Brad DeLong Flies His Orthodox Engelsist Freak Flag on Transformations in þe Mode of Production; & BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2023-02-04 Sa
A Non-Platonic Twitter Dialogue: In a Better World than This, This Is What Twitter Would Have Been Used for: Bhandari, DeLong, Riley, et al.; Martin Wolf; Mike Konczal; Very Briefly Noted; & ¶s
FOCUS: A Non-Platonic Twitter Dialogue: In a Better World þan Þis, Þis Is What Twitter Would Have Been Used for:
But Jack Dorsey decided he wanted to get rich by becoming yet another manipulative-grift advertising platform, and now Elon Musk has set the whole thing on fire:
Brad DeLong Flies His Orthodox Engelsist Freak Flag on Transformations in þe Mode of Production:
Rakesh Bhandari: You can’t have the cake baked under extant production relations as if those were natural & ahistorical & then have the cake divided up any way you want afterwards as if that were an autonomous political question. How’d you respond to Marx’s critique of Mill, @delong? Aside from thinking that the idea of a “just distribution” is as incoherent as a “yellow logarithm”, Marx also argued that distribution couldn’t be changed without a change in the structure of production. He may have been wrong about that as well as his skepticism of justice.
Another problem begins with Habermas. Marcuse had questioned technology as domination, breaking with productive forces fetishism. E.g., we can see how AI moves towards surveillance & excessive automation, not worker empowerment. Habermas seems not want to question technology itself.
Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson’s forthcoming book on “Technology and Power” begins with Bentham’s panopticon. They are interested in those technical choices that take us down a path of surveillance and automation rather than worker empowerment. Book is a great read so far.
Brad DeLong: If I may ask, what provoked this, exactly?
Rakesh Bhandari: I’ve been thinking for a while now about your idea that we have solved the production but not the distribution problem. And by accident I came across some German theoretical discussion in the 1970s of the relation of Marx to Mill. So I thought I’d ask for your thoughts.Thank you!
Brad DeLong: Yes, the changing technology-driven forces-of-production hardware of society greatly constrain and shape the relations-of-production and superstructural econo-politico-socio-cultural software of society that puts the forces-of-production to work and does the distribution and utilization of our common and collective wealth.
Yes, feudal-era forces- and relations-of-production teach people that society is static, hierarchical, with who you are chosen for you by the role ascribed to you; that production is small-scale, handicraft, and individually autonomous; and that those who work owe rent to those who protect them and tithes to those who guide them to salvation. Hence the feudal mode-of-production requires that we write feudal-society software to run on top of it.
Commercial-imperial gunpowder-empire forces- and relations-of-production, by contrast, teach people that society is mobile, contractual, with who you are chosen by you if you can make a contractual-network place for yourself; that production is middle-scale, aided by tools and finance, and interdependent; and that we all owe each other a peaceful world in which we can make and fulfill the bargains and contracts our interdependence requires. Hence the commercial-imperial gunpowder-empire mode-of-production requires that we write bourgeois-society software to run on top of it. We had 700 years—from 1000 to 1700—to do this software-writing, -testing, and -debugging as technology carried us from the first to the second. By 1700 we had cobbled together running code, and had a functioning—albeit not a good—society.
But the story does not end with democratic capitalism, as Frank Fukuyama would claim that it does. Steampower forces- and relations-of-production teach, or so Freddie from Barmen wrote in… 1880? I believe… that:
society is collective, that we are similar, with who we are on the one hand plastic because of society’s massive wealth but on the other hand requiring that we fit into the finely-specified slots of the industrial world’s complex division of labor;
that production is social in which none of us can claim to have produced anything since it is the division-of-labor network that makes things;
that each individual is both essential and unnecessary—essential in the network, but unproductive outside of it;
thus we all owe each other a recognition of our common equal humanity and contribution, and need to dress in identical blue denim overalls, create a free society of associated producers;
and tghen we need to rotate through the administration and coordination jobs, which have been greatly simplified by modern management science to require only knowledge of the four rules of arithmetic and the ability to issue appropriate receipts.
Freddie from Barmen wrote that we had had only 180 years to rewrite the software from the bougeois-society version that had run on top of the commercial-imperial gunpowder-empire forces- and relations-of-production of 1700 for teh forces-of-production of the Steampower age as of 1880.
Freddie from Barmen wrote that we had not yet done the job—and so, in 1880, we did not yet have a running society.
But, he wrote, we could see what the requisite relations-of-production econo-politico-socio-cultural software rewrite was, or at least we could name it: FULL COMMUNISM.
Freddie from Barmen… did not have the analysis right.
And, moreover, technological history did not stop with the Steampower age. Second-Industrial-Revolution. Fordist. Global Value-Chain. And now we go into the Info-Biotech age. Each of these a revolution in the power and components of our forces-of-production hardware as great as the 1000–1700 jump from feudal to commercial, or the 1700–1880 jump fro commercial to steam.
How have the changing technology-driven forces-of-production hardware of society constrained and shaped the relations-of-production and superstructural econo-politico-socio-cultural software of society that put the forces-of-production to work and does the distribution and utilization of our common and collective wealth since Freddie’s 1880 analysis?
Freddie’s followers and students have been of absolutely no help in this. According to them, Steampower capitalist society was followed by “Late Capitalism”. And then “Later Capitalism”. And then “Late-Later Capitalism”. And now, I suppose, the society we are going to build on top of Info-Biotech age forces-of-production will be called “Later Late-Later Capitalism”. That is not helpful.
But the question remains: How have the changing technology-driven forces-of-production hardware of society constrained and shaped, et cetera? And how are we to rewrite that relations-of-production and superstructural econo-politico-socio-cultural software of society that puts the forces-of-production to work and does the distribution and utilization of our common and collective wealth, so that we can use our wealth wisely and well? So that we can equitably distribute the wealth create by the human anthology intelligence’s brains and hands, and have a society in which people feel safe and secure and are healthy and happy?
Dylan Riley: /What is very interesting about this discussion is that DeLong is adopting a highly orthodox Engelsian/Kautksyian interpretation of economic development: production relations are constrained forces of production which continued to develop at an ever-increasing rate. Then DeLong [asks] a basically Marxian question: what is the most rational way to organize society so as to take advantage of those forces of production?… At least one strand of Neo-Marxist theorizing, obviously that coming out of Brenner and Wood, decisively rejects the forces of production determinism inherent in DeLong’s posing of the issue.
But doesn’t this way of posing the problem face serious difficulties? In particular, what explains the markedly uneven nature of the development of the forces of production? That is to say, why did they basically not develop for most of human history? Or, to put the point a bit differently, why is Ibn Khaldun’s analysis basically correct for most of human history, but then becomes rather suddenly inapplicable? Seems close to tautologous to refer to the forces of production?
Brad DeLong: Well, yes… which is why Bob lectured me for 45 minutes last fall.
Terence Renaud: Considering the dumb crusade against “culture” by some on the left recently, I think in many ways we’re still stuck in that 19th-century debate over materialism vs idealism: the point is to overcome the debate, not perpetuate it.
Dylan Riley: Very true; it as if Gramsci, Labriola, Lukács, Korsch, Marcuse etc. had never written, or rather, as if it would have been better if they never had. All that is needed is a bit of Kautsky leavened with Anglo-American Methodological Individualism.
Terence Renaud: Yes! it’s a regression in Marxist theory, which is unfortunate!
Brad DeLong: The “development” of a theory is not necessarily “progress”. Speaking as a slightly repentant left-neoliberal, much of the Marxist cultural turn was an attempt to build an orrery to explain why Engels's predictions about how the steampower mode of production would educate humanity for socialism went wrong. But, in my view, much of the orrery was unnecessary. The bifurcated world of mass steampower factories growing larger and larger as the ruling and middle classes grew smaller and smaller would have brought Engels's hopes of revolution rich countries much closer. (Whether those revolutions would have had the desired beneficial consequences is a deep issue.) But technology advanced, the mode of production moved on. The Second-Industrial-Revolution mode of production was not the Steampower one. Fordism was not Second-Industrial-Revolution. Global Value-Chain was not Fordism. And Info-Biotech will not be Global Value-Chain.
Ispeculate that perhaps we can go very far by returning to Engels's path and blazing the trail forward. Think seriously about technology—as mode-of-production, -distribution, -domination, and -communication—and figure out what kind of society-running relations-of-production and other econo-socio-politico-cultural software we need to write to make a truly human world.
To take the cultural turn, and then stop, would be to turn us into the Young Hegelians—those who thought that they young Germans themselves were absolutely key, because while the English bourgeosie was building the economy and the French revolutionaries were building the political order of utopia, the young German Hegelians were doing the key work in building the philosophy of utopia.
Dylan Riley: This is a very interesting thread. I would point out that the central question that DeLong poses is basically the question at the center of all Marxist thinking; namely, how to deploy the forces of production to promote human freedom/flourishing? /On the specific question of "western Marxism", I think it's a bit reductive to say that they were all trying to save a problematic theory by adding cultural bells and whistles. Even if that were the initial impetus, Gramsci's theory of hegemony and Lukács'[s] account [of] reification make contributions that quite decisively transcend the context of their production. I think the attempt to liquidate the more conceptually difficult aspects of that heritage is basically regressive.
Brad DeLong: You can say—as I do in my Slouching Towards Utopia <bit.ly/3pP3Krk>—that much of the problem in rewriting the software as the technology-driven mode-of-production changes is the tension between, on the one hand, a von Hayekian desire to use the market as a crowdsourcing mechanism at the price of accepting “the market giveth; the market taketh away: blessed be the name of the market”, and, on the other hand, a Polanyian demand that society deliver social justice and vindicate rights other than property rights, for “the market was made for man, not man for the market”. If you do say that, then Gramsci and Lukacs are of great value in detailing how a movement away from the von Hayekian pole in the direction of balance is not necessarily an improvement, for “social justice” can be very unjust, and often is very unjust, as it often reflects merely the will of those stronger in their ability to access and manage the structures of propaganda.
As Milton Friedman once said to me: For the Wisconsin legislature in 1940, “social justice” meant firing Milton Friedman from his job as a professor at U. Wisconsin, because—no matter how good a teacher and researcher he was—it was unjust that the U. Wisconsin faculty had so many Jews on it. Friedman was willing to die on this hill: at the von Hayekian pro-market pole, at least people are incentivized to (a) contribute to society by making something other people are willing to pay for, and (b) work hard. And, he said, that is usually better than giving social power to whoever comes out on top of some alternative constructed status hierarchy of putative moral desert.
Gramscian hegemony and Lukacsian reification are both ways of analyzing how a move away from the von Hayekian “the only rights that market society vindicates are property rights” to the vindication of other kinds of rights may produce a less entrepreneurial and less bourgeois but not necessarily better distribution of social power.
Dylan Riley: More fascinating stuff reprising the central discussion in the new book between Hayek and Polanyi. However I wonder how Marx/Marxists actually play into this discussion. It is true that Polanyi was concerned with ideas of justice, and this distinguishes him from Hayek. But Marx and Hayek, in my view, were in agreement in their suspicion of the idea of social justice. (I made this point in Microverses). Indeed one of the things that makes Hayek fascinating is his refusal to dignify market produced distributions of income with any theodicy of merit. Marx's main point was not at all that capitalism was unjust, but rather that it was an internally contradictory social form. His critique of capitalism was pitched at an entire different level from Polanyi who remained a moralist who had much in common with Edmund Burke in his basic outlook. In any case very much looking forward to our discussion Brad!
“Freddie from Barmen” = Friedrich Engels, 1820-1895 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Engels>
ONE VIDEO: Martin Wolf: Þe Crisis of Democratic Capitalism:
ONE IMAGE: Cool Mike Konczal Inflation Graphic:
Very Briefly Noted:
Preston Caldwell: Fed Raises Rates and Says It Isn’t Done Yet. We Think It Is. - Morningstar, Inc.: ‘Even as the Fed says it expects “ongoing” rate hikes, we expect the next move will be to cut rates by year-end…
Economist: Britain’s carmaking industry is increasingly under threat: ‘Britishvolt’s collapse is not the only bad omen for battery-powered cars…. In the 1950s Britain churned out more cars than anywhere except America…. Six years ago… 1.7m cars rolled off production lines…. Only 775,014 cars emerged from British factories in 2022, the worst year since 1956…
Scott Lemieux: This man thinks he can be president: ‘Mike Pence has decided he’d rather finish 11th than 9th in the first Republican primary: ‘Former Vice President Mike Pence… said Thursday that he wants to “reform” Social Security and institute private savings accounts…. While promoting incredibly unpopular policies is not going to help him become president, every act of honesty by a prominent Republican hurts the party. Win-win!…
Geoffrey Sayre-McCord: Home of PPE…
Timothy Garton Ash: Ukraine in Our Future: ‘Ukraine faces extraordinary challenges, but it also presents a challenge for Europe—and a great opportunity…
Radley Balko: Roundup: A guide to the Tyre Nichols case, some progress in Arizona, and the harrowing police shooting of Jason Harley Kloepfer…
Claire Berlinski: The Surprising Reason Europe Came Together Against Putin: ‘A major advance in translation technology means that Ukrainians can inform and debunk in real time. The world hasn’t seen a weapon quite like it before...
Josh Barro: Why Republicans Find it Hard to Be Nice These Days: ‘Candidates are looking at what they perceive to have been Donald Trump’s path to victory and trying to copy his persona. Even on this metric, they fail—Trump is funny… imitators… lack Trump’s sound political instinct for moderating on… issues like entitlement cuts. But the biggest problem is that… if you succeed at copying… you’re running a playbook to get 46%…
Tim Burke: The News: Moves on the Chessboard: ‘The Nichols case underscores what numerous other cases have demonstrated: police unions train their members on how to perjure themselves...
¶s:
Eric Loomis: Ron DeSantis Is Overplaying His Hand: ‘The DeSantis boom is not something I am particularly worried about. This isn’t because I don’t think he’s a scary. He’s slimy evil little fascist who wants to be the American Orban. But, like Paul, I think Trump is almost certainly the candidate in 2024 if he even remotely tries, which actually seems unclear at this point. In any case, DeSantis could be the candidate, sure. But I don’t see how he wins. First, he has the charisma of a rock. Say what you will about Trump or George W. Bush, but the men had certain types of charisma that appeals to certain Americans. Ron DeSantis, like Scott Walker before him, absolutely does not have a lick of it. He simply comes across as terrible on television. But second, and I think a lot more important, is that he is massively overplaying his hand on the culture war stuff…
Nicholas MacPherson: Britain should not accept its status as the ‘sick man of Europe’: ‘The country has economic problems, but there are solutions if only politicians would grasp the nettle…. Britain still has a lot going for it… strong university cities… a thriving research base, great creative industries… an irrepressible financial sector… a dynamic labour market…. But there is no denying that Britain has a problem…. Macroeconomic policy will hold back growth in the short run. But that’s a price worth paying…. Second, there was a perfectly respectable political case for Brexit…. But the evidence that Brexit is a drag on economic performance is compelling…. Third, the UK has an inefficient and underpaid public sector…. Finally, the economy is suffering from chronic under-investment…. But all is not lost…. The Sunak government is showing signs of wanting to tackle problems rather than to deny their existence…
Heather Cox Richardson: February 3, 2023: ‘Mike Pence came out and said it: “I think the day could come when we could replace the New Deal with a better deal.” Pence was talking about Social Security—a centerpiece of the New Deal—saying: “Literally give younger Americans the ability to take a portion of their Social Security withholdings and put that into a private savings account.” Privatizing Social Security is his plan to address the growing national debt…
Duncan Black: 87 Jiminies: ‘This poll must be false, as 100% of white pundits over the age of 55 think these are the most important issues: “And when the Times/Sienna poll asked midterm voters to name the most important problem facing America, only one of the survey’s 1,641 respondents mentioned the debt, the deficit, or federal spending.” The deficit scolds took a break as the always do during Republican administrations and the new generation is too busy Owning The Libs to keep trying to convince people that the deficit is going to kill them. It's actually a bit weird that "deficit politics" kind of imploded. Was a fixture my whole life and now...
This post was crazy fun. It all starts with this interdisciplinary Rakesh guy accusing @DeLong of thinking like J.S. Mill and our hero refusing to take it as a compliment and instead insisting that he's a lot like Freddie-from-Barmen, but different. Yeah, but maybe, compared to Mill, not different enough.
What Mill brings to the table is separability. Some feudal-mode-of-production guy once wrote 'qui bene distinguit bene docet," and sure enough, Mill is clear-headed enough to say that all sorts of constraints apply to the production of wealth, but "it is not so with the distribution of wealth." Mill thought that we had slouched damn near to utopia on the production side, but were idiots when it came to distribution. Mill did NOT think "rules" of distribution were inseparably bound to the forces or relations of production. He thought that there were many possible distribution schemes, "but what practical results will flow from the operation of those rules must be discovered, like any other mental or physical truths, by observation and reasoning." I don't think he means introspection here. I think he means "Let's try some things and see what works."
Brad, I don't think you improve on Freddie-from-Barmen by discerning new forces-and-relations-of-production-regimes, each with its new determinate distribution regime. As I see it, the forces-and-relations stuff is all idealistic, internal-relations nonsense. It's too many connections and too few distinctions, cats chasing dialectical tails. We have better tools for measuring constraints and imagining possibilities. We have human ingenuity to build on and human nature to contend with. A so-so economist, Mill still saw this clearly. Let's forget Engels and move on.
re: Fed Raises Rates and Says It Isn’t Done Yet. We Think It Is. - Morningstar, Inc.: ‘Even as the Fed says it expects “ongoing” rate hikes, we expect the next move will be to cut rates by year-end…
Given the lead time on interest rate changes, this timing would support the paranoid Thumb On The Scales theory that the Fed is engineering a recession in time for the election ending in the quarters after.
Just because your (sic) paranoid...