Two Types of People

There are two types of people (1) those who work for a living and (2) those who own things for a living. Workers and owners. It's a simplification, of course, but I think it helps to make some things clear. 

A capitalist is someone who owns things for a living. Their assets are invested so as to provide for their livelihood. No work is ever required. Capitalists, the owners, are the new "aristocracy" (more accurate the "aristoi"). Even the work of managing their assets is largely done by employees. 

If you work for a living, even if you own your own business, you are not a capitalist.  You might be a fan of people who own things for a living. You might even believe that we have no choice but to let the people who own things for a living run the world to suit themselves. But in the end you're just a collaborator. 

Unless you actually own things for a living, you are not one of them. It's the difference between following a pro sports team, and playing pro sports. To be a capitalist you have to actually make your livelihood from the stuff you own. 

One of the great lies of capitalism is that, if you own stuff you are like them. That owning stuff is the measure of success. The problem is that the stuff that fuels consumerism is not income generating. Having bought some fancy shit, it immediately starts to lose value, and is eventually worthless. For most people the only except is their house. Simply owning non-income generating stuff is counterproductive for working people. It makes it harder to acquire capital assets. 

The distinction also makes it clear what the true relative value of these two classes are. Imagine that all the people who worked suddenly ceased to exist. The owners would die out within a month (most in the first week). Now imagine that all the people who own stuff ceased to exist. All the working people would be considerably better off, especially if we didn't replace the owners. 

So yes, the owning class are in charge. Yes, they do present themselves as better than us. Yes, their rhetoric is powerful. But in reality, owning stuff is a *completely useless occupation* that contributes nothing of value to society. Indeed by creating artificial scarcities owners tend to create the conditions for social inequality, political corruption (and fascism), and economic instability. 

We can do without owners. We cannot do without workers. We really don't need anyone to just own stuff and make no other contribution. 

Globalisation

There is no better example of who is supposed to benefit from globalisation that the clamour for free movement of goods and capital and the simultaneous clamour to prevent the free movement of workers.

Global capitalists get rich by exporting production to places with cheap labour. They have lobbied to remove barriers to moving capital away from, and the flow of cheap goods back to, wealthy countries. So making them wealthier.

The argument is that this also benefits local workers by providing them with jobs. But if we really wanted to benefit those workers we'd let them move freely to places with higher wages. Imagine if capital and goods faced the restrictions than people do!

The neoliberal economic program is not egalitarian. It aims to promote conditions under which the wealthy can exploit workers to get more wealth. Keeping workers trapped in low-income countries is essential to this program.

This was the impetus behind 20 years of bogus headlines about the EU in UK media. And the driving force behind the Brexit campaign.

Free movement of workers was a problem for the super-rich and so they stoked irrational fears and the ever-present English racism to drive a wedge between Europe and the UK.

Ironically, driving a wedge between the EU and the UK suited Putin, so he gave Brexit a helping hand for free. A divided Europe is in the best interests of Russia. Still, the driver of it all, even in Russia, was the super-rich defending their hoarded wealth.

Deep Adaptation

Jem Bendell - Deep Adaptation

Misled By Donkeys

Recently I discovered the group, Led By Donkeys. They began by hijacking ads on billboards putting quotes from politicians in the form of Tweets (though in general the quotes were not tweets). They focus on catching politicians out changing their minds about Brexit. Many of them have done so.

It's funny in a kind of slapstick, people really are getting hurt, kind of way. Today they posted something on Twitter which appeared to show hardcore Neoliberal politician, Jacob Rees Mogg, saying "I don't advocate leaving the EU". And a video of him saying those words at a speech to the Neoliberal think tank the Centre for Policy Research.

I wanted to share this more widely and went looking for a YouTube version of the speech, which I duly found. It was just 20 minutes so I listened until I came to the part. It was interesting to see and hear the man outline his ideology. He is a man of his time and place: an upper class, Roman Catholic, patrician with inherited wealth and privilege. He has all the prejudices you would expect from a man of his class and background. He's pretty much everything I hate.

However, when I listened to what he actually said I was appalled to discover that Led By Donkeys had been dishonest in their editing, making him seem to say the opposite of what he did say. Now just to be clear, I don't like anything about Rees Mogg. To emphasis this I will refer to him now as "the little toad". At some cost to my mental health I have transcribed the relevant part of his speech here. It's about two minutes worth. I've tried to make this accurate - the first part has many fillers, but he hits his stride and is a lot less hesitant in the second part.

"...So much in this county, so much that we want to do is prohibited by Europe, um, and so much that we don't want to do is enforced by, by Europe. I'm not an advocate of withdrawal from it, um, but instead I want a fundamental renegotiation of terms, and this isn't code for saying that I want to withdraw from it but I'm just not brave enough. 

Ah, the reason for saying I don't think we should withdraw is that the day after we withdrew we would be negotiating a free trade pact, ah, with the European Union so we might as well stay in and get what we want rather than nominally go out and straight back in again. Ah, and I think UKIP's position on that, ah, is essentially the same; very quickly going back in in some form of EU. Ah, but we must we willing to take unilateral action if we haven't renegotiated to avoid being dragged down economically. 

In my view Europe has decided that it cannot really compete with the emerging world and must therefore try to create an unthreatening but declining cocoon for its members. It has opted to apply the big state on an international scale imposing restrictions and uncompetitive practices across a whole continent to have a level playing field, but a level playing field of inefficiency and high cost. This has made the single market a millstone rather than an opportunity for commerce to bloom in what should be the largest free trade area in the world. 

Jacob Rees Mogg, Speech at the Centre of Policy Studies, 2012. Verbatim. 

The little toad is clearly anti-EU as the EU existed in 2012 (and still does). The renegotiation he is insisting on as a criteria for remaining in the EU is truly fundamental. He wants to get rid of all the regulatory powers that the EU have over people like him - investment bankers. He believes in the kooky free market utopia. Even though the first round of Liberalism (Classical Liberalism) was a disaster that degraded all of humanity Neoliberals want a second go. Of course we have seen what an unregulated finance industry does. It brings down the entire global financial system. So those of us who want to stay in the EU are partly seeking protection from being devoured by toads.

On the other hand it is widely perceived in the UK that the EU imposes far too many petty and unnecessary rules on trade. The EU attempts to micromanage trade, for example telling member states what shaped fruit they can sell. This micromanaging tendency while allowing the finance industry to go rogue without any oversight is deeply problematic. The EU is far from perfect but we cannot change it from the outside. Already in 2012 it is apparent that the little toad sees the EU as beyond reform. Saying that he doesn't advocate leaving is merely a rhetorical device.

Of course this perception of an interfering EU has been stoked by the elements of the media that share the little toad's ideology - they all want to go back to before the Great Reform Act of 1832 so they can enslave the population and make unlimited profits while doing unlimited damage to the environment. And they must be stopped.

In any case the group Led By Donkeys has clearly set out to mislead people on the little toad. I don't feel sorry for the odious little toad. Fuck him. But if a group calling itself "Led By Donkeys" is so tempted by success that they flirt with being donkeys themselves by manipulating the words of the most odious of politicians because they couldn't find something actually odious that he said, then we are in trouble.

If your mantra is "they are dishonest" then you better make damn sure that you are scrupulously honest or you are no better than those you mock.

I support Extinction Rebellion. 

For real masochists, here is the speech timed to start just before the transcribed portion. Mind you watching from the start one gets a better idea of what Neoliberalism sounds like. Know your enemy.

Fuck Neoliberalism

A great theme of Neoliberalism is the benefit of competition. Competition is the main tool in the neoliberal tool box, so they treat most problems like nails. Primary and secondary education doesn't benefit from competition and yet the focus is relentlessly on offering "choice". If people only have a choice, the arguments go, then the competition will improve the poorer schools. In fact it simply makes the poorer schools worse off.

This idea about competition is Victorian. It is evolution, but from Huxley rather than Darwin. It was Huxley who coined the term "survival of the fittest". This was part of a culture in which the British Empire systematically exploited its own people and the people of all the places it conquered. This created a huge class of people who never had to work for a living, including most Victorian intellectuals.

The rapacious Empire needed some kind of intellectual justification. Some moral justification came from Christianity and the accompanying white supremacy that continues to dog Christian Europe. But it was the atheistic intellectuals who provided the ongoing arguments for the present day bourgeoisie: Utilitarianism, Mercantilism, and economic Liberalism.

In fact Neoliberalism can be seen as a reaction against the rise of social liberalism in the post-war years, especially in America. As Lewis Powell puts it in his famous Memo to the American Chamber of Commerce (1971):

No thoughtful person can question that the American economic system is under broad attack.

One of his big concerns was curbs on doing business to prevent them damaging the environment.

"Current examples of the impotency of business, and of the near-contempt with which businessmen's views are held, are the stampedes by politicians to support almost any legislation related to 'consumerism' or to the 'environment.'" - Lewis Powell, 1971 

The conservative businessmen of the USA did what Powell suggested, though many critics suggest that his memo is more descriptive than prescriptive. Conservative businessmen began to buy up the news media and appoint editors sympathetic to their cause; they bought chairs in business studies and founded universities which taught economic liberalism; they funded PhD programs; they founded think-tanks which employed the new PhDs to keep the conservative businessmen's message in the public eye and to lobby politicians; they spent billions lobbying politicians and employed armies of lawyers, psychologists, speech writers, and other graduates to shape their message for maximum effectiveness.

Conservative, or Bourgeois, Socialism

Continuing my commentary on The Communist Manifesto

"To this section belongs economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of the working class, organisers of charity, members of the SPCA, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of every imaginable kind... 

The Socialistic bourgeois want the living conditions of modern society without the struggles and dangers necessarily resulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wish for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisie natural conceives the world in which it is supreme to be the best; and Bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortable conception into a more or less complete system. 

... A second and more practical, but less systematic, form of this Socialism sought to deprecate every revolutionary movement in the eyes of the working class, by showing that no mere political reform, but only a change in the material conditions of existence, in economic relations, could be of any advantage to them... 

.... Free trade: for the benefit of the working class. Protective duties: for the benefit of the working class. Solitary confinement: for the benefit of the working class." 

- The Communist Manifesto, 1848, Chp 3.

Anyone in Britain reading this recognises, or should recognise, the present government as the most recent in a long line of governments who dismiss revolution and argue that they are the party of the workers, the only ones who can make the workers better of materially. As if offering workers back some minuscule fraction of the products of their own labour in order to be a better consumer has anything but the enrichment of the 1% in mind.

At the same time they knobble labour unions, export jobs to other countries, and most importantly they *remain in power*.

The bourgeois remain in control and dole out rewards to the faithful workers in the form of "benefits" when their jobs are annihilated or the system crushes them so much that they can no longer work. And we see the 1% getting exponentially richer while workers become redundant or keep their jobs only at the cost of less wages and poorer conditions.

We are even treated to the slogan "taking our country back from the bureaucrats of Europe". What a bitter irony that is.

But as (right-wing) comedian Simon Evans has remarked, there was never in history, a country less likely to revolt than Britain is today. Workers have bought the line about the desirability of material goods, are eager to be consumers, and have their minds anaesthetised by reality TV and the internet. The constant pressure to relocate away from family and community to seek work is slowly atomising society. Schools churn out conformist drones for the call-centres, who live for the binge drinking weekend. And best of all, he points out, "a stroke of genius", the poor are *fat*. At least in the past the poor were thin and hungry and that made them eager for change.

The collapse of totalitarian forms of state socialism seems to have been used to discredit the left generally. As though there is no value in helping each other, supporting each other. Our politicians are completely insulated from the problems they cause. The supposed party of the workers is so busy with its internal power struggles that it has lost the ability to perform any function in the power structures of the nation. But it long ago become bourgeois.

The ruling classes have hoodwinked the population into believing that there is no alternative to Neoliberalism - a combination of discredited economic and social policies that lead to the breakdown of economies and societies, but which succeed in enriching the rich. And we're not even really angry about this. Bombarded with TV news in which our capacity for empathy is swamped by vicarious suffering and hyperstimulation, we struggle to respond to the people around us.

Some of us think we can create a protective bubble around us. Walk around the homeless, ignore the political corruption, cling to what we have, and keep our fingers crossed that the people in charge will not take our jobs, homes, and savings again as they did in 2008. But we are not protected by this.

The weird thing is that be definition we out number the 1% 100 to 1. We could simply repossess all that wealth. There are not enough police to stop us if we all acted together. But Capitalism per se has atomised society to the extent that concerted action is probably no longer possible. Effective resistance to the bourgeoisie is all but over. Most of us are not even thinking in terms of resistance, let alone revolution. Revolution, as Marx and Engels predicted has been discredited, and participation in free market Capitalism is now the only way for workers to improve their lives. Free market Capitalism has replaced the Christian Church as the arbiter of values and consumerism as the opium of the masses.

To be fair, Capitalism has dragged everyone with it to some extent. The average worker does have a materially better standard of living. But that raising of the workers is steadily reversing now that opposition has been neutralised. Wages are falling. Jobs are disappearing to places where people labour in worse conditions for less for less pay. Atomisation continues apace.

Cybernetics, Game Theory, and Economics

In Adam Curtis' documentary The Trap, he links Game Theory to Economics. Game theory-inspired economics has a lot in common with cybernetics in that modern Neo-classical economics argues that economies, like organisms, tend towards homoeostasis, or in economic jargon, to equilibrium.

It is true that organisms, ecosystems, and Gaia all tend towards homoeostasis, or to put it another way they all have feedback mechanisms that sustain the environment in state that is conducive to life and is typically deflected from the equilibrium that would hold under inorganic chemistry. For example having 21% oxygen in our atmosphere is not something that could be sustained by chemistry alone, but requires constant renewal from living sources. Left to itself oxygen reacts with just about anything to form oxide compounds that are hard to break down. Without life on earth, the oxygen levels would plummet from 21% roughly 0% in quite a short period of time.

When James Lovelock was asked to contribute to a NASA project for finding life on other planets, he told them to look for systems out of equilibrium. Look for too much oxygen for example. One didn't need to actually visit Mars to decide if life exists there, one need only measure the composition of the atmosphere which one can do by spectroscopy right here on earth. It turns out that the atmosphere of Mars is at chemical equilibrium. Therefore, there is no life on Mars. The requirements of living systems are very different from the chemical environments found anywhere on earth at present, and bound within each living cell is a modified vestige of that original milieu in which life originated (which was probably in warm, alkaline, thermal vents)

Neoliberalism draws on such economic theories, from libertarianism, from merchantilism, and game theory to create the idea of the black box called The Market. The argument is that the market is a homoeostatic system that seeks equilibrium. It responds to inputs directly to produce outputs. The theory is that there is a linear relation between input and output and that the participants in the system are rational, but selfish and greedy (as if selfishness and greed are rational!)