Noahpinion: Libertarianism is a "low-end" strategy of state formation

The basic theory behind Noahpinion: Libertarianism is a "low-end" strategy of state formation ignores the social surplus production of differing societies.

The article assumes that societies have a choice in the amount of surplus production that they surrender to the state. This choice is presented as a difference between “low-end” of minimal surplus to “high-end” of a centralised bureaucracy.

My understanding of Marxist economic theory is that a particular mode of production has a certain ratio of surplus social production. The minimal amount is the primitive communist society ranging to high in the capitalist society. It is the social organisation that determines the amount of surplus production.

In all societies, the ruling class expropriates the surplus production to itself. It will spend this surplus in order to maintain its rule. The more that is expropriated, the greater the cost.

The existence of the State is not an optional extra—the State is the visible manifestation of class rule. The State exists solely to keep the subject classes in their place. This is done through naked force such as the army and the police as well the crimminal justice system, and the ideology promulgated through the mass media, educational system, and the bureaucracy. These things costs money.

The Libertarians want to expropiate the surplus production without paying for the protection of their theft.

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Market Democracies and Inequality

Mark Thoma reposts Basic institutions and democratic equality, by Dan Little at Market Democracies and Inequality.

The conclusion seems to be:

…market and electoral institutions both create and reproduce social inequalities even when they are working correctly; inequality is built into them at a very basic level. The institutions are tilted in favor of privileged groups, and it is no surprise when corporations wield substantial influence in Washington and Paris and tax policies are enacted that favor the richest percent of American income earners. These aren't abnormal anomalies; they are instead precisely what we should expect when we analyze the basic institutions carefully.

In other words, Capitalism creates inequality through the ongoing concentration of wealth just as Karl Marx said it would do.

These basic institutions are all part of the state apparatus. And the state exists to serve the interests of the ruling class.

It is only through the mystification of the burgeois state by Capitalist ideologues that we think of the state as a separate entity outside of the class war. The state is the fundamental tool of oppression of the working class.

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Posts Noted 2011 March 13

Blog posts noted on 13 March 2011

• Mark Thoma reposts on The End of the 'Washington Consensus' part of The end of the 'Washington consensus', by Kevin Gallagher. A premature celebration, perhaps, as the iron fist of the US military is not alluded to at all. These things are not mentioned in polite company.

The bigger point here is that, even if Colombia gets the sorry trade deal it wants and doesn't get a canal, the United States is literally and figuratively bankrupt in its competition with Chinese finance. Literally, because the US has the largest deficit on the planet and owes a big chunk of that to the Chinese. Figuratively, because the economic model that the US has exported to Latin America hasn't worked. China is funding infrastructure, exploration, science and technology, and all the other things that President Obama says we should be spending on here at home.

• Cassandra's legacy: Joseph Tainter: talking about collapse. The complexity overwhelms the ruling class' ability to manage society. The more efficient a society becomes, the smaller the ruling class becomes. This relative smallness reduces the pool of talent able to meet crises.

Tainter's point is that there is a strong relationship between resources and complexity. It is clear that complexity cannot exist without resources - not for a long time, at least. But the relationship is far from being linear: with resources diminishing, complexity does not decrease – on the contrary it keeps increasing. It is the result of the benefits that complexity gives: resource depletion can be counteracted by increasing complexity, but only up to a certain point and with ever-reducing returns. At some moment, returns become negative, society cannot support any longer its complex infrastructures and the result is collapse.

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How socialism can be won

From GLW issue 871, How socialism can be won.

First of all, where are we headed?

To win socialism — a society democratically owned and run by and for the majority of people — we have to get rid of the capitalist system that stands in our way.

Who is going to do it?

It's those who are exploited and oppressed by the system that have an interest in changing it.

How are we going to get there?

Because every reform can be reversed, the struggle for reform as an end in itself is insufficient. Socialists fight for reforms in order to make a revolution.

Every time working people win reforms, they get a glimpse of their power to change society. Every time they occupy an office or factory, they know they don't need a boss to run it.

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Social Justice and Political Stability

Mark Thoma comments on Social Justice and Political Stability (the original paper is Social justice and democratic stability, by Dan Little).

One thing I find interesting about the sustained demonstrations and protests in Madison, Wisconsin is the fact that people on the streets do not seem to be chiefly motivated by personal material interests. Rather, the passion and the sustainability of the protests against Governor Walker's plans seem to derive from an outrage felt by many people in Wisconsin and throughout the country, that the Governor's effort is really an attempt to reduce people's rights…

The same thing is seen in the current Arab Revolt.

This is an insight that James Scott expressed a generation ago in The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia, and E. P. Thompson a generation before that in Customs in Common, in the theory of the moral economy. In its essence, the theory holds that the fact of sustained violation of a person's moral expectations of the society around him or her is a decisive factor in collective mobilization in many historical circumstances. Later theorists of political activism have downplayed the idea of moral outrage, preferring more material motivations based on self-interest. But the current round of activism and protest around the globe seems to point back in the direction of these more normative motivations -- combined, of course, with material interests. So it is worth reexamining the idea that a society that badly offends the sense of justice of segments of its population is likely to stimulate resistance.

Emphasis in original.

What the Capitalists forget is that humans are a social species. This has been proven time after time in scientific experiments. And all social species have moral norms—the primary one being justice.

Despite Capitalism's relentless assault upon our collective sense of justice through the propaganda of the educational system and the mass media, humans still retain this natural sense of justice. We could not survive as a species otherwise—we are too weak physically to compete with other predators.

The atomisation of human society into competing individuals is a doomed project of Capitalism. Either it will succeed and the species dies out; or Capitalism is replaced by a more equitable system. I am aiming for Communisim.

Thoma's conclusion is that:

I would add the powerlessness and frustration that workers feel due to stagnating incomes and high rates of unemployment as motivating factors, and also add the additional frustration that comes from the growing feeling — intensified in Wisconsin — that the political process does not represent workers' interests.

Emphasis mine.

The ideologues of the Capitalist system are openly expressing the forbidden thought that the workers are politically oppressed. Whatever happened to the mystique of the representational Democract?

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