Friday 8 December 2017

Big Money Rules

I've always been overly fond of irony, even though I also accept Rilke's sage advice in 'Letters To A Young Poet':

Irony: Don't let yourself be controlled by it, especially during uncreative moments. When you are fully creative, try to use it, as one more way to take hold of life. Used purely, it too is pure, and one needn't be ashamed of it; but if you feel yourself becoming too familiar with it, if you are afraid of this growing familiarity, then turn to great and serious objects, in front of which it becomes small and helpless.
(Viareggio, April 5th, 1903)

I'm neither young nor a poet, and I'd never actually become ashamed of irony until now. The irony that finally proved too much for me is this - that fate of democracy may now depend upon the best efforts of the US intelligence agencies. They may now be the only institutions capable of arresting (for their own far-from-progressive interests of course) the process described in Diane Ravitch's NYRB article Big Money Rules.  It's a grim but a necessary read if you want to know what's really going on in the world.

Saturday 23 September 2017

Social Democracy Uber Alles

The outcry over the revoking of Uber's London licence shows that the service it provides is popular, and it's unquestionably a significant, innovative use of new technology to improve transport. On the other hand the outcry from drivers about lack of benefits and job security show that the application of technology is being used (not uncommonly) both to increase exploitation of the labour force and to flout legal regulation designed to protect labour and customers. The outcry of Black Cab drivers against Uber ignores the fact that people flocked to Uber not merely for convenience (though that is considerable) but because Black Cabs had priced themselves out of the market with the last big price hike.

Put all this together and it's clear that all the parties need to get together and find a workable solution, which is highly unlikely to happen because of the vastly different political atmospheres between UK and USA, and a general lack of adult leadership on both sides. I can imagine a system where Uber's technology is used, within a revised legal framework that brings in Black Cab drivers too. Uber would have to give up predatory pricing and recognise its employership, while Black Cab drivers would have to slacken their monopoly. And pigs would have to mount flying unicorns.

Amazon, Google, Facebook, Uber and the rest have built a worldwide, highly effective infrastructure of the sort that socialists (especially Stafford Beer) used to dream about - but unsurprisingly, as private enterprises, they use it to generate mega-profits for their owners and to erode working conditions and pay for their workers. The challenge for social democrats - which few are thinking straight (or even talking) about - is to devise new reforms that will make this infrastructure work better for the public interest, without destroying it or crushing its ability to keep innovating.

Tax avoidance by the big tech companies is certainly a major issue, and getting them to pay anything at all would be a step forward, but punitive taxation is not a solution either. Similarly with ownership, old-style nationalisation is unimaginable, unaffordable and might in any case stifle innovation. As for regulation, we need to grasp in precisely what ways the new connectivity renders many older forms of regulation ineffective, and modify them to the new reality. In fact we need to rethink a whole complex of now-inseparable issues - benefits, universal basic income, employment rights, taxation, public v private provision.

Not convinced? Then remember for a moment all those billions of pounds from the public purse that have been wasted over the last 50 years on failed NHS and other public IT projects. Now try to imagine how technology like Amazon/Google/Facebook's would help the NHS with appointments, record keeping and sharing, even diagnosis...

No parties that I'm aware of on either side of the Atlantic are thinking seriously about these matters in sufficient depth and urgency. In the USA the sheer incompetence of the Democratic Party has put the Republicans in a position not only to erase what remains of New Deal social democracy, but also to salt the earth against any possibility of its regrowth. In the UK social democracy has fallen down the crack that runs down the middle of the Labour Party, between a Right that remains wedded to neoliberalism, and a Left often hobbled by nostalgia (not always conscious) for state socialism. Not until Jeremy Corbyn starts calling himself a social democrat rather than a socialist, can you be sure that the party has remembered the difference.

Tuesday 14 March 2017

Collapse of the Left

The devastating setbacks recently suffered by the Left in the UK, USA, Turkey, Hungary and Poland (perhaps soon to be followed by more within the EU) have not yet lead to any satisfactory explanation of what is going wrong. They're still largely discussed in terms of Right v Left, but using partially outdated definitions of what these terms imply.

For the first half of the 20th century, the democratic Left was associated with socialised services, economic regulation, high wages and worker's rights,, while the Right espoused militarism, privatised services, free markets and low wages. The 1960s counterculture crucially changed the beliefs of the so called New Left in the direction of pacifism, minority rights and social libertarianism, and these positions have now merged into the mainstream Left to produce a bewildering range of different combinations and sects.


The Right still likes militarism, free markets, and individualism but has also adopted substantial parts of New Left libertarianism, to further complicate things. Apropos of which, this disturbing and highly unorthodox blog post by Dale Beran may come as a surprise if you're unfamiliar with the seamy end of the Internet: https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb#.kthc5781h

What's happened is that major changes in the economy - financialisation, falling profit rates, neoliberal fiscal policies - have reduced the Left's ability to deliver social democracy, and as a consequence the generation of the 1960s' counterculture, (that is, mine) substituted a new position based on anti-racism, LGBT rights, and much more - what's often called 'identity politics' but could equally be called 'minoritarianism' . Sometimes this switch is justified by reference to Gramsci's concept of hegemony, that is achieving power over culture and society in times when state power is unattainable. (In fact he still saw state-power as the ultimate goal)

An insightful article in the LRB by UCL's professor of Philosophy of Law, George Letsas (https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n06/george-letsas/brexit-and-the-constitution) shows a different way to see what's actually happened. He criticises the usual definition of that 'populism' which lead to Brexit and Trump's victory, namely that it means bowing to 'what the people want' and deploying rhetoric that appeals to their emotions. Instead he attacks this populism in politico-legal terms, as a 'deliberate attempt to bypass the normal channels of representative democracy'. That might sound like the same thing, but it isn't.

Rather than 'populism' this approach is better called 'majoritarianism'. It claims that the sole justification for political action is indeed 'what the people want', but more precisely, what they voted for in the last election or referendum. This conception of democracy is held by as many on the Left as on the Right (of those who adhere to democracy at all that is), but it doesn't correspond to the way UK democracy, or many others, actually work. Democratic political action was until recently always justified by a continual process of collaboration and conflict between the executive, legislature and electorate - the process we call 'checks and balances' - which, however imperfectly, protects at least some of the rights of the minorities within the majority.

This creeping majoritarianism in the wake of Brexit and Trump isn't yet the full-scale authoritarianism or fascism that some on the more excitable Left are claiming, but it is their precondition. It's also clear that the so-called Alt-Right is fully aware of the crucial role such checks-and-balances play in maintaining liberal forms of democracy, and they're rapidly achieving sufficient power to undo them all. And one reason that such majoritarianism is gaining popular support so rapidly is precisely the fact that the Left has more or less given itself over to minoritarianism.


Of course the mass media play an important role in encouraging majoritarianism, but they merely complete a vicious circle with the Left's increasingly extreme and vociferous minoritarianism. The still-mostly-silent majority believes that its interests are being sacrificed to those of a wide range of minorities, in a process that inexorably inflates rather than combats racism, sexism, xenophobia and the rest of the isms.

This almost universal misconception about the nature of representative democracy renders 'more democratic than thou' political arguments moot, as the rancour over Brexit so clearly demonstrates. Letsas doesn't claim that understanding it will solve the problems of the Left, far from it. Particularly among younger people, confusion caused by the New Right's espousal of libertarianism, 'anti-elitism' and anti-PC runs deep, and any policy solutions for the Left aren't at all obvious. Letsas does suggest that in the long-term one way out is a written constitution for the UK, something I've always believed to be less important than electoral reform, but I think he has convinced me.

Friday 20 January 2017

Trump of Doom?

Thought for the day. The type of economy we call social democracy depended for its success on a willingness of the majority of the population to cooperate as well as compete with one another, giving up a portion of their income in taxes to be spent on various public goods like medicine, education and transport. If the population loses its willingness to make these reasonable sacrifices then it becomes impossible to maintain a social democracy.

The UK population was so willing for at least 30 years following WWII, to a large extent thanks to the experience of necessary cooperation among the generation who fought that war. But over the *last* 30+ years that willingness has been steadily eroded by many factors, including (but by no means confined to): greater individualism stemming from precisely the relative affluence and economic freedom that post-war social democracy conferred; successive economic crises (some related to oil, some to financial recklessness); industrial decline, outsourcing and austerity imposed by politicians in thrall to neoliberal economics; free market propaganda promulgated by politicians in thrall to neoliberal economists; mass migrations; international terrorism.

The UK Brexit referendum, US election of Donald Trump, and developments within many EU countries suggest that this willingness has now been lost by somewhere around a crucial 50% of my own "baby boomer" generation, and there's evidence of loss too among younger generations whose expectations have been drastically curtailed. But despite the nationalist rhetoric of "taking back control" from the Brexiteers, it seems more likely that what's actually happening is a withdrawal of people's engagement from the nation-state altogether, back to the individual family as unit of survival.

Perhaps the only way the willingness required for social democracy could ever be restored is in the event of some major catastrophe, on the order of magnitude of a world war, great depression or an abrupt climate deterioration, that forces people to relearn cooperation in order to survive. Recent governments in both Europe and USA have been just barely prudent and competent enough (tempering their neoliberal policies with judiciously-applied shots of Keynes during the emergencies) to avoid such a catastrophe. Such a catastrophe feels quite a lot closer following the inauguration of the impulsive President Trump, but a catastrophe it would remain - and to imagine otherwise would be grotesque.

GILT BY ASSOCIATION

I don’t have any special credentials as a commentator on geopolitics, but occasionally, like now, I feel obliged to have a stab at it. The c...