Posts Tagged ‘neoliberalism’

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Jordan Peterson: Poverty and climate change

January 29, 2022

There is a relationship between poverty and climate change. No question. However it might not be the one that Jordan Peterson is claiming.

The usual position is that poorer people are generally forced to live in areas nobody who can afford to get out of would live. Not always true, because poor areas can also be quite communal, supportive and looking out for each other – co-operation helps survival. The land they occupy tends to be less fertile or vulnerable to seizure if it suddenly proves useful as the laws are not written to protect or benefit them. They tend to be in areas subject to flood, subject to heat, subject to drought, subject to disease, subject to heavier pollution, poisoning and rubbish dumping. In the cliché, the rich live at the top of the hill and the poor get the sewerage run down – they literally get pissed on. Corporations come in, use up, or destroy, the land and move on, out of reach of recompense; their promises of local prosperity for the poor never being fulfilled.

The poor are vulnerable to climate change, generally because of the areas they live in. However, as I have said previously the ‘ecological footprint’ of poorer people tends to be small. The ecological footprint (or pollution and destruction total) of wealthier people tends to be huge. For example, the Center for Global Development states that the average Briton produces 200 times the climate emissions of the average Congolese person, the average people in the US producing 585 times as much. I’ve mentioned the idea of the ‘polluter elite‘ [1], as an essential part of capitalism, before.

So what is Jordan Peterson’s attitude towards this?

He argues that:

The fastest way to make the planet sustainably green and ecologically viable is to make poor people as rich as possible as fast as we possibly can… poor people [are] not resource-efficient. They use a lot of resources to produce very little outcome, so that’s a problem… when you’re insecure on a day-to-day basis, you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, you’re not paying attention to the broader environment around you

Taft. Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan Talking About Climate Change Will Make Your Brain Dissolve. Gizmodo

This more or less contradicts the data which suggests that rich people use huge amounts of resources. Naturally if they use huge amounts of resources they may well (by some measures) produce a big outcome, but it may not be all that efficient, but wasteful – and its easily possible to assume that when resources are easy to obtain, and produce no immediate suffering to the person obtaining them, that this person will not care how much they expend and waste, and pay little attention to the environmental consequences of that use. It is wealthy societies which are destructive. The logic works both ways, but let use assume that Peterson is right and people should be wealthier and this will produce green behaviour.

Peterson apparently says something to the effect that “Everything pollutes something – net-zero is nonsense“. This may be true (indeed I’ve argued that the mode of pollution is as socially important as the mode of production), but only a very wealthy person could assume that any amount of pollution somewhere else is ok.

My source is not clear on how Peterson wants to make people rich – indeed one source suggests Peterson criticises Corporate capitalism implying that companies “thrive at the disadvantage of the worker“. So he gives little hint of what we should do, as I presume he will not discuss the benefits of socialism or the mixed economy. My guess is that he is inconsistent and follows neoliberalism and handing everything over to the corporate market – this suspicion is boosted as he apparently argues that deregulation doesn’t create ecological disaster and that fracking is great. The problem here is that while we want to help people become as prosperous as possible, we don’t want everyone to have a huge ecological footprint. If the average Chinese or Congolese person gets to have the same ecological footprint as the average Australian does now, we are stuffed. We need prosperity with a smaller footprint. That means we need to learn to reduce Australia’s ecological footprint (or whatever your country’s footprint is, etc.). And we need to stop profiting from encouraging other countries to increase their footprints by buying our fossil fuels. We need to be able to generate wealth without pollution and destruction – partly because the costs of pollution and climate change are already high [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]. This again points to the difference between ‘wealth’ and ‘illth‘.

As poor people usually survive with a very low ecological footprint, they are often amazingly resource efficient, whatever Peterson says. This is one reason we send our garbage overseas. People reuse it. They extract minerals and valuable materials from it. They are generally not that wasteful. I’ve talked to people from some developing countries and they have been amazed at what Australians habitually throw out. You can’t afford to be wasteful if you are poor. Everything counts. That is certainly how my parents were brought up. They were not endlessly disposing of stuff – they reused, they repaired and so on. I would guess this could be true of Jordan Peterson’s parents as well. Thrift is usually considered a virtue, but modern machinery is often quite difficult and expensive to repair by design – hence the idea of a right to repair [9], [10], [11], and the request for biodegradable plastics and other materials.

Peterson continues:

You can’t even really worry about your children’s future in some real sense because ‘No, no, you don’t understand. Lunch is the future. We don’t have lunch, we’re hungry and that goes on for like a month we’re dead.’ That’s the future.

Taft. Jordan Peterson and Joe Rogan Talking About Climate Change Will Make Your Brain Dissolve. Gizmodo

Yes extreme poverty may not be good for future thinking, but then you need to ask what causes this kind of poverty, and it is often brought about by other people getting extremely rich; taking the land or forest the poor people have occupied and looked after for centuries, displacing them into cities (or other places where they have no land they know) where they cannot grow anything or look after themselves easily. Or perhaps poorer people suffered from taking perfectly legal loans which turned out to have unpayable interest rates, and they fled or a parental member of the family suicided for shame. Or they were forced into buying GM seeds which were infertile, or the water dried up because it was used for local industry or industrial farming, or climate change…. Riches and illth creation can involve destruction for some.

The problem here, apart from the likelihood that all this will get worse with continuing climate change, is differential of power. And again there is going to be little difference if getting people prosperous does not weaken the power differential and the force of unequal law.

What Peterson says is true:

The attempt to make the environment habitable and sustainable — that comes up of its own accord at a grassroots level and spreads everywhere.

but this is usually prevented by the hierarchies that exist and seek for profit rather than sustainability. Corporations may have no tie to the land, and no care for it, at all. They are only a temporary resident exploiting resources, not planning to maintain things ecologically for all.

Now Peterson tries to get political saying:

“left-wing types” seem “willing to sacrifice the poor to their Utopian [visions]” by pushing green energy resources to make the world more sustainable.

Well that may be true, if you have seen the damage that massive coal mines, or fracking can do to the land to provide old unsustainable energy. The IEA has said since 2020 that

Solar PV and onshore wind are already the cheapest ways of adding new electricity-generating plants in most countries today….

Solar projects now offer some of the lowest-cost electricity in history.

IEA. Renewables 2020: Analysis and forecast to 2025. p12-13

Renewables are consistently cheaper than new coal or gas based electricity. Renewables not only have the potential to be cheaper, but they are modular – they can easily be expanded when locals have more money. Villagers can become self-reliant on renewables and control it. It may be awkward but is often better than what they have now. They don’t have to wait for power cables to be built to their village from some distant source, or serviced, and they don’t have to pay for the capital expense of that wiring. Once renewables are paid for, they are paid for, ongoing costs are minor.

Peterson develops his incorrect argument that renewable energy is more expensive, by saying:

What happens is that in any system that’s hierarchical—and left wingers know this because it drives their whole philosophy — when you stress the system, the disproportionate amount of that stress falls on the people who are in the lower rungs because they’re barely hanging on anyways.

This is true of hierarchies in general. The weird thing is that previously we have seen Peterson defending right wing established hierarchies and refusing to admit there was any problem at all. So he here may be changing his whole political opinion. Perhaps he objects to hierarchies he does not like and which may not exist, or perhaps he is opportunistic. This is why you need a whole transcript. Anyway, in this case, we might all be able to agree we should scrap the hierarchies, including the capitalist hierarchies, and hand choice back to the poor.

He continues:

There is the old saying, ‘When the aristocracy gets a cold, the working class dies of pneumonia.’ So fine, increase energy costs. Well, what happens? A bunch of poor people fall off the map and the more you increase the energy cost, the more that happens.

True again, so you want cheap locally controlled and owned energy, which will have to be renewable. You don’t get cheap locally supplied fossil fuel energy, which does not harm the land. To support the poor, you want to scrap fossil fuel mines that displace people, you want people not to be forced away from the land that supports them, and that they know how to look after. Let’s get rid of extreme poverty without increasing ecological footprints – and lets try and reduce our own footprint as much as possible. That way we will be providing an example, and investing in ways of doing things that are less destructive, so the innovation will occur and spread.

Neoliberalism is not the only way forward, indeed it is a method to make things worse.

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Social Murder

January 26, 2022

In these days of ecological destruction, climate change and Pandemic, the concept returns….

From Engels Condition of the Working Class in England

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of workers in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.

I have now to prove that society in England daily and hourly commits what the working-men’s organs, with perfect correctness, characterise as social murder, that it has placed the workers under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long; that it undermines the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so hurries them to the grave before their time. I have further to prove that society knows how injurious such conditions are to the health and the life of the workers, and yet does nothing to improve these conditions. That it knows the consequences of its deeds; that its act is, therefore, not mere manslaughter, but murder

Conditions of the Working Class in England (slight changes in punctuation and paragraphing).

It is worth joining this up to the ideas of Stochastic Terrorism, and Information mess as tools used by the Dominant classes to wage war on everyone else.

Perhaps it happens because in neoliberalism (or in old fashioned capitalist liberalism) the only important thing is the corporate economy, which must be protected at all costs. Without that economy the dominant groups think there is nothing. Natural systems, and people, don’t exist apart from the economy, and as tools for the economy, under the economy. If those systems, or people, get in the way of the economy, or the way of corporate profit, then they have to be sacrificed to the economy to placate that economy. Then everything will work out fine.

Another aim of neoliberalism is to turn business people into heroes and everyone else into disposable and anonymous numbers. 29 unnamed people died today of Covid in NSW, to support the corporate economy and to maintain the fiction that all is well; and it is pretty good for the billionaires.

The ideal model of the worker, is the soldier who will do as they are told until they die for the greater good. They like the soldier are forced to go into danger, the threat not being firing squad, but hunger and homelessness for them and their children. The greater good is the corporate economy and those who run it, which is surely greater than any atomistic, unnamed worker…. The people who die under neoliberalism have only themselves to blame: they are old, they have pre-existing conditions, they are sick, they are not keeping quarantined, they don’t understand medical information, they don’t trust the government, they are idiots, they are not wealthy, they have no savings, and so on. All ways of distancing the rest of us from the murdered, and helping to stop us recognising that we could be next.

However, we should now know, that if the CEOs and high level executives don’t turn up for work, everything is ok. But if the garbage collectors, the street sweepers, the truck drivers, the people who put stock on shelves, the people who harvest and pick the food, the nurses, the ambulance drivers, the teachers don’t turn up, then there is panic. These are the essential workers, and these are the ones the system kills.

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Problems of Economics

January 10, 2022

Firstly, there are lots of economic theories and practices guided by those theories- there is not just one economic theory, although people tend not to realise this. Some theories may be better than others. However, evaluating different theories is not the point of this post.

Nearly all economics faces some incredible difficulties.

  1. Economics tends to be caught up in social values. After all, economic theory encourages behaviours, forms of organisation, government policies and aims for particular results. It is difficult to conduct social theory without importing values into it, and much harder to be objective about such issues, than it can be when studying physics for example. I suspect that values cannot be separated from what a person perceives to be reality, and what they ignore of reality. Values can prompt unreality, but we cannot not have values.
  2. Values also get caught up in the dynamics of politics and power. The economic theories and practices which tend to be well known and used in a society will nearly always be those which support the wealth and power of the dominant groups in that society. Who else gets to promote theories and their proposers easily? Even if the theories were ok, they will be distorted by this practice, and become ideological tools to hide important processes, or to justify inequalities of power and opportunity. We could ask if some action is avoided because of economic damage, what kind of economic damage counts, whom does it primarily effect, and what might be a way of avoiding that damage?
  3. As a result of these political processes, most current well known western economics, tends to assume that capitalism is an inherent given, rather than one mode of social organisation among many, even in capitalist societies. For example, people generally do not treat their children as only being cheap labor, or as a cost.
  4. Societies and economic systems seem to be what people call “complex systems”. That means they are composed of ‘events’ which are influencing each other. A theory may have been a good theory, but after a while the practices associated with that theory change the system, so that the theory no longer works – sometimes people say that the system is ‘self-reflexive’. Complexity means that all knowledge is a simplification at best, and that the only accurate model of the system is the system itself, and that reality includes people working with the theories. [This does not mean models of complex systems are useless, they are the best we can do, but they are not completely accurate in their predictions, and this should always be remembered]. ‘Items and events’ within complex systems do not exist apart from those systems, or without being influenced by those systems.
  5. Complex systems don’t have firm boundaries. Economics, in its current forms tends to forget that John Stuart Mill’s removal of social factors, culture, politics and psychology was only an attempt to simplify the system to make a start at analysing it. He did not, and economists should not, think that economics is independent of these factors. If you remove these factors then you are going to be erroneous.

These factors seem to be relevant for all kinds of social and political understanding. They are one reason it is difficult to engineer a ‘good society’, whether we try to do this by regulation or unregulated capitalism.

This does not mean it is impossible to get a better society, but we probably should remember:

  1. Our values can distort what we perceive and what we do.
  2. Models can have values and politics and self-benefit hidden within them.
  3. Capitalism is not natural, inevitable or inherently good.
  4. Complexity seems to be a fact of life. Uncertainty, degrees of ignorance, unintended conseuqences, and unpredictability are normal. Useful values and policies probably have to reflect this ‘fact’. Everything we do is experimental, not given as true in advance.
  5. Different fields overlap. You cannot have a healthy non-ecological politics, or an economics which disregards power, the power of wealth, or the existence of varied modes of exchange.

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Would life be better without neoliberalism?

December 28, 2021

Prediction of alternates is always difficult, but the short answer is “almost certainly”

Neoliberalism in practice

Neoliberalism is a word usually used to describe policies which support corporate dominance while pretending to support free markets and individual liberty.

Neoliberalism aims to protect corporations from political influence and regulation while increasing political control by corporations.

It implies that wealth has no power to control markets or to allow people to buy political power, so it effectively promotes the power of wealth elites at the expense of ordinary people.

Although it allows corporations to control government, it pretends that government is independent of those corporations and is to blame for everything that goes wrong. This enables them to further render government useless for people, and increase corporate power.

It posits all human relationships as primarily being individually oriented, competitive and economically oriented (thus accidentally harming families and communities). The primary aim of this claim is to allow them to deny that wealth elites will ever team up for their own advantage – which is otherwise observable fact. Strangely they do recognise that workers can team up for their own advantage, making unions, and they argue this is bad.

The only class war they recognise, is when people team up to take on the wealth elites in general (not just part of the wealth elites such as Soros or Gates). The wealth elites suppressing people is just normal business practice.

Neoliberalism tends to be opposed to government handouts to unemployed or unfortunate people, but usually remains silent when there are government hand outs to the wealthy. Hence wealth and power inequalities continually increase, and people get left out of their own governance.

There are people who argue that all this is in the tradition of classical liberalism, but I doubt that is the case entirely; few classical liberals would argue that capitalist economics is the only driving force in human psychology, and neoliberals tend to demand extensive authority to protect existing corporate privilege. This is why neoliberalism can easily tilt into fascism, or authoritarian hierarchy, polarisation, nationalism etc.

It can be suggested that nearly everything bad today has come about through neoliberalism.

Costs of neoliberalism and benefits of no neoliberalism

Wages have stagnated because neoliberals dislike costs to business, lowering the amount of income you receive is important to them. They call this market discipline, or worker competition and flexibility.

Without neoliberalism, unions would have retained their place and would not be pushed out. Workers would have a collective power to be able to increase their wages, improve conditions of labour, and lower working hours without loosing money – as was the case in the 50s or 60s.

Because neoliberalism involves government by the wealth elite, it has an interest in preventing people from participating in government. Without neoliberalism, it might be that their would be more community government, and real public participation in electoral processes – the democratising and civil rights moves of the sixties and seventies might well have continued. If so, then people would be less alienated from the process of government.

Neoliberal corporations control most of the media, hence they can use it to mislead people as to the cause of problems. They often say the problems can be blamed on a non-existent socialism which needs curbing by more neoliberalism and hence more power to the wealthy. They also try to build loyalty through compulsive abuse of ‘alternatives’ rather than encourage discussion, fact finding and building ties between people across groups. This means that many people live in a neoliberal fantasy world, rather than engage with reality. Hence the ease with which real problems are ignored, and people encouraged to vote against their interests. Without neoliberalism, we would have more, smaller, and competing media organisations. There would be more views represented, and better investigations of problems.

Under neoliberalism the problems of climate change and ecological destruction cannot be faced in time, because that might involve restrictions on profit or on corporate privilege to pollute with ease and freedom. Dealing with ecological crisis will possibly curtail some of their liberties, and if the people suffer as a result, neoliberals can live with that. Fifties and Sixties style capitalism might well have easily dealt with climate change and ecological destruction. Indeed some argue neoliberalism was promoted to stop public interest in solving these problems.

Without neoliberalism, people might be more prone to admit humans are co-operative as well as competitive and that everything exists because of everything else, and we depend upon each other and our ecology. With an ecological vision neoliberalism does not make sense.

Likewise neoliberals stop changes to the rules of markets which might protect smaller people, and promote changes to the rules which protect wealthy people and allow them to get more of the general wealth. Neoliberalism tends to imply that all non-economic transactions are zero-sum; that is you gain at the expense of other. If other people are helped this takes money and status from you. Zero sum economic transactions tend to be hidden. This is one reason why neoliberalism is often known as trickle down economics – it pretends that making sure the wealthy get wealthier benefits everyone all the time.

Without neoliberalism corporations would pay more of their share of tax, and there would be more money for public services and general needs.

Without neoliberalism there would be less privatisation of public business, and better and cheaper service with less corruption. There might still be publicly owned businesses which would allow real competition and hinder wealth cartels. All of these factors would have likely kept the continuing rise in living standards for people which was such a factor of post WWII capitalism.

Conclusion

A clear description of neoliberalism demonstrates one reason people do not want to be labeled as neoliberals – its very hard to openly, or awarely campaign for more corporate power and wealth and less power and wealth for everyone else.

Without neoliberalism, we would still have problems, but life would probably be better. It has been one of the great disasters of the last 50 years.

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Polluter Oligarchies

September 19, 2021

Polluter Elite

Dario Kenner adds to the analysis of the Carbon Oligarchy with another exceptional book Carbon Inequality. He points out that our political and economic elites, the centres of power, are a ‘polluter elite’. Their power and wealth is also expressed as pollution.

This makes it crucial to understand the role of the richest in shaping environmental outcomes in the US and globally. In the US many of the largest fortunes were based on oil and automobiles from the 1890s onwards.

Kenner Carbon Inequality, p.5.

Wealth, power and freedom are tied up with an ability to pollute:

  • Through consumption and lifestyle. Massive air travel, private jets, private ocean going vessels, luxury imports. Energy wastage.
  • Emissions made through investments and return on investments – i.e. through investing in polluting and destructive industries.
  • Political influence and the ability to protect pollution through ‘State capture’.

We might summarise this as the polluter elites have the ‘right to pollute and poison others;’ the right to ignore harms to others produced by their own actions; the right to be unconscious of the damage they cause; the right to ignore the limits of the planet; and the right to expect the State to suppress protest against pollution with force.

These points are, if you will, the direct face of the carbon oligarchy and their violence.

Given the dominant political power of the oil & gas polluter elite the low-carbon transition will only happen on the large scale and at the rapid speed that is needed if they are weakened.

Kenner Carbon Inequality p10

Note this is not just because they are wealthy and powerful, but because as well as being dedicated to wealth and power, they are dedicated to destruction and harm in the protection of that wealth, power and liberty.

The term ‘polluter elite’ (I’d probably prefer ‘Polluter Oligarchy’) is also useful to remind us that Carbon Dioxide and Methane are only part of the pollution picture. Other forms of harmful pollution, in their origins, produced by relatively small numbers of people are also routine. Although Kenner rarely heads in that direction, it is implicit in the work.

This elite has the ability to shape the consumption choices of the general population to skew them towards lifestyles that are intertwined with fossil fuels, and other forms of pollution, so that the average citizen remains “addicted” those to fossil fuels and other forms of pollution, and they remain within an intersecting set of social systems which reinforce the pollution, and the wealth generated by pollution. Again, we need to realise that we are not just dealing with private companies, but with State owned companies, who use the State directly to support and ignore the pollution that they produce.

The Polluter/carbon Oligarchy has been in existence since at least the second quarter of the Nineteenth Century (Kenner 39), when industrialism started to render cities, atmospheres and rivers poisonous: what John Ruskin summarised in quasi-religious terms as the apocalyptic “Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century” although he did not directly tie it to industrialism, the tie is implicit as is the more obvious tie to his audience’s moral blindness and refusal to care for ecology and its beauty [12], probably because of intertwining of monetary wealth and pollution.

The Polluter/carbon Oligarchy stretches across the world. We have the polluting elites and the polluted lower classes, everywhere. It is not perhaps just a matter of the developed world vs the developing world, although it is part of that contest. The ultra rich everywhere protest against environmental protection [13], and in a plutocratic social environment their ‘vote’ counts for more than those being harmed.

A report by Lucas Chancel and Thomas Picketty from 2015 states:

Global CO2e emissions remain highly concentrated today: top 10% emitters contribute to 45% of global emissions, while bottom 50% contribute to 13% of global emissions. Top 10% emitters live on all continents, with one third of them from emerging countries…

Our estimations show that the top 1% richest Americans, Luxemburgers, Singaporeans, and Saudi Arabians are the highest individual emitters in the world, with annual per capita emissions above 200tCO2e. At the other end of the pyramid of emitters, lie the lowest income groups of Honduras, Mozambique, Rwanda and Malawi, with emissions two thousand times lower, at around 0.1tCO2e per person…

[The bottom 50% of emitters produced] 13% of world emissions

Chancel & Picketty Carbon and inequality: from Kyoto to Paris Summary.

Other research presents similar data and estimates. For example the Oxfam report, ‘Confronting Carbon Inequality,’ suggests that:

The richest one percent of the world’s population are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the 3.1 billion people who made up the poorest half of humanity during a critical 25-year period of unprecedented emissions growth.

Between 1990 and 2015… [t]he richest one percent were responsible for 15 percent of emissions… during this time – more than all the citizens of the EU and more than twice that of the poorest half of humanity (7 percent).

During this time, the richest 10 percent blew one third of our remaining global 1.5C carbon budget, compared to just 4 percent for the poorest half of the population.

Oxfam Carbon emissions of richest 1 percent more than double the emissions of the poorest half of humanity 21st September 2020

In more detail the report states that between 1990 and 2015:

The poorest 50% have made 7% of cumulative emissions and have remained steady since 1990.
The middle 40% have made 41% of cumulative emissions and are responsible for 49% of emissions growth since 1990.
The richest 10% have made 52% of cumulative emissions and are responsible for 46% of emissions growth. The top 5% alone are responsible for 37% of emissions growth. Oxfam p3-4

Wealth asymmetry is tied up with pollution amongst other problems. Wealth asymmetry also makes change difficult. As Kenner points out:

When previous civilizations collapsed one common driver has been that the elite were able to insulate themselves from the impact of their decisions. Often the elite were motivated to seek personal profit even if in doing so they harmed the rest of society…

Mackay argues that even when societies have possessed sufficient technology and cultural knowledge, they have not used these solutions because the oligarchy has blocked them. Instead, the oligarchy has captured decision-making to enrich themselves and strengthen their own power [see 14]

Kenner, p53.

This is symptomatic of what I have called the Toynbee Cycle.

As Kenner implies, in these circumstances, the polluter elite should not be seen entirely as wealth creators but also as wealth destroyers, “where wealth is understood as the necessary conditions for a habitable planet.” (Kenner 57) ‘Monetary’ or ‘material’ prosperity (‘riches’) is not just an unmitigated good, it is (necessarily?) accompanied by destruction and harm, or by what Ruskin called ‘illth’ [15], [16]. Again resistance to diminishing the harm occurs because capital investment is sunk into harmful procedures and infrastructures such as rigs, mines, pipelines, railroads, refineries, tankers, which cannot be stopped without loss to the oligarchy (Kenner, p. 67).

The oligarchy has access to the State, it appears to be part of what keeps the State functional, and hence has access to taxpayer’s money, and this is reinforced by the neoliberal ideology that that business and the market are the main important things in life.

between early 2017 and the end of 2018 the Trump administration had successfully eliminated 47 environmental rules mainly related to fossil fuel extraction and emissions, and was trying to eliminate another 31 rules. [Popovich] The elimination of these rules helped to reduce costs for fossil fuel producers. This made them more competitive abroad which is one factor in the rise in US coal exports. Trump approved the Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines. He removed regulation on leasing for oil and gas operations on federal lands. He gave the green light for drilling for oil in US coastal waters.

Fenner p.71

Noeliberalism has also led to massive tax cuts for the wealthy and wealthy organisations which has helped incapacitate the ability of those parts of the State which seek to avoid environmental disaster to act to prevent that disaster, while the dogma of growth reinforces the reluctance of the State to act against industries which have traditionally brought about employment, State revenue and cheap available energy – even if they are not currently bringing in that much revenue to the State.

Naomi Klein points out that it is often argued that fighting against climate change requires some people to engage in self-sacrifice, and this obstructs action. However, over the last 40 years most people in the West have been persuaded to engage in a self-sacrifice which has boosted the oligarchies – calls for austerity and sacrifice to support neoliberal dominance and economic stability have been successful.

we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis…. [Sensible actions] are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets….

The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatisation of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending.

Naomi Klein How will everything change under climate change? The Guardian 8 March 2015

They justify these lessening of people power by terms like “liberty,” “free markets” and “choice” which have, in practice, meant eliminating most restrictions on the ability of wealth elites and the Polluter Oligopoly to do as they please, and ignore the costs. We need to “shift the focus from the super-poor to the super-rich” if we are to overcome climate change

We have sacrificed for the Oligarchy, even if we sacrificed because we were deceived, now it may be time for many to sacrifice for the sake of our continuing place on Earth.

Conclusion

If we wish to survive and to limit ecological destruction and climate change, then we have to recognise the power and prevalence of the ‘Polluter & Carbon Oligarchy.’ They are not mere innocents making money and bringing prosperity, they are also stuck into bringing destruction, and issuing propaganda in favour of that destruction, or hiding that destruction. The wealth they have enables them to defend themselves and keep the destruction going. They are not just businesses, but are tied into the State, and tied into State, subsidy and protection, the more securely the more voters are convinced into abandoning the State and leaving the State to them.

At the least, we have to challenge tax and other subsidies given to the Oligarchy, challenge regulations that make it easier to pollute and destroy ecologies – such as offsets, carbon accounting and so on – and challenge imaginary technologies like carbon capture and storage, or geo-engineering, which appear to make it ok to keep pollution going on. We may need steadily increasing carbon and pollution taxes to levy revenue for the State and to compensate those among the community who face higher prices. We may also need subsidy, and plans, for communities to set up their own renewable power generation, to free them from dependence on the Oligarchy, and to make energy use, revenue and control, local and more democratic. We may need to make environmental regulation more secure, which sadly may be used to raise ill-will against the general transition.

Protests and legal challenges against expanding coal mines, gas field and oil fields – may fail, but they also keep bringing the issue into public view and they add to the costs of the Oligarchy’s operation. The more that new pollution can be delayed, the more likely that renewables will replace what was ‘needed’, and the fossil fuels become uncompetitive.

One positive sign is that in 2016-17, according to Fortune Magazine, 5 of the top six companies in terms of revenue were fossil fuel companies. Now in its August 2021 list only 2 of the top 6 are oil and gas companies, and only 6 of the top 25 are fossil fuel companies. This does not mean that fossil fuels, pollution and destruction are not important for the operation of the other companies, but that the balance is possibly changing.

But the Oligarchy is unlikely to give up without combat. This is a struggle which will not stop for a long time, but it is one we cannot afford to lose.

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Defining Capitalism

September 5, 2021

It is hard to define capitalism rigorously without excluding some of the obvious characteristics of capitalism, or making the definition so general that it perhaps reduces capitalism to exchange, or ‘private property’ (as if there was only one kind of private property). This is too general to be useful, other than to pretend capitalism is innate. There are also varieties of capitalism [2], [3], and cultures of capitalism. Capitalism in Norway, is not the same as capitalism in the 21st Century UK, or 19th Century UK, or in the USA, or Japan, or India, or China etc.

So this definition is a definition by listing. If some economic system is described by a large number of these points, then it is strongly capitalist, if it has non of them it is not capitalist. Other systems may share some of these points as well.

  • Capitalism is a form of State sanctioned, and enforced economic hierarchy.
  • In capitalism, the majority of people have to sell their labour (physical and mental) and the products of their labour to an employer. The property resulting from labour, is generally not owned by the labourers, but by the employer prganisation. In some cases even ideas that have nothing to do with their work are owned by the workers’ employer. This general ‘alienation’ of labour may rob people of satisfaction.
  • In general capitalism attempts to make all labour wage labour. It destroys self-sufficient social groups, by making them ‘uneconomic’, taking them over and merging them into a bigger company, or through violence.
  • Most ordinary wage labour is governed by downward pressure on wages. Automation of labour, that removes the skills of labour helps to diminish the cost of labour, and make workers interchangeable and largely indistinguishable. However, wage labour closer to the top of the hierarchy may become more expensive, or prosperous.
  • Capitalism ideally gives an employer the right to dismiss any worker in any circumstance. There are few official types of continued responsibility, obligation or relationship, between bosses and workers. Capitalism breaks social bonds around labour.
  • In capitalism the power of the boss should increase, while the power of the workers is diminished. Obedience to a boss, who has no obligation to you, is one of the fundamental social relations of capitalism. It does not promote liberty.
  • Capitalist property is marked by exclusion and exclusivity. In general, the owner of property has the right to destroy that property without regard to anyone else, and to exclude anyone else from using it. On privately owned land the owner can determine, as far as their intention prevails, what happens on that land. Libertarians, for example, frequently support the right of land owners to suppress protests on their land, even if that land has been appropriated from the community.
  • The one exception seems to be that mining companies can often do what they like on your land to get at materials they have contracted from the State. This varies from place to place. If this is the case their is a hierarchy of property ownership.
  • You can ideally sign away your rights to anything for payment. Some libertarians support ‘voluntary’ slavery.
  • Capital, and property, itself grew from the plunder of colonies (or plundering of the plunder of the colonizers as with British Privateers), theft or conquest of land, dispossession of people from land, and the forced labour of human bodies. Capitalism and its property/capital is based on the products of theft, reinvested in new production. This is usually justified by instancing other forms of input and ‘improvement’ usually done by forced or wage labour. If, however, a landlord’s property is improved by tenants, then this does not apply the other way, and legally justify taking the landlord’s property.
  • Capitalism usually involves the free movement of (previously appropriated) wealth (capital), and its investment in the production of more wealth. It is an ethical question, whether capitalism and its inequalities can be abstracted from history.
  • Capitalism usually allows cheap ecological destruction and pollution, so as to maximise profit.
  • Capitalism appears to demand constant growth and expansion. Companies also seem to demand that the rate of profit continues to grow. It is not obvious, that this can keep happening forever. If expansion cannot go on forever, then capitalism is self destructive.
  • Capitalist processes tend towards concentration of wealth. While the total wealth may increase, the percentage of total wealth going up the hierarchy also increases. So inequality of prospects, action and power is magnified. If this does not happen, then the system is probably not capitalist.
  • The State in capitalism, tends to be controlled by the wealth elites. The more the wealth difference between them and the rest of the populace increases, the greater the tendency.
  • The State eventually becomes a tool, whereby capitalism, its property, regulation and inequality is protected. However, different businesses may have different ideas of protection, hence the State can still be a site of limited dispute.
  • Capitalism’s main institution is the stock (shareholder) company – which is a form of collaboration between controllers, and owners, of wealth (capital).
  • As the wealth elites own shares in many companies, and may be on the board of directors of many companies, or own those directors, collaboration between members of the wealth elites increases, at the expense of everyone else, including those who actually make the products or services the companies sell.
  • ‘Crony capitalism’ is normal and approved, as is suppression of worker associations.

General points

Contemporary capitalism has an origin in the UK sometime between the 16th and 19th Centuries. It is not natural, eternal or innate. It spread through force (East India Company, and imperialism) and also because nations wanted the same level of military might that it generated to protect themselves and gain power. States have frequently promoted capitalism, to boost their power.

The idea of the ‘free market’, acts to reduce all social and governance questions to questions of profit maximisation, and wealth increase for the wealth elites. It also tends to act as an excuse for letting ‘The Market’ determine what should be done, no matter how destructive, as long as it benefits some of those wealth elites, and dispute amongst the wealth elites does not then lead to some form of regulation to benefit (or protect) some of that elite.

Worship of the Market does not lead to liberty, because the market is regulated and patterned to favour certain groups and their existence. Liberty might be found in escape from the market.

All markets have regulation. Market activity includes politics. If people pretend markets do not include politics, then the market is probably being regulated in favour of a dominant group. There is no such thing as a ‘free market.’

As capitalism is marked by conflict between ‘workers’ and owners and controllers of employment and capital because of:

  • Alienation of labour and the products of labour
  • Destruction of self-sufficiency
  • Forcing wages down, deskilling of labour, making workers interchangeable and impersonal (dehumanisation),
  • No ties between workers and employers, other than money
  • Demands for obedience from bosses
  • Concentration of wealth
  • Control of companies being reserved for the few
  • Capitalist control of the state and increasing exclusion of non-capitalist interests, unless they support capitalist interests…

then capitalism is marked by class struggle. However class struggle is not unique to capitalism, so is not part of its definition. Also, some of this struggle can be remedied by easily available, non-policed and livable unemployment payments. These allow workers to leave bad bosses, and bad working conditions, without suffering, and can help ‘nudge’ employers into providing better working conditions and sharing more of the profit with the producers. This kind of practice increases general liberty, and so is strongly opposed by capitalists.

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What do followers of Trump get?

August 13, 2021

This is pure hypothesis.

After 40 years of neoliberal attacks on working conditions and lower income Americans, Trump recognised that many people in the US are in despair. They see no future. Things are not as good as they were for them. No one was paying any helpful attention to them. Social Mobility is pretty dead. They were in a mess of apathy, because they were repeatedly told they were useless, or responsible for their own pain, by politicians, media, employers, preachers and self-help people. They had no security and little way of bettering themselves. Many people were and are struggling. The American Dream, was lost.

Many of them saw affirmative action programs for other people, but nothing to help them. People rarely see what they have. They were annoyed about this and it reinforced their sense of rejection. The Left in particular seemed, to them, to worry about other people.

Trump managed to change the apathy to anger. He made their suffering and lack of hope, all the fault of Democrats, liberals and communists, despite the neoliberal domination of politics and economics for the last 40 years. Indeed, he made it so, there was no difference between Liberals and communists and fascists. He would protect the people, by tariffs and trade wars with China, by cultivating national pride.

He was supported in this by one of the biggest pro-neoliberal media organisations in the English speaking world, News Corp. which owns Fox. They helped build the anger. People felt recognised, and so pardoned Trump’s incoherence (he was just an ordinary guy) and his violence, because they were angry and felt like violence, even if they were not openly violent and didn’t want to be. They respected Trump for saying what he thought, no matter how petty. And they empathised with him when other people denounced him for speaking his mind or making stuff up, because that happened to them all the time. And when he accused others of cheating it meshed with their life experiences, because they had been cheated of their dreams, despite their best efforts.

That Trump did not succeed, is either denied, or proves to them that the establishment still cheated them. Naturally the establishment, which won’t accept them or listen to them, got rid of Trump through massive undetectable electoral cheating. This is just normal experience.

What they don’t want to know, is that their only hope is a fraud, with no plans to help them, and with no care for them at all. So that knowledge becomes subliminal: he isn’t perfect but he can still be a tool for God’s purpose to bring America back to faith and greatness. We must have faith. Otherwise there is apparently nothing for them. It is easy to deny what would make it seem we have been deceived.

Even if Joe Biden was great for the working and middle class, then how would they get to know about it? Fox and ONAN won’t let them know – people don’t experience events directly, they experience them through past knowledge, through the comments of those on their side and so on.

So the tools President Trump uses to keep at the centre of attention are pretty basic, he pretends to listen and to sympathise with them, while working up anger against supposed enemies who are his enemies. He keeps harping on how successful he is, and that he can do more or less anything. And he keeps repeating this framework over and over.

Then there is what his followers do for themselves.

People who go to his big rallies get a sense of togetherness, they build bonds with other people who have similar experiences and talk about them. It gives people a sense of being part of a movement. It appears to repair the networks of self-organised support, and helps to make people feel safer, with some hope for the future. Surely if so many people turn up, this hope can be the basis for the future?

People who join Trump conversation sites get their ‘knowledge’ reinforced and an even greater sense of participation and meaning. They also have it reinforced that non-Trumpists are their enemies, because they might obstruct Trump, and these enemies form a great place to dump and purge some of their anger. This is much better than feeling depressed and apathetic. This is living.

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Buber and Binaries

May 8, 2021

First let me be clear I am no Buber expert, so everything I say may be wrong, but this is really a more general point.

I have in previous blogs said that I find the idea of binaries, over-common, and intellectually dangerous for several reasons.

1) Binaries tend to be conceived as opposites or negations,

However very few processes negate each other. Let us take a common binary: men and women. These categories are often conceived as opposites. Men are rational/women are emotional, men are aggressive/women are passive, men are tall/women are short. Whatever the level of plausibility here, there is lots of overlap, and the binary misses it, or even conceals it. For example while the ‘average man’ is taller than the ‘average woman’, it is not that difficult to find women taller than the average man, and men shorter than the average women. These short men or tall women are not, not-men, or not-women. The variation is not categorical but statistical. The same is almost certainly true of rational and emotive, or aggressive and passive.

Likewise the category of ‘not-woman’ contains a lot more creatures than just men: sharks, elephants, cows, bacteria, gum trees and so on. Men do not exhaust the entire category of not-women. So the category is not even logically sufficient or illuminating. Men are not the negation of women, or the opposite of women, or vice versa. The binary conceals a much more complex and shifting reality.

2) Binaries tend to have one pole made significant or dominant

This point was made by de Beauvoir although many people will attribute it to Derrida.

Using the man/woman binary again as an example, it has been standard practice to take the male as exemplary of the human, saying ‘Man’, ‘Mankind’, using the pronoun ‘he’ to include everyone, or using the term ‘the opposite sex’ to mean ‘female’, because male is supposedly the natural default sex. And of course, the male is supposed to dominate the female naturally. So the binary tends to inculcate, and indicate, dominance and passivity, or significance and lesser-significance. It lessens the chance of a mutual I-thou relationship.

Surprise?

The continual reduction to binaries, might be considered surprising when the dominant religion in the West supposedly believes that God is a trinity, and that its sacred text talks about the human triad of flesh, spirit (pneuma) and soul (psyche). Spirit and soul have been made the same, so we can have the binary of mind and body, spirit and body, mind/matter etc, with the mind/spirit dominant over, and more important than, the body, which can be dismissed and transcended.

This kind of binary might help people think their real life is in the spiritual world or ‘heaven’, and to dismiss the planet that they live on, as being inferior, and of little concern.

The solution?

Look for the third….. This is not the Hegelian or Marxist third which can be reduced to the synthesis of the original two, or a mediation between the two, but another factor altogether which co-exists with the original binary. Let’s be clear we are not limited to three, but the four tends to be reduced to binary oppositions again, so if we recognise a four, let us aim for a five…..

The Buber binary

The Buber binary is the two relations I-thou and I-it, of which the I-thou is primary.

The It-Authority relationship

I would suggest that there is at least one other possible relationship which adds to our understanding of human life. That is the It-Authority relationship. In which the ‘I’ becomes an ‘it’ in the face of authority, and there is no thou.

Before authority we are to quail, obey, stop thinking and side with the authority, or else we are to be crushed without remorse. We become instruments of the authority, without comment, or with only minor comment. The authority is not a subject and neither are we, there is no interaction other than authority’s instruction and our pleading or acquiescence.

Of course we can rebel, but we often rebel within the format of the It, just being resistant, not taking back our, or others’ ‘thouness’.

I would suggest that many people’s relationship to God is of the form It-Authority, were God is the authority, the rules, the punishments and blandishments, applied with no input from the human. This is the God who needs an eternal hell. I suspect that this is not a healthy relationship, or even a relationship at all – even if people pretend it is, so as to placate their God and hope to get on its good side, for fear of the alternative.

The It-Authority relationship seems common in sites of neoliberal employment, in which employees are an inconvenient cost centre, to be controlled, restructured and dismissed as ‘it’s, with little to no real valued input into the process….

I also suggest that the political response to ecological crisis is often conditioned by an It-Authority relationship to ‘the market’. This is the religion of the market, in which the market is neither recognised as being both made by humans, and made politically, but gets taken as a force in itself; an Authority, superior to the ecology in which it is actually immersed. The market is taken as an authority with which there is no appeal, and which will not be placated – unless it is to help out those who are already sanctified by the market, such as fossil fuel companies. This market reduces people and the world to ‘it’s, and treats them accordingly.

It makes the crisis even harder to deal with.

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Will Covid-19 end the triumph of Neoliberalism?

May 5, 2021

Short answer: No.

Firstly, neoliberalism, its politics and economics are non-empirical – they are matters of faith and ‘logic’ from faulty premises. Their position seems impossible to falsify under any circumstances, and (in complex systems) what counts as facts can be made a matter of selection and interpretation, so they can always say ‘their facts’ support them.

Secondly, a totally free market society has never existed, and probably cannot exist, therefore neoliberal advocacy for a ‘free market’ cannot be said to have anything to do with Covid, or any other project. The fact that neoliberals only ever engineer corporately controlled markets, as opposed to free markets, makes them theoretically pure.

Thirdly, if anything goes wrong in a capitalist society, Neoliberals hold it is always the fault of government, and never the fault of capitalists, corporations, or wealthy people. If such people overtly do do anything wrong or stupid, then that is because of the government (even if it was they who bought the government’s actions). As capitalism requires regulations to function and protect property distribution, there will always be government involvement of some type in the economy and daily life which can be blamed for failure.

Fourthly, there is no explicit connection between neoliberalism and Covid. Trump, who can be held responsible for denying Covid was a problem and denying help to badly affected states, was not officially a neoliberal (he even restricted trade), other than in being a corporate supremacist who helped transfer massive amounts of taxpayers’ money to the wealthy – but his followers refuse to believe that. Likewise with Boris Johnson, and Narendra Modi. We can say that governments were influenced by neoliberal ideas and thought everyone should get back to work before the problem was solved. But again this was the fault of governments, not apparently of neoliberals.

Fifthly, because of the information confusion and the pro-corporate right’s promulgation of neoliberal propaganda, Neoliberals can if they wish embrace the confusion and say Covid was just a “summer flu” or the “common cold”, and not really that bad. They can also state that any attempt to control people or slow down transmission was faulty, badly designed or an imposition on liberty, which (of course) they officially monopolise. As many people did not die from Covid, and the death figures may confuse people (there are allegations that they are faked, presumably all over the world), then they are likely to succeed – particularly given the supposed ‘common sense’ of the neoliberal backing of the corporate economy above people, and people’s dislike of being told what to do.

Sixthly, If they can convince people that Covid was the fault of governments (which it was to an extent, when governments acted in a confused or negligent manner), that the economy was seriously hurt (because the economy is the only thing that matters), that poor people were freeloading (because poor people are evil or lazy, or poor voluntarily), that private enterprise could have solved the problem quicker (because it was supposedly in their interests to solve it), and that what action was taken was tyrannous and oppressive and so on…. then it is possible we will be even worse in our preparation for the next pandemic, and less able to respond.

And that will not be the fault of neoliberals either, because it never is…….

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Covid Conspiracies??????

April 29, 2021

To assume that Covid was fakery produced by government conspiracy, or that scientists were paid to fake data, you might have to make a lot of assumptions.

You would have to assume: a) that Donald Trump had approved the payments to scientists in the USA and b) that his government was exaggerating the dangers of Covid, rather than playing them down and telling people it would pass. This seems somewhat contradictory.

You would have to assume that Russia, the UK, France, Australia, Iran, Brazil, China and India (amongst others) also conspired together to lie about Covid, even when their governments were pretending there was not much of a problem. This also seems improbable, especially given they rarely can agree to do anything together.

That does not mean there could have been no conspiracies.

It seems more likely that some governments conspired to pretend that covid was not a big deal to keep the economy going, and keep the people docile at work, and were annoyed when scientists would not all go along with this.

It may also be the case that some governments, through intermediaries, publicised fake information about covid in the hope that people in other countries would take their advice and do nothing, or people would refuse to accept the quarantines, and those other countries would be ravaged by the disease and destroyed.

Did some governments try to shut down dissent? Well they certainly used the virus to shut down climate protests, school strikes, and some BLM events… So possibly they did. But I don’t see any really huge differences in the US, UK etc…. produced by Covid. Of course I could be wrong.

The virus appears to be unlike the flu or the common cold, although it is often alleged by politicians that it is similar. It has different effects on the body, can affect livers, hearts, brains etc…. For some people it continues for months. It seems to have killed as many people in the US in a year, than about 10 years worth of flu.

Of course the death figures could be all faked, but again it seems improbable, especially given that many governments wanted everyone to get back to work and suppressed figures, and its easy to under-find deaths from Covid, because Covid can have consequences for a business (such as a retirement home), or the Covid death looks like stroke, or heart attack or lung embolism etc….

If the Vaccine is a mind control device, as some people allege, then we have heaps of secret tech knocking around that most scientists seem unable to understand, or explain. If the tech was that advanced you probably would not need to pretend there was a deadly virus to spread it. You could just put it in people’s food, or in normal vaccines or normal medicines – that way it would be much easier to hide.

One thing you might notice, if “you did the research”, was the amount of taxpayers’ money going to help the wealthy, in terms of subsidies and tax breaks, or used to shore up companies dying from other causes, but that is pretty normal nowadays, and is rarely commented upon.

I’d suggest that there may already be a conspiracy to turn the US into a dictatorship, or a form of corporate plutocracy. Republicans seem to have been running this conspiracy since the 1980s, and have won over much of the supposed opposition. This conspiracy is generally known as ‘neoliberalism’ or ‘free market economics,’ and seems designed to benefit established corporations and wealth, at the expense of everyone else.

I’d be much more concerned about that conspiracy than about a Covid conspiracy, but somehow that idea gets far less publicity than the fake news around Covid.

Oh and those neoliberal free market supporters, just seem to be the ones promoting the idea that covid is fake and being used to increase government tyranny. Wonder if that is a distraction, from what they are doing?

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