October 17 will mark the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution in its final iteration, Martov’s moderate Mensheviks having lost to Lenin’s radical Bolsheviks. A little rusty on my Russian history, I brushed up a bit over the summer break by reading Louis Fischer’s 1964 magnum opus The Life of Lenin. I suppose reading this 684-page scholarly work delving into every conceivable interstice of Lenin’s life and mind was a bit of overkill for a non-historian, but it got me thinking about a trifecta of nagging of puzzlements. One is the utter failure of Vladimir Lenin’s chaotic dream of world socialism, and how awkward the anniversary is going to be for another Vladimir (Putin), who runs an oligarchy disguised in the rather cheap raiment of a capitalist state, but one that has nevertheless retained its strict authoritarian intolerance of any dissent, real or imagined. (Some habits, it seems, are indeed hard to break.)
The other idea that I cannot shake from my mind, is how the Revolution and subsequent establishment of the soviet damaged capitalism so profoundly. The third puzzlement, and a result of the second, is the how the current revolutionary mood in much of the West as a response to the crisis of capitalism will play out.
Of course I know that we Americans “won” the Cold War. After all, all of the Soviet Union’s socialist satellite states went all capitalistic on that bitch (the Motherland), and even the stalwart of Eastern Communism, China, has turned to our style of neoliberal political economy. Sadly, we wasted a war in Korea and another in Vietnam (and other many other places too), as well as meddled in the affairs of so many other governments that it would put the meddling of Russia in our own most recent national election look bush-league, when all we had to do is just wait everybody out until they saw the error of their socialist ways. (I was reminded while serving in West Berlin in the 1980s that U.S. propaganda was superfluous to East Berliners, as they only needed to look over the Wall to see western prosperity.) As it were, we simply didn’t have the self-confidence to let a sleeping bear lie. Why couldn’t we just go about our business and let communism cannibalize itself? Theories abound, such as the Russians had a very real chance of winning the war of sociopolitical ideas, a permanent block of communist countries would necessarily limit the world consumer market for capitalists (viz. economic development), communism is inextricably tied to atheism (an anathema to the Christian West), and many more other things besides. Perhaps it was some combination of all of these things, but I’m less interested in the why and more interested in the result.
The damage the Russian Revolution (and by extension the Cold War) inflicted on capitalism, was as subtle as it was insidious. Because we were battling a war of ideas, we could not dispassionately examine the warts of our beloved system of free markets and political liberalism (the damage to democracy rather than our political economy must remain the subject of another essay). Doing so would be admitting the possibility of weakness for the enemy to exploit. Thus, the American propaganda machine rolled on for nine decades until the “truth” about of virtues of free market capitalism and the evils of autocratic socialism became a permanent part of almost everyone’s mental furniture. The stamping out of communism required, not surprisingly, our own purges and black lists for those with a tainted political ideology. Indeed, in many circles calling someone a socialist is still the ultimate political insult, and the central tenant of conservatism remains ideological purity, which must include banishment to the hinterlands of thought the slightest miasmic whiff of socialism (or abortion, but that’s another matter). It should not be lost on historians and political philosophers that the similarities of Lenin’s insistence on ideological puritanism with regard to state socialism is similar in kind to that of American conservatives in their fetishism of capitalism (the ideological ends always justifying the intellectually dishonest, and often violent, means). Henry George wrote in 1871 that laissez faire economic theories promoted by big business were the purest form of legerdemain, noting that monopolies and not free markets were the order of the day, in particular with respect to California railroads, which were paid for by the federal government for the benefit of capitalists. In more modern times, Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Amazon all benefited greatly from government welfare as well, but how many search engines and computer operating systems are competing in this “free” marketplace? Curiously, these seemingly incompatible political economies mirrored each other in another way. The Soviet Union was never purely socialistic, especially for the well born, well placed, and internationalist elites who enjoyed their summer dachas, caviar, and premium vodka, and there are many aspects of our own economic system which are overtly socialist – Social Security, the Postal Service, the funding of public schools, and the welfare safety net, among many other programs and agencies.
Nevertheless, as I said, the West won. But just like Putin’s Russia is unable to wean itself from authoritarianism, we are unable to wean ourselves from the idea that laisses faire capitalism is an unalterable, inerrant gift from the Heavens. The coterie of capitalists (or their cognate of corporatists) in their current unchecked state are not members of a religion, but rather a cult, which bastardizes and obfuscates the English language with is very own cultish Orwellian argot, turning the idle rich into “job creators” and the great unwashed working class poor into “takers.” If North Korea can properly be described as a necrocracy, as Christopher Hitchens so cleverly labeled it, then America is a capitalistocracy. Yes, I know, there is a colorable argument that it is better defined as a plutocracy, or kakistocracy, or kleptocracy, or better yet an amalgam of the three, but the underlying dogma behind whatever it is, at least since 1980, is neoliberalism: that magic of onward-upward-forever growth which will solve all human problems if untethered from the yoke of governments, stifling regulations, and welfare dependency. Within this ass-backwards dogma, everything and everyone must be monetized – thus we have become accustomed to the abominable terms “human capital” and “human resources” – where non-participants in the economy must be punished by peonage (in our prison systems), or at the very least held in the greatest of contempt and marginalized as something less than human.
And yet the cris de coeur of history tells us that capitalism has never worked as we were told it would, just as history informed the Soviets that state socialism never worked as they were told it would. The Soviets, of course, listened. (Even the Cubans came around, finally, when the Russian teat was removed from those righteously socialist mouths hungry for the surrogate motherland’s milk in the form of cold cash.) Yes, three post-war decades were good economically for America, but can capitalism take full credit? More likely, circumstance was the principal player. America was a seemingly land of limitless natural resources populated by people fully drunk with the Protestant work ethic, far from the ravages and deprivations of European wars, all too willing to profit from world demand for goods and services.
For those that are not completely purblind to reality, though, capitalism’s blemishes are now fully visible. In fact, they are more than blemishes – they are cancers that have metastasized to the middle class which is shrinking and weakening by the day. Wealth inequality is increasing. The consumer economy is literally suffocating the planet with plastics and carbon dioxide. We’re chasing ghost villains to assuage our tribal instincts: regulations, Mexicans, Jews, ridiculously improbable conspiracies, identity politics. You name it. Anything and everything, except for the obvious – the very dogma of the hyper-capitalistic neoliberal economic system itself. The trend is clear enough, and no PhD in economics is needed to see it. As automation continues to eliminate jobs (as Marx, Lenin, and Keynes predicted) there will be fewer consumers with money to purchase the goods and services required to keep companies in business. Little wonder that a growing number of the rich are joining the prepper movement.
In sum, the promise free market capitalism is, and always has been, a convenient fiction. Not unlike a global pyramid scheme, it only works as long as people continue to believe that it is real. Thus it is the purview of the apologists for hyper-capitalism holed-up in Plato’s Cave (conservative think tanks), to polish their sophistry to levels of sophistication that would shame the most risible preachments from the most practiced New Age TV prophets.
Both Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders tapped deeply into the gradual but growing revolutionary fervor in America. Unfortunately, revolutions cannot be proper revolutions without the added ingredient of passion, which means abandoning or sidelining reason, and thus we find our great nation led by a failed real estate broker and borderline moron. The bigger picture though – the forest and not the trees – is more important. People are easily duped into voting against their own interests, and there is nothing sadder than seeing a poor working class white conservative at the ballot box voting Republican because a Mexican might rape him, or voting Republican because taxing the rich might mean they will create fewer minimum wage jobs, one of which he aspires to obtain someday. For the conservative leadership in office or in the media, claiming that the poor are responsible for their own predicament only works up to a certain point. It will become a much harder sell when almost everybody is poor, unless, of course, you can defenestrate the poor from the body politic, which seems to be the current Republican strategy. This of course could only lead to a real revolution, meaning one that – to slightly modify Hobbes’ phrase – is nasty, brutish, and long.
Sure, a significant (enough) demographic turned toward Trump-style strongman populism. But I’m reasonably certain that we’ll “get tired of winning” relatively soon. The alternative of trickle-down-supply-side economics voodoo continues to lose credibility by the minute, as does the argument that it isn’t working because of over regulation (economic conservative to a dangerous market bubble: “I just can’t quit you”). There is of course an alternative. It begins with a simple proposition: forget about economic absolutism and the inerrancy of a single economic model. Economists – the wizards of the dismal science – are so bad at making accurate predictions that they should more rightly be called pseudoscientists rather than social scientists. As the contrarian Nobel laureate economist Joseph E. Stiglitz presciently noted, economists are like drunks looking for their keys under the lamppost, because that’s where the light is. For example, they like measuring things like GDP; while increased GDP due to high health care costs is a “positive indicator,” Americans paying those costs are nonetheless hurt economically. It would seem that there is very little “positive” about that. Like philosophy, in economics the most important things it has had to say have already been said, most notably by John Maynard Keynes. Don’t get me wrong – by all means, let economists keep working, but recognize that most of what they produce are either armchair musings, intuitive ideologies (like neoliberalism) that work in theory and fail in fact, or failed economic models, because they make the absurd assumption that human behavior is rational. (In my view, a prerequisite for a PhD in economics should be first an undergraduate degree is human psychology.)
To cite but one notable example, Friedrich Hayek’s ridiculous postulation that the free market, when supersized on a global scale, was tantamount epistemologically to the conception of the human mind, remains in vogue, though there is very little evidence for its efficacy when applied to economic prosperity for the many and not only the few. Keynes was right all along, but economics, like all academic disciplines, is subject to fads, and soon Keynesian economics fell out of fashion in favor of Hayek’s neoliberal economic theory – a misreading of Adam Smith and step backward promoted by Milton Friedman, Reagan’s darling, which when implemented in 1980, sharted us out as a stain along the long, lonely road to dystopian ruin.
An alternative to economic theory is economic pragmatism. History, after all, is a good teacher if we accept her lessons, and certainly Benjamin Franklin would have agreed. Take what works and reject what does not, shedding your favorite ideological shirt when it becomes too ghastly worn to wear. Under-regulated free market economies create chaos – not only recursive bubbles and crashes, but also inequality and environmental degradation. They are, too, subject to manipulation by the wealthy who can (in the case of the U.S.) buy and sell legislators and executives like so much chattel. This is not to say that state controlled socialist economies didn’t have their own problems, namely inefficiency, stagnation, and inertia caused by predictably poor human centralized planning, and also subject to manipulation by the well-placed. For reasons discussed above, we’ve been convinced that we must choose one or the other. This is the dumbest idea since the invention of the shit milkshake. (I am reminded of a quote from the protagonist in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, “If shit were to become money, poor people would start to be born without assholes.”) If the rules are clearly delineated, there is no reason that we cannot choose what policies work and discard what doesn’t within both systems, and of course develop new ideas along the way as well.
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Because of my lowly beginnings in a laboring class family in rural northern California, I have the opportunity to debate died-in-the-wool working class conservative friends almost on a daily basis. Their arguments are not really arguments at all, but rather recitations of conservative economic memes, platitudes and aphorisms. (“Socialism is fine until you eventually run out of other people’s money” is one of my favorite thoughtless non sequiturs.) They refuse to acknowledge that we already have a mixed economy with overtly socialistic programs. They apparently skipped the Great Depression and the New Deal in high school history class but somehow still got a diploma, imprinted from birth with the rural frontier culture of individualism, and it doesn’t wash off easily. But I digress.
More than 10 million working families receive SNAP benefits (36% of the working population) and a majority of working adults receive some form of public assistance to keep their heads above or at the poverty line, according to a study by the U.C. Berkeley Labor Center. This is hardly a commentary about a failed welfare state, but instead a rather obvious symptom of a malfunctioning free capitalist market. Yet when I use the word “socialism” the conservative response is to pull back as if a jellyfish were going for their testicles. I’m convinced that when I say the words “democratic socialism” they hear instead “Soviet Stalinism.” Again, this is testament to the power of a century of economic propaganda. Economic conservatives even poo-poo the socialist democracies of Europe, despite the fact that in many of those countries the middle class is significantly larger as percentage of the population, homeless is exceedingly rare, everyone enjoys healthcare as a right, workers receive far more vacation days, along with all sorts of other benefits, such as paid maternity and paternity leave. In short, life is better. But apparently on principle it is preferable to garret yourself in your parents’ basement in a stained wife beater – your jeremiad at the television muffled by concrete, rebar, and potting soil, sounding more like a fentanyl-induced dirge – rather than live in a free and prosperous socialist democracy.
Nearly as annoying are my somewhat younger radical progressive friends who advocate for violent revolution. This is the neo-hippie, over-caffeinated crowd of nipple-pierced anarchists and Luddites who are naïve enough to believe that the global economy can be reverse-engineered, but not toward a Norman Rockwell America that only ever existed in the imaginations of white conservatives, but rather to an equally ridiculous utopian vision of peace, love, and hairy commune sex. The Beatles song “You Say You Want a Revolution” was largely response to this crowd of overzealous Liberal reactionaries of a prior generation. I find myself applauding their fight for racial equality, equal justice, inclusiveness, and opposition to organized religion, but I can’t keep my eyes from rolling when they wax revolutionist about organic communal farms feeding a world of anemic vegans lacking the energy to plow a single row. Perhaps they’re ahead of their time. Or behind.
There are other views on our economic future as well, including those of comfortable, salaried professionals (some supporters of Trump and some of Clinton) who don’t realize they’re standing on the precipice of extinction, thinking that things are more or less fine the way they are.
Be that as it may, we will be faced in the very near future with a choice. Corporate profit growth decoupled itself from wage growth in the early eighties. Corporate profits will continue to rise as wages remain stagnant or fall and jobs are lost or replaced with the crowdsourcing scam of piecemeal contractors. When Americans stop buying products and services because they can no longer afford them, the party ends, the champagne having either been drunk or spilled. This is already happening, as businesses who cater to the middle class are drying up, as one might expect because the middle class is drying up as well, while businesses catering to the poor are hanging on, as are luxury brands for the rich. This could continue to play out in several ways. To avoid the economic disaster of a middle class gone the way of the dodo, companies could lower prices, supported by both by cheaper offshoring, crowdsourcing, and automation technologies, while selling more to emerging economies with rapidly germinating middle classes. But if the history of capitalism and the exponential growth of technology is any guide, this is simply a stop gap solution. As the middle class approaches its apogee in emerging economies, so will the pressure to reduce manufacturing costs by eliminating jobs there as well. We’re already seeing it happen with the explosion of robotics worldwide. The end game is an environmentally toxic world of insanely wealthy and the desperately poor. As climate change really turns its swag on, things would get apocalyptically ugly.
And here I return to Stiglitz. He noted that when looking to find solutions within the free market that they were as difficult to find as the free market itself, meaning that the “market” is not quite as free as one might think because its natural evolution leads to monopolies. A recent study by two economists from Princeton and University College London seems to confirm this trend. When competition dwindles and corporate business markets are consolidated, companies are freer to jack up markups. The average markup for the costs of goods and services has gone from 18% in 1980 to 70% in 2014. In a real, truly free, free market, this wouldn’t happen. Reducing costs with outsourcing, offshoring, crowdsourcing, and automation, while increasing profit margins is obviously good business, it is so only in the short term. Consumers are needed to purchase products. Consumers need to work in order to purchase products. In sum, there is no sustainable end game in the world’s current economic structuring.
There is another solution, though – a revolution, but not a violent or disruptive one. Indeed, it might be more accurate to call it an evolution (John Lennon’s preference when referring to paradigm shifting social change).
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If we are to be saved, and if we are to save the planet, the only realistic answer must include universal basic income (UBI). We already spend $1 trillion a year on welfare (more than half of that on Medicaid), and even more on sustaining the enormous bureaucracy required to run the programs. Scrap it. Give every adult a monthly income, adjusted for geographic location and number of dependents, which would allow them to live a minimally dignified life. No luxuries, no vacation money, no new cars – just the necessities, including universal healthcare. There are lots of variations on the specifics, but it’s not a new idea. Martin Luther King Jr., Richard Nixon, and he king of neoliberalism himself, Milton Friedman, all endorsed it. Where it’s been tried, most notably in Canada, it has worked (before being scrapped by a new conservative government). It would be a revolution because it would require the toppling two centuries of economic free market wisdom: the idiotic idea that selfishness is the answer to ameliorate human suffering, eliminate poverty, and promote universal prosperity.
Alas, the math works, but the psychology doesn’t. What I mean by that is that we tend to intuit that giving people money leads to complacency and dependency – at least that’s the folk-wisdom that Joe Biden seems to believe. It’s one of the myths that feeds capitalism: if you give people money they will simply stop being productive citizens. Never mind the studies that falsify this intuitive conclusion, just try a simple thought experiment. Would you quit your job and content yourself with basic cable and a Barcalounger if you were to receive UBI? You may or may not quit your job, but the chance of you doing nothing is just about zero. You would write a book, or start a business, or go back to school, or become a real parent, or any number of productive endeavors. Free from the stress of the precariat, you could pursue what you want to pursue. Let us not forget that idleness is not a common trait of human nature (or we would still be on the African savannah, or more likely, simply succumbed to extinction), and paid labor is a rather recent human invention. But as Biden has objected: What about the importance of the dignity of work? If mindless repetitive factory or service work for poverty wages is your idea of dignity, then by all means keep your factory or service job, enjoying the extra taxable income for the finer things in life, and the taxes you would pay on your earned income would be supporting the UBI of people just like you. But also imagine the flourishing of the human spirit, the innovation that would occur when the experimentation with new ideas need not come at the cost of potential financial ruin. Your first idea didn’t work? Try again, and again, and again. There would be no penalty for trying.
Would corporations like this plan? If their boards haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid of hyper-capitalist neoliberalism and are willing to face the very real failures of capitalism, surely they would. They’d be guaranteed a steady supply of consumers, and a growing rather than shrinking middle class. But that’s not who would need the most convincing.
It would be a harder sell to ideologues on both sides of the political spectrum as well as every bureaucrat who benefits from the current welfare system. It would strip them Conservatives from the shibboleth that the poor are to blame for their plight, not to mention it would represent an unequivocal endorsement of socialism. It would diminish Liberals in their paternalistic control of the welfare system, and thus some of their power. Because everyone would receive UBI, it would reduce the argument from the rich that they rose to the top without government handouts (of course they didn’t), as well as eliminate from the irresponsible poor who spend their incomes on box wine and cigarettes, the argument that it isn’t possible to survive on the current incarnation of the government dole. As the historian Barbara Tuchman observed, once a complex public policy is in place, its own massive inertia, as well as its beneficiaries, makes it very difficult to change, even if it would be a benefit to society as a whole: it is the natural order for system in place to perpetuate the system in place.
But how could we pay for it? Well, we’re no longer fighting the Cold War, although the Congress and Pentagon apparently didn’t get the memo. We’re spending around $600 billion a year for “defense” while, and according to the last census, 45 million Americans live below the poverty line. The grand apologist of neoliberalism, Thomas L. Friedman, noted in The World is Flat that many wars are avoided because the countries enjoying the benefits of participating on the global supply chain wouldn’t like the disruption and destabilization of their economies. (He has been wrong about quite a lot, but he was right about that.) Which is yet another reason to unleash capitalism (and diminish corporatism) while also unleashing the human potential. Of course I can hear the objections already to curtailing military spending: What about terrorism! The fact is the world is safer than it has been in the course of human history, and you’re more likely to be killed by a television falling on you than by a terrorist. But “nothing happened today in Peoria” is not likely to make it as the lead on the evening news. So yes, I say, let capitalism turn its swag on, but with very clearly delineated rules, including the actual enforcement of antitrust laws already on the books, environmental protections, clean energy, and sustainable development.
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UBI is not a bold vision, nor a radical one. It is not a roadmap toward utopia. And it is not a stop-gap measure either. By itself it does not answer the most pressing question for world civilization: How do we stop manmade climate change? I am arguing against intuition that we need both capitalism and socialism at the same time, yet emphasizing that both words in the context normally attributed to them are essentially meaningless. When we no longer feel compelled to rely on fossil fuels, when we can feel free to embrace clean energy solutions and conservation of the natural environment because we can detach it from personal and corporate incomes dependent on them, we can thrive. It is not a perfect solution for humanity. It by itself cannot restore to reality the myth of the American Dream. But it can be a quiet, bloodless, revolution. A revolution that celebrates our greatest aspirations, denying nothing, and giving us a sense of self, of belonging to a community of humans striving forever foreword toward something better. A new Enlightenment rather than a regression toward tribalism, and our all too human love affair with dogma over science.
The chalice is dangled before our very eyes. Will we take it? No, I do not think that we will. Once the lie is purchased, it’s very difficult to return. While Canada is looking again toward UBI, in the United States it is still a political taboo to even seriously debate it. My best guess is that we will slouch toward a slow motion apocalypse, as the Sumerians and Egyptians and Romans did, but of course this one will be final. As Hegel said, we learn from history that we learn nothing from history. I hope he was wrong.
Glen Olives Thompson is a professor of U.S. and Canadian law at La Salle University in Chihuahua, Mexico. His primary research interest lies at the intersection of law and public policy.