Once again, Andrew Stevens and I rampaged through Micah Tillman's site with as much wrath and little regard for our environs as Godzilla and Mothra - this time about the comparative collateral damage between Capitalism and Marxism. In the interest of allowing ourselves to stretch out conversationally, I've dragged the discourse back over here. One quick reassurance a la Bill Hicks to everyone rolling their eyes at political cockfighting: don't worry, there's more music-nerd snark on the way.Any “statistical grudge match” with any kind of intellectual honesty would be forced to conclude that Marxism caused vastly more premature deaths than capitalism ever has. I can only assume that your claim is going to be that capitalist countries cause life expectancies to fall somehow, since a mere body count won’t even get you close."A mere body count"... ah, how we value life in the free world! But no, I wasn't referring to life expectancies. Of course, even that isn't an airtight argument for the free market, not the least because most of the countries with greater life expectancies than the US (Japan, Iceland, Sweden, Canada, etc.) have market regulations that would be decried as draconian on Wall Street. The chief difficulty in comparing body-counts between Capitalism and Marxism is that no one has ever been killed in the name of Capitalism as such. Whereas the enforcers and executioners of Communist regimes dispatched dissidents and undesirables under the flutter of red flags, no tanks or helmets have ever been decorated with dollar-sign decals. So it's a delicate yet arbitrary judgment as to how many deaths are on capital's tab. Those who've died of famine or a toxic environment as a result of exploitive trade practices? The victims of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre? The 2 million dead of the Korean war? The 6 million of the Vietnam war? The minimum hundred-thousand of the current Iraq war? The 8 million slaves who died en route to the Americas, to say nothing of the untold millions killed during the procurement of the surviving 11 millions slaves shipped west?
I think it is quite appropriate to measure how good a government is by how few people it gratuitously slaughters.Well, it's obviously a handy criterion, but if that becomes the chief consideration of a government's worth, that's bloody pathetic (no pun intended). What about access to healthcare? Education? Low unemployment rolls and CPI? No? I'd think that quality of life would be a greater consolation than a simple shurg, "Well, at least the prime minister ain't no Ismail Enver."
...Experiments [in competing ideologies] were East Germany/West Germany, North Korea/South Korea, and arguably Hong Kong/China. In each one of these experiments, the regimes in question started with similar resources and similar, if not identical, cultures.As "laboratory experiments," these qualify as incredibly sloppy science. Not only had Hong Kong been a British concession for over a century by the time Mao Zedong consolidated power in 1949, but to think a country as expansive & ethnically diverse as China was (or is) even vaguely homogeneous is ignorant. Meanwhile, in Korea, there was violent agitation by left-leaning activists in the south following WWII; had the US not ditched the Moscow Accords and helped install Yi Seungman (a thug who embezzled over $20 million in gov't funds and died in exile) and subsequently reinforced his flagging defenses, Korea very well may have been reunified by Kim Il-Sung. (Kim, of course, was a unimaginative, waffling narcissist responsible for the deaths of 1.6 million of his countrymen.) West and East Germany are the closest to "control" groups by which to compare the success of competing ideologies. Nevertheless, the Soviet "scorched earth" war tactics and its extra-aggressive dismantling of German industry (to compensate for the USSR's desperate economic situation and staggering loss of 26 million lives) bequeathed the GDR a far more tenuous socioeconomic foundation than the West, and a consequent, inherent resentment of its foreign overseer.
Though it goes without saying, I am not an apologist for Mao, Stalin, the Stassi, or Juche. But throughout the Cold War, the single answer to the myriad problems of Communism was: capitalism. And still, the single answer to the myriad problems of Western capitalist hegemony is: more capitalism! As jaded as I may be regarding humans' collective discipline or reason, this as a prescription is, well, insufficient.
Round 3
Shortly thereafter, Mr. Stevens was (again) the sole respondent to my questions regarding whether or not the US is in a recession. I felt compelled to comment not the least because the cited source of "good news" was walking mental laxative Jonah Goldberg, and Tillman seems to take his sources at face-value. A great many people (Tillman included) received the news the 3.3% bump in the US GDP as though it was some ad infinitum forecast of the country's economic health - forgetting about those stimulus cheques and White House Press Secretary Dana Perino's caveat, "No one is doing a victory dance." Mr. Stevens was right to articulate the value of imputed income, though I wasn't so much arguing against its inclusion in the equation as encouraging statistical scrutiny. Take the unemployment rate for example: officially 5.7%, it rises to around 9% once "discouraged" workers, "marginally attached" workers, and involuntary part-timers are included. But then factor in those on Social Security, disability, etc. who've been "bought off the unemployment rolls" and the number crawls closer to 12%. There are other concerning facts to consider: construction continued to hit the brakes at a current rate of almost 16%, and after-tax corporate profits fell by 3.8% after a single-point gain in the first three months of 2008.The slight skip in GDP is obviously good news, but it'd be foolhardy to dismiss the "doomsayers" so quickly. The benefit of being Chicken Little is that, if you're wrong - hey, no problem! But given that 97% of consensus forecasts in the 1990s failed to predict some sixty different national recessions, perhaps "permabears" like Dr. Nouriel Roubini aren't quite the marketplace miserablists they appear to be.
Owing to Mr. Stevens' relative online anonymity, I initially wondered if I was debating either a veteran business journalist or the star of Body Chemistry 3: Point of Seduction. No such luck: he's a midwestern economist, judging by his extensive font of financial know-how (not to mention haughty asides deriding "non-economists"). As such, that he indulges an autodidact muso in lengthy exchanges seems explicable only because they take place on "his" turf. Nonetheless, I appreciate that he's the only one who deems my ideas worthy of rebutting on Tillman's site, where my minority opinions (however carefully worded) have apparently earned me troll status. No great loss, though, as that site disappears increasingly up its own skyward nose. Tillman's monocular political skepticism and dull predilection towards grammatical fundamentalism make him sound ever more like the idiot who looks at the finger, not the moon at which the finger points. As much as Mr. Stevens and I may differ in our ideological orientation, his readiness to have an concerted discussion is most welcome.
Posts
5 comments:
Sorry for the long delay. I've had some personal issues to deal with this past week.
The chief difficulty in comparing body-counts between Capitalism and Marxism is that no one has ever been killed in the name of Capitalism as such. Whereas the enforcers and executioners of Communist regimes dispatched dissidents and undesirables under the flutter of red flags, no tanks or helmets have ever been decorated with dollar-sign decals. So it's a delicate yet arbitrary judgment as to how many deaths are on capital's tab. Those who've died of famine or a toxic environment as a result of exploitive trade practices? The victims of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre? The 2 million dead of the Korean war? The 6 million of the Vietnam war? The minimum hundred-thousand of the current Iraq war? The 8 million slaves who died en route to the Americas, to say nothing of the untold millions killed during the procurement of the surviving 11 millions slaves shipped west?
Count it however you like; you still won't get to Communism's tab. I do object to counting all the dead in conflicts between capitalism and communism against capitalism, but not against communism (e.g. Vietnam and Korea) and I mildly object to slavery, which doesn't have anything to do with capitalism (and far, far predates capitalism). But even if we do it your way, Communism's going to win. However, this is not to trivialize those people killed by capitalist governments, which is certainly not insignificant. I will argue that the number of people prematurely killed by capitalist entities like corporations (pollution, asbestos, and all) is tiny compared to the number of people killed by governments. And, of course, it's hard to find a famine caused by capitalism (unlike communism). When you say "exploitative trade practices" causing famine, you probably mean anti-free-market protectionist policies by capitalist governments. By the by, I am willing to add a great many deaths from the Great Irish Famine to capitalism's tab. It wasn't caused by capitalism (indeed, it was caused because of anti-capitalist colonialist practices by Great Britain), but Great Britain did justify not sending aid to Ireland due to an overly rigid capitalist ideology.
Well, it's obviously a handy criterion, but if that becomes the chief consideration of a government's worth, that's bloody pathetic (no pun intended). What about access to healthcare? Education? Low unemployment rolls and CPI? No? I'd think that quality of life would be a greater consolation than a simple shurg, "Well, at least the prime minister ain't no Ismail Enver."
I will, of course, happily match up capitalist nations' records on any of these things to communist nations. I might object only to "education" and "low unemployment rolls." Communists have always done very well in these regards. They had to, the better to indoctrinate their citizens. And there's no question that they put every citizen to work. Whether this actually improved their workers' lives is another question entirely.
As "laboratory experiments," these qualify as incredibly sloppy science.
Of course I agree that these weren't perfect laboratory experiments. However, it's the great consistency which is the problem for Communist apologists. Over and over again, the Communists failed while their capitalist neighbors thrived. We can come up with a different excuse for each one if we like, but by the twentieth time, they start wearing a bit thin.
Meanwhile, your criticism of the myriad problems of capitalism compares us to. . .well, nobody. It's not like there's a more successful system out there, certainly not one that has been tried in many different places and cultures and been successful everywhere.
Take the unemployment rate for example: officially 5.7%, it rises to around 9% once "discouraged" workers, "marginally attached" workers, and involuntary part-timers are included. But then factor in those on Social Security, disability, etc. who've been "bought off the unemployment rolls" and the number crawls closer to 12%.
All of this is probably true, but it doesn't seem particularly relevant to me. You're not, I assume, seriously arguing that we shouldn't be giving Social Security and disability to people so I have to take that as a red herring. I don't think any reasonable person would find the figure you claim to favor to be the more useful measure of unemployment than the official figure. We're interested in what percentage of people who want jobs don't have them, not what percentage of people aren't working including the aged and infirm.
I do, by the way, agree that the economy still has issues to sort out and I think it's clear that we're in an employment recession even if we're not in a GDP recession.
Owing to Mr. Stevens' relative online anonymity, I initially wondered if I was debating either a veteran business journalist or the star of Body Chemistry 3: Point of Seduction. No such luck: he's a midwestern economist, judging by his extensive font of financial know-how (not to mention haughty asides deriding "non-economists"). As such, that he indulges an autodidact muso in lengthy exchanges seems explicable only because they take place on "his" turf.
I'm not actually an economist though I am a finance professional with training in economics (mostly financial economics, not macro or microeconomics). I didn't mean "non-economists" in a haughty way. I was mostly pointing out that Mr. Phillips is not an economist and, I believe, making a standard non-economist error, not touting myself. This is my real name, but I do value my anonymity. I am fortunate that my name is common enough that I can use my real name while simultaneously preserving my anonymity. (Not for any particular reason. Mostly because I don't like getting emails and/or phone calls from strangers.)
I am in fact happy to indulge in lengthy exchanges on a great many academic subjects. They don't have to be "my" turf. But they have to be on something where I at least have something to offer. I really have very little to say when it comes to cultural criticism (the basis of your blog) since I'm a philistine.
No worries about the wait. I ain't going anywhere.
Re: The Bodycount
Of course, it's unfair to count the dead of the Korean & Vietnam wars solely against one side. Though I understand your objection to including slavery on the list, that the practice predates capitalism as a formal theory does not mean it wasn't a consequence of the conditions & practices definitive of capitalism; that something doesn't have a name does not negate its existence. Also, when I referred to "exploitive trade practices," I was thinking not so much of defensive policies as of economic incursions into developing nations by multinational corporations backed by the IMF & WTO.
My main point here was calling attention to the difficulty in clearly weighing culpability for megadeaths, though I'm sure some firebrand grad student has found a convincing means of charging capitalism with counts of murder that exceed communism's ~100 million. As was stated before, a bodycount is a piss-poor leading criterion of a gov't or ideology's worth.
Re: Standard of Living
Though we can agree on such useful measures as access to healthcare, literacy, CPI, life expectancy, etc., this question also becomes quickly becomes muddied by ideology. As soon as I posted my response, I recalled that the "standard of living" (in terms of GDP, education, healthcare, and life expectancy in particular) rose in both the American & western European slave economies and under Stalin. Meanwhile, life expectancy in America is currently declining. So a materialist assessment of the standard of living is insufficient, as it doesn't reflect how free, just, or progressive (in the literal, not political, sense) a nation is. And then we're back into the culture wars.
The economic track record of communist countries doesn't give much to boast about, and yes, the endless supply of apologies & qualifiers (e.g. where would Cuba be without the US embargo?) gets tiresome. But there have been plenty of disasters within capitalist economies, too - and I don't mean something as benign as the popping of the '80s Japanese price-asset bubble. The Argentinian crisis of 2001 (and its current farming crisis), the Ecuadorian dollarization debacle in '98, illegal modern slavery in Brazil - not to mention that capitalism as economic ethos has nothing to do with how stable, free, or just a country is (China, Zimbabwe, Nigeria).
The reason I refer to myself as a "lapsed" Marxist is because, like many cynics & aesthetes, while I appreciate the ideals & forms of the philosophy... (a) I think there are lenses other than class struggle through which to view history (hence my psychology-hobbyism), (b) I see nothing that gives me faith that people can behave as nobly & compassionately as Marxism demands of them. Yet, to abandon the ideals (however pie-in-the-sky) for realpolitik guarantees that we will never do better than we already have. True, there's no contemporary system by which to compare capitalism (or, for that matter, democracy). But that doesn't mean a little judicious overreaching won't some day create a new breakthrough in socioeconomic theory. To polish off Einstein's old chestnut, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
Re: Tweaked economic statistics
No, I'm not asking that retirees or people on disability necessarily be counted as unemployed - though I think "discouraged," "marginally attached," and involuntary part-time workers should be. As for the recession, perhaps it's my generally doomy worldview talking, but I always feel it better to believe in (and prepare for) the worst, so that any surprises will be good ones; this is why I immediately dismissed the cheers greeting the GDP bump.
Of course, context did play a role as well: Tillman, for all his nit-picking, seems to be gleefully oblivious to any & all news that doesn't support his tidy, comfortable worldview. (Witness his mockery of Charles Gibson's affectatious demeanor whilst totally ignoring Palin's li'l slip-ups like, y'know, not knowing what the Bush doctrine is.) I was trying to poke some holes in his sail.
Re: Identity
Please don't think I was calling you out to divulge any additional information about yourself; the crack about the CNN correspondent & the hack actor was just because I was amused by the Google search results. I absolutely respect anyone that manages even a modicum of privacy in this wired world. (The only reason I'm more flippant is because, by now, I'm on so many different governments' databases that if truly They're Out to Get Me, they can.) But I do enjoy that you're willing to have thorough, non-flame-war exchanges with someone who may know less (and certainly thinks differently) about a given subject than you without being just another condescending desktop pundit. Cheers!
And heck, philistines can be very helpful in keeping cultural critics' heads out of their own asses. Everyone needs to be kept in check now & then.
By the by, I meant to mention how brilliant I found your illustrative photos for this post. The kids sumo wrestling in particular was inspired.
I do agree that the count is very difficult since capitalist countries have rarely sent poor people to gas chambers or labor camps or anything like that. I suppose you might be correct that some grad student somewhere could claim that capitalism had killed more people than Communism, if only because capitalism has been around longer.
Oh, life expectancy in America is certainly not declining; I'm not quite sure how you could have gotten that impression. I was able to find this article by socialist propagandists (and was able to find the actual study as well). The study found that life expectancy had gotten somewhat worse (statistically significantly so) between 1983 and 1999 for men in 11 U.S. counties and women in 180 U.S. counties. There are 3077 counties in the United States. We can agree that this shows that those counties were not experiencing as great an improvement in life expectancy as the rest of the country, but as for actual declines, the word I would use for these is "noise." All of the counties are sparsely populated counties in the Deep South, along the Mississippi River, and in Appalachia. Sometimes I despair at the statistical illiteracy of your average medical researcher. Tests for a statistical significance of, say, 95% are very useful if you're looking at one county. But 5% of all random counties in the country will meet this statistical significance test just by random chance if you're looking at all of them. Some sparsely populated counties are going to see higher mortality just through bad luck. I should refuse to discuss medical research until they improve their statistical literacy really. There are things that can be concluded from this study, but not nearly so strong as the conclusions that were actually reached.
I actually have sympathy for your dream of a post-capitalist world. I share this dream, for what it's worth. I believe we'll get there through capitalism when it brings about Aristotle's dream of a mechanized society which frees men from drudgery. We're not there yet, but I think we will be eventually.
I also sympathize with the aesthete's criticism of capitalism. Art in capitalist countries always aims for the lowest common denominator. It must be frustrating for a great artist to realize he's less popular than Britney Spears. When the American Empire is buried and the United States has broken into four or five different countries, the U.S. will not be remembered for its cultural greatness. This is okay with me since, as speakers of English, we are co-inheritors of the great British literary tradition. But there are advantages to the U.S. culturally as well. Bohemianism is only possible in a country like the U.S. which shucks off so much wealth that you can live like a pharaoh off the garbage of other people. And I also believe that the rest of the world has been convinced by American artists and poets that America has no artists or poets. While the U.S. is culturally not much, it is, in terms of providing freedom and prosperity to as great a number of its citizens as possible, one of the greatest nations ever on earth. I was born poor in America and I'd rather be a poor American than rich in most other nations.
I actually don't sympathize with the arguments about the "Bush Doctrine" since there isn't really any such thing. I couldn't tell whether she didn't know any of the definitions of the Bush Doctrine or was just trying to clarify which "Bush Doctrine" Gibson was referring to, since it's a nebulous, ill-defined term. (It's not like Bush has ever announced that such-and-such is the Bush Doctrine.)
I actually quite enjoy these conversations. It always interests me to see where the other side is coming from. Left-liberals in this country like to talk about diversity, but what they mean by it is lots of people who look different from them, but think exactly like them. I am in favor of genuine diversity. I am interested in the opinions of orthodox Jews, neo-Nazis, lapsed Marxists, neo-Marxists, flat earthers, Holocaust deniers, JFK conspiracy theorists, and UFO enthusiasts as well as the conventional left and the conventional right. Since I believe in capitalism and the marketplace of ideas, I say let everyone speak and the truth will emerge.
Thanks for the links RE: life expectancy. My sources had been a few mainstream news sites that (at least nothing as obviously biased as "World Socialist Web Site"), but clearly they'd used cherry-picked data from researchers prone to gross generalisation.
One final word on bodycounts: true, capitalist countries have scarcely dispatched the poor to gas chambers or labour camps in great numbers - but on an individual level, the death penalty is administered in a less-than-fair manner.
Y'know, as much nauseating dreck as the US pumps out, I often find myself vehemently defending its cultural contributions to myopic snobs abroad. You needn't reach as far back as Melville or Thoreau, nor even the Lost Generation or jazz, to find meaningful contributions to the arts. America has been at the helm (or at least first mate) of cinema as an art since its inception. For every paperback toilet-roll flogged by Oprah's book club, there's an author like P.K. Dick, Vonnegut, or David Foster Wallace. Many of the most incendiary comedians, from Bruce to Pryor to Hicks to Chappelle, have been American. And don't even get me started on the music - funk, punk, hip-hop...
It's always been acceptable (if not fashionable) to decry America as a land of no culture, and it's always been patently false. To make the same critique of Brazil, or Australia, or Mexico would not only be dismissed as untrue, but would smack of racism.
Thanks to the digital dissemination of culture, there's a certain global cultural homogeneity according to class - which is the root of most of my complaining. (This was also the crux of the whole "hipsterism"/"minimal techno" conversation a while ago.) It's just a pity that most art produced outside of bourgeois metropolitan hubs is dismissed condescendingly as "folk art" of lesser skill or intrisic worth.
And yes, the great thing about these conversations is broadening the scope, both of one's own thoughts and the larger dialectic. There's always far too much back-slapping and self-congratulation amongst any political or cultural clique. There's nothing to lose and everything to gain from engaging as many dissenting views & diverse perspectives as possible.
By the way, it's funny that you should mention the "Balkanization" of America - this is something I've long considered a possibility, though not necessarily within my lifetime. I do wonder how a country as geophysically vast, with such a breadth of lifestyles, as the US can manage to remain unified. That it's done so thus far is a admirable.
As for the "Bush Doctrine," it's one of the more odd talking points signified by the American left (along with its misreading of the so-called "reality-based community"). I agree that it's a misnomer, though I consider the invasion for which it's named a very dangerous legal & military precedent to have been set.
Glad you liked the pics. It's a good means of keeping the pace brisk & the tone diplomatic.
I happen to work for a business which sells both life insurance and annuities. If U.S. life expectancy ever started declining, I'd be one of the first to know. As it is, we just added a "depression" scenario to our risk metrics (equity markets drop like a stone and then flatline for a decade). Even in that scenario, we didn't assume life expectancy would get worse, just that it would stop improving.
I totally agree with you about the death penalty. I certainly don't approve of the way Texas uses it. My own opinion is that it should exist for people whose guilt is obvious and undisputed and who are so dangerous that even imprisonment is too great a risk. (Jeffrey Dahmer, Milwaukee's resident cannibal, didn't kill a fellow prisoner; he got killed himself. But it could easily have gone the other way. I'd have been fine with executing Dahmer had Wisconsin had the death penalty. Charlie Manson is another, had he not been saved by the Supreme Court, and I'm okay with the execution of Timothy McVeigh. But not with Ricky Ray Rector.) However, with the death penalty, you're talking about a hundred to two hundred people a year. It would take millions of years at that rate to reach Communism's toll.
And certainly cinema is what the U.S. will be known for culturally. People keep talking up various French films, but every time I finally see it, it's just pretentious rubbish. Of course, good films do exist in non-Anglo countries (giving Britain and even Canada their due, of course), e.g. Kurosawa and many others. (On a side note, I always considered punk to have been primarily English. However, now that I look at it, the Ramones do seem to predate the Sex Pistols, although I'm not sure who published first.)
And I do think the Balkanization of the U.S. will happen eventually, though I am talking about centuries in the future. Nobody's going to secede so they can teach their kids creationism. The breakup of the U.S. won't happen during my lifetime, but I've read too much history to think it will never happen at all. The U.S. has already dodged one bullet (slavery) and had to purge this land with blood. It would be hopelessly utopian to think that the U.S. will continue to hold together for all eternity.
I think most people agree with you and Charlie Gibson that the "Bush Doctrine" means pre-emptive war. However, it was originally used to refer to unilateralism on the ABM, Kyoto, etc., later used to refer to Bush's statement that the U.S. would not distinguish between terrorists and those who harbor them, later used for pre-emptive war, and finally used for Bush's claim that the U.S. should be a global crusader for democracy. So when people talk about the Bush Doctrine, I generally assume that they're referring to pre-emptive war since that's the most popular definition, but I never really know. I suspect Gibson didn't even realize that the term has been used in so many different ways. Of course, it wasn't clear that Sarah Palin was familiar with any of those ways, which, if true, would show a surprising ignorance of national politics.
Post a Comment