On the Left
tbray.org
tbray.org
So as interesting as Tim Bray's five point plan sounds, I'd prefer to be in the control group. Of course the status quo has problems (don't get me started). But big changes (especially ones that increase state control of the economy) tend to be catastrophic.
1. http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/on-income-stagna...
2. See the chart halfway down: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/upshot/the-great-wage-slow...
> Over the past 25 years, inflation-adjusted income for non-supervisory employment (aka workers, not managers) has remained stable or increased.
That sounds great except that it is not. Zero growth or slight increases are not good enough. Not when real inflation including education, health and property (i.e. things people must do) is growing faster than real incomes.
Our grandparents wage grew in real terms by 10x. Is that going to happen for their grandchildren? If not, why not?
Outside of the SV, I see diminished expectations everywhere.
> Unemployment is at 4.7%. If these are signs of "extreme problems", then every developed economy on the planet is coming apart.
This is much more plausible than you appear to think. Tens of millions of workers are just dropping out of the workforce because they don't see the point in competing anymore and welfare + modest income produces a 'good enough state'. This isn't true of those making > 75k per year but below that it's endemic. It's not just about money, it's about purpose. You can't push people up Maslow's pyramid and then be surprised they don't find life satisfaction in plucking chickens.
On the point that 'revolutions' tend to be a worse cure than the disease I tend to agree but it depends on how long the stagnation goes on for.
So we are supposed to give people purpose in life? At best this is futile. Purpose cannot be given. In reality this is false. Purpose can be given. For a short period of time. You can take those miserable people and ride their wave of misguided contempt to a revolution and grab the power. Then kill everyone who challenges your power. The first thing that disappears amidst civil war is justice.
Those people who feel unfulfilled better find a way to find their meaning of life for themselves instead of nursing jealousy and hatred towards people who did.
I don't know the answer to that but I was hoping that The Young Lady's Illustrated Primer (a kind of AI from a book called The Diamond Age that educated in such a way to enable social mobility) would solve the problem by giving some structure, showcase available possibilities and opportunities in a way specific to a person's current context and where they wanted to go etc.
> You can take those miserable people and ride their wave of misguided contempt to a revolution and grab the power. Then kill everyone who challenges your power.
Yes I know that very well. Murdering your enemies in a fit of righteous rage coupled with self preservation is the most fun a human can have. People will deny this of course, but the evidence is everywhere. It's in our entertainment and our history.
I have two concerns. One is that simply killing people rarely provides long term solutions to systemic inefficiencies or bottlenecks. I think this is the true reason why violence has gradually declined over the centuries. This is true whether it's proles killing elites or elites killing proles.
My second concern is that just as Rome developed Bread and Circuses to distract the citizenry from system reform, we could neuter our population's drive to progress. All the time and energy spent fighting internal battles could make our system vulnerable to outside threats. This won't be politically correct but I don't give a shit.
To a first approximation our young men are the source of all innovation and invention in society, as well as being the most volatile element within it. Currently they are:
- Busy masturbating and playing vidya. [60%] [proles]
- Working frenetically to compete. [30%] [middle]
- Wasting their time with intellectual wankery [10%] [elite]
This doesn't bode well for encountering future trouble. I would encourage a period of military training like the Israelis to encourage group solidarity for that reason.
Our biggest strength as a species is our creativity, imagination. The ability to change a niche. To enlarge it, to scale back, to change to a completely different niche. It's what makes us truly dangerous and inventive. Right now we're burning a lot of CPU cycles in the three categories I mentioned but we're not actually getting to any destination that is better. This is stagnation. Our economy is on a treadmill going nowhere and we're gradually getting older. If we don't manage to snap out of this funk and open up new niches we'll crash and burn in the end.
No, you're supposed to acknowledge that "purpose in life" is far more immaterial and nebulous than our ingrained concepts of professionalism and our ingrained cultural work-ethic usually admit, and that if the economy doesn't demand someone's labor, it doesn't affect their innate value as a human being integrated into the same broad moral ecosystem as all other human beings.
Sure, those people could be engineering vastly improved medicines or train systems. They could be painting houses or planting gardens. They could even be taking care of children.
But society has decided, of its own free will and through its own mechanisms, not to allocate living wages to doing those things. Complaining that broke and unemployed people don't form (uncapitalized) work teams to perform pro-bono labor on behalf of Society and the Nation and Humanity simply isn't fair game, even if the things you'd like them to work on seem necessary or beneficial to you. If you think the Greater Glory of Something is so important, pay for it.
Nor did he intend to say much. He famously said "I don't write recipes for the kitchens of the future". He gave advice to organizers in his day, and left the future for those in the future, with the material conditions and relations of production they would have.
> there isn’t a proletariat any more
In the world of 1867, the proletariat was rather small. The world just shifted from majority rural to majority urban/suburban a few years ago. The proletariat is larger than it ever was. You can argue if it will ever be a vanguard revolutionary class or not, but it has not disappeared.
One point Marx and Engels made is the world has seen several economic systems over the past 10,000 years - primitive communism, slavery, feudalism and capitalism. The last three systems all collapsed under the weight of their own contradictions. Marx and Engels believed capitalism would run its course and eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions just like the previous economic systems. Capitalism has only become predominant relatively recently historically.
He gave advice to organizers in his day,
Lenin and Stalin implemented those points to a T. Didn't exactly bring about the predicted benefits.
The core of the problem was that Marx really didn't have a meaningful concept of state and of political change. He could only conceive of a state as an oppressive tool of capitalist control, that would whither away together with capitalism after the revolution. And he thought political systems can only change in revolutionary change. The latter, while false, is kind-of understandable from the myopic view of Marx's times where revolution was more or less the only way governments changed. The former was simply naive. Marx's main teacher (Hegel) already had a much more sophisticated theory of the state in society, but Marx was so blinded by naive economism that he was unable to grasp the productive function of a state structure in any large-scale society.
[1] https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Man...
The reality is that Marx's ideas were bad, and were understood to be bad at the time by contemporaries like Bakunin who swiftly identified the obvious flaw in the plan: no state powerful enough to perform massive redistribution of wealth from the bourgeois to the proles would ever simply say "job done" and dissolve itself. To argue for the Marxist plan was inherently to argue for totalitarian dictatorship of a vast and powerful bureaucratic state.
We don't inhabit a true Capitalist society any more ( my term for the current system is Crapitalism )
Further it is unclear if our current machine can survive
* peak stuff ( we don't need to consume as much any more ) why would companies invest in new jobs and infrastructure when they are not going to recoup the cost through growing sales ?
* population still on the rise . Where do jobs come from for 10 billion when we've hit peak stuff
* robber barons control the laws, courts and media ( a constant over human existence)
* massive debt load ( unfunded pensions, national debts, private mortgage debts )
But I would ask Tim Bray what I ask everyone else who says radical measures are required. Namely, how is the transition made without mass cleansing and warfare in the interim.
Often ( Viet Cong, Khmer Rouge, Mao, Stalin ) the middle class and educated are unfairly lumped in with the elite and exterminated.
Is the current brokenness worth millions dead, and proportionally lots of HNers ?
We currently have a glut of consumer goods, but they're mostly consumer goods with low marginal desirability, and we actually have a shortage of physical capital, collective infrastructure, and equipment for personal empowerment.
To wit: it's better to have affordable, high-quality education and public transit, at the margins, than the N+1st craft brewery.
Brayism, for want of a better name, seems to have the following features:
1) A conviction that capitalism is going to ruin everything good unless it's destroyed.
2) A belief in massive redistribution of wealth (taxing the crap out of the 1%) in order to benefit the poor.
3) Totalitarian state surveillance in which financial privacy is forbidden.
4) A vague desire to whack business people and other capitalists much more severely than today, and generally crack down on anything that smells capitalist (like financial transactions).
5) An uncosted UBI i.e. more massive wealth redistribution.
That all sounds like a rather classically Marxist agenda to me, just with updated terminology. Bray claims the proletariat no longer exists whilst spending the rest of his post talking about the plight of the non-1% and how awful well paid bankers and CEOs are. Instead of "handing the means of production to the proletariat" it's "a universal basic income funded by taxing the 1%", but that's a relatively trivial matter of wording compared to the massive implications.
Bray ends his post by asking which parties have ideas like the ones he listed. I think he'll find the communist party is a good fit.
Is it just a little pension increase there, a little distribution here?
Please tell me I'm only seeing the mainstream left and there exists interesting innovators out there I've overlooked.
Over the past century, a lot of people tried to implement the ideas of Marx and Engels. People tried different versions of communism in different cultures, different geographical regions, and different levels of technological development. On two occasions, people even split a country in half and ran one side communist and the other side capitalist. In every case, the citizens of the communist regimes ended up worse-off.
If we've learned anything from these experiments, it's that Marx's ideas reliably create failed states. There are probably better systems than what we have today, but they're not close relatives to communism.
Fortunately, many far leftists have understood this and gone searching for other ways to improve the lives of the poorest. For example, basic income seems to be growing in popularity.
On the one hand they are self-satisfied and smug that limited scope progress in the culture war means they are succeeding. In fact, it is a distraction that makes them complacent and focused ever more narrowly on identity politics.
On the other hand the more radical factions on the left seem to be descending into a form of victim culture driven social Maoism, where they seek to purge their community bubbles of "anti-revolutionary" ideas.
I see no factions on the left that are achieving meaningful results against the permanent global war that has become official policy of the U.S. government. I see no factions on the left that are winning policy battles over civil liberties and fair government. I see no factions on the left that are winning significant numbers of elections. In the U.S. all we have is Democrats. they are fully captured by the global corporate elite and they are a hawkish war party as well. the token gestures they make towards social justice (this year its advocating for Trans-persons, what will it be next year?) is much too little for us to settle for.
I find myself in the position now of actively seeking out alternative political movements. Nothing I have interacted with so far is appealing to me.
Yes, they're called anarchists.
> 1. Tax the crap out of the 1%
I don't think we need to go back to the 1950s levels. A move back to the late 1990s would be okay by me. But then again we're not going to get that through Congress and alot of nitwit legislators will use that to justify their reelection so it's not worth the cost as far as I'm concerned.
> 2. stamp out most forms of high-leverage financial speculation
IMO, a "War on Speculators" would be just like the drug war. Only less costly, and less effective since it's much easier to move massive amounts of money to a country with less lax regulations than it is the comparable amount of drugs. Better enforcement of some of the existing anti-fraud/insider trader rules would be welcome. But this isn't going to help prosperity for the average worker. Just give nitwit legislators something to argue over.
>3. introduce ruthless transparency such that any asset whose beneficial ownership cannot be established where legally appropriate is subject to summary confiscation
Not even sure what this means? Is this going to pass the 5th amendment even if it can be translated into law? Considering the use of confiscation to fund the Drug war policies, can you maybe see some potential for conflicts of interest here?
> 4. adopt a zero-tolerance posture on business crime, with jail time regularly administered for significant financial misdeeds, in rough proportion to the size of the takings.
Again, "War on finance" vs. "Drug war" potential for abuse and the same lack of effectiveness. I agree that many of the people involved in the collapse in 2008 should have been hammered more than they were. However, this feels more like a case of getting better people in DoJ and other agencies rather than more legislation.
> 5. roll out a universal basic income to deal with the inevitable decline in the proportion of humans “enjoying” full employment.
Could work, but maybe just start with raising the minimum wage, increasing overtime protections, and just getting the work week and vacation time closer to Europe, Japan, and/or Australia levels rather than going "full basic income" to start. I also don't know if this will all help the "average unemployed" but it may help make things less miserable for the average worker.
[Edited for typos]