The Right Kind of Left

This is part of a series of posts I’ll be doing on the possibility of a Leftism that is free of ressentiment, envy, wrath, spite, hatred (yes, even of the oppressor), animistic collectivism and nihilism.

Good:

1. Creating jobs for people for their sake, perhaps in part through the Government.

2. Investing in infrastructure, definitely through the Government.

3. Being willing to help someone who has gone astray, or to redirect them to someone else who can help them where possible. This with the patient, persistent and gentle care seen in A Walk to Beautiful.

4. Inclusiveness, as the actual solution to elitism.

Bad:

1. Handing people cash indefinitely or unconditionally, thus encouraging laziness and dependence.

2. Expecting that infrastructure will just build/maintain/clean itself through private investment, which it will not. In fact you’d have to pretty deluded to think it will. Third world countries rely on private infrastructure development, and this means that there are great roads and bridges in front of giant mansions, but no roads and bridges where the poor people are (only garbage and toilet water, since there are no sewage or trash collection services either. Such services are normally provided by the state, but with a minimalist state you have to take care of such matters yourself, which of course you can’t. Yes, not even you, invincible White male who descended from the heavens).

Even the U.S., an extremely wealthy society in terms of GDP, has extremely poor places where there is terrible infrastructure, comparable to third world countries (certain parts of Brooklyn and the deep South, for example). Canada, by comparison, does not have so many extremely poor places, even in far out rural and forested areas, and this despite being a poorer country overall. This is in part because of equilization payments.

3. Patronizing people and forcing them to take treatments that are degrading or against their will. Institutionalizing them against their will, or treating them like a problem that needs to be fixed. The mental hospital and its treatment of the mentally ill is the most barbaric and disgusting stain on Western civilization.

There is a certain vicious intolerance that runs through the West, that I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s this tendency to see certain people as not being human, a cutting off of one’s empathy with them. To deal with this mass psychopathy, I think an extremely reactionary ‘anarchist’ Left has come into being, one that is itself pathological and walks around carrying the burden of its spite, guilt and ressentiment. I can’t decide who is worse, the reactionary who reverts to paganism (I consider this ‘anarchist’ Left to be essentially pagan) and starts idolatizing The Community™ out of desperate self-medication and as a wish-fulfillment fantasy, or the psychopathic White male doctor who straps you to a bed because you’re too crazy and worthless to be considered human anymore. I honestly can’t decide .

This same vicious strain is visible in the way families interact over here. White families tend to be alienated, i.e. the members alienated from each other. I see young people moving out at aged 20 (too young an age to move out, IMO), and parents not being willing to take care of their own children beyond the minimum necessary. I suspect this is not the case with Jewish and Black families, and I know it isn’t with South Asian families. This isn’t merely a lack of family values, however, as it appears to be something deeper and more essential to the West, with the family indifference being perhaps a symptom of some other underlying problem.

Maybe this comes with class privilege. Something similar exists in Pakistan as well, among the upper and middle classes (even in me when I was not ‘democratized’), a similar tendency to dehumanization. The West has overall class privilege because it is the upper class of the Earth, and then the upper class of the West has even more privilege added to that original baseline. Add being White and male to that and you can imagine how twisted your psyche must become.

4. Nihilism, as the perceived solution to elitism. It’s one thing to believe in social equality, but another thing to believe in value equality. Value equality is a contradiction in terms, as when you have values you automatically see some things as better than others. Some things are better than others. Kindness is better than indifference, humility better than pride. Happiness is better than suffering, and making yourself happy is good even when others are suffering (if you call that selfish, then it is the grandest and most virtuous selfishness I can think of). Celibacy is better than sexual activity, monogamy better than promiscuity, drug-abstinence better than intoxication, vegetarianism better than omnivority, and faith better than atheism. Etc.

These values should be upheld without the exclusionariness of Country Clubs and other elitist hellholes. This is not cultural elitism, nor is it Pharisee-ism. It is Christianity at its truest: simultaneous inclusiveness of people and intolerance of bad things. I guess you have to see it in action to really appreciate it.

(Cross-posted to Yes and No.)

Why Capitalism Fails

I know nothing about economics, and I think I know why. It is a presumptuous discipline, one that has always been ideological. As such, I maintain no opinion on economic matters save what I can see for myself.

Here is a man who is presumptuous as economists generally are, but unconventional. I’ll let y’all judge him:

‘Minsky drew his own, far darker, lessons from Keynes’s landmark writings, which dealt not only with the problem of unemployment, but with money and banking. Although Keynes had never stated this explicitly, Minsky argued that Keynes’s collective work amounted to a powerful argument that capitalism was by its very nature unstable and prone to collapse. Far from trending toward some magical state of equilibrium, capitalism would inevitably do the opposite. It would lurch over a cliff.

This insight bore the stamp of his advisor Joseph Schumpeter, the noted Austrian economist now famous for documenting capitalism’s ceaseless process of “creative destruction.” But Minsky spent more time thinking about destruction than creation. In doing so, he formulated an intriguing theory: not only was capitalism prone to collapse, he argued, it was precisely its periods of economic stability that would set the stage for monumental crises.

Minsky called his idea the “Financial Instability Hypothesis.” In the wake of a depression, he noted, financial institutions are extraordinarily conservative, as are businesses. With the borrowers and the lenders who fuel the economy all steering clear of high-risk deals, things go smoothly: loans are almost always paid on time, businesses generally succeed, and everyone does well. That success, however, inevitably encourages borrowers and lenders to take on more risk in the reasonable hope of making more money. As Minsky observed, “Success breeds a disregard of the possibility of failure.”

As people forget that failure is a possibility, a “euphoric economy” eventually develops, fueled by the rise of far riskier borrowers – what he called speculative borrowers, those whose income would cover interest payments but not the principal; and those he called “Ponzi borrowers,” those whose income could cover neither, and could only pay their bills by borrowing still further. As these latter categories grew, the overall economy would shift from a conservative but profitable environment to a much more freewheeling system dominated by players whose survival depended not on sound business plans, but on borrowed money and freely available credit.

Once that kind of economy had developed, any panic could wreck the market. The failure of a single firm, for example, or the revelation of a staggering fraud could trigger fear and a sudden, economy-wide attempt to shed debt. This watershed moment – what was later dubbed the “Minsky moment” – would create an environment deeply inhospitable to all borrowers. The speculators and Ponzi borrowers would collapse first, as they lost access to the credit they needed to survive. Even the more stable players might find themselves unable to pay their debt without selling off assets; their forced sales would send asset prices spiraling downward, and inevitably, the entire rickety financial edifice would start to collapse. Businesses would falter, and the crisis would spill over to the “real” economy that depended on the now-collapsing financial system.’

Capitalism vs. Science

Written by Mike Palecek  

Wednesday, 12 August 2009

With thanks: International Marxist Website

Cross Posted at : Sherryx’s Weblog

We are constantly bombarded with the myth that capitalism drives innovation, technology, and scientific advancement. But in fact, the precise opposite is true. Capitalism is holding back every aspect of human development, and science and technology is no exception.

We are constantly bombarded with the myth that capitalism drives innovation, technology, and scientific advancement. We are told that competition, combined with the profit motive, pushes science to new frontiers and gives big corporations incentive to invent new medicines, drugs, and treatments. The free market, we are told, is the greatest motivator for human advance. But in fact, the precise opposite is true. Patents, profits, and private ownership of the means of production are actually the greatest fetters science has known in recent history. Capitalism is holding back every aspect of human development, and science and technology is no exception.

Main slab of the Darwinius masillae holotype fossil. Photo by Jens L. Franzen, Philip D. Gingerich, Jörg Habersetzer1, Jørn H. Hurum, Wighart von Koenigswald, B. Holly Smith.The most recent and blatant example of private ownership serving as a barrier to advancement can be found in the Ida fossil. Darwinius masillae is a 47 million year old lemur that was recently “discovered”. Anyone and everyone interested in evolution cheered at the unveiling of a transitional species, linking upper primates and lower mammals. Ida has forward-facing eyes, short limbs, and even opposable thumbs. What is even more remarkable is the stunning condition she was preserved in. This fossil is 95% complete. The outline of her fur is clearly visible and scientists have even been able to examine the contents of her stomach, determining that her last meal consisted of fruits, seeds, and leaves. Enthusiasts are flocking to New York’s Museum of Natural History to get a glimpse of the landmark fossil.

So what does Ida have to do with capitalism? Well, she was actually unearthed in 1983 and has been held by a private collector ever since. The collector didn’t realize the significance of the fossil (not surprising since he is not a paleontologist) and so it just collected dust for 25 years.

There is a large international market for fossils. Capitalism has reduced these treasures, which rightly belong to all of humanity, to mere commodities. Privately held fossils are regularly leased to museums so that they may be studied or displayed. Private fossil collections tour the world, where they can make money for their owners, instead of undergoing serious study. And countless rare specimens sit in the warehouses of investment companies, or the living rooms of collectors serving as nothing more than a conversation piece. It is impossible to know how many important fossils are sitting, waiting to be discovered in some millionaire’s office.

Medical Research

The pharmaceutical industry is well known for price gouging and refusing to distribute medicines to those who can’t afford it. The lack of drugs to combat the AIDS pandemic, particularly in Africa, is enough to prove capitalism’s inability to distribute medicine to those in need. But what role does the profit motive play in developing new drugs? The big pharmaceuticals have an equally damning record in the research and development side of their industry.

AIDS patients can pay tens of thousands of dollars per year for the medication they need to keep them alive. In 2003, when a new drug called Fuzeon was introduced, there was an outcry over the cost, which would hit patients with a bill of over $20,000 per year. Roche’s chairman and chief executive, Franz Humer tried to justify the price tag, “We need to make a decent rate of return on our innovations. This is a major breakthrough therapy… I can’t imagine a society that doesn’t want that innovation to continue.”

But the innovation that Mr. Humer speaks of is only half-hearted. Drug companies are not motivated by compassion; they are motivated by cash. To a drug company, a person with AIDS is not a patient, but a customer. The pharmaceutical industry has a financial incentive to make sure that these people are repeat-customers, consequently there is very little research being done to find a cure. Most research done by the private sector is centered on finding new anti-retroviral drugs – drugs that patients will have to continue taking for a lifetime.

There has been a push to fund research for an AIDS vaccine and, more recently, an effective microbicide. However, the vast majority of this funding comes from government and non-profit groups. The pharmaceutical industry simply isn’t funding the research to tackle this pandemic. And why would they? No company on earth would fund research that is specifically designed to put them out of business.

The Money that Prays

Jeremy Harding [with thanks: LRB]

Last September, as dust and debris from the tellers’ floors began raining onto the empty vaults below, a note of satisfaction was sounded by bankers in the Arab world. Financial institutions sticking to the tenets of Islam, they announced, were largely immune from the debt crisis. Devout Muslims may lend and borrow under certain conditions; they can even buy and sell debt in the form of ‘Islamic’ bonds, but most other kinds of debt trading are frowned on. Al Rajhi Bank, based in Saudi Arabia, and the Kuwait Finance House posted impressive profits in 2008. Both have come under some nervous scrutiny in 2009 but their ability to weather the recession that has set in behind the credit crunch is not at issue.

Unlike most banks in the Middle East, Al Rajhi Bank and KFH are ‘sharia-compliant’ businesses, which means simply that they try to abide by the evolving body of rules known as the sharia – ‘the path to the headwater’ – which govern the lives of Muslims. The sharia serves mostly as a guide to personal conduct, though some rules are drafted into the legal codes of majority-Muslim states. It’s founded, we’re always told, on revealed truth from the Koran and exemplary stories from the Hadith, the sayings and doings of the Prophet. But the real influence of the sharia lies in the way this material is constantly read and recast by modern Islamic scholars, reinventing old traditions or asserting new ones. Whatever they take it to be, growing numbers of Muslims are keen to stay on the path when it comes to banking and finance. The global Muslim population is upwards of 1.3 billion – roughly one in every five people on earth – and, with a religious revival of twenty or thirty years’ standing, the way of Islam is now a crowded thoroughfare. It is plied by a great diversity of travellers from different parts of the world; some have money to burn, others next to none, but anybody with a modicum of wealth is nowadays a potential opportunity for banks offering sharia-compliant retail services: current accounts, straightforward financing schemes and home-ownership plans.

The term ‘Islamic finance’ wrests a lot of activities down to a catch-all definition. The same is true, in the financial universe, of the words ‘sharia’ and ‘Islam’ itself. Sharia is not a single, coherent jurisprudence for Muslims; there are various schools of interpretation and marked disagreements within each of them. ‘Islam’, a broad term of convenience for most non-Muslims, is a power-point word in the City: it tells bankers and traders that every day for a few minutes they should shut out the din of the money that merely talks and tune in to the money that prays. But why bother, given that sharia-compliant finance is probably worth less than 1 per cent of the total value of the world’s stocks, bonds and bank deposits? This was reckoned at about $170 trillion in 2007; it’s much less than that now of course, but even so, with a value of around $700 billion, Islamic stocks, bonds and bank deposits remain a minority affair, just as Muslims remain a minority in global terms.