The Donald J. Trump Presidency

chrondog wrote:Right wingers don't understand that their hypercapitalist, authoritarian nonsense is being perfected in China. I can't figure out why some of them hate the place so much. That's what they want for America.

Read long npr articles yesterday on Xi’s vision and on Muslim internment camps in China. Was god damn terrifying and couldn’t help but think, “ Well, keep it up ultra right xenophobes cause this could be us!”

Y'all see that Omar (too mildly) criticized Elliott Abrams, yesterday?  Totally antisemitic move, right there.  What a monster this woman is.

chrondog wrote:Right wingers don't understand that their hypercapitalist, authoritarian nonsense is being perfected in China. I can't figure out why some of them hate the place so much. That's what they want for America.

I think the word corporatism is underrated for purposes of such discussions. Despite market reforms of the last 40 years, I don't find the word capitalist particularly fitting for China (aside from maybe Hong Kong and the other SARs). It's really a distinct economic system and corporatism or another term could describe it better. I agree with you that many on the U.S. right (and especially Trump) genuinely would love a China-style system of rule, which is an amazing turnaround from the Cold War view of China (and Russia) on the right.

zappo wrote:Y'all see that Omar (too mildly) criticized Elliott Abrams, yesterday?  Totally antisemitic move, right there.  What a monster this woman is.

It's interesting to filter out those who criticized or defended her in both incidents and find the people who criticized her earlier comments and then credited these new comments.

jesus jones wrote:i think we can all agree that everything is, and i can't stress this enough, incredibly fucking stupid

Even I can't disagree with this statement.

Is there a distinction between State capitalism and corporatism?

I actually think it's important to make a distinction between the market-derived solutions of American right wingers and the 'authoritarian, hypercapitalist model' of present-day China. From my limited understanding, the Chinese model functions in two important and reinforcing ways. Western critics rightly focus on the increasing authoritarianism of Xi's regime, their horrible human rights record (the treatment of Uyghur Muslims especially), and their suppression of public opposition/discontent. But the longevity of the Communist Party's monopoly of State power is also a result of their unique command economy, which makes it so they can avoid the market-induced "externalities" of our own capitalist system. There is actually something much crueler about the strident free market logic of American right wingers because it enables them to abstractly rationalize pretty atrocious levels of human suffering amongst their own citizenry. In the Chinese system, at least to this point, these sorts of externalities would be addressed by massive (and profitable) State investment programs in housing, healthcare, transportation, etc.

It can actually be really difficult, when I am trying to think in these terms, to understand how neoliberal market capitalism has been so politically successful over the past thirty or forty years.

I'm sorry that I wasn't in the thread to defend her earlier comments, Raj, in a timely enough manner to prove myself to you for no reason whatsoever.  lol  Get over yourself, B.

WP64 wrote:Is there a distinction between State capitalism and corporatism?

Probably not, I just think without free markets state "capitalism" is kind of a marketing term used by authoritarian regimes, hence my preference for corporatism.

It can actually be really difficult, when I am trying to think in these terms, to understand how neoliberal market capitalism has been so politically successful over the past thirty or forty years.

It's flaws are real and I think you're not wrong that it feels especially callous to many people, but it has been associated with significant worldwide reduction in poverty. I don't know that there has been an alternative system that has done as well over that period.

zappo wrote:I'm sorry that I wasn't in the thread to defend her earlier comments, Raj, in a timely enough manner to prove myself to you for no reason whatsoever.  lol  Get over yourself, B.

My intent was to suggest that you get more interesting takes when you remove the people who will always support or always criticize the person in question (including the group you were referencing who will call someone a racist regardless of how they say something). Sorry if my previous message sounded like a criticism of you, you certainly don't need to prove anything to me or anyone else in the thread.

I apologize and, as it turns out, entirely agree with you on that front. Genuinely sorry!

I can't figure out quotes on this board, so responding to Duff on the last page:

Fair that the conflation predates Hillary! But she worked hard to codify it into international law. Not that Republicans wouldn't have done the same, but, again, it shows the bipartisan consensus here.

Fair also from TechnoRaj. I was going to use the term "fascism" to describe the blend of authoritarianism and corporatism, but didn't. I'm fine with calling China "state-directed corporatism". However, I do think they have a hypercapitalist, unregulated market in many new sectors of the economy (the older industrial economy was more state driven).

I think the Republican Party today would be ideologically fine with a command economy if there was single-party rule. Because of American politics they pick and choose more which things they want to "command" so they can seem "conservative", but their real ideology is power and I'm sure they wouldn't mind. Or, at the very least, acquiescing to some sort of patron-style capitalism where they give an industrialist command powers over labor.

techno raj wrote:It's flaws are real and I think you're not wrong that it feels especially callous to many people, but it has been associated with significant worldwide reduction in poverty. I don't know that there has been an alternative system that has done as well over that period.

I think this should be better acknowledged by Leftists. This is why we should support a mixed system! By taking the benefits of market capitalism and redistributing that wealth for social good, you're able to get the best of both worlds to some degree. That's why uncritical "capitalism is bad" takes by faux Marxists online are so damn stupid--they literally have no prescription or alternative. 

Capitalism is good for SOME people. If we have Democratic Socialism, we can make the most of that success for MORE people.

That weird song-songy bullshit earlier today honestly looked like senility. We’re long past the overdue point for taking away grampa’s driver’s license and just trying to stop him from hurting people.

I walked by a television when I was clocking in at work this morning and watched 10 seconds of his press conference.

Insane to think about how 3+ years ago this random snippet would have turned anyone else into an unelectable joke and destroyed their career. Twelve hours later and no one even remembers it.

Remember when Mitt said "binders of women" and it was a blunder he had to fight his way out from underneath for almost a week?

I still torch this dumb motherfucker for these shits.

chrondog wrote:Venezuela is a fantastic example of shitty socialism at work. The government seized much of the means of production and did fuck all with it. They turned oil revenues into nonsense dividends instead of infrastructure spending. They botched land reform and created tons of unproductive agricultural land. They postured in the foreign policy arena for domestic political points instead of enacting popular programs at home. Fuck the Venezuelan government. The people need sustenance, not ideology.

If anyone is interested, there is a really good podcast that The Dig put out a couple of weeks ago on Venezuela. It's essentially just a roundtable discussion with three academics (two of which have experience living in Caracas) that unpacks the current political crisis, puts into conversation with the changing politics of the region as a whole, and also gives a pretty good summary of the Bolivarian Revolution and the enduring political appeal of Chavismo within the working-class (or popular) urban barrios.

It's important to just place these events in their proper historical context. Venezuela was a corrupt, petrol-State prior to the socialist seizure of State power. Unfortunately, as Chrono points out, the political leadership did not effectively break the country's economic dependence on crude oil export markets. This is something that Chavez understood very well, but it was more politically convenient for his party to maintain the status quo rather than to risk completely remaking and transforming the domestic political economy in order to break their dependence on oil sales. Instead, they maintained their monopoly on State power through popular welfare programs, but once global oil commodity prices began to fall in recent years, the State revenue to maintain these programs went missing. Rather than risk scaling those programs back and sacrificing their political base, they kept on spending, which has created the inflationary crisis of today.

But using Venezuela to disprove socialism is as sensible as using Nigeria to disprove capitalism. The more significant factor in both cases is their over-reliance on a single export commodity and their history as a post-colonial nation, not their economic structure.

Chrono, you seem really fluent and comfortable in conversations around political economy. Is that something you've studied in the past? I have a relatively strong theoretical foundation in the field, but I get pretty lost when it comes to the practical workings of globalized financial capitalism. For example, the World Bank is getting ready to elect a new President and there are calls to appoint someone who is willing to reinstate the previous Bretton Woods system. Here is the article that I am referring to. I understand the basic argument, but I have a hard time following something like this:

But Keynes’s ICU was rejected. The United States was unwilling to replace the dollar as the anchor of the new monetary system. And so the IMF was downgraded to a bailout fund, the World Bank was limited to lending from its own reserves (contributed by stressed member states) and, crucially, any possibility of the IMF leveraging the World Bank’s investments (like a central bank might have done) was jettisoned.

Following large US trade deficits, then president Richard Nixon announced on 15 August 1971 the effective end of the Bretton Woods system – just as Keynes had predicted.

Immediately, the private banks, which the Bretton Woods system had been keeping under a lid, sprang up and the world was taken over by financialisation.

I would love to take a course just on global finance from that moment in 1971 into the present. Whenever I try to understand these things by myself, I get lost trying to understand the machinations of financial instruments like interest rate hikes or institutions like the European Central Bank, the IMF, etc., which really isn't my interest. All I really want to understand how these financial instruments/institutions function and mediate within the competing State forces of a globalized market system, but that can be really hard to do. I want to read Adam Tooze's book eventually, since it apparently does a really good job summarizing the history of finance capitalism since the recession in 2008, but slogging through 700 pages of that can be a bit much...

chrondog wrote:

techno raj wrote:It's flaws are real and I think you're not wrong that it feels especially callous to many people, but it has been associated with significant worldwide reduction in poverty. I don't know that there has been an alternative system that has done as well over that period.

I think this should be better acknowledged by Leftists. This is why we should support a mixed system! By taking the benefits of market capitalism and redistributing that wealth for social good, you're able to get the best of both worlds to some degree. That's why uncritical "capitalism is bad" takes by faux Marxists online are so damn stupid--they literally have no prescription or alternative. 

Capitalism is good for SOME people. If we have Democratic Socialism, we can make the most of that success for MORE people.

And finally, this is just really wrong.

First, it is definitely the case that capitalism (and its 19th century political companion of bourgeois liberal democracy) has created incredible amounts of wealth and technological innovation. No good Marxist would disagree that capitalism is a progressive historical force, but they would obviously point to its bloody frontiers of colonial resource extraction and exploitation, which is also directly implicated with the history of chattel slavery in the United States. Second, in the case of the United States and post-war Europe, there was a so-called 'golden period' of capitalism wherein the interests of laborers, capital, and the State found a common consensus. There were huge profits to be made in remaking the European continent and in creating the necessary manufacturing bases in the United States that, in turn, helped to lift generations of American families into the middle classes. But in the collapse of this consensus, which is what we are currently living in, it becomes difficult to understand where political consent for these systems is actually coming from. Basically, how do you explain working families supporting the corporate regulation (or 'de-regulation') of the economy at the same time as their own wages/incomes/net wealth are all either stagnant or declining?

And as for Chrono's point, the end goal of democratic socialism should always be to democratize ownership and abolish class. That doesn't mean it needs to start there and there can be definitely moments of effective and relatively stable compromise between the competing interests of labor and capital, which is maybe what we are currently seeing in the Scandinavian model. But the contradiction that exists at the core of these larger systems, which is what is Marx scientifically explains in his writing, is that capitalism relies upon laborers buying their own socially-mediated surplus labor from the capitalist classes. While nineteenth century 'wage-slavery' may have given way to salaried middle classes with 401(k) retirement plans, the essential contradiction remains.

David Harvey does a better job explaining this than I do though.

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