@419623b4@5a78798a@4c04d469@43d7c4ea
Personally I think it's a bit of a stretch to call the LibDem's complicity with the 'austerity' programme a 'mistake'. Actually the Brown government had reacted to the crash in exactly the right way to minimise its impact, then along came the Tory/LibDem 'austerity', which many economists pointed out at the time was precisely the opposite of what should have been done. You can't call that 'a mistake' - it wasn't a little slip-up, but deliberately, disastrously, completely wrong-headed.
A better interpretation of events, I'm afraid, is that Osborne and co didn't care, because they were ideologically fixated on shrinking the state anyway, and that the LibDems simply didn't understand.
You'd think they'd have learnt something from the obvious failure of brexit - indeed of every other right-wing project once it leaves the westminster-media bubble and has the slightest brush with reality.
But NO! - who cares about evidence or experience when you know what's what in your own fantasy world?
@f6753445
I noticed a passing observation in a book I read recently, that you could tell what 'economic development' actually meant in Africa from the fact that the colonial legacy transport systems just went from resources to ports - there was never any attempt to actually link indigenous communities.
I urge everyone to read this article - https://mondoweiss.net/2023/09/jewish-settlers-stole-my-house-its-not-my-fault-theyre-jewish/ - not just for its moving insight into the terrible situation faced by Palestinians, but also for its accurate critique of the way 'western' countries 'privilege' discriminatory language over real, physical oppression and violence.
Forgive me if I link a more light-hearted take in this deadly serious context - but the brilliant South African comedian, Loyiso Gola, here makes a similar point about this odd focus on relatively trivial language issues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZOg-aVvKA3A
Guardian commenters are discussing the best lines in Marina Hyde's latest article on Rishi Sunak. Proposals include...
"The long-planned, hugely expensive London-to-Manchester HS2 line will go to neither London nor Manchester – a genuine feat of infrastructural dadaism that should receive some kind of global recognition."
"The net zero U-turn in particular suggests our spurned hero is at the stage of buying sulphuric acid and going to the country with the slogan “If I can’t have you, no one can.”"
And depressingly...
"It’s palliative politics, giving the tacit impression that the best the UK can be offered is a sort of end-of-country care."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/26/rishi-sunak-long-term-thinking-suella-braverman
@b8146f32
Hmmm... Just as Marx predicted.
Neoliberalism is capitalism working just as it is supposed to do - how it worked before the disruptions of the 20th century, all that Keynesian interference, etc...
@2ee43d7d
It's amazing, isn't it?
After the Linaker controversy, she must know that this language is reminiscent of 'that used by Germany in the 1930s'. Her speech writers, civil servants - those around her - must also surely have alerted her to this.
So the invocation of fascism must be conscious, deliberate, planned.
Interesting article - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/26/europe-right-research-left-voting-data-julia-cage-thomas-piketty
"Over the past few years, the view has taken hold that the working classes have entirely abandoned the left....
"We show, however, that first: not only is this working-class switch away from the left not the case, but it has never been the case...
"The (often intentional) confusion comes from the fact that commentators tend to associate the working classes only with blue-collar manufacturing workers, forgetting that the average wage of supermarket cashiers, restaurant staff, cleaners, care workers and other service industry employees has fallen below that of manufacturing workers for several decades now.
"In other words, the French political landscape can be described as follows: low-income urban voters, who tend to be mainly service industry employees and tenants, vote predominantly for the left, while working-class voters outside the main cities, who are mainly blue-collar workers and homeowners, are more likely to vote for parties of the far right."
Worth thinking about this in relation to the MAGA and 'Red Wall' phenomena in the US and UK.
In particular, note the distinction between tenants (who vote left) and blue-collar homeowners (who are more likely to vote far right) - a reminder that for Marx it was asset-ownership, not type of occupation, that was the key determinant of social class.
@c0d42c1a@b541bfe5
From my perspective - from France - there are 2 mysteries here. One is the stupidity of not simply accepting trans men as men, and trans women as women. But the other seems to be overlooked by most Americans: why have separate toilets at all? Here in France most public toilets, and those in cafés, etc, are unisex. Pas de problème !
@a2d249cd
Interesting article on Huawei - though I believe it wrongly implies that its 100% employee ownership is unique in China - it certainly isn't - I was involved in a research project on social enterprise in China, and found that employee ownership is in fact common.
"Fascinating/depressing German research tracked 51 populist presidents/prime ministers from 1900-2020 in 60 countries. They are defined as those whose central argument is one of the “true people” v “dishonest” elites, and the bad news is their number has been on the rise for three decades. Worse, once they get into office they tend to stay for twice as long as non-populists. They are annoyingly good at politics, but very bad at economics. The researchers find that having a populist leader hits a country’s GDP per capita and living standards by about 10% over 15 years as the economy turns inward, institutions are undermined and risks are taken with macroeconomic policy. And there’s a specific warning for the likes of the US: once you’ve had one in power, populist leaders repeat on you... So populists are like cigarettes. It’s not the first one that does you in, but getting addicted to them that kills you."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/17/populist-leaders-bad-for-economy-but-hard-habit-to-break
@2c841a34
I think the idea of an immediate return of the UK to the EU is a bit naive, to be honest. It won't go like that. What will happen (because the economic logic is inescapable - whatever party is in power) is a series of sector-by-sector deals, until rejoining the single market and customs union will not seem like a big deal to anybody.
But rejoining the EU - the political union - is a different matter, and depends not only on the UK, but on how the EU has evolved without the UK in the meantime.
@c9fb3d77
There are many examples of the absurdity of GDP and 'growth' - one of my favourites is Varoufakis seeing planes flying to quell a forest fire in Greece and seeing that the forest contributes more to GDP by burning down than by just living.
And the usual argument of apologists for capitalism - that investment 'creates jobs and boosts the local economy' might just as easily be applied to the arsonist buying matches.
@70a8036e@134318c2
I've been wondering about the tendency over the last few years for cars to be black-grey-silver-white instead of colourful. Odd.
Is it one of those general economic mood things, like hemlines going up in booms (the 20s, the 60s) and down in depressions?
Or is it to do with the power of finance - in some countries most new cars are actually leased now, and I guess the finance companies want bland cars they can easily repossess and resell - a bit like property developers preferring bland interior design because they don't narrow the market?
@c8b85fde@636cb8f3
The only label I'm sort-of comfortable with is 'socialist', because it alludes to the fundamentally social nature of humanity, and to the fact that everything that makes life good is socially produced - even self-awareness.
But I tend not to label people (while not denying that 'isms', etc, can be useful in grouping related ideas, etc); nor (I hope) do I have 'an ideology' - the whole point of left-wing thinking, surely, is just that: trying to see through ideology, to look reality square in the face.
@7db1d990@0f342e77
True - Britain has a long history of political radicalism. In more recent times, Wilson won in 1964, 1966 and 1974 with pretty leftwing manifestos (and revolutionised the education system) as did Attlee in 1945 (the NHS, etc). Even Blair/Brown, in 1997 at least appeared to offer something, well... NEW (and despite Blair's further wins, they were all with seriously shrinking votes, against weak opposition).
The truth about Labour would seem to be it has only ever won power with a radical offering. Now, as you say, in opinion polling most English people favour left policies (if not left parties) - and over two-thirds of under-35s 'want to live in a socialist society' - 'centre' left might soon be a misnomer.
What is true is that lots of older people were bought by Thatcherism's housing and finance sector policies giving them a one-generation asset wealth. That will soon work its way out, and Brits will be as radical as they ever were.
@c8b85fde@636cb8f3
Of course there are a range of views - otherwise we wouldn't be able to 'take what insights we can from all the great traditions of left thought'. I don't see anything negative - or ambiguous - in this.
But don't mistake the various different blueprints for better societies that appear from time to time for substantive differences. Such blueprints come and go, and will never be realised everywhere forever anyway - history doesn't end - and as Camus argues in 'The Rebel' such teleological illusions carry inside them the terrible danger of believing 'the end justifies the means'.
The underlying unity of left thinking lies elsewhere: in working for the oppressed, opposing exploitation and injustice, and, deepest of all, in the belief that humanity is capable of organising itself on the basis of evidence and reason - it is this that really defines the left, and distinguishes it from the political right and centre.
@91a2d17f@636cb8f3
In the attempt to annoy 'marxists' they've probably put off almost everybody else, except I guess dyed-in-the-wool factional anarchists.
@43d7c4ea@419623b4
There is though a subtle difference between 'surge pricing' in pubs and dynamic pricing in theatres, airlines, etc... There is a harder limit on the number of theatre/plane seats that the public can easily perceive, than on the number of drinks a bar can sell. I think therefore people are more likely to see surge pricing in pubs in terms of profiteering, rather than supply logistics.
This article is focused on Australian society - https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/16/consent-laid-bare-chanel-contos-interview - but I was struck by the wider resonance of insights like this:
"“We need to ‘other’ rapists, because it is too confronting to accept that our society doesn’t just allow them to exist but to thrive,” she says. “The traits that the entitled opportunist harbours are the very neoliberal traits that are celebrated in men and lead them into positions of success.” She pauses. “There are no consequences.”
"These dynamics, she says, were magnified in the milieu of elite Sydney private schools in which she grew up, a world of parties and luxury holidays and rugby games at the intersection of wealth and whiteness and class. This world shapes the country’s corridors of power – from the law and politics to the media.
"The entitled opportunist, Contos writes, is “unlikely to reoffend if they are held accountable for their actions or taught explicitly what consent is”.
"Contos wrote her dissertation on the colonial aspects of Sydney’s private boys schools, which were imported from England, and the ways in which we talk about how in Australia rape culture is shaped by the settler-colonial state."
@dd1f0824
Can you go at least part of the way by bike? My friend from Herefordshire, UK, visits me here in Brittany, France by taking his bike on the train to Plymouth, then the ferry to Roscoff, then cycling the 100 or so kilometres here along the wonderful, scenic cycleways we have in France.
Sometimes he has an overnight stop, but if he gets the overnight ferry he can do the cycling leg in a day (human-powered - not electric bike - carrying luggage - and he's in his 60s now).
@636cb8f3
You might be interested in my own immediate reaction to #TheDawnOfEverything: https://climatejustice.social/@GeofCox/109916064374143676
Incidentally, I'm neither a 'marxist' nor an 'anarchist' - just a working-class left-leaning man that takes what insights I can from all the great traditions of left thought - and I think you'll find most left-leaning people find this ongoing squabble in the left family a bit silly - leading, in this instance to a 'review' that spends more time trying to charicature a 'marxist' straw man than on the book it's supposed to be reviewing. Not to mention, in the process, getting dangerously close to an anti-intellectualism we'd normally associate with the extreme right.
Six Portuguese children and young people are suing 32 countries in the European Court of Human Rights for failing to act on climate-ecological breakdown.
"Our case is really very simple – the harm that climate change is causing, and will continue to cause, to the mental and physical health of these young people and to their wellbeing, is a clear violation of their human rights.”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/14/young-people-to-take-32-european-countries-to-court-over-climate-policies
UK Tories, like US Republicans, are gerrymandering voting rights to retain power:
Following the introduction of voter ID in the UK, research has revealed that there are "a disproportionate number of people being turned away from polling stations in more deprived areas compared with affluent places. Young people, those from ethnic minorities, the unemployed and people with significant disabilities were all more likely than the average voter to cite lack of ID as their reason for not having cast a ballot... The demographic segments most affected tend also to support Labour, giving the Tories a partisan incentive to depress turnout." (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/13/the-guardian-view-on-voter-id-and-turnout-critics-were-right-about-this-cynical-manoeuvre)
But anyone who has looked at voting in detail - not just the media/right-wing obsessions with seats and swing - will know that turnout is generally the key to left electoral victories. Right-wing politicians (Tories and Republicans) obviously know this. Do the left?
@BigDave@00b07ccb@21d229c4
Indeed - great post @21d229c4 . When millions starved in post-revolutionary USSR or China it's 'killed' by communists' - when it's in the British Empire etc it's never 'killed by capitalism' - yet the numbers of the latter are far higher overall - and still counting.
At the height of the Irish starvation, in 1847, Ireland exported £17million of food to England, under the protection of English troops. In 1845-50 a million and a half poor Irish died of starvation and the disease that followed it - but the disaster went on much longer in terms of both deaths and emigration - between the 1840s and 80s the population of Ireland almost halved, from over 8 million in 1841 to not much more than 4 million in 1891.
This was not a 'famine' - it was the deliberate gutting of a country for profit - and it went on all over the European empires.
@43d7c4ea@ebb6b3d7
Yes I agree - BUT remember it took crash, depression, war and holocaust for the Keynesian settlement (and European Social Model) to emerge. This is so clear in French history: the factors in play were not only the terrible shock across the whole political centre - centre-right included - at what had happened to Europe, but also the role the communists and other leftist groups had played in leading the resistance. The Programme du Conseil national de la Résistance set out a vision similar to the 1945 UK Labour government's - and in some ways the 'New Deal' in the US - except that because of the terrible wartime experience of France, and the respect widely felt for what the communists, etc, had done, it was not a single party manifesto, but agreed across the political spectrum (except of course the cowed fascists), and is still widely supported here today, despite the inroads made since the 1970s by neoliberalism.
I therefore think the question of whether a new 'capitalist' settlement can emerge now is really a question of whether climate ecological breakdown is sufficient trauma in itself to create a wide political consensus like the Programme du Conseil national de la Résistance - or whether we have to plunge further into chaos and conflict first. Probably, different negotiations will appear at different times in different places. But anyway, successful solutions won't be anything like the growth-oriented capitalism we have now - they can't be, can they? - they will be further than Keynes towards strongly regulated free enterprise and markets.
@3a607a2d@ebb6b3d7@43d7c4ea
But these are different phenomena - though linked to the underlying polycrisis (see my other reply here: https://climatejustice.social/@GeofCox/111056958005658098).
Macron like the right-wing extremists in Poland, etc, was indeed a product of the collapse of the centre (both centre-right and centre-left parties) in France. He did this by promising something entirely new - 'beyond right and left'. Voters have already started punishing him for not delivering anything very new - hence the continuing rise of both Mélenchon and LePen camps in the last Assembly elections. Macron is now deeply unpopular.
But despite this common origin of their support in rejection of the status quo, Macron is very different precisely in being more neo-liberal. The extreme right in Poland, etc, is rather different because it is post-free-market, post-globalisation, post neoliberal - it is more nationalist - more fascist if you.like. France could go that way too - but left traditions are also still strong here, so it cold go our way (by which I mean the way of humanity).
@ebb6b3d7@43d7c4ea
The "lots of right wing parties getting more popular" phenomenon is international - actually more pronounced outside the EU than in (though it manifests in different ways in different electoral systems - in the UK by the Tory Party effectively incorporating UKIP, in the US by the MAMA takeover of Republican grassroots, etc...) - and this in turn is part of an even larger movement of voters and activists to political extremes - in Europe advantaging the left a few years ago - with the sudden rise of Syriza, Podemos, Pirate Parties, etc - now perhaps the right - but on other continents the left again. All are really symptoms of the collapse of the centre - faith in the status quo - and underlying this the crisis of capitalism.
I'm pretty sure the movement of voters to political extremes will continue, because I'm pretty sure capitalism is collapsing - in a scenario scarily like Europe in the 1930s. I think the EU, like all current political institutions, will get severely battered in the process - but I also think it's one of the focuses for hope.
@ebb6b3d7@43d7c4ea
And it's not just infrastructure - "The UK is becoming the toxic poster child of Europe. The government has repeatedly promised that our environmental standards won’t slip post-Brexit. And yet here we are, less than four years later, and already we’re seeing our standards fall far behind those of the EU. With UK bees and other pollinators in decline, and our waters never more polluted, now is the time to be taking steps to protect nature. Instead, the government is choosing to expose British wildlife to an ever-more toxic soup of chemicals.” - https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/13/uk-fails-ban-pesticides-outlawed-use-in-eu
The UK has always been halfway between 'the European Social Model' (free enterprise but within a broadly socialist framework) and the US free-market-free-for-all - brexit was just one stage in its unfortunate choice of the latter.
It's inevitable now it's in the unmitigated race-to-the-bottom that is globalisation that it will end up with 'third world' standards. But it might be good for the EU, because the UK was central to the introduction of neoliberal ideas inside it - without the UK, the 'socialist framework' part of the EU equation should be strengthened.
@4b816d9c@bd15ffd6
True - UK politics is in a desperate state. As is American, etc...
But I do think a left-leaning party would be very popular if it kept hammering out messages like...
Is it fair that unearned income is taxed less than income people actually earn?
- or
Is it fair that people in modest homes pay a higher ratio of their home's value in council tax than do people living in mansions?
- or on the investment side, say...
Providing free school meals to every child doesn't cost anything, because the country will get back more in tax revenue and other contributions when all kids become well-educated, healthy productive adults - its an investment in a better future for everybody
- or simply:
We don't believe governments should spend anything at all - they should only invest in their people.
@bd15ffd6
Agreed - the centre-left - spectacularly the UK Labour Party now - makes a big mistake in accepting the right-wig framing of 'tax and spend'.
The most effective way to present taxation reform is around 'making tax fair' - rather than approaches such as 'we need the money for services' (which as you say is not strictly true - tax is only needed if services create inflationary pressures - they may not if, say, spending on health, education, etc, enhance productivity).
Which leads to the second term of 'tax and spend'. Government 'spending' on public services is NOT like personal or household, or indeed businesses' spending - it is in fact more like investment, and should be presented as such - pretty much everybody agrees it is a GOOD THING, as Sellar and Yeatman might say - it always creates economic activity, future tax income, general well-being.
Most importantly of all, though, supposedly 'impartial' journalists (eg. working for the BBC) need to stop using, and start challenging right-wing framing like 'tax and spend government'.
@ee2d3a5e@b6548392
Hardly - it was the UK that was blocking VAT on financial services - the EU has actually just completed a review and is likely to recommend its introduction.
@b6548392
Almost every aspect of the UK tax system favours the wealthy - O suspect the most effective way to present improvements to the system is precisely as 'making tax fair' - rather than approaches such as 'we need the money for services' (which is not strictly true - tax is only needed if services create inflationary pressures - they may not if, say, spending on health, education, etc, enhance productivity).
@7f5dfb68
The most interesting example, perhaps - both of a Kuhnian 'paradigm shift', and of its relationship to the wider cultural context, is Einsteinian relativity.
The obvious parallel is cubism - Picasso was experimenting with exploded-view-point work by 1906 - but rooted obviously in Cezanne's work in the 19th century - but a closer parallel perhaps is in the differing points of view and fragmentation of absolute 'truth' in modernist literature - again with obvious roots stretching back into the 19th century. The idea that different observers, in different positions, experience reality differently, was clearly 'in the air' - and this surely played a part in allowing Einstein to see beyond Newtonian absolute time and space - and as his work in turn became known, of course, it too entered the cross-discipline feedback loop - explored by Rachel Crossland - 'Modernist Physics' - and others.
@11b6165d
Stories like this about how capitalism drives scientific progress are always coming up - and they're always distortions. I wrote the following reply to somebody that used the iPhone as one such example...
iPhones didn't suddenly emerge fully-formed out of nothing, or out of any one economic system. Without the long history of civilisation the development of mathematics and of mechanical computation iPhones are literally inconceivable (an early history, by the way, that seems to have been largely Asian and African - as is obvious enough if you know the etymology of al-gebra, al-gorithm, etc...)
Moreover, many, perhaps most of the crucial steps to modern computers have been taken not in a 'capitalist' milieu but just the opposite - Babbage, for example, was not a businessman, but a university mathematics teacher, Turing never worked in the private sector - all his crucial work was in fact government-funded, as was that of Berners-Lee. Others will know better than me the role of public funding (and the military) in American computer developments.
Of course the various economic systems in which all these developments have taken place have had a role and influence - but what they primarily depend on is the accumulation of knowledge that we call civilisation - which spans many very different economies, societies and cultures - and (hopefully) will continue to do so...
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