@slothrop
this takes us back to Rousseau vs Hobbes and the “real” “nature” of man…
Must dig my Dupuy texts! Over and out for today.

Posted by: Jérôme | Jan 6 2005 23:28 utc | 3

Also, anticipating any riposte here that opportunities are provided to all persons equally to “compete” for limited resources is pure nonsense. One example suffices to prove my point: “perfect information.” In order for markets to “clear” all participants require equal access to market information (prices, investment info, etc.). There are so many examples not worth mentioning here that prove how even the most basic assumptions of “efficiency” are betrayed by normal marketplace practices.

Posted by: slothrop | Jan 6 2005 23:43 utc | 5

Let’s have a best cartoons in the world(political and otherwise) Thread , soon.
I haven’t seen Calvin, or HOBBES, for about six years. They are about as dead, literally and meaningfully, as the real ones. Ditto Luther, Zwingli, Lenin, Trotsky, Marx(except the brothers and the trains),Mao, Che, Hegel, Riccardo(Except Lucy and Ricci), Bentham, Malthus, and Adam Smith(except for George Will, who needs a perpetual meal-ticket). And for Christ’s sake let’s bury Ayn Rand too, a tenth-rate intellect if I ever saw one.

Posted by: FlashHarry | Jan 7 2005 1:03 utc | 7

I’ve always used “iatrogenic” when referring to a physician-created condition…
Funny, I didn’t feel nitpicky when I woke up this morning… Musta been the cotto salami on a toasted english muffin with dijon mustard that did it.
😉

Posted by: Kate_Storm | Jan 7 2005 1:22 utc | 9

flashharry
what you & the long family do not know is that i am chapter leader & srgeant of arms with a motorcycle gang in the deep south – they are known as
hegel’s angels – the materialst friends of the hegelian dialectic & without putting too fine a point to it we do not take to any demonisation of our hero so i’d keep an iron bar close by the bed for a while flash
& as for brother slothrop -i agree in each & every aspect alluded to but i see very little poverty in his philosophy – on the contrary — the pertinece of his texts astoundes me as even frere derrida caught on in his spectres of marx
i’m quite convinced & have it proved in colloques & forums that people interested in divesting karl of his clothes – know very very little of his texts – if at all, sometimes
its people who have studied secondary texts of a secondary text & when you demand a bit of specificity in their knowledge – they are too often found out
i will not enter into this debate because as you have pointed out the premises are all false – at least to me. in fact ii would go so far to say that they are very thin on the ground & depend on such a small time in history as to be almost meaningless in any fundamental historical sense
i think jérôme has some very strange ideas in this area – not least of all – that ideology is a baton with which to beat other people around the head
now while hegel’s angels are quite glad to beat anyone around the head with a 4×2 of schelling, for example or even of rawls – it seems slighty impetuous & impertinent to offer world views with so little historical evidence
the theories of contracts, of incitations & of information zero sum games are the idle work of people with too much time & money to spend – i know if i was in uruguay today i know where iw ould go to look for theories & it would be a long way from chicago or the sorbonne for that matter
i’d suggest jérôme read some of husserl or even of japsers to understand what he is seeing is not what he is seeing
& please do not take this is a conversion – hegels angels are not taking member for the next ten years & only flashharry may come around to drink with us but he better be carrying….
i just don’t see either/or black/white yes/no – situations as being adeaquate – i would have thought that the last 150 years of french philosophy have at least taught us that – to search for our theories through multiples which is a long long way from absolutism
deleuze died a marxist & i didn’t see him building any monument. levinas regard for marx is clear even in his reading of talmudic texts & yet i did not hear him building a barricade
but i must repeat brechts maxim – that beween founding a bank & robbing one – it is difficult to tell which is the more criminal
but even empiricist philosophers of the worst kind in our time do not give credit to any idea of inherent traits – whether they are of laziness or of virtue or even of the other way around
i want to remind him also that my dear dear walter benjamin who is really the tim buckley of philosophy has written a hommage to laziness that i find very credible & even laudatory
but i have spoken too long…..the bikes are calling & we’re out looking for flash

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 7 2005 1:41 utc | 11

@RGiap:
I am glad to see that you are partaking of the salutary Louisiana air with your philosphical biker gang.
From what I know of these philosophers(and I read mostly history), Hegel and Marx, of the old ones, have stood up best over time. I think both are still very relevant today.
That being said,it seems to me, that if persons are to have a dialog, a much more meaningful dialog might be had by speaking as “I think”, without copious footnotes and citations of the long dead.
I really like your reference to Brecht:
“that beween founding a bank & robbing one – it is difficult to tell which is the more criminal.”
Now that guy was an enduring philosopher.
Take care. very insightful thoughts.
@Kate Storm:
Get a dietary counselor, for breakfast suggestions–You’ll clog your arteries up.(citation-Christmas Story).

Posted by: FlashHarry | Jan 7 2005 3:37 utc | 13

Good news: the American government’s despicable attempt to grab the steering wheel from the UN’s hands and appear in command of aid operations seems to have failed. You’ll find buried deep within this piece of news the information that “the so-called core group of nations the U.S. formed last week with India, Japan and other countries to coordinate aid and recovery efforts will be dissolved, a Japanese official said yesterday.” (I didn’t say so-called, they did.) Perhaps now they would be so kind to call the Jeb-Powell Compassionate Grandstanding Travelling Show back home and let the adults work?
About the ongoing discussion in this thread, I lack depth even to sit in the aisles, but I’d suggest a more up-to-date quote I read somewhere (was it here?) to replace Brecht’s somewhat mild sentence above about the relativity of evil: “Terrorism is violence by people who lack an air force.”

Posted by: pedro | Jan 7 2005 4:07 utc | 15

That being said,it seems to me, that if persons are to have a dialog, a much more meaningful dialog might be had by speaking as “I think”, without copious footnotes and citations of the long dead.
Well put. This has been bugging me also.
And we can likewise eschew obfuscation. Can you explain “capitalist homogenization of human creativity” to your motor mechanic in words that he can understand?

Posted by: DM | Jan 7 2005 4:29 utc | 17

Most anthropology would show that LSC does not exist symptomatically in aboriginal society, it might also show that what you (jerome) are calling” trust” is actually the” collective impulse” so characteristic in the social relations of all aboriginal society. There are no examples of populations of humans that exist as “free roaming individuals”. So I don’t think it would be such a leap to even consider it hard wired (in the human brain). If “trust” or” collective impulse”were to replace LSC as the initial presupposition, the LSC can easily be seen simply as some emergent symptoms (or a necessary condition, according to slothrop) that characterize the larger “State” type social/economic structures — as immediate survival dependency (on the group) is lessened. I would think that law, in this scheme, is important in so far as it reflects (institutionally) the original sense of “trust”.

Posted by: anna missed | Jan 7 2005 4:32 utc | 19

anna missed
you go girl.
The question of the law is complicated but the US constitution mostly subverts “trust.”

Posted by: slothrop | Jan 7 2005 4:52 utc | 21

And one more thing, can we please just agree that what we are calling socialism here is just capitalism where the state owns the capital? Same domination, same belief system that worships capital.
As I guess some won´t easily agree to this convention as they are used to other uses of the word “socialism” (and might have used that word on this site with another meaning) maybe we can have some kind of socialism(a) as stated by Citizen while socialism(b) refers to some more utopian state of affairs which is neither capitalist nor a dictatorship (of the proletariet, the party or otherwise). As socialism(a) and socialism(b) are somewhat cryptic maybe someone can come up with some useful words.

Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Jan 7 2005 5:20 utc | 23

@SKOD:
I got lost somewhere there between mile mark a and b.
But if it works for you, keep on truckin’.

Posted by: FlashHarry | Jan 7 2005 5:39 utc | 25

Please ignore my mention of religion, I couldn’t resist the joke, but it probably isn’t funny.
Also, perhaps no one will find it obvious that democracy is being slandered in America.

Posted by: Citizen | Jan 7 2005 6:15 utc | 27

I suppose that thanks to Cloned Poster many Moonies visit the
Today in Iraq blog . The link provided there today to

The Poor Man seems especially cogent.
Here’s a sample quote regarding “estimates” on the number of Iraqi insurgents:

We should remember that these numbers are not actual numbers of anything – no one at any point took a head count of the “insurgency”, they do not indicate that the actual number of anti-US fighters has increased by 2-3 orders of magnitude over the last year (although it may be so) – these are figures pulled out of someone’s ass, massaged for political expediency, and then released into the wild. So while this tells us nothing quantitative about the actual size of the insurgency, it’s a useful way of measuring the anxiety in official quarters. The point of the 200,000 number is not that there are 200,000 insurgents, it’s that things are going so poorly that it’s no use saying anything less.

Dark conjecture: If the U.S. misadventure in Iraq ends with an embarassing “last days of Saigon” fiasco, possibly within this calendar year, the Bushian response will be a (possibly nuclear) attack on Iran’s nuclear installations, justified
on various (and spurious) grounds of national security and morale, and applauded by “the usual suspects”. Remember the Mayaguez!

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Jan 7 2005 7:36 utc | 29

Can anyone here get their head around this latest Thomas Freidman piece?

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jan 7 2005 9:15 utc | 31

HKOL:
The Iraq body count has the numbers of iraqi admitedly killed by coalition troops. Now you just need the same for the insurgents.
Citizen:
I think those might work. I don´t recall myself using the word “socialism” on this forum before as it is one of the words I tend to use with care because of its often undefined nature.
As to the French revolution, I noted when I took history at the university that we were taught the seven phases of the french revolution, who the mayor persons were in each phase and so on while the Russian revolution just happened because of the first world war. I have in different circumstances read Emma Goldmans “2 years in Russia” and got some information of what happened there. This was the long way of saying that I agree.
Pedro:
It was an interesting story and one that lies close to my experiences. I don´t think the person who called you an utopian anarchist was joking. 🙂

Posted by: A swedish kind of death | Jan 7 2005 10:54 utc | 33

A lovely OpEd in todays LA Times:
Hey, It Worked for the Romans – Listen up, foreign nations: Meet Uncle Sam’s demand for tribute or he’ll pay you a little visit.

The Bush administration’s foreign policy is centered around fighting a highly expensive counterinsurgency in Iraq. The administration’s domestic policy is centered around driving federal tax revenues to ever-lower levels.
Some observers say there’s an unsolvable contradiction here. I say those people just aren’t thinking creatively enough. There’s a simple, logical way to reconcile President Bush’s foreign and domestic policies: Start demanding tribute from foreign countries.
…
The particular genius of the conservative movement has been to make the unthinkable thinkable. A few decades ago, ideas like supply-side economics and privatizing Social Security were confined to the lunatic fringe. Today they’re conventional wisdom within the GOP.
I’m not optimistic enough to believe that the U.S. government can begin demanding tribute tomorrow. The idea has to incubate for a while. I propose a well-placed Op-Ed article in the Wall Street Journal, followed by a conference at the American Enterprise Institute (“Paying Tribute to Tribute”), followed by a resolution in Congress (is Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn interested?), followed by a talk-radio blitz. Soon enough, we will be regarding opponents of tribute as anachronistic, if not vaguely anti-American.

Unforunatly the author is far behind the curve. The US is exactly doing this for some decades already. Read the long but very good analyse The Naked Hegemon Part 1 and Part 2

Uncle Sam has reneged and defaulted on up to 40% of its trillion-dollar foreign debt, and nobody has said a word except for a line in The Economist. In plain English that means Uncle Sam runs a worldwide confidence racket with his self-made dollar based on the confidence that he has elicited and received from others around the world, and he is a also a deadbeat in that he does not honor and return the money he has received.

Posted by: b | Jan 7 2005 12:46 utc | 35

pedro
A sort of hybrid socialism may come top-down; what the French rebels wrote on the walls in 1968, “the imagination in power”, may yet become a business requirement.
Excellent post. Some econ pros refer to your example as “craft production”–decentralized, cooperative enterprise. I agree that such industrial organization is needed as a reform of monopoly capitalism (Walmartization). Again, all industries prone to network effects (communications, transportation, energy, etc.) should be socially owned.

Posted by: slothrop | Jan 7 2005 16:35 utc | 37

Patrick Basham of the Cato Institute asks, “Can Iraq Be Democratic?”
Executive Summary:
Is Iraq capable of moving smoothly from dictatorship to democracy? This paper contends that the White House will be gravely disappointed with the result of its effort to establish a stable liberal democracy in Iraq, or any other nation home to a large population of Muslims or Arabs, at least in the short to medium term.
Why are Islamic (and especially Arab) countries’ democratic prospects so poor? After all, in most Muslim countries a high level of popular support exists for the concept of democracy. In practice, popular support for democracy is a necessary, but is not a sufficient, condition for democratic institutions to emerge. Other factors are necessary. Hypothetical support for representative government, absent tangible support for liberal political norms and values and without the foundation of a pluralistic civil society, provides neither sufficient stimulus nor staying power for democracy to take root. That reality was borne out over the past generation in numerous countries where authoritarian regimes were displaced by newly democratic regimes but democratization failed because of shallow foundations.
The building blocks of a modern democratic political culture are not institutional in nature. The building blocks are not elections, parties, and legislatures. Rather, the building blocks of democracy are supportive cultural values—the long-term survival of democratic institutions requires a particular political culture.
Four cultural factors play an essential, collective role in stimulating and reinforcing a stable democratic political system. The first is political trust. The second factor is social tolerance. The third is a widespread recognition of the importance of basic political liberties. The fourth is popular support for gender equality.
Paradoxically, a more democratic Iraq may also be a repressive one. It is one thing to adopt formal democracy but quite another to attain stable democracy. A successful democracy cannot be legislated. The White House is placing a very large political wager that the formation of democratic institutions in Iraq can stimulate a democratic political culture.
On the contrary, political culture shapes democracy far more than democracy shapes political culture. Therefore, the American government may need to compromise its democratic ideals with a healthy dose of pragmatism. Democracy is an evolutionary development rather than an overnight phenomenon.

Posted by: Pat | Jan 7 2005 17:23 utc | 39

Nice that Krugman is back.
Worse Than Fiction

‘ve been thinking of writing a political novel. It will be a bad novel because there won’t be any nuance: the villains won’t just espouse an ideology I disagree with – they’ll be hypocrites, cranks and scoundrels.
In my bad novel, a famous moralist who demanded national outrage over an affair and writes best-selling books about virtue will turn out to be hiding an expensive gambling habit. A talk radio host who advocates harsh penalties for drug violators will turn out to be hiding his own drug addiction.
In my bad novel, crusaders for moral values will be driven by strange obsessions. One senator’s diatribe against gay marriage will link it to “man on dog” sex. Another will rant about the dangers of lesbians in high school bathrooms.
In my bad novel, the president will choose as head of homeland security a “good man” who turns out to have been the subject of an arrest warrant, who turned an apartment set aside for rescue workers into his personal love nest and who stalked at least one of his ex-lovers.
…
How did we find ourselves living in a bad novel? It was not ever thus. Hypocrites, cranks and scoundrels have always been with us, on both sides of the aisle. But 9/11 created an environment some liberals summarize with the acronym Iokiyar: it’s O.K. if you’re a Republican.
The public became unwilling to believe bad things about those who claim to be defending the nation against terrorism. And the hypocrites, cranks and scoundrels of the right, empowered by the public’s credulity, have come out in unprecedented force.
Apologists for the administration would like us to forget all about the Kerik affair, but Bernard Kerik perfectly symbolizes the times we live in. Like Rudolph Giuliani and, yes, President Bush, he wasn’t a hero of 9/11, but he played one on TV. And like Mr. Giuliani, he was quick to cash in, literally, on his undeserved reputation.
…
Either way, when the Senate confirms Mr. Gonzales, it will mean that Iokiyar remains in effect, that the basic rules of ethics don’t apply to people aligned with the ruling party. And reality will continue to be worse than any fiction I could write.

Posted by: Fran | Jan 7 2005 18:13 utc | 41

Wolfowitz out
Bolton out

Posted by: b | Jan 7 2005 18:45 utc | 43

Hello all. Back from a week in Nanaimo BC (Canada), travelling there and back by train and various other conveyances. Once again struck by the pathos of (what is left of) the US rail system — who was it said that it would “embarrass a Bulgarian”? — several fellow-passengers commented, during a true “Amtrak from Hell” experience northbound, that they were personally ashamed that their “great country” has one of the worst rail systems on Earth.
Being in Canada for a few days was like a brief vacation from the loony bin. People were sane, well-behaved, courteous; cities were fairly clean, transit systems ran on time and were well maintained. While there is far too much Americanisation of BC, particularly the ludicrous/tragic Giant Strip Mall that sprawls N and S of Nanaimo, the general tenor of life is calmer, less volatile, more civil. Even the road signage exhorting drivers to obey speed limits, turn lights on and off, etc. prefaces its directives with “Please” and often ends them with “Thanks”. By contrast, US signage barks out orders with the telegraphic rudeness of paramilitary discourse.
Of course most people were talking about the tsunami (I was staying among maritime folks). One old codger in a chandlery remarked that it was nice living in western Canada — “we don’t have earthquakes and tsunamis, and we don’t have Bush.” Interesting juxtaposition. His equally venerable chum responded that they should knock on wood, the Yanks might invade any day on a whim — “we’ve got natural gas eh?”. So there’s my tiny sample of “How America’s Image is Doing Among Ordinary Folks”.
Haven’t had time to catch up on the mass of posting since I left, but skimmed the open threads. I do tend to agree that Jerome’s LCS thesis is seriously flawed — both historically and anthropologically underinformed — and would like to engage w/it in more detail; but for the nonce will merely snipe at one fundamental assumption: “the peasants are better off under capitalism than they were before [under feudalism?].” This is a core justification for capitalism-the-ideology. Actually all social systems from theocracy to the Divine Right of Kings justify themselves in this way — even if their ostensible purpose is to curry Divine approval, the end result is that happy Gods are kinder to the people, the crops will be good, etc. Because it is a fundamental tenet of the Capitalist Faith, I think it bears much closer examination.
The first question we could ask is “which peasants?” After all, what we know as capitalism was jump-started in C16 by a massive looting of specie and other goods from colonised nations, in other words an unparalleled global act of armed theft. A massive liquidation of fauna and flora throughout the N hemi, massacres and imprisonment of indigenous peoples (some of the most severe taking place in S America where the maximum extraction of precious metals also occurred), and a thriving slave trade are the foundation stones of modern capitalism. If we count all the hundreds of millions of peasants who over the course of capitalism’s ascendancy were deprived of land, livelihood, autonomy, culture, language, children, and life itself in order to build this “great” new system of capitalism, we would have to conclude that only white peasants of European descent eventually, after many generations, became “better off” as, after great struggle, they were finally allowed a share of the loot.
Initially, of course, Euro peasants were driven by force into the maw of factory labour, by the Enclosures (UK version) and similar processes: land holdings were consolidated and privatised, collective agricultural practises were outlawed by both force and fraud. The desperate and starving ex-peasantry that resulted from this deliberate displacement were easy recruits for 14-hour-a-day, starvation-wage factory work — and this mechanism persisted for two or three centuries before there was any substantial reform effort. Even if we limit our consideration to Anglo peasantry, were the generations who slaved from dark to dark in the “Satanic mills,” from the age of five on, “better off” than they had been working on the land? They did not think so — the folk culture of their day laments with heartbreaking poignancy the cruelty of their forcible conversion into mass, expendable industrial labour. They had to be herded off their land and into the mills and mines at gunpoint, much as indigenes worldwide had to be forced to labour for the new Anglo overlords under the lash, hanged and burned by the hundreds and thousands pour encourager les autres and so on.
So, when we proclaim proudly that capitalism made peasants “better off,” what we are talking about is the apparent contemporary affluence of the great-grandchildren of the survivors of what at the time was a disaster even for peasantry in N Europe, and is still an on-going disaster for peasantry and indigenes worldwide. Capitalism continues to destroy the lives of peasants today, by the destruction and contamination of biotic systems — which devastates their agricultural security; by the consolidation of wealth (by means of usury and loan sharking as well as by the more widely accepted mechanisms of interest accumulation and speculation) which leads inexorably to consolidation of land ownership, expropriation, foreclosure etc.; and by the continuing, systematic process of undermining regional autonomy and food security in favour of perilous dependence on fixed, rigged global commodity markets and upon the exploitation of “cheap acreage” to produce cash crops for wealthy Western markets at the expense of local nutritional sufficiency.
Even yeoman peasants such as American family farmers are seeing their land and livelihood destroyed, inexorably, decade by decade. I think the claim that “peasants” are better off is one of the weakest that can be made for the system. Suggested reading for Jerome: Guns Germs and Steel (I’ll think of some more later).
There is also the question of how enduring the increased well-being of the petit-bourgeois, tradesman, and servant class (the people who really benefited most from their masters’ adoption of capitalism as the new ideology of wealth) really is… but that’s a whole other can of worms. The liquidation model of resource use is more “industrial” than it is either capitalistic or communistic, that is, we can point to Lake Baikal or to Rocky Flats as examples of the same feckless, suicidal attitude to resource, toxicity, and biotic viability. At heart both systems partake of the fantasy that humans “create wealth,” and the rigorous denial that real wealth (biotic viability, the ability of landscape to sustain life) is often destroyed, sometimes irrevocably, by the practises that create wholly symbolic, artificial “wealth” in terms of cowrie shells or numbers in bank accounts. Capitalism has so far distinguished itself by its extraordinary efficiency in looting and wrecking real resources (soil, water, biotic diversity, predictable climate) in order to create surplus short-term “wealth”. Since peasants live closest to these resources, their lot is likely to become less and less happy as the “externalised cost” liquidation model rushes headlong towards its inevitable brick wall.

Posted by: DeAnander | Jan 7 2005 19:50 utc | 45

deanander
i’d though you have gone bush – as in wilderness
wish you a strong new year & my best a strongest wishes

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 7 2005 20:00 utc | 47

@b
Deputy Defense Secretary Wolfowitz Says He Is Staying

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jan 7 2005 20:24 utc | 49

The military finally had a useful project but stopped it – too bad: Fuck for peace chemicals
I would have liked to see a test applied in several official settings 🙂

Posted by: b | Jan 7 2005 20:45 utc | 51

De – I find it much harder to refute your very concrete evidence than slothrop’s theoretical/philosophical musings…
I think my argument boils down to “democracy and capitalism are compatible, and thus capitalism is the least bad system as it provides for hope of improvement”, whereas slothrop says, I think, that capitalism and democracy are inherently opposed, and that socialism and democracy are compatible but have been thwarted by outside (capitalist) forces. I don’t see how to reconcile our positions beyond the point that “democracy is good” 🙂
I don’t agree that capitalism is built only on the exploitation of other men or resources. Exploitation HAS given it a boost, but at least it has been able to leverage this. Other systems, especially socialist ones (and most other authoritarian ones) have also gleefully raped nature and others around them, with no other result to show than that rape. And capitalism seems the only system able to nurture within itself more efficient ways (such as what I am currently doing in my job). Others show no ability to reform or improve, which is why most of them wither while capitalism thrives.
Like democracy – and thanks to democracy and the rule of law – capitalism, however, bad, is still the least bad.
Or maybe I am just in denial.

Posted by: Jérôme | Jan 7 2005 21:42 utc | 53

dan of steele
like slothrop i have great difficulty with anything that says there are inherent traits – too much like lysenko to me – i believe it to be so much more complicated but that finally man has his own destiny within his hands & for me that sometimes means that people have to wage wars of liberation to get hold of that destiny
mao when asked sometimes in the early sixties what he thought of the french revolution he sd it was too early to tell & i feel a familiar hesitancy with our immediate history – & i would call our immediate history that of the last century. i don’t see any system really working today but i instinctively feel as you do that indegenous peoples have often (without reducing them to noble savages) have much better refined social & productive relations free of the perversity of capital
what i can say however – is that people like hobbes are sinister – if ever there was an ideological thug – mr hobbes fits the bill
economist are amongst the worst social scientist to be judging human charachter however – though they have an apparent proximity to external necessity they have none at all about internal necessity. an interior life – a spiritual life if you want to call it that. marx, for me wrote very clearly in the german ideology & in the holy family about these ‘lived’ relations
i am glad the deanander can offer the form of detail that is necessary to clarify questions. not to do an endless search for an eytmological base – though that is not without importance- but to respond with what the english like to call empitrical facts
still steel

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 7 2005 22:45 utc | 55

Forget the comma between “however” and “bad” in my last sentence above…
Dan – agreed in that we have third or fourth-order problems.
See Positional Goods. (and google for more)
There must be a better system – nope! Sad, but true.

Posted by: Jérôme | Jan 7 2005 23:08 utc | 57

Sweden, the Model
How is the Swedish model faring?
by Joakim Palme, director of the Institute for Future Studies
Sweden moved into the 21st century after a decade of mass unemployment, financial crisis and cutbacks in the social welfare sector. Moreover, inequality has increased today, the population is ageing and large groups of immigrants are jobless. EU membership and globalisation of the economy, meanwhile, appear to be restricting Sweden’s room for manoeuvre on national policy issues. This prompts the question of how the Swedish model is faring.
Ever since the arrival of Marquis Childs’s book, Sweden: The Middle Way, in the 1930s, the idea of an alternative Swedish social model has been strong in people’s minds, both internationally and at home. At various times, this model has been associated with the way decisions are made, the shape of social welfare policy and other public institutions, and the nature of differences in people’s lives and circumstances. Despite the fact that society has changed radically since the 1930s, the concept of a Swedish model lives on. In recent years, however, the perception that Sweden is special has been increasingly questioned in Sweden itself. And beyond the country’s borders, the crisis of the 1990s and the cutbacks and reforms introduced as a consequence, have been seen as the beginning of the end for this model.
In the field of social welfare, Sweden has come to represent the archetype of a universal model. All Swedish residents are included and the vast majority are insured primarily via the various public welfare systems. In the case of welfare transfers, employees receive a combination of general benefits and universal means-tested benefits. Entitlement is individual and is not related to the family provider. Public healthcare insurance is available to all. A distinguishing feature of the Swedish social model is its comprehensive range of publicly subsidised welfare services for everything from childcare to care of the elderly. Local authorities have been the main providers of these services. Social policy programmes targeting disadvantaged groups have been variously integrated into the country’s public social welfare institutions. Policy in the disability field is one such example. In addition, the Swedish social welfare model has been based on a policy of full unemployment with a strong element of both active and selective labour market initiatives. The welfare services sector itself is a major employer.
In discussing social welfare models, people tend to confuse the instruments of social policy with the consequences they are thought to entail. This causes problems when the time comes to analyse the actual impact of different social policy models on such things as poverty levels and inequality in society. The Swedish model is generally associated with low poverty levels, a low level of inequality, a high employment rate, a high level of employment among women, and a situation in which disadvantaged groups such as single mothers and people with disabilities are more likely than in other countries to live on terms that are not very different from those enjoyed by the majority of the population. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that the institutions comprising the Swedish model have contributed to such an outcome, but there are also other reasons why equality in living standards has become a feature of this model.
Relations between the social partners, labour and management, tend to be discussed in terms of the mutual understanding and negotiated solutions that are usually achieved in Sweden, often with a strong emphasis on equality. Such agreements, too, are seen as a feature of the Swedish model. They do not mean, however, that the underlying conflicts in society have been eliminated, but rather that compromise has been viewed as a means of reducing open conflict and thereby promoting growth. The fierce political battle that took place over the introduction of a compulsory profit-sharing scheme, the so called wage-earner funds, and the employers’ decision to move away from central wage negotiations in the early 1980s could both be viewed as departures from the consensus model. After the country’s economic crisis peaked in the mid-1990s, however, the introduction of a new, more decentralised model for wage formation, along with the emergence of a more independent Bank of Sweden (Riksbanken), contributed to real wage increases and employment growth coupled with a low rate of inflation. Pay differentials, however, have increased. It remains to be seen how persistent and sustainable this trend will be and how well the new institutions will be able to cope with future conflicts.
While the features described above characterised social welfare institutions in Sweden going into the 1990s, some sectors were clearly having problems introducing the welfare principles involved and others were finding it hard to uphold them. The earnings-related principle in both traditional social insurance and unemployment insurance was eroded as a result of a growing number of people moving up into income brackets that brought them above the ceiling for benefit entitlement. In addition, there were obvious failings in the provision of decent basic benefits for parental leave, for instance. Regular unemployment insurance was not universal but based on a voluntary state subsidised model. Childcare services had been expanding during the 1980s but access was uneven around the country and between different groups in society. At the same time, austerity measures had been introduced in the old-age care sector. The healthcare service was struggling with queues for operations and recruitment problems as unemployment in Sweden soared to record heights towards the end of the decade. It is wrong, therefore, to imagine that the Swedish social welfare model has ever worked perfectly.
The 1990s began with what was described as the tax reform of the century. It involved reducing marginal rates while at the same broadening the tax base; it separated tax on labour and capital, it redistributed income by means of household transfers rather than progressive taxation, and so forth. While the tax reform was under-financed, a larger problem for government finances was the time of its introduction. The problem was that the financial and credit markets had already been deregulated while wage increases were now inflationary and marginal tax rates high. This led to a rush of speculation in the property market. When the social partners agreed on a wage freeze, inflation vanished and the speculation bubble burst, triggering a banking crisis. Moreover, the tax reform made it expensive for Swedes to borrow but profitable to save. Household demand fell dramatically while at the same time the country’s export industry entered a recession. Unemployment hit the manufacturing sector first but then spread to the publicly financed welfare services sector. In the space of only two years, the employment rate plunged 13 per cent. Unemployment in the open labour market rose from 1.7 to 8.2 per cent, and the proportion of people in government relief jobs and training programmes, etc, rose from 2.2 to 6.2 per cent. Sweden’s GNP declined for three successive years. The crisis in public finances became acute when the budget deficit reached 13 per cent of GNP. Meanwhile, the biggest wave of refugees Sweden had seen since the Second World War was arriving. No part of the Swedish model was in good shape.
One of the pillars of this model, an active employment policy, was designed to manage an unemployment rate of no more than 3 per cent. The shift from active to passive government measures, therefore, was a dramatic one and the quality of the active measures deteriorated. Despite this, a growing number of the jobless had no recourse to either active or passive unemployment benefit but flooded into the social benefit system instead. The direct costs of unemployment grew extremely high and virtually crowded-out other areas of government expenditure, while at the same time the tax base was eroded.
The centre-right coalition government that held power from 1991 to 1994 reacted by imposing widespread cutbacks in the country’s social security systems, although leaving some untouched. The Social Democratic government that followed continued in the same vein but combined cutbacks with tax increases of almost the same magnitude. The list of cutbacks in income maintenance systems was long. The hardest to bear for most people were the cutbacks in sickness benefit and unemployment benefit. Reductions in the nominal child allowance sum also belong in this category. Revising the indexing of various benefits is a frequently used method for reducing expenditure without this being too evident. The changes made in the indexing of pensions fell into this category, as did the changes in advance-maintenance support to single parents. These changes involved cutbacks without actually constituting a change in model in the sense of importing principles from other social welfare models. Lower benefit levels, however, increase the scope for collectively bargained schemes and other kinds of private insurance.
In one respect, some developments brought social insurance in Sweden closer to what is termed the basic security model. This was a result of ‘non-decisions’ whereby no changes were made in the ceilings for income on which benefit entitlement is based. As these ceilings or maximum benefit levels followed price trends, the fact that real wages increased meant that a growing number of people earned incomes in excess of the ceilings. This applied in the case of sickness and parental benefit, and to an even greater extent in the case of unemployment benefit.
Qualification rules have been enforced more strictly in most social insurance areas without this being directly influenced by regulatory changes. Similarly, one can see variations in the way the rules and regulations concerning social assistance have been applied, both across time and between local authorities.
In the welfare services sector, developments have been more heterogeneous. In some areas, the trend is towards greater universalism, in others greater selectivism. Most areas are having to conserve their resources, which have declined in relation to needs.
In the childcare sector, the pattern in the 1990s was one of both greater universalism and greater resource depletion. This was due on the one hand to an increasingly large proportion of each age cohort entering publicly subsidised childcare, which reinforced the universal character of the Swedish model. On the other hand, a marked decline occurred in the amount actually spent on each child in public childcare, which led to such developments as a lower staff-child ratio. Despite an improvement both in expenditure and staff density at the end of the decade, the levels achieved in 1990 were not restored.
In compulsory education, both costs per pupil and staff-pupil ratios have been reduced considerably. Upper secondary schools have suffered resource depletion on a similar scale, but in their case universalism has increased as a growing number in each age cohort have entered upper secondary programmes after compulsory school. Resource depletion in the educational field could be said to correspond to the reduction in social insurance benefit levels and in that sense could be described as another cutback that does not actually represent a change of model.
In the old-age care sector, a declining share of elderly people receive publicly financed home help services. A small group with very extensive needs are appropriating an increasingly large share of the available resources. At the same time, responsibility for the elderly is shifting from public institutions to the family and the market.
Disability policy is another sector that displays conflicting tendencies. On the one hand, this sector as a whole has been an object of ambitious reforms and special measures – in particular the personal assistant reform – that have considerably improved the resources and freedom of action of the most disadvantaged among the disabled. On the other hand, many of those with disabilities have been confronted by changes in home help services that have meant fewer and fewer people receiving increasingly expensive help.
Throughout the welfare services sector, employment policy included, a decentralisation trend is discernible, even if some movement in the opposite direction has been noted in recent years. In the welfare services field, ideology has played an increasingly important role. It is not clear how this should be interpreted in model terms, but the purchaser-provider approach has paved the way for the growth of private provision in a number of areas. Both the proportion and the actual numbers working in private companies have increased sharply in all welfare service areas, although starting levels have varied to a considerable extent. For the welfare services sector as a whole, the proportion of private employees increased from about 6 to 12 per cent during the decade. Models differ from area to area. Sometimes what are known as customer choice models are used, but often a bidding procedure is involved with public and private actors competing for the contract. It is also clear that private providers are largely a metropolitan phenomenon. Very little information is available concerning the consequences of privatisation, as regards both user experience and provider experience.
The notion of a ‘model shift’ denotes changes of such a far-reaching nature that they alter the fundamental principles of a country’s central social welfare system. This may, for instance, involve changes from earnings-related to flat-rate social insurance benefits, to means-tested benefits or to a state corporatist system of earnings-related social insurance. A few changes introduced in the 1990s were clearly designed to bring about a change of model but proved to be only minor disruptions in the overall trend. One of them concerned the introduction of a ‘home care allowance’ for parents with young children, which only lasted a few months in 1994. This allowance represented an attempt to give the family greater responsibility for children with the aid of public funding, and marked a departure from the ‘dual earner model’, according to which both spouses contribute to family upkeep by going out to work. The other reform coincided with the first and met the same fate. It concerned the introduction of a compulsory dimension into the unemployment insurance system. This reform marked a departure from the established Swedish model involving state subsidies to voluntary unemployment funds. However, it applied to an area where the existing system deviates from the compulsory universal approach that otherwise characterises the Swedish social insurance system. At the height of the economic crisis, there were far-reaching plans to make the social partners responsible for both sickness and unemployment benefit, i.e. to introduce a corporatist model. In the debate on this issue, there have been vociferous calls for the introduction of means-testing across the board. There have also been calls from time to time for the introduction of ‘citizen’s accounts’ or a ‘citizen’s wage’. The most striking outcome both of the debate and of the crisis years is the fundamental stability of the social welfare policy systems, in contrast to the fevered nature of the debate on their future.
A number of dramatic changes have, however, taken place. The major pensions reform introduced in Sweden in the 1990s presents a formidable challenge to anyone seeking to describe social policy reforms in modern, mature welfare states. For a start, this was no straightforward retrenchment package. On the contrary, it entailed increased government spending in both the short and medium terms. In the long term, the outcome is genuinely uncertain. If economic growth in Sweden is good, expenditure will be higher than it would have been had the rules not been changed. What complicates matters is that as a result of the system’s contribution-defined character, pension levels have become dependent not only on employment and growth but also on life expectancy in the population. If life expectancy increases, this would mean lower expenditure than if the reform had not been introduced. This demographic factor is likely to exert a general and downward pressure on the level of pensions. Otherwise, the revised entitlement rules mean that some people will be drawing smaller pensions and some larger. The reform also means an increase in the degree of pre-funding, with a strong element of privatisation and freedom of choice for the individual to invest a portion of his pension contributions as he wishes. The size of the return on the part of the pension that is invested in a pension fund will depend on the individual’s choice of fund manager. This introduces an individual form of risk diversification that was previously foreign to the social insurance system. The social policy objectives of providing both basic security and security of income within the framework of a publicly financed compulsory system remain unchanged. The means, however, have altered, which in itself may have far-reaching consequences for various interests in society.
Membership of the European Union has had little direct impact on Swedish social policy. Swedish policy on alcohol is perhaps the most notable exception. Historically, it has been incorporated into the country’s general social and healthcare policy. The aim has been not only to get to grips with widespread abuse and a drink culture that is peculiar to the Nordic area, as well as the consequences of this culture in the form of suicides and crimes of violence, but also to reduce the harmful effects of alcohol on public health. In practice, policy has been based on what is called the total consumption model. A central observation in this respect is that the harmful effects of alcohol are closely related to average levels of consumption in society. Accordingly, policymakers seek by various means to reduce overall consumption via high prices (selective purchase tax) and to restrict access both in retail stores and in the number of distribution points. In addition, efforts have been made to influence drinking patterns by taxing wine less heavily than spirits. The lower prices found in Europe and the substantially higher import quotas now permitted have not only boosted border trade but also increased the pressure on Sweden’s alcohol policy as a whole. In the case of drugs policy, it is worth noting here that different countries in the European Union apply different approaches.
Although it is difficult to find evidence of any substantial change of model in Sweden in the 1990s, either in the welfare services sector or in the transfer sphere, some changes marking a departure from the Swedish model may be noted. In some cases, they could be labelled partial changes of model that in the course of time may cause social welfare to move in a direction other than the established one. Even moderate cutbacks in public benefit levels, for instance, increase the scope for individual coverage and collectively bargained alternatives, which may force benefit levels down still further. Similarly, any deterioration in quality or accessibility in the welfare services sector may cause privileged groups to choose alternatives that lie wholly or partially outside the public system. Such a development might in turn lead to a loss of interest in preserving the quality of the universal systems. On the other hand, greater freedom of choice in the publicly financed security systems may make people more willing to pay taxes and fees to compulsory systems. Local authorities’ greater freedom of decision enables them to introduce local changes of model of a more dramatic kind in the welfare services sector. Also, a lack of political decision-making may have far-reaching consequences for how the country’s social security systems are perceived.
The crisis that the Swedish model has undergone has presented different aspects. The financial crisis was deep but could be overcome relatively quickly. The political and ideological crisis that this model underwent for much of the 1980s and early 1990s appears to have been superseded by greater backing for major public undertakings in the various areas of social policy. Furthermore, the number of people who feel that the various systems are being over-exploited declined in the early 1990s. Public faith in the model now appears to be strong on the whole, but an element of distrust remains. It is expressed in dissatisfaction with healthcare services and with the returns on taxes. Faith in private alternatives, however, does not appear to have increased.
The beginning of the 21st century brought a recovery for several of the country’s social security systems – the Swedish model is now in slightly better shape. At the same time, new problems and challenges have emerged. The increase in long-term sick leave means that working life must be re-examined and that more resources must be allocated to healthcare, education and social care programmes in particular, but also to rehabilitation programmes. A certain amount of debt build-up was a feature of the 1990s, with the national debt being just one example. The crisis imposed a strain on families’ financial margins, on the working environment in the form of greater stress, on people’s mental health and on the situation of disadvantaged groups in society. The declining birth rate increases the pressure on family welfare policy to provide the kind of resources that would enable women and men to start the families they wish for.
The various developments in the evolution of the Swedish model over the years could be viewed as reactions to structural changes and political mobilisation. If the politicians fail to respond to the new challenges facing them, there is a danger that important social policy gains will be lost, such as low poverty levels and improved gender equality. The Swedish model is now facing some important choices as to the future course of welfare policies. The choices made will shape the character of the Swedish model in the years to come. The only thing we can be sure of is that whatever decisions are reached, the model will remain Swedish.
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Joakim Palme is the newly appointed director of the Institute for Future Studies in Stockholm. He has worked for many years at the Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University.

Posted by: Cloned Poster | Jan 7 2005 23:24 utc | 59

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration paid a prominent commentator to promote the No Child Left Behind schools law to fellow blacks and to give the education secretary media time, records show.
A company run by Armstrong Williams, the syndicated commentator, was paid $240,000 by the Education Department. The goal was to deliver positive messages about Bush’s education overhaul, using Williams’ broad reach with minorities.
The deal, which drew a fast rebuke from Democrats on Capitol Hill, is the latest to put the department on the defensive for the way it has promoted Bush’s signature domestic policy.
The contract required Williams’ company, the Graham Williams Group, to produce radio and TV ads that feature one-minute “reads” by Education Secretary Rod Paige. The deal also allowed Paige and other department officials to appear as studio guests with Williams.
Williams, one of the leading black conservative voices in the country, was also to use his influence with other black journalists to get them to talk about No Child Left Behind.
The law, a centerpiece of President Bush’s domestic agenda, aims to raise achievement among poor and minority children, with penalties for many schools that don’t make progress.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Friday that the decisions on the practice were made by the Education Department. He did not directly answer when asked whether the White House approved of the practice, saying it was a department matter.
The Education Department defended its decision as a “permissible use of taxpayer funds under legal government contracting procedures.” The point was to help parents, particularly in poor and minority communities, understand the benefits of the law, the department said.
Williams called criticism of his relationship with the department “legitimate.”
“It’s a fine line,” he told The Associated Press on Friday. “Even though I’m not a journalist — I’m a commentator — I feel I should be held to the media ethics standard. My judgment was not the best. I wouldn’t do it again, and I learned from it.”
Three Democratic senators — Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts and Harry Reid of Nevada — wrote Bush Friday to demand he recover the money paid to Armstrong. The lawmakers contended that “the act of bribing journalists to bias their news in favor of government policies undermines the integrity of our democracy.”
Rep. George Miller of California, the top Democrat on the House education committee, asked for an inspector general investigation into whether the deal with legal and ethical. He and other Democrats also wrote Bush to call for an end to “covert propaganda.”
The department’s contract with Williams, through the public relations firm Ketchum, dates to 2003 and 2004. It follows another recent flap about the agency’s publicity efforts.
The Bush administration has promoted No Child Left Behind with a video that comes across as a news story but fails to make clear the reporter involved was paid with taxpayer money. It has also has paid for rankings of newspaper coverage of the law, with points awarded for stories that say Bush and the Republican Party are strong on education. The Government Accountability Office, Congress’ auditing arm, is investigating those spending decisions.
The GAO has twice ruled that the Bush administration’s use of prepackaged videos — to promote federal drug policy and a new Medicare law — is “covert propaganda” because the videos do not make clear to the public that the government produced the promotional news.
“There is no defense for using taxpayer dollars to pay journalists for ‘fake news’ and favorable coverage of a federal program,” said Ralph Neas, president of People for the American Way, a liberal group that has tracked the department’s spending.
from cnn
these people are nothing more than good & chattels to be bought & sold
no surprise – just distaste

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 8 2005 0:37 utc | 61

“In December 2003, for instance, a man in Baghdad, speaking of the Abu Ghraib atrocities, said to me, “Why do they use these actions? Even Saddam Hussein did not do that! This is not good behavior. They are not coming to liberate Iraq!” And by then the bleak jokes of the beleaguered had already begun to circulate. In the dark humor that has become so popular in Baghdad these days, one recently released Abu Ghraib detainee I interviewed said, “The Americans brought electricity to my ass before they brought it to my house!”
dahr jamail – extract from a long & very good report from iraq – common dreams

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 8 2005 0:48 utc | 63

“But, writing in the London-based Guardian four days into the new year, George Monbiot did the unholy math: “The U.S. government has so far pledged $350 million to the victims of the tsunami” and has spent $148 billion on the war in Iraq. “The war has been running for 656 days. This means that the money pledged for the tsunami disaster by the United States is the equivalent of one and a half day’s spending in Iraq.” (The British government’s killing-to-helping ratio, while not quite so extreme, is also overwhelmingly for death.)” normon salomon

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 8 2005 1:08 utc | 65

B: No joke. It’s been my opinion since 2 years that if things continue to go as bad and if US economy goes down the toilet as it has done since W took over, blackmail was the only solution for the US survival next decade: “Give us a few billions or we’ll nuke your ass.” Classical mafia style, but heck, mafia is just capitalism at its logical peak (ok, Treblinka, the “profit-making” death camp, was the other logical peak of capitalism).
Of course, the US does that in its own secretive ways, but once the dollar drops dead, they’ll be forced to do that in the real open way.
Both Wolfie and Bolton to quit? That’would be one of the best news I’ve read since weeks. But if Wolfie remains, may we still get rid of Bolton? Please?
LCS and global situation: inside Western nations, people may be better off now than they were before. Globally speaking, I’ll maintain that the average human being was better off under the early Roman Empire than he’s under they tyranny of ultra-capitalism gone berserk, which is what we have nowadays. And of course people were way better in the paleolithic, but that’s something we simply can’t go back.
As to people being lazy, well, they’re lazy when they know they don’t earn what they’re working on, but when someone else gets the reward. So people would tend to be lazy when their CEO and a cohort of greedy invisible shareholders get the money, the same way the Roman slave wasn’t going to kill himself working the field when he hasn’t anything in return except a bowl of milk the evening. The difference being when the masters understand they can’t expect their slaves to die at work, and when they still expect them to be grateful to the masters and to die for free (which is basically Wal-Mart, Nike and other Evil companies in action).
If DeAnander wants to look at an example of industrial annihilation of resources, I’d say the insane deforestation done in Amazonia or various Indonesian islands is a pretty frightening example of methodical destruction, the kind of things you’d expect some Nazi overlords to do at Auschwitz.
As far as I’m concerned, of course, a system will be judged by how badly it manages the environment, and if a dictatorial system manages to avoid both extinction of mankind and of large ranges of various living species, it means it’ll have done better than the fucked-up pseudo-democracies we have now, based on the idea that any loon’s vision of how the universe works and should be ruled is equally worth. But then I’m openly of the opinion that most humans are too fucking stupid to be given the wide range of freedom and mankind at large still needs a few millennia of good education until it can correctly assumes its freedom and responsibly exert its rights.
And since I’m already gone off the deep end, I won’t say that “property is theft” in every possible way, since some properties should logically be tied with some people for some length of time (I mean, common share of underwear would make for some sick concept); but I’m definitively convinced it fully applies when we speak of copyrights and intellectual property (you can easily guess my low esteem for the DMCA and its clones in the rest of the world, for instance).
And now, for some unrelated fun, the kind of stuff I (mostly) would love to write, from Something Awful: Engines of Grief.
I used to see nuance and diversity in religions and their various followers. That luxury has been swept away by the wave propelling quasi-theocratic scum to success and power. I now resort to their weapon; the hateful generality. Religion is the tool of corrupt men and women with shallow principles and reluctance to see the world outside the monochrome. If you are declared evil for what you believe or who you are, surely you are then justified in returning the favor.
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.

Posted by: Clueless Joe | Jan 8 2005 2:14 utc | 67

DeAnander,
Welcome back. I “borrowed” your “neandercon” coinage over at the All Spin Zone in this thread.
I hope your sojourn was both envigorating and restful.

Posted by: Kate_Storm | Jan 8 2005 3:57 utc | 69

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
Indeed. A potent quotation, Joe.

Posted by: Kate_Storm | Jan 8 2005 4:04 utc | 71

@Clueless (who is far from) As far as I’m concerned, of course, a system will be judged by how badly it manages the environment I don’t think any human system has passed this test yet, except some quiet and humble ones that we consider “failures of history” and “also-rans” like the !Kung and some other aboriginal folks.
The nature of what we call “civilisation”, i.e. Empires, Monarchies, Nation-States, is that they loot. They expand. They consume. The core loots the periphery and then expands to get some more periphery to loot. They don’t know the meaning of Enough — they want More. Hence, they inevitably overdraw their resources.
The Romans pretty much desertified N Africa in their insatiable need for cheap grain. The Vikings and the British iirc both chopped down most of their best forests to build boats to go a-conquering in. And we all know what happened on Rapa Nui.
Wherever a “great civilisation” has flourished you will most always find a desert, unless someone else came along and killed them off first — as the Anglos did to the Aztecs and Incas. I don’t think anyone in human history has yet succeeded in having what we call “high culture” and a sustainable society. We were speculating about this late in Dec, about the mysterious efflorescence of cultures just before their collapse: is the peacock-like display of high culture only achievable via unsustainable consumption? Lately it’s been bothering me; I’m wondering if there’s something axiomatic about this, and I really, really have to read Jared Diamond’s new book…

Posted by: DeAnander | Jan 8 2005 5:07 utc | 73

eye-opening book that i’ve brought up here before – discovering america as it is – still dreaming the american dream? by valdus anelauskas. the bio is almost humorous: “a former anti-Soviet dissident who expelled from the USSR for human rights activities on behalf of his native Lithuania. After coming to the United States as a high profile exile, he initially shared a platform with such key Republicans as Newt Gingrinch and others. Little by little, as he was confronted with the harsh realities of life in America, he became a dissident again.”
Of his former home Lithuania he writes

While Lithuania is now a free country and we could go back, things there, unfortunately, did not turn in the direction I hoped they would while fighting for my country’s independence. I always projected that a free Lithuania would become more like Denmark or the Netherlands – a relatively humane and just social democracy. Unfortunately, now it is rapidly becoming more and more like America, with an even more direct and open leaning toward criminality…Most working people are much worse off economically today than when they lived in the former system under the rule of Russia. Many are extremely disappointed and depressed. As my father wrote to me a couple of years ago: “Never has anybody mocked the Lithuanian people so badly as the people in power do, today.” This is the view of one who had spent ten years in the Siberian GULag.”

On comparing his experience living in both the USSR and America, he writes:

In communist Soviet Union, there was a totalitarian state tyranny, but Americans live in a system of private tyranny, where all the rules have been set by the wealthy few. I soon came to see no difference and to view American capitalism as just as incompatible with humaness as Soviet communism was…I have now spent almost ten years observing American society. Not only observing, but studying, analyzing, and comparing it to other societies. When I lived in the Soviet Union I thought that the Soviet communist system was the worst possible social order. At that time Russian communism truly seemed to me to be the only incontestable evil in the world. Evidently, I was wrong…I haven’t changed my opinion about the totalitarian aspects of Russian communism, but now I no longer think that it was the only evil system in the world and that with its demise, all systemic evil is finally gone. I see that the American variant of capitalism is not the lesser evil, and in some aspects it may be even worse that the Soviet system was. But then, what was called Soviet communism wasn’t really even an alternative to capitalism, but rather only a totalitarian form of state capitalism. While living in Lithuania, I always actively opposed the totalitarian Soviet system and fought against it at every opportunity. As a result, eventually I was expelled from the Soviet Union. So, one cannot say that I came here with a pro-communist mindset. I always hated the mock Soviet version of socialism or communism, which distorted and defiled the very concept of socialism, and my opinion on the whole remains unchanged. The totalitarian Soviet system made claims to be “real socialism,” but it wasn’t socialism at all. At least, it wasn’t characterized by the democratic egalitarianism that I define as socialism, and that I would like to see in the world. After I contrast capitalism as it exists in extreme in America with defunct Soviet communism, I judge this system as no better than the other. They are like two ends of the same stick. It makes no difference with which end of the stick you strike. Both cause the same pain: both enslave and brutalize. Moreover, after living here, I realize that perhaps the American system is worse…
There can be no doubt that only a very few people in the former Soviet countries would claim that the communist system was perfect or even good, but perhaps even fewer would say that what they have now is better. Everyone would agree that the Soviet system had very serious flaws, but in some ways – actually many – yes, it was considerably better that what people have here in America. I’m of the opinion that for the vast majority of working people anywhere, the Soviet system, bad as it was, would have been probably more acceptable than this American version of extreme capitalism, if they had a choice…The sickening reality of America has transformed me from a sort of pro-capitalist libertarian into a socialist to the core. My ideal for the future now is a truly democratic socialist-oriented society built upon justice, rule by the people, cooperation and solidarity.

Posted by: b real | Jan 8 2005 6:05 utc | 75

The former Soviet Union does not have capitalism, it had a Leviathan system; when you take out Leviathan, you get anarchy, anything goes, everything can be bought kleptocracy – that’s not capitalism.
(The US has done a terrible service to the world by associating “democracy” and “capitalism” with the horrible free-for-all kleptocratic outcome of the collapse of the statist model)
Re education in Soviet Union and similar places. sure they have great mathematicians and ballet dancers. That’s were the people that did not want to be corrupted went because science and athletic performance are much harder to pollute with politics. These education systems have failed abysmally at creating ethics, morals in their population. The Soviet rule is “what is mine is mine, what does not belong to anyone is worthless because otherwise it would have been taken by someone, and thus it can be mistreated.
I had people shit in the stairs or pee (or throw up, of course that was so frequant that I almost forgot to mention it) in the lift in my appartment building when i lived in Kiev. When I cleaned it up, people were aghast. Why would you do this, it’s not yours (the commons), why do you care?
Re the efflorescence of cultures – the western world is the first civilisation to keep on growing while continuously reducing the intensity of its consumption (i.e. we need less and less units of energy and natural resources to consume the same amount). Consumption still grows, and thus so does overall use of resources, but the trend is nevertheless interesting.
I repeat – the West (I’ll stick to that word so that you don’t throw the US system at me when I use “capitalism” – remember that I have more the European/French/continental version of capitalism in mind) is the first system which is learning – slowly – to restrain itself.
I’d be curious to see what Mr Anelauskas says of his country after a few years in the EU (the grandest experiment yet to render capitalism harmless by talking about it to death)

Posted by: Jérôme | Jan 8 2005 8:12 utc | 77

I have been following this thread with great interest. At first I thought that my discomfort with this discussion was because I am not very knowledgeable about all these philosophs. But slowly my feelings are becoming a little clearer and I would like to share them and ‘add my own mustard’ (literal translation of a German saying).
Basically, I feel that all systems in their ideal version and on paper sound great. Capitalism has its advantages and its disadvantages, as is the case with socialism and communism. I think the crux of all these systems are aspects of human nature. Looking at those systems what keeps their ideals from being manifest in reality is human greed, lust for personal power and self-importance. It seems, that idealist, often are corrupted once they achieve positions of power.
So, I believe as long as we are not, and by this I mean each human being, overcoming greed and attachment to material things, non of these ideals will be achieved. The problem with this is, I believe, it can be achieved only on a personal level. Goethe stated once: ‘If each one of us would clean their own house first, we would live in a great world’(cited from memory). It needs courage to look inside oneself, to face one’s own darkness. There are not many known contemporary people who have gone fully through their own shadow or darkness. Those that come to my mind are Gandhi, Mandela and the Dalai Lama. I am sure there are more, but less know people who have done it too.
Looking at the greed and power stuff, I would guess what is behind that, is fear – existential fear of not having enough or fear of not being good enough. To be on the save side one starts hoarding, the beginning of greed and thus actually take away from others. So, I guess if we could overcome this fear, it would become easier to share and trust that when we are really in need others will share with us too.
I would be interested to know, if the Swedish model has been able to reduce this fear and thus also greed.

Posted by: Fran | Jan 8 2005 11:23 utc | 79

Basham on the drafting of the new Iraqi constitution in 2005:
“One hopes that the authors (whoever they
prove to be) of the forthcoming Iraqi constitution
are aware of the relevant historical
lessons. Above all, history informs us that the
political infrastructure necessary to support
a democratic system of representative government
requires a constitution that limits
the power of government to interfere in people’s
lives, establishes the primacy of the rule
of law, settles conflict through an impartial
judicial system, maintains public order
through an untainted police force, mandates
regular elections, and guarantees freedom of
speech and association. Critically, Iraq’s constitutional
writers must recognize that the
absence of those elements will doom the chosen
model regardless of other, more ornate,
constitutional trappings.”

Posted by: Pat | Jan 8 2005 12:25 utc | 81

Pat, are you such a contrarian that you are trying to tickle me, now?
That’s fine, I am also a contrarian… (with you again there!). I kind of agree with the diagnosis by Basham on the EU constitution, but not with their conclusion, but then of course, they want it to fail whereas I want it to work… time will tell.
I find it endlessly amusing, though, to see English-speaking writers present the fact that EU laws trump national laws as a “new” aggression against democracy, even though it’s been part of EU rules for decades. Same again with presenting the EU as a “political” project, as if that were some kind of new twist. The EU has always been a political project. British leaders have found it convenient to sell the EU to their population as an economic endeavor, and they have paid the price ever since…

Posted by: Anonymous | Jan 8 2005 14:36 utc | 83

This thread keeps tempting me to forget that the term “capital,” as Marx develops it, is a critical and not a positive term. He uses this term to demystify the fetish–as of class, the commodity, religion, property, ownership–any and all things conceived as endowed with a value beyond the value of exchange. He even approaches the ownership and management of capital by the state (by the body politic as a whole) as a problem of the fetish (as in the “Critique of the Gotha Program,” for example). I can think of no place where Marx regards any particular form of government as a guarantee of justice (since doing so would fetishize that form). Justice–if justice there be–comes as the incidental yield of that ongoing critique.

Posted by: alabama | Jan 8 2005 15:44 utc | 85

Off Topic queries on an Open Thread? Some questions herewith for Pat (or for any knowledgeable colleague): what ‘s to be made of Gen. Gary Luck’s mission to Iraq? Did he write up his findings before boarding the airplane? If not, what surprises might he find in the course of his investigations? What are the practical options available to OIF before expiring in 12-18 months (as I seem to recall your mentioning in a recent post)? And having sacrificed the National Guard and the Army Reserves on the altar of his own desires, is the President now preparing to sacrifice the Marines? Is there any hope for a military coup in the Pentagon?

Posted by: alabama | Jan 8 2005 16:57 utc | 87

alabama
the ‘critique’ has two dimensions: ‘forces’ and ‘relations’ of production. the critique of ideology/fetish has to do w/ the social relations of production. I’d say, mostly, this thread is oriented to the ‘iron laws’ of the forces of production.

Posted by: slothrop | Jan 8 2005 17:18 utc | 89

slothrop, do you know of any place where Marx, to his own satisfaction, claims to comprehend “capital,” in the ways that Comte (for example) claims to understanding the laws of science, sociology, history, and who knows what else besides? For me, his work is overwhelmingly a critique, a reading (via negativa?) of all other economic theories ever devised. It certainly generates imperatives on every scale of action, it passes judgments, and its sense of promise, and of responsibility to promise, is messianic. Marx certainly argues that there are laws of the forces of production, and that they can be, and should be, revealed, but I know of no place where he says that they positively have been. It’s a question yet to be answered, always. His project is truly theoretical–a hypothetical project (like Freud’s metapsychology). It aspires to attaining the status of a science without ever claiming to have done so. Read in this way, his most decisive statements about “capital” work primarily as counter-arguments to other, weaker, and less trenchant takes on the subject, and that’s what I’ve had trouble remembering on this thread.

Posted by: alabama | Jan 8 2005 18:37 utc | 91

i think there is a great deal in what is called the posthumous ‘capital’ where the questions you are asking are answered precisely by the old german jew
in french it exist in the complet works – of gallimard – i have no idea whether it exists in english perhaps the grundrisse – the economic & philosophical manuscripts
engels of course does riffs all over the place – you do not appreciate my incoherence – engels takes that incoherence to a transcedental level
still steel

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 8 2005 19:29 utc | 93

So: “la vie poltique cherche“….”..il lui faut“….”la question de savoir si…n’est pas [a], mais [b]…c’est dans [b] que l’homme doit….”ils doivent renverser”….”c’est dans les rapports immédiats qu’il faut chercher le secret intime, le fondement caché….This is the syntax, the lexicon, the rhetoric of speculative philosophy? It poses the premises from which it draws conclusions, and it argues that the premises themselves are the object of an unending, reflective rumination (a process that includes action, that praxis which is perforce an experiment, an ongoing test of its own premises–an obligatory experiment (“l’homme doit,” “il faut,” “ils doivent,” “il faut chercher”: the complements to these phrases cut across any hard distinction between theory and practice, they comprise theory and practice as the common labor of the negative). This is hardly the language of positivist science; at its most positive, it puts all other political-economic theory and practice into question. It contests the other positives in a drive to comprehend them.

Posted by: alabama | Jan 8 2005 19:59 utc | 95

“l’immixtion de l’état rendu necessaire par le fait qu’une nouvelle aristocratie financière, une nouvelle espèce de parasites déguisés en faiseurs de projets, fondateurs et directeurs de pure forme, développe tout un système de duperie et de fraude”
karl marx capital lll
marx was the witness to the concretisation & ‘develoment’ of capital but i feel he was more than a witness he implicity said much that constitutes a model or a form
le capital arrive au monde en suant le sang et la boue par tous les pores” lr capital l
still steel

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 8 2005 20:37 utc | 97

marx sd
“l’existence de l’état et l’existence de la servitude sont
inséperables”
look if this research is too oblique i willtake conseil from other posters to not clog up the thread with my researches though i have tried to find sections that are apparent even if you do not understand french
still steel

Posted by: remembereringgiap | Jan 8 2005 21:17 utc | 99