"Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next?"

Socialism has failed. Now capitalism is bankrupt. So what comes next?

Seems like a question for ilx.

when did socialism fail

Don't ask me. I am merely a conduit. Although of course it probably depends on your definition of socialism and failure. Which is what the comments on that article seem to have got bogged down in.

Communism failed. There's a difference.

and capitalism isn't bankrupt. that article sucks.

Can I just make it clear that I neither think that socialism has failed, nor that capitalism is bankrupt. I'm really just wondering out loud whether we're really going to be looking at an alternative to these in the years to come as the eminent historian Eric Hobsbawm thinks?

And frankly "that article sucks" really isn't going to cut it.

We have lived through two practical attempts to realise these in their pure form

Complete and utter nonsense. stopped reading.

"The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another."

tada

there has never been a truly free market economy - all nominally "free market" capitalist economies are subject to regulation by states, use govt currency, etc. Likewise there has never been a truly socialist economy - all socialist economies have been, to varying degrees, capitalist economies that are simply heavily controlled and directed by (most often) dictatorial governments, and occasionally by more democratic ones. Workers' collectives have never run anything for any considerable period of time. Similarly, capitalism has never (and really I don't think it practically ever can) existed and functioned without the authority and oversight of the state.

so duh. fuck this nitwit.

in other news: sky is blue

We have lived through two practical attempts to realise these in their pure form

Complete and utter nonsense. stopped reading.

― This Board is a Prison on Planet Bullshit (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, April 10, 2009 12:54 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

We have lived through two practical attempts to realise these in their pure form

Complete and utter nonsense. stopped reading.

― This Board is a Prison on Planet Bullshit (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, April 10, 2009 12:54 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark

― Imaginary Dead Baseball Players Live in My Cornfield (Pillbox), Friday, 10 April 2009 17:05 (34 seconds ago)

amazingly, im saying shakey otm.

we've been living in a mixed economy for somewhat more than six months eric!

all nominally "free market" capitalist economies are subject to regulation by states, use govt currency, etc.

I agree with your main point, and think this article is pretty dopey, but does "free market capitalism" really = no state regulation or govt currency at all?

(I mean, I agree with EH's main point too, if it's that we should move towards a more heavily socialized mixed economy.)

does "free market capitalism" really = no state regulation or govt currency at all?

No, and it never has. Without regulation any market will either fail completely or turn into an oligarchy, which is not a free market. The term is supposed to mean "every firm has an equal opportunity to succeed or fail / everyone has the right to compete in the market if they so choose" which requires regulation to insure that can happen.

Its very sad that these crazies are suggesting a free market = no rules, just right.

That said I'm a social democrat so I think the US could stand to be a fair bit more socialist.

"Hobsbawmian Centro-nominalism"

e-hobs say:

"We have lived through [...] the totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market capitalist economy."

nah.

I think I agree with both Shakey and EH (when he gets to his point) but I have to say I'm kind of shocked by the sloppy thinking at the start of the article (and in other places) - Hobsbawm's books are pretty great (although I haven't read anything he's written in the last five years or so) but maybe age has caught up with him.

The term is supposed to mean "every firm has an equal opportunity to succeed or fail / everyone has the right to compete in the market if they so choose" which requires regulation to insure that can happen.

I think free market loonies like Grover Norquist would disagree. Also our quibbling over the definition of "free market" doesn't really impact the fact that EH is grossly misrepresenting history with his fatuous overgeneralizations.

Yeah this article had me WTFing constantly...

That;s what's so shocking - they are overgeneralizations - and I was sort of hoping for more. Sigh.

Because I am intrigued by the idea of an alternative (that isn't...er...fascism).

if only we had tried fascism in its pure form amirite

EH is grossly misrepresenting history with his fatuous overgeneralizations.

― This Board is a Prison on Planet Bullshit (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, April 10, 2009 7:32 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yep.

el hobso is lord of my particular manor (birkbeck college) and he has a very *lucid* prose style, which is a lot more than can be said of others of his kidney. he remains a very dubious historian. i'm a bit uncertain what his reputation rests on: i know his large, general surveys -- the nineteenth century trilogy and 'industry and empire' -- and miscellaneous stufff like 'bandits' and 'revolutionaries', but what does his rep rest on?

mttp: a marxist shouldn't use the idealist construction 'x in its pure form.' that is basic.

ok lol i just started reading this and, like everyone else, cannot get past the first sentence of the second graf. particularly: "totally unrestricted and uncontrolled free-market economy."

"The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another."

Sounds a lot like the present.

Well we could always return to Feudalism.

better outfits

great article for a high school newspaper IMO

The alternative is robots.

haha curtis otm

Ah, Hobsbawm. Should have known.

The flaws mentioned are real, but this article isn't as desperately bad as people are making out. It's mostly pretty standard, unprovocative stuff really.

yeah and also wrong

Impotence therefore faces both those who believe in what amounts to a pure, stateless, market capitalism, a sort of international bourgeois anarchism, and those who believe in a planned socialism uncontaminated by private profit-seeking. Both are bankrupt. The future, like the present and the past, belongs to mixed economies in which public and private are braided together in one way or another. But how? That is the problem for everybody today, but especially for people on the left.

impotence faced both those folks long before today, since neither has ever gotten close to what they wanted. the current crisis absolutely does not present a meaningful intellectual threat to either unfettered stateless anarcho-capital OR central planning, since the economies that have failed were state/market mixtures to begin with. which is what everyone has already been saying

Is he wrong to say that we need some kind of moderate centre-left mixed economy formula to try to work out way out of crisis?

Maybe - maybe that's not revolutionary or tough enough. But even if it's wrong, it doesn't sound disastrously wrong to me; I don't have a lot of better ideas, and don't think I know anyone who does.

I think the piece is a bit slackly written and doesn't really have much distinctive to say, but I don't think it's wildly wrong or embarrassing as others do.

a spiritual revolution

great points guys--but remember communism looks good on paper but never works out in reality

Hahaha, I was just going to say that!

but Communism doesn't look good on paper! I wish people would stop saying that.

No, it does...
http://www.davno.ru/posters/collections/ads/img/poster-02.jpg

^^^so true lolz - I cannot count the number of times that image has been ripped off

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_B1Cdf7384n4/SYnGIWKS6HI/AAAAAAAAAJA/Cnbl5Y6MchQ/s400/08row-500.jpg

I doubt she'd have got very far in the collective farm with those skinny arms.

http://betterpropaganda.com/images/artwork/Lift_Your_Skinny_Fists_Like_Antennas_To_Heaven-Godspeed_You_Black_Emperor!_480.jpg

but to be fair to hobsbawm (because why not), i think he's talking more about rhetoric than substance. definitely the rhetoric of the last 30 years -- in the u.s. and britain, anyway -- has privileged the idea of "private enterprise" at the expense of the theoretically bloated, inefficient state. (by saying "theoretically" i don't mean to imply that states aren't bloated and inefficient -- large enterprises of all kinds tend toward bloat and inefficiency. whether bloat and inefficiency are actually or necessarily bad things is a whole other argument that i'm not even getting into right now.) both the u.s. and u.k. have in fact maintained mixed economies through the entire era, but the rhetoric of market capitalism has so successfully displaced the rhetoric of the public sector that a few years ago i had to explain to a successful college-educated businessman what a "mixed economy" even was (much less the fact that he happened to live in one, and not in the "capitalist economy" he imagined, whatever that even means). the political leadership learned over those decades to only ever acknowledge the public sector when they were talking about cutting it. never mind that a lot of experiments with "privatization" were either abject failures or expensive mediocrities (and that in many cases the "privatization" was only possible with significant public subsidy). the important thing was how people talked about it all. really it's only the scale of what's gone on in the last year that has finally forced some of those charades to end. when you're pumping trillions of dollars of public money into the private sector, it's hard to pretend that what you're doing is in any real way "private enterprise."

otoh, the extent to which that mindset still holds sway is evident in the way the obama administration is insistently pretending it wants a "private sector" solution to the financial sector, while its actions repeatedly demonstrate just how little faith it has in that prospect. so i think hobsbawm is crowing a little early, really. the rhetoric isn't dead. it may be changing, but it's not like most people are really saying "the hell with capitalism." i think a lot of people are actually mostly rendered mute by confusion.

For whom is Obama pretending?

i think the pretense is enacted -- and understood -- as a tacit acceptance of the existing power structures. it's signaling that he's no revolutionary, he's not looking to tear anything down, he just wants to make it all work better. (better in obamaland being something like fairer, more honestly, and with more provisions for the bottom 25 percent or 50 percent or 98 percent.) he does not come to bury capitalism but to praise it, etc. which is where i think hobsbawm is engaging in some wishful thinking, in terms of anything being "discredited." i think the obama idea in the long run is something like what the clinton and blair ideas were, which is to accept the underlying mixed-economic framework but emphasize how much it depends on an active public sector rather than de-emphasizing it -- and obama has a freer hand to do that than clinton or blair, because of the situation he inherited.

I can't believe how bad this article is, especially in terms of writing. Also - agree about the first sentence of the second paragraph, but what about the first sentence of the first paragraph:

The 20th century is well behind us, but we have not yet learned to live in the 21st, or at least to think in a way that fits it. ?

I guess he does know that the Gregorian calendar is simply an administrative arrangement for thinking about time? It's not like some preordained route we are following where we say on 1 January 2000 "ok - 21st Century guys - here comes the cyborgs and orgasmatron".

the political leadership learned over those decades to only ever acknowledge the public sector when they were talking about cutting it.

this isn't true of the uk under new labour. a lot of double-talk, no doubt, and a lotta pfi etc, but new labour politicians' rhetoric has always been 'look how much we are spending on health and education', and they weren't kidding.

never mind that a lot of experiments with "privatization" were either abject failures or expensive mediocrities (and that in many cases the "privatization" was only possible with significant public subsidy).

well, yep. this is obviously true of british rail.

when you're pumping trillions of dollars of public money into the private sector, it's hard to pretend that what you're doing is in any real way "private enterprise."

but, again in britain at least, and i think hobsbawm hints at this, the same sort of thing was happening in the 1970s with british industry, only in reverse. it was hard to claim the failing nationalized industries, like auto and coal, counted as "socialism."

I get the sense that Gordon Brown is deeply, deeply fucked off that he allowed himself to be seduced by post-Thatcherite thinking and therefore can never be the architect of global New Capitalism he so desperately wants to be, because he is hamstrung by his own reputation and his own ten years running the UK economy.

Obama I'm not so sure about. I'd like to believe he really has the courage of his convictions but I'm bound to be disappointed. Who else is going to lead us forward? France and Germany would like to, but then both countries have centre-right governmnents.

The level of govt spending in the public sector is irrelevant here and has always varied from country to country - NuLab were always about higher taxes and higher public spending even though they pretended not to be. Where the consensus has shifted is the attitude towards public interference in the market. I think the govt line so far has not progressed much further than "if we don't do whatever we can do the pillars of capitalism will crash and burn" - the key question is what they will do when things are booming again, as they inevitably will. Politicians by their nature think short-term - my worry is that once markets are stabilised and bubbles are re-inflated, they will be scared to let the air out of the balloon, and we'll see a return to the old ways. It will be all "we interfered, and it worked, this happens once a century and doesn't mean capitalism is broken". No one 'important' sees the next crisis coming.

So yes, I think what comes next won't be that different to what came before, no matter the best intentions. In UK terms, his is the only way I can make sense of a Tory government coming to power at this point. By all rights they shouldn't, but New Labour have ensured we'll be going against the grain for a while yet.

This piece from Aaron Benanav feels important. Very long, takes in a sweeping history of economic philosophy, takes Marx to task for not having a theory of investment, takes Keynes and the postwar welfare state dreamers to task for both underestimating the resistance to their plans from capital as well as being naive about the political dimensions of strategic planning. Gets a little hand wavey at the end as these pieces tend to do but he promises a Part II that spells out the institutional requirements for the "investment composition" project he envisions - building democracy and a political process into each step.

It's "Groundwork for a Multi-Criterial Economy".

By multi-criterial he means going beyond profit as the single criterion for economic progress under capitalism, as well as going beyond other single criteria in other systems, like, say, total national output as measured in labour hours. I would love the thoughts of the smart people here as it feels quite exciting to read things like this but my background in these subjects is limited.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii153/articles/aaron-benanav-beyond-capitalism-1

I don't think it was Keynes' job to discover ways to circumvent the resistance of capital to his ideas. His job was to have ideas and articulate them. He was good at that and the ideas were very helpful.

"Taking to task" is a perfunctory way of describing Benanav's attitude in the article. You should probably read it, it's better than my massive simplification. He's a great fan of Keynes' contributions. Let's say, instead of taking Keynes to task, Benanav is documenting the limits of his approach, where Keynes runs up against practical opposition, where new ideas are needed - both in terms of how capital will sabotage any effort to curb its power, and in terms of the inevitably political dimension of public investment prioritisation.

One thing that almost always gets overlooked is that despite whining all the time about politicians most people just don't gaf about being involved democratically in decision making and won't make the effort - I'm looking forward to see how Benanav addresses this