Power (Plough, Sword & Book) and Progress (Exit, Voice & Loyalty)
December 12, 2023 12:12 AM   Subscribe

Justice by Means of Democracy [archive|transcript] - "[T]he work of democracy is to continuously resist capture. There is no end of history. There is no state of rest for democracy. Democracy is the work of resisting capture by powerful interests and restoring power-sharing just over and over and over again. So we have to do work to introduce new governance mechanisms in the place of those that are not working."[1,2; link-heavy post!]
So power-sharing liberalism is an effort to turn the dial on a long history of liberalisms that the Western world and this country in particular have seen. So take liberalism in the first instance as committed to the protection of rights. That’s what makes it liberalism.

So protecting freedom of expression and freedom of association but also freedom to participate, to vote, to run for office, to be one of the people that is co-creating the public norms and constraints that shape all of our lives.

So liberalism is that. It’s our protection of rights. And power-sharing liberalism recognizes that all of the versions of liberalism we’ve had — 18th century, 19th century, 20th century — have always had a fatal flaw in their heart, and that fatal flaw was to reserve power to the few. So in classical liberalism — late 18th, early 19th century — political power is reserved to people who hold property — more or less white men for the most part as property holders.

Then even in the 20th century as we begin to move towards some kind of universal inclusion, we get the right to vote for women. Finally, in the middle of the 20th century, we get voting protection for African Americans. We nonetheless see a political system that is still reserving power — concentrating power in particular in elites of various forms — moneyed elites, technocratic elites and the like.

So power-sharing liberalism is really the goal to build, in the 21st century, a version of a rights protecting constitutional democracy where power is genuinely shared throughout organizational structures throughout political institutions...

One of the greatest values of democracy is precisely that together we can in fact be much smarter than we can be as individuals. So all the places in the report where we proposed integrating elements of deliberation — whether that’s participatory budgeting at the municipal level, whether that’s having members of Congress have access to deliberative assemblies and deliberative tools to improve their own learning about what the issues are in our society.

Those are really about improving that process of social discovery where we learn together about the shape of the hardships that we’re facing. We see solutions that can emerge into visibility because of that collective work when we can’t actually get to them from any specific point of expertise or any single isolated position. So that’s really the picture.

And so you’re asking a different kind of question really, I think, which is about that experience of participation. And I think you’re asking both what makes us think that people are going to want it and why do we think that it is valuable too beyond the payoffs that I’m describing. I think we see a lot of evidence that people want it where participatory budgeting is used around the world. People love it. People enjoy it. People are really glad of the opportunity to help steer the direction of their municipal budget or identify needs that are going otherwise unnoticed by their central administrative bodies.

So the reason we see a lot of people feeling the drag of participation is because right now it’s really hard to participate. And it will always be hard in the sense of taking time and a tax on time. But that’s where I think we need an economy that supports that. We need a workplace where we’re not talking just about work-life balance, but we’re talking about work-life-civic balance so that people have the time to participate. And then we actually need non-opaque structures to participate in. We have a huge opacity problem, which is a real tax on people’s experience of the creative joy of participation.
Ask a Political Scientist Symposium on the Contributions of Danielle Allen: Introduction - "Simone Chambers... worries that this route is not enough to meet the deepest problems America faces today. She argues that these problems arise not simply from polarization, in which politics focuses not on ideas or policies but on the perceived evil identities of one's opponents. Bad as that is, what is worse is the radicalization of the right in contemporary America, with many conservatives now seeing liberals and progressives as so deeply immoral and dangerous that it is permissible to lie, it is permissible to ignore or overturn democratic processes, it is permissible to resort to violence, in order to keep them out of power."
Many on the right believe it is actually their civic and religious duty to do so. Chambers contends that because this severe, anti-democratic radicalization is far more prevalent on the right than on the left of American politics, it demands a militant opposition that fiercely attacks the radical right by all legal, political, and rhetorical means that are consistent with an overriding commitment to democracy—rather than seeking to build bridges and find common ground, as Allen primarily aims to do...

Even in this era of wide and deep alienation from existing institutional leaders and their policies, most people are still strongly attached to many of the traditions, institutions, and identities of the nations into which they were born or which they have joined. If that were not the case, the recent surge of populist nationalist movements around the world, including Donald Trump’s MAGA/America First crusade, could never have become so formidable. If Americans were given a clear choice between rapid, radical transformations in America as it is, or embrace of a self-congratulatory conservative nationalism, there is a sobering likelihood that, even in truly democratic processes, a majority would choose the latter, as would citizens facing comparable choices in many other nations.

Consequently, there is surely something, and arguably a great deal, to be said for pursuing the kinds of democratic politics that Danielle Allen has identified, analyzed, advocated, and practiced, along with organizing social movements and engaging in militant resistance against anti-democratic forces, often through transnational democratic alliances. It may indeed be wise to consider constantly how existing institutions can be made more democratically accessible, responsive, and effective in addressing common problems and pursuing common goods. It may be prudent and, at least in the somewhat longer run, productive to develop forms of civic education that enhance people’s skills and will to participate in collective problem-solving.
-Why Allen Ran by Susan McWilliams Barndt
-Danielle Allen and the Continuous Project of American Making by Deva Woodly
-Citizenship in Times of Crisis: A Comment on Danielle Allen's Democratic Theory by Simone Chambers
-An American Political Theorist between History and Utopia by Ryan Balot
-Feeling Seen by Danielle Allen
  • @che_huai: "The new Netflix series #WaveMakers is a MUST SEE for all people interested in #Taiwan's electoral democracy."
  • @xinyun_tw: "10/10 recommend to everyone who's interested in Taiwanese political scene to watch #WaveMakers on Netflix."
America is in a 'Great Pulling Apart.' Can we pull together? - "Our nation is in desperate need of democracy renovation. We need to bring this old house we all share up to date and fit for purpose in the 21st century. To some extent, our challenges are simply that our family is bigger now. Systems are straining under the scale and complexity of our family's needs. But there's also the fact that our house wasn't originally built for everyone."
In 2017, I had the opportunity to co-chair a national commission mounted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The academy is older than the country. It was founded by the same people who drove the Revolution — John Hancock and John Adams, among others. George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were members. Its charge then was to supply the new country with the knowledge resources it would need for success. The commission I was invited to chair was aimed at answering the same questions I was asking, so I leaped at the chance. In 2020, we released “Our Common Purpose” — a report on reinventing U.S. democracy for the 21st century.
An economy should be judged not only on its efficiency and productivity but on its ability to improve people's well-being.
-- Advancing a People-First Economy, Commission on Reimagining Our Economy
  • US needs new way to measure and advance economic fairness, group says - "The U.S. must change how it measures the well-being of its people - including gauging how much of a voice they feel they have in political outcomes - as part of a larger effort to reverse rising inequality across the economy. That's the assessment of a new report released on Thursday by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. It includes recommendations ranging from redesigning social programs with an aim of providing greater stability to those facing economic hardships to extending to Black World War Two veterans and their descendants the benefits they were denied under the G.I. Bill decades ago."
  • US Economy Scores Low on New Index Measuring Nation's Well-Being [ungated] - "The index, a project of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, seeks to go beyond traditional economic indicators to assess how households are really doing and their outlook in life. The new dashboard includes 11 gauges of health, wage growth, education and civic participation, among other measures, down to the county level."
Putting Flourishing First: Applying Democratic Values to Technology - "Drawing on the accumulated wisdom of democratic societies, the authors show that the values of democratic governance that have promoted human flourishing can be translated into a rubric for judging new technologies."[3]
Specifically, the authors propose “power-sharing liberalism,” which is democracy “renovated” with the adoption of five core values: (1) difference without domination, (2) individual and community self-determination, (3) egalitarian pluralism, (4) connective and coordinating capacity, and (5) collective ownership of the assets needed for shared governance. In the paper and in her forthcoming book, Justice by Means of Democracy, Allen expounds on each of these values. Together, they are an elegant distillation of the lessons of democratic practice that goes below the surface features (elections, checks and balances, etc.) to get at the conditions that allow for autonomy and therefore are essential for human flourishing.
  • Something Weirdo this Way Comes - "But here my point is much simpler: you probably don't want the folks managing AI's release into society running Singularity memes in their noggins any more than you want the management of public lands in the United States to be in the hands of apocalyptic Christians who think conservation doesn't really matter because the rapture is nigh. (Which actually happened in the 1980s, when Reagan made nutty James Watt Secretary of the Interior.)"
  • Doug Rushkoff Is Ready to Renounce the Digital Revolution - "The former techno-optimist has taken a decisive political left turn. He says it's the only human option."
Power and Progress: Our Thousand Year Struggle over Technology and Prosperity - "Technological progress does promise a better future. But it does not deliver one automatically. If the promise is to be achieved and costs contained, both the technology itself and, still more, its impact must be brought under social control."[4,5]

Power and Progress review – why the tech-equals-progress narrative must be challenged - "Most people around the globe today are better off than our ancestors because citizens and workers in earlier industrial societies organised, challenged elite-dominated choices about technology and work conditions, and forced ways of sharing the gains from technical improvements more equitably."
There are three things that need to be done by a modern progressive movement. First, the technology-equals-progress narrative has to be challenged and exposed for what it is: a convenient myth propagated by a huge industry and its acolytes in government, the media and (occasionally) academia. The second is the need to cultivate and foster countervailing powers – which critically should include civil society organisations, activists and contemporary versions of trade unions. And finally, there is a need for progressive, technically informed policy proposals, and the fostering of thinktanks and other institutions that can supply a steady flow of ideas about how digital technology can be repurposed for human flourishing rather than exclusively for private profit.
Power and Progress (Book Review) - "Power and Progress is an important book but also deeply problematic. As it turns out the discussion format provided a good opportunity both for people to agree with the authors as well as to voice criticism. Let me start with why the book is important. Acemoglu is a leading economist and so it is a crucial step for that discipline to have the book explicitly acknowledge that the distribution of gains from technological innovation depends on the distribution of power in societies."
The authors follow an incisive diagnosis with a whimper of a recommendation chapter. It feels almost tacked on somewhat akin to the last chapter of Gurri’s book, which similarly excels at analysis and falls dramatically short on solutions... The authors call for more democracy as a way of “avoiding the tyranny of narrow visions.” I too am a big believer in more democracy.
Is technology our friend or our foe? 'Power and Progress' dives in - "The book provides a timely look at how technology can either enrich a narrow elite or become the foundation for widespread prosperity."
Who benefits from various technologies is an economic, social and political choice, the duo write. In today’s world, the wrong choices are being made; or, rather, too few people are involved in making decisions about what is, and what isn’t, progress. This has led the ideas of tech leaders to become the default narrative and the accepted norm, they conclude.

But automation doesn’t have to mean fewer jobs for blue-collar workers. Massive data collection doesn’t have to mean anti-democratic surveillance. Artificial intelligence doesn’t have to mean we all live in fear of becoming unemployed.

With the right choices, made by fully operating democracies endowed with strong civil society organisations, and where people with different visions have a voice; better, more just, outcomes will emerge, the economists argue...

Progressivism was a bottom-up movement populated by a diverse set of voices, and offers three learnings for the pickle we find ourselves in today, the authors suggest. First, the need for a new narrative; secondly, the need to cultivate countervailing powers to the accepted norm; and thirdly, policy solutions. Acemoglu and Johnson suggest that the modern environmental movement confronting the climate crisis demonstrates this three-pronged formula remains relevant today.

They credit Rachel Carson’s 1962 work Silent Spring, which for the first time drew attention to the impact of pesticides on nature and human health, as the trigger for a change in narrative. Countervailing power appeared in the form of NGOs such as Greenpeace and other climate change organisations, including green parties. These movements put pressure on the corporate sector, and the results were technical and policy solutions.
Tamara Winter is helping to build a culture of progress - "Ultimately, making progress on progress requires more than research alone. It requires a culture that embraces institutional experimentation, tolerates risk and learns from failures, and generates enough buy-in to have political impact. And, crucially, it requires a vision that steers technological progress toward shared prosperity to tie it all together."

The Collective Intelligence Project:
Introducing the Collective Intelligence Project - "The Collective Intelligence Project (CIP) is an incubator for new governance models for transformative technology. CIP will focus on the research and development of collective intelligence capabilities: decision-making technologies, processes, and institutions that expand a group's capacity to construct and cooperate towards shared goals."[6]

The Transformative Technology Trilemma - "Coalescing camps implicitly or explicitly assume the need to accept significant trade-offs between progress (advancing technological capabilities), participation (enabling public input and self-determination), and safety (avoiding disproportionate risks). This reliably leads to a set of three failure modes."
  1. Capitalist Acceleration: Sacrificing safety for progress
  2. Authoritarian Technocracy: Sacrificing participation for safety
  3. Shared Stagnation: Sacrificing progress for participation
The Solution: Collective Intelligence R&D - "Our goal is to find a fourth path, by developing a plurality of CI systems that encompass all three goals: participation, safety, and progress. When trade-offs must be made, they should be made in light of material outcomes and state-of-the-art information and preference gathering, not preconceived assumptions."
  1. The CI Stack: Building the institutions of the future
    2. funding >> development >> deployment >> distribution >> governance
  2. Value elicitation: Surfacing, aggregating, and understanding conflicting values
  3. Remaking technology institutions: Executing on values via aligned institutions
Towards a Collectively-Intelligent Future - "Edward O. Wilson once described the problem of humanity as having 'Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology'. This is not a sustainable trajectory. The time is ripe for new, collectively-intelligent institutions."
Why America Abandoned the Greatest Economy in History - "Was the country's turn toward free-market fundamentalism driven by race, class, or something else? Yes."
Why did America abandon the New Deal so decisively? And why did so many voters and politicians embrace the free-market consensus that replaced it? ... Three main theories have emerged, each with its own account of how we got here and what it might take to change course. One theory holds that the story is fundamentally about the white backlash to civil-rights legislation. Another pins more blame on the Democratic Party’s cultural elitism. And the third focuses on the role of global crises beyond any political party’s control. Each theory is incomplete on its own. Taken together, they go a long way toward making sense of the political and economic uncertainty we’re living through.
Pluralism or magnanimity? - "History has jolted back to life. It resumed its customary pastime of contriving our deaths, en masse. But we really did live in better times, for a while. There was a good trajectory that we failed to sustain. Perhaps, of course, it was unsustainable. Perhaps some inherent contradictions of our collective condition doom us to collapse. There is and was nothing to be done. But perhaps we just misunderstood some things about how our successes actually worked, and therefore made some mistakes."
The neoliberal turn, which it’s easy now to deride as idiot cargo-cultism, appeared to work for about 30 years. The way I’d explain that is, well, there’s a lot of ruin in a social democracy. The period from the end of World War II until the middle 1970s created extraordinary societies in the West, shockingly prosperous and cohesive. During that period, policymakers took seriously that good economic ends required application of diverse and muscular social means. Courts enforced antitrust law based on a positive view that economic power should be widely dispersed, rather than narrow claims of “market failure”. Social institutions, from corporations to unions to civil society organizations, were understood and regulated in broad terms, rather than caricatured as the profit-maximizing agents of economic models. The social democratic era created circumstances following which a parasitic neoliberalism could seem to thrive, for a while. We could deceive ourselves and believe liberalism was working.

Since World War II, in the West, social liberalism seemed broadly to be working as well. Western countries enshrined universalistic approaches to human rights into law, and thrived, culturally as well as economically. Pluralistic liberalism, invented, arguably, to calm Europe’s religious wars centuries before, now seemed able to manage national and ethnic rivalries and keep an initially unlikely peace.

But has it actually worked? Did liberalism succeed, or did the ethnic cleansing that didn’t yet have a name at the end of World War II create conditions under which ethnonational rivalries were just easier to manage than thay had previously been? Should we understand postwar Europe to be a triumph of pluralism? Or did the triumph belong to a paroxysm of ethnic cleansing that left nation-states sufficiently homogeneous and cohesive that they could afford a kind of magnanimity? It is much easier to avoid ethnic strife when a dominant group’s hegemony is assured than when multiple groups must either share power or meaningfully contend for dominance.

I am not a “post-liberal”. The end I seek is a liberal, pluralistic society in which the claims we call human rights are respected as broadly and fully as possible. I’m a “social democrat”, because I would also include various positive economic goods among those claims — “rights” to education, housing, health care, etc.

But precisely because I seek those end, I want to take seriously the question of means. I understand that there are trade-offs and contradictions between the various rights to which I think we should aspire. Simply declaring and sanctifying a panoply of rights, and condemning in moral terms any abrogation, does not strike me as a recipe for achieving and broadening the purchase of those rights.

On the contrary.
State as coordination - "I increasingly find it useful to adopt a more expansive definition of 'the state' than is conventional. Instead of defining the boundaries of the state by legal formalities — this institution is an agency of the education department, while that institution is organized as a private corporation — I define the state functionally, as the panoply of institutions that serve to coordinate human behavior at the scale that the formal state superintends."
All states — under both the conventional narrow definition and my preferred much broader definition — resort to coercion to varying degrees, as part of a portfolio of strategies by which they manage the population-scale specialization and coordination that prosperity and defense require. But a trick of states, especially the states we describe as liberal, is to launder massive wallops of state coercion through markets, and then deny they are exercising any form of coercion at all. Allowing the formal state to pretend, absurdly, that it stands apart from the market, to proclaim that the key institution that performs the function of the state is unfortunately some external fact of nature, provides politicians and bureaucrats with a commodity they value very highly: plausible deniability. Conceiving of state and market as distinct does not coherently constrain the modern state, because nation-scale markets cannot function without extensive state construction, regulation, and support. However, maintaining the conceit does help state actors — and the private interests who lobby them! — avoid accountability for outcomes that in fact result from political choices.

Laundering coercion through markets is the modern state’s core crutch, its excuse for failing to deliver outcomes that we should, with better coordination, be capable of achieving.

States are not in fact responsible for all of our individual, idiosyncratic market outcomes, and preserving the perceived “naturalness” of those outcomes remains important for social peace. We will not all afford the home we most desire, alas. Some of our businesses will fail. But the shape of market outcomes writ large, whatever is systematic rather than idiosyncratic, is either the work of the state, or else it is beyond any agency we can hope to hold accountable.

I say it is the work of the state. The state is that which coordinates behavior at the scale of the nation, whatever its notional form. All of the state should be subject to democratic accountability.
The 'Wages are determined by supply and demand' talking point is not the brilliant observation right-libertarians think it is. - "Yes, by definition all market prices result from the interaction of supply and demand. Now ask yourself what institutional factors determine the supply and demand themselves."
There's an almost endless range of possible institutional arrangements concerning property and wealth distribution, and in each of them supply and demand --if allowed to operate-- will result in a different market-clearing price. "Supply and demand" says NOTHING of substance.

The price of a prescription drug under patent is determined by supply and demand. The price of a generic prescription drug whose patent has expired is also determined by supply and demand. Those prices are different. See how that works? The same thing applies in regard to the institutional rules governing ownership and distribution of capital, land, etc.

When people complain about low wages, or how much senior executives are paid relative to production workers, they're complaining about the institutional factors that resulted in the particular balance of supply and demand that are responsible for this situation.
  • How to build a new world in the shell of the old - "For Hannah Arendt, the German-American political theorist, 'power' is people's ability to act in concert—the capacity for collective action."
  • Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy - "Plural social science... [John] Dewey focused specifically on the role of technology in creating new forms of interdependence that created the necessity for new publics. Railroads connected people commercially and socially who would never have met. Radio created shared political understanding and action across thousands of miles. Pollution from industry was affecting rivers and urban air. All these technologies resulted from research, the benefits of which spread with little regards for local and national boundaries. The social challenges (e.g. governance railway tariffs, safety standards, and disease propagation; fairness in access to scarce radio) arising from these forms of interdependence are poorly managed by both capitalist markets and preexisting 'democratic' governance structures."[7,8]
Markets fail because these technologies create market power, pervasive externalities, and more generally exhibit “supermodularity” (sometimes called “increasing returns”), where the whole of the (e.g. railroad network) is greater than the sum of its parts. In the technology industry, the most famous example of this is so-called “network effects”, where use of a system by some raises its value for others. Capitalist enterprises cannot account for all the relevant “spillovers” and to the extent they do, they accumulate market power, raise prices and exclude participants, undermining the value created by increasing returns. Leaving these interdependencies “to the market” thus exacerbates their risks and harms while failing to leverage their potential.

Dewey revered democracy as the most fundamental principle of his career; barely a paragraph can pass without him harkening back to it. He firmly believed that democratic action could address the failings of markets. Yet he saw the limits of existing “democratic” institutions just as severely as those of capitalism. The problem is that existing democratic institutions are not, in Dewey’s view, truly democratic with regards to the emergent challenges created by technology.

In particular, what it means to say an institution is “democratic” is not just that it involves participation and voting. Many oligarchies had these forms, but did not include most citizens and thus were not democratic. Nor would, in Dewey’s mind, a global “democracy” directly managing the affairs of a village count as democratic. Core to true democracy is the idea that the “relevant public”, the set of people whose lives are actually shaped by the phenomenon in question, manage that challenge. Because technology is constantly throwing up new forms of interdependence, which will almost never correspond precisely to existing political boundaries, true democracy requires new publics to constantly emerge and reshape existing jurisdictions.
(D)ecisions about the development and exploitation of computer technology must be made not only "in the public interest" but in the interest of giving the public itself the means to enter into the decision-making processes that will shape their future.
-- J. C. R. Licklider, "Computers and Government", 1979
posted by kliuless (20 comments total) 49 users marked this as a favorite
 
Man, so many links.

I alighted on the Douglas Rushkoff one, having followed him on and off since reading Media Virus in the early 1990s and knowing he'd identified something important. The article is a really interesting account of the different trajectories of various Gen X technoenthusiasts. It felt as if he'd ended up where he has surprisingly late, until I remembered that few of those Gen X tech gurus had much grounding in political science (just as few Gen X and older political scientists had much grounding in tech).

At the end of the 1980s, when I was majoring in both computer science and political science as an undergrad, people used to ask me what I expected to do with that odd combination, and I really couldn't say; I was just interested in both. For years it seemed as if I'd have to choose one over the other. Now I know that I was just getting ready for the twenty-first century.

The start of it, anyway. Now I need to bring in the strand I dabbled in but didn't carry through to a major, environmental science and politics, to tackle the next part of the century... but life is too short, and gets in the way. Gen Z won't remember everything that Gen X saw, though, so we Xers need to tell them about it. Rushkoff is right—he's ended up in the right place.
posted by rory at 1:11 AM on December 12, 2023 [8 favorites]


One of the greatest values of democracy is precisely that together we can in fact be much smarter than we can be as individuals.

far be it from me to bleat "citation needed" in a kliuless post, of all places...

[a most excellent post, of course!]
posted by chavenet at 2:24 AM on December 12, 2023 [2 favorites]


So funny how often a kliuless megapost runs right alongside a hazy train of thought I've had running through my head for a few days; in this case, "Seems like there's only one possible way to defeat a global authoritarian takeover demonstrably coordinated by the International League of Billionaires, and that is for the non-insane, non-billionaire majority to, well, coordinate!"
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 2:50 AM on December 12, 2023 [7 favorites]


Mod note: Couple of comments removed. Yes, it's long post with a lot of links, but please don't be dismissive of the length. It's totally ok to avoid commenting on posts you're not interested in.
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 5:23 AM on December 12, 2023 [8 favorites]


> Seems like there's only one possible way to defeat a global authoritarian takeover demonstrably coordinated by the International League of Billionaires, and that is for the non-insane, non-billionaire majority to, well, coordinate!

I'm slowly working my way through Caliban and The Witch, and one of the (many) dispiriting things you learn while reading it is how good capital/governments/the church/etc. have always been at using culture wars to keep the general populace at each others' throats instead of at theirs, and if that didn't work well enough for whatever reason, that's what cops/the army/mercenaries are for.
posted by The Card Cheat at 6:26 AM on December 12, 2023 [6 favorites]


SO much to see here, and these are the things that most intrigued me on my initial skim:
We need a workplace where we’re not talking just about work-life balance, but we’re talking about work-life-civic balance so that people have the time to participate. And then we actually need non-opaque structures to participate in. We have a huge opacity problem, which is a real tax on people’s experience of the creative joy of participation.
Just these phrases:

"work-life-civic balance"
"the creative joy of participation"

I mean, I could put those on T-shirts and they could spark all kinds of inspiring, creative, imaginative thoughts in whoever saw them.

I don't think I'd ever hear of Danielle Allen before today.

Thank you SO MUCH for this rich, bountiful post, kliuless - I am grateful even just for those two ideas, and also hoping to find the time to dig into all this more deeply.
posted by kristi at 6:55 AM on December 12, 2023 [5 favorites]


I don't think there's actually much hope for a renovated liberalism. Liberalism has always had the core internal contradiction of expressing a universalizing view of human rights and liberty, while depending on the extreme — even compared to its predecessors — exploitation of out-groups who are excluded from the circle of human rights. The current mainline trend in liberalism, neoliberalism, exacerbates this by naturalizing oligarchy by way of limiting the scope of those areas of governance in which elected bodies are allowed to intervene.

See: Liberalism, a Counter-History.
posted by Carcosa at 7:01 AM on December 12, 2023 [8 favorites]


Mod note: Comment removed for containing inappropriate content. Let's avoid mocking fellow community members!
posted by Brandon Blatcher (staff) at 7:23 AM on December 12, 2023


That looks like an interesting link too, Carcosa.

Skimmed, don’t have time to dig in yet, but like most kliuless posts, this is relevant to my interests and a topic I have dug into/thought about a bunch in the past. Since it apparently came up (based on the mod comment), just wanted to drop in a thank you for the “link-heavy post” warning above the fold. I know it seems trivial to those of you who aren’t bothered by these things, but I greatly appreciate the contribution of that small detail to helping me manage my expectations about the post (eg. knowing that it’s something I won’t be able to delve into right away even though the topic is very interesting).
posted by eviemath at 7:47 AM on December 12, 2023 [2 favorites]


Laundering coercion through markets is the modern state’s core [pretense], its excuse for failing to deliver outcomes that we should, with better coordination, be capable of achieving.

Perhaps it only seems this way because I was raised as a conservative, but this is one of those core insights that fundamentally changes one's worldview.
posted by a faded photo of their beloved at 7:56 AM on December 12, 2023 [12 favorites]


Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich--that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere, in the “petty”--supposedly petty--details of the suffrage (residential qualifications, exclusion of women, etc.), in the technique of the representative institutions, in the actual obstacles to the right of assembly (public buildings are not for “paupers”!), in the purely capitalist organization of the daily press, etc., etc.,--we see restriction after restriction upon democracy. These restrictions, exceptions, exclusions, obstacles for the poor seem slight, especially in the eyes of one who has never known want himself and has never been inclose contact with the oppressed classes in their mass life (and nine out of 10, if not 99 out of 100, bourgeois publicists and politicians come under this category); but in their sum total these restrictions exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.

Marx grasped this essence of capitalist democracy splendidly when, in analyzing the experience of the Commune, he said that the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!

But from this capitalist democracy--that is inevitably narrow and stealthily pushes aside the poor, and is therefore hypocritical and false through and through--forward development does not proceed simply, directly and smoothly, towards "greater and greater democracy", as the liberal professors and petty-bourgeois opportunists would have us believe. No, forward development, i.e., development towards communism, proceeds through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and cannot do otherwise, for the resistance of the capitalist exploiters cannot be broken by anyone else or in any other way.

And the dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e., the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy. Simultaneously with an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the money-bags, the dictatorship of the proletariat imposes a series of restrictions on the freedom of the oppressors, the exploiters, the capitalists. We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force; it is clear that there is no freedom and no democracy where there is suppression and where there is violence.
-V.I.L., 1918
posted by Richard Saunders at 8:08 AM on December 12, 2023 [4 favorites]


Nothing to contribute yet except to say: I absolutely love these long, link-filled posts by kliuless. They must take forever to compile, and they give me days and sometimes weeks of new things to read and think about. Can't wait to dig into all of this.
posted by reclusive_thousandaire at 8:11 AM on December 12, 2023 [1 favorite]


To help me navigate this: is the “Barbara Winter…” link also part of the collection of “Power and Progress” links? (Those aren’t organized into sub-lists like most of the other included topics. Overall this, and your other long posts, have been easier for me to navigate/discern the organization of lately, however. Which is helpful for if I want to take a breadth-first approach to the links instead of depth-first/sequential reading.)
posted by eviemath at 8:22 AM on December 12, 2023


We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force; it is clear that there is no freedom and no democracy where there is suppression and where there is violence.

The contradictions were not accidental, because irrational violence demands it to reach such a conclusion. A reasoned conclusion would have no effect. The real enemy in thought reform is thinking itself.
“When I met Lenin, I had much less impression of a great man than I had expected; my most vivid impressions were of Mongolian cruelty and bigotry. When I put a question to him about socialism in agriculture, he explained with glee how he had incited the poorer peasants against the richer ones, ‘and they soon hanged them from the nearest tree—ha! ha! ha!’ His guffaw at the thought of those massacred made my blood run cold.”

Bertrand Russell, “Eminent Men I Have Known”
posted by Brian B. at 9:46 AM on December 12, 2023 [4 favorites]


Nobody who read The Jakarta Method would think that.
posted by Richard Saunders at 9:58 AM on December 12, 2023 [3 favorites]


I didn't see a reference to Exit, Voice, and Loyalty other than in the title, so for those who are not familiar: It's a classic book by political economist Albert O. Hirschman. From Wikipedia: "members of an organization ... have essentially two possible responses when they perceive that the organization is demonstrating a decrease in quality or benefit to the member: they can exit (withdraw from the relationship); or, they can voice (attempt to repair or improve the relationship through communication of the complaint, grievance or proposal for change)." (Hirschman spent most of his life in academia, but during WWII, after escaping the Nazis in Paris, he risked his life working in Vichy France to help evacuate refugees over the Pyrenees to Spain.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 10:51 AM on December 12, 2023 [3 favorites]


Mongolian cruelty

It's amazing how large the mote in the eye even of someone with the intellectual vigor and pacifistic inclination like BRussel.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 11:25 AM on December 12, 2023 [6 favorites]


> is the “Barbara Winter…” link also part of the collection of “Power and Progress” links?

not exactly; it's adjacent :P as part of stripe press i'm pretty sure she's more in the 'abundance progressive' camp, although of course there can be a lot of overlap...

re: hirschman, he's briefly mentioned in the plurality book (near the FPP's end ;) check out this thread about him!
Anti-fascist, resistance hero, later a development economist—may be the most interesting person to ever take up the profession... Hirschman had fought fascism in four countries, earning two graduate degrees along the way. He was still just 25 years old.
but the exit, voice & loyalty reference was more in relationship with this:
I’ve taken to calling those sides Team Exit & Team Voice - but there is also this, Team Loyalty (which is anything but democratic) ... At the extreme pole you find Aadhar / India stack and the CCP’s cybernetic WiFi curtain / open air prison (Extreme loyalty). Which are far more extreme than WEF/Altman’s version of UBI web3.
posted by kliuless at 11:04 PM on December 12, 2023 [2 favorites]


The mention of Hirschman and voice brings to mind some research on power within organizations and how power distributions are preserved, reenacting behaviors within organizations that we can observer in a broader polity:

Jeffery Kassing's work on organizational dissent (e.g.), Gail Fairhurst's work on discursive leadership (e.g.), and Stanley Deetz's Democracy in an Age of Corporate Colonization.

I've found this work often runs into the "excels at analysis and falls dramatically short on solutions" critique.

Deetz has one of the best discussions I've found of discursive closures: patterns of language used to obscure and preserve the operation of power. But then he falls back on encouraging acts of micro resistances, which may be part of the solution but are cold comfort for an employee caught in the thrall of corporate leadership run amok or for a citizen watching our wider unspooling.
posted by audi alteram partem at 5:43 AM on December 13, 2023


It's too bad they caught & fired the guy who filmed a gay sex scene in the Senate Judiciary Committee room. We'd have enjoyed the upcoming election much more if there was a stream of gay sex scenese being released over the next year as commentary, with this first being some comment on Dobbs.
posted by jeffburdges at 6:35 PM on December 16, 2023


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