butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Has it. OK. How?
After Neo-Liberalism?
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Has it. OK. How?
TruXta
tired
They give us fine wines and fine women, we give them... uh.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Slavery.
TruXta
tired
I meant for Gmart to guess, smartypants.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Don't quote me then nazi.
JimW
支那暗杀团
I'd not really bothered with the ideas of Hayek etc in the past though was vaguely aware of this whole process of him and fellow travellers/school working to recapture the idea of liberty from the left because I pretty much never met anyone daft enough to argue them in this pure form rather than the related but proper stuff rooted in actual history of the failures of the socialist states. Then with the Internet you realised there's tons of these loons being churned out of colleges these days and not just in the US any more. Ford Foundation spent a fair bit of money getting key Chinese figures over to Chicago from the late 80s on to drink the woo juice too and they're all climbing higher up the greasy pole here now.
TruXta
tired
I'll quieten you, red devil man.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Was it? Or did that system of laws itself develop from the unwritten 'law of the jungle'? Social animals live by certain rules. They have to, otherwise their society would break down. Among baboons, for instance, it is utterly socially unacceptable to injure an infant, so much so that they may hold up an infant in front of them to stop another adult from hitting them.
The first formal laws we know about, such as those of Hammurabi, actually reflect something else - they reflect changes in society as a result of settling, agriculture and the growth of cities, which led to the need for forms of rules to govern relations between members of the society who may not actually know each other. But, more importantly, they reflected the new hierarchical structure of those societies, with a king at the top as law-giver, who was in that position by divine right, and whose laws had the authority of divine right (Hammurabi, for instance, stated that his laws were dictated to him by the god Marduk).
Law has always played this dual role - regulating behaviour for the benefit of all, but also regulating behaviour in such a way as to preserve and reinforce the hierarchical structure. And these two imperatives may come into conflict - but where they do, unsurprisingly the preservation of the structure, of order, wins out as the prime directive of law enforcement.
deke t lefel
Active Member
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I don't really buy that analysis that social democracy somehow stopped in 1975. If you look around Europe, you see an awful lot of social democratic institutions of one kind or another. Yes, they are being attacked, and have been eroded more in some places than others, but they are still there, and still very hard to get rid of.
I guess what the author is getting at is that there is now a general drift away from social democracy. But while there's a good case for that, there's no reason to assume that this drift will inevitably continue, particularly as the neo-liberal economic policy has failed already. There was a perception that Keynesian social democracy had failed in the 70s, which began the drift away from it. But it's very hard to make any kind of case for the success of its replacement.
Not sure what you mean by a revival of neo-corporatism. I guess the tories' latest attempts to get the economy going by underwriting housing could be seen as that kind of thing - state guarantees for the private sector. We'll see how that pans out.
I guess what the author is getting at is that there is now a general drift away from social democracy. But while there's a good case for that, there's no reason to assume that this drift will inevitably continue, particularly as the neo-liberal economic policy has failed already. There was a perception that Keynesian social democracy had failed in the 70s, which began the drift away from it. But it's very hard to make any kind of case for the success of its replacement.
Not sure what you mean by a revival of neo-corporatism. I guess the tories' latest attempts to get the economy going by underwriting housing could be seen as that kind of thing - state guarantees for the private sector. We'll see how that pans out.
deke t lefel
Active Member
some form of capitalist economy based on cooperation rather than the selfishness of neo-liberalism
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Right, ok. I was confused by your use of 'corporatism'. It is linked to fascism in my mind - the idea of a 'vertical' system of interests rather than a horizontal one, which was encouraged by many fascist regimes. Franco was a big fan of this idea - it's an attempt to stamp out the idea of class interests.
deke t lefel
Active Member
it's also linked to syndicalism, so not always vertical
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
A cooperative capitalism, really?
deke t lefel
Active Member
tripartism out of necessity
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Meaning what? And of whose necessity?
deke t lefel
Active Member
cooperation between business, labour and state
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
You mean the Scandinavian model?
deke t lefel
Active Member
not necessarily
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
I know what tripartism means, i was asking how this classic model of social democracy is to come about in modern conditions given that one section of the model is politically redundant and defeated. Why would the state and capital turn back to this model? What advantages would it off them? Can you really see the state and capital happily reconstructing a situation that they spent decades destroying? I think the answer that social democracy comes after neo-liberalism to be pretty far fetched and based on a misunderstanding of where we actually are today and where we are likely to be going.
What about the capitalists - the owners of the capital?
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Well, as ever, you need to look for the reasons which such cooperation will develop. What is the incentive for business to cooperate with labour, for instance? And how do we get from here to there?
I'm not averse to the idea that cooperative, worker-owned businesses may have fresh impetus in the future as conventional capitalist returns tend towards zero. To make a shift towards this would require a nationalisation of the banking system, not such a difficult thing to do, really.
I'm not averse to the idea that cooperative, worker-owned businesses may have fresh impetus in the future as conventional capitalist returns tend towards zero. To make a shift towards this would require a nationalisation of the banking system, not such a difficult thing to do, really.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
They turn their back on it because the capitalist model is failing. We're already seeing a crisis of investment whereby there simply aren't the returns available.
deke t lefel
Active Member
yeah, you're probably right - slavery it is then
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
And when you don't find them? When the state and capital resists such suggestions and there is no objective political or economic necessity for them to do accept them? I think you're confusing what you think may be desirable with what is and will actually happen here.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Not at all, the labour-capital relation can (and historically has) been played out in many ways - new compromises or fixes develop around different mediations, that's the whole point of Goldner's historic periodisation.
deke t lefel
Active Member
what way are new compromises likely to come about?
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Perhaps. The reason I see for how it could happen is the destruction of returns on capitalist investment. We're already seeing this, with capital taking refuge in state bonds. So the economy tanks and the state sees that it is the only replacement for capitalist investment available. Even the tories are seeing this now, and it was a right-wing government in Japan that saw and responded to the same thing. Now the tories are responding in a rather crap way that won't be very effective, because they are still wedded to the old, failing model. But the failure of capitalist investment structures does leave room - not only room, but a necessity - for other kinds of investment to take their place, kinds of invesment that see zero return as worth doing. So how is zero-return worth doing? when it gives jobs, generates wealth and taxes. It is something a government has a self-interest in doing. And perhaps it is something that the rest of us might be able to influence too.
I don't pretend that there is some golden age of worker-owned businesses around the corner. But I do think the space for such things to develop in significant ways may open up as current systems fail.
butchersapron
Bring back hanging
Well this is the question that the thread is asking. If we examine how past compromises or fixes came about we will find that, for example, the social-democratic fix came about through a combination of factors Technical - deskilling produced the mass worker which did away with a class relation based on restrcicted access to skills, which then helped produce a political situation suited to bourgeois representative democracy and the incorporation of the political representatives of labour within the sphere of national and international power relations, and then an economic and technological increase in the amount of commodities produced and the democratic market leading to a further flattening of the way that capital functions that requires an integrated working class for all the above reasons.
Which would suggest that today, if we wish to uncover the outlines of future developments we might be wise to have a look at what is happening in the world of wage-labour, in the political representation of the working class and the functional requirements of capital. If you have a look at all these and can see a way that they lead back to classical social-democracy then i'd be interested to see it.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
This is a very valid point. But surely the suppressing of wages is itself self-defeating, destroying demand. Isn't that the point about where massive personal debt arose in the last 30 years or so?
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