Welcome to Part 2. Bernie Sanders is zipping across the U.S. and firing up people of all sorts with ideas from democratic socialist economics. His ideas for an ethical economics are perfectly suited to our times of inequality and oligarchic corporatist government. And they have been brewing in the developed world since the 60s.
Links to Part 1 & 3 can be found at the bottom of this diary, if you'd like to follow the series.
BTW, if your audience is afraid of the word "socialist" just say "ethical" economics instead.
This diary series (four) explores the outlines of Bernie's type of economic philosophy.
We're using a book from the 60s. It is by the post-WWII British economist E.F. Schumacher, the perennially popular Small Is Beautiful (1973). We follow the four parts of the book very closely in summary form. It is subtitled Economics As If People Mattered. Have no fear, there's no technical language, or math, or any Marx. Well, it's a tad long and the language is from the 60s, but so am I :-)
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Here's a link to Abebooks, where I buy all my books used. I try not to support Amazon if I can help it.
http://www.abebooks.com/....
Overview
Why is democratic socialist economics so important today?
It is clear to progressives that corporate capitalism has failed the people of the developed world since the 1970s, and, more importantly, is destroying the environment and driving climate change into the sixth great extinction. However, corporatist liberals and conservatives are not persuaded.
Capitalist conservatives deny climate change itself and think a capitalism badge is required for entry into Ayn Rand's heaven. Capitalist liberals, such as the DNC and the "centrist" Democratic Party members, accept climate change, while thinking that capitalism itself could still be reformed to serve human needs and curb climate change.
I think Bernie's rapturous reception will force the Democratic Party in 2016 to choose it's primary loyalty. Folks will have to choose between corporate capitalism - by the DNC with a smiley face or by the GOP with an angry face - and democratic socialism.
For now, welcome to the only economics fit for human sustainability.
Small Is Beautiful is comprised of four parts:
1. The Modern World (same now as the 60s - the sh*tstorm only flies faster now)
2. Resources (today's topic)
3. The Third World (now called the "emerging world")
4. Organization & Ownership
This diary summarizes part two, which contains five chapters.
PART TWO: RESOURCES
Six - The Greatest Resource, Education
Notice that democratic socialism begins a discussion of resources with education, not capital. Schumacher remarks that:
If western civilisation is in a state of permanent crisis, it is not far-fetched to suggest that there may be something wrong with its education.
Our education system is good at transmitting know-how, but we need it to be good also at transmitting ideas about
values. And not values as dogma - that is worse than useless. We need to learn how to use our values as instruments with which to look at the world.
The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of values that fill our minds. One's mind must be able to bring to the world a set of powerful ideas, otherwise the world will seem strange and chaotic.
The despair we find in western societies is not due to a lack of know-how but a lack of coherent ideas about values with which to engage in the world and make decisions. Our main problem today is that the leading ideas of our times are mostly derived from the 19th century, but they have been either misapplied or applied outside of their particular niches.
Schumacher identifies six such themes of 19th c. ideas and values.
1. The idea of evolution - that higher forms continually develop out of lower forms, as a natural and automatic process. The 20th c. saw the systematic application of this idea to all aspects of reality - without exception.
2. Flowing from a narrow view of evolution, was the idea of competition - natural selection as the survival of the fittest, which purports to explain the natural and automatic process of evolution and development.
3. The idea stemming from Marxism that all the higher manifestations of human life, such as religion, philosophy, art, etc., are nothing but a cultural superstructure erected to disguise and promote economic interests, the whole of human history being the history of class struggles.
4. If Marxists denigrated all the higher manifestations of human life as being disguises for economic oppression, the Freudian interpretation reduces them to the dark stirrings of a subconscious mind and explains them mainly as the results of unfulfilled incest-wishes during child-hood and early adolescence.
5. The general idea of relativism (not the general theory of relativity :-), which denies all absolutes, dissolves all norms and standards, leading to the total undermining of the idea of truth in pragmatism, and grumps Schumacher, "affecting even mathematics, which has been defined by Bertrand Russell as 'the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, or whether what we say is true.'"
6. Finally, the triumphant idea of positivism, that valid knowledge can be attained only through the methods of the natural sciences and hence that no knowledge is genuine unless it is based on generally observable facts. Positivism, in other words, is solely interested in 'know-how' and denies the possibility of objective knowledge about meaning and purpose of any kind.
So there you have it. Our people are educated with this set of ideas (values) and with which they set out to face the world. It is no wonder that the rich world is filled with so much depression and angst.
Schumacher points out what these ideas have in common:
They all assert that what had previously been taken to be something of a higher order is really 'nothing but' a more subtle manifestation of the 'lower' - unless, indeed, the very distinction between higher and lower is denied. Thus man, like the rest of the universe, is really nothing but an accidental collocation of atoms. The difference between a man and a stone is little more than a deceptive appearance.
Man's highest cultural achievements are nothing but disguised economic greed or the outflow of sexual frustrations. In any case, it is meaningless to say that man should aim at the 'higher' rather than the 'lower' because no intelligible meaning can be attached to purely subjective notions like 'higher' or 'lower', while the word 'should' is just a sign of authoritarian megalomania.
This set of ideas dominate humanities today, and which claimed to do away with metaphysics, are in Schumacher's words "themselves a bad, vicious, life-destroying type of metaphysics." Metaphysics and ethics, it turns out, cannot be thought away; what we ended up with underpinning western civilization was "bad metaphysics and appalling ethics." It is not so much the specialization of modern education that is bad, but the lack of depth and the lack of metaphysical awareness.
Schumacher says that Economics is being taught without any awareness of the values, the view of human nature that underlies present-day economic theory. In fact, many economists are themselves unaware of the fact that such a view is implicit in their teaching and that nearly all their theories would have to change if that view changed.
Fortunately, says Schumacher, the heart is often more intelligent than the mind and refuses to accept these six ideas completely.
So the man is saved from despair, but landed in confusion.
In order to lift the confusion, we should learn to accept metaphysical ideas that are pretty much the opposite of these six leading ideas of our time. That is not to say that one rejects evolution. Of course not. But it does mean that the bad metaphysics with which the struggle for the acceptance of evolution has left us can now be safely discarded. No one is bringing back paternalistic theism or creationism or any such thinking.
So what are these healthier (values) metaphysical ideas?
1. The first is the re-acceptance (without theism) of levels of being in the universe.
It is only when we can see the earth as a ladder, and when we can see the human position on the ladder, that we can recognise a meaningful task for human life on earth.
Maybe it is man's task - or simply, if you like, man's happiness - to attain a higher degree of realisation of his potentialities, a higher level of being or 'grade of significance' than that which comes to him 'naturally': we cannot even study this possibility except by re- cognising the existence of a hierarchical structure.
As soon as we accept the existence of 'levels of being', we understand why the findings of physics - as Einstein recognised - have no philosophical implications.
(Schumacher further developed this concept in a remarkable and wonderful book called
A Guide for the Perplexed (1977).
2. The second new idea is the acceptance of opposites.
Schumacher states that it is the nature of our human thinking to think in opposites, ones that cannot be resolved at that level of thought. He presents the example of the opposites of freedom and discipline in education. There's no one formula that can capture this, but countless parents and teachers do it everyday.
They do it by bringing into the situation a force that belongs to a higher level where opposites are transcended - the power of love.
The true problems of living - in politics, economics, education, marriage, etc. - are always problems of overcoming or reconciling opposites. They are divergent problems and have no solution in the ordinary sense of the word. They demand of humans not merely the employment of their reasoning powers but the commitment of one' whole personality.
3. The third new idea is that of the renewal of ethics.
The 19th century thinking encapsulated by the six idea noted above meant the diminished acceptance of the existence of levels of being and the idea that some things are higher than others.
This has has meant the destruction of ethics which is based on the distinction of good and evil, claiming that good is higher than evil.
The result has been confusion. Schumacher asks: "What is the guiding image that young people have before them when the leading intellectuals claim that everything is relevant and ethics is treated with cynicism?"
The task of our generation is one of metaphysical reconstruction, using the age-old ideas in new formulation.
Seven - The Proper Use of Land (and it's creatures)
Schumacher begins with this inconvenient and inescapable fact:
Someone once gave a brief outline of history by saying that "civilized man has marched across the face of the earth and left a desert in his footprints."
This has been one of the prime reason for the collapse of successive civilizations, necessitating the need to always move along. Schumacher notes that the questions posed by the
proper use of land are not technological. They belong to a higher order of thinking.
One of the most important tasks for any society is to distinguish between ends and means, and to have some sort of cohesive view and agreement about this. Is the land merely a means of production or is it something more, something that is an end in itself?
Capitalist economics, based on 19th c. ideas and values, consider land and its creatures to be factors of production -
means-to-ends. (And the results of this are in, eh?) But this is only their secondary nature. Before everything else, land and its creatures are
ends-in-themselves.
Schumacher says they are meta-economic:
and it is therefore rationally justifiable to say, as a statement of fact, that they are in a certain sense sacred.
This is where we run headlong into materialistic, capitalist economics, which refuses to recognize
anything as sacred, because it cannot imagine that
there are meta-economic facts that precede and should determine it.
Schumacher notes that he can treat his car any way he likes, for it is human-made, but he cannot treat a cow the same way (as is done in industrial farming), for they are different levels of being, something that modern economics is incapable of understanding.
The main danger to the soil, he says, is modern human determination to treat agriculture the same as industry; it is the prime danger to agriculture and civilization. We poison the earth, we poison ourselves. Again the fact that agriculture, which deals with living processes, is different from industry is a metaphysical, a meta-economic fact. It must precede and pre-determine economics.
Real life consists of the tensions produced by the incompatibility of opposites, each of which is needed, and just as life would be meaningless without death, so agriculture would be meaningless without industry. It remains true, however, that agriculture is primary, whereas industry is secondary, which means that human life can continue without industry, whereas it cannot continue without agriculture.
Human life, at the level of civilization, however, demands the balance of the two principles, and this balance is ineluctably destroyed when people fail to appreciate the essential difference between agriculture and industry - a difference as great as that between life and death - and attempt to treat agriculture as just another industry.
The capitalist economist sees agriculture as primarily directed towards food production.
Schumacher insists, however, that in ethical economics, agriculture has three tasks:
- to keep man in touch with living nature, of which he is and remains a highly vulnerable part;
- to humanise and ennoble man's wider habitat; and
- to bring forth the foodstuffs and other materials which are needed for a
becoming life.
I do not believe that a civilisation which recognises only the third of these tasks, and which pursues it with such ruthlessness and violence that the other two tasks are not merely neglected but systematically counteracted, has any chance of long-term survival.
Eight - Resources for Industry
This is a chapter one may safely skip as it contains numerous technical calculations based on assumptions from 1973. The majority of the chapter is concerned with energy as the primary consideration in industry.
Schumacher calculated that peak oil would arrive in the 80s. He was off by 30 years, but correct in the thrust of the argument. He would have approved of all renewable energy development.
Nine - Nuclear Energy - Salvation or Damnation?
First, some context. Schumacher wrote this book in the 60s, when serious people still thought nuclear energy could be made to be sustainable. Schumacher, though, wasn't having any of it.
No degree of prosperity could justify the accumulation of large amounts of highly toxic substances which nobody knows how to make 'safe' and which remain an incalculable danger to the whole of creation for historical or even geological ages.
To do such a thing is a transgression against life itself, a transgression infinitely more serious than any crime ever perpetrated by man.
The idea that a civilisation could sustain itself on the basis of such a transgression is an ethical, spiritual, and metaphysical monstrosity. It means conducting the economic affairs of man as if people really did not matter at all.
After Fukushima, I found an article and a documentary that made the issues clear:
http://www.culturechange.org/...
Nuclear butchers of the earth - www.culturechange.org
I personally feel strongly about the abomination of nuclear energy. Never waste a breath of argument with people who hold that nuclear energy is anything but an unmitigated disaster. The evidence of human inability to manage this most dangerous of all human activity is so overwhelming that its continued existence is only due to human greed and metaphysical blindness.
Schumacher builds the case, in the face of the early optimism of his era, about nuclear energy of its disastrous consequence with evidentiary precision such that one cannot but despair of human evil.
If you have any doubts at all about nuclear energy, read Chapter Nine carefully for yourself. And remember, he wrote before Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and countless studies of radioactive toxicity. Just think about it, is any venture worth it if the collective insurance industry of the world refuses to touch it?
No cooperation with evil.
Ten - Technology With a Human Face
This chapter is a presentation of the need for changing how we create and apply technology. Schumacher notes that the modern world has been shaped by its metaphysics, which has shaped its education, which in turn has shaped its science and technology. And the world is in crisis in part because of its technology, which becomes more inhuman by the day.
For example, there is a great difference between the laws of nature and the laws of technology.
Nature is characterized by the principle of self-limiting growth.
As a result, the system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self- balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Technology knows no such boundaries and is not self-regulating.
Schumacher says our modern world, as shaped by our present technology, is immersed in three crises simultaneously:
First, human nature revolts against inhuman technological, organizational, and political patterns, which it experiences as suffocating and debilitating;
Second, the living environment which supports human life aches and groans and gives signs of partial breakdown; and,
Third, it is clear to anyone fully knowledgeable in the subject matter that the inroads being made into the world's non-renewable resources, particularly those of fossil fuels, are such that serious bottlenecks and virtual exhaustion loom ahead in the quite foreseeable future.
What is technology good for?
Well, it lightens some workloads while increasing others. It is very disruptive. Schumacher worries that what our technology seems to be most good at is reducing or even eliminating skilful, productive work of human hands in touch with real materials of one kind or another.
Think of most physically productive, creative work, such as making clothes or furniture, cooking from scratch, any guild work, or farming. In advanced industrial societies such work is rare now and it is difficult to make a living. Our technology has vastly reduced the employment of actual producers.
Schumacher says the result has been that the prestige carried by people in modern industrial society varies in inverse proportion to their closeness to actual production.
Our reality is that "virtually all real production has been turned into an inhuman chore which does not enrich a man but empties him."
Modern technology has deprived humans of the work we enjoy most: productive, creative work, and has multiplied immensely work of a kind that only relates to production incidentally. Karl Marx was right about this: "They want production to be limited to useful things, but they forget that the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people."
Schumacher says it is time we take stock of the direction into which our technology is developing. The number of people who believe that our technology is developing on the wrong track is growing. Such people are not against 'growth' but care about the quality of growth. It is a matter of what should grow and what should recede and do we have the right balance based on sound principles.
Schumacher says it is important for ordinary people to take sides. To leave it to the 'experts' is to leave to those in 'charge' of the stampede. He is hopeful that change is possible because ordinary people generally take a more humanistic view than do the experts.
Feel the Bern!
Schumacher closes Part Two on Resources with this:
Man is small, and, therefore, small is beautiful. To go for gigantism is to go for self-destruction. And what is the cost of a reorientation?
We might remind ourselves that to calculate the cost of survival is perverse. No doubt, a price has to be paid for anything worth while: to redirect technology so that it serves man instead of destroying him requires primarily an effort of the imagination and an abandonment of fear.
I'll work next on a summary of Part Three, which deals with lessons for us from the emerging world.
And here's a link to Part 3:
Democratic Socialist Economics for us Beginners Part3/4
Here is a link to Part 1:
Democratic Socialist Economics for us Beginners Part 1/4