Seven Rules for Running a Real Left-wing Government

I warned you.

“Get out of the game. You aren’t fit for it. This is all mean. Millions of people die every year and millions more are ruined by the current system. If you’re in this game to win it, rather than feel good about yourself, you will have to play real power politics by the actual rules of the game.”

Yes. If you don’t like to fight, don’t fight. But don’t try to stop the people who *are* willing to fight because fighting makes you feel bad.

“Take Control of Distribution and Utilities

Yeah, sorry, but no one said this would be easy. In Venezuela, you had the economic elite deliberately worsening shortages. Huge stocks of consumer goods buried and hidden.”

You can not be more ignorant of the facts! All utilities in Venezuela ARE own by the government: CANTV (communications), PDVS (oil) , All the electric utilities. The shortages come form incompetence. Oil production has gone from 3M to less than 1.8M despite huge investment $ (that went to government officials)

By the way MOST media conglomerates are own by the state. There is hardly anyone that is private and those are continuoslly fine and harass.

My advice to you is due a little research before you write otherwise your credibility goes down the drain

These rules seem rather advice on how to run a successful revolution. In this regard, it is important to keep in mind a few points. Revolutions are always violent. This is so because the old order creates the need for revolution precisely by the violence it practises (stealing trillions from the rest of us, selling us crappy, unusable health insurance, sending our jobs to China and Mexico, etc). It is so habituated to this violence that it sees it as the natural course of things. For the same reasons, it will defend its wealth, privileges, and power with unlimited violence against any challenges. It is used to violence, and its right to power is a fundamental law of the universe.

We do need expertise. We do not need elites, the system of privilege and wealth which those with expertise have woven around themselves. As a class our elites have betrayed us. As elites, they really could do nothing else. The difference between now and other periods is simply the extreme degree of the betrayal. I would say our political class at a national and state level, that is present and past officeholders, is a dead loss. Only at the local level, there may be a few officeholders and office seekers who might fit into a new order of things. The same could be said for some staff at the state and national levels. One of the keys to a successful revolution is organization and the creation and recruiting of networks to replace the old order. This gets to Ian’s point of identifying those we can work with. A good place to start are with staff who have retired but who still retain contacts with those in the system.

It is good to break up the media conglomerates. They have been providing a steadily worse, more expensive, more propagandized product for decades. Once again virtually all of the current practitioners are a dead loss. This scenario is repeated as we go through the various categories of the elites: the legislature, the executive, the judiciary, the media, the bureaucracy, and academia. Huge swathes of them are not only worthless and unretrainable but hostile to anything that would disturb the status quo and their privilege.

A revolution also needs a clear, easily followed program. This program is in two parts, one positive and one negative, what we are against and what we are for (and how to get there). None of this is new. Recently, I was glancing through John Stuart Mill’s essay Socialism published in 1879 a few years after his death and noticed he said much the same thing:

“As in all proposals for change there are two elements to be considered—that which is to be changed, and that which it is to be changed to—so in Socialism considered generally, and in each of its varieties taken separately, there are two parts to be distinguished, the one negative and critical, the other constructive. There is, first, the judgment of Socialism on existing institutions and practices and on their results; and secondly, the various plans which it has propounded for doing better.”

Revolutions erupt out of discontent with the way things are, but for them to be successful and accomplish some good, this initial negative energy is insufficient. To keep this energy flowing, it needs to be channeled into the positive and constructive.

brutal [leaders].

the only ones who will understand the extremes of such revolutionary rule are those few good critical thinkers. the great mass populace are [irrational] “i believe’ers,” “i tv’ers”– sorry, give me names, facts and figures. the elite are entrenched, having fed the tap root of dumbness over generations. a missing rule is “purge the idiots from the populace.” and that won’t happen w/o lots of holocaustic cruelty/ bloodshed/ pushback from world opinion — “you’re depriving your citizens of their basic human rights [of freewill].

what is the likelihood of such a powerfully grounded leadership that can stand against the world? a more likely scenario is the apocalypse of the book of revelation.

Has anyone been paying attention to the Philippines presidential elections? Outsider left-wing populist Rodrigo Duterte upset the usual lame centrist candidates. The western media has been calling him the “Filipino Trump,” which is a huge insult to Duterte. Duterte is a much more accomplished politician and plausible leader than pretty boy Trump. It’s good timing for this post, since Duterte is anything but a beautiful soul.

Anyway, ideological change starts at the fringes and then moves to the center. It’s still ambiguous what the change will bring, and it will be ambiguous until the last moment.

Excellent essay Ian. Kudos

Wondering if a U.S. city could do this. Would Lumumba’s Jackson, Mississippi have made it?
Public bank, universal healthcare, publically run utilities, green energy and housing paid for by municipal taxes. No developer or corporate breaks. Citizen councils that govern for the people. Could it be done at the municipal level?

gringo repeats the Chomskyan fallacy that if only American influence were removed everything would be hunk-dory. This view fails to recognize that the US as hegemon has only been on the world scene for 70 years. It also effectively denies the rest of the world its own history, a clearly false assertion. Even if the US ceased to exist tomorrow, local and regional conflicts would persist. Indeed most of these antedate the assumption of US hegemony at the end of World War II by centuries. While no other state is in a position to become a global hegemon, there would still be plenty of regional hegemons seeking to create spheres of influence and dominating their neighbors. Class warfare would not cease to exist. Whether the US was here or not, kleptocracy would remain the paradigm of governments everywhere.

“Obey the Laws of Purges”

I particularly liked that section; cuts directly to the point without sentimentality.
The 240 years of lies will not die easily…

Naked Capitalism: Sanders and Class Struggle in the Democratic Party

Carlos and Cody are getting at problems not addressed in this list. These rules are good and fine for wrestling the state from control of its previous masters, but they are not helpful for thinking through where to go from there. A revolutionary government needs a program for how to effectively devolve power to the masses, and also carry out that agenda. I don’t think such an agenda needs to be essentially utopian in order to succeed. But there needs to be a plan for how to empower (both politically and economically) the formerly disenfranchised classes in the long run. A concrete proposal for how to transform society. The elites and bourgeois stay in power not just because they control the state, but because the entire society is designed to reproduce their interests, values, and social structure. Otherwise, the old revolutionaries simply transform themselves into new elites in socialist costumes- as has happened in Venezuela. The PT in Brazil is an even more horrid monstrosity in certain aspects.

Yes to this.

Much of what passes for the left in the US operates on the presumption they are working to implement the existing laws, in the courts, elections and so forth fairly. And fiddle around the edges by tweaking health insurance, immigration, family leave or, marijuana laws.

In the meantime, their opponents are herding millions through the prisons, expropriating the earnings and the homes of millions more, entrapping the entire working population in debt peonage, while squandering the national wealth on endless war to enrich the contractors and fuel the deluded apocalyptic fantasies of the global billionaire class.

They’re bringing a letter opener to a knife fight. It’s gonna take more than that.

Letter opener to a gun fight.

Great article, but still understated. IIRC, one of the first things FDR did was to fund and organize under non-com military control the CCC, placing a company of broke hungry young men in every county in the US with shovels and picks…and then demanded Congress authorize it.
And we got a half-assed social democracy.

I look at the “successful” social revolutions in places integral or important to the world system and the circumstances that surrounded them, Napoleon, Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin, Mao and they all involve catastrophic war. At some point, the rich will declare some kind of truce and try subversion and messing with your borders instead of all-out war…for a while. You can’t stop at Brest-Litvosk (?). Don’t invade Russia. 🙂
But it will be total war.

You will probably need to lose half your population while your enemy loses 1/4 to get a chance to build. Your grandchildren and great-children or somebody else’s may live in a slightly better world because of your efforts. Get the nukes, use a couple. Or they will, if really threatened. Hopefully, revolution will be measured in 1-2 billions.

Hard sell, slavery may be better.

Fredric Jameson wrote a recent book where he advocates militarizing everything public. Trotsky.

Great post. I agree with all of itl except you left one thing out.

Last, but not least, if you successfully complete Ian’s Mandatory Requirements List, be prepared to be bombed back to The Stone Age by America, especially if you have Natural Resources even if your Economy is not predicated on the extraction of those Natural Resources.

The Global Oligarchy has staked its Claim — and that Claim is The Planet.

I disagree with everything on the premise of the abhorrent statism implied, but… when I got to the part about the purges, I was like, so amazed it just lit up my brain like a Christmas tree. Absolutely! RICO would totally have applied to at least 15-25 institutions with assets over 10B. That’s a perfectly cromulent centrist point. And civil forfeiture laws, why not. Brilliant stuff.

I suppose there’s a subtext that the orientation of the legal system’s outcomes is at least in some sense politically guided and not nearly a consistent representation of justice, this is a good example why statism is bad news.

Instead of trying to fabricate top-down microcosms, level the playing field by designing tools for the individual to organized collectively in a dynamic, localized, voluntary way. See, that will actually create systems that produce economic outputs, possibly even measurable in some metric other than units of state-licensed corporate debt. But to do that, you’d have to move on from 19th century economic theory and mid-20th century psych/philosophy to 21st century unit operations.

Bitcoin for example is way too Austrian in it’s orientation to benefit a large number of poor people, and the fees are too expensive for low holdings, but a better blockchain protocol with lower cost, more scalability, running a mutual credit clearing protocol on top, incorporating capital into community credit, funding worker owned co-ops, no interest. Nobody has to die or get imprisoned for economic advancement and social justice to co-exist.

Anyways brilliant post, it brings the whole left conversation forward a chapter I think by breaking down the game. I hope a contingent of us will break off from the statist, night of long knives mentality, and start building new, fairer games to compete with the rigidity of the old systems. Imagine that the market can benefit from optimizing its place in the search space of regulatory rule-sets, and this optimization can remain distributed in an elegalitarian fashion given an individually sovereign form of money (i.e. user-issued credit vs. corporate/state credit).

I’ll but a bow on it by saying that, in your Leftist paradise, you’re still sucking interest out of the people running an old school banking system, nationalized or not. Sure you could fix rates low (like the Fed) or broadly marshall lending programs through 4 horsemen of state-owned entity financing (like China), or provide a low-cost, direct account service to de-cash and provide added services to people in even the poorest places (like in Bolivia) – presumably your country would not run a peg like China and Bolivia do/have.

I guess it comes down to who is more efficient at allocating credit, the state or the public?

After seeing how so many adult snowflakes are readers of childish fantasy novels this manifesto exhibits their magic thinking and illogic clearly. They’re going to sprinkle some magic powder or use some occult powers to overcome their growing weakness and the rubes will follow them while the military and the police sit and watch unable to respond to the magic powers.

Normal people don’t see much profit in turning over power to a Stalinist collective or the apparatchiks who would manage this state, things are bad enough .

Thanks for this post, Ian, which represents a huge step forward in the march to actually try to have a realistic discussion of this issue. An adult discussion. And, of course, a hypothetical, theoretical, one.

That said, I submit that ugly violence would almost certainly play a much bigger role in any successful revolution than most here seem to contemplate.

Based on that assumption, I submit that the immediate focus should be on the critical point that when one opts for violent revolution as the mission, one must simultaneously yield much or all of the high moral ground we are so used to doing our posturing from. The focus must be on pragmatism at the outset, or you can’t even get started without self-delusion.

E,g,, the Declaration of Independence was necessary to provide an alternate moral justification because the revolution itself represented a complete rejection of the preceding existing system of laws and morality. You can’t claim the protections of the same justification system that you are trying to destroy while you are actually and simultaneously trying to destroy it.

So, revolutionaries need to come to terms with the very thorny issue that if they are to be effective, they cannot continue to be about high morality and child-proofed safe spaces. This is a very hard hurdle for decent people to get over.

Separately but related, because modern surveillance is so complete, organizing in large groups for true revolutionary purposes will be pretty much impossible. That means that probably what would have to happen first is a breakdown in ‘order’ that comes about because of the individual spontaneous actions of enraged (deranged? doesn’t matter) people in sufficient numbers to throw the status quo into disarray. That means ugly guerilla-type activities. That means chaos, not carefully organized, neat little scenarios for an efficient organization process. Not at the outset.

So, that takes one back to the need to decide if the fight is worth tipping the immediate balance from morality to pragmatism. And, frankly, I think getting past that hurdle is a major obstacle.

Interested to hear what others think about this fundamental issue.

@ bob

It’s really more a matter of a philosophical balancing of fundamental moral and pragmatic considerations. Very time-honored stuff. I think we are still allowed to have such discussions.

What do we want humanity’s future to look like? Is it ever worth fighting over? What is freedom, and should we allow it?

Fundamental questions.

Clear thinking!

Of course, the average frustrated lefty does not have the stomach for this. Most don’t really want power as that entails responsibility and unsettling compromises. V.I. Lenin, who was as unsentimental a thinker as it gets, recognized as much, and that is part of how he got the job of being Lenin.

The other problem is – even if you get your revolution, how do you prevent it from being co-opted? How do you prevent the institutions you put in place from being subject to the Iron Law of Oligarchy, just like every other system invented to date?

I.V. Stalin put forth a truly terrifying solution, but that only worked for so long, and was disastrous for many, including those who had done nothing wrong. Still, Stalin won the Great Patriotic Fatherland War, put Nazi Germany in its grave, and died in his bed, loved and hated and feared in equal measure.

Stalin’s successors, L.I. Brezhnev in particular, consolidated their hold on power with the phrase “stability in cadres” and the oligarchy was in place and had a firm hold on power.

One other thing – the SEC did’t exist at the time the first of the two major federal securities laws (the Securities Act of 1933) entered into force. The Federal Trade Commission was given jurisdiction over the securities sector, to much wailing and gnashing of teeth on Wall Street.

The SEC was created under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, in large part because the FTC was seen as being too zealous in doing their job and an independent agency would be easier to coopt.
Joe Kennedy got the job as a political favor.

“…without having properly thought out what they do once in power.”

Important issue– but even more important is getting into power–which seems to be centered on the construction of a small coalition of powerful supporters (who ends up supporting whom and the nature of the resources that get allocated to these individuals/organizations to maintain that support).

In addition the absolute necessity of having as broad a base of public support as possible with the understanding that you rarely can afford take money out of your powerful supporters pockets while simultaneously recognizing that you have to offer the right combination of public goods to survive.

Presently the National Security State dictates our agenda(in cooperation with Wall Street and Silicon Valley) and has the muscle (Joint Special Operations Command) that is essential in controlling the flow of revenue.

How does a genuine Left coalition deal with this part of the present ruling coalition?

Does a genuine left also have the courage to attempt to make an alliance with the populist/libertarian wing of the right and center so as to lock in a potentially huge base of public support–those who believe in horizontal transcendence (the genuine left) as well as those who believe in a vertical transcendence that is central to many in the Center,the Right, and among Independents( whether in a religious or entrepreneurship dimension).

There are models like with Helbollah. It’s worth repeating they did very well against Israel a few years back. A few thousand folks.

As I say, most successful revolutions of the past several decades have come from the right, not the left. There’s a reason for it.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of “Red” China into a state capitalist workhorse/workhouse are fundamental to understanding the rightist ascendancy.

There’s a critical void on the left without the Soviet or Chinese revolutionary examples. The social democracies have all been co-opted by rightist reactionaries under the guise of neoliberalism. Outright Socialist governments are literally squeezed to death in the global vise.

Would-be revolutionaries — simple rebels at heart — understandably follow whatever rebellious or resistance zeitgeist is in the air, and when it’s all rightist or reactionary, that’s where they go.

The rightist-reactionary Islamist revolutions are an obvious case in point. As is their murderous and equally reactionary suppression by Imperial storm troopers.

That’s where today’s revolutionary and counter revolutionary fervor lies, not on the left. Whether the left will ever re-emerge as a revolutionary force is an open question. It doesn’t look promising.

There is a quieter opposition, however, communitarian and transformational.

Ten Beers is having another one of his fits so you might worry about including him in your revolution. AT has the great idea of creating a Homeland Hezbollah who would receive the blessing of the Supreme Leader and maybe some rockets.

Ian showed where these fantasies can lead when he included the Cult of Kali to meditate on. The Thuggee model may be an appropriate choice for this movement.

Revolutions need two programs, one positive, one negative. On the negative side, once you have the powers that be on the run, keep them on the run. Give them any respite and they will sabotage you or start a counter-revolution against you. As I have said before, for them, violence is only violence if it comes from us in resistance to them. The violence they do to us, and which makes revolution necessary and inevitable, they always call something else and impute to impersonal, natural processes over which they have no control. Both Obamacare and the shit Republican substitutes for it are examples of this. Tens of thousands die, tens of millions are left with poor, overpriced healthcare or no healthcare, all but the few are left in fear of getting sick, they loot us like bandits, and for them, it’s just business as usual, don’t fix the problem, use it.

For a revolution to be successful, it needs a clear and encompassing vision so that people know what they have signed up to, see its positive effects in their lives, and hold it and their leaders accountable. We need to ditch cons like the “magic of markets” and understand that all markets and the economy itself do not just happen but are run for someone’s benefit, and that benefit should be ours and our society’s. To that end, the larger the social impact of an industry, the more it should be run as a utility or become a function of government. Banking, healthcare, and the internet are three that come immediately to mind. But more than this, we need a social ethos, that it is not just about maximizing profit, but providing and accomplishing a social good. Creating monopolies and providing crappy, overpriced products, essentially today’s business model, should be scrapped. If a corporation does not serve some social good, it should be scrapped.

“Creating monopolies and providing crappy, overpriced products, essentially today’s business model, should be scrapped. “

I once did significant business with Home Depot. But today in my area, much of their entire tile support product line comes from one company, Custom, which they have an exclusive contract with for low quality high volume sales products. On the plus side, small brick and mortar shops (literally) are opening up to fill that quality void. And as a just in time alternative to HD’s move towards online (lag time) sales. The one I went to today was packed with contractors. As more people figure this out others are profiting from the backlash.

Next up, big medical/pharma/insurance. But they do have those big lobby influences…

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I’m not trying to be troublesome, but it seems obvious to me that discussions of how to rule post-revolution should be secondary to figuring out if we can, and especially, HOW TO, win a revolution.

I see that people are more comfortable with the fantasy that they have already had and won a revolution, than they are with the difficult question of how a revolution might actually be successful in replacing the staus quo power players.

Fantasy football, fantasy baseball, fantasy lottery winners, fantasy sexual beings (sex robots?), fantasy revolution.

We are a nation of fantasy-lovers. Maybe we deserve the fate that is being fashioned for us?

That’s also why Gibbon could write six volumes about the decline an fall of the Roman Empire.

I gave a thought to the 2nd century Roman Empire yesterday, as our current global lack of effective resistance, and whether under conditions of Empire (esp during war, or forever war) popular or populist uprisings are effectively impossible. Populist risings or social revolutions often come after losing a war there are many, but I have a hard time thinking of ones while Empire is cruising. Now I guess we now can decide if the US is an Empire in decline and losing our current wars.

@bob mcmanus

Almost by definition, a strong empire lacks the conditions for a popular uprising, since the discontent necessary for the uprising will already have weakened the empire. The French Revolution, the 1917 Russian Revolution, and the takeover of government by the Chinese Communists all took place in weakened empires, and in the two latter cases, while the countries were actively fighting foreign wars.

One very important rule that was left out – any reformer (leftie or rightie) must get control of the military and security services.

Did we not learn anything from the examples of Chile in 1973 or Portugal in 1974?

This is right out of Game Of Thrones. Sadly, I think that it is near the truth. The way we are goings, we will have another financial disaster. It’s only a matter of time. Obama squandered that first opportunity in 2008. The elite were on their knees facing torches and pitchforks – and he stupidly let them off the hook.

For years, I had hoped that reasonable legislation and an unwinding of things like Gerrymandering would be enough. But the march towards oligarchy and kleptocracy has been going on for far too long for that.

We can only hope that there is a power player that is willing to act when the next financial crisis hits. The rug needs to ripped out from under the elite when they are most vulnerable.

As Littlefinger from Game Of Thrones so aptly said – “Chaos is a Ladder…”

(Btw, I make reference to the popular show because it is a reference point that most people can relate to…)

Ian, this essay is always a welcome reread!

–Gaianne

This article is well worth the price of admission.

I feel I get my $5/month worth with this one column, alone.

Keep on fighting!

Sounds an awful lot like fascism.

well Ian, you talk, or, write, anyway, a good fight. Be interesting to see you in action.

Amazing piece. So many relevant truths that are not going to be discussed in polite political circles or “safe spaces” as they call them.

As A Daoist, I understand where you are, but you are not done cooking yet. You think you can control mankind! HA! Let me let someone long dead explain:

http://nothingistic.org/library/chuangtzu/chuang26.html

“I have heard of letting the world be, and exercising forbearance; I have not heard of governing the world. Letting be is from the fear that men, (when interfered with), will carry their nature beyond its normal condition; exercising forbearance is from the fear that men, (when not so dealt with), will alter the characteristics of their nature. When all men do not carry their nature beyond its normal condition, nor alter its characteristics, the good government of the world is secured.”

and continues

“Tshui Khü asked Lâo Tan, saying, ‘If you do not govern the world, how can you make men’s minds good?’ The reply was, ‘Take care how you meddle with and disturb men’s minds. The mind, if pushed about, gets depressed; if helped forward, it gets exalted. Now exalted, now depressed, here it appears as a prisoner, and there as a wrathful fury. (At one time) it becomes pliable and soft, yielding to what is hard and strong; (at another), it is sharp as the sharpest corner, fit to carve or chisel (stone or jade). Now it is hot as a scorching fire, and anon it is cold as ice. It is so swift that while one is bending down and lifting up his head, it shall twice have put forth a soothing hand beyond the four seas. Resting, it is still as a deep abyss; moving, it is like one of the bodies in the sky; in its resolute haughtiness, it refuses to be bound;– such is the mind of man!'”

I read read Ian’s list. The nearest successful examples appear to be the various revolutions in Europe, with perhaps the early 20th century UK Labor party being an exception to the revolutionary model.

It also appears the right has had more success with revolutions, especially in Central and South America. Aided by the United States?

It’s a great article and I don’t think it’s necessarily proposing a revolution. I urge readers to look at countries with old labor movements that created labor parties or social democratic parties. It’s not impossible for Germany and France to see a revival of their SD parties (founded mid-1850s). The Americas, save for Canada, have not had strong political parties of labor. But I’d point to two other countries which have long had labor parties that became the main rival to capitalist ones, Britain and Australia. The older is the Australian Labor Party (1893), which, over the years, carried out many of the reforms Welsh mentions. Both Britain and Australia have national broadcasters, the BBC and ABC, loathed by Murdoch. The ALP has a more ‘left’ wing history but Corbyn’s program is similar, and in Australia the polls are showing a possible Labor win by mid-2019. They would have much to do but, in both countries labor governments would mostly be reviving their past, successful policies. Traditions unfortunately matter.

Very interesting to re-read the post, and the comments both.

I feel like there’s a shadow imperative among Ian’s “seven rules” that runs along the lines of, “try much harder to be less stupid”.

Human political society is complex and problematic. You (any “you” and certainly me, too) do not understand how to organize or govern well enough to ensure good results. At best — the pragmatic best achievable under realistic circumstances is to repeatedly try, fail and learn: it is necessary to have some model, some theory, some doctrine, some ideology, rigid enough to motivate persistent and determined effort and flexible and open enough to allow learning and adaptation. That’s a tall order even from the ideal safety of an ivory tower, let alone the contested terrain of politics where the opposition does not share your values let alone your goals.

“Stupid” is powerful in politics. “Stupid” wins many, many political arguments and struggles just by stubborn incomprehension and consequent incapacity to engage. If you hope to advance some ideal by persuasion and rational argument, you are very likely to be defeated rather handily by teh stupid.

And, oddly perhaps, it is not effective pragmatism for the left to try to compete at the level of teh stupid. Stubborn incomprehension isn’t really proof against either corruption or failure thru incompetence.

The right makes stubborn incomprehension work as a false front for smart and cunning selfishness.

The left — the non-revolutionary left of idle and ill-conceived speculation, especially — seems to want a pretense of smart as a false front for endlessly gullible naiveté and an idealism derived from the power of denial. And, when the pretense of smart doesn’t work, they fall back on their own curated form of teh stupid, where every one “wants the same things” and things can be arranged in an unblemished and uncomplicated, unmanaged(!) socialism of anarchy and good intentions.

The 1954 Guatemalan coup is a classic example of how American involvement in other nations affairs works. Guatemalans democratically elected a government which began working for the people, but against some US corporate interests. The US government then used a variety of nefarious means to overthrow that will of the Guatemalan people.

Pretty much the same thing had happened in Iran 1953, which might be considered the start of America’s habit of overthrowing popular and democratically elected governments just to benefit American corporations, in the modern era. Whether Eisenhower was duped, or simply believed he was choosing a lesser evil is for others to decide.

Somewhere along the way the elites decided that the will of the American people could also be overthrown, nefariously, because we’re as worthless to them as Guatemalans or Iranians. But that’s a different topic.

Millions have been lifted out of poverty in China and India,

Millions were lifted out of poverty in China, which stuck with the old-fashioned pre-neoliberal, pre-“free trade”/”globalization” economic policy programme.

India today has the same per-capita calorie intake that it had before “globalization”.

In Venezuela less than 10% of the population farm. This created an opportunity for the international right to create food shortages. The Chavez government attempted to increase this percentage but was largely ineffective.There is nothing like hunger to dampen your enthusiasm for revolution.
In the US 2% of the population farms. As the number of farmers has decreased the farm size has increased and the variety of commodities produced has decreased. Canada has seen a similar decline in regional food production.
No revolution can be successful if the populace can be held hostage by the global elites for their daily bread.
I guess most who comment here remember the Cuban “Period0 especial”:

“The country lost approximately 80% of its imports, 80% of its exports and its Gross Domestic Product dropped by 34%. Food and medicine imports stopped or severely slowed. The largest immediate impact was the loss of nearly all of the petroleum imports from the USSR The effect was felt immediately. Entirely dependent on fossil fuels to operate, the major underpinnings of Cuban society—its transport, industrial and agricultural systems—were paralyzed. There were extensive losses of productivity in both Cuban agriculture—which was dominated by modern industrial tractors, combines, and harvesters, all of which required petroleum to run—and in Cuban industrial capacity.

The early stages of the Special Period were defined by a general breakdown in transportation and agricultural sectors, fertilizer and pesticide stocks (both of those being manufactured primarily from petroleum derivatives), and widespread food shortages. Australian and other permaculturists arriving in Cuba at the time began to distribute aid and taught their techniques to locals, who soon implemented them in Cuban fields, raised beds, and urban rooftops across the nation. Organic agriculture was soon after mandated by the Cuban government, supplanting the old industrialized form of agriculture Cubans had grown accustomed to. Relocalization, permaculture, and innovative modes of mass transit had to be rapidly developed. For a time, waiting for a bus could take three hours, power outages could last up to sixteen hours, food consumption was cut back to one-fifth of its previous level and the average Cuban lost about nine kilograms (twenty pounds).[5] Although starvation was avoided, persistent hunger, something not seen since before the Cuban Revolution, suddenly became a daily experience, and initially, malnutrition in children under five was evident after just a few weeks of these food shortages.”

Good doc was made about this period, “The Power of Community, How Cuba Survived Peak Oil”, Faith Morgan made the doc.

Lessons for all would-be revolutionaries.

Apropos of Ian’s admonition to be satisfied with what you grow or make, I find my gardening/farming friends are generally happy to eat their own produce and eschew eating “out of season” fruits and veggies.

Money is by far the most important factor. The British hegemony made all its colonies suffer when its own banks got out of control. Deep recessions everywhere but the ‘jewell’ India had the worst of it. That British commentator is just wrong. Australia is a useful case: the Empire spent a fortune massacring Indigenous guerrillas, helped by UK officers-capitalist agribusinesses. But the immigrants were the empire’s white radicals: Chartists, unionists and the Irish, then feminists, made fun of pompous aristocrat- money men. Banks were hated from the outset. The aim for state ownership, less to take over but out-compete capitalist banks and industry, became a key to undermining the whole show. Since the 1990s, fragments remain, many still able to be revived. However, I’d point to the US Fed as an apppalling contrast. The District Feds are capitalist bank-owned. Obama faced Geithner who represented Wall Street as head of the NY Fed. How hopeless! The Fed Board in Washington DC has barely stood up to the NY District Fed. FDR tried and failed to nationalise the District Feds. It’s also possible that WW2 was more important in breaking Wall Street’s stranglehold, than FDR. But still FDR did get a lot of class traitors onto his Admin, on that I agree with Welsh. They knew that money had to be democratised; they were committed to serving the public. Is that too much to ask?

Ian, you pathetic commie slut! I almost thought I wrote those comments while sleep-writing. Your little manifesto will do one good thing, peg you as an undesirable and keep you out of our great country, MAGA.

(Ian – this is Peter’s last comment on this blog.)

Hardest of all might be: avoid doing some policy that is really stupid.

Which in practice means never committing yourself to any particular policy, only to trying and sticking to what works. There are risks with “experimentalism” — particularly that things that do work will be abandoned too soon or too easily, but no particular policy will work indefinitely and some policies may well blow up in your collective faces. Be more ready to abandon failing policy than power.

Some kinds of stupid are avoidable. But, no individual and no committee is exempt entirely from vulnerability to really stupid. Some of Ian’s advice is focused on the systematic need to find people who can run things because they know how. Which is based on knowing that most people do not.

Neoliberalism is notable for being an ideology that effectively creates a degree of immunity for corrupt elites by diverting and subverting the shared, popular capacity to think through policy critically. This immunity to critical reason is going to be a serious obstacle for left-wing movements as the imperium collapses. What Ian said about the Media is true — but the culture of a journalistic establishment that is 4/5’s PR hacks and 1/5 stenographers is as much a problem as centralized strategic control in a few corporate hierarchies and inter-networks. That most academic economists are deep in Dunning-Krueger territory is a problem, but so is the culture of administrative hierarchies “trained” in the mind-numbing rhetoric of conventional economics in college or business school.

Very good. I agree about the law of purges. When you have the powers that be on the run keep them on the run. As to the world trade system, globalism was always a con. The important thing about this essay is that it applies as much to the US as it does developing countries.

Subtle Ian, subtle. Bet it goes over like an aluminum falcon.

I remember.

Are there any success stories of countries who achieved some kind of success by following this recipe?

This is very good, but I’ll quibble here: “Your First Act Must Be a Media Law. Break them up. Take them over. Whichever”.

Don’t take them over. Turn the media into worker co-ops so managers answer to workers instead of shareholders.