Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
The number of UK children in food poverty has nearly doubled in the last year to almost 4 million, new data shows, ramping up pressure on ministers to expand the provision of free school meals to struggling families.
According to the Food Foundation thinktank, one in five (22%) of households reported skipping meals, going hungry or not eating for a whole day in January, up from 12% at the equivalent point in 2022.
Regular readers will know I’ve written about this often. The UK appears to be in decline to third world status. While the EU is neoliberal, it was better than what UK neoliberals wanted to do by leaving it. The UK has spent the time since Thatcher deliberately de-industrializing, leaving it with little more than the financial industry and a few hi-tech spars remaining. Leaving the EU makes the “City” less valuable: being inside the EU was useful, and now it’s outside.
On top of this, financialization cannibalizes real industry, since financial profits are higher and the highest profits come from taking public goods and privatizing them. This has been done to everything substantial owned by the UK government in 79, when Thatcher took power, from railroads to water and electricity, leaving on the National Health Service. That’s the last big chunk of profits, and then they’re done.
At that point, what does Britain have to offer to the rest of the world other than a corrupt financial center? Little, and that financial center can’t, won’t and doesn’t want to support most of the population, since even if they could, that would defeat the point: the people who run it don’t want to share, they want to be rich.
The Russia mess has also made this worse. There was a lot of Russian money in the UK, and freezing or taking it means no more will come in and it also makes everyone who’s in a non US ally country wary of using London to store money, whether in banks, securities or properties. After all, they could be next.
Brexit done right could have been the start of rebuilding the UK, but that would have required reigning in the City and engaging in industrial policy to provide industries capable of employing Britons, supply domestic British needs rather than importing, and also able to export.
As it is, Britain is done. The political fallout will probably include, within a decade or so, the loss of Northern Ireland and Scotland. At which point the United Kingdom (Scotland and England unified) will be no more, and England will stand alone again.
The Sun does set, it seems.
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Seems to be what most of us thought it was before the war ever started: try to replicate Afghanistan in the 80s. Keep Russia tied down till Russia collapses, supplying weapons and letting masses of Ukrainians die, avoiding US casualties. The country will be in ruins and not recover for decades if ever.
There are a few problems with this.
Russia is not the USSR. In many ways the USSR was stronger, but Russia is far more resilient. The USSR had a food deficit, while Russia is a net food exporter: one of the world’s largest. They still have a vast market for hydrocarbons and for their weapons. There is nothing the West can sanction that they must have. This is especially the case because while China and India have pretended to go along with the sanctions, both countries are moving into Russia in a big way to replace the Western businesses which left.
In the 80s China was not a Russian ally, and even if it had been it was not the greatest manufacturing power and world’s largest exporter. The Chinese make noises about peace, and they don’t supply weapons, but they are happy to buy Russian oil and gas and to sell Russia whatever else it needs.
Russia has a population problem, but it still has a far larger population than Ukraine. It can feed men into the grinder far longer than Ukraine will. Weapons are great, but they must be used by soldiers.
Further, Russia is not trying to occupy the entire country, but only the parts which are Russian majority or close to it. These places are not anti-Russian. They are not ideal for guerilla operations, both because of the lack of support for them and because Ukraine is basically a large open plain, not mountain or jungle.
Internally, as I’ve pointed out repeatedly, the Russian leadership cannot afford to lose. If Putin is seen by Russians to have lost the war, he will lose power and he may not survive that, nor may his family.
Further, people who think Putin losing power would be good for Ukraine or the West are deranged. The people who will replace him are to his right, and they will want another go. Their primary complaint is that Putin hasn’t gone all in: hasn’t full mobilized, hasn’t used all the weapons available (Russia has been far more restrained than the US was in Iraq), and hasn’t moved to a war economy.
Meanwhile, the West is becoming more unified, but not stronger. China continues its rise, and US reshoring efforts seem to involve taking industry from Europe and some week efforts at moving semiconductor production to the US. China produced more semiconductor patents last year than the rest of the world combined, the idea that the Western tech lead is durable is a joke.
Western power and leadership is a wasting asset. Russia is now firmly a Chinese satrapy, China and Russia and India are moving to their own payment system and OPEC is moving to sell oil in non-dollar denominations. Meanwhile climate change advances and it increases Russia’s advantage in agriculture: it improves their yields.
This is a fantastically stupid war, with no good end and it’s not going to replicate Afghanistan and the USSR because Russia is not the USSR, Ukraine is not Afghanistan and America is not the America of the 80s, still vastly dominant economically.
Negotiation should be the way out, but we are stuck in a maximal position: Russia must get nothing.
And that is not going to happen any more than Russian collapse.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
In “Fire From The Gods” I argued that humanity has proven consistently unable to handle new technologies: that we have usually wound up making them do more harm than good. This is a first in a series on looks at past attempted solutions.
Now the people who made these solutions usually didn’t say that they were trying to solve the problems of technology, though it’s implicit in some myths, like that of the eating from the tree of knowledge and being kicked out of paradise. But there is a wave of major solution sets being proposed all at about the same time. This is known as the Axial revolution, and includes Socrates/Plato, Confucius and Buddha. Zoraoaster comes in a bit earlier, Jesus rather later and the Jewish prophets (who spend a lot of time on social issues) scattered around thru the period.
The Buddha was born a nobleman, and during his life his father was conquered. While called a “king”, his father really lead a coalition of nobles and warriors: clans. He wasn’t a powerful king in the sense of having the ability to enforce his will. The Kings who were rising during this period in India were, and it was one of them who conquered his father. Indeed the Buddha’s time was one of huge prosperity in the part of India he lived in: probably this was the most prosperous area in in the world. They were urbanizing and for those who got in on the prosperity, standard advice was to keep one-third of one’s profits for oneself, give one-third to one’s friends and give the final third away.
They were filthy rich.
At the same time they were deeply dissatisfied and a large group of people renounced and tried to find a better way of living. These people were admired: they weren’t considered to be bums, but because they lived with few possessions and were trying to find a way out for everyone, were generally looked up to. It is that group Siddhartha joined.
Now the story of Siddhartha is that he was brought up by his father with all suffering concealed from him: aging, death and disease in particular, because a prophecy said that if he saw such, he would leave. Eventually he did and he left.
But, and this is important, the essence of the Buddha’s question is heroic to the point of being quixotic. Siddhartha saw suffering and instead of saying “well, it’s inevitable, I just have to accept it” instead determined:
Fuck suffering. I refuse to accept it is inevitable and I will dedicate my life to finding a way to end suffering.
Now that’s heroic to the extent of imbecility, except that he seems to have succeeded.
This is the core of all great ideologies, of which religion’s are a subset. The are based on a heroic ideal: a heroic conception of what it is possible for humans to achieve. Something extremely idealistic, often to the point of near insanity.
Buddhism is a heroic ideology, just like Christianity and Marxism and the Declaration of Independence and Confucianism and even Capitalism (to name only a few, but a few we will be covering.)
On a personal note, having done a lot of work and meditation and met a fair number of masters who seem to “have it” I’d say the Buddha succeeded: his way works. But, unfortunately, it doesn’t work for everyone, at least not in one life. (If reincarnation is a thing.)
Buddhist societies have sometimes extended the mandate. Asoka, the first Buddhist King of India had, so far as I know, the world’s first animal welfare laws. Construction in Buddhist Tibet was slow and difficult, because they would dig out the foundations very carefully, sift thru the dirt and remove the insects and worms and so on so they didn’t kill them.
Even when suffering cannot be ended, we can reduce it. The reduction of suffering and, when possible, its end, is the goal of Buddhism.
Mahayana Buddhism, with its Boddhisattva ideal, is an extension of this. Final enlightenment is said to remove one from the cycle of reincarnation (this doesn’t necessarily mean the individual stops existing, but they stop coming back here.) So a Boddhisattva swears to not accept final enlightenment until all sentient beings are enlightened. They’re going to stick around and keep helping, thru multiple lives if necessary.
We’re all ending suffering together
That’s the Mahayana extension.
Now of the great solutions, Buddhism is in the group I consider to have done less harm than good, but it’s definitely been perverted at various times. Like all ideologies, like all great ideals, there are ways it goes wrong. We’ll deal with that in the next article, but I wanted the articles separated, and this will be a pattern, because I want people to focus on the dream, on the ideal, on the greatness of the initial conception and its beauty. That beauty is there in all great ideologies; all of them, or they would not have succeeded.
Sometimes you have to dig a bit to find it, though not in Buddhism, but it’s always there. Just as in dealing with enemies, even when it’s an ideology you have (or perhaps you hate all ideologies) acknowledging whatever virtues there are is important. Great ideologies succeed, in part, because of some seed of great beauty: something wonderful.
If you want to understand the ideology, you cannot just look at all the evil it has done, or what you hate about it. You must find the beauty. If you haven’t, you aren’t close to the truth. If I skip some ideologies, it will be because I can’t see the core beauty that obvious exists in them. (Islam perhaps, if I can’t figure it out while I’m doing this series.
We’ll continue with the failures of Buddhism: the ways it either went wrong, or failed to achieve its dream. But understand that failing to go all the way doesn’t mean good wasn’t done, for any ideology, or even that more good wasn’t done than ill, especially for a period of time.
See you soon.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
by Tony Wikrent
War
How The U.S. (And UK) Sabotaged Peace In Ukraine
[Moon of Alabama, via Naked Capitalism 2-23-2023]
In an interview with an Israeli outlet (vid), former prime minister of Israel Naftali Bennett, who was personally deeply involved in the negotiation process, also alleged that the ‘West’ blocked them:
“Reports at the time reflect Bennet’s comments and said Russia and Ukraine were softening their positions. Citing Israeli officials, Axios reported on March 8 that Putin’s “proposal is difficult for Zelensky to accept but not as extreme as they anticipated. They said the proposal doesn’t include regime change in Kyiv and allows Ukraine to keep its sovereignty.”
“Discussing how Western leaders felt about his mediation efforts, Bennett said then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson took an “aggressive line” while French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz were more “pragmatic.” Bennett said President Biden adopted “both” positions.
“But ultimately, the Western leaders opposed Bennet’s efforts. “I’ll say this in the broad sense. I think there was a legitimate decision by the West to keep striking Putin and not [negotiate],” Bennett said.
“When asked if the Western powers “blocked” the mediation efforts, Bennet said,
“ “Basically, yes. They blocked it, and I thought they were wrong.”
Recognizing The War Is Lost The ‘West’ Seeks An Exit
[Moon of Alabama, via Naked Capitalism 2-21-2023]
President Vladimir Putin’s State of the Nation address, 21 February 2023
Gilbert Doctorow [via Naked Capitalism 2-25-2023]
The State Duma has just approved a law sent to it by the President declaring the suspension of Russian participation in the New Start treaty. There is now no remaining convention limiting the nuclear arsenals of the nuclear superpowers.
The constellation of treaties that was developed starting in the 1970s was important not only for setting down numbers and kinds of systems that were permitted to the signatories. Still more important were the verification procedures which were ongoing. They involved regular meetings of high officials from both sides and served to establish some kind of mutual respect and trust. As I noted from the opening remarks of Vladimir Putin in his address, there is now zero mutual trust and the guard rails protecting us from nuclear holocaust have been removed.
A Fight for Survival: What Victory Looks Like to Putin
[Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, via Naked Capitalism 2-24-2023]
Putin’s state of the nation address effectively suggests that in the growing confrontation with the West, Russia will rely on one sole argument: the nuclear option. In this respect, suspending the New START treaty also sends a warning to non-Western countries of the consequences for the entire world of the West’s anti-Russian policies. Moscow is presenting the global community with a choice between Russia or descending into a nuclear disaster.
[The Converstion, via Naked Capitalism 2-22-2023]
Use to discuss topics unrelated to recent posts.
We’re all familiar with the myth: Prometheus steals fire from the Gods and gives it to man and is cruelly punished for it.
I’ve considered writing a story in which Prometheus is freed by Zeus and returned to Earth to judge the results of his action.
We’ve gone over the problems of industrialization and agriculture many times and that isn’t what this post is about, but as a brief summary: most people’s lives got worse about two thousand years after agriculture, and in some ways immediately after. Rotten teeth, more disease, reduced lifespan and narrow hips in women leading to more deaths in childbirth and harder live childbirths, then the rise of the kings and all the evil that came with them. As for industrialization, it came with capitalism and required stealing people’s property rights and forcing them to take wage jobs that up until the middle of the 20th century were worse than staying on the land. Then climate change and ecological collapse, without which technological triumphalism might have something of a point
But the bitterness of the fruit (and the fall from Eden is a related myth) is the bitterness that knowledge has turned in our hands and struck us. We learned to do amazing things: to grow our own plants; to domesticate animals; to make a vast variety of items; to use river and wind and coil and oil and the sun itself for power; to look at our own DNA and change it and so on and so forth.
The triumphalism in some circles: the joy at human ingenuity, is largely justified. What we have learned and invented as a species is amazing and we should, collectively, be proud.
The issue isn’t human ingenuity, it’s demonstrated instead that every time something new is discovered or invented, instead of thinking “what great things will we do with this”, many of us think “oh fuck, how is this going to be misused?” The recent AI crap is instructive, but I’m old enough and was online enough in the 90s to remember the initial predictions from futurists about how the internet itself was going to change the world. A lot of it was right, but way too much of it was wrong: far too optimistic.
My favorite example is that every study I know of (there may be a few exceptions) find that the more you engage with social media the more unhappy you are. There are countless other examples, insert your own.
So the pattern, and this is a pattern that has gone on for somewhere between eight to ten thousand years, depending on whether you look at agriculture or the rise of kings as the watershed, is that we figure out something amazing and then, more often than not the balance between how much it makes life worse and how much it makes life better is in favor of “oh crap.”
Debates about capitalism, communism, anarchism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam and so on are debates about a way out of this trap, these original sins—these stories of taking fire or knowledge from the Gods and then burning ourselves more than helping ourselves. They are attempts to find a way to get more of the good and less of the bad, to tilt the field solidly towards the good.
Most major attempts have been sincere in their inception, much like the glee of of most discoverers of new knowledge. Then they have gone wrong, some more than others.
Some solutions have done significant good, especially at first. Others have had the opposite pattern. The same is true of specific inventions. The printing press in Europe (not China) probably did far more evil than good for about 200 years (say hello, wars of religion.)
We’re going to spend time teasing this apart over the next few months or maybe year or two because this is important. If there is a way out of this trap, it lies partially in understanding what we’ve tried in the past, and how it both worked and failed.
In the meantime, the simplest understanding is this: we are in a trap. As a species we created this trap ourselves. We forged our own chains and our own torture instruments, then used them on ourselves and keep doing so, in large part because we imagine them to be ourselves.
There is blame here, sort of, but really the blame/responsibility distinction is more important. We were born into societies that were already fucked up and that are immensely powerful, far more powerful than we are. Our collective might and the weight of the chains we have forged for ourselves over millennia is like Sisyphus’s boulder. It’s too much and every attempt to push it to the top of the hill has failed.
But the Gods haven’t said we must suffer forever from our own discoveries and inventions: only that we must learn to use these inventions with consistent kindness and wisdom.
Our task, then, is to figure out how to use knowledge and power with wisdom and kindness, in a sustained way, over not just a few decades or a century or two, which seems to be our best record so far, but over millennia, in a stable solution set.
Let’s get to it.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.
Eric Anderson wrote an excellent post on how late-stage capitalism engenders mental illness. I thought I’d follow it up with a simple post on capitalism.
As the name implies, capitalism is the accumulation of capital. This doesn’t mean money, primarily, that’s not what the early theorists meant by capital: they meant the means of production: land, workers, resources and capital goods: machinery in particular.
Capital is the ability to make and grow items. Because of economy of scale, if you concentrate capital it is easy to increase how much you make: Adam Smith’s famous pin factory.
But to concentrate capital you have to take it from a large number of people and put it in the hands of the few. This has been covered by a number of authors, and it involves taking away the commons rights of people in Europe (their right to use the land, which had existed for about a thousand years or so). We demonize serfs and peasants, and they had to engage in demeaning acts of servility, but they had strictly defined obligations to their lords for a certain amount of work, crops and animals and once that was taken care of they were able to spend their time as they pleased and they could grow crops on land they had right to; pasture their animals and so on.
Economists call the concentration of capital “primitive accumulation” but what it was was taking away property rights from people so they couldn’t support themselves. This forced them to go to cities and work in factories and so on, where they lived shorter lives, worked a hell of a lot harder (6 1/2 12 hour days were pretty common) and were sick a lot more often. The freedom of capitalism is the right to sell your labor, not the right to control how you spend your day. Unlike serfs and peasants, who were tied to the land, you could choose your master, but for most of the population, that’s what it was, a choice of masters, at least when there weren’t enough workers.
In the rest of the world European capitalism was about conquering land and into the 19th century, about taking slaves. The only thing better than workers who are desperate being workers who you didn’t even have to pay.
Capitalism, again, is about concentrating the means of production, capital, in the hands of the few. It is justified by the idea that concentrated capital is more effecient and therefore everyone has more. There’s a lot of arguments about whether that’s true and we now know, for example, that land clearances didn’t increase agricultural productivity much more than on communal lands, and in the case of some crops, communal lands were more efficient.
But it’s hard to make the case for the path not taken. Perhaps communal forms could have worked, I think they could have, and would have produced more prosperity in time, since they didn’t involve impoverishing people and two-thirds of the non-European globe, but… the water is passed and the argument is important not for what might have been, but for what might be in the future.
But all systems are made up of means and ends. Capitalism justifies removing the ability of most people to support themselves without working for others beyond what amounts to taxation by the violent authorities (that’s all governments. Don’t pay your taxes and eventually the big men with guns will show up, just like the knights did when a peasant didn’t meet his feudal contract.)
The means of capitalism in the modern world amount to “wage slavery,” something well understood by they yeoman farmers who were being forced off their land in the 1800s, and who seem to have coined the phase. You will have a master and if you can’t find one, you will starve.
It’s important to separate “capitalism” and “industrialization”. Because we industrialized under capitalism we think of the two as the same thing, or perhaps as co-joined siamese twins, but it’s not hard to imagine industrializing, which is about machines and assembly lines, in different ways: perhaps with communal organizations co-owning the means of production. This is distinct from Soviet communism, in which the government effectively owned everything, leading to the normal problems of totalitarian organization. Plurality and capitalism and synonyms.
This is something you need to think through; to imagine, for yourself. Try and come up with different ways industrialization and technology could have advanced, and don’t be caught up in historical inevitability. If you think that the past could not have been any different, then you effectively believe the future is determined.
This is one of the issues of Marxism: historical determinism. When it turned out (at least so far) that the historical dialectic didn’t work out how Marx and Engels envisaged, well, the house of cards collapsed. You have to give up inevitability to have choice and the ability to adapt.
We have plenty of options for the future and do not have to make the mistakes of the past. The first principle is that if your means are bad, no matter how good your ends, your society is going to have huge problems. You can’t routinely do evil, day in and day out, and expect the some invisible hand to lead to a good world for all.
The results of the work I do, like this article, are free, but food isn’t, so if you value my work, please DONATE or SUBSCRIBE.