No matter the political or economic system, what is to be avoided is the concentration of power, both “soft” and “hard”. Alas, I’m more convinced than ever before that this is a feature of homo sapiens, and not a bug.
This is why you have to insure the alignment of direct stakeholders and not overly broaden it above those who are directly impacted. You never want the same guy selling your food to be the same guy that verifies that it is safe.
A Stakeholder Socialist system, I think, is that ideal as it utilizes coöp commonwealths, democratic workerplaces, muti-stakeholder and syndicated ownership models, and federated levels of oversight such that power only escalates for things necessary and narrowly at that scope like interconnected grids or safety in international food trade.
The fundamental problem with stakeholder socialism isn’t the ideas, it’s the reality that the ideas need to supervene on. If you tried to apply this model to the USA today, there would be such a massive disparity in what we can do versus what we actually need that you would need some way to collate all the information and plan a path towards sustainability. And that’s a central planning function. Remember that Marx wasn’t advocating central planning because it was inherently good and exactly what socialism is. He was advocating for it because it’s what is necessary to get us from where we are today to where it becomes to apply a distributed, dynamic, horizontal system like you’re proposing. We all know the problems with horiontalism - existing imbalances will threaten equilibrium and horizontal attempts to address them will create systemic oscillations that will threaten the entire system’s stability. Most horizontal systems collapse into a perverse vertical system with the power elite being defined by those who were sociopathic enough to destroy the horizontal system for their own benefit.
Instead, a centralized system needs to be designed and adapted over time to manage the extant imbalances in society, and indeed between the society and the larger world, until such time as the imbalances become small enough in magnitude to horizontal power structures can remain stable. But since we have literally never seen a stable sustainable horizontal system work at the scale of a single society for a couple centuries, we don’t even have good theories as to what makes them stable and how they can fail and what we can about those failure modes. We need to test these horizontal systems out, gather analyses, and get empirical data about failure modes. And to do that? Yup. Central system. Unless of course we’re OK with one of the failure modes being a return of sociopathy qua state bring out a new form of megalomaniacal fascism and forcing everyone back into a arms race for survival. I’m not, which is why I support a centralized governing function.
I agree that social hierarchies are a feature of homo sapiens, hence why any good form of governance should be based on restricting our worst instincts. That’s what the original liberalism improved with the separation of political power into executive, legislative, and judicate branches. Unfortunately, the same was not done for economic power, which - most liberal democracies - allowed to keep concentrating with few to no safeguards.
The entire point of liberal “democracies” is to provide the conditions so that capitalists could concentrate wealth and power without meddling from the nobility class of feudalism.
This is not a bad take, but I think there is no point other than propaganda for the simple structure of those who have the most get to get the most.
A great example of this is the French revolution that just transferred wealth and power from one ruling class to another. Democracy and Liberty is just a window dressing to this reality, a way to placate the masses if you will.
Not exactly. Liberals are very consistent in what they define as liberty, it’s just that this definition of liberty only matters to the wealthy. If you’re not wealthy you will suffer immensely under Liberalism. This is different than what came before Liberalism. Before Liberalism was monarchy and hereditary aristocracy. They knew they were concentrating wealth and therefore they had to provide public welfare for the peasants (nobilesse oblige). But Liberals wanted that wealth to be more fluid, to change hands, and to become a form of competition where the best could win their fortune and do what they pleased with it. They really did think that not being able to buy a castle for cash was a reduction in liberty and an affront to universal human rights. But they also thought that nobilesse oblige was also an affront to individual autonomy. They wanted all peasants to be “free” to work for whoever would pay them the most, and whoever paid them would have zero obligation to them at all.
And that’s what they got. The rich and the poor alike are free now. Free to sleep under a bridge or to buy a private island. Free to trade their labor for a wage or free to invest their fortunes in weapons manufacturing and hedge it with commodities in oil, gold, and food. Free to send their children to enriching experiences all over the world or to have them working two jobs and failing school to help the family survive. Free to work in coal mines or uranium mines or to buy and sell coal mines or uranium mines.
I really like what you have to say here. I have often wrestled with the real meaning of liberty that explains what the rhetoric really means. I think liberty is the absence of rules, laws, and regulations. Freedom from these things but not really freedom as most people have come to believe its meaning. This is a toxic form of freedom that informs us we are only free as we have money.
We even have sayings that support this worldview like “Fuck you” money. The type of money that would allow you to walk away from any situation. It is the ultimate in freedom in US society. This says a lot about our culture.
It not just US culture. Liberalism was born in Europe. Locke put it into high minded abstract philosophy but before Locke there were so many people, all wealthy merchants who could afford printing press time, who would put out arguments that basically said “I have money but the king won’t let me buy land because he says it’s only for nobility with titles. Well fuck that! What about the nobility I earned through human trafficking?! I should have just as much power, or more even, then some inbred aristocrat!”
That was all over Europe. Hell, the wealthiest merchants even bought charters from kings to create their own cities and run them like liberal experiments, which is where a lot of liberal ideas and practices were incubated. The idea of fuck you money was a dream in the heads of European merchants and bankers for centuries.
The US is just an extension of Europe anyway, so it shouldn’t really be a surprise.
No matter the political or economic system, what is to be avoided is the concentration of power, both “soft” and “hard”. Alas, I’m more convinced than ever before that this is a feature of homo sapiens, and not a bug.
This is why you have to insure the alignment of direct stakeholders and not overly broaden it above those who are directly impacted. You never want the same guy selling your food to be the same guy that verifies that it is safe.
A Stakeholder Socialist system, I think, is that ideal as it utilizes coöp commonwealths, democratic workerplaces, muti-stakeholder and syndicated ownership models, and federated levels of oversight such that power only escalates for things necessary and narrowly at that scope like interconnected grids or safety in international food trade.
The fundamental problem with stakeholder socialism isn’t the ideas, it’s the reality that the ideas need to supervene on. If you tried to apply this model to the USA today, there would be such a massive disparity in what we can do versus what we actually need that you would need some way to collate all the information and plan a path towards sustainability. And that’s a central planning function. Remember that Marx wasn’t advocating central planning because it was inherently good and exactly what socialism is. He was advocating for it because it’s what is necessary to get us from where we are today to where it becomes to apply a distributed, dynamic, horizontal system like you’re proposing. We all know the problems with horiontalism - existing imbalances will threaten equilibrium and horizontal attempts to address them will create systemic oscillations that will threaten the entire system’s stability. Most horizontal systems collapse into a perverse vertical system with the power elite being defined by those who were sociopathic enough to destroy the horizontal system for their own benefit.
Instead, a centralized system needs to be designed and adapted over time to manage the extant imbalances in society, and indeed between the society and the larger world, until such time as the imbalances become small enough in magnitude to horizontal power structures can remain stable. But since we have literally never seen a stable sustainable horizontal system work at the scale of a single society for a couple centuries, we don’t even have good theories as to what makes them stable and how they can fail and what we can about those failure modes. We need to test these horizontal systems out, gather analyses, and get empirical data about failure modes. And to do that? Yup. Central system. Unless of course we’re OK with one of the failure modes being a return of sociopathy qua state bring out a new form of megalomaniacal fascism and forcing everyone back into a arms race for survival. I’m not, which is why I support a centralized governing function.
I agree that social hierarchies are a feature of homo sapiens, hence why any good form of governance should be based on restricting our worst instincts. That’s what the original liberalism improved with the separation of political power into executive, legislative, and judicate branches. Unfortunately, the same was not done for economic power, which - most liberal democracies - allowed to keep concentrating with few to no safeguards.
The entire point of liberal “democracies” is to provide the conditions so that capitalists could concentrate wealth and power without meddling from the nobility class of feudalism.
This is not a bad take, but I think there is no point other than propaganda for the simple structure of those who have the most get to get the most.
A great example of this is the French revolution that just transferred wealth and power from one ruling class to another. Democracy and Liberty is just a window dressing to this reality, a way to placate the masses if you will.
Not exactly. Liberals are very consistent in what they define as liberty, it’s just that this definition of liberty only matters to the wealthy. If you’re not wealthy you will suffer immensely under Liberalism. This is different than what came before Liberalism. Before Liberalism was monarchy and hereditary aristocracy. They knew they were concentrating wealth and therefore they had to provide public welfare for the peasants (nobilesse oblige). But Liberals wanted that wealth to be more fluid, to change hands, and to become a form of competition where the best could win their fortune and do what they pleased with it. They really did think that not being able to buy a castle for cash was a reduction in liberty and an affront to universal human rights. But they also thought that nobilesse oblige was also an affront to individual autonomy. They wanted all peasants to be “free” to work for whoever would pay them the most, and whoever paid them would have zero obligation to them at all.
And that’s what they got. The rich and the poor alike are free now. Free to sleep under a bridge or to buy a private island. Free to trade their labor for a wage or free to invest their fortunes in weapons manufacturing and hedge it with commodities in oil, gold, and food. Free to send their children to enriching experiences all over the world or to have them working two jobs and failing school to help the family survive. Free to work in coal mines or uranium mines or to buy and sell coal mines or uranium mines.
Freedom. Liberty. Achieved. Liberalism actually really believes that.
But yes, they also used it as propaganda to get the peasants to fight on their behalf.
I really like what you have to say here. I have often wrestled with the real meaning of liberty that explains what the rhetoric really means. I think liberty is the absence of rules, laws, and regulations. Freedom from these things but not really freedom as most people have come to believe its meaning. This is a toxic form of freedom that informs us we are only free as we have money.
We even have sayings that support this worldview like “Fuck you” money. The type of money that would allow you to walk away from any situation. It is the ultimate in freedom in US society. This says a lot about our culture.
It not just US culture. Liberalism was born in Europe. Locke put it into high minded abstract philosophy but before Locke there were so many people, all wealthy merchants who could afford printing press time, who would put out arguments that basically said “I have money but the king won’t let me buy land because he says it’s only for nobility with titles. Well fuck that! What about the nobility I earned through human trafficking?! I should have just as much power, or more even, then some inbred aristocrat!”
That was all over Europe. Hell, the wealthiest merchants even bought charters from kings to create their own cities and run them like liberal experiments, which is where a lot of liberal ideas and practices were incubated. The idea of fuck you money was a dream in the heads of European merchants and bankers for centuries.
The US is just an extension of Europe anyway, so it shouldn’t really be a surprise.