"You look out here and it's a second Rome"
January 15, 2017 6:23 AM Subscribe
Capitalism without opposition is left to its own devices, which do not include self-restraint. The capitalist pursuit of profit is open-ended, and cannot be otherwise. The idea that less could be more is not a principle a capitalist society could honour; it must be imposed upon it, or else there will be no end to its progress, self-consuming as it may ultimately be. At present, I claim, we are already in a position to observe capitalism passing away as a result of having destroyed its opposition—dying, as it were, from an overdose of itself.Wolfgang Streeck, How Will Capitalism End?, New Left Review, 87 (May–June 2014).
Streeck's essay has now been expanded into a book, How Will Capitalism End: Essays on a Failing System (Verso, 2016).
LRB review [mixed]:
In the gloomiest pages of How Will Capitalism End?, as [Streeck] takes an X-ray of the consumer culture that continues in his view to prolong capitalism’s survival, it isn’t just pragmatism and coping that come under suspicion, but hope too. For Streeck, coping and hoping aren’t simply habits characteristic of the modern subject: they have, under the sign of market society, taken on a specific ideological valence. For Streeck, ‘coping, hoping, doping and shopping’ form a behavioural structure that is fundamental to sustaining profit and accumulationAdam Tooze, A General Logic of Crisis, LRB (5 January 2017).
Guardian profile and interview:
Streeck is predicting that the capitalists will be their own gravediggers, through having destroyed the workers and the dissidents they needed to maintain the system. What comes next is not some better replacement but is more akin to the centuries-long rotting away of the Roman empire.Aditya Chakrabortty, Wolfgang Streeck: the German economist calling time on capitalism, The Guardian (9 December 2016).
Meanwhile, in Democracy Journal, Henry Farrell (drawing on the work of the late Peter Mair) examines what the apparent collapse of organised political opposition in Britain means for the future of British politics.
Wolfgang Streeck reviews Peter Mair's last book:
Mair’s story about the hollowing of mass democracy would fit nicely with a more general account of the transformation of the post-war Keynesian growth regime—which was obliged to look for economic progress through redistribution from the top to the bottom—into a Hayekian one, which puts its hope in redistribution from the bottom to the top. More generally, it could be placed in the context of a basic dilemma for democratic politics under capitalism: the fact that egalitarian democracy may, in good times, help to manage the social tensions produced by the nature of the capitalist accumulation process, yet in the process may cause economic turmoil—capital flight and so on—that undermines the preconditions of successful government. In a situation like this, governing parties may feel they have little choice but to become ‘responsible’ and make their peace with the capitalist class, while protecting themselves as best they can from pressures to be ‘responsive’ to their members and voters.Wolfgang Streeck, The Politics of Exit, New Left Review, 88 (2014).
The rich won. Can we start over now?
posted by Beholder at 6:40 AM on January 15, 2017 [11 favorites]
posted by Beholder at 6:40 AM on January 15, 2017 [11 favorites]
As I believe Perry Anderson once said, "What comes after 'late capitalism'? More capitalism."
posted by spitbull at 6:46 AM on January 15, 2017 [11 favorites]
posted by spitbull at 6:46 AM on January 15, 2017 [11 favorites]
The good socialist central planers USSR got a lot wrong but they didn't have the technology or insight to build out large flatscreen technology or a Singularity (Google ∪ Amazon). Once the robotic infrastructure fully ramps up the GreatAlgorithm will take care of us all. Why will you need capitalism with you can just click the universal preference:
☑ Just send it when I need it.
posted by sammyo at 6:53 AM on January 15, 2017 [1 favorite]
☑ Just send it when I need it.
posted by sammyo at 6:53 AM on January 15, 2017 [1 favorite]
The rich won. Can we start over now?
No. That's the whole point.
posted by pompomtom at 6:57 AM on January 15, 2017 [8 favorites]
No. That's the whole point.
posted by pompomtom at 6:57 AM on January 15, 2017 [8 favorites]
I'm much less concern with how and when will capitalism end, and more with how many people will suffer while the ruling class desperately tries to keep the farce going by injecting public money away from social security stability programs into failed private banks and services, while the owners of said enterprises laugh all to way to door of the plane on fire with their golden parachutes.
posted by lmfsilva at 7:00 AM on January 15, 2017 [14 favorites]
posted by lmfsilva at 7:00 AM on January 15, 2017 [14 favorites]
I'm skeptical of this analysis, but that might just be a function of my recent reading material. I've been working my way through Immanuel Wallerstein's four-volume history of the modern world-system, and a lot of the things Streeck points out: increasing polarization of wealth, financialization of the economy, declining share of manufacturing and growing social unrest - map pretty easily onto Wallerstein's model of how hegemonic economic actors (in this case, the USA and Europe) pass on their dominance to rising successors. Similar patterns appear in the late 1600s as the Dutch fall from their dominant position, and again in the early 20th with Great Britain passing out of the economic limelight. The crisis that Streeck is pointing towards probably looks a bit different from the point of view of Chinese elites (and even of Chinese workers). You could make a case that he's interpreting as a crisis of capitalism generally what is in reality a crisis of Western capitalist societies specifically.
I do think that there are severe and maybe fatal barriers to capitalism's continued existence (most prominently the ecological ones), but I don't have any confidence in this sort of idea that capitalism's inherent contradictions will bring it to an end, or that the travails we're presently going through here represent its death throes. Streeck points to
doubts about the compatibility of a capitalist economy with a democratic polity [which] have powerfully returned.
The key word there is "returned". We've seen this before, in previous economic crises, stretching from the 1880s through, most famously, 1929-1939. Which were both more severe and also more costly to everyday citizens, occurring as they did in a period of essentially non-existent social safety nets and government aid to the poor, as opposed to today, when such are declining but still in existence. But capitalism did not fall, because, in the end, Western elites could, when forced to the wall, re-divy up the rewards of capitalism more equally (though of course never anywhere near actual equality), to satisfy the population at large. That was the key factor. There was always a reserve of benefits from the system that could be divested when fear finally overcame greed, and this is because Western elites controlled the global capitalist system. They could decide who got what (they got what they wanted, their populations got what they could not be safely denied, everyone else got whatever was left).
I think that what we're seeing today is a world in which the West which led world capitalism into existence and thereafter dominated it is passing the reins. Which means that a) Western elites can no longer deliver the benefits of world capitalism to the populations of their countries (which they previously could, even if they were only willing to do so at political knifepoint), and b) that Western populations are no longer the sole determining factor as to whether or not the planet will remain "capitalist" or not, or how that capitalism (or its successor) will be constructed. The populations (and elites) of China, India, Brazil, the Asian Tigers etc. are moving from becoming much-begrudged and overlooked participants in that decision to predominant actors, a situation which is unprecedented and hard to recognize for Western thinkers who still live in a mental world where the only opinions that matter - elite or on-the-street - reside in the USA and Europe. From there, the idea of going beyond capitalism looks increasingly attractive, but can the same be said from Beijing, Nanking, Seoul, New Delhi? Fifty years ago, that question wouldn't have mattered. Today it does matter, and I suspect that even twenty years hence it will be decisive.
posted by AdamCSnider at 7:20 AM on January 15, 2017 [58 favorites]
I do think that there are severe and maybe fatal barriers to capitalism's continued existence (most prominently the ecological ones), but I don't have any confidence in this sort of idea that capitalism's inherent contradictions will bring it to an end, or that the travails we're presently going through here represent its death throes. Streeck points to
doubts about the compatibility of a capitalist economy with a democratic polity [which] have powerfully returned.
The key word there is "returned". We've seen this before, in previous economic crises, stretching from the 1880s through, most famously, 1929-1939. Which were both more severe and also more costly to everyday citizens, occurring as they did in a period of essentially non-existent social safety nets and government aid to the poor, as opposed to today, when such are declining but still in existence. But capitalism did not fall, because, in the end, Western elites could, when forced to the wall, re-divy up the rewards of capitalism more equally (though of course never anywhere near actual equality), to satisfy the population at large. That was the key factor. There was always a reserve of benefits from the system that could be divested when fear finally overcame greed, and this is because Western elites controlled the global capitalist system. They could decide who got what (they got what they wanted, their populations got what they could not be safely denied, everyone else got whatever was left).
I think that what we're seeing today is a world in which the West which led world capitalism into existence and thereafter dominated it is passing the reins. Which means that a) Western elites can no longer deliver the benefits of world capitalism to the populations of their countries (which they previously could, even if they were only willing to do so at political knifepoint), and b) that Western populations are no longer the sole determining factor as to whether or not the planet will remain "capitalist" or not, or how that capitalism (or its successor) will be constructed. The populations (and elites) of China, India, Brazil, the Asian Tigers etc. are moving from becoming much-begrudged and overlooked participants in that decision to predominant actors, a situation which is unprecedented and hard to recognize for Western thinkers who still live in a mental world where the only opinions that matter - elite or on-the-street - reside in the USA and Europe. From there, the idea of going beyond capitalism looks increasingly attractive, but can the same be said from Beijing, Nanking, Seoul, New Delhi? Fifty years ago, that question wouldn't have mattered. Today it does matter, and I suspect that even twenty years hence it will be decisive.
posted by AdamCSnider at 7:20 AM on January 15, 2017 [58 favorites]
A nod to Piketty's 'Capital in the 21st Century.'
I think it's an essential read, in terms of demolishing the myth of 'Capitalist markets bring equality and prosperity.' When, speaking historically and from an evidence-based perspective, one could only say 'No, that's not what they do.'
Of particular interest is their inevitable, cyclic drift towards system inequality of the worst kind. That's not a 'great system' to weld to a democracy, in terms of causing massive cyclic unrest.
posted by mrdaneri at 8:00 AM on January 15, 2017 [4 favorites]
I think it's an essential read, in terms of demolishing the myth of 'Capitalist markets bring equality and prosperity.' When, speaking historically and from an evidence-based perspective, one could only say 'No, that's not what they do.'
Of particular interest is their inevitable, cyclic drift towards system inequality of the worst kind. That's not a 'great system' to weld to a democracy, in terms of causing massive cyclic unrest.
posted by mrdaneri at 8:00 AM on January 15, 2017 [4 favorites]
I think it's an essential read, in terms of demolishing the myth of 'Capitalist markets bring equality and prosperity.' When, speaking historically and from an evidence-based perspective, one could only say 'No, that's not what they do.'
Of particular interest is their inevitable, cyclic drift towards system inequality of the worst kind. That's not a 'great system' to weld to a democracy, in terms of causing massive cyclic unrest.
The way I think of it is like this: "capitalist markets bring prosperity" is a statement that resides easily along other statements like: "standing militaries bring security" and "governments bring justice". As freestanding statements none of these are true. A standing military might bring security for the citizens of a country, or the chronic domestic insecurity of a military dictatorship. A government might bring justice, or it might systematically inflict injustice or abolish the rule of law altogether. There is an institutional context within which these things can be place which will lead to these positive outcomes, and absent that context, no guarantees - indeed, often an active trend to negative outcomes.
Within certain institutional contexts, capitalist markets bring massive and relatively broad-based prosperity - the New Deal and social democracy being two examples, and you can see similar experiments in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea from the 1950s onwards and you see a broad push for similar experiments in China today. In the USA and parts of Europe today (and in the late 1800s through the 1920s), you see the dismantling of those protections on the assumption that markets will just naturally deliver prosperity on their own, much as governments tend to try to remove checks on their power on assumption that they will be better able to deliver security and justice without the institutional context of, say, checks and balances or due process. Part elite interest, part ideology.
posted by AdamCSnider at 8:12 AM on January 15, 2017 [23 favorites]
Of particular interest is their inevitable, cyclic drift towards system inequality of the worst kind. That's not a 'great system' to weld to a democracy, in terms of causing massive cyclic unrest.
The way I think of it is like this: "capitalist markets bring prosperity" is a statement that resides easily along other statements like: "standing militaries bring security" and "governments bring justice". As freestanding statements none of these are true. A standing military might bring security for the citizens of a country, or the chronic domestic insecurity of a military dictatorship. A government might bring justice, or it might systematically inflict injustice or abolish the rule of law altogether. There is an institutional context within which these things can be place which will lead to these positive outcomes, and absent that context, no guarantees - indeed, often an active trend to negative outcomes.
Within certain institutional contexts, capitalist markets bring massive and relatively broad-based prosperity - the New Deal and social democracy being two examples, and you can see similar experiments in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea from the 1950s onwards and you see a broad push for similar experiments in China today. In the USA and parts of Europe today (and in the late 1800s through the 1920s), you see the dismantling of those protections on the assumption that markets will just naturally deliver prosperity on their own, much as governments tend to try to remove checks on their power on assumption that they will be better able to deliver security and justice without the institutional context of, say, checks and balances or due process. Part elite interest, part ideology.
posted by AdamCSnider at 8:12 AM on January 15, 2017 [23 favorites]
2 billion people lifted out of poverty. Doesn't seeem so bad to me.
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:46 AM on January 15, 2017 [2 favorites]
posted by MisantropicPainforest at 8:46 AM on January 15, 2017 [2 favorites]
Thanks for the post, and thanks AdamCSnider for your informed comments.
So is there actually such a thing as a stable economic system which isn't absolute complete repression of the vast majority of the people "participating" in it?
Partly, to me, it seems like a question of focus. Recognize our basest natures, superstitions put aside, just based on evidence. We're tribal. We like the shiny. We seek status. "The other" is a powerful motivator; we're insecure and scared a lot of the time. We are reactionary, not proactive. We much prefer the concrete to the abstract. We are clever. We are also easily seduced by easy answers, sunk costs, long odds, and other lazy forms of thinking.
These are the motivators which, when pitted against "nobler" goals like equality, justice, and the like, win. So how do you design a system which uses the list of winning (but venal traits) to generate the nobler outcomes? How do you get people to care about the Great Barrier Reef (RIP) as much as they care about their local football team?
Capitalism has been sold as this "final solution" system, but it's been sold using half-truths (at best) and the appearance of equal opportunity, but it's no different than feudalism once the "easy" resources are exploited.
posted by maxwelton at 8:51 AM on January 15, 2017 [6 favorites]
So is there actually such a thing as a stable economic system which isn't absolute complete repression of the vast majority of the people "participating" in it?
Partly, to me, it seems like a question of focus. Recognize our basest natures, superstitions put aside, just based on evidence. We're tribal. We like the shiny. We seek status. "The other" is a powerful motivator; we're insecure and scared a lot of the time. We are reactionary, not proactive. We much prefer the concrete to the abstract. We are clever. We are also easily seduced by easy answers, sunk costs, long odds, and other lazy forms of thinking.
These are the motivators which, when pitted against "nobler" goals like equality, justice, and the like, win. So how do you design a system which uses the list of winning (but venal traits) to generate the nobler outcomes? How do you get people to care about the Great Barrier Reef (RIP) as much as they care about their local football team?
Capitalism has been sold as this "final solution" system, but it's been sold using half-truths (at best) and the appearance of equal opportunity, but it's no different than feudalism once the "easy" resources are exploited.
posted by maxwelton at 8:51 AM on January 15, 2017 [6 favorites]
Capitalism has been sold as this "final solution" system
Given the historical use of the term "final solution", I think it's pretty accurate.
posted by hippybear at 9:11 AM on January 15, 2017 [6 favorites]
Given the historical use of the term "final solution", I think it's pretty accurate.
posted by hippybear at 9:11 AM on January 15, 2017 [6 favorites]
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang, but after a word from our sponsor.
posted by Catblack at 9:25 AM on January 15, 2017 [46 favorites]
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang, but after a word from our sponsor.
posted by Catblack at 9:25 AM on January 15, 2017 [46 favorites]
On this trip he went to a conference on Brexit. “I was shocked by the unanimous sense of guilt.” One former British ambassador “began by saying we have to apologise to our foreign friends for the vote to leave Europe. I said, ‘You ought to be happy to have sent a warning to the European Union.’”
posted by Segundus at 9:49 AM on January 15, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by Segundus at 9:49 AM on January 15, 2017 [1 favorite]
There will always be a mix. Where in the the world are there extensive private toll roads (capitalism?) There have been some at times but it did not work well. Fully private electrical generation was shut down quickly, but public internet utilities seem to not be workable.
But people want more than just exactly what they need and there will be some segments of society that accumulate local surpluses (see the Madoff prison post) to trade for what they want. Legitimately or black market, supply & demand is a law of nature which I expect functioned in the most socialized of societies. Well regulated or ugly crime based, Capitalism occurs.
posted by sammyo at 10:44 AM on January 15, 2017
But people want more than just exactly what they need and there will be some segments of society that accumulate local surpluses (see the Madoff prison post) to trade for what they want. Legitimately or black market, supply & demand is a law of nature which I expect functioned in the most socialized of societies. Well regulated or ugly crime based, Capitalism occurs.
posted by sammyo at 10:44 AM on January 15, 2017
2 billion people lifted out of poverty. Doesn't seeem so bad to me.
Out of extreme poverty into...not so extreme poverty. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. The world bank defines "extreme poverty" as living on $1.90 a day or less. So if you live on $1.91 a day we are supposed to slap ourselves on the back and go yaaay capitalism? Either way, most of those raised out of "extreme poverty" have been from China. Not exactly the model we should be lionizing, is it?
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 10:55 AM on January 15, 2017 [8 favorites]
Out of extreme poverty into...not so extreme poverty. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. The world bank defines "extreme poverty" as living on $1.90 a day or less. So if you live on $1.91 a day we are supposed to slap ourselves on the back and go yaaay capitalism? Either way, most of those raised out of "extreme poverty" have been from China. Not exactly the model we should be lionizing, is it?
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 10:55 AM on January 15, 2017 [8 favorites]
It seems to me that our economic foundation is debt. Debt is the machine that verifies the dollar, or the euro, or the wampum string. Every dollar in my wallet is an IOU that I can use to exchange for stuff. Banks live and thrive on the IOUs held by citizens at large. Every dollar in my IRA, or in bonds, represents an IOU. Credit is the difference between the IOUs I hold and the goods I consume. Nobody expects me to save up cash to buy a car or a house, or to finance my vacation in Hawaii with my credit card. I am expected to pay the money back.
As a nation of debtors, the upper layers of the fiscal spectrum are assured a secure future according to how many of their debtors manage to pay back into the system. Bankruptcy in debtors is okay, so long as the debtors don't all default on their loans. This works because of the huge inequity between those who have wealth and those who don't--the sheer number of debtors create the fiscal buffer that floats this particular boat.
You can check this reasoning by noticing that during the last big upheaval it was the creditors who were supported, not the debtors. Think how cool it might have been if, for example, mortgage holders and students were forgiven their debts instead of the financiers whose excesses caused the kerfuffle in the first place.
The reason it's hard to envision a replacement to capitalism is because, as yet, nothing else accounts for money. I admit to a lack of education relative to economic theory, and I realize that common sense doesn't seem to carry one very far in this area. Anyhow, if the world is really nuts, then what harm does another crackpot theory do?
posted by mule98J at 11:14 AM on January 15, 2017 [4 favorites]
As a nation of debtors, the upper layers of the fiscal spectrum are assured a secure future according to how many of their debtors manage to pay back into the system. Bankruptcy in debtors is okay, so long as the debtors don't all default on their loans. This works because of the huge inequity between those who have wealth and those who don't--the sheer number of debtors create the fiscal buffer that floats this particular boat.
You can check this reasoning by noticing that during the last big upheaval it was the creditors who were supported, not the debtors. Think how cool it might have been if, for example, mortgage holders and students were forgiven their debts instead of the financiers whose excesses caused the kerfuffle in the first place.
The reason it's hard to envision a replacement to capitalism is because, as yet, nothing else accounts for money. I admit to a lack of education relative to economic theory, and I realize that common sense doesn't seem to carry one very far in this area. Anyhow, if the world is really nuts, then what harm does another crackpot theory do?
posted by mule98J at 11:14 AM on January 15, 2017 [4 favorites]
Unfortunately, there's no crisis in capitalism. Yet. If there were, we could easily take power back from the plutocrats— as happened in the US when the Great Depression weakened and delegitimized them, and in Europe after WWII did the same.
The Great Recession made people think more about inequality... but not to the same extent, and electorates have been turning toward rather than away from the conservative elite. And most of history shows that conservative elites can hang on for centuries. As Orwell told us, they're not smart but they understand power.
A lot of Streeck's charts don't show what he'd like them to show, because the start point is too late. Piketty gives data going back a few centuries, showing that in things like wealth and income inequality, growth, return on capital, and government debt, we are simply returning to the 19th century, a period that to its inhabitants was scary and conflicted, but by later standards was incredibly stable. (As just one instance, Streeck seems alarmed by a 100% government debt/GDP ratio. In 19th century Britain it was over 200%.)
I think Streeck has a good point about capitalism needing rivals. When fascism and communism were around, they provided motivations for egalitarian policies. But it's not exactly a just or sustainable solution for the globe to have fascist and communist states just to make the capitalist states nicer.
Also, AdamCSnider's point is key. "Capitalism" isn't just the West any more. India and China have some major challenges, but they're not at all the same things the West is facing. (Apart from climate change, of course, which can destroy us all.)
posted by zompist at 2:14 PM on January 15, 2017 [4 favorites]
The Great Recession made people think more about inequality... but not to the same extent, and electorates have been turning toward rather than away from the conservative elite. And most of history shows that conservative elites can hang on for centuries. As Orwell told us, they're not smart but they understand power.
A lot of Streeck's charts don't show what he'd like them to show, because the start point is too late. Piketty gives data going back a few centuries, showing that in things like wealth and income inequality, growth, return on capital, and government debt, we are simply returning to the 19th century, a period that to its inhabitants was scary and conflicted, but by later standards was incredibly stable. (As just one instance, Streeck seems alarmed by a 100% government debt/GDP ratio. In 19th century Britain it was over 200%.)
I think Streeck has a good point about capitalism needing rivals. When fascism and communism were around, they provided motivations for egalitarian policies. But it's not exactly a just or sustainable solution for the globe to have fascist and communist states just to make the capitalist states nicer.
Also, AdamCSnider's point is key. "Capitalism" isn't just the West any more. India and China have some major challenges, but they're not at all the same things the West is facing. (Apart from climate change, of course, which can destroy us all.)
posted by zompist at 2:14 PM on January 15, 2017 [4 favorites]
So is there actually such a thing as a stable economic system which isn't absolute complete repression of the vast majority of the people "participating" in it?
Every time these conversations come up, I always wonder why we're not thinking about Scandinavia. The scandinavian countries are dealing with their own European shocks right now, but not at anywhere near the same degree as their neighbors to the south (They're also not all on the Euro or fully in the Eurozone). Regardless, by doing what Piketty et al have suggested for the last few decades, they seem to have threaded the needle on their stable capitalism and political systems. I won't deny that they have multiple advantages such as resources and a highly education population, but it's always worth pointing out that not everybody does capitalism the same way. Some do it in a far less short-sighted manner.
As a classic "will never be wealthy" liberal type, I obviously favor the Scandinavian system, but I always like to point out that we have all the technology and historical knowledge needed to solve our problems. We can still live somewhat similar lifestyles by switching our energy systems, we can reform our capitalist systems to better support more people fairly, at the cost of the lifestyles of the extremely wealthy. What we lack is the political will to solve our problems.
Many would have you believe that everything needs to be redone from the ground up. I could argue that it shows a lack of imagination. The liberal project, such as it was, was to reform things slowly enough for people to adjust, but fast enough to keep problems from sinking the whole system. Can it endure? We shall see.
posted by Strudel at 2:30 PM on January 15, 2017 [9 favorites]
Every time these conversations come up, I always wonder why we're not thinking about Scandinavia. The scandinavian countries are dealing with their own European shocks right now, but not at anywhere near the same degree as their neighbors to the south (They're also not all on the Euro or fully in the Eurozone). Regardless, by doing what Piketty et al have suggested for the last few decades, they seem to have threaded the needle on their stable capitalism and political systems. I won't deny that they have multiple advantages such as resources and a highly education population, but it's always worth pointing out that not everybody does capitalism the same way. Some do it in a far less short-sighted manner.
As a classic "will never be wealthy" liberal type, I obviously favor the Scandinavian system, but I always like to point out that we have all the technology and historical knowledge needed to solve our problems. We can still live somewhat similar lifestyles by switching our energy systems, we can reform our capitalist systems to better support more people fairly, at the cost of the lifestyles of the extremely wealthy. What we lack is the political will to solve our problems.
Many would have you believe that everything needs to be redone from the ground up. I could argue that it shows a lack of imagination. The liberal project, such as it was, was to reform things slowly enough for people to adjust, but fast enough to keep problems from sinking the whole system. Can it endure? We shall see.
posted by Strudel at 2:30 PM on January 15, 2017 [9 favorites]
At this point , I'd also question that the various attempts by authors discussing Capitalism with Asian Values are, while significant, yet conceptually undermined by their own ideological states. Understandably so. I think that's the critical stone that needs to be turned.
posted by polymodus at 2:42 PM on January 15, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by polymodus at 2:42 PM on January 15, 2017 [1 favorite]
The topic of China brings out the most spurious of analogies (see above:police) and wild conjecture. I've cited Robert Reich's Inequality for All before and do so again because the contraction of wealth/debt is a modern cycle (200 years) with two unprecedented developments: uniting the world's exchange markets and shipping. Wealth and capital will not be dictated-- it dictates. Statism still hides the enterprise of trans-national corporations well enough, and culture and tribalism does not disappear, but if you're fortunate enough to travel, how consumerism shapes the world is plain enough. The want of people will be provided-- by mall and by smart-phone and margins matter.
Thanks to AdamCSnider and Mule98J's accounts.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 2:45 PM on January 15, 2017 [1 favorite]
Thanks to AdamCSnider and Mule98J's accounts.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 2:45 PM on January 15, 2017 [1 favorite]
But yet the Scandinavian model is made possible by relatively small and homogenous populations. They're already starting to lean rightward as more immigrants come in. Norway in particular can afford its generous social benefits because of the nationalization of the North Sea oil fields. They're good test cases and examples to learn from but pretending we can generalize from a few million relatively homogenous people to hundreds of millions of all manner of races/creeds/ethnicities is a bit of a fever dream.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 3:08 PM on January 15, 2017 [3 favorites]
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 3:08 PM on January 15, 2017 [3 favorites]
I do think that there are severe and maybe fatal barriers to capitalism's continued existence (most prominently the ecological ones), but I don't have any confidence in this sort of idea that capitalism's inherent contradictions will bring it to an end, or that the travails we're presently going through here represent its death throes.
There's zero ideological resistance to capitalism at the state level, and the bargaining power of labor (the masses) has evaporated with the continued advancement of computers and automation. Even the transfer of wealth from the American and western European middle classes to those newly formed in China and India is a blip on that path. From the perspective of those in power, most of the human population is now surplus. I think humans are capable of behavior other than such brutal competitiveness, but that's where our cultures are at today.
When I was poking around on theoildrum.com a decade ago one of the oft-repeated best-case future dystopias was a world in which the elites get the solar power and electric cars, while the masses slowly (or quickly) fade away living off the remainder of fossil fuel based civilization, as difficult ecological realities force a shrinking of population.
posted by MillMan at 3:09 PM on January 15, 2017 [1 favorite]
There's zero ideological resistance to capitalism at the state level, and the bargaining power of labor (the masses) has evaporated with the continued advancement of computers and automation. Even the transfer of wealth from the American and western European middle classes to those newly formed in China and India is a blip on that path. From the perspective of those in power, most of the human population is now surplus. I think humans are capable of behavior other than such brutal competitiveness, but that's where our cultures are at today.
When I was poking around on theoildrum.com a decade ago one of the oft-repeated best-case future dystopias was a world in which the elites get the solar power and electric cars, while the masses slowly (or quickly) fade away living off the remainder of fossil fuel based civilization, as difficult ecological realities force a shrinking of population.
posted by MillMan at 3:09 PM on January 15, 2017 [1 favorite]
China's economy is far too complex to be reduced to one-word descriptions, but whatever factors helped shift from mass death to incremental improvement does seem worthy of some positive recognition.
Relative to what? Relative to whatever you or others deem as "some"? Because that's the tricky bit. I'm Asian, I grew up there, so some of this is coming across as talking over the experiences of others. There's a contradiction in disapproving of one-word labels and yet putting forth a judgment that something was "kind of a good thing, right"? Isn't that precisely how neoliberal propaganda operates, that form of internalization?
Again in any discussion of capitalism and Asia the theoretical issue is the problem of ontological categories. Like the claim (narrative) that the West "brought" capitalism to Asia. I'd expect that should make people ask a lot of questions otherwise all this is conceptual thin ice.
posted by polymodus at 3:18 PM on January 15, 2017 [5 favorites]
Relative to what? Relative to whatever you or others deem as "some"? Because that's the tricky bit. I'm Asian, I grew up there, so some of this is coming across as talking over the experiences of others. There's a contradiction in disapproving of one-word labels and yet putting forth a judgment that something was "kind of a good thing, right"? Isn't that precisely how neoliberal propaganda operates, that form of internalization?
Again in any discussion of capitalism and Asia the theoretical issue is the problem of ontological categories. Like the claim (narrative) that the West "brought" capitalism to Asia. I'd expect that should make people ask a lot of questions otherwise all this is conceptual thin ice.
posted by polymodus at 3:18 PM on January 15, 2017 [5 favorites]
2 billion people lifted out of poverty. Doesn't seeem so bad to me.
Passing over the somewhat contentious discussion that followed this, it might be worth looking at where those numbers are, geographically - the number I see cited a lot is 1 billion lifted out in the last 20 years, and that's mostly in countries (China, Singapore, South Korea, Brazil, etc.) that have espoused market mechanisms but not free trade as such - they include protectionist economic policies to protect and grow key industries, and where economic elites are not nearly as dominant over (or, as in the USA, more or less identical to) political elites who oversee the institutional makeup of the countries they reside in. Markets played a massive role in this progress, but to hit my dead horse above yet again, only within a given institutional context that limits and shapes them. Not lassiz-faire.
Historically, when you look back past 1800 at the way capitalism succeeded in raising living standards in the US, Western Europe, and (after the Meiji Era dawned) Japan, you see something very similar. Even in non-democratic states, it wasn't through "free trade", whose benefits only really existed for the top dog (in this period, Great Britain), and even the top dog maintained certain non-lassiz-faire controls. Lassiz-faire was something inflicted upon weaker or non-European states in order to destroy their internal manufacturing bases and reduce them to peripheral status within the overall economic system. It's a form of economic warfare, which works equally well between or within states (targeting foreigners or the general population). It doesn't generate prosperity.
But yet the Scandinavian model is made possible by relatively small and homogenous populations. They're already starting to lean rightward as more immigrants come in. Norway in particular can afford its generous social benefits because of the nationalization of the North Sea oil fields. They're good test cases and examples to learn from but pretending we can generalize from a few million relatively homogenous people to hundreds of millions of all manner of races/creeds/ethnicities is a bit of a fever dream.
But the Scandinavian model is something we have seen operating elsewhere over extended periods - in the Anglosphere from the 1950s through the 1970s, in postwar Japan and Germany. It's not as if there's something magical about Scandinavia, they've just resisted the pressure to break down those institutions in the interests of economic elites at the expense of the rest of the population.
Again in any discussion of capitalism and Asia the theoretical issue is the problem of ontological categories. Like the claim (narrative) that the West "brought" capitalism to Asia. I'd expect that should make people ask a lot of questions otherwise all this is conceptual thin ice.
It might be worth defining what I mean by "capitalism", because I think I'm using it a bit differently than others in the thread.
I worked briefly in college for a professor who had spent considerable time in Eastern Europe, both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, and we had some really interesting conversations about how things worked that went beyond what I understood the difference to be ("socialism" vs. "democracy/capitalism") at the time. The most important difference, in her view, survived the fall of the Berlin Wall and the death of the Warsaw Pact - it was the basic relationship between money and power.
In the West, power tends to follow money. There are some specific counterexamples - religious leaders and other charismatic public figures who enrich themselves based on their status, celebrities and so forth, but in general Western states are run with the economic system of capitalism, and the interests of capitalist actors. There are relatively few institutional checks on the ability of money influencing forms of power like political office, control of the media, etc, even physical force in the form of private security organizations, gated communities, etc. At the same time, there are more institutional checks on power directly influencing the distribution of money - the fact that I, for example, hold political office won't necessarily make it easier to straight up take other people's money and make it my own, or give it to my friends.
Whereas in Eastern Europe (if I remember correctly she'd mainly lived and worked in Bulgaria and Romania), money followed power. Knowing and being friends with the right people (sometimes related to them, but more often patronage connections of various kinds, sharing a non-formal organizational context, etc.) could bring you considerable wealth, but starting out wealthy didn't necessarily mean you could gain traction in politics or society more generally in the face of enemies with the right connections - in fact, you could easily find that your money rapidly vanished out of your hands and into theirs if you didn't acquire the right connections.
Historically, the way my professor described Eastern Europe in the 1990s roughly matches how most societies (including those in the West) operated before 1400, just to pick a rough date. As someone who briefly worked on a degree centering in the late Roman Empire, it was certainly how things worked there - taxation, for example, was handled by local city councils of notables, who had to raise a set sum to send to Rome - and if you were a wealthy individual within that city who had pissed off the wrong folks, you'd find yourself paying a vastly oversized share of that tax load, while better-connected rich men got off with a pittance. Wealth couldn't conquer power directly or consistently in that environment.
During the three or four hundred years after 1400, this changes in Europe, slowly, haltingly, but steadily. You see the growth of the system that came to its peak from 1840-1929 in Europe and the USA, and which is trying to re-establish its purity of form now: a system run for capital and sometimes explicitly by capital, that is to say where capitalist elites and their organizations (corporations, large banking houses, financed think tanks and lobbying groups) are the most important voice in how the institutions of society are set up and managed. They may give ear to other voices (the population at large, religious leaders, labor), but it is they who maintain the decisive edge over time. That, to me, is capitalism. Markets have existed and been important for thousands of years. Lending with interest, merchants as a class, and rich people have existed more or less as long. If we take these to be "capitalism" then pretty much every society has been "capitalist".
Now, back to China. China has had a long, complex history, but if we take the historical moment at which the West began to interact with it directly and consistently (late Ming, then Manchu periods), I think its safe to say that this was not a period when China was ruled by a regime of capitalism. Other elites were decisively more powerful in shaping the institutions and societal values of Ming and then Manchu China than those whose predominant form of power was wealth. And I think it can be further said that the assault on China's independence, political and economic, was made at least in part to force it into the global capitalist system, to subordinate it to the money-leads-power scenario. In that sense, I think that the West did indeed bring capitalism to China. It did not bring markets, or capital accumulation as such, or mercantile activity, or banking.
posted by AdamCSnider at 4:14 PM on January 15, 2017 [27 favorites]
Passing over the somewhat contentious discussion that followed this, it might be worth looking at where those numbers are, geographically - the number I see cited a lot is 1 billion lifted out in the last 20 years, and that's mostly in countries (China, Singapore, South Korea, Brazil, etc.) that have espoused market mechanisms but not free trade as such - they include protectionist economic policies to protect and grow key industries, and where economic elites are not nearly as dominant over (or, as in the USA, more or less identical to) political elites who oversee the institutional makeup of the countries they reside in. Markets played a massive role in this progress, but to hit my dead horse above yet again, only within a given institutional context that limits and shapes them. Not lassiz-faire.
Historically, when you look back past 1800 at the way capitalism succeeded in raising living standards in the US, Western Europe, and (after the Meiji Era dawned) Japan, you see something very similar. Even in non-democratic states, it wasn't through "free trade", whose benefits only really existed for the top dog (in this period, Great Britain), and even the top dog maintained certain non-lassiz-faire controls. Lassiz-faire was something inflicted upon weaker or non-European states in order to destroy their internal manufacturing bases and reduce them to peripheral status within the overall economic system. It's a form of economic warfare, which works equally well between or within states (targeting foreigners or the general population). It doesn't generate prosperity.
But yet the Scandinavian model is made possible by relatively small and homogenous populations. They're already starting to lean rightward as more immigrants come in. Norway in particular can afford its generous social benefits because of the nationalization of the North Sea oil fields. They're good test cases and examples to learn from but pretending we can generalize from a few million relatively homogenous people to hundreds of millions of all manner of races/creeds/ethnicities is a bit of a fever dream.
But the Scandinavian model is something we have seen operating elsewhere over extended periods - in the Anglosphere from the 1950s through the 1970s, in postwar Japan and Germany. It's not as if there's something magical about Scandinavia, they've just resisted the pressure to break down those institutions in the interests of economic elites at the expense of the rest of the population.
Again in any discussion of capitalism and Asia the theoretical issue is the problem of ontological categories. Like the claim (narrative) that the West "brought" capitalism to Asia. I'd expect that should make people ask a lot of questions otherwise all this is conceptual thin ice.
It might be worth defining what I mean by "capitalism", because I think I'm using it a bit differently than others in the thread.
I worked briefly in college for a professor who had spent considerable time in Eastern Europe, both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union, and we had some really interesting conversations about how things worked that went beyond what I understood the difference to be ("socialism" vs. "democracy/capitalism") at the time. The most important difference, in her view, survived the fall of the Berlin Wall and the death of the Warsaw Pact - it was the basic relationship between money and power.
In the West, power tends to follow money. There are some specific counterexamples - religious leaders and other charismatic public figures who enrich themselves based on their status, celebrities and so forth, but in general Western states are run with the economic system of capitalism, and the interests of capitalist actors. There are relatively few institutional checks on the ability of money influencing forms of power like political office, control of the media, etc, even physical force in the form of private security organizations, gated communities, etc. At the same time, there are more institutional checks on power directly influencing the distribution of money - the fact that I, for example, hold political office won't necessarily make it easier to straight up take other people's money and make it my own, or give it to my friends.
Whereas in Eastern Europe (if I remember correctly she'd mainly lived and worked in Bulgaria and Romania), money followed power. Knowing and being friends with the right people (sometimes related to them, but more often patronage connections of various kinds, sharing a non-formal organizational context, etc.) could bring you considerable wealth, but starting out wealthy didn't necessarily mean you could gain traction in politics or society more generally in the face of enemies with the right connections - in fact, you could easily find that your money rapidly vanished out of your hands and into theirs if you didn't acquire the right connections.
Historically, the way my professor described Eastern Europe in the 1990s roughly matches how most societies (including those in the West) operated before 1400, just to pick a rough date. As someone who briefly worked on a degree centering in the late Roman Empire, it was certainly how things worked there - taxation, for example, was handled by local city councils of notables, who had to raise a set sum to send to Rome - and if you were a wealthy individual within that city who had pissed off the wrong folks, you'd find yourself paying a vastly oversized share of that tax load, while better-connected rich men got off with a pittance. Wealth couldn't conquer power directly or consistently in that environment.
During the three or four hundred years after 1400, this changes in Europe, slowly, haltingly, but steadily. You see the growth of the system that came to its peak from 1840-1929 in Europe and the USA, and which is trying to re-establish its purity of form now: a system run for capital and sometimes explicitly by capital, that is to say where capitalist elites and their organizations (corporations, large banking houses, financed think tanks and lobbying groups) are the most important voice in how the institutions of society are set up and managed. They may give ear to other voices (the population at large, religious leaders, labor), but it is they who maintain the decisive edge over time. That, to me, is capitalism. Markets have existed and been important for thousands of years. Lending with interest, merchants as a class, and rich people have existed more or less as long. If we take these to be "capitalism" then pretty much every society has been "capitalist".
Now, back to China. China has had a long, complex history, but if we take the historical moment at which the West began to interact with it directly and consistently (late Ming, then Manchu periods), I think its safe to say that this was not a period when China was ruled by a regime of capitalism. Other elites were decisively more powerful in shaping the institutions and societal values of Ming and then Manchu China than those whose predominant form of power was wealth. And I think it can be further said that the assault on China's independence, political and economic, was made at least in part to force it into the global capitalist system, to subordinate it to the money-leads-power scenario. In that sense, I think that the West did indeed bring capitalism to China. It did not bring markets, or capital accumulation as such, or mercantile activity, or banking.
posted by AdamCSnider at 4:14 PM on January 15, 2017 [27 favorites]
2 billion people lifted out of poverty. Doesn't seeem so bad to me.
Capitalism: lifting billions out of abject poverty, only to kill them all with cataclysmic climate change
posted by Automocar at 4:51 PM on January 15, 2017 [4 favorites]
Capitalism: lifting billions out of abject poverty, only to kill them all with cataclysmic climate change
posted by Automocar at 4:51 PM on January 15, 2017 [4 favorites]
I disagree a bit with maxwelton who suggests that capitalism meshes well (to long-term advantage or not) with human nature. Just as there was this "paleo" movement that wanted to go back to the food humans evolved to eat (though the movement denied and simplified a lot!), we can look at the actual conditions in which human nature was shaped by evolution, and find that there was a huge dramatic change instituted when we turned from hunter-gatherers (or pastoralists) to agriculture.
For most of humanity's evolution, due to rapid spoilage of the kinds of foods we ate, there was no real stockpiling of wealth possible. (Also studies show hunter-gatherers didn't even work terribly hard, got more exercise, and ate a greater variety of food.) Maybe your tribe's ochre coloring industry could export to all the nearby tribes, but we weren't on the kind of "food lockdown" that modern civilization has. Money doesn't grow on trees, but once food and shelter did. And once a rich class can stockpile food and deny conditions to others to procure their own, then the rich have the poor under coercion, and can make them do degrading work on their whimsy. In some times and places we had capitalism with a frontier: you could go out west and claim a plot of land to live off. That dwindled, we had people come in from their farms to cities with factories, and unions grew up organically from the immiseration produced. But now we're mostly out of the factories (in the West), out of the farms, and out of frontier.
From time to time culture has had to confront non-agricultural societies, such as the Mongols who overrun China, or the contact between native Americans and Europeans. I think this has sometimes reformed the thinking of those cultures.
Agriculture's been around long enough that humans have started to adapt; we digest starches better, and sometimes tolerate lactose. Some people thrive through capitalist style competition, but I think those who don't, who might thrive better in social systems that fit our pre-agricultural nature, have their voices stifled through capitalist propaganda. Not that capitalism didn't add layers on top of the possibility, brought by agriculture, for winner to take all, which was also after all feudal policy. Capitalism has allowed layers of deniability to be added to profit-seeking. Clerks at the East India Company could push papers all day and have no idea they were part of an atrocity machine.
posted by Schmucko at 5:39 PM on January 15, 2017 [4 favorites]
For most of humanity's evolution, due to rapid spoilage of the kinds of foods we ate, there was no real stockpiling of wealth possible. (Also studies show hunter-gatherers didn't even work terribly hard, got more exercise, and ate a greater variety of food.) Maybe your tribe's ochre coloring industry could export to all the nearby tribes, but we weren't on the kind of "food lockdown" that modern civilization has. Money doesn't grow on trees, but once food and shelter did. And once a rich class can stockpile food and deny conditions to others to procure their own, then the rich have the poor under coercion, and can make them do degrading work on their whimsy. In some times and places we had capitalism with a frontier: you could go out west and claim a plot of land to live off. That dwindled, we had people come in from their farms to cities with factories, and unions grew up organically from the immiseration produced. But now we're mostly out of the factories (in the West), out of the farms, and out of frontier.
From time to time culture has had to confront non-agricultural societies, such as the Mongols who overrun China, or the contact between native Americans and Europeans. I think this has sometimes reformed the thinking of those cultures.
Agriculture's been around long enough that humans have started to adapt; we digest starches better, and sometimes tolerate lactose. Some people thrive through capitalist style competition, but I think those who don't, who might thrive better in social systems that fit our pre-agricultural nature, have their voices stifled through capitalist propaganda. Not that capitalism didn't add layers on top of the possibility, brought by agriculture, for winner to take all, which was also after all feudal policy. Capitalism has allowed layers of deniability to be added to profit-seeking. Clerks at the East India Company could push papers all day and have no idea they were part of an atrocity machine.
posted by Schmucko at 5:39 PM on January 15, 2017 [4 favorites]
Agriculture's been around long enough that humans have started to adapt; we digest starches better, and sometimes tolerate lactose. Some people thrive through capitalist style competition, but I think those who don't, who might thrive better in social systems that fit our pre-agricultural nature, have their voices stifled through capitalist propaganda.
I don't think that "human nature" in its pre-agricultural state is ever going to be useful model for human societies over a hundred people or so - if you look at the closest examples we can project to "natural" humans, like hunter-gatherers - although there we run the risk of assuming a homogeneity of our ancient ancestors based on often very environment-specific modern examples - or chimpanzees, we're not mentally and socially built to function "naturally" in groups much above that number. We can't, in that sense, live "naturally."
On the other hand, I think that "natural" and "better" are not necessarily the same thing. In a natural setting I'd have died long before I reached the present ripe old age of 32, due to genetics alone. And neither chimpanzees nor hunter gatherer societies necessarily offer their inhabitants less stressful lives, for all that they don't work eight hour days. Violence plays a more significant role in their lives, the forms of exercise they get are usually more dangerous than we engage in (okay, maybe not football) and cause greater physical damage with no access to modern medical care to assess or treat it, which means that they are more likely to cause lasting complications or to prove fatal. Their lives aren't "nasty and brutish" but by our standards are frighteningly short.
From time to time culture has had to confront non-agricultural societies, such as the Mongols who overrun China, or the contact between native Americans and Europeans. I think this has sometimes reformed the thinking of those cultures.
The overwhelming majority of Native Americans were, in fact, living in sophisticated agricultural societies and had been doing so for centuries before the Europeans got there. The Mongols (and other steppe tribes) were pastoralists, which is really no closer to how pre-Neolithic Revolution humans lived than agriculturalists are. They just took a different route, primarily domesticating animals rather than plants. Which didn't keep Europeans from projecting all sorts of odd ideas about "primitive" or "traditional" societies onto them, but I don't think that's a particularly fruitful example to follow.
I agree with the idea that "capitalism" doesn't map onto some fundamentally "natural" human traits, but nor does any other truly available system in a world of billions of people organized into states that can reach hundreds of millions, where most people live in urban centers of millions to tens of millions. Natural humans aren't socialist, or anarchist, or feudal either - these are all options that are post-agricultural and given that we are likely to remain post-agricultural I don't think that "human nature" is really going to be useful prescriptive concept.
But by the same logic, it's entirely possible that there are other forms of social organization in which a broader section of the human community could live better lives than capitalism, even if those forms were even farther from whatever archaeology or anthropology eventually determines the "natural" form of human social existence to be. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a pretty good book that covers a whole plethora historical societies that took different paths regarding, well, debt and related concepts, and I don't think that sort of innovation has come to an end with the dawn of the 21st century.
posted by AdamCSnider at 6:17 PM on January 15, 2017 [7 favorites]
I don't think that "human nature" in its pre-agricultural state is ever going to be useful model for human societies over a hundred people or so - if you look at the closest examples we can project to "natural" humans, like hunter-gatherers - although there we run the risk of assuming a homogeneity of our ancient ancestors based on often very environment-specific modern examples - or chimpanzees, we're not mentally and socially built to function "naturally" in groups much above that number. We can't, in that sense, live "naturally."
On the other hand, I think that "natural" and "better" are not necessarily the same thing. In a natural setting I'd have died long before I reached the present ripe old age of 32, due to genetics alone. And neither chimpanzees nor hunter gatherer societies necessarily offer their inhabitants less stressful lives, for all that they don't work eight hour days. Violence plays a more significant role in their lives, the forms of exercise they get are usually more dangerous than we engage in (okay, maybe not football) and cause greater physical damage with no access to modern medical care to assess or treat it, which means that they are more likely to cause lasting complications or to prove fatal. Their lives aren't "nasty and brutish" but by our standards are frighteningly short.
From time to time culture has had to confront non-agricultural societies, such as the Mongols who overrun China, or the contact between native Americans and Europeans. I think this has sometimes reformed the thinking of those cultures.
The overwhelming majority of Native Americans were, in fact, living in sophisticated agricultural societies and had been doing so for centuries before the Europeans got there. The Mongols (and other steppe tribes) were pastoralists, which is really no closer to how pre-Neolithic Revolution humans lived than agriculturalists are. They just took a different route, primarily domesticating animals rather than plants. Which didn't keep Europeans from projecting all sorts of odd ideas about "primitive" or "traditional" societies onto them, but I don't think that's a particularly fruitful example to follow.
I agree with the idea that "capitalism" doesn't map onto some fundamentally "natural" human traits, but nor does any other truly available system in a world of billions of people organized into states that can reach hundreds of millions, where most people live in urban centers of millions to tens of millions. Natural humans aren't socialist, or anarchist, or feudal either - these are all options that are post-agricultural and given that we are likely to remain post-agricultural I don't think that "human nature" is really going to be useful prescriptive concept.
But by the same logic, it's entirely possible that there are other forms of social organization in which a broader section of the human community could live better lives than capitalism, even if those forms were even farther from whatever archaeology or anthropology eventually determines the "natural" form of human social existence to be. Debt: The First 5,000 Years is a pretty good book that covers a whole plethora historical societies that took different paths regarding, well, debt and related concepts, and I don't think that sort of innovation has come to an end with the dawn of the 21st century.
posted by AdamCSnider at 6:17 PM on January 15, 2017 [7 favorites]
If you want to hang a capitalist, he will sell you the rope himself. -- Lenin
I wrote a short essay the other day, pointing out that the fake news epidemic is a direct result of capitalism. Because so much internet content is ad-sponsored, people write content that drives advertising.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:53 PM on January 15, 2017 [1 favorite]
I wrote a short essay the other day, pointing out that the fake news epidemic is a direct result of capitalism. Because so much internet content is ad-sponsored, people write content that drives advertising.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 7:53 PM on January 15, 2017 [1 favorite]
i'm more persuaded by the (gellnerian) breakdown of industrial organization than (contradictory) capitalism per se. that is, a market economy depends on accurate price signals to operate, but with a zero marginal cost information economy and increasing-returns-to-scale automation -- not to mention global warming -- the institutions that make capitalism work in practice are no longer functioning. what new institutions are needed? make work maybe? but to me an UBI makes more sense.
But yet the Scandinavian model is made possible by relatively small and homogenous populations...
But the Scandinavian model is something we have seen operating elsewhere over extended periods - in the Anglosphere from the 1950s through the 1970s, in postwar Japan and Germany. It's not as if there's something magical about Scandinavia, they've just resisted the pressure to break down those institutions in the interests of economic elites at the expense of the rest of the population.
viz.
posted by kliuless at 1:56 AM on January 16, 2017 [8 favorites]
But yet the Scandinavian model is made possible by relatively small and homogenous populations...
But the Scandinavian model is something we have seen operating elsewhere over extended periods - in the Anglosphere from the 1950s through the 1970s, in postwar Japan and Germany. It's not as if there's something magical about Scandinavia, they've just resisted the pressure to break down those institutions in the interests of economic elites at the expense of the rest of the population.
viz.
“Whatever it takes” is an attitude that drives not just Kirkkojarvi’s 30 teachers, but most of Finland’s 62,000 educators in 3,500 schools from Lapland to Turku—professionals selected from the top 10 percent of the nation’s graduates to earn a required master’s degree in education. Many schools are small enough so that teachers know every student. If one method fails, teachers consult with colleagues to try something else. They seem to relish the challenges. Nearly 30 percent of Finland’s children receive some kind of special help during their first nine years of school. The school where Louhivuori teaches served 240 first through ninth graders last year; and in contrast with Finland’s reputation for ethnic homogeneity, more than half of its 150 elementary-level students are immigrants—from Somalia, Iraq, Russia, Bangladesh, Estonia and Ethiopia, among other nations. “Children from wealthy families with lots of education can be taught by stupid teachers,” Louhivuori said, smiling. “We try to catch the weak students. It’s deep in our thinking.”cf. "Finland will soon hand out cash to 2,000 jobless people, free of bureaucracy or limits on side earnings. The idea, universal basic income, is gaining traction worldwide."
posted by kliuless at 1:56 AM on January 16, 2017 [8 favorites]
oh and: "we already generate some 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day, meaning that about 90 per cent of all data in the world has been created in the past two years. To see the effect that this data use can have, just take a look at the advertising industry... The datafication of many other industries, such as health, transport and energy, aided and abetted by the application of artificial intelligence, is proceeding apace." and yet...
posted by kliuless at 2:04 AM on January 16, 2017
posted by kliuless at 2:04 AM on January 16, 2017
Mod note: Deleted weird tangle of confusion / derailment from earlier.
posted by taz (staff) at 3:54 AM on January 16, 2017
posted by taz (staff) at 3:54 AM on January 16, 2017
It might be worth defining what I mean by "capitalism"
Very important issue. The late Ellen Meiksins Wood had a good short article about this:
If you want to hang a capitalist, he will sell you the rope himself. -- Lenin
Not actually a Lenin quote.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 5:17 AM on January 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
Very important issue. The late Ellen Meiksins Wood had a good short article about this:
Capitalism is a system in which all major economic actors are dependent on the market for their basic requirements of life. Other societies have had markets, often on a large scale; but only in capitalism is market dependence the fundamental condition of life for everyone. And that is equally true of capitalists and workers.It is a point that many -- including Wallerstein and the world-systems people -- often get wrong, which cripples their analysis. They are of the opinion that capitalism begins at some arbitrary point due to increases in world trade or some such. Brenner provides a much better account of the transition to capitalism, IMHO.
If you want to hang a capitalist, he will sell you the rope himself. -- Lenin
Not actually a Lenin quote.
posted by Noisy Pink Bubbles at 5:17 AM on January 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
Wanted to recommend this short story by Liu Cixin as some supplementary reading here. Its sci-fi, but concerned with the ultimate result of capitalism and what an inviolable right to private property really means.
posted by deadwater at 7:49 AM on January 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by deadwater at 7:49 AM on January 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
> It's not as if there's something magical about Scandinavia, they've just resisted the pressure to break down those institutions in the interests of economic elites at the expense of the rest of the population.
That is magical. The Nordics stand uniquely alone in having been able to resist the pressure, so the fact that they "just" resisted the pressure is, itself, special, and worthy of investigation. (A deeper look at how they were able to resist would be fascinating, if anyone has any books to recommend.)
Norway's oil money always comes up because it's easy to think that because Norway has all that oil money, it's easy for them. Ignoring that there are other Nordic countries, Venezuela is having "issues" with their economy, Texas doesn't share, the Middle East states import slave labor to build modern-day castles. If it's so easy, how come everyone else doesn't do it?
Think about if that nation-sized pile of oil money looks good when shared with a whole nation, imagine the size of your house if you had discovered oil and then... didn't have to share it with the rest of country.
Corporations used to have giant piles of money called the pension fund. It just takes a few selfish individuals in the right (er, wrong) places feeling like they're overworked, underpaid, and y'know what, they deserve, it to "put it all on black".
The grass is, of course, greener on the other side. Stockholm is freezing cold this time of year compared to San Diego, Russia is awfully close to Finland and making lots of noise, and everything's super-expensive in Norway.
But the fact remains that selling out your countrymen for a bigger house (or houses) is a time honored tradition in capitalism, despite the apocryphal origins of the Lenin quote. (Arguably, that goes back to before capitalism.) "Just" resisting the temptations, when it's you and your buddies alone in the board room making all the decisions, is astounding! Economic elites meet in board rooms around the world and have been break down institutions the world over, what makes the Nordics so special?
posted by fragmede at 8:02 AM on January 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
That is magical. The Nordics stand uniquely alone in having been able to resist the pressure, so the fact that they "just" resisted the pressure is, itself, special, and worthy of investigation. (A deeper look at how they were able to resist would be fascinating, if anyone has any books to recommend.)
Norway's oil money always comes up because it's easy to think that because Norway has all that oil money, it's easy for them. Ignoring that there are other Nordic countries, Venezuela is having "issues" with their economy, Texas doesn't share, the Middle East states import slave labor to build modern-day castles. If it's so easy, how come everyone else doesn't do it?
Think about if that nation-sized pile of oil money looks good when shared with a whole nation, imagine the size of your house if you had discovered oil and then... didn't have to share it with the rest of country.
Corporations used to have giant piles of money called the pension fund. It just takes a few selfish individuals in the right (er, wrong) places feeling like they're overworked, underpaid, and y'know what, they deserve, it to "put it all on black".
The grass is, of course, greener on the other side. Stockholm is freezing cold this time of year compared to San Diego, Russia is awfully close to Finland and making lots of noise, and everything's super-expensive in Norway.
But the fact remains that selling out your countrymen for a bigger house (or houses) is a time honored tradition in capitalism, despite the apocryphal origins of the Lenin quote. (Arguably, that goes back to before capitalism.) "Just" resisting the temptations, when it's you and your buddies alone in the board room making all the decisions, is astounding! Economic elites meet in board rooms around the world and have been break down institutions the world over, what makes the Nordics so special?
posted by fragmede at 8:02 AM on January 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
Was post-New Deal/Marshall Plan, pre-Friedman/Reagan social democracy the same as the Scandinavian social model though, or just a light version of it? From what I understand, the Scandinavian model involves some degree of what is referred to as Jante Law, where individuals willingly subordinate their interests to society in return for expecting the society to provide a place for them, as well as the sort of transparency that's unthinkable in the individualist Anglosphere (for example, in Finland, if you're fined for speeding, the fine is proportional to your income, because the traffic courts knowing how much you make is not considered a violation of your human rights).
posted by acb at 8:14 AM on January 16, 2017
posted by acb at 8:14 AM on January 16, 2017
World's eight richest people have same wealth as poorest 50%.
posted by porpoise at 3:57 PM on January 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by porpoise at 3:57 PM on January 16, 2017 [1 favorite]
(A deeper look at how they were able to resist would be fascinating, if anyone has any books to recommend.)
The Primacy of Politics has something to say about that, if I remember correctly, although its mostly about how the Scandinavian experiment came about and how it diverged significantly (but also shared significant traits with, originally) the fascist and nationalist experiments of pre-WWI and interwar Europe. Might be worth checking out.
As regards Norway's oil fund - I'm told Alaska operates something similar, and there have been efforts to set natural resources at similar public disposal in Latin America and Africa, I believe. As far as I can tell the "secret" is set up public dispersal of funds ASAP, before private interests can mobilize effectively to capture it.
Was post-New Deal/Marshall Plan, pre-Friedman/Reagan social democracy the same as the Scandinavian social model though, or just a light version of it?
Well...neither? It's not my area, but I don't think that the New Deal planners were basing their ideas off of Scandinavian models, and either succeeding or failing to live up to them. They were working on their own set of ideas, many of which (and this is true in postwar Great Britain as well) owed more to the Progressive/reformist movements of the late 1800s than to foreign models generally. The Anglosphere planners were, for all their undoubted vision, a rather parochial bunch.
What I was trying to get at above was that I don't think that social democracy, or a solution to capitalism's ills generally, can be adequately pictured as a single, narrow path that the Scandinavian states have succeeded, alone and unaided, in walking while everyone else falls astray. Its one among a series of different experiments along those general lines, all of which ran into trouble (the Lost Decade in Japan, for example, or the crises that gave Reagan and Thatcher their openings in the 70s and 80s), some of which continued on with their models intact (Germany's a great example, for all that they play ruthless hardball in their foreign economic policy), some which did not. And it includes experiments in East Asia that are much more recent and have their own take on things. And we can learn just as much from those other examples as from Sweden, Norway et al.
This is kind of a pet peeve of mine, actually, and I should probably stop going on about it, but I don't like the way liberal/Leftists tend to narrow their gaze, domestically or internationally, to an ever-shrinking set of "idealized" exemplars by throwing out all flawed, complex, or unfamiliar examples of how to handle capitalism's ills. And I kind of see this in the way that Scandinavia has become the Land of Perfect That Will Show Us The Way, to the detriment of looking at other, perhaps more problematic examples (looking at Germany can't teach us anything because of how they've treated Greece recently, Japan is too foreign, South Korea and Taiwan spent an uncomfortably long period of their postwar boom as authoritarian US client states, Singapore is still an authoritarian US client state in some ways). There's more to the story than Vikings.
posted by AdamCSnider at 4:17 PM on January 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
The Primacy of Politics has something to say about that, if I remember correctly, although its mostly about how the Scandinavian experiment came about and how it diverged significantly (but also shared significant traits with, originally) the fascist and nationalist experiments of pre-WWI and interwar Europe. Might be worth checking out.
As regards Norway's oil fund - I'm told Alaska operates something similar, and there have been efforts to set natural resources at similar public disposal in Latin America and Africa, I believe. As far as I can tell the "secret" is set up public dispersal of funds ASAP, before private interests can mobilize effectively to capture it.
Was post-New Deal/Marshall Plan, pre-Friedman/Reagan social democracy the same as the Scandinavian social model though, or just a light version of it?
Well...neither? It's not my area, but I don't think that the New Deal planners were basing their ideas off of Scandinavian models, and either succeeding or failing to live up to them. They were working on their own set of ideas, many of which (and this is true in postwar Great Britain as well) owed more to the Progressive/reformist movements of the late 1800s than to foreign models generally. The Anglosphere planners were, for all their undoubted vision, a rather parochial bunch.
What I was trying to get at above was that I don't think that social democracy, or a solution to capitalism's ills generally, can be adequately pictured as a single, narrow path that the Scandinavian states have succeeded, alone and unaided, in walking while everyone else falls astray. Its one among a series of different experiments along those general lines, all of which ran into trouble (the Lost Decade in Japan, for example, or the crises that gave Reagan and Thatcher their openings in the 70s and 80s), some of which continued on with their models intact (Germany's a great example, for all that they play ruthless hardball in their foreign economic policy), some which did not. And it includes experiments in East Asia that are much more recent and have their own take on things. And we can learn just as much from those other examples as from Sweden, Norway et al.
This is kind of a pet peeve of mine, actually, and I should probably stop going on about it, but I don't like the way liberal/Leftists tend to narrow their gaze, domestically or internationally, to an ever-shrinking set of "idealized" exemplars by throwing out all flawed, complex, or unfamiliar examples of how to handle capitalism's ills. And I kind of see this in the way that Scandinavia has become the Land of Perfect That Will Show Us The Way, to the detriment of looking at other, perhaps more problematic examples (looking at Germany can't teach us anything because of how they've treated Greece recently, Japan is too foreign, South Korea and Taiwan spent an uncomfortably long period of their postwar boom as authoritarian US client states, Singapore is still an authoritarian US client state in some ways). There's more to the story than Vikings.
posted by AdamCSnider at 4:17 PM on January 16, 2017 [2 favorites]
So this is all part of Corbyn's plan, just sit back and let it eat itself.
posted by Damienmce at 7:38 AM on January 17, 2017
posted by Damienmce at 7:38 AM on January 17, 2017
From what I understand, the Scandinavian model involves some degree of what is referred to as Jante Law, where individuals willingly subordinate their interests to society in return for expecting the society to provide a place for them, as well as the sort of transparency that's unthinkable in the individualist Anglosphere...
The Nordic triangle?*
posted by kliuless at 10:04 PM on January 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
The Nordic triangle?*
Here's an interesting frame for the difference between America, Germany, and Sweden: every society has a different relationship to "the triangle formed by reverence for the Family, the State and the Individual."re: transparency - "Last year, Dalmo paid $102,970 in personal taxes on his income and wealth. I know this because tax returns, like most everything else in Norway, are a matter of public record. Anyone anywhere can log on to a website maintained by the government and find out what kind of scratch a fellow Norwegian taxpayer makes—be he Ole Einar Bjørndalen, the famous Norwegian biathlete, or Ole the next-door neighbor. This, Dalmo explains, has a chilling effect on any desire he might have to live even larger."
[...]
Americans favour a Family-Individual axis... suspecting the state as a threat to liberty. Germans revere an axis connecting the family and the state, with a smaller role for individual autonomy. In the Nordic countries... the state and the individual form the dominant alliance.
posted by kliuless at 10:04 PM on January 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
The Fight of Our Lifetime: Past against Future - "Many of the people in power or currently grabbing for it are trying to maintain the recent past or even go back further..." (note the rough draft of 'world after capital' is very rough, at least when i read it! but i thought it also contained some v.good ideas :)
posted by kliuless at 10:56 PM on January 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
posted by kliuless at 10:56 PM on January 17, 2017 [1 favorite]
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in tears
posted by entropicamericana at 6:27 AM on January 15, 2017 [7 favorites]