Beware Sargonism

Lord Keynes over at Social Democracy for the 21st Century is a sharp fellow.  He makes the following observation:

Ever since Gamergate, there has been a newfound hostility to SJWism, Cultural Leftism, and Third Wave feminism amongst some Liberals and leftists, especially the young.
This movement has manifested itself in the popular YouTube personalities like these: 

(1) Sargon of Akkad

(2) Dave Rubin, The Rubin Report

(3) Gad Saad 

The most popular of these are probably Sargon of Akkad and Dave Rubin.  The ideology of these latter two is rapidly degenerating into Classical Liberalism and libertarianism-lite, because they lack any alternative perspective on economics.

Keynes later warns us:

"Sargonism,” if we can call it that, is an intellectual dead end, and a Hayekian-lite rehash of the libertarian movement of the early 2010s. Don’t be seduced."

Sargon of Akkad (the Kekistani, not the Mesopotamian) comes in for a lot of flak and criticism, most of it unjustified.  On any given day, he's attacked from the neoreactionary right for being a cuck and a liberal sellout.  From the left he's attacked for being a nazi, a misogynist and an all round garbage person.  Welcome to the club, Sargon.  If you're catching flak from both sides, it means you're doing something right.

But Lord Keynes's issues are not so easily dismissed, although Sargon does come across as recognizing some need for curbs on the excesses of capitalism.  But this is not merely about Sargon himself, but about the recent surge in opposition to the excesses of cultural leftism overall.  Just about every anti-SJW space I've seen online seems prone to a sort of rightward drift.  The SJW criticism of libertarianism and liberalism as a sort of camel's nose that once let in the tent is quickly followed by a more decidedly reactionary and even hateful body does seem to verify itself with disheartening frequency in anti-SJW spaces.  It was largely for this reason that I decided to involve myself in the alt-left.

The issues that I have with the cultural libertarian and skeptical communities are basically these: 1) I distrust the libertarian stance on economics and 2) I saw and continue to see these movements and their supporters repeatedly overshoot the mark in their opposition to political correctness and descend into genuinely hateful and spiteful views. It's one thing to rightly object to the campus feminist's love of censorship or bouts of misandry. It's quite another to attack her personally, mock her appearance and weight, and engage in doxing, threats and the like.  Like the social justice warriors, the cultural libertarians - who inevitably succumb to capture from the alt-right, are essentially postmodern: they're movements of identity and self serving moral relativism, not movements of principle.

Another problem with both the SJWs and the Alt-Right is that both are economically blind, and this blindness is actually driving a lot of the toxic narratives on both sides. No, Ms. Intersectional Feminist and Mr. Neoreactionary, neither the patriarchy nor the Elders of Zion are out to ruin your life. You're victims of rapacious global capitalism.  This is exactly where the unions were telling us we'd end up back in the mid 1990s when globalization, deregulation, privatization and free trade were touted as the ultimate panacea. 

The social injustices sustained by women and people of color, as well as the economic dislocation suffered by working class white males, had no means of articulating itself via economic theory, so the only thing either one could do was to keep doubling down on a cultural or identitarian critique that has no chance of addressing their real grievances because the whole realm of political economy is essentially invisible to them.  But, as long as these grievances are not effectively addressed, these movements will continue to exist and will only grow more strident.  The situation seemed hopeless to me until I saw the public enthusiasm for the campaign of Bernie Sanders for POTUS. Of course Sanders was far from perfect, but he showed that there was potential for a candidate running as a socialist, even in the USA.

The anti-SJW left is in a tricky position. It's turned out to be difficult to disentangle the culture of leftism - the revolutionary romanticism, as I think of it - from the actual economics of publicly or cooperatively owned (or at least regulated) economic institutions. It comes naturally to me because I have actual experience in housing cooperatives, labour unions and non-profit societies that are actually run by the same kinds of people who operate heavy machinery and crunch numbers in cubicles all day, instead of deconstructing the patriarchal elements of Shakespeare or LARPing as anarchist revolutionaries on college campuses. The real problem, though, is that the organs of the left have long since been hijacked by the kinds of people who figure that African blacks were the real lost tribes of Israel or that all penetrative sexual intercourse equates to rape. This loss of direction began innocently enough back in the 1970s, but is likely to be next to impossible to recover from except over a long time span, regardless of how harmful it is to the left. Narratives hold a powerful grip on the human mind.

Cultural libertarians and the skeptical community have a mirror image of the same problem. Their admirable message that free speech should be absolute and that the mob and the state have no business in the bedrooms of the nation gets too easily hijacked by people who figure a Jewish conspiracy is behind the decision to abandon the gold standard, or that the emergent trans-acceptance movement is the latest wedge of a cultural Marxist plot obsessed with destroying western civilization. 

Plus, neither the SJWs nor the alt-right have any kind of real answers to the economic side of either rising inequality or of national decline.  The entry level libertarian or Marxist platitudes they're respectively prone to expressing aren't going to cut it. Beneath the veneer of admiration for Che Guevara or Augusto Pinochet is virtually zero understanding of how macroeconomics actually work in any real appreciable way.   

People like Lord Keynes and myself are in a difficult position. We are navigating between Scylla and Charybdis, and the raft we're doing it on is not at all that seaworthy.  Sargon of Akkad, Dave Rubin and their ilk are one half of the map we need to not crash upon the rocks.  But if we don't likewise want to sink and drown, we'd do well to steer clear of the economic ideas Hayek and Friedman.  Civil libertarianism and a solid regulatory welfare state cannot be mutually exclusive.  In fact, they need each other.

Lord Keynes blogs regularly at Social Democracy for the 21st Century and can also be found on Twitter.  Highly recommended.

The Theory of Surplus Value

I've seen the Marxist theory of surplus value summed up in the following way:

The Capitalist - the Boss - pays workers to produce products for them to sell.  In exchange for this, they pay the workers a wage.  However, the wage is always less than the product is worth.  This is the only way profit can be produced.  The workers can never receive the full value of what they produce.  This is the inherent inequality of capitalism.

I would be lying if I said I never bought into this line of reasoning.  It made perfect sense to me in my Marxist/Anarchist days, while in my early 20s.   But it has been a long time since I've bought into this line of reasoning.

Don't get me wrong.  Capitalism can be, and usually is, exploitative.  But I don't think it necessarily has to be.  The problem with it is not that the workers on the shop floor do not receive all of the company's revenue in the form of compensation.  The problems occur when most of the capital - ownership of the means of production, to use the Marxist jargon - is concentrated into relatively few hands and the bulk of the population is reduced to propertyless proletariat with no real bargaining power.  At that point, excessive profits become a form of rent seeking, meaning generation of revenue due to leverage in the marketplace rather than through actual production.  Not surprisingly, this happens a lot in this day and age.

The Marxist notions of surplus value go too far the other way, though. It's also important to note that Marx developed many of his theories at a time when capitalism was almost feudal in its nature.  The vast majority of wealth was inherited, or extorted from the land, or more aptly, the people who worked the land.  Either at home or from indigenous peoples in other parts of the world.  Property, plant and equipment were owned outright by someone who had wealth sufficient to come into possession of them.  The rise of joint-stock corporations, themselves still novel things in the early 19th century, changed this somewhat.  I say somewhat because only the wealthy could afford to invest.  But it also made a non exploitative form of capitalism possible.

The theory of surplus value, strictly applied, ignores the fact that not all "profit" - revenue generated above and beyond what the workers are compensated - ends up in the pocket of some top hat and coat tails tycoon. Though even if some of it does, is some degree of compensation for the risk that the capitalist took in staking venture capital on the company not warranted? Plus, much of the "surplus value" is reinvested in the company with the intent, at least, of making it more productive. Libertarian arguments against taxation run up against a similar flaw: sometimes the taxation is invested in infrastructure and other capital projects that can't or won't be provided by the private sector for whatever reason, but nonetheless are vital for the productivity and ultimately the profitability of the private sector.

Lack of capital markets, meaning a lack of means of investing today to make a profit tomorrow somehow, is the achilles heel of socialism, or at least the 19th century conceptions of socialism that romantic leftists ever since then, seem enamored with.  Whether a system of universal state ownership or an interlinked network of producer's, consumer's and tenant's co-operatives, the inability to 'go public' and raise capital to increase or expand operations hamstrings economic growth and development.  Some or another system of capital accumulation seems essential to a successful economy, and seems contradictory to most popular conceptions of revolutionary socialism.

Which isn't to say that the objectives of socialism: greater equality and reduced alienation of labor, need to be abandoned. Indeed they would seem to be essential. Left to its own devices, capital accumulation in a capitalist economy would have the opposite sort of effect through overinvestment and eventual downturn.  So what can be done?

Better ideas for our time would include one or more sovereign wealth funds. This is state investment in capital markets, with growth and dividends contributing to public finance.  From this a citizen's dividend or a social dividend, either in the direct form of a guaranteed income or a non transferrable share in said sovereign wealth fund could be issued all citizens.   Employee stock ownership can achieve a similar kind of effect at the workplace level.  

My preference is for these kinds of market socialist ideas.  Classic social democratic proposals: progressive taxation, strong unions, loose money policies, higher minimum wages and so on are fine, but face resistance in the form of investment strike and capital flight.   Businesses pass the cost increases onto consumers, and begin well funded and professional PR campaigns to discredit the government attempting to implement said policies.  This is done frequently and effectively by corporate lobbies intent on resisting a regulatory and redistributionist clampdown.  The Tea Party movement in America, for instance, was largely health insurance industry astroturf cooked up to resist Obamacare.  

Ernest Everhard, Do You Even Socialist, Bro?

Do you even socialist, bro?

"Ernest Everhard" - my personal meme stash and blogging page on Facebook, named for the Marxist protagonist in Jack London's dystopian classic, The Iron Heel, received the following message earlier today:

"Also, do you think you could establish a doctrine beyond just anti SJW? You say you a communist but in your policy you are a social democrat. Are you a revolutionary socialist?"

Fair question and fair point, though I do think I'm more than merely anti SJW.  I'm against closed, manichean systems of thought, of which intersectional feminism is one.  Revolutionary socialism is another, so I guess that answers that question.

I think there's a great deal to be said for Marxist materialism as a means of analyzing the economic structure of a given society.  But my messenger makes a good point: for someone who so insists that part of how leftism has gone wrong recently is its neglect of economics in favor of cultural issues, I do tend to neglect economics in favor of cultural issues.  Physician, heal thyself!

So here goes ...

Marxist materialism was a work of genius for its time.  But it hasn't aged well, obviously.  Marx wrote at a time when early industrial capitalism still had an almost feudal character to it.  Some top-hat and tails tycoon - think any antagonist from Charles Dickens novel or Sir Topham Hatt - owned the textile mill, sewing floor or whatever.  Whatever was left over after all of his expenses were paid was his, straight out, unless he was indebted to a bank or other patron.

For reasons too complex to detail here, Marx thought this system doomed to fail.  Capital would amass into fewer and fewer hands and downward pressure on wages, and hence demand, would contrast with increased productivity, and therefore supply, driving the whole thing to collapse like a house of cards.  His famous predictions of a dictatorship of the proletariat and eventual rise of communism are, of course, well known.  To this day, the mystique of "worker controlled" economies continues to enamor idealists.  Perhaps had things remained that way, Marx's predictions would have come to pass by now.  In my experience, workers aren't that interested in worker's control.  Worker's control actually entails more work.  Best to leave it to professional managers, That's what they're paid the big bucks for, is the general attitude.

The emergence of the joint-stock corporation in the mid 19th century changed things.  Somewhat.  Larger industrial concerns - steel mills and the like, became too costly for all but the most obscenely wealthy people to afford.  Joint-stock made it possible for somewhat less obscenely wealthy people to get in on the action as well.  Now, instead of one Sir Topham Hat, many could go in together as shareholders, who would elect a Board of Directors to run the organization.  In most models of corporate governance, the Board hires a CEO to manage things on a day-to-day basis.  This model had the effect of separating the managers from the owners - profits accrued to the shareholders, and the board/CEO were salaried employees much like the workers themselves were, albeit more generously compensated.

Of course, the same downward pressure on wages remained, since profit still amounted to the difference between income and expense.  But the countervailing measures we're all familiar with began to emerge: the rise of organized labor, government regulation of wage levels and working conditions, and progressive income tax schemes used to fund social programs for the benefit of the needy - the basic planks of social democracy.  Once these measures were in place, however, capitalism was allowed to remain.  Back in the USSR (bonus points if you read that in Paul McCartney's voice), capitalism was abolished entirely, and Lenin and his successors would try out actual socialism in earnest.

History has generally not been kind to either the socialist or the social democratic ideals.  I'll consider the reasons below:

Places where capitalism was done away with entirely encountered varying degrees of bad results.  The reasons included lack of competition and lack of profit incentives stifling innovation and productivity, and the economic calculation problem - when markets are not used to allocate goods, price fluctuations are not able to signal increases or decreases in demand.  What really kills socialism, though, resides in Marx's theory of surplus value.  The assumption at all profit = exploitation and that therefore the whole value of labor should accrue to the workers or the state results in an absence of capital markets.  You see, not all of those profits went towards top hats and tails.  Of course, a lot of it did and obscene differences in wealth emerged and continue to emerge.  But a lot of it was reinvested too, and this allowed economic growth and jobs to increase.  Where capital markets cannot exist; where stocks and bonds cannot be issued, this becomes much more difficult.  This, I suspect, is why thoroughly socialized economies tend to descend into stagnation and failure.

What of social democracy, then?  Traditionally social democratic mixed economies tend to be top performers in the world economy, so social democracy is the horse to bet on, is it not?  While it is superior to either Sir Topham Hat capitalism or communism, it's not without limitations.  Limitations that have grown harder to get around as the economy has become more globalized, though wiggle-room still exists and governments, particularly neoliberal ones, are as likely to use these factors to rationalize giving away the store to corporate interests as they are to face these factors as true constraints.

The main problems are investment strike and capital flight.  Those with the capital to do so simply don't invest and therefore fewer jobs, less credit and reduced growth long term.  This article in the great Jacobin magazine illustrates the pressures that international investors can bring to bear upon governments in order to erode social democratic protections.  These result in reduced taxes on high incomes, weakened unions, working class taxpayers shelling out for bail-outs, job losses due to free trade deals, taxpayers shelling out for startup costs, weakened consumer, shareholder, labor and environmental protection legislation and everything else that excite Thatcherites and Reaganites.

The competitive nature of capitalism and the drive for ever reduced costs and increased profits drive transnational corporations to exert these pressures on governments.  This is how Bill Clintons and Tony Blairs happen.  We are back to where we were before we considered socialism and social democracy to begin with.

So what can be done?

The core problem seems to be that revolutionary socialism goes too far while social democracy doesn't go far enough.  I believe the answer is to go back to the basic corporate model of ownership and governance, and work with rather than against market forces.  If tax or wage increases eat into net income and therefore disincentivize further investment, then we can achieve the desired results - increased incomes for the working class and revenues for the state to then spend on social welfare - through increased state and/or worker ownership of shares in the publicly traded corporations.

To achieve this, I would make the following proposals:

• That a public investment authority be created in order to establish sovereign wealth funds.  This has been done with some success in other places - the Norwegians did it with their oil industry and have been quite successful.  Doing this would require the state to begin acquiring shares in publicly traded corporations at home (preferably) and abroad.
• All citizens receive a capital endowment upon reaching a certain age.  This endowment would take the form of a non-transferable share in the aforementioned sovereign wealth fund.  This share would naturally be equal in size only to every other share that every other citizen likewise receives.  So one share of millions.  Plus, the state would not divest the entire value of its sovereign wealth fund in this manner.  The state would retain a sizable share, and reinvest the profits as well as use some of the income so generated for public finance.  All told, not enough to put anyone on easy street, but should help with those "pay the rent vs. feed the kids" conundrums that the underclasses contend with.
• The entirety of the nation's publicly traded stock would not be nationalized in this manner.  A capital market would continue to be permitted to exist.  No single person or entity would be permitted a complete controlling interest in any corporation.

And yet the basic corporate model of governance and operation remains.  Except that the shareholders entitled to vote at annual shareholder meetings are now much of the population, or at least trust companies, banks or investment firms retained by much of the population to manage their investments, should they so choose.  This means partial, if not majority votes to the board of directors.  Which would still be required by its fiduciary duties to maximize shareholder value, but could also be restrained by limitations imposed by the shareholders.  

The obscene and ridiculous American habit of allowing the Chair of the Board to also serve as the Chief Executive Officer could be made against the corporate charter or bylaws, for example, though this should simply be outlawed by fiat.  In other regards, regulation of the corporation would thus be as much a matter of internal governance as compliance with government legislation.

Beyond this, social democratic measures would be vastly easier to implement, though they'd likely be less necessary since the above measures deal with the structural inequalities of capitalism.  This will be especially important as advances in artificial intelligence and robotics kill ever more jobs.  Fully automated luxury communism just might be possible after all!

Still, utilities and essential services would still be best delivered by crown corporations and universal social programs.  Social safety nets, a negative income tax, a basic income or even a job guarantee would still be worth considering.  Unions would still be a part of things, both as a means of codetermination - representing company staff on corporate boards of directors (like they do in Germany) and standard collective bargaining roles more generally.  

Well, it is seizing the means of production, in a manner of speaking, is it not?

My Own Alt Left Manifesto

Alternative left manifestos are springing up left and right these days.  Let's not forget some of the older mainstays, such as Rabbit's Counter Currents article and Bob Lindsay's definition of the alt left, more based on what it isn't than what it is.  Others abound, amidst a growing bevy of media exposure, most of which is getting us entirely and completely wrong.

I've wandered into these waters myself, on occasion.  Sort of.  But only in a somewhat general sense.  So some clarity then.  What follows is an abbreviated outline of what I call "My own Alt-Left Manifesto.  With Blackjack and Hookers." A treatise on Postmodern Political Economy .  

Prelude

• Since the end of WWII, the American left has been primarily concerned with anti-racism, while the American right has been primarily concerned with anti-communism.  While there are other concerns in both cases, those ones dominate.
• Both sides have therefore been successful.  Not totally successful, but more or less so.  The left has seen the passage of civil rights laws, affirmative action, an anti-racist consensus among the general public and even elected a black man for two consecutive terms in the oval office.  The right has seen the dissolution of the USSR, market reforms in China, and a retreat of ideological socialism in most parts of the world.
• Despite, or possibly because of this success, both sides of the US political spectrum have vocal factions that are more rather than less strident and fanatical, such as the paleo-cons and the Tea Party on the right and Black Lives Matter and the social justice warriors on the left.
• What typifies these strident ideologues is epistemic closure - the ideologies are marked by obsessive preoccupation with issues that are of little relevance to others (microaggressions, democrats coming to take everybody's guns away, safe spaces, tax revolt etc) refuse dialogue and negotiation and are impervious to persuasion.  All liberals are America hating cultural Marxists, all white males are racist and sexist, and so on.
• Epistemic closure and overall ideological excess has been enabled by the rise and spread of postmodern philosophy and thought: first in academia and subsequently throughout popular culture.  Postmodernism isn't an easy thing to pin down, but critical to it is a rejection of philosophical objectivism on all levels.  Postmodernists would not only claim that morality is subjective, but also that very axiomatic concepts: the nature of basic perception of reality and the foundations of thought, are socially constructed.  The resulting denial of a common reality and a common set of moral and philosophical principles binding to all has caused increased political and social fragmentation and divisiveness.
• Alternative politics have arisen out of frustration with the above and with how tepid and unresponsive mainstream centrist politics is.  Alternative politics have been further enabled by the enhanced reach and networking capability of social media.
• In response to the race-obsessed left, the Alternative Right is marked by "race realism", white nationalism and a narrative of white victimhood at the hands of a militant left enabled by a weak state, corporate power and obliviousness on part of a mainstream right too preoccupied with wealth accumulation to be at all concerned with preservation of European cultural and racial heritage.

Class Realism

• In keeping with the above, in response to the wealth and property obsessed right, the Alternative Left is marked by "class realism," working and middle class solidarity and a narrative of class war waged by a greedy right enabled by a weak state, corporate power and obliviousness on part of a mainstream left too preoccupied with identity politics to be at all concerned with the welfare of working and middle class people.
• "Class Realism" is defined as acknowledging the reality of class, in the historical materialist sense of the term.  Meaning that class is marked by relations of production - some people make their living entirely off ownership of capital through rent, interest, dividends and so on, while others make their living only by selling their own labor power, while still others are some combination of the two, with wildly varying income levels all around.  Class is best seen then in terms of income, net worth and relations of production.
• Class realism acknowledges that at least since the elections of Ronald Reagan in America and Margaret Thatcher in the UK, western governments have been waging active class war against their own working classes.  This is chiefly marked by the exporting of jobs, importing of mass surplus labor, attacking the unions, deregulation, privatization, and the enabling of large amounts of private and public debt.
• While the right wing has been the main driver in this class warfare, it has been enabled by a regressive left that has displayed neutrality on class and economic issues and defines oppression and marginalization instead in terms of culture and identity, causing socially destructive racial and sexual strife and enabling the right's class warfare.

Manifesto of the Alt Left

• The alt left shall strive to be principled but not dogmatic.  Its primary purpose should be able to passionately and philosophically advocate on behalf of the material needs and interests of the working and middle classes, in favor of policies that materially benefit the broader portion of the population and defend them against rentier policies and economics that would only benefit the few.
• The alt left shall remain committed to full employment and worker's rights at all times.
• The alt left recognizes and opposes all forms bigotry as being socially divisive and undermining working class consciousness and solidarity.  But the alt-left does not recognize any form of systemic racial or sexual oppression as taking place in the western world, and rejects the self serving regressive left dogmas of privilege theory and "power plus prejudice."  
• The alt left recognizes no preferred racial, sexual, gender, ethnic or religious categories, and shall not hinder or oppose free expression thereof or free identification with any of them, subject of course to the laws that govern us all.
• The alt left shall value rationality, reason, free thought and other enlightenment humanist values.  The alt left should eschew dogmatism, fanaticism and be no place for the "true believer."  Conversely, the alt-left should be skeptical of postmodernism and its doctrines of extreme cultural relativism and social constructionism.  Romanticism and religion are important aspects of human nature whose free expression in the private realm should be protected, but are poor guides to governance and public policy.
• The alt left is therefore civilly and culturally libertarian.  The alt left fights for rights, not feelings.  Censorship and penalizing of "offensive" speech is dangerous in light of the fact that what is deemed offensive is subjective.  The alt-left recognizes no special prerogatives (such as past or present marginalized status) on part of any segment of society to censor or penalize expression it deems offensive.
• The Alt Left is gravely concerned about ideological capture of higher education, social media and mass media, and the abuse of organizational structures of these institutions by managerial personnel acting as ideological gatekeepers.  This should be a matter of public concern and corrective measures sought out and taken.
• The alt left believes that questions of human biodiversity across racial and gender lines is a matter best left to scientists rather than politicians, and should no way alter our commitment to the above listed principles.
• The alt left believes that intervention in the affairs of other nations does much more harm than good the vast majority of the time.
• The alt left recognizes that fossil fuels will not last forever and that their ongoing use contributes to climate change, pollution and habitat degradation.  It would well behoove us to research and convert to renewable and clean sources of energy sooner rather than later.

The Other Red Pill: A Touch of Class

Friedrich Engels wrote:

The materialist conception of history has a lot of [dangerous friends] nowadays, to whom it serves as an excuse for not studying history. Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French "Marxists" of the late 70s: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist." (...) In general, the word "materialistic" serves many of the younger writers in Germany as a mere phrase with which anything and everything is labeled without further study, that is, they stick on this label and then consider the question disposed of. But our conception of history is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelian. All history must be studied afresh, the conditions of existence of the different formations of society must be examined individually before the attempt is made to deduce them from the political, civil law, aesthetic, philosophic, religious, etc., views corresponding to them. 

In short, historical materialism is not a master key to understanding all of history and society, and is not a shortcut to understanding the complexities and nuances of each individual society and era.  Marx and Engels, though they had insights sufficient enough to merit rescue from "the more savage travesties of his critics", were not infallible or omniscient.  No one ever is.

The usefulness of historical materialism as a means of analyzing the way societies worked, and just how powerful a critique it was (and to a considerable extent still is) in criticizing capitalism, combined with with the almost apocalyptic nature of Marx's predictions on where capitalist society was headed (predictions that were overwhelmingly wrong the vast majority of the time) and the resulting romanticization of revolution for its own sake, led to Marxism becoming a kind of surrogate religion for many of its most devoted followers.  Especially since Marxism naturally entailed kicking one's opium (of the masses) habit, and a similar kind of belief system was needed to fill the void.

This resulted in all of the evils of religious fanaticism that were carried out under the cross or the crescent over the centuries being carried out under the hammer and sickle in the 20th century.  These "communist" states carried out countless atrocities and disastrous policies which were driven in large part by a religious fervor towards Marxist ideology, or what these fanatics thought Marxist ideology was, which is very often very different from what both its supporters and opponents thought it was.  Think critically at all times, even towards otherwise good ideas.

It's worth touching upon the age old debate of whether or not the USSR was actually socialist.  This depends on how one defines the term.  What we do know, however, were that the "soviets" - democratic councils of workers established to manage factories and local economies - for which the USSR was named, were taken over, often by force, by the central Bolshevik state as soon as they had the power to do so.  Like the "state priests" of the "Bonapartist State" of the early 19th century that Marx himself criticized, and like the regressive left SJWs in media and academia in our time, the Bolsheviks regarded themselves as a kind of "intellectual" elite who, by virtue of their superior insight into the one true faith, had the right to capture popular democratic institutions and use them to rule over the plebs with an iron fist.  For their own good, of course.

In materialist terms, what we know is that the Soviet state had utter and complete control over the means of production.  Compared even to monopoly capitalism, ownership was more rather than less concentrated under the USSR system.  Of course, even totalitarian states knew the value of good PR, and so described themselves in ideal socialist terms.  The arrangement was also useful, if in an ironic way, to the capitalist elite in the west, who could then point to the monstrosity that was the Soviet state and claiming that was what socialism really was all about, kill any interest in the materialist outlook that its working classes may have had.  Even western leftists were drinking this Kool-Aid, especially after the Soviet state unraveled, with results I've discussed elsewhere.  

Any Soviet citizen who complained about any aspect of it could expect to find themselves sent to that part of it known as the gulag.  If socialism or communism can be defined as kinds of democratic citizen's or worker's control over the means of production, the USSR and its copycats and sock puppets were as far away from that as you can get.

Perhaps more significantly, is full blown democratic citizen's or worker's control over the entire means of production feasible or even desirable?  Perhaps they were when Marx put pen to paper in the mid 19th century, but are they now?  Are they now that the joint stock or limited liability corporations have become the primary organization in capitalist production and distribution, doing away with the strict dichotomy of bourgeois tycoon vs. propertiless proletariat that so much of Marx's theory depended on?  What would Marx, or Adam Smith or John Maynard Keynes for that matter, make of an incorporated entity in which the employees, customers, parts of the broader community or even the state were in part or in whole, the shareholders?  These all seem to be vastly superior models to classic Marxist-Leninism if you ask me.  If we were opt to "in whole" as opposed to "in part" ownership in the above cases, how would these organizations raise capital?

Marx's critique of capitalism relied heavily on the labor theory of value, and the claim that profit resulted from surplus value: the workers receiving less than the value of what they produced, and the difference going into the capitalist's pocket.  I doubt that this is always necessarily true, though it can be, and without a proper regulatory structure, economic forces most likely will result in the kinds of economic meltdowns that Marx believed would eventually destroy capitalism, such as the market crashes of 1929 and 2008.  

If the capitalists compensate themselves for their own work in organizing production, if they compensate shareholders for the risk the run in investing in the business in the first place, if they invest in capital that increases the productivity of the business, resulting in more revenue and allowing for higher salaries across the board, wouldn't this admittedly ideal (meaning not always the really occurring) scenario be, in many ways preferable to the physical laborers simply taking it all as income, while allowing the capital assets to deteriorate?  I've often suspected that this is why real existing socialist societies - from Russia a century ago to Venezuela today, start out so well for the commoners, but the standard of living then deteriorates to a point where capitalist systems surpass them in terms of living standards.  

And don't get me started on the economic calculation problem, demonstrating the almost total lack of feasibility for any system of planned economics.  Societies that romanticize revolution and demonize capitalists pay a heavy price for doing so.  The thing to aspire to, I think, is not a retread of revolutionary socialism, but a capitalism wherein all, or at least most can profit, not just a few.

The Other Red Pill: Tense Relations

In the previous installment of the other red pill, we looked briefly at the overarching premise of the material conception of history, which is that the way in which people sustain themselves economically form the basis of society and culture.  More or less.  Nothing is ever so simple as that, of course, and it would be a mistake to believe that it is, but I'm sure its importance is indisputable to any honest historian, economist or sociologist.

There's no real way of sugar coating what is to come now.  And that's Marxist terminology and a fair bit of it.  And a few general accounting and financial management principles on top of that.  In my four plus decades on this Earth, I've studied a fair bit of both.  So keep this page bookmarked for those nights when you really need something to put you to sleep.  But it's useful stuff to know because, for reasons that will be explained in subsequent installments of the other red pill, this is going to be an important way to look at social issues for people interested in being able to lock horns with right wingers and regressive leftists with any hope of obtaining decisively positive results.  So here goes:

As mentioned in the previous section, we evolved to be social animals and productive animals.  Some of us more than others, no doubt.  Groups of people have advantages over lone individuals in that they can have a division of labor that allows for things to get done more efficiently.  Anyone who's ever done work in a group can be forgiven for believing otherwise.  But we take for granted just how much this is done already.  If you actually have a job, besides being lucky these days, you have a recognizably specialized niche in the overall economy.  No one person does it all.

So let's say you're one of the lucky ones and you work full time these days.  You're a wage earning schmuck somewhere.   We're going to follow you around a bit to get a glimpse of how this whole system works.  Once at work - in a plant, warehouse or office you don't own, situated on land you don't own, you typically use tools of some sort - machines, computers and so on.  You don't own those either.  These Marx referred to as the means or instruments of labor.  So that they don't sound too Marxist, the guys you work for probably refer to the same things as capital assets, or something similar.

While at work, you utilize your labor power along with the means of labor to act upon what are called the subjects of labor - raw materials, raw data, inventory and so on, with the intent of adding value somehow.  You don't own any of this either.  If this doesn't sound terribly exciting, that's because it usually isn't.  That's why a lot of people, yourself possibly among them, spend a fair bit of your day watching the clock.  Or reading blogs like this.  Don't let your boss catch you, or you'll end up in what Marx called the Industrial Reserve Army.

Now pay attention, because this is central to it all: The instruments of labor, labor power and the subjects of labor together are referred to as the means of production.  Did I mention you don't own any of it?

Since you don't own any of this, who does?  This is a more complex question.  Chances are, it's not the guy yelling at you to get back to work.  He's probably got somebody looking over him telling him to not to goof off as much as he does either.  Not that you feel sorry for him, of course.  He's still a jerk.  But he's not the tophat and tails capitalist that Marxist jargon brings to mind.  Business ownership structures are complex and varied, but at some point a bank expecting repayment or shareholders expecting growth or dividends are the ultimate owners.  Taken together, all of the kinds of relationships that people enter into for productive purposes are the relations of production, and they vary largely by ownership, or lack thereof, of capital.

Now pay attention again, because another important concept here: all of the people in any society whose jobs have the same or very similar relations of production are what is really meant by the term class.  And all this time you thought it referred to something along the lines of taste or decorum.  Marx's most famous examples of classes were the bourgeoisie - those who owned the means of production, and the proletariat - those who did not.

As mentioned above, things are more complicated than that in actuality.  Bourgeoisie and proletariat are best thought of us a spectrum rather than mutually exclusive absolutes, though they can be.  For example, you can have a "functional" capitalist, who manages the means of production but is also herself an "employee" of a higher level executive or board of directors, and a "rentier" capitalist, who profits entirely off of  ownership.

But as concepts, a class that makes its living entirely from profits generated due to ownership of capital, and a class that completely lacks capital and has no choice but to sell its time and labor in exchange for a wage, are useful to us.  The class structure of society together with its means of production are what is meant by the term mode of production.  Capitalism is so called because it is capital - the above mentioned means of labor - are what really makes the world go round.

As you can probably imagine, capitalism is a better deal for the bourgeoisie than it is for the proletariat.

You're a lucky fellow if your relations of production are a source of happiness in your life.  If your employees are smart and productive, if your boss is decent and appreciative, if your banker or landlord is a someone you'd love to have a glass of wine with or anything like that, consider yourself fortunate.  Oftentimes they're not, but not because they're fundamentally bad people, although they can be.  The economic relations of production naturally make a lot of these relationships antagonistic.

Our full time worker, however nice he is and however decent his supervisor may be, is ultimately listed as an expense on the company income statement.  Expenses are things that people like to keep low, and not because they're greedy evil capitalists, or for that matter, (((greedy evil capitalists.)))  It's about something much simpler than that: nobody likes to spend more than they have to for the things they need.  Especially if their boss expects frugality on their part.

Which is not to say that you - the worker - have no value to your employers.  Okay, maybe you personally have no value to them, but the job you do does.  This is because labor power is needed in order to make all those shiny capital assets do what they're there to do.  Which is to make people other than you rich.  Isn't it nice to feel useful?  But it's not a total bust - you do get a wage for it, and so long as you're producing more than you're costing the company, you're fine.

Contrast this with the above mentioned means of labor, or capital assets.  Accountants, managers and other fascinating people of that sort like these things, because they add value to the business.  They look good on balance sheets, and balance sheets that don't look good cause problems.

To get balance sheets looking good, bossy types of people want to have revenues exceed expense (and keep in mind that you are an expense) so that the company can post a net income.  Net income can then be used to either pay debt, acquire more assets (of which you are not) or increase the owner or shareholder equity in the business.  Balance sheets are evaluated largely by how much debt the company has compared to its assets and/or its equity - the less the better, generally.  They don't achieve this by giving you a raise.

Like the good German he was, Karl Marx had a word for everything.  The money you as a proletariat need to generate over and above your salary in order to make sure that income statement looks good is referred to as surplus value.  Which, for reasons we'll explore in future installments - is not necessarily always a bad thing.  The tense and conflicting interests of various classes, compounded by the lack of power and control that the lower classes suffered he referred to as alienation.

That's been your daily dose of the other red pill.  Now get back to work, you prole!

The Other Red Pill: Living in a Material World

... and I am a material girl!  Hey, don't try and gender me, sh!tlord!  And buy me diamonds, pearls, gold and jewels while you're at it.

When you hear the term "materialism," that kind of mindset is doubtlessly what comes to mind.  While that's not wrong, that's not really what "materialism" is going to mean in the context of the other red pill: Marx's idea of historical materialism.

Marx isn't easy to read.  He's very much a product of it's time, which was characterized by verbosity for verbosity's sake.  Materialism in his own words is a case in point: "The chief defect of all materialism up to now (including Feuerbach's) is that the object, reality, what we apprehend through our senses, is understood only in the form of the object or contemplation (Anschauung); but not as sensuous human activity, as practice; not subjectively. Hence in opposition to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism -- which of course does not know real sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects really distinguished from the objects of thought; but he does not understand human activity itself as objective activity."

People were better educated in the 19th century.  A pity, actually.  But the basic, underlying concept is not really as complex as all that.  It begins with the fundamental premise that the meeting of our most basic needs - physical sustenance - is the most important of all human activities.  This is self evident.  If you don't believe me, try not eating, drinking water or sleeping in a safe environment sheltered from the elements for a while.  I'm sure you'll be convinced then.  So far, so good.

Because of how important economic activity is to people, the activities and behaviors that people engage in for this purpose are a primary motivator for human association.  It should not require too much elaboration to understand why groups of people have a better shot at survival than lone individuals.  This was most unarguably the case in prehistoric times, where the choice was this or be eaten by saber tooth tigers or the like.  There was evolutionary advantage to co-operative society, so man evolved as a social and a productive animal.

Already some things about human nature become easier to understand.  We tend to identify strongly with the groups we belong to, and attach importance to our roles in those groups.  They are literally a matter of life and death.  This is why ritualistic acknowledgement of the tribes we identify with and our roles within those tribes as tied in with people's means of sustenance and security are seen so universally across human civilizations.  Thus, culture and identity are not unimportant.  They are.  But they derive fundamentally from the means whereby people provide for their basic security and economic needs in a social context.

And that is what historical materialism is really all about.  Our "material girl" is materialistic in her own way, certainly. And as you try in vain to get that earworm of a tune out of your head, think about why she's like that, and why this song topped the charts when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were at their political heights, in light of what we've learned here: accumulation of wealth in the form of capital (the means of basic sustenance) is the basis of status and power in a capitalist society (the expression of group position within that society) and hence why men who do this are desirable mates in the capitalist mode of production.  Which we'll discuss more in future installments of the Other Red Pill.

Now about those diamonds and pearls ...

Stark Truth Interview with mysterious alt-left blogger.

Alt left veterans Robert Stark (no, not THAT Robert Stark), Rabbit, Robert Lindsay and Alex Goldstein interview Alt-Left blogger Ryan England (with an a) who blogs at Samizdat Chronicles.  Which is here.  Which means it was me they interviewed.

The secret's out!

The interview can be heard here.  It's easy to get lost over at The Stark Truth if you're not careful. You can easily lose a LOT of time listening to Mr. Stark interview people with unconventional outlooks on just about any kind of issue or subject you can think of.  Highly recommended for anyone wanting to break out of the red state vs. blue state mold.

Topics for conversation include:

• My unpleasant youthful politicization during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. 
• My subsequent exposure to leftist ideas listening to former Dead Kennedys lead singer Jello Biafra's spoken word tours, and Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky.
• How I lost faith in left wing politics for a time as a result of reading "The Myth of Male Power" by Warren Farrell, as well as the underlying class-based concerns that Dr. Farrell raised that are of concern to the left.
• My loss of faith in right wing politics as a result of how conservatives only ever care about the interests of corporations and high profits, and could really care less about social issues and social cohesion.
• How for a long time I remained left wing on economic issues and labor issues, and even became involved in job action and workplace organizing.  But I hated cultural leftism, but the cultural right didn't do it for me either.
• How I encountered the early alt-right, but was put off by their white nationalism.
• And then wondered if there was an alt-right, could there be a leftist counterpart.  Which led me to the discovery of Rabbit and Robert Lindsay's blogs.  I didn't agree with them on everything, but grasped the overall gist of it.
• My own theory of the alt-left, based on the need to for a restoration of economic class analysis to clear up popular misconceptions around the notions of power and privilege.
• Splintering and factionalism on the alt-left, as with so many political movements.  "Judean People's Front" syndrome.
• How untrammeled capitalism is the force that destroys relations based on nation, family and so forth. Corporations have loyalty only to the bottom line.

Enjoy!

Socialist Objectivism - A philosophy for the alt-left?

I'm probably not the person who you'd expect to hear this from, but I've always been a fan of the writings of Ayn Rand.  I think that objectivism is, for the most part, a reasonable way of looking at things.  The Ayn Rand Lexicon writes:

My philosophy, Objectivism, holds that:
 

• Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man’s feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.

• Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man’s senses) is man’s only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.

• Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

• The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man’s rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

Well, three out of four ain't bad.  The first point could be a bit tricky - it's debatable whether the nature of reality is indeed so absolute, but it is not so dependent on the subject as the postmodern relativist would have us believe either.  But even the last paragraph isn't all bad.  What's wrong, after all, with free and voluntary exchange for mutual benefit?   That's all capitalism really is, when you get right down to it, right?  What could possibly go wrong?

Well, quite a bit, as it turns out.  Even the most right wing conservative governments of recent history - Thatcher's UK and Pinochet's Chile, among others, did not trust free market capitalism to the degree that Rand shilled for it.  Rand was one of more than a few right-libertarian thinkers (and that's what Rand was, whatever claims to the contrary she may have made) who claimed that "there was no such thing as society, only individuals."

Not so fast.  Group and institutional dynamics matter.  The manner in which power, responsibility and reward are distributed in both formal and informal associations of people impact on human behavior a great deal, making the total of the whole greater, or at least different than the sum of the parts.  The now famous prisoner's dilemma experiment is a perfect case in point wherein rational individuals acting in the most rational way to pursue their self interests, can end in mutually disadvantageous results.

In this era of postmodernism, cultural relativism and moral relativism seeming dominant in left wing thought, it's easy to forget that the economic left was once advanced by minds so preoccupied with systemic and logical rationalization of human interaction that they dared to call their take on socialism "scientific."  Whatever flaws Marxist historical materialism may have had - if we can take the failure of the USSR and the survival of capitalism to this day as evidence of the failure of this theory - there's also something to be said for it.

For one thing, it states the obvious: entering into "relations of production" of some kind or another really isn't voluntary.  Sorry libertarians.  If there's anything Rand and Marx would agree on, it's that man's necessities for survival aren't going to produce themselves.  This exposes a fatal defect in Rand's theory: the claim that laissez faire capitalism is rendered the ideal system due to all transactions that occur therein being completely voluntary is simply not true.

Marx's definition of class - those segments of the population with the same relationship to the means of production, remains an invaluable concept for clearing away all kinds of ideological rubbish, from the denial of class so often asserted by libertarians and conservatives to the assertion on part of SJWs that social groups with no specific relationship with the means of production - white males specifically - can actually form a ruling class.  Note that even if a disproportionate majority of the ruling class: that class that owns the means of production, are white males, their dominance derives from their ownership of the means of production, not from their being white males.

That all said, there's much to be said also for "free, voluntary exchange for mutual benefit", and that suppression of market activity such as was seen in the USSR requires a ruling class even more draconian than anything seen prior to it.  The idea to aspire to, I think, is not some kind of gigantic central planning bureaucracy, but some means whereby a market system can be socially owned.

Marxist theory made note of the strained political nature of the relationship between the ruling and subject classes.  While this had the danger of demonizing the ruling class and so rationalizing many ugly human rights abuses seen in the Soviet sphere, it also made apparent the need for a strategic political theory on part of the subject classes, whereby they could ultimately challenge the ruling class for, at least, a slate of basic rights under the system, if not ultimate control over it.  Contrast this with the more conservative nature of objectivism, which merely holds its truths to be self evident and simply awaits their uncritical embrace by a populace that accepts basic objectivist tenets.  Marxism reminds us that privileged classes have a vested interest in the maintenance of the status quo and do not give up their positions without a fight.

Historical Materialism was no more infallible than Objectivism was.  For one thing, Marxism was prone to reversing the mistake that Rand and her proteges made: while individualist thought denies the existence of "society", Marxist thought was prone to the misapplication of denial of the individual. This led to a cavalier disregard for the rights and lives of individuals in the theory and practice of Marxism, its offshoots from Lenin onward, and its present successor, critical theory.  What is said here is not a call that Marxism be revived and adhered to in a chapter and verse manner - there is much there that I disagree with (the labor theory of value, for instance), but rather that basic objectivist principles be joined with basic materialist principles as one (though by no means the only) means of analyzing social relationships.

The greatest danger present in both these rationalist systems of thought is losing sight of the fact that science and reason are processes, not positions.  They are the means of arriving at truth, not labels that one slaps on a particular doctrine as a means of rendering it infallible.  Randroids and Marxists regard capitalism and socialism respectively as the final word on economic theory because their "scientific" or "rationalist" reductionist formulas "proved" them true, and so they are clung to as if they were holy dogmas even in the face of obvious failure and need for reform.  That this kind of pseudo-religious devotion to any kind of theory is dangerous and directly countermands what objectivist and materialist philosophies claimed to stand for needs to be reiterated.  The only dogma should be that there are no dogmas, but theories that are shown to be sound and effective should be regarded as such until proven otherwise.

Never the less, there's a strong tendency towards objectivism on the alt-left, and I would go as far as to say that this is the philosophical basis for the alt-left's quarrel with the regressive left.  I do not think that we can deny the possibility of some kind of "Socialist Objectivism" or "Objectivist Materialism" - an objectivism that accepts some sociological concepts and even some aspects of conflict theory.  It is clear to me that this is indeed the underlying philosophy of much alternative left thinking.