Greed, oligarchy and Marx

Earlier we looked at electoral post-mortems by some on the Right. And last time, we scrutinized the whole range of Electoral College possibilities, in case there turn out to be forty+ republican electors who are simultaneously patriotic, moral and sane... which these fellows deem to be highly unlikely.

Only now let’s do a sudden veer! Taking you into an unexpected direction by citing a name you thought relegated to the dustbin of history. It seems likely that, during the centennial year of his greatest victory, we'll be hearing more of him.

Karl Marx. Nothing puzzled the father of tendentious-socialist theory, more than the USA. Every time America seemed about to tip into his scenario of the "next phase" - capitalist-oligarchic rule - and from there, on trajectory for communist revolution, we somehow used politics to institute reforms, restoring health to the middle and staunching any thought of class warfare. 

The adjustments made under Teddy Roosevelt and others confused Marx, because politics wasn't supposed to be able to do that. Did this constitute “buying off” the working class? If so, later (Franklin) Rooseveltean Reforms did it even better. So well, in fact, that the entire Baby Boomer generation grew up unable even to picture in their minds something taken for granted by nearly all other generations across 4000 years: class war.

To be clear, the notion of class war was second nature to almost all of our ancestors.  Peasants would hide their harvests from the feudal lord or the confiscating commissar. Those exploiters would swoop in and take whatever they liked, sometimes spurring fierce resistance, even revolution. Marx gained a following because of this expectation. Only in the FDR era and especially post-war, did a generation rise up that took for granted the very opposite. That the rich are just like us. And that a lower middle class worker is just a future rich-dude, whose ship hasn't yet come in.

Despite these American Setbacks, Marxists were confident that such alternative paths would ultimately fail. Oligarchs cannot leave any social contract alone. Greed is a central human attractor state, as is feudalism. The Rooseveltean compact would be betrayed, and Marx described how.

He wrote of how elites stir populist resentment among the lumpen proletariat, using racism and machismo and anti-intellectualism to divert and distract. The Prussian “junkers” lords thought they were clever by supporting (gleefully at first, then to their regret) fascism in 1930s Germany. As French nobles did in the 1780s, and Roman Senators, much earlier. (As if aristocrats are ever truly as smart as they think they are.)

That pattern was vastly more common than our recent experiment in politically fine-tuned class peace. Hence, Marxists felt confident that the savvy AFL-CIO negotiators who erased class conflict in the 1950s would be replaced by lesser minds, who would take their eye off the ball. 

So, is Marx coming back into pertinence? As a topic at least, if not inspiration? See the recently released Karl Marx: Greatness and Illusion by Gareth Stedman Jones.

We need to step back and look at the big picture, as Dr. Sally J. Goerner does, in her recent Evonomics piece: Why Trump-Sanders Phenomenon Signals an Oligarchy on the Brink of a Civilization-Threatening Collapse: Oligarchies tend to win, except when society enacts effective reforms. Her historically verified assertion: “…oligarchies always collapse because they are designed to extract wealth from the lower levels of society, concentrate it at the top, and block adaptation by concentrating oligarchic power as well.” 

Our difficult task, maintaining a civilization of empowered citizenship -- the "diamond-shaped social structure" about which I often speak – requires constant effort, not only to fight each generation’s oligarchic putsch, but also to avoid the opposite calamity of monolithic socialism… which has always led to just more feudalism under a different vocabulary. (Just because Marx had insights, that did not make him right.)

Our quandary was well described by the famous historians Will and Ariel Durant, in The Lessons of History.  

"…the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, 

which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth

or by revolution distributing poverty.”  

Goerner suggests that: 
   “We have forgotten the lessons of the 1760s, 1850s, and 1920s. We have let Economic Royalists hijack our democracy, and turn our economy into their money machine. Now the middle class is evaporating, infrastructure is crumbling, and pressure is reaching a breaking point. Anti-establishment candidates are on the rise, and no one knows how things will turn out.

“What then shall we do? The first step is to remember that our times also hold a positive possibility – a transformation akin to those which followed 1776, 1865, and 1945. Honest reformers from education and agriculture to energy and finance are already reinventing their fields.”

The irony in all this is that our greatest need, at present, is not redistribution of wealth. (Though note that the American Founders seized and redistributed up to a third of all the land in the original 13 colonies. And it could come to that, again.) 

No, we can probably accomplish enough of a reset simply through transparency! Elsewhere, I describe how simply making open and clear who owns what would enable all modern systems to work better, even without any modifications in law. Certainly without any increase in taxes.

But back to us aging, grumpy white male boomers, who pulled this year's latest, nasty trick on our far-better children.  The Trumpists want to "Make America Great Again," without ever specifying when that "again" refers to. But the implication is they're thinking of the 1950s, when the Greatest Generation that overcame Depression and Hitler contained communism and built vast-productive enterprises that made us wealthy enough to turn our attention to old-bad habits like racism. Got that right?

Except the Greatest Generation did all that under high, New Deal tax rates. Labor unions were were strong and admired. And the wealthiest Americans were only a few hundred times as rich - effectively - as average folks. And the Greatest Generation's favorite living human was a person reviled now by all right wing media... Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Yeah. Then.  

== Proof that the left contains loons, as well ==

Okay, so I raised the issue of once and future terms like communism.That doesn't mean I want it back!  It is a horrendously simpleminded religion that ignores everything from Darwinian selection to biology to how actual human beings function.  Indeed, one of the right's many crimes is the way that have started to make class war pertinent again, elevating an oligarchic caste whose very stupidity ensures Marxism's return.

Does today's left contain dogmatic partisans? There are stunning rationalizations that the Democrats had abandoned the middle class, like this article, in which every paragraph makes a statement that is either misleading or false. Refuted in this piece, which almost get it right.

No, the chief difference between the parties is that the Democrats contain some far-left loons. While today’s entire American right wing consists of such. There is all the world’s difference between “contains” and “consists,” as well as between “far” and “entire."

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't glance, occasionally in all directions. Anyone who has spent time on a university campuse knows that PC bullies and maniacs do exist.  They provide the ammo that Fox has used to tar the vast majority of American liberals – the last clade of progress-loving, positive-sum, pragmatic-reforming citizens that remains in the republic. Moreover, while we may be allies with the Left, we should never take our eyes off them. Indeed, making that distinction will always be our first step toward winning back our confederate neighbors. Persuading them to choose to be Americans again.

== Speaking of the economy ==

It’s not just urban vs. Rural. Or race or gender or even the top correlate - education level. And yes, the almost three million more voters who picked Hillary Clinton, smashing all records for public will, stymied by both cheating and the Electoral College.  

The strongest correlation appears to be wherever economic activity is vibrant, healthy and vigorous. From: Donald Trump lost most of the American economy this election, in The Washington Post:  

“The divide is economic, and it is massive. According to the Brookings analysis, the less-than-500 counties that Clinton won nationwide combined to generate 64 percent of America's economic activity in 2015. The more-than-2,600 counties that Trump won combined to generate 36 percent of the country's economic activity last year. Clinton, in other words, carried nearly two-thirds of the American economy,” writes Jim Tankersley.

One can take it several ways… that the outcome reflects comeuppance for elite snobbery toward Regular America who’s been snubbed and left behind. Or else, that Red America was taking revenge, for the fact that their children – the brightest members of every high school graduating class – go hurrying to the America of lights, universities, entrepreneurship and all that.

It's cultural. 

== A human lifetime ==

And finally... It isn’t just NATO and Pax Americana and global trade that made the last 70 years the best in the history of our species. The world and national systems crafted by geniuses like George Marshall also gave one entire, massive generation of Americans a social order that was incredibly flat by historical standards, as well as increasingly inclusive, with each passing decade. So flat (as described above) that we boomers were the first ever to imagine that ‘class war’ was permanently behind us. A delusion that’s been exploited expertly by the folks at Fox.   

And yet, looking back to George Marshall’s era from the Time of Trump, I have an even deeper concern:

What will happen to America’s crown jewel — our 70 year dominance in creativity, R&D and science? With almost every American scientist - along with nearly all the teachers, economists, medical doctors and all the other knowledge castes - deeply fearful about a Trump presidency, there is one clade that seems to be jubilant over his victory. 

No, it is not the traditional republican oligarchy. (Rupert Murdoch has good reasons to fret, that we’ll get into later.)

No, the delighted ones appear to be — foreign despots. 

Oligarchy, predators & parasites: what the New Feudalists would be doing now, if they had sense.

Evonomics is burgeoning rapidly into the go-to place where sane-insightful sages discuss what's gone wrong with modern capitalism. Not from any leftist or hostile perspective, but with an eye to rescuing the goose that has laid our golden eggs -- truly creative-competitive enterprise. These top folks refute the notion that our struggles are "left vs right." Market economics can be saved, and generate the vast (and efficient) wealth enabling us to redouble generosity, if it is again made to be flat-open-fair.

Take this interview with Michael Hudson, author of Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy. Wherein the agenda is not to oppose competitive capitalism... rather the parasitical manipulators who Adam Smith himself denounced as markets' worst enemies... and have been for 6000 years.

Predators and Parasites: In Evonomics, Prof. David Sloan Wilson interviews Lynn Stout - Distinguished Professor of Corporate and Business Law at the Cornell – on the hoary mythology spread decades ago by Milton Friedman, that the only purpose of a modern corporation is to maximize short term value to stockholders. A cancerous dogma that is at last being dissected, disproved on every level and demolished. 

For example, Wilson cites a major study which monitored the survival of 136 firms starting from the time they initiated their public offering on the U.S. Stock Market. Five years later, the survivors—by a wide margin—were firms that did best by their employees.

Other critics show that Friedman’s cult encourages companies into short-term thinking and stock buy-backs instead of investing in new products – eating their seed corn – which is exactly the opposite of what we were promised by “supply side” zealots. Then there are “externalities” where corporations will ignore the needs of our children (e.g a less-toxic planet) unless regulated into taking such factors into account, in pricing.

== Sure, oligarchs want oligarchy. But can it be smart? ==

Here’s a perfect IQ test for the 0.001% aristocrats. Are you uber-oligarchs capable of noticing when greed may tip way beyond mere economic stupidity and immorality into life threatening self-destruction? When - as happened many times in the past - insatiable top-down class war could wind up taking you on a tumbrel ride toward guillotines? 

This fascinating open letter from a rich man to his fellow zillionaires makes a point that was stated eloquently by Joseph Kennedy, to explain why that ruthlessly self-serving mogul supported FDR during the Great Depression: “I’d rather lose half my fortune to help raise a healthy and contented middle class than lose it all to revolution.” 

In other words. Self-interest should look to farther horizons.

Hence, looking ahead, Nick Hanauer - a Seattle-based entrepreneur and early Amazon investor - published an “Ultra-rich man’s letter: To My Fellow Filthy Rich Americans. The Pitchforks Are Coming.”

“Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship. And what do I see in our future now? I see pitchforks. At the same time that people like you and me are thriving beyond the dreams of any plutocrats in history, the rest of the country—the 99.99 percent—is lagging far behind…. Unless our policies change dramatically, the middle class will disappear, and we will be back to late 18th-century France. Before the revolution.”

Nor is Hanauer alone. Among U.S. billionaires and sub-billionaires, those who got rich through technological innovation, through delivery of new and popular goods and services, have increasingly expressed the same worry.  They became wealthy working side by side with creative, middle class engineers, scientists, artists, etc. Moreover, they increasingly find present trends — set in motion largely by “supply side” so-called 'economics' — to be deeply destructive and dangerous voodoo.  

Which is ironic to a stunning degree; they are the only billionaires who did use Bush tax cuts to invest in productive innovations and goods. Yet they are nearly all now democrats, calling for an end to those tax cuts.

It is the other branch of uber-wealth — those who got it via Wall Street parasitism, resource extraction-exploitation, capturing regulators or inheritance — who seem mostly unable to read the writing on the wall.  While congratulating themselves that they are geniuses, they happily ignore lessons of history.

I might add that any ‘angry peasants’ in the future will be far better armed than the 1789 Jacobins. Forget torches and pitchforks. Many will have fancy tools of cyber or genetic or chemical engineering. ISIS is a joke compared to what an enraged American technical caste could do, if (no, when) they ever wake up and rediscover that every human generation except the Baby Boomers knew class war.

Boomers grew up in an illusion of classlessness because the Rooseveltean reforms enacted by the Greatest Generation were so spectacularly successful! And another such moderate/pragmatic reset is still possible, reviving healthy-competitive market enterprise while re-invigoration the great middle. That is, if the oligarchy listen to folks like Hanauer.

== Farmers awaken ==

Nor is Hanauer alone. We know that most of the tech billionaires have joined Warren Buffet in rejecting the winner-takes-all mantra of Fox-style economics. But how about midwest agri-business leaders?

Greg Page is executive chairman and former CEO of Cargill, Inc., the largest private company in the U.S. Page participated in the high-level “Risk Committee” of top business leaders that forecast the US economy could suffer damages running into the hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century due to climate change.

Page describes the northward movement of the American agricultural belt. As average temperatures have risen over the past decades, the growing season in the northern plains has expanded, while heat waves further south baked America’s traditional agriculture producing states like Iowa, Oklahoma, Nebraska and Texas.

These explorations continue on the Evonomics site. In this article economist Sally J. Goerner elucidates why the “Trump-Sanders Phenomenon Signals an Oligarchy on the Brink of a Civilization-Threatening Collapse.” Goerner maintains that: “oligarchies always collapse because they are designed to extract wealth from the lower levels of society, concentrate it at the top, and block adaptation by concentrating oligarchic power as well.” 

History shows that this tendency can be periodically corrected. If done in a moderate but determined way, the public will mobilize behind honest leaders and effective reforms. 

Or as Will and Ariel Durant wrote in The Story of Civilization: "…the unstable equilibrium generates a critical situation, which history has diversely met by legislation redistributing wealth or by revolution distributing poverty.”   

Of course we know why the oligarchy has tried so hard to turn lower middle class anger toward all the meritocratic professions. Especially toward the technology castes. Get working class whites to despise modernity and scientists, doctors, teachers, journalists, economists, civil servants… hey it worked in 1930s Germany and in the Confederate south. And look how well those turned out.

This is why the tech billionaires… most of them… are democrats nowadays. As would be Adam Smith, if he were alive today. They want an FDR to get them out of this bind, and not a Robespierre. And it is why we must pry the hands of the other kind of oligarch — those who fail this IQ test — off of society’s tiller. If theses guys are so rich, why ain’t they smart?

== What they'd be doing now, if they truly were smart ==

Some of you may recall a scene in Existence, set at a Swiss Alps meeting of the Trillionaires' oligarchy? I portrayed what I think aristos would be doing now, if they were both smart and wanted to restore feudalism, without repeating the same damned mistakes that feudalism made across 6000 years. 

Do I oppose feudalism? With all my soul. But so did Machiavelli, fighting for the Florentine Republic. Then, when it was clear there was no hope at all and all was finished, he got employment trying to talk the artistos into at least being smart about it. 

(Hint, I am willing, under carefully defined circumstances, to consult discretely on this matter, with some exceptional suggestions... accompanied by a wagging of fingers. And if finger-wags deter you guys from seeking the best ideas - and I have the best - then you'll deserve what inevitably happens to you.)
Alas, there's a quandary here. The smartest billionaires today want nothing to do with feudalist trends. But feudalist trends are powerful in themselves and favor the dumb rapacious kind. The type who will never hold meetings of the kind I portrayed in Existence. 

Indeed, it is doubtful that many of them read. Yet they hire flatterers to tell them how smart they are.

Thus proving the very opposite.

== Right vs Left Solutions ==

How shall we measure politics? According to hoary, insipidly lobotomizing metaphors like “left-vs-right,” which none of you could properly define, even if your lives depended on it? 

Or according to what we really need, today, which is pragmatic flexibility – a willingness to drop stale dogmas and do what’s right for our children and the world? Okay, then dig this… the Obama Administration – backed up my many modern environmentalists –is exploring ways to help the U.S. nuclear industry survive and keep reactors running, to weather hard times brought by cheap natural gas.

Mind you, that cheap gas is a huge improvement over relying on filthy coal. And the long term solution is looming fast, with solar, wind, tidal and storage power becoming economical faster than even optimists expected. Still, nuclear is now viewed much more favorably by techno-liberals, starting some years ago with Stewart Brand and others, but increasingly by mainline environmental groups.

Oh, they are still wary!  And problems with spent fuel are worrisome. And we can argue which newer “better” fuel cycles deserve investment. But keeping currently clean, already running nuclear plants going would seem blatantly in our interest.

Moreover, this shift by liberals is diametrically opposite to their political opponents on the right, who cannot even begin to ponder changing their minds in the face of evidence. About anything. Ever. It is genetically impossible. 

And that – rather than any “left” or “right” nostrum – is the real difference in U.S. politics today.