Let's start the week with this inclusive (and implicitly humanist) message from Philip Schellekens (UNDP).
Of course, there are all sorts of questions this begs, from what actually *is* development to the Q. of whether development should still be pursued in the same way in the face of the climate crisis... but its central message that more links us than divides us remains vital if the human race is to (continue to?) prosper.
#development #climate #politics
h/t LinkedIn
The contention in Sullivan & Hickel's 'Capitalism & Extreme Poverty' - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X22002169 - that 'the rise of capitalism... is associated with a decline in wages to below subsistence, a deterioration in human stature, and an upturn in premature mortality', and that 'significant improvements in human welfare began only... with the rise of anti-colonial and socialist political movements' - seems to me confirmed by similar evidence of current decline in the 'developed' world.
Bernie Sanders pointed out in the inquest on Trump's election that real wages in the US are lower than 50 years ago, and Kenan Malik recently made the same point about welfare benefits in the UK. The rise in life expectancy that was such a feature of the 20th century has now reversed in the most neoliberal countries like the US and UK.
The 'developing' world is, in fact, just partially recovering from an extreme form of capitalism (slavery and colonialism); the 'developed' world did so over the ''Trente Glorieuses' - the 30 years or so after the war when it built welfare states with 90% marginal tax rates - then has gone backwards, back into the more extreme form of capitalism we know doesn't work.
Indeed; capitalism is a system focussed on finding ways to make a surplus on economic activity, before then directing that surplus towards the richest, which is what Marx pointed out in C19th.
The big Q. is are there forms of capitalism that are less like that & from which greater balanced social welfare can be derived, or is capitalism (in all forms) an engine of increasing inequality & enrichment of the powerful elite?
And if the latter how do we replace it?
Public ownership of land and natural resources along with nationalised provision of essential services would go a long way towards stifling capitalist exploitation without regulating everything to the point of stagnation.
Making shareholders directly responsible for the actions of the companies they own would also help, as would closing loopholes on financial trusts and offshore savings.
100% IHT would probably be too vindictive.
Interestingly, one of the key 'shining examples' of the ultra-capitalists, Singapore, is much nearer this than they might realise (as the vast majority of housing is state/city owned)
Good point. Telecoms too (or at least it was)
@ReggieHere @ChrisMayLA6 @KimSJ @urlyman
@thegarbagebird
Ah yes - Singapore, the model small-state-free-market economy of the brexiteers - remember "Singapore on Thames" ? - Singapore, where almost all the land and 85% of housing are in public ownership, and nearly a quarter of national output is from state-owned enterprises...
I have what may be an unusual view of economic systems and how to replace them - which is not to worry about it. They change. All real economies, whatever they call themselves, are mixed - so the task of politics is to change the mix. For me, the core problem confronting us has two main aspects: inequality and climate-ecological breakdown - but at bottom these are the same problem: the over-exploitation (of people and environment) and overconsumption (by the relatively wealthy).
The remedy also has two main aspects: making tax fairer and making big business more socially and environmentally responsible. Pursuing these aims will in effect end capitalism (but not free enterprise - small business will be taxed and regulated differently, but in many ways stay as it is) - but we don't need to talk about ending capitalism, just about the harm that big business and billionaires are doing.
@GeofCox @ReggieHere @ChrisMayLA6 @KimSJ @urlyman @thegarbagebird
That looks awfully like 'feasible socialism' as formulated by #alecnove in the 1980s.
@djr2024 @GeofCox @ReggieHere @KimSJ @urlyman @thegarbagebird
Crikey, now there's a name I've not heard for a while
@GeofCox @ChrisMayLA6 @KimSJ @urlyman @thegarbagebird
Agreed. Free enterprise and commerce are not the same as capitalism.
@GeofCox @ReggieHere @KimSJ @urlyman @thegarbagebird
Completely agree; there is no one capitalism, or even a pure form to which 'we' might aspire - there are only varieties of capitalism, and depending on how fine grained ones analytical approach, there are either some large groupings or a wide range of different mixtures.... and of course we shouldn't forget the Braudelian & Polanyian points that markets as a economic mechanism far predate modern capitalism!
I'm inclined to think markets are an almost universal phenomenon in any human society of sufficient size. They certainly existed in the ancient world, under feudalism, and in may ways in 'communist' societies - which have been just as diverse - mixed - as the different 'capitalisms'.
Markets are in principle - and often in practice - lovely, friendly, human places, where people that have made or grown a lot of some things can trade them for other things they need. But that has nothing whatever to do with capitalism as we know it, whose main direction is precisely the other way: towards monopoly, cornering the market, buying up competitors, policing intellectual property, tying up customers in contractual small print, capturing whole industrial sectors... Aaagh !
@GeofCox @ReggieHere @KimSJ @urlyman @thegarbagebird
I agree; the issue is scale. John Ruskin's view of markets is that they could only remain socially embedded (Polanyi's phrase not his) and moral, where the mistaken between participants was limited to the community where each person could plausibly know the person they were dealing with.... this both engendered trust but also acted as a limitation on bad faith dealing.
https://www.academia.edu/1967015/John_Ruskin_s_Political_Economy_There_is_No_Wealth_but_Life_
In 2010 it will be 150 years since John Ruskin’s major intervention in political economy was published. While in many ways Ruskin remains a well-known British commentator, his work on political economy has languished, relatively under-appreciated and
There's an account on here that - without irony - claims that all criticisms of capitalism are meaningless because 'pure' free market capitalism has never been tried.
@ReggieHere @GeofCox @KimSJ @urlyman @thegarbagebird
Ha ha, on one level I can see the point; but of course that supposes that no partial/mixed forms of capitalism exhibit the characteristics of pure capitalism.... its a similar argument that free trade zealots make; we cannot criticise the effects of free trade because trade has never been totally free.
Ha! true. In this case I think it was buyers' remorse from the Austrian crew, who are justly annoyed with corporations for wrecking free markets with their monopolies and anti-competitive behaviour.
Who could have possibly guessed that they'd revert to such tactics?
Well, I suppose that when the Mises and Hayek groupies who created this mess in the first place start to hate corporations for messing up their childishly idealistic model of 'free' market capitalism then we've come full circle.
....not that the corporations and their shareholders care at this point.
@thegarbagebird @ReggieHere @ChrisMayLA6
There are at least two scary errors in the idea that we don't know how capitalism works because 'pure capitalism' has never been tried: (1) that we have to try something to see if it's a good idea, and (2) that it's possible to impose a 'pure' blueprint on the messy reality of diverse human societies.
(The latter is the mistake of those revolutionaries - of both left and right - whose abstract idealism turns to terror. They want to change everything all at once, but not everybody - even 'fellow travelers' - will go along with every change, and since the precious blueprint is more important than human lives...)
On 'pure free-market capitalism' I would make observations in two areas: (1) capitalism can't work even in theory - for example it has no effective built-in incentives for socially and environmentally responsible behaviour - there is no market mechanism that would mitigate disasters (like climate breakdown) that are decades or centuries in the making; and (2) we do know that the nearer capitalism gets to a 'pure' form - ie. less regulation, less public ownership, less state education, lesser welfare state, etc - the worse it gets, even in its own terms (eg. as a matter of factual economic history, high growth is associated with precisely the above 'socialist' policies, whereas neoliberalism is associated with low growth).
@GeofCox @thegarbagebird @ReggieHere @KimSJ @urlyman
Agreed; this is why I've always been a supporter of 'regulatory capitalism' - capitalism kept within bounds where it can be useful, and excluded from those aspects of society where other methods enhance social welfare
For me, there are social benefits to both free enterprise and economic planning, so it's really just (just!) a question of finding the optimal mix.
I don't see capitalism as really about either free enterprise or free markets - it misunderstands itself. It's really about 3 things: privatisation of what really belongs to nobody and what would be better held in common, depriving most people of the means to get their own living so that they have to work for wages, and specific ideological, institutional, legal and financial arrangements that impose and perpetuate these mistakes.
Both enterprise and markets predate capitalism and are not specific to it. Trying to curtail the energy and creativity of growers, makers, experts of all kinds seems to me an obvious mistake - but so does protecting their 'property rights' to the point where they curtail the energy, creativity, freedom, and indeed health of others, or despoil the Earth of resources, beauty and wonder. This is in practice (as I think you said earlier) largely a question of scale.
There's plentiful evidence from the UK's experience of privatisation that basic infrastructure works better in public ownership, and also from the history of co-operatives and other forms of social enterprise that they can work well big or small; many privately-owned small businesses also work well - but conversely, as far as I can see, the evidence is that enormous private megacorporations - Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Tech, etc - always end up working against the public interest.
In 'communist' Yugoslavia I believe free enterprise was allowed until it got to 20 staff, when it would have to introduce employee ownership. Thomas Piketty has explored the idea of a 'sliding scale' of business ownership, which would require the progressive passing of ownership out of private hands as a business grows. But in a sense it doesn't matter where we eventually end up - the point is to set off in the right direction: extend pubic ownership of basic infrastructure where we can, support anti-capitalist but market-oriented structures like co-operatives and social enterprise, regulate big business to make it increasingly socially and environmentally responsible, protect vulnerable people... When a grand master plays chess, they don't calculate every possible future like a 'brute force' chess computer programme - they just start building a strong position and see what happens.
@GeofCox @thegarbagebird @ReggieHere @KimSJ @urlyman
yes, I explored the Yugoslav model in my book on Corporations when discussing different ways of managing enterprises (along with coopertaives like Mondragon)
So, basically this is an admission that capitalism has already failed.
Obvious parallel to how people started talking about how "actual communism" had never been tried.
Oh no. Apparently free market capitalism *hasn't* failed, so much as it's being inconvenienced by bad actors who don't know the rules....so much for the famous self-correcting markets!
The parallel with communist idealism is hugely ironic.
Oh, by the way, was it that Mises-head?
Those are the worst. And apparently, they think now is the time to crawl back out of the woodwork, because they think "libertarianism has come out as just nazism regurgitated" has slipped out of memory of the public.
And the fundamental impetus of all right-wing politics (all of it, not just fascist ones) is personal gain.
Traditional conservative parties are all about hoodwinking the middle-class into voting for "pragmatic economic policy" that is actually solely for the benefit of the ultra-rich. This the politicians do for personal gain, usually juicy appointments after their term in office.
Every single time.
A command economy also has great potential for personal enrichment.
@ReggieHere @ChrisMayLA6 @GeofCox @KimSJ @urlyman @thegarbagebird
@KimSJ @androcat @fgbjr @ReggieHere @GeofCox @urlyman @thegarbagebird
Yes, I sort of miss One-Nation Toryism - it may have been paternalistic & sometimes its solutions were wrong headed, but as you say at least they were often genuine in the desire to make the UK a better place for all
@fgbjr @KimSJ @androcat @ReggieHere @GeofCox @urlyman @thegarbagebird
there's a collection of sayings - 'damp squib'; 'wet lettuce' etc. - that equate wetness with uselessness...
Emeritus Prof Christopher May
GeofCox
Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷
Reg
JenW
Donald Roy
johnny anhedonic
Mutineer
Androcat
Frank Bennett 🇯🇵