Nothing wrong with capitalism, the capitalists are the problem

In March 1964, a group including Linus Pauling, Gunnar Myrdal, Tom Hayden, Ben B. Seligmanm and computer pioneer Louis Fein sent a letter to President Lyndon Johnson covering their report on “The Triple Revolution.” The letter began: “We enclose a memorandum... prepared out of a feeling of foreboding about the nation's future. The men and women whose names are signed to it think that neither Americans nor their leaders are aware of the magnitude and acceleration of the changes going on around them. These changes, economic, military, and social, comprise The Triple Revolution. We believe that these changes will compel, in the very near future and whether we like it or not, public measures that move radically beyond any steps now proposed or contemplated.” They were right about the changes but underestimated our ability to drift towards the iceberg most would not see until much later.

The three revolutions were in cybernation, weaponry and human rights. The nuclear and other new weapon systems threatened peace. The African American struggle for equal rights in the US was part of the rising demand around the globe for full human rights. But the report focused on the affects of the cybernation revolution (their term). The combination of the computer and automation was issuing in a new mode of production as different from the industrial as that was from the agricultural. It would result in “almost unlimited productive capacity which requires progressively less human labor.” Yet the current economic model awarded access to this production, to the wealth it created, unequally to those with capital and those who earned their keep through labor. The cybernation of production would mean increasingly less of good paying industrial jobs. The US was experiencing this process first but it would spread throughout the world we dominated.

The report argued that having access to the collectively produced wealth of society could not any longer be tied to labor. Maintaining and improving individual wellbeing across society – through making maximum use of the potential of automated production – would have to transition from depending on good paying jobs. Income would have to be separated from work. This would require some form of guaranteed individual income and vast investment in public goods. Left to itself, the market would not move in this direction, it would require government action.

As it turned out, capital figured out a way to exploit the new cybernetic economy by shifting production to automation (and now AI) and to areas of cheap labor. Some developing countries – like China – followed suit using their cheap labor to industrialize. This form of globalization produced cheaper goods and did lift many from poverty, worldwide. But it mostly benefited capital rather than labor.

The Western democracies did little to ensure the political sustainability of free trade globalism. This would have required providing those reduced to un- and under-employment or low-paying service sector jobs with the decent income and public goods (including improved education, free healthcare and jobs created through spending on updating infrastructure) that we could have begun 60 years ago. The Western European democracies did a bit better than the US with their social welfare programs but still found themselves in this 21st Century facing the political drift to the right fueled by those left out of the wealth creation.

In the US, we got Trump and his MAGA movement. This virulent form of the anti-globalism reaction has plunged the world into Trump’s tariff war on the very foundations of the world capitalist order.

Nothing wrong with capitalism, indeed there seems to be no good alternative to markets coordinating supply and demand. Free trade to maximize market functioning is part of this (with some measures perhaps needed to ensure fair trade). The World Trade Organization could expand its trade liberalization agenda to include mandates to improve local living standards alongside fair labor standards. Rather than make war on the system of rule-based trade that we have benefited from, the US government would encourage foreign investment in our productive sector as part of a rational approach to whatever re-industrialization makes sense. (This could include China.)

The monopoly capitalists at the top of our cybernetic economy are the problem. They need to be taxed at levels considerably greater than their workers. Their ability to wield political power through money needs to be ended. Government must be empowered to ensure that everyone benefits from market functioning even if this means a form of guaranteed minimum individual income. The Democrats need to do more than wait for Trump to fail. Railing against the billionaires must be accompanied by explaining the need for change and advocating the policies laid out in that report to Johnson.

Three Things

Thing One: As noted before, we now have front row seats to Trump’s attack on governing, the Constitution, his enemies, migrants, and the government protections built up over decades to protect us from the ravages of unrestrained capitalism, climate change, and globalized disease. The pundits have recognized that Trump’s aggressive efforts to see what he can get away with – the courts being the only potential obstacle – is an intentional effort to enlarge his power not by flaunting law and order but by bending it to his will.

The mostly unqualified sycophants with which he is seeking to stuff his cabinet will pass or not through the Senate – Hegseth squeaking by J.D. – and thus fully legally. As Jon Stewart recently noted, this is not fascism but entirely consistent with the 18th Century founding document – allowing a presidential monarchy – we seem to be stuck with. We will have to do something about that someday if we are to ever grow up. This bring me to ….

Thing Two: In the face of Trump flooding the field to keep everyone else off balance, the Democrats are either hiding, lost in a forest of self-analysis, or just plain waiting for the Trump chickens to come home to roost on all of those deluded people who voted for him. That is not much of a political party, more a herd of well-fed sheep. The Democrats need to find a way to address the issues that drove so many to place hope for a better life in Trump and the oligarch-loving Republicans amassed under the MAGA banner. This brings me to ….

Thing Three: The Democrats need, the country needs, to find a way to deal with the forces driving so many to feeling relatively deprived. All too many Americans feel that they and their children cannot reach, or maintain, the lifestyle of their own parents or grandparents. They are right to so believe.

The post-WWII economy of the Boomers peaked by the early ‘80s. Since then, inequality has been increasing while the Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats have favored capital over labor. Good paying union jobs gave way to low paying service sector work. Big capital fought off unions. The 21st Century has added further automation, now powered by AI, to further diminish the good paying working class jobs of the past. Health costs have risen, public schools struggle, drug use moved well beyond inner cities. Folks wonder what happened? So they look for those to blame – migrants, Jews, anyone different – and those to save them.

We need to face up to a few basics. We will never be a country full of high-paying work again. Tariffs won’t do it and build-it-here won’t do it. Most remaining (or recaptured) industry and many so called white-collar jobs will be done by machines and computers. For a while we may still need some skilled craftspeople like plumbers and electricians. But picking our crops, slaughtering our animals and rebuilding our outdated infrastructure will be done by machines and those migrants we say we don’t need. (No high paying jobs there.)

What is to be done? The Democrats will need to bite the bullet and revisit that approach long made anathema by the rich and their Republican servants: socialism. By which I mean, collecting substantial taxes from the obscenely rich and from big business, perhaps nationalizing fundamental platforms of the 21st Century economy such as Amazon and providing a guaranteed minimum income to everyone. This last would not be means tested or require looking for work and should be at least a few multiples of the basic poverty line. (Free healthcare, life-long education and varied public goods would supplement this.) We should, in other words, separate making and providing the goods we sell to ourselves and the world from the necessity to make them through human labor.

From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

Watching President Trump

In my previous piece, I laid out what another Trump presidency might look like. In short, if he does what he said he would do during the campaign: chaos. But it could also be, if not actual fun, certainly interesting – an experiment, if you will – to watch him do, try to do or, in the end, not do all the things he said. The list is a long one:

• seeking revenge on his opponents, including by weaponizing the Justice Department;

• imposing high tariffs on China and goods not made in America;

• putting Musk in charge of making more government more efficient (apparently by stopping all $2 trillion of USG discretionary funding);

• letting RFK Jr. “go wild” on health issues such as vaccines and fluoride;

• rounding up and deporting 20 million “illegals” using police and the National Guard;

• preventing by various measures “illegal migration” and finally building that wall;

• supporting a wide open field for crypto including Bitcoin;

Now, it may be that the Trump will not take any of these actions. The Republican leadership – and JD – may focus instead on using control of all three branches of government to do the things the party has always sought to do, provide tax cuts for corporations and the rich, dismantling “troublesome” regulations on business as well as consumer protections and ending efforts to combat climate change. There are also positive elements among the many other promises Trump made during the campaign, such as ending taxation on Social Security or providing payments for IVF. This approach would make the new Trump Administration a “normal” one in which the ruling party carries out its own ideological platform (with or with out elements of Project 2025).

But what if Trump does try to take action against political opponents and “illegal migrants” using the justice system, law enforcement and the military? This could result in considerable activity in the courts. If the military is asked to undertake actions forbidden under the Constitution – such as domestic law enforcement – relations between the Commander-in-Chief and the military leadership could become very tense.

Discretionary spending ($1.7 trillion in the 2023 budget) includes the military ($806 billion, where surely there must be considerable waste) and everything else the government does including education, social services, health, transportation, science and technology, justice and local development. Leaving aside the military (?), allowing Musk to dismantle the social safety net and backbone of our economy built up over the last several decades would have a serious social and economic impact. Raising tariffs – and therefore prices – of everything we now import – also causing shortages of needed goods that we cannot yet produce in quantity – could plunge the economy further into a downward spiral. Rounding up “illegals” and stopping the flow of migration into the US – if even possible – would reduce the supply of labor in the many places in which no one else wishes to work. Allowing an unfettered field for crypto-currency speculation could add financial turmoil to economic disruptions.

Empowering Kennedy to turn the U.S. health system into a haven for anti-vaxers and anti-fluoride, flat-earthers could lead to more pandemics and a legion of new dental patients.

Trump has also said he would settle the Ukraine war even before taking office and has vowed to bring peace to the Middle East. These too will be interesting to watch, especially the process of picking the losing and wining sides. It may also be “fun” to watch our NATO allies try to back fill their ability to go on their own. And the whole world may experience economic and political tremors.

Some of the 71 million majority who voted for Trump could experience a bit of buyers remorse. But he may not have any interest in matching his election campaign performance with real life action. It may also be that his supporters really don’t expect him to do so. In any case, we will all have front row seats.

PS: A friend reminded me of this from H.L Mencken:

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

So what if Trumps wins?

If Donald Trump wins the presidency on November 5, it will be the third time this century that a Republican has won with a minority of the vote. This owes to the anti-democratic elements of our 18th Century Constitution (the Electoral College, Senate and Supreme Court). The Republican Party is a minority party riding on every advantage our outdated system gives it. They win – with help from the Russians and arrogant tech lords like Musk – by converting Trump’s clownish authoritarianism into the false consciousness of whites who feel threatened by the increasing diversity of America despite being themselves among the richest 4% of the global population.

What would Trump’s victory mean? One can consider the U.S. domestic implications and the impact on the world in general.

Domestically, Trump will seek political vengeance while using the justice system to avoid prison. (Avoiding prison is his main reason for running.) His cohort of Project-2025ers will seek to undermine the administrative state while using state power to favor those capitalists that see government as hindrance. Together they will probably throw our economy, politics, courts, health & education systems, social safety nets and society in general, into turmoil. Their efforts to govern through authoritarianism and populism – the essence of MAGA – will test our democratic institutions and wreck havoc.

But we are not Weimar Germany. Our institutions will hold, although any Trump effort to use the military for domestic actions – such as dealing with “illegal migration” – could lead to a real crisis. It may well be that in the midterm elections of 2026, the upheaval would be enough to lead to a Democratic resurgence. (It will be interesting to watch a Vice President Vance. He could call the policy shots from the background. As an opportunist par excellence, he may be sensitive to the popular reaction to the various outrages pushed by the P-2025ers and tack accordingly.)

A Trump regime’s impact on the world stage is another matter. He will favor isolationism, economic nationalism, unilateralism, pro-Russian approaches in Ukraine and Eastern Europe, disengagement from the Mideast and who knows what with North Korea. This will fundamentally weaken the global position of the U.S. But let’s consider this from the 35,000 foot level.

The U.S. has held center stage in the world since the end of World War II. The various political and economic institutions of the global order – including the UN, IMF, World Bank, NATO etc – were ours by design. We established the contours of the Cold War that divided the world into good guys and bad guys and led to many distortions of the domestic affairs of other countries. After the fall of the USSR, we found other ways to define bad actors by choosing – often unwisely – which regional states to offer favored status and protection. As we began to lose our industrial advantage – with other economies coming online – globalism became our religion and we used the available levers to impose austerity and free trade everywhere we could.

We Americans have always been pretty self-centered, focused on our own navels. We governed the world – to the extent we did – for our own purposes, assuming that what was good for America was good for everyone. Trump’s obsession on making America “great again” is simply a dysfunctional flavor of this.

Our record as the predominant global hegemon has been mixed, to say the least. The world today can be legitimately described as a mess, with violent conflicts of various kinds and sources, terrorism, mass migration, political polarization, continued poverty and inequality, nuclear proliferation, the emerging technological singularity, and widespread and worsening climate disruptions. The U.S. did not cause any of these – at least not by ourselves – but they all happened on our watch. Meanwhile, the world has increasingly begun to just ignore us. (Watch China, India and the other BRICS cozy up to Putin despite his assault on world order.) Our inability to anything about the Mideast has not surprised anyone but ourselves. Maybe it’s better that we do withdraw somewhat from world affairs and let folks get on with finding their own way? If Trump wins in November, however messy it will be, maybe it’ll be what the world needs?  Like a heart attack that scares you into changing your bad habits? 

(Maybe we Americans will finally upgrade our Constitution.)

The Next 80 Years

Just finished the first two books of William Gibson’s latest planned trilogy: The Peripheral and Agency. Both are typically well written with plots and characters that briskly move a complicated story forward. Gibson has been ahead of his time since his 1984 sci-fi novel, Neuromancer launched the cyberpunk world of computer hacking anti-heroes. The new “jackpot” books are built around figures in the future (just prior and after 2100) using quantum entanglement to exchange information with people living earlier in this century. (Wikiquote describes the jackpot as “an ‘androgenic, systemic, multiplex’ cluster of environmental, medical and economic crises that begins to emerge in the present day and eventually reduces world population by 80 percent over the second half of the 21st century.”) The future period is in the aftermath of the jackpot, where whats left of humanity, after it was far too late, took climate change seriously. The earlier times (in the first book, 2032 and in the second 2017) take place when it was already far too late but we hadn’t yet changed how we live.

Gibson nailed it. To expand in my own words, these are the next 80 years.

It’s hard to know where to draw the line of when humans began degrading the world with the way we live. Was it with language, a bigger brain, fire and tools allowing homo sapiens to raise above mere animal abilities of tooth and claw? Or with the emergence of agriculture, where we began consuming our environment and changing the very face of the earth? Certainly with the industrial revolution and the utilization of hundreds of millions of years of buried sunlight in the form of hydrocarbons. Finally, with post-industrial, global capitalism, our consumption of the environment, and resultant waste dumped into it, increased exponentially.

This year, 2023, we have seen what must be – to anyone not totally fuddled by the paid climate change deniers – the many faces of climate change. Going well beyond mere weather extremes, it includes pandemics, drought, desertification, death of pollinators, failed crops and food shortages, unquenchable mega-fires, soot-filled air, regular “once-in-a-century” floods, climate-fueled illnesses (from hotter temperatures, swifter passage of pathogens and toxins), spreading invasive destructive and disease-causing pests, disappearing habitats, mass extinctions, ocean temperatures rising, over-fishing, death of reefs, melting ice and glaciers, garbage filled oceans and even whales attacking boats. Along with these are related violence and conflicts over mass migration, diminished water supplies, precious metals and growing domestic and global inequalities. Our own version of the Four Horses are saddling up.

Calling the tune is the oligarchy that benefit from the current form of global capitalism. They have been doing everything possible since big oil hid awareness of the implications of hydrocarbon use for the climate in order to maintain profits. They and their fellow mega-profit-maximizers have funded political elements resisting all efforts to challenge their power and seek even modest change in the dynamics of increased inequality and degradation of the environment. These political elements seek to divert attention away from the possibilities of real change by pushing backward-looking nationalism, racism, and fabricated cultural divisions meant to magnify the otherwise rational discontent with the world in which most of us now live into fear and rage directed at anyone but the rich and powerful. Thus many of those who might most benefit from change have nevertheless been convinced to accept outrageous lies and authoritarianism in its various guises.

There are few good guys among the world’s mega-corporations. The media platforms promulgate hate and directed misinformation. The new tech industries offering their magic are actually plunging us ever further into the technological singularity where fundamental change in our made-world runs ahead of our ability to understand and control it (AI and energy-intensive black crypto are certainly examples). And my iPhone, I must admit, is another opiate assuring us that we are up-to-date and in control of something (at the cost of far away miners dying in deep pits of rare earths.)

But we humans are likely to simply get used to the new normal exemplified by 2023. As long as it doesn’t happen to us it’ll remain just those things briefly floating into the media highlights. And so it is likely to go for the next 10, 15, 20 years until the cumulative changes chaotically coalesce into the widespread collapse of food chains (and not just for us), emptied aquifers, mass starvation, whole areas made unlivable by pervasive wet-bulb temperatures beyond 95o and the wars and domestic violence fueled when those who have nothing to loose try to get what remains from others. Then we descend into 40-60 years of continued catastrophe. Gibson called this the jackpot, I suppose somewhat ironically as everything comes due at once. He seems somewhat optimistic that, at some point, the economic and political elites will come to feel threatened enough – if only from the wholesale lost of customers – to look to the science and technology of green energy, carbon capture and revitalization of what’s left of the natural environment to reverse the effects of climate change. Surely, even now, such technology exists and is getting better all the time, but just not “economic” in the judgement of those who still make lots of money from hydrocarbons and those they have enlisted in their “anti-woke” crusades. So we will suck every last bit of hydrocarbons out of the earth before we change our approach enough to make a difference.

One can hope. Those living in the places where climate change is already threatening their lives, especially in the tropics, are trying to adapt and, if that is not possible, leave. We in the West have the biggest cushion. But we are too heading into bad times.

Trump Agonistics

 "They say and do not." But the kingdom of God is not in word, but in Power. He talketh of prayer, of repentance, of faith, and of the new birth; but he knows but only to talk of them. I have been in his family, and have observed him both at home and abroad; and I know what I say of him is the truth. His house is as empty of religion as the white of an egg is of savour. There is there neither prayer nor sign of repentance for sin; yea, the brute in his kind serves God far better than he. He is the very stain, reproach, and shame of religion, to all that know him; it can hardly have a good word in all that end of the town where he dwells, through him. Thus say the common people that know him, A saint abroad, and a devil at home. His poor family finds it so; he is such a churl, such a railer at and so unreasonable with his servants, that they neither know how to do for or speak to him. Men that have any dealings with him say it is better to deal with a Turk than with him; for fairer dealing they shall have at their hands. This Talkative (if it be possible) will go beyond them, defraud, beguile, and overreach them. Besides, he brings up his sons to follow his steps; and if he findeth in any of them a foolish timorousness, (for so he calls the first appearance of a tender conscience,) he calls them fools and blockheads, and by no means will employ them in much, or speak to their commendations before others. For my part, I am of opinion, that he has, by his wicked life, caused many to stumble and fall; and will be, if God prevent not, the ruin of many more.... Paul calleth some men, yea, and those great talkers, too, sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.

John Bunyan, The Pilgrims Progress

 

Came across this while reading Bunyan. Not sure how I got into it but it's difficult to put down. The Pilgrims Progress is deep at the source of the evangelical stream of Christianity. Bunyan eschews human law, secular morality and government in favor of the Bible as written. He urges ignoring the visible in favor of the invisible, i.e., the Biblical God. Trump finds his support base among those immersed in this Pilgrim stream. And he's all Talkative.

No Equivalency

In the aftermath of January 6, most Americans have condemned the violence perpetrated by the insurrectionists in our nation’s capital. Some 57% even blame Trump. But many white Americans seem to feel uneasy about taking a stand against seditious violence by white extremists without also throwing in the violence we saw last year in the events surrounding Black Lives Matter protests and during Trump’s 2017 inauguration. So these conflicted whites must add that they oppose all violence to achieve political ends.

Now, there was violence during the Trump inaugural, in the aftermath of police killings of unarmed Blacks and during the events prompted by Trump’s waving a bible in front of St. John's Episcopal Church on June 1, 2020. Some of the worst was committed by white anti-fascists. The violence during the mostly peaceful protests of police behavior – especially burning down a Minneapolis police station – served no useful purpose and hurt communities that still deserve security. (Two of the four indicted in August for the Minneapolis incident are white.) But the rage expressed by the Black Lives Matter protests must be understood as the pent up reaction to white violence directed at Blacks going back to the days of lynching and often perpetrated or condoned by public officials and police. One can say violence out of even righteous rage is wrong. But it is not in the same category as what happened last week.

There is no equivalency – moral or legal – between any recent past incidents of protest violence and that carried out at the request of the President of the United States against the US Congress. Just saying this should make it clear. After railing against “criminals” including members of Congress, other Republicans, the press and social media that block his dog-whistle tweets – and threatening the Vice President to “do the right thing” – the President of the United States sent white thugs, extremists and fanatics to intimidate the US Congress through what Rudy Giuliani had just called a “trial by combat.”  And the white crowd that invaded the Capital targeted the very government that provides them, more than others, their race privilege and economic support.  

Yes, political violence in a democracy is always wrong. But there is no way that what happened on January 6 is anything less than treason and the attempted overthrow of the US Constitution. That is in a class by itself and needs to be understood as such without the white caveats.

Can Liberal Democracy Survive?

As authoritarian, repressive and nationalistic political leaders and parties proliferate and the Western democracies waver in the face of the globalization and climate change, it’s reasonable to ask if liberal democracy can survive. Indeed, globalization and its discontents – diminished prospects, resentment, and blame casting – have become a potent political force undermining mutual tolerance, optimism and willingness to compromise without which democracy falters. The non-democratic regimes – China, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, North Korea – see blood in the water and seek to hasten the decline. Others – Hungary, Poland, Turkey – sense the winds and seek to entrench themselves in power through superficially democratic means.

Liberal democracy: an open society with constitutional government based on popular consent, allocation of political power through multi-party elections, separation of powers, rule of law, market economy with private property, and equal protection of human rights, civil rights, civil liberties and political freedom for all regardless of belief, self-identity, race, religion, gender or ethnicity.

Liberal democracy and evolution: Darwinian evolution works through adaption of species to their environment through natural selection, that is, through random mutations, some of which allow individual organisms to reproduce more successfully than others. In this way, a species may evolve over time into something new. Some fail to survive because of environmental changes too rapid to allow time for successful mutations to arise – the Cretaceous impact that wiped out the dinosaurs – or because they become too tied to an environment which then disappears – as happening to lemur species in Madagascar as rain forests fall victim to man.

Although we are social creatures, human nature is highly individualistic. We strive as individuals to survive and thrive in our environment. A liberal democratic society can be thought of as a species that permits the fullest range of random “mutations” as unique individuals are allowed to live and innovate as their individual nature and capabilities allow. Such a society is more likely to successfully meet the challenges of its environment and thrive than one which seeks to limit or control individual variability. Liberal democracy confers evolutionary advantage.

Globalization is an ideology: For decades, liberal democracy has been in the hands of capitalist, rent-seeking elites pushing their self-serving ideology of supra-national, borderless free trade. In the U.S., this has been at the expense of the working class and increased inequality. Those left behind by globalization make up the natural breeding ground of support for the populist, nativist politics used by rightist parties seeking to entrench themselves in power through subverting democratic practices.

But there is nothing sacrosanct about globalization. There is no reason why a polity could not decide to place limits on international capitalism within its borders. It might well value policies in support of domestic labor and domestic production even if it led to higher prices. These could be offset through creation of better paid union jobs, addressing economic inequality with higher minimum wages and perhaps guaranteed minimum incomes, higher taxes on the wealthy and big corporations and rebuilding industry and extending infrastructure green.

Building it back better: Liberal democracy’s evolutionary advantage lies in openness to random change, i.e. economic, technological, cultural and social innovation. To reach its potential, innovation needs enabling infrastructure and a population with full access to public primary and secondary education and opportunities for university and technical and vocational training. It requires mass communication and transport systems available everywhere and at every level. In the U.S., government played a large role here through providing postal services, building roads and supporting rail systems. These could be brought into the 21^st Century by bringing free broadband Internet to every home, small business, library and school. Efficient mass transport networks in cities and through small towns and rural areas would allow decentralization of economic activity without requiring more cars. The Postal Service – with its presence everywhere – provides outlets for delivering not only mail and goods at reasonable cost but also direct government services for individuals and businesses. Government spending to connect and empower small businesses and green industry and innovators would be productive even if it increased debt.

Liberal democracy has considerable advantages over control systems. If the human species – facing our self-created singularity – has a future, it will be in the hands of something like liberal democracy. Survival demands the fullest range of mutation and adaption of which humans are capable. This can be a future in which the United States plays a leading role. Our democracy can fail only at our hands.

Language, Hunting and Bezos

Language makes us human and different from all other of earth's creatures. With it, we can think, plan and act. Other animals communicate with each other through various means (bees do it through dance). But only we have words and grammars, with which we can great structures of meaning. With language comes society, culture, science, technology, and history.

But from whence comes language? Perhaps from group hunting. Social carnivores such as wolves and lions do not have language but still coordinate hunting. Between early learning – cubs practicing innate skills and watching adults – and basic vocalizations, they can surround prey and attack in unison. Some whales coordinate their approach to circle their prey and drive them into a concentration that allows a dense feeding ball. But these creatures come with their weapons built in, fangs, teeth and claws or huge mouths.

Primitive humans did not have built-in weapons or thick hides. Out on the savanna, they were easy prey for other carnivores and would be poor hunters against anything big enough to satisfy the group’s hunger. They needed to make artificial weapons and, working together, use them to kill their prey.

At some point in human evolution, some series of chance mutations increased the brain’s capacity to process and organize information sufficiently enough to move beyond simple grunts and other calls towards a structured use of vocalizations. This would have provided a huge evolutionary advantage. Humans could begin to coordinate more elaborate approaches to prey animals.

Language – as it became more elaborate – would serve many other purposes, such as passing on learning about making weapons and which plants were good to eat and where to find them. But it may have been most useful at first in hunting. Homo sapiens even hunted the huge mammoths into extinction. The first leaders in human society may have been those most capable of using language to coordinate hunting.

Language allows the possibility of free-flowing thought. With words and grammar, individuals can recall the past, examine the present, probe accumulated human experience, and imagine a future to be pursued to advantage. Throughout human history, those that do this best made the best “hunters” and captured the biggest “prey.” They drove human development by finding new ways to exploit others and the found environment. As society superseded family, they also thought of monopolizing what they “captured” to turn temporary advantage into permanent advantage. Great war leaders might seek to become kings, great inventors owners of ever expanding conglomerates. Jeff Bezos seeks to own the core exchange mechanism of 21^st Century economy.

The drive to seek and maintain profit has provided a positive dynamic in human civilization. We cannot and should not seek to prevent the hunters from seeking new prey. Bezos and Amazon clearly show the advantages of the e-approach to economic exchange and it has become very useful during the current COVID-19 crisis. Bezos has even prodded old line hunters like Walmart into more effective ways. But allowing the best hunters free reign only works for the group when they share the meat.

A number of “tech giants” have now become the focus of attention for their efforts to monopolize their hunting style and for using it mostly for their own gain. It is reasonable for the rest of us – who also do our part to maintain the social and economic order – to look to limiting their ability to seek only self-enrichment. This doesn’t mean doing away with successful hunters – even if we could – but helping them share better through truly progressive taxation, less exploitative practices and perhaps breaking up their enterprises to create room for more hunters.

The Profit Motive

There can be no doubt that the profit motive provides a positive dynamic in human society. It is essentially the drive for Darwinian survival expressed in the economic realm. One can argue that the tremendous global changes brought about in the past few centuries have not been unambiguously good for us and the planet. But it’s also true that the profit motive has lifted human life to an entirely different plane. It provides for the sustenance and comfort of billions and has allowed mankind to reach for the stars. It also seems that there is not a clearly better way to run an economy. Inventors, makers and sellers trying to get buyers to pass them money for whatever it is that they are offering does, in theory and largely in practice, effectively and rationally organize economic exchanges. It seems much more likely that free markets of willing sellers and buyers works better than any one actor or group of actors trying to mandate or direct such exchanges.

But.

Darwinian adaptation is blind. It does not automatically lead to the greatest good for the greatest number. It aims instead at the continued viability and growth of the individual organism. The other members of the species or the ecological community may find themselves not much advantaged by the successful organism and may in fact be harmed or out-competed. The profit motive in human society operates in the same way and does not, by itself, work towards the greatest good for the greatest number. Over time, markets become encrusted with the Darwinian “winners” whatever else has happened to the others sharing the economy. Inequalities will increase and society will move ever further from distributive justice. (According to John Rawls, a just society is one in which we would be satisfied being born into if we did not know where in that society we would appear.)

Pure markets – where the profit-seeking winners take all – are rarely truly free. More to the point, no innovator or entrepreneur has created all the inputs and structures that make his or her business possible. Every individual “creation” of something profitable rests on the social, cultural, political, economic and built capital that was already there. So it seems fair to place some requirements and limits on successful enterprises and even certain incentives to nudge enterprises towards adding to social value as well as their own.

Some examples:

1. Progressive income taxes on individual and corporate wealth and income (from whatever source).

2. Inheritance taxes on every generation and similar turnover.

3. Various forms of government action to tilt income distribution back towards even such as livable minimum wage and unemployment assistance levels, some form of universal health care, cash payments to children born to parents below a certain income level, high quality and affordable primary and secondary education and vocational training and/or university.

4. Occasional and limited government actions and policies to avoid or ameliorate the broad social and economic impacts of economic disturbances.

5. Occasional, limited and restricted government support to promising and socially or economically beneficial technologies or enterprises.

None of this would entail abandoning the profit motive (or capitalism) but would instead go in the direction of perfecting its results.

Time to Be Progressive

It's possible to understand both of our two major political parties as having led America into a crisis. The Republican Party – in control of the US federal government and many states and in the hands of ideological and religious extremists – has been captured by an immoral egotist with no capacity for governing. In pursuit of elite interests and “conservative values,” Republicans have launched an assault on everything good in how our government has come to serve the common welfare since the days of Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt.

Democrats have not been on the playing field. They threw away the 2016 election by passing the presidential nomination through a politically correct form of primogeniture. The candidate threw it away through own goals and writing off voters in certain groups and states. Lacking any coherent vision to address the economic and social effects of globalization, the Democratic Party instead played to niche politics and appears to have little to offer beyond waiting for Trump to crash and the Republicans to burn.

Joe Biden does have a heart and could oversee cleaning up the mess the Republicans leave behind. But there must be a cohesive progressive agenda to go beyond that. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren understood that presenting voters with one could begin the process of putting the country on the right path again. A progressive agenda must begin with embracing the progressive income tax. Government needs money to serve the common good. Our tax system must be made more fair and taxes sufficient to meet our needs. (The Republicans have sought to subordinate this to cutting spending and a regressive taxing system favoring the owners of capital.) It need not be confiscatory but should treat the fruits of labor and capital equally with progressively higher tax rates on individual and corporate income no matter where it comes from and with very limited exemptions.

With adequate funding, the federal government can attend to the chief challenges facing American society in the 21st Century: healthcare, jobs, inequality and education.

Healthcare should be treated as a basic right as it is in other advanced Western societies. It need not be done through a government entity but perhaps with needs-based expansion of Medicare, a non-profit public option and/or payments to purchase insurance on open markets.

In the 21st Century, technology and globalization have conspired to reduce the need for human labor. There simply may not be enough good paying jobs for everyone. A reduction in the work week from 40 to 32 hours plus an increase in the minimum wage may help in opening job opportunities to a greater number. Federal funding to pay for some of the increase in the minimum wage could help reduce the burden on small businesses. Insofar as training will help prepare workers for new roles, government needs to fund that as well.

Inequality undercuts democratic community through making life for many nasty, brutish and short. The federal government should ensure some minimum income for those unable to work and those for whom jobs do not pay enough to rise decently above poverty.

Federal funds should support quality, free public education by focusing on providing modern facilities and adequately paid teachers and staff for all local public school systems. Federal oversight of local schools should be kept to the minimum required to ensure equal access.

Some elements of a progressive agenda need not require additional funding:

Money’s role in politics needs to be removed through campaign financing reform. A national commission on redistricting should oversee the drawing of congressional districts. Each vote should count equally.

A pathway to citizenship should be created for those now in the US “illegally.” A cross border agreement should be made with Mexico (and possibly with the Central American countries) so seasonal workers may go back and forth legally.

The role of contractors and lobbyists in the budgeting process – especially as concerns the military – should be subject to tight limitations.

The Democratic Party needs to begin talking to this agenda in the next three months and not only focusing on Trump’s disqualifications. Waiting for the Republicans to march lemming-like over their cliff might still not be enough and would nevertheless leave the country without a clear direction forward. Biden appears to be getting this.

What Needs To Be Done

Let us put aside for the moment the fear that Joe Biden’s lead against Trump in the polls is bad because it seems all too reminiscent of Hillary’s last time. Let us also assume that that Republican defeat in November is so complete that the Democrats win both houses. Let us then consider what the agenda should be for a new Biden Administration in 2021.

The first challenge facing President Biden and the Democratic Party will be to begin the arduous process of undoing the damage Trump and the Republicans have done. This means first of all, of course, leading the country in the effort to put the corona virus behind us and refunding state and local governments and health institutions. But also, reviving rule of law and the administration of equal justice, undoing the dismantling of environmental protections, ending the war on immigrants, reimposing federal oversight of local police performance, aiding states to simplify and protect their voting systems, reestablishing our relations with friends and allies abroad and countering Russian, Chinese and other actors waging cyberwar upon us. These reflect simply the requirement to reverse the erosion of governance and national interest inflicted by Trump and his administration but will nevertheless take great effort and concentration.

But the real challenge will be even harder because it will require going beyond fixing what Trump has broken to fixing America itself as the damage predates him. Indeed, Trump is a symptom of the two fundamental and related problems that afflict us: gross and growing economic inequality and partisan tribalism. Economic inequality reinforces both racism and ultra-nationalism and exacerbates racial inequality. Partisan tribalism has made it near impossible to extract rational political debate and responses to the problems we face from our government.

There is no way to tackle economic inequality without re-conceptualizing how we do capitalism. The United States is as near as one can imagine to a completely laissez faire system, in which not only does the market rule in the economic realm but in politics as well. Both parties are fueled by loose money and have long accepted the results of the market, its up and downs, its winners and losers. The Republicans seek the to protect the gains of the winners and ensure that the downturns don’t lead to raised taxes on the rich or efforts to place limits on the way business is done. The Democrats – to give them their credit – have sought to provide and protect minimum social welfare and have begun to do the same with health care. But they too accept market mechanisms as a given.

It is time to place limits on markets, allow them to operate in some areas, limit how they affect others and ensure that their results work for the majority and not only the few. The goal must be to greatly reduce economic inequality and provide basic necessities – including health care – for all as needed.

Partisan tribalism goes back to the very founding of our republic. But the degree to which it has in the last decades overwhelmed the very ability to actually govern is without precedent. Bill Clinton’s effort in the 1990s to take the Democrats towards a more market friendly approach was met with worried warfare by Newt Gingrich and the Republicans. If the Democrats tacked right, the Republicans would go even further in that direction. Since then, they have waged class war in favor of the 1% and against the middle class and the poor by cynically seeking to enlist the latter into an assault on the very government that could protect them. The policies pursued by the Republicans lowered taxes on the rich, cut government services for the non-elite as much as possible and covered everything in the rhetoric of patriotism and charges that the other side were socialists. The Democrats seemed obvious to the possibility of representing the 99% (with Hillary actually calling them the “deplorables”). The Democrats therefore implicitly eschewed the class approach to the political war waged against them instead sinking into a morass of contending internal constituencies each seeking to tear their own piece of flesh from the party and its candidates. Bernie Sanders – not surprisingly an independent – understood this dynamic and sought to bring the party to its natural base. The Democrats twice refused. (Whether or not Sanders was too “socialist” to be elected leaves open the question of whether Elizabeth Warren was overlooked because she was too much a woman.)

Trump may bring the Republicans to their knees. But this will not by itself end the tribalism. Indeed, it seems time for the Democrats to go on the offensive. Clean up Trump’s mess, begin undoing economic and racial inequality, and figure out what kind of country America needs to be to face the foreign, domestic and environment challenges the rest of the 21^st Century will bring. Yes, elect Biden and then get on with it!

COVID-19: The Great Equalizer

By now, the human species has been altering the natural order for some 11000 years. It started with the advent of agriculture and went through urbanization and industrialization which transformed the surface of the earth and began changing a host of natural systems including the climate, animal life, forests and oceans. We humans have known about this for a while. But most of us – especially those of us in the advanced economies and not living too close to the rising waters – could see the impact of our disruption of natural systems as something that would affect other people – future generations, the poor, those living in low-lying island nations – and not so much us in the here and now. COVID-19 has altered that by bringing to all of us the results of our changes to the earth. It has equalized the impact of the destruction of natural environments (which stresses what lives in them thereby making them more prone to diseases that can jump to us), the way we use animals (including how close we live with them and the antibiotics we use to fatten them) and the close quarters (in large numbers) in which we live. Add to this the way we use hydrocarbons to travel and transport, the interconnectedness of our ways of life and economies and the varying shortcomings of our political systems. We should not have been surprised by the current bio-crisis. It’s not that any one of these caused the virus but that the total impact of what we have wrought was largely hidden until now though very much operative.

So COVID-19 shows us that the bill won’t wait to be delivered and that everyone must pay. The rich may be able to retreat to their enclaves and private transport. But their world will change as ours does. The species as a whole will survive. But this is the wake up call. The future disrupted world is upon us now. Returning to “normal” – whenever and whatever that turns out to be – may well be just a breather before the next episode. We need to take the next step in our evolution – remake our economies and politics, restoring nature even if gradually and treating each other more equally – and start now or the humanity that makes it to the 22^nd Century may be unrecognizable.

Continuing Notes on Sabine's "A History of Political Theory" -- Episode 33

For episode 32, see here

The Theory of the Nation-State: The Moderns 

XXXIII. Fascism and National Socialism
 A. Somehow national socialism and fascism were combination of
     professed socialists and professed nationalists.
 B. Attempt to marshal total energies of people behind government
     led to emphasis on war (or preparation for war, even permanent
     preparation for war).
 C. Mussolini and Hitler mined the ideas of philosophic irrationalism.
       1. Combined, on an emotional level, cult of the folk and cult
           of the hero.
       2. Schopenhauer saw behind nature and human life the
           struggle of a blind force within the human mind -- 'will' --
           to construct an illusion of order and reason.  The hope for
           mankind was to end this struggle through contemplation,
           consciousness without desire.
       3. Nietzsche moralized struggle in place of achievement. Values
           based on superior capabilities would replace liberal values. 
       4. Bergson gave utilitarian value to intellect and saw it as the
           servant of the 'life force' (similar to 'will').
       5. Sorel substituted 'life-force' for materialism thus stripping
           Marxism of its economic determinism.  Class struggle is
           the manifestation of sheer creative violence on the part of
           the proletariat. Myths inspire such movements; philosophy is
           social myth.
 D. Hegel was a rationalist and did not see philosophy as myth.
       1. But Mussolini used Gentile's Hegelianism (theory of the
           state) because it was expedient.
       2. Claims were merely in pseudo-Hegelian language where
           'might is right' and 'liberty' is found in subjection. 
 E. Central terms of national socialism:
       1. Folk (race) -- organic people.
       2. The Elite and the Leader.
       3. Lebensraum -- the territorial expansion of a Germanic
           empire.
       4. The Folk:
           i. the individual emerges from the Folk tom which he owes all
           ii. individuals are not equal as they embody the reality of the
              Folk in varying degrees
           iii. at the center is the Leader
       5. Society is:
           i. the Leader -- charismatic 'natural" hero of the folk
           ii. the ruling elite -- provides intelligence and direction
           iii. the masses -- not capable of heroism, inert and led 
               by emotions


Note:  This ends my notes from Sabine's A History of Political Theory. These entries start here. I have tried to be truthful to what I recorded as I read Sabine many years ago but have tweaked them here and there.  I have regained an understanding of Western political thought and its continuing relevance.  I hope they might help do the same for whoever stumbles upon them.