OK, I’ve been embroiled in yet more pointless debates. Except that intervention here was important, to correct the arrant nonsense that was being peddled.
‘Left-wing anti-capitalism is the new climate denialism.’ That was the charge. That one again – every position that is alternate to one’s own is the ‘new climate denialism.’The climate school for bullies at work again, appropriating the environmental issue to their own politics, and denigrating everyone who disagrees as a denier. That’ll work. Not. One day, this crowd may come to take politics seriously, and actually respect individuals as citizens, rather than presuming the fundamental rightness of their politics and seeking to dictate them to the rest of us – labelling people with alternate views ‘deniers.’ It’s a charge that could easily be turned right back against those making it – because these reformists are completely oblivious to certain economic and political realities, and indulge in fairy tale fantasies of their own. Of course, they don’t see it, and so abuse others. They call themselves climate educators and communicators. In truth, they are climate bullies, and that’s how people see them, and experience their endless hectoring. People are sceptical for this reason, they see an active and organised minority dictating policies to governments over the heads of people. They see themselves as informing the empty heads of passive citizens. They do nothing to engage citizens in order to create the political will that leads to legitimate public action. After decades of climate campaigning, I am now accused of being a denier for locating the problem in the social system and demanding its transformation. What to call people who can’t see the structural causes of the climate crisis, and hence reject the need for system change? Deniers, I’d say. Tricky business, politics. Disagreement is the nature of the beast. Those who think climate science points to clear, non-negotiable solutions put politics on ice, and effectively stifle the popular voice. Bullies who should never be trusted with political power.
Apparently, the adoption of the Swedish model is going to save the U.S. and save the climate, apparently. Nothing against Sweden, but in the words of good old Charlie Brown, "Good grief." Years ago when I studied international industrial relations at Keele, I was warned of the dangers of comparative analysis – the temptation of people to identify a favourite social system and argue for its adoption in one’s own country. “Not for export” I was told. The Swedes have got what the Swedes have got because they earned it, fought for it, built it, and built the culture that supports it. But Sweden has loomed large in social democratic fantasies for decades, and that fascination shows no signs of abating. Build your own Sweden I say!
I did my economics masters on the German 'socially responsible market' economy (Sozialmarktwirtschaft). I argued at length for its combination of economic efficiency, social justice and environmental responsibility. I was also told that to make the German system work you would need German employers’ organisations, German trade unions, German culture, German education system, German politicians, the German industrial organisation and political structure … Whatever Sweden, Germany, Finland, anywhere you care to name, have, the people there, in their various identities, created it. And that’s what you have to do in your own countries.
I’m growing tired of U.S. Democrats who think they can just import the European model of their choice. It cropped up in the election with Bernie Sanders and the German social market model. That’s the one I know most about. Hilariously, American conservatives seem to think it amounts to socialism. As I have said many times before, American politics is clueless, a world of the deluded, a fantasy world and fiction factory in which the blind fight the blind. Keep me out of it, I’m not interested.
But I will intervene whenever my own views get caricatured and abused. There is some appalling self-serving rubbish written on socialism - not just by conservatives, but by liberals, whose ignorance and prejudice take hysterical forms. At least it gives them a break from whining over the dreaded Donald (if you want to know where this monster came from, look in the mirror, liberals: decades of half-measures through a bloated state that substitutes for genuine social purpose and reduces people to passive clients; a tick-box identity politics and mindless mass constituencies instead of real community and solidarity, and a complete sell out to corporate capitalism and the Megamachine, people left to rot - there is far, far worse than Trump to come as a result of these inanities and stupidities).
I recommended the German social market model to the world. That was a quarter of a century ago. At the same time, I noted the extension and entrenchment of the corporate form, allied to liberalisation in trade and finance (miscalled privatisation) under the ideological cover of neoliberalism, suggesting that there were structural reasons here why this 'social market' model would be under pressure where it was established, and lacking the social roots to take off elsewhere. I'd still recommend that model, but I've long since stopped holding my breath. We can follow the Scandinavian model if we like, it will go the same way (the leader of the UK Labour Party in the 1980s Neil Kinnock advocated the Swedish model as "tomorrows socialism." It led nowhere, we got neoliberalism instead. I’ll be damned if I’m going to take lectures from U.S. Democrats on Sweden or Germany or the social market model, not when they praise their Clintons and Obamas to the hilt whilst demonizing Trump. This is all very convenient. It was their darling Bill Clinton who gave us free trade when others were trying to get some form of managed trade. Read up on the negotiations in the mid-1990s on this, how the World Trade Order was set up deliberately on free market principles aimed directly and deliberately against all the social market models people like me recommended (whether Scandinavian, Alpine-Rhenish, German). The Democrats have had 18 of the last 24 years of the presidency, giving us in that top top-down, tinkering technocratic neoliberalism. It is that that brought us Trump. He is the symptom of the problem, not the architect, and Democrats are very far from its solution. Trump is your problem, own it, and own up to it.
Apart from anything else, models are not for picking and choosing in this way - it depends on structural forms. This criticism needs to identify a specific target, because a phrase like “magic anti-capitalist fairy dust” means precisely nothing, and is mere caricature. As one who identifies this problem in terms of specific social relations and specific social forms, that is, engages in an immanent critique of the capital system, (its commodity value form and accumulative dynamic) drawing a distinction between use value (including natural wealth) and exchange (monetary) value – rather than some vague, meaningless, reference to “capitalism” – I see the pursuit of climate solutions that lacks a critique of political economy a waste of time. It has wracked up decades of failure and brought us to where we are – so that a climate scientist such as Kevin Anderson at the Tyndall Centre tells us that the only options left are radical. Any left wing critique of capitalist political economy worth its salt has nought to do with 'blowing everything up' and ‘starting from scratch’ - it is, if it is on any nodding terms with Marx, an immanent critique, proceeding from within the system to be transformed, identifying its laws of motion and contradictory dynamics and proceeding from there. The capital system is not a public domain, it is a regime of private accumulation, and it proceeds without regard for persons and planet. That blind spot is systematic, inherent, not an accidental feature. Labour and nature belong to the realm of use value; the capital system is concerned with the pursuit of exchange (monetary) value. It will take a whole lot of legislative and regulative force backed by popular will to constrain it in another direction. I wish reformists well, and have spent a lifetime pushing for said reforms. But that takes quite a lot of faith too. Plus, incrementalism and holistic critique/transformation are not either/ors. Let’s nail this one clearly. There may well be leftists who argue for an “all or nothing” approach to politics, overthrowing and destroying all that exists in order to build anew. As the piece I am currently preparing on Istvan Meszaros makes abundantly clear, such an approach changes nothing, and does a lot of damage. That approach, most certainly, is not the left position against the capital system. Liberal reformists can criticise that position all they like in order to justify their own ‘moderate’ approach, that is, conceal their accommodation with the status quo. But if that caricature is applied to the Marxist critique of the capital system, then I will weigh in to correct. There is no ideological rejection of reformism and incrementalism. The view that nothing changes unless and until all changes is a crude and infantile reading of what a holistic critique entails. Read up on Marx and his support for reformist measures, factory laws to the extension of the franchise to participation in ‘bourgeois’ parliaments, the man was a pragmatist, But he set this ‘incrementalism’ within the bigger picture of transformation. Marxist theorist Ralph Miliband understood this plainly:
“Challenge and advance will not occur until what may be called the crisis of agencies has been overcome—until, that is, mass parties of the Left are able and willing to speak and act as parties committed to the advancement of 'reformist' policies and struggles within the perspective of a fundamental transformation of the social order” (Miliband Divided Societies, 1989:223).
By the time of his last book, Socialism for a Sceptical Age, Miliband was less concerned with short-term politics and more able to focus on long range principles. His views on the European Union (and possibilities for the extension of the social market economy) are noteworthy. Left integrationists readily accept that the European Union is a capitalist organisation marked by a considerable 'democratic deficit', but nevertheless seek to increase the powers of the European Parliament. ‘This is fine, but it is extremely doubtful whether that body could come to exercise a strong control over the European Commission or the Council of Ministers, and to exercise it for left purposes’ (Miliband 1994:180). The question, then, is how to achieve such strong control, at the political and institutional level but ultimately at the level of social control of the whole economic metabolic order. Miliband notes that ‘Left parties cannot retreat into a national bunker; and a socialist government would not leave the Union of its own volition, but would rather seek to find allies in its attempts to overcome unacceptable constraints. Its general aim would be to loosen integration in favour, at most, of arrangements which would leave a socialist government with the greatest possible degree of autonomous decision-making in economic and all other fields of policy. There are conservatives who advocate loose arrangements on narrow nationalist grounds. Socialists should advocate such arrangements on very different grounds, and should be committed to an internationalism based on solidarity with all left forces in the world’ (Milband 1994:180). Conservative forces are vocal enough and effective enough in resisting an internationalism that is proceeding on capitalist grounds within the EC. If the EC faces the difficulties it does as a result of conservative opposition, how much more difficult is the project of socialist internationalism based on solidarity with all left forces in the world? Which left forces? ‘Until this happens’, Miliband continues, ‘the Left cannot accept integration into a 'union' whose members are actively opposed to the kind of fundamental transformation which it is the purpose of a left government to achieve. This is not to under-estimate in any way the importance of the globalization of capital or the internationalization of economic life. It is simply to say that socialists cannot accept a parallel political internationalization which, for the present and the immediate future, is bound to place intolerable constraints on the purposes they seek to advance’ (Miliband 1994:180).
Miliband’s view has the merit of separating two quite distinct issues here 1) the effective regulation of global capitalism; 2) socialism as a genuine social control and internationalism and as an alternative to capitalism’s objective, unsocial and inegalitarian socialisation and globalisation. It is perfectly possible to argue the case for the superiority of the Social Market model of capitalism over the Liberal Market model. That is, to quote the title of Michel Albert’s book, a case of ‘capitalism against capitalism’. Miliband’s point is that the notion of supranational public regulation amounts to a political internationalisation which complements rather than challenges economic internationalisation. That is precisely what it does, seeking the effective regulation of the global economy. That is surely better than financial instability, uneven development, competitive downsizing, tax harmonization to zero or less and any number of negative consequences which follow an unregulated global economy. It isn’t socialism but it is better than liberal market capitalism.
In which case, one can argue that, in the long run, socialism is better than Social Market capitalism is better than Liberal Market capitalism. In this respect one can draw on the conclusion to another of Miliband’s books, Divided Societies, where, arguing for socialism, Miliband acknowledges that ‘the conditions do not at present exist—and will not exist for some time to come in any advanced capitalist country—for the coming to power of the kind of government that would seek to bring about a radical transformation of the existing social order. But as I have sought to argue, it is quite realistic to think that these conditions will come into being within the next ten, twenty, or thirty years—a long time in the life of an individual, but a mere moment in historical time. In this perspective, class struggle for the creation of democratic, egalitarian, co-operative, and classless societies, far from coming to an end, has barely begun’ (Miliband 1989:234).
We've only just begun - feasible, incremental reforms undertaken within a radical social transformation, the one feeding seemlessly into the other. That's pretty much what Marx envisaged, not some idiotic 'all or nothing' revolution or some craven bit-by-bit reformism that gets so far before running out of steam (and other people's money ...)
Further, what liberal reformists criticize as ‘Communism’ and ‘Socialism’ are anything but, but refer to the political appropriation/extraction of surplus value organised through the authoritarian state, something that remains very clearly within the accumulative logic of capital. Hence the clear distinction that is made between the capital system (accumulative logic and dynamic within the capital relation) and capitalism (which merely changes the institutions, such as the title deeds on property, not the production relations). Unless we are just talking vaguely about 'the economy', without identifying the specific mediations (just productive human activity generally as making demands on resources, which, again, says nothing).
"We need to ensure there are ways to internalize externalized costs." Try to do that, then, and see what happens. Externalisation is a structural principle of the capital system. I wholly support the circular economy and the real materials economy, the degrowth or postgrowth economy. But there is something essential missing in the analysis. The problem is that this emphasis on material and energetic transformations in ecological economics is itself a partial understanding. The one-sidedness of a monetarist economics focused on capital and the process of accumulation has been replaced by the one-sidedness of a bioeconomics focused on nature and physical processes. Both sides neglect the social forms through which economic activity proceeds. An integral view which looks at the entire metabolic order is required if we are to develop an effective response, in terms of policies and actions, to the contemporary environmental crisis. The ecologically disastrous transformations of matter and energy at the heart of this crisis need to be properly identified in the accumulative dynamic driving capital’s social metabolic order and uprooted at source. Ambitious demands and policies for degrowth are utopian unless they are attached to structural transformations that integrate labour and nature, contesting the expropriation, alienation and exploitation of both under the commodity form, the ‘pivot’ of political economy. This ‘pivot’ goes missing in both classical and neoclassical economics, where capital is agent in an alienated system of production that has inverted subject and object, and in bioeconomics, where the emphasis is upon material and energetic transformations. In both, the creative agency of labour is either denied, perverted or neglected, resulting in an understanding that merely perpetuates political economy’s characteristic one-sidedness. There is an absence of mediation that serves to vitiate any insights offered. On the one side, it is the money, commodity and capital forms that are considered to be of sole significance, one the other side it is matter and energy. The problem, then, is one of the missing mediation. Both perspectives neglect the specific social form which determines the way in which labour and nature come to be used under the capitalist mode of production, meaning that there is a failure to explain how and why these ‘resources’ are transformed into capital, and why the material base of society is endlessly revolutionized.
Externalisation as a structural principle does not appear in the analyses on either side of this divide, a blind spot that one can identify in the various alternative economics being developed in light of the deepening crisis of the capital system – evolutionary, ecological or circular, commons, community, degrowth or post-growth, all of which grasp an important part of the truth, but not all of it, and fall short of the system-wide transformation required as a result. Many of the insights generated in these areas are good, but risk failure through the neglect of the necessary, and contradictory, dynamics of capitalist economics in relation to society, labour and nature.
There is a blind spot at the heart of the capital system as a result of the distinction between use value and exchange value, resulting in the ecological and social costs of production being excluded from the bottom line. I can point clearly to this in terms of neoclassical economics, and its modern neoliberal variant. Think you can overcome it? We've been long trying. We are up against the fact that externalisation is a structural principle of that system. Internalizing costs means revaluing the two sources of wealth (labour and nature) in the realm of use value – and that does imply a very different economic system. The expansion of the capital system, through the overriding objective of exchange value, brings conflict with the natural environment, generates externalities and opens up an ecological rift. But none of these deleterious environmental consequences register in the value calculations that motivate the system. The damaging behaviour lacks a self-correcting mechanism. The capital system is therefore fundamentally dissipative in that the pursuit of exchange value will continue until use values are exhausted. Marx, long, long ago, pointed to the notion of metabolic ‘rift’ as a result – we call it transgressing planetary boundaries now. And he showed it to be a necessary feature of the system, not accidental. You cannot eliminate the negative features and keep the positive features, the system is a package deal. There are many forms of denial, they usually come in the form of ideological blinkers. Having spent far too many years studying economics in depth, I don't care to see painstaking institutional and structural analysis dismissed as "fairy dust." That may well apply to those who indulge in wishful thinking rather than set down clearly how they propose to meet the Alternative Institutions Requirement and Transitions Requirement (the institutions of a viable and stable economic order and how we get there). But there are plenty of left thinkers who work on those requirements (I know they exist, I know them personally, and they know their stuff).
From Jonathan Wolff’s book "Why Read Marx Today?"
‘Yet the idea of domination goes much deeper still. Consider the well-worn idea ‘you can’t buck the market.’ We have become used to the idea that there are such things as ‘market forces’ and if you ignore them you do so at your peril. You are just as likely to come to grief as if you ignored natural forces – gravity, magnetism, and so on. For example, if you are a capitalist and your competitors around you start cutting prices, then you had better follow suit or you will go out of business. If your customers decide that they no longer like what you produce, then you had better produce something else, smartish.
The lesson is that the capitalist economy renders some forms of behaviour rational and others irrational. So you had better do what the market mandates or you will be in trouble. Consequently we find ourselves dominated by the market. But what is the market? Simply the accumulated effects of innumerable human decisions about production and consumption. It is, then, our own product. From which it follows that, once more, we have come to be dominated by our own product. And even though it is our own product it is not under our control. Who, for example, wants the stock market to crash? But this happens, from time to time, as an unintended consequence of our own individual actions, each one of which may have seemed perfectly rational in its own terms. The market is like a monster we have accidentally created, but which now comes to rule our lives. As Marx puts it …’
P33
I labour these points in my work, emphasising the extent to which, within specific social relations, individual freedom generates a collective unfreedom in a mutual self-cancellation. Externalisation is a structural principle of the capital system. With climate change and global warming, this self-cancellation threatens mutual self-annihilation. The social identity connecting immediate self-interest and long-term common good does not exist within these relations. Individuals are locked within socially structured patterns of behaviour in which the dominant form of rationality is immediate interest, and action for a public good requires a level of sacrifice of this interested which is deemed irrational. Until we restructure that, we will lack the means and mechanisms of effective collective action. Going all the way back to St Thomas Aquinas in the Summa, he notes that knowledge and know-how give us the ability to act, they do not in themselves make us want to act. That points to the need to bridge the gap between theoretical reason and practical reason (ethics, politics, economics, the way that scientific knowledge and technological know how come to be used for the common good).
With respect to the passage from Wolff, I’m not happy with the focus on the market and markets. As I emphasized in my thesis on Marx, the principal focus of Marx’s critical analysis was not the market at all but the commodity form. Marx is committed to extirpating the commodity value form, not markets. Marx wrote little on markets, there is little analysis of them, to him they are merely a social institution whose character is clearly dependent on social forms and relations. His critique goes much deeper than markets to the necessary operation of the capital system through the value form. And this raises the real questions.
I don’t know what fantasy world liberal reformists live in – incrementalism is incapable of the holistic engagement with the entire social metabolic order of the capital system, a system sustained by a series of circular likages. The truth is that it is much easier for some people to envisage the end of civilisation, the end of the world, even, that to envisage the end of the capital system.
Global inequality is growing, with half the world’s wealth now in the hands of just 1% of the population, according to a new report.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2015/oct/13/half-world-wealth-in-hands-population-inequality-report
Richest 1% own half the world's wealth, study finds
Credit Suisse report highlights increasing gap between the super-rich and the remainder of the globe’s population
The global economy created a record number of billionaires last year, exacerbating inequality amid a weakening of workers’ rights and a corporate push to maximize shareholder returns, charity organization Oxfam International said in a new report.
“People are ready for change. They want a limit on the power and the wealth which sits in the hands of so few.”
Ralph Miliband identifies taxation as an exceptionally important issue in the waging of class struggle from above. ‘Dominant classes everywhere have naturally always sought to reduce to the greatest possible extent the amount of money they have to pay in taxes. They seek this for themselves; and, in a capitalist context, those who are in charge of capitalist enterprise seek it for their firms. One of the most truly remarkable aspects of the history of capitalist democracies in the twentieth century is how successful dominant classes have been in these strivings, notwithstanding the constant complaints and wailings of business and the rich about the tax burdens they have to bear; or perhaps it is not so remarkable, given the consideration, generosity, and partiality with which the state in these societies has always treated both business and the rich’ (Miliband 1989:136/7).
Figures like this are not accidental, they are structural, and no amount of legislative and regulative action can restrain it.
The same with respect to climate change. Here are a few things to concentrate the minds of all the 'moderate' 'centrists' out there who think the appeal to sweet reason will be sufficient to win the day. (The people who presume that very thing that is missing - the centre ground for each and all to stand on)
Rough paper suggests ‘very high risk’ target will be surpassed by middle of century
Only a dramatic and unprecedented shift away from fossil fuels will enable world governments to limit warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial times, it said.
A draft report from the IPCC says only huge and rapid change in the way we live can keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, the lower limit set out by the Paris Agreement. Reactions to the leaked paper vary.
It is very unlikely we would be able to give up fossil fuels by 2040 — necessary to limit warming to 1.5 degrees — "if you look at the next 10 years and what we are going to be burning just by virtue of how the economy is set up," Karsten Haustein, a climate and policy researcher told DW.
Researchers find that economic, emissions and population trends point to very small chance Earth will avoid warming more than 2C by century’s end
The document says the Earth will probably overshoot 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, and have to find a way to cool back down.
Still think you can tackle this by a piecemeal incrementalism? It's a global problem that requires a holistic approach. Tackle this bit by bit, and you will be lost in a swamp. Such is the history of reformism. Neoliberalism didn't spring from nowhere. At the point at which mechanisms of investment, accumulation and valorisation are threatened and subverted, 'the system' reacts back.
Centrism as the way forward? Seriously, these 'centrists' are telling me, and I quote, that a 'free market welfare state' is a serious alternative to Trump and to the 'fairy dust' of socialism.
I remain enamoured of Hegel's Sittlichkeit, his tripartite structure of the state as the ethical agency serving the universal interest, a civil society of intermediary institutions, and the private economy as a 'system of needs': strong, efficient markets to create prosperity and facilitate exchange, strong governmental institutions and regulations to protect the public interest and preserve healthy markets, and a strong safety net of social welfare rooted in a self-socialising society. But that remains vulnerable to the predation of the capital system, as Marx noted all those years ago.
Whatever happened to the high hopes I had for the German 'socially responsible market'?
'Germany under chancellor Angela Merkel was meant to be the bastion of the neoliberal centre in Europe.'
The federal elections in September showed that the neoliberal centre ground is being squeezed in Germany just as it is elsewhere in Western capitalism.
The social roots of liberalism have withered, the centre ground it cravenly seeks in the attempt to avoid the realities of political division and conflict does not exist - all of which ensures that 'centrism' always falls back on the status quo.
I am unrepentant. My only regret is remaining so quiet for so long on this, trying to establish collaborative links across the political spectrum. That just permits the continuation of political delusion, problems getting progressively worse in time, wedding the left of centre to the bloated state, inviting the right wing backlash - time for a self-socialisation that enables individuals to step forward as citizens, constituting public life through small scale assocation, creating ties from below, ending the clientage of politics in favour of a genuine public community, and overcoming the distinction between (active) leaders in educative relation to a (passive) mass.
As for America becoming like Sweden ...
Since 2001, the U.S. government has spent more than $1.8 trillion in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq – that’s $8.3 million per hour.
'Mark my words, America’s war spending will bankrupt the nation. For that matter, America’s war spending has already bankrupted the nation to the tune of more than $20 trillion dollars.'
As Eisenhower recognized in a speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, on Apr. 16, 1953, the consequences of allowing the military-industrial complex to wage war, exhaust our resources and dictate our national priorities are beyond grave:
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people… This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
Socialism or Barbarism. Any 'third way' option is the new climate denialism. You see how easy it is to revert to bullying in politics?