Tag Archives: Podemos

Contemporary Britain, a country dominated by Nietzsche’s untermensch (under men)

Economics, Neo-Liberal economics, Philosophy, scepticism, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Nietzsche hated democracy because it makes possible the rule of the common man and the suppression of the superman. A term that Nietzsche uses to describe the common man is untermensch or underman, a term which was open to misunderstanding and abuse. What he meant by the untermensch was a man who lacked the potential to live the life of a ubermensch or superman. What was never understood was that for Nietzsche the distinction was based on intellect and character, not power or physical strength. Originally he named the saint, artist and philosopher as his supermen. Even his dislike of Christianity as the religion of slaves did not stop him admiring Christ as a possible superman. He admired Christ as a founder of a religion but despised Christians for slavishly following the beliefs of another. What I think is most useful is his description of the untermensch as those in thrall to a slavish culture. People incapable of independent thought. When I look at the British parliament and the legislatures of other Western nations it seems obvious that we live in an age of the untermensch.

What the untermensch share is a slavish adherence to a common culture which means that politicians of whatever political stripe, will all give the same replies to questions on policy. These are a few examples which demonstrate this clearly.

In Britain the housing market is broken and many people are forced to live in private rental sector. Properties in which they have no security of tenure and for which they pay ever increasingly exorbitant rents. Whenever it is suggested that these tenants should be given security of tenure or have their rents controlled, the same parrot cry comes from politicians, whether of the parliamentary left or right, that such controls would only make matters worse. They claim that such controls would force landlords to withdraw from the market, reducing the number of properties for rent and so making the situation worse for tenants.

Britain’s railways are the most expensive and some of the least efficient in Europe. When it is suggested that these railways should be taken out of private ownership and returned to the state, it meets with howls of derision from the collective parliamentary body. Everybody in parliament knows that the state is peculiarly unfitted to run business and businesses such as the railways are best left in private hands. The solution to the problem is as every parliamentarian knows is to transfer the railway franchises to more efficient private owners.*

There are many other examples of the politicians collective thought that could be mentioned. What is common to these practitioners of politics is a hatred of those that think independently, they expel or seek to suppress from the collectivity of politicians those who think differently. At present the parliamentary Labour party is seeking to purge itself of a leader who thinks differently. A glance at the politics of contemporary Europe provides evidence that those who think differently have no place in the mainstream political parties, they have to come from insurgent parties such as Podemos in Spain or The Five Star movement in Italy.

One common place truth of contemporary political analysis is that the political elites have lost touch with the people. It is a resentful and sullen people that turn to the populist parties of the right. These parties at leas recognise the pain of the people, something that the political parties of the left fail to do. Durkheim called socialism a cry of pain, the parliamentary socialist parties of today no longer this truth. Rather than ignoring the people, parliamentarians are following a culture that denies the validity of other expressions of the truth other than its own. Truths that might appear obvious to the people are to politicians merely uninformed opinions.

Another demonstration of the untermensch mentality is the slavish following of opinion polls. Rather than leading, politicians prefer to follow, all to often they are prepared to abandon their principles because the people as expressed a different views to theirs in an opinion poll and the peoples will  must be respected. Never do they consider that they are elected to lead the country, they prefer to follow.

The language of politics is so often that of the untermensch. One of our most popular newspapers is said to ensure that all of its content can understood by the average thirteen year. It does not tax its readers with difficult text or content. Similarly our leading politicians prefer the language of the thirteen year old which are  expressed in what are meaningless phrases or slogans. Our current Prime Minister is campaigning for re-election with a series of simple phrases, such as that she will provide ‘strong and stable government’ as opposed to the opposition who represent a ‘coalition of chaos’. She it seems feels no need to present a detailed and reasoned manifesto to the electorate.  A vague and rather meaningless manifesto will suffice and that is all she and her advisors believe is necessary is a few repeated slogans to get out the vote.

Defenders of the present political system will argue that the overwhelming majority of parliamentarians not only went to university, but elite universities and got good degrees. However the very intelligent can be members of the untermensch, as its a mentality or way of thinking and it is as much about  character as intellect. Politicians rarely stray beyond the party line or parliamentary consensus of views, they sacrifice their individuality on the altar of group think. What Nietzsche’s supermen do is to challenge the conventional thinking of the time. When politicians continually speak and think in the language of the average thirteen year old, it cannot but deform their personalities. What at first becomes a means of communicating with the masses through does through constant repetition become incorporated within their personality. They take some of the characteristics of what they affect to despise, the common or under man.

While I think that Nietzsche’s understanding of British democracy is correct today, it has not always been the case that the British parliament promotes the mediocre at the expense of the talented. Today parliament has been overtaken by the culture of the untermensch, whether its expressed in terms of loyalty to the one’s party, obedience to the will of the people or submission to the dominant Westminster belief system. In previous times there has been a much more vigorous culture at Westminster, one in which individualist thinkers could thrive and even achieve the highest office. What is needed is an ending of the stranglehold on Westminster culture of the parties of the consensus, then politicians of an independent mindset will begin to flourish there.

There are those who will have a different understanding of Nietzsche’s concept of the superman. Mine derives from the earlier writings of Nietzsche, as his understanding of the superman did change in his later writings. Obviously those who have read ‘The Will to Power’ a book created by his sister out of his notes will have a very different understanding. Personally I think that this understanding of Nietzsche’s superman is invalid and of little intrinsic merit.

* Any independent minded economist could easily expose the flaws in such thinking.

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Les Miserables and the economics of revolution

economic history, Economics, politics, , , , , ,

  
http://www.dailytelegragh.co
Towards the end of the film ‘Les Miserables’ there is a very moving scene in which the young radical students who rose in revolt against the government are shot by the police. The revolt is doomed to failure as they fail to gain the support of the wider Parisian population and the authorities are easily able to suppress this uprising. This is the popular perception of revolution, that is a futile uprising by the young against the tyranny of the old order one that is easily put down by the authorities. Any history of the 19th century consists of a long list of failed uprising, the Poles in particular participated in number of uprisings against their Russian overlords, all of which ended in its participants being imprisoned or going into exile. However this is a misunderstanding of the nature of revolution, the successful ones usually don’t involve violence and generally take place over a number of years. What I mean by revolution is the shift in people’s attitudes that can be best described as a sea change in their behaviour and attitudes. 
Revolution of the Right
Often this type of revolution is initiated by the right, as instanced by the successful revolution by the right against the welfare state. If Britain is taken as an example when the welfare state was introduced it was seen as a bulwark against the twin evils of sickness and unemployment. It was seen as an individual right that the state should provide an income for those unemployed through sickness or bad luck. The political right in Britain never really concealed their dislike of the welfare state principally because they saw it as an injustice, that the rich were expected to pay more tax than the poor to fund welfare programmes. They ceaselessly campaigned against the iniquities of the welfare state. Now they have practically succeeded, welfare payments are now seem as benefits to a group of undesirables the work shy. The emphasis now is on reducing benefits and targeting the claimants with sanctions to force them into work. Only last week the welfare minister announced to general a claim that he would target the disabled forcing more of them to take work, through making it harder to claim benefits and by reducing individual welfare payments. The assumption is that by making life progressively more difficult for them, they will take up employment to avoid the unpleasantness of life on benefit. As one who has worked with disabled people, I can only see this minister as an uncaring monster largely lacking the human traits of empathy and compassion.
Now the philosophies of such as Ayn Rand are the guides to life for the decision makers in society. While it may seem harsh to suggest that a writer who would welcome the death by starvation of hundreds of the useless poor provides the distorting ideological glass through which these people view the world, evidence suggests otherwise. Recently our rulers withdrew the Royal Navy from the task of rescuing refugees adrift in the Mediterranean, on the grounds that by making the journey across the sea safe it would encourage migrants to attempt the crossing. The unspoken assumption was that if some refugees drowned at sea it would discourage the rest from trying to enter Europe. This policy was not questioned by any of the opposition leaders, so demonstrating that the spirit of Ayn Rand flows through our the veins of all our political leaders. Now it is ‘cool’ to be uncaring, as this is regarded as hard nosed realism, as distinct from the naive sensitivity of the political left. 

Revolutions of the Left

Unlike revolutions of the right which are initiated at the top of society, revolutions of the left are initiated by those in the middle and lower orders of society. This means that they are inevitably doomed to failure as the top orders of society command the instruments of power. The legal system can be directed against the insurgents. Imprisonment being but one of the means of suppressing such people. Yet such revolutions are not futile even if they end in defeat. They can despite their repeated failures change the nature of society and ultimately achieve their desired ends. This can be demonstrated through a metaphor, these revolutionary movements are as a wave from the sea smashing against a rock, the rock at first repulses the wave leaving it to fall back into the sea, yet the constant pounding sea will eventually destroy the rock. Similarly while the revolutionary movements of the left are initially doomed to failure, they can through insurgencies change society. By revolutionary surges I don’t mean violent revolution, so much as oppositional social movements which constantly rise and fall, but which eventually undermine the existing social structure, which leads to change.

The sea metaphor has further applications. British society at present resembles a placid sea but which under the surface there are currents swirling which can change the nature of the sea. One such current which has surfaced in the insurgency which threatens the Labour party. In the current elections to find a new leader it is the outsider Jeremy Corbyn who seems to have an unassailable lead in the contest. He represents a very different politics to that of the main stream party, a politics well to the left of the current parliamentary consensus. It is quite likely if elected his term as leader will be brief, as the parliamentary party will find means of rejecting a leader they don’t want. However he is representative of a much larger social movement, a left insurgency that rejects the harsh austerity programmes endorsed by the parliamentary party. This current which is sweeping through the party will change it whatever happens in the leadership contest. There are other similar examples of insurgency in Europe such Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece. Whether these individual insurgencies succeed or fail, what matters is that the initial process of undermining the unequal social order has begun.  
Then there is in the USA the ‘Fast Food Forward’ campaign whose aim is to secure a national minimum wage of $15 an hour, if it succeeds it will transform US society and economy, it is yet another insurgent movement. What these movements have in common is that they form outside the political system, as that system is constructed so as to prevent change, rather than facilitate it. Change of this significance will only take place in response to change from outside the political process. The established political process is dominated by the dogmatists who believe that the existing social and economic order is the the best possible one as it is founded on the universal truth of the free market. Politicians believe their only role is to implement changes to make the market system work more effectively, keep things as they are and if necessary repress those movements campaigning for change.

The economics of change and revolution

Society comprises of competing social groups with conflicting claims on its wealth. Rather than stable social order organised around one universal organising principle  that of the free market, it is a kaleidoscope of competing different groups all wanting very different orderings of the social system and its wealth. Society at best is the ring in which these groups compete, but according to rules of the competition.  Violence for example as a means of effecting change is ruled out. However if the dominant group refuses to recognise the legitimacy of the competing groups and tries to suppress them, violence will be resorted to as the social order or the rules of co-existence have been destroyed by the dominant social group.

Economics to have any relevance must be a dynamic subject one that can accept change, not a subject that believes that it has found the holy grail of social existence in the free market. It must recognise that the society of today can be very different from that of yesterday and so should accommodate that change. Economics cannot be a subject of universal truths, but one of partial truths, it must establish which of those truths in its current content list can be used in the study of different societies. A modest subject that seeks to find truths in very different economic and social systems, rather than have a universal blue print to which all societies and economic systems must conform. 

The Flawed Belief in TINA (there is no alternative)

economic history, Economics, Philosophy, Politics, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Today there was yet another article in my daily newspaper by a prominent politicians disparaging those on the political left that fail to recognise the realities of life and want to make impossible changes in society. This disparaged group who are abused as fantasists, protest voters but never by terms that suggest that their choices are made on the basis of rational judgement. The only surprise is that he did not suggest taking the vote away from these ‘childish’ voters. Actually one former leading politician did suggest that by suggesting that the vote for the new leader of the Labour Party should be sabotaged by the other candidates withdrawing so making the contest invalid. If this had happened the same politician would have advised on how to rig the voting mechanism to ensure the right person was elected.

costume-french-nobles-2

18th Century Aristocrats (counter-factual.net)
What is barely understood is that we are governed by an elite comparable to the landed aristocratic elite that dominated politics in the eighteenth century. This elite is composed of politicians, media persons, technocrats and financiers educated at the elite universities. (There are other groups that could be included but for brevity I have excluded them, what they all have in common is an education at one of the elite universities. It is this education that sets them apart from the rest of society.) What they practice is a policy of exclusion, only the dialogue between the members of this selected group is considered valid. They only listen to themselves, the rest of society is to be a childish rabble whose views and opinions are not worthy of consideration.

What I want to attack is the shared understanding of this group, an understanding which ‘things must be as they are’ or as it is more familiarly known TINA that is the society in which we live is the product of economic, social and technical forces that are beyond the control of individuals. What the politician must do is understand those forces making for change and work within the constraints imposed by them. Social democratic politicians recognise the pain of people working on zero hours contracts and that caused by job insecurity, but their role is not to change the cruel inequalities in society. Their task is to explain that low wages and job insecurity are a feature of modern society and must be accepted and that it is only through individual efforts at self improvement can circumstances change. The only amelioration they offer is the most modest of reforms, which will have little impact on there working lives. The social democratic party refuses to accept policies that would reduce or end job security by insisting that it is not the role of government to ensure that employers treat their employers well, what they instead offer is a way out of this appalling way of life through self improvement via education.

This new elite remains isolated by its adherence to things must be as there are ideology from the wider discontent in society. They believe that they are the ‘grown-ups’ in the words of Christine Lagarde (Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund). The new left in Greece (Syriza), Spain (Podemos) and Britain are childish fantasists trying to ignore the reality of the grown up world.

As a sceptical economist I must doubt such understanding of society I would ask why is it society is as it is? The reasons given are irreversible technological and social changes. Yet on examination they are only partial truths. Technological change has taken place but the distribution of incomes is determined by the social order. The company director in Britain earns a hundred times the salary of the average of the incomes of the employees in his business. In the 1960s the director’s salary was only 30 times greater than the average. Why the change, if the answer is that company directors have become more productive, that is open to objection. The profitability of companies as a return on capital invested in very similar to that of companies in the 1960s. The falsity of this view is demonstrated by the fact that in many failing businesses the directors are paid excessive salaries, how can huge salaries be justified for such corporate dimwits?

What as the sceptical economist I would say that there are different reasons for gross income inequality. While it cannot be doubted that some income differentials are due to technical change in that information technology has made many former skilled occupations redundant, the growing prevalence of the low wage culture has origins elsewhere. One is custom and tradition which decrees that unskilled occupations only deserving of low incomes.There is one interesting example which demonstrates this fact. When at university I read a book on applied economics by a Professor Brown and one example from that book sticks in my mind. He stated that the evidence suggested that wage differential between craftsmen and unskilled labourers had remained the same since Roman times. This suggests to me that much the justification of current income differentials comes from custom and tradition and does not reflect the real contribution each employee makes to the business. Why should the cleaner or the sales assistant be paid so little?

The other factor is power, the financial and industrial elites have cited custom and tradition as the reasons for low pay. Their mantra is unskilled staff make such a small individual contribution to the businesses profitability that they are only deserving of low pay. Yet I have never read of any study which has successfully identified the contribution to the firms productivity of say the cleaner and the financial director, yet the salary of the latter is more than that of the former. Businesses are a collaborative venture in which it is impossible to identify the contribution that each individual makes to the success of the business. Is the cleaner really that unproductive? It is the cleaner that maintains the workplace as a clean and healthy environment in which to work. Dirty toilets and uncleaned washrooms would lead to outbreaks of illnesses associated with unhygienic environments. How productive would the company director or IT specialist be if struck down by dysentery? There is good reason to suggest that cleaners are vastly underpaid, yet employers continue to pay the minimal wages.

Governments have enabled this power grab by the business elite by passing legislation to weaken or destroy those organisations that are the only means of equalising power in unequal labour market. Ever since the Neo-Liberal revolution politicians have constantly weakened the power of those groups that threaten the power of the over mighty employer. In Britain it has meant the emasculation of the one powerful trade union movement, changes in the law now make it very difficult for the unions to effectively organise industrial action. Therefore there is little restraint on the employer who wishes to pay as little as possible to his staff. It is no coincidence that some of the most profitable businesses with the highest paid directors in Britain have been the supermarkets an industry where low pay and job insecurity are endemic.

Scepticism as a philosophy is misunderstood, sceptics don’t believe are no truths, in that all philosophies or ideologies are fallacious. Instead it is the belief that in subjecting an ideology, philosophy or belief system to sceptical enquiry the truths it contains can be discovered it is the stripping away of error.

Being a sceptic is not contrary to a belief that society can be improved through reform, it is just a scepticism about the nature of such much contemporary reform, reforms whose fundamental truths are based on custom, tradition and exploitation of market power. I am a left of centre sceptic who believes in the superiority of left of centre ideology because it contains less wrongs than the alternatives and that with its emphasis on fairness those wrongs are likely to be less damaging to humanity than the wrongs of alternatives that exclude any notion of fairness. A sceptic also favours democracy as in a democracy there are always contending philosophies and ideologies as the proponents of each that will be subjecting each to scrutiny and through that many of the errors of policy associated with the mono-thought of the Neo Liberal world view can be avoided.

Unlike the interchangeable Neo-Liberals and New Keynesians who dominate the political process with their uniformity of view, I want a political culture that recognises many ideologies and philosophies as valid and that a recognition the aim of politics is not to destroy the opposition but to create a political culture in which many views can thrive. Contemporary politicians are so assured of the rightness of their beliefs that they cannot concede that they may wrong. They are as in Christine Lagarde’s word the grown ups who understand reality and who don’t indulge in childish fantasies. What a sceptic would say is that any believers in any ideology that denies it contains any errors or wrongs are the childish and naive ones.