The rationalist’s guide to left-wing politics (LONG POST IS LONG)

So firstly, if you were linked here and want some propaganda literature, the Communist Manifesto and Debt: the First 5000 Years make very good sequels to Yvain’s “Meditations on Moloch”.

Going from there…

The very short summary is: capitalism is the private, profit-seeking ownership of the means of production, and their operation via wage-labor. Socialists are against this! The reason for italicizing that definition is because it’s important: almost all economic systems have included elements of communal cooperation, loose social cooperation (as between ordinary friends rather than tribe-mates or family members), trade and exchange, and hierarchical domination (this is parroting Graeber). Capitalism, as such, is a historically recent (1800s, more-or-less) and particularly pernicious arrangement of these elements. In fact, even capitalism has taken varied forms in different places and times, some more vicious and others even somewhat benign. Moreover, all of them were instituted by the deliberate imposition, through violence (usually state violence), of new ways of living and new ownership arrangements on existing populations.

The important thing is, we are not talking about a “naturally-occurring” economy. There is no such thing. All social systems are invented by people, imposed by people, and made to compete for efficiency by people. In fact, the best argument usually made for capitalism is not that capitalism is the most natural economy (or worse, the only possible economy), but that earlier, more natural occurring economies are really fucking poor.

All capitalism’s variations, by definition, are characterized by private, profit-seeking ownership of the means of production, and the operation of those means (such as machines and land and such) by wage-labor. The standard anticapitalist criticism is that capitalism contains “internal contradictions”, or in other words, it can neither keep its own promises nor preserve itself from economic crisis. This is part of the core Marxian thesis from Das Kapital: capitalism just is defecting in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, eating your own seed corn, sacrificing a few more values to Moloch, populating past carrying capacity.

In fact, that’s a fairly good way to describe what a crisis of capitalism (depression or secular stagnation) actually is: it is just what happens when the owning class attempts to harvest more wealth from wage-labor than is actually available. Marx’s Labor Theory of Value really ought to be called a Labor Theory of Profit. We all know there’s always a gap between the cost of raw materials plus the cost of labor, and the final price of goods. That gap is, of course, profits, supposedly allocated to capitalists for their role in risk-management and planning.

However, the goods are almost entirely paid for by other companies’ workers: capitalists can’t consume everything at a profit themselves. Thus, ultimately, one capitalist’s profits must come out of other capitalist’s labor-costs. Since each capitalist wants to maximize their profits by minimizing wages, maximizing prices, and maximizing consumer appeal, profit becomes a non-renewable resource.

Worse, as the easy profits get eaten up with low risk by capitalists, and thus accumulate as capital to be reinvested, capitalists are forced to seek increasingly risky investments: investments where the prospect of profit is imprecise (difficult to plan for) or just plain small. Low-risk = low-profit is not a conventional investing principle for nothing: it’s a fundamental result of needing to bet (take risks) on ways to obtain a non-renewable resource (profit).

Worse, as even very risky profits from the actual sale of goods become scarce, investors need to turn to even simpler ways of making money: just take money from people. Basically, start loan-sharking, squatting on natural resources, consolidating market shares, or even outright stealing from people. This is called rentiering, and was the major subject of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty.

If profit is a non-renewable resource, what stops capitalists from over-consuming it and leaving no new profits available to be made? Well, history tells us: nothing at all. They proceed to do exactly that, again and again and again. This is what an economic depression is: an over-harvesting of the non-renewable resource that is profit, resulting in a mass failure of investors’ plans and massive budget gaps for everyday stuff that needs to keep operating.

Now, there is one bright spot, as any conventional economist will point out. “Counter-forces” (to use Marxist terminology) do exist to this tendency towards economic disaster: productivity increases, population increases, and wealth redistribution. Productivity increases allow more or better goods to be made with the same amortized cost for raw materials and labor, and then sold for the same prices. Productivity growth is thus the one true and healthy source of economic growth. Population increases add to the supply of labor – but they only add to consumer demand when productivity growth or redistribution is high enough. Wealth redistribution recycles profits: it takes them from the rich and gives them to the working classes, who proceed to go ahead and spend them, turning them back into profits.

Sufficient wealth redistribution to sustain capitalism has been done in the real world. It was called various things: left-liberalism, Keynesianism, or (most of the time) social democracy. It’s actually a very good system for its available level of technology, but also contains its own internal contradiction. Generous redistribution to consumers, workers, and retirees requires consistently high productivity growth and consistently low rentiering. Without both those factors (the latter of which requires vigorous state action to break up monopolies and oligopolies), all that redistribution cuts into investors’ rate of profit as taxes, and investors “go on strike”. This was what happened in the 1970s stagflation: the oil cartel spiked rentiering rates up, the productivity growth from rolling out industrial implementations of WW2-era inventions tapered off, and working-class militancy (an attempt to bargain a larger share of revenue for wages) was high. Thus, investors took their money to other countries and sponsored “neoliberal” political forces who would do what needed doing: Ayn Rand, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher.

(We can now conjecture: what is a secular stagnation today? When productivity growth is low, population growth is low, risks are accurately assessed, and the primary investment incomes come from rentiering.)

In overall summary, capitalism promises cheap consumer goods, but then creates glut/depression/debt-crisis conditions in which the overwhelming majority of the population can’t afford those consumer goods. So you end up with “poverty in the midst of plenty”. This is the natural attractor state of the system!

So what about socialist movements, the responses by the working class to capitalism? Well, at first, different terms were used for the same things, and then divisions developed. Broadly, socialist and social-democratic movements aim to reduce or eliminate those internal contradictions by changing to a substantially different economic system, one we aim to make more sustainable, rational, and humane than capitalism.

• Historically, “social democracy” overlapped with both socialism, communism, and labor liberalism (the kind of “liberalism” you’re familiar with from FDR-LBJ). Parties called themselves “social democratic” just to indicate they were more-or-less left-wing and stood for labor concerns. So for instance, the Leninists/Bolsheviks originally formed as a faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. The place where social democracy has been most fully implemented is in the famous “Nordic model”, though nowadays it’s subject to the same headwinds as everyone else.

• Historically, “socialism” referred to almost any form of society or economy premised on common ownership of stuff. Back in the day, everything from 19th-century “utopian” socialism (ie: 19th-century communes) to Marxism (which Marx himself called “scientific socialism”) to anarchism to syndicalism was called “socialism”. This usage persisted into through the present day: the nonviolent Socialist Party of Eugene Debs were democratic socialists (today’s Democratic Socialists of America descend directly from them), the Israeli kibbutz system was socialist, today’s Mondragon cooperatives were socialist, nationalization of major firms in otherwise capitalist countries was considered socialist, etc. In general, self-proclaimed socialists consider the word to mean “radical democracy” or “economic democracy”: the extension of democratic participation into not only governmental institutions, but all institutional components of daily life, especially the workplace.

• “Communism” meant one thing when Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, and then came to mean another thing in the 20th century. When Marx wrote about “communism” in 1848, it referred to destroying the major empires and early nation-states that existed at the time, in favor of networks of worker-controlled municipalities. In fact, Marx’s core idea was precisely that After the Revolution (capitals because the phrase is a traditional refrain!), the socialist state would wither away and control over life would be decentralized to precisely those worker-controlled localities. This would be “full communism”: a stateless, classless, money-less society in which labor is planned out to create appropriate levels of abundance and leisure for everyone.

• However, once the Russian Bolsheviks got their movement really underway, they adopted the name “Communist” for themselves, founding the Russian Communist Party. For the rest of the 20th century, “communism” referred specifically to the Bolshevik movement, and all other left-wing groups had to take stances on whether they were communist (Soviet-controlled), pro-communist (pro-Soviet but not themselves Soviet-controlled), anti-communist (actually opposed to the Soviet Union), or non-communist (neither particularly for nor against the Soviet Union). The derisive name for these Communists on the Left ended up being “tankies”, after the Soviet Union deployed tanks to crush a left-wing uprising in Communist Hungary.

• The other major question created by the Russian Revolution was: to what degree could Soviet Russia be considered “actually existing socialism”, a form of socialism that had really been achieved and from whose example we can learn? To the Russians themselves, the phrase “actually existing socialism” became a bitter joke: their lives were miserable, and the phrase was constantly used as an excuse for why the widespread prosperity and personal freedom of “full communism” (see above) never actually arrived.

• Anarchism was a major distinct current in socialism, often acting in contradistinction to revolutionary socialists. They share the goal of a stateless, classless society, but differ on how to get there: anarchists believe that “workers’ states” cannot be trusted to “wither away”. They therefore believe in trying to dismantle the state apparatus as the first step towards democratic, participatory human freedom.

• Further, as the 20th century went on, the distinction between democratic socialists, social democrats, and revolutionary socialists (with communists as a strict subset of the latter) grew harder. Social democrats were those who worked to get elected to government in liberal-democratic countries so as to reform or tame capitalism to make people’s lives better. Democratic socialists were those who also worked to get peacefully elected in liberal-democratic countries, so as to replace capitalism with socialism via legislation rather than violence. Revolutionary socialists were those who believed formal politics under a capitalist system was useless, because the government would always be corrupted by money, and thus that they needed to overthrow the capitalist state by force.

• That brings us to neoliberalism, a particular form of capitalism which grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, and really came into full swing in the 1980s. We’ve been living under neoliberal capitalism since then, and still are. A simple way to think of neoliberalism is as a chiefly political program: to dismantle social democracy and render it impossible, leaving no alternative to a (relatively) pure, unreformed form of capitalism.

That basically gets us up to today, and everything else would involve going into minutia. Now that I’ve got the terminology, I can at least say, “This is what I ACTUALLY BELIEVE”, South Park-style.

I believe the best actually-existing societies/economies have been, variously, social-democratic and democratic socialist. I believe that these societies worked particularly well because they maintained the negative freedoms of liberalism, the positive freedoms of socialism, the capacity for experimentation inherent in autonomous firms, and the diverse mingling of interests and values characteristic of democracy. I believe the sociological research I’ve seen showing that peaceful changes of government, be they formally labeled elections or revolutions, lead to stabler societies in the long run, and in complex modern societies, are actually more likely to work. Finally, I believe with perfect faith (let me know if you get that joke) in the coming of Fully Automated Gay Space Luxury Communism ;-), as described by the prophets Iain Banks and Kim Stanley Robinson.

I profoundly hate neoliberalism, and fear that its effect is precisely, “[to] make peaceful revolution impossible … [and] violent revolution inevitable.” Both social democracy and democratic socialism have existed in the real world and worked well, but neoliberalism reconfigures things precisely so as to make those actually-existing good systems impossible figments of the past. I worry that we are now living through a crisis in which neoliberalism has, to a great degree, run itself into the ground and started “eating its seed-corn”, trying to profit by simply discarding human beings instead of finding profitable work to do. I also worry that we may well be living through a “revolutionary moment” in which the broad population will grow so discontented that violence can break out and completely overthrow the existing society, with… high-variance results. We seem to be past the time when one could safely contemplate politics from afar. I therefore sometimes, but not always, support revolutionary socialists and anarchists.