Rumours of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt.
George Bush’s grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.
The Guardian has obtained confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism.
His business dealings, which continued until his company’s assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.
The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator’s action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy.
The debate over Prescott Bush’s behaviour has been bubbling under the surface for some time. There has been a steady internet chatter about the “Bush/Nazi” connection, much of it inaccurate and unfair. But the new documents, many of which were only declassified last year, show that even after America had entered the war and when there was already significant information about the Nazis’ plans and policies, he worked for and profited from companies closely involved with the very German businesses that financed Hitler’s rise to power. It has also been suggested that the money he made from these dealings helped to establish the Bush family fortune and set up its political dynasty.
Remarkably, little of Bush’s dealings with Germany has received public scrutiny, partly because of the secret status of the documentation involving him. But now the multibillion dollar legal action for damages by two Holocaust survivors against the Bush family, and the imminent publication of three books on the subject are threatening to make Prescott Bush’s business history an uncomfortable issue for his grandson, George W, as he seeks re-election.
While there is no suggestion that Prescott Bush was sympathetic to the Nazi cause, the documents reveal that the firm he worked for, Brown Brothers Harriman (BBH), acted as a US base for the German industrialist, Fritz Thyssen, who helped finance Hitler in the 1930s before falling out with him at the end of the decade. The Guardian has seen evidence that shows Bush was the director of the New York-based Union Banking Corporation (UBC) that represented Thyssen’s US interests and he continued to work for the bank after America entered the war.
Tantalising
Bush was also on the board of at least one of the companies that formed part of a multinational network of front companies to allow Thyssen to move assets around the world.
Thyssen owned the largest steel and coal company in Germany and grew rich from Hitler’s efforts to re-arm between the two world wars. One of the pillars in Thyssen’s international corporate web, UBC, worked exclusively for, and was owned by, a Thyssen-controlled bank in the Netherlands. More tantalising are Bush’s links to the Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC), based in mineral rich Silesia on the German-Polish border. During the war, the company made use of Nazi slave labour from the concentration camps, including Auschwitz. The ownership of CSSC changed hands several times in the 1930s, but documents from the US National Archive declassified last year link Bush to CSSC, although it is not clear if he and UBC were still involved in the company when Thyssen’s American assets were seized in 1942.
Three sets of archives spell out Prescott Bush’s involvement. All three are readily available, thanks to the efficient US archive system and a helpful and dedicated staff at both the Library of Congress in Washington and the National Archives at the University of Maryland.
The first set of files, the Harriman papers in the Library of Congress, show that Prescott Bush was a director and shareholder of a number of companies involved with Thyssen.
The second set of papers, which are in the National Archives, are contained in vesting order number 248 which records the seizure of the company assets. What these files show is that on October 20 1942 the alien property custodian seized the assets of the UBC, of which Prescott Bush was a director. Having gone through the books of the bank, further seizures were made against two affiliates, the Holland-American Trading Corporation and the Seamless Steel Equipment Corporation. By November, the Silesian-American Company, another of Prescott Bush’s ventures, had also been seized.
The third set of documents, also at the National Archives, are contained in the files on IG Farben, who was prosecuted for war crimes.
A report issued by the Office of Alien Property Custodian in 1942 stated of the companies that “since 1939, these (steel and mining) properties have been in possession of and have been operated by the German government and have undoubtedly been of considerable assistance to that country’s war effort”.
Prescott Bush, a 6ft 4in charmer with a rich singing voice, was the founder of the Bush political dynasty and was once considered a potential presidential candidate himself. Like his son, George, and grandson, George W, he went to Yale where he was, again like his descendants, a member of the secretive and influential Skull and Bones student society. He was an artillery captain in the first world war and married Dorothy Walker, the daughter of George Herbert Walker, in 1921.
In 1924, his father-in-law, a well-known St Louis investment banker, helped set him up in business in New York with Averill Harriman, the wealthy son of railroad magnate E H Harriman in New York, who had gone into banking.
One of the first jobs Walker gave Bush was to manage UBC. Bush was a founding member of the bank and the incorporation documents, which list him as one of seven directors, show he owned one share in UBC worth $125.
The bank was set up by Harriman and Bush’s father-in-law to provide a US bank for the Thyssens, Germany’s most powerful industrial family.
August Thyssen, the founder of the dynasty had been a major contributor to Germany’s first world war effort and in the 1920s, he and his sons Fritz and Heinrich established a network of overseas banks and companies so their assets and money could be whisked offshore if threatened again.
By the time Fritz Thyssen inherited the business empire in 1926, Germany’s economic recovery was faltering. After hearing Adolf Hitler speak, Thyssen became mesmerised by the young firebrand. He joined the Nazi party in December 1931 and admits backing Hitler in his autobiography, I Paid Hitler, when the National Socialists were still a radical fringe party. He stepped in several times to bail out the struggling party: in 1928 Thyssen had bought the Barlow Palace on Briennerstrasse, in Munich, which Hitler converted into the Brown House, the headquarters of the Nazi party. The money came from another Thyssen overseas institution, the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvarrt in Rotterdam.
By the late 1930s, Brown Brothers Harriman, which claimed to be the world’s largest private investment bank, and UBC had bought and shipped millions of dollars of gold, fuel, steel, coal and US treasury bonds to Germany, both feeding and financing Hitler’s build-up to war.
Between 1931 and 1933 UBC bought more than $8m worth of gold, of which $3m was shipped abroad. According to documents seen by the Guardian, after UBC was set up it transferred $2m to BBH accounts and between 1924 and 1940 the assets of UBC hovered around $3m, dropping to $1m only on a few occasions.
In 1941, Thyssen fled Germany after falling out with Hitler but he was captured in France and detained for the remainder of the war.
There was nothing illegal in doing business with the Thyssens throughout the 1930s and many of America’s best-known business names invested heavily in the German economic recovery. However, everything changed after Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Even then it could be argued that BBH was within its rights continuing business relations with the Thyssens until the end of 1941 as the US was still technically neutral until the attack on Pearl Harbor. The trouble started on July 30 1942 when the New York Herald-Tribune ran an article entitled “Hitler’s Angel Has $3m in US Bank”. UBC’s huge gold purchases had raised suspicions that the bank was in fact a “secret nest egg” hidden in New York for Thyssen and other Nazi bigwigs. The Alien Property Commission (APC) launched an investigation.
There is no dispute over the fact that the US government seized a string of assets controlled by BBH – including UBC and SAC – in the autumn of 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy act. What is in dispute is if Harriman, Walker and Bush did more than own these companies on paper.
Erwin May, a treasury attache and officer for the department of investigation in the APC, was assigned to look into UBC’s business. The first fact to emerge was that Roland Harriman, Prescott Bush and the other directors didn’t actually own their shares in UBC but merely held them on behalf of Bank voor Handel. Strangely, no one seemed to know who owned the Rotterdam-based bank, including UBC’s president.
May wrote in his report of August 16 1941: “Union Banking Corporation, incorporated August 4 1924, is wholly owned by the Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart N.V of Rotterdam, the Netherlands. My investigation has produced no evidence as to the ownership of the Dutch bank. Mr Cornelis [sic] Lievense, president of UBC, claims no knowledge as to the ownership of the Bank voor Handel but believes it possible that Baron Heinrich Thyssen, brother of Fritz Thyssen, may own a substantial interest.”
May cleared the bank of holding a golden nest egg for the Nazi leaders but went on to describe a network of companies spreading out from UBC across Europe, America and Canada, and how money from voor Handel travelled to these companies through UBC.
By September May had traced the origins of the non-American board members and found that Dutchman HJ Kouwenhoven – who met with Harriman in 1924 to set up UBC – had several other jobs: in addition to being the managing director of voor Handel he was also the director of the August Thyssen bank in Berlin and a director of Fritz Thyssen’s Union Steel Works, the holding company that controlled Thyssen’s steel and coal mine empire in Germany.
Within a few weeks, Homer Jones, the chief of the APC investigation and research division sent a memo to the executive committee of APC recommending the US government vest UBC and its assets. Jones named the directors of the bank in the memo, including Prescott Bush’s name, and wrote: “Said stock is held by the above named individuals, however, solely as nominees for the Bank voor Handel, Rotterdam, Holland, which is owned by one or more of the Thyssen family, nationals of Germany and Hungary. The 4,000 shares hereinbefore set out are therefore beneficially owned and help for the interests of enemy nationals, and are vestible by the APC,” according to the memo from the National Archives seen by the Guardian.
Red-handed
Jones recommended that the assets be liquidated for the benefit of the government, but instead UBC was maintained intact and eventually returned to the American shareholders after the war. Some claim that Bush sold his share in UBC after the war for $1.5m – a huge amount of money at the time – but there is no documentary evidence to support this claim. No further action was ever taken nor was the investigation continued, despite the fact UBC was caught red-handed operating a American shell company for the Thyssen family eight months after America had entered the war and that this was the bank that had partly financed Hitler’s rise to power.
The most tantalising part of the story remains shrouded in mystery: the connection, if any, between Prescott Bush, Thyssen, Consolidated Silesian Steel Company (CSSC) and Auschwitz.
Thyssen’s partner in United Steel Works, which had coal mines and steel plants across the region, was Friedrich Flick, another steel magnate who also owned part of IG Farben, the powerful German chemical company.
Flick’s plants in Poland made heavy use of slave labour from the concentration camps in Poland. According to a New York Times article published in March 18 1934 Flick owned two-thirds of CSSC while “American interests” held the rest.
The US National Archive documents show that BBH’s involvement with CSSC was more than simply holding the shares in the mid-1930s. Bush’s friend and fellow “bonesman” Knight Woolley, another partner at BBH, wrote to Averill Harriman in January 1933 warning of problems with CSSC after the Poles started their drive to nationalise the plant. “The Consolidated Silesian Steel Company situation has become increasingly complicated, and I have accordingly brought in Sullivan and Cromwell, in order to be sure that our interests are protected,” wrote Knight. “After studying the situation Foster Dulles is insisting that their man in Berlin get into the picture and obtain the information which the directors here should have. You will recall that Foster is a director and he is particularly anxious to be certain that there is no liability attaching to the American directors.”
But the ownership of the CSSC between 1939 when the Germans invaded Poland and 1942 when the US government vested UBC and SAC is not clear.
“SAC held coal mines and definitely owned CSSC between 1934 and 1935, but when SAC was vested there was no trace of CSSC. All concrete evidence of its ownership disappears after 1935 and there are only a few traces in 1938 and 1939,” says Eva Schweitzer, the journalist and author whose book, America and the Holocaust, is published next month.
Silesia was quickly made part of the German Reich after the invasion, but while Polish factories were seized by the Nazis, those belonging to the still neutral Americans (and some other nationals) were treated more carefully as Hitler was still hoping to persuade the US to at least sit out the war as a neutral country. Schweitzer says American interests were dealt with on a case-by-case basis. The Nazis bought some out, but not others.
The two Holocaust survivors suing the US government and the Bush family for a total of $40bn in compensation claim both materially benefited from Auschwitz slave labour during the second world war.
Kurt Julius Goldstein, 87, and Peter Gingold, 85, began a class action in America in 2001, but the case was thrown out by Judge Rosemary Collier on the grounds that the government cannot be held liable under the principle of “state sovereignty”.
Jan Lissmann, one of the lawyers for the survivors, said: “President Bush withdrew President Bill Clinton’s signature from the treaty [that founded the court] not only to protect Americans, but also to protect himself and his family.”
Lissmann argues that genocide-related cases are covered by international law, which does hold governments accountable for their actions. He claims the ruling was invalid as no hearing took place.
In their claims, Mr Goldstein and Mr Gingold, honorary chairman of the League of Anti-fascists, suggest the Americans were aware of what was happening at Auschwitz and should have bombed the camp.
The lawyers also filed a motion in The Hague asking for an opinion on whether state sovereignty is a valid reason for refusing to hear their case. A ruling is expected within a month.
The petition to The Hague states: “From April 1944 on, the American Air Force could have destroyed the camp with air raids, as well as the railway bridges and railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz. The murder of about 400,000 Hungarian Holocaust victims could have been prevented.”
The case is built around a January 22 1944 executive order signed by President Franklin Roosevelt calling on the government to take all measures to rescue the European Jews. The lawyers claim the order was ignored because of pressure brought by a group of big American companies, including BBH, where Prescott Bush was a director.
Lissmann said: “If we have a positive ruling from the court it will cause [president] Bush huge problems and make him personally liable to pay compensation.”
The US government and the Bush family deny all the claims against them.
In addition to Eva Schweitzer’s book, two other books are about to be published that raise the subject of Prescott Bush’s business history. The author of the second book, to be published next year, John Loftus, is a former US attorney who prosecuted Nazi war criminals in the 70s. Now living in St Petersburg, Florida and earning his living as a security commentator for Fox News and ABC radio, Loftus is working on a novel which uses some of the material he has uncovered on Bush. Loftus stressed that what Prescott Bush was involved in was just what many other American and British businessmen were doing at the time.
“You can’t blame Bush for what his grandfather did any more than you can blame Jack Kennedy for what his father did – bought Nazi stocks – but what is important is the cover-up, how it could have gone on so successfully for half a century, and does that have implications for us today?” he said.
“This was the mechanism by which Hitler was funded to come to power, this was the mechanism by which the Third Reich’s defence industry was re-armed, this was the mechanism by which Nazi profits were repatriated back to the American owners, this was the mechanism by which investigations into the financial laundering of the Third Reich were blunted,” said Loftus, who is vice-chairman of the Holocaust Museum in St Petersburg.
“The Union Banking Corporation was a holding company for the Nazis, for Fritz Thyssen,” said Loftus. “At various times, the Bush family has tried to spin it, saying they were owned by a Dutch bank and it wasn’t until the Nazis took over Holland that they realised that now the Nazis controlled the apparent company and that is why the Bush supporters claim when the war was over they got their money back. Both the American treasury investigations and the intelligence investigations in Europe completely bely that, it’s absolute horseshit. They always knew who the ultimate beneficiaries were.”
“There is no one left alive who could be prosecuted but they did get away with it,” said Loftus. “As a former federal prosecutor, I would make a case for Prescott Bush, his father-in-law (George Walker) and Averill Harriman [to be prosecuted] for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. They remained on the boards of these companies knowing that they were of financial benefit to the nation of Germany.”
Loftus said Prescott Bush must have been aware of what was happening in Germany at the time. “My take on him was that he was a not terribly successful in-law who did what Herbert Walker told him to. Walker and Harriman were the two evil geniuses, they didn’t care about the Nazis any more than they cared about their investments with the Bolsheviks.”
What is also at issue is how much money Bush made from his involvement. His supporters suggest that he had one token share. Loftus disputes this, citing sources in “the banking and intelligence communities” and suggesting that the Bush family, through George Herbert Walker and Prescott, got $1.5m out of the involvement. There is, however, no paper trail to this sum.
The third person going into print on the subject is John Buchanan, 54, a Miami-based magazine journalist who started examining the files while working on a screenplay. Last year, Buchanan published his findings in the venerable but small-circulation New Hampshire Gazette under the headline “Documents in National Archives Prove George Bush’s Grandfather Traded With the Nazis – Even After Pearl Harbor”. He expands on this in his book to be published next month – Fixing America: Breaking the Stranglehold of Corporate Rule, Big Media and the Religious Right.
In the article, Buchanan, who has worked mainly in the trade and music press with a spell as a muckraking reporter in Miami, claimed that “the essential facts have appeared on the internet and in relatively obscure books but were dismissed by the media and Bush family as undocumented diatribes”.
Buchanan suffers from hypermania, a form of manic depression, and when he found himself rebuffed in his initial efforts to interest the media, he responded with a series of threats against the journalists and media outlets that had spurned him. The threats, contained in e-mails, suggested that he would expose the journalists as “traitors to the truth”.
Unsurprisingly, he soon had difficulty getting his calls returned. Most seriously, he faced aggravated stalking charges in Miami, in connection with a man with whom he had fallen out over the best way to publicise his findings. The charges were dropped last month.
Biography
Buchanan said he regretted his behaviour had damaged his credibility but his main aim was to secure publicity for the story. Both Loftus and Schweitzer say Buchanan has come up with previously undisclosed documentation.
The Bush family have largely responded with no comment to any reference to Prescott Bush. Brown Brothers Harriman also declined to comment.
The Bush family recently approved a flattering biography of Prescott Bush entitled Duty, Honour, Country by Mickey Herskowitz. The publishers, Rutledge Hill Press, promised the book would “deal honestly with Prescott Bush’s alleged business relationships with Nazi industrialists and other accusations”.
In fact, the allegations are dealt with in less than two pages. The book refers to the Herald-Tribune story by saying that “a person of less established ethics would have panicked … Bush and his partners at Brown Brothers Harriman informed the government regulators that the account, opened in the late 1930s, was ‘an unpaid courtesy for a client’ … Prescott Bush acted quickly and openly on behalf of the firm, served well by a reputation that had never been compromised. He made available all records and all documents. Viewed six decades later in the era of serial corporate scandals and shattered careers, he received what can be viewed as the ultimate clean bill.”
The Prescott Bush story has been condemned by both conservatives and some liberals as having nothing to do with the current president. It has also been suggested that Prescott Bush had little to do with Averill Harriman and that the two men opposed each other politically.
However, documents from the Harriman papers include a flattering wartime profile of Harriman in the New York Journal American and next to it in the files is a letter to the financial editor of that paper from Prescott Bush congratulating the paper for running the profile. He added that Harriman’s “performance and his whole attitude has been a source of inspiration and pride to his partners and his friends”.
The Anti-Defamation League in the US is supportive of Prescott Bush and the Bush family. In a statement last year they said that “rumours about the alleged Nazi ‘ties’ of the late Prescott Bush … have circulated widely through the internet in recent years. These charges are untenable and politically motivated … Prescott Bush was neither a Nazi nor a Nazi sympathiser.”
However, one of the country’s oldest Jewish publications, the Jewish Advocate, has aired the controversy in detail.
More than 60 years after Prescott Bush came briefly under scrutiny at the time of a faraway war, his grandson is facing a different kind of scrutiny but one underpinned by the same perception that, for some people, war can be a profitable business.
Athens, Ioannina, Kalamata, Kozani, Thessaloniki, and Trikala constitute the six Greek cities chosen by the European Committee to participate in the “100 Climate-neutral Cities by 2030” Project.
What is Climate-neutrality, though?
According to the European Committee, climate neutrality is the transition to an economy with zero greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, those six Greek cities aim to build economies that eliminate emissions, with green development being the goal.
Hence, the importance of climate neutrality is obvious. However, is climate neutrality possible for an economy constantly aiming to grow? Is it possible for an economy whose government seeks to accrue GDP yearly?
We know empirically that GDP accretion comes with greenhouse emission accretion. So far, no western economy has succeeded in its expansion while emissions are eliminated. Neither a western state nor a city is climate neutral. How will the six Greek cities and the ninety-four rest make it till 2030?
The most common answer is via high technology. Smart cities, big wind generators in the mountains, robots in factories and streets, and everything will eventually go green. The green development defenders will only suggest we examine Copenhagen’s or any other West European city’s green miracle.
The fact that greenhouse gas emissions elsewhere are not taken into account by those green “miracles” is something they, intentionally or not, skip mentioning. Construction, conservation, and rejection of modern technologies entail significant amounts of energy, toxic waste, and inhuman labor conditions.
Copenhagen’s green “miracle” is based on emissions and sometimes child labor otherwhere, mainly in Africa and South-Eastern Asia.
From the exhibition of Vassilis Kostakis “The materiality of the immaterial” at the Berkman Klein Center in Harvard (USA) in summer 2018/ source.
Consequently, Copenhagen is not climate neutral. Its sustainability depends on human misery and the destruction of local ecosystems far away from green Denmark. In times of climate crisis “local” becomes “global” and the other way around. Everything’s connected.
How can we address those issues?
Even though there is no golden recipe, there is a combination of ways to make EU economies go green without degrading economies and ecosystems elsewhere. You can check out the suggestions about the development of energy communities in Greece and open technology parks.
This article’s first aim is the saliency of climate neutrality’s dark side.
The second is the beginning of public debate and experimentation toward truly democratic climate neutrality.
—
*Vasilis Kostakis studies affairs of ecology and technology as a professor at TalTech University and as a researcher at Harvard University. He is a member of Meta’s advisory council. The article above was published under the permission of CC BY-SA 4.0 in which reapportionment and syndication are encouraged.
Article translated from Greek by Fivi-Androniki Boutari.
MARXISM AND COLLAPSE: The following is the first part of the interview-debate “Climate Catastrophe, Collapse, Democracy and Socialism” between the linguist and social scientist Noam Chomsky, one of the most important intellectuals of the last century, the Chilean social researcher and referent of the Marxist-Collapsist theoretical current Miguel Fuentes, and the American scientist Guy McPherson, a specialist in the topics of the ecological crisis and climate change. One of the most remarkable elements of this debate is the presentation of three perspectives which, although complementary in many respects, offer three different theoretical and political-programmatic approaches to the same problem: the imminence of a super-catastrophic climate change horizon and the possibility of a near civilisational collapse. Another noteworthy element of this debate is the series of interpretative challenges to which Chomsky’s positions are exposed and that give this discussion the character of a true “ideological contest” between certain worldviews which, although as said before common in many respects, are presented as ultimately opposed to each other. In a certain sense, this debate takes us back, from the field of reflection on the ecological catastrophe, to the old debates of the 20th century around the dilemma between “reform or revolution”, something that is undoubtedly necessary in the sphere of contemporary discussions of political ecology.
Noam Chomsky
American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian, social critic, and political activist. He adheres to the ideas of libertarian socialism and anarcho-syndicalism. He advocates a New Green Deal policy as one of the ways of dealing with the ecological crisis.
Miguel Fuentes
Chilean social researcher in the fields of history, archaeology, and social sciences. International coordinator of the platform Marxism and Collapse and exponent of the new Marxist-Collapsist ideology. He proposes the need for a strategic-programmatic updating of revolutionary Marxism in the face of the new challenges of the Anthropocene and the VI mass extinction.
Guy McPherson
American scientist, professor emeritus of natural resources, ecology, and evolutionary biology. He adheres to anarchism and argues the inevitability of human extinction and the need to address it from a perspective that emphasises acceptance, the pursuit of love and the value of excellence.
In a recent discussion between ecosocialist stances and collapsist approaches represented by Michael Lowy (France), Miguel Fuentes (Chile) and Antonio Turiel (Spain), Lowy constantly denied the possibility of a self-induced capitalist collapse and criticized the idea of the impossibility of stopping climate change before it reaches the catastrophic level of 1.5 centigrade degrees of global warming.Do you think that the current historical course is heading to a social global downfall comparable, for example, to previous processes of civilization collapse or maybe to something even worse than those seen in ancient Rome or other ancient civilizations? Is a catastrophic climate change nowadays unavoidable? Is a near process of human extinction as a result of the overlapping of the current climate, energetic, economic, social and political crisis and the suicidal path of capitalist destruction, conceivable?[1](Marxism and Collapse)
There is not much time to implement these proposals. The real question is not so much feasibility as will. There is little doubt that it will be a major struggle. Powerful entrenched interests will work relentlessly to preserve short-term profit at the cost of incalculable disaster. Current scientific work conjectures that failure to reach the goal of net zero Carbon emissions by 2050 will set irreversible processes in motion that are likely to lead to a “hothouse earth,” reaching unthinkable temperatures 4-5º Celsius above pre-industrial levels, likely to result in an end to any form of organized human society.
Let’s reflect for a moment on the above. On the one hand, Chomsky accepts the possibility of a planetary civilisational collapse in the course of this century. On the other hand, he reduces the solution to this threat to nothing more than the application of a “green tax”. Literally the greatest historical, economic, social, cultural and even geological challenge that the human species and civilisation has faced since its origins reduced, roughly speaking, to a problem of “international financial fundraising” consisting of allocating approximately 3% of world GDP to the promotion of “clean energies”. Let’s think about this again. A danger that, as Chomsky puts it, would be even greater than the Second World War and could turn the Earth into a kind of uninhabitable rock, should be solved either by “international tax collection” or by a plan of limited “eco-reforms” of the capitalist economic model (known as the “Green New Deal”).
But how is it possible that Chomsky, one of the leading intellectuals of the 20th century, is able to make this “interpretive leap” between accepting the possibility of the “end of all organised human society” within this century and reducing the solution to that threat to what would appear to be no more than a (rather timid) cosmetic restructuring of international capitalist finance? Who knows! What is certain, however, is that Chomsky’s response to the climate threat lags far behind not only those advocated by the ecosocialist camp and even traditional Marxism to deal with the latter, based on posing the link between the problem of the root causes of the ecological crisis and the need for a politics that defends the abolition of private ownership of the means of production as a necessary step in confronting it. Moreover, Chomsky’s treatment of the ecological crisis seems to be inferior to that which characterises all those theoretical tendencies which, such as the theory of degrowth or a series of collapsist currents, advocate the imposition of drastic plans of economic degrowth and a substantial decrease in industrial activity and global consumption levels. The latter by promoting a process of “eco-social transition” which would not be reduced to a mere change in the energy matrix and the promotion of renewable energies, but would imply, on the contrary, the transition from one type of civilisation (modern and industrial) to another, better able to adapt to the new planetary scenarios that the ecological crisis, energy decline and global resource scarcity will bring with them.
But reducing the solution of the climate catastrophe to the need for a “green tax” on the capitalist market economy is not the only error in Chomsky’s response. In my view, the main problem of the arguments he uses to defend the possibility of a successful “energy transition” from fossil fuels to so-called “clean energy” would be that they are built on mud. First, because it is false to say that so-called “clean energies” are indeed “clean” if we consider the kind of resources and technological efforts required in the implementation of the energy systems based on them. Solar or wind energy, for example, depend not only on huge amounts of raw materials associated for their construction with high polluting extractive processes (e.g., the large quantities of steel required for the construction of wind turbines is just one illustration of this), but also on the use of extensive volumes of coal, natural gas or even oil. The construction of a single solar panel requires, for instance, enormous quantities of coal. Another striking example can be seen in the dependence of hydrogen plants (specially the “grey” or “blue” types) on vast quantities of natural gas for their operations. All this without it ever being clear that the reduction in the use of fossil fuels that should result from the implementation of these “clean” technologies will be capable of effectively offsetting a possible exponential increase in its “ecological footprint” in the context of a supposedly successful energy transition[4].
But the argumentative problems in Chomsky’s response are not limited to the above. More importantly is that the danger of the climate crisis and the possibility of a planetary collapse can no longer be confined to a purely financial issue (solvable by a hypothetical allocation of 3% of world GDP) or a strictly technical-engineering challenge (solvable by the advancement of a successful energy transition). This is because the magnitude of this problem has gone beyond the area of competence of economic and technological systems, and has moved to the sphere of the geological and biophysical relations of the planet itself, calling the very techno-scientific (and economic-financial) capacities of contemporary civilisation into question. In other words, the problem represented by the current levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, or those related to the unprecedented advances in marine acidification, Arctic melting, or permafrost decomposition rates, would today constitute challenges whose solution would be largely beyond any of our scientific developments and technological capabilities. Let’s just say that current atmospheric carbon dioxide levels (already close to 420 ppm) have not been seen for millions of years on Earth. On other occasions I have defined this situation as the development of a growing “terminal technological insufficiency” of our civilisation to face the challenges of the present planetary crisis[6].
In the case of current atmospheric CO2 concentrations, for example, there are not and will not be for a long time (possibly many decades or centuries), any kind of technology capable of achieving a substantial decrease of those concentrations. This at least not before such concentrations continue to skyrocket to levels that could soon guarantee that a large part of our planet will become completely uninhabitable in the short to medium term. In the case of CO2 capture facilities, for instance, they have not yet been able to remove even a small (insignificant) fraction of the more than 40 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emitted each year by industrial society[7]. Something similar would be the situation of other ecological problems such as the aforementioned increase in marine acidification levels, the rise in ocean levels or even the increasingly unmanageable proliferation of space debris and the consequent danger it represents for the (immediate) maintenance of contemporary telecommunication systems. In other words, again, increasing threatening problems for which humanity has no effective technologies to cope, at least not over the few remaining decades before these problems reach proportions that will soon call into question our very survival as a species.
Unsolvable problems, as unsolvable as those that would confront anyone seeking to “restore” a clay pot or a glass bottle to its original state after it has been shattered into a thousand fragments by smashing it against a concrete wall! To restore a glass of the finest crystal after it has been smashed to pieces? Not even with the investment of ten, a hundred world GDPs would it be possible! This is what we have done with the world, the most beautiful of the planetary crystals of our solar system, blown into a thousand pieces by ecocidal industrialism! To restore? To resolve? Bollocks! We have already destroyed it all! We have already finished it all! And no “financial investment” or “technological solution” can prevent what is coming: death! To die then! To die… and to fight to preserve what can be preserved! To die and to hope for the worst, to conquer socialism however we can, on whatever planet we have, and to take the future out of the hands of the devil himself if necessary! That is the task of socialist revolution in the 21st century! That is the duty of Marxist revolutionaries in the new epoch of darkness that is rising before us! That is the mission of Marxism-Collapsist!
There is no escape from the mass extinction event underway. Only human arrogance could suggest otherwise. Our situation is definitely terminal. I cannot imagine that there will be a habitat for Homo sapiens beyond a few years in the future. Soon after we lose our habitat, all individuals of our species will die out. Global warming has already passed two degrees Celsius above the 1750 baseline, as noted by the renowned Professor Andrew Glikson in his October 2020 book “The Event Horizon”. He wrote on page 31 of that book: “During the Anthropocene, greenhouse gas forcing increased by more than 2.0 W/m2, equivalent to more than > 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures, which is an abrupt (climate change) event taking place over a period not much longer than a generation”.
So yes. We have definitely passed the point of no return in the climate crisis. Even the incredibly conservative Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has already admitted the irreversibility of climate change in its 24 September 2019 “Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate”. A quick look around the globe will also reveal unprecedented events such as forest fires, floods and mega-droughts. The ongoing pandemic is just one of many events that are beginning to overwhelm human systems and our ability to respond positively.
All species are going extinct, including more than half a dozen species of the genus Homo that have already disappeared. According to the scientific paper by Quintero and Wiens published in Ecology Letters on 26 June 2013, the projected rate of environmental change is 10.000 times faster than vertebrates can adapt to. Mammals also cannot keep up with these levels of change, as Davis and colleagues’ paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on 30 October 2018 points out. The fact that our species is a vertebrate mammal suggests that we will join more than 99% of the species that have existed on Earth that have already gone extinct. The only question in doubt is when. In fact, human extinction could have been triggered several years ago when the Earth’s average global temperature exceeded 1.5 degrees Celsius above the 1750 baseline. According to a comprehensive overview of this situation published by the European Strategy and Policy Analysis System in April 2019, a “1.5 degree increase is the maximum the planet can tolerate; (…) in a worst-case scenario, [such a temperature increase above the 1750 baseline will result in] the extinction of humanity altogether”.
All species need habitat to survive. As Hall and colleagues reported in the Spring 1997 issue of the Wildlife Society Bulletin: “We therefore define habitat ‘as the resources and conditions present in an area that produce occupancy, including survival and reproduction, of a given organism. Habitat is organism-specific; it relates the presence of a species, population or individual (…) to the physical and biological characteristics of an area. Habitat implies more than vegetation or the structure of that vegetation; it is the sum of the specific resources needed by organisms. Whenever an organism is provided with resources that allow it to survive, that is its habitat’”. Even tardigrades are not immune to extinction. Rather, they are sensitive to high temperatures, as reported in the 9 January 2020 issue of Scientific Reports. Ricardo Cardoso Neves and collaborators point out there that all life on Earth is threatened with extinction with an increase of 5-6 degrees Celsius in the global average temperature. As Strona and Corey state in another article in Scientific Reports (November 13, 2018) raising the issue of co-extinctions as a determinant of the loss of all life on Earth: “In a simplified view, the idea of co-extinction boils down to the obvious conclusion that a consumer cannot survive without its resources”.
From the incredibly conservative Wikipedia entry entitled “Climate change” comes this supporting information: “Climate change includes both human-induced global warming and its large-scale impacts on weather patterns. There have been previous periods of climate change, but the current changes are more rapid than any known event in Earth’s history.” The Wikipedia entry further cites the 8 August 2019 report “Climate Change and Soils”, published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is among the most conservative scientific bodies in history. Yet it concluded in 2019 that the Earth is in the midst of the most rapid environmental change seen in planetary history, citing scientific literature that concludes: “These rates of human-driven global change far exceed the rates of change driven by geophysical or biospheric forces that have altered the trajectory of the Earth System in the past (Summerhayes 2015; Foster et al. 2017); nor do even abrupt geophysical events approach current rates of human-driven change”.
The Wikipedia entry also points out the consequences of the kind of abrupt climate change currently underway, including desert expansion, heat waves and wildfires becoming increasingly common, melting permafrost, glacier retreat, loss of sea ice, increased intensity of storms and other extreme environmental events, along with widespread species extinctions. Another relevant issue is the fact that the World Health Organisation has already defined climate change as the greatest threat to global health in the 21st century. The Wikipedia entry continues: “Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations collectively agreed to keep warming ‘well below 2.0 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) through mitigation efforts’”. But Professor Andrew Glikson already pointed out as we said in his aforementioned book The Event Horizon that the 2 degrees C mark is already behind us. Furthermore, as we already indicated, the IPCC also admitted the irreversibility of climate change in its “Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate”. Therefore, 2019 was an exceptional year for the IPCC, as it concluded that climate change is abrupt and irreversible.
How conservative is the IPCC? Even the conservative and renowned journal BioScience includes an article in its March 2019 issue entitled “Statistical language supports conservatism in climate change assessments”. The paper by Herrando-Perez and colleagues includes this information: “We find that the tone of the IPCC’s probabilistic language is remarkably conservative (…) emanating from the IPCC’s own recommendations, the complexity of climate research and exposure to politically motivated debates. Harnessing the communication of uncertainty with an overwhelming scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change should be one element of a broader reform, whereby the creation of an IPCC outreach working group could improve the transmission of climate science to the panel’s audiences”. Contrary to the conclusion of Herrando-Perez and colleagues, I cannot imagine that the IPCC is really interested in conveying accurate climate science to its audiences. After all, as Professor Michael Oppenheimer noted in 2007, the US government during the Reagan administration “saw the creation of the IPCC as a way to prevent the activism stimulated by my colleagues and me from controlling the political agenda”.
Let’s begin with population growth. There is a humane and feasible method to constrain that: education of women. That has a major effect on fertility in both rich regions and poor, and should be expedited anyway. The effects are quite substantial leading to sharp population decline by now in parts of the developed world. The point generalizes. Measures to fend off “global ecosocial disaster” can and should proceed in parallel with social and institutional change to promote values of justice, freedom, mutual aid, collective responsibility, democratic control of institutions, concern for other species, harmony with nature –values that are commonly upheld by indigenous societies and that have deep roots in popular struggles in what are called the “developed societies” –where, unfortunately, material and moral development are all too often uncorrelated.
But even a traditional socialist approach to these problems, such as the one above, also falls short of accounting for the kind of planetary threats we face. Let’s put it this way, the discussion around the ecological crisis and the rest of the existential dangers hanging over the fate of our civilisation today really only begins, not ends, by giving it a proper Marxist contextualisation. One of the underlying reasons for this is that the traditional socialist project itself, in all its variants (including its more recent ecosocialist versions), would also already be completely insufficient to respond to the dangers we are facing as a species. That is, the kind of dangers and interpretative problems that none of the Marxists theoreticians of social revolution over the last centuries had ever imagined possible, from Marx and Engels to some of the present-day exponents of ecosocialism such as John Bellamy Foster or Michael Lowy[8].
Another similar example: it is often claimed in Marxist circles (sometimes the numbers vary according to each study) that 20% of humanity consumes 80% of the planetary resources. This means that approximately 1.600.000.000.000 people (assuming a total population of 8 billion) would be the consumers of that 80% of planetary resources; that is, a number roughly equivalent to three times the current European population. In other words, what this sentence really tells us is that a much larger segment of the world’s population than the capitalist elites (or their political servants) would also bear a direct, even grotesque, responsibility for the unsustainable consumption patterns that have been aggravating the current planetary crisis. Or, to put it in more “Marxist” terms, that a large percentage (or even the totality) of the working classes and popular sectors in Europe, the United States, and a significant part of those in Latin America and other regions of the so-called “developing countries”, would also be “directly complicit”, at least in regards of the reproduction of the current ecocidal modern urban lifestyle, in the destruction of our planet.
Modern civilisation has borne some of the best fruits of humanity’s social development, but also some of the worst. We are in some ways like the younger brother of a large family whose early successes made him conceited, stupid and who, thinking of himself as “master of the world”, began to lose everything. We are that young man. We should therefore shut up, put our ideologies (capitalists and socialists) in our pockets, and start learning a little more from our more modest, slower and more balanced “big brothers”; for example, each of the traditional or indigenous societies which have been able to ensure their subsistence for centuries and in some cases even millennia. The latter while industrial society would not even have completed three centuries before endangering its own existence and that of all other cultures on the planet. In a few words, start learning from all those traditional societies that have subsisted in the context of the development of social systems that are often much more respectful of ecological and ecosystemic balances. Those “ecosocial balances” which are, in the end, in the long view of the evolution of species, the real basis for the development of any society… because without species (be they animal or plant), any human culture is impossible. Scientific and technological progress? Excellent idea! But perhaps we could take the long route, think things through a bit more, and achieve the same as we have achieved today in two centuries, but perhaps taking a bit longer, say ten, twenty or even a hundred centuries? Who’s in a hurry? Let us learn from the tortoise which, perhaps because it is slow, has survived on Earth for more than 220 million years, until we (who as Homo sapiens are no more than 250.000 years old) came along and endangered it.
-Guy McPherson:
As ecologists have been pointing out for decades, environmental impacts are the result of human population size and human consumption levels. The Earth can support many more hunter-gatherers than capitalists seeking more material possessions. Unfortunately, we are stuck with the latter rather than the former. Ecologists and environmentalists have been proposing changes in human behaviour since at least the early 20th century. These recommendations have fallen on deaf ears. However, even if it is possible to achieve substantial changes in human behaviour, and if they result in an effective slowing down or stopping of industrial activity, it is questionable whether this is a useful means of ensuring our continued survival. One reason for this lies in the knowledge of what the effect of “aerosol masking” could mean for the climate crisis.
The “climate masking” effect of aerosols has been discussed in the scientific literature since at least 1929, and consists of the following: at the same time as industrial activity produces greenhouse gases that trap part of the heat resulting from sunlight reaching the Earth, it also produces small particles that prevent this sunlight from even touching the surface of the planet. These particles, called “aerosols”, thus act as a kind of umbrella that prevents some of the sunlight from reaching the earth’s surface (hence this phenomenon has also been referred to as “global dimming”)[11]. In other words, these particles (aerosols) prevent part of the sun’s rays from penetrating the atmosphere and thus inhibit further global warming. This means, then, that the current levels of global warming would in fact be much lower than those that should be associated with the volumes of greenhouse gases present in the atmosphere today (hence the designation of this phenomenon as “climate masking”). To put it in a simpler way, the global warming situation today would actually be far more serious than is indicated not only by the very high current global temperatures, but also by the (already catastrophic) projections of rising global temperatures over the coming decades. This is especially important if we consider the (overly optimistic) possibility of a future reduction in the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere as a result of a potential decrease in greenhouse gas emissions over the next few years, which should paradoxically lead, therefore, to a dramatic increase in global temperatures.
Global temperatures should then not only be much higher than they are today, but the expected rise in global temperatures will necessarily be more intense than most climate models suggest. According to the father of climate science, James Hansen, it takes about five days for aerosols to fall from the atmosphere to the surface. More than two dozen peer-reviewed papers have been published on this subject and the latest of these indicates that the Earth would warm by an additional 55% if the “masking” effect of aerosols were lost, which should happen, as we said, as a result of a marked decrease or modification of industrial activity leading to a considerable reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. This study suggests that this could potentially lead to an additional (sudden) increase in the earth’s surface temperature by about 133% at the continental level. This article was published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications on 15 June 2021. In conclusion, the loss or substantial decrease of aerosols in the atmosphere could therefore lead to a potential increase of more than 3 degrees Celsius of global warming above the 1750 baseline very quickly. I find it very difficult to imagine many natural species (including our own) being able to withstand this rapid pace of environmental change.
In reality, a mass extinction event has been underway since at least 1992. This was reported by Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson, the so-called “father of biodiversity”, in his 1992 and 2002 books The Diversity of Life and The Future of Life, respectively. The United Nations Environment Programme also reported in August 2010 that every day we are leading to the extinction of 150 to 200 species. This would thus be at least the eighth mass extinction event on Earth. The scientific literature finally acknowledged the ongoing mass extinction event on 2 March 2011 in Nature. Further research along these lines was published on 19 June 2015 in Science Advances by conservation biologist Gerardo Ceballos and colleagues entitled “Accelerated human-induced losses of modern species: entering the sixth mass extinction”. Coinciding with the publication of this article, lead author Ceballos stated that “life would take many millions of years to recover and that our species would probably soon disappear”. This conclusion is supported by subsequent work indicating that terrestrial life did not recover from previous mass extinction events for millions of years. It is true, however, that indigenous perspectives can help us understand ongoing events. However, I am convinced that rationalism is key to a positive response to these events.
[3] See this and other related reports on the Breakthrough National Centre for Climate Restoration website at the following link: https://www.breakthroughonline.org.au/about-1.
[4] An explanation of this paradox can be found in Jorge Riechmann’s presentation “Where are we? Ecosocial crisis and climate emergency”, available on YouTube at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXwzJkDYtdE.
[8] For a discussion of the unprecedented problems facing the socialist horizon today, see the articles “Socialist revolution in the face of the abyss” (2015-2019) and “Ecological crisis, civilisational collapse and terminal crisis of classical Marxism” (2019), available in the strategy section of the Marxism and Collapse website at the following link: www.marxismoycolapso.com/estrategia.
[9] A very suggestive graphic example of the impact that the current rates of human reproduction are having on the planet can be seen in the following audiovisual presentation entitled “World Population History (1 C.E. – 2050 C.E.)”, available at the following link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X2n4uRvZ-M.
[11] For an informed and didactic explanation of this phenomenon, see the documentary “Global Dimming” at the following link: https://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/xp3p67?autoplay=1&logo=0&hideInfos=1&start=0&syndication=208464&foreground=&highlight=&background=.
The final version of this document has been edited by Dutch archaeologist Sven Ransijn.
I agree with much of what Noam Chomsky, Miguel Fuentes, and Guy McPherson say, but do not agree completely with any of them. My view of the planetary ecological emergency starts with the world scientific consensus, insofar as that can be ascertained, and draws on the long critique of capitalism developed most centrally by historical materialism. In terms of the scientific consensus on climate change, the reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are most important. The planetary emergency is not, however, confined to climate change, and also encompasses the entire set of planetary boundaries that are now being crossed, demarcating the earth as a safe home for humanity. Most of my comments here, though, will center on climate change.
In terms of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report, published over the course of 2021-2022, it is no longer possible for the world entirely to avoid crossing the 1.5° C increase in global average temperature. Rather, in the most optimistic IPCC scenario (SSP1-1.9) the 1.5° C mark will not be reached until 2040, global average temperatures will go up a further tenth of a degree by mid-century, and the increase in global average temperature will fall again to 1.4°C by the end of the century. We therefore have a very small window in which to act. Basically, meeting this scenario means peaking global carbon emissions by 2030 and reaching net zero carbon emissions by 2050. All of this was outlined in the first part of AR6 on the Physical Science Basis published in August 2021. This was followed by the publication of the IPCC’s Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability report in February 2022, and its Mitigation report in April 2022.
Global surface temperature changes relative to 1850-1900 (IPCC, 2021)
Each IPCC assessment report (AR1-AR6) has three parts, each of which is published separately and is introduced by a “Summary for Policymakers,” followed by a series of chapters. In the IPCC process scientists, reflecting the scientific consensus, write the whole draft report. But the “Summary for Policymakers” for each published part—the only section of the overall report that is widely read, covered by the press, and constitutes the basis for governmental policies—is rewritten line by line by governments. Hence the published “Summary for Policymakers” is not the actual scientific consensus document, but rather the governmental consensus document that displaces the former. Especially with respect to issues of mitigation, related to social policy, governments can obliterate the entirety of what the scientists determined.
Capitalist world governments were particularly worried about, part 3 of AR6 on Mitigation, as drafted by scientists as of August 2021, since it was by far the most radical IPCC treatment of the mitigation issue, reflecting the fact that revolutionary-scaletransformations of production, consumption, and energy use (both in terms of physical and temporal scales) were now needed if the 1.5°C pathway was to be reached—or even in order to keep the increase in global average temperature well below 2°C. This is considered the guardrail for avoiding irreversible out-of-control climate change, which, if crossed, would likely lead to a global average temperature of 4.4°C (best estimate) by the end of the century, leading to the collapse of global industrial civilization. Chapter I of the AR6 Mitigation report went so far as to question whether capitalism was sustainable.
Anticipating that governments were prepared drastically to alter thescientific consensus “Summary for Policymakers”, scientists associated with Scientific Rebellion (linked to Extinction Rebellion) leaked the scientific consensus report for part 3 on Mitigation in August 2021, days before the release of part 1 of the report on The Physical Science Basis.This action allowed us to see the radical social conclusions of the scientists in Working Group 3, who well understood the enormous social transformations that needed to take place to stay within the 1.5°C pathway, and the inability of existing and prospective technologies to solve the problem, independently of transformative social change. The scientific consensus Summary for Policymakers for part 3 on Mitigation also pointed to the importance of vast movements from the bottom of society—involving youth, workers, women, the precarious, the racially oppressed, and those in the Global South, who had relatively little responsibility for the problem but were likely to suffer the most. All of this was eradicated, and in many cases inverted, in the published governmental consensus “Summary for Policymakers” in part 3 of AR6 on Mitigation, which was almost a complete inversion of what the scientists had determined. For example, the scientific consensus draft said that coal-fired plants had to be eliminated this decade, while the published governmental consensus report changed this to the possibility of increasing coal-fired plants with advancements in carbon capture and sequestration. The scientific consensus Summary for Policymakers attacked the “vested interests.” The published version removed any reference to the vested interests. More importantly, the scientific consensus report argued that the 1.5°C pathway could be reached while dramatically improving the conditions of all of humanity by pursuing low-energy solutions, requiring social transformations. This, however, was removed from the published governmental consensus Summary for Policymakers.
This, I think, is a good reflection of where the struggle lies in relation to the science and what we have to do. We have to recognize that there is a pathway forward for humanity, but that the capitalist world system, and today’s governments that are largely subservient to corporations and the wealthy, are blocking that pathway, simply because it requires revolutionary-scale socioecological change. The world scientific consensus itself in this planetary emergency is being sacrificed to what ecologist Rachel Carson called “the gods of production and profit.” The only answer, as in the past, is a social earthquake from below coupled with volcanic eruptions in every locale forming a revolt of the world’s population, emerging as a new, all-encompassing environmental proletariat. There are incredible obstacles before us, not least of all the attempts of existing states to mobilize the right-wing elements of the lower-middle class, what C. Wright Mills called “the rear guard of the capitalist system,” generating a neo-fascist politics. Nevertheless, we are facing a historically unprecedented situation. A Global Ecological Revolt is already in the making. Hundreds of millions, even billions, of people will enter actively into the environmental struggle in our time. Whether it will be enough to save the earth as a home for humanity is impossible to tell. But the struggle is already beginning. It is possible for humanity to win, and our choice as individuals is how we join the struggle.
It is clear from the world scientific consensus as embodied in the Mitigation report that a strategy of capitalist ecological modernization, financed by global carbontaxes and the financialization of nature, is something that is too little and too late—and relies on the juggernaut of capital that is already destroying the earth as a home for humanity—on the pretense that saving the climate can all be made compatible with the accumulation of capital.
What Robert Pollin and Noam Chomsky have advanced in terms of green taxes and a global Green New Deal that depends primarily on decoupling economic growth from greenhouse gas emissions through technological change—basically a strategy of capitalist ecological modernization with some just transition features, is not sufficient to deal with the crisis at this point—and would at best give us a little more time. Even this, though, is being resisted by the vested interests as a threat to the system. The capitalist class at the top is so intertwined with fossil capital as to be incapable of even a meaningful strategy of climate reform. It is prepared to drag its feet, while building fortresses to safeguard its own opulent conditions, stepping up its looting of the planet. This is not quite a suicidal strategy from the standpoint of the self-styled “masters of the universe”, because they have already largely separated themselves in their consciousness from humanity, the earth, and the future.
In contrast to Chomsky, the views of Fuentes and McPherson, though realistic on many points, seem, in different ways, to have given up. Yet, humanity as a whole has not yet nor will it ever give up. As Karl Marx said quite realistically, in confronting the destruction that British colonial rule unleashed on the Irish environment and population in his day, it is a question of “ruin or revolution.” We know now that even in the most optimistic scenario whole constellations of ecological catastrophes are now upon us in the next few decades. This means that human communities and populations need to organize in the present at the grassroots for survival at the local, regional, national, and global levels. Issues of survival are bearing down the most on marginalized, precarious, oppressed, and exploited populations, although ultimately threatening the entire chain of human generations. It is here we must take our stand. As the great Irish revolutionary James Connolly wrote in his song “Be Moderate,” “We only want THE EARTH.”
John Bellamy Foster
June 10 / 2022
Land of Dreams (still), 2021, feature film. Courtesy the artist
We’re happy to announce that Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari ‘s latest feature film “Land of Dreams” (2021) will have its North American Premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 17th, 18th and 19th.
-June 17th (premiere) at 5pm at SVA Theatre 1 Silas (Q/A & actors attending) -June 18th at 9pm at Village Easy by Angelika: Theatre 1 (Q/A) -June 19th at 9:30pm at Village East by Angelika: Theatre 7 (Q/A)
LAND OF DREAMS
In the near future, the census goes beyond data collection to explore the dreams of those interviewed. But the uses of that information are unknown, even to those gathering it like photographer Simin (Sheila Vand). But as she begins taking on new responsibilities for the government that employs her, Simin’s morals, connection to community, and safety become tested in unforeseeable ways.
A science-fiction satire that sports a star-studded supporting cast of Matt Dillon, Anna Gunn, and Isabella Rossellini, Land of Dreams is deeply grounded in current American politics and prejudices while imagining a world of innovation that is equal parts insightful and terrifying. Audacious, outrageous, and profoundly human, there is nothing else quite like Land of Dreams out there. Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari’s English-language debut maintains the gorgeous imagery and fiercely anti-authoritarian spirit of their earlier films while applying a uniquely modern focus on surveillance and the limits of the American dream. –Cara Cusumano
CAST & CREDITS Directed by Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari
Shirin Neshat and Shoja Azari are Iranian born filmmakers and visual artists living in New York. They have co-directed three feature-length films, Women Without Men (2009), which received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the 66th Venice International Film Festival, Looking For Oum Kulthum (2017,) and Land of Dreams (2021.)
DIRECTOR Shirin Neshat
PRODUCER/Sol Tryon, Amir Hamz, Christian Springer/SCREENWRITER/Jean-Claude Carrière, Shoja Azari/CINEMATOGRAPHER/Ghasem Ebrahimian COMPOSER/Michael Brook EDITOR/Mike Selemon EXECUTIVE PRODUCER/Amir Neshat, Shirin Neshat, Fahri Yardim, Mark Amin ASSOCIATE PRODUCER/Lina Bertucci
Just after the completion of the first phase of the Ios Art Residency, the artist and curator of the program talks about this new and interesting initiative.
Held for the first time this year by the Save Ios Association, the event aspires to include the island of Ios in the Greek art map, bringing in the foreground issues such as the environmental and cultural effects of the development of the islands.
What is Save Ios and what is its purpose? Why was Ios Art Residency created?
The main purpose of the Save Ios Association is the protection of the natural and man-made environment of Ios. Much of the island has been bought by companies with their own business interests. These companies promote a development that is completely incompatible with the Aegean physiognomy of the island – both in the form of the projects being built and the extensive environmental damage caused, the latter recently punished in court. The respective governments have supported this situation, by – even – including the investment plans of the companies in the category of “strategic investments”. They justify those decisions in the name of “development”· although it is accompanied by the destruction of unique landscapes and cultural features and despite the fact that the benefits to the national economy in terms of creating quality jobs are minimal.
Our union fights against this absurdity, with actions it takes at the legal level, the communication level, and others. One of the communication activities is the Ios Art Residency, through which we seek to raise public awareness, both for the inhabitants of Ios and the Ios visitors, about the fragility of the Cycladic landscape and the effects of human intervention in it.
What do you think is, or should be, the role of art initiatives in the Greek region?
Such actions in the field of visual arts activate a condition of extroversion and connection of the center with the region. An important factor in this is the dialogue and exchange of views with the artists, the residents, and the visitors, creating stimuli about the necessity and the ways of ensuring the cultural viability of a place. The visual arts landscape of the country is expanded in this way through a system of expressive content that enhances its capacity and evolves its aesthetic values. The hospitality (residency) programs invite artists from abroad, attracting interest in Greece and strengthening its presence in international cultural events.
What is the theme of Ios Art Residency?
The residency program in April, as well as the exhibition that will take place in August, is entitled “Micro-stories of a changeable landscape”. It is held with the support of the Municipality of Ios and under the auspices and the support of the Ministry of Culture and Sports. Its main goal is the creation of a unique and modern narrative, the promotion of the sustainable development of the island, and the cultivation of the environmental and social sensitivity of its inhabitants and visitors. In particular, Ios Art Residency #1 aims to create a strong cultural meaning in relation to the interaction of human activity and the natural environment, the geopolitical concepts behind the land-sea dialectic, and the relationship of proximity to nature.
Why did you choose the environment and sustainable development as one of the main axes of the program?
The Cyclades islands (as well as many other Greek islands) are under enormous housing pressure as prices for luxury homes have skyrocketed. Without the required attention and protection, the islands will lose their unique beauty and physiognomy, without ensuring the economic viability of local communities. Environmentally friendly development is the only way out for these sensitive tourist areas. It is also possible, as, for example, countries like France and Italy have managed to protect beautiful landscapes and traditional settlements in areas with high tourist demand. This is what we should pursue in Greece as well, despite the strong pressures that can be exerted by private financial interests. With Ios Art Residency we want to emphasize the above topics.
Which artists are participating in this year’s event?
We have invited for two weeks in April 2022, three visual artists, Dimitra Kondylatou, Orestis Mavroudis, and Fotini Palpana, to get to know Ios up close, to exchange views with its inhabitants, and, through field research, to produce new works with media of their choice. The works will be hosted in the context of a month-long Contemporary Art Exhibition in August 2022, it being the cause for a public debate on the necessity to ensure the environmental and cultural sustainability of the island and the possible ways to do so.
How is Ios Art Residency differentiated from other residency programs running in Greece?
The distinct landscape and the history of the island are very important elements that artists are invited to explore during their residency. Also, the initially pointed-out approach to the particular problem of “development” of Ios and the dangers that lurk differentiate the reason this residency was created, in relation to other hospitality programs.
What is the interaction of the program with the local community?
For Ios Art Residency, the daily practice of art comes to function as an open dialogue with society, to ask questions about the sustainable development of the island and explore the possibilities of environmental regeneration in interdependence with socio-ecological values. Always taking into account the local, social and historical context of the region, Ios Art Residency aspires to function as a field of systematic research and dialogue about Ios and the wider Cyclades region.
How do you count cooperation with other initiatives outside Ios?
From the beginning, our goal is to collaborate at some point in the future with other similar distinct efforts taking place in the Cyclades. Mainly in order to build a network and a bridge that aims to raise awareness of the islands’ environment which is currently more endangered than ever.
What would you like the future of Ios Art Residency to be?
Ios Art Residency aspires to expand its scope to other art forms such as dance, music, performance, and literature. We also want it to grow in terms of the number of participants, as well as with the participation of foreign artists, in order to raise its voice so as to promote and protect the natural beauty of Ios.
Yannis Vovos, Member of OEMY MeRA25
from the Red Goat Collective
Does the US Left have a “cancel culture” problem? Or is ‘cancel culture’ just a cynical right-wing bogeyman aimed at disparaging leftists, Millennials, and academia?
Perhaps cancel culture is mostly mirage: the social media shadow of American celebrity obsession, distracting us from the overall healthy left culture on the ground?
Maybe left-wing cancel culture is real, but marginal. Just a crazy niche of fringe folks—better to ignore?
Or is there a genuine ‘there’ there—a problem with significant reach and influence—and if so, what does it consist of?
While we’re by no means settled on the term “cancel culture” and remain open to other possible names for ‘it,’[1] experience and investigation over the past decade have led us to the conclusion that, yes, indeed, there is a ‘there’ there: whatever we call it, ‘cancel culture’ indexes a real problem on the Left. And it is no minor matter, of interest only to the ‘cancelled’; it hinders whole sectors of the organized and movement Left—intellectually, socially, morally, and politically.[2]
How might we define this left cancel culture? It is undoubtedly a tall task, and we do not mean to offer here a monolithic or final definition. Nonetheless, for now, we offer this: that cancel culture on the left can be understood as a bundle of distinct yet interlocking methods that mishandleproblems among regular and working people, as if some regular people are—or are always on the verge of becoming—the enemy (and others, their fragile and helpless victims).[3] This blunt projection of demonization (and blanket victimhood) leads to treating differences, complexities, and conflicts that could and should be approached through reasoned discussion and principled struggle instead as melodramatic antagonisms that demand one or another form of coercion—whether by relying on existing institutional power, or the moral panic of ‘mob rule’.
We might grasp cancel culture here as an expression of punitive (or carceral) thinking within our own social movements, whereby the punishment and purge of individuals comes to symbolically substitute for the collective structural and cultural transformations that liberation ultimately requires. In this sense, cancel culture represents a seeping of ruling class methods of punishment and ‘divide and rule’ into the emancipatory movement, but without access to the resources of the ruling apparatus—a fact which makes cancel culture’s maneuverings in some respects even cruder, more erratic, and less discerning than the more sophisticated attacks of established state power. However genuine the concerns that may animate it, cancel culture remains a grossly inadequate salve for real world injuries and actual domination.
Let us be clear, we are not here making a ‘liberal’ argument: We concede that there are antagonisms in the current capitalist-imperialist world system that are so deeply entrenched that they may indeed require the use of force to overcome and transform them. This is, in other words, not a ‘defense’ of the economic and political Bosses who are positioned to force underlings to endure indignity, exploitation, and abuse—and then to deny them access to institutional recourse. But cancel culture trains us to see virtually all social conflicts, even those among our own comrades, allies, and regular people, through this harshly antagonistic lens. And that’s a problem. Leaping to treat even what may be fleeting (or unsubstantiated) offenses as unquestionable mortal injuries, cancel culture can quarantine and ostracize, but can it understand, let alone heal or transform, the underlying problems to which it responds? Can it attract and sustain the kind of broad mass involvement we need if we are ever to win the deep social transformation our times demand?
The list of fallacies below is an attempt to clarify and compile some of the false assumptions and wrong methods—sometimes held consciously, often unconsciously embedded in existing practices and organizations—that enable ‘cancel culture’ (hereafter CC) and more generally perpetuate the marginalization, divisiveness, and even self-destruction of the contemporary Left. While we’ve tried to represent the operative notions here in a way that shows their serious problems—and with a hefty dose of sarcasm—we’ve also tried to do so in good faith, using language not too far from what perpetuators and participants of CC might recognize as their own, even as the ideological undercurrents we bring out for each are seldom brought to the surface so explicitly.
One last note: It could be pointed out that many of the problematic ideas and practices below are themselves symptoms of deeper issues—from the logistical limitations of contemporary left organizations, to the weakening of the labor movement and other forms of progressive politics based in democratic accountability, to the distortions of corporate social media algorithms, to a sense of despair and suspicion that pervades society generally in this age of compound crises, when an emancipatory path forward may seem in doubt.[4] Nonetheless, though the notions enumerated below can indeed be seen as the symptomatic effects of more fundamental causes, we believe that ideas and methods that take hold of the minds of millions can become causes in their own right—and that many of these fallacies have taken on a life of their own.[5]
And so, we present: 21 Fallacies that Fuel Cancel Culture.
1) Optics are more important than Substance.
We must worry more about how things look from the outside, and less about what’s happening on the inside—be it a meeting, an organization, an event, a relationship, or an artwork. External appearances are not even ‘external’ anymore, since such optics, with the help of social media, quickly become internal factors as well. A tweet from a private meeting can start a public firestorm that will consume an organization even before said meeting is completed. Whereas it might have once been possible to explore the nuances of complex matters internally, admitting rough edges and testing unorthodox interpretations in private before deciding on public positions or precise language for broader consumption, this line between ‘public’ and ‘private’ has collapsed. Anyone attending a meeting might shave a sharp splinter from the draft party platform and send it flying as a deadly public blow dart in an instant. Therefore, we must now hold every ‘private’ gathering—every meeting or seminar, every moment, each sentence—to the same public optical standard we would use for an official press conference. No word, phrase, or idea that can be decontextualized or excerpted—tik tok-ed or tweeted—to imply something ‘offensive’ or ‘problematic’ should be allowed, even in private. The enforced loss of spontaneity (and honesty) is a small price to play for making sure we aren’t made to look like fools or bigots. Better to strangle internal discussion than to take a public dart in the neck.
2) Engagement equals endorsement; Association is complicity.
To engage someone in public conversation means you are endorsing all their (potentially problematic) ideas or associations, or at least making light of them—even those ideas that are not part of whatever conversation occurs. Thus, an interlocutor must be deemed ‘safe’ of compromising statements or associations prior to such engagement. If you or your organization don’t have the time or resources to research all the ideas and statements of a potentially ‘controversial’ person ahead of time, well, then maybe you should just not bother engaging them at all. After all, merely being associated (even privately) with a person deemed problematic is enough to compromise you. It is thus better to cut ties with problem people than to sustain contact with them, since the influence of association can only pull in one direction: the ‘bad’ one. The idea that your engagement might encourage positive change in the person deemed problematic, or at least help keep that person from further sliding in the problematic direction, is naïve, at best. Worse, the idea that such association might help the rest of us better understand the context or incorrect ideas that gave rise to the problem in the first place insultingly implies we don’t already know enough to pass judgment. In short: it’s just not possible to do something good with someone bad. Cut ‘em loose.
3) Conversations can’t change problematic people; Political opponents can’t be won over.
If a person opposes us now, they’ll most likely oppose us forever. It’s not possible that discussion with ‘problematic’ figures might give the person in question a chance to clarify, correct, contextualize, qualify, or walk back troubling ideas. Bad ideas can’t be deflated or improved through engagement or ideological struggle; they must be de-platformed. It’s not possible—or not worth taking seriously as possibility—that such people could have, even at one and the same time, multiple views, values, interests, priorities, associations, or commitments that conflict with one another, with some pointing towards a better way forward, others holding such progress back, or with some ideas being residual remnants reflecting that person’s history, but not necessarily their future. People don’t change. They are static and self-identical. Disregard that dialectical bullshit about people as constantly BECOMING relative to what they HAVE BEEN and what they MIGHT BE. People just are what they ARE. Those the enemy has persuaded are lost to us forevermore. Say goodbye to your Trumpy uncle.
4) Problematic views and acts flow from malice or monstrosity, not mere error.
Why give a person the benefit of the doubt when you can cast them as your conscious and mortal enemy, a living embodiment of all you seek to oppose and destroy? Forget that quaint notion that we should “Never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance.” It’s best to assume that the do-er of a problematic thing was, at the time of said offense, in possession of all relevant information, the full range of opinion, and had their senses about them, and yet still—even after all of that—pursued this bad idea or act as the one that they still wanted or needed to take. Circumstances don’t mitigate wrongdoing.In the off chance that an offending person was not in sound mind or body at the time of an act in question, well, that’s tough shit: they should have known better than to put themselves in a position where they would be likely to fuck up. If their sources of information, opinion, or logic are flawed, well, that’s their fault too. There is no need to factor where someone has come from into our judgment of them today. Good People don’t make Bad Mistakes, therefore, making an error deemed Bad is proof of being a Bad Person. Talk of mitigation is liberal bullshit that upholds an oppressive order of privilege.
5) People can be reduced to their worst action or idea, without doing them an injustice.
Why assume that something bad someone has said or done was an outlying mistake when it can be seen instead as the expression of their essential being? People’s worst moments express their truest selves. (Indeed, for every shitty thing they’ve done that we’re aware of, there are probably a dozen shittier things still unknown to us—we need to factor in these ‘unknown knowns’ as well.) Further, to call attention to the good work that people have done (or might do in the future) as a matter of contextualizing a misstep is to make light of their shittiness. The aftermath of harm is not a time for ‘balance’ or ‘perspective’—and, let’s face it, these days we are always in the aftermath of harm. The only thing that ought to be discussed once a wrong is reported is that wrong; any other element of a person’s work, character, or history is at best irrelevant. Worse, mentioning the ‘other side’ is insulting and insensitive to those who feel they have been harmed and understandably want ‘justice’. It is fine and just to essentialize those you oppose.
6) The passage of time is irrelevant.
A wrong committed decades ago is just as relevant as one that happened last week. There is no reason to assume that someone who did something shitty years back (be it donning an insensitive Halloween costume or acting like an asshole at a party) has taken time to think about it, or to improve their conduct or philosophy in the interim. Certainly, there is no obligation to investigate whether someone has made steps to improve since those events years ago; it’s perfectly ok to treat them now as if they are the person they were then—or that someone told you they were then, since maybe you weren’t around when whatever went down went down. Since our movement seldom seeks to put people in actual prison—that would mean cooperating with the police state—formal sentencing never occurs…but also must never end. People can and should be banished and branded for life, regardless of what they have done to improve themselves or address the relevant issues. We must assume the worst if we are to keep our spaces safe. People don’t change, so there’s no need to give them a chance to. Debts to victims or to society can never be repaid. But a culture of permanent excommunication will prevent harmful future behavior and help past victims heal.
7) A threat to ideological comfort is a threat to safety.
Being subjected to challenging, provocative, offensive, or incorrect ideas puts the person hearing them in jeopardy. Intellectual discomfort causes harm. Therefore, it is ok—even imperative—to exert prior restraint, up to and including prohibition and exclusion of discomfiting ideas or words (or the people seen as likely to express them). People have a right not to be offended—not just a right to respond reasonably to what offends. Moments of intellectual provocation are not ‘teachable moments’; they are triggers for trauma. Making people think too hard about difficult subjects becomes a kind of violence. In particular, people’s ideas about their own perceived identity or oppression must not be challenged. People from historically oppressed groups especially cannot and ought not be subjected to arguments or debates about such topics, in print or in-person, regardless of the merit or content of the criticism expressed. Ideas that people have grown attached to should be viewed as parts of their physical or spiritual being. For someone to abstract and criticize said ideas—even for purposes of temporary analysis—amounts to a kind of ‘attack.’ Therefore, it is the job of good ‘allies’ to protect oppressed or traumatized people, not only from clear and present physical or institutional attacks, but from intellectual or ‘existential’ ones as well, like, say, someone asking a critical question about a concept or term with which they presently identify. Most certainly, it’s not possible for someone outside of this social group to offer helpful insight on matters pertaining to that group’s current situation, no matter how much genuine study or listening on the topic they’ve done. Immediate experience trumps outside knowledge, period. (Never mind that what counts as ‘experience’ may be at least in part the product of the ideological lenses through which a person has been taught to look.) A corollary: oppressed groups are monolithic, without significant ideological, intellectual, political, or methodological conflicts within their own ranks. So, it’s ok for one spokesperson of said group to give voice to the entire group’s will or interest. Anyone who contradicts such a spokesperson—especially if they do not personally belong to the category in question—is disrespecting or harming the group and needs to shut the fuck up.
8) Complicated things (and people) are compromised and not worth engaging.
How can we learn from people or things (including artworks) that are themselves ‘problematic’? Why not just move on and replace the shitty with something safer? Sure, there may be artworks (or people) that now stand for something offensive but have been deemed ‘brilliant’ in the past. But what does it say about you if you overlook the offensiveness in favor of the brilliance by promoting such content? Are you saying that aesthetic beauty or intellectual rigor or historical influence is more important than keeping our spaces safe and inclusive? How can we reduce the influence of problematic works or people if we keep giving them airtime? If someone is seen to be seriously wrong on 1 out of 10 issues, then their insight on the other 9 things is compromised, if not altogether invalidated by their hypocrisy. Hearing them out on those other 9 issues would only be providing cover for the problematic 10th. You can’t just bracket off the bad parts; they bleed into everything. The bad gobbles up the good. It’s thus not conceivable that a person or group with 9 incorrect ideas might nonetheless have something crucial to teach us regarding the 10th. Wokeness comes in batches—no sense distinguishing all these different aspects. As a corollary, wherever possible, people should declare themselves with clear and easy-to-read labels and signs. If the expressions of such a person appears to be complicated, or not immediately ‘clear’ and on the ‘correct’ side in a way that can fit into, say, a series of rapid-fire tweets, then that person bears the responsibility for any confusion that results. The responsibility certainly does not fall on the viewer or reader to investigate such complexities. Who has time to do close readings these days?
9)To entertain a ‘problematic’ joke or cultural product is never innocent.
Laugh at impure humor and you open your belly to the abyss. To listen to a comedian or other cultural content creator who is pushing values deemed bad is to risk being influenced by that content—how can one be exposed to bad content and not be marked? Even worse, it is to give the impression to those who have already made up their mind about the comedian or cultural producer that you have not made up your mind. Such indecisiveness on your part throws the settled judgements of the offended into doubt—an existential insult. After all, if you trusted and believed in them properly then why couldn’t you take their word for it? Why did you need to go and explore it for yourself? What, do you think that you’re smarter than the rest of us? That your curiosity or ‘complicated’ enjoyment is more important than other people’s right to have their grief-laden verdicts accepted without question? The death of comedy and entertainment is a small price to pay to make sure nobody gets their feelings hurt.
10)Every “micro”-aggression is just the toxic tip of a macro-iceberg.
There are no innocent errors, just instances that have yet to be analyzed and traced down to the deeper danger beneath. The difference between ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ aggressions is a microscope; little annoyances or snubs are made of the same stuff as life-threatening mortal violations. It is thus correct to react to a minor offense as if it were a major one—especially if a pattern of minor problems has been alleged. In the latter case, one need not give the offender a chance to correct their behavior before bringing out the big guns: they already have a ‘history of misbehavior,’ after all, and must be condemned for it. Their chance for rectification and improvement has passed (even if this is the first time we’ve communicated our concerns to them). The fact that existing law makes qualitative distinctions between different categories of acts—and that the alleged behavior may not have crossed any legal line—is yet more proof that the Law is a relic of an oppressive order that doesn’t take oppressed people’s wounds seriously. By amplifying and harshly punishing examples of even low-level alleged misbehavior, we amplify the safety of our special spaces (at least for all who have not been flayed alive for past missteps). Fuck fine distinctions and fuck due process.
11)The moral imperative is to eliminate (what might be) evil, even if it means wrecking good work.
Political progress is to be understood not as a complex positive project of building something Good from the mixed materials that now exist, but rather, negatively, as the elimination or exposure of those elements deemed Evil. Better a pure Nothing than a compromised Something. Radical political intervention is best understood as a solvent to burn away the bad rather than as an adhesive or mixing agent that holds things together so that the better can be built. Isn’t it best to purify oneself and others of sympathy for the devil rather than to burden one’s brain or one’s organization with the messiness of sifting through more mixed elements? Tear that shit down. We’ll worry about building things later (maybe).
12) If we deprive badness of a platform, it will lose its platform elsewhere, too.
If we can prevent bad or backward ideas from getting a hearing in ‘progressive’ or ‘left’ platforms, this will prevent their circulation elsewhere. We can meaningfully reduce the circulation and impact of ideas in the ‘mainstream’ by denying them the ‘legitimacy’ provided by left spaces and engagement, however small and isolated the Left may be at present. The possibility that such an approach might rather enable the Left’s own blindness and disconnection from the actual state of ‘controversial’ debates, and thus perpetuate or expand our isolation from people who are already influenced by that ‘mainstream,’ is a secondary or tertiary concern. The further possibility that spending time with someone or something deemed objectionable might actually help us better relate to our neighbor or coworker or family member who has also been exposed to that person or thing, is swallowed up by the danger that such exposure will merely drag us into being ‘like them,’ or else give comfort to the enemy. The related likelihood, that I can only criticize something accurately if I know the object of critique intimately, is eclipsed by the danger that, in giving stuff deemed bad such close attention, you impart the impression that you secretly or not-so-secretly actually like that garbage. Can’t have that. Sure, right now the millions of people watching so-and-so’s podcast or cable show may not be waiting for our permission to do so—or even know that we exist!—but unless we model what a principled refusal to look or listen looks like, how will said millions ever learn to do likewise? If enough of us just close our eyes and block our ears really tight then it will almost be like the big bad wolf outside the door isn’t there anymore.
13) We can win social change without winning over the millions who currently disagree with us.
After all, isn’t righteousness on our side? Aren’t we fighting for the good of the entire planet? Who needs to win over the conservative hicks (or centrist fence-sitters) in a backward country like this one? Or heck, even in our own households, communities, or classrooms? It’s not like revolutions require super-majorities, do they? Can’t a militant minority do the job? It’s not like radical change means you need to win masses of people over.Those who disagree with us are probably stupid and hopeless. (The masses, alas, turned out to be asses.) Best to protect our spaces from such “deplorables.” Wouldn’t building an expanded base end up watering down the purity of our correct politics anyway? Why take the risk that our ever-so-precious conversation or community could be mired with their mess?
14) ‘Digging in’ in the face of CC critique is proof of privileged arrogance and domination.
If someone refuses to give in to criticism and public pressure to retract or apologize, no matter how small the issue was to begin with, their resistance to recanting itself reveals a bigger issue, which may require more extreme response. In particular, for a person associated with a historically dominant group to refuse to admit the validity of criticisms coming from someone associated with a historically dominated group is to engage in an arrogant abuse of privilege, regardless of the merits of the criticism expressed. Such resistance suggests that the refuser disrespects not just their immediate critic, but the group that critic is speaking for and the entire historical experience of collective oppression that has led up to this point. Someone who refuses to give in to group pressure could not possibly be a person committed to the facts as they understand them, nor could they be expressing honest concerns out of their love for the cause; they are merely providing new evidence of how insensitive and domineering they are, a fact which then in turn pretty much settles the question of whether or not they were actually guilty of the precipitating offense in the first place (as if it were in doubt!). Although there may not have been clear evidence for that first catalyzing event (ok, now we’ll admit it!), the evidence we gather from the accused’s resistance itself is retroactive, since resistance to the group itself proves that the person is the type to commit those other egregious errors as well. (Never mind that the extreme group response itself may be what pushed the targeted person to double-down in self-defense in the first place.) Corollary: Even a false accusation can be of use; it helps us see who is willing to go along with the group, and who is not. If someone ‘digs in’ and disputes the nature a ‘minor’ offense, they are merely revealing that the problem goes deeper, as we predicted. A micro-violator who is stubborn about their problematic millimeter might as well be demanding our most precious mile.
15) The open exchange of ideas is not to be trusted.
“Free speech” is an oppressive concept, a chimera that elides the actual-existing power dynamics that rule our world. Face it: beneath every invocation of “freedom” is the reality of power. Considering the compromised nature of discourse, then, it’s preferable to use force to shut down purveyors of bad ideas, if we can, rather than to use reason, argument, or evidence to refute the ideas themselves. Why debate when you can de-platform! The fewer people are exposed to those bad ideas, the better. Let’s be honest: We don’t trust people to sort truth from lies, even with our help. And if we’re really being honest, we’re not sure we can unpack and criticize the specific ideas of our enemies effectively anymore, anyway, since we’ve pretty much limited our intake of them to second-hand snippets and soundbites for years. (Not everyone has the luxury of spending endless hours in the library, dude.) Therefore, we’re justified shutting down misleaders in advance to protect the herd. Why initiate or allow complex debate and discussion that is just likely to confuse people? Or even worse, to lead our group to lose its clarity, unity, and focus? If our organization admitted that it didn’t yet have a clear, single, united view on something important, well, wouldn’t that make us seem indecisive and weak? How can we be the vanguard of the revolution if we admit we’re still thinking things through? Airing important differences aloud impairs our movement.
16) Opinion and rumor about certain things must be accepted as fact.
The statement of a strongly held feeling about another’s wretchedness, even if lacking substantiation, can be enough to decide the truth of a matter—at least for now. And since there is no obligation on the rest of us to investigate said ‘truth of the matter’ –since we’re all busy and life is hard, and investigations are difficult, and our activist organizations don’t have the resources of the state to call upon—it’s fine to let such strongly stated assertions stand as accepted truth…pretty much indefinitely. Furthermore, it’s improper to point out that a second-hand (or third- or fourth-hand) account is not a first-hand one. This is not the time to distinguish between hearsay and solid evidence! Similarly, it’s not ok to ask for evidence or substantiation in the wake of an unproven claim on a sensitive topic. What’s wrong with you, do you not believe INSERT SPECIAL CATEGORY OF PERSON HERE? It’s better to uncritically accept and quickly act upon serious but unsubstantiated rumor than to subject oneself or one’s organization to the messiness, discomfort, uncertainty, or complexity of pursuing an actual investigation.
17)Accusers (even third-party ones) are always reliable—so due process need not apply.
It’s not necessary to hear ‘both sides;’ when we’re dealing with an iteration of systemic oppression, one side is more than enough. Aggrieved people don’t lie, dissemble, or exaggerate. In fact, the experience of being aggrieved necessarily improves moral character. All that violence and systemic injustice and desperation a person may have been exposed to doesn’t leave any compromising psychic wounds. Aggrievement and oppression, however, do make people more vulnerable to harm, especially when others doubt or question their honesty or reliability. Thus, denying aggrieved people the fullness of human complexity, including the potential to be dishonest or just confused, is less bad than making it seem like you don’t take their every word for gospel. It follows that accusers or allegers need not—indeed, should not—be made to go on the record in detail. (We must ‘believe survivors,’ yes, but without requiring them to be specific about what exactly we’re being asked to believe.) It goes without saying that the accused need not have the right to confront their accusers, or even to know the specifics of what they are being accused of. (Habeas corpus is so 20th century and so ‘bourgeois state-y’—forget that liberal crap about it being a product of historical struggles against state repression.) It’s more important to protect the anonymity of accusers, and even 3rd or 4th hand rumor-ists and gossips, than it is to provide the accused a fair chance to address what’s been said about them. Transparency just doesn’t apply to those who circulate charges—that would put them at risk, since, after all, we must assume that all who have been alleged to have caused harm in the past are out to perpetrate even greater harm in the future. The sheer possibility of retaliation, which can never be fully ruled out, means that we must not demand accountability from accusers, or from those who speak in their name. Thus, it’s perfectly ok to weaponize defamatory gossip behind the back of the accused, to work to exclude them from spaces (including online ones), or even to go after their livelihoods, rather than to try and clear things up through more direct two-way communication. Further, since we cannot expect the actual victim to take on the burden of speaking up, anyone speaking in their name or on their unconfirmed behalf must be treated with all the deference owed to the actual alleged victim. The fact that some who speak in the victim’s name may not be authorized to do so and may even be weaponizing the situation for their own ends is outweighed by our belief that Excommunicating Perpetrators objectively helps Victims In General to heal and feel safe. Forget the lessons of the ‘telephone game’ we learned in kindergarten; second- or third- or fourth-hand allegers should be treated as if they are giving reliable first-hand accounts. There are no misunderstandings, only survivors and perpetrators: Which side are you on?
18) Exaggeration in the cause of social justice is necessary.
Emotional amplification, public dramatization, or even deliberate exaggeration is justified in cases where someone is speaking out against injustice or alleged wrongdoing. Feelings of aggrievement are to be validated, not questioned or fact checked. The more passionate someone is in denunciation, the more trustworthy they become. No Investigation? No Problem! Amplifying what might have occurred is more important than figuring out what actually did. (Never mind that mounting evidence shows that mental health problems in this country are at an all-time high. And never mind that COINTELPRO in the 60s and 70s routinely organized campaigns of false accusation to wreck radical organizations and defame left leaders.) Let’s face it: in these crazy media days, one needs a bullhorn to break through the noise, a sledgehammer to knock down the wall of indifference. Nuanced accounts of complex interactions won’t cut it. We need to Go Big to grab people’s attention and make things stick. Therefore, rounding up the rhetoric regarding particulars is not only permissible; it is necessary. We must cherry-pick the statistics and images that best fit our worldview, even if they bestow a misleading picture of the whole: how else to dramatize the essence of evil and get people caring about a system of oppression whose effects are often diffuse, subtle, and uneven? Sure, our exaggerations may lead to the proliferation of factual inaccuracies in the short term—maybe even a simplistic sense of the overall situation—but, in the long term, the heat and attention created by our maximalist presentation will lead to more people getting involved, therefore illuminating other abuses elsewhere. (Those who burn out on the melodramatic framing weren’t really committed to the cause in the first place.) Whatever harm is done to people who are tarnished, indeed slandered and defamed, by broadcast falsehoods in the process, is not our concern. It will be worth it in the long run. Can the harm done to an accused wrong-doer ever really be compared to that of the harm-sufferer, even if the harm in question remains unsubstantiated? In contrast to the longstanding judicial principle that “Better 10 guilty men go free than one innocent be convicted,” we affirm that “Better 10 men ruined by false accusations than one victim be doubted.” (No men in this society are “innocent,” anyway.)
19)Vengeance arcs toward justice.
Sure, we might be a little rough or excessive sometimes, but the arc of retaliation bends towards righteousness. (Or at least towards what feels righteous.) When in history have regular people’s urge to vengeance led them astray? It’s wrong to tell those who are feeling the need to strike back or destroy that they should channel that rage in a more constructive, reasonable, strategic, or fair manner. That’s tone-policing. Better to encourage righteous rage and fan the flames, wherever they lead. Tailing spontaneity and immediate emotion is the way of the future: as evidenced by what goes viral on our corporate-owned social media feeds. In times of big changes and sweeping historical crisis, it’s bourgeois and oppressive to be worried about the fate of just one individual (or other individuals who happen to be connected personally to that one individual). If we need to go a bit overboard in punishing a particular person in order to send a message to others and make our group’s militant morality absolutely clear, so be it. We were never going to win over everyone anyways. And you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Individuals are disposable.
20) Hyper-sensitizing individuals will lead to collective liberation.
In the struggle to radically uproot vast systems of oppression, we prioritize tenderizing individuals, one by one. If some people must be broken like eggs, others must be taught to think of themselves as fragile eggshells. Our goal is to make as many people as we can as sensitive as possible to the myriad offenses that exist in the world today—especially those ‘small’ offenses they experience directly, at the hands of other regular individuals on a day-to-day basis or on social media. As ‘micro’ offenses rather than macro- ones—papercuts not limb loss, bad word choices more than cluster bombs—such offenses may not be immediately obvious. Training people to see how small affronts and slights are actually BIG ones is thus crucial work, much more important than training people to work through the smaller stuff charitably, in light of the truly humongous threats all poor and working people now face. Similarly, training people to focus primarily on the offenses that affect them personally is more important than encouraging them to struggle in solidarity against the oppression of others, let alone spending time studying more abstract things like History or Social Theory that may take them away from their immediate self-interests. Focusing on other people’s oppression leads to ‘savior’ complexes, but teaching people to amplify all the many small slights they themselves experience personally: that’s the road to liberation. Each molehill, when inspected properly, reveals a mountain. Who is to say that the Big Crises we all share are more important than the millions of tiny ones that divide us and make us unique?
21) Fuck it, let’s be honest: Radical change ain’t happening in the USA (unless built upon its smoldering ashes).
Contrary to our at times ‘revolutionary’ rhetoric, we don’t really feel it is possible to change this country in a deep or transformative way. So, let’s just enjoy our moral superiority, our exclusive ‘movement’ spaces, and our curated media feed until the ship goes down or the smoke of the last forest fire consumes us. In the meantime, the best we can probably do is kneecap every ‘privileged’ or ‘problematic’ person, project, or institution we can reach. Sadly, the real big oppressors—the Dick Cheneys of the world—are generally protected behind bunkers of money and armed security: the best we can do is to take aim at whatever dick we can reach. All we’re really good for, here and now, is to fuck this bad shit up, while keeping enclaves of righteousness alive—maybe for after the fires burn out and we re-emerge from this cave. Most Americans are so complicit (settler colonialism, white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, etc.) that they can’t really be part of any positive solution, anyways. So, if we end up tearing down our former comrades and driving away potential recruits or allies…No. Big. Deal. (Never mind the fact that capitalism is increasingly wrecking their lives and futures, too.) Let’s be clear: We didn’t start this fire. So, is it really fair to expect us to take responsibility for putting it out? Such a responsibility is a burden that oppressed and aggrieved people especially should not have to bear (even if there is no one else to bear it). Who the fuck are you to suggest otherwise?
IN CONCLUSION
‘Cancel culture’ teaches its adherents to focus on weaknesses of people in order to tear down their strengths, rather than uniting with people’s strengths to overcome those weaknesses, in light of the common threats we all face. It trains people in suspicion, fear, hyper-sensitivity, and overreaction, and thrives on decontextualization and sensationalism. It teaches people to weaponize vulnerabilities and to instrumentalize others as means to an end, rather than treating them as human ends in themselves. It traffics in moral posturing more than political strategy, expressing a burning impatience with wrongdoing in the world—this is its positive aspect—but too-often directing that impatience against regular people, against comrades, and often against intellectual discussion or due process itself: all things we need if we are to change the world for the better. Unable to strike meaningfully at the heights of the system, CC tends towards ‘horizontal violence,’ with callous disregard for those it harms or the work it wrecks.
To be sure, cancel culture did not come out of nowhere. It is inseparable from the habits encouraged and enabled by corporate social media: Hasty generalization, reduction of complexity, public virtue signaling, echo chambers discouraging dissent, the fear of false ‘friends,’ and the rapid dissemination of unreliable information are all key features of its function. It takes advantage of the impunity of the online troll and the connectivity of social networks to pursue all-spectrum bullying. At the same time, CC reflects the sad sobering reality that in the contemporary USA, the ‘muck of the ages,’ the impurities and damage of capitalism, empire, male-domination, racism, narrow individualism, etc. have indeed marked us all, in one way or another. But rather than finding in this common state of imperfection a basis for humility, compassion, and mutual improvement, CC seizes upon the faults of others as if those who have strayed thereby become irredeemable monsters—infiltrators to be purged, punished, or eliminated from pristine existing spaces. Faced with a complex world of developing human beings, always operating in conditions not entirely of their own choosing, cancel culture insists on Angels and Demons. It thereby discourages genuine openness, intimacy, trust, friendship and understanding, while silencing those who don’t abide its wild swings of judgment.
As we’ve seen above, cancel culture traffics in guilt by association, expresses cynicism about people & their potential to change, and embodies an anti-intellectualism mired in narrow identitarianism, as well as deeply problematic notions of evidence & epistemology. It also evinces a profound lack of strategy, for which it substitutes performative moral panic and self-righteousness. At times, to be sure, cancel culture is instrumentalized deliberately to forward individual careers, or to deliberately destroy movement-organizations, whether by those with personal vendettas or in the employ of the enemy state (see COINTELPRO). Such deliberately destructive actors, however, could not succeed without the help of many well-intentioned people, who, nonetheless, tacitly enable cancel culture’s destructive practices. Even as, on some level, they may know better.
By helping to surface left cancel culture’s fallacious methods here, we hope to contribute to an increasingly conscious and collective process of thinking through and beyond the present impasse. Together we can and must develop the theory, the practice, and the sustaining infrastructure that can move beyond cancel culture, re-ground left movements and organizations, and thereby give us a fighting chance to build the culture of respect, debate, and comradeship we will surely need for the struggles to come. We need movements that can build effective resistance to the current unjust and unsustainable world system, that can shepherd broad popular forces capable of defeating the ruling-class agenda, that can help people to grasp the world’s problems in their genuine complexity, and that can nurture into existence a new world that will be more reasonable, just, and free than the one we have now.
In that spirit, the Red Goat Collective welcomes all manner of thoughtful responses to this polemic, at the email address below (or elsewhere). We also welcome stories of how ‘cancel culture’ has played out in readers’ own circles, as well as resources and reflections to help our movements and organizations develop alternative methods for dealing with the challenges we face. Thank you for reading. And for continuing the discussion.
[1] Other candidates include: culture of disposability, culture of excommunication, carceral culture, leftist purge culture, call-out culture, the neoliberal personalization of politics, left authoritarianism, cannibal leftism, culture of shame or disgrace, culture of suspicion, sectarianism, “woke” mob rule, moral panic, culture of escalation, de-platform culture, the proverbial “circular firing squad,” and good ol’ fashioned Calvinist Puritanism.
It also should be said that many of the ideas examined below can be found in some form on the Right (or the Liberal-Center) as well. (See for instance the current reactionary campaigns to keep children ‘safe’ from “Critical Race Theory,” as well as the bipartisan Cold War history of anti-communist blacklisting.) To those who would dismiss our critique here as being ‘one-sided’ for bypassing the ’real threat’ from the Right, we point out the following: while some (but not all) the ideas criticized below may be found on the Right (or in the Center), those bad ideas are largely compatible with the Right and Center goals of maintaining or deepening the current unjust social order. Such ideas clash, however, with the Left’s historic mission of universal emancipation and global human flourishing; we thus direct our critique where prevalent ideas and practices stand in the way of our ostensible goals. We would further add that such obsessive fears of the Right, however understandable, at times work to suppress critical discussion on the Left about some of the fallacious methods we examine below—as if to engage in serious self-critique within our movements would be to give quarter or credence to right-wing attacks, rather than a way of inoculating against them.
[3] We should note here at the outset that we are thus not primarily concerned with the ‘cancelling’ of those who truly do sit atop oppressive hierarchies, and who use the power and privilege of their position to take abusive advantage of those who have no choice but to suffer their domination. We are instead mainly concerned with the way in which methods that might be appropriate to conditions of truly systemic oppression and desperation—where people have next to no other options, where the stakes of inaction are high, and where the structurally exploitative commitments of the offenders are unapologetic and clear—have been taken up against our fellow working-class people, middle-class comrades, movement leaders and allies. Taken up: as if the things that divide us, despite our roughly common class position,are just as incommensurable and beyond reasoned resolution as those that stand between us and imperialist-capitalist class elites. Taken up: as if we could ever have a chance of overthrowing our true ruling-class enemies and transforming current oppressive social conditions, without learning somehow to live, grow, work, and struggle alongside other roughly regular people, people with whom we will undoubtedly have all manner of disagreements—some of them serious—but whose common interests and concerns nonetheless remain our best leverage for realizing serious social change of this world.
[4] Arguably, the entire phenomenon is shaped (albeit unconsciously in some cases) by the verdict that universal liberation, popular transformation, and social revolution beyond capitalism and its structuring inequalities are no longer possible. With the horizon of revolutionary abundance thus ruled out, all that remains for such a ‘Left’ are fights for small reforms, coupled with rhetorically inflated yet imaginatively impoverished, often inward-looking, competitive clashes over the scarce discursive space and social resources still allowed us by our capitalist overlords.
[5] Readers seeking a straightforward set of “alternative” methods or substitute approaches to the problems that ‘cancel culture’ mishandles will not find such a positive guidebook here, though we believe that better ways of handling genuine movement challenges are embedded throughout the critique. We certainly welcome the process of creating such alternative and improved methods in the days to come. In the meantime, we believe that clearly identifying, exploring, and establishing the validity of criticizing these problematic ideas and practices publicly and forcefully can be a key step in building the intellectual and social space within which new and better organizational and cultural approaches can incubate. The process of developing new methods of work must, in the end, be a collective and inclusive endeavor. (One such archive of methods is the work of Mariame Kaba, compiled in her 2021 book We Do This ‘Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice, https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1664-we-do-this-til-we-free-us).
Romanian lawmakers have called for a three-day weekend — but with the existing 40-hour workweek now crammed into four shifts. The situation shows how reorganizing the workweek can hurt workers’ interests if they don’t have a say in the process.
A three-day weekend sounds like a blessing — a chunk of the week to do what we really want. With the rise in remote work and new technology allowing shifting work patterns, it’s no wonder that calls for a four-day workweek have gained traction around the world.
Yet there’s wide variation in the intention — and outcome —of such projects. While left-wing parties in countries from Britain to Chile have called for an overall reduction in working time, Belgium has introduced a voluntary four-day workweek but with no change in total hours. Experiments in Iceland as well as pilot research at New Zealander financial services firm Perpetual Guardian proved that shortening the workweek is beneficial for workers, while also highlighting its merits in increased productivity.
But the idea that this is a business-friendly measure comes up against the limits of the proposal. Last month, Romanian MPs from center-right and right-wing parties introduced a bill to change the workweek to four days and the standard workday to ten hours. The sponsors of the proposed legislation said:
After the employee goes through the adaptation period, they will realize that they have an extended weekend at their disposal, in which they will rest much better, considering the three days off. At the same time, at the macroeconomic level, there would be an increase in consumption and, implicitly, in sales and profit in public catering, services, and tourism, due to the extended weekend.
So is it better for everyone? Not quite.
Ten-Hour Shifts
The Romanian law proposes three days off, which will give workers more rest time with their families and more time for consuming.
Yet the promise that this schedule will be more restful is countered by the testimony of restaurant workers in the United States who tried ten-hour workdays and found the schedule “too grueling.” Despite claims by companies such as WeWork and Hourly, research shows that people who work ten hours or more a day have an increased risk of developing occupational health problems.
In Romania, the examples of the pilot at Perpetual Guardian and one at Microsoft Japan are often included in articles advocating the new longer workday. What is left out is that these firms decreased the number of working days while also reducing overall working time, which did indeed leave employees with more free time on their hands.
Without a clear decrease in total working hours, changing the structure of the workweek to four days instead of five can actually do more damage to the employee. Jonathan Malesic, author of The End of Burnout: Why Work Drains Us and How to Build Better Lives, told Healthline that “Working those two extra hours during the day is really tough. Your productivity after the eighth hour on the job probably diminishes, but the stress doesn’t.” The experiment in Iceland was successful precisely because it didn’t rely on extra working time on each workday.
Also crucial is the question of who decides. While unions were part of the project implementing the four-day workweek in Iceland, in Romania, they were not consulted for the right-wing legislative proposal. Bogdan Hossu, president of the country’s Cartel ALFA union, told Jacobin that the Romanian initiative is disrespectful to the people who fought and even sacrificed their lives in the historical battles for the eight-hour workday. While some point to Henry Ford enforcing the eight-hour workday as part of his application of scientific management, the struggle for shorter hours goes back to the nineteenth century, when the working class paid the price in blood for this demand.
Even aside from this important historical heritage, Hossu says that “changing the normal workday to ten hours will change how overtime bonuses are given and also the amount of work that people put in each day.” In a country like Romania — where the majority of salaries do not match the cost of living and where 35 percent of employees work more than forty hours per week — the chance to earn additional income comes from working overtime. Overtime work is not paid in all cases, but when workers voluntarily opt into it, they might stay two hours longer and be remunerated accordingly.
By changing the standard workday to ten hours without requiring that the added two hours be paid as overtime, we could end up with a situation in which the most vulnerable will have to work more than ten hours a day or even work on the fifth day in order to afford to live. Workers thus end up with more stress and longer working hours overall.
French Lessons
One indicative case of the limitations of legislative constraints on working time comes from France, which started the process of decreasing the workweek to thirty-five hours on average in 1998. The change allowed for flexible work arrangements, with companies such as luggage firm Samsonite choosing to work shorter weeks in the winter and longer ones in the summer when demand for their products is higher.
Mandating an average workweek of thirty-five hours allowed for more flexibility but did not reduce outright the total hours people actually worked. French workers on average put in around thirty-six hours of work a week last year, although the financial crisis has driven the overall average down through a rise in part-time jobs. In reality, the workweek for full-time employees is around thirty-nine hours a week, with everything above the thirty-five-hour threshold being counted as overtime.
Aside from the aforementioned benefits, research on the pension gap between males and females suggests that shortening the workweek can be beneficial for those who leave the paid workforce to care for family members (predominantly women). In Romania, the pension gap is around 25 percent. This stems mostly from women leaving the workforce early or never being formally employed, since the gender pay gap in the country is among the lowest in Europe (2.5 percent). The risk of poverty for females claiming pensions is much higher than it is for men (28.5 percent vs 16.4 percent), showing how damaging being outside the paid workforce can be in the long run.
While some voices call for a universal basic income, Romania is far behind on demands for basic welfare guarantees, with the crippling of the health care and educational system a result of decades of neoliberal policies. Before we get to a point where we can ensure everyone a stable income regardless of employment status, shortening the workweek could help decrease the pressure on women’s shoulders.
But there are other problems with this legislation. Just because someone is ostensibly expected to work four days a week does not mean that they will not have to answer phone calls, finish additional tasks on the weekend, or show up at the office if their boss requires them to do so. The Romanian bill builds on previous discussions about work flexibility that arose during the pandemic, when certain workers found themselves at home, having to take care of children and help them through school.
Romanians who had the flexibility of working from home mostly liked it: 70 percent of those who had the chance to move their office into their living room reported their satisfaction. But despite the calls for more flexible workweeks, the wider reality is that we are shifting toward a permanent economy that consolidates and deepens “the encroachment of bosses and market forces in our private lives.” In order to achieve a better work-life balance, cutting the workweek should be accompanied by right-to-disconnect laws, like those in Belgium and Portugal, which prohibit bosses from messaging workers during their free time.
The research conducted in New Zealand, at Microsoft Japan, or in Iceland prompted California congressman Mark Takano, who now has the backing of several groups, including the Economic Policy Institute and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, to suggest introducing the four-day workweek and reducing total working time to thirty-two hours. According to the bill, every additional hour worked above the thirty-two-hour mark should be compensated as overtime, given empirical research that suggests the same number of tasks can be accomplished in less time.
As the movement to decrease the workweek becomes more popular around the world, we should ask if this can mean something more than a rearrangement of the existing burden of toil and stress. Cramming forty hours of work into four days holds little appeal for workers who will be more prone to accidents and have to put in painfully long shifts that would have once been compensated as overtime. A clear solution would be to decrease the working week to thirty-two hours and set maximum overtime at eight hours per week. Based on previous examples, this would make workers happier, give them more free time, and allow them to escape their boss’s control a little bit more.
Wallpaper magazine interviews Anish Kapoor in his south London studio ahead of a major two-venue retrospective during the 59th Venice Biennale, where the artist will finally introduce the world to his Vantablack sculptures
Portrait of Anish Kapoor by George Darrell, 2021
Anish Kapoor’s art is rarely easy on the eye, but it is hard to stop looking at. Each of the many rooms in the artist’s vast south London studio contains very different Kapoors. Some are visceral, messy and erupting with disobedient desires. Some reflect, warp and bend what we know as physicality; others pretend it doesn’t exist.
This is a place of production, but also trial-and-error experimentation. For a Turner Prize-winning, Knighthood-bearing artist with frequent seven-figure auction results, he’s remarkably willing to reveal works in progress – just don’t take any pictures.
We’re touring Kapoor’s studio ahead of his mega-moment in Venice, where, during the 59th Venice Biennale, he will stage two simultaneous solo shows. The first takes place at the revered Gallerie dell’Accademia, where Kapoor, who represented Britain at the 1990 Venice Biennale, will become the first British artist to be honoured with a show. The second will unfold across the canal at the 18th-century Palazzo Manfrin, which, following many years of vacancy, has been acquired by the Anish Kapoor Foundation to become its headquarters once restorations are complete.
There is poetic symmetry in these shows. In the 18th century, Count Manfrin, a wealthy, Croatian-born tobacco merchant, transformed the first floor of Palazzo Manfrin into a public picture gallery. It became one of Venice’s main tourist attractions, visited by such cultural dignitaries as Lord Byron, George Ruskin and Edouard Manet. After Manfrin’s death, the collection was sold and many masterpieces – including La Tempesta by Giorgione – ended up, and remain, in the Accademia’s collection. In both these spaces, Kapoor, through iconic historical works and new, unseen paintings and sculptures, will consider what’s to come through what’s come before.
Despite his obvious market success, Kapoor shows little interest in ‘playing the game’. ‘The artist in a way is, at an elevated level, the cosmic fool, at a less elevated level, just a fool,’ he quips during our tour. ‘It is our job to allow the half-thought, the half-made. In today’s art world, the market has taken over everything. We have to remind ourselves that we are not makers of commodities; Louis Vuitton does it better.’
The first studio space on the tour is like an abattoir, chaotic red: ‘the colour of interiority’. The walls and floors are bloody. There are bits of bodies with the skin off, or which never had the skin on. Skin hangs and drapes on stair-like structures above pools of glistening, blood-like resin. The centrepiece is an utterly enormous steel sculpture. There’s no skirting around the obvious, it resembles a vulva – a recurring theme in Kapoor’s works. When I last visited his studio in September 2021, it was bare, now it bears a globule of bloody flesh. This piece is destined for the Palazzo Manfrin – shipping works to Venice is never an easy task, but at two and a half tonnes, this will be quite the operation.
Another room is erupting with what appears to be the inverted embodiment of Shakespeare’s ‘mountain of mad flesh’, another enormous sculpture to be exhibited within the colonnade of Palazzo Manfrin.
Kapoor’s paintings, revealed for the first time at Modern Art Oxford last year, harbour a similar depth of gore and violence. Deep purples, whites, and most reds on the spectrum capture a human body that is desecrated before it ever came to be, perhaps even more fleshy, bloody, primal, anatomically horrific than the Francis Bacons currently dominating London’s Royal Academy up the road.
In another room, the mood changes again with Kapoor’s clean-cut, reflective works, the sort that often find their way into public spaces, and onto Instagram. Part science, part art, their concavity induces a kind of vertigo, enveloping the body, stretching it and turning it upside down, and confusing what we know to be physicality. These ‘non-objects’ penetrate the human desire to be seen from new perspectives, through the eyes of something, or someone else.
It’s difficult to avoid the feminine motifs that weave in and out of Kapoor’s work so freely. Sometimes they’re subtle, sometimes they’re blatant. Either way, Freud would have his work cut out in these studios. ‘Who is she? What is she? Is she my mother? I think that’s of course an ongoing, deeper, pursuit, again to which I don’t know the answer. Who cares!’ Kapoor exclaims, standing in front of a work that resembles a giant black vulva draped in a testicular formation.
At last, it’s time for the black magic show, also known as the ‘Vantablack’, ‘Anish Kapoor black’, or ‘blackest black’ works (or in popular culture wars, the subject of a longstanding, vitriolic stand-off with the artist Stuart Semple after Kapoor’s studio bought the exclusive licence to its application for artistic use). After many years of fame, infamy, anticipation and mystery, these works will appear in public for the first time in Venice. ‘There’s been this ridiculous controversy about me having control over the colour,’ Kapoor tells me. ‘It’s perfectly straightforward: it’s not a colour. It’s a technology. And it’s extremely complicated and sophisticated.’
For those of us without a PhD in nanotechnology, Vantablack is a brand name for a type of ‘super black’ coating, developed for military stealth use by UK-based Surrey NanoSystems. When applied to a surface, the material becomes a forest of vertical particles that eat 99.8 per cent of visible light. When light strikes Vantablack, instead of bouncing off, it gets trapped, transformed into heat, and never leaves. As Kapoor claims, the material is ‘blacker than a black hole’.
The room is a grid of glass cases filled with black forms on white backgrounds (as Kapoor notes, an homage of sorts to Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square). Granted, these forms are very black, and, even on close frontal inspection, very flat. But look again, and move to the side of the glass boxes and something magical does indeed occur. What had two dimensions now has three as shapes protruding seemingly from nowhere.
Kapoor’s vacuous Vantablack works show no interest in their surroundings, reflect nothing and acknowledge no shadows. ‘If you put it on a fold, you can’t see the fold. So my proposition is that this material is therefore beyond being,’ he says.
It’s a bold claim, but this is a bold material that gets to the very heart of art as an illusion, the raison d’être of the Renaissance. Kapoor’s affinity with the period, and Venice by proxy, is clear; they share an obsession with colour, perspective, spiritualism and optical theatrics: ‘There are these weird wonderful, powerful parallels which I think are completely contemporary,’ he says. ‘Look at this bloody world that we’re living in.’ But there is one key difference: whereas the Renaissance sought to capture reality, Kapoor’s work attempts to swallow it whole. §
Anish Kapoor’s work will be on view at the Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia and the Palazzo Manfrin from 20 April – 9 October 2022 in conjunction with the 59th Venice Biennale.
Editor’s Note: discussion topics include monopoly & oligopoly, how to regulate monopoly in capitalism, how to regulate monoply in parecon, how to organise strategic & essential sectors (like health) in parecon.
[After The Oligarchy] Hello fellow democrats, futurists, and problem solvers, this is After The Oligarchy. Today I’m speaking with Professor Robin Hahnel.
Robin Hahnel is a professor of economics in the United States, and author of many books, but today I’m interviewing him as co-originator with Michael Albert of the post-capitalist model known as Participatory Economics (or Parecon).
Today’s conversation is in association with meta: the Centre for Post-capitalist Civilization. This is the third in a series of interviews with Professor Hahnel about participatory economics, and in particular his latest bookDemocratic Economic Planning published in 2021. If you haven’t watched the first two interviews check them out here.
It’s an advanced discussion of the model proposed in that book so I recommend that you familiarize yourself with participatory economics to understand what we’re talking about. You can do that by visiting participatoryeconomy.org. You can also read Of the People, By the People (2012) for a concise introduction to parecon. And Professor Hahnel has a new book coming out in a few months called A Participatory Economy (2022).
Robin Hahnel, thank you for joining me again.
[Robin Hahnel] Great to be with you again.
[ATO] The next question is a bit different, it’s about monopoly and strategic sectors. For example, what about natural monopolies in parecon? These would be things like electricity, [methane] gas, water, sewage, transport, communications, health, mining, etc. These are sectors of the economy, these are production processes, where … electricity production and distribution is a classic example; it doesn’t make sense for there to be three companies with three different electrical grids, for example. And which are also of strategic, vital, importance. That society be provided with a reliable supply of electricity, where there aren’t blackouts, where it has an appropriate cost, and so forth. So, there are sectors like this which are natural monopolies, and either you end up with a situation – where you have a market system – private monopolies, or a situation where the solution is for the state to take control of these and nationalize them.
So, is there any opportunity in parecon to charge monopoly rents? And what if natural monopoly worker councils don’t treat indicative prices parametrically? Let’s deal with the first question then come back to the second. And if you could just explain what a monopoly rent is to people.
[RH] We have an answer. Every economist knows that only if you have competitive market structures could you make any case that you’re going to get efficient outcomes. As soon as you have a market structure that’s not competitive in a capitalist economy, what will happen is in the most extreme cases a monopoly, and a natural monopoly is sort of the most likely real world example to end up with, one company is the only company that’s producing this product.
As soon as you have that, there is a perverse incentive for that company to produce less than the socially optimal outcome, and therefore to drive its price up. So, two things happen. It reduces the amount that it supplies. That also means it reduces the number of units it’s going to sell, so that’s a negative effect on revenues. On the other hand, every unit it does sell is going to sell at a higher price, and that’s a positive effect on revenues. And the problem is the positive effect is larger than the negative effect leading to a predictable sub-optimal level of output.
Now there are two solutions to this in a capitalist economy. One is to nationalize the natural monopoly and not have it maximize profits but to maximize net social benefits, that is produce the amount that actually is the efficient amount. And the other solution is to regulate the monopoly and say well there’s only one of you but we’re going to set up a regulatory agency. And the regulatory agency’s job … Most people think the regulatory agency’s job is to keep them from price gouging but what economists understand is, no, the regulatory agency’s job is not really to keep them from price gouging, it’s to force them to produce more than they would otherwise be willing to produce if they weren’t regulated. And then the price will take care of itself.
That’s how it works, and one of the problems that defenders of modern market capitalist economies are faced with is in theory they know their economy is only efficient if all industries are competitive. But in reality, what has happened over time is the number of non-competitive industries, and it’s usually not a monopoly, a natural monopoly, it’s an oligopoly. But the same logic applies to oligopolies and economists all know this. So, on the one hand in the real world markets become less and less competitive, and yet defenders of market capitalist economies continue to insist that these are the most efficient economies.
We have a solution in a participatory economy. And the solution takes a very simple form, which is any worker council in our economy is supposed to take the indicative prices as givens.
[ATO] Can you just explain to people briefly what the indicative price is?
[RH] Right, so for instance if you have a natural monopoly let’s choose electricity. During the planning procedure that natural monopoly is quoted a price per watt of electricity and then responds with its output proposals.
[Editor’s Note: During annual planning, worker councils and consumer councils make production and consumption proposals for the year. These proposals are aggregated by the Iteration Facilitation Board (IFB) which feeds back new ‘indicative prices’ to producers and consumers according to a rule chosen to encourage the balancing of supply and demand. This continues for a number of rounds (iterations) until a feasible plan is reached.]
Now, the thing that a monopoly does that’s inefficient is it doesn’t look at market price and take it as a given. Instead, what it does is it asks well wait a minute I’m looking at the entire demand curve. I’m not going to take the price I’m quoted as a given because I can see that if I reduced my supply I could drive that price higher. So, in effect what monopolies are doing is they are not taking prices as givens. They are recognizing that their monopoly status permits them to affect what the price is going to end up being.
These are worker councils in a participatory economy, and there just happens to be one that’s producing electricity in a given region. They don’t have stockholders that are telling them to maximize profits, instead they are certainly supposed to be obeying the rules of the system and one of the rules is when you make your proposals you respond to indicative prices as the given price. You do not calculate ‘but I could affect that price by my response in this round’. Aha, what would prevent one from doing it?
[ATO] Yes, exactly.
[RH] And our answer is a worker council might try and do that, so let’s not be naive and consider it to be impossible. Oh, but it would be it would be anti-social behaviour, it wouldn’t be nice, you’re not supposed to. Let’s take the hard-nosed I-don’t-want-to-be-naive attitude toward this.
If you take the hard-nosed attitude in capitalism you either nationalize or you regulate. When you take it in our system, there is also a response to prevent the behaviour but it’s a different response. The different response is if we catch you doing that it’s against the law. The question becomes devising whatever penalties there would be for a worker council that was doing that. Essentially we have a system that has rules, and one of the rules is when you participate during the annual planning process you are directed, explicitly, to take these prices as givens when you’re doing these various responses. If it’s discovered that you’re not doing that then you’re basically not participating in the annual planning process in good faith and according to the terms of being allowed to participate.
Basically, there have to be rules for who gets to participate in the annual planning process. One is you have to be an approved worker council. And suppose one way you can get disapproved is oh when the industry checked you out when you said you wanted to be a worker council, you said you wanted to be a worker council producing steel but you have no engineers. I mean, in your group and you don’t have any qualified engineers, you have no credibility. So you can be disapproved as a worker council to take part in the annual participatory planning process because you don’t have any credibility that you could actually do what you’re making these proposals about. So we’re not going to let you mess up our planning process.
Another way you can get disapproved is – we talked about it before – that you said you were going to make the shoes people wanted and but you kept sending the yellow toed shoes even though nobody was picking them up, and you just didn’t care. So you can get disapproved as being a worker council for that kind of behaviour.
This is another kind of behaviour you can get disapproved for. If you’re caught during the planning process trying to manipulate the modifications of the indicative prices in the way that monopolies do in capitalist economies, if you’re caught doing that then that’s grounds for some sort of penalty, or fines, or reprimands, or you can simply be decertified as a worker council that we’re going to allow to participate.
[ATO] That makes sense but can I just ask to my mind the hard bit there is not deciding what the penalties are, it’s …
[RH] How do you know if a worker council is doing that?
[ATO] Yes, and can I just elaborate that on a little bit? Why do I think that that might be difficult, or why am I having trouble imagining that? It’s that …
[RH] I can answer your question. Why would you think it might be hard to identify that? It is hard to identify. It’s the same hard job that regulatory agencies have when they regulate natural monopolies. I’m not claiming that it’s not a hard job, but it’s the same kind of hard job that we have to deal with through regulation [in capitalism].
When you nationalize you don’t have stockholders who have an incentive to try and get higher dividends. When you regulate in capitalism you still have stockholders, so the regulators have an opponent that has a clear incentive. I don’t think in the participatory economy there is a clear incentive for the worker councils to engage in this kind of illegal behaviour that is of the same magnitude that there is for a natural monopoly that we have allowed to be a privately owned, a for-profit corporation. Because we have those in the united states
[ATO] Look, we’re dealing with a hypothetical perverse incentive which I think it is reasonable to say would not be on the same order of magnitude as exists under capitalism. Because you have much stronger forces driving things towards that kind of strategic behaviour, trying to hack the system basically. But I think you make a fair point about saying well look this is just the problem of regulation. And I think that that pretty much is the answer to that.
The reason I thought it would be difficult is just because essentially it’s saying that there is a rule that you cannot engage in, effectively, strategic behaviour. You need to take these prices as givens, these indicative prices as givens, and it just seems to me that it’s very difficult to ascertain what is genuine, legitimate, engagement with [the planning process]. What that proposal would be and then what is an illegitimate proposal.
[RH] I’ll admit to some propagandistic element to the response that I’ve given to this question in the past. Because one of the things that I’ve done – and I don’t think it’s totally illegitimate – one of the things that I’ve done is say hey in market systems you really have a serious problem with lack of competitive market structures. And one of the advantages of a participatory economy is we don’t have to worry about the fact that maybe we would have industries where the number of worker councils is not sufficiently large so that you would call the industry competitive.
And particularly when we when you look at the modern trend, and it basically is a modern trend in technology, where the efficient number of firms in an industry from the point of view of technology shrinks. It has been shrinking over time. So, if you’re looking ahead and you see the reality of where the technologies are leading us, well then if you have a system where there is no problem when there’s a monopoly, and there is no problem when there’s oligopoly, it doesn’t matter to us if the industry structure doesn’t have many, many, many, many, worker councils in it.
We have an answer. And I’ve portrayed that as an advantage. But in an attempt to be brutally honest with people, I believe what we have is a system where the incentive to try and manipulate a price on the part of a worker council in the participatory economy would be far less than the incentive to do so for a capitalist firm. And then I think we also then face a situation that is no different from the situation that regulators face [today] which is we would have to detect whether or not a worker council is behaving in that way. We would have to suspect it, we would have to do an investigation, we’d have to look and see. And in that case, the actual policing, you’re policing against agents who have a less powerful incentive to misbehave. And yet you still have to have policing, and the policing probably doesn’t look that different from the kind of policing that takes place [in today’s] regulation.
Because there’s an accusation, and there’s an investigation, and there’s a finding. The accusation has to be somebody thinks there’s reason to believe that a worker council that is the sole supplier of something is not taking the price signals being set out on the rounds of the annual planning procedure as indicative and givens, but is manipulating. They are participating in annual planning by sending responses that are an attempt to manipulate what that next price signal is going to be. You have to be willing to put worker councils on some sort of trial, which is what regulators do. It’s not really called … I mean, regulation isn’t usually a court case. It’s not part of our judicial system. But it effectively is its own judicial system. That’s what regulation is about.
So, I make no claim that in a practicing real world version of participatory economy that you would not … You would have to have procedures for triggering an investigation when there’s any suspicion that this is going on. Now, you don’t have to be suspicious if there are three thousand worker councils who are putting in proposals about shoes. But it would be wise to every once in a while to be suspicious about the only worker council that is supplying electricity. Whether you call that a regulation or whatever you call it is a question of semantics.
[ATO] Can I ask a follow-up question about that? And then another question about monopoly but in a different direction.
The follow-up question is about the SB/SC = 1 constraint [for an enterprise]. The break-even constraint, social responsibility constraint, the idea that a production proposal by a worker council must represent at least not being a greater cost to society than it is a benefit.
[Editor’s Note: In Parecon, an enterprise must have Revenue ≥ Cost. Otherwise, during the annual planning process, its production proposal will not be approved. In other terminology, this is equivalent to requiring that an enterprise achieve Social Benefit ≥ Social Cost, or SB/SC ≥ 1].
What is meant to happen is that if that SB/SC ratio is less than 1, the proposal will be denied. But I’m just wondering in the case of – you gave the example there – if you have 3,000 worker councils producing shoes, if one worker council’s proposal is denied, no problem, there are 2,999 to replace them. But if you have one worker council which is producing, say, bauxite, in practice how can their production proposal be denied? Because who takes their place? That just means that the bauxite production grinds to a halt for that year. So, how to approach that?
[RH] Well that’s interesting so you’re basically saying our procedure says you haven’t made an acceptable proposal yet …
[ATO] Yes.
[RH] And the workers at the bauxite mine, their response is … It’s ‘make my day’, I’m thinking of the Clint Eastwood movie. But that’s not really the right one, it’s not ‘make my day’ … ‘Yeah, so what? Yeah, so whatcha gonna do?’ Well, we’re not going to be able to let those workers be the sole producer. They’re not going to be the ones making bauxite anymore.
This is always a delicate question that socialists never liked asking about their economy, which is ‘well, but is it going to be okay for workers to go on strike in your economy?’ The answer in theory is there never would be a reason for workers to go on strike, because as long as workers are doing reasonable things and they’re being rewarded reasonably, then there would never be any reason for them to go on strike. And somebody who’s a very real world oriented person would say ‘yeah, but what if they do anyway? And do your police beat them over the head or what?’.
[ATO] Yes, that’s a good question.
[RH] So, I think in effect you’re asking me a question where you’ve got some workers at a bauxite mine and they know they’re doing something that’s socially irresponsible, and now we’re into policing and punishing in the real world. I think those are important issues and it’s important to handle them well, but I get to excuse myself as but I’m just the economist. I’m not in charge of a humane system of criminal justice.
[ATO] Well let me refocus the question because I’m not really talking about that. I’m not talking about what the punishment is. The solution there is – in the abstract, nothing about the practicalities – according to the rules of parecon, proposals where the SB/SC ratio is less than 1 are considered socially irresponsible. There’s an appeals process, but assuming that the appeals process doesn’t grant the appeal, that it’s actually a bad proposal, it’s an ineffective use of resources; the solution there is if you have this worker council, they’re totally intransigent and they’re not willing to change anything, well that worker council needs to go and needs to be replaced by somebody else who is given the legal right to use those resources.
[RH] Right. And you posed an example that’s particularly difficult. The answer when there are other worker councils in the industry is well we know these other worker councils can manage to use these resources in a way that is socially efficient. And so the fact that you can’t, we have somebody else who can.
Remember, in a participatory economy nobody owns the bauxite deposit. That’s something that worker councils that are going to propose to be mining operations, they are bidding for the right to use [those resources].
So, basically we are saying well you can’t make good use of it but we already know there’s some others who can. Now, you made a particularly difficult example because in your example there is no other worker council that can readily step in and use this resource better than you apparently can. Because our other response is also to say well why wouldn’t you have a trial period where you got a bunch of worker councils, they’re doing the same kind of thing and this one just can’t get a proposal in that seems to be socially responsible. There has to be some reason for that. So, you can let them operate for a period of time, and you can send people from the other worker councils in the industry that seem to know how to do this better over to work and find out what’s going wrong there. And you can send some of them over to the exemplary [enterprises] that are having no problem.
But you’ve created a situation in which none of those things can happen because there’s only one, which is why it becomes a police issue immediately. It’s why the logic leads to a police response.
[ATO] Well, let’s try to avoid that for for the moment. You raised a good point there which is … The issue is the show must go on. Whether it’s bauxite or whatever it is, this must continue to be produced. If we’re wanting to produce it … it could be, well hopefully not natural gas, or fossil gas, people talk about ‘natural gas’, it’s the branding it makes it sound warm and bucolic. But anyway, the show must go on. It’s unrealistic to expect that we can bundle together a worker council, and swap these guys out and swap these guys in, in the month, few weeks, or whatever, of the annual planning procedure.
Now, what you could say is maybe it’s the case that …
[RH] I have an answer. Suppose their proposal is one where their social benefit to social cost ratio (SB/SC) is only 0.8. And we can’t replace them with another worker council during the month of December. One answer is that your average income is only 0.8 compared to worker councils in every industry that have an SB/SC ratio of 1. I mean, that’s one of the advantages of essentially connecting those SB/SC ratios to the average income of a worker council. So they would continue to produce and they would be punished through lower average consumption for their members for the fact that we couldn’t replace them.
[ATO] Can I make a recommendation in addition to that though?
I think that is good but what I was going to say was: it’s decided in the planning procedure there isn’t an alternative, it’s not practical, we cannot substitute a more efficient worker council for this inefficient worker council in this small time period. So what we do is we say look you will continue to produce for the next year. However, at that point you will be replaced. We’re going to make preparations to replace you next year, and your income will be lower.
In that case it gives them an opportunity to get their act together, it enforces the constraint. Because we need to avoid that slippery slope of ‘now we can get away with production proposals in the red and just take lower income’. That might be something that could work and then if they don’t get their act together, well you’ve had a whole year to find a replacement if necessary.
[RH] I’m very happy with this solution. I think we now have a solution to the problem of what about a bunch of workers who are very, very, stubborn. I mean they might feel that they had legitimate grievances over long periods of time, and therefore they have got what we might call attitude problems. And I think we have a solution that didn’t require a billy club.
[ATO] Well that’s always good. I mean, we’ve had plenty of that in human history, so if there’s one problem that doesn’t involve smashing in somebody’s skull with a truncheon. I can tell you that those truncheons hurt a lot.
[RH] You know, as soon as I said ‘billy club’ I thought that there are so many words that you never think about. And then clearly there must be some historical reason that these things in some people’s culture got called billy clubs. And you know what’s wonderful about the internet? You can google it and find out why was that called a billy club? And I’m sure there was some strike someplace where the word billy came out of.
But yes, it’s a problem that will probably arise from time to time and leftists have to learn how to cope with being able to think in very utopian ways about better futures and at the same time not lapse into pretending that in real world practice problems won’t arise that are going to require responses. Leftists haven’t been very good at that historically. That’s one of our failings. One of our failings is on those grounds.
[ATO] Absolutely. It’s equally important to be visionary and pragmatic. There’s an unfortunate tendency, and it’s understandable, for us to polarize into either being almost totally visionary or almost totally pragmatic. And, really, being purely visionary isn’t that visionary and being purely pragmatic isn’t that pragmatic. So we either say here are my ideals and so help me I will not compromise on them for any reason, even if that means that they’ll never actually be implemented. And on the other hand we say we say look this is the real world, and in the real world you’ve just got to leave your principles at the door in order to create a principled society, and just be as brutal in implementing that as possible.
It is very difficult but we need to do that and we’re running out of time as a civilization. So we really better start doing it.
So, the last question about monopoly is: aren’t there some goods or services, or sectors, that are so important that they demand additional oversight and control by society as a whole? Healthcare is an example. And that is a case where the need to provide an excellent service preponderates over worker council autonomy, or at least it is very important. Energy is another example because of climate change. And the usual socialist solution is nationalization. So is this the parecon solution? And what, if any, differences are there?
[RH] Let’s do schools, and clinics, and hospitals, rather than an electric utility monopoly. Think of all the constituencies involved with schools. You have the teachers, you also have the actual students, who might be kindergarteners and who have parents.
When we’re making shoes, there are the workers in the shoe factory, and then the other people involved are the people who want shoes and wear shoes and the consumers who buy the shoes. Now, the consumers who buy the shoes, they want quality and they want variety. So it’s not like they don’t have an interest in what’s being produced. But their interest is rather easy to identify. And we can figure out how to get that interest represented in a more or less straightforward way; whereas the workers’ interest is in they don’t really much care whether they make yellow shoes or red-toed shoes, but they do care about how they make it and the work process.
But it’s a more complicated situation when you think of schools. And the consumer in this case, the students, and perhaps their parents depending on age, they should be more involved in the actual decisions about the workplace. Not that the teachers shouldn’t be involved, but it’s a more complicated situation.
And I would argue that health care is somewhat similar. Now, one way to think about this is that the consumer’s interests just dig deeper into the production process, and you have to figure out how to accommodate that differently. So, the procedures we use for deciding how to make shoes are probably going to be somewhat different than the decisions we make about how to run our schools and how to manage our schools, and how to manage our healthcare industry.
There’s no need to get into the sorry state of the healthcare industry in the United States, which is an abomination. And we don’t even have to get into the difference between the Canadian healthcare system, which is a thousand times better, and the UK healthcare industry which goes back to right after World War II.
[ATO] I think it was 1948, yes.
[RH] Okay, 1948. I mean, the Canadians don’t have a National Health Service the way that the UK does, and there are lots of people who study the pros and cons of those different models.
What you’re asking is, well, what would it look like in a participatory economy? My sense is that you still have worker councils. That’s the sensible way to enfranchise the teachers, the doctors, the nurses, etc.
Now, in the case of both of those you don’t have paying customers. So the students aren’t paying, and the patients aren’t paying. Paying in the sense that they’re not [paying at the point of consumption] …
I was in Cuba and during a visit my wife had to have an appendectomy. And at the end of it I told him ‘look, I’ve got I’ve got health insurance back in the United States. So give me a bill and I will take it back with me, and I’ll find out how much my health insurance pays for this. And I’ll send you the money. There’s no reason that your Cuban medical service should provide this to my wife without compensation.’ And they said ‘oh fine’. And then we’re leaving the hospital and all of a sudden, we were out the door and I realized they hadn’t handed me a bill. So I walked back in and said ‘hey, remember you’re going to give me the bill and I’m not going to actually pay it right now? But when I get home I’ll file this through my insurance and we’ll see what they [say].’ And they acted very embarrassed and said ‘well we understood, and when we told you that we thought we could do it. But we have no way of doing it. We have no charges for any of these things, so we didn’t know how to draw up the bill.’ At which point I just thought ‘god this is wonderful, exactly how it should work’. So I am imagining something that’s like that. The students aren’t paying.
But that’s not an answer to the question well where is the demand going to come from for education and for healthcare services? And the answer is for the healthcare services, it has to come from consumer federations. It’s basically being paid for as a public good through our consumer federations. And for education, it has to come from … Well, it’s public education. Where do public schools get their money? They get it from tax dollars as part of the quote-unquote, in our case, local political system. France has a national educational system so it’s not a question of local government funding local education, it’s national, whether it’s elementary or whatever. All those options are available. But, in any case, whether it’s local government, state government, or national government, it’s government. And that’s what’s determining the total demand for educational services.
My answer is I still think we have worker councils. How those in the worker councils in these two areas relate to their ‘customers’, those they serve, is more complicated. And that extra complication needs to be reflected in a greater level of participation about the particulars. I mean, we want parents going into elementary schools and participating in PTAs [Parent-Teacher Associations] about how the school is running, and whether it’s running well, and is running in the way that they feel their kids [need]. But the people who wear the shoes made in my worker council, we don’t need them coming into the shoe factory. And I don’t even want them coming to my worker council meetings. So, there’s the difference. That you actually want consumers present during the meetings that are talking about what’s being produced and how it’s being produced in these settings, whereas that’s not necessary for so much of the economy.
[ATO] Yes exactly. I was going to say, we were talking before in our last interview about worker self-management, and you were talking about the notion proposed by some people about having external board members in an enterprise. So you have the workers – the worker council – and then there are seats on the board of that enterprise of people who don’t work there.
[RH] And I’m opposed to that in general, but here’s the situation where obviously it has to be.
[ATO] Yes. In the case of, say, health, this is a life-or-death matter. It’s extremely important, really one of the most structuring factors in people’s lives is their health. So, this is a case, as opposed to, say, shoes. I mean, we all want to get the shoes that we want, but it’s just not as high a priority as health, for example. Same thing with education, schooling.
[RH] I think the general principle that we’re always shooting for is decision-making input in proportion to the degree that you’re affected. I think that’s the right goal to shoot for. But we’re picking cases in real economies where applying that principle comes to rather different conclusions about who is involved and precisely how they’re involved.
I would say the same thing about patient care, that one of the problems is that patients are too disenfranchised in a lot of medical systems. Even in terms of how many times a day is somebody checking on me when I’m lying in the bed, or whether or not I’m allowed to go down to the cafeteria, and things like that. I think one of the places where most current medical care systems fail us, from the perspective of the people having decision-making input in proportion to the degree they’re affected, is precisely that patients in healthcare systems are too disenfranchised and too uninvolved in the decision-making process. And one would hope to seek ways to correct that.
[ATO] I think that is a formulation which makes sense. It’s nice to summarize that in a general principle, and I think it clarifies things.
Now, to keep going and maybe do one question about competition. But I don’t want to …
[RH] I remember the question about competition now and I liked it. By the way, I was thinking about my answer to the competition question. My facetious answer was going to be well doesn’t it always just come down to what words you use to describe it? On the one hand, you can call it socialist emulation, and then, on the other hand, you can call it competition. But I do think there’s a very real issue. Because, ultimately, it’s a question of in one’s own mind what does one think one is doing? Do I think I’m competing with you? Or do I think that I am basically engaging in behaviour so that you and I can figure out how we best want to cooperate?
I don’t want to pretend things are what they’re not by putting prettier words on them. On the other hand, this is a case where I really do believe that we’re going to start doing things in a certain kind of way, and in capitalism we do things in a way where people are very aware that what they’re doing is competing against one another. They’re not competing with one another they’re competing against other. And yet, the goal in my mind is always no we don’t want to set things up so that that’s people’s perception of what they’re doing. The world doesn’t have to be that nasty, it doesn’t have to be that oppositional, confrontational, antagonistic.
[ATO] I think that’s part of it, though, if you don’t mind me coming in. Look, I think this is a very important topic and we can schedule a discussion and start with this. But what I’d say to that is that you make a very interesting point, I think that’s a very good point. But I’d say that there’s also the matter – and I think this is perhaps more important – that there are objective patterns, relationships, behaviours, which we could group together and we could call that competition. We could call it whatever we wanted, but we could call that competition and we could call something else cooperation. And that there are objective characteristics here that might be of interest to us, that we might think are beneficial. For example, to make it concrete, we might say we want cooperation if enterprises have knowledge about a production process; that it would make sense, in the ideal case, if this was shared.
[RH] They would share it immediately.
[ATO] Yes. And that this would make society more efficient and therefore raise the standard of living. The point for me is that I think they’re related. Even if people feel like they’re competing, that act of cooperation, objectively you might say, it’s still happening. Now, I think the two go hand-in-hand. So. I think that there are other elements.
[RH] That’s probably a good subject for to beat around for 20 minutes or half an hour at least, so let’s do another session.
[ATO] Okay, that’s good.
[RH] The other thing is, besides Saint Patrick’s Day, we’re in the middle of March Madness and I think I’m winning my betting pool. I have to go check on all the basketball scores.
[ATO] Well, just in terms of sport, Ireland beat England in rugby last week in Twickenham in England, so that’s really …
[RH] All the Irish are very happy at the moment.
[ATO] Yeah, that’s the match of the year.
[RH] But can you beat the South Africans and the Kiwis in rugby?
[ATO] Well, sometimes. But, you know, as long as you beat the English, that’s fine in my book.
[RH] Oh, I understand, yes. My approach to sports is also like that. In American football we always play my arch-enemy twice in a 16-game season. So there are 16 games and we play the arch-enemy twice and, in my mind, if we win two and lose 14 it’s been a totally successful season. It was the right two.
[ATO] Yeah no exactly, those are the ones that count.
[RH] I am very vengeful in my sports attitudes. I do have to admit to that.
[ATO] Well that’s what it’s about. And particularly if you’re a leftist, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and everything, that’s your opportunity to just be as kind of bigoted and primitive as you want, and just it’s all just about destroying the enemy.
[RH] Well, I mean, there was no greater empire by a smaller little country than the English empire at one point, in fairly recent history. And so as an absolutely committed anti-imperialist, with enough Irish ancestry so that I can throw that in the boot, I am always willing to kick the English. Always willing to kick the English.
[ATO] That’s gas.
Thank you for watching. If you got anything from this video, then please press the Like button, consider Subscribing, and, if you really enjoyed it, then kidnap a 15-year-old and force them to share it on Tik Tok in interpretive dance.
There’s a lot more to come. We’ll keep exploring better futures for humanity until we get there. And, as always, I want to hear your thoughts in the Comments section below. This channel has a wonderful audience and there are usually some very interesting comments under the video, so let’s continue that.
Editor’s Note: Discussion includes optimal and efficient production plans in Parecon, accounting of benefits and costs, enterprise incentives, worker control, and satisfying consumers.
[After The Oligarchy] Hello fellow democrats, futurists, and problem solvers, this is After The Oligarchy. Today I’m speaking with Professor Robin Hahnel.
Robin Hahnel is a professor of economics in the United States, and author of many books, but today I’m interviewing him as co-originator with Michael Albert of the post-capitalist model known as Participatory Economics (or Parecon).
Today’s conversation is in association with mέta: the Centre for Postcapitalist Civilisation. This is the third in a series of interviews with Professor Hahnel about participatory economics, and in particular his latest bookDemocratic Economic Planning published in 2021. If you haven’t watched the first two interviews check them out here.
It’s an advanced discussion of the model proposed in that book so I recommend that you familiarize yourself with participatory economics to understand what we’re talking about. You can do that by visiting participatoryeconomy.org. You can also read Of the People, By the People (2012) for a concise introduction to parecon. And Professor Hahnel has a new book coming out in a few months called A Participatory Economy (2022).
Robin Hahnel, thank you for joining me again.
[Robin Hahnel] Great to be with you again.
[ATO] Last time we were talking about production units and we’re going to continue talking about production units, as in worker councils, as in enterprises. And the first question is a follow-up to part of our discussion last time, and we were talking about social costs and social benefits, and the incentives of worker councils in parecon.
So let me frame the matter by presenting my understanding of our last interview. This is going to be a bit technical for viewers but we will break it down and it will be understandable. So I asked you, essentially, ‘wouldn’t we want worker councils to strive for a social benefit much greater than a social cost rather than merely the social cost equalling the social benefit – or having a social benefit to cost ratio of one? Because that means producing the greatest net social benefit. And, if so, what will make worker councils do that?’
‘Social Benefit’ is Revenue. ‘Social Cost’ is Cost.Net Social Benefit: Revenue – Cost.‘Social responsibility’ constraint is breaking even. Revenue ≥ Cost.
And you replied, basically, ‘no, we want worker councils to produce up until the marginal social benefit is equal to the marginal social cost. Because if the social benefit is greater than the social cost then there is still some net social benefit to squeeze out by producing another unit (like producing another chair). And this terminates when the marginal social benefit is equal to the marginal social cost, which is when the social benefit the social cost ratio equals one (SB/SC = 1).’
‘Marginal’ refers to the last chair produced, the last tomato, the last dental filling.Total Net Benefits are maximised when Marginal Benefit equals Marginal Cost.The quantity output when Total Benefit = Total Cost is different to when Marginal Benefit = Marginal Cost.
That’s a mouthful. So, this is my understanding of what was said at the time. Please correct me if I misinterpreted what you said during that interview because it seems to me that maybe there was a miscommunication. Because it seems to me that if you keep producing chairs up until the marginal social benefit of that chair is equal to the marginal social cost, that’s the point at which social benefits minus social costs is the greatest. But that’s not going to be the same as the social benefits divided by the social cost equal to one, that there is parity between social costs and social benefits. So could you just clarify or respond to that please?
[RH] First of all, I want to thank you for asking the question and probing on this. Because it is a little complicated and it forced me to go back and rethink through. So let me just see if I can lay it out there on in a straightforward way. What I’m going to lay out there is standard and then I’m going to explain why the way we model something is different from standard. And that’s I believe where the sort of miscommunication comes in.
So you’re absolutely right that the general efficiency criterion is you want total social benefits minus total social costs to be as large as possible. You want to maximize, as you’re saying, the difference between total social benefits and total social costs. I mean this principle is we call it the ‘efficiency criterion’ and applies to anything. Anything you’re doing, you want to do it so as to maximize the benefits to any and all people over all time periods minus the cost to any and all people of overall time periods.
Toy example illustrating Marginal Benefit and Marginal Cost. Here Net Total Benefit is maximum when Marginal Benefit = Marginal Cost.
Now, mathematically what that is equivalent to is you want to keep doing something up to the point where the last little unit of whatever you did generated exactly the same amount of social benefits as it did increase social costs. So saying you want to maximize the difference between total social benefits and total social costs is the same as saying you want to keep doing something up to the point where the marginal social benefit of the last little bit of it you did is exactly as big as the marginal social cost of the last little bit you did. That’s just mathematics.
Here’s where things get a little complicated. When we’re talking about social benefits, then the context in which I’m always talking about it is I’m thinking of a particular worker council or a particular consumer council. Then you have to ask well the social benefits in the mathematical pure sense includes everybody, which means it includes the council that we’re considering. So social benefits are usually thought of as being social benefits for others, for everybody else other than the worker council; and social costs are usually thought of as being only the social cost to those who aren’t in the council.
I mean one thing that’s always a little bit delicate or complicating is these social costs that we’re thinking of cost a society something that a worker council does. That includes the opportunity cost – traditionally, as everybody does it – of using scarce labour in that worker council. If you have you have a certain amount of engineers and carpenters in an economy, any time one worker council uses them they can’t be used in another worker council. And that we traditionally call an ‘opportunity cost’. So standard treatments will include the opportunity cost of using engineers or carpenters in any workplace, in any worker council. It doesn’t usually include something that mainstream economists call the ‘disutility of labour’. So there’s a scarcity cost to using labour but in addition – for labour, unlike other inputs – there’s also not just an opportunity cost, performing the activity might be more or less pleasurable, or more or less unpleasurable.
Usually, traditionally, when we’re talking about social costs for a workplace we include the opportunity costs of using these different categories of labour but we don’t really include the disutility. Or at least it’s possible not to include that part. Now, for two particular reasons, that I’m going to come to in a minute, we chose to model worker council and consumer councils in a particular way.
For consumer councils it’s very straightforward and easy to understand. A consumer council should maximize what economists call their utility, their well-being, their satisfaction from the activities they engage in. And for a consumer council we usually think of the activities of people are engaging in as what are called consumption activities. So the whole idea is you want your consumer council to maximize the well-being they get out of their consumption activities. Oh, but it’s subject to a constraint. And I’m going to use this phrase to describe the constraint: broadly speaking I would say as long as what they’re consuming is socially responsible. And in the case of a consumer council what social responsibility amounts to is well it would be irresponsible if the social cost to society of their consumption activity was larger than what we consider to be their fair income. So for a consumer council we basically have this set up where what we want them to do is to maximize their well-being as long as they’re being socially responsible. As long as the social cost of society of their consumption activity is what I would call justified or warranted by the income that they fairly have. And for us that income for some of them it’s their income from work, and for some of them it’s their social security payment or their childcare allowance or whatever it is.
We wanted to model worker councils exactly in the same way. We wanted to say, hey, these are people, these are humans engaged in a human activity. It happens to be an activity we think of as work or production rather than consumption. But the worker council is a bunch of people engaged in an activity and we want them to maximize the satisfaction or utility they get from engaging in their activity as long as their activity is socially responsible. So, we modelled worker councils as maximizing … Now, in their case it may be maximizing the satisfaction you get from the work process that you engage in. What it may amount to is minimizing the disutility of your labour. But still, it’s the same sort of … I mean where we had reasons, basically underlying methodological reasons, for wanting to view the entire thing in this way, sort of very symmetrical to what it is that consumers are doing.
So for a worker council what we said is we’re going to assume that what they’re going to try to do is to maximize their utility subject to the social responsibility constraint. Now, for us the social responsibility constraint is: nobody should object to them doing what they want to do as long as what they’re doing is not making anybody else worse off. So we model their social responsibility constraint as: worker council do whatever you want, as long as the social benefits – and now these would be the social benefits to any and all other people – are at least as great as the social cost to any and all other people. And that’s the way we set up our procedure. That’s the way we set up our model.
And when we say that the annual participatory planning procedure will achieve an efficient outcome, or in economist language a Pareto optimal outcome under certain assumptions, what we mean is if worker councils do this and if consumer councils do this, we can prove that the outcome will be socially efficient. It will be a Pareto optimum. Now you might ask well why did we want to model things this way? And this is where I thank you for forcing me to think back why decades ago we did this.
It was for two reasons. We actually believe in self-management. I think there’s long been a divide between anti-capitalists, between the anarchists and the socialists, or on the question of socialism how libertarian a socialist are you. And I think we’re firmly in the camp of feeling that there is a very important, great, value put on doing things in a way that provides workers and consumers with self-management. So if you’re thinking in terms of self-management, then the idea that we want people, we want workers and consumers to be doing whatever they want as long, as they’re behaving in socially responsible ways is in our mind the right way to look at it.
And the other thing is – I now recall when I was thinking back over it – we felt like there was an advantage to reminding people that basically any and all human activity is similar in a certain kind of way. That any and all human activity basically has the same purpose which is maximizing human well-being, whether it’s work activity or its consumption activity. What we’re trying to do, or what we think as libertarian socialists we should be trying to do, is to maximize human well-being, but we want to leave that to the people whose well-being it is to decide what gives them well-being and what does not. So we want them to self-manage their own search for well-being, provided that it’s being done in socially responsible ways.
When I thought back over it I thought well Robin why did you set up the process and the formal treatments in a way that, quite frankly, is not common, that is not the standard way in which it’s done? And that’s why I was thanking you for reminding me of that, because now I remember that’s why we did it this way. And actually I was happy to discover that I think I am as comfortable, if not more comfortable, now as when we made those decisions back decades away ago about, well, why don’t we analyse it this way.
You’re correct that the constraint for the worker council just says you’re not making anybody else any worse off than they would have been had you not done what you just said you wanted to do. And that’s different from maximizing for any and all people the difference between total social benefits and total social costs. But in a sense what we’re saying is we’re actually concentrating on a part of benefits or cost that doesn’t really usually get considered when people talk about social benefits and social costs. And that’s the actual well-being and the size of the actual well-being or the quantification of well-being or utility of the workers in the workplace where whatever is going on is going on.
So that’s my very long answer to what I think was a very perceptive and probing question on your part.
[After ATO returns from dealing with food poisoning]
Nobody’s going to believe that that you’re not vomiting today because you were overly excessive in St. Patrick’s day yesterday. I mean it’s there’s just no credibility there whatsoever.
[ATO] I know, and the funny thing is you know I’m the one Irishman who basically doesn’t drink. I mean, I drink sometimes but …
[RH] No, I know when you told me … I mean, I didn’t tell you how disgusted I was when you said you drank non-alcoholic beer that’s just an abomination in my book.
[ATO] Well look, when I’m at home I just prefer to drink non-alcoholic beer.
I actually feel much better now, alive, and I can think and everything, which is good because this is probably the most complex topic that we’ve talked about. And I’m sitting there thinking ‘don’t get sick’.
So, let me let me respond to what you said and then I’ll pose some questions. Thank you very much for that explanation, for clarifying that, and I think saying it in an understandable way. It’s very interesting, what you were saying. And I think that this has very deep significance for an economy, for participatory economics.
There are a few things that occur to me. I’ll start with the one that’s most obvious to me. One might immediately hear this and say ‘yes, worker self-management is very important. Maximizing – if we want to put it this way – the utility of workers in the production process or minimizing disutility, this is very important, and this is something that should be done.’ But one might say that imposing the constraint that the worker council must be socially responsible as meaning social benefits must be at least equal to social costs – breaking even, basically – it might be necessary, it might be the minimum, but it might not be sufficient or desirable in terms of how we want an economy to function. In the sense that if everybody’s breaking even all the time, assuming that that was the case, would we not want there to be a more efficient use of resources?
You understand what I’m getting at, so how would you respond to that?
[RH] You may be right. And you forced me to think about some things that I had not necessarily thought about before. If you’re an academic and you’ve published something, and somebody comes up with something, the first instinct is oh my god, I need to go and check and make sure that what was actually published is still correct, or else if I’m an honourable person I’d have to issue a retraction. And so I skedaddled over to make sure that my proof that the planning procedure was pareto optimal still held, and I let out a huge sigh of relief when I discovered no, no, what we’re talking about now does not negate the proof that the planning procedure will be pareto optimal under the setup of the model.
But I would say yes, thinking out loud about it could be that the constraint should just be that the marginal social benefits have to be equal to the marginal social cost. That that’s the constraint under which the worker council is trying to maximize their satisfaction and their pleasure from work. And I suspect it would work out very much this the same.
The other thing is this particular issue had come up as a somewhat divisive issue amongst all of us who in some way or another support the model. but in a different way and for a different reason. The discussion there had to do with what should the average effort rating be for workers in a council. Figuring out within a council – and I think you have some questions on this subject coming up anyway – but within a council you know it’s very clear-cut what we’re proposing and what we have suggested would be a reasonable way of trying to decide if there’s any differences in the efforts and sacrifices that that workers within a worker council are making.
But we have conceded the get-go there needs to be a cap on average effort ratings for every worker council. Or else there’s going to be a tendency for every worker council to say why should I be judging my work mates harshly? It’s just easier for me if we can all award each other very high effort ratings and then we’ll all have very high consumption allowances. So there’s that perverse incentive, and you eliminate that perverse incentive completely if you cap the average effort rating in every council.
But that doesn’t tell you what the cap has to be. Any cap will accomplish that goal. And the question then is well for two worker councils who have the same social benefit to social cost ratio it would seem clear they should have the same cap. And we don’t want any worker council proposal to be accepted if the social costs are actually higher than the social benefit. But that leaves open the possibility that we’d have some worker councils where the social benefit the social cost ratio is exactly one, and then maybe some other worker councils where the social benefit the social cost ratio is 1.05.
And so the debate, that’s sort of an unsettled debate amongst advocates for a participatory economy model, is well should the average effort rating of that second worker council be five percent higher than the average effort rating for the first worker council? And, in theory, if the reason that the ratio is 1.05 in one of the worker council, if the reason for that is that the workers there are sacrificing more or just working harder, putting out more effort, then it would be a good idea. And some of us have said we should do that. On the other hand, there’s been debate and controversy over whether or not that would be a good idea.
One of the very important issues that would presumably influence your view on that subject is well just how accurate do you think our indicative prices are at measuring these opportunity costs and the relative values of these different things? On the one hand, if you think this system is going to do a really good job of getting the indicative prices right, then you could make the case well the only reason that one worker council would have a higher ratio than another has to be because they were putting in extra efforts and then it’s warranted. On the other hand, if you think well these are good reasonable estimates, the indicative prices are the best we can do, but they’re not going to be that good, then there are some people who feel well the whole idea that you would propose that some worker councils have a higher average effort rating than others maybe isn’t such a good idea.
So, in that context there’s been a lot of discussion about this. And depending on which one of us you talk to, you get a slightly different view about where to come down on this issue. But you’ve raised this whole social benefit to social cost ratio as a constraint for a different reason, and basically I think of merit some thought
[ATO] They’re very closely connected. I mean, the topic that you raised there is directly connected. And it’s actually the second question. Reading through Democratic Economic Planning, I noticed that a number of times the fact that worker councils had an average effort rating cap proportional to the social benefit to social cost ratio – which you could take as one measure of economic efficiency, so that their average effort cap is tied to their production efficiency – seemed to actually be doing important work multiple times in the system. There might be a criticism or a concern that somebody might have and one of the replies might be well the fact that worker councils have their effort rating cap proportional to this SB/SC ratio will deal partially with that. And so, the second question there I was talking about is the ‘size six purple women’s high-heeled shoe with the yellow toe’ problem, which I think is a brilliant name.
[RH] Yeah, I think it’s a brilliant name too. But every time I talk about it, when I have to talk about it I can’t remember it. So I’ve created something that in writing I think is very felicitous but now I feel like I’m plagued by the fact that I’m going to embarrass myself because I can’t remember it. But anyway, go ahead.
[ATO] Yeah, it’s memorable but I can never remember it. It’s a bit like Chinese Whispers, every time another word is added on or deleted.
Anyway, the idea of that is it’s a question about basically why will a worker council produce exactly the kind of good to the level of specificity that consumers want. So, somebody doesn’t just want a shoe but they want a size six purple shoe which is a women’s shoe, a high-heeled shoe, and it’s got a yellow toe. That’s a wider discussion but part of the response to that on page 167 of Democratic Economic Planning is that there’s an incentive to produce the right shoe because otherwise the worker council would get a lower social benefit to social cost ratio.
Why would they get a lower ratio? It’s because less people would purchase the shoes that they produce and therefore their social benefit would be less. And therefore that SB/SC ratio would be lower. Just to explain to people. That’s obviously only true if that holds, if that effort cap is actually proportional to that SB/SC ratio.
[RH] No, that’s a good point.
[ATO] There are several other times where that occurs. It slips my mind now. So there’s an issue of fairness like you’re bringing up there about do the indicative prices capture all of the information that we want such that we can say a worker council’s effort rating will only be greater if the expenditure of sacrifice of the workers is actually greater. Okay, that’s one issue. But then there’s this other issue of overall though are we going to end up with a society that functions, according to other metrics, like we want. And I think those are important as well.
[RH] I do think that there is rather clearly an incentive for worker councils to produce the shoes that it turns out people want. And this is a legitimate issue. One of the criticisms of the centrally planned Soviet type economies was that there was just no incentive for the producers to actually produce the kind of products that people wanted. And so another way of putting it is socialists have to own up to that and people should scrutinize to see whether or not we have a more adequate response given the history.
And my point has simply been, look, I think it’s still clearly in the interests of a worker council to produce things that people went and took off the shelves at the consumption centre instead of left there. Because if it’s left there, then the question becomes we approved you to use these socially costly productive inputs based on the assumption that you were going to generate a certain amount of social benefits as outputs. So that’s the basis upon which you were approved to go ahead and do what you’ve done.
But if it turns out that what you claimed you were going to generate in social benefits was actually not the case, because when there were clear signals that people wanted red toes not yellow toes you just decided you didn’t care and you kept supplying the yellow toes; the answer to that is well when worker councils deliver stuff to distribution centres, if those distribution centres discover that the stuff is still sitting on the shelf, and it could sit on the shelf for two different reasons (1) it actually was defective or low quality or (2) it was a yellow toe and nobody wanted yellow toes. And it doesn’t make any difference, the whole point is that you didn’t deliver what we were counting on and approved you for.
So in the end when you’re looking to see whether a worker council has fulfilled its responsibility, in the end the proof is in the pudding. In the planning phases we were all taking everything on good faith, but in the end if it turned out that you weren’t in good faith then you will end up getting penalized by what we’ve proposed.
Now, there are two possibilities. One is the only thing that matters is whether your SB/SC ratio is one or higher. It could be that you were approved because it looked like it was one, but now at the end of the year we discover it was not one, it was less than one. Well, in that case there’s going to be some sort of penalty and the penalty will have to be that the average income that you get to distribute amongst yourself is less than it would have been. The other penalty is if you get caught doing this time after time after time, well then you might have your approval to participate as a legitimate trustworthy worker council in the entire planning procedure challenged, if this turns out to be a problem.
So there are there are ways of handling this. If we had a system where your average income for the year depends on that SB/SC ratio, it doesn’t matter if the plan you submitted is one where it would have been 1.05. If it turns out not to be 1.05, then the average income from for your enterprise isn’t 1.05 anymore. It’s whatever it turned out to be.
[ATO] I would query whether the only important point is that people are only getting income in proportion to the sacrifice that they make. Now, I actually think that in general the parecon argument of remuneration according to sacrifice is a very good argument. But what I mean is that there are many factors to consider. And I’m not actually saying this to disagree with what you said, but just to comment on it.
If we have a socialist society which cannot, for example, provide proper consumer goods to people that is a disaster for so many different reasons. But it’s also a social harm. I mean, the goal of an economy is to satisfy the wants and needs of people. It’s not necessarily unfair to consider that a worker’s council’s income will be slightly bigger to satisfy that need. Now, for me I suppose that the question is limiting that to make sure that you don’t have a society where people are getting paid according to how much they produce and that is the main norm.
[RH] First of all, I completely agree with you. One of the failures of – I mean, we can debate whether to call it socialism or not – one of the failures of the existing socialist societies. That was one compromise in terms of language: let’s just call in the existing 20th century socialist economies, that way you can say well they were existing but they weren’t really socialist.
Whatever you want to call them, it is clear that one of their failings was that consumers were disenfranchised to an extent that was highly undesirable. So, on the one hand, it’s important for us to look and see whether or not our actual proposals for how a participatory economy would operate meet up to the challenge of making sure that consumers have been fully enfranchised. But that was certainly a goal that we had firmly in mind. Now just because you think you have a goal friendly in mind doesn’t mean you propose something that would achieve it, I understand that. And that’s one of my admonitions to everybody that’s in this line of work, which is there are two steps, not one. The first step is being very clear about what you’re trying to achieve, and the second is just because you’re clear about what you want to achieve doesn’t mean what you’ve proposed will actually achieve that.
And so the hard work comes from testing to see. And what we’re talking about here is basically testing whether or not what mainstream economists call consumer sovereignty would be an adjective you could just you know that you could you could realistically ascribe to a participatory economy. But there’s a lot of features you know where I think that it measures up.
We have consumer federations – we have empowered consumers by basically giving them these federations that will go to battle on their behalf when products are not what the consumer expected. So instead of individual consumers – we’ve talked about this – having to go to the complaint department at the department store of a multinational corporation to get satisfaction over the fact that the damn thing didn’t work, and I should get all my money back, all you have to do is just say no this is unsatisfactory and give it back to the consumer federation. And my consumer federation goes to the worker federation to settle the issues.
I think that’s an important thing when we’re talking about the coloured toes on the footwear that are coming out of the worker council. Clearly if the red toes are not being picked up and the yellow toes are, and one of the worker councils just doesn’t respond and continues to supply the red toes, well there are procedures where you don’t get credit for that. If you deliver something that’s defective, if you deliver something that wasn’t the colour people wanted, then you’re not going to get credit for that as part of the social benefits that you generated, to be compared with the cost of the inputs, and the machines, and the things that you used to do it.
Now, exactly how they’re going to be penalized, that’s where we’re talking about the sort of nitty-gritty details and the pros of cons of penalizing one way or another. But one way or another there’s going to be a penalty for that, for any worker council in a participatory economy. And I think that’s the important thing for anybody looking at the system and asking ‘do I think this system would be satisfactory from the point of view of embodying the principle of consumer sovereignty?’. We have answers, even if those answers in some cases are multiple and there’s disagreement about whether this way to do it or that way to do it would be a little bit better, what the pros and cons are.
[ATO] I just want to make one clarifying remark on that and then we can move on to another question. We were joking about the name ‘size 6 purple women’s high-heeled shoe with the yellow toe’ problem. I just wanted to make a comment that the purpose of that particular example was to pick something that was deliberately finicky and to think about whether parecon will be able to handle such finicky preferences. But that’s not what the stakes are it’s not just …
[RH] Well, let me clarify. This is a ticklish subject because it can get me into hot water with feminists so I want to defend myself. You don’t realize that there would be feminists who would already have taken umbrage at the example we picked.
I would just like to go on the record as saying I don’t think that’s finicky at all. I don’t think it’s finicky, and I am completely in sympathy with – who was John Stuart Mill’s mentor? – Jeremy Bentham. Jeremy Bentham’s attitude was push-pin versus poetry, we are not going to sit in judgment about what people’s consumers preferences are. So I think for somebody to have particular preferences over their shoe is absolutely fine, they have every right to have that, and the business of the economy is to satisfy that, not to in judgment on it.
So I was just trying to pick an example where there were multiple details.
[ATO] Yes.
[RH] Where the thing could differ. So there were multiple details where the thing could differ, and that example was intended to help us think through the problem of broad categories during planning versus we actually have to have detailed production and delivery. And how can you how can the necessary detail actually get taken care of if the planning was done at the level of broader categories such as women’s dress shoe? Without reference to colour, without reference to heel, without reference to all these other sort of details.
And the answer was the details get filled in during the year when the discovery process: I sent these things over, I sent over as many yellow as red toes because I had no other information to go on. But now we get feedback during the year, the yellow-toed shoes are going like hotcakes and the red-toed shoes aren’t. As long as that information is communicated to the worker councils making the shoes, and as long as there are incentives for them to respond in the perfectly obvious way that you would want them to respond to that information, then we’re okay. That’s my way of thinking about it. Then we’re okay.
But if the system isn’t communicating that information, or if there’s no incentive for the worker councils to respond to the communication of the information about whether yellow or red is more what the consumers wanted, then we have a problem. So that’s the way that I think that that should be thought about.
[ATO] Yes, that’s very important context. And the issue of categories of goods and services in parecon is a huge topic, it’s very important. I would recommend that if people want to read about this topic in particular that they – in addition to Democratic Economic Planning – should read Anarchist Accounting by Anders Sandström and he really goes into detail and it’s worth reading.
And I just want to say yes, the way you phrased that I used the word ‘finicky’, you put it in a much more neutral and I think accurate way. I just want to make it very clear I am clearly no stranger to peculiar sartorial tastes …
[RH] Point well taken! Your listeners can’t see you but I’m seeing you on a video screen and man this guy dresses funny folks, he does.
[ATO] Well, they can see me on YouTube.
And I certainly would not pass judgment on women for liking shoes any more than any other person, which of course is ludicrous. What I more mean is I’m thinking of the person who might be listening in and thinking oh well look we’re talking about shoes, whether men or women, or what colour stripes they have, compare this to climate change or compare this to all these big issues. It can seem like that might just be finicky or a little bit trivial – consumerist problems.
I just wanted to make the point that – I think you made a very good point there, which is that look we have these preferences and that’s fine and we need to deal with that. But also I want to make the point in addition to that which is look if you don’t like the example of the purple shoe with the yellow toe, this applies across the board. You can think about any kind of consumer good, and even intermediate goods. The point is that goods and services when they’re delivered need to be what people want, whether that’s something used in the production process or that’s a final good used by a consumer. And that could be a shoe, it could be something that this hypothetical person might think is much more important. So the issue can’t be dismissed really, that’s the point I wanted to make.
But just to move on …
[RH] Let me say something on what you just covered before you move on. This is relevant to what we’ve just been talking about.
In some ways, I think that socialists may try to make a virtue out of the failure of centrally planned economies to provide consumers with the variety of choices the consumers wanted. And they sort of portrayed this as oh well that’s only bourgeois individualism. I mean the truth of the matter is that if we give you a good working shoe, there’s no difference between one working shoe and another. And it’s only in capitalism, when you have profit maximizing enterprises that are trying to prey [on consumers], that they’re the ones who are creating these notions in your head that their working shoe might be a little bit better or different than somebody else’s working shoe.
I think that if there’s actually a difference in the cost of society of making one working shoe compared to another that’s fine. And if you want the one that’s a little more expensive, we’ll charge you for that one. And if you want the one that’s a little less expensive, we will charge you less for that one. So you can decide how finicky you are about your working shoe. But it shouldn’t just be us telling you that you have no preference over what working shoe that you’re getting. Because we have a historical responsibility to own up to mistakes, I think this is an important thing to go on a record on [about]. I think we need to go on record, people have a right to hear us go on record, and we’re attempting to do so on that subject.
[ATO] Yeah, there’s a space somewhere between consumerist insanity and brainwashing, and distortion of the human personality, and really the manufacture of infinite desires and cravings, and homogeneity and dissatisfaction of human wants and needs in consumer goods. There’s a rich space there and somewhere in the middle in that space is where we want to be.
[RH] And you could argue that we’ve created a society where seeking pleasure in some areas has been precluded, like seeking pleasure in self-managed work, and therefore people therefore seek pleasure in other areas. And that might be being overly concerned about slight differences in the things they’re consuming. So you can recognize that that may have happened in capitalism, and that’s part of the reason that people do pay as much attention to [consumer goods]. But anyway we’re on the same page about the fact that the job of the economy is to give people what they want.
[ATO] Indeed.
Just about the social benefit and such cost issues again. If we just briefly touch on this, you were talking about modelling using a socially responsibility constraint of social benefit divided by social cost is equal to one – social benefit equals cost – as simulating a kind of possible but conservative case. A kind of worst case scenario of the scenarios where things would actually function in parecon.
And I just briefly want to talk about something which is very important, which is the difference between modelling a participatory economy (as in simulating it), to designing a participatory economy (as in how it’s supposed to work, how it’s intended to work), and the actual behaviour of a participatory economy. And I plan to ask several questions at a later time about the simulations in Democratic Economic Planning, so we can talk at length then. But if you just want to comment on that difference.
[RH] This has to do with the sort of worst case scenario. I think there’s a useful purpose to modelling something where you assume an actor will do what is in that actor’s individual self-interest. And that’s not because people always choose to behave in their own individual self-interest. People often take the interests of others into account when they choose what to do. But I’m interested in evaluating what kind of behaviour institutions are going to generate or what is the effect of an institution. And if I want to know what the effect of an institution is, one way to answer that question is well in the context of that institution what would it be in the self-interest of actors to do?
So I don’t think of it as a predicting issue. I don’t think of it as we’re trying to predict what people are going to do. And I certainly don’t think that people are homo economicus. I don’t think humans are little self-interested machines. But I do think that what we’re doing is designing economic institutions. And if you want to know what kind of behaviour an economic institution is going to generate or encourage, then the way to do that is to say well what would be rational behaviour for actors in their own self-interest if you put them in that context? So that’s the reason that I do that kind of modelling and that’s the way I interpret what it is that I’m doing.
You can also see it as a kind of a worst case scenario, that here we have these institutions and what’s the worst case scenario behaviour that they could generate, that could come out of this? And in some sense the answer to that I think is well if everybody behaved in their own self-interest this is what we would get. And if we can design institutions so that even in a worst-case scenario what we get is something that looks like it would be fair or looks like it would be efficient, well then in some sense that makes the argument more powerful.
Because I know that a lot of people from the socialist tradition take umbrage at the whole idea that we’re going to be modelling things in ways in which we’re thinking about people behaving in selfish ways, whether it’s workers in their councils or consumers. That somehow, if you do that, you are maligning the best of humanity. And just despite the world’s sorry history, I continue to have great faith in the best of humanity, and I see it operating every day despite all sorts of disincentives to behave in solidaristic ways. But that’s not my point it’s not a comment about humanity. It’s a comment about what we need to take into account when designing institutions.
[ATO] Last time you were saying that in a particular modelling and simulation exercise you decided to impose a constraint that for a firm social benefits had to equal at least equal to social costs and that the workers would try to maximize their utility, or minimize their disutility of working. And what you’re saying there is you weren’t necessarily saying this is how I think humans behave or this is how parecon is designed to operate, but you’re saying if this happened in parecon what would be the consequences? Would it still function?
And in engineering terms you can think about that as a kind of fail-safe. Everybody knows the word fail-safe. So if you’re designing an airplane, for example, if you’re designing, say, sensor for an aileron, if that fails is it going to just lock into a position that it sends the plane into a nosedive? Or is it just going to settle into some kind of neutral state where at least it doesn’t cause a catastrophe? And it’s a similar idea.
[RH] I think that’s a very apt analogy. I think that’s exactly right.
The other thing about the modelling was again it’s a case of a worst case scenario or it’s pushing something to the limit. In my view, one of the big errors that socialism made historically was in not taking seriously enough the importance of people engaging in self-management, particularly workers. so if you want to counteract that mistake, one way to do it is to say we want the workers and the council to do whatever they want and we want consumers to do whatever they want. Well, that can’t exactly be true. We can’t really just let everybody do exactly what they want. That doesn’t work. It wouldn’t be right, it wouldn’t be efficient, it wouldn’t be fair. It would be wrong for all sorts of reasons.
But what if we simply say the only constraint that you have to deal with when you are deciding what you want is you can’t make everybody else worse off? And that’s essentially why the social benefit to social cost ratio has to be at least one. That’s basically what that constraint comes down to. So I’m not really saying that’s the way we want to run the economy, but at least it puts us in a situation where we’re almost going to the opposite extreme from what I view as being one of the historic errors that socialism made in terms of not taking nearly seriously enough providing opportunities for [worker self-management].
Consumers have had their defenders. It’s interesting that given the history of our economies, and because we’ve had market economies the whole idea of consumer sovereignty, nobody should be dictating to consumers what they what they consume they should be deciding what they want to consume, that’s a very, very, popular idea. That part has sunk in.
But the whole idea among socialists at least that workers in their own councils should be in charge of deciding what they do … And one manifestation of this we’ve talked about was the [Pat] Devine – [Fikret] Adaman proposal, where the workers in the councils don’t even get to sit down just amongst themselves to even begin the discussion about what they want to do. We have to have these other affected parties that are on the board of directors, etc. So, in part it’s sort of a response to that, as recognizing from history that we have under-provided adequate ways for workers in their workplaces to make their own decisions, to talk about things amongst themselves before they have to deal with anybody else, and make their own decisions about what they want to do as long as they’re being socially responsible. Why not? So that was the motivation for modelling it exactly in that way.
[ATO] Thank you for watching. If you got anything from this video, then please press the Like button, consider Subscribing, and, if you really enjoyed it, then make a reaction video of you half watching it while playing a computer game.
There’s a lot more to come. We’ll keep exploring better futures for humanity until we get there. And as always I want to hear your thoughts in the comment section below. This channel has a wonderful audience and there are usually some very interesting comments under the video, so let’s continue that.
This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously.
Cookie
Duration
Description
cookielawinfo-checbox-analytics
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Analytics".
cookielawinfo-checbox-functional
The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checbox-functional
11 months
The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Functional".
cookielawinfo-checbox-others
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checbox-others
11 months
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Other.
cookielawinfo-checkbox-advertisement
The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category "Advertisement".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-necessary
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Necessary".
cookielawinfo-checkbox-performance
This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category "Performance".
viewed_cookie_policy
The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. It does not store any personal data.
Functional cookies help to perform certain functionalities like sharing the content of the website on social media platforms, collect feedbacks, and other third-party features.
Cookie
Duration
Description
__atuvc
This cookie is set by Addthis to make sure you see the updated count if you share a page and return to it before our share count cache is updated.
__atuvs
This cookie is set by Addthis to make sure you see the updated count if you share a page and return to it before our share count cache is updated.
Performance cookies are used to understand and analyze the key performance indexes of the website which helps in delivering a better user experience for the visitors.
Analytical cookies are used to understand how visitors interact with the website. These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc.
Cookie
Duration
Description
uvc
The cookie is set by addthis.com to determine the usage of Addthis.com service.
Advertisement cookies are used to provide visitors with relevant ads and marketing campaigns. These cookies track visitors across websites and collect information to provide customized ads.
Cookie
Duration
Description
loc
This cookie is set by Addthis. This is a geolocation cookie to understand where the users sharing the information are located.
