I like this title a lot more than "vulture capitalism" and Blakeley writes about "capitalist oligarchy" near the end of the interview, so I think it works here. Still not in love with the title. I...
I like this title a lot more than "vulture capitalism" and Blakeley writes about "capitalist oligarchy" near the end of the interview, so I think it works here.
Still not in love with the title. I wanted to write something concise about the gist of the article: that capitalism does not exclusively (or even mostly) operate via a free market, and socialism similarly is not married to the concept of central planning. But that doesn't condense down very easily into a few catchy words.
Anyways, I thought this was interesting and worth sharing. I'll leave the debating and bitching about whether it's correct or not to someone else more willing to waste their evening online.
One thing I've noticed is that often, important things happen as a public-private partnership. For example, Covid vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, funded by the US government, and of course...
One thing I've noticed is that often, important things happen as a public-private partnership. For example, Covid vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, funded by the US government, and of course starting out as academic research. So I agree that the situation is pretty complex.
"Mixed economy" seems like a fairly neutral term for this.
(Emphasis mine.) So… Marxism? I hope that's not supposed to be a revelatory insight. It's a strange way to open this interview. Oh. That said, I think that she has a point. Ultimately, class...
She joins today to explain why conceiving of “free markets” and “government planning” as opposites is highly misleading, because our neoliberal “market-based” economy involves many deep ties between the state and corporations. Instead of thinking of “capitalism” and “socialism” as a spectrum that runs from markets to government, Blakeley says we should focus our analysis on who owns and controls production, and who gets the benefits.
(Emphasis mine.)
So… Marxism? I hope that's not supposed to be a revelatory insight. It's a strange way to open this interview.
Robinson
I want to break this down, because the idea is really ingrained that there’s some kind of spectrum between how much “the government” produces the economy and how much the market makes economic decisions. You brought up the economists Hayek and Keynes in the 20th century. Hayek wrote this book, The Road to Serfdom, where he says with welfare programs and healthcare and all that, soon, you’ll have Nazism in Britain, or whatever—it’s incredible that this argument was taken so seriously because it’s insane. But then you have, as you say, on the opposite pole of that Keynes, this idea that, in fact, the economy will be a disaster unless there are decisions made in government about how to allocate resources. You say that’s not the spectrum of possible ideas. Break us out of the spectrum.
Is there, perhaps, a third economist that we can bring in here who might have some other ideas?
Blakeley
There’s Karl Marx. I come from a Marxist perspective, basically.
Oh.
That said, I think that she has a point. Ultimately, class probably does matter more than "public versus private" and our conception of things along that single axis doesn't make a lot of sense. It is excessively reductive. You can have a very large government that works like ours and seems to mostly serve the interests of business elites, or you could have a smaller government that was focused more on improving public welfare.
However, her suggestion for the solution seems hilariously unimaginative for someone who says she is a Marxist.
The question is, how do we create a real democracy? How do we make sure that the decisions that are being made about people’s lives aren’t being taken by corporate executives, technocrats, or politicians, to the extent that it’s possible to be being taken by them? And so, that really requires a thorough democratization of the economy, and a thorough democratization of society. So yes, it means things like having collective ownership of the most important resources in our society. Workers should own the firms that they work in.
People say, that’s impossible, it wouldn’t work. Well, I highlight in the book plenty of times throughout history where it has worked, where workers have actually come together and shown that they have the expertise to be able to govern the firms in which they work and actually often do so better than the managers who came before them, in the sense of running the firm more efficiently and more effectively.
It's not hard to think of reasons why having worker-owned big businesses wouldn't be a panacea. Employees might focus on short-term gains to ensure their immediate financial security, leading to decisions that are not in the best long-term interest of consumers or society in general (e.g., underinvestment in sustainable practices or innovation). Or employee-owners might have a narrower perspective, prioritizing their own needs and benefits over broader societal impacts. Or employee-owned businesses might become resistant to changes that could benefit consumers but disrupt the status quo for employees.
Worst of all, collective decision-making can (and likely would) result in diffusion of responsibility, leading to less accountability for negative outcomes. Without clear accountability structures, poor decisions can persist. We are, ultimately, a hierarchical species. While I would love to be a species that could do completely flat business or governmental structures, I don't think we are wired that way. Someone needs to be in charge. We just have to find ways to incentivize them to prioritize the workforce (and consumers) more and shareholders less.
But maybe I am a victim of exactly the mentality that she says we all suffer from, where we can't imagine a world too different from the capitalist society we have been raised in.
Oh man, I'm genuinely not trying to be mean-spirited here but your critiques are absolutely hilarious. All the problems you brought up about worker-owned businesses are actual well documented...
Oh man, I'm genuinely not trying to be mean-spirited here but your critiques are absolutely hilarious. All the problems you brought up about worker-owned businesses are actual well documented critiques of corporate capitalism. Ensuring immediate financial success rather than focus on long-term interests of consumers? Prioritizing their own needs over broader social implications? Have you been around for multiple housing crises? Or heard about the great depression? You can find interviews of investors talking about recessions are yard sales for the wealthy.
And, yes, diffusion of responsibility is a big deal... Which is the express purpose of bureaucracy and corporations. It's in the name. LLC is limited liability corporation. We even let them make shell corporations with little value so when they do something terrible they just fucking dissolve it.
If you were being satirical, well done sir, you got me.
At no point did I intend to suggest that those were problems exclusive to worker-owned businesses. My point is that worker-owned businesses are not a panacea. You have a lot of the same problems...
At no point did I intend to suggest that those were problems exclusive to worker-owned businesses. My point is that worker-owned businesses are not a panacea. You have a lot of the same problems because, at the end of the day, whoever owns the business, it's still going to be run by humans. It might come with some novel problems, but I am skeptical that incredibly flat organizations are automatically better than more traditional ones. I think organizations at either extreme—that are too flat or too vertical—are problematic.
Marxists are so concerned with who owns "the means of production" that they tend to, in my experience, assume that that alone is going to solve a lot of the problems in society. And I just don't buy it. It feels like the grass is just greener because it's radically different and it made a lot of sense to prominent left-leaning intellectuals in the midst of the Second Industrial Revolution.
And just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that our current socioeconomic system works great. I just find myself incredibly skeptical of classical Marxism, which is what Blakeley seemed to be advocating for in the interview.
I'm not a Marxist, I don't know that much about it. I have been in a couple unions though and I've worked in social services. There's tons of data about the massive impact unions, social services...
I'm not a Marxist, I don't know that much about it. I have been in a couple unions though and I've worked in social services. There's tons of data about the massive impact unions, social services and public projects have had on quality of life and the rise of the middle class from the 1940's to the 1980's.
Unfortunately, since the 60's, the cold war and the rise of neoliberalism, people have bought hook, line and sinker that it was just manufacturing and capitalism that did all that and that anything remotely public is "communist" or "Marxist".
The USA and Canada have moved so far right in the last 50 years most citizens have no idea what gave them their rights, standard of living and wealth. Hint, it was unions. If you doubt that we've moved further to the right... Richard Nixon almost passed a UBI in 1969.
I guess what I'm saying is, there are documented, evidence-based solutions to problems that aren't just "leftists being Marxist".
Oh, I absolutely don't doubt that. You don't get a degree in European history with an emphasis on Europe from c. 1880s to c. the 1960s without seeing that. And I'm absolutely in favor of the lot...
If you doubt that we've moved further to the right... Richard Nixon almost passed a UBI in 1969.
Oh, I absolutely don't doubt that. You don't get a degree in European history with an emphasis on Europe from c. 1880s to c. the 1960s without seeing that. And I'm absolutely in favor of the lot of evidence-based leftist solutions to societal problems. Just not the Marxist "means of production" solutions from the nineteenth century.
I'm kind of baffled why everyone seems to be assuming that I'm advocating for the status quo or right-wing politics. It is possible for a leftist like me to be critical of Marxism.
This is debatable. I would argue that most are trained to accept orders from above without questioning and that society does not systematically nurture their independent thinking, decision making...
We are, ultimately, a hierarchical species
This is debatable. I would argue that most are trained to accept orders from above without questioning and that society does not systematically nurture their independent thinking, decision making and self-respect.
From strict parents, through school, into the first job as an employee. Unless you luck out with parents who teach you self-respect or meet someone who'll show you, you end up drone.
This also makes it simpler for narcissistic or sociopathic people to rise, given the lack of competition from normal people.
Dawn of Everything points out we were not hierarchical originally. My personal take is that increasing population density enabled hierarchy. With only so much coastline and rivers to provide steady access to salt, cost of getting away from a tyrant exceeded the means of most people, so they had to either give in or actively fight back. Most people don't wish to suffer, so those who didn't mind won over time.
And then we slowly started losing the ability to negotiate as equals.
Wow. I'd write up a treatise, but if you haven't even glanced at over a century of historical fact from what industrial age capitalism has done to everything ... it'd be a waste of my time....
It's not hard to think of reasons why having worker-owned big businesses wouldn't be a panacea. Employees might focus on short-term gains to ensure their immediate financial security, leading to decisions that are not in the best long-term interest of consumers or society in general (e.g., underinvestment in sustainable practices or innovation). Or employee-owners might have a narrower perspective, prioritizing their own needs and benefits over broader societal impacts. Or employee-owned businesses might become resistant to changes that could benefit consumers but disrupt the status quo for employees.
Wow.
I'd write up a treatise, but if you haven't even glanced at over a century of historical fact from what industrial age capitalism has done to everything ... it'd be a waste of my time.
Capitalism has captured most governments on the planet. And has turned, or is busy turning, those societies into techno-feudalism. The people who actually staff the companies making widgets and providing services know how to make widgets and perform services. They do it every week, just not full time since it's far cheaper (more profitable for the capitalist class owners) to not pay benefits to a full-time worker.
We know what capital class owners do to companies. We know what they do to countries, to people. We know just how bad it is. Arguing worker control would be worse is, to be very polite, either extremely disingenuous or actively ignorant.
And regardless, maybe it's time to try something new. We know how bad capitalism is for people. Not theory, fact. Doing the same thing expecting a different result is insanity or stupidity. Let's let workers have a shot.
You seem to be thinking that I'm some kind of anarcho-capitalist or libertarian. I'm definitely not. But "capitalism really sucked, so we should try Marxism, because we haven't done that yet," is...
You seem to be thinking that I'm some kind of anarcho-capitalist or libertarian. I'm definitely not. But "capitalism really sucked, so we should try Marxism, because we haven't done that yet," is ultimately an argument from ignorance. Extraordinary claims — that, for example, radically different socioeconomic systems, untried throughout human history, can overcome all of the problems of human nature — require extraordinary evidence. Marxism doesn't have that. It's all conjecture.
Which is not to say that I believe that all Marxist theory wholly wrong. I think Marx did an excellent job describing the problems, particularly those faced during the Second Industrial Revolution. I'm just skeptical of the proposed solutions.
I'm pretty pessimistic about human nature, particularly when you get to industrialized societies, with their vast scale and environment destroying capability. I don't think we are a species that can live up to the ideal of "from each according to their ability to each according to their need." I wish we were. But I think the limitations of our empathy, our preference for hierarchy, and our present bias are massive, massive obstacles to creating societies that are as utopian as classless Marxist communism.
For whatever it's worth, I'm much more inclined to look to Thomas Piketty then to Karl Marx for answers.
Hi! So, as I consider myself an anarcho-communist, I obviously have a bunch of points against your arguments in this thread. Others have, however, already put many of those forward, so I'd like to...
Hi! So, as I consider myself an anarcho-communist, I obviously have a bunch of points against your arguments in this thread. Others have, however, already put many of those forward, so I'd like to focus on some positive notes instead!
You mention a pessimism in human nature. I definitely get where you're coming from, and especially as someone who does believe more in Marxist solutions then you do, it's a hard struggle to not get completely depressed by what we see around us in the world. However, I think we often fall pray to a skewed vision of what human nature is actually like, as it's right now being presented to us through a harsh neo-liberal lens.
To counter that, I would suggest you take a look at Kate Raworth's excellent book 'Doughnut Economics'. In it, she first explains her view on a current malaise in modern economic theory and then presents a possible economic model towards a more sustainable and just world. Throughout, she constantly provides examples of real world activities, organisations and events that are already implementing these. More then anything, all of these examples gave me a welcome injection of positivity. Most if it gets underreported because it's not the shiny type of action that can draw pundit or investor attention, but it IS happening.
What also helped my pessimism is the works of David Graeber. He draws on extensive anthropological and archeological evidence to help us peer beyond our self-imposed narrow world vision, where people are just rational self-absorbed actors in a profit-driven economic model, and that is the only thing keeping us from utter barbarity. Actual history seems to paint a very different picture. (They're also just great reads in general)
Hope any of that can help. :) For my part, I'm gonna look up Piketty a bit more, since I've only ever encountered him being mentioned as a source and never read any of his actual work.
So, pretty much like we have now, but with more of the produce going to the people actually doing the work. An improvement, in other words. Much as @AlexeyKaramazov, I'm scratching my head at why...
Employees might focus on short-term gains to ensure their immediate financial security, leading to decisions that are not in the best long-term interest of consumers or society in general (e.g., underinvestment in sustainable practices or innovation). Or employee-owners might have a narrower perspective, prioritizing their own needs and benefits over broader societal impacts.
So, pretty much like we have now, but with more of the produce going to the people actually doing the work. An improvement, in other words.
Much as @AlexeyKaramazov, I'm scratching my head at why you mention things that might happen in a more socialist economic landscape, but absolutely already do in our current predatory capitalist one. It's baffling.
I like this title a lot more than "vulture capitalism" and Blakeley writes about "capitalist oligarchy" near the end of the interview, so I think it works here.
Still not in love with the title. I wanted to write something concise about the gist of the article: that capitalism does not exclusively (or even mostly) operate via a free market, and socialism similarly is not married to the concept of central planning. But that doesn't condense down very easily into a few catchy words.
Anyways, I thought this was interesting and worth sharing. I'll leave the debating and bitching about whether it's correct or not to someone else more willing to waste their evening online.
One thing I've noticed is that often, important things happen as a public-private partnership. For example, Covid vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna, funded by the US government, and of course starting out as academic research. So I agree that the situation is pretty complex.
"Mixed economy" seems like a fairly neutral term for this.
Many historians would tell you there is no such thing as free markets without governments.
(Emphasis mine.)
So… Marxism? I hope that's not supposed to be a revelatory insight. It's a strange way to open this interview.
Oh.
That said, I think that she has a point. Ultimately, class probably does matter more than "public versus private" and our conception of things along that single axis doesn't make a lot of sense. It is excessively reductive. You can have a very large government that works like ours and seems to mostly serve the interests of business elites, or you could have a smaller government that was focused more on improving public welfare.
However, her suggestion for the solution seems hilariously unimaginative for someone who says she is a Marxist.
It's not hard to think of reasons why having worker-owned big businesses wouldn't be a panacea. Employees might focus on short-term gains to ensure their immediate financial security, leading to decisions that are not in the best long-term interest of consumers or society in general (e.g., underinvestment in sustainable practices or innovation). Or employee-owners might have a narrower perspective, prioritizing their own needs and benefits over broader societal impacts. Or employee-owned businesses might become resistant to changes that could benefit consumers but disrupt the status quo for employees.
Worst of all, collective decision-making can (and likely would) result in diffusion of responsibility, leading to less accountability for negative outcomes. Without clear accountability structures, poor decisions can persist. We are, ultimately, a hierarchical species. While I would love to be a species that could do completely flat business or governmental structures, I don't think we are wired that way. Someone needs to be in charge. We just have to find ways to incentivize them to prioritize the workforce (and consumers) more and shareholders less.
But maybe I am a victim of exactly the mentality that she says we all suffer from, where we can't imagine a world too different from the capitalist society we have been raised in.
Oh man, I'm genuinely not trying to be mean-spirited here but your critiques are absolutely hilarious. All the problems you brought up about worker-owned businesses are actual well documented critiques of corporate capitalism. Ensuring immediate financial success rather than focus on long-term interests of consumers? Prioritizing their own needs over broader social implications? Have you been around for multiple housing crises? Or heard about the great depression? You can find interviews of investors talking about recessions are yard sales for the wealthy.
And, yes, diffusion of responsibility is a big deal... Which is the express purpose of bureaucracy and corporations. It's in the name. LLC is limited liability corporation. We even let them make shell corporations with little value so when they do something terrible they just fucking dissolve it.
If you were being satirical, well done sir, you got me.
At no point did I intend to suggest that those were problems exclusive to worker-owned businesses. My point is that worker-owned businesses are not a panacea. You have a lot of the same problems because, at the end of the day, whoever owns the business, it's still going to be run by humans. It might come with some novel problems, but I am skeptical that incredibly flat organizations are automatically better than more traditional ones. I think organizations at either extreme—that are too flat or too vertical—are problematic.
Marxists are so concerned with who owns "the means of production" that they tend to, in my experience, assume that that alone is going to solve a lot of the problems in society. And I just don't buy it. It feels like the grass is just greener because it's radically different and it made a lot of sense to prominent left-leaning intellectuals in the midst of the Second Industrial Revolution.
And just to be clear, I'm not suggesting that our current socioeconomic system works great. I just find myself incredibly skeptical of classical Marxism, which is what Blakeley seemed to be advocating for in the interview.
I'm not a Marxist, I don't know that much about it. I have been in a couple unions though and I've worked in social services. There's tons of data about the massive impact unions, social services and public projects have had on quality of life and the rise of the middle class from the 1940's to the 1980's.
Unfortunately, since the 60's, the cold war and the rise of neoliberalism, people have bought hook, line and sinker that it was just manufacturing and capitalism that did all that and that anything remotely public is "communist" or "Marxist".
The USA and Canada have moved so far right in the last 50 years most citizens have no idea what gave them their rights, standard of living and wealth. Hint, it was unions. If you doubt that we've moved further to the right... Richard Nixon almost passed a UBI in 1969.
I guess what I'm saying is, there are documented, evidence-based solutions to problems that aren't just "leftists being Marxist".
Oh, I absolutely don't doubt that. You don't get a degree in European history with an emphasis on Europe from c. 1880s to c. the 1960s without seeing that. And I'm absolutely in favor of the lot of evidence-based leftist solutions to societal problems. Just not the Marxist "means of production" solutions from the nineteenth century.
I'm kind of baffled why everyone seems to be assuming that I'm advocating for the status quo or right-wing politics. It is possible for a leftist like me to be critical of Marxism.
This is debatable. I would argue that most are trained to accept orders from above without questioning and that society does not systematically nurture their independent thinking, decision making and self-respect.
From strict parents, through school, into the first job as an employee. Unless you luck out with parents who teach you self-respect or meet someone who'll show you, you end up drone.
This also makes it simpler for narcissistic or sociopathic people to rise, given the lack of competition from normal people.
Dawn of Everything points out we were not hierarchical originally. My personal take is that increasing population density enabled hierarchy. With only so much coastline and rivers to provide steady access to salt, cost of getting away from a tyrant exceeded the means of most people, so they had to either give in or actively fight back. Most people don't wish to suffer, so those who didn't mind won over time.
And then we slowly started losing the ability to negotiate as equals.
Wow.
I'd write up a treatise, but if you haven't even glanced at over a century of historical fact from what industrial age capitalism has done to everything ... it'd be a waste of my time.
Capitalism has captured most governments on the planet. And has turned, or is busy turning, those societies into techno-feudalism. The people who actually staff the companies making widgets and providing services know how to make widgets and perform services. They do it every week, just not full time since it's far cheaper (more profitable for the capitalist class owners) to not pay benefits to a full-time worker.
We know what capital class owners do to companies. We know what they do to countries, to people. We know just how bad it is. Arguing worker control would be worse is, to be very polite, either extremely disingenuous or actively ignorant.
And regardless, maybe it's time to try something new. We know how bad capitalism is for people. Not theory, fact. Doing the same thing expecting a different result is insanity or stupidity. Let's let workers have a shot.
You seem to be thinking that I'm some kind of anarcho-capitalist or libertarian. I'm definitely not. But "capitalism really sucked, so we should try Marxism, because we haven't done that yet," is ultimately an argument from ignorance. Extraordinary claims — that, for example, radically different socioeconomic systems, untried throughout human history, can overcome all of the problems of human nature — require extraordinary evidence. Marxism doesn't have that. It's all conjecture.
Which is not to say that I believe that all Marxist theory wholly wrong. I think Marx did an excellent job describing the problems, particularly those faced during the Second Industrial Revolution. I'm just skeptical of the proposed solutions.
I'm pretty pessimistic about human nature, particularly when you get to industrialized societies, with their vast scale and environment destroying capability. I don't think we are a species that can live up to the ideal of "from each according to their ability to each according to their need." I wish we were. But I think the limitations of our empathy, our preference for hierarchy, and our present bias are massive, massive obstacles to creating societies that are as utopian as classless Marxist communism.
For whatever it's worth, I'm much more inclined to look to Thomas Piketty then to Karl Marx for answers.
Hi! So, as I consider myself an anarcho-communist, I obviously have a bunch of points against your arguments in this thread. Others have, however, already put many of those forward, so I'd like to focus on some positive notes instead!
You mention a pessimism in human nature. I definitely get where you're coming from, and especially as someone who does believe more in Marxist solutions then you do, it's a hard struggle to not get completely depressed by what we see around us in the world. However, I think we often fall pray to a skewed vision of what human nature is actually like, as it's right now being presented to us through a harsh neo-liberal lens.
To counter that, I would suggest you take a look at Kate Raworth's excellent book 'Doughnut Economics'. In it, she first explains her view on a current malaise in modern economic theory and then presents a possible economic model towards a more sustainable and just world. Throughout, she constantly provides examples of real world activities, organisations and events that are already implementing these. More then anything, all of these examples gave me a welcome injection of positivity. Most if it gets underreported because it's not the shiny type of action that can draw pundit or investor attention, but it IS happening.
What also helped my pessimism is the works of David Graeber. He draws on extensive anthropological and archeological evidence to help us peer beyond our self-imposed narrow world vision, where people are just rational self-absorbed actors in a profit-driven economic model, and that is the only thing keeping us from utter barbarity. Actual history seems to paint a very different picture. (They're also just great reads in general)
Hope any of that can help. :) For my part, I'm gonna look up Piketty a bit more, since I've only ever encountered him being mentioned as a source and never read any of his actual work.
So, pretty much like we have now, but with more of the produce going to the people actually doing the work. An improvement, in other words.
Much as @AlexeyKaramazov, I'm scratching my head at why you mention things that might happen in a more socialist economic landscape, but absolutely already do in our current predatory capitalist one. It's baffling.