Politics – Page 9 – The Dream Café

Why Can’t the US turn into Scandinavia?

“The Russian bourgeois dreamed of an agrarian evolution on the French plan, or the Danish, or the American – anything you want, only not the Russian. He neglected, however, to supply himself in good season with a French history or an American social structure.” Trotsky—History of the Russian Revolution

The issue of “modified capitalism” or “a mix of systems” or “Scandinavian style capitalism” has been coming up a great deal on social media as the capitalist juggernaut crushes more and more people and the idea of revolution seems less far-fetched and therefore, to certain social layers, more terrifying. I’ve added a section to my sidebar post, “Answers to a Few Things I’m Tired of Hearing,” (point #20) , but it’s coming up so often now that I’ve decided to talk about it here. This is mostly a copy of what I put there, with some expansions.

Of course it is tempting to point and say, “They do it there, why can’t we do it here?” Like all easy answers to difficult questions, it makes intuitive sense, but falls apart upon examination. Before I get into methodological problems, let’s look at it historically for a moment.

There is no question that in certain countries the working class, through terrible struggle and through the creation of labor parties, was able to win significant and important concessions from capital that have made those societies far more humane. This was a product of the post WWII conditions, that is, a time when capitalism, having gone through this slaughter, and massive destruction of property, had given itself a certain amount of flexibility. At the same time, the bourgeoisie was absolutely terrified of the social revolutions that were threatening throughout Europe (and Asia). In general, expressing it in the form of an equation, we get something like this:

Flexibility in capitalism + fear of social revolution = the possibility of reform.

That is pretty much what happened in the Scandinavian countries (as well as England, Belgium, &c) after WW II. But then, what about the US? Alas, thanks above all to the betrayals of the Stalinists in the US Communist Party, the same upsurge in the US (1946-48 strike wave, see also the Progressive Party ), was not able to produce a political arm, which has crippled the ability of the US working class to win similar concessions (although it still did win some: see medicaid, medicare, &c). But here’s what I want to emphasize: The idea of doing so now, when capitalism has so little flexibility that it is taking away every tiny thing once gained, and is going so far as to turn police forces into militarized terrorist gangs, and is attacking democracy on every front, is utterly absurd. And if you believe the best way forward is to recreate those post-war conditions, in other words, to have a third world war (nuclear this time) merely so capitalism can continue its bloodbath while being a bit gentler in the more privileged countries, I’m going to have to fight you on that.

Moreover, capitalism is international. Financial exchanges, capital investments, and deals for new factories fly across borders that, after all, are only intended to keep the working class in place, not the elite, and certainly not the elite’s money. I won’t say that a butterfly in New Mexico can cause a hurricane in China, but we’ve seen that a bank failure in Thailand can cause a stock market crash in New York. And as these crises increase in frequency and severity, we know who is asked to pay for them. Hint: It isn’t the capitalists. Not here, not in Thailand, and not in Iceland.

Capitalism is rattling itself apart like a machine whose control mechanism has broken. Rather than the Scandinavian countries being a model for what the US should do, the US is a predictor of what will inevitably happen there. We can already see it in the virulent anti-immigrant stances that are more and more common there (and in Australia). Such reactionary positions are not independent of attacks on the working class domestically, but are part of the same process. In other words, the reformists in most of those countries have either lost power, or are moving sharply to the right. The others will follow because they must. If capitalism is to be preserved, it must be preserved on the backs of the working class; the working class, on the other hand, has no way to protect what it has won, or, in this country, to win basic human rights like healthcare, without a program that rejects the idea that capitalism has a right to exist. However much you’d rather it were otherwise, those are our choices: the needs of the masses, or the free market.

What I want to emphasize, though, is the method behind this confusion: in part, it comes from looking at surface phenomena and accepting them, without digging deeper into causes. But another part comes from the same methodological flaw that produces right Libertarianism: the idea that the way forward involves thinking up what sort of society you’d like to live in, then convincing enough people that this would be a good idea that it is (somehow) implemented. I hope and believe that, someday, this can happen—that humanity will achieve a level of cooperation and a height of intellectual power that we will be able to plan out our own future development. But we’re not there yet. Now we’re where history has placed us, and we have to move forward from here as best we can, and that means, among other things, a study of history, and an effort to learn its objective laws. That is where to begin, not with picturing an ideal society, but with where are we, how did we get here, what are our options, and what do we need? Turning the US into another Scandinavia is simply not on the table.

One last point, because it’s somewhat related: for those who claim the Scandinavian countries are socialist. Uh, no. They do not have public ownership of production, state power in the hands of the working class, or state monopoly on trade—and those are only the foundations upon which socialism can be built, not even addressing distribution. Socialism does not mean capitalism that isn’t quite as brutal as it is elsewhere. It is a sign of the poverty of political understanding in the US, and additionally a sign of the barbarity of the US ruling class, that anyone could look at those countries and consider them socialist. As a side note, I have yet to meet anyone from Sweden or Norway or Iceland or Denmark or Finland who claims to live in a socialist country.

Defending a President I Hate

To be clear before we start, in case there’s anyone here who doesn’t know it, I did not vote for Hillary Clinton, and I am not a fan of, well, anything she’s done since she was elected. She was so universally despised that she nearly lost an election to Donald Trump for god’s sake, and nothing since she’s taken office has made me think she should be more popular.

But.

The attacks on her from the extreme right have gotten so absurd, that I just have to say something. I’m not talking about Republican accusations of treason for her meeting with Kim Jong-un; anyone with half a brain knew that was coming. It’s other things.

One thing that makes me rub my eyes is immigration. What the hell do the Republicans want? She is already continuing Obama’s mass deportations (as well, of course, as the slaughter in Yemen and the bombing in Syria to make sure of a growing supply of refugees to abuse and deport), and even continuing his massive deportation of children. She is on pace to break his record of most deportations of any administration in history. Isn’t that enough? Will the Republicans not be satisfied until concentration camps are set up? Sheesh.

Of course, the Republicans are silent about the worst aspects of her presidency: her continuing Obama’s policies of cuts to SNAP benefits, her support of police militarization, her “get tough” talk against Russia and China (along with increasing the US supply of nuclear weapons!), her continuing drone killings of non-combatants, her failure to do anything about climate change, constantly pushing for legislation that will benefit no one but Wall Street, her headlong retreats before the religious right, &c &c. Those things the Republicans like, so they just ignore them like good little hypocrites.

What broke it for me was the accusation, again, of treason (do you guys even realize that there is no such thing as treason absent a foreign power being a legally defined enemy, which pretty much means a war? No, of course not; why would Republicans bother learning about the law before making accusations?) for what happened in her meeting in Copenhagen with President Rivlin of Israel. I mean, come on. Did Israel interfere in the US elections, as the Republicans keep yammering about, and as the various intelligence services say they did? No doubt they did—as did thirty or forty other countries, all working for their own agendas, as happens in international politics. Chances are, Putin (Vladimir Putin, president of Russia) interfered just as much on behalf of Trump. But if Trump had won—as nearly happened—I don’t think we’d have seen the Democrats complaining about his “interference.” And, seriously, when President Clinton (or “President Hillary” as Fox News has started calling her, using the thin justification that there was recently another President Clinton) implied that she didn’t necessarily believe the report of the intelligence services, well, it was like every Republican Senator was about to have his head explode. I mean, did you hear Paul Ryan, during his reelection campaign? I thought he’d have a coronary right there. *scream scream* treason *scream scream* anti-American *scream scream* bought and paid for by Israel *scream scream*. Here is a place where I have to agree with my Democratic friends who have been doing such a good job of pointing out the history of the US intelligence services. If it’s treason to mistrust everything said by the NSA, the CIA, and the FBI, then treason has just been defined as, “having a minimal amount of common sense.”

Anyway, sorry for the rant. No, I do not support President Clinton. But I can’t watch this absurd Republican hypocrisy without saying something.

Free Speech, Censorship, Hate Speech, Twitter

I’ve been seeing more and more calls for twitter to ban hate speech. Hate speech is an ill-defined term, but I think in this case it includes racial slurs, sexual slurs, and in general remarks intended to silence someone, or make someone afraid, and to inspire those backward elements that thrive on the sort of ignorance expressed by racist, sexist, transphobic, or homophobic comments.

Asking twitter to ban users who say such things is a result, in my opinion, of a failure to think things through. It is the result of observing the harm these kinds of comments can do, and stopping there. I do not believe it is that simple.

I saw someone make the analogy that this was like being at Mark’s house and using language that offends Mark. Mark certainly has the right (moral right; I’m not discussing legal rights) to ask you not to use that language, and ask you to leave if you persist. The analogy, however, falls apart if Mark has bought up half the houses in town and wants to lay down the law in each of them.

We’re talking about twitter. We’re talking about a multi-billion dollar corporation (15.7 billion according to Forbes) that has tremendous power over information. Facebook and Google—the other two giants in terms of controlling a lot of the information most of us receive—have already demonstrated a willingness to censor left-wing and anti-war sites. And now you are attempting to put pressure on Twitter to assert more control over what we can and cannot say, over what we can and cannot hear. You do not see this as a problem? It is not, in my opinion, a possibility that, were this to happen, many left wing groups and people would be accused of “hate speech” and shut down—it is a virtual certainty.

“You are not obligated to provide a platform to anyone who feels like talking,” I hear. That is a very seductive argument, but it fails to hold up. We’re not talking about my blog, or your Facebook page, or that person’s twitter feed. Quantity, as it does, has transformed into quality. Twitter is a fundamentally different thing than my blog. It has hundreds of millions of users and incalculable influence. We’re talking about what is, in effect, a public utility (and one that, in my opinion, should be in fact a public utility, but that’s a subject for another time).

Here’s the thing: every defense, every analogy I’ve seen to justify asking twitter to shut down hate speech, has come down, in the last analysis, to a defense of property rights. And yet, the most casual observation ought to tell you that we are now locked in a battle between property rights and human rights. If you must resort to a defense of property rights to bolster your argument, I beg to submit that you should either take another look at what you’re defending, or stop calling yourself a progressive.

The answer to hate speech is to strike at its roots: inequality and its bastard offspring, ignorance. This fight requires organizing—organizing in mass ways. In Boston, they did not have the city—ie, the police, the repressive arm of the capitalist state—shut down the Nazis, the people there, to their everlasting credit, did it themselves. Much of the organizing work in the moment happened on twitter. By demanding twitter act against hate speech, you are asking twitter to take a greater role in deciding what content is permitted; can you really believe that will not be turned against us? Against the next effort to organize against Nazis? Can you doubt that the state, and, yes, the Nazis, will ultimately benefit from that?

Free Speech (by which I mean the moral right, of which the First Amendment is a limited reflection) is neither some supra-historical principle that must be worshiped as sacred and placed above any other aspect of struggle, nor is it that set of nice silverware that we take out when certain guests are over and leave in a drawer the rest of the time. It is the product of long struggle by the oppressed to create a tool that will permit a platform for organizing.

Are there occasions for the suppression of speech? In my opinion, yes. But the question is less, “what speech is being suppressed” than “who is doing the suppression?” If it is the masses of the people, shutting down efforts by white supremacists, Nazis, and other filth to organize, then yes. Drown them out, shut them down! If they want to try the same thing with us, let them; we do not fear a test of strength, because the masses of the oppressed are on our side—or will be, if we do our job, and are able to communicate with them.

But if you are asking a multi-billion dollar corporation that already has immense control over communication to assert more control over content, you are, in my opinion, working against the interests of those you are hoping to protect.

Criticizing Capitalism: A Thought Experiment

You know, I was just thinking about this thing people do, where you point out something terrible that capitalism does, and they say, “Communism wouldn’t be any better!” Let’s look at that for a minute. Let’s ignore the fact that, sometimes, it doesn’t even make sense in context, and let’s also ignore the fact that it almost always indicates someone whose study of political philosophy hasn’t advanced since high school social studies. Let us, as a thought experiment, pretend that this is literally true.

Okay, now what? Do we stop criticizing capitalism? Do we lie about it and say that it is perfect in all details? Anyone with a shred of decency will realize that even if—especially if—convinced that capitalism is the ultimate answer to how to produce and distribute human wants, insofar as there are problems, we should try to understand them, in order to, at least, attempt to alleviate them. Isn’t that, after all, the essence of reformism? “This will be here forever, so let’s make it as good as we can.”

But this requires study. This requires an understanding of the mechanisms of wage-labor, the generation of surplus value, capital investment, market forces, competition, efficiency of scale, &c &c. And if, in the course of this study, we were to come across something that is inherent in the very nature of capitalism, or is a natural result of the inevitable domination of finance capital over industrial capital, or the inextricable ties between capital and the state, or of the nation-state system that is so closely tied to commodity production, we ought to point it out. How else can those who see capitalism as permanent hope to improve it?

This, however, we never get from these people. When you make the observation that financial catastrophes, that destroy countless lives, happen with appalling regularity, you do not get anyone saying, “No, that doesn’t happen!” which I admit would be a hard case to make. And you don’t get anyone saying, “That’s because they’ve been doing it wrong for the last five hundred years, but I know how to fix it.” You also don’t get anyone saying, “Yes, that is true, and it is inherent in capitalism, so we should figure out how to alleviate the harm as much as possible.”

No, what you get is, “Communism would have the same problem!” It is the political equivalent of the schoolboy’s cry, “And you’re another!” and does just as much to advance human knowledge.

Exactly what this says about the defenders of capitalism I will leave as an exercise for the reader.

Bad People or Bad System?

It’s been forever since I’ve posted here. Sorry, fighting off personal crap. Anyway, I found myself making a long-ish comment on facebook, and I think I got it more or less right (enough qualifiers there?), so I’m going to copy it to here. The issue was the claim by another commenter, and I hope I’m summarizing him correctly, that capitalists mistreat workers because they’re morally corrupt, whereas in my opinion the problem is systemic, not personal. If I’m correct, it brings up the question: why, exactly, must a corporation treat its workers as poorly as possible while still keeping them coming back the next day? If it isn’t greed, and I contend greed is more of an effect than a cause, then why is it? Here’s what I said:

I’m going to take on your assertion that capitalists have a choice about how to treat workers, because it’s important. Please bear with me as I try to work through this.

The issue is competition. Not in the simple, straightforward sense (lower wages = lower prices = underselling the competition) because, in fact, the connection between wages and prices doesn’t work like that.

It’s a bit more complex. Lower wages (and the equivalent in reduction of benefits &c) put more money into the pocket of the capitalist. Some of this goes into supporting his life style, but for most of these people, that’s pretty well set. Instead, the extra money becomes capital, much of which, in practice, goes into the financial markets of pure speculation, some of which becomes investments in other companies, often competitors (the degree to which the major capitalists have their hands in each others’ pockets is mind-boggling), and some of which goes back into the business.

It can go into the business in various ways: a greater sales force, more investment in advertising and marketing, even research or new manufacturies. Maybe even a temporary massive “loss leader” (which looks like lowering prices, but the temporary nature makes it a different animal). In any case, all of these translate to the same thing: the fight for market share.

The fight for market share is brutal, constant, vicious, and, in the end, a fight for survival. A two percent loss of market share can send the board of directors into a panic. And, by their standards, it should: market share represents your power, your security, and your freedom to maneuver and take chances.

In short, a major corporation ( smaller companies, niche companies, or those like entertainment in which market share is less dependent on financial might can and sometimes do treat their workers well) that puts a significantly greater percentage of its working capital into labor than its competitors, is putting itself into a very dangerous position. Thus, the constant drive to put less into things like health care, a comfortable environment, safety precautions, and, of course, wages.

This is one half of the class struggle. The other half, obviously, is the desire of the labor force to have as much as possible of those things. But the point is, that is why I disagree with your position that capitalists are free to treat workers as well as they want. And if you’ve stayed with me for all of this, whether you agree or not, you have my thanks.