It’s always mildly frustrating reading your pieces, as you give a diagnosis of modern political psychologies that are absolutely spot on, but your economic views are always vague and naive (exactly like the people you criticise). For what it is worth, I would probably be considered a ‘liberal’ in the US - the fundamental basis of my view is that I am in the business of constructing large scale societal machines to improve people’s lives, and however bad the capitalist machine is, the socialist machine has fundamental design flaws that make it even worse. Is there anywhere where you do actually articulate your full economic arguments and views, because in pieces like this it just read like you complaining that things aren’t good now so *clearly* capitalism is a good thing and engaging in the exact same vibes based reasoning as most other left wingers?
And also one of the most fragmented and divided. Calling yourself a ‘Marxist’ reveals almost nothing without a further elaboration of what you take that to mean (in actual policy terms, not vague aspirations like ‘end exploitation of the proletariat’ or whatever).
Freddie: please, for us ignorant slobs, just go ahead and do a Marxism 101 piece one day. You needn't blush to admit your writing is a bit more engaging and accessible, to the average 21st c. reader, than that of Marx and Engels.
Well where in your view does capitalism work well? There are many more capitalist states than "Marxist" states unless you use an absurdly elastic definition of "Marxism". Many of these capitalist states are very, very poor. Even in the richest of these states (the US) there are millions of impoverished children, people who die preventable deaths because they couldn't afford the doctor, etc, etc. Why are you so sure things couldn't be better?
Living standards have improved in places like the former USSR and China, too, though, so it is not necessarily the case that progress is impossible in the absence of capitalism.
It's a question of if things are as good as they could be. I think we can avoid having millions of children grow up in poverty. Others think it is a necessary evil.
For a long time 1st-world wealth depended a LOT on resource extraction from 2nd- and especially 3rd-world states. It's not quite as egregious as colonial times now, but it is still very much a thing.
Regardless, have you ever tried to ask yourself what the difference in relative standard of living gains have been between rich and poor over the last two centuries? I don't have the data for this, but I'd be willing to wager that despite both obviously increasing, the former gains vastly outpace the latter.
And that 'resource extraction' as you deem it is DIRECTLY why industrialization occurred, which in turn has lifted most of the global population out of abject privation! What's ur point here? Has there been exploitation, corruption, unequal outcomes, and unforgivable immorality? Most assuredly. Welcome to human history and civilization. The modern West, Enlightennent, Liberalism, and Captalism has done more to foster the growth and well being of ALL Humanity than anything that has come prior. It's not even debatable...(but folks still try!)
As for the gains aspect, it's no surprise that those on the 'upper' end have gained exponentially more than those not in that class. Again, welcome to history. Is it intended? Maybe, at least indirectly? I dunno. It's likely an indirect function of the increase of modern civilization. Again, I'm wondering what ur getting at by articulating these things? Should the 1st world feel guilty? Dunno. Should we at least be aware that inequalities are a serious problem among humans and work diligently, and INTELLIGENTLY, to mitigate the issues that arise as a product of these inequalities? We do. To the point where currently we are stuck navel gazing, somewhere btwn guilt and shame, and are in danger of losing the whole thing.
Am I to understand that your definition/conceptualization of Marxism is akin to the von Humboldt philosophy of 'to enquire and create, devoid of external influences'? At least somewhat?
Marxism has a big literature but you are basically the only one here who’s read it! You have a huge captive audience here of people who really want to find high quality leftist thinking, even if most of us are not currently leftists. Why don’t you ever write an article literally telling us something about Marxism?
In particular you point at Bernie socialists as having supposedly abandoned the liberal capitalist system, but I don’t see that at all. They’re seem to me to be broadly normie social democrats, committed to democracy, the rule of law, and for the most part property rights, but advocating for much more muscular state intervention in market failures than US Democrats have been comfortable with. But it sounds like you think the overall system does need to be abandoned. In what way? Do you support a vanguard-led revolution? What kind of political system should they impose? As full of material as the Marxist corpus is, you’re well aware that it’s got a broad mix of positions on these questions, and Marx himself was pretty resistant to describing details of a socialist state, so it’s really quite fair that we have no idea what you actually want. I’d love to find out!
Yeah, it seems like Bernie just wants a mixed economy which is further to the left than we have right now. Which makes sense. I don’t think anyone wants to live under a system of *pure* anything, be it capitalism, socialism, monarchy, democracy, etc., and their “true believers,” who usually need to be kept from power altogether. But I did enjoy this piece and agree with the basic principle that equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes are a distinction without a difference - though they can be different “North Stars,” if you will, to guide rhetoric and in some cases policy.
But assuming that someone wasn't raised a Marxist and doesn't have the depth of knowledge you have, and wants to have Marxism make the best case it can in the same amount of time we'd give to the various articulations of liberalism that you criticize as insufficient, what would you recommend? This isn't a gotcha question, I genuinely want to know.
If only there was a search engine that would let you google "communism reading list" and get a huge swath of books and essays written over a hundred year period that you could peruse at your leisure.
Are you tone policing everyone in this thread or just the people you don't agree with? You don't have to answer, I can see from all the snarling contempt people are throwing that somehow is not as worth a rebuttal.
Tone policing? Lol. Wtf does that even mean? And ofc no one need answer/comment. The irony of that position is palpable. Who wrote the entirely snarky response? You did. And of what use is it?
You want to defend Marxism? Then do it. Don't expect others to become 'experts' in order to point out the failings and mostly pedantic tenets of some utopian system that has zero chance of EVER being implemented. You know, w/o killing a few million folks here and there. My time would be better spent 'studying' the corpus of astrology....at least no one suffers from astrology.
K-I'm sure you're correct, as far as that goes. However, go to any bookstore, and look for the Marxist literature shelf. Good luck with that. Ditto any public library. The Jacobin Is hardly the most popular magazine in the country. I can assure you that folks in Eastern Europe do not embrace Marxism. My general familiarity with Western Europe is the same. So, quite frankly, I find the basic assertion risible.
The basic assertion is that there has been a huge amount of writing about communism by economists and political theorists, the fact that you are too lazy to go look for it does not invalidate that claim.
With respect, Freddie, the entire Marxist corpus is a tower of verbiage signifying nothing. The entire edifice is incoherent. Pointing to the volume of writings on Marxism as evidence of the truth of its claims is analogous to saying that all those centuries of Scholasticism proves the correctness of Christian cosmology and eschatology. Lots of writers talking to each other in increasingly tight loops of esoteric mutual masturbation does not result in proof of anything. Aquinas and Gramsci are both fancy talkers explaining away the evidence of everyone's eyes. What's the difference?
Human nature is an actual thing. Since we are all doomed to live trapped inside our own skulls, to have our own orgasms whether or not they are simultaneous with anyone else's, and to eventually die in solitary terror, the individualism you decry is inevitable in all societies no matter how their economics are organized. And in truth, all economies are organized the same way at bottom, no matter what they pretend.
In the end, Cuba could not permanently suppress the impulse for self-seeking economic activity among the population at large. And while it tried to suppress private property and private enterprise, the well-situated players in the state apparatus--the army, the ministries--did and got what they could for themselves. It's no accident that the Soviet Nomenklatura became the kleptocrats of the post-Soviet era. Capitalism is the human condition, as itself or under some other name. These conversations always remind of the Soviet satirical magazine, Krokodil, which mocked that capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, and Communism is the exact opposite.
Look, Marxism is not a system of ideas, it's an understandable and humane emotional reaction to the sadness of economic life in all societies since the species began. In the caves, the headman took too much and left too little for the others. During the Industrial Revolution, the plutocrats exploited child workers and coal miners and women in sweatshops. Liberals feel what you feel about these things and try to do practical things to mitigate the worst of it. But to fundamentally change the underlying hierarchy of human life, or to set parameters on what is achievable by people (you can make between $X and $Y, not less and not more) isn't just politically impossible to get passed. It's impossible to enforce even if it were. Just like it would be impossible to enforce age limits on human beings (you may not live past 85, we need the space for others, so you. must off yourself for the good of everyone). Human nature won't allow it. Only intellectuals living in their heads and divorced from the urges of normal people could possibly believe in a human nature that doesn't contain the selfish Id.
I agree with everything ... except the part about the children. Children in the Victorian era like children in 21st century Asia aren't forced to work because The Man. Children in these conditions beg to work because in the Victorian era, as in modern Asia, food is so very expensive that if you don't work, you also don't eat.
That's a great point. Re-reading this it struck me. First I thought— outside of: an abundant inexpensive energy first world, food is an extremely difficult problem.
Then it occurred to me: Food isn't incredibly inexpensive, globalism has levelized food prices. Because of capitalism, we're so incredibly wealthy, food is incredibly inexpensive to us.
Trade, capitalism, commerce….is bound up in human evolution and the development of religions; it’s the framework we have to work within, like gravity. “tower of verbiage signifying nothing”. Add into that the massive PhD icebergs….it’s meaningless obfuscation.
Your last line lines up with a thought I was having. Marxism, in its applied iterations, reminds me a bit of "The Forbidden Planet" where the Krell build a machine of almost limitless power, forgetting that they are deep down savages, and destroy themselves in a single night “Monsters from the id” :)
Put another way, Marxism has produced the most "talk" in human history. That it's the province of philosophical navel-gazing isn't a feature. How about some "walk"? Instead of merely pointing out the existence of reams & reams of "talk," outline *your* vision for how we get there. Yes, liberalism & capitalism do not produce optimal outcomes. Literally everyone knows this; some people are okay with the tradeoffs in the absence of something that might do a better job. What, then, will (or could)? I would sincerely like to read your positive vision rather than just another "Boo capitalism!" (or liberalism) post.
On this point, I had the good fortune three years ago to read David Harvey's The Limits To Capital. One of the key takeaways from that book is that some key tenets of what is described as Marxist economic theory, which are often considered by a certain kind of self-defined Marxist as fundamental "truths" of the doctrine, are in fact more provisional and less final than they are often considered to be, and may well have been revised by Marx and Engels had they lived to do so. In other words, Marx and Engels developed an interesting program for further research rather than a corpus that could or should have been treated as a final body of doctrine, let alone the official dogma of political parties and governments.
The breadth of "Marxist" thought makes it perfect "motte and bailey" material. Can we, perhaps, judge Marxism as a working political philosophy based on the outcomes it's achieved?
It's the very size of the corpus that makes it vague. Maoism and Trotskyism are both Marxist but very different. When I am in West Bengal a marvel at the communist party flags which are all marked to distinguish which school of communism they are promoting.
I think socialism's curse is that a one-page summary sounds so attractive to young adults who think it's too much effort to study the whole corpus, so lots of socialist coded output (as in tweets, blog posts) is indeed incoherent, like that guy whose tagline is the hammer and sickle plus the anarchy A.
Something closer to this, which is clearly sympathetic to Socialism but also clear-eyed about the functions it would need to fulfill to be an appealing alternative to Capitalism, would be welcome:
Yes, I completely agree. Freddie also takes as a *premise* that liberal capitalism is incapable of producing broad prosperity and then uses that to illustrate a contradiction in Hayes' thinking, when that's exactly the thing Hayes and others would disagree with him on! (I do agree with the point that equality of opportunity is a pretty silly concept, though.)
Indeed, Capitalism is historically quite good at producing broad prosperity, especially when paired with a government and a tax policy engineered toward that same aim. Those are problems of political systems, though, not economic ones.
This hits the nail on the head. Exactly where on the “Political” spectrum can you realistically set the control mechanism for the “Market” to achieve the desired “Outcome.” Both Liberalism and Marxism are unhelpful in this regard. Without a well articulated regulatory framework adapted to the political environment it’s a mess. You have to make the adjustments from the bottom up by marshaling political will. The old “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Capitalism has been good at producing broad prosperity during a time of historically unprecedented productivity that might be going away. A fundamental principle of Marxism is that the second economic productivity slows down corporations have to make hard decisions about where to cut costs to increase profit they will pick labor every time, and if you have strong political forces marshalling them not to do so you are basically forcing them to operate under conditions that will make them not profitable, at which point they won't be competitive anymore and will collapse.
We've been seeing a little of this in the conversations professional economists have been having about the trade-offs between high wages and high costs for basic goods, right now we are managing to balance on that knife edge (although plenty of people are still unhappy), but you can imagine if people stop buying inflated goods, then the only way to prevent a massive recession is to either allow massive lay-offs or wage decreases, neither one of which really sings "broad prosperity" to me.
In a capitalist economy, even a "massive recession" is historically unlikely to result in widespread famine. The same cannot be said of Communist supply controls.
Many of the wage issues that you address are actually the result of globalism—which is a political choice—rather than capitalist principles, which can, and should, be reigned in by good governance.
Oh, they are absolutely capitalist. Capitalism is all about efficiency. Taking advantage of cheap labor and reduced construction costs in a distant country by offshoring because the reduction in costs to create more than offsets the costs to ship the finished goods is all efficiency. There are political issues at stake too, but the impetus is 100% capitalism.
Sure, and perhaps I worded poorly; my suggestion was that Capital Markets are subject to their governments; it's why we couldn't just "make" the USSR, or Vietnam, or Cuba, or China, or Venezuela adopt capitalist ideals, even through war, and more than we could just "make" Afghanistan and Iraq into democracies.
It's why food and tech companies can't do in the E.U. what they get away with in the U.S. Surely the capitalist impulses of Google make it want to operate the same way in Germany—to say nothing of China—as it does in the U.S., but the governments of those nations will not permit it. The globalist effects of capitalism *in the United States* are political, regulatory, and trade problems, not economic ones.
It's like nuclear power vs nuclear bombs. If you can place systems, constraints, and controls on the raw power of something, you can yield incredible results. If you don't, you get destruction. But that's not the fault of the power itself! It's a reckless failure to harness the incredible potential at hand.
Decisions about production made under politically-captured command economies are also all about efficiency - they're just optimizing for different types of efficiency. Capitalism solves for the largest delta between production cost and public demand. Political economy solves for the largest social benefit to the person making the decisions (e.g. benefits to clients, personal enrichment, etc.) You'll notice that the former depends on things continuing to get made in order for profits to keep coming in. The latter is entirely disconnected from production at all - in fact, it almost works better if the messy business of actually making things is entirely disconnected from the status-games. Hence, things getting run into the ground and shortages.
I don't know how to take seriously the claim that global trade and outsourcing aren't natural consequences of capitalism, otherwise IDK what you mean by globalism.
Also, I don't dispute the communist famines, but you should read "Grapes of Wrath" sometime to see what people went through in this country vis a vis famine and hunger during thr Great Depression. They don't teach us in school how many people died of malnutrition, but I'm betting a quick Google search will show that it definitely happened to hundreds, maybe thousands of people. And let's never forget, the decision to feed people who can't afford it is fundamentally not a free market one.
I have read The Grapes of Wrath, twenty-two years ago. It was incredibly formative to my politics.
I also had a maternal grandfather who grew up during the depression, in a part of the country (Southern Appalachia) that did not see any of the resources of more urbanized parts of the country. Then Pearl Harbor, Marines, Okinawa and Peli Liu. I had the opportunity to both live with and care for him late in his life, as well as formally interview him for middle-school "Greatest Generation" projects in the Nineties. It was subjective, of course, and localized, but I have a quite intimate view on the effects of the Depression in the U.S.
There was no famine in the U.S. during the depression. There was, infact, *over* production, and the birth of federal grain subsidies. The malnutrition that was experienced was driven by poverty, not scarcity. It would take another 30 years for LBJ's "War on Poverty" to start putting in place the social guardrails (SNAP, EBT, etc) that we see today.
The curious thing about The Grapes of Wrath is that story was a favorite of the Soviet propaganda machine. So much so that when made into a movie, it was shown in the USSR ... until the inmates discovered the poor in America actually had trucks! The movie was quickly pulled after that.
The Depression and the Dust Bowl were not the direct result of a command economy visiting hardship on its population out of ideological rigidity. Moreover, whatever death by famine occurred during the Depression is microscopic compared to good times visited upon people by Lenin, Stalin, Mao and their copycats.
Excellent point. Hunger, for example, is a solved problem. A lot of political theory couldn't assume this fact because for almost all of human history it was an immediate, deadly concern to all but the absolute richest. Virtually everyone was one bad harvest away from death. It is precisely the profit motive and the technological cascade dating from prior to the Industrial Revolution that led to the path of global abundence of food, and it's the modern capitalist states that are its stewards. If we ran the simulation again, would a non-profit motive system have managed this?
Exactly the example I had in mind. Much of the Leftist discourse boils down to well-meaning middle-to-upper-middle-class Marxists in the West obsessing over a belief that their citizenry is somehow entitled to "more", because they have no experience of having "nothing."
I don't defend it. Merely point out that capitalism dramatically improving the lot of many people by doing things like improving crop yields and enhancing technology better than socialism could isn't really a ding against Marxism. Marx would have granted capitalism's great power in that regard. I believe his criticism had to do with the cost, the unjustness of it, and that that inherent unjustness would spell its doom. Again, as I understand Marxism; I'm no expert. I don't believe that to be correct, at least no more than it's correct to say that every massively powerful institution falls from within, not from without.
Exactly. Marx was predicting the natural failure state of capitalism, which is when innovation and productivity are no longer the driving forces of profit but everything has been optimized to a point where the only way for capitalists to continue to profit is to destroy wages. The reason this hasn't happened is because it turns out there were a lot of industries that were only at the beginning stages of capitalist innovation at the time Marx was writing, and I think Marx himself would be surprised and how much runway capitalism turned out to have by innovating entirely new service industries and telecommunications industries into existence. Which, good! But now we are at a point where we can basically see the same dynamic in every single industry that only a decade or two ago was thought to be at the frontier of boundless new potential and they are all flagging and stuttering. The service industries can't afford to pay people a wage they want, and all the fancy disruptive tech industries are instituting massive layoffs and pushing AI innovation in the desperate hope that it will open up some new field of profit because otherwise they aren't going to be able to sustain the share prices that make them seem immune to the economic gravity everyone else is dealing with.
I understand what you are saying, but I will remain a "Rawlsian Liberal," with all the limitations of that stance, because the historical experience of "Marxism" is of extreme brutality and suppression of all dissent – such that history shows that "Marxism" as it has really existed is no more effective at addessing the problems we all want to solve than is liberalism, and in fundamental ways is much worse. I am frustrated by liberalism, but I fear "Marxism", and I think I have good reason to.
To be fair, I wouldn't call the Soviet or Chinese govs "Marxist" by any honest stretch of the word. Communist sure. And the USSR could have easily been considered fascist based on how it operated in reality.
Calling the USSR or China 'Marxist' is as big a stretch as calling our primaries and caucuses 'democratic'.
“Do you just want things to change a little bit? Do you just want the banks to be a little bit nicer, or for people to be a little more respectful of each other’s identities — All of which is good — but basically you carry on living in a nice world where you tinker with it…
…the key thing is that in confronting those powers, and trying to transform the world you might lose a lot. This is a sort of forgotten idea. Is that actually you surrender yourself up to a big idea and in the the process you might lose something but you’d actually gain a bigger sense, because you change the world for the better. I know it sounds soppy, But this is the forgotten thing about politics. Is that you give up some of your individualism to something bigger than yourself. You surrender yourself — and it’s a lost idea. And I think really in answer to your question: You can spot real change happening when you see people from the liberal middle classes, beginning to give themselves up to something. Surrender themselves for something bigger. And at the moment, there is nothing like that in the liberal imagination”
I sympathize a bit with the sentiment, but I find that talk of sacrifice comes cheaply when you’re talking about anyone except yourself.
Does Curtis himself, with a highly successful and enviable career in filmmaking, match the standard he outlines here? Does he acknowledge any shortcomings with respect to this ideal in the interview this quote comes from?
no, but it makes it harder to treat that individual as an exemplar or model to emulate in your own life. if you want people to actually sacrifice things, giving them examples of how to do that in a real and meaningful way is important!
I've never thought very much about what "equality of opportunity" would entail – if I had to articulate my assumptions, it would be something like removing as many barriers to success as possible, not fretting about the ones we can't do anything about, and letting whatever comes of that be the outcome.
Which, now that I say it, would really be more in line with a right-wing-ish, Republican-y desire to shred regulation and shrink oversight. Because what's stuff like the EPA or OSHA except some of the few barriers to opportunity we can control?
That's not a conclusion I'm all that comfortable with. I'll have to chew on this some more.
In some cases the content of the regulation is just “only incumbents and their designees may ply this trade” - see taxi medallions. This is obviously anathema to equal opportunity. (Closed shop unions were similar, though not exactly a regulation).
Some, like say San Francisco’s permitting process, are theoretically possibly to get through, but in practice clearly favor the deep pocketed and politically connected. These are pretty bad for equal opportunity.
Others, like say restaurant health codes, are clearly surmountable by millions of entrepreneurs - who just need to be reasonably conscientious about the way they do things - and are no problem at all.
Regulation isn’t the primary thing though, it’s usually about the accessibility of public education.
If barriers fall equally on all of us, they are not equality barriers but rather limitations we place on ourselves out of a greater need (not drinking poison water, not having waste disposal plants next to schools). I get regulatory capture and whatnot, which is problematic, but not an argument against rational rules for a clean environment or a safe workplace.
No, they're regressive and disproportionately hurt smaller and under-resourced market participants, just the same as a flat $20/day fee means nothing to Jeff Bezos, but would be debilitating to someone on a low income.
Liberal market economies are the worst except for everything else that we’ve ever been able to pull off. Criticize it all you want, but unless you can formulate a form of Marxism that doesn’t just devolve into a dictatorship of the nomenklatura, your criticisms are empty. Liberal market economies are terrible, but that’s the best we have and the only choice is to figure out how to make them less bad. The Nordic model seems like a big improvement on the US model, and it’s beyond me why anyone on the left would wouldn’t make that their lodestar. Stop tilting windmills.
What's also weird is the defacto claim that the exchange btwn labor and capital is exploitative. This is an assumption that isn't true. Further, not sure how exploitation is absent in even the 'purest' forms of what is euphemisitcaly called Marxism.
(You may well already know this - I just don't think it's quite right to call it an assumption - more of an equation that arguably leaves out some factors).
I think you are overstating the negative aspects of free markets/rule of law/equality under the law/individual rights considerably. Most people in the US do well, or well enough, and far better than at any other time or place in history.
Marxism is inherently coercive and admits of no countervailing or competing systems. Which is why the dialectic has such an enormous body count.
The focus on process isn’t arbitrary though. It’s to protect individuals from government abuse, and to prevent the market system that produces wealth for all of us from government destruction. Freddy might say that growth is slowing, and the only thing left to do is redistribute the winnings, but I think markets and liberalism will continue to periods of waxing and waning growth, and the resultant reductions in poverty and increases in middle class lives, all while protecting individual autonomy. Pretty good! Worth protecting!
"markets and liberalism will continue to periods of waxing and waning growth, and the resultant reductions in poverty and increases in middle class lives, all while protecting individual autonomy."
Unless Marx and 21st century Marxists are right that those reductions in poverty through capitalism happen only because capital finds new domains and populations to exploit and immiserate. It used to be straight-up colonial capture by capital; nowadays the immiseration happens in other ways that aren't always measured through GDP––disease and death by pollution, loss of homelands through rising seas, uninhabitable geographies, etc.
I’ve long been of the opinion that a true and fulsome state of “equal opportunity “ is extremely difficult if not impossible to reach.
I had not considered that “absolute” equality of opportunity begets equality of outcomes. However, this does assume that all unique individual characteristics (like interests, preferences, strengths, weaknesses) fall under the auspices of “opportunity”. But would it not hold, if taken further to the extreme, that absolute equality of opportunity would culminate in a solitary (ie. single) outcome state? And if so, does that even seem plausible?
Rather, I would not consider everything under sun to be in the realm of opportunity. I would start by removing immutable traits. Such as with your waitress eye colour example. “If her eyes were a different colour” is not a knock against equal opportunity; it’s a call for an alternate or parallel reality.
Also, to argue that a given opportunity must result in a certain outcome is to then argue against free will. Almost to a Sam Harris level. And I recall you seem to not be a Harris fan (although maybe in this frame, you are).
That waitress example is weird af. It presupposes the absence of free will, as you note; it also has an inherent power differential embedded in it; and is also inherently all about externalities.
It's weird because it's pointless. Equality of opportunity doesn't mean 'opportunity to get lucky in a random encounter'. It means: provide everyone with the basic tools through public education (or private, if available) and then no barriers or limitations on who can pursue which goal. There is no guarantee of equal outcomes, which is why Taylor Swift is who she is and almost all of the millions of other people with a decent voice are doing something else for a living. I, for example, did not play college or professional football, not for want of desire.
I wrote-in Bernie in 2020 with no regrets. Of course I did so in full awareness that it was a quixotic gesture and with no hope that a plurality of my fellow Americans would join me, and, in any case, those J6 maniacs would have probably launched a truly serious putsch if they had. But I also wished Bernie had thought more deeply about how to push his message. I’m not afraid of the word, but ‘socialism’ remains a deal-breaker for many. I think what’s required is a more comprehensive and detailed description of what it would actually mean for the middle class. The more closely the picture resembled the postwar liberal America pre-1980ish the better its chances of persuading the previously resistant. Of course there has been a sense of this - I’m not exactly offering a brilliant insight. But the details need to be worked-out, publicized and defended with tenacity. And the pitch will have to be made to a much wider range of voters and places. The fence sitters will want to know what distinguishes Century 21 socialism from the discredited command-economy disasters of the Cold War. They’ll also want to be confident that democracy is a non-negotiable value of socialist pols. Spelling out the dollars-&-cents bottom line for small biz owners - the petit bourgeois for all you Leninists out there - would also be necessary. Etc. So, how about it? I’ve been hanging around wondering when the poptimism complaints would finally make way for the meat and potatoes. Let’s see some movement on this…
Thanks Kat. But not too surprised. As all smart kats such as yourself know well, there was always overlap, and one thing I liked that Trump did that Bernie had also planned to do was cancel the TPP trade agreement. It’s called ‘populism’ for a reason, right? Was disappointed Bernie went quietly.
When a member of the outgroup is clearly not going to win it becomes easier to say nice things about them. Even easier if you can imply that the choice the outgroup *did* make lacks that honesty virtue.
At least half of these complaints are about wage differences between workers & how workers are sorted between careers and seniority levels. These problems also occur in the civil service and state owned enterprises; collectivization doesn’t fix them. And zeroing the capital share of income is neither here nor there with respect to the resentment of your boss or your competitor who landed a more prestigious job. The liberal social safety net and wage redistribution stuff gets closer to actually addressing the core complaints.
I think we’ll make a capitalist out of you yet, Freddie. The observation that trying to create outcomes equal for everyone is fools errand is part of capitalism’s appeal. From a macro POV, capitalism gives the most people the most opportunity (and has led to the wealthiest society in history). Some people are left behind, but more get ahead. And it’s on us as a society, through policy or charity to figure out what to do with the people who aren’t making it. Dems tend to favor policy while GOP favors charity. But very few people want to actually go to a system of communism where nobody gets ahead.
"Some people are left behind, but more get ahead. And it’s on us as a society, through policy or charity to figure out what to do with the people who aren’t making it."
But the Marxists don't think those who lose are simply "left behind." They argue that certain people and places are exploited, and have to be exploited, in order for capitalism to produce the wealth of those who "get ahead."
Just about everyone agrees that was true of capitalism's origins in the early modern period. Land and resources are "free" when you take them by force from native peoples. Labor is free/cheap when you impose slavery and force people into wage labor. Massive profits can be extracted and then given to a small group of people (owners, investors) who build modern economies and extract greater or lesser rents where ever they can.
You can debate whether that model (profits are extracted by the few by immiserating the many) still describes what happens in the 20th and 21st centuries. But for Marxists, even today the capitalist production of wealth can't happen by inviting everyone to take a shot at "making it" to the middle class or the mega-rich; it still relies on actively imposing structures that permit capital to extract profit––somewhere, somehow––from people and things (seas, land, air) that aren't aligned with capital and protected by its power.
So a Marxist is not going to agree that capitalism, even in a liberal society, could ever succeed at overcoming exploitation, even if enough liberal people wanted to.
This whole view of the world is just completely demolished by those graphs of world GDP per capita continuously increasing, fraction of people living in poverty continuously decreasing, etc. The world is running out of places you can point to as exploited. In 2100 or so, when literally every country on Earth has an HDI above that of, say, Peru in 2024, maybe we’ll finally stop hearing Lenin’s old claim that colonialism is necessary for capitalist economies to grow.
" The world is running out of places you can point to as exploited."
I don't know. With a different lens, it's possible to argue that the world is running out of ways to escape the results of a globe that's been pretty thoroughly exploited. The dramatic increases in wealth and HDI have also introduced concrete existential threats, risks that aren't included in those graphs of world GDP. The concept of progress might turn out to be the biggest misnomer in history.
And even putting aside those stakes, economic metrics don't measure a lot of intangibles that can count as exploitation and coercion. No one asks the people who have been farmers for generations if they want to have their mothers leave for 11 months a year in return for enough income to buy a stove and radio. You don't need colonial occupation to force people into wage labor they wouldn't ever choose.
Nor do you need to be in a developing country to have, say, rates of suicide and "deaths of despair" that go up even when national GDP goes up.
I haven't studied economics closely enough to know whether an alternative to capitalism could do better at giving most people a baseline material foundation dignity and self-determination than, say the kind of muscular democratic socialism envisioned by Hayes. But I do think DeBoer is probably right that what liberals like Hayes envision as a desirable society can't be achieved politically, at least in the US, because the owners of capitalism wouldn't allow it. Certainly not if we are talking globally.
"You don't need colonial occupation to force people into wage labor they wouldn't ever choose."
I don't get this. As opposed to the farm labor they would never choose? Most people would not choose labor at all (at least not serious labor) if it were not forced on them.
Who or what is doing the forcing? People choose to work rather than starve, sure. But historically, a lot of people would prefer to do the work that is bound up with their own values and ideas of governance, especially when the alternative means they have to move or split up their families or become subject to an employer or ruler who is from a vastly different culture. Indigenous peoples are the most obvious case, but you can see this among all kinds of peoples, even in the present.
The histories of colonialism actually show that in the past, most people would in fact choose the subsistence labor they and their ancestors had done for centuries––small-scale farming, hunting––over doing wage labor for capitalist production. That's why there were armies and not job fairs near the mines, plantations, and fruit harvesting operations.
Once capitalism reached a certain tipping point, a lot of societies can no longer hang on to subsistence economies even if they were left alone (although many people devise ways to live but still evade wage labor––which gets labeled as morally suspect). And wealth in a region can bring things that virtually everyone wants and genuinely chooses, e.g. better medical care, sharing of new ideas and pleasures. So it's a complicated picture. But I think it's myopic to just look at GDP rates and assume that everyone feels blessed to have been conscripted into a way of life where they have lives organized by working, buying and consuming––the "good life" of capitalism.
Indeed. During colonialism capitalism ran efficiently by shifting the exploitation overseas; during post-colonialism, this still occurs, but combined with a stealing from the future. Capitalism as a system aims for infinite growth on a planet with finite resources. As such, while technological and economic growth have helped bring millions out of poverty (while millions more are exploited) it has simultaneously led to massive ecological overshoot.
ie. what the late Michael Dowd is arguing from 12:00 to 18:00 here:
Yet if you look at the data, it's already clear that the worldwide trend is that of GDP growth decoupling from eg CO2 emissions. In many developed countries they've been going in opposite directions for a quite a while now. And yes, this is accounting for “outsourced” emissions. And yes, even China is going in the same direction. A lot if is due to the rapid decline in the cost of solar, wind and batteries.
Of course, while I suppose you'll agree CO2 emissions growth should be one our top concerns, the same is true for lots of other metrics as well, starting from different kinds of pollution. It's true for concerning trajectories with a more complex relationship with economic growth, as well, such as overpopulation. In that respect, modeling Sub-Saharan Africa is still a bit tricky, but the odds are quite comfortably on the side of world population capping at around 10B by 2050 or soon thereafter.
"Indeed, in order to achieve equality of opportunity, we would have to achieve equality of outcome anyway."
I generally agree with this. However, like most folks, I wouldn't pretend that I'm striving towards something I can actually reach, any more than I would reach Buddhist enlightenment. Those of us who strive for equal opportunity will always fail. And if you force me to choose between striving for equal opportunity, or striving for equality of outcome, I choose the former seven days a week and twice on Sundays. The outcome of striving towards equality of opportunity are not always good -- in many ways, it does indeed tend to reproduce the values of society in general, especially those who are more powerful in society. But it also produces incentives to make society better for all, as well as incentives to seek rents and exploit the rest of society). The outcome of striving towards equality of outcome, on the other hand, tends to provide incentives to destroy the benefits enjoyed by some (and, in cases, all) to ensure an equal playing field. You criticize the liberals who follow "the process" but the reality is that processes produce results that are not necessarily their ends; the equality of opportunity process, the liberal process, generates significantly more of value for all of society than equality of outcome does (even if most of that value is concentrated among the richest and most powerful; but most of society is better off as well). We are not crazy for thinking processes tend towards results.
"It’s a philosophy of well-meaning proceduralists who want the best for everyone but who cannot admit to themselves that the procedure they worship is entirely incapable of resulting in the best for everyone."
It wants the best *that is reasonably achievable* for everyone. No process or ideology or actions produces the actual best results for everyone. You think that destroying capital is the way to do that. I might even agree, very, very much depending on how that is accomplished (because processes produce results that are not necessarily their ends).
"It is not a coincidence that a liberal capitalist order always produces systems that preserve preexisting inequality."
I would argue they best preserve the values of the people who occupy them, and that is the only just way a society can operate. They don't do so perfectly, and not all of those values are good. But liberalism offers the actual robust means to *change* those values (free expression and inquiry, freedom of association, and relative freedom of action).
Maybe equality of opportunity has to be further watered down to “freedom from human imposed impediments to equality of opportunity.” The more I think about it the harder that is to define. But there seems to be an intuitive distinction between “you can’t play in the NFL because you’re 5’0” (fine) and “you can’t attend Harvard because you’re a woman.” (Not fine). Maybe equality of opportunity is about finding the type 2 inequalities and getting rid of them.
I too found this discussion of equality of opportunity quite challenging. Maybe something along the lines of "removal of structural obstructions based on invidious distinctions." I think that is what I would like to see. That might not be the end of what I want, but it's a start, but too big a mouthful. I think that this way of looking at it might be the same for many others, in which case, "equality of opportunity" is simply shorthand for what I said. The trouble with shorthand, and other labels, which in time become common usage, is that hey turn into the reality, and what was the underlying truth is lost.
I assume that by by "structural obstructions" you mean de jure laws that prevent equality of opportunity. I think there are plenty of obstructions that people face that are a results of both economics and culture. I think plenty of people would describe those obstructions as structural even if they're not legal obstructions.
I did not mean legal obstacles, since there can be societal, cultural and other "structural" impediments to advancement. But, if I'm missing something, please enlighten. Thanks.
I definitely think there are societal impediment that stand in the way of success for some people. The three most important:
- I think those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds face cultural challenges that make it harder to get into good colleges and good jobs and be successful in them.
- I think Black American still face significant cultural biases that make it harder for them to be successful. Jennifer Eberhardt's wonderful book "Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do" is by far the best book on this subject.
- I think women still face biases and cultural norms that make it harder for them to reach the top of organizations.
To me the steelman case for liberalism isn't its potential to achieve a final, utopian outcome, but as some form of it being maybe the best we can do under current and foreseeable future constraints. Which isn't to say Marxist ideas have no value as a type of criticism. But it isn't like we have no examples of societies that have embarked on those kinds of experiments, and big, important ones at that. And the result has never once yet been a more free, more prosperous society.
So by all means criticize liberalism. Part of liberalism's upside is that it has mechanisms for constructive criticism that can, at times, lead to system level improvements. But let's not pretend the Soviets or East Germans (or even governments still attached to those sorts of ideas like the ANC in South Africa) have figured out something superior. They haven't and the proof is right there in their societies' outcomes. Even the Chinese have abandoned the big ideas in all but name for a kind of nationalistic mercantilism.
The PMC's "official" ideology, if it could be said to have one, is not liberal -- at least, it's not liberal any longer. Now it's the opposite of liberal: weak totalitarian. Or, perhaps a better way to put it is that there's a war going on within the PMC between liberalism and weak totalitarianism, and weak totalitarianism has taken hearty root in most of the PMC institutions.
The PMC doesn't have one set of class interests any more than "workers" do. Class analysis suffers from some of the same problems identitarian analysis does: it pretends that the values and interests of a class of people are all the same. They are not.
That’s a good comment (and why i’m not much of a commenter; too laborious for me to be succinct)
OWS was a mess. And it’s been spreading ever since. I find the, well, cosplay, of ‘Struggle Session’ type thinking…just bizarre. And it’s in town and state governance now. My best hopes = demographic; that it will flame out in 20 - 40 more years, as those adjuncts age out of university teaching.
"Hayes has always been someone who defined a moral vision of the world that I could get behind, but who was apparently incapable of recognizing the profound limits of his sunny attachment to the Way Things Work, the modern liberal dedication to democracy and rights and capitalism and all of that jazz."
-What are some of the ways that an attachment to rights--at least as they're conceived by American liberals--prevents us from achievinng that moral vision?
Chris Hayes is the uber-nerd of neoliberal news. I think he sold his soul to MSNBC a long time ago. He's not going to do anything to jeopardize his cushy, clubby standard of living. I can't take him very seriously, myself.
It’s always mildly frustrating reading your pieces, as you give a diagnosis of modern political psychologies that are absolutely spot on, but your economic views are always vague and naive (exactly like the people you criticise). For what it is worth, I would probably be considered a ‘liberal’ in the US - the fundamental basis of my view is that I am in the business of constructing large scale societal machines to improve people’s lives, and however bad the capitalist machine is, the socialist machine has fundamental design flaws that make it even worse. Is there anywhere where you do actually articulate your full economic arguments and views, because in pieces like this it just read like you complaining that things aren’t good now so *clearly* capitalism is a good thing and engaging in the exact same vibes based reasoning as most other left wingers?
Criticizing Marxism as vague, when it's the largest philosophical corpus produced in human history, is... interesting.
I think he just means your defense/description of it.
And also one of the most fragmented and divided. Calling yourself a ‘Marxist’ reveals almost nothing without a further elaboration of what you take that to mean (in actual policy terms, not vague aspirations like ‘end exploitation of the proletariat’ or whatever).
Freddie: please, for us ignorant slobs, just go ahead and do a Marxism 101 piece one day. You needn't blush to admit your writing is a bit more engaging and accessible, to the average 21st c. reader, than that of Marx and Engels.
This would actually be great. I'm a bit of an ignorant slob when it comes to the ins-and-outs of the philosophy as well.
And it works well where?
Well where in your view does capitalism work well? There are many more capitalist states than "Marxist" states unless you use an absurdly elastic definition of "Marxism". Many of these capitalist states are very, very poor. Even in the richest of these states (the US) there are millions of impoverished children, people who die preventable deaths because they couldn't afford the doctor, etc, etc. Why are you so sure things couldn't be better?
Oh come on. This is just a tad 'perfect is the enemy of the good' is it not?
And exactly HOW have things NOT gotten 'better' over the last ~2 centuries?
Living standards have improved in places like the former USSR and China, too, though, so it is not necessarily the case that progress is impossible in the absence of capitalism.
It's a question of if things are as good as they could be. I think we can avoid having millions of children grow up in poverty. Others think it is a necessary evil.
If you think improvements in Russia and China, etc have occurred due to an ABSCENCE of Capitalism, then you are just simply delusional.
For a long time 1st-world wealth depended a LOT on resource extraction from 2nd- and especially 3rd-world states. It's not quite as egregious as colonial times now, but it is still very much a thing.
Regardless, have you ever tried to ask yourself what the difference in relative standard of living gains have been between rich and poor over the last two centuries? I don't have the data for this, but I'd be willing to wager that despite both obviously increasing, the former gains vastly outpace the latter.
Or is that working as intended?
And that 'resource extraction' as you deem it is DIRECTLY why industrialization occurred, which in turn has lifted most of the global population out of abject privation! What's ur point here? Has there been exploitation, corruption, unequal outcomes, and unforgivable immorality? Most assuredly. Welcome to human history and civilization. The modern West, Enlightennent, Liberalism, and Captalism has done more to foster the growth and well being of ALL Humanity than anything that has come prior. It's not even debatable...(but folks still try!)
As for the gains aspect, it's no surprise that those on the 'upper' end have gained exponentially more than those not in that class. Again, welcome to history. Is it intended? Maybe, at least indirectly? I dunno. It's likely an indirect function of the increase of modern civilization. Again, I'm wondering what ur getting at by articulating these things? Should the 1st world feel guilty? Dunno. Should we at least be aware that inequalities are a serious problem among humans and work diligently, and INTELLIGENTLY, to mitigate the issues that arise as a product of these inequalities? We do. To the point where currently we are stuck navel gazing, somewhere btwn guilt and shame, and are in danger of losing the whole thing.
Can you NOT see how this makes his point even more apt?
Every time we try and pin you down on how it would work in practice, you just hand wave it away.
Am I to understand that your definition/conceptualization of Marxism is akin to the von Humboldt philosophy of 'to enquire and create, devoid of external influences'? At least somewhat?
Marxism has a big literature but you are basically the only one here who’s read it! You have a huge captive audience here of people who really want to find high quality leftist thinking, even if most of us are not currently leftists. Why don’t you ever write an article literally telling us something about Marxism?
In particular you point at Bernie socialists as having supposedly abandoned the liberal capitalist system, but I don’t see that at all. They’re seem to me to be broadly normie social democrats, committed to democracy, the rule of law, and for the most part property rights, but advocating for much more muscular state intervention in market failures than US Democrats have been comfortable with. But it sounds like you think the overall system does need to be abandoned. In what way? Do you support a vanguard-led revolution? What kind of political system should they impose? As full of material as the Marxist corpus is, you’re well aware that it’s got a broad mix of positions on these questions, and Marx himself was pretty resistant to describing details of a socialist state, so it’s really quite fair that we have no idea what you actually want. I’d love to find out!
I too would love to see Freddie's discourse on this
Yeah, it seems like Bernie just wants a mixed economy which is further to the left than we have right now. Which makes sense. I don’t think anyone wants to live under a system of *pure* anything, be it capitalism, socialism, monarchy, democracy, etc., and their “true believers,” who usually need to be kept from power altogether. But I did enjoy this piece and agree with the basic principle that equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes are a distinction without a difference - though they can be different “North Stars,” if you will, to guide rhetoric and in some cases policy.
But assuming that someone wasn't raised a Marxist and doesn't have the depth of knowledge you have, and wants to have Marxism make the best case it can in the same amount of time we'd give to the various articulations of liberalism that you criticize as insufficient, what would you recommend? This isn't a gotcha question, I genuinely want to know.
Where does this corpus reside?
If only there was a search engine that would let you google "communism reading list" and get a huge swath of books and essays written over a hundred year period that you could peruse at your leisure.
Not sure snark is helpful, in any way.
Are you tone policing everyone in this thread or just the people you don't agree with? You don't have to answer, I can see from all the snarling contempt people are throwing that somehow is not as worth a rebuttal.
Tone policing? Lol. Wtf does that even mean? And ofc no one need answer/comment. The irony of that position is palpable. Who wrote the entirely snarky response? You did. And of what use is it?
You want to defend Marxism? Then do it. Don't expect others to become 'experts' in order to point out the failings and mostly pedantic tenets of some utopian system that has zero chance of EVER being implemented. You know, w/o killing a few million folks here and there. My time would be better spent 'studying' the corpus of astrology....at least no one suffers from astrology.
K-I'm sure you're correct, as far as that goes. However, go to any bookstore, and look for the Marxist literature shelf. Good luck with that. Ditto any public library. The Jacobin Is hardly the most popular magazine in the country. I can assure you that folks in Eastern Europe do not embrace Marxism. My general familiarity with Western Europe is the same. So, quite frankly, I find the basic assertion risible.
The basic assertion is that there has been a huge amount of writing about communism by economists and political theorists, the fact that you are too lazy to go look for it does not invalidate that claim.
Lotsa stuff written about lotsa stuff. What's ur point?
Oh....snarl, snarl
Marxism.org they have a huge library of pdfs
I'm going to suggest that the Catholic Church and the Royal Shakespeare Society, among many others, have large libraries.
With respect, Freddie, the entire Marxist corpus is a tower of verbiage signifying nothing. The entire edifice is incoherent. Pointing to the volume of writings on Marxism as evidence of the truth of its claims is analogous to saying that all those centuries of Scholasticism proves the correctness of Christian cosmology and eschatology. Lots of writers talking to each other in increasingly tight loops of esoteric mutual masturbation does not result in proof of anything. Aquinas and Gramsci are both fancy talkers explaining away the evidence of everyone's eyes. What's the difference?
Human nature is an actual thing. Since we are all doomed to live trapped inside our own skulls, to have our own orgasms whether or not they are simultaneous with anyone else's, and to eventually die in solitary terror, the individualism you decry is inevitable in all societies no matter how their economics are organized. And in truth, all economies are organized the same way at bottom, no matter what they pretend.
In the end, Cuba could not permanently suppress the impulse for self-seeking economic activity among the population at large. And while it tried to suppress private property and private enterprise, the well-situated players in the state apparatus--the army, the ministries--did and got what they could for themselves. It's no accident that the Soviet Nomenklatura became the kleptocrats of the post-Soviet era. Capitalism is the human condition, as itself or under some other name. These conversations always remind of the Soviet satirical magazine, Krokodil, which mocked that capitalism is the exploitation of man by man, and Communism is the exact opposite.
Look, Marxism is not a system of ideas, it's an understandable and humane emotional reaction to the sadness of economic life in all societies since the species began. In the caves, the headman took too much and left too little for the others. During the Industrial Revolution, the plutocrats exploited child workers and coal miners and women in sweatshops. Liberals feel what you feel about these things and try to do practical things to mitigate the worst of it. But to fundamentally change the underlying hierarchy of human life, or to set parameters on what is achievable by people (you can make between $X and $Y, not less and not more) isn't just politically impossible to get passed. It's impossible to enforce even if it were. Just like it would be impossible to enforce age limits on human beings (you may not live past 85, we need the space for others, so you. must off yourself for the good of everyone). Human nature won't allow it. Only intellectuals living in their heads and divorced from the urges of normal people could possibly believe in a human nature that doesn't contain the selfish Id.
It's human nature to write big corpus.
I agree with everything ... except the part about the children. Children in the Victorian era like children in 21st century Asia aren't forced to work because The Man. Children in these conditions beg to work because in the Victorian era, as in modern Asia, food is so very expensive that if you don't work, you also don't eat.
That's just generally true outside of modernity. Absent refrigeration and modern agriculture, food and nutrition is an extremely difficult problem.
"outside of modernity"
That's a great point. Re-reading this it struck me. First I thought— outside of: an abundant inexpensive energy first world, food is an extremely difficult problem.
Then it occurred to me: Food isn't incredibly inexpensive, globalism has levelized food prices. Because of capitalism, we're so incredibly wealthy, food is incredibly inexpensive to us.
Trade, capitalism, commerce….is bound up in human evolution and the development of religions; it’s the framework we have to work within, like gravity. “tower of verbiage signifying nothing”. Add into that the massive PhD icebergs….it’s meaningless obfuscation.
Your last line lines up with a thought I was having. Marxism, in its applied iterations, reminds me a bit of "The Forbidden Planet" where the Krell build a machine of almost limitless power, forgetting that they are deep down savages, and destroy themselves in a single night “Monsters from the id” :)
Put another way, Marxism has produced the most "talk" in human history. That it's the province of philosophical navel-gazing isn't a feature. How about some "walk"? Instead of merely pointing out the existence of reams & reams of "talk," outline *your* vision for how we get there. Yes, liberalism & capitalism do not produce optimal outcomes. Literally everyone knows this; some people are okay with the tradeoffs in the absence of something that might do a better job. What, then, will (or could)? I would sincerely like to read your positive vision rather than just another "Boo capitalism!" (or liberalism) post.
On this point, I had the good fortune three years ago to read David Harvey's The Limits To Capital. One of the key takeaways from that book is that some key tenets of what is described as Marxist economic theory, which are often considered by a certain kind of self-defined Marxist as fundamental "truths" of the doctrine, are in fact more provisional and less final than they are often considered to be, and may well have been revised by Marx and Engels had they lived to do so. In other words, Marx and Engels developed an interesting program for further research rather than a corpus that could or should have been treated as a final body of doctrine, let alone the official dogma of political parties and governments.
The breadth of "Marxist" thought makes it perfect "motte and bailey" material. Can we, perhaps, judge Marxism as a working political philosophy based on the outcomes it's achieved?
It's the very size of the corpus that makes it vague. Maoism and Trotskyism are both Marxist but very different. When I am in West Bengal a marvel at the communist party flags which are all marked to distinguish which school of communism they are promoting.
I think socialism's curse is that a one-page summary sounds so attractive to young adults who think it's too much effort to study the whole corpus, so lots of socialist coded output (as in tweets, blog posts) is indeed incoherent, like that guy whose tagline is the hammer and sickle plus the anarchy A.
Something closer to this, which is clearly sympathetic to Socialism but also clear-eyed about the functions it would need to fulfill to be an appealing alternative to Capitalism, would be welcome:
https://jacobin.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black
Yes, I completely agree. Freddie also takes as a *premise* that liberal capitalism is incapable of producing broad prosperity and then uses that to illustrate a contradiction in Hayes' thinking, when that's exactly the thing Hayes and others would disagree with him on! (I do agree with the point that equality of opportunity is a pretty silly concept, though.)
Indeed, Capitalism is historically quite good at producing broad prosperity, especially when paired with a government and a tax policy engineered toward that same aim. Those are problems of political systems, though, not economic ones.
This hits the nail on the head. Exactly where on the “Political” spectrum can you realistically set the control mechanism for the “Market” to achieve the desired “Outcome.” Both Liberalism and Marxism are unhelpful in this regard. Without a well articulated regulatory framework adapted to the political environment it’s a mess. You have to make the adjustments from the bottom up by marshaling political will. The old “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
Capitalism has been good at producing broad prosperity during a time of historically unprecedented productivity that might be going away. A fundamental principle of Marxism is that the second economic productivity slows down corporations have to make hard decisions about where to cut costs to increase profit they will pick labor every time, and if you have strong political forces marshalling them not to do so you are basically forcing them to operate under conditions that will make them not profitable, at which point they won't be competitive anymore and will collapse.
We've been seeing a little of this in the conversations professional economists have been having about the trade-offs between high wages and high costs for basic goods, right now we are managing to balance on that knife edge (although plenty of people are still unhappy), but you can imagine if people stop buying inflated goods, then the only way to prevent a massive recession is to either allow massive lay-offs or wage decreases, neither one of which really sings "broad prosperity" to me.
In a capitalist economy, even a "massive recession" is historically unlikely to result in widespread famine. The same cannot be said of Communist supply controls.
Many of the wage issues that you address are actually the result of globalism—which is a political choice—rather than capitalist principles, which can, and should, be reigned in by good governance.
Oh, they are absolutely capitalist. Capitalism is all about efficiency. Taking advantage of cheap labor and reduced construction costs in a distant country by offshoring because the reduction in costs to create more than offsets the costs to ship the finished goods is all efficiency. There are political issues at stake too, but the impetus is 100% capitalism.
Sure, and perhaps I worded poorly; my suggestion was that Capital Markets are subject to their governments; it's why we couldn't just "make" the USSR, or Vietnam, or Cuba, or China, or Venezuela adopt capitalist ideals, even through war, and more than we could just "make" Afghanistan and Iraq into democracies.
It's why food and tech companies can't do in the E.U. what they get away with in the U.S. Surely the capitalist impulses of Google make it want to operate the same way in Germany—to say nothing of China—as it does in the U.S., but the governments of those nations will not permit it. The globalist effects of capitalism *in the United States* are political, regulatory, and trade problems, not economic ones.
It's like nuclear power vs nuclear bombs. If you can place systems, constraints, and controls on the raw power of something, you can yield incredible results. If you don't, you get destruction. But that's not the fault of the power itself! It's a reckless failure to harness the incredible potential at hand.
Decisions about production made under politically-captured command economies are also all about efficiency - they're just optimizing for different types of efficiency. Capitalism solves for the largest delta between production cost and public demand. Political economy solves for the largest social benefit to the person making the decisions (e.g. benefits to clients, personal enrichment, etc.) You'll notice that the former depends on things continuing to get made in order for profits to keep coming in. The latter is entirely disconnected from production at all - in fact, it almost works better if the messy business of actually making things is entirely disconnected from the status-games. Hence, things getting run into the ground and shortages.
I don't know how to take seriously the claim that global trade and outsourcing aren't natural consequences of capitalism, otherwise IDK what you mean by globalism.
Also, I don't dispute the communist famines, but you should read "Grapes of Wrath" sometime to see what people went through in this country vis a vis famine and hunger during thr Great Depression. They don't teach us in school how many people died of malnutrition, but I'm betting a quick Google search will show that it definitely happened to hundreds, maybe thousands of people. And let's never forget, the decision to feed people who can't afford it is fundamentally not a free market one.
I have read The Grapes of Wrath, twenty-two years ago. It was incredibly formative to my politics.
I also had a maternal grandfather who grew up during the depression, in a part of the country (Southern Appalachia) that did not see any of the resources of more urbanized parts of the country. Then Pearl Harbor, Marines, Okinawa and Peli Liu. I had the opportunity to both live with and care for him late in his life, as well as formally interview him for middle-school "Greatest Generation" projects in the Nineties. It was subjective, of course, and localized, but I have a quite intimate view on the effects of the Depression in the U.S.
There was no famine in the U.S. during the depression. There was, infact, *over* production, and the birth of federal grain subsidies. The malnutrition that was experienced was driven by poverty, not scarcity. It would take another 30 years for LBJ's "War on Poverty" to start putting in place the social guardrails (SNAP, EBT, etc) that we see today.
The curious thing about The Grapes of Wrath is that story was a favorite of the Soviet propaganda machine. So much so that when made into a movie, it was shown in the USSR ... until the inmates discovered the poor in America actually had trucks! The movie was quickly pulled after that.
The Depression and the Dust Bowl were not the direct result of a command economy visiting hardship on its population out of ideological rigidity. Moreover, whatever death by famine occurred during the Depression is microscopic compared to good times visited upon people by Lenin, Stalin, Mao and their copycats.
Excellent point. Hunger, for example, is a solved problem. A lot of political theory couldn't assume this fact because for almost all of human history it was an immediate, deadly concern to all but the absolute richest. Virtually everyone was one bad harvest away from death. It is precisely the profit motive and the technological cascade dating from prior to the Industrial Revolution that led to the path of global abundence of food, and it's the modern capitalist states that are its stewards. If we ran the simulation again, would a non-profit motive system have managed this?
Exactly the example I had in mind. Much of the Leftist discourse boils down to well-meaning middle-to-upper-middle-class Marxists in the West obsessing over a belief that their citizenry is somehow entitled to "more", because they have no experience of having "nothing."
In fairness, I believe Marx claimed that capitalism was a useful (possibly necessary) precursor to socialism.
Which is even MORE magical thinking.
I don't defend it. Merely point out that capitalism dramatically improving the lot of many people by doing things like improving crop yields and enhancing technology better than socialism could isn't really a ding against Marxism. Marx would have granted capitalism's great power in that regard. I believe his criticism had to do with the cost, the unjustness of it, and that that inherent unjustness would spell its doom. Again, as I understand Marxism; I'm no expert. I don't believe that to be correct, at least no more than it's correct to say that every massively powerful institution falls from within, not from without.
Exactly. Marx was predicting the natural failure state of capitalism, which is when innovation and productivity are no longer the driving forces of profit but everything has been optimized to a point where the only way for capitalists to continue to profit is to destroy wages. The reason this hasn't happened is because it turns out there were a lot of industries that were only at the beginning stages of capitalist innovation at the time Marx was writing, and I think Marx himself would be surprised and how much runway capitalism turned out to have by innovating entirely new service industries and telecommunications industries into existence. Which, good! But now we are at a point where we can basically see the same dynamic in every single industry that only a decade or two ago was thought to be at the frontier of boundless new potential and they are all flagging and stuttering. The service industries can't afford to pay people a wage they want, and all the fancy disruptive tech industries are instituting massive layoffs and pushing AI innovation in the desperate hope that it will open up some new field of profit because otherwise they aren't going to be able to sustain the share prices that make them seem immune to the economic gravity everyone else is dealing with.
I guess start here and then come back for more advanced reading recommendations, if you desire?
Socialism: A Very Short Introduction (2nd edn)
Michael Newman
https://academic.oup.com/book/32741
I understand what you are saying, but I will remain a "Rawlsian Liberal," with all the limitations of that stance, because the historical experience of "Marxism" is of extreme brutality and suppression of all dissent – such that history shows that "Marxism" as it has really existed is no more effective at addessing the problems we all want to solve than is liberalism, and in fundamental ways is much worse. I am frustrated by liberalism, but I fear "Marxism", and I think I have good reason to.
To be fair, I wouldn't call the Soviet or Chinese govs "Marxist" by any honest stretch of the word. Communist sure. And the USSR could have easily been considered fascist based on how it operated in reality.
Calling the USSR or China 'Marxist' is as big a stretch as calling our primaries and caucuses 'democratic'.
“Do you just want things to change a little bit? Do you just want the banks to be a little bit nicer, or for people to be a little more respectful of each other’s identities — All of which is good — but basically you carry on living in a nice world where you tinker with it…
…the key thing is that in confronting those powers, and trying to transform the world you might lose a lot. This is a sort of forgotten idea. Is that actually you surrender yourself up to a big idea and in the the process you might lose something but you’d actually gain a bigger sense, because you change the world for the better. I know it sounds soppy, But this is the forgotten thing about politics. Is that you give up some of your individualism to something bigger than yourself. You surrender yourself — and it’s a lost idea. And I think really in answer to your question: You can spot real change happening when you see people from the liberal middle classes, beginning to give themselves up to something. Surrender themselves for something bigger. And at the moment, there is nothing like that in the liberal imagination”
-Adam Curtis
I sympathize a bit with the sentiment, but I find that talk of sacrifice comes cheaply when you’re talking about anyone except yourself.
Does Curtis himself, with a highly successful and enviable career in filmmaking, match the standard he outlines here? Does he acknowledge any shortcomings with respect to this ideal in the interview this quote comes from?
An individual’s inability to live up to an ideal does not invalidate that ideal
no, but it makes it harder to treat that individual as an exemplar or model to emulate in your own life. if you want people to actually sacrifice things, giving them examples of how to do that in a real and meaningful way is important!
Perhaps not, but it does call into question the individual who is doing the advocating.
WHAT is this 'something bigger'?
I've never thought very much about what "equality of opportunity" would entail – if I had to articulate my assumptions, it would be something like removing as many barriers to success as possible, not fretting about the ones we can't do anything about, and letting whatever comes of that be the outcome.
Which, now that I say it, would really be more in line with a right-wing-ish, Republican-y desire to shred regulation and shrink oversight. Because what's stuff like the EPA or OSHA except some of the few barriers to opportunity we can control?
That's not a conclusion I'm all that comfortable with. I'll have to chew on this some more.
In some cases the content of the regulation is just “only incumbents and their designees may ply this trade” - see taxi medallions. This is obviously anathema to equal opportunity. (Closed shop unions were similar, though not exactly a regulation).
Some, like say San Francisco’s permitting process, are theoretically possibly to get through, but in practice clearly favor the deep pocketed and politically connected. These are pretty bad for equal opportunity.
Others, like say restaurant health codes, are clearly surmountable by millions of entrepreneurs - who just need to be reasonably conscientious about the way they do things - and are no problem at all.
Regulation isn’t the primary thing though, it’s usually about the accessibility of public education.
If barriers fall equally on all of us, they are not equality barriers but rather limitations we place on ourselves out of a greater need (not drinking poison water, not having waste disposal plants next to schools). I get regulatory capture and whatnot, which is problematic, but not an argument against rational rules for a clean environment or a safe workplace.
No, they're regressive and disproportionately hurt smaller and under-resourced market participants, just the same as a flat $20/day fee means nothing to Jeff Bezos, but would be debilitating to someone on a low income.
Liberal market economies are the worst except for everything else that we’ve ever been able to pull off. Criticize it all you want, but unless you can formulate a form of Marxism that doesn’t just devolve into a dictatorship of the nomenklatura, your criticisms are empty. Liberal market economies are terrible, but that’s the best we have and the only choice is to figure out how to make them less bad. The Nordic model seems like a big improvement on the US model, and it’s beyond me why anyone on the left would wouldn’t make that their lodestar. Stop tilting windmills.
What's also weird is the defacto claim that the exchange btwn labor and capital is exploitative. This is an assumption that isn't true. Further, not sure how exploitation is absent in even the 'purest' forms of what is euphemisitcaly called Marxism.
I think it devolves to that, in the absence of a regulated market for labor. (Hence, I'm a dirty Liberal.)
That's due to how Marx calculates surplus value i.e. as Richard Wolff explains straightforwardly here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VcgarDdIBA
(You may well already know this - I just don't think it's quite right to call it an assumption - more of an equation that arguably leaves out some factors).
So if an equation leaves out 'some factors', of what use is that equation?!?
Hint: it's worthless.
I think you are overstating the negative aspects of free markets/rule of law/equality under the law/individual rights considerably. Most people in the US do well, or well enough, and far better than at any other time or place in history.
Marxism is inherently coercive and admits of no countervailing or competing systems. Which is why the dialectic has such an enormous body count.
The focus on process isn’t arbitrary though. It’s to protect individuals from government abuse, and to prevent the market system that produces wealth for all of us from government destruction. Freddy might say that growth is slowing, and the only thing left to do is redistribute the winnings, but I think markets and liberalism will continue to periods of waxing and waning growth, and the resultant reductions in poverty and increases in middle class lives, all while protecting individual autonomy. Pretty good! Worth protecting!
"markets and liberalism will continue to periods of waxing and waning growth, and the resultant reductions in poverty and increases in middle class lives, all while protecting individual autonomy."
Unless Marx and 21st century Marxists are right that those reductions in poverty through capitalism happen only because capital finds new domains and populations to exploit and immiserate. It used to be straight-up colonial capture by capital; nowadays the immiseration happens in other ways that aren't always measured through GDP––disease and death by pollution, loss of homelands through rising seas, uninhabitable geographies, etc.
Right but none of that is actually required for capitalist economic growth. That’s always been the most obviously wrong part of Marxism.
Interesting piece.
I’ve long been of the opinion that a true and fulsome state of “equal opportunity “ is extremely difficult if not impossible to reach.
I had not considered that “absolute” equality of opportunity begets equality of outcomes. However, this does assume that all unique individual characteristics (like interests, preferences, strengths, weaknesses) fall under the auspices of “opportunity”. But would it not hold, if taken further to the extreme, that absolute equality of opportunity would culminate in a solitary (ie. single) outcome state? And if so, does that even seem plausible?
Rather, I would not consider everything under sun to be in the realm of opportunity. I would start by removing immutable traits. Such as with your waitress eye colour example. “If her eyes were a different colour” is not a knock against equal opportunity; it’s a call for an alternate or parallel reality.
Also, to argue that a given opportunity must result in a certain outcome is to then argue against free will. Almost to a Sam Harris level. And I recall you seem to not be a Harris fan (although maybe in this frame, you are).
That waitress example is weird af. It presupposes the absence of free will, as you note; it also has an inherent power differential embedded in it; and is also inherently all about externalities.
It's weird because it's pointless. Equality of opportunity doesn't mean 'opportunity to get lucky in a random encounter'. It means: provide everyone with the basic tools through public education (or private, if available) and then no barriers or limitations on who can pursue which goal. There is no guarantee of equal outcomes, which is why Taylor Swift is who she is and almost all of the millions of other people with a decent voice are doing something else for a living. I, for example, did not play college or professional football, not for want of desire.
I wrote-in Bernie in 2020 with no regrets. Of course I did so in full awareness that it was a quixotic gesture and with no hope that a plurality of my fellow Americans would join me, and, in any case, those J6 maniacs would have probably launched a truly serious putsch if they had. But I also wished Bernie had thought more deeply about how to push his message. I’m not afraid of the word, but ‘socialism’ remains a deal-breaker for many. I think what’s required is a more comprehensive and detailed description of what it would actually mean for the middle class. The more closely the picture resembled the postwar liberal America pre-1980ish the better its chances of persuading the previously resistant. Of course there has been a sense of this - I’m not exactly offering a brilliant insight. But the details need to be worked-out, publicized and defended with tenacity. And the pitch will have to be made to a much wider range of voters and places. The fence sitters will want to know what distinguishes Century 21 socialism from the discredited command-economy disasters of the Cold War. They’ll also want to be confident that democracy is a non-negotiable value of socialist pols. Spelling out the dollars-&-cents bottom line for small biz owners - the petit bourgeois for all you Leninists out there - would also be necessary. Etc. So, how about it? I’ve been hanging around wondering when the poptimism complaints would finally make way for the meat and potatoes. Let’s see some movement on this…
Honestly, I live in a fire engine red state, surrounded by MAGA types.
You would be shocked how well many of them regard Sanders. "I don't agree with him, but at least he's honest...." is a frequent refrain.
Thanks Kat. But not too surprised. As all smart kats such as yourself know well, there was always overlap, and one thing I liked that Trump did that Bernie had also planned to do was cancel the TPP trade agreement. It’s called ‘populism’ for a reason, right? Was disappointed Bernie went quietly.
When a member of the outgroup is clearly not going to win it becomes easier to say nice things about them. Even easier if you can imply that the choice the outgroup *did* make lacks that honesty virtue.
You have a point. But I heard these comments in 2016 when Sanders was a genuine threat.
At least half of these complaints are about wage differences between workers & how workers are sorted between careers and seniority levels. These problems also occur in the civil service and state owned enterprises; collectivization doesn’t fix them. And zeroing the capital share of income is neither here nor there with respect to the resentment of your boss or your competitor who landed a more prestigious job. The liberal social safety net and wage redistribution stuff gets closer to actually addressing the core complaints.
I think we’ll make a capitalist out of you yet, Freddie. The observation that trying to create outcomes equal for everyone is fools errand is part of capitalism’s appeal. From a macro POV, capitalism gives the most people the most opportunity (and has led to the wealthiest society in history). Some people are left behind, but more get ahead. And it’s on us as a society, through policy or charity to figure out what to do with the people who aren’t making it. Dems tend to favor policy while GOP favors charity. But very few people want to actually go to a system of communism where nobody gets ahead.
"Some people are left behind, but more get ahead. And it’s on us as a society, through policy or charity to figure out what to do with the people who aren’t making it."
But the Marxists don't think those who lose are simply "left behind." They argue that certain people and places are exploited, and have to be exploited, in order for capitalism to produce the wealth of those who "get ahead."
Just about everyone agrees that was true of capitalism's origins in the early modern period. Land and resources are "free" when you take them by force from native peoples. Labor is free/cheap when you impose slavery and force people into wage labor. Massive profits can be extracted and then given to a small group of people (owners, investors) who build modern economies and extract greater or lesser rents where ever they can.
You can debate whether that model (profits are extracted by the few by immiserating the many) still describes what happens in the 20th and 21st centuries. But for Marxists, even today the capitalist production of wealth can't happen by inviting everyone to take a shot at "making it" to the middle class or the mega-rich; it still relies on actively imposing structures that permit capital to extract profit––somewhere, somehow––from people and things (seas, land, air) that aren't aligned with capital and protected by its power.
So a Marxist is not going to agree that capitalism, even in a liberal society, could ever succeed at overcoming exploitation, even if enough liberal people wanted to.
This whole view of the world is just completely demolished by those graphs of world GDP per capita continuously increasing, fraction of people living in poverty continuously decreasing, etc. The world is running out of places you can point to as exploited. In 2100 or so, when literally every country on Earth has an HDI above that of, say, Peru in 2024, maybe we’ll finally stop hearing Lenin’s old claim that colonialism is necessary for capitalist economies to grow.
" The world is running out of places you can point to as exploited."
I don't know. With a different lens, it's possible to argue that the world is running out of ways to escape the results of a globe that's been pretty thoroughly exploited. The dramatic increases in wealth and HDI have also introduced concrete existential threats, risks that aren't included in those graphs of world GDP. The concept of progress might turn out to be the biggest misnomer in history.
And even putting aside those stakes, economic metrics don't measure a lot of intangibles that can count as exploitation and coercion. No one asks the people who have been farmers for generations if they want to have their mothers leave for 11 months a year in return for enough income to buy a stove and radio. You don't need colonial occupation to force people into wage labor they wouldn't ever choose.
Nor do you need to be in a developing country to have, say, rates of suicide and "deaths of despair" that go up even when national GDP goes up.
I haven't studied economics closely enough to know whether an alternative to capitalism could do better at giving most people a baseline material foundation dignity and self-determination than, say the kind of muscular democratic socialism envisioned by Hayes. But I do think DeBoer is probably right that what liberals like Hayes envision as a desirable society can't be achieved politically, at least in the US, because the owners of capitalism wouldn't allow it. Certainly not if we are talking globally.
"You don't need colonial occupation to force people into wage labor they wouldn't ever choose."
I don't get this. As opposed to the farm labor they would never choose? Most people would not choose labor at all (at least not serious labor) if it were not forced on them.
Who or what is doing the forcing? People choose to work rather than starve, sure. But historically, a lot of people would prefer to do the work that is bound up with their own values and ideas of governance, especially when the alternative means they have to move or split up their families or become subject to an employer or ruler who is from a vastly different culture. Indigenous peoples are the most obvious case, but you can see this among all kinds of peoples, even in the present.
The histories of colonialism actually show that in the past, most people would in fact choose the subsistence labor they and their ancestors had done for centuries––small-scale farming, hunting––over doing wage labor for capitalist production. That's why there were armies and not job fairs near the mines, plantations, and fruit harvesting operations.
Once capitalism reached a certain tipping point, a lot of societies can no longer hang on to subsistence economies even if they were left alone (although many people devise ways to live but still evade wage labor––which gets labeled as morally suspect). And wealth in a region can bring things that virtually everyone wants and genuinely chooses, e.g. better medical care, sharing of new ideas and pleasures. So it's a complicated picture. But I think it's myopic to just look at GDP rates and assume that everyone feels blessed to have been conscripted into a way of life where they have lives organized by working, buying and consuming––the "good life" of capitalism.
Indeed. During colonialism capitalism ran efficiently by shifting the exploitation overseas; during post-colonialism, this still occurs, but combined with a stealing from the future. Capitalism as a system aims for infinite growth on a planet with finite resources. As such, while technological and economic growth have helped bring millions out of poverty (while millions more are exploited) it has simultaneously led to massive ecological overshoot.
ie. what the late Michael Dowd is arguing from 12:00 to 18:00 here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hV91pH8HORo
Yet if you look at the data, it's already clear that the worldwide trend is that of GDP growth decoupling from eg CO2 emissions. In many developed countries they've been going in opposite directions for a quite a while now. And yes, this is accounting for “outsourced” emissions. And yes, even China is going in the same direction. A lot if is due to the rapid decline in the cost of solar, wind and batteries.
Of course, while I suppose you'll agree CO2 emissions growth should be one our top concerns, the same is true for lots of other metrics as well, starting from different kinds of pollution. It's true for concerning trajectories with a more complex relationship with economic growth, as well, such as overpopulation. In that respect, modeling Sub-Saharan Africa is still a bit tricky, but the odds are quite comfortably on the side of world population capping at around 10B by 2050 or soon thereafter.
"Indeed, in order to achieve equality of opportunity, we would have to achieve equality of outcome anyway."
I generally agree with this. However, like most folks, I wouldn't pretend that I'm striving towards something I can actually reach, any more than I would reach Buddhist enlightenment. Those of us who strive for equal opportunity will always fail. And if you force me to choose between striving for equal opportunity, or striving for equality of outcome, I choose the former seven days a week and twice on Sundays. The outcome of striving towards equality of opportunity are not always good -- in many ways, it does indeed tend to reproduce the values of society in general, especially those who are more powerful in society. But it also produces incentives to make society better for all, as well as incentives to seek rents and exploit the rest of society). The outcome of striving towards equality of outcome, on the other hand, tends to provide incentives to destroy the benefits enjoyed by some (and, in cases, all) to ensure an equal playing field. You criticize the liberals who follow "the process" but the reality is that processes produce results that are not necessarily their ends; the equality of opportunity process, the liberal process, generates significantly more of value for all of society than equality of outcome does (even if most of that value is concentrated among the richest and most powerful; but most of society is better off as well). We are not crazy for thinking processes tend towards results.
"It’s a philosophy of well-meaning proceduralists who want the best for everyone but who cannot admit to themselves that the procedure they worship is entirely incapable of resulting in the best for everyone."
It wants the best *that is reasonably achievable* for everyone. No process or ideology or actions produces the actual best results for everyone. You think that destroying capital is the way to do that. I might even agree, very, very much depending on how that is accomplished (because processes produce results that are not necessarily their ends).
"It is not a coincidence that a liberal capitalist order always produces systems that preserve preexisting inequality."
I would argue they best preserve the values of the people who occupy them, and that is the only just way a society can operate. They don't do so perfectly, and not all of those values are good. But liberalism offers the actual robust means to *change* those values (free expression and inquiry, freedom of association, and relative freedom of action).
Maybe equality of opportunity has to be further watered down to “freedom from human imposed impediments to equality of opportunity.” The more I think about it the harder that is to define. But there seems to be an intuitive distinction between “you can’t play in the NFL because you’re 5’0” (fine) and “you can’t attend Harvard because you’re a woman.” (Not fine). Maybe equality of opportunity is about finding the type 2 inequalities and getting rid of them.
I too found this discussion of equality of opportunity quite challenging. Maybe something along the lines of "removal of structural obstructions based on invidious distinctions." I think that is what I would like to see. That might not be the end of what I want, but it's a start, but too big a mouthful. I think that this way of looking at it might be the same for many others, in which case, "equality of opportunity" is simply shorthand for what I said. The trouble with shorthand, and other labels, which in time become common usage, is that hey turn into the reality, and what was the underlying truth is lost.
I have to say, I am at a loss trying to think of any structural obstructions currently operative in the US.
I assume that by by "structural obstructions" you mean de jure laws that prevent equality of opportunity. I think there are plenty of obstructions that people face that are a results of both economics and culture. I think plenty of people would describe those obstructions as structural even if they're not legal obstructions.
I did not mean legal obstacles, since there can be societal, cultural and other "structural" impediments to advancement. But, if I'm missing something, please enlighten. Thanks.
I definitely think there are societal impediment that stand in the way of success for some people. The three most important:
- I think those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds face cultural challenges that make it harder to get into good colleges and good jobs and be successful in them.
- I think Black American still face significant cultural biases that make it harder for them to be successful. Jennifer Eberhardt's wonderful book "Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice That Shapes What We See, Think, and Do" is by far the best book on this subject.
- I think women still face biases and cultural norms that make it harder for them to reach the top of organizations.
In the construction trades: seroius cronyism, old boy networking, corruption, selective enforcement, and in big cities, organized crime.
To me the steelman case for liberalism isn't its potential to achieve a final, utopian outcome, but as some form of it being maybe the best we can do under current and foreseeable future constraints. Which isn't to say Marxist ideas have no value as a type of criticism. But it isn't like we have no examples of societies that have embarked on those kinds of experiments, and big, important ones at that. And the result has never once yet been a more free, more prosperous society.
So by all means criticize liberalism. Part of liberalism's upside is that it has mechanisms for constructive criticism that can, at times, lead to system level improvements. But let's not pretend the Soviets or East Germans (or even governments still attached to those sorts of ideas like the ANC in South Africa) have figured out something superior. They haven't and the proof is right there in their societies' outcomes. Even the Chinese have abandoned the big ideas in all but name for a kind of nationalistic mercantilism.
Liberalism, as the officially sanctioned ideology of the PMC, cannot produce other outcomes without damaging the class interests of the PMC.
Therefore, liberals love them some feel-good bullshit, spectacle, symbol and moral victories.
I think you mean US Democrats....lol
Basically.
Also true across the pond tho, too.
The PMC's "official" ideology, if it could be said to have one, is not liberal -- at least, it's not liberal any longer. Now it's the opposite of liberal: weak totalitarian. Or, perhaps a better way to put it is that there's a war going on within the PMC between liberalism and weak totalitarianism, and weak totalitarianism has taken hearty root in most of the PMC institutions.
The PMC doesn't have one set of class interests any more than "workers" do. Class analysis suffers from some of the same problems identitarian analysis does: it pretends that the values and interests of a class of people are all the same. They are not.
That’s a good comment (and why i’m not much of a commenter; too laborious for me to be succinct)
OWS was a mess. And it’s been spreading ever since. I find the, well, cosplay, of ‘Struggle Session’ type thinking…just bizarre. And it’s in town and state governance now. My best hopes = demographic; that it will flame out in 20 - 40 more years, as those adjuncts age out of university teaching.
I don't know about that. The PMC love themselves some DEI, which is the most illiberal philosophy out there right now.
I suppose it depends on one's definition of "liberal". DEI does nothing to change the way the economic pie gets sliced.
Are you sure about this?
"Hayes has always been someone who defined a moral vision of the world that I could get behind, but who was apparently incapable of recognizing the profound limits of his sunny attachment to the Way Things Work, the modern liberal dedication to democracy and rights and capitalism and all of that jazz."
-What are some of the ways that an attachment to rights--at least as they're conceived by American liberals--prevents us from achievinng that moral vision?
Chris Hayes is the uber-nerd of neoliberal news. I think he sold his soul to MSNBC a long time ago. He's not going to do anything to jeopardize his cushy, clubby standard of living. I can't take him very seriously, myself.
Hayes is nothing but Maddows bottom