Author: Ian Welsh Page 12 of 400

I would suggest that the left’s core belief is:

Everyone should have a good life and society should work to make that happen.

What different left ideologies are arguing about his the means more than the end. A Communist believes the only way for this to be achieved is for the proletariat to control the means of production. (This makes them effectively the left oppositional image of capitalists.)

I, personally, want everyone to have enough and be happy. I recognize that the second is impossible: but it’s a guiding principle. However, at least since the 20th century it’s been more than possible for everyone to have enough food, water, shelter and medicine. We produce or can produce more than enough of all of them (especially food). We simply choose not to distribute to everyone because our current main economic ideology says that if you don’t have enough money you don’t deserve anything.

In the modern world there are three main ideological groupings. Broadly the right, the left, and liberals/neoliberals. These don’t appear on a line, they’re a triangle and each has something in common with the others. The left, generally speaking, is anti-war, for example, and so are parts of the right, especially paleocons. Liberals are very identity politics focused and the left has sympathy for that, but isn’t as dedicated to it. The left’s primary focus is on economic issues and relationships and the relationship to IP is more of “of course everyone should be treated equally.”

The left’s argument about IP is that is splits coalitions when taken to extremes like micro-aggression hunting and reeducation for everyone because everyone’s racist and sexist. Liberals IP, on the other hands, is along the lines of “of course women and minorities should be able to become CEOs and President!”

Neoliberals, the dominant sub-ideology of liberalism believe in regulated markets intended to funnel money towards market winners and to keeping the mass of the population from making long term real wage gains. That’s why, over time, they’ve lost the support of the working class. Democrats were left wing under FDR, a coalition of left and liberals (not neoliberals) from 44 to 79, and have been neoliberal controlled ever since.

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Neoliberalism is in direct opposition to most strains for left-wing ideology. All may not be as extreme in their distrust of concentrations of wealth and capital as communism, but all believe that you can’t take care of everyone if the rich are too powerful. FDR had 90% top marginal tax rates for a reason and estate taxes under post-war British governments were absolutely punitive, but didn’t break up the great Ducal estates, alas.

We’ll discuss conservatives at a later time, but the general orientation is towards authoritarian identity. The left emphasizes horizontal ties, conservatives emphasize primitive identity (religion and culture) mediated through vertical ties. Ruler, nobles, rich, church. Nation and race and ethnicity. (The exception is theoretically libertarians, but they’re completely marginal.) The NASA mission to the moon was about many people’s contribution. Admirers of SpaceX give all credit to Elon Musk, who’s hasn’t engineered or built anything on his rockets.

Liberals are the great apostles of capitalism, not conservatives, though they like the way capitalism stratifies society. Left wingers are the opposition to capitalism. The most extreme versions want an end to it entirely, the moderate versions want it under firm control, made to contribute to mass prosperity, not turned to produce billionaires.

And, again, this is because what the left wants everyone prosperous, not a highly stratifed society, where a stratified society is a goal both liberals and conservatives share.

Fundraising Update #2: New Tier Hit, Close To The Next One

By Ian Welsh

On November 12, 2024

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This blog has been around since 2009. I had just stepped down as managing editor of FireDogLake (one of the larger progressive blogs of the time) after editorial direction disagreements. Running FDL was a seventy hour a week job for not very much money, you had to really believe in it. I had for most of my run, and under my editorship readership increased about 70%. After the election the site kept most of the readers who had started following it during the 2008 election, but I had lost my belief in the direction the site was to take. (The publisher trumps the managing editor.)

I still wanted to keep my foot in, so I threw this place up and in a fit of non-inspiration figured “fuck it, I’ll just use my name.”

Any blog this longstanding has a mix of good and bad, but there’s a lot I’m proud of. This collection of articles on character and ideology, for example. Over the years there have been troughs and peaks—ideas burst out, then there are periods of contemplation, then they come again.

I’m hoping to keep going, and to see a few more peaks and troughs. We’re up at a little over $8,300. That puts us past the second goal, adding three more books. One of them will be “MITI and the Japanese Miracle.” Industrialization and re-industrialization are among the topics of our age, and Japan pioneered the Asian model which China has since used to take the world by storm. Another will be “The Sociology of Philosophies”, which rambles over thousands of years of European, Chinese and Indian philosophy. With its rules of small numbers, the consolidation of the weak, the splitting of the strong and so on it offers both a look at the internal workings of intellectual communities and the circumstances which allow them to prosper, or which choke them into insipidness.

At $10,000, which is about 1,700 away, I’ll write an article on one of the fundamental processes, perhaps the fundamental process which keeps society together and how it renews or fails.

Thanks to all who have donated and to all my readers. It’s been a lovely and lively journey, hopefully you’ll be here with me for years more travel towards that horizon which is as far as we can imagine.

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What Is A Communist?

By Ian Welsh

On November 11, 2024

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One annoying tendency in modern political discourse is right wingers and centrists calling people communist.

They don’t know what the word means.

A communist believes that the means of production should be owned and controlled by the proletariat: the workers.

If you don’t believe this, you aren’t a communist. Wanting universal healthcare doesn’t mean you’re a communist unless you think the health workers themselves (or, just perhaps, the party or government) should control the healthcare providers.

Wanting universal healthcare, in the modern context, makes you a socialist.

Now there’s a lot of argument around what it means for the proletariat to control the means of production. If the “Party” controls it, like in the USSR or pre-Deng China, is that communism, or is it just old fashioned government authoritarianism?

Is modern China communist? About half the economy isn’t controlled by the Party, and worker co-ops are minor players. There’s clearly a capitalist class controlling vast amounts of the means of production, though government is very willing to intervene. The Chinese Communist party says this is still communism but that seems like a stretch to me. The same is true in Vietnam: the Communist party is in charge, but the economy isn’t communist.

Note that you could have a market economy which IS communist. If workers co-ops or something similar control most of the organizations, that would be communism, and it’s something that a lot of intellectuals in America and Europe during the 50s pushed for: a sort of “best of both worlds.”

Centralized control economies like the USSR, from this point of view can’t really be communist, because the workers aren’t really controlling capital.

For myself, I’d say moving away from stock companies and towards a mix of worker owned organizations and perhaps mutual companies (or mixed versions) would be the best way to move towards something that might both be communist and workable, allowing the dynamism of the market.

Generally speaking my time in the workforce convinced me that upper management is usually clueless because they don’t do the job and haven’t done it in ages. You have to be on the front lines to have some idea what the issues actually are.

Communism is worker control of capital, and nothing else. We’ve never really tried it.

Open Thread

By Ian Welsh

On November 9, 2024

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Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts. (No election or Trump related comments.)

Let’s Assume Trump Is Serious About Some Policies, What Are The Effects?

By Ian Welsh

On November 8, 2024

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The great problem with Trump, predictively, is that he’s fickle. He often doesn’t do what he says he’ll do. Even if he was sincere he’s easily handled by flatterers. The best model for Trump is an arrogant and touchy king who wants to be made to feel he’s amazing.

This means that court games matter even more than in a normal Presidency, and those who play them best have the most power and influence.

But even a good courtier can step wrong with Trump and be pushed out. The limelight has to stay on Trump himself. A courtier can have great power, but the credit and the media must flow to the top. The last thing any courtier wants is to have people saying publicly that they’re the power behind the throne.

Trump also likes to please people, especially mobs of people and he can sometimes get the bit between his teeth and run with an idea no matter what anyone around him says.

Preamble aside, Trump did come back and back to some of the same issues.

Thirty Percent Tariff on Chinese Goods

This will raise costs for American businesses and for consumers. Prices will rise more than the actual cost, as many businesses will use this as an excuse to raise prices even more than their costs. It will not significantly improve US jobs because China’s cost structure is more than 30% cheaper than America’s. It will help other foreign producers, however, and it will lead to a lot of scamming, where Chinese goods are shipped to a third party, scrubbed, and sent to the US, similar to the way Europe is now buying so much “Indian” oil. But…

Mass Deportation Of Immigrants

This is one of those places where I’m uncertain how serious Trump is, especially when it comes to measures like using the national guard. But let’s say he does manage to both massively slow immigration and remove many current immigrants. The effect is an inflation riptide: it will reduce rent, and increase the price of groceries (because most farm workers are immigrants. There will be general wage increases in businesses which can afford them, offset by demand declines. Deported immigrants don’t consume, after all. Because there is a significant and increasing problem with long-term illness and disability, the labor market will wind up even tighter.

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Some people will win from this pair of policies and even win fairly big. If you’re in a business with pricing power, it’ll be able to afford the increased wages, if you’re in one that can’t, the businesses will fail and you’ll lose big. We’ll have to see how much the price of housing and rent drops to have a full feel for this. Ironically, for this to really work would require anti-trust action against large landlords who are colluding to increase rent. Withdrawing some federal price-support for housing prices would help cause a collapse in housing prices which would benefit a lot of people, but hurt the upper classes. Of course those upper-classes went for Biden, not Trump.

NATO

Trump’s going to push hard for increased NATO spending by members. They’ll say they’re going to do it, in most cases, then won’t. At this point there’s a chance that Trump leaves NATO. I think, of all his policies, this is the one where there’ll be the most pushback from elites, including many people in his own administration, so I’d say odds favor NATO surviving, but it’s not a sure thing. If the US does leave NATO, it will be a huge boon for the world, and the best thing which could happen to Europe, forcing them to get serious about handling their own affairs. The policies Europe should follow are not those America wants.

Favoring gas cars and disfavoring Electric Vehicles and Sustainable Energy

Obviously a disaster for the environment and climate change. Effectively a subsidy for American automobile producers, who are behind on EV tech and production, but it also puts them into a national ghetto, as the rest of the world moves towards electric and hybrid and they fall behind even further. I assume Musk will push hard against the EV part of this, we’ll see whether he succeeds.

Trump has more proposed policies and his allies have many more. How much of Project 2025 will be enacted is unclear. Trump repudiated it, but the architects will be a big part of his administration. We’ll touch more on these in a later article.

The basic issue is that policies need support from each other. If you want re-industrialization you need to do a number of things. Tariffs would be part of that, but they aren’t all of it. Mass deportation of immigrants could work economically, but not at the same times as measures aren’t taken to deal with long term sickness in the native population, and so on. Proper automobile policy would be to invite branch plants and insist on local part sourcing in addition to tariffs, so that domestic producers learn and the jobs are in America.

Trump’s fundamentally a scatterbrain. He’s not a systems thinker, and the people in his adminstration are ideologues of a set of policies which won’t work economically, so Trump’s economy is unlikely to be overall great, though there will definitely be some winners. In 2028 there will be an opening for someone with more genuinely economically populist ideas, because many people will have been hurt by the Trumpconomy.

More later.

It’s The Economy, Stupid (AKA Economists)

By Ian Welsh

On November 6, 2024

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Over ninety-nine percent of economists did not predict the 2008 financial crisis.

The vast majority of economists were pro-globalization, by which I mean pro offshoring and outsourcing. They said it would be good for America, they were wrong.

China is predicted to wind up with over 50% of the world’s industry by 2030. Forget all the bullshit about great power competition. It’s over. There may be a war, but if there is one the West will either lose or the world will be destroyed in a nuclear exchange.

Back in the 90s an economist called Brockway liked to say “Economists are bad for your health.”

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Let’s bring this back to the election. I thought that abortion would be the election defining issue. Stupid of me, though abortion was #2 and only four percent behind inflation. It was inflation, which given how much I write about it, I should have expected. Two tables from the CNN exit polls:

Abortion was the second most important issue. Inflation was #1, and people who voted for pro-abortion measures voted about 9% less for Harris.

Economists meanwhile keep talking about the #Vibecession: the idea that there is no recession, people just think there is.

Economists, as usual, are full of shit. They have a professional dependence on official statistics and refuse to realize that many of them don’t reflect reality. As I have written in the past, according to official inflation statistics the price of cards did not rise between 2000 and 2020. In another case, you will be happy to know that medical service costs are going down. Hedonic adjustments are completely out of control: prices are dropping, you see, because products are so much better now. (There are other finangles, this is the main one.)

Growth numbers are based entirely on nominal growth minus the inflation rate, as are real wage numbers.

I would bet that the US economy has been contracting since 2008, but since inflation is understated, it isn’t visible.

I would also bet that median welfare for Americans has been declining since somewhere between 1968 and 1979, though average might have been increasing till 2008 because of how much money was being shoveled to the rich and wealthy.

We live in a pretend world, and economists are the chief pretenders, the sycophants telling the Emperor how wonderful his new clothes are.

To riff on Galbraith, economists exist to make astrologers look good.

Economics, as a discipline, should be wiped from the face of the Earth. The less than 1% of economists who aren’t charlatans or fools are not enough to justify the harm economists do, which exceeds even that of MBAs.

Harris lost because of the insistence of Democrats that the economy was good, inflation was fine, and that voters were too stupid to read their own grocery bills. Because of this belief Harris said she wouldn’t have done anything different than Biden did. What she needed to do was get out there and say she was going to drive down prices, especially rent and groceries.

As for Trump, we’ll talk more about the effects of his economic plans, if instituted, later.

Trump Wins

By Ian Welsh

On November 6, 2024

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And it’s a big enough victory that we shouldn’t expect Lawfare to overturn it. He very likely even won the popular vote.

I thought Harris would pull it out based on abortion, but I was wrong. (I’m terrible at election prediction, as I warned.) What happened is that people voted for abortion at higher rates than for Harris. The numbers below aren’t final, but they’re indicative:

Men really showed up, as well.

It seems that running on:

I wouldn’t do anything different than Biden did;
I’ll keep the genocide going;
Cheney and other neocons are wonderful;
I’ll appoint Republicans to my cabinet.

wasn’t a winning strategy.

I suspect that we’ll find out it mostly came down to the economy, because no, people aren’t wrong that prices are too high.

I find it hard to be entirely certain what Trump will do as President because he’s, ummm, inconsistent and senile, but I’m sure it won’t be pretty. We’ll see how serious he was about huge tariffs, using the national guard against immigrants and ending the Ukraine war (which would be a good thing.)

We’ll also see whether he leads the US to war against Iran. The Resistance would be well advised to use the next two months wisely.

The biggest obvious loss will be Lisa Khan no longer leading the FTC. Anti-trust will take a big step backwards. Elon Musk has proved over the last few years that he’s an incompetent ideologue, whether he was sane and competent in the past or not, so that’s bad too. And RFK shouldn’t be in charge of anything.

Don’t expect Trump’s policies to improve the economy. Tariffs can work, but they require industrial policy and other steps he won’t take, as we’ve discussed often on this blog.

(This blog is for understanding the present, making educated guesses at the future, and telling truths, usually unpleasant ones. There aren’t a lot of places like this left on the Web. Every year I fundraise to keep it going. If you’d like to help, and can afford to, please Subscribe or Donate.)