Dreaming Our Way Out of Capitalism

Review of "Understanding Capitalism", by Richard Wolff.

When I picked up this book, I thought it was going to be a sober analysis of capitalism, by a real economist. But what I was met with was something quite different- a Marxist screed with the most flaccid intellectual grounding, disingenuous and dishonest by turns. Wolff apparently has been paid to teach economics at liberal institutions, but this book is evidence that they have little idea what they are buying. 

Not that I am unsympathetic. Capitalism is a highly problematic system. But it hardly helps to make statements like: "Given China's huge influence on poverty measures, one could claim that reduced global poverty in recent decades results from an economic system that insists that it is not capitalist, but socialist." Note the squirrely way this is phrased, not defining the economic system, but noting only the wholly outdated self-description. China is one of the most capitalist countries in the world right now, having harnessed naked capitalism (and a lot of stolen IP) to raise its industries and living standard dramatically. 

Or how about this, in a discussion of why the idea that capitalism is highly innovative is a myth: "Yet the USSR, for example, exhibited much small business formation on its collective farms, in its service sector, and in its black markets, all replete with competition and innovations." If black markets are evidence of the innovative capacity of socialist economies, then the US is surely headed for Marxism forthwith.

It is almost funny how poorly this book is argued, and how formulaic its critiques and nostrums. But it provides a jumping-off point for a discussion that is a bit more grounded. Wolff casually describes capitalism as just another system, like feudalism and mercantilism, having its day and sure to pass on to some other, better system. He ends up promoting worker-owned cooperatives that are democratically run, where every action is voted on. Needless to say, such ideas have not, and will not, go anywhere. They are simply not practical. For we are, at base, dealing with human nature and the imperatives of existence. 

The state of nature (in larger societies) is organized crime- the strong rule the weak, and call themselves noble. Workers are managed by aristocrats (and priests), who make a fetish of not doing any work themselves. The feudal system was an attempt to give some order to this system of relations, by raising the serfs from mere slavery, and mandating some notional reciprocal duties. Capitalism, as even Marx appreciated, was an enormous advance over feudalism, putting the workers and businesses both on firmer legal footing, with a (labor) market intermediating between them. Labor markets have all sorts of problems and biases, but with advances in regulation and labor agitation, it has become for most people a relatively civilized way to exchange labor for money. 

Is capitalism still unfair? Yes, grossly so. But let's look two of its most basic injustices. First is that it takes money to make money. If one is born rich, one can be a capitalist and not work a day on one's life. Capitalism puts a high value on using that money to take risks and create businesses. But most rich people are content to buy bonds and sit on their money. What kind of capitalism is that? On the other hand, there is a large industry of venture capital that exists to lure money from the pockets of dentists and other rich people, promising high returns from risky ventures. This is the kind of essential engine that classical capitalism envisions- a tireless hunt for new business opportunities and technologies that will, in the end, make the economy more efficient and raise the standard of living. 

Wolff offers a telling example of capricious unfairness in management, where a business brings in a machine that replaces half of its workers, who are fired. He decries the loss of jobs, and suggests that the machine be used instead to fund continuing pay for all the workers. But just in the section before, he had decried the much-vaunted efficiency of capitalism as a myth. It does not sound like a myth here, where more work is done by fewer workers, and those fired workers are then freed to go off into other (presumably) productive forms of work.

Maybe China does a better job using state capitalism to deploy large amounts of capital. Maybe the USSR did a reasonable job, for a couple of decades, in deploying capital to build its heavy industry and arm for World War 2. And maybe free capital markets tend to vacillate between over-enthusiasm and credit contraction. But over the long term, it is clear that relatively free capital markets (with lots of government regulation!) do a good job of finding innovative business prospects and driving efficiency increases over the whole economy. So ... we should definitely think about taxing wealth, and finding ways to make the rich use their money in socially beneficial ways. But the idea that voters, or the state, can do a better job of general capital deployment is not realistic.

A second gross unfairness is management and surplus production. Why are workers still treated like slaves, told what to do, and then underpaid? Sadly, the fact is that management is a difficult job too. We had a worker-run bakery down the street in our city, and it only lasted a few years, because of the inherent problems of not having someone in charge of a business organization. The leading methods of worker-owned corporation now are oriented to giving workers ownership (like the Publix supermarket chain), but not management roles. Workers are on the board, but they do not run the day-to-day operations, because there simply has got to be decisiveness, accountability, and responsibility up the chain of a productive organization. Whether these roles have to be paid a lot more is open to question. But they do have to exist. Even in socialism, political commissars were part of management.

It is worth noting here that while management and unemployment are the disciplining factors for workers, competition is the disciplining mechanism for capitalists (in addition to government regulation). Without competition across the gamut, for labor, for markets, and for inputs, capitalists can abuse their workers and their customers. That is why a renewed focus on antitrust enforcement is an essential part of any progressive program of state oversight over the capitalist system.

As the example of black markets shows, market capitalism is a natural way of organizing human activities and satisfying our desires. But capitalism has plenty of problems. Capital and credit markets can not be left to their own devices. Glaring market failures, like in medicine, show that whole sectors of the economy have no business being capitalist businesses. Capitalism is an engine for turning "externalities", like minerals, air, and creativity, into money, heedless of destructive effects. So capitalism needs heavy regulation and continual reform to tame it into something that provides us with a civilized life. But at its core, it merely expresses our desires, needs, and ambitions, and that core engine needs to be preserved as well.

• When your Tesla crashes, it's your fault.
• Cheap e-vehicles are all the rage.. scooters, bikes, trikes.

The Problem of Desire, Part 2

What is the future of capitalism?

Last week, I discussed how capitalism is a natural way for many of our desires to organize economic activities, though leaving important other desires out in the cold. The philosophical work to come up with alternatives to capitalism appeared, in the end, to be a practical dead end, however appealing to idealists. But what comes next? Once we have settled on the mixed political / economic system that is the rule over most of the modern world, how can we envision it serving humanity into the future? Is it sustainable?

The answer to that is: obviously not. We have far higher population, and use far more resources than the earth can supply sustainably. We might blame capitalism, but that is just the ugly packaging covering our own desires. There was a nice article in the NYRB recently about "degrowth communism", promoting the ideas of Kohei Saito, another provocative self-labeled Marxist. It makes of Marx some kind of prophet of green, which frankly could hardly be farther from the truth. Marx wanted workers to own the means of production so that they could all share in the fruits of modern technology, not to make them return to the idiocy of rural life. So, while degrowth is an important idea, its connection with Marxism is specious, other than the catastrophic degrowth unintentionally induced by the various implementations of Marxism through the last century.

If we excercised our wisdom, we would desire, first and foremost, a sustainable form of life. Unfortunately, our technologies and forms of pillaging the earth have ranged so widely by this point that we hardly have any idea of the harms we are causing and the shortages that are building up. Who would have predicted that plastics and forever chemicals would turn into a growing plague? Who has the answer to climate change? The key thing to realize, however, is that we have the power. We do not need a revolution overturning capitalism, because we have the state. The state can regulate, it can nationalize, it can utility-ize, it can crush companies or create them. It can make the rules and change the rules. It is through the state that we can express our larger desires for sustainable and decent living. 

For example, states can (and have) set up a carbon tax to move the transition away from fossil fuels. California has done so, as have many other countries. Just because we in the US are at a corrupt and mean political moment where short-term (at best) thinking rules the roost does not mean that people's deeper and longer-term interests will forever remain submerged. Indeed, this moment has provided an instructive (if appalling) window into how powerful the state can be. 

The article cited above also maintains that growth is inherently tied to capitalism, and that degrowth requires a revolution of some kind. Again, I beg to differ. Capitalism simply is a way to satisfy our desires. If we want to live simply, it will still serve us. Whether growing or contracting, capitalism marches on doing its best to satisfy our desires. Companies compete for business and growth, but there are plenty who have stable business models, such as, to take one example, the toothpaste business. 

More interesting is the popular revolt against growth that is expressed in declining birth rates. All over the modern economies, people are having fewer children, and causing a great deal of head-scratching and alarm. Is this due to the death of patriarchy? A fear of the future? The death of boredom? I think it has a lot to do with the fundamental contraction of our frontiers and a sense of limits. After a couple of centuries of breakneck growth, when large families were common and there were always new territories to occupy, we in the US hit the ceiling in the 1970s. Cities stopped growing, housing construction slowed, zoning enforced stasis. The expense and complexity of raising children in this environment grew as well, becoming subtly more competitive than cooperative. 

So, growth is slowing already, but not enough to save us from extreme ecological harms. We do need a more conscious degrowth strategy, encompassing accommodation of lower population, slowing down of lifestyles in some regards, strong movement through the sustainable energy transition, expanding natural habitats instead of degrading them. In all these issues, capitalism is not the problem. The problem is figuring out what we really want. In Europe over the centuries, there was a gradual transition from building with wood to building with stone. Which is to say, the value of sustainability gradually won out over wasteful short-term solutions. We need to start building in stone, metaphorically, thinking of the next hundred and thousand years, not just our own brief lifetimes.

• Bearing witness to the unconstitutional court.
• Krugman points out that Brazil is way ahead in crypto... specifically their central bank coin, Pix. In the US, banks, crypto, and Republicans are ideoidiotically opposed.
• Continuously unconstitutional.
• Is nothing sacred?

The Problem of Desire

We got what we want... are we happy now?

I have been enjoying a podcast on philosophy, which as is typical for the field, dances around big questions and then pats itself on the back for thinking clearly. What really got to me was a discussion of why Zizek, who calls himself a communist, couldn't be bothered to frame a positive system for how the world should be run. No, he is merely the philosopher and critic of the screwed up system we are in. Plenty of hard work there! Asking for a way forward, well, that would be like making the visionary have to build the rockets and recruit the astronauts to build the new world. That is someone else's work ... grubby details!

Whoa! The thinker who is just a critic is leaving the job almost wholly undone. Everyone is a critic, after all. The paying work should be in thinking up better worlds and solutions, and standing behind them in the face of the inevitable, yes, criticism. A major obsession of the show and these philosophers (around the 200 episode mark) is capitalism- why it is so terrible, the many critiques and complaints about it, and throwing some love at the anarchists, communists, and other outré comrades ... on the highest philosophical plane, of course. 

But what it all boils down to for me is the problem of desire. The capitalist system is one natural and highly refined way to get what we want. We pay into the system with our toil, and get back the products of everyone else's toil. Fair and square, right? The system is wholly shaped by desire. What the consumer wants out of the system, what the worker knows they need to do in order to be that consumer, and what the capitalist and managerial classes need to do to put the two together, and make a killing for themselves in the bargain. This system is a wonder of labor allocation, providing the most varied and productive forms of work, and of products, ever known.

A still from Chaplin's Modern Times.

And yet... and yet, this system doesn't really give us everything we want, because, well, there are other desires that aren't met in the capitalist market. Desires for love, for community, for a virtuous and just political system, for a wholesome environment. There are a lot of other desires, and letting capitalism gobble everything up and sell itself as the end-all of social organizing principles is obviously not a healthy way to go. Though we have surely tried! Not to mention the warped psychology of pitting everyone against each other in the many competitive planes of capitalism- the labor market, the exploitation by capitalists, assaults of marketing and advertising, and the resulting inequality of income and wealth. There is plenty to complain about here.

The problem is that we have many desires, of which many conflict with the desires of others, and many conflict with each other. Even for the individual person, prioritizing one's own many desires is an excruciating exercise of tradeoffs and negotiation. Imagine what that is like for a whole society. That is why figuring out what is "good" is such a chestnut in philosophy. We all know what is good at some very abstract level, but the variety and relationship of goods is what does us in. 

So it is easy enough to say that the capitalist system is evil, and we would like a new and better system, please. Much more difficult to frame a replacement. Following our desires makes it clear that capitalism is an element of the good life, but far from the only element. Even something as simple as providing toothpaste can not be left entirely to the capitalist system. Our desire for effective toothpaste can easily conjure up fraudulent business "models", where the fluoride is left out, or lead contamination gets in. The government has a role in this most humdrum of capitalist goods, to provide a legal framework for liability, perhaps direct regulation of medical / food products, not to mention guarding against monopolies other forms of business regulation. 

We end up, as we have in practice, with a mixed system where natural capitalist motivations are fostered to provide as much organization as they can, but our many other, often much more lofty and significant, desires lead us to regulate that system extensively. To put a larger frame around this, consider what the good life is in general terms. It is a life where each person is educated to the extent they wish, and contributes in turn to society in some useful way, building a life of mutual respect with others in their community. It aligns very strongly with the American dream of work, striving, and self-reliance, at least once the genocidal clearance of the original inhabitants was taken care of. The Civil war was premised on the abhorrence of slavery, not only on behalf of the abused Blacks, but also as a philosophical system of life where people thought it their right to live parasitically by the sweat of other people's brows. 

This has strong implications for our current moment, where inequality is higher than ever. A well-organized society would reward work with the kind of pay that supports a respectable life. It would not tolerate immiseration and abuse in the labor market. At the same time, it would not allow the incredible concentration of wealth we see today. And especially, it would not allow the intergenerational transfer of that wealth, nor the complexity and laxity of a tax system that provides the majority of work that the rich appear to engage in- that of avoiding taxes. In order for everyone to live a good life, children should neither be born to so much money that they fritter their lives away, nor to so little that their whole futures are immediately wiped away. All this requires a strong and moral state, working in collaboration with a strongly regulated capitalist system.

It has been abundantly proven that neither anarchism, nor communism, nor libertarianism provide the basis for practical societies. No amount of reframing, or consciousness raising, or struggle sessions, will bring such systems to pass. Only theocracies and autocracies have shown a comparably durable basis, though of a distinctly unpleasant kind. Therefore, philosophies that dabble in such utopianism should recognize that they are dealing in abstractions that can be instructive as extreme ends of a spectrum, as well as object lessons in failure. It is simply malpractice to tease people with glimmering alternatives to our communal realities, rather than doing the gritty work of reform within them.

• Case in point... jeans in the DDR.
• Bill Mitchell on the commodification of leisure.
• The Supreme court continues abetting clearly illegal activities.
• Science, schmientz
• Gullible prove resistant to further gulling.
• Yes, this gullible.

Capitalism on the Spectrum

Prospects for the new administration.

Political economics can be seen as a spectrum from anarchic gangsterism (Haiti) to total top down control such as in communism (Cuba, North Korea). Neither works well. Each end of this spectrum ends up in a state of terror, because each is unworkable on its own terms. Capitalism, in its modern form, is a compromise between these extremes, where free initiative, competition, and hierarchical relations (such within corporations) are allowed, while regulation (via the state and unions) makes humane what would otherwise a cutthroat system of gangsterism and corruption. The organization and stability allowed by state-sponsored legal systems raises system productivity far above that of the primeval free-for-all, while the regulatory rules also make it bearable to its participants- principally the workers. The magic comes from a dynamic balance between competition and guardrails to keep that competition focused on productive ends (that is, economic/business competition), rather than unproductive ones (war, assassination, corruption, capture of the state, etc.)

The new Trump administration promises to tear up this compromise, slash regulations, and cut government. That means that the workers that voted for this administration, and who are the primary beneficiaries of the regulatory state, will be hurt in countless ways. The grifting nature of so many in this incoming administration is a blazing alarm to anyone who pays attention. Whether it is stiffing workers, bloviating on FOX, hawking gold sneakers, making a buck off of anti-vax gullibility, defrauding the government of taxes, promoting crypto, or frankly asking for money in return for political favors like petroleum deregulation, the stench of corruption and bad faith is overwhelming. Many of them, starting from the top, see capitalism as a string of scams and frauds, not exactly Milton Friedman's vision of capitalism. An administration of grifty billionaires is unlikely to rebuild US manufacturing, help workers afford housing, or fulfill any of the other dreams of their voters. Indeed, a massive economic collapse, on the heels of bad policy such as crypto deregulation, or a world-spanning trade war, is more likely, and degraded conditions for workers all but certain.

Freedom for capitalists means permission for companies to abuse workers, customers, the environment, the law, and whatever else stands in the way of profit. We have been through this many times, especially in the gilded age. It can spiral into anarchy and violence when business owners are sufficiently "free" from the fetters of norms and laws. When the most powerful entities in the economy have only one purpose- to make money- all other values are trampled. That is, unless a stronger entity makes some rules. That entity can only be the government. It has been the role of governments from time immemorial to look to the long term interests of the collective, and organize the inherent competition within society into benign and productive pursuits.

OK, more than a little ironic, but you get the idea.

On the other hand, there is a problem even at the golden mean of governmental rule-making over the capitalistic free-for-all, which is that the quality of the rule makers and their rules, their attention to real conditions, and their prompt decision making, all can decline into bureaucratic inertia. While this may not be a Stalinist system of top-down planning and terror, it still can sap the productive energies of the system. And that is what we have been facing over the last few decades. For instance, there is the housing crisis, where home construction has not kept up with demand, mostly due to zoning stasis in most desirable places in the US, in addition to lagging construction after the 2008 financial and real estate crisis. Another example is public infrastructure, which has become increasingly difficult to build due to ever-mounting bureaucratic complexity and numbers of stakeholders. The California high speed rail system faces mountainous costs and a bogged-down legal environment, and is on the edge of complete inviability.

Putting rich, corrupt, and occasionally criminal capitalists at the head of this system is not, one must say, the most obvious way to fix it. Ideally, the Democrats would have put forward more innovative candidates in better touch with the problems voters were evidently concerned with. Then we could have forged ahead with policies oriented to the public good, (such as planetary sustainability and worker rights), as has been the practice through the Biden administration. But the election came up with a different solution, one that we will be paying for for decades. And possibly far worse, since there are worse fates than being at a well-meaning, if sclerotic, golden mean of governmental regulation over a largely free capitalist system. Hungary and Russia show the way to "managed democracy" and eventual autocracy. Our own history, and that of Dickensian Britain, show the way of uncontrolled capitalism, which took decades of progressivism, and a great depression, to finally tame. It would be nice to not have to repeat that history.

• Daniel P. Moynihan was for the job guarantee.
• Housing in New Zealand.
• Nature's key scientists of 2024.
• A grumpy Krugman signs off.
• Notes on crypto and its grifting community.
• Who is for workers?
• MAGA to kill off the greatest public health advance, ever.

Welcome to Lubyanka!

Another case of penal systems illuminating their culture.

Most of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's In the First Circle is a desultory slog, at least if you have already read the Gulag Archipelago. But there are a few glorious set-pieces. One is the mock trial of Prince Igor of Kiev that the prisoners stage in their free time, a bitter satire of the Soviet judicial system. The second is a meticulous description of how prisoners are brought into and introduced to the Lubyanka prison- the central prison of the KGB/FSB/Cheka/GPU/OGPU/NKVD/NKGB, etc.. the frequently renamed, but never-changing organ of the Russian government.

The character is Innokenty Volodin, a Soviet diplomat who has recently had second thoughts about the rightness of the Soviet system, and has placed a call (around which the book's plot, such as it is, mostly revolves) to the Americans to prevent Russia from obtaining certain critical atomic secrets. Solzhenitsyn carefully prepares the way by portraying Volodin's rarified position and luxurious life. As was customary, Volodin is lured into his arrest under false pretenses, and finds himself driven to the prison almost before he knows what has happened. Then, with almost loving detail, Solzhenitsyn describes the not just systematic, but virtuosic process of degradation, step by step, shred by shred, of Volodin's humanity, as he is inducted into Lubyanka.

One cardinal rule is that prisoners must have no contact with other prisoners. Even to see others is forbidden. As they are conducted from one cell to the next, they are shoved into mini phone-booth cells if another prisoner is being conducted in the opposite direction. Their possessions are gradually taken away, down to buttons, belts, and steel shoe shanks. They are shorn. They are sleep deprived. They are relentlessly illuminated by glaring bulbs. They are spied on constantly. They are moved relentlessly from place to place and disoriented. In the middle of the night, the building is abuzz with activity, as though this were the very nerve center of the Soviet empire. 

While the rest of Russian society is mired, or cowed, in mediocrity, this is a shining point of competence. The purest expression of its obsessive leader, and the product of decades of careful study and accumulated wisdom. It is also a deeper expression of the nature of Russian society- its reflexive despotism and its strange infatuation with suffering. The closest thing we have is mafia culture, with its honor codes, brutality, and constant battle for dominance. Chess, the emblematic game of Russia, expresses this view of life as a pitiless contest to crush one's opponent. There may be a lot of historical reasons for this nature, such as the long centuries of Mongol rule, the many invasions, both ancient and modern, and the perceived success of leaders such as Ivan the Terrible and Stalin, but it is a deep and disturbing aspect of the Russian psyche. 

Should we have expected anything else, in the long road of declining relations after the cold war? Should the Russian people give thanks to the ruthlessness of their national leadership and psyche for the current position of relative power they wield in the world, far out of proportion to their population or economic strength? Other countries with larger populations peacefully mind their own business, avoid outside entanglements, and eschew invading their neighbors. It is the bullies, the intransigent, and the cruel, who appear to account for most of the drama in the world. Should we understand them, or fight against them?

• Another way to crush spirits.
• It is good to be outside.
• AI is not helping job seekers.
• On paying the devil his due.
• Why have kids anymore?

The Shadow War

We are in a new world-wide cold war. And ironically, the many new technologies from the West have given autocratic states extraordinary new powers. 

Paul Theroux had a remarkable passage in one of his travel books, as he was passing through Myanmar, a military dictatorship then and now, that illuminated attitudes towards China and from China. 

"I heard lots of praise for the United States in distancing itself from the regime, and lots of blame for China and Russia and Singapore in supporting it- China especially. But China's prosperity, its need for oil and wood and food, had created a new dynamic. China had no interest in any country's developing democratic institutions; on the contrary, it was a natural ally of repressive regimes. When the World Bank withheld funds from an African country because it was corrupt and tyrranous, demanding that it hold an election before it could qualify for aid, China would appear with money- 'rogue aid,' with no strings attached, and got the teak, the food, and the drugs." - Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, 2008

The world seems headed into another cold war, definitely rhyming with the last cold war. It is highly unfortunate, and testament to some defects in US management of the post-cold war era, to the surprising durability, even attractiveness, of authoritarian systems, and to the many weaknesses of democratic systems. This new cold war, which I will call the shadow war, features Russia and China as the main poles of opposition to democratic and developed countries, mostly in the West, but including many others. This time around, China is the stronger power by far, and both Russia and especially China are quite advanced in their development, so that the West no longer has a monopoly in any particular technology or kind of organization. China has adopted all the magic of capitalist market mechanisms to grow its wealth, and stolen (or forced the transfer of) huge amounts technology and knowledge to make itself a leader in all sorts of industries.

The West has lately begun to wake up to the problem. Our hope that capitalism was somehow related to, or a leading wedge for, democracy has been dashed several times over. Instead of China turning into Hong Kong, it is Hong Kong that is turning into China. Not only is capitalism, as has been tirelessly pointed out from the left, amoral and indifferent to human rights, (as we already knew from slavery in the US), but democracy is also far more fragile than we had hoped, requiring a wide range of civic understandings, media practices, and forms of education that are far from universal, or natural. We had, in the windup to the cold war, seen many countries make slow and fraught transitions to democracy (Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, and Eastern Europe), but have more recently seen countries backtrack into autocracy (Russia, Hungary).

Naturally, the war in Ukraine has put the most urgent point on this conflict, where Russia, which is to say its autocratic leader, felt that the existence of an independent and democratic Ukraine next door was too much to bear. Now, China also tells us that it loves its brothers in Taiwan so much that re-unification will come, no matter what the Taiwanese themselves might want. Love certainly takes some strange forms!

But it is a much broader issue, spanning the globe, and the depths of human psychology. On one list of countries ranked by democratic governance, the median country is Armenia, with a "hybrid regime" and scores of roughly five out of ten. This is not a great situation, where half the world, in rough terms, lives in various states of miserable, oppressive government. And as the quote above suggests, the authoritarians have in some ways the stronger hand. What happened?

We in the West had thought that democracy was the natural harbor of all peoples- the end of history, indeed. But in the first place, people power is a very limited power, if whoever has power is authoritarian enough to use tanks against it. And in the second place, democracy is not natural in many cultures. The Muslim culture, for instance, for all its virtues, has a fundamentally patriarchal and tribal governance model, with little room for democracy, though there are, traditionally, various forms of freedom, for men at least. So however attractive democracy is in theoretical terms, and as a model in the West that people from authoritarian countries like to vacation to... as a cultural pattern, it is not universal. And authoritarian patterns are hardly foreign to the West either. The Catholic church is an example of the preserved archetypes of patriarchy and authoritarian strong-man rule.

The Chinese dream is highly militaristic, and rather threatening.

But more deeply, the archetypes we have of leadership and politics are authoritarian.. the king, the hero. Jungian psychology, aside from its focus on archetypes, deals in the shadow, which is our real needs and instincts, insofar as they run counter to our surface goodness and conscious ego construction. A person like Donald Trump exemplifies all these trends. Why on earth are we still saddled with this sociopath after a decade of drama-queenity? He clearly touches a lot of people's archetypal conceptions of strength and heroism. His powers of psychological projection, reflectively rejecting his own shadow, are immense. He is rubber, others are glue. And his fundamental bond with the followers, by licensing their shadow sides of hate and violence, makes his every pronouncement right no matter what. We in the US are facing a cataclysmic political season, trying to repress the shadow of humanity, which is so amply expressed around the world in political / power systems that follow the logic of strength, ending up in states of terror.

Modern technology hasn't helped, either. After a brief flush of excitement about the ability of social media to amplify people power, especially across the Muslim world, it all went to pot as the shallow-ness and disorganization of such movements became apparent. The powers of databases, personal identification, surveillance, and media manipulation have been much more useful to authoritarian governments than to their antagonists, making state terror more effective than ever. Authoritarian countries now control their internet and media environments with great precision, increasingly project their twisted narratives abroad, and even hunt down dissidents outside their borders using the new information tools. So while information may want to be free, it doesn't really have a say in the matter- those with power do.

What to do about it? We in the West have lost control of our media environments. While we are waking up to some extent the the malevalent media from abroad, domestic media is controlled by money, which in the current environment of yawning wealth inequality, political fissiparation, and clickbait "business models" is just as crazy and corrupt. So there should be two approaches to this. One is to strengthen quality media, like PBS and its cohorts, with more offerings and deeper reporting. The other is to restrict how corporations can control media. The right to individual free speech can be preserved while making corporations more sensitive to social goods. The Dominion case against FOX was a small example of the powers available. Liability for lying should be a broader effort in the law, specifically against corporations, which are creatures of the state, not natural persons. We need to recognize the deep psychological powers we are up against in preserving enlightened, respectful civil government and discourse.

Obviously getting our own house in order, against the atavistic forces of political authoritarianism, is the first order of business. Abroad, paradoxically, we need to project strength as a democratic and developed community, holding the line in Ukraine and Taiwan, and against all sorts of authoritarian encroachments, until temperatures are lowered, and the current nationalist fevers abate. For what China has right now is an imperialist fever. It has been weak for so long and surrounded by so many unfriendly countries, that one can understand that it sees its recent economic prosperity as a special opportunity to recover a leading position in its neighborhood, militarily and politically as well as economically. That would be fine if it were not also trying to subvert free political systems and prop up tyrannical ones. There are good reasons why its neighbors are fearful of China.

Like in the last cold war, I think time plays a key role. We have to believe that democracies, for all their weaknesses, are better, and are seen as better, by people around the world. While today's authoritarian powers may have greater durability than those of the communist era due to their embrace of, rather than flouting of, market principles and modern technologies, they are ultimately fragile and subject to the opinions of their own people. Putin will not last forever. Xi will not last for ever. (The Kim regime of North Korea may, however, last forever!) Change is the achilles heal of authoritarian conservatism. So we are in for a very long haul, to keep spreading people power and peace internationally.

• Trade theft and IP warfare.
• Myanmar is a typical case of China's influence and values.
• Religion and war.
• Food oligopoly.
• Ghost roads and the end of nature.
• What, exactly, is the problem?

Are we all the Same, or all Different?

Refining diversity.

There has been some confusion and convenient logic around diversity. Are we all the same? Conventional wisdom makes us legally the same, and the same in terms of rights, in an ever-expanding program of level playing fields- race, gender, gender preference, neurodiversity, etc. At the same time, conventional wisdom treasures diversity, inclusion, and difference. Educational conventional wisdom assumes all children are the same, and deserve the same investments and education, until some magic point when diversity flowers, and children pursue their individual dreams, applying to higher educational institutions, or not. But here again, selectiveness and merit are highly contested- should all ethnic groups be equally represented at universities, or are we diverse on that plane as well?

It is quite confusing, on the new political correctness program, to tell who is supposed to be the same and who different, and in what ways, and for what ends. Some acute social radar is called for to navigate this woke world and one can sympathize, though not too much, with those who are sick of it and want to go back to simpler times of shameless competition; black and white. 

The fundamental tension is that a society needs some degree of solidarity and cohesion to satisfy our social natures and to get anything complex done. At the same time, Darwinian and economic imperatives have us competing with each other at all levels- among nations, ethnicities, states, genders, families, work groups, individuals. We are wonderfully sensitive to infinitesimal differences, which form the soul of Darwinian selection. Woke efforts clearly try to separate differences that are essential and involuntary, (which should in principle be excluded from competition), from those that are not fixed, such as personal virtue and work ethic, thus forming the proper field of education and competition.

But that is awfully abstract. Reducing that vague principle to practice is highly fraught. Race, insofar as it can be defined at all, is clearly an essential trait. So race should not be a criterion for any competitive aspect of the society- job hunting, education, customer service. But what about "diversity" and what about affirmative action? Should the competition be weighted a little to make up for past wrongs? How about intelligence? Intelligence is heritable, but we can't call it essential, lest virtually every form of competition in our society be brought to a halt. Higher education and business, and the general business of life, is extremely competitive on the field of intelligence- who can con whom, who can come up with great ideas, write books, do the work, and manage others.

These impulses towards solidarity and competition define our fundamental political divides, with Republicans glorying in the unfairness of life, and the success of the rich. Democrats want everyone to get along, with care for unfortunate and oppressed. Our social schizophrenia over identity and empathy is expressed in the crazy politics of today. And Republicans reflect contemporary identity politics as well, just in their twisted, white-centric way. We are coming apart socially, and losing key cooperative capacity that puts our national project in jeopardy. We can grant that the narratives and archetypes that have glued the civic culture have been fantasies- that everyone is equal, or that the founding fathers were geniuses that selflessly wrought the perfect union. But at the same time, the new mantras of diversity have dangerous aspects as well.

Each side, in archetypal terms, is right and each is an essential element in making society work. Neither side's utopia is either practical or desirable. The Democratic dream is for everyone to get plenty of public services and equal treatment at every possible nexus of life, with morally-informed regulation of every social and economic harm, and unions helping to run every workplace. In the end, there would be little room for economic activity at all- for the competition that undergirds innovation and productivity, and we would find ourselves poverty-stricken, which was what led other socialist/communist states to drastic solutions that were not socially progressive at all.

On the other hand is a capitalist utopia where the winners take not just hundreds of billions of dollars, but everything else, such as the freedom of workers to organize or resist, and political power as well. The US would turn into a moneyed class system, just like the old "nobility" of Europe, with serfs. It is the Nietzschian, Randian ideal of total competition, enabling winners to oppress everyone else in perpetuity, and, into the bargain, write themselves into the history books as gods.

These are not (and were not, historically) appetizing prospects, and we need the tension of mature and civil political debate between them to find a middle ground that is both fertile and humane. Nature is, as in so many other things, an excellent guide. Cooperation is a big theme in evolution, from the assembly of the eukaryotic cell from prokaryotic precusors, to its wonderous elaboration into multicellular bodies and later into societies such as our own and those of the insects. Cooperation is the way to great accomplishments. Yet competition is the baseline that is equally essential. Diversity, yes, but it is competition and selection among that diversity and cooperative enterprise that turns the downward trajectory of entropy and decay (as dictated by physics and time) into flourishing progress.

• Identity, essentialism, and postmodernism.
• Family structure, ... or diversity?
• Earth in the far future.
• Electric or not, cars are still bad.
• Our non-political and totally not corrupt supreme court.
• The nightmare of building in California.

Bukharin's Lesson in Communism

A review of "The ABC of Communism", by Nikokai Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky, 1920.

Nikokai Bukharin was one of the 1917 revolutionaries that brought communism to Russia. He was in New York (as was Leon Trotsky) in February 1917, as the news of the budding revolution spread around the world, and joined that revolution in May. He and Trotsky were penning a socialist newspaper at the time, and were particular fans of the New York public library- a great example of a public-private partnership, (not to mention free speech), which houses countless products of private enterprise, in a public facility. Back in Russia, they helped establish the world's first socialist and communist state, destroying the nascent parliamentary system of Karensky, and then the arrayed forces of the old aristocracy in the Russian civil war. They did this by promising something even better than parliamentary democracy- a proletarian state that would forever place workers in power, and end the power of capital and the aristocracy. 

A convenient document of the thinking behind all this is the "The ABC of Communism", by Bukharin and Evgenii Preobrazhensky, put out in 1920 and republished long thereafter to provide a popular argument for communism and the soviet system. It encapsulates the economic and political theories that animated, at least at a conscious level, the new rulers. Bukharin was relatively young, regarded as a leading theoretician, and somewhat on the liberal side, not quite as ruthless as Stalin and Lenin. An autobiography and film about his wife tried to paint a positive image of him and of what things would have been like if Bukharin had managed to not get murdered by Stalin. So this work should present a relatively coherent and attractive case for communism.

Bukharin (center) in happier days, in Soviet leadership.

Well, I have to say that it is not very impressive as either economics or politics. While it provides insight into some capitalist dynamics, it fundamentally fails to understand the most basic drivers of economic systems, and obviously has not engaged with Adam Smith, who had written almost 150 years before. 

On the plus side, there is a lengthy treatment of the economies of scale, which rightly describes the advantages that large industrial enterprises have over smaller ones. The point of this, however, is mostly political, to show why anarchism, which was one of the many revolutionary threads still active at the time, made little sense. The Bolsheviks were besotted by industry and large-scale industrialization, which was at least one area where they put a lot of resources and accomplished a great deal, saving their skins in world war 2, later on.

"Consequently, THE LARGER THE UNDERTAKING, THE MORE PERFECT IS THE TECHNIQUE, THE MORE ECONOMICAL IS THE LABOUR, AND THE LOWER IS THE COST OF PRODUCTION."

Secondly, the author's treatment of cyclical crises in capitalism is not too far off the mark. They pin the problem on over-production, which then leads to workers getting laid off, loss of income and buying power, loss of credit, loss of ancillary business, and the downward spiral of depression. Whether lack of demand or over-supply, imbalances of this kind are indeed central to this kind of crisis. The author's solution? Better organization, in the form of state control over every aspect of the economy. They ceaselessly rail against the waste of capitalism- the competition with similar products, the disorganized manner of production by competing and cut-throat capitalists, the lack of overall harmonious coordination for the public good. But what of Adam Smith? It turns out that the chaos of capitalism has its beauties, and its efficiencies, squeezing every drop out of the environment, and out of workers, in its Darwinian competition.

Thirdly, they make a great deal out of the ambient excesses of capitalism, which were truly horrific, and were clear enough all over the world, leading to the communist's program of world-wide revolution by the working class. The monopolies, the strike-breaking, the child labor, the inhuman conditions, and the vast inequality- these were unquestionable evils, some of which remain endemic to capitalism, others of which have been ameliorated through reform in (relatively) democratic countries. As is typical, criticizing is easy, and there were, and remain, plenty of problems with capitalism and with democracy as well. The question is whether Bukharin plumbs the essential depths of economics sufficiently to come up with a better economic system, or of its associated politics to come up with a better form of the state.

And here the answer has to be, as history demonstrated, no. In their discussion of large scale enterprise, they go through a rather particular example to show the power of scale.

"How great is the advantage of this system was made manifest by some American researches instituted in the year 1898. Here are the results. The manufacture of 10 ploughs. By hand labour: 2 workers, performing 11 distinct operations, worked in all 1,180 hours, and received $54. By machine labour: 52 workers, performing 97 operations (the more numerous the workers, the more varied the operations), worked in all 37 hours and 28 minutes, and received $7.90. (We see that the time was enormously less and that the cost of labour was very much lower.) The manufacture of 100 sets of clock wheels. By hand labour: 14 workers, 453 operations, 341,866 hours, $80.82. By machine labour: 10 workers, 1,088 operations, 8343 hours, $1.80. The manufacture of 500 yards of cloth. Hand labour: 3 workers, 19 operations, 7,534 hours, $135.6. Machine labour: 252 workers, 43 operations, 84 hours, $6.81."

... "All these advantages attaching to large-scale enterprise explain why small scale production must invariably succumb in capitalist society. Large scale capital crushes the small producer, takes away his customers, and ruins him, so that he drops into the ranks of the proletariat or becomes a tramp. In many cases, of course, the small master continues to cling to life. He fights desperately, puts his own hand to the work, forces his workers and his family to labour with all their strength; but in the end he is compelled to give up his place to the great capitalist."

If we read this carefully, and do the math in the case of the ploughs:

$54 / 1180 hours = 4.58 cents per hour in wages

$5.40 per plough in cost

$7.90 / 37.5 hours = 21.1 cents per hour in wages

$0.79 per plough in cost

... we can see that not only is the plough almost ten-fold cheaper (some of which is presumably shared with the buyer in the market), but the workers were paid almost five-fold more per hour. How is this a bad reflection on capitalism? This is by way of telling why small scale production dies in a capitalist system ... it doesn't stand a chance. But the authors fail to mention that, in their own example, some of these gains are apparently shared with workers. So the gains in efficiency are shared quite widely- with customers, with workers, and also with the managers and capitalists, since this new form of work requires much greater contributions of management and capital equipment.

Bukharin and Preobrazhensky are "doctrinaire" communists, blind to a gem hidden in their own data that tells us how and why the capitalist system really works. Why did workers flock to the cities when there were agricultural jobs to be had? It was higher pay. Were the new capitalists holding workers as serfs against their will? Not at all. In the US likewise, whatever the horrors of capitalism, it did not hold a candle to the horrors of slavery.

More broadly, Bukharin and the communists generally had little appreciation for the difficulties and role of management. The surplus labor theory of Marxism leaves no room for management contributions of value to the final product- it is all excess labor stolen from the worker, to be restored in the idealized worker state/paradise. The capitalists are parasites:

"In communist society parasitism will likewise disappear. There will be no place for the parasites who do nothing and who live at others' cost."

Rentiers may be parasites, but managers are not. Theirs is the job to locate the resources, drum up the customers, to build the factories, to negotiate the wages, to run the work and fire the lazy. It is not an enviable or simple position to be in, rather is perhaps the most complex in the capitalist system, or any economic system. (And it is noteworthy that failures of management are endemic in government, of even the most enlightened kind, where crucial parts of this constricting set of incentives are often lacking.) It is the competitive forces pressuring on all sides- from customers, from workers, from government, from the financial markets, etc., that are integrated by the petty bourgeoisie / kulak class into a solvent enterprise, and are the soul of the capitalist system, for which they take a premium of profits off the top.

Bukharin and colleagues never pause to consider why capitalism is so dominant:

"Contemporary capitalism is world capitalism. All the countries are interconnected; they buy one from another. We cannot now find any country which is not under the heel of capitalism; we cannot find any country which produces for itself absolutely everything it needs."

Why is this? There was no shortage of experiments in the 1800's in socialistic styles of life, extending from the Shakers and the Owenites to the Tolstoyans. Few of them even survived very long, and none had a broader impact, let alone rising to the organic level of country-wide economic system. Religious monasteries are probably the only example of successful long-term socialistic organizations, though most are run on more or less totalitarian lines, with a whole separate set of emotional and personal committments. This starkly unsuccessful track record should have been a red flag- forgive the pun!- that while socialist utopianism is very popular, it is not practical.

This cavalier disregard of management and the elementary aspects of human economic demand (aka desire, aka greed) naturally came back to bite the communist Soviets, when, in the absence of a well-thought out way to run things in the wake of winning power on the back of their fantasy of a perfectly (and apparently easily, thanks to a mythical "statistical office") ordered and efficient economic system, they fell to the lowest device in the manager's toolbox- terror.

Bukharin on his way to execution, after having helped Stalin hound Trotsky to death.

Why the loose economics, fantastical pronouncements, and embarassing lack of realism? The reason becomes apparent as you read through "The ABC of Communism", which is that its main purpose is to inspire hate. It is a political tract that, as was current among communists then and since, seeks to frame an enemy, inspire hatred of that enemy, and support for the valiant vanguard that will vanquish that enemy. 

"What civil war can compare in its destructive effects with the brutal disorganization and devastation, with the loss of the accumulated wealth of mankind, that resulted from the imperialist war? MANIFESTLY IT IS ESSENTIAL THAT HUMANITY SHALL MAKE AN END OF CAPITALISM ONCE AND FOR ALL. WITH THIS GOAL IN VIEW, WE CAN ENDURE THE PERIOD OF CIVIL WARS, AND CAN PAVE THE WAY FOR COMMUNISM, WHICH WILL HEAL ALL OUR WOUNDS, AND WILL QUICKLY LEAD TO THE FULL DEVELOPMENT OF THE PRODUCTIVE FORCES OF HUMAN SOCIETY."

... "We are thus confronted by two alternatives, and two only. There must either be complete disintegration, hell broth, further brutalization and disorder, absolute chaos, or else communism."

Millions of people all over the world were thoughtless enough to accept this poisoned chalice, and went down the road of economic brutalization, famine, mass terror, and the gulag. Communism turned out to be a power play, not an economic Oz. It was a bright and shiny political lie. We are in the US becoming familiar with the power of such lies- their use of the basest and most powerful instincts- hate, and hope. Their ability to cut straight through any rational and empathetic analysis, and their ability to make seemingly reasonable people believe the flimsiest absurdities.

• China is looking at some serious problems.
• Utopias should be strictly for thinking, not doing.
• Wait, I can't live in an exclusive neighborhood?
• Is it OK for lawyers to engage in insurrection?

Profiles in Pusillanimity

China, its communist party, and our free speech. Review of America 2nd, by Isaac Stone Fish.

Why are there always spoilers on the international scene? Some country is always unhappy with the way things are, and does its best to shake up the system. That shaking can be as detrimental to itself as to any other nation, but greed and ambition are always with us. After the Cold War, Russia descended into criminal chaos, with little real help from the West, and, once it had finally pulled itself together, turned around with veangence on its mind to refashion its imperial / security sphere. Russia could have been a nice country, tied into the European cultural and defense system. But no, the nostalgia for satellites and empire were just too strong. Putin spent a decade and more pulling Ukraine into the Russian orbit, only to be finally rebuffed in a people-powered revolution. Now he is trying to do it the hard way, and will take and keep whatever he can grab, little though that may be.

All that is peanuts compared with the game brewing between us and China. While Russia is playing for its neighborhood, the stakes in this next game are the whole world. That is, who runs the "international system", such as it is, and who plays the dominant role over the next century. The US has spent the last couple of decades trying to pull China into the existing trade and security system, in hopes that it would change into a "nice" country, aligning with the US, Europe and our developed allies all over the world in a quest for peace and lawful security. That has not happened. Even less so than with Russia, which at least has a long strand of pro-European sentiment, China learned its lessons from the Russian debacle, and its own Tienanmen square brush with democracy, and resolutely stayed in the Leninist camp- of absolute and unapologetic party power. It was hardly even tempted by European values.

In his book "America 2nd", Isaac Fish is eloquent about how deep China's resentments vs the West go. China suffered a century or more of humiliating vassalage over the 19th century, mired in poverty, opium, and weakness vs colonial powers. Then it suffered again at the hands of imperial Japan, and then several decades on its own account under Mao enduring the Western ideology of Marxism-Leninism. Maybe the last part is projected on the West as well, I am not sure. But China has plenty of ground to make up, and the last few decades of managed capitalism have been, as all can see, completely transformative.

China has already attained number one status in pollution, in population, (though later overtaken by India), and will soon attain that status in GDP. China is busy projecting its power and values via foreign aid, "Wolf Warrior" diplomacy, their takeover of the South China sea, propaganda, intelligence, and hard-ball economic warfare. The question Fish asks is- why are we supporting this policy and the propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)?

Recall the quaint old days of "linkage", when the US considered using some points of leverage with Russia to influence Soviet policies we didn't like? China has no such qualms. Everything is linked, and particularly, China's great economic engine is linked with CCP propaganda. US companies that say anything the CCP does not like lose business and IP. The NBA went through a humiliating episode when Darryl Morey of the Houston Rockets criticized CCP repression in Hong Kong. The CCP promptly cancelled NBA air time and business in China, until the NBA comprehensively groveled back into its good graces, and has ever since kept its mouth shut. Black lives may matter, but Tibetan lives, Uyghur lives, Hong Kong lives... not so much, when a totalitarian power waves its big stick.

China can make its own jingoistic media as well. This is Wolf Warrior 2, whose tag line runs: "Anyone who offends China, no matter how remote, must be exterminated."

Far more damaging is the capitulation of Hollywood. After dabbling with tailoring films for the Chinese market, it turned out that it was easier, and not at all influenced by CCP pressure to project a positive world wide image, for Hollywood studios to get fully on board with CCP censorship for all releases, not portraying China or Chinese in a negative way. So, after a brief and now thoroughly repressed few years of agitation on behalf of Tibet a couple of decades ago, the film industry, one of the premiere arms of American soft power, has been turned and cowed, into a lapdog of the CCP. Not a peep about Tibet any more, indeed DreamWorks brought out a thoroughly whitewashed Tibet-adjacent feature in 2019 that suggests everything there is perfectly fine, thanks to Han characters who protect the region.

Capitulation has been the rule across the business world, as each business faces the brutal choice of playing with the CCP, or being barred from Chinese markets, and even hobbled in other ways as China gains power abroad. But this has not been enough. China has been busily corrupting the US government itself, masterfully using former officials to press its case for Western acquiescence. Henry Kissinger is the pioneer in this effort, but former presidents and many other officials have spared no effort in setting up post-career "consultancies" that assiduously advise any and all comers that resistance is futile- China will rule the world and we must accommodate ourselves to that fact. 

"There are plenty of antagonists in this story, some Chinese, some not. For those upset with Beijing's influence in America, understand this: by helping normalize corruption among our former diplomats and warping American perception of China over the last four decades, Henry Kissinger has done more harm to American interests than every ethnically Chinese businessman, hacker, spy, whether they hold American or Chinese citizenship."

It is ironic, with all the current complaints about cancel culture, free speech for fascists, woke restrictions, etc. that we are actually being policed in our speech by our geopolitical opponent, China, and do not seem to think anything amiss about that.

The ancient Art of War recommends winning by shaping the battlefield and the minds of the opponents- whereby not a shot needs to be fired. Fish emphasises the United Front operations of the CCP and its propaganda arms, which seek influence in many ways, not just media. The seduction of foreign officials and fixers comes under this area of government work, for instance, as does the pressuring of speech and behavior by foreign corporations. Everything is linked, as is proper under a totalitarian system, and every oar pulls in the same direction of keeping the CCP in power and gaining influence across the world.

The CCP has a great deal to answer for, both historically, and in its brutal approach to its current rule, even given its huge successes in economic growth and allowing the modernization of China. A democratic and free China would look very different, and could flourish just as well. We should not be taken in by the propaganda of identity between the CCP and China, or the permanence of CCP rule. We need to be able to think and speak freely, and facilitate the freedom of others. And this should start with Taiwan, whose freedom is in the crosshairs of the CCP. We should not acquiesce to the narrative that Taiwan must/will be assimilated into China, or that it is not, in fact, an independent nation with every right to self-determination. The CCP's track record of cultural genocide in Tibet, actual concentration camps and genocide in Xinjiang, and the decapitation of Hong Kong shows clearly enough what would be in store for Taiwan, and for the rest of us, were China to gain even more leverage.

• More of the same, and Maurice Greenberg is always at hand to support China.
• India is only marginally better.
• Should we end the drug war?
• Maybe we should just leave nature alone.
• Fascism is coming.
• But Scientology is ... aready here.

War is Politics by Other Means

What happened in the American war in Vietnam?

I am watching the lengthy PBS series on Vietnam, which facilitates a great deal of sober reflection. This dates me, but I recall (barely) the nightly body counts on TV, and the arguments with family about what was going on, both abroad and in the US in reaction to the war. I was too young to be particularly anti-war or pro-war, but I was very perplexed. The US was the greatest nation ever, had nuclear bombs and aircraft carriers, and had sent people to the moon. What power did this tiny country so far away have that we did not have?

The salve of time helps to clarify that we had lost this war long before it ended. Because, in the Clausewitzian dictum, war is politics by other means. The North Vietnamese had something that we didn't, which was an unassailable political position and ideology. They were in effective charge of much of the South, especially rural areas, for most of the war. The North Vietnamese had the double political distinction of military victory against the French, and of effective land reform against the landlords. In comparison, the South Vietnamese government was a bumbling, corrupt holdover from the French, which spent its time alienating the majority religion of the country, Buddhism, and keeping the landlords in power over the peasants of the countryside. Who was going to win this battle for hearts and minds?

Yes, North Vietnam was run by communists, and is still. But their propaganda and policies were effective to the mass of the population, in selling themselves as nationalists first and foremost- victors over the Japanese, the French, and later on the Americans too. Who would mess with that kind of record? Unfortunately, to put it in LBJ terms, we got into a pissing match with the North Vietnamese. No one wanted to "lose" South Vietnam, or let communism snatch one more country, or be the first president to lose a war. So it was our pride vs the North Vietnamese pride. Sadly, this did not translate into political support or governing competence in South Vietnam. Its government crumbled in our hands, and no amount of napalm was going to fix that.

We should at this point (that is to say, roughly 1963) have reframed the whole effort in Vietnam as one strictly in support of the South Vietnamese government. The US military is never going to win hearts and minds in foreign countries, not unless, as in World War 2, we have utterly destroyed those countries first and brought all their civilians to their knees in thankfullness for ridding them of their demented fascist government. Not conditions that come around very often, thankfully. The more time we spend somewhere, (say, Afghanistan, or Iraq), the worse it gets. The fact that the US had previously propped up the French position in Vietnam didn't help either. So all we can realistically do is support the native government (and even that may bring taints of colonialism and racism, rendering that support rather poisonous). And in this case, the government of South Vietnam was a mess, and should have been left to die on its own. That is what the politics dictated at the time, and the PBS series makes it clear that this was apparent to those who knew what was going on. They showed a great passage by an ex-soldier from the North, to the effect that, were it not for the US, the North would have taken Saigon by 1966.

It is instructive to compare our effort in Korea. North Korea tried to set up a Viet Cong-style insurgency in the South as well, but it was crushed by our client there, Syngman Rhee. North Korea tried to drape itself in the banner of anti-Japanese militancy, but that didn't play particularly, since the overwhelming US role in defeating Japan was so clear. South Korea instituted effective land reform in 1948 as well, which was key to dampening enthusiasm for communism. One might wonder why communism excites enthusiasm at all, but to landless peasants whose rent is half their crop, and who suffer countless other humiliations, it is a pretty easy sell, at least before the collectivization drive begins(!) So the political position of South Korea, destitute as it was, was far better than that of South Vietnam vs their respective northern antagonists. One might also add ancient cultural patterns, whereby modern Vietnam was created over the preceeding millenium by the gradual southward military expansion of the North Vietnamese, after they had successfully defended themselves against the Mongol and Chinese empires. 

Ho Chi Minh city, present day. Is this communism?

So, communism. Vietnam suffered terribly upon reunification due to a decade of doctrinaire communism, as if the aftermath of our brutal war hadn't been bad enough. After the wonderous dispensation of market-Leninism (!), begun in 1986, it is now a moderately prosperous but still one-party state with a miserable human rights record. Vietnam is reaping rewards from the US-China trade tensions as it becomes a top destination for low cost manufacturing. The US is its top export market. Its citizens have 1.4 cell phone subscriptions per capita, and its Gini coefficient is now similar to that of the US. Buddhism remains the leading religion, which, while confined to a state-run Sangha and political impotence, is relatively free otherwise. 

The US was right to be against communism. States like North Korea, Cuba, China and Vietnam show that communism, even after all the reforms and backtracking on Marxist theory, is antithetical to fundamental human freedoms, due to its Leninist / Stalinist greed for single party political control, which implies vast intrusion into all aspects of civic, social, and personal life. Russia is backsliding into that mindset, and we are right to stand once again with a friend in need, this time Ukraine, against its onslaught. But the new war just goes to show the critical importance of having a friend able to stand on its own feet, politically. Our military help would be pointless if Ukraine were a rotten state, with Russian insurgents and sympathizers, say, running 70% of the rural communities, and the central government pursuing vendettas against the Orthodox church instead of shoring up its support on all fronts.

Integral to the politics of warfare are economic factors like land reform and inequality. It was the corruption and steadfast lack of recognition of the peasant's plight that destroyed South Vietnam. The Viet Cong would not have been able to mount an insurgency were the peasants not desperate and open to well-honed propaganda based on economic equality / opportunity. Ruthless terrorism played a role, as it did for the Taliban. But the basic position of hopelessness versus an uncaring state and economic system was fatal. We are facing similar issues ourselves, as people in rural areas feel left behind and neglected, despite being the beneficiaries of such various and generous handouts from the state that would make welfare recipients blush. No matter- the US has become incredibly unequal and economically/socially stagnent, which is a recipe for populism and revolt, of which we recently had a taste. As inequality rises in China and Vietnam, will they face class-based revolt, driven by some new ideology of equality, fraternity, and liberty?

• Krugman on inequality.
• Photos of Vietnam.
• A green transition.
• A plague of bad plates.

Prisons as Social Prisms, Mirrors, and Shadows

From deTocqueville to BLM by way of Solzhenitsyn.

Carl Jung promoted the concept of the psychological shadow- that part of ourselves that is dark, bad, and repressed. It tends to be what we project on others, leading to the kind of political and cultural polarization we see so much of today. For individuals, integrating the shadow, (that is, at least perceiving it, if not valuing it), is difficult but an important path to a more mature and integrated self. Societies have similar psychological characteristics, and have shadows that they project on others, both other cultures and unfortunate classes in their own system. Unlike shadow elements in individual psychology, which are all too easily hidden and ignored, people are harder to keep out of sight, so societies do a lot of explicit work to heap opprobrium on the lower classes- minorities and the poor, in a social process that keeps the social hierarchy stable, and keeps the majority self-satisfied.

A big product of the shadow work of society has appeared in prisons. In primitive times, no one had prisons, and criminals were tortured, killed or ostracized. Now, the world is too small, ethical standards have risen somewhat, and we have turned to prisons as a general purpose punishment- a modern form of ostracism. Prisons express (and contain) our attitudes and definitions of antisocial activity and contagion. Alexis de Toqueville came to the early US to investigate our prisons, as a way of gaining insight into our society, before being waylaid into a much more general tour of this vibrant country. But his instincts were sound. France had been through its revolution only forty years prior, with its gruesome imprisonments and executions, which mirrored the tumultuous reversals of the social order. In the US, de Toqueville found a relatively unsophisticated and small carceral system, as money was short and there was plenty of room for criminals to disappear out west. It did not turn out to be an interesting prism on American life.

Today things are vastly different. The gangster era of the 20's and 30's led to a new focus on crime, noir, and high-profile prisoners like Al Capone. The crime and drug era of the 80's and 90's led to an almost four-fold increase in the prison population, so that now the US leads the world with a prison population of roughly 0.5% of the population behind bars. The BLM movement and defund the police movements were in part about recognizing that something had gone serious astray here. Whether it originated from environmental lead poisoning, or social breakdown, or drug cartels, the result was a huge population of ostracized, mostly male, and disproportionately minority people locked away. On top of that, the society had lost interest in rehabilitation amidst its turn to more conservative attitudes that valorize the rich and powerful and disparage the poor and disadvantaged. 

Our prisons today say alot about us as a society. Not that prisons are not needed, and that there aren't true criminals and insidious criminal organizations that prey on the rest of society; but our lack of empathy and lack of a wider social vision is palpable. Particularly, our attachment to property, its "rights", its local and parochial control, and particularly its inheritance, has gotten a little extreme. It is the perpetuation of privileges through property and wealth that explain a lot of the persistent lack of social mobility, the vast industries of greed/tax avoidance, easily politicized fears. Capitalism is at its heart competitive, and having winners of billions implies also having losers- those who sleep on the street, and those locked up, not to mention the hordes of low-wage workers who make everything go.

All this came to mind as I read Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago. It is a vast tome, befitting the vast archipelago it describes, its huge population, its protracted duration, its unimaginable suffering, and what it says about its society. While unexpectedly enjoyable to read, as Solzhenitsyn is joking the whole time in various sarcastic and dark modes, it is an indictment of Soviet Russia on a comprehensive basis. One particularly striking theme that he weaves through is comparison with the Tsarist period that came before. Solzhenitsyn meets prisoners, often dedicated socialist revolutionaries, who had done time under the Tsar, and regarded that experience as heaven compared to what they were faced with now, under Stalin. To put it very bluntly, Russia used to be a civilized country. Now, under the Bolsheviks, torture of the most vile kinds is practiced, less vile kinds are routine, execution is carried out on a whim, and law and justice are a mockery. The Gulag is loaded up with many orders of magnitude more political prisoners than the Tsar had ever contemplated and works them mercilessly to early graves.

Breaking rocks in the gulag.

While this all mostly reflected the paranoia and totalitarian genius of Stalin, he was only following his model, Lenin, as Solzhenitsyn lays out in particularly damning detail. The larger Russian society clearly had, and still has, an ambivilent nature, as close students and subjects of the Mongols, but also as eager to engage with and learn from Western Europe. Who knew that the most left-tinged and idealistic ideology to be imported from the West would so quickly curdle into a second coming of Ivan the terrible? But so it did, and Solzhenitsyn describes what that really meant in human suffering, in this book that may have done more than any other to delegitimize and ultimately destroy that system.

• The neighborhood to prison pipeline in the US.
• The questionable science of ice cream.