of the people) and all traditional rights and liberties are to count for nothing – society (family, church, secular fraternal mutual aid societies) corrupted and destroyed. With the individual left naked and helpless – the plaything of “the people” meaning the state.
The Tech companies such as Google and the “mainstream” media love this vision because the are “educated” to love it – and it is a vision of Hell on Earth.
It is now clear that the virus is being used as an excuse for what the left (the radicals, the Progressives) have long desired.
The mask is removed now – such people as the Governor of Michigan are not well meaning people who happen to have another point of view. They are monsters – and they wish to wipe out all dissent. Indeed they want to PROVOKE a violent response in order to have an excuse to destroy what liberty remains (do not let them provoke you).
Robespierre was the same. They are the “Lawgiver” of Rousseau – I repeat they are monsters.
As for the United Kingdom – there is little dissent here to crush, the Daily Telegraph, but that is about it.
When I see the lack of regard for individual liberty in my country, my heart fills with despair.
I am forced to conclude that there was a deep sickness in this land, long before the virus.
The virus has just brought out the decay (the Progressiveness) that was already present – and shoved it before our eyes.
Private ownership can be real or it can be a legal fiction.
In National Socialist Germany private ownership was a legal fiction – as neither a farmer, a store owner or a factory owner had any right to reject an order of the state – regardless of what that order was.
In the People’s Republic of China private ownership is a legal fiction – because neither a farmer, or a store owner, or a factory owner had any right to reject an order of the state – regardless of what that order is.
The Obama Administration tried to make private ownership of land a legal fiction – by using unlimited EPA regulations to control water (control all water – and you control the land).
Presently via “lockdown” orders and so on there is a move to make private property a legal fiction in the modern West.
President Trump has NOT stood clearly against this evil movement – on the contrary he has compromised and tried to split-the-difference (seeking a middle ground – like the Pragmatist he really is).
Only a few people have made a real stand for private property (for individual liberty) – no one is perfect, but the Governor of South Dakota has come closest to making a principled stand.
The key point is that there must be rights (property rights) AGAINST the state – otherwise freedom is just an illusion, and the country is socialistic – even if not formally socialist.
And anyone who, at this point, thinks it is just about the virus – is a fool.
“While no single definition encapsulates many types of socialism, social ownership is the one common element.”
It was the bit about “no single definition” I had issues with. And note that “social ownership” is not the same thing as “ownership by the workers”.
“Social ownership” can mean ownership by cooperatives, ownership by the government, ownership by an abstract “society”, ownership by the state, charitable foundations, labour unions, or other bodies on behalf of society, ownership by consumers, ownership by (various different groups of) workers, ownership by savers, all sorts of things. Does “ownership” imply control? Does it mean getting a share of the profits? Does it mean contributing to the costs? Do you have to be able to afford to ‘buy in’ to your employer to get a job there? Or is “ownership” granted for free? How about people who are out of work – do they get a share by being in society, or not because they’re not workers? The retired? The disabled? Wives and children? Do I own all businesses in the country, or just the one I work in, and if the latter, how do we draw the line around what counts as “my” industry when the production chain is so distributed/interconnected? Does the “socialist” definition apply only if *all* enterprises are owned by the people, or does it apply to those systems where only *some* are collectively owned? Does nationalisation of the railways, utilities, education, and health system but not other businesses count as a system advocating social ownership of the means of production? Does “We demand nationalization of all businesses which have been up to the present formed into companies (trusts)” count as a Socialist policy? If someone proposes starting by nationalising some industries, then gradually increasing the number of industries nationalised until everything is covered, but never actually gets that far because their economy collapses first, is that not socialist because they didn’t start with nationalising everything, and never did, or socialist because that was their plan?
It’s a huge fuzzy ball of fuzz. Which is why I question categorical declarations that some group is or is not “socialist” based on just one particular viewpoint. I’d suggest it’s the other way around – there are a wide range of policies and movements considered “socialist”, and the definition is an attempt to summarise the fuzzy ball by drawing a line around the densest bit of it, rather than starting with the definition and cutting off all the fuzzy bits hanging outside the neat line.
“It’s the theme of “Oh, they won’t come for me, they’re on the same side as me” – until they did come for you, because they really weren’t on your side.”
Thank you. Yes, I see your point.
NiV –
I, personally, agree, quite profoundly.
I don’t believe that nationalisation is the same as “ownership by the workers”, but a state-socialist would say that it is, if you extrapolate “workers” to mean “the people”. It runs into two problems that immediately spring to mind – you’ve mentioned one already, which is “What? So do I own all of the nationalised businesses? How much of them? One part in approx 65million? So what? In what practical sense does my ownership mean anything?”.
The other is that by that logic – if the government owning industry means that (abstractly) the workers own the industry, then I’m uncertain why any strong enough government that owns everything can’t call itself socialist – not just the obvious examples, but say a proper Monarchy could own everything, but that doesn’t mean that the (hypothetical) serfs then have a say in the running of the businesses. Therein lies madness. Which is why I made the comment that Marx “perverted” the course of socialism.
In most circumstances, I’ll happily and with no guilt use the word “socialism” in the sense of “state owns the means of production”. It’s the commonly held belief, after all, and it serves well enough as a quick and dirty definition. But I feel the same about a lot of words, they have baggage. Libertarian means different things to different people in different cultures. So does capitalism, even. There’s types of capitalism that I abhor, even though I’m a passionate believer in free markets. It very much depends on who I’m talking to, and whether I trust them to know me well enough to not make assumptions. I might, for example and if circumstances and the conversational context were appropriate, say to *you*, NiV, that I’m in some ways a socialist, and hope and trust that you know me well enough from previous conversations to at least consider that that might not mean I’m a statist (on the Political Compass, I’m all the way to the bottom). If I’m talking to other people, I won’t say that, since I don’t trust them to extend me that consideration, and they’ll just jump to the conclusion that despite all the times I’ve denounced central planning for it’s moral and practical deficiencies, I’m in love with central planning and 5 year plans.
So, in a thread where we were talking about really drilling down into definitions, I felt it appropriate to note that socialism doesn’t have to mean “state”. But yes, I didn’t articulate myself well – a common problem for me, I’m aware 😉
Which is why I say that the issue with “It wasn’t proper socialism (or communism, not quite the same thing)” isn’t that they’re wrong to say it – it’s that they think it will be different next time.
Using the Political Compass (if that’s ok? Just that I’m more used to it than the Nolan Chart), that would be the top-left (Authoritarian-Left), which I’m used to calling Marxist-Leninists.
Now, I’m sure a proper ML could answer your questions – I, unfortunately, can’t answer many of them with any sense of authority, and I’m biased against most of the positions that an ML would take, and I’m sure that bias would come across.
I’ve not read a lot of ML theory (too little time, and I’m not up for delving deeply into an ideology that I profoundly disagree with, both morally and practically) – so I can’t SteelMan the position in order to attack it, and it would be wrong and dishonest of me to pretend that I can.
At best, I’d present a case that reflects only my ignorance of the theory – more likely, I would present a weak case with my own biases against it built into it, which we’d then proceed to tear apart while high-fiving each other. Which is probably not helpful to the advancement of knowledge…
I hope that clarifies my position a little?
Paul:
We can certainly agree that neither Italian Fascists nor German National Socialists were conservatives, but what does that have to do with whether they were “of the Right”???
“I hope that clarifies my position a little?”
Well, I’m still not sure what the issue was, but I feel no need to pursue it any further. I’m happy to put it down to misunderstanding.
For what it’s worth, while I don’t think socialism works, and when attempted has caused huge harm, I have no particular issue with it morally as an economic or moral proposal. As I explained earlier, the problem with Hitler was not that he was a socialist, or a racist, or any of the other side issues. It was that he was an authoritarian about it – imposing his system on other people. It works both ways. It’s not right to castigate either the right or the left because Hitler was supposedly right wing or left wing, whatever your beliefs about which it was. And conversely, Hitler gets no pass because he happened to be right wing or left wing in his policies. It’s perfectly valid to identify National Socialism as both Nationalist and Socialist (by many modern definitions, at least), without that implying either that Nationalism/Socialism are therefore inherently evil, or that evil is inherently always on the Nationalist/Socialist side. The issue is authoritarianism alone, and even the most unexceptionably moral beliefs and doctrines can be turned into the most horrific oppression when people decide ‘virtue’ should not be optional.
Well, when it’s been attempted, it’s the authoritarian nature of the attempt that was both morally wrong (IMO), and also the cause of it’s failure.
Carrying on with the theme of clarifying definitions:
“The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.” (from JS Mill’s Principles Of Political Economy)
What’s your opinion on that quote?
Do you believe that to be a socialist form of association, or a capitalist (or free-market, if you prefer that term) one?
Now, I’ve not read the book, so there’s non-zero chance that I’ve cherry-picked a non-representative paragraph – I was googling around for examples, and was pleased to find one from Mill, since I know that you’re familiar with him.
“What’s your opinion on that quote?”
First, thank you for a fascinating quote! It was very stimulating!
To answer: I’m highly dubious about the detail – I think it’s as hard to predict the economic arrangements of the far future as to predict its technology – but in general terms, something of the sort is not unlikely.
As workers get wealthier, less in hand-to-mouth need of reliable income, and with rare skills in high demand, they frequently move towards contract work, in which the worker decides which contracts to accept, who to work for, and if they don’t like the terms or the management they don’t sign on. It’s not ownership, but it is a greater degree of control.
Consider also start-ups, where it is common for workers with a common interest in doing something (intellectually interesting, historically significant, highly lucrative) will form a very small company in which they own shares. (It’s often the cases that start-ups have no income or cash for a long time initially, so they pay their staff in company shares.)
Employee share schemes where staff can buy shares in their company at a discount are actually quite common nowadays – it’s perceived as a way to get staff to take an interest in the success of the company.
And just in general terms, as the workforce gets wealthier, is able to save more, and so less absolutely dependent on a continuous reliable income, they have greater power to negotiate on working conditions. We have seen ourselves the progression from subsistence farming to sweat shops and factories to Western-style workforce participation. The wealthier society is, the more disposable income they have, the more they have saved up to act as a cushion against interruptions and set-backs, and the more demand there is for their skills, the more negotiating power they have in wage/conditions negotiations with their management. If a manager can’t retain staff because of the way he or she treats them, the manager will be replaced.
I’m highly dubious that in the larger enterprises workers will actually *own* their own specific employer. It’s not a wise investment strategy to put all your eggs in one basket. But I am certain they will have a lot more power, and a lot more say in how things are done. Or they walk out the door and get a job somewhere better, or live off their savings for a bit.
Consider: workers wealthy enough to have savings and pension funds will invest them. Investment funds own the companies. So society – all the investors and savers putting a bit by for adversity and old age – and workers in particular collectively own the means of production! It’s not all owned by a tiny few any more, it’s owned collectively by every worker who has a pension or a savings account. And as society gets wealthier, that’s going to become more common.
So is that free market capitalism or is it socialism? Can I answer that by saying “Yes!”? 🙂
HA! Oh, not only “can” you answer “yes”, but that’s exactly the answer I was hoping for! 😀
The “something of the sort” already exists, in small pockets. Mondragon in Spain are (AFAIK) the biggest example, and of course John Lewis here in the UK are enormous. The exact structures of the different co-ops differ wildly from each other (as is both right and proper), and most people go a bit squint-eyed at John Lewis, because their conception of a co-op is something where everyone gets the same pay, or there’s no managers, or everything has to go through a million votes and decisions are impossible to make, or other such ideas.
And of course, after you’ve negotiated better wages, with more of a cushion behind you, the braver employees will think “you know, I reckon I can do this better”, and set up a competitor – your start-ups.
And we like competition, since it drives prices down. More “stuff” for everyone!
(And between higher wages and lower prices, there’s less to skim off the top. So you put a dent in inequality as well, if that sort of thing keeps you up at night)
I like co-ops.
It seems to me that y’all forget that the average IQ is 100, which means there are a lot of sub-100 people out there in the workforce.
So when you talk of workers leveraging their valuable skills into (near) ownership, you have to include many people who will never really be more than shovelers.
Should those workers – who are still contributing value through manual labor, but cannot match the value contributed by the smarter workers – be co-equal in work relationship in this co-op with the more capable skilled workers?
And, in the end, if the answer is no (as I think it must be), where’s the change in systems if you end up with valuable “A” workers and less valuable “B” workers and shovel-only “C” workers? Don’t you merely end up with the exact same hierarchical system that you replaced? Because if you value the “A”s the same as the “C”s, the “A”s aren’t going to stick around or contribute.
Co-ops are great if the seething mass of humanity is fungible, but it isn’t – we all have different levels of productive value, and can thus demand different levels of favor from the co-op.
The co-op idea works, perhaps , amongst a smaller group of honorable and productive friends who are “A”s and maybe “B”s – we can all name good examples – but as a mass system, good luck. I think you think too highly of human nature. The “C”s still need paying work, but they’re not going to be welcome or needed in most co-ops.
“HA! Oh, not only “can” you answer “yes”, but that’s exactly the answer I was hoping for!”
🙂 Mmm. Well, while I’ve got no problem with co-ops as a valid way to run a company, I suspect they’re not going to become ubiquitous. However, my more major point was that pension funds and savings invested in shares also constituted “ownership by the workers of the means of production”. I’d call that free market capitalism. It’s not what I think most people would call ‘socialism’, but it meets your definition, and so when talking to you I’d have to answer “Yes” and be vague about what I was implying. I think it’s pretty odd, though, and renders the debate meaningless to have both sides being described as ‘socialist’.
I was rather hoping you’d notice. 🙂
“And between higher wages and lower prices”
Higher wages are higher prices. As I think I might have mentioned before. 🙂
“Should those workers – who are still contributing value through manual labor, but cannot match the value contributed by the smarter workers – be co-equal in work relationship in this co-op with the more capable skilled workers?”
Equal pay-per-value-added is not the same as equal pay.
“Don’t you merely end up with the exact same hierarchical system that you replaced?”
No, you end up with a hierarchy at a higher level of prosperity. Even the shovellers at the bottom have more options, more safety margin, than they used to previously. Feeding the family used to be the concern. Today I see the schoolkids on the buses from the ‘deprived’ areas and they’ve all got mobile phones. The working class kids here go on holiday to Ibitha. That’s because mobile phones and holiday flights are cheaper, and food is hugely cheaper. The issue shifts from ‘survival’ to ‘getting the nice stuff like all the other kids at school’.
We’re not there yet. It will probably take to 2080 for the poor to reach the level we would consider OK. But even the poor today in Western countries have a standard of living that the Medieval rich could only envy. And that’s only going to get more so.
No, there is unlikely to ever be equality of outcome. But competition makes equality of opportunity the most profitable strategy.
But, wait – I thought you were speaking in terms of socialism. Now you’re talking about the improvements for the general lot that I would ascribe to capitalism.
Isn’t socialism with worker competition simply capitalism with one level of owners removed from the payout?
“But, wait – I thought you were speaking in terms of socialism. Now you’re talking about the improvements for the general lot that I would ascribe to capitalism.”
Yes. Capitalism that leads to broad share ownership of public companies via pensions and savings funds meets Neonsnake’s definition of socialism as “ownership by the workers of the means of production”, or collective ownership by the community in the more general definition, but it isn’t what we generally mean by ‘socialism’. Definitions are difficult.
Socialism as I think is more commonly understood is a combination of goals (bringing about more widespread prosperity out of empathy for the poor) and particular proposals for achieving this (seizing wealth from the rich and redistributing money and ownership to everyone, irrespective of capability). I agree with that goal, but I don’t think the means work. But if you define ‘socialism’ a different way, this sort of argument falls apart in confusion as we all talk past one another. Which is why I wanted to agree on terminology before we started on all that. 🙂
I think Mill was just addressing the liberty issue – that people ought to have more say and more control at work, as a next stage of development. (The methods proposed are perhaps more questionable, depending on what he meant exactly, unless taken as a loose speculation about the distant future.) I agree – I just think free market capitalism is the most effective way of achieving that.
I think I agree that it meets my definition, but you’re right, I didn’t notice – it’s (again, I think) a sort of rhetorical flourish much like the ones used by state-socialists (?).
It might technically be true, but it doesn’t meet the goals of “ownership” in any meaningful way – at least in my personal understanding of the stated goals, which was that greater ownership increases empowerment, decreases alienation, and decreases inequality.
I’ll stress, that’s my personal understanding of libertarian socialism. It might be that I’ve misunderstood, or it might be that I’ve just made up an entirely new philosophy from thin air. And if I’m a bit hesitant about it, it’s because some of this is fairly new to me as I’ve been broadening my reading over the last year and trying to get my head round some new concepts that I was only passingly familiar with before.
(I’m actually fairly certain that I’m actively contradicting things I might have expressed 12 months ago. C’est la vie!)
One model that I’m aware of is that the members vote in the management team, and then that management team make the decisions. There’s lots of different models.
When I first started paying attention, I immediately imagined the factory that John Galt worked for in Atlas Shrugged – decisions bogged down by endless votes, people voting in self-interest; further exploration suggests otherwise.
My guess, same as yours, is that the smaller the company, the more directly the worker can affect it and the more say-so they have in day to day decisions. As companies scale, I’d assume otherwise. I’d need to spend more time to be certain, but someone like Mondragon or John Lewis would (I assume) still have hierarchies on a day to day level. There’s lots of different models of co-ops, as far as I can tell. I don’t think it necessarily means that the shovellers get paid the same as the highly skilled engineers, nor that the shovellers get the same degree of decision making power as the executives. I think it’s that the shovellers are “valued” more in a co-op than in a standard company, are paid higher wages, and have more say-so, and are less exploited. See also NiV’s answer. (and I wholeheartedly endorse the sentiment that equality of outcome is not the goal, before anyone says otherwise!)
Go on? I think I understand, but if you’re open to explaining, I’d like to hear your explanation?
(I’m assuming you mean that wages are the price for labour)
Capitalism…or free-markets?
I was hoping we’d get to this point – should we now define capitalism? I’d be very interested to hear both your and NiV’s thoughts.
Off the top of my head:
1) a system with property rights and voluntary exchange of products and services
2) a system where big businesses with money lobby the government for laws in their favour
3) a system where an ever-decreasing number of people who have wealth and own the means of production rule, de facto, over society, the workplace and the government (via donations etc)
I’m in favour, unreservedly, of 1. But I call it “free markets”, in most conversations, to distinguish it from 2 or 3, which is what I think we actually live under.
Yes…the capitalist 😉
It keeps the payout with the workers.
NiV (sorry if I’m repeating myself a bit, but I want to make it really clear that I’ve not somehow turned into a state-socialist or capital-C communist) – I’ve spent some time quite recently reading back through the old libertarians of the 19th and early 20th Century (bobby b knows this already); people like Benjamin Tucker, Pyotr Kropotkin and so on. I’ve honestly no idea how familiar you are with them, which is why I pleased to be able to quote Mill, rather than someone you might not be familiar with, or have only second-hand knowledge of.
(I wouldn’t, on the other hand, be at all surprised if you know all about them)
I’m still getting my head round a lot of it, but I think it reconciles the struggle I have, and have sometimes frustratedly expressed between my social values (which most people here would consider to be leftist) with my
which are radically free-trade. But I do mean free. Not state-sponsored “actually existing capitalism”.
I’m really enjoying this conversation.
But we can agree, at least, on the goal, then?
I’m fairly happy to drop the rest of it; I agree that “socialism” in it’s modern usage implies and assumes forcible re-distribution of wealth. That’s not something I subscribe to, it’s just that I’m aware of the history of the word (but also of the baggage that comes with it)
“My guess, same as yours, is that the smaller the company, the more directly the worker can affect it and the more say-so they have in day to day decisions. As companies scale, I’d assume otherwise.”
Yes, and when the company is owned by the entire nation, the input of any one owner is negligible. In practice, of course, the revolutionaries expect to be managing it ‘on behalf’ of the people.
“Go on? I think I understand, but if you’re open to explaining, I’d like to hear your explanation? (I’m assuming you mean that wages are the price for labour)”
Yes, exactly. Also, the price of labour contributes to the price of the goods the labour produces. We demand higher wages to be able to buy the goods we want, and that action itself raises the price of the goods.
People get the value of wages and money the wrong way round. They presume that because you have to obtain wages/money to get the goods you want, the two are equivalent and both of positive value. But more properly, money represents the work you have done for society that society has not yet repaid. Money is the negative you are exchanging for the positive in trade. You have to lose the money to get the benefit. It’s a highly counter-intuitive way of looking at it, which is why I usually try to avoid the issue by saying ignore the money, pretend it’s invisible, just look at the goods and services produced and the work done to produce them. It’s far easier to see that making more stuff to go round for less effort is good, than to see that creating artificial shortages of manufacturing labour to raise wages (prices) is bad. Bastiat called it the theory of abundance and scarcity.
“I was hoping we’d get to this point – should we now define capitalism? I’d be very interested to hear both your and NiV’s thoughts.”
My personal definition is that it is the practice of separating ownership of capital (the means you need to be able to produce) from ownership of the labour. A workman’s tools are ‘capital’. A factory is ‘capital’. The initial funds needed to buy stock, the shop or stall you sell them from, the vehicles to get them to market are all ‘capital’.
So consider, you have one man who owns a factory, but who cannot run round all the different workstations and man it entirely himself. And then you have a hundred men none of who can possibly afford a factory, but who have the skills to use one to create goods. In a world without capitalism, both are limited to what they can make using only their own resources. The factory owner starves. The workers are limited to what they can produce with the few hand tools they can afford. But if the two can make a trade, then the factory owner can provide the factory, the labourers provide the labour, and much more stuff can be made, making everyone richer.
Originally, a beef farmer would breed more cattle than he could look after himself, and so would hire workers to look after them for him. The workers don’t have anything like the resources to own enough cattle to make it worthwhile, but have the skills to look after them. ‘Head of cattle’ or other animals was the original meaning of ‘capital’.
“sorry if I’m repeating myself a bit, but I want to make it really clear that I’ve not somehow turned into a state-socialist or capital-C communist”
Don’t worry. You don’t need to with me.
“I’m really enjoying this conversation.”
Me too! This is the sort of thing I comment for.
neonsnake, your definition of socialism excludes Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc., etc. Having done so, it can certainly exclude Hitler too – as I said in my reply. So it seems to me you were furiously agreeing with me above (well above, by this time sudden tasks at my day job let me return to this thread 🙂 ), though clearly it did not seem so to you.
However Stalin, Mao, Chavez, etc., etc., called themselves socialists and were taken seriously by western intellectuals who also called themselves socialists – people whose ability to define what ‘socialism’ means in the public domain has always exceeded that of those who hold your definition, and continues to do so. If those people accept socialism in e.g. “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” but reject it in “National Socialism” then they do not reject the latter for your reason, and the claims with which they defend their choice can be examined for consistency – or the absence thereof.
Separately, the folk-wisdom perception of what looks like right-wing tyranny and what looks like left-wing tyranny causes ordinary people to read stories about life under nazi occupation and think ‘right-wing’ whereas stories about being under Stalin strike them as left-wing.
Touche’. Being too loose with my words there.
But I’m still wondering about mechanisms, I think. You form a co-op. You need equipment – capital equipment. Who supplies it? Do you need to buy in to be a full member? Do you thus establish a hierarchy based on who has been able to save funds? (Which is going to leave out a lot of shovelers, who hardly ever make more than subsistence, which is why capital has value in the first place.)
You can certainly pay each co-op member differing rates for their input of daily value – are you then also paying some sum for the use of their tools and buildings – their contributed capital? Or is that expected for free? If not, then I suspect we’re back to capitalism instead of free markets.
I confess, I don’t fully understand still.
I agree that the price of the labour contributes to the cost of the goods produced. There are theories that say that ultimately, the cost of a good is made up of nothing but the labour that went into producing it. If my business is selling shovels, and I’m buying the wooden handles, then the cost of the handles can be considered to be the labour of the woodchopper+the carpenter, so ultimately the final cost of my shovel is the labour that I expended on it, plus the labour that went into all the component parts. And if the lad who I employ to, I dunno, work the bellows demands a higher wage, and I concede, then yes, the cost is now higher, which inevitably affects my final asking price. So far, so good.
But if I was the only shovel-maker in town, and was cheerfully making 40% profit, and then an enterprising young chap in the next town over decides he can get by on 20% profit, I’m going to be forced to accept lower profits (or invent a better shovel etc etc). So prices come down, regardless of wages going up. And if there’s an abundance of shovels, as per the Bastiat essay, then I might have to reduce the price even further.
But the sentence I’ve quoted seems to imply a 1:1 relationship, so that nothing ever gets relatively cheaper, which can’t be right, surely? Or is it the “relative” bit that’s important? If goods go up in price, then as long as wage increases outstrip them, then everything is relatively cheaper?
Seems sensible. For clarity, I as the cowboy own my labour, right? That’s what you mean by the second bit? But the farmer owns the cattle. So he’s the capitalist in this example?
(I’m 99% sure that is what you meant, just making sure I’m 100% sure!)
For further clarity – there’s no legal barrier in your definition to me or my cowboy mates starting our own farms, maybe with just a couple of cattle to start with, and competing with the first farmer, eventually even employing other cowboys in turn?
Or, us clubbing together and saying “Hey, Farmer Brown? Me and my mates offer you a large proportion of our combined savings to buy your farm!”
(ignore the practicalities for now – I’m just talking about purely legal barriers)
I found this, a wiki entry on worker’s co-ops. About 3/4 of the way down, there’s an interesting table (health warning, there’s a dispute over the factual accuracy. I’ve skimmed the disputes, and I don’t think they’re relevant for our purposes)
“Sources of capital:
a) By members or by lenders who have no equity or vote
b) From net earnings, a portion of which are set aside for reinvestment”
Is there a reason why “lenders who have no equity or vote” couldn’t simply mean “borrow it from a bank”? Does the equity part prohibit that?
I’m not sure about whether you need to “buy in” – my guess would be that some co-ops would require it, but maybe not all? Honestly not sure about that one – I can’t find a definite answer.
And then I’ve also found this, a list of principles which it at least appears that most co-ops follow.
Under “Limitations on member compensation and appropriate use of surpluses”, it notes that “Members usually receive limited compensation, if any, on capital subscribed as a condition of membership.”
(It seems to cover consumer co-ops as well as workers co-ops)
“But if I was the only shovel-maker in town, and was cheerfully making 40% profit, and then an enterprising young chap in the next town over decides he can get by on 20% profit, I’m going to be forced to accept lower profits (or invent a better shovel etc etc). So prices come down, regardless of wages going up.”
Where are wages going up? Your wage previously was 40%. Now it’s 20% to keep up with the competition. That’s less, isn’t it?
“Or is it the “relative” bit that’s important?”
What’s important is increasing production and reducing effort. Goods produced have positive utility. Effort has negative utility. Leisure has positive utility. You want to maximise utility.
When the total amount of effort available is fixed and can be assumed to be all used, you can look at the ratio of production to effort. If production goes up fourfold and effort goes up twofold for a particular process, that’s still good. It means you can take effort away from something less productive, move it to the new process, and produce more. Total production going up means more stuff to go round. It’s fair enough to pay more for more and better stuff.
If you invent a shovel-making machine, that you just set running and it turns out thousands of shovels with no effort at all, that’s the ideal. If you’re the only one who has got one, you can charge a huge profit margin, but that encourages competition which cuts your profit margin down. Looking no further, that competition would seem bad for you, except that the same thing applies to all the people making baskets and hammers and cartwheels and cloth. You gain from everyone else’s produce being cheap, what you lose from your own produce being cheap. If you just look at the goods available and the effort needed to produce them, you can see that machines making everything makes everyone richer. It’s more advantageous to stop all the other would-be monopolists from charging you a fortune than it is to be allowed to continue charging everyone else a fortune.
More, you gain from getting access to a bigger market. Selling 10 shovels at £100 profit a piece is advantageous. Selling 1,000,000 shovels at £1 profit a piece is even more so. Cheaper shovels mean more can afford them. It means more people have them, so they can do more and produce more themselves, which also lowers prices and increases goods produced.
“Seems sensible. For clarity, I as the cowboy own my labour, right? That’s what you mean by the second bit? But the farmer owns the cattle. So he’s the capitalist in this example?”
Yes, that’s right.
“For further clarity – there’s no legal barrier in your definition to me or my cowboy mates starting our own farms, maybe with just a couple of cattle to start with, and competing with the first farmer, eventually even employing other cowboys in turn?”
No barrier. In fact all you cowboys can start up a pension fund, put a little bit of your wages by into it each month, and the fund can own the cattle. It’s the same system.
If as workers you’ve got the resources jointly to buy the farm, then yes, of course you can buy it. Usually, workers don’t until late on in their career. You start out as an 18 year old with no money, just the clothes on your back. All your fellow factory workers do the same. If you work for other people, save a little of your wages, you may eventually build up enough to buy a stake in a farm, or your own little patch of land. The farmer will eventually want to retire, and get his capital back to live off. If the younger ranch hands buy the farm from him, that funds his retirement. But the buyers have to have enough saved up, which means they need to have been earning for a long time.
Or as an 18 year old new starter in the workforce you need a house to live in, but you’ve not earned enough yet to be able to afford one. So you go to a capitalist who has money they don’t need to use right at the moment (e.g. pension fund) and ask to borrow it. That enables you to buy the house, which enables you to work to earn the money to pay back the loan. At the end you get the house you worked for, but you got the use of it 25 years early thanks to the capitalist. You’re *allowed* to buy the house for cash. You’re allowed to share a house. But even with costs and ownership shared, it’s a rare 18 year old who can do that.
There’s no problem with workers owning their own capital, but for those who can’t afford it, even jointly, separating ownership makes a lot more possible. Plus, it spreads the risk. If the business fails, and you own it, then you lose both your job and your savings. If they’re separate, you can lose one and keep the other. If you own a small piece of lots of businesses, then the failure of any one of them is not such a blow.
“Is there a reason why “lenders who have no equity or vote” couldn’t simply mean “borrow it from a bank”?”
It can mean borrow it from a bank, or by issuing bonds, or from family, or a loan shark, or a hundred other means of borrowing money.
There are lots of different arrangements the capitalist and the workers can make between them. The factory owner can hire the workmen. The workmen can hire the factory from its owner. A capitalist with money can use it to buy the factory and hire the workers, or hire the factory and the workers, or loan it to the workers who hire or buy the factory. I’m setting no limits on the legal arrangements you can make in trade – all I’m talking about is the separation of ownership of capital and labour. People without capital can borrow or rent it. The only arrangement I’m objecting to is them stealing it.
The law, of course, no doubt has many regulations on how co-ops are to be run, because of their need to prevent fraud, collect taxes, etc. which I’m no expert on. I’m no accountant or lawyer. I’m just commenting on the economics.
For me, yes – but I’ve raised the young lad’s wages, because I’m soft-hearted caring type, so the cost of my shovel now has gone up. Is this one of those things where you’re talking macro and I’m talking more micro?
I agree with everything in this quote and the surrounding paragraphs. I’ve seen you define wealth as “stuff” in the past; I define it in the same way.
Of course – that’s the practical truth of the matter. What I was more interested in was whether you’d put barriers in – legal barriers – that would prevent any of that (or make it legally very difficult).
My extremely strong suspicion is that *you* (meaning “you, NiV”, rather than a broader “you, the supporter of capitalism”) wouldn’t – I’m very aware of your stance on tariffs, for instance, which are a way of creating monopolies and artificial scarcity, and of course the Bastiat essay supports that.
Would the same stance stand for regulatory barriers to entry like occupational licencing (as purely one example), or not being allowed to sell cupcakes from your lounge? All of the myriad little laws and regulations which in aggregate have the effect of consolidating production power into the hands of the few, rather than the many?
To put it another way, do you believe that “actually existing capitalism”, the system we currently live under, actually IS capitalism under your definition of the word? And if not, in which ways does it differ?
I assume – but feel free to correct me! – that “your” capitalism does not, and is not intended to, lead to increasing concentration of capital amongst fewer and fewer people? Would I be correct to assume so?
There’s something about that sentence that bothers me, but I’m not sure I can put my finger on it. I might come back to it, if I have a moment of clarity several posts down the line, so please don’t be surprised if I suddenly refer back to it seemingly out of nowhere…
It’s something to do with being able to afford to have money sitting in several different businesses, whereas most people aren’t able to afford it. Or, maybe, with the implied concept that if all your investments went belly-up, then you’ve lost your income and your savings, but it’s ok if you’re appropriately diversified. It’s something about your income being dependent on other people’s work and success that bothers me.
It was more of a question on the specific nature of banks – in the table at the link, it states under “Sources of income” that a “For-profit Corporation” can source capital from “Investors, banks, pension funds, the public”, as well as from re-investment of profits, which I understand completely.
However, bobby b asked the question of how co-ops source capital – a very good question – and for co-ops the entry says “By members or by lenders who have no equity or vote”.
The word “banks” is conspicuous by it’s absence.
I get that, from an ethos perspective, a co-op isn’t going to source capital from investors who expect a return on their investment, while not being part of the workforce. That’s pretty much the point.
My question on banks was very much a genuine question of the “I don’t know the answer to this” type – is there a reason they can’t just borrow money from a bank, in specific case of co-ops – that I was hoping someone more knowledgeable than me could answer.
“To put it another way, do you believe that “actually existing capitalism”, the system we currently live under, actually IS capitalism under your definition of the word? And if not, in which ways does it differ?”
It’s capitalism – ownership of capital and labour may be separated – but it’s not a free market – there are barriers to trade designed to create artificial scarcities and so raise prices. It’s more free than many, and more free than for most of history, but it’s not free.
“I get that, from an ethos perspective, a co-op isn’t going to source capital from investors who expect a return on their investment, while not being part of the workforce.”
All investors are going to expect a return on their investment. (Otherwise it’s a gift.) But that return can take many forms – a straightforward repayment at an agreed interest rate is common, it doesn’t necessarily have to be in the form of owning a piece of a company increasing in value.
But I was talking about what sort of arrangements I’d allow in general – I think the question you was asking is what sort of arrangements can you make and still define yourself as a worker-owned co-op. If you take out a bank loan to buy your tools, do you own the tools or does the bank? I think the legal position is that when someone loans you money, it’s then your money. But from an economic point of view (and possibly a moral one, if your morals lean that way) this could be regarded as a legal fiction.
Legally, it has to work that way, or a worker in a co-op would not be able to take out a loan with anyone else for anything, as you’d be able to argue it was offsetting some of the money put into the co-op. But if you want to have workers owning the means of production, for some sort of moral or ideological or religious reason (some religions outlaw usury), then they have to own it themselves entirely, out of their own resources. No loans. No outside contributions. The workers must pay for everything themselves.
It’s not something I’d object to. It’s your money, and you can spend it how you like. But I’d expect it would lose out in competition with businesses that could use loans.
At first glance, I completely saw what Ferox meant and was very surprised at neonsnake’s thinking his link was any kind of refutation. It links to a detailed YouGov polling analysis of left and right (who identifies as which, and what each thinks of their policies and of the others’) that has no question on “How many murders would you commit for the cause?” or similar, still less any evidence that rightists would favour more than leftists.
However I can make a guess at what neonsnake was thinking (he will doubtless qualify or correct it if needed). For example, both sides agree that capital punishment is a right-wing policy, albeit a sizeable minority of left-identifying respondents favour it. Let’s assess that in the specific case of the recent Washington State Supreme Court decision regarding a man convicted of 49 gruesome sex crimes (believed to have committed 71) whom it was proposed to release lest he catch the ChiComCold. By 5 to 4, they decided not to release him – no prizes for guessing that the 4 who wanted to let him out trend left of the 5 who did not.
If you ask right-wingers, “Do you really want to risk leaving him in jail to die of the virus?”, replies will be along the lines of “I can live with that” and some of them will put it, shall we say, more strongly. 🙂 If you ask left-wingers, “Do you really want to risk letting him out to do a Willie Horton, returning to jail with his convicted total raised to 55 and his assumed total to 80, say?”, you can imagine the kind of stuff they’ll say – and use the transformer if imagination falters – but what they won’t say is, “Yeah, we’re good with that”, still less “That’s the outcome we’d prefer.”
This reflects a general trend. (Unless PC intimidation makes them pretend otherwise) capitalists are rather flattered when their actually fairly safe and often community-benefitting activities earn them comparison to beasts of prey in a ruthless capitalist jungle. The workers are far likelier to starve in a Venezuelan socialist ‘paradise’ than in some capitalist ‘hell’ but the left will not thank you for comparing them to any horseman of the apocalypse.
Yes, it was a purely technical question, not one of morals or philosophy. Whilst I appreciate you taking the time to talk about the sort of arrangements you’d allow in general, that’s a (sort of!) separate point. I asked a question around the meaning of the word equity that I (thought I?) made clear that I just didn’t know the answer to. I was hoping for a “This, but.. hey, also, as an addition to your question, here’s some stuff!” rather than an “instead of”, I guess.
That’s fine, I’ve found the answer – having spent some time today googling, it appears to be an error of omission – it’s perfectly (legally) permissible to take a conventional bank loan, albeit that it (largely) would seem to be the last resort; the important bit is that the facilitator of the loan doesn’t have a say in how you run the business.
Which makes perfect sense – if we believe that the people best-placed to make decisions are the ones who have to make decisions and are affected by them (kind of a pillar of libertarianism, that), then that excludes those whose input is nothing more than providing capital.
I’ve cut out “religious”, because I’m not religious, but I do think so for some sort of moral and ideological reasons.
If we say that the world works better when the baker or the blacksmith or the butcher acts in their own self-interest, then the extension of the worker acting in his self-interest would seem obviously logical – ie. they share in the profit when their business is doing well – as opposed to he just gets a wage regardless – what people refer to as wage-labour.
Now, I don’t think that co-ops are a silver bullet that are guaranteed to succeed 100% of the time – obviously not. But they evidently succeed far more of the time than conventional businesses. And, counter-intuitively, don’t appear to suffer when they scale.
Now, I’ll certainly say the following: I’m unsure that Janice who works the till at my local Waitrose feels any more empowered than me (a cog in a machine in a reasonably horizontally organised but inarguably private-equity owned business). It’s not a panacea.
Nor do I deny that there are examples where it doesn’t work – when Meridian purchased Triumph, for example, they were unable to overcome, by the sheer magical force of being a co-op, the underlying commercial issues that Triumph were experiencing.
However, the evidence appears to be on the sides of co-ops, as it stands.
And I’ll note that I’m not projecting into the future, like Mill, I’m talking about companies that actually exist today. It certainly appears that the co-op model not only can be successful (as evidenced by the amount of co-ops that currently exist), but that they might be more successful than “conventional” businesses where profits go to external investors.
Also strikes me that such businesses are more, not less, libertarian than those where profits go to external investors.
If that’s true, that’s a bug, not a feature. Most expansion is funded with retained profit, not extra investment. 92%, according to this bloke
The inability to access capital (the ability to prime the pump, as it were), is just another government intervention, successfully lobbied for. Remove that monopoly, and you level the playing field; you achieve (in one sense) a greater sense of equality of opportunity, which is what I assume most of us are aiming for (I’m aware that not all of us are aiming for that; some aren’t just “licking” the boot…)
Traded stocks add very little value to a business. It’s just masturbation. And it’s become very clear over the past weeks and months how little the stock market, or investments, add to the economy (or “stuff”) – corona affects people, not stocks, and not physical materials. There’s still the same amount of “stuff”, just not the ability to work it, or distribute it. Centralised (ie. big capital) supply chains have broken. I’m certainly hoping that radically localised and radically localised supply chains are a thing that comes out of this.
“But they evidently succeed far more of the time than conventional businesses.”
Are they more risk-averse, do you think?
If your entire savings are invested in one company, the same one on which your job depends, you’re going to want to be *very* sure it’s going to work out. So far fewer business ideas would be taken up and invested in as co-ops, but they’d be the safest investments available. Possible?
My impression is the exact opposite – and I think the very reasons you have for liking them are evidence of that opposite.
In the UK, both the fact and the idea of cooperatives have coexisted with capitalism for more than two centuries – precisely because people have repeatedly thought how much nicer, how much more egalitarian they would be than bossy conventional capitalism (and also than Marx-style socialism, a point their supporters noticed before Marx started writing).
Despite this, cooperatives show no sign whatever of displacing ordinary capitalism. They have always been a small minority of enterprises.
1) Some simply lose the will to be cooperatives. The TSB bank got tired of its ill-defined legal state and decided to sell itself to find itself. Margaret Thatcher’s government was happy to rule that it was ‘unowned’ and vote an instrument for the sale. Some who disliked both Maggie and capitalism decided to campaign against the sale. The larger stupider part of the campaign just yelled bossywomanbad arguments and deservedly got nowhere. A few clever ones decided to roll with Maggie’s arguments to defeat her: if the TSB was unowned then there were only two legal states it could be in – res nullius (never owned) or bona vacante (was once owned) and since a bank being res nullius was “obviously ridiculous” it had to be bona vacante, so the crown as ultimate heir owned the bank and by letting it sell itself instead of selling it for state profit, Maggie was giving her capitalist friends a huge bung. Though their specific reasonings lost – they had tried to use the 1835 act on unincorporated mutual associations – they sort of won their case: the lords ruled that the 149 branches who had agreed to treat an 1817 clarifying law as applying to them had unwittingly made themselves government property thereby (the Alloa branch was the sole holdout that hadn’t IIRC). Of course, it was too late to change the act of parliament. (FYI, I always thought “ridiculous” was handwaving and the bank was res nullius. I also thought that if it had unwittingly become government owned for no payment it was highly appropriate that it unwittingly ceased to be government owned for no cost.)
2) Some are killed by those you’d think should be their friends. ‘The Equitable’ was the UK’s cooperative building society, and unlike the TSB it tried to leverage that status for competitive advantage: (briefly) if you buy a life assurance policy from a capitalist building society and separately buy some of its shares, any ‘minimum’ return guaranteed by your policy obviously does not apply to your dividends. But if the self-same sum of money paid to a coop both buys your policy and entitles you to a dividend, what does the ‘minimum’ cover then? The Equitable kept Tony Blair’s new financial oversight authority very fully informed of their legal analyses in the late 90s when Russia’s default and etc., made paying just the minimum an issue, but around that time I (who had nothing to do with The Equitable) heard a financial professional (also wholly unconnected) discussing interactions with that authority say to me in the most natural way “so when we had explained to the minister what a pension was” (the people Tony put in charge need comparison with Diane Abbott to look competent). What looked like defensible, honestly-intended interpretation from one side was effortlessly drowned by what looks like sustained utter incompetence on the other side. What began in such incompetence had to be finished in lying. It was just another revelation of what those champagne bottles meant (the ones that littered the BBC and other channels’ corridors after Tony’s victory) that the media managed to present it as an example of Brair’s government punishing greedy capitalists victimising customers, concealing the fact that The Equitable had no greedy capitalists because it was owned by its customers (along with bizarre obfuscation of every other detail, whether from bias or journalistic incompetence I know not).*
3) Some suffer from the very enthusiasm the left has for them. I think it is recent enough and well known enough that I need not summarise how The Cooperative Bank gained less than no benefit at all from Labour’s relationship to it.
Many a cooperative has existed and functioned well for a long time. The lockdown may be the death knell for John Lewis, in which every sales assistant is a partner, since they, like other department stores, were already struggling with the effect of Amazon, but they’ve functioned respectably for a long time and outlived capitalist rivals. However coops show no statistical sign of equalling, let alone outperforming, ordinary capitalist enterprise in general, whatever coop.org may say.
The observed history is far more important than whatever Niall have-a-guess Kilmartin may think the reason is. That said, I’ll ask if you’ve ever been paint-balling where one side is a civilian group, accustomed to win and with many a talented professional, and the other is just an off-base training exercise sergeant or 2nd lieutenant and a group of newbie squaddies or mere weekend TA soldiers (that’s National Guard for any across-the-pond readers). The military group routinely flattens the civis, often to the latter’s amusing astonishment, not because range experience helps with the site’s wildly inaccurate short-range paintball guns nor because the tactics for the real thing have the slightest overlap for what paintball needs, but because the experienced civis function like a coop of equals and the military function like a group of squaddies whose officer can casually tell off four of them to become Kandinsky impressions and die sideways at the head of a column crashing into the civi’s position or whatever. Leadership matters. Individual responsibility has value when it means that one individual is responsible, and can assign others minimal roles that in effect say they’re responsible for very little.
—
* A full discussion of The Equitable’s strategy to make being a cooperative a competitive advantage would raise several complex points. I have briefly indicated the case for The Equitable because only an absurd caricature of the case against ever got into the public domain two decades ago.
Sounds plausible, definitely. I’d want to do a bit more research before committing to that, though.
My initial reaction was that for employees of a conventional firm, it’s not much different. Their entire income (in most cases) is tied to the company they’re employed by. If they have a bonus scheme of any note, then there is an incentive to work in whatever fashion increases the firm’s chance of hitting whatever KPI your bonus is based on (how much influence you actually have will obviously vary from firm to firm).
The key and obvious difference is that if the co-op worker has capital invested in the co-op, then they stand to lose it if the firm goes bust. So I’d guess it’s probably a mixture of negative reinforcement over the, uh, “deposit” along with positive reinforcement of a decent share of the retained profits.
Plus, I suspect that co-ops just attract a certain type of person who is more likely to be motivated to work hard within that environment. As I said, they’re clearly not a silver bullet that works flawlessly, but the evidence appears to point that they work better, by some metrics which may or may not be important to everyone, than conventional firms.
Niall, I will drily note that as an analogy, capitalism is good and works because the leader can order the minions to get themselves killed for the good of the higher-ups isn’t the greatest defence of it that I’ve heard 😉
I will further note that that’s exactly what some people think of capitalism, and further further note that those people think that’s why the right has such enthusiasm for it 😉
Joking aside – leadership is important, I agree.
In a crisis, properly defined leadership is even more so, particularly when moving fast is important. I’m sure a few of us are noting that in our workaday lives right now.
But even in normal circumstances, leadership matters. Co-ops don’t ignore that (particularly, as I’ve noted, given that they appear to have many different structures). An obvious example would be one where they vote in the leadership team on regular if infrequent intervals. I can only presume that as they scale up, a hierarchy of sorts would become a necessity. John Lewis clearly is not a free-for-all, and I harbour grave suspicions that Janice who works the tills at my local Waitrose probably does not have equal-decision making-power as the store manager.
Thank you for the examples above; I’m only passingly familiar with them.
I have no reason to believe that Blair would have any strong love for co-ops; unless you see him as a true heir to Thatcher’s ideals (some do, I don’t). Indeed, it seems that Thatcher herself was a much stronger proponent of worker’s co-ops:
“The Act setting up the Cooperative Development Agency (CDA) was passed by Parliament with all-party support in 1978, and had the task of providing finance and other support and advice to groups of workers who wished to form cooperatives. Mrs Thatcher’s Government, elected the following year, continued and expanded the operation. In 1978 there were 150 cooperatives in Britain; by 1983 there were 900.”
I’m not wholly surprised – I’m no fanboy of Thatcher, but it seems entirely in-line with her vision “where three out of four families own their home; where owning shares is as common as having a car; where families have a degree of independence their forefathers could only dream about.” I can’t fault her on that. I doubt that she preferred them to conventionally owned businesses, but she appears not have been against them (nor to have associated them with the “left”)
Indeed so! 🙂 – which was, of course, my point. Cooperative-style socialism aims to lose the ‘authoritarian’ rebuke that can so justly be hurled at state socialism. Insofar as it does lose that reproach, it gives coops a political attractiveness that capitalism cannot easily match – even if you do not claim the latter’s chief virtue is one as unpopular as my “not the greatest defence” was intentionally chosen to be. 🙂
Therefore ordinary-style capitalism must have some advantage over cooperative-style socialism (not necessarily the one I guessed) that is great enough to keep it the dominant form despite two centuries of cooperatives being easier to sell to the many-headed as an idea.
There is of course, a somewhat similar question to be asked on the other side – why does state socialism so often capture the intellectuals and leaders of left-wing movements? Typically, the revolution breaks out – to the great surprise of the professional revolutionaries, whom it liberates from their endless debates in some Swiss coffee house or in some cell of one of the relatively comfortable and undisturbed jails of the ancien regime. At the same time, ‘soviet’ (original meaning) cooperatives appear vestigially where the revolution has messed up the existing order, and these start running the factories. The professional revolutionaries then turn up, take charge and steal the coops’ popularity while crushing their reality. Politically, the professionals have name recognition and a stopped clock’s ability to look like they know what they’re talking about – the revolution they endlessly predicted has suddenly happened. However I seriously doubt that’s the only reason authoritarian socialism so routinely triumphs over the cooperative-style socialism that routinely appears in an early revolution and is routinely stamped on by the revolutionaries. Or why the authoritarians so routinely gain and keep control of the left’s public organs.
And that gets us back on topic (hurrah!). As neonsnake illustrates above (at the end of May 5, 2020 at 6:00 pm), contrasting Margaret Thatcher with Tony Blair, non-authoritarian socialism’s enemies are not right-wingers but those left-wingers who so routinely capture public leadership of the left.
Some time ago, when I worked for a multinational insurer, I got paid with money, and rewarded with company stock options.
I always sold the stock as soon as the options vested, as did everyone else. Basic risk analysis – you never want all of your eggs in one basket.
Niall, depends on how you’re defining capitalism. Waaaay up-thread, I briefly off the top of my head came up with 3 broad definitions, all of which I think are reasonably popular:
1) a system with property rights and voluntary exchange of products and services
2) a system where big businesses with money lobby the government for laws in their favour
3) a system where an ever-decreasing number of people who have wealth and own the means of production rule, de facto, over society, the workplace and the government (via donations etc)
Why is capitalism the dominant system?
Well, under “1”, it puts the people who have problems in charge of solving them, which is (I personally believe) far more efficient than putting people disconnected from the problem in charge of solving them. What we normally call “The Knowledge Problem”, in very broad terms. It leads to innovation and efficient allocation of resources.
Under 2 or 3, it’s because “capitalists” get very rich off of it, and pay sums of money to law-makers to keep it that way, and to pretend that it’s actually “1”.
Under the weight of regulations, barriers to entry, de facto monopolies and etc etc etc that we live in, I believe that we actually live under 2, heading towards 3 (with some significant wiggle room!).
I *think* that you are in favour of 1. I am very much in favour of 1.
My aim with contrasting Thatcher and Blair, which I think you got, isn’t that it’s necessarily the left-wingers that are the problem, it’s the authoritarians that are the problem.
Non-authoritarian socialism’s enemies are indeed the authoritarians. If I critique “capitalism” (as such), then I can-more-less guarantee that it’s not left-wingers that are the problem, but that it’s the authoritarians in the authoritarian-right quadrant (I, of course, would say that my examples “2” or “3” caused by this – authoritarian government giving hand-outs to their mates). If, I dunno, Branson gets a bail-out, I’d put that well and truly in categories 2 or 3.
The point isn’t that “left” or “right” are the problem, the point for both of us is that “up” and “down” (depending on which political chart you’re using!) is the problem.
Take away the authoritarians that are preventing either of us from pursuing our own pet economical plans, and then we’re just down to “and may the best man win!”.
(I’m not using government force to expropriate your factories, and you’re not using government force to expropriate my land because Esso gave them a bung to do so.)
Whether my model is more or less efficient, also, isn’t really the point.
I assume that if a sufficiently advanced AI could one day genuinely do everything that Stalin or Mao wanted to do – ie. full-blown central planning, planning your day to the minutest increment, for 40 days a week, whilst housing and feeding everyone adequately and providing entertainment and so on – but with full, unquestionable authority, we wouldn’t suddenly become state-socialists just because it was more efficient, would we?
If nothing else, I appear to have persuaded people that left-libertarianism (which is different to the Bleeding Heart Libertarians, as I now understand it, but didn’t previously) is a legitimate political position (again, not bothered by whether it’s efficient or not, or whether it’s utopian or not).
Also, that the different strands of libertarians have far more in common with each other across the left-right divide, than they do with either type of authoritarian, and could probably co-exist pretty peacefully in a pluralistic world.
Yep. That’s why a whole bunch of smaller, decentralised firms with shorter supply chains is better than fewer, bigger firms with brittle supply chains. Turns out that when they fail, they fail hard…
(I’m teasing, I know that wasn’t your point. I always do the same when I get stock options or my SAYE schemes come to fruition)
This is called free enterprise. Because we were talking about cooperatives and their political appeal, I spoke of ‘cooperative socialism’ above and contrasted it with what I called ‘ordinary capitalism’. But of course a co-op can easily operate within a free enterprise system, as two centuries and more of economic history shows. Both are forms of free enterprise.
This is called crony capitalism or creeping socialism, depending how far it has gone, and whether you think the element of government shaking down business outweighs the element of business corrupting government. The terms can also apply to systems where the laws are enforced or ignored to favour the government-connected against rivals. Depending on the surrounding culture and/or the degree of visibility, much effort can be spent justifying the laws on nominally public spirited grounds in some places while in others, as Milton Friedman put it discussing licensing schemes when only government officials and their ingratiating friends are involved, “The pretence can grow threadbare indeed” (quoted from memory). And of course, when the state is run by Putin, the resemblance to strictly criminal systems where you must pay off the mafia or the mexican cartel in order to operate at all can go beyond law – Putin may find a law to break you with and go through the motions of a trial, or there again you may just have an unfortunate accident.
This is the Marxist definition of capitalism’s outcome. In real life, a sufficiently corrupt state can become like the drug cartel in the Bond film where, as its leader explains, one day you realise that every official law enforcer is now on your payroll. “Then you take what you want.” In such cases, the formal state may remain as a facade (“Remember,” says the leader to the man he employs to play the role of president, “you’re only president for life.”).
If the true state dumps the facade and rules openly, and takes not just what it wants but everything, then it’s called communism.
If the state abandons its function, criminals may take over:
– Italy: the scars of lockdown will long outlast the virus
– Amid Pandemic, The Mexican State Left A Void The Cartels Are Filling
I’m not sure what you call the above – beyond “not good”, of course. 🙁
If I’m understanding correctly, I think that means we’re in agreement on 1 being good (not just good, but great!), 2 being bad, and I think we agree that 3 is also bad? With maybe some disagreement over how far down the road to 3 we actually are? Am I understanding you correctly?
I wasn’t aware that that was the Marxist view, although now that you say it, it sort of makes sense. I’ve not read everything that Marx wrote, just enough to think that he “nailed the diagnosis, but bollocksed the prescription”, as I’ve said before. I’m very open right now to listening to people that have read different stuff than I have.
I came to 3 independently from a simple observation that the return on capital is greater than that of productive output.
Which Bond film is that, out of curiousity?
It’s called Communism (capital-C) or State-Communism. Anarcho-communism is a thing that’s very separate from State-Communism. I’m not an An-Com, but if they want to form groups (voluntary, of course), and provide for each other according to need, then I wish them all the very best.
If there’s anything that I’d like people to take away from this, it’s this: there is a movement (small though it is) of left-libertarians, and over time, I’ve realised that that’s me. That’s not a position I’d have taken 12 months ago, and I think that’s why I get frustrated sometimes. Now that I’ve worked it through, I’m much more comfortable.
Whilst glancing somewhat nervously at the phrase “several property” at the top right of my screen… 😛 😛
I assume that most of us know the history of the word “libertarian”? That it originated with the non-state socialists? Those that opposed the state-granted privileges of land-owners (land being granted by the state), and so on?
There were two breaks – Marx and Engels took it in a statist direction, and at the time, the (to my mind) true anti-statists fought valiantly against him, but ultimately lost. So we lost the word “socialist” to the state-socialists.
Then Rothbard et al took the word “libertarian” as well, so we lost the word “libertarian” to the state-capitalists.
There are many different angles to take on those stories.
Before I answer, I ask a straight question – why, specifically, do you assume that I would go with “not good”?
That’s not entrapment, it’s proper straight, neutral question. What do you think are the factors within it that I would deem “not good”?
(I will repeat, at this point, an earlier statement: I’m really enjoying this thread)
“2) a system where big businesses with money lobby the government for laws in their favour”
2) is Protectionism, and it’s not just big business that does it. Unions lobby government for laws favourable to union members. Nationalists lobby government for laws favourable to citizens of their own nation. etc.
“3) a system where an ever-decreasing number of people who have wealth and own the means of production rule, de facto, over society, the workplace and the government (via donations etc)”
As Niall says, this sounds a lot like what Marx said. But it’s not actually how capitalism works.
Wealth arises when productivity exceeds ones basic needs, and you can start to accumulate resources you don’t need to use for immediate survival. There are many ways to use wealth to improve your means of production. You can do research, and invent new technology. You can seek out education, and learn methods others have invented before you. You can make tools, that multiply what you can achieve with your hands. You can build automation, that can produce without human effort. You can buy more stock, more land, more seed, more cattle, that enables larger scale and more efficient production. It gives rise to a self-reinforcing feedback – the more wealth you have to spare, the more productivity-improvements you can acquire, and so the faster you can produce even more wealth. But remember, the majority of the benefit from productivity falls to the community as a whole. You can only get yourself a bigger share of it if it is scarce – if demand for it far exceeds supply – otherwise competition strips away all the excess profit.
When humanity first started to acquire more resources than it needed for immediate survival, this first appeared in the most productive members of society. The tiny number of inventors and innovators who started businesses that aided millions of others. Human talent is skewed low, with a long thin tail at the upper end. Thus, when the industrial revolution first started, the first capitalists were both very few in number and very wealthy due to their scarcity. Most people could barely read. Not many had the resources to learn enough physics to invent the steam engine.
It was during this era that Marx created his theories, and it is not too surprising that he assumed this initially universal state of affairs was a necessary part of the system. Goods produced had a value, determined in the market and based on the labour needed to produce them, and if the worker did not get it all, but some part of the price went to the owner of the capital – the means of production – then it was being stolen. There was only so much value in the world, so much labour available, so if the rich were gaining then the poor must necessarily be losing it. That’s just Arithmetic! With a one-way flow from workers to capitalists, the capitalists would become ever richer, the workers ever more impoverished, until there was nothing left and the system would collapse.
But what actually happened was that as more and more wealth-producing technologies and techniques were invented and spread around, more and more people had their basic needs met and started to accumulate spare resources. More and more people were able to participate in the self-reinforcing feedback, getting better educations, buying better tools, gaining experience in more specialised techniques and skills, and exactly the reverse of what Marx predicted started to happen. The rising tide floated everyone’s boats. The poor became richer, just as the rich did. Rather than a fixed amount of wealth (from the fixed amount of labour) being increasingly concentrated in the hands of the rich, instead there seemed to be new wealth flowing in apparently from nowhere, and filling up the pockets of the poor, too. The poor began to be able to save for their old age, and suddenly started becoming capitalists and investors too. They had wound up buying the means of production, and that wasn’t the plan at all! To the Marxists, it was all going wrong. It was called the ‘Crisis of Marxism‘.
Capitalism results in an ever increasing amount of wealth in the hands of an ever increasing portion of society. As more wealth is freed to become capital, the means of production get more powerfully productive, which breeds even more wealth. People today aren’t working any *harder* than a Medieval serf ploughing a strip of land by hand, but capital makes the labour they do expend vastly more productive. The source of most value is not the labour but the capital.
And so from deprivation the Marxists have turned their attention instead to inequality. Even if there is more stuff, it’s still unfair that some get more than others. The capitalist reply is that this is because some people produce more than others, which you could also say was ‘unfair’ on the producers. The difference is driven by scarcity. Where there is more demand for what a person has (skill, talent, willingness, capital, whatever) than people to supply it, then they get paid more for a whole list of reasons. To reward and encourage them to keep contributing long after their immediate needs are met. To direct resources to those who can do the most with them. To limit their use to the most productive applications that most need their talents. To fund their efforts developing even more capability. To motivate others to put in the effort for the education and experience to compete with them. Or to invent new technology to enable less skilled people to meet the need. If there is no blocker to others gaining the same skills, this pushes society to fill in the skill gaps and erase the inequality. The free market aims to reduce inequality, too – persistent inequality is a sign of a shortage, an unmet need. Prices are a signal pushing the economy to correct the shortage, like water finding its own level. Short-circuiting or otherwise messing with price signals stops the problem being corrected, and makes the shortage permanent.
The aim of the free market is to eliminate scarcity. The aim of capitalism is to put the means of production to their most productive use. The ideal of both is that society becomes more productive, wealthier, with more resources to spare to create capital, and for inequality to become a self-correcting residual adjustment reallocating resources to their most efficient use. The freer they are, the fewer restraints you put on how they are to be put to use, the more powerfully productive they become. And most of the world’s ills arise from all the many attempts to ‘fix’ a system that is not broken, merely misunderstood.
‘Licence to Kill’. The baddie gets several good one-liners, like the second I quoted which is very funny in context.
Since ‘everything Marx wrote’ amounts to thousands of pages of turgid German, I too have not read all – but I’ve read enough to think his diagnosis as bad as his prescription – and sometimes screamingly funny. As for his prognosis, ‘The Crisis of Marxism’ (that Nullius appropriately references) was the first point at which it became difficult for sizeable numbers of fans to avoid noticing how far apart were theory and reality.
Voluntary communes have been around as long as voluntary cooperatives, but (outside hierarchic religious contexts) they have a much poorer record than co-ops.
Debatable. I’d have said there was a time well before the web when ‘libertarian’ (to those who were not libertarian) meant, “I like to smoke weed but am not a socialist”. And while that kind were doubtless not a perfect xor with admirers of Ayn Rand, for example (IIRC she was more likely to ‘pep up’ her mind than to dull it with weed), the latter seem pretty distinct to me. Nullius likes to quote John Stuart Mill, whom I’d not find easy to fit in either camp. He called himself a utilitarian but there is quite an emphasis on being free of needless laws or customs. Long ago, the MSM-backed left in the US stole ‘liberal’ to mean themselves, and in so doing redefined it rather drastically. Those old-style liberals who could no longer use the term had to scrabble around for terms that could convey what they were. As regards voting in a two-party system, they tended to become conservatives or neo-conservatives – at least to their left-wing enemies (voting for Thatcher or Reagan, for example) – but I guess the kind of people who first led them to call themselves libertarians (probably prefaced by the word ‘moderate’) more often read Ayn Rand than passed joints. Etc. Some undeniably individualist people may have insisted they were socialists and libertarians but as far as the mass of the people are concerned in our lifetimes, the word socialist meant state socialist much more strongly than the word libertarian meant anything. (This is my impression – it doubtless reflects the circles I’ve moved more in and read more about, so FAIK reveals that I know less of others.)
As regards
there is a slight misunderstanding; in that sentence, my ‘you’ meant ‘one’ or ‘it would be called’. I was making a general statement, not specific to you.
The ability of the Mexican state to respond to its citizens is obviously very imperfect. The cartels are wholly self-ruled – like feudal barons (in 11th century France or the Apennines, not even England). They are also in conflict with the US, so their power degrades the US state, not just Mexico. I could say more, but I feel I’ve said enough to see the development as ‘not good’. The Mafia was founded in Sicily in 1283 after the Sicilian Vespers. Its effect on Sicily is known and is not good. Increasing its power is not a good idea.
Excellent!
You’ve described my version of capitalism (my “1”) perfectly. Absent government intervention, it alleviates at least, and eliminates at best, scarcity – for all. Not only that, but it’s a leveller. I’ve often said that zero inequality would be a bug, not a feature, of my utopia, since it indicates that differing lifestyles and wants are being suppressed, but I believe that my “1” would lead to a higher base level of wealth, and a lower upper limit. Effectively, it would limit inequality to acceptable levels (just in practical terms, there will always be some).
If I’ve understood you and Niall correctly, and the link you provided – and please correct me if not – does that mean that Marx said that my “1” (a system with property rights and voluntary exchange of products and services) leads inexorably to “3”? If so, I would disagree strongly with him.
I say that 2 leads to 3, and then creates a self-reinforcing feedback loop.
I, further, say that my 1 leads to the opposite of 3. It leads to more people owning their means of production, and therefore receiving the full product of their labour, and LESS surplus value being skimmed off the top.
I suspect that in the late 1890s, conditions were such that smaller businesses could, indeed co-exist and thrive alongside much larger businesses. I further suspect that over the last 120 years, it’s become much harder. But I don’t think that’s because of untrammelled capitalism (or free-markets, a term I prefer amongst certain company, as it’s less “loaded”). I think it’s because of ever-increasing intervention – the attempts to “fix” the system. Had they left well enough alone, I strongly suspect that the “bad” capitalists – ie. those whose property is nothing more than “the sum total of legal privileges bestowed upon the holders of wealth” (Property is Theft!) would be eaten in the market by the competition, by dint of ever increasing ownership of property: “the laborer’s individual possession of his product or of his proportional share of the joint product of himself and others” (Property is Liberty!)
(Quotes: Benjamin Tucker. Brackets, of course, Proudhon)
Remember – 2 and 3 are not how I define Capitalism; they’re merely beliefs which I feel confident are commonly held, are used as arguments against Capitalism or for state-socialism, but are actually directly derived from state interference with “Free Markets”.
If I have a quibble, NiV, it’s this:
I don’t agree with that. People’s talents are many and varied, and not always recognised, depending on what metric you’re using. A lot of innovation comes from talking to “the workers” – Upper Management worth their salt, in my experience, get their best ideas by talking to people doing the doing, and the “workers” have the best ideas.
One of the reasons I thought Marx a fool for believing his theories, and even his saner followers fools for taking decades to reach “the crisis of Marxism”, was the history already available for his inspection. If 2 leads to 3, how did Elizabethan England become Victorian Britain? By world standards of the time, there was a lot of freedom in Elizabethan England – which of course has not a little to do with its becoming Victorian Britain – but Queen Elizabeth’s nation of crown-granted monopolies (to mention only one of many things) was surely more like 2 than England in Queen Victoria’s day.
That was the only part of NiV’s comment that I too, found myself thinking about. It is a complex issue.
– Typically, the left believe in the future equal ability of human beings, after their rule cures us of our prejudices that hold us back, but see the present as containing an easily-self/mutually-recognising moral and intellectual elite who are far above the deplorable norm.
– Typically, the right, by contrast, believe that such elite beings as there are cannot be recognised – certainly not by so crude a device as a political movement – and are understood post-hoc if at all. The right also have a much higher opinion of the left-deplored average.
So the right disagree with ‘low’ but grant the possibility that some individuals can be ‘The Fountainhead’, as Ayn Rand put it – you just can’t be sure who they are till it’s mostly too late to matter. The left believe they are the long thin tail’s members, and that the average is indeed very low, but they think that can be cured by whatever revolutionary change they currently favour.
Ah, yes. I would not like to work out how long it’s been since I saw that one, as that would suggest that I’m no longer the spring chicken I once was. A Bond marathon might not be a bad way to pass the time, actually…
Thanks for link about communes, a really interesting read. Other than the horrifically authoritarian nature of them, something that seemed to stand out (do you agree?) was a disdain for technology. In certain circles, that’s known as “An-Prim” or “Anti-Civ” or even “Eco-Fash”. I personally find it ridiculous, and terribly ableist. They’re not well thought of…
As in, the very obvious “appeal to emotion” is that I think electric scooters for people with (eg, but not limited to, and yes, I’m absolutely talking of people I know) chronic-fatigue related illnesses are a wonderful thing. I’m sure that everyone here has a similar analogy/anecdote that’s relevant to them.
I do agree.
As far as I know, the word socialist was first used by Henri de Saint-Simon. The first “libertarians” were, to my understanding, the mid-19th Century types. For me, that’s Proudhon as the starting point, but I think we can trace the thinking back to, let’s say Adam Smith, and I personally think it’s academically interesting to note much older philosophies such as Daoism which have “leanings” to libertarian thought, but didn’t really have much to say about, say, economics.
In between Adam Smith and us here today, there’s many other figures who we each take inspiration from.
See this:
I could not agree more. IIRC, you take some inspiration from Burke, say? I have some knowledge of him, but in an argument with you, I’m the proverbial unarmed man – furiously googling quotes and wikipedia articles that reveal nothing more than my ignorance of the man.
There’s always a point where our reading informs us, and our biases inform us. I’m more of a Thomas Paine type than a Burke (I think 😉 ), and I’m familiar with On Liberty, but that’s all by JS Mill, other than the odd quote here and there.
Before our lifetime, libertarian meant nothing more than “no government”. Here, I’m talking Proudhon and the Anarchists. I followed him to Josiah Warren, Enrico Maletesta, Pyotr Kropotkin, Mikael Bakunin, Benjamin Tucker and so on. And these guys all called themselves “socialists”. It’s full-on free-market. No ifs, not buts. That’s MY libertarianism. “Unterrified Jeffersonanism”, as Tucker puts it.
Then…Marx. And that was the first big split, as everyone went “oh, for the love of *whatever god you choose to believe in, or no god at all*, that’s not socialism, you fucking weirdo” (in much more polite terms, what with it being the 19th Century)
Maybe the first instance of “it’s not proper socialism”? 😉
So “we” lost the word socialism, as it’s now inextricably bound up with state-socialism.
The second split, I think, came with Rothbard and others, when in his words, “One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy . . . ‘Libertarians’ . . . had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety.”
That was probably the point where “libertarian” stopped having any consistency, at least in Rothbardian circles, as it surrendered itself to the state and started upholding state-granted privileges as “libertarian ideals”.
That’s probably roughly the time that “libertarians” stopped pushing the boot away, and started licking it – or more likely, became attractive to those who liked to lick the boot. I leave to the more graphically minded reader what happened when we progressed beyond licking.
I hadn’t seen the mafia thing; I had seen the “favelas” thing.
There’s several responses, all of which are true:
In the worst circumstances, the worst people do good things.
How has the government allowed this to happen?
Are the people who are taking advantage of this kindness expected to pay it back?
Maybe if drugs weren’t illegal, there wouldn’t be cartels?
Is it still coercive? I mean, it’s enforced by people with guns, no?
The state has failed.
Fuedal lords are taking over. Mad Max time!
Food is good. Providing food is good.
Do we need armed gangs to persuade us to help our neighbours?
(the order is random, and not representative of my thoughts)
Of course.
You, however, say this:
Which at a glance gives me the proper heebie-jeebies. It’s the Randian Uber-mench nonsense that some people are just…better…than others.
Am sure I’ve misunderstood, however…
“Which at a glance gives me the proper heebie-jeebies. It’s the Randian Uber-mench nonsense that some people are just…better…than others.
Am sure I’ve misunderstood, however…”
I’m not commenting above on causes, or whether it’s innate, educational, cultural, or fixable if we did things differently. (I suspect much of it is fixable.) I’m not limiting myself to conventional elitist or academic definitions of ‘talent’, either. It was just an observation on life. There are not many geniuses. For whatever reason.
The number of people around today who know enough physics to ‘invent’ the steam engine (or the equivalent, in their own area of experience) is surely far greater than it used to be. An advanced education is much more widely available. But I’d still think that even today the majority of people would struggle.
Perhaps I could ask you, just for example, why do you think it is that most people drop out of maths or physics education before getting their PhD? Is it entirely down to choice/interest? Or is there any element of “some people are just…better…than others” at maths?
Dunno. I have a degree in maths (largely stats based) so…
I counter-
If I gave you today, a kilo of asparagus, what do you do with it? No googling! Why have I chosen asparagus?
Steam…you know, I have this idea that if we’d have worked out electricity first, the world would be so much better? Steam concentrated everything around one driveshaft, electricity would have de-centralised everything, and given us a better world of field, factories and workshops all local and defined by demand-pull, instead of supply-push. Our situation would be much differnt now.
A road not taken, I guess. I do wonder why (I don’t, I’m being sarky. That’d be government protecting “private property”)
“Why have I chosen asparagus?”
No idea!
“I have this idea that if we’d have worked out electricity first, the world would be so much better?”
It’s an interesting thought. How would you have generated it?
(I guess you mean the motor/generator? ‘Electricity’ has been studied since around 1600, roughly the same as the steam engine.)
Just for clarity, that was part of my intentionally “most politically-unpopular guess I could offer” for why ordinary capitalism in the UK had not been steadily replaced with cooperatives over the last two centuries. I am a million miles from thinking it the only or even the main circumstance in which individual responsibility has value.
(That said, the point about paintball is well verified in my experience and anyone who knows anything about military matters or military history knows that it reflects a broader truth. There are exceptions – for a while, the mediaeval Swiss pikemen, who fought like a co-op, outfought the neighbouring feudal lords, because the latter were exceptionally talentless. But when the Swiss encountered mere mercenaries led by an English-trained one, they got nowhere. So my guess is a part of the whole story.)
Proudhon is the first man who said “Property is Theft” (“La propriété, c’est le vol!”). He indeed called himself, and is called, an anarchist. “Property is Theft” is no modern form of libertarianism that I know – certainly not Samizdata’s. (Of course, modern US usage of liberal fits ill with what the term meant back when both Burke and John Stuart Mill could lay claim to it.)
Because they’re in season right now, grow like billy-o, cope well with being stuck in a jar of olive oil for several months, and are delicious.
Knowledge comes in many forms; agricultural knowledge being as useful (and possibly more urgent…) as many others 🙂
Yeah. It’s an odd musing. With steam power, it made sense to have enormous factories, one massive driveshaft powering lots of different machines. Mechanical marvels of course, but led to centralisation, inevitably. But with electric motors, we could have destroyed the enormous factories, and moved production back to a more local basis. In turn, the supply-push model would have given way to a leaner, demand-pull model. I wonder if it would have been cheaper, more efficient and less brittle.
Heh. I was just googling to check some phrasing, and just came across this little gem:
Superfluum quod tenes tu furaris (the superfluous property which you hold, you have stolen), from Saint Ambrose (340-397). Apparently, he was also the originator of the phrase “When In Rome, do as the Romans do.”
Funny, the things you sometimes come across!
——————–
Proudhon also said, crucially, that “Property is Freedom!”
Inasmuch as he was talking about theft, he was talking about unjustly acquired property (land grants from the monarchy, that kind of thing) as well as property rights that are nothing more than legal privileges, and allow a person to exploit others by demanding tribute (or rent) for their use.
Inasmuch as he was talking about freedom, he was talking about (what he considered) mankind’s inviolable right to the fruits of their labour, of products purchased or exchanged via contract. I’ve read somewhere that in the original French, he used “property” and “possession” to distinguish between the two, but the translations missed that, thus leading to 200-ish years of confusion; I don’t know how true that is.
I..really wouldn’t recommend reading Proudhon as a starting point for someone looking to learn about anarchism. It might just be the translations but he seems to revel in paradox (indeed, he says so himself) to be provocative. It took me several tries to get through “What Is Property?”, and if that was my starting point, I’d have come away, I think, with a very wrong idea of what anarchism is. As it was, I didn’t learn anything new, or at least nothing that hadn’t been written in clearer terms by those who came after him.
Here’s Tucker again, on private property (emphasis mine):
“Anarchism is a word without meaning, unless it includes the liberty of the individual to control his product or whatever his product has brought him through exchange in a free market—that is, private property. Whoever denies private property is of necessity an Archist. This excludes from Anarchism all believers in compulsory Communism.”
(I’m using Tucker because English was his first language, and he writes very clearly and unambigously)
It’s definitely at odds with modern-day usage of the term libertarian (let’s say from the 1950s onwards? Possibly a bit earlier?), but they were the “original” libertarians (I’m taking some liberties – ba-doom – with the word original, in that I’m sure others pre-dated them).
I don’t know whether they’re consciously invoking Locke (I do know they’re consciously invoking Adam Smith), but it fits with Locke’s definition of justly-owned property, in that you own it or take possession of something by mixing your labour with it (all emphases mine):
“This no body has any right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right of other men.”
But he goes on:
“God has given us all things richly, 1 Tim. vi. 12. is the voice of reason confirmed by inspiration. But how far has he given it us? To enjoy. As much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils, so much he may by his Labour fix a property in: whatever is beyond this, is more than his share, and belongs to others.”
And further:
“Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough, and as good left; and more than the yet unprovided could use.”
The interpretation that the anarchists came to, is that a person has the moral right to whatever he produces; that taking more than you can use for yourself is a moral failing, and that (for instance) fencing off huge amounts of farmland and then demanding tribute for it’s use is also morally wrong – and it doesn’t matter whether the reason they can enforce the “fence” is that they own a private army, or because it’s a legal right (meaning they can call the police) – they believe that the legal privilege is itself immoral.
It’s not tooooo dissimilar to the example we use of Zuckerberg asking for legal regulation of social networks. He wants to “fence off” territory that he can control, and destroy competition, since he can rely on his private army of lawyers and content checkers to keep people from saying the “wrong thing”, knowing that the smaller guys can’t do so.
Important note: there’s nothing in anarchism that prevents private contracts. If I want to borrow your tractor to make better use of the land I justly own, there’s nothing saying that you can’t, or shouldn’t say “Sure, neon. I want it back at the end of the year though, in as good condition as it is today. And I want 10% of your crops, to pay me back for not being able to use the tractor myself”.
What anarchism does (in theory), is prevent you from being the sole source of tractors – it should give me the option so say “Actually, don’t worry about it – NiV is prepared to rent me his tractor for only 5% of my crops.” since the abolition of legal privileges works naturally to prevent monopolies – without, it needs to be said, legal injunctions against them (another misunderstanding of anarchism is that it will pass laws – how? – to prevent enormous accumulation of capital)
What it hopes for is that we’ll, instead, come to an agreement where we say “Niall, I’ve got a field, you’ve got a tractor *nudge nudge wink wink* see what I’m saying?…what if we work together, and we’ll share the results to an equally agreed upon level?” and we share the profits of whatever we worked on between ourselves.
Make sense?
I wouldn’t recommend reading him for any reason other than as a precautionary tale. But I promise not to channel Owen Jones by thinking it suspicious that you have. 🙂
As did George Bernard Shaw, who admiringly quoted Prudhon – like calling to like, perhaps. In each, the liking for paradox betrays the character: egotism of that kind that delights to appear cleverer than his company, and rub the company’s nose in it, and, though possessed of some wit, will supplement it by cheating to ensure his ‘fix’ of that unpleasant pleasure. (In a similar way, it was said of Noam Chomsky, by one that knew him well, that he had an impressive memory for statistics, but would also slyly slip invented ones into the midst of an argument at need – for the ’cause’, of course 🙂 but also because he had a similar-style enjoyment of winning arguments.)
There is a superb take-down of that typically-intellectual behaviour in Tom Stoppard’s ‘Travesties’, when James Joyce (the intellectual with intellect – and with a touch of reality) leads the conversation up to the moment when he mockingly says
and so abruptly enrages the dadaist who suddenly realises his bourgeoisie-gobsmacking paradox has been destroyed, and he himself exposed.
Ah, but in this case, your suspicions would be largely correct 😉
I don’t agree with every single thing he said (and certainly I find some of his private musings problematic in the extreme); and I do find that most of his thoughts are expressed better by others, but it’s still largely the origination of my brand of libertarianism.
Pro-free market, anti- state-capitalism (crony capitalism/corporatism/protectionism – whatever term you prefer!), and I believe that a proper free-market will do the job of effectively “redistributing” wealth, leaving a more (not complete!) equitable distribution, rewarding those, uh, entrepreneur-“capitalists” who work for it more directly, rather than disproportionately channelling wealth to rentier-“capitalists”.