I’m suspicious of the general idea that all we need is to implement some particular institution, and there is no role for ex-post judgement to evaluate outcomes. It’s a very deep idea in Western ideologies. The neo-liberals say all we need are competitive markets, and the only policy prescription is to correct market failures so they become more like the ideal competitive market. Or the idea that all we need are elections, and there is no need for consultations and engagement with people in between elections. And now, all we need is to implement and enforce laws!
Why is there such a strong desire for “one ring to rule them all” solution in Western philosophy?
I don’t know about imperial China, but the current CCP led government long abandoned any idea that there is a perfect institution (eg equal distribution of property, public ownership, etc). Rather, the overall philosophy is the one that Deng espouses: to cross the river by feeling for stones; or it doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches rats! That is, we need a government that takes nothing for granted and continually engages with the people to ensure that their reasonable aspirations are met.
Thanks for reading my comment. My point was not really about pragmatism, but about the need for judgement vs some formulaic approach. (Apologies that my argument isn’t clearly expressed!)
«the overall philosophy is the one that Deng espouses: to cross the river by feeling for stones; or it doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches rats! That is, we need a government that takes nothing for granted and continually engages with the people to ensure that their reasonable aspirations are met.»
Politics is not an earnest search for the best policies for most people, to be discerned by exploration, whether done by fair and just philosopher-kings or by a competent and flexible mandarinate, unfortunately
Politics is not "kumbaya" or a Norman Rockwell painting either. Why should ever the people in government spend a lot of their time to "continually engages with the people" and work really hard to "ensure that their reasonable aspirations are met" instead of their own, and who defines "reasonable"?
Politics is about material interests and in particular those of of the dominant factions, and "whose interests does it actually serve?" should be asked of every political ideology and of every policy. Politicians and administrators work for the interests that "sponsor" them, often with very generous "compensation", and from what they deliver they should be judged.
Neoliberals don't actually pursue policies that are intended to enable competitive markets, they claim they do but in actuality they attempt to create highly cartelized economies.
isn't that just the end result of capitalism anyway, in its actually existing form?
economies of scale, capital investment, massive sums---who wants that to ride on whether a competitor comes to take it all away next quarter? certainly not any sane investor.
and constant "evolution" in products that don't need such changes, and the changes are mostly trivial because the product fills a pretty prescribed need already, in order to appear "new and different". oh, and planned obsolescence to sell replacements continually.
Yup. But in the late seventies (although its construction had begun long before then) when the Neoliberal (or whatever else someone wants to call it) program began to be fully booted up, some of the biggest things they began to do were the elimination of antitrust and antitrust-type (much of it wasn't formally called that, such as the capital flow inhibitors between US states) stuff. So it has gotten much worse, but anything that has been done can also be undone....
what i am saying is that it may not actually be in anyone's interest to have traditional "competitive" environments in products that are essentially quite established and need few innovations. the end result may in fact be some kind of monopoly, or various forms of integration. what to do about that, when bringing back "antitrust" wouldn't actually help?
various people talk about changing the tax code to encourage more internal investment, but beyond a certain point that wouldn't be helpful either.
perhaps we need to realize that certain industries, products etc have a certain scale at which they "work" and deal with the results of that scale. what no one ever says is forcing some proportion of national or worker ownership on such vehicles when they hit that scale.
BTW, I recognized you saying "what no one ever says is forcing some proportion of national or worker ownership on such vehicles when they hit that scale", my point is about the aggregate power structures; in relation to my earlier comment which you were responding to, it means that we have become strikingly centralized, it just doesn't seem that way because it's been done professionally surreptitiously. Not enough time for further thoughts. Thanks for the ,convo, have a great week!
Kinda partially fully agree (sorta :)). This system, in some places, does this through utilities. Where me and you may diverge is not in the essence of you're statement but rather in who(m) gets to decide, if its a planetary centralized authority, not only would they F it up, but if they posesed the vast powers that would be required for them to actually make their word solid, then they'd be by definition a planetary dictatorship....
just as "antitrust laws" are written and enforced, i would imagine some kind of "when a company reaches a certain integration, certain market share and is of an established product needing few further innovations, x percent of the company will be given to the workers and x percent nationalized and both blocks will have shareholder voting rights".
i don't think it would solve everything, but if monopoly is nearly inevitable....
as for utilities, i find no arguments for private ownership convincing.
As much as I appreciate economic insights of the physiocrats, particularly Quesnay’s Economic Tableau, there are fundamental misconceptions in the whole edifice of their social and societal views. For one the definition of ‘natural laws’ - private property certainly is not a natural law but a corollary of profit driven social division of labor. The same goes for personal freedom as specified by liberal westerrn enlightenment, which in a truly free society needs to be subordinated to collective freedom. However, the point is not merely to reject liberal values of equality and freedom but to elevate them beyond the individual in civil society to the level of collective freedom - free from the constraints of wage labor and class society.
Individuality can not be fully developed if the individual is separated from the collective - contrary to what liberal western ideology strenuously promotes as a fundamental achievment - isolated individual entitlement to anything a highly commercialized neoliberal ‘free market’ world is advertising - based on the capitalist competitive law of the jungle, no matter what the cost for society as a collective entity. Marx statement that ‘Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of relationships and conditions in which these individuals stand to one another’ is clearly phrasing the significance of the category of collectivity in society. Western personal freedom - which means unlimitited and reckless entitlement - is not an achievement - it is a fundamental capitalist disease. Thus the predominate definitions of 'personal freedom' do not hold.
Progress that benefits society and the whole population takes precedence over individual liberties - a communist principle enacted by the Communist Party of China and just recently stressed by Xi-Jinping.
Another fundamental flaw is the view that a 'well educated' strata of people - the ‘right people’ using the ‘right principles’ - should run the nation. It always has been the elites to specify those 'right principles' and having themselves put in a position to represent the 'right people'. The constitution of the US based upon the thinking of the founding fathers - Those who own the nation should rule it - is a striking example. Anyone can see how this turned out. That is exactly what is leading to liberal oligarchies thinly veiled as so called democracies - either the contemporary west or state dominated bureaucracies of the late Sovietunion. It is institutionalized class opression by the elites regardless if there is a legitimized supreme leader or not. Therefore institutions established as ruling bodies by elitist law are deeply suspicious since their purpose is to serve power and the interest of the ruling class - that might be what the physiocrats had in mind when talking about a desired equilibrium between public and private interest.
To paraphrase Michael Parenti - Those who make the laws - the oligarchic clique - represents its own privileged special interests as tantamount to the general interest.
The elites and the bourgeois middle class strata, who put their entitlement and individual privileges before the wellbeing of the collective and society as a whole, act like this strata and their interests were representative of society.
What's more, establishing that perfect equilibrium between the private and the public interest is a deceptive illusion at best, given the dynamics of any kind of capitalist societies.
It is not the rule 'for the people' but the rule 'by the people' - that is why there is no justifiable ruling as long as it is not a rule by the people - no leaders but collective rule by legal bodies representing the people - communes, councils, soviets - whatever you call it - unshackled from the ruling of an elitist class to permanently voicing the collective needs of society. Institutions and the state gradually have to wither away - as Lenin extensively elaborated in 'State And Revolution'
You had recently noted that China’s policies under Xi have re-orientated towards guaranteeing social stability rather maximising economic growth. This was arguably the chief objective of the imperial system that the Physiocrats professed to admire. The mandarinate was more clearly meritocratic than the administrative arrangement in Europe at the time of the Physiocrats and beyond. However, when the Chinese and European polities collided less than a century later, the European system allowing for greater ‘natural selection’ in the completion within and across countries proved decisively superior.
you've just given a contradiction in terms, or exposed the lie of "meritocracy". if the Chinese chose those who have merit (through mainly credentialing, if school was teaching us correctly about history), and the western system chose those who have merit by "natural selection", then how can the two groups differ? either one has "merit" or they don't, right?
please define exactly what "merit" is and how to locate it in people. because if it's self evident, then the two groups of people should not have had very much difference except the system of political economy they were employing.
one suspects that the two groups were nearly the same (well-to-do people with aspirations and the means to get whatever was deemed necessary to show they had "merit", that fuzzy category but which was the result of their own and most importantly their family's social, economic and other forms of "capital", and rarer than diamond mines among the poor), but their personalities and goals were different, having been shaped by the system they developed in and were put to manage.
"Once the natural laws (“la loi naturelle” or even “physiocracy”, the term apparently invented by Quesnay who liked to play with Greek neologisms) that consist in personal freedom, private property and security of person, are discovered, there is not much more that a society needs to do but enforce them."
they sound like American Libertarians. nothing good comes from those people.
please define "natural laws" and how to discover them. if this is easy, then they should be universal or at least should show regularity with small, meaningless cultural variations, right?
The original caste system was based upon aptitudes. Nepotism, the family, destroyed it.
We see resistance against that when eunuchs were made the most powerful, but subversion from the outside will always damage any system.
The enforcement system became the aristocracy and now, the merchant classes have bought out all governments they can.
The system will break down again, preparing the way for a struggle involving the survivors. Not tomorrow, not this decade nor the next. The cause will not be human. Surprise! It is recurring.
Many families already know the cause. They are preparing for the aftermath. Controlling industries and nations, they must be stripped of that domination. Since they will retreat to their basements, bunkers etc, they should be given the same treatment allowed Salazar.
I’m suspicious of the general idea that all we need is to implement some particular institution, and there is no role for ex-post judgement to evaluate outcomes. It’s a very deep idea in Western ideologies. The neo-liberals say all we need are competitive markets, and the only policy prescription is to correct market failures so they become more like the ideal competitive market. Or the idea that all we need are elections, and there is no need for consultations and engagement with people in between elections. And now, all we need is to implement and enforce laws!
Why is there such a strong desire for “one ring to rule them all” solution in Western philosophy?
I don’t know about imperial China, but the current CCP led government long abandoned any idea that there is a perfect institution (eg equal distribution of property, public ownership, etc). Rather, the overall philosophy is the one that Deng espouses: to cross the river by feeling for stones; or it doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches rats! That is, we need a government that takes nothing for granted and continually engages with the people to ensure that their reasonable aspirations are met.
This is pragmatism, which is anathema for ideologues.
Which is why ideologues are dangerous ...
Thanks for reading my comment. My point was not really about pragmatism, but about the need for judgement vs some formulaic approach. (Apologies that my argument isn’t clearly expressed!)
«the overall philosophy is the one that Deng espouses: to cross the river by feeling for stones; or it doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches rats! That is, we need a government that takes nothing for granted and continually engages with the people to ensure that their reasonable aspirations are met.»
Politics is not an earnest search for the best policies for most people, to be discerned by exploration, whether done by fair and just philosopher-kings or by a competent and flexible mandarinate, unfortunately
Politics is not "kumbaya" or a Norman Rockwell painting either. Why should ever the people in government spend a lot of their time to "continually engages with the people" and work really hard to "ensure that their reasonable aspirations are met" instead of their own, and who defines "reasonable"?
Politics is about material interests and in particular those of of the dominant factions, and "whose interests does it actually serve?" should be asked of every political ideology and of every policy. Politicians and administrators work for the interests that "sponsor" them, often with very generous "compensation", and from what they deliver they should be judged.
Neoliberals don't actually pursue policies that are intended to enable competitive markets, they claim they do but in actuality they attempt to create highly cartelized economies.
Thanks, I tend to agree.
isn't that just the end result of capitalism anyway, in its actually existing form?
economies of scale, capital investment, massive sums---who wants that to ride on whether a competitor comes to take it all away next quarter? certainly not any sane investor.
and constant "evolution" in products that don't need such changes, and the changes are mostly trivial because the product fills a pretty prescribed need already, in order to appear "new and different". oh, and planned obsolescence to sell replacements continually.
Yup. But in the late seventies (although its construction had begun long before then) when the Neoliberal (or whatever else someone wants to call it) program began to be fully booted up, some of the biggest things they began to do were the elimination of antitrust and antitrust-type (much of it wasn't formally called that, such as the capital flow inhibitors between US states) stuff. So it has gotten much worse, but anything that has been done can also be undone....
what i am saying is that it may not actually be in anyone's interest to have traditional "competitive" environments in products that are essentially quite established and need few innovations. the end result may in fact be some kind of monopoly, or various forms of integration. what to do about that, when bringing back "antitrust" wouldn't actually help?
various people talk about changing the tax code to encourage more internal investment, but beyond a certain point that wouldn't be helpful either.
perhaps we need to realize that certain industries, products etc have a certain scale at which they "work" and deal with the results of that scale. what no one ever says is forcing some proportion of national or worker ownership on such vehicles when they hit that scale.
BTW, I recognized you saying "what no one ever says is forcing some proportion of national or worker ownership on such vehicles when they hit that scale", my point is about the aggregate power structures; in relation to my earlier comment which you were responding to, it means that we have become strikingly centralized, it just doesn't seem that way because it's been done professionally surreptitiously. Not enough time for further thoughts. Thanks for the ,convo, have a great week!
RE: Stephen Hymer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Kinda partially fully agree (sorta :)). This system, in some places, does this through utilities. Where me and you may diverge is not in the essence of you're statement but rather in who(m) gets to decide, if its a planetary centralized authority, not only would they F it up, but if they posesed the vast powers that would be required for them to actually make their word solid, then they'd be by definition a planetary dictatorship....
just as "antitrust laws" are written and enforced, i would imagine some kind of "when a company reaches a certain integration, certain market share and is of an established product needing few further innovations, x percent of the company will be given to the workers and x percent nationalized and both blocks will have shareholder voting rights".
i don't think it would solve everything, but if monopoly is nearly inevitable....
as for utilities, i find no arguments for private ownership convincing.
***
As much as I appreciate economic insights of the physiocrats, particularly Quesnay’s Economic Tableau, there are fundamental misconceptions in the whole edifice of their social and societal views. For one the definition of ‘natural laws’ - private property certainly is not a natural law but a corollary of profit driven social division of labor. The same goes for personal freedom as specified by liberal westerrn enlightenment, which in a truly free society needs to be subordinated to collective freedom. However, the point is not merely to reject liberal values of equality and freedom but to elevate them beyond the individual in civil society to the level of collective freedom - free from the constraints of wage labor and class society.
Individuality can not be fully developed if the individual is separated from the collective - contrary to what liberal western ideology strenuously promotes as a fundamental achievment - isolated individual entitlement to anything a highly commercialized neoliberal ‘free market’ world is advertising - based on the capitalist competitive law of the jungle, no matter what the cost for society as a collective entity. Marx statement that ‘Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of relationships and conditions in which these individuals stand to one another’ is clearly phrasing the significance of the category of collectivity in society. Western personal freedom - which means unlimitited and reckless entitlement - is not an achievement - it is a fundamental capitalist disease. Thus the predominate definitions of 'personal freedom' do not hold.
Progress that benefits society and the whole population takes precedence over individual liberties - a communist principle enacted by the Communist Party of China and just recently stressed by Xi-Jinping.
Another fundamental flaw is the view that a 'well educated' strata of people - the ‘right people’ using the ‘right principles’ - should run the nation. It always has been the elites to specify those 'right principles' and having themselves put in a position to represent the 'right people'. The constitution of the US based upon the thinking of the founding fathers - Those who own the nation should rule it - is a striking example. Anyone can see how this turned out. That is exactly what is leading to liberal oligarchies thinly veiled as so called democracies - either the contemporary west or state dominated bureaucracies of the late Sovietunion. It is institutionalized class opression by the elites regardless if there is a legitimized supreme leader or not. Therefore institutions established as ruling bodies by elitist law are deeply suspicious since their purpose is to serve power and the interest of the ruling class - that might be what the physiocrats had in mind when talking about a desired equilibrium between public and private interest.
To paraphrase Michael Parenti - Those who make the laws - the oligarchic clique - represents its own privileged special interests as tantamount to the general interest.
The elites and the bourgeois middle class strata, who put their entitlement and individual privileges before the wellbeing of the collective and society as a whole, act like this strata and their interests were representative of society.
What's more, establishing that perfect equilibrium between the private and the public interest is a deceptive illusion at best, given the dynamics of any kind of capitalist societies.
It is not the rule 'for the people' but the rule 'by the people' - that is why there is no justifiable ruling as long as it is not a rule by the people - no leaders but collective rule by legal bodies representing the people - communes, councils, soviets - whatever you call it - unshackled from the ruling of an elitist class to permanently voicing the collective needs of society. Institutions and the state gradually have to wither away - as Lenin extensively elaborated in 'State And Revolution'
You had recently noted that China’s policies under Xi have re-orientated towards guaranteeing social stability rather maximising economic growth. This was arguably the chief objective of the imperial system that the Physiocrats professed to admire. The mandarinate was more clearly meritocratic than the administrative arrangement in Europe at the time of the Physiocrats and beyond. However, when the Chinese and European polities collided less than a century later, the European system allowing for greater ‘natural selection’ in the completion within and across countries proved decisively superior.
you've just given a contradiction in terms, or exposed the lie of "meritocracy". if the Chinese chose those who have merit (through mainly credentialing, if school was teaching us correctly about history), and the western system chose those who have merit by "natural selection", then how can the two groups differ? either one has "merit" or they don't, right?
please define exactly what "merit" is and how to locate it in people. because if it's self evident, then the two groups of people should not have had very much difference except the system of political economy they were employing.
one suspects that the two groups were nearly the same (well-to-do people with aspirations and the means to get whatever was deemed necessary to show they had "merit", that fuzzy category but which was the result of their own and most importantly their family's social, economic and other forms of "capital", and rarer than diamond mines among the poor), but their personalities and goals were different, having been shaped by the system they developed in and were put to manage.
"Once the natural laws (“la loi naturelle” or even “physiocracy”, the term apparently invented by Quesnay who liked to play with Greek neologisms) that consist in personal freedom, private property and security of person, are discovered, there is not much more that a society needs to do but enforce them."
they sound like American Libertarians. nothing good comes from those people.
please define "natural laws" and how to discover them. if this is easy, then they should be universal or at least should show regularity with small, meaningless cultural variations, right?
The original caste system was based upon aptitudes. Nepotism, the family, destroyed it.
We see resistance against that when eunuchs were made the most powerful, but subversion from the outside will always damage any system.
The enforcement system became the aristocracy and now, the merchant classes have bought out all governments they can.
The system will break down again, preparing the way for a struggle involving the survivors. Not tomorrow, not this decade nor the next. The cause will not be human. Surprise! It is recurring.
Many families already know the cause. They are preparing for the aftermath. Controlling industries and nations, they must be stripped of that domination. Since they will retreat to their basements, bunkers etc, they should be given the same treatment allowed Salazar.
I suppose you have read Florence Gauthier's article Political economy in the eighteenth century – Popular or despotic? The Physiocrats against the right to existence, http://et.worldeconomicsassociation.org/papers/political-economy-in-the-eighteenth-century-popular-or-despotic-the-physiocrats-against-the-right-to-existence/.
According to her, the physiocrats demanded an iron-fist against everything that meddled with the market. Their chance came with the flour wars.