Socialism and class
Are we are all socialists now? I think not. 'Big' government as such is not socialism.
We are being asked to empathize with certain political leaders given the weight of the burden on their shoulders. This is crass political bullying that needs to be resisted, checked, and sent packing. Said leaders have not been leading at all, not with respect to looking after the welfare of the citizens they represent. Instead they have been tearing up the public and social fabric to create an environment which makes it easier for the rich and powerful to predate on society and nature and they have been caught out big time. They have been leaders in the class struggle from above. Noam Chomsky's word "sociopathic buffoon" directed against Donald Trump is apt. Such characters and those who continue to support them, actively and passively, bring civilisation ever closer to ruination and collapse. What Chomsky describes as the "deterioration of democracy" has been deliberately wrought and systematically engineered through a vicious ‘anti-government’ politics. The deliberate intent has been to disable the collective voice of the people in exerting a check on overweening power and wealth.
Over in the USA, people are being asked to spend some time pondering how well the President is doing in dealing with a crisis that 'nobody' saw coming. And to pray for him. The implication is that if we choose to spend our time differently or, worse, dare to criticize him and his ilk for their culpability in this and other crises, then we are all terrible people who are 'playing politics.' The language gives them away. They are guilty of the very things they charge others with. It's all political games to them, employing any cheap tactic and lie in order to 'win.' Including and especially fake consensus, unity, and moralism. This kind of politics is poisonous of the public realm. Hopefully, their deceits are now so manifest that enough people, at last, will see them for what they are. But such hopes have been expressed and dashed many times before.
As for the claims I am hearing that "nobody" saw this virus coming, that statement is so manifestly wrong that it beggars belief that people can have the hard-faced temerity to try it on. There have been lots of warnings, not just on coronavirus, but on the threats constituted by pandemics. Time magazine warned that the USA, and the world in general, is not prepared back in 2017. Trump actually dismantled the institutions set up to deal with pandemics. He did this as part of his anti-government onslaught, by which is meant each and every collective purpose concerned with the social welfare and environmental good. In this, Trump is continuing a political and ideological crusade that was begun decades ago, aimed at dismantling the welfare state and restoring ‘free’ markets. Since the sixties and seventies there has been a concerted systematic assault on the use of government for public purpose and collective ends, a quite deliberate political hobbling of the public realm so as to check and subvert democracy and make politics safe for the rich and powerful, who proceed to exert their power through the external, impersonal, anonymous force of the market. Economic libertarianism is an anarchy which claims to be for deregulation against regulation, but in fact isn’t – it is concerned to re-regulate public life, society, and labour around accumulative imperatives that work in favour of the rich and powerful. The only collective purpose that such libertarianism recognizes is that of militarism, nationalism, and corporate welfare. It's an ancient lesson: Liberty, they say, when they mean licence, Aristotle wrote in the "Politics." This 'anti-politics' politics is designed to check and disable government as an agency of the common good and social welfare, leaving society available to the predation of the rich and powerful in the name of 'liberty,' subjecting all to the external collective constraint of the capital system and its accumulative imperatives. The same crowd will have the nerve to tell us one day that no-one raised the alarm on climate change and global heating. It is time to reclaim politics as an agency for governing common affairs and resolving common issues and start doing politics for real. This has been the story of politics for the past few decades, and it surely has to be game over now. If it isn’t, it will shortly be game over for civilisation.
With respect to the USA, as far as I can tell, an awful lot of people equate "government" as such is "socialism" and therefore slippery slope to Stalinism. The errors and fallacies involved in such thinking are so huge it is hard to know just how to even start to unravel them. It’s like a hardwired political stupidity has been engineered over such a long period of time that not even hard experience suffices to change the mindset. There is a little book available on the Internet entitled An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments. It is a short guide on identifying and avoiding logical fallacies. Some people, however, go deliberately to bad arguments out of political and ideological choice. There is no way of getting through to this world. Of course, it is a monstrous manufactured political hypocrisy, engineered from the top, mediated by the full range of social institutions, and swallowed wholesale by too many sections of the public.
The ideologues loathe each, any, and every form of collectivism concerned with social and environmental health, but openly break the sacred libertarian principles of methodological individualism they claim to revere when it comes to militarism, religious nationalism, and corporate welfare. They constantly rail against regulation and seek to deregulate every collective purpose instituted for social and environmental ends, whilst at the same time re-regulating labour and society to put them under an austerian control for private accumulative ends. It's hardball politics, pure and simple, and does immense damage to all the things that human beings - and the planet - require in order to flourish in health and harmony.
Behind the 'anti-politics' of ‘anti-government’ is an economic libertarianism that fits political authoritarianism like a glove. Social atomization and political centralisation go hand in hand. The ‘big’ state the ideologues claim to oppose is actually the counterpart of the ‘free’ market, its official licence and sanction: it is the austerian regime necessary for the effective imposition and operation of the 'free' market. Those most vocal in denying the effectiveness of government and politics are the ones who mobilize the most politically and spend the most resources in the political process with the deliberate intent to capture and monopolize government. This is done to disable collective action for social and environmental goods and divert collective purpose into the service of private accumulative imperatives. As a result, the world is subject to the external constraint of the anarchy of the rich and powerful, who are left ‘free’ by captured and limited (gutted) government to predate on a deliberately fractured public.
I dared raise the dreaded 'c' word 'class' the other day, only to be met for the umpteenth time that such 'us and them' thinking is obsolete. I wish to God it were. It isn’t, for the very reason that we live in an ‘us and them’ world. If you pretend that class analysis is obsolete, holding to the politics of sweet reason, then class and its exploitative relations will be with us until kingdom come. It's an 'us and them' world, and the neoliberalism that people rightly reject is simply part of a class struggle waged from above. If you want to uproot that 'outmoded' form of thought, organisation, and action, then you had better start waging class struggle back against ruling class warriors from below. Try to cut across those realities with a classless appeal and you will end up making an appeal to a social identity that does not exist, but stands in need of creation. In other words, don't put the cart before the horse. And don't practice a classless politics - or a politically and socially neutral non-politics of knowledge and know-how – in a class society. If you do, you are heading for defeat (or are engaged in a concealed class war as conscious agents of an internal transition to a new class society, the kind of which the likes of Veblen presaged with his 'revolt of the engineers' a century ago.) (I have nothing against engineers, btw, they are essential to rebuilding society anew, against class systems, not skill, talent, and expertise and their application).
We need to firmly expose and reject the false opposition that many establish between 'small' and 'big' government. These terms stem from an utterly false political philosophy which separates individuality and sociality, severing individuals from collective purpose, and which is (deliberately) debilitating in practice. This coronavirus crisis shows the importance of good governance and sound science, along with much else. And it flags up the need to bridge the worlds of theoretical reason (our knowledge of the world, and technological know-how as its spin-off) and practical reason (ethics and politics).
I like what Naomi Oreskes, professor at Harvard University, says on this in an interview: “And so my happy ending story would be that this was a wake-up call and that people began to see the need to rebuild our scientific and governmental institutions and to rebuild our faith and expertise, and rebuild our faith in so-called big government, but realizing that it's not really that it's big government, it's that its efficacious government.”
Absolutely! It's called ‘good government.’ Appropriate size and scale is determined by level of representation and competence with respect to the issues to be addressed and affairs to be managed. The ancients I love were rather keen on this notion. The Catholic Church also recognizes the principle of subsidiarity here, power and resources residing at the lowest level of competence and ascending upwards. Somewhere in time, money corrupted government – and there's the problem.
Too much time has been wasted, to the tune of decades. We need to gear up politics now or face inevitable collapse. The Climate for Corona makes it clear that our warming world is more vulnerable to pandemic.
“If the impact of Covid19 is another step in the collapse of modern societies, then it is likely it will have been another climate-driven step in that collapse. Understanding that context is important for deeper learning about reducing future harm.”
Was the pandemic caused directly by climate change? That may be a likely contribution, but there seems to be a much stronger connection to a dysfunctional political economy. That connection also explains why GHG emissions continue to increase and exacerbate global heating. This refers specifically to the capital system and its accumulative imperatives.
It is striking how many different people and places are beginning to get this message. Of course, the writing has been written on the wall in large capital letters for a long time, with added pictures to aid those slow to understand. The "Financial Times" is hardly the bastion of anti-capitalist sentiment, so when it's editorial board start to read the writing on the wall, then it is time for purported progressives to get serious about social reformations and transformations, instead of soft-pedalling class in favour of consensus and collaboration between each and all. The 'game' is up for the libertarians whose liberty entails licence for the rich and powerful to predate on society, public life and the natural environment. The anti-"government" obsession is a sociopathology with potentially fatal consequences for civilisation. Suffice to say, what the FT writes here is the bare minimum of what is required:
"If there is a silver lining to the Covid-19 pandemic, it is that it has injected a sense of togetherness into polarised societies. But the virus, and the economic lockdowns needed to combat it, also shine a glaring light on existing inequalities — and even create new ones.
Radical reforms — reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades — will need to be put on the table. Governments will have to accept a more active role in the economy. They must see public services as investments rather than liabilities, and look for ways to make labour markets less insecure. Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix."
Radical reforms are required to forge a society that will work for all
Now why can’t we say that? We do, of course, some of us, anyway. So why doesn’t the likes of the FT and other establishment sources quote us and allow us to practice what we preach? Simply, because we are serious about radical social transformation, and they want the barest minimum of change so as to preserve the system and its power relations intact.
Also from the FT: Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’:
“The tragedy is immediate, real, epic and unfolding before our eyes. But it isn’t new. It is the wreckage of a train that has been careening down the track for years.”
“Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it."
Will the Financial Times come to practice what it preaches here with regard to inequality by changing the pay structure at their offices so that the ratio of the least paid to the most paid is no more than 1 to 5 (including all bonuses and benefits)? Or are they merely reading the writing on the wall which everyone else is reading, putting themselves at the head of reasonable reform to divert energies and intentions away from more radical reformation? Will they name and shame the wealthy CEOs complicit with this inequality they condemn, listing their salaries along with the salaries of their employees? Will they commit to a politics that restores the social contract?
I very much doubt it, hence my real interest lies in the rest of us, poor plebs as we are, coming to read the writing that is now written in large capital letters on the wall. And act on it.
When the FT says that "Redistribution will again be on the agenda..." they may well see this as a threat to the rich and the wealthy. In other words, they are warning the rich and powerful to give the people reform from above in order to avoid the people giving them revolution from below.
That's my warning, not to settle for this nice, reasonable, and superficially radical language that is now coming from the principal apologists of the iniquitous status quo. It only because that status quo has now been laid bare that is causing this interest in reform. I would always be sceptical of representatives of the status quo taking the language of social reformism and democracy into its own hands so as to offer us the reform required only on terms designed to keep existing power relations intact. The capitalist class is at bay and on the run. The lesson is for the rest of us not to miss and waste this crisis with transformative potential, and not settle for half measures that will go off half-cocked, inviting these expropriating, exploiting, and emitting miscreants back in. They have been caught bang to rights.
I love Marx's notion of praxis, 'the educator must also be educated,' which undercut notions of philosopher rulers and placed responsibility for change squarely in the hands of the class agency itself. I'll go with that. Without that mass movement, we remain in the hands of representatives of the ruling class, now talking reasonable reformist form with the FT here, but which change and revert to type very quickly once control has been ensured. Either way, there's a need to set new course, because this world is headed for the abyss.