Category: Commentary, Critique, and Response

FROM THE AUSTRALIAN LEFT WING: (Learn Something)

FOR SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY

April 17th, 2018 by John Quiggin

—“As I mentioned a while ago, in the years that I’ve been blogging, I’ve described my political perspective as “social-democratic”. In earlier years, I mostly used “democratic socialist”.

My reason for the switch was that, in a market liberal/neoliberal era, the term “socialist” had become a statement of aspiration without any concrete meaning or any serious prospect of realisation. By contrast, “social democracy” represented the Keynesian welfare state I was defending against market liberal “reform”.

In the decade since the Global Financial Crisis, things have changed. Socialism still describes an aspiration, rather than a concrete political program, but an aspiration to a better society is what we need now as a positive response to the evident failure of neoliberalism.

On the other side of the ledger, nominally social democratic parties nearly all failed the test of the crisis, accepting to a greater or lesser degree to the politics of austerity. Some, like PASOK in Greece, have paid the price in full. Others, like Labor in Australia, are finally showing some spine. In practice, though, social democracy has come to stand, at best, for technocratic managerialism, and at worst for capitulation to the demands of financial capital.

So, I’ve changed the description of this blog’s perspective to socialist. I haven’t however, adopted the formulation “democratic socialist” which was used, in the 20th century, to emphasise a rejection of the Stalinist claim to have produced “actually existing socialism” in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. That’s no longer necessary.”—

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REPLY by CURT DOOLITTLE:

As has been true for most of the history of the modern world, the only serious threat to democracy is now coming from the right. So, it’s important to defend democracy as well as advancing the case for socialism.

So you’re a democratic (monopoly majoritarian), socialist (discretionary authoritarian rule) independent of (in conflict with) rule of law (non-discretionary rule), because you sponsor reproductive redistribution (dysgenics) despite regression to the polity mean, rather than reproductive meritocracy (eugenics) which circumvents regression to the mean, despite the rather obvious fact, that we can only choose between high trust highly redistributive small homogenous kin state (eugenics – europe), and large, low trust, corrupt, authoritarian heterogeneous polities (india, south america, southeast asia, and the muslim world).

And you do this in a world where technological, institutional, and geographic advantages are no longer competitive, and the principle difference between the wealth of groups (peoples, nations, countries, states) is demographic (eugenic vs dysgenic) and normative (the result of genetics) – and you do this without accounting for (and therefore cherry picking) the cumulative cost of that dysgenia (primarily intelligence, personality traits, and rates of reproductive maturity).

That just means you’re not a scientist, but a priest or philosopher driving your people to destruction, dark age, and despair as a means of escaping the near term cost of policing the most important capital humans have ever developed by the simple act of reproductive and migratory intolerance.

I mean. You really can’t get around it. That’s just what you’re doing. And you’re doing it for virtue signals from others, and yourself. It’s unearned virtue signaling, because it’s not creating any intertemporal capital – just consuming an inheritance you had nothing to do with producing.

We dragged the peasantry out of ignorance, superstition, poverty, starvation, hard labor, child mortality, early death, disease, the heat, the cold, and the vicissitudes of nature by consumer capitalism. That you (foolishly) attempted to construct extractions via non market activity (state, union, rebellion) against your own interests is merely evidence of your origins in the peasantry who cannot comprehend that their associative, reproductive, cooperative, commons, political, and military market value to those who we have so delivered from suffering, is near zero.

Virtue signaling and status climbing is what it is: admission of the cumulative failure of you and your ancestors to improve your inventory (ability), and you seek (quite unintentionally that is) to lower your betters (who are rewarded demonstrably for their service of others) to your level, because you will not (as is your inheritance) pay the high personal price of self, family, and kin reform.

The pseudoscientific era is done. The data is in. Marx, Freud, Boaz, Cantor, Adorno (and co.), and the french (postmodernists) provided a comforting fiction to retaliate against Maxwell, Poincare, Darwin, Spencer, and Nietzsche. Fictionalisms are cheap (pseudoscience, pseudo-rationalism, pseudo-historicism).

You can lie for a while, and do it cheaply, but science eventually makes its case: in the nature nurture debate, nurture can only go wrong. It can’t improve. Because 80% of everything, including your moral intuitions, and the reason you make your arguments, the result of your genetic inheritance, and your learning to negotiate (quite unconsciously) on its behalf. The problem is – you are the problem.