Voting Labour is not insane

Blogging will continue to be sparse over the next period.

Most people don't run the spreadsheet over party policies, preferring to rely upon gut feel and general impressions.

My personal impression of the Tories is summed up by Theresa May's unguarded remarks (to her neoliberal critics) that her 'Blue Labour' nationalist turn to the traditional (northern) working class was, in fact, the only way to save globalism. She has a point.

The Conservatives have run a cynical, patronising campaign. They initially thought Theresa May would appear impressive as a leader, but, as they say, 'she has been found out'.

In focus groups, when asked to compare political leaders to an animal, Corbyn is likened to 'a labrador'; May is described as 'a snake'.

In management terms I'd describe her as clearly stressed in the top job and showing little sign of growing into it. She lacks natural authority and vision. Most senior managers would not have assessed her as being ready for promotion - it was the referendum wot done it, removing the better-qualified 'remainer' candidates.

Turning to Labour, the powers-that-be have slung a lot of mud but little of it has stuck. This raises the question: what would a Corbyn administration look like?

Firstly off, it's plainly not going to abolish capitalism; it seems likely that it wouldn't even have the dogmatic idiocy to trash it à la Venezuela.

I suspect that once the dust had settled, the issue would be whether the new administration could find a different path for UK capitalism - and I think such an outline is faintly discernible.

1. The neoliberal global-interventionist thrust of UK policy since whenever might be further blunted. As it is, it's barely affordable. A foreign policy which is more Scandi might be the result (it could be termed 'minding your own business'). It's not clear the world would be a worse place as a result, to put it mildly.

2. Public services would be rebalanced: reorganised and somewhat-better funded. It is true that the economy has to grow - productivity has to grow - to afford ubiquitous public services. As immediate problems health and care for the elderly loom large; housing too.

But capitalists - especially globalised capitalists - are not much interested in those outcomes, their concern is rather valorising their rather large mountains of capital. The Tories are not trusted on mass-welfare issues - regardless of what they say - because people know instinctively that the rich really don't care, except defensively, to keep the masses from getting too excited.

I would like to think that the unfortunate statist DNA of a new Corbyn administration could be overcome. Wasn't it Lenin who identified the malign effects of monopolies as being one of the defining features of imperialism?

3. Taxation would be increased. The rich complain, but then they would .. after all, they are the ones who have the money. However, there is both a lot of ruin in a rich capitalist economy and far less elasticity of behaviour than is commonly argued by the rich and powerful, and their media mouthpieces.

It would do no harm to move some wealth from private hands to public services: it does not happen spontaneously or without some protests. The effects, if managed carefully, would not be dire.

I would also recommend that a Corbyn administration should encourage the development of the productive forces (a well-funded focus on R&D) - as Marx would have wanted.

So to summarise, I think an incoming Labour Government would effect a rebalancing and redirecting of UK capitalism; that Corbyn himself would be a Reaganesque figure, an affable front man; and that there would be significant visionary and operational talent behind him to execute the new course*.

A Theresa May government, by contrast, would flatter to deceive - mouthing the words while actually implementing under the hood a continuing neoliberal governance model in alliance with the US administration.

I believe Stephen Hawking agrees with me.

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* People might say - evidence? - but power has a way of attracting talent, and nothing here violates core Labour norms and values.

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Putting thought experiments to one side, is any of this going to happen in this election?

Not a chance.

This ritualisation of Marxism is getting tiresome

Another day and the Labour leadership will be asked once again whether they "agree with Marx". They will reply - again! - that there is a lot to learn from Marx, but that he was wrong about some things.

And they will be right.

I have been reading: "Globalisation: A Systematic Marxian Account" by the excellent Tony Smith,

Amazon link

and I have read no other account of globalisation so sophisticated, profound or analytic (a detailed review here).

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We all want some kind of roadmap, a clue as to where human civilisation is heading in the twenty first century. Smith reviews four contemporary theories:

• Traditional social-democracy: capitalism plus a redistributive national state
• Neoliberalism: emphasising the benign power of global markets
• The "catalytic state": exemplified by the Chinese activist-state model
• A putative 'democratic world-state' checking the power of global capital.

All these models assume global capitalism and seek to ameliorate its more perverse or dire effects, those currently creating the popular backlash against the dominant neoliberal ideology - so-called 'populism'.

Smith then cruelly eviscerates each of these models, giving a master-class elaboration of the Marxist approach to economics. It might help to have read Michael Heinrich's "An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital" first.

Amazon link

Such criticism is fine: indeed, a breath of fresh air. Where Marxism fails is not so much in the analysis - who could deny that the 'structures' of society are, in any deep analysis, highly-sophisticated protocols of systematised (but malleable) human behaviour? - but in the remedy.

Describing capitalism for what it is should be ethically-neutral .. in the tradition of scientific analysis.No Marxist analysis has, for example, demonstrated that capitalism would collapse through its own inner nature through some terminal crisis.

But Marxists then add something new and extraneous: an ethical criticism.

They claim that capitalism is inherently unfair, oppressive and - dare I say it? - evil. In opposition, a communitarian solution is proposed (although the Marxist tradition was - and is - understandably sketchy on the details).

The model of future-communism is seldom subject to the level of rigorous criticism correctly bestowed on capitalism, but if it was, it would be understood to be an impossibility. It presupposes a biological human nature which does not exist.

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There have been precisely zero attempts to integrate Marxism with current understanding of human (evolutionary) psychology, genetics or genomics. Attempts to do so are disavowed as if some category error is being proposed. Marxist blank-slatism reacts with horror to the idea that there could even be such a thing as human nature, detachable from specific and historic relations of production and exchange.

Such a lack of seriousness: the sure hallmarks of an ideology to be taken on faith.

If we learned one thing from Marx, let alone from the Stalinist experience, it's that lack of development of the productive forces is the root of all evil. Conversely, as capitalism increases those forces seemingly without limit, who can predict - yes, who? - as to how future-humanity may be able to organise itself?

In the meantime, let's just crack on and increase those productive forces, while ameliorating the consequences of their current inadequacy.*

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* Yep, a lot of people think that. And then the arguments start 😟 ..