Ideologies of Work

Review of Elizabeth Anderson: "Hijacked: How neoliberalism turned the work ethic against workers, and how workers can take it back."

We live by the sweat of our brow, though work. At least that has been the story after we were thrown out of the garden of Eden, where we had previously foraged without effort. By the time of Puritans, work had been re-valued as being next to godliness, in what became known as the Puritan work ethic. Elizabeth Anderson takes this as her point of departure in a fascinating historical study of the winding (and mostly descending) road that attitudes toward work took down the centuries, in the perennial battle between workers and parasites who have found ways to avoid sweating, yet eat just the same ... or better.

Anderson trots through all the classical economists and philosophers, down to John Stuart Mill and Marx, showing two main threads of thought. First is the progressive thread, in which the Puritans can (curiously) be classed, as can Adam Smith. They value work as both a cultural and meaningful activity, not just a means of sustenance. They think everyone should work, and criticize anyone, high or low, who shirks this responsibility. Genteel landowners who spend their time hunting rather than improving their estates are just as culpable as drunkards and other able-bodied peasants who fail to do their share. Learning and innovation are highly valued, as not just ameliorating the lot of those making improvements, but at the same time raising the wealth of, and standard of living for, all.

In contrast is the conservative thread. Anderson herself describes it trenchantly:

"From the conservative perspective, however, poverty reflected an individual's failure to filfill the demands of the work ethic. Society is at fault solely in establishing institutions that violate natural law in promoting vice through provisions such as the Poor Law. Conservatives agreed that the Poor Law must therefore be abolished or radically reformed. If poverty is caused by the vice of the poor, the remedy for poverty must be to force the poor to practice virtue, to live up to the demands of the work ethic. Conservatives differed somewhat on which virtue was most necessary for the poor to practice. Priestly focused on frugality, Bentham on industry, Malthus on chastity, Paley on contentment (understood as the opposite of covetous envy of the rich). Thus, Priestly hoped to convert poor workers into virtuous bourgeios citizens through a legally mandated individual savings plan. Bentham favored a workfare system that turned the working poor into imprisoned debt peons of capitalist entrepreneurs. Malthus advocated leaving the poor to starvation, disease and destitution, but offered them the hope that they could rescue themselves by postponing marriage and children. Burke and Wately agreed with Malthus, but attempted to put a liberal-tory paternalist veneer on their view. ...

"The moral accounting that assigns responsibilities to individuals without regard- and even in inverse proportion- to the means they have to fulfill them remains a touchstone of conservative thought to the present day. ...

"The ideology of the conservative work ethic is distinguished by a harsh orientation toward ordinary workers and the poor, and an indulgent one toward the 'industrious' rich- those who occupy themselves with making money, either through work or investment of their assets, regardless of whether their activities actually contribute to social welfare. in practice, this orientation tends to slide into indulgence toward the rich, whether or not they are industrious even in this morally attenuated sense. ...

"Here lies a central contradiction of the conservative work ethic. All the conservatives claimed that the key to overcoming poverty was to make the poor bourgeois in attitude. All they needed to do was adopt the work ethic, or be forced to adopt it, along with the spirit of competitive emulation, the desire to better others in the race for riches and ensure that one's children not fall beneath the standard of living in which they were raised. Poverty was proof that they hadn't adopted bourgeois virtues and aspirations. This presupposed that the poor suffered from no deficit in opportunities. The path to prosperity was open; the poor were simply failing to take it. Yet we have seen that, Priestly partially excepted, conservative policies knowingly reduced the opportunities of the poor to acquire or retain property, work for themselves, or escape precarity."

My major critique of Anderson's analysis is that putting all this conflict and history into the frame of the work ethic is inappropriate and gives the work ethic far more weight than it merits. Firstly, everyone thinks of themselves as working. The most sedentary rentier doubtless thinks of his or her choosing among investments as of critical importance to the health and future of the nation. Even his or her shopping choices express taste and support a "better" sort of business, in that way performing work towards a better community. The English royals probably see themselves as doing essential cultural work, in their choice of hats and their preservation of cherished traditions. Parenting, community associations, and political agitation can all, to an expansive mind, be construed as "work". And indeed some of our greater artistic and other accomplisments come from the labors of wealthy people who were entirely self-directed rather than grubbily employed. All this implies that a work ethic can be accommodated in all sorts of ways if markets are not going to be the standard, as they hardly can be in any philosophical or moral system of a work ethic. This makes work ethics rather subjective and flexible, as Anderson implicitly demonstrates through the centuries.

However a more serious problem with Anderson's analysis is that it leaves out the ethic of power. Her presentation laments the sad misuse that the work ethic has been subjected to over the years, (by conservatives), without focusing on the reason why, which is that a whole other ethic was at work, in opposition to the work ethic. And that is the power ethic, which values domination of others and abhors work as commonly understood. Or, at best, it construes the organization of society for the benefit of a leisured upper crust as work of momentous, even civilizational, significance. Nietzsche had a field day calling us to recognize and embrace the power ethic, and not hide it under sweeter-smelling mores like the Christian or work ethics.

Anderson does helpfully discuss in passing the feudal background to the Puritan work ethic, where the Norman grandees and their progeny parcelled out the land among themselves, spent their time warring against each other (in England or in France), and lived high off the labors of their serfs/peasants. No thought was given to improvement, efficiency, or better ways to organize the system. Conservatism meant that nothing (god-willing) would change, ever. Even so, the work of politics, of war, and of religious ideology was never done, and the wealthy could easily see themselves as crucial to the maintenance of a finely-balanced cultural and economic system.

Anderson also notes that the original rationale of the gentry, if one must put it in an economic frame, was that they were responsible for military support of the king and country, and thus needed to have large estates with enough surplus in people, livestock, horses, and food to field small armies. When this rationale disappeared with the ascendence of parliament and general (at least internal) peace, they became pure rentiers, and uncomfortably subject to the critique of the Puritan work ethic, which they naturally countered with one of their own devising. And that was essentially a restatement of the power ethic, that the rich can do as they please and the poor should be driven as sheep to work for the rich. And particularly that wealth is a signifier of virtue, implying application of the work ethic, (maybe among one's forebears, and perhaps more by plunder than sweat, but ... ), or transcending it via some other virtues of nobility or class. 

But in Locke and Adam Smith's day, as today, the sharpest and most vexing point of the work ethic is not the role of the rich, but that of the poor. By this time, enclosure of lands was erasing the original version of the job guarantee- that is, access to common lands- and driving peasants to work for wages, either for landowners or industrialists. How to solve extreme poverty, which was an ever more severe corollary of capitalism and inequality? Is it acceptable to have homeless people sleeping on the streets? Should they be given work? money? social services? education? Do the poor need to be driven to work by desperation and starvation? Or is the lash of work not needed at all, and lack of wealth the only problem? Malthus was doggedly pessimistic, positing that population growth will always eat up any gains in efficiency or innovation. Thus it requires the predatory power of the gentry to enable society to accumulate anything in the way of capital or cultural goods, by squelching the poor in sufficient misery that they will not over-reproduce.

The progressive view of work and the poor took a much more sanguine view. And here one can note that much of this discussion revolves around "natural" laws. Is the population law of Malthus true? Or is the natural communitarian tendency of humans also a natural law, leading to mutual help, spontaneous community formation, and self-regulation? Are some people "naturally" superior to others? Is a hierarchical and domineering social system "natural" and necessary? Adam Smith, in Anderson's reading, took a consistently pro-worker attitude, inveighing against oppressive practices of employers, collusion of capital, and cruel goverment policies. Smith had faith that, given a fair deal and decent education, all workers would strive to the best of their abilities to better their own condition, work diligently, and thereby benefit the community as well as themselves.

For the story of Eden is fundamentally wrong. Humans have always worked, and indeed valued work. Looking outside the window at a squirrel trying to get into the bird feeder ... is to see someone working with enthusiasm and diligence. That is our natural state. The only problem was that, as human civilization progressed, power relations, and then even more- industrialization- generated work that was not only cruel and oppressive, but meaningless. The worker, forced to work for others instead of him- or herself, and routinized into a factory cog, became fully alienated from it. How to get workers to do it, nevertheless? Obviously, having a work ethic is not a full solution, unless it is of a particularly astringent and dogmatic (or tyrannical) sort. Thus the dilemma of capitalist economies. For all their trumpeting of the "natural laws" of competition and "freedom" for employers to exploit and workers to be fired, capitalism violates our true natures in fundamental ways.

So the question should be, as Anderson eventually alludes to, do we have a life ethic that includes work, rather than just a work ethic? She states plainly that the most important product of the whole economic system is ... people. Their reproduction, raising, education, and flourishing. It is not consumption products that should be the measure of economic policy, but human happiness. And a major form of human happiness is doing meaningful work, including the domestic work of the family. The world of Star Trek is even alluded to in Anderson's last chapter- one where no one works for subsistance, but rather, people work for fulfillment. And they do so with zeal.

Anderson sees great potential in the more progressive forms of the work ethic, and in the social democratic political systems that implemented them after World War 2. She argues that this is the true legacy of Marxism (and of Thomas Paine, interestingly enough) and expresses the most durable compromise between market and capital-driven corporate structures and a restored work ethic. Some amount of worker participation in corporate governance, for instance, is a fundamental reform that would, in the US, make corporations more responsive to their cultural stakeholders, and work more meaningful to workers. Tighter regulation is needed throughout the private economy to make work more humane for the very low-paid, giving workers better pay and more autonomy- real freedom. More public goods, such as free education to university levels, and better provision for the poor, especially in the form of a job guarantee, would make life bearable for many more people. For my part, inheritance seems a key area where the ethics of the dignified work and equal opportunity run up against completely unjust and artificial barriers. In America, no one should be born rich, and everyone should grow and express themselves by finding a place in the world of work.

• Annals of capitalist control.
• Corporations and the royal we.
• More equal societies are better societies.
• The Stepford wife.
• The Supreme Court is dangerously wrong.

Euthansia of the Rentier

It is bad enough when business models make people rich for destroying the planet. Do we have to enrich those who do nothing at all?

John Maynard Keynes had a famous quip in his central work, The General Theory.... which goes, slightly re-arranged:

"Interest today rewards no genuine sacrifice, any more than does the rent of land. The owner of capital can obtain interest because capital is scarce, just as the owner of land con obtain rent because land is scarce. But whilst there may be intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of land, there are not intrinsic reasons for the scarcity of capital. ... It would be possible for communal saving through the agency of the state to be maintained at a level which will allow the growth of capital up to the point where it ceases to be scarce. Now, while this state of affairs would be quite compatible with some measure of individualism, it would mean the euthanasia of the rentier, and consequently, the euthanasia of the cumulative oppressive power of the capitalist to exploit the scarcity value of capital."

Keynes assumed that this day would naturally come as capitalism developed and piled up endless riches in the form of money. But recently Thomas Piketty came along and stated that this day will never come, because for some curious/mysterious reason, returns on capital are persistently higher than they have a right to be, and higher than the economic growth rate. That means that the rich keep getting richer, on a magic escalator, forever, and the only way to change this, historically, has been the horsemen of the apocalypse- war, pestilence and famine. Economic depressions can be pretty effective as well. Sadly, we have rendered all these mechanisms less effective than they have been in the past, so need to come up with something else for this modern age.

It is quite clear that advanced economies have plenty of capital. Companies routinely give money back to shareholders or buy back stock, for lack of anything better to do with their mountains of money. Interest rates tend to be low. The Federal Reserve has campaigned mightily over the last three decades to raise interest rates, to what they deem "normal" rates, which are roughly 5%. The Fed is heavily influenced by the private banking industry, which benefits (perhaps) from higher rates, as do rentiers. Each time, however, some catastrophe has intervened and sent rates back to zero. Whether the latest push turns out be the charm is not clear, but Paul Krugman expects rates to eventually return to very low levels. Japan has had near-zero rates for a couple of decades, with little harm to its domestic economy. So it seems as though the natural interest rate in this era, among stable, peaceful economies, seems actually to be very low, approximately equal to the inflation rate, and thus approximately zero.

History of US interest rates and Japanese interest rates. We keep flirting with zero rates.

This abundance of capital has sent investors to the stock market as a better bet for growth. This has sent stock valuations higher, with price/earning ratios coasting at much higher than historical levels. There is a metric called the "Buffet index", which relates stock valuations to total GDP, and this is also unusually high, twice what it has been historically. Whether all this reflects overall wealth, or the greater profitability of current corporations (due to monopolies, lack of regulation, repeated stock buy-backs, shortchanging workers, etc.), or the push of too many investors into this market, it is a worrisome situation over the long term, as returns may fail to justify expectations.

At any rate, the question is.. how to address inequality and particularly the basically unjust income of rentiers, and bring Keynes' prophecy to fruition? The recent tax changes by the Democratic congress, to impose a cost on stock buy-backs, is a tiny step in the right direction. The the fact that federal taxes on income from work (except when that work is done for hedge funds!) is twice that on investment is a clear bias, inherited from the Reagan era, that needs to be eliminated. Outright wealth taxes are also needed, as are programs against off-shore wealth hiding and abuse of trusts. There is a very long list of ways to reduce the ratchet of wealth, and especially inherited wealth, that fundamentally corrodes the basic equality on which our social and political system is (or should be) based.

The modern monetary theory community has long advocated for another policy that would address this problem, which is to end the issue of federal government bonds. They see these bonds as a relic of past times when we were on the gold standard, and really had to borrow money from the public to make ends meet. With a fiat currency, closely managed by the Federal Reserve, the federal government has no need to borrow at all. It can and does print as much money as needed ("print" being a metaphor for creating mostly electronic forms of money). State and local governments, on the other hand, are financially constrained, and need to put out bonds if they want money for large projects, beyond what taxes bring in. In 2022, the federal government spent 476 billion dollars on interest payments on the debt, which may increase drastically if inflation rises on a durable basis. 

Who holds US federal bond debt?

Whom do these interest payments go to? Well, the Fed itself and the Social Security Administration hold huge amounts- no real loss there. Foreign countries hold huge amounts- China, for example, has a trillion dollar's worth; so does Japan. But then come banks, pension funds, and mutual funds- rich investors who like these low but extremely reliable returns. The mainstream argument for bond issuance, in the absence of a gold standard, is that bonds drain demand from an economy, preventing inflation that would result were the government to not "balance" its spending with borrowing that brings that money back into its coffers. What MMT proponents point out is that those who invest in government bonds are already rich and don't need the money they are parting with. Bonds are not displacing effective demand in the economy, just productive (or unproductive) investment. Secondly, federal bonds are a fully liquid market- the money is not actually tied up in a way that prevents it from turning into economic demand.

These are the classic rentiers, whom we are collectively paying roughly half a trillion dollars a year that could be much, much better spent on other things. The last time that the federal bond market came into doubt, as the Clinton administration, under pressure from the deficit scolds, went into surplus and started paying back the "debt", who raised a hue and cry? The banks, of course, who could not imagine a world without this manna falling from heaven. Well, the fact of the matter is that the foreign countries, and the banks, and all the other rentiers, could just as well hold the fundamental debt instrument of the US government- the dollar, instead of bonds. We don't have to pay all these entities a premium to take dollars off our hands, if that is what they want.

What keeps us from ending these bond payments? It isn't economics, it is purely legislative fiction, the same kind of fiction that makes congress go through the absurdities of raising the "debt" ceiling. The US federal debt is the obverse of economic growth, for which more currency needs to be issued. The Fed and treasury issue new dollars into the economy, channeled through federal spending, and a notional debt is created. The current law just means that one debt (dollar bills) must be traded for rentier-paying debts (bonds) ... because ... we used to do so. But it is no different than the debt implied by every dollar bill: that the government, and the economy in total, stand behind each dollar bill as a manifestation of faith and credit (and good federal management). The debt does not need to be "paid off", it will not drag down future generations, and most of all, it shouldn't be compounded with interest payments to the least deserving recipients imaginable.

• Maybe some de-oligarchization is in order.
• Loneliness is a political risk.
• A curious conference just happened.
• After holding out the hope of carbon capture for decades, it is now not "deployable".
• Perhaps maturity is better than growth.
• How do you think?
• They should come up with something better than they.

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?

Founders, Schmounders

Elie Mystal rakes constitutional originalism over the coals, in "A Black Guy's Guide to the Constitution".

I was raised to revere the founders and the elegant, almost scriptural document they constructed to rule our society. But suppose I was a black person, knowing that these founders were the rich white guys of their time, owners and abusers of slaves? I might think that while their aspirations were rhetorically high, their constitution was rather more utilitarian in its denial of true democracy to most people living in the colonies, its indirect and unjust approach to the democracy it did allow, and its euphemistically stated, but absolute, denial of freedom to "other persons". I would have experienced the US legal and cultural system as one of systematic oppression, dedicated to the proposition that while white, rich, men might be equal in some way and enjoy a rules-based system, the larger point of the system was to maintain power in their hands, and deny it to all others.

At least that is the sense one gets from Mystal's book, which, along with a lot of colorful language and wry jokes, assembles a trenchant rebuke of the American constitution, of conservatives, of Republicans, and especially of the originalist ideology of jurisprudence. Every hot button topic gets its due, and every amendment its contrarian interpretation. The second amendment is easy- it is about a regulated militia, after all, not about some commandment handed down from Charlton Heston to the ammosexuals of the nation to stock up on AR-15s and have a mass shooting if they are feeling a little antsy. 

Police brutality, prejudice, impunity, and immunity from accountabiliy is another easy, if painful, target. Mystal describes how he has been profiled and roughed up, for no other reason than being black. The legal system seems to have driven a semi through the fourth amendment against unreasonable searches when it comes to vehicles owned by black people, for one thing. And the fifth amendment comes into play as well- why do we allow police to play cat and mouse with suspects, trying to trip them up and get them to confess, cutting corners and playing games with their Miranda rights? Mystal makes a strong case for doing away with this whole theater of intimidation, with its slippery slope to fraud and torture, by barring police from eliciting or transmitting confessions at all, period. He notes that anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with the legal profession has learned to say nothing to police without a lawyer by her side.

Mystal's approach to abortion, however, is where this book really shines. Was Roe "wrongly decided"? Hardly. In the first place, Mystal provides an interesting discussion of "substantive" due process, (fifth amendment, and fourteenth), meaning that the rights and protections of the constitution are not to be taken merely literally or trifled with by twisting their meanings. They must be afforded by realistic means and set in a legal / civil system that supports their spirit. And that means that the right to privacy is a thing. While its poetic origin may be in the "penumbras" of the constitution, it is integral to the very idea of much of it- the concept unreasonable searches, of rights against self-incrimination, of any sort of rights of the individual vs the state. This is not to mention the ninth amendment, which asserts that just because the constitution and bill of rights mentions some rights explicitly, that others by their ommission are not covered. Privacy would, in general terms, clearly fall in this category.

But where else could a right to abortion be found? Plenty of places. One is the equal protection clause of the fourteenth amendment. Mystal, and many others, note that this should be taken as applying to women, making the whole equal rights amendment (ERA) unnecessary, given a modicum of enlightened interpretation. It could also be taken to afford men and women equal protections regarding reproduction, meaning that the penalty for a roll in the hay should not be grossly unequal, as it is when abortion is banned. Mystal goes on to suggest that the eighth amendment against cruel and unusual punishment could be invoked as well. If men were faced, as a penalty for sex, months of mental and physical torment, and then the excruciating labor of birth, one could be sure that no court would consider banning abortion for a nanosecond. And how much more cruel and vindictive is it be if that pregnancy arose from rape? There is also, after all, the thirteen amendment against involuntary servitude/labor.

Originalists brazenly throw their so-called principles out the window when it comes to abortion. Unenumerated rights? Never heard of them. Keeping the state out of the most sacred precincts of our private lives? No comment. Colonial attitudes towards abortion were very loose, nothing like the personhood-at-conception garbage we get today from the right/Catholic wing. It just goes to show that a little knowledge (here, of biology) can be a dangerous thing.

It is really originalism and conservatism, however, that is the overarching and corrosive topic Mystal takes on. The founders were people of their time, and that was a white supremacy kind of time. They wrote a constitution with hopeful ideals and judicious language which insulated it somewhat (though hardly enough!) from the prejudices of their day. To say that our current interpretation of their words should be confined to whatever psychoanalysis we can make of their meanings at the time would lock our whole political and legal system into those same prejudices that they were trying to overcome. To take the second amendment, Mystal argues (I am not sure how successfully) that its "militias" were most keenly understood to mean bands of Southern planters gathering together to prevent or put down slave revolts. Southerners did not want to be dependent on Federal sympathy and arms, and thus insisted that a right to raise their own militias for their own peculiar needs should be enshrined in the constitution. Well, if we were to restrict outselves to such an interpretation, that would have significant effects on our practice of the second amendment. Gun control would be allowed in the North, just not in the South, allowing guns to white males with certain property qualifications, perhaps, and certain mental proclivities.

Even the civil war amendments would be infected with originalism, since very few people at that time envisioned the full social equality of black citizens. It is remarkable to consider the flurry of anti-miscegenation laws passed during the Jim Crow era, after the Southern slave owners had spent a century or two conducting forced miscegenation. Whence the squeemishness? Anyhow, consistent originalism would never have struck down such laws, or abetted the civil rights movement for blacks, let alone gays. Mystal imagines the nettlesome questioning of a prospective conservative justice going like: "Do you believe that Loving v. Virgina was rightly decided?" This case was about the social system of the South, which Mystal tries to separate from the legal and political aspects, and clearly on originalist principles could not be decided as it was. And much more so on Obergefell, which draws on the fourteenth amendment's due process concept to free personal choices (of gay people) from government intrusion, again doubtless totally in contradiction to the social vision and intention of any of its authors.

Instead of fixating on the past so much, in constitutional interpretation, we might think about the future more.

So originalism, for all its rhetorical seductiveness, (after one has been properly indoctrinated in the divine virtues of the founding fathers), is an absurdity for a country with even the tiniest ambition towards social progress, or change of any kind. It amounts to extreme conservatism, pure and simple. Mystal is relentlessly dismissive of the conservative mindset, tied as it is (ever more explicitly in our polarized moment) to regressive, even violent, racial anti-minority politics. 

What is the deal with conservatives? I think there is another unenumerated right that undergirds all these tensions, which is the right to win, and win by inheriting what our forebears wrought- physically, monetarily, politically, socially. America is a highly competitive country- we compete in making money, in politics, in sports, in war. In any society there is an inherent tension between the cohesiveness required to build common structures, like a constitution, or a military, and the the competitiveness that, if channeled properly, can also build great things, but if let loose, can tear down everything. The right to succeed in business, and to bequeath those gains to one's children- that is a widely shared dream. Our founders saw that there had to be limits to this dream, however. The creaky aristocracies of Europe fed on centuries of priviledge and inheritance. America was fundamentally opposed to noble privileges, but in their slaveholding and other businesses, the founders were far from averse to hereditary privileges in general.

It was the whites who won all this- won the American continent from its native inhabitants, won the slaves from their native hearths, invented the technologies like the cotton gin, devised the capitalist system, etc., etc. Who has a right to inherit all these winnings? Conservatives subscribe to a fundamentally competitive system. That is why Trump won the hearts of a rabid base. Lying isn't a bug, it is a feature, an intrinsic part of winning in a duplicitous cultural competition- and winning is everything. To conservatives, social justice is a fundamental affront. Who said the world was fair? Not us! Constitutional originalism is way of expressing this denial of social progress and justice in concrete, and superficially palatable, terms. For as Mystal reiterates, the justices are not calling balls and strikes- constitutional interpretation runs rather freely, as we can see from second amendment jurisprudence. That is why capture of the supreme court has been such a existential project of the right for decades.

Counterpoised to the conservative conception of (lack of) justice in America is that of the left, perhaps best exemplified by the California Reparations task force. If one looks back and considers the losses of enslaved and oppressed Americans, one quickly reaches astronomical levels of reparations that would be required in a just world. How to make up for death and torture? How to make up for the bulldozing of entire communities? How to make up for centuries of economic, social, political, and legal disadvantage? There is simply no way to make up what has been lost, and to do so would open up many other claims, especially by Native Americans, all inhabitants of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, not to mention countless other victims of historical processes going back centuries and ranging world-wide. Justice is a massive can of worms, if looking back in time. But how about something simple, like affirmative action, giving formerly oppressed people a small leg up in the current system? Conservatives can't stand that either, and cry anti-white racism. 

It frankly boggles the mind, how greedy some people can be. But I think the problem of inheritance remains a central touchstone. In each generation, does everyone share equally in the inheritances from the past, or does one race inherit more, do children of the rich inherit more, do the well-connected send their children into the halls of power? The only way to insure a fresh and fair start for each generation is to, not only demolish the idea of inherited nobility as our founders did, (and which we are edging back toward with extreme economic inequality), but go a little beyond that to end other forms of inheritance ... of money and power. The meritocratic systems of higher education did a great deal in the twentieth century to advance this ideal, allowing students from all backgrounds to aspire to, and achieve, all kinds of success. This made the US incredibly powerful and the envy of the world. Liberals should continue this tradition by attacking all forms of entrenched and inherited power, from private schools to the shameful lack of inheritance taxation. The better way to make reparations is to pay it forward, with more just future world.

• Entering blackness.
• "Private jets are on average 10 times more carbon intensive than commercial flights"
• The perils of ransomware.
• The incredible and thoughtless craven-ness of Republicans.
• Our problem with futile medicine.
• Wow- lots of papers (in bad science journals) are duplicated, plagiarized, or fake ... the paper mills.

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.

Building the Middle Class

Why are poor people in the US enslaved to tyrannical, immiserating institutions?

Santa Claus brought an interesting gift this Christmas, Barbara Ehrenreich's "Nickle and Dimed". This is a memoir of her experiment as a low wage worker. Ehrenreich is a well-educated scientist, feminist, journalist, and successful writer, so this was a dive from very comfortable upper middle class circumstances into the depths both of the low-end housing market and the minimum wage economy. While she brings a great deal of humor to the story, it is fundamentally appalling, an affront to basic decency. Our treatment of the poor should be a civil rights issue.

The first question is why we have a minimum wage at all. What is the lowest wage that natural economic conditions would bear, and what economic and social principles bear on this bottom economic rung? In ancient times, slavery was common, which meant a wage of zero. This was replicated in the ante-bellum American South- minimum wage of zero. So as far as natural capitalism is concerned, there is no minimum wage needed and people can rather easily be coerced by various social and violent means to work for the barest subsistence. The minimum wage is entirely a political and social concept, designed to express a society's ideas of minimal economic, civic, and social decency. Maybe that is why, as with so many other things, the US reached a high point in its real minimum wage in the late 1960's, 66% higher than what it is now.

Real minimum wage in the US, vs nominal.

The whole economy of low wage work is very unusual. One would think that supply and demand would operate here, and that difficult work would be rewarded by higher pay. But it is precisely the most difficult work- the most grinding, alienating, dispiriting work that is paid least. There is certainly an education effect on pay, but the social structure of low end work is mostly one of power relations, where desperate people are faced with endlessly greedy employers, who know that the less they pay, the more desperate their workers will be to get even that little amount. It is remarkable what we have allowed this sector to do in the name of "free" capitalism- the drug tests, the uniforms, the life-destroying scheduling chaos, the wage theft, the self-serving corporate propaganda, the surveillance.

Is it a population issue, that there is always an excess of low-wage workers? I think it is really the other way around, that there is a highly flexible supply of low-wage work, thanks to the petty-tyrannical spirit of "entrepreneurs". No one needs the eighth fast food restaurant, the fifteenth nail salon, or the third maid cleaning service. We use and abuse low wage labor because it is there, not because these are essential jobs. If a shortage of low-wage workers really starts to crimp an important industry, it has recourse to far more effective avenues of redress, such as importing workers from abroad, outsourcing the work, or if all else fails, automating it. What people are paid is largely a social construct in the minds of us, the society of employers who couldn't imagine paying decently for the work / servitude of others. To show an exception that illustrates the rule, nurses during the pandemic did in some cases, if they were willing to travel and negotiate, make out like bandits. But nurses who stayed put, played by the rules, and truly cared for those around them, were routinely abused, forced into extra work and bad conditions by employers who did not care about them and had .. no choices. In exceptional cases where true need exists, supply and demand can move the needle. But social power plays a very large role.

Some states have raised their minimum wage, such as California, to $15. This is a more realistic wage, though the state has astronomic housing and other costs as well. Has our economy collapsed here? No. It has had zero discernable effect on the provision of local services, and the low wage economy sails on at a new, and presumably more humane, level. When I first envisioned this essay, I thought that a much more substantial increase in the minimum wage would be the proper answer. But then I found that $15 per hour provides an annual income that is almost at the US level of median income, 34k annually for an individual. The average income in the US is only 53k. So there is not a lot of wiggle room there. We are a nation of the poorly paid, on average living practically hand-to-mouth. On the household level, things may look better if one has the luck to have two or more solid incomes.

My own individual incomes analysis, drawn from reported Social Security data.

Any any rate, a livable wage is not much different from the median wage, and even that is too low in many economically hot areas where real estate is unbearably expensive. This is, incidentally, another large dimension of US poverty, that the stand-pat, NIMBY, no-growth zoning practices of what is now a majority of the country have sentenced the poor and the young to an even lower standard of living than what the income statistics would indicate, as they fork over their precious earnings to the older, richer, and socially settled landlords among us.

So what is the answer? I would advocate for a mix of deep policy change. First is a minimum wage that is livable, which means $15 nationwide, indexed for inflation, and higher as needed in more high-cost states. It should be a basic contract with the citizenry and workers of all types that working should pay decently, and not send you to a food pantry. All those jobs and businesses that can not survive without poorly paid workers... we don't need them. Second would be a government employer of last resort system that would offer a job to anyone who wants one. This would be paid at the minimum wage, and put people to work doing projects of public significance- cleaning up roadways, building schools, offering medical care, checkups, crossing guards, etc. We can, as a society and as civil governments, do a better job employing the poor in a useful way than can the much-vaunted entrepreneurs. Instead of endless strip malls of bottom-feeding commerce, let local governments sweep up available labor for cleaning the environment, instead of fouling it. Welfare should be, instead of a demeaning odyssey through DMV- like bureaucracies, a straight payment to anyone not employed, at half the minimum wage.

Third, we need more public services. Transit should be totally free. Medical care should be completely free. Education should be free. And incidentally, secondary education should be all public, with private schools up to 12th grade banned. When we wonder why our country and politics have become so polarized, a big reason is the physical and spiritual separation between the rich and poor. While the speaker in the video linked below advocates for free housing as well, that would be perhaps a bridge too far, though housing needs to be addressed urgently by forcing governments to zone for their actual population and taking homelessness as a policy-directing index of the need to zone and build more housing.

Fourth, the rich need to be taxed more. The corrosion of  our social system is not only evident at the bottom where misery and quasi-slavery is the rule, but at the top, where the rich contribute less and less to positive social values. The recent Twitter drama showed in an almost mythical way the incredible narcisism and callous ethics that pervade the upper echelons (... if the last administration hadn't shown this already). The profusion of philanthropies are mere performative narcissism and white-washing, while the real damage is being done by the flood of money that flows from the rich into anti-democratic and anti-government projects across the land.

And what is all this social division accomplishing? It is not having any positive eugenic effect, if one takes that view of things. Reproduction is not noticeably affected, despite the richness at the top or the abject poverty at the bottom. It is not having positive social effects, as the rich wall themselves off with increasingly hermetic locations and technologies. They thought, apparently, that cryptocurrencies would be the next step of unshackling the Galtian entrepreneurs of the world from the oppression of national governments. Sadly, that did not work out very well. The rich can not be rich without a society to sponge off. The very idea of saving money presupposes an ongoing social and economic system from which that money can be redeemed by a future self. Making that future society (not to mention the future environment) healthy and cohesive should be our most fervent goal.

• How about universal basic services, like housing and transit?
• But not in this congress.
• Bernie is still on the case.
• Meanwhile, how does a soak-the-poor tax system sound?
• Mint that coin!
• Economic regression.

Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era

China girds for defense against infiltration by Western ideas. And Wang Huning leads the way.

The current Chinese Communist Party congress prompts us to take stock of where we are in our relations with China and where China is going. The major theme is of course conservativism. Xi Jinping remains at the helm, and may stay there for several cycles to come. The party remains uniquely in control, using all elements of new and old technologies to "guide" Chinese culture and maintain power. And increasingly is trying to shape the international environment to abet its internal controls and maybe spread its system abroad.

It is worth recounting the fourteen points of Xi Jinping thought in detail, as stated on the Wiki page:

• Ensuring Communist Party of China leadership over all forms of work in China.
• The Communist Party of China should take a people-centric approach for the public interest.
• The continuation of "comprehensive deepening of reforms".
• Adopting new science-based ideas for "innovative, coordinated, green, open and shared development".
• Following "socialism with Chinese characteristics" with "people as the masters of the country".
• Governing China with the Rule of Law.
• "Practice socialist core values", including Marxism-Leninism and socialism with Chinese characteristics.
• "Improving people's livelihood and well-being is the primary goal of development".
• Coexist well with nature with "energy conservation and environmental protection" policies and "contribute to global ecological safety".
• Strengthen the national security of China.
• The Communist Party of China should have "absolute leadership over" China's People's Liberation Army.
• Promoting the one country, two systems system for Hong Kong and Macau with a future of "complete national reunification" and to follow the One-China principle and 1992 Consensus for Taiwan.
• Establish a common destiny between the Chinese people and other peoples around the world with a "peaceful international environment".
• Improve party discipline in the Communist Party of China.

The casual reader will note that Communist party dominance and retention of control is the subject of roughly four or five of these points, depending on interpretation. One can sense that control is absolutely the central obsession and fear of party. And no wonder- there are plenty of structural and historical reasons.

China has had a tumultuous history from earliest recorded times, cycling between centralization and dissolution and civil war. The golden periods were always ones of stability, while the worst were times of anarchy, banditry, decline. Then there were the colonial humiliations, from the opium wars to Japanese occupation. Whether one adds in the disastrous legacy of Marxism- which also came from the West- into the mix, is a matter of taste. As noted above, the current CCP still gives lip service to Marxism-Leninism (though pointedly not to Maoism!).

In the more current era, the West promotes free trade, human rights, and democracy as a way to contest the power and ideology of the CCP. Each have their ulterior aspects, certainly in relation to China. Human rights and democracy are obviously direct attacks on the very core values of the CCP. Free trade might seem like a no-brainer and objectively desirable. But in reality, it cements the advantages of highly developed countries, since less developed countries can never gain an advantage in high technology if their only advantage is low labor cost and poor education & other infrastructure. Therefore, China has had to protect itself from the onslaught of the West, economically, politically, and socially.

This is the basic theme of the CCP ideology, driven particularly by Wang Huning, a social scientist. academic, and now politbureau member and close advisor of Xi Jinping. Huning has been a close advisor to the last three leaders of China, and evidently a major architect of their signature mottos, "The Three Represents", "The Chinese Dream", and now "Xi Jinping thought ...". He is a close student of the US, and appears generally to be the "vision guy" for the Chinese leadership. (Maybe even the brains behind the operation, if one wants to be hyperbolic.) While Huning in his earliest writings advocated for the democratic development of China, in line with general development of a modern, mature state, and with models such as Japan, that has all been deferred and subsumed under the more immediate needs of the party. His public writing ceased after he joined the central government. 

The biggest and most traumatic historical shock guiding the CCP today was undoubtedly the collapse of the Soviet Union. (As it guides Putin as well.) Before everyone's eyes, the siren song of the West, of capitalism, and of "freedom" (particularly the freedom to be nationalist) captured the populace, and destroyed the Soviet state from within, resulting in a gangster Russia that has only painfully re-established its strength and order, turning back into an authoritarian (and nationalist) state and a colleague of China on the anti-Western world stage. 

The Chinese Communist Party avoided all that through its merciless grip on power. It never let its eye stray from the ball, or softened it heart towards its dissidents and malcontents. It patiently experimented with a mixed capitalist / one party rule system, which has turned out (so far) to be highly successful. It availed itself of all available technology and capitalist methods from the West to develop its economy at a pell-mell rate, learning especially from its fellow-tigers, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. However, it continues to (rightly) fear the siren songs of freedom, democracy, etc. as core threats. It conveniently uses psychological projection to blame the West for all these attractive ideas, which in truth are not exclusively Western at all, but are dreams that Chinese people have as well. (See Hong Kong, see Singapore, see Taiwan) So the ideology and the propaganda follows the age-old script of justifying a bloated, intrusive, and often very cruel state by casting the blame for dissent on outsiders.

That's a big TV screen.

The CCP has also been highly effective in many areas. It obviously keeps tabs on everyone with not just surveillance, but with social surveys and party members at the grass roots, and even allows limited local protests, so that it has a feeling for what the people want, despite a lack of formal democracy. It has engineered a miracle of infrastructure, trains, and housing. Indeed, there is an overhang of construction that it is slowly winding down, in the current real estate crunch. It has protected its population comprehensively from Covid, surely saving millions of lives, even as it imposes stark, and likely not sustainable, costs. It has recognized the dangers of bitcoin and shut down the cryptocurrencies in comprehensive fashion- something we might learn from. And it is leading the way in solar manufacturing and installation, even while its use of coal remains catastrophic. It continually identifies and fights corruption in its own ranks, recognizing that a one-party state is an invitation to rot and sclerosis.

But the fundamental conundrum remains- how to justify and strengthen a one-party state in the midst of the rising well-being, education and sophistication of its own population. The other tigers, including even Singapore, all began with strongly authoritarian systems that each evolved, in parallel with their economic development, into more or less free democracies today. While one can sympathize with the CCP's desire to avoid the chaos of the Soviet Union's demise, the now more cogent and relevant models of political evolution in the local region are far more positive stories, which the CCP seems to pointedly, and lamentably, ignore. 

Indeed, China appears to be heading in a different direction, a bit more like that of North Korea. Their wolf warrior diplomacy is given to vitriolic statements and bullying, now showcased over Taiwan. Their internal propaganda is increasingly nationalistic and strident, following the Xi Jinping thought's guidelines of shaping the cultural values of China to be more cohesive and disciplined. (Covid hasn't helped, either.) It is increasingly intolerant of diversity, as shown against minority ethnic groups, which are being wiped out in systematic terms. For example, the government offers generous subsidies to minority members who marry Han ethnic partners, and drives the same policy by locking up large numbers of Uyghur men for re-education. China's ideological leaders are groping for CCP-friendly "values" that can effectively block what they view as foreign viruses, but which are, in point of fact, endogenous and natural to the human condition.

Under Xi and Wang Hunting, the party is still searching for those elusive "socialist core values" that are uniquely Chinese, not Western, not from the backward (and somewhat feudal) countryside, and supportive of the Communist party. But all they have come up with are greed/capitalism, nationalism, an obsession with stability, and a new personality cult. 

While I can not foretell the future, this does not seem like a good way to go. In foreign policy, one can measure success by how friendly the neighboring countries are- in this case to China, and to the US. There are areas of the world where very peaceful relations exist, such as across the EU, and between the US and its neighbors. That does not seem to be the case in the South China Sea. The constant drumbeat of threats and bullying by China, against Taiwan in particular, but others as well, various territorial disputes, and a enormous military building spree have put everyone very much on edge, and not on friendly terms. This is a fundamental problem for China, and for the rest of us if they bull their way into a world war.

Domestically, it is quite possible for the repressive system to continue indefinitely, given its continuing determination and often very intelligent management, always on guard against the heresies of freedom and goodwill. But that would be giving up an important future path. The Chinese culture would have greater growth prospects, and greater beneficial consequences at home and abroad, if it opened up and tolerated greater pluralism. Its economic dynamism is up till now built on foreign technology, and its ability to innovate and operate truly in the vanguard of world development depends on some significant degree of political and social dynamism as well, not on Big-Brotherism. 

So I see a future where inevitably, the CCP will have to experiment with grass-roots democracy in order to resolve its fundamental value and motivation conflicts as growth slows and China becomes a wealthier country. These will be frought and dangerous experiments. But in time, there is a chance that they will lead to the same kinds of opening that other Asian countries have experienced so successfully, with the gradual development of another party, and a more humane and less paranoid culture. Conversely, insistence on repression tends to spiral into a need for additional repression, with corresponding chances for a dramatic crackup that might produce another one of the grand cycles of Chinese history.

• Another review, focusing on Xi Jinping.
• On the dangers of private schools.
• Critique of the Nobel prize in economics.
• Religion and the nuttery.

For the Love of Money

The social magic of wealth ... and Trump's travel down the wealth / status escalator.

I have been reading the archly sarcastic "The Theory of the Leisure Class", by Thorstein Veblen. It introduced the concept of "conspicuous consumption" by way of arguing that social class is marked by work, specifically by the total lack of work that occupies the upper, or leisure class, and more and more mundane forms of work as one sinks down the social scale. This is a natural consequence of what he calls our predatory lifestyle, which, at least in times of yore, reserved to men, especially those of the upper class, the heroic roles of hunter and warrior, contrasted with the roles of women, who were assigned all non-heroic forms of work, i.e. drudgery. This developed over time into a pervasive horror of menial work and a scramble to evince whatever evidence one can of being above it, such as wearing clean, uncomfortable and fashionable clothes, doing useless things like charity drives, golf, and bridge. And having one's wife do the same, to show how financially successful one is.

Veblen changed our culture even as he satarized and skewered it, launching a million disgruntled teenage rebellions, cynical movies, songs, and other analyses. But his rules can not be broken. Hollywood still showcases the rich, and silicon valley, for all its putative nerdiness, is just another venue for social signaling by way of useless toys, displays of leisure (at work, no less, with the omnipresent foosball and other games), and ever more subtle fashion statements.

Conversely, the poor are disparaged, if not hated. We step over homeless people, holding our noses. The Dalit of India are perhaps the clearest expression of this instinct. But our whole economic system is structured in this way, paying the hardest and most menial jobs the worst, while paying some of the most social destructive professions, like corporate law, the best, and placing them by attire, titles, and other means, high on the social hierarchy.

As Reagan said, nothing succeeds like success. We are fascinated, indeed mesmerized, by wealth. It seems perfectly reasonable to give wealthy areas of town better public services. It seems perfectly reasonable to have wealthy people own all our sports teams, run all our companies, and run for most political offices. We are after all Darwinian through and through. But what if a person's wealth comes from their parents? Does the status still rub off? Should it? Or what if it came from criminal activities? Russia is run by a cabal of oligarchs, more or less- is their status high or low?

All this used to make more sense, in small groups where reputations were built over a lifetime of toil in support of the family, group, and tribe. Worth was assessed by personal interaction, not by the proxy of money. And this status was difficult to bequeath to others. The fairy tale generally has the prince proving himself through arduous tasks, to validate the genetic and social inheritance that the rest of the world may or may not be aware of. 

But with the advent of money, and even more so with the advent of inherited nobility and kingship, status became transferable, inheritable, and generally untethered from the values it supposedly exemplifies. Indeed, in our society it is well-known that wealth correlates with a decline in ethical and social values. Who exemplifies this most clearly? Obviously our former president, whose entire public persona is based on wealth. It was evidently inherited, and he parlayed it into publicity, notariety, scandal, and then the presidency. He was adulated, first by tabloids and TV, which loved brashness (and wealth), then by Republican voters, who appear to love cruelty, mean-ness, low taste and intellect, ... and wealth. 

But now the tide is slowly turning, as Trump's many perfidies and illegal practices catch up with him. It is leaking out, despite every effort of half the media, that he may not be as wealthy as he fraudulently portrayed. And with that, the artificial status conferred by being "a successful businessman" is deflating, and his national profile is withering. One might say that he is taking an downward ride on the escalator of social status that is in our society conferred largely by wealth.

All that is shiny ... mines coal.

Being aware of this social instinct is naturally the first step to addressing it. A century ago and more, the communists and socialists provided a thoroughgoing critique of the plutocratic class as being not worthy of social adulation, as the Carnegies and Horatio Algers of the world would have it. But once in power, the ensuing communist governments covered themselves in the ignominy of personality cults that facilitated (and still do in some cases) even worse political tyrannies and economic disasters. 

The succeeding model of "managed capitalism" is not quite as catastrophic and has rehabilitated the rich in their societies, but one wouldn't want to live there either. So we have to make do with the liberal state and its frustratingly modest regulatory powers, aiming to make the wealthy do virtuous things instead of destructive things. Bitcoin is but one example of a waste of societal (and ecological) resources, which engenders social adulation of the riches to be mined, but should instead be regulated out of existence. Taking back the media is a critical step. We need to reel back the legal equation of money with speech and political power that has spread corruption, and tirelessly tooted its own ideology of status and celebrity through wealth.

• California police could use some supervision too.
• Marin- a cruel gerontocracy?