Three articles I read recently contain such valuable lessons for critical thinking that for my end-of-month analysis I want to summarize them for you and extract for you the general lessons you can learn from them, so you can apply them to every question in your life (whether political, philosophical, professional, or personal).
Election Polling
I’ll go straight to the spoiler and explain the one about election polling. Here the article to read is Ed Kilgore’s analysis in “Polling Errors Won’t Necessarily Help Trump This Time” for the Intelligencer.
Everyone is freaking out over how close the election polls are, and even over fractions of a percent or a percentile lead for one candidate or another. But the fact is: no poll has shown any difference between the candidates that exceeds their margin of error. Which means the polls are actually giving us no data about who will win (the Polymarket thing, meanwhile, is being rigged by shadow money and thus is useless data). And this is because polls are fuzzy instruments—they have wide margins of error because they do not have reliable access to the data, and have to use complicated tricks to build guesses at what the data really is. It’s rather like when we thought there were canals on Mars because telescopes were exceeding their resolution.
Stated margins are calculated expectations of this error; but a poll’s real margin of error can exceed what is calculated, because of factors they aren’t even including in the math (or aren’t including correctly). We have seen this in election polls increasingly the last few cycles: polls have proven to be way off in 2016 and 2020, when we got a complete look at the actual data (when we got to count the actual votes the pollsters were trying to get at). They were wrong by more than their combined margin of error could account for—but within or close to the margin for an average individual poll. So you need to take the margins of error seriously. If it’s close and they say it’s +/-3%, that means unless they show a candidate over six points ahead of another, you should assume the poll got “no result,” and we simply do not know who will win.
But this isn’t even the problem at issue now. Well, it is. But it’s worse than that.
Because, in fact, polls are not just a count of who said what. Maybe most of my readers know this already. But just in case any don’t, I need to explain this: polls try to find a way to ask people who they will vote for by randomizing who they will ask. Traditionally this is done by random phone dialing. Because, for example, an internet poll is never a random sample, because of the biases of who is on the internet, who is looking at that specific poll, who is motivated to take the time to take the poll, and even who has been flying-monkeyed by an influencer to swamp the poll, and so on. But phone dialing is no longer reliable: too many people don’t answer their phone anymore. Many don’t talk to pollsters (Who has the time? Who trusts strangers pretending to be pollsters?). Many don’t even have phones. Many have multiple phone numbers. Many hide their numbers. Many numbers are fake. Etc. (see “The Problem with Polls” at PBS).
So pollsters have started having to build models of the polled population and fix their results to the model. So, for instance, if after they collect all their data (the people who answered), they find there are, let’s say, half as many black people as a genuinely random sample should have collected, they need to count each black person who answered twice, to “guess” that the ones they didn’t reach will break the same way. Which is not a safe assumption. So the models get even more complex, using other data and mathematics to account for all the ways that assumption could be wrong. And so on. And they do this for every demographic they track. And all of this often isn’t accurate either (for instance, people will refuse to answer demographic questions, or lie about the answer or get it wrong). So the models get more and more complex. So when a poll says, say, 20% of registered black voters say they will vote for Candidate 1, that is not “for every 100 registered black voters we asked, 20 said that.” Rather, it is a guess at how many registered black voters would say that, if they had been able to ask them. And likewise all the way down the line (young voters, old voters, college educated, urban, rural; whatever the comparative data asked for). And notice: a poll that collects no demographic data (and just asks for the vote) will be the most inaccurate poll of all, because it is blind to all the ways it is failing to collect reliable data.
And then, here’s the kicker. You know what pollsters also do to correct for likely error? Ah. Yeah. They build corrections into their models based on past election-cycle polling errors. That’s right. Because polls undercounted Trump voters in 2016 and 2020, the polls today are being adjusted up for Trump, on the assumption the same errors are in today’s data. Think about that for a moment before it hits you. You may have been worried because, “OMG, the polls undercounted Trump by two or even four percentiles before, so a dead heat today actually means Trump is ahead by two or even four percentiles!” But that’s fallacious. Because the polls being reported to you today already made that adjustment (or whatever adjustment their model determined; it might not be a straight add like that).
It is therefore more likely Trump votes are below what is being reported. And you can give many reasons why. The electorate and conditions have so changed since 2016 and 2020 that it is folly to assume the same error trend holds today as then. For example, this is the first election cycle in American history in which literally hundreds of Republican leaders are literally endorsing the Democrat to get rid of Trump, while rank-and-file Trump voters are no longer shy about admitting it (reducing dishonest and non-response biases), due to the campaign’s “Overton Window” swing towards open endorsement of rage, racism, sexism, and conspiracy theories (giving motive and permission to voters to proudly say to pollsters whatever they want). So, one might argue, it is not as likely that we are undercounting Trump voters by much this cycle. And Kilgore reports that studies show “there are signs the Trump vote is now being captured fully.”
And there are lots of ways this could be showing up in the math. For example, Kilgore quotes Nate Silver pointing out that one technique for correcting for past polling error, called “weighting on recalled vote,” has a specific reliability problem. In this technique, the pollster asks who the polled voter voted for in the last election, which the statisticians can then check against the actual vote count in the last election, and thus have a check on whether their random sampling was off, and then correct for that deviation with more weighting (just as with my “undercounted black voters” example). But as Silver points out, we have data confirming that “people often misremember or misstate whom they voted for and are more likely to say they voted for the winner,” which would be Biden in this case. “That could plausibly bias the polls against Ms. Harris because people who say they voted for Mr. Biden but actually voted for Mr. Trump will get flagged as new Trump voters when they aren’t.” Ooops.
Another example noted is that Trump’s gains among Hispanic voters tend to be among young men—who are the least likely to actually vote. So the “numbers” suggest he’ll get a lot more Hispanic votes—but in reality, since past data show that a lot of young men who claim they will vote, won’t, that might not materialize, or not by as large a margin as pollsters counted (this is exactly what happened to Bernie Sanders). Pollsters know this, but there isn’t any reliable way to account for registered voters lying to them. They could try to build-in previous rates of deviation between claims and actual votes, but which polls are doing that? And is the previously determined rate still the case? Things have changed so much, who knows? Younger voters have started rising in participation rates, thus defying expectations from the data. But is this increased participation skewed by race? By party? By issue? Point is, the instrument is blurry. So results within even calculated margins of error are not results at all. You shouldn’t even report the numbers. You should just say “results inconclusive.”
Knowing all this about polls will help you be a better critical thinker about this kind of mass public polling data. It is never anymore a straight count of who said what. It is a generated guess as to who would say that, based on complex mathematical models, and which model any given poll is using may make a difference in any given case as to how reliable it even is on whatever you want to know. The models can be wrong. The models can overlook important factors. The models can create biases in a fallacious effort to reduce them. And so on. This is why it is always informative to look into how poll numbers are being generated and reported. You should be familiar not only with margins of error, but also confidence level. Polls often don’t report that, but it’s the probability that the true result will be “somewhere” in the margins, but we cannot claim to know where—so we should never say, for example, “52% +/-3%” but always “49% to 55%” since it is as likely to be 55 as 49, much less 52. But if the confidence level is as low as 90%, then actually, there is a 1 in 10 chance the true result will be outside that range.
Above all, knowing what they are adjusting (weighting) in their model can affect what you conclude. The big example here is: they are already adjusting for previously undercounting Trump voters. So they are more likely overcounting (or not undercounting) those voters today. So you shouldn’t assume what happened in 2016 or 2020 will happen next week. The polls you’re reading have already done that.
Generational Wealth
If you think that was enlightening, then I highly recommend you read “What’s Behind the Sudden Surge in Young Americans’ Wealth?” by Federica Cocco and Andrew Van Dam for the Washington Post. Because it is a sterling example of critical thinking in action. The authors start by debunking the meme (that even I used recently in Debunking John Davidson’s “Pagan” America) that “Me in my 30s” versus “my parents in their 30s” shows a massive decline in generational wealth (mainly illustrating the rise in wage stagnation and income disparity that is crushing the American middle class). But then they critically think themselves mid-article, and follow the first rule of critical thinking: try to prove yourself wrong, before concluding you’re right. They actively try to think of ways they could be wrong, and then go check and see. And lo. They were wrong. The last half of the article then explains why the meme is, in fact, an accurate capture of reality.
In the process you will learn a lot about how diverse the ways are to measure economic success or status, and why they aren’t all equivalent. You will also learn some things about economics generally. But above all, you’ll learn how easy it is for a pundit or politician to invent any narrative “about the economy” by simply cherry picking which fact they wish to call your attention to—and then hiding from you (or possibly even from themselves) all the other facts that entirely change that narrative. An accurate narrative thus requires multiple converging lines of evidence, not a single factoid that you then tell a just-so story about. So once you are armed against this, you can defend your mind from invasion and capture, by knowing you need to not only fact-check the cherry-picked claim (is it even true?), but also check for what other data might change the significance of that claim even when it is true. I have long noted that all apologetics, for all false beliefs (whether it’s religion or flat earthism or holocaust denial) operates on a single principle: omitting evidence that, when reintroduced, reverses the conclusion. My best demonstration of this is showing that all arguments for God, when the evidence left out is reintroduced, become arguments against God.
This technique of looking for the omitted evidence can be expanded to any issue or question, and you can learn from this example ways to figure out what evidence you should be looking for in any other case. And now you have a triangulatable second example of that here in Cocco and Van Dam’s article about generational wealth. What they do is start with just the federal measure of “wealth,” and see that, yes, before 2020, millennials were at the bottom of accumulated wealth (comparing themselves to X-ers, boomers, and silents at the same age), but by 2024, they were at the top, and by an even wider margin. Presto! Millennials are now the wealthiest generation in America! And no one has ever been so lucky!
But, no. “At least that was our first response,” Cocco and Van Dam admit. Then they thought about it. And checked some things.
The change has occurred entirely in home value. Meaning, the accelerating costs of housing in America have inflated their “on paper” wealth metric, as homes they bought a few years ago doubled in value practically overnight. And that makes this illusory, because “all flavors of assets aren’t created equal.” The “wealth created by rising home prices exists mostly on paper and is very hard to tap—which means it may not translate to a higher standard of living.” If you still can’t afford your mortgage and gas and utilities and food, the paper value of your house doesn’t help. You can borrow against it, but that just adds debt load, and thus diminishes your monthly spending power rather than increases it. You can sell it, but you still have to live somewhere—and every house’s value went up, so there is no way to translate your home’s value into cash. And even if you find some way to do that, that cash evaporates as you spend it. Your wealth then goes down. You could try to translate the difference into investments that pay out annually—so your wealth stays put while your income grows—but hardly anyone is positioned to do that (e.g. even moving to a cheaper market costs thousands of dollars, not just in moving expenses, but also a down payment and closing costs, and livable-space renovations). And even when you can pull it off, the gain is small (e.g. if you cash out a house into investments and then rent, your annual increase in rent will eat your annual investment income, and you’ve gotten nowhere).
This translates into very few people being able to benefit from this state of affairs—and most of them were already rich (because Luck Matters More Than Talent). The remaining state of affairs is that millennials have comparatively lower incomes with comparatively higher expenses. They remain screwed.
But wait. That’s not all. Yes, this dampens the claim that millennials aren’t screwed “because housing prices went up.” That’s a factor we can’t omit, and it does change the narrative when included. But Cocco and Van Dam’s fact-checking of themselves uncovered an even bigger problem: “Housing—and its investment returns” will still at least “build wealth” long-term (e.g. mortgages, unlike rents, don’t rise, and even eventually go down), “but you know what usually doesn’t? Living with [your] parents.” That’s right. The data showing large rises in millennials’ wealth didn’t include millennials living with their parents. Um. Ooops. The number of millennials who had to move back home due to relative poverty (and thus can’t buy into the exploding housing market at all) has almost doubled over their lifetime.
And this is where a problem arises in the reported data:
Due to the difficulties of disentangling a family’s holdings, the Fed combines the wealth of “financially interdependent” household units and effectively assigns it the demographics of the head of household (or more accurately, what the Fed calls the “economically dominant single individual or couple” in the home’s “primary economic unit”). So, when we say millennials have record wealth for their age, we’re really saying millennials who have become financially independent are doing well for their age.
That’s right. Data tracking generational wealth literally doesn’t even count the sixth of millennials living at home. The fact that more of them have to signals a decline in their economic prospects, not a rise. And if we could re-calculate the average wealth of all millennials, including the ones with neither an apartment nor a home of their own, their measured advantage will decline. Cocco and Van Dam don’t specifically mention it, but this should also be the case for millennials sharing rent—i.e. roommates and collectives. Since the Fed is only counting each of those as a single “household,” the fact that, say, Sally has to rent a single room off the books with split rent on a lease not in her name, and share the remaining public space of an apartment, is also a factor that needs to be counted. Have millennials outpaced other generations in having to resort to this? Oh. Yeah. They did. They are literally called The Roommate Generation. Roughly a quarter of them are in this predicament. So, what will millennial generational wealth add up to when we count these people, too, and not just the “live at homers”? Well, it will drop again. Probably by a lot again. So we should have asked, what is the federal wealth statistic actually measuring? Who is left out of that? And what other economic markers matter besides that? Do home values really translate into better quality or costs of living, the things we are supposed to be measuring?
As Cocco and Van Dam realize by the end of their analysis, they had to change their minds. “By largely focusing on the winners who have left their family’s financial support behind, we’re really only getting a picture of the most successful young Americans.” The more so by focusing on the winners who left the need of roommating behind. The overall generation is not so winning. It’s getting crushed. And in a fantastic finale, they point out that this is another example of what’s called “survivorship bias,” which usually is illustrated by the WW2 airplane armor paradox: when a survey was made of where all the bullet holes were in returning aircraft to decide where to up-armor the planes, someone had the wisdom to conclude the answer was “where there weren’t any bullet holes.” I’ll let you reason out why.
So this whole case becomes another instance of “omitted evidence” skewing perceptions of reality. That’s why looking for what evidence might be omitted is a crucial critical thinking skill. If you haven’t done that, you shouldn’t be confident in any conclusion you reach, about anything. Of course, this then gets you to the next layer, of learning to discern what even actually is evidence. Cranksters and delusionoids will invent a lot of stuff they claim is evidence, but logically isn’t—because even when it’s true, it does not increase the probability of their conclusions. This is where vetting arguments for fallacies becomes important, as well as knowing what makes any fact actually evidence for something. I actually gave examples of this in my last article, on the Rapture, where Preterists like to claim a bunch of evidence that isn’t.
Remote Work
Finally, a third example I want to draw attention to is a recent debate over whether converting to remote work is good or bad labor policy. Here you should read the brilliant article by Advait Sarkar, “Evaluating The Economist’s Claim That Remote Work is Less Productive,” which abundantly illustrates this skill, of looking for what’s being omitted (and what’s really being counted), in many different and creative ways. All can teach you how to think of what to check and what to look for in other cases. Here we are looking at Sarkar critiquing a seemingly fact-filled (yet anonymous) editorial at The Economist.
And this, in sum, is what we get (Sarkar provides many more details, analyses, and references):
- The Economist claimed one study showed remote work leads to a 4% decline in productivity. Sarkar found this to be false. They took that figure out of context and got it wrong. It was only a decline for call centers (not a representative industry). And the figure “refers to productivity decline relative to already-remote workers, not relative to on-site workers.” Which means the cause was not remoting the work, but something else. Sarkar finds it to be management bias: managers were inefficiently favoring officed workers over remote workers. For which the solution is obviously: fix management.
- The Economist claimed another study showed remote work leads to an 18% decline in productivity. Sarkar found this to be false. “The same two criticisms apply: this is a study of data entry work, which is an extremely poor proxy for office work in general,” and the study itself said “that it is not remote work per se, but constraints on choosing their work location which are the biggest detractor of productivity,” in particular, “people with children, home care responsibilities, and poorer households” are less productive at home (because they can’t pull so much overtime, and are more exhausted, are multitasking, etc.).
- Sarkar notes the study The Economist cited for that datum also came to a different conclusion than it reports: that “rather than force people into the office, employers should seek to equalize people’s opportunities through policies such as universal child care.” I would also suggest changing pay-scheme: at-home data entry might increase its productivity if the employee is paid per gigabyte than by the hour—since “productivity” here only relates to company cost per gigabyte entered (as the study only measured typing speed per hour), so it does not matter to the company whether an employee takes twice as long to do that, as long as they are paying for outcome and not clocktime. Point being, we should be looking at the causes of any decline, and addressing them, rather than concluding it is some sort of inviolable law of physics. This is also the case because the study averaged its results, which hides the fact that some people might not have been less productive (or some even more productive) at home—and if so, what is the difference? Can we reproduce or teach it? Can we measure who this is, and so distinguish them as good subjects for remote work? By not even asking these questions, we can tell The Economist was pushing a pre-desired narrative (selection bias), rather than identifying problems and their solutions (critical thinking).
- The Economist claimed another study showed remote work leads to a 19% decline in productivity. Sarkar found this to be false. This study showed “productivity in fact remained the same.” Only productivity per hour declined, and only “during the earliest and most uncertain period of the shift to remote work during the pandemic,” when people were on a new learning curve and faced with unusual challenges. Without reproducing the study after that, its result is useless. It is also moot (again) if pay-scheme changes to outcome rather than clocktime pay. Sarkar in particular notes “the researchers find that working hours mainly increased due to an increase in ‘coordination activities’ (i.e., meetings),” and in result, “Employees with children suffered the greatest decline in productivity due to an increase in working hours.” In other words, the problem wasn’t remoting the work. It was meetings. This jives with widespread findings that too many meetings, lasting too long, is what kills productivity at companies regardless of where labor works (per Forbes, the Harvard Business Review, and Inc.).
- The Economist cited a study showing chess players perform worse remotely than in person. Needless to say, this has little to no relevance to work. But as Sarkar also points out: “the authors attribute the initial decline in performance to the sudden transition induced by the pandemic, finding that these decreases get less and less pronounced as players adapted to the remote work setting.” So, the study basically said the opposite of what was claimed.
- Which reminds me to mention: always read the study. Not only is “the effect size decreases over time, suggesting an adaptation to the new remote setting” literally in the abstract, the study shows a result of “no effect” is within their margin of error on almost all trials. Which means the effect size was so small as to be, essentially, meaningless—a “no result,” just as for election polling. The study also didn’t measure what you think—how often players won or lost—but a hyper-obscure and convoluted measure of “move quality” that is prone to itself being meaningless.
- The Economist referenced increasingly less relevant studies than these, including one that showed a trivial difference in “how many” creative ideas a team could come up with “in five minutes” (seriously: virtual teams came up with 14.74 ideas; in person, M = 16.77, for a difference of one idea out of fifteen), but when it came to “selecting which idea to pursue, we find no evidence that videoconferencing groups are less effective.” Ooops. Should have read the study, Economist. Trivial effect size. And no real effect found. (Sarkar also notes this study bears little relation to remote work anyway.)
- The Economist referenced a study that shows remote teams change certain social networking behaviors, but as Sarkar points out, the study itself admitted it found no measurable changes in productivity. What it called “more static and siloed” (emotionally charged words that deviate from objective science) really just meant people slightly reduced the number of people they communicated with; no one became “siloed” or “static” at all.
- The Economist referenced a study that supposedly said “virtual watercoolers” didn’t do much. Even were that true, it’s hard to ascertain even the logical relevance of this. “We tried a thing and it was useless so we got rid of it” bears no relation to “our productivity went down.” But Sarkar says this is even “a straight up misrepresentation” since it “cherry picked one observation out of many” in the study, while “ignoring” the study’s actual conclusion which was “that virtual water coolers—or videoconference sessions for small groups of interns and a senior manager—may yield higher performance and career outcomes” under certain documented conditions. Which sounds like the opposite result to me. As Sarkar concludes, “like many other things to do with remote work, virtual watercoolers can work just fine when they are applied intentionally and with critical understanding of their uses and benefits.” And The Economist’s own referenced study proved that. Yet they chose to misrepresent what the study showed instead. You might be starting to see a trend.
- The Economist did this again, when it references a study as supposedly concluding that “feedback exchanged between colleagues dropped sharply after the move to remote work” (you might notice the curious absence of the word ‘productivity’ in that sentence), when in fact that study “actually found a 21% decrease in code output for on-site workers, versus remote workers.” In other words, it found a substantial increase in productivity, completely nuking The Economist’s narrative. So this is starting to look like lying. Sarkar discusses the comms finding in the study and what a critical thinker would learn from it (rather than an apologist trying to sell a false narrative—remember my point about that in my discussion of the article on intergenerational wealth).
- The Economist then references a study that they admit “notes the negligible impact” of remote work “on productivity” but “workers put in longer days and wrote more code when in the office,” which are irrelevant metrics. If workers can do as much in fewer hours, that is increased labor productivity (and if they were paid hourly, it would be increased cost productivity as well). And the deceptively worded “wrote more code when in the office” means hybrid workers all wrote the same amount of code—they just shifted more coding to the office when deciding how to allocate their time between locations. In other words, a triviality that had no connection to productivity. And as Sarkar points out, “What they neglect to report is the main finding of the study, which is that hybrid working improved job satisfaction and reduced attrition by 33%.”
Oh. Right. Remember how there is more than one metric for economic success, and “how much your house is worth” doesn’t really capture the reality of spending power? Well, there is also more than one metric for labor utility than productivity. Job satisfaction and retention are capital benefits businesses not only earn from. Since institutional knowledge is a dividend-paying capital asset, in contrast to increasing training budgets for continuous new hires, which is a drag on profit margins, retention is a vital metric for business success. Just as job satisfaction improves a business’s competitiveness for quality labor. Both of which, you might suspect, will likely improve its productivity relative to competitors. Access to remote work is a benefit with which to hire labor; it also vastly increases your accessible labor pool (since geography and commute time no longer limit who you can hire).
Sarkar then concludes with some examples of yet more studies finding the opposite of what The Economist claims—the simplest possible example of “reintroducing the evidence they left out.” One takeaway is that Sarkar found such a large number of omissions, mistakes, and distortions in The Economist article, all skewed toward the same position (defending the status quo and the emotional feelings of managers and owners over objective reality), that we should doubt the reliability of that periodical altogether (or at least the authors of that one article, whoever they are; maybe other authors perform better there). It is giving business leaders literally bad advice. Certainly, it goes in the “side-eye” bucket for next time you read an article at The Economist. It must be put on intellectual probation: now anything The Economist says needs to be independently checked first. You cannot implicitly trust it. (On this procedure for calibrating the level of trust in a source, see my Primer on Media Literacy.)
But notice again, the trick was not just fact-checking (though that was clearly important here), but also remembering to look at what is not being said, what is not being included, what is not being measured, what is not being asked, what is not being checked—in other words, what is being omitted. If Critical Thinking Rule Number One is “always try to disprove a claim before believing it,” Critical Thinking Rule Number Two is “always look for what is being left out—and whether bringing it back in changes the narrative.”
All three of today’s examples illustrate this, and all the various different ways to carry these rules out.
In science the value of a unit of measure is of immense importance and much effort is put into its determination. It’s also important that the value stays constant. Sure, over the centuries the length of the metre, say, has changed, but this is a consequence of scientists attempting to define it with greater precision.
Economics is far different – units of currency are used to measure wealth and these fluctuate in value daily and, over longer periods of time, change value wildly. A scientist would see having such units as crazy. Economists know this of course and adjust their unit to a standard value that accounts for inflation. But the rate of price inflation is not the same for all classes of goods. Where I live (the UK) house price inflation is mostly greater than general inflation and it seems the same applies in the US.
I like to think the house price problem is clarified by measuring wealth using a different unit, one that doesn’t change its value over time, viz. the “standard house”. (Let’s call this unit the SH.) Assuming all things remain equal (the house doesn’t acquire more rooms, its distance to shops, schools, etc doesn’t change, the local authority doesn’t place a sewage farm next door) then the wealth conferred by a standard house remains at one SH over time. So, house price inflation doesn’t increase the wealth of a house owner when measured this way. In fact, when house prices inflate at a greater rate than general inflation and wages (and ignoring leverage), then the wealth of a house owner may well decrease over time because the value of their other assets will be worth fewer SHs. This decreasing wealth is worse for non-house-owners, of course. Leveraged house owners do benefit however – their debt becomes smaller when measured in SHs while their house asset retains constant value.
TL;DR – counterintuitively, house price inflation decreases wealth for most people including many house owners.
Mart, I am not sure what your point is.
Measures of wealth are not “units” in the sense you are describing. You seem to be confusing different things. The measured quantity is not the unit of measuring it.
Economics is a science. And there is nothing crazy about the ways it measures wealth. It is as precise as any science could derive (plenty of measures in science can’t be as precise as “a meter” so the resolution of a metric is not an issue—it’s built into the science).
If your newly invented amateur metric were useful or possible, they’d be using it by now. There is a reason they aren’t.
Case in point: since your imagined SH changes in the entire market, it is always equal to 1 (if you sell 1 house as measured, you can with the return buy only 1 house as measured), unless you move to a different market (hence my point about moving costs, etc.), but then you still make no net gain or loss in wealth (unless you spend the profit rather than invest it; then it’s a loss).
Your arithmetic is also incorrect. If you have a house, you can never get below 1 SH—because you have a house—so rising home prices can’t reduce your total wealth. You will always have 1 SH + AW (additional wealth). The changing price of the SH does not shrink AW (nor, tautologically, shrink SH).
So really all you are proposing is that we measure wealth merely as “how many houses can you buy.” But that makes no sense. Because when you are buying more than one house, you aren’t talking about cost of living any more, but business investment. But in business investment, you are not limited to buying houses. So your wealth is not decreased by limits on how many houses you can buy. You can simply divert your investment income to stocks, bonds, commodities, business ventures, etc. So you won’t “lose wealth” with rising home values. By contrast, everyone has to live somewhere, so you cannot “get out” of the cost of housing—you either buy, rent, or mooch. The effect on wealth is as economists then measure.
Conversely, as you build equity from rising home value, refinancing allows you to reduce your mortgage, thus freeing more income to (in principal) invest, thus building wealth. So I don’t see any way rising home values can ever reduce anyone’s wealth.
As for inflation, that isn’t relevant to what is being discussed in my article. You must not confuse a measure of inflation with a measure of cost of living or buying power, of example. You can’t know the latter simply by knowing the former (e.g. if wages increase with inflation, and home values rise, there will be no net change in wealth metrics).
Moreover, inflation vis-a-vis goods is not the same as inflation vis-a-vis property or even rent. As you note, housing costs change due to factors apart from any usual metric of inflation—case in point, the home values doubling in five years did not correlate with massive inflation but in fact an economy approaching deflation; while the inflation under Biden has now quelled but prices of goods remain high, because that’s how inflation works—yet home values are dropping; etc.
And as you notice, the disconnect between housing costs and other metrics like inflation and even cost of living is apparent regionally (e.g. in California, many regions are upside down, where it is cheaper to rent per square foot than buy, because property values have rocketed above the accessibility of most residents, so a mortgage on a new property is greater than almost any rent that could be earned on it, resulting in massive real estate operations turning out rent-mills that are pricing based on ability to pay to make a return on existing investments rather than fixing rents to property value).
So I am struggling to see what your remarks pertain to in my article.
Perhaps you mean to complain about how capitalists define wealth precisely because it doesn’t measure what most people think wealth means (the ability to buy stuff—the actual metric really is only meaningful to rich people, since it only measures capital, not what you can do with it). That’s fair, but that’s why other measures exist, and why the article I’m discussing points this out.
Thanks for your reply.
“I am not sure what your point is.”
My remarks are a quibble on a point you quote in your Generational Wealth section. But they are offered as a further example in support of the overall message that critical thinking is needed when dealing with deceptive narratives peddled by pundits and politicians.
Your quote from the article: “Wealth created by rising home prices exists mostly on paper and is very hard to tap—which means it may not translate to a higher standard of living.” My quibble is that wealth is not “created” by rising home prices. The wealth that a house represents does not increase with house-price inflation, it remains at one house-worth of wealth (all else being equal).
The deception in this case is hard to spot because of equivocation around the terms “wealth” and “money”. So I attempted a clarification by measuring wealth using a unit of measure that (unlike money) does not change its value over time.
I address some of your criticisms:
“The measured quantity is not the unit of measuring it.”
I never intended this. My invented unit (the SH) is used to measure all classes of wealth, not just houses.
“… there is nothing crazy about the ways [Economics] measures wealth. It is as precise as any science could derive (plenty of measures in science can’t be as precise as “a meter” so the resolution of a metric is not an issue—it’s built into the science).”
My issue isn’t with the resolution of the metric used by Economics – the dollar, say, is an extremely fine unit when measuring the total GDP of the US for example – rather, my issue is with the way the metric changes value over time. (I fully accept economists recognise this.)
“If your newly invented amateur metric were useful or possible, they’d be using it by now. There is a reason they aren’t.”
I’m not suggesting they use it; I used it in the context of house prices merely to clarify a point. The invention of a metric in non-academic articles by writers on economics is far from unusual – for example, how often do we see, in other contexts, a particular brand of candy bar used as a metric?
I don’t understand how your “Case in point” pertains to what I wrote.
“Your arithmetic is also incorrect. If you have a house, you can never get below 1 SH—because you have a house—so rising home prices can’t reduce your total wealth. You will always have 1 SH + AW (additional wealth). The changing price of the SH does not shrink AW (nor, tautologically, shrink SH).”
I stand by my arithmetic. I’m talking about total wealth (house + AW) when measured by my SH unit in an economy where house price inflation is greater than general inflation and wage rises. The house component of total wealth over time does indeed retain its value (I tried not to suggest otherwise) but when measured in the unchanging SH unit the other components decline in value. $100,000 in the bank may have been worth 1 SH ten years ago, but even with interest added it is worth less than that now (assuming the rate of interest is lower than the rate of house price inflation). So total wealth decreases when measured in SH units, even for a home owner when he or she has some AW. (That person’s total wealth may go from 2 SH to 1.5 SH. I accept it never goes below 1 SH – my arithmetic isn’t that bad!)
“So really all you are proposing is that we measure wealth merely as “how many houses can you buy.” But that makes no sense.”
Well, yes, that is kind of how I’m proposing we measure wealth. But for illustrative purposes only and in that case it makes sense – your digression into the business of owning houses is beside the point. Take wages, for example. If, ten years ago, the wage for a particular job was one fifth of a SH and today that job pays one tenth of a SH then the metric can sensibly be used to illustrate the decline in value of the wage.
“I don’t see any way rising home values can ever reduce anyone’s wealth.”
Not even in the scenario where house price inflation outstrips general inflation and wage rises? Okay, you say now “home values are dropping,” and I accept that. But long term?
I don’t know about America but in the UK politicians tend to welcome rising house prices because they can spin it as increasing wealth for home owners under their watch. This is, in my opinion, a false narrative that should be challenged.
Thanks again for your reply.
It is when you define wealth as capital. Which is what economists do. That might not be what you or I are interested in. But they have measures for that, too (income disparity, wage stagnation, relative cost of living, etc.).
But even if you define wealth as money it still tracks (albeit differently than this)—since you can still sell your house and walk away with a ton of cash. The fact that you still need to live somewhere is then a social cost, not a capital consideration (e.g. you could move in with your parents or an RV and invest the cash windfall in stocks and bonds: which is wealth; someone without a house can’t do that, which creates a wealth disparity in terms of what you can do, even if it’s not exactly what most people want to do or would see as worth doing).
This becomes more obvious when we discuss intergenerational wealth: if I can inherit a house my parents paid off, I begin with real wealth (I have no mortgage or rent to pay, yet an entire house to live in). This matters when we compare this to someone not in that situation: I have an enormous capital and cash advantage over someone who does not have a house to inherit (because while they are bleeding a thousand dollars a month for a place to live, I am not, so ceteris paribus, I’m a thousand dollars a month wealthier than they are; and I also have no closing costs or credit rating as an entry barrier to owning a home). So this really matters when we compare this across racial discrimination lines.
This is trivially true, though. Per my points about the arithmetic. It gets us nowhere to talk about such a metric.
And I explained why that doesn’t actually measure anything useful to know.
The only people with > 1 SH are rich people, i.e. capitalists (people with wealth to invest in capital), not ordinary people, who just need a place to live. So talking about these units doesn’t explain anything we want to know. That there are rich people and not rich people is a trivial fact we already know.
And as I explained, this is not meaningfully true.
If I have 2 SH I can convert 1 SH into profit-making investments and still have a place to live (which, contrary to earning me a profit, earns me a loss in property tax).
So in no way are SH units meaningful anymore when converted into something other than a house. There is no sense in which it remains “the same” in total wealth. The value of stocks can rise or fall independently of housing, and a profit-making investment increases in actual cash value in a way that owning a home does not—unless you are renting it out, and then we’re back to capitalists and the difference between the rich and the poor, and the difference between owning a home to live in it, and selling or renting homes to make money—which is why real estate investors get rich, while mere homeowners generally don’t.
You will never convince real estate investors that owned property is not “wealth” because of some nonsense about SH units. They have a house. That’s 1 SH, plus a ton of profit-making properties, i.e. wealth.
Only relative to buying a house. Not relative to anything else you could do with that money. That’s why this metric is meaningless. If you’ve had a hundred grand earning interest the last ten years, you’ve also had somewhere to live those last ten years. So you already had 1 SH plus a hundred grand in investment capital. Meanwhile, if you mean to discount people living in RVs/parents/apartments/rooms as not having 1 SH, the person who has a hundred grand can easily get 1 SH with a hundred grand (because closing costs on an average house in a median market here in the U.S. are well below a hundred grand; and in fact, if you put all of that in, you’d be paying half the mortgage of anyone else, and thus have the remainder in “cash ahead,” i.e. cash wealth).
Which is meaningless. They only need one house. The remainder they can divert to any other capital enterprise. So all you are saying is a tautology: when housing prices are up, you have to divert more wealth to a house than you would otherwise—if you need to live somewhere. Which is a trivial observation. There is no math you can do with this other than to say “housing prices are high,” which is what we are already discussing without that metric.
On this we agree. But we don’t need some weird useless new metric to say this.
We (the people) well know rising housing costs means worse conditions for us: fewer people who can buy and thus own a home and thus the more people enslaved by rents to the investor class with “thousands SH” in wealth; and even for the homeowners it means higher property taxes, on a property that earns no money with which to pay it, thus locking out the poor even further, and essentially raising taxes on the rich (relative to income).
I don’t think anyone is fooled by this rhetoric. So I have no trust that they are saying it to fool the people. They do not imagine this is impressing ordinary people in any way. They are dogwhistling to the rich: “we improved your capital values; so buy our next election, please.”
Thanks for your second reply. I appreciate your taking the time.
I still maintain price inflation does not “create” wealth no matter how much the issue is fudged by discussion of how money can be made by switching between various asset classes. The rich do this, for sure, and although I didn’t explicitly do so, I exclude them from those who are made less wealthy by inflated house prices.
I exclude also those with property portfolios and rental income (a subset of the rich, mostly). Indeed, since rental yields are strongly linked to property prices and many with such portfolios will be leveraged to some extent, price inflation is good for them. I’d even go further and say that part of the wealth lost by those made poorer by the system is being transferred to them.
You will never convince real estate investors that owned property is not “wealth” because of some nonsense about SH units.
Why do you think that I, in any way, intend this? Some communication breakdown? I absolutely think owned property is wealth.
Let me give you the definition of wealth I’m using:
Wealth is the possession of economic resources that can be measured in terms of either real goods or monetary value.
The measurement part of this definition is important. You assert my non-monetary unit of measure is “nonsense” but I disagree. I do accept that monetary units (dollars, pounds, etc) are most commonly used to value wealth and are the most convenient. But as a unit of measure money has the great disadvantage of changing its value over time (declining in value at various rates, mostly). It could truthfully be said that non-monetary units of measure change in value as does money – were I to measure wealth based on a commodity such as wheat (as some ancient cultures did) then value would vary up or down depending on the success or otherwise of the harvest. And in the same way my unit of measure, the “standard house” or SH (a unit of measure, not a unit of housing by the way), could decline in value given a massive oversupply of houses or government action to strictly control private-sector rents and/or provision of widely-available cheaply-rented public housing.
Now, I take the view that modern western governments wedded to neoliberalism will not take any such action and so the value of my nonsense unit is pretty stable – its value is derived from the amenity value of a standard house and this does not change with the price of the house. For this reason I find it useful as an explanatory tool, not nonsense. (For the avoidance of doubt, I don’t suggest all houses are valued at 1 SH – some have more amenity than others, more rooms, better location, better state of repair etc. They’re not all of the same standard.)
So in no way are SH units meaningful anymore when converted into something other than a house.
To be honest, I find your repeated characterisation of my invented metric as “meaningless” also indicative of a communication breakdown. I mean by it nothing more than a unit of measure with which to measure wealth. It’s value I’ve defined above. It may be cumbersome and may not be the most appropriate unit to use for some classes of wealth, but it has a defined value and so has meaning. The metre is the SI unit of length, but does that make the mile meaningless? No. And were I to use some other non-monetary unit to value an asset, ounces of gold say, would people not understand it?
I originally wrote that most people are made less wealthy by house price inflation. I gave the extra detail above that this doesn’t include mostly rich classes of people. I think we agree that ordinary people who don’t own property are made poorer. So what about ordinary people who own their house, have a job, some cash savings, a car and other chattels and don’t play around exploiting changing asset prices? These are the people I maintain are also made less wealthy over time when all their wealth (house + AW) and their wage is valued using my stable unit of measure.
Disagree with this if you like, but please don’t complain about the arithmetic – it is sound.
The only people with > 1 SH are rich people, i.e. capitalists (people with wealth to invest in capital), not ordinary people, who just need a place to live.
The only people? There are many I know (they tend to be elderly) who are as I described above with modest wealth > 1 SH. I don’t consider them rich. But I think they are important because they are the demographic to whom is directed the politicians’ false narrative about increasing wealth. And when it comes to generational wealth, they are the ones with most to lose – in the UK at least, their wealth is under attack hence the importance of exposing the false narrative.
I don’t think anyone is fooled by this rhetoric. So I have no trust that they are saying it to fool the people. They do not imagine this is impressing ordinary people in any way.
I have to disagree. Not a scientific study, I grant you, but everyone I’ve asked (via a self-selecting questionaire on social media) who is in the house + modest AW demographic has said house price inflation makes them richer. They are fooled. Yes, other ordinary people without property know they are getting poorer – they’re not fooled in that way – but most still think the house-owners are getting richer. From the politician’s point of view this misconception is important – the house owners are in a demographic that is very likely to vote while the non-house-owners, if they vote (many don’t), are useful in obtaining consent to attack the wealth of the owners.
TL;DR – House price inflation does not “create” wealth. Rather it facilitates a transfer of wealth away from those whom I previously described as made less wealthy by it to the rich who are able and willing to play the system.
That’s literally how all static wealth is created. Stocks go up, wealth. Property and commodities go up, wealth. Interest rates on the loans you issue go up, wealth.
The other way wealth is created is dynamic, e.g. by increasing productivity (thus lowering prices but increasing ROI), but that isn’t applicable to housing prices (they are not driven by what it costs to build a house).
The only difference created by housing is that everyone needs one place to live. But that leaves three kinds of people: people who can’t afford to buy a home (i.e. people without wealth), people who can only afford one home (i.e. people with more wealth than the first; and they remain wealthier than those who can’t, because they build equity and thus their housing costs go down over time while the first group’s housing costs always rise; and they have capital to loan against, and the others don’t; and they have property they can bequeath to heirs) and people who can afford more than one home (and that very fact makes them wealthy, because their extra homes are not tethered to any need to live in one, and thus they become simply another stock to trade).
A vote for Harris is a vote for gemocide
The destruction of gems?
Not voting for Harris is also a vote for “genocide.”
So…you’re just bad at Trolley Problems.
If people continue to vote for politicians when they support genocide then genocide won’t have any electoral consequences. What incentive does the democratic party have to even lessen their support for Israel at all of people continue supporting them regardless of it. (stop deleting this)
You are acting like somehow letting worse things happen will “teach” anyone to shift policy your way. That never happens.
That irrational mode of thinking will only ensure everything gets worse and worse, as you allow “worse thing” to happen every election cycle.
If you want to change policy, you have to change what the voting public wants. Because the only way to get a politician who will ever actually sit an office to adopt your policy is to show them the votes. If the majority don’t want what you want, they can’t get elected. So you need to be concentrating your rational efforts on persuading the masses, not walking out on elections. The latter will have absolutely no effect on what you want—while instead it will screw us and yourself over on every other metric. That’s why it’s irrational.
If people continue to vote for politicians when they support genocide then genocide won’t have any electoral consequences. What incentive does the democratic party have to even lessen their support for Israel at all, if people continue supporting them regardless of it. (Stop deleting this)
Trolley Problem: “no genocide” isn’t on the ballot. But a ton of other stuff is. You therefore have to vote based on the other stuff.
This is rationality 101.
“Getting out of here with my leg isn’t an option; my only options are cut off my leg or die; so I vote cut.”
This is the very thing that separates humans from animals: we can reason. And yet even a smart animal will bite its own leg off the save itself. What you are communicating is: you aren’t even as smart as a mere animal. But since we know you can be (if you choose to), because you have the intelligence—you just have to choose to use it—it’s time you choose to start using it.
There are only two things on the ballot: “not great; and a lot worse.” To prevent it being a lot worse you must vote not great.
P.S. No one is deleting your posts. They are going to moderation until cleared. If you want your comments to publish immediately, see my Comments Policy for how to earn that privilege.
Again, you’re focusing on the trolley problem and not the “untying people from the tracks” problem! The trolley problem is a lot easier to fret about than the other problem. But, for the individual, voting isn’t the same thing as a trolley problem, because you’re kind of at the mercy of everyone else who voted! Voting would be more like a trolley problem IF the masses were organized into a bloc that was CONSCIOUS of its own genuine interests and weren’t distracted by their own bourgeois concerns! We need to be focusing on our shared proletarian concerns! Politics is about power! But power to what end!? It only makes sense that the power should be used to lift up THE PEOPLE (as opposed to the corporations, for example)! Until there’s a PARTY that does that, I’m not optimistic about the ability of, say, the democrats to galvanize the masses because they don’t have a coherent message! They don’t have a coherent narrative that they truly care about the masses! Because that would require them to show that they care more about people than corporations! Being against price gouging is nice, but it’s not enough! Politicians need to be listening to the masses! Not just the people who fund their campaigns! They would need to have conversations with people on the ground! That’s not the same thing as calling my congressperson! That’s not a conversation! People can’t even have conversations with people like me because all they see is my autism! But they see autism as a disease and not as a normal human trait! We need to be listening to each other and not imposing our static categories on them! A human being isn’t a problem for you to figure out! They’re a human being!
You can’t untie people from the tracks.
This is the fundamental fail of people who fail at Trolley Problems: they try to make the problem go away by inventing a third solution—that can never be implemented in the case at hand. The whole point of the Trolley Problem analysis is you do not have time to untie people. It represents the fact that there is no switch to pull that saves everyone. That’s why it is irrational to act like not flipping the switch is flipping an imaginary second switch that doesn’t exist.
Your failure is: you end up choosing the worse outcome, based on a fantasy.
And now, with Trump elected, you will get to see exactly what I mean.
Mario: Yes, if we could vote as a large group and affect change, then we could force politicians to listen.
We can’t, not yet, so the only option for today (as I go to cast my ballot is), “Do I put in the influence afforded me by elite systems to minimize genocide or maximize it?”
Maybe 2006 or 2008 is different. This one isn’t. And it’s irrational to grouse over battles you never could have fought.
Derek: I understand your position and your clear empathy for the victims here.
The problem is that Harris cannot give you that.
Just like a vegetarian can never exert influence over a fried chicken restaurant because they’re not ever going to be a customer (unless they signal that they would eat there for a vegan alternative), so too can you never control someone with a simple denial of a vote. Because then they have to move on.
The current state of the Democratic Party is such that “being anti-Israel” cuts key donors and causes controversy. Yes, so does the alternative. So Harris has to triangulate. Which she is doing. She is nowhere near as rabid in signaling support to Bibi as Trump. And she and Biden have both pushed for ceasefires: Cutting military aid to Israel is a non-starter.
Vote Harris and then call every Democrat and tell them to cut aid to Israel or make it contingent.
Fred: my position is that voting as an individual “with your conscience” (or whatever) is simply an expression of (sorry) bourgeois special snowflake° individualist idealism! So I’m voting like I’m Ezekiel! He did weird shit so that people would ask him why he did it! History is going to ask why people voted 3rd party (Jill Stein, for example) in 2024! Maybe they’ll see comment sections on the internet where people report that they were trying to vote against genocide! History can say whatever they want about 3rd party voters, but they’ll absolutely see there was strong dissent! History will not be kind to the US of this era! Not if I have anything to say about it! And I’m not the only one!
°there’s a difference between a bourgeois special snowflake and a proletarian special snowflake, but that’s a separate discussion!
Mario:
The problem is that Stein is soft on genocide too.
Russian genocide.
She cannot call Putin a war criminal.
And so voting for her now signals, today and to future generations, that the left was selective about its outrages.
Also, Stein can’t win.
So that’s just a non-vote.
It’s like faced with a real Trolley Problem, and you choose “scream at the sky” and claim you therefore didn’t choose “don’t pull the switch,” but the actual reality is, you chose “don’t pull the switch.” And get all the consequences thereof. Making up a delusional reason to convince yourself you didn’t do what in fact you did is what it means to be irrational.
Fred: by the way, speaking of history, I’m not a liberal democrat, which is to say, I have no blind faith in liberal democracy! I study liberal democracy historically! Which is to say, using the principles of historical and dialectical materialism! Also, when I say, “I’m not a liberal democrat,” I also say I’m a communist! And I don’t wanna get zapped for this, but communism isn’t something that’s going on in the world today! It’s the stateless, classless, moneyless society! And if you’ve read any theory, you’d know that you can’t get to communism, the stateless, classless, moneyless society, FROM liberal, bourgeois “democracy”! You can only get there by ABOLISHING the liberal dictatorship of the bourgeoisie and replacing it with nothing but the dictatorship of the proletariat! Sure! It’s gonna look a little “illiberal” at the beginning! That’s why it’s called a “dictatorship”! But I’m not worried about that because when proletarian class consciousness is inspired in the masses, that’s when there will be no contradiction between the will of the people and the policies of the government! But we can’t get there until the masses (including people like you) attain proletarian class consciousness! That’s why the masses (including people like you) need to study dialectics! The metaphysical perspective isn’t the only perspective there is, Fred!
Fred: I don’t want to open up YET ANOTHER can of worms, but did you watch bad empanada’s videos on “genocide”? I apologize for being so sloppy with my language! Space Jesus Christ! 🙄
https://youtu.be/m316DcYhb8w?si=h7MdytouX6pKWFW3
https://youtu.be/CDdt9QfC68U?si=pd_KWXaY7JPuEjQA
Mario:
It’s not a matter of “faith”. Candidates demonstrably have different outcomes. Allende and Pinochet were not the same. Hindenberg and Hitler are not the same. There’s a range of outcomes that are possible in any institutional system. (BTW, this is an example of how Marxism can mislead. Even though Marxism depends on a system having an internal process of change and thus different moment-to-moment states, “contradictions”, Marxists often take the trivial conclusion “It’s still liberal state capitalism” to the non-trivial conclusion “Therefore, its current state does not matter”).
And you absolutely can, even in Marxist theory, get there from here. That’s the point of immiseration etc. Your argument is that we need revolution to get there. Fine. Agreed.. But we’re not at the revolutionary stage.
And so, in a pre-revolutionary stage, you don’t abandon the battle for control of the state.
That’s, again, pretty basic Marxist theory.
So the vote needs to be a viable vote. In particular, that vote should signal solidarity with the actual working class. Which means the opposition to the misogyny, racism, transphobia and homophobia, etc. of the Republicans, all of which are in a class framework, because they are now fascist.
Just like a given battle in a revolution doesn’t win the war and isn’t judged by the idea that it will, we vote because it is harm mitigation.
In practice, I think Michael Albert is firmly right on non-reformist reformism, that using reforms to push the needle is part of a revolutionary process, as it improves conditions, empowers people to fight, creates coalitions, and demonstrates to people not convinced yet that the system cannot accommodate their maximal goals.
And the dictatorship of the proletariat is dangerous. We tested this already. It has never once led to communism. It merely empowers the techno-managerial coordinator class. This is Marxism’s most massive blindspot. You will not get large numbers of people in functioning democracies to sign up for a class dictatorship.
I have not seen all of Bad Empanada’s video (but I did watch the intro), but let’s be clear: What is happening in Ukraine, and what is intended to happen to transphobes here, is genocidal. The Ukrainians are being targeted as a people with explicit intent to wipe out not just their state but their culture and language. This isn’t a marginal case. (Just like the Gaza situation isn’t either). And the intent of conservatives here is at minimum vicious state-sanctioned trans erasure and really likely extensive force especially as they become Hitlerian. I don’t use the term lightly.
As regards the Holodomor, it fucking counts, Mario, and leftists need to stop fighting this one. (Again, don’t know if either you or he are denying this). I agree that a generic famine, even one that can be blamed on institutional incompetence or callousness, is not genocide. The Chinese famine was not genocide. But the Holodomor was. It came directly from a nation-destroying impulse (again, just like today), with expressly racist motives and intent. We have access to Soviet documents. We know what was going on. They were malicious, not merely incompetent.
Fred: I’m not sure I’m going to get to everything, but, look, Hitler and Pinochet and Bush II and Trump never got to power because they won the popular vote in a bourgeois election! They all got it through explicitly undemocratic means! Also, are you going to tell the people of Vietnam that the dictatorship of the proletariat doesn’t work!? Seems a bit presumptuous to me! The reason I’m not a liberal is that I don’t think bourgeois liberty is what should be maximized! The false goddess of bourgeois liberty keeps poking me with her sword! I’m a communist in no small part because I keep getting mugged by capitalism! I suspect the reason you (for example) are (still) liberal is that you’re not seeing capitalism’s mugging (and much, much worse!) victims AS victims of capitalism! Also, I wasn’t even TALKING about the holodomor, but if you watch the badempanada video on it, he goes through what the historians have said about it! It’s very thorough! https://youtu.be/3kaaYvauNho?si=K3AzlgaW2YX0kd_O
Fred and Richard: one last point: it’s Kamala’s job to win the election! My job, to paraphrase Elon James White from 2016, is to “stay [disabled] and die”!
It’s your job to save lives, not kill more people.
If you did not vote for Harris, you will have killed more people over the next ten to a hundred years than you would have.
And that’s simply now the story of you.
All your irrational and delusional excuses will never change that. Reality doesn’t care about your beliefs.
Richard: obviously voting doesn’t untie anyone from tracks! That’s hard work! It’s what, for example, Adam Conover helped do in LA along with people like Nithya Raman. Yes, EVENTUALLY, Nithya ran for city council and won, but that was something she did AFTER the grassroots organizing! Adam talks about that here: https://youtu.be/71Ue5Qy6w1w?si=6o2z75s66Zsx_5Pc
Dr. Carrier! You’re the fucking delusional one if you’re ascribing such metaphysical power to one person’s vote! You’re engaging in “vote fetishism”! You’re treating a vote the same way Marx said people treat commodities! One person’s vote doesn’t have that much metaphysical power! I refuse to accept your liberal emotional blackmail! I don’t need your liberal approval! I’ve turned all the lights on in my subconscious! I know exactly who I am! I know exactly how much my vote is worth! I know how much it’s ACTUALLY worth! So don’t come talking to me about “reality”! I’m not in the “reality-based community”! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community?wprov=sfla1
Funny that you’re saying I’m being “irrational,” btw! I literally had Nietzsche-level psychotic episodes while I was taking your naturalism class! It didn’t seem to faze you at all! I know all about “irrationality”! I’ve spent a lot of time there! I spent enough time to know that there’s a dialectical relationship between the rational and the irrational! By the way, since you’re talking about “realism” so much. Are you a “realist” or are you a naturalist!? Your book has “naturalism” in the title! Not “realism”!
A vote has physical power, and therefore metaphysical power. Trump could not be President now if each individual vote had no physical effect on the world.
Because there is no such thing as a million votes, without each single individual vote.
To ignore this is irrational. To go on pretending it isn’t true even when shown that it is, is delusional. And it is the delusionality of the majority of Americans that secured Trump’s tyranny. You can either have helped them or fought them. There is no third thing you could have done. So depending on which you did, that’s now the story of you.
Richard: no! That’s YOUR story! It’s YOUR bourgeois, liberal story! I’m not tangled up in your bourgeois liberal story or your bourgeois liberal “reality”! My story is that it was Kamala’s job to convince the masses she was on their side! She had thousands if not millions of people working and volunteering for her toward that effort! And she failed! One person can’t do more than the Democrats or their “machinery”! I’m sure the story that blames people like me is more comforting for you, BUT IT’S JUST YOUR STORY!
Dr. Carrier! You’re looking at me from the metaphysical perspective! Just like the security guard at the Creed concert in September, which led to my getting the Elijah McClain treatment! Just like my catholic uncle who thought I was demon possessed just because I was having an autistic meltdown at his house! Just like my brother who stopped talking to me because I’m “rude”! I’m not defined by the stories they told themselves about me! Just like I’m not defined by YOUR story about me!
I’m not just telling stories. I’m explaining reality.
You are constrained by reality. You cannot change or defy that reality by redefining yourself. All you can do is better navigate that independent concrete reality with better decision making. Your resistance to this fact is irrational. Your persistence in resisting it is delusional.
Dr. Carrier! The only reason I was even born American is the US invaded Mexico! That means, essentially, that the border crossed me! I didn’t ask to be born on land stolen by fascist slavers! I didn’t ask to be born in a bourgeois “liberal democracy” built on stolen land! I didn’t sign some “social contract”! I talk a lot about “decolonizing your mind,” but you’re literally a colonizer! You literally got housing assistance for being a member of a colonist military force! I’m not letting you project your liberal bourgeois anxieties onto me! You already projected your liberal bourgeois nation-state onto me! Isn’t that enough!?
Mario, that’s not relevant to any present discussion.
You are doing it again. Changing the subject mid-conversation.
You’re delusional if you think policy changes are based on public opinion. What is the evidence for that?
You are delusional if you think public opinion has never changed policy. Much less that it wouldn’t do so more often if it stopped acting as delusional as you and actually got involved, informed, and voted. Which was my point.
For our sanity’s sake, please stop this nonsense and deal with reality.
Read the article Dr. Carrier cited and also read these:
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.timesofisrael.com/trump-claims-netanyahu-disregarded-bidens-advice-on-war-was-right-to-do-so/amp/
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/10/muslim-american-support-trump/680449/
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cg3eppp0n57o
This is especially dumb because the two candidates aren’t even Tweedledeedee and Tweeedledeedum on this issue.
Trump is emboldening native Islamophobia. Because of that Nazi bigotry he is now directly signaling about, he isn’t just going to back up Bibi. He may very well kill people who protest Israel because they’re the “radical left” “enemy within”. He shredded our diplomatic corps.
The traditional Democratic softness on Israel is unfortunate but they are infinitely more likely, if people are protesting loudly enough (and that’s the only thing that should matter to the movement), a Harris Presidency could be swayed. Trump couldn’t. And, again, Harris will at least allow us to protest and resist. Trump may not.
The world in general is going to be much more dangerous under Trump. We know how thin his isolationist bona fides here. He exceeded Obama in drone strikes. His attacks on international institutions are destroying the mechanisms that can maybe be used to save the Palestinians.
And it really is so morally venal to make Palestine your line in the sand given the genocidal risks to Ukrainians, trans people, immigrants, and countless other groups here. “Don’t vote against the absolute Nazi because the other guy is 5% Nazi” is such an atomically bad take. (And please don’t whine that you have to vote for some percentage of Nazi. You sure do!)
You are hurting your cause. A lot of people will take the Israel issue slightly less seriously because of folks like you fetishizing a vote that even by your own framing is a neutral vote. Focus on changing minds here, not on virtue signaling with nonsense purity politics that aren’t even internally sensical.
Indeed, as Fred points out, in no way will Trump defund Israel. He likes dictators who conquer land they claim is theirs. And he has zero sympathy for Palestinians. As Trump said already to Bibi, “Do whatever you have to do.” Indeed, the current state of affairs was actually advanced by Trump’s actions in office: this is indirectly an effect of his “peace” efforts in the region, which concluded in his endorsing Israel’s claim on Jerusalem.
In addition to that, and this analysis by the Middle East Institute, as I noted in my analysis of the Trump war platform: the entire thing is a veiled “we will threaten everyone with war to stop them going to war,” paired with “we stand with Israel,” which sounds like a recipe for continuing genocide. This is why “Trump has attacked Biden and his opponent Harris by claiming that they are holding Israel back from being able to achieve its war aims in Gaza” (“Where does Donald Trump stand on Israel, Palestine and the Middle East?”, Middle East Eye). Likewise see Islam Hassan’s comment here.
So, no, “ending genocide” isn’t a choice you have. But preventing many other evils is.
Mario:
No, but Milosevic’s party did. Same with the party that won in Rwanda. Genocides and authoritarian regimes often win elections, and actually even fiercely contested elections. And Hitler did gain power through electoral means: https://www.dw.com/en/fact-or-fiction-adolf-hitler-won-an-election-in-1932/a-18680673 .
More importantly, even beyond that, there’s a difference between Bush and Gore, or Bush and Kerry. Even before Trump Zinn’s “not a dime’s worth of difference” line wasn’t really all that true, and could at least be responded to by “If you don’t have a dime, even a nickel matters”. (Hence Chomsky, Albert, Zinn, etc. all clearly indicating to pay attention to elections enough to vote tactically). And after Obama and Trump, the difference is actually quite stark. There’s milquetoast progressivism and blithe non-bigotry versus extreme right-wing nonsense and overt bigotry. That’s a reason to vote. Socialism won’t be easier if Trump murders or impisons leftists.
Ummmm, yes, Mario, I will absolutely tell the people of Vietnam that a dictatorship of the proletariat doesn’t work. America largely achieved their war aims and Vietnam suffered. Even the party acknowledged that the second Five Year Plan failed.
Moreover, we’re not Vietnam, and the total success rate of these approaches is miserable. North Korea, Cambodia, China, Russia and Romania should be sufficient. You just get a corrupt party of apparatchiks that transition seamlessly to oligarchs if things break down.
Sen and Dreze are absolutely right to identify authoritarian regimes as constitutionally incapable of dealing with any kind of crisis where you need organic, useful information from the ground up. People are afraid of speaking the truth, both in your apparatus and outside of it, and this prevents you from getting critical data.
And not only are we not talking about “bourgeois liberty” which frankly is such a meaningless term, but in any case it’s pretty blithe to dismiss free speech, free expression, etc. Those things matter. Marxists’ willingness to bin our ability to freely explore and create is one of their ugliest failure modes.
Yes, getting mugged by capitalism sucks. But you could get mugged by a state and also be unable to complain about it or, say, marry someone you love, or express your gender. Authoritarian regimes are especially awful for marginalized people. Again, a massive blindspot of Marxism born from affirming the consequent: “Capitalism causes problems” is not cognate of “Therefore, all problems are caused by capitaism”. Lots of other serious socal problems exist.
I’ll need to watch that video at some point, but given that I see that he’s associated with straight up Holodomor denialism upon search, I suspect you may need to consult other sources. This seems to be just “A libertarian says that we’re bad, therefore we should deny an atrocity”. it is the overwhelming consensus that the Holodomor was genocidal. There’s nuance of course, but it wasn’t just incompetence. (Also, and I can’t believe I have to be saying this: Just like the Nazis could never make the excuse “Oh, they’re dying because of war conditions” because you have a duty to not let your prisoners die, so too did the Russians imposing a new form of government on Ukraine that had a deleterious consequence on them count against them and should be treated as genocide because they could have only experimented with their own people, so even that argument is absolutely a warmed over Nazi argument in disguise).
And I’m an anarchist, Mario. I’ve explained this at length. I want a revolution. Just not a dictatorship of the proletariat. The fact that you didn’t catch that is I think exceedingly telling. It shows that your position is doctrinaire Marxism: You literally can’t comprehend of a non-authoritarian revolutionary position.
And, yes, it is Harris job to win the election, and ours to vote for her. Dual responsibility. Pretty trivial point.
Fred: I get that you’re an anarchist! I myself believe humans are capable of building the stateless, classless, moneyless society! We’ve done it before! That means we can do it again! I’ve read Kropotkin too! It’s been a while, but even he said the revolution needed to be armed (and would potentially be violent), right? He did say that the revolutionaries needed to be organized, right? The proletariat needs to be REAL fkn ORGANIZED when it revolts if they wanna fend off the inevitable invasion by (usually foreign, but also domestic) capital forces, right!? You keep acting like my knowledge (or whatever) is insufficient, but that’s not the issue! You’re still looking at things from the metaphysical perspective! You can’t learn from the past with that perspective! You can’t bring your fixed static categories with you when you try to learn history! That’s not how history works! The main reason I’m a communist is that I’m a dialectical materialist! That means I believe in DIALECTICAL MATERIAL! It’s what two photons “cancel each other out” into in the two-slit experiment! It’s not “nothing”! What do you think they “cancel each other out” into?
Mario:
“Possibly armed” and “authoritarian” are not cognates. We can fight to establish freedom. Our tactics may be violent, but our goals, even our intermediary goals, do not need to include dictatorship. Just like the American Revolution, which was fought violently (and, unfortunately, somewhat illiberally), but ended with a (nascent) liberal democracy.
Mario, I really, really want you to define what you mean by “metaphysical”. Because, any time we have a disagreement on something, the accusation is I’m being “metaphysical” (or Richard is), with scant explanation as to why. How can we possibly have a disagreement on intended goals and tactics where I am being metaphysical and you’re not? What’s the metaphysical disagreement at hand?
“Fixed static categories”? What, Mario, like “stateless, classless, moneyless”? Unlike you, I actually am okay with some kind of currency. Parecon models have currency. Precisely because I don’t dogmatically insist on anything. I don’t dogmatically insist on absolute equality either. I am okay with those who work harder having more, and only such people. This creates an incentive value and lets everyone determine for themselves how much of their time they want to put into the collective good. I’m firmly experimental on all this.
And why is it that you can mention, say, Vietnam, or discuss the definition of genocide, but not be looking at fixed static categories, or be metaphysical, or be only keyed to the past?
It, frankly, seems like you have a doctrinaire Marxist “Get Out of Argument Free” card, where if there’s a substantial disagreement and you don’t seem to have an actual argument, you just invoke an accusation of “metaphysics”. You’re definitely a pleasant dude and I think a good example of a Marxist who isn’t a sectarian dick (and oh boy are they out there), but this is a common failure mode among Marxists even for someone nice like yourself.
And there is an argument for a dictatorship of the proletariat: it’s that it’s the only way to disarm the enemies of the rising working class. The problem is
a) That’s false
b) Marx proposed it without empirical testing, which is really telling as to how authoritarian he could be as a person (and Engels as well)
c) We’ve tested it now and it’s false; in fact, some kind of either vanguard party or state dictatorship always acts in an authentically counter-revolutionary way (e.g. disbanding the soviets) while acting revolutionary, becoming indistinguishable from fascist apparatuses
d) No Marxist I’ve ever met has ever told me either how I can identify the difference between a successful dictatorship of the proletariat winning an ultimately free society and a failed dictatorship of the proletariat using dictatorial means to entrench (or, worse, reentrench) some new elite, nor actually why such any such mechanism couldn’t be performed by a fundamentally democratic state using emergency powers
I am glad we’re off the Holodomor topic, though.
Fred: I’ve read several books on Marxism! That doesn’t make me a professional! It’s far better to get your Marxism from professionals than from amateurs! One of the (equivalent to) professional sources I’ve been drawing from is the Vietnamese Marxism-Leninism textbook translated by Luna Nguyen! https://www.banyanhouse.org/product/ebook-the-worldview-and-philosophical-methodology-of-marxism-leninism/?sync-done
Mario: I understand that you are an activist and not a philosopher. But I’ve read Marx, and Engels. I’ve read Lenin. I’ve read the cultural Marxists (who had a lot to say). I’ve read Gramsci. And my conclusions remain what they are: Marxism is an ideology of the techno-managerial coordinator class and not a pathway to authentic liberation, it is prone toward class reductionism, it has baggage from flawed 19th century philosophy, and it tends to produce sectarianism and authoritarianism, even in its best forms.
So here, for example, you are literally pointing me to state propaganda. That should terrify you. The likelihood that you are getting suckered, in Bayesian terms, is massive. Actual Marxist philosophers are worth considering, but the output of a state apparatus should be highly suspect.
More importantly to our discussion, you have something you mean by “fixed category”, by “metaphysics”, etc. That may be a lay understanding (though frankly politics is not so sophisticated of a topic that someone of your intelligence shouldn’t be able to understand at least the basics, and the idea that there’s some deep non-obvious truth in Marxism is as obviously false as it is to say that about right-wing economics), but it’s your understanding. So I would like to know what you mean, and why those categories meaningfully make my logic incorrect while yours is correct. I want to know what your logic is for sorting something into those bins.
Fred! I just told you the “deep, non-obvious truth” contained within Marxism! It’s “dialectical material”! It’s the “stuff” photons are made of, energized in a specific way! That’s how they “cancel each other out” in the two-slit experiment! They “cancel each other out” into “dialectical material”! It’s not “nothing”! And it’s not just the fucking geometry! Though it does indeed exist and move at every point in the geometry! It’s how a photon can even “interfere with itself” in the “one photon at a time” version of the two-slit experiment! Didn’t Lenin write about the dialectical material? If not that specific term! I know he made a big deal about something having to do with tar. That and the stuff about the true nature of material is all in the Vietnamese textbook! Though in certain cases I’m adding one more inferential step from other sources from my research that I’d love to have a conversation with you about some time!
Fred! “state propaganda”!? There you go again with your fixed bourgeois static idealist categories! You can lead a liberal to dialectical materialism, but you can’t make them decolonize their mind! Dr. Carrier has a copy of this “state propaganda” as of my last information! I’m the one who recommended it to him! Whether he’ll get read it is a separate matter! But like I said, I’d love to talk to you about my other sources! One of them is called “Industrial Society and its Future”! And when Uncle Ted was yapping about “the power process,” he was talking about basically the same thing as Marx’s “unalienated labor”!
MarIo:
Okay, so Marxism contains nothing deep. Got it.
I have to be blunt here. The way you just described the dialectic is effectively religious, but with the downside of even a supernatural explanatory mechanism. You don’t show any examples of it actually being used usefully. You included concepts that not only have nothing like a dialectical interaction, like entanglement, but were not what Marx or Engels could have possibly meant in an era before quantum mechanics and even relativity. You don’t demonstrate that the dialectic can have your, and only your predictive outcome, and you definitely don’t then show the predictive utility of this approach or any other criterion that would let us know this is how reality works.
This is not empirical reasoning. At no point do you explain what empirical evidence establishes any of this to be true. Like any Christian apologist, you use “It’s metaphysical” as a catch-all against falsification. But your metaphysics must follow your physics. When reality tells you that your metaphysics are unconfirmed or false, you don’t argue from those metaphysics.
And, frankly, at least religious metaphysics are somewhat coherent. The dialectic is such a wideranging concept that one can fit essentially any change process into it. I have encountered no one, not even in the philosophical and sociological literature, who can explain how to differentiate an accurate use of the dialetic from an inaccurate one.
And, for the record, academic Marxists overwhelmingly don’t use dialectical reasoning. They just stick with what they can prove.
To be clear, Mario, I don’t think that Marxism is only the dialectic. Marxist approaches of substructure and superstructure analysis and of class tensions, and later ideas like that of hegemony, are actually useful tools. I don’t call them “deep” but I don’t call anarchist theory “deep” either. Chomsky may be a little too harsh on the social sciences, but his core point, that we don’t yet have anything like a remotely-complete and predictive explanatory model of even individual human behavior let alone social behavior, remains true. It’s a tough nut to crack and we’re working on it. There’s excellent Marxist work in many fields,
But what that means is that you can’t invoke Marxism in the same way one would invoke relativity. It is, at best, like string theory, and really much worse because of its falsified predictions. It’s a heuristic-based approach to human behavioral analysis with some merit and some massive failed predictions. Meaning that you have to take any conclusion from that framework as highly provisional. And, when other useful frameworks such as feminism, multiculturalism/polyculturalism and anti-racism, theories of international relations, anarchism, liberalism, etc. are telling you that you’re wrong, you should be very reticent to proceed on that front.
And this criticism applies to most social theories. Mertonian strain is a really cool and actually quite specific theory, but it has limits to its explanatory power. Anomie is way better documented than the dialectic, and even it has pretty drastic limits.
All of this means that, when Richard and I disagree with you, you should refer to facts on the ground. Again, there are Christians I know who can at least argue from a secular framework with facts everyone agrees upon to a secular conclusion that they happen to believe is also entailed by their Christian framework. And they’re not even always wrong!
And dismissing my point about state propaganda not being obviously state propaganda ( even under Marxist theory it would be, Mario ) is telling. It means your ideology makes you blind to real dangers, which you will blithely sweep under the rug for the sake of your ego by dismissing that as just the conclusion of fixed categories. Especially ironic from someone who is operating from a doctrinaire perspective from the 19th century rather than a pragmatic hybrid approach.
Fred: you can’t come to “state propaganda” FROM a place of phobia! Just like you can’t come to “Industrial Society and its Future” from a place of phobia! Your phobia of “state propaganda” is not a flex! Just like the phobia of Uncle Ted is not a flex! My lack of phobia of those things is not a flaw! A phobia is something to be overcome, comrade! Look at how many people reject OHJ simply because of their phobia of how revolutionary it is!
Fred: also, did you read Dialectics of Nature by Engels? Sure, a lot of it’s “outdated,” but one of the things he goes into is that Darwin’s theory of evolution was like a “key” to unlocking a method of dialectical analysis for nature itself! Indeed, it’s easy to miss the dialectics in, say, quantum entanglement if you’re not looking for it!
Mario:
“From a place of phobia” is poisoning the well. And, frankly, it comes off as gainsaying and even gaslighting by acting as if there is no legitimate suspicion. I didn’t express phobia. I expressed a reasoned, Bayesian analysis. All else held equal, official proclamations from governments should be held up to greater suspicion. The entire swath of human history shows governments outright lie, mislead, prevaricate, and make bold ideological proclamations. To think that any given piece of government communication requires evidence. For something like a health warning, that evidence doesn’t need to be strong: People in government are human and don’t want people to pointlessly die, and from a pragmatic functionalist perspective public health is useful for elites especially if it’s cheap. But this is an entire outline of philosophy core to the regime. That is virtually never going to be some neutral, balanced accounting. I’ll give it a skim and share some findings at some point.
And this especially applies to “Communist” propaganda . They were especially dishonest in their propaganda.
So, again, your viewpoint is biased and non-empirical. Instead of recognizing how suspicious a piece of overt propaganda is and trying to overcome that Bayes factor against you by pointing to some really great bit of argumentation in it and saying “It’s worth reading, here’s proof”, you just say I should suspend all my priors. Even as you would never do that for capitalist propaganda. Making this egregious special pleading.
As for Engels: That answers precisely none of my concerns. An arbitary list of examples of a principle is not an explanation of the methodology, let alone a justification for it. Anyone can retrofit their pet theory, especially when it’s vague, to any data. Again, you would notice this immediately if a capitalist did it, or a fundie.
And the book is a great example of precisely why this approach sucks. Take this. “However, the process of making fire by friction is still one-sided. By it mechanical motion is converted into heat. To complete the process, it must be reversed; heat must be converted into mechanical motion. Only in that case is justice done to the dialectics of the process, the cycle of the process being completed – for the first stage, at least. But history has its own pace, and however dialectical its course may be in the last analysis, dialectics has often to wait for history a fairly long time”. So reversing entropy is how we’re going to accomplish the dialectic? Great, then that’s not happening. He chose an example precisely of where dialectics makes no sense, an irreversible one-way process that has no meaningful thesis/antithesis to it, and then glommed on his Hegelian claptrap on top of it, then overlaid his politics onto it. Anyone can do that. A person of his intelligence is only misled by legerdemain like this when they’re intellectually motivated.
And the chapter on biology also shows why hitching their star to this wagon was so dumb. Because that first part of “The Part played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man” is interesting. When Engels says, “Thus the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour. Only by labour, by adaptation to ever new operations, through the inheritance of muscles, ligaments, and, over longer periods of time, bones that had undergone special development and the ever-renewed employment of this inherited finesse in new, more and more complicated operations, have given the human hand the high degree of perfection required to conjure into being the pictures of a Raphael, the statues of a Thorwaldsen, the music of a Paganini”, that’s an interesting framing. It’s more philosophical than scientific, but it’s an interesting framing to put onto the topic. That’s making me think, including thinking about where it may be misleading or false.
In contrast, the word “thesis” and “antithesis” doesn’t even appear in the chapter. Because it does no work.
Dialectics of Nature is an interesting philosophical analysis of science repeatedly ruined by the application of a vague, pointless idea that doesn’t actually elucidate anything and is used as a shorthand for “change”. I am reminded of Chomsky decimating Skinnerian thinking in his day by pointing out how utterly vapid their concepts of “reinforcement” had become. This is not a good advertisement for dialectical thinking. It’s actually an example of how useless and straightforwardly misleading the idea is.
I get it. When you start playing with the idea, it feels so powerful. It’s just like Jung. Then you realize that it’s just intuitive spiirtualism, just something our brain says feels right, and is actually really analytically nebulous. And since you’re not even trying to defend any other aspect of Marxism, I really suggest you take a look at why you are.
Fred: I literally have a paper I haven’t “published” yet describing the process of the sperm meeting the egg in terms of dialectics! I also describe the process of stopping at a stop sign in terms of dialectics! I also describe the condom, the bicycle shoe, and the nightguard (for nocturnal bruxism) in terms of dialectics! I can email you those segments of the paper if you want! I sent Dr. Carrier some gibberish about all that when I was having one of my episodes while I was taking his naturalism class! I was saying shit like, “tears are the dialectical synthesis of the tragedy and the statistic”! I was getting real nutty with it! 👀
Mario:
Yes, I am sure you can put it that way. You can take a complex process about a lot of chemistry and signaling and reduce it to “1 + 2 = 3”. And while I’ll happily read the paper, I can guess the kind of thing it’s going to say.
Funnily, this is actually one of the few best examples of the dialectic, but it still sucks. The egg is not in conflict with the sperm. There’s no “antithesis”. There’s just two objects merging. Hegel had to imagine a male-biased worldview where everything comes from conflict, invasion, merging and defeat. But it’s just not useful, and even insofar as it is, it’s not a method, it’s an extremely general approach.
And the very fact that this is a method that you can “get nutty with” is sort of its biggest problem 😀 . It lets you put everything into the pattern of the Trimurti, of creation and preservation and destruction. But it so rarely lets you arrive at a conclusion you wouldn’t have otherwise that is actually useful or accurate. It’s so vulnerable to retrofitting.
And, of course, because it’s so vacuous, we can put everything in these discussions into the terms of the thesis and the antithesis. Had people voted for Harris, that could have been the thesis of the Biden Presidency and the antithesis of the Trump threat creating the synthesis of Harris. So it can’t be used to make any argument because it can be used to make every argument .
Not one bit of which justifies a dictatorship of the proletariat. What I find so galling about that idea is that you talk about getting past fixed categories, but the only thing Marx had to offer as far as an innovative, out-of-the-box solution was… statism. Warmed-over authoritarianism. Just another dictator or monarch, but beating the people with the people’s stick. It’s such a spectacular failure of imagination, and Bakunin was correct to call him out on it.
Yes, Fred! Putting everything in terms of dialectics is entirely the point! It’s a better system of analysis! It’s certainly a better method of analyzing my “behavior” as an autistic person than, say, what, behaviorism? My meltdowns aren’t “demonic possession” or “choosing violence”! My freeze response and my mutism isn’t “rudeness”! Didn’t you read 1984!? “Orwellian logic” is just a (per)version of Hegelian logic! It’s right there in the Goldstein book! There really IS a dialectical relationship between war and peace! This relationship shows itself when we can call it a time of peace when we have 800 or however many military bases around the world! It can’t be a coincidence that reading Hegel prepared me for reading Orwell to the point where I wasn’t shocked by any of it! And I’m one of the proles, Fred! The difference between the 1984 society and the society I want to live in mainly involves LOVE! Not the “love” of Big Brother, but simple proletarian love! And I’m not afraid of proletarian love! It’s all some people have! Who am I to expect anything “better”? Look, Fred! Communism will win! Until then, disabled, gender non-conforming communists are kinda one of the people the fascists “go after first”! So I’m a little bit more concerned about that (among other things) than I am wringing my hands about whether the dictatorship of the proletariat will truly be a “state that can wither away”! And I wish America was more concerned with stuff like that before they started stuff like operation paperclip, operation gladio, the 2nd red scare, MK Ultra, you know, basically the whole cold war thing in general, but, hey, I’m glad we had this conversation, for what it’s worth!
Mario:
Again, you just baldly assert that dialectics is a better mechanism to put things into. You don’t say what it’s better at nor against what alternative(s). You don’t discuss analytical tradeoffs. You don’t discuss fields where it works well and fields where it doesn’t.
This would make dialetics more valuable and useful than either relativity or quantum mechanics. Because relativity and quantum mechanics differ on the nature of gravity and so both break down in critical ways, and anyone discussing them will acknowledge this.
This is an extremely extraordinary claim. It requires really, really good evidence. Something on the order of dozens of falsifiable, unfalsified/met predictions made by dialectics and nothing else to a high degree of specificity and accuracy.
What you have instead is something that “always works” because it’s vacuous.
The gulf here is incredible.
Putting aside how bad Marxists have been about issues like autism, LGBTQ+ issues, women, etc., the dialectic doesn’t explain anything you discussed. Not only is behaviorism a better explanation than dialectics because at least there’s a there there (though it’s incomplete), but in any case there’s no dialectical explanation that explains why you having a meltdown isn’t a demonic possession. The Christian can easily say, “The thesis of your vulnerability plus the antithesis of Satan leads to the synthesis of demonic possession. You must complete the thesis of possession and the antithesis of giving your life to Christ to achieve the synthesis of liberation”. Oh what’s this link to dialectical theology doing here? https://www.gotquestions.org/dialectical-theology.html
I don’t know what Goldstein book you’re referring to, so I looked and found this: https://gastronomica.org/2007/11/02/dialectical-consumerism/ . ” Is this emulation of Western-style markets merely the latest stage of dialectical materialism, which demands that society abandon the local—the imperfect and chaotic—in favor of the global, that which appears to be perfect and contained? Must a society pass through this phase in order to prize the local and imperfect once again, as we in the West are only now beginning to do? What would Karl Marx have to say about fresh food versus sanitary conditions?” How the hell is this dialectical? There’s no synthesis! There’s just two competing models! What she had to discuss was interesting, and ruined by welding on Marxist analysis that doesn’t help! Worse, it’s clear that she has a bias toward the “fresh” model that makes her ignore, deeply ironically, that *there is a fucking synthesis! * Have local regulations and standards, use tech to make local companies use freshness-preserving packaging and deliver excess food to people who can use it, etc. etc. The two approaches don’t have to be in conflict. So even where the dialectic could have been useful, this author abandons it because of her personal biases.
And the military bases? I’d argue that we don’t have peace but colonialism, as seen by the goddamn wars we have as well as lower level conflicts. But someone on the other side of the discussion can readily point out that there’s actually no contradiction between peace and 800 military bases: The peace exists because of those bases. I guess one could call that a “dialectic” of an existing lack of peace and a desire for it with the threat of violent methods to produce an enforced peace, but again, that’s vapid.
Every actual method we’ve discovered, Mario, has tradeoffs. Do we focus more on falsification or on coherence and verification? Do we use qualitative or quantitive methods? Is a Likert scale actually going too be better for our purposes than asking an open-ended question? Which data set are we going to use and why? This very article discusses complexities in those tradeoffs. The fact that you never once feel the need to discuss the dialectic’s limits, where it may not apply, etc. shows what’s going on. You think you’ve discovered a master code to the universe. But you haven’t. Or else you’d be able to make highly specific, non-trivial claims.
As for love: If you believe in free love, you should despise a dictatorship of the proletariat. Dictatorships aren’t about love. I agree that you should be focusing on love first. So just drop the dictatorship. You know it’s not useful in the present, you know it’s free propaganda to your opponents, and you know that love is better anyways. But it’s part of the Marxist package, so you have to hold onto it. Again, that’s dogma, not theory.
Fred: I’m already a vegan antinatalist! I’m used to being lied about! Anthony Bourdain compared vegans to Hezbollah! He said vegans should kill themselves! But what the devil meant for evil can be recontextualized for good! I don’t mind getting compared to the party of Hassan Nasrallah! 🤣
Also, I’m an expert on love! I strongly depend on it to keep me alive! Because the simple act of interacting with me has been reported as phenomenally indistinguishable from torture for people without a sufficient level of love for me! You might even say that I was “born with a personality only a mother could love”! As a practical matter, it’s very important for me to know who ACTUALLY loves me versus who only loves the IDEA of me! I’ve preached the gospel of self-love to the incels! Etc, etc!
Look, it’s like Hegel said, the dialectical synthesis of being and nothing is becoming. The proof of the pudding is in the eating (Marx was fond of that one). Or, in the words of Uncle Ted, you can’t eat your cake and have it too. They weren’t talking about arguing on the internet! They were talking about living life! So if I have to document the life I’ve lived and put it in a peer reviewed book, fine! I guess! It’s not like I can bring back Elijah (McClain)!
On Bourdain: His comments on veganism were pretty shockingly closed-minded and irrational, but he explained that he had death threats hurled at him by vegans. Like socialists, they’re often the worst advertisement for their own position 🙂 . That’s not really relevant to the issue at hand. Both “local and imperfect” and “sanitary and integrated” models can accommodate veganism. (Though, frankly, I find it shocking how many vegetarians and vegans don’t realize that they actually disproportionately benefit from a globally integrated trade system.It becomes much harder to consistently fufill that lifestyle if you actually are stuck, especially on protein, with what is locally available). And both can actually be combined.
“Nothing” isn’t “becoming”. A thing “becoming” is a thing transitioning from a previous state. Again, this sounds deep but it’s at best just a specific method to do comparisons and contrasts of abstract concepts that exist only in our minds. And not being able to have your cake and eat it too is precisely an example of where the dialectic breaks down. There is no synthesis where you’ve eaten your cake and still have that cake, or anything like it.
And, again, you are never able to advance an argument from this that I can’t use the same verbiage to do. There’s no argument toward veganism, or the dictatorship of the proletariat, from this. And, frankly, I don’t think even you were convinced of the dictatorship of the proletariat by the dialectic.
Fred: if you want to know what convinced me of what, you’re more than welcome to read my article on “trans-platonic formalism”! I published it with full awareness of how insane it sounds! But no more insane than the book of Ezekiel! At least my article has sources!
https://mariomarrufo.com/2024/06/08/platos-cave-allegory-and-the-trans-platonic-caves/
Mario: I’ve read some of it. It’s definitely not in a formal or particularly readable style.
The bigger issue is that you argue that Popper’s actual, real and virtual all are “as above, so below”.
No. They’re not. People can act “virtually” based on internally contradictory propositions, or based on impossibilities. The category of things we can imagine internally are far greater than what are achievable.
In any case, as I can virtually imagine a transition without a dictatorship of the proletariat, and can also articulate why such a dictatorship is such a toxic thing virtually, you have no argument for it from this.
That’s the problem with “anything imaginable is on the table”.
Fred: The point is that the “virtual” is always connected to the physiological! And the physiological is physical! That means it’s connected to the external! That’s the connection between the “virtual” and the “real”! It’s hard to talk about “tripping,” but that IS all that’s happening when a person “trips”! And, well, “tripping as a natural phenomenon” is all that happened to St. Paul! And yet it was enough to “transform” him in some sense! There were different “precursors” to my trips than Paul’s, but it was still all “natural” (as opposed to “supernatural”). Speaking of which, you’ll notice that when people talk about “reality,” they’re usually not taking nature into account, which is (at best) an error! Because interacting with humans involves interacting with human nature! People tend to only want to interact with each other on a “real” (which is to say “social,” which, in our modern capitalist world is almost invariably to say “artificial”!) level! It’s very rare to get beneath this “real” level of artifice! But I’m not afraid of that anymore! I’ve stopped masking! Unmasking is something I had to learn how to do! It wasn’t easy!
Mario:
Yes, the “virtual” is physiological. Not magical. That’s precisely what makes Platonism not really compelling. The stuff we imagine is obviously heavily limited by both external and internal inputs. We struggle to visualize fourth-dimensional and higher objects even though the mathematics shows they are quite coherent. And we can imagine things that are nonsensical or actually internally contradictory.
All this means is that, like any computer, we can model counterfactuals.
The outcome of “tripping” is precisely indicative of that, as I think you’re alluding to. It’s not magical. It’s just the brain doing different things under different conditions.
…How in God’s name are people not usually taking nature into account when they discuss reality? I can’t imagine an interpretation of the word “nature” that makes that not false. Yes, of course we want to interact with other on the level of the real and the virtual. That’s because
a) We’ve been so massively successful as a species that our biggest problems, by far, are caused by each other, and so that’s the most salient part of reality by a country mile
b) Social circumstances are also the ones we can actually do something about, whereas many natural issues are either objects of only mere curiosity (though all of scientific discussion and curiosity about the world indicates that your claim here is still far afield) or are aspects of the world we can’t change except by engineering around them
This of course creates a massive bias toward discussing topics with social salience. We’re social animals. That’s not a remote surprise. Very often, discussing a natural problem we can’t do something about is just pointless whining. If we need to vent about it, fine, but that’s going to tend toward being in specific contexts.
And, again, how do you know that people don’t take nature into account? Did you have some method that looked at an actually representative cross-section of discourse?
By the by, part of the issue, arguably, with Marxism, is precisely not taking nature into account, and viewing humans only in a social context, even as their argument actually hinges on an implicit human nature they do not bother discovering.
I’d also point out that it is precisely natural sympathies and the need to protect nature that is a critical part of why people oppose the dictatorship of the proletariat. I recommend reading Bookchin instead of state propaganda.
Fred: I’m autistic! People aren’t taught in our round hole society how to deal with the “square pegs” who have autism IN THEIR NATURE as autistic people! Even I wasn’t taught how to deal with my own nature as an autistic person! That’s something I had to learn very painfully over the course of about 38 years! And the learning never stops! The liberal subject is not the human in their natural state! Liberal subjectitude is a very artificial form of human consciousness! Hence the “kill the Indian, save the man” slogan! In the philosophy of synthetic naturalism (which I advocate), we realize that, while there are many legitimate modes of being/human consciousness OUTSIDE liberal subjectitude, we, as a species, have to come up with concrete limits to impose on, essentially, overproduction if we want a livable biosphere (i.e., nature imposes limits on us, and we had better prepare for that however we can)! I don’t have evidence that we can impose those limits under any method! I’m only “betting” on communism because at least in communism they’re supposed to understand the difference between “use-value” and “exchange-value”!
Mario:
I understand that. I too have experiences most people don’t know how to relate to or comprehend. It’s something that social systems need to build in allowances for and work around. And notice how, at no point, did we need the dialectic to discuss that problem, and doing so would indeed be an additional barrier to entry for most people for no gain.
Why is a liberal subjectitude more artificial than any other state? It’s a social construct. It’s learned interactions. And why would your alternative necessarily be any less artificial? I agree that false consciousness, propaganda, etc. is operating. But that really only applies to capitalism . The precepts of liberalism, arguably with the exception of the primary focus on the individual, are things that, once discovered, are actually quite intuitive. When one realizes things like the advantages of having a libertarian ethos where you leave others alone unless you have a compelling reason not to, or the advantages in informational terms of a democracy, etc., they really tend to stick. Hence the empirical success of that model.
And collectivism is also actually pretty artificial too. It requires a ton of constant conditioning to suborn the ego to a collective consciousness. In Japan, the entire society has to constantly push for the individual to push their efforts for the team, even in things like baseball. It’s not at all organic.
But, okay, there’s valid outside modes. Great. Why does that justify a dictatorship of the proletariat? It doesn’t! That’s the advantage of multicultural tolerant libertarian liberalism! You let people experiment with models!
Understanding the difference between use value and exchange value not only isn’t necessarily sustainable thinking logic, but in any case is totally separate from the dictatorship of the proletariat. I have to keep repeating this because you absorbed a dogma. You can be a communist without being a Marxist. You can be a Marxist and agree with the anarchists that the transitional state, if one even needs to exist, need not be a collectivist dungeon but can be a state with freedoms. You can recognize that encouraging voluntary, ground-up innovation and change is going to be less violent and more effective than vanguard partyism. You never argue for any of these things because you accepted a dogmatic package where the truth of one actually-unrelated proposition (“Communism may be the best approach to save the environment”) is bound up with others (“Therefore, we need a dictatorship of the proletariat, and also the Holodomor wasn’t genocide somehow, and also I should trust state propaganda as long as they slap the right label on it”).
Fred: When/how is the liberal subject supposed to take the hero’s journey!? How is the liberal subject supposed to learn struggle? How are they supposed to be safely exposed to feelings of danger and discomfort? How are they supposed to learn to earn (their place in society, for example)? How are they supposed to learn self-respect and self-love!? Through the artificial, exploitive market economy!? Liberals consistently act like humans have graduated from being an anthropological species! Many of them (notably Sam Harris) consistently act like history itself is irrelevant in explaining human behavior! That’s why they consistently display such contempt against the “3rd world”/”global south”! Regardless of the Marx shit, I see this western supremacy mentality fairly often, and I believe it’s holding “western leftism” back! We have to recognize that we share the same struggle as workers in the global south! We have to be in solidarity with them! We only have to decode the divide and conquer strategy the ruling class is using against us! We are not petty bourgeois labor aristocrats! Let’s not internalize the mentality that attaining that status should be one of our goals! Every “made in Bangladesh” sticker is someone’s story! Every bar of chocolate is someone’s story!
Mario:
Where do we do the hero’s journey in liberalism? In fucking life? Have you taken a look around? This idea that we need our social systems to give us more shit on our plate to deal with than death, illness and pain is some straight up fascist shit. It’s misanthropy, masochism and sadism. It’s total nonsense. It’s a Joe Rogan quip.
Social systems in the vein of liberalism (and, again, I’m an anarchist, I’m not arguing for classical liberalism, but come on, a classical liberal could have you absolutely caught here) create opportunities for autonomous agents to express themselves and learn. To develop and grow. In fields like science, sport and civic participation, we discover who we are. We do so relatively safely so we don’t throw away the wisdom that people have gained by killing them. Humboldt, Locke and Dewey’s visions of education and human liberation are incredibly beautiful for precisely that reason. And, frankly, Freire continues in their vein.
And is a dictatorship of the proletariat supposed to do that? Gulags aren’t exactly “Live Love Learn” moments.
And “graduated from an anthropological species”? You mean, like suggesting that we’ll have a classless society and history will be over? Is your complaint that they jumped the gun on this? Frankly, I’d argue that a lot of modern people in the purported Enlightenment tradition, like Pinker, are actually infinitely more guilty of the opposite: arguing that we are an anthropological species, constrained by entropy (which is erroneous anthropology as well as missing the point), fixed in social change by biotruths they make up. It strikes me that it’s the left’s point that humans are so adaptive and social that we cannot be understood like we are Paleotithic people. Culture changes us in a very real way.
I agree that many act like history isn’t important… which is the opposite of the accusation you’re making, near as I can tell. But that’s modern liberals, who view history as being “over”, erroneously. But that doesn’t make the other ideas incorrect. They’re just wrong that this is the pinnacle.
And “Western supremacy”? Where the hell was I Western supremacist? Saying that one group had a great idea doesn’t mean no other group did. I don’t think Westerners are metaphysically superior, and I think the idea is nonsense. I think that the “West”, already a nonsense abstraction, came up with some great ideas along with a lot of bad, and we should use the good ideas. Just like the good ideas from everywhere else.
But, again, the fatal flaw in any argument like this is that the only framework in which this conversation is even coherent is under something like multicultural liberalism. Perhaps something more radical, but with the assumption that individuals can and should be free to develop and create. I would argue that liberalism focused too much on the atomized individual and that they should be focusing on the social individual, but even that is something that’s easy to say for an extrovert, and a good society needs to be able to work for the hermits and the socially anxious as well as me. Only I am talking about a framework that actually lets people live together.
It sounds like you fundamentally don’t want to defend the dictatorship of the proletariat. I’m glad! It’s indefensible.
Fred: my hero’s journey looked a lot more like liberal 1984 or Invisible Man (the one by Ellison) or, hell, The Passion of the Christ (I’m not kidding!) than anything we’re promised in liberal subjectitude! But the only reason it even turned out “that well” is that I SURVIVED! The philosophy of synthetic naturalism dictates that I regularly mourn my loved ones who did NOT survive their “hero’s journey”! Because we have to synthesize our survivor guilt with our survivor bias! That’s how tears become a dialectical synthesis of the tragedy and the statistic, Fred! I’m only good as a “Marxist” insofar as I am a missionary FROM the Sentinelese! We practice the same religion! Mother Earth! And, look, I don’t care HOW they do it, but the revolutionary (working) class can only come into consciousness of itself as the individuals in the revolutionary class come into collective class consciousness, and the self actualized individual can only come into consciousness of theirself as a member of the revolutionary class insofar as they also recognize theirself to be simply another child of mother earth within/in terms of the DIALECTICAL order of NATURAL CYCLES, regardless of where humanity aspires to put themselves in any bullshit liberal patriarchal technofuturist “hierarchical” order!
Mario:
And yet you had it, in liberal subjectitude. So even if we can’t blame any issues on capitalism, clearly it’s not inconsistent with liberal subjectitude. I think you are conflating what the model promises with what it allows. It’s precisely one of the strength of multicultural liberalism that the model allows a lot more than its ideal default package. I’m dubious if that’s even true, I suspect your hero’s journey is perfectly consistent even with liberal subjectitude, but whatever, it’s certainly not precluded by it. Your argument is self-refuting by your own example.
(Also, I recommend watching Maggie Mae Fish on the hero’s journey. The idea is fundamentally flawed, ironically an idea in need of a dialectic).
So if you don’t care how they did it, why did you defend a dictatorship of the proletariat? But, whatever. The problem is precisely that such a dictatorship inevitably creates alienation. The process of creating authority of some over others produces precisely the dynamic where the working class cannot operate together. Dictatorships inherently concentrate power and this inherently prevents class solidarity. Also, the point of the revolution isn’t to make the working class ascendant. It’s to end class.
And “natural cycles”? Okay, so you’re the one making a biotruth. With no evidence. Either humans are cultural animals or they’re not. You can’t have it both ways. So, again, it seems like your problem with the people saying history is over is just that they called the play early, not that you actually have a fundamental problem with ignoring humans as a group that is culturally evolving.
Your arguments hinge on evidence you don’t have. Again, this is a failure of Marxism, and of a metaphysical focus. You’re smuggling in quite non-metaphysical assumptions about anthropology, history, sociology, etc. in your framework. Those assumptions may be true or false, but they need to be defended. They’re not proper axioms. And, near as I can tell, the assumptions are false. (Which is not the same as endorsing liberalism or patriarchy or technocracy).
Fred: apparently you haven’t read 1984. Fine, whatever. It’s not “a warning against socialism.” If anything, it seems like Orwell is saying, like Marx, that the fall of capitalism is inevitable! What it’s a warning against is the surveillance state, the permanent war state, the end of history narrative, and the (resulting, apparently) death of love/joy! We didn’t need to transition out of capitalism (or even liberalism) for our governments to adopt those policies! History can only “end” after class society ends! Because the “advent” of history was very tied up in the “advent” of class society! I don’t “reduce” people to their class! It’s capitalism that tends to “reduce people” to their class! Let’s remember that a person’s class is tied up in their relation to the means of production! The revolutionary (working) class can have all the discussions we want, but we need goals, right? And one of them has to be seizing the means of production, right? So we need programs to get all us proles ready for that! We need to create dual power movements/organizations, not (completely) unlike Hezbollah in Lebanon!
What are we talking about when we say we’re against the atomization of the individual? Because the philosophy of synthetic naturalism fights the atomization of the individual by putting the individual in very intimate relationships with their own community members! A “neo-tribe,” if you will! A “tribe” of self-actualized individuals who attained self-actualization through recognizing themselves as children of mother earth, and as members of the working class that works for itself! The philosophy of synthetic naturalism sees the human being as “synthetically natural,” not (completely) unlike the bacteria that evolved to eat plastic! It doesn’t see people like me, who have autism, as (merely) “square pegs” just because of our limitations in the capital economy! It sees a place of dignity for everyone! We just have to rethink “dignity” a little! Ok, fine, the dictatorship of the proletariat isn’t the same thing as the neo-tribe, but it doesn’t really matter as long as there are compatible interfaces! These are just sketches! But we can’t fight fascism as atomized individuals! Let’s not forget that!
Ok, look, I don’t want to get into the hero’s journey too much, but it’s what Björk went through when she made Homogenic! It’s what Sarah McLachlan went through when she made Fumbling Towards Ecstasy! It’s what Lana Del Rey went through when she made Ocean Blvd! In other words, it’s not something everyone goes through in western society! You almost have to “luck into it” by surviving heartache and tragedy! But at the end, they find love and peace! They had it the whole time! They just weren’t looking in the right places! It’s a big deal to find/figure out where your love and peace come from!
Mario:
I have read 1984. I know Orwell was a socialist. I’ve read Animal Farm, I’ve read the foreword to it, I’ve read Shooting an Elephant, I’ve read his socialist work, I’ve even read parts of Homage to Catalonia. I know that 1984 is intended as a specific warning about the trend of Western nations to fascism, hence him using Oceania. But the problems he identifies, as he well knew, being a fierce critic of Stalin (ironically to doctrinaire Marxists like yourself – that’s literally who the foreword for Animal Farm is targeted at), extend to the USSR and to “Communist” states. In fact, in reality, as I’ve discussed elsewhere just recently, if you look at fasciist states, they’re rarely that organized. They’re usually far more incompetent and bumbling. It’s actually really only the authoritarian left and a more traditionalist autocratic right that has ever actually run regimes with the density and sophistication of the propaganda and cultural engineering he discusses in 1984. (Though, as Chomsky points out, Doublespeak is something that corporate media can promulgate quite well).
And, yes, Mario, I know that capitalist societies can do those things. This should tell you why the dictatorship of the proletariat is a bad idea. Because you can have a dictatorship, using propaganda to say that it’s the dictatorship of the proletariat, that’s just a degenerate form of state capitalism. Like the USSR . Like China. Indeed, that is the only mode we have ever observed for it . Yes, including Vietnam.
And, yes, Mario, you have tended to avoid class reductionism, but your response here is flailing. The point is that Marxism, as an analytical category, places economics, a priori, ahead of all other concerns. That’s the point of the substructure-superstructure analysis. Marx was brilliant at recognizing the interconnections, but he still put his own preferred disciplne, economics, on top, analytically.
But a feminist can point out that the most fundamental structures of societies are really famiilies and kinship groups, and that those dynamics precede essentially any sophisticated economics, and all economics pass through them. A cultural anthropologist or anti-racist can point out that culture dictates everything, that culture is what people actually live, day to day, and all other things are secondary. I read a fantastic article that I wish I could find again that argued that the ideology of capitalism was secondary to racism and colonialism, effectively an ad hoc justification for “The thing we are doing to these people anyways”. And a an anarchist or pollitical science can note that all human interactions take place in contexts of norms, rules, laws and policies, that when we seek to act collectively we always engage in a kind of politics.
So why put economics first? There is no reason.
And this is yet another flaw of the dialectic. It’s one-dimensional. You can only ever analyze one topic. But soocieties aren’t one-dimensional. They’re not univariable.
So Liberating Theory ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/264871916_Liberating_Theory , there are other free PDFs) argues, I think far more successfully, for a “force field” approach. These different axes of human interaction are always co-operant. While one may be more important in any given context or even across many contexts, all can be dominant at any given point, and all matter. There is no “superstructure”. There are interacting structures, like a spiderweb.
And, yes, we can seize the means of production. Which doesn’t require a dictatorship. Again, I’m being really specific here, and you’re dancing around it.
Okay, so you recognize that the atomization of the individual is a problem. Great. I think a “neo-tribe” format is perfectly reasonable. Do you have any evidence that it works? That there are no additional problems? Chomsky lived on a kibbutzim. He pointed out that, as much as he loved it, small groups like that tend toward a kind of busybodyism, of people being really inordinately worried about other people’s business. So how do you get the benefits of love and community without intrusion and loss of privacy?
And, yes, it doesn’t matter if they’re complimentary interfaces. They’re fucking not . Dictatorships destroy all the organic solidarity you’re discussing. Seriously, why are you still defending this? It’s so transparent that you don’t actually care to. Your method really is wholly un-dictatorial. So why not drop it? Get rid of it. It was a bad idea. Doesn’t make anything else Marx said wrong. But we ran the experiment, and it has a miserable failure rate. It’s not worth including it.
(And want to talk about square pegs in round holes? Again, dictatorships don’t do great on those! The idea that neurodiverse people are well-served by some top-down one-size-fits-all solution that just has sickle and hammer branding is, in my view, utterly moronic).
As for the hero’s journey: Just watch the Maggie Mae Fish video. I think it will make you realize how utterly restrictive the hero’s journey is. And you are talking about folks like Bjork and McLachlan and Del Ray who you do not know. You do not know if they fit this pattern, and in fact, women rarely do. Hence the proliferation of the “heroine’s journey”, a story pattern where a woman goes through a hero’s journey, comes home, and realizes there’s still work to be done that doesn’t fit into some easy pattern. Ironically, one reason why is social issues. Social issues don’t see final resolution the same way killing a dragon does.
You’ll also notice that the hero’s journey is both individualistic rather than collectivistic and parochial rather than universal. The hero’s journey ends with the hero returning home. What about the hero leaving his homeland forever, in solidarity with a new people? Finding an adoptive family? Seems like the kind of things lefties in particular should pay attention to.
And, again, I really want to point out: You are forcing innumerable people you don’t know into a pattern that was meaningful to you but you have no idea was meaningful to them. That’s the same kind of analytical violence you decried in liberal servitude. Based on an ideology derived from liberal servitude . Look up what Campbell had to say about women and the left. You may be shocked.
But, again, what I suspect is going on is that you’ve taken a specific category that is rich with information and, in trying to retrofit it to everything, reduced it to triviality. Just like the dialectic. Just like Skinner with behaviorism. You want master keys to the world and you don’t have any. You have good ideas in specific contexts that you are overapplying.
Fred: sorry about the 1984 thing. It’s just that the Goldstein book is the document they give Winston that explains the dialectical relationship between war and peace! Anyway! I don’t know if you live in America, but fascists are about to take over! Maybe if I click my heels together three times, I’ll be lucky enough to get DEPORTED to a “dictatorship of the proletariat”! That’ll teach me, I bet! Then I’ll be sorry! 😒
Re: Campbell: I watched Maggie’s videos about that Nazi! I don’t care about him! Björk IS my hero! I don’t need some Nazi to tell me she went on a journey! She says herself that she’s going on a journey in the song “Hunter”! At the end of the album, after “Alarm Call,” where she “goes to the mountaintop,” and “Pluto,” where she “explodes,” she finds that “all is full of love”! That’s a big deal! Self-actualization is a TRANSFORMATIVE process! The self-actualized individual who recognizes theirself as a child of mother earth and a member of the class that works for itself has inner peace! They don’t live in fear of their neighbor! They live in the spirit of imagination and curiosity! They have useful skills! Even if those skills might not be recognized as “useful” in the capital economy! They love and respect theirself! They are fiercely loyal (i.e., they demand a society where there is NO CONTRADICTION between loyalty to the self, to the class, and/or to mother earth)! They know how and when to stay in their own lane! They have a sense of humor! Especially a sense of gallows humor! They know the meaning of struggle and “earning it” and self-sacrifice! They know how to mourn! They have a long memory! The indomitable revolutionary human spirit of the self-actualized […] individual working in a collective of other so-self-actualized individuals will not be defeated in the long run! I am a self-actualized individual who recognizes theirself as a child of mother earth and the class that works for itself! And I can assure you that I think for myself! And I always will! Even if it kills me! It’s not like I haven’t had a few scrapes!
Mario:
…But the whole point of Orwell is that war isn’t peace. That’s yet another practical failing of the dialectic: It can be used identically to the reasoning of authoritarian propaganda to transmute one thing into its opposite using verbiage, basically a fallacious Ship of Theseus argument. Orwell’s whole point is that any language or any assumptions that can lead you to think war can in any way be peace is tricking you. That’s why Politics and the English Language suggests plain-speaking, honest discourse.
And you would not do well under Stalin’s purges, Mario. It’s really scary that you don’t recognize that. Orwell’s contemporaries, or even people before the Wall came down, could maybe be forgiven for not realizing how utterly screwed up the Russian dungeon was and the kind of ongoing damage it did. The ongoing problem with Russian corruption is fully traceable to the Soviets (and, yes, the Czars before them): Authoritarian regimes make people lie to each other even in blatant ways because of the panoptic fear that either will get ratted out (the Russians call it vranyo , and this enables blatant corruption).
People today don’t have that excuse. It is willful ignorance now to look at these regimes and think they’re at all defensible. Bakunin’s prediction of the red bureaucracy beating the people with the people’s stick is apt. And when people make falsifiable predictions that are ultimately confirmed, they deserve to be paid attention to.
Regarding the hero’s journey: Okay, then why are you using his Nazi idea? The whole point of Fish’s argument is that the idea itself is fundamentally flawed. It’s not just that Campbell sucked. It’s that Campbell’s biases can be seen in the journey. How the hell did Bjork refuse the call? She’s been in music since she was six. What threshold guardian did she battle? In what way did she meaningfully leave home? She went back to Iceland because of gun violence.
What you’ve done is just take people with any kind of remarkable journey and shove the name “hero’s journey” onto it. This is, of course, totally contrary to Orwell’s advice about avoiding needless jargon. It’s actively misleading. And, since you clearly just mean any kind of trajectory of personal growth, it makes the idea that liberal subjectitude can’t do it especially false…
Especially as you talk about people in the fucking belly of liberal subjectitude . Bjork is a goddamn Norwegia. She’s influenced by Kraftwerk and Kate Bush. She’s not singing Kapital.
So, yes, self-actualization is a transformative process. That’s different for each person. That doesn’t follow a monomyth. And is done all the time by people in all sorts of social contexts.
And when you say “Even if those skills might not be recognized as “useful” in the capital economy!”, that’s you condemning capitalism. Not liberalism. See why I keep makng the distinction?
I’m sure what you do feels good. But, as an outside person interacting with you, Mario, it seems like someone high on their own supply. It’s okay to take a second look at these ideas. It’s okay to say, “Okay, yeah, the dictatorship of the proletariat is a bad idea”.
Fred: ok! Fine! You got me! You speak of “high on your own supply.” indeed, the self-actualization journey inevitably involves altered states of consciousness! However, in many cases, the “altered states of consciousness” experienced by my heroes in their self-actualization journeys were forms of dissociation caused by traumatic event(s) they managed to heal from in the process of making the album! My self-actualization occurred on April 16th, when I was taking Dr. Carrier’s naturalism class! That was the day I synthesized my Cartesian Demon with my Laplacian Demon! The reason it sounds “crazy” is that it was phenomenally (metaphysically) indistinguishable from a psychotic episode! I experienced (“heard”) an audible pop in my head! I thought I was having a stroke or something! I called an ambulance! They still want me to pay $450! I have insurance, Fred! Anyway, the “statistical miracle” is that I was able to stay calm and not panic because of everything I had learned about the subconscious in the course of taking three of Dr. Carrier’s courses! It’s not just him! I did a lot of extra reading! But he recommended a lot of it! But you’d expect me to have been panicking (if you didn’t know I had been learning so much about the subconscious) because I was having a psychotic episode!!! But I’m my actual self now! That means I can’t go back to my pre-actual self! And it’s not like I haven’t experienced systems trying to get me to go back somehow!
On surveying: Not only is the data you get from a phone call distorted for all the reasons you specified (and to specific directions, too – e.g. the people who don’t own phones are likely poorer or in marginal living situations and likely lean Dem, while if you’re calling landlines you’ll get older people and thus more lkely conservatives), but it’s even worse than that.
People lie on anonymous surveys. The specifics of how you ask the question matters, even for something as consistent as political polling. People have weird idiosyncratic perspectives in their heads, which explains all of the bizarre conclusions you can draw from the American population from things like Gallup polls.
And people’s voting behavior is going to differ from their statement in any case. A pang of conscience may get them when they were virtue signaling earlier, or they may decide on a protest vote in the spur of the moment. Extrapolating from how people feel even the day before doesn’t always work. That’s why even exit polls will differ from the data!
The weighting on recalled vote stat is going to be a problem too. Because a lot of people who’d vote Trump in 2020 won’t vote for him this year. So if you’re correcting your model that way, when there has been such a stark difference in each election in how people perceive them, you’re going to introduce a pretty substantial bias.
On Cocco and van Dam: One thing that happens in these discussions between people with expert training and those without is that experts use aggregate data. So I know, with a sociology background, that the overwhelming consensus is that we’ve seen declining real wages versus rocketing real costs, that the CPI may arguably undercount real costs, etc. etc. And all that is cross-confirmed by people’s perceptions that the economy sucks. Human beings can be irrational, but they’re rarely so irrational that they can’t identify that, actually, they’re totally doing super great when they know they’re struggling to make rent.
So this is why we count things like socioeconomic status, and do wealth breakdowns, and think about fungible wealth.
But the average conservative gadfly won’t. Either because they don’t even know about it or because they don’t care.
Another thing, too, is something I like to call a “greedy argument”.
So let’s say that, on average, millennials were doing super well.
Okay. Does that help the one who isn’t?
If millennial wealth came from inflated home prices from those lucky enough to get into one, that means the middle quintiles can still be in trouble.
This is why folks frequently look at average rental prices in cities. Quantify it directly and, yeah, wages aren’t keeping up.
So the person responding to this kind of argument from a millennial is missing the point, even if their claims were correct in the full context, and they’re obviously not. But that requires admitting that a truth in general (that maybe the economy isn’t so bad) can fail to apply in specific instances (such that there can still be millennials really struggling).
On The Economist: Their Harris endorsement aside, they remain ghoulish. It’s the overwhelming consensus of people studying remote and flexible work that it’s best for everyone (which The Economist doesn’t even bother to assess the true value of because they are bootlickers). This is something that the business community is just being irrational about. But, instead of being the voice of reason, they decided to repeat mythology.
And, yeah, not taking into account retention costs and other costs is just so dishonest, and so people like Ben
Askins constantly point this out. In particular, you want your employees happy with you even when they’re about to leave. Because, if your employees have high morale and know you’re not trying to fuck them over by bringing them back into the office no matter how inconvenient it is and no matter how much an individual employee may be meeting or exceeding performance benchmarks, they’ll recommend you to their friends. Which saves you time in recruiting and gets you trustworthy people. Piss people off and get a bad name in the industry and you’ll find your productivity plummeting.
The problem is that it’s hard to measure those stats and see the connection. So it’s easy for pencil pushers with no empathy or decency to ignore it. At great cost not just to the employees but to their own bottom line.
And on those individual benchmarks: The Economist is letting average statistics do a lot of work here to justify their nonsense too. And this is also why it’s important to bear in mind the context in which claims are being made. Companies aren’t just deciding to bring home some low performers. That would be justified under The Economist’s (false) argument. Companies are issuing ends to all work from home. (While managers will totally have loopholes for them and their friends, because of course they will). So the average isn’t enough here. Even by The Economist’s desperate flailing, one should not be agreeing with the companies here. They’re clearly overcorrecting.
Comrade Lenin knew that the Economist was just “a journal that speaks for British millionaires”! 🤣
And nothing has changed 🙂 .
Though The Economist is worth reading, just like Forbes, the WSJ, etc. There’s a branch of the business community that ranges liberal to pragmatically conservative. But they are generally people who are paying at least some attention to reality. The unfortunate reality of the social media age is that the editorial bias has creeped in (Chomsky’s rule of thumb was to just not read the editorial section at these places), but they still are generally going to present the best accounting of the position of a segment of the business class, and those people need to care about reality to some degree.
Hence The Economist endorsing Harris.
Yes! I advocate diligent study of bourgeois “realities,” but I don’t LIVE (or advocate living) in that “reality”! 🤣