
On the Left - zdw
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2016/06/04/On-the-Left
======
chroma
I'm wondering where this "overwhelming evidence" is. If you look at the stats,
the US economy is doing fine. Over the past 25 years, inflation-adjusted
income for non-supervisory employment (aka workers, not managers) has remained
stable or increased.[1] Inflation-adjusted household income has remained
stable over that same time.[2] Unemployment is at 4.7%. If these are signs of
"extreme problems", then every developed economy on the planet is coming
apart.

So as interesting as Tim Bray's five point plan sounds, I'd prefer to be in
the control group. Of _course_ the status quo has problems (don't get me
started). But big changes (especially ones that increase state control of the
economy) tend to be catastrophic.

1\. [http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/on-income-
stagna...](http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/12/on-income-
stagnation/?_r=0)

2\. See the chart halfway down: [http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/upshot/the-
great-wage-slow...](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/11/upshot/the-great-wage-
slowdown-looming-over-politics.html)

~~~
internaut
Hello. Attack!

> Over the past 25 years, inflation-adjusted income for non-supervisory
> employment (aka workers, not managers) has remained stable or increased.

That sounds great except that it is not. Zero growth or slight increases are
not good enough. Not when real inflation including education, health and
property (i.e. things people must do) is growing faster than real incomes.

Our grandparents wage grew in real terms by 10x. Is that going to happen for
their grandchildren? If not, why not?

Outside of the SV, I see diminished expectations everywhere.

> Unemployment is at 4.7%. If these are signs of "extreme problems", then
> every developed economy on the planet is coming apart.

This is much more plausible than you appear to think. Tens of millions of
workers are just dropping out of the workforce because they don't see the
point in competing anymore and welfare + modest income produces a 'good enough
state'. This isn't true of those making > 75k per year but below that it's
endemic. It's not just about money, it's about purpose. You can't push people
up Maslow's pyramid and then be surprised they don't find life satisfaction in
plucking chickens.

On the point that 'revolutions' tend to be a worse cure than the disease I
tend to agree but it depends on how long the stagnation goes on for.

~~~
blahi
>You can't push people up Maslow's pyramid and then be surprised they don't
find life satisfaction in plucking chickens.

So we are supposed to give people purpose in life? At best this is futile.
Purpose cannot be given. In reality this is false. Purpose can be given. For a
short period of time. You can take those miserable people and ride their wave
of misguided contempt to a revolution and grab the power. Then kill everyone
who challenges your power. The first thing that disappears amidst civil war is
justice.

Those people who feel unfulfilled better find a way to find their meaning of
life for themselves instead of nursing jealousy and hatred towards people who
did.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>So we are supposed to give people purpose in life?

No, you're supposed to acknowledge that "purpose in life" is far more
immaterial and nebulous than our ingrained concepts of professionalism and our
ingrained cultural work-ethic usually admit, and that if the economy doesn't
demand someone's labor, it doesn't affect their innate value as a human being
integrated into the same broad moral ecosystem as all other human beings.

Sure, those people _could_ be engineering vastly improved medicines or train
systems. They _could_ be painting houses or planting gardens. They _could_
even be taking care of children.

But society has decided, of its own free will and through its own mechanisms,
not to allocate living wages to doing those things. Complaining that broke and
unemployed people don't form (uncapitalized) work teams to perform pro-bono
labor on behalf of Society and the Nation and Humanity simply isn't fair game,
even if the things you'd like them to work on seem necessary or beneficial to
you. If _you_ think the Greater Glory of Something is so important, _pay for
it_.

------
pastProlog
> Marx didn’t say much use­ful about how to fix the prob­lem

Nor did he intend to say much. He famously said "I don't write recipes for the
kitchens of the future". He gave advice to organizers in his day, and left the
future for those in the future, with the material conditions and relations of
production they would have.

> there isn’t a pro­le­tari­at any more

In the world of 1867, the proletariat was rather small. The world just shifted
from majority rural to majority urban/suburban a few years ago. The
proletariat is larger than it ever was. You can argue if it will ever be a
vanguard revolutionary class or not, but it has not disappeared.

One point Marx and Engels made is the world has seen several economic systems
over the past 10,000 years - primitive communism, slavery, feudalism and
capitalism. The last three systems all collapsed under the weight of their own
contradictions. Marx and Engels believed capitalism would run its course and
eventually collapse under the weight of its own contradictions just like the
previous economic systems. Capitalism has only become predominant relatively
recently historically.

~~~
mafribe

        He gave advice to organizers in his day,
    

Yes, and terrible advice it was: in the Communist Manifesto [1] Marx & Engels
gave concrete recommendations what is to be done to bring about a transition
from capitalism to communism via a revolution and an intermediate phase of
socialism.

Lenin and Stalin implemented those points to a T. Didn't exactly bring about
the predicted benefits.

The core of the problem was that Marx really didn't have a meaningful concept
of state and of political change. He could only conceive of a state as an
oppressive tool of capitalist control, that would whither away together with
capitalism after the revolution. And he thought political systems can only
change in revolutionary change. The latter, while false, is kind-of
understandable from the myopic view of Marx's times where revolution was more
or less the only way governments changed. The former was simply naive. Marx's
main teacher (Hegel) already had a much more sophisticated theory of the state
in society, but Marx was so blinded by naive economism that he was unable to
grasp the productive function of a state structure in any large-scale society.

[1]
[https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Man...](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Manifesto.pdf)

~~~
sievebrain
Indeed. It's too bad that so many leftist intellectuals try to defend Marx as
merely a product of his time, or worse, as someone misunderstood.

The reality is that Marx's ideas were bad, and were understood to be bad at
the time by contemporaries like Bakunin who swiftly identified the obvious
flaw in the plan: no state powerful enough to perform massive redistribution
of wealth from the bourgeois to the proles would ever simply say "job done"
and dissolve itself. To argue for the Marxist plan was inherently to argue for
totalitarian dictatorship of a vast and powerful bureaucratic state.

------
tezza
Interesting piece. There's so much broken in the world.

We don't inhabit a true Capitalist society any more ( my term for the current
system is Crapitalism )

Further it is unclear if our current machine can survive

* peak stuff ( we don't need to consume as much any more ) why would companies invest in new jobs and infrastructure when they are not going to recoup the cost through growing sales ?

* population still on the rise . Where do jobs come from for 10 billion when we've hit peak stuff

* robber barons control the laws, courts and media ( a constant over human existence)

* massive debt load ( unfunded pensions, national debts, private mortgage debts )

But I would ask Tim Bray what I ask everyone else who says radical measures
are required. Namely, how is the transition made without mass cleansing and
warfare in the interim.

Often ( Viet Cong, Khmer Rouge, Mao, Stalin ) the middle class and educated
are unfairly lumped in with the elite and exterminated.

Is the current brokenness worth millions dead, and proportionally lots of
HNers ?

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>* peak stuff ( we don't need to consume as much any more ) why would
companies invest in new jobs and infrastructure when they are not going to
recoup the cost through growing sales ?

We currently have a glut of consumer goods, but they're mostly consumer goods
with low marginal desirability, and we actually have a shortage of physical
capital, collective infrastructure, and equipment for personal empowerment.

To wit: it's better to have affordable, high-quality education and public
transit, _at the margins_ , than the N+1st craft brewery.

------
sievebrain
Bray claims he's not a Marxist. I'm less convinced. Putting aside the jargon
for a moment, the core theory of Marxism was that capitalism would collapse
due to its own contradictions, and that would open the possibility of creating
a fully equal society through the destruction of the ruling capitalist class
and massive redistribution of wealth. Marx thought that once that was done the
state would disappear (doh).

Brayism, for want of a better name, seems to have the following features:

1) A conviction that capitalism is going to ruin everything good unless it's
destroyed.

2) A belief in massive redistribution of wealth (taxing the crap out of the
1%) in order to benefit the poor.

3) Totalitarian state surveillance in which financial privacy is forbidden.

4) A vague desire to whack business people and other capitalists much more
severely than today, and generally crack down on anything that smells
capitalist (like financial transactions).

5) An uncosted UBI i.e. more massive wealth redistribution.

That all sounds like a rather classically Marxist agenda to me, just with
updated terminology. Bray claims the proletariat no longer exists whilst
spending the rest of his post talking about the plight of the non-1% and how
awful well paid bankers and CEOs are. Instead of "handing the means of
production to the proletariat" it's "a universal basic income funded by taxing
the 1%", but that's a relatively trivial matter of wording compared to the
massive implications.

Bray ends his post by asking which parties have ideas like the ones he listed.
I think he'll find the communist party is a good fit.

------
internaut
I see no interesting ideas on the left. You need to reinvent yourselves. Since
the fall of communism it has been very boring and I blame you for that.

Is it just a little pension increase there, a little distribution here?

Please tell me I'm only seeing the mainstream left and there exists
interesting innovators out there I've overlooked.

~~~
chroma
If you're wondering why there's been so little innovation related to the ideas
of Marx and Engels, it's probably because most people decided those ideas
weren't useful.

Over the past century, a lot of people tried to implement the ideas of Marx
and Engels. People tried different versions of communism in different
cultures, different geographical regions, and different levels of
technological development. On two occasions, people even split a country in
half and ran one side communist and the other side capitalist. In every case,
the citizens of the communist regimes ended up worse-off.

If we've learned anything from these experiments, it's that Marx's ideas
reliably create failed states. There are probably better systems than what we
have today, but they're not close relatives to communism.

Fortunately, many far leftists have understood this and gone searching for
other ways to improve the lives of the poorest. For example, basic income
seems to be growing in popularity.

------
nikdaheratik
Well, it's good to see someone putting their own opinion out there, in an
election year no less, instead of parroting whatever party nonsense is being
spread around. But I don't feel like these are really solving for anything,
other than maybe trying to deal with inequality by hammering down the top end.

> 1\. Tax the crap out of the 1%

I don't think we need to go back to the 1950s levels. A move back to the late
1990s would be okay by me. But then again we're not going to get that through
Congress and alot of nitwit legislators will use that to justify their
reelection so it's not worth the cost as far as I'm concerned.

> 2\. stamp out most forms of high-leverage fi­nan­cial spec­u­la­tion

IMO, a "War on Speculators" would be just like the drug war. Only less costly,
and less effective since it's much easier to move massive amounts of money to
a country with less lax regulations than it is the comparable amount of drugs.
Better enforcement of some of the existing anti-fraud/insider trader rules
would be welcome. But this isn't going to help prosperity for the average
worker. Just give nitwit legislators something to argue over.

>3\. in­tro­duce ruth­less trans­paren­cy such that any as­set whose
ben­e­fi­cial own­er­ship can­not be es­tab­lished where legal­ly
ap­pro­pri­ate is sub­ject to sum­ma­ry con­fis­ca­tion

Not even sure what this means? Is this going to pass the 5th amendment even if
it can be translated into law? Considering the use of confiscation to fund the
Drug war policies, can you maybe see some potential for conflicts of interest
here?

> 4\. adopt a zero-tolerance pos­ture on busi­ness crime, with jail time
> reg­u­lar­ly ad­min­is­tered for sig­nif­i­cant fi­nan­cial mis­deed­s, in
> rough pro­por­tion to the size of the tak­ings.

Again, "War on finance" vs. "Drug war" potential for abuse and the same lack
of effectiveness. I agree that many of the people involved in the collapse in
2008 should have been hammered more than they were. However, this feels more
like a case of getting better people in DoJ and other agencies rather than
more legislation.

> 5\. roll out a uni­ver­sal ba­sic in­come to deal with the in­evitable
> de­cline in the pro­por­tion of hu­mans “enjoying” full em­ploy­men­t.

Could work, but maybe just start with raising the minimum wage, increasing
overtime protections, and just getting the work week and vacation time closer
to Europe, Japan, and/or Australia levels rather than going "full basic
income" to start. I also don't know if this will all help the "average
unemployed" but it may help make things less miserable for the average worker.

[Edited for typos]

