Talk of social transformation is in the air. People are becoming aware of the extent to which there can be no going back to normality, since it is normality that is visiting crisis upon crisis upon us. Coronavirus is merely one of a number of crises we are being called on to address. The members of the ruling class who are concerned that dealing with this virus does not damage 'the economy' sound cruel and callous, and no doubt they are in the way they make capital and its accumulative imperatives the priority, to which people and planet are to be sacrificed. But they have a point that many do not seem to grasp - there has to be a viable economic system if there is to be a civilized life at all. That system may not be capitalist, but it has to be something. As large as the looming economic crisis is, even greater is the climate crisis and the ecological catastrophe on the horizon. These are crises with transformative potential. Transformation is also imperative if civilisation is to survive and be expanded to all.
People need to understand that 'the normal' has gone and that they are being charged to create a new, socially and ecologically (and morally and spiritually) viable normality. The normal was socially iniquitous and ecologically destructive in the first place, hence the crises that are upon us.
I want to have a brief look at Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics.
The Doughnut was first published in 2012, proposing a social foundation and ecological ceiling for the whole world. Ever since then people have asked: can we downscale the Doughnut so that we can apply it here – in our town, our country, our region?
This from Kate Raworth
Today sees the launch of a new and holistic approach to downscaling the Doughnut, and we are confident that it has huge potential at multiple scales – from neighbourhood to nation – as a tool for transformative action. Amsterdam is a great place for launching this tool because this city has already placed the Doughnut at the heart of its long-term vision and policymaking, and is home to the Amsterdam Donut Coalition, a network of inspiring change-makers who are already putting the Doughnut into practice in their city.
Answers the key question: "how can our city be a home to thriving people in a thriving place, while respecting the well-being of all people and the health of the whole planet?"
I would read this in the context of Paul Mason’s article. Mason is stronger and more explicit when it comes to the critique of political economy.
It will be impossible for capitalism to return to normal: we need an economy that has people’s wellbeing and public health as its priority.
"What we need, both in the physical fight to stop the virus and the economic fight to stop financial contagion, is the very thing successive governments have destroyed and disavowed: a plan."
"The social price for what we will have to endure must be twofold: the actions taken have to be universal and they have to redistribute wealth and power downwards, not upwards."
"After the Black Death wiped out a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century, the economic system of feudalism was doomed. Samuel Kline Cohnm in his account of the revolts that followed (Lust For Liberty) describes a move from “utter despondency and fear to a new confidence on the part of peasants, artisans and workers that they too could change the world, fundamentally altering the social and political conditions of their lives”.
"We won’t face physical catastrophe on the magnitude of the 1340s – but our complex and financialised economy is quite capable of inflicting economic catastrophe on us. In response, we need a new economic system, which has people’s wellbeing and public health as its main priority, and stabilises our relationship with the planet."
I look for coherence between the list of “transitional initiatives” that is often provided. I want greater precision with respect to the social forms supporting worker cooperatives, the commons, circular economy, alt currencies, alt economics, alt business models, Financial Transactions Tax and Universal Basic Income etc., forms which indicate clearly how social labour is to be supplied in the future economy. I also look for a critique of political economy, identifying the precise socio-economic drivers, answering questions of incentives, and giving greater clarity on questions of political power, authority, structural capacity, social transformation, democratic legitimacy, and transitions when it comes to democratisation.
Hence I like to read Raworth against the backdrop of Marxist analysis of class, capital, and contradictory dynamics. I have learned to be suspicious of bourgeois reticence with regard to political economy. I note the seemingly congenital aversion to class among bourgeois ‘radicals,’ something which vitiates their radicalism in practice time and again.
PostCapitalism by Paul Mason review – a worthy successor to Marx?
It may not, as promised, predict the future. But this fresh and insightful book illuminates the present in unexpected, revelatory ways
To that criticism, I would say that Marx was always about human beings as agents making the future, not knowledge of objective trends and tendencies enabling us to predict the future.
I was particularly interested in the suggestion that we "revoke the intellectual property rights of the manufacturers, make the blueprints [for ventilators] open source". It is insane that rewards/profits for product design should come before the need to produce in large quantities to save lives. Likewise with sharing other medical methods and discoveries. But this is a notion that economist Dean Baker has long held pre-Corona....that patents/copyrights are a very poor method to encourage development, and the method is a great hindrance to having good healthcare.
Rewards for innovation should be paid directly by the government, and the patents owned by the public. Richard Wolff wrote in various tweets "Capitalism caused today’s disaster, not the latest virus. Mutating viruses have always been with us. A rational economic system would have learned to plan and manage them*. Capitalism failed to learn because profit was/is its #1 priority. This is class struggle: profit versus people".
I hope this virus causes people to wake up and demand reforms, not only in health care, but in the over-all system that rewards greed and ignores human needs.
*The L.A. Times had a good article on Trump ending a $200 million program (called PREDICT) designed to give early warning to pandemics.
The PREDICT program trained and supported staff in 60 foreign laboratories — including the Wuhan lab that identified SARS-CoV-2
See
Bungle the coronavirus response, profit from death and disaster, and then there are the Social Darwinist creeps who welcome the opportunity to send the weak to the wall.
How this seeped into the overt Christianity of the US right merits a study all of its own. Ayn Rand considered religion to be an affront to religion. And yet many of the US Christian Right openly espouse Rand and her deified ‘I.’ It’s not for me to look into another’s soul and denounce people as false prophets doing the work of Anti-Christ. But these views are antithetical to Christianity.
O'Reilly's term "on their last legs" is reminiscent of the phrase from Julius Striecher's 1938 children's book "Unnutze Esser" ("Useless Eaters"), or "Lebensunwertes Leben." ("Life Unworthy of Life"). These were Nazi designations for those with medical problems, unproductive and hence undeserving of care.
I also keep thinking of that term "useless eaters." Hence the implication that behind "herd immunity" is a Social Darwinism that values only those who make a contribution to the GNP. I think they take aim not so much against the elderly and those with underlying health condition as those who lack the financial means to look after themselves. Trump et al will think their money their licence. I am incredibly sceptical of all those who espouse an overt 'classless' and 'non-political' standpoint - their politics consistently defaults to an untransformed status quo.
And then there are the people who fall for it, those people who are utterly deficient in political acumen. Herd alert!
There are people who are claiming that Trump and Johnson are doing good jobs in face of an unknown crisis. When critics dissent, they insist that it's no time for politics. The problem is that it never is time for politics for people like this, not for politics in terms of legitimate criticism of government and policy designed to hold power to account and bring about a transformation for the better. That is all illegitimate. The ‘non-politics’ they assert is very much in favour of the unchallenged, unquestioned, and untransformed status quo, with all its iniquities, crises, and contradictions.
To assume a non-political stance in the context of social division, in reality, an implicit political endorsement of the class divided status quo. It is de facto to take the side of the stronger power against the weaker: "things are fine the way they are, no need to discuss them politically". Or as you put it, so-called neutral positions "preserve power relations and class dynamics intact."
It can seem at times that the only people who ever wake up are the ones who are already woken. Some people really are a herd.
There is, of course, always a danger that you are just in your own bubble. I am seeing a greater interest in a new economics. It could just be the people who populate my world, a smart crowd on the whole, people with knowledge, skills, brain cells, a conscience and a backbone. I try to feel the pulse of the people in my local community. There are many critical voices, desperate for an effective political agency to bring about transformation. At the same time, I still get a sense of a yearning for normality on the part of many, people who little realize the extent to which the normal is bust. Nevertheless I do detect increasing numbers of people becoming more open to new ways, such as the "Doughnut" experiment in Amsterdam. Spain is going for this citizen income, too. It may take practical examples like these to persuade many of those clinging to a lost normality. I note Richard Wolff's comment "This is class struggle: profit versus people." I have been exchanging words with certain types of 'classless' socially neutral environmentalists who think talk of class is outdated 'us and them' thinking. I have news for them, it is an 'us and them' world. If you practice classless politics in a class society you entrench and extend class relations.
Talking of class struggle and social alternatives, this open letter is well worth reading.
I'm interested in the massive competition for jobs that this crisis will unleash in the future if social relations and economic arrangements are not changed. I am currently on various jobs websites, and can see the positions closing long before closing date due to the numbers applying. If we try to go back to the old economy, then the world is in for a bleak, miserable, and disastrous time for many years until its miserable end.
So I most certainly argue for social transformation and the recalibration of the economy, complete with new forms of governance, urbanity, and community. It is in this light that I heartily recommend the work of Kate Raworth.
The critical comments I offer below are offered not to detract from Raworth’s work but to strengthen it and thereby strengthen the social transformations it entails.
Like a lot of current texts in radical economics, Raworth’s Doughnut Economics is excellent. But we shouldn’t be too impressed with accounts which highlight the deficiencies of mainstream economics and prevailing economic models. We have been identifying the theoretical weaknesses of conventional economics since Paul Ormerod’s The Death of Economics from 1994 and before. I would also recommend Robert Heilbroner’s The Crisis of Vision in Modern Economics. Raworth exposes the myths of mainstream economics skilfully, but these have been exposed before. In my own work, I seek not merely to expose myths but to locate them in their structural and systemic causes within specific social forms.
It is with respect to identifying precise structural roots and social forms that many radical economics books can show a debilitating deficiency. Raworth’s Doughnut Economics is strong in detailing the problems and exposing myths but deficient in relating analyses of the prevailing to solutions implying its transformation. The book lists pretty much every “transitional initiative” that is available, and so is likely to impress those looking for alternatives. But lists do not constitute a coherent critique, and very easily fall apart when any systemic weight is placed upon them. It is easy to favour worker cooperatives, the commons, circular economy, alt currencies, alt economics, alt business models, Financial Transactions Tax and Universal Basic Income and such like. But it is coherence that counts, identifying the precise socio-economic drivers and setting them within specific social forms. Add economic incentives and the ability to persuade people to participate in the new economy via time, labour, skill, talent, and there is a remarkable democratic deficiency with respect to creative, wilful agency. The proposals can come to seem paper thin, plausible at the level of principle, but question begging at the level of practice. In making this criticism I am thinking specifically of the way that all significant questions of political power, authority, structural capacity, social transformation, democratic legitimacy are skimped. Ideals and goals are stated, but the processes leading from here to there are sketchy. The book is full of statements like this: “Ensuring workers’ rights to organize and bargain collectively is one way of offsetting such deep power imbalances.” Well, yes, we know this and have always known this. The ruling capitalist class know this too, and all the world over acts to subvert, constrain, or ban rights and collective bargaining. It’s called class struggle, the kind of thing that has certain radicals running a mile, calling it ‘socialism’ (which they understand to mean the same as capitalism). It is that aversion to class and class struggle I note in many of those who are most vocal in singing the praises of Raworth’s Doughnut Economics. I support Raworth’s work, but add the rider that without a stronger grasp of and commitment to class analysis and politics it will either be absorbed into the prevailing system or flounder against it.
To take another example of the socially and politically deficient statement I wish to see beefed up, Raworth paraphrases political scientist Gar Alperovitz, “Tackling inequality at root calls for democratising the ownership of wealth”. That issues the demand without showing how it is to be met. A democratisation of this type is not for the asking, quite the contrary. This is precisely what Marx showed to entail the abolition of capital, understanding capital to be a relation and not a ‘thing’ that can be possessed, controlled, democratised, and diverted to public ends. The key practical question of instituting this democratisation is totally ignored. I’m not quite sure the radicals demanding a new economy have quite escaped the clutches of bourgeois categories, and hence risk reinstating capitalist economics instead of extinguishing them.
There is a commitment to “democratic governance” throughout the book. Like ‘democratisation,’ such a thing is easy to support. The precise forms of this governance are skimped. That leaves us with a statement of ideals and principles.
Completely missing from the book is a clear statement to the effect that capital accumulation and profit derive from the expropriation of surplus value created by labour.
Doughnut Economics is excellent as far as it goes, and I recommend it. The danger is that it doesn’t go much further than the bourgeois economics it purports to criticize. At least not in letter. In spirit and implication, it makes it plain that systemic social transformation is required. To the extent that the essential systemic and structural details are left out, proposals and initiatives for change will remain within the bourgeois paradigm. Hence the queasy feeling I have when I see the extent to which bourgeois liberals and do-it-yourself reformists from below love it. They are precisely the kind of people who will go so far in social and political change, but bail out long before the radical transformations required. To them, its major attraction lies in promising change without class struggle and, no doubt, the working class. But without that class struggle and without the structural force of the workers, there will be no transformation.
But it is good that there is movement at the practical level, where the issues which be thrashed out, and clarity will come by way of agency, and outstanding issues resolved (or not).