News have been quick to spread that Andrius Tapinas of Laisvės TV has organised a 5 million Euro crowdfunding campaign of buying a Bayraktar combat aerial vehicle (commonly referred to as a drone) for the Ukraine military in support of its war with Russia. People in Lithuania were actively urged to participate and donate. The crowd-funder was a success and by 2022-05-28 the goal had been reached in 3,5 days. Here I would like to raise an issue with the current campaign that applies more broadly to “voluntary pooling” of resources.
Undoubtedly, military conflict and war demands huge resources and finances. War means destitution for many while being a lucrative opportunity for a select few. Nevertheless, this post is not regarding the general connection of money and war. Criticisms of crowdfunding a purchase of military equipment might:
Raise moral concerns as it is “never right to support war”;
That one should spend the money in peaceful, perhaps domestic, perhaps humanitarian ways;
That one should not support another autocratic regime of Recep Tayip Erdogan in Turkey and it’s military-industrial complex by purchasing Turkish guns.
All of the criticisms above pale in significance when compared to another issue – the lack of progressivity of financing the effort. This aspect is actually dangerous to Putin, Erdogan, Ukraine’s own oligarchs as well as Western business and economic “elites” which is why it is not and will not be widely discussed.
Hype-funding the Bayraktar in particular and crowdfunding in general is not sustainable. With inflation eating into people’s incomes and their savings, with ever-increasing prices of real estate that are reaching astronomical levels, asking those same people to donate seems obscene given the context of increasing wealth-stratification and inequality. Crowdfunding is almost always regressive as poorer people commit a larger share of their finances than richer ones. The only proper way of financing any social endeavor, including defense, is by demanding a larger share from the wealthy, which is most effectively achieved by income and wealth taxation. The focus should lay on millionaires like Matijošaitis, Numavičius and others starting at the list of the wealthiest in Lithuania.
The argument also applies to food banks that are logically, though absurdly, situated in huge supermarkets. The corporations conveniently dodge attention and get hailed as socially-responsible business for allowing social campaigns inside while regular people continue to be hounded and/or shamed into donating. This same can be said regarding platforms such as GoFundMe that cannot and must not be a substitute for a proper social support system.
Speaking more generally, social equality is a necessary condition for peace and stability. This has been known for at least a hundred years – just note the post-war policy considerations at the end of WWII for imperial Japan:
In 1943 and 1945, American researchers assessed that the low distribution of wealth to Japanese industrial workers and farmers had stunted domestic consumption and driven overseas economic expansionism. This was now to be addressed by labor reorganization with higher wages that would promote domestic consumption and facilitate demilitarization. Economic democratization and leveling were not ends in themselves: the underlying policy goal was to combat militarism by restructuring features of the economy that might be conducive to overseas aggression.
Walter Scheidel (2017, p. 67) – The Great Leveler
Thomas Piketty develops the argument further and proposes an antidote:
Whatever the wealthy of the Belle Époque (1880–1914) may have thought to the contrary, extreme inequality was not the necessary price of prosperity and industrial development. Indeed, all signs are that the excessive concentration of wealth exacerbated social and nationalist tensions while blocking the social and educational investments that made the balanced postwar development model possible. Furthermore, the increased concentration of wealth that we have seen since the 1980s in the United States, Russia, India, and China and to a lesser extent in Europe shows that extreme wealth inequality can reconstitute itself for many different reasons, from profiteering on privatizations to the fact that large portfolios earn higher returns than small ones, without necessarily yielding higher growth for the majority of the population— far from it.
To prevent a return to such extreme wealth concentration, progressive taxes on inheritances and income must again play the role that they used to play in the twentieth century when rates in the United States and United Kingdom ran as high as 70–90 percent on the highest incomes and largest fortunes for decades—decades in which growth rose to unprecedented levels. Historical experience shows, however, that inheritance and income taxes alone are not enough; they need to be complemented by a progressive annual tax on wealth, which I see as the central tool for achieving true circulation of capital.
Thomas Piketty (2020, p. 702) – Capital And Ideology
Inequality regimes do not last forever as Scheidel and Piketty explain. The wealthy will pay their fair share – this will happen either in a peaceful manner with significant (one might call exproriation-level) progressive income and wealth tax rates or in massively violent conflicts and political instability. Unfortunately, in the past levelling happened only as a consequence of great violence. I surely would like to see us going the peaceful route for once, but at the moment that prospect does not seem likely.
The 24th of February, 2022 marked the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. This is a disturbing continuation of NATO-Russian tensions in the 21st century – previously we have seen the Russo-Georgian War in 2008, the 2014 Euromaidan protests and the Revolution of Dignity, the subsequent annexation of Crimea and the occupation of Donetsk and Luhansk.
Even though I’m speaking from a Eastern European NATO country, I would like us not get sunk into the simplified mainstream narrative that NATO is “good” and Russia is “bad”. Statements that the war is caused by one “mad man” (Vladimir Putin) fulfilling personal ambitions are perhaps telling, but such psychologizations are no explanations. As painful as it is, we are dealing with human behavior and human behavior always happens because of material/physical reasons.
We cannot allow ourselves to consider the current events as a mere unfortunate sequence of events but rather we should see them as unavoidable given the socio-economic condition of western and Russian societies. I’ll try to demonstrate why.
Brief preliminaries
From the leftist point of view all wars are a disaster. The tragedy first and foremost is experienced by the people of Ukraine, both lives and cities being turned into rubble. Beyond the direct effects, any prospects for peace, equality or “green” politics fade away.
While the active belligerents in the war are Russia and Ukraine, the conflict may be seen as the collision of interests of two major blocks of capital – Russian and Western. I believe the economic dimension bears the most clarity on the situation, after all:
War is a racket.
Smedley Butler (1935)
Let’s take a closer look at the warring sides:
Russia
I would like to visit some comments from Thomas Piketty and Naomi Klein regarding Russia’s socio-economic and political condition. One will find that the country is in a rather miserable state – the political dimension is under the hands of a oligarchic dictatorship, huge resources are spent on militarisation and the security apparatus while Russian society experiences deep income/wealth inequalities, rampant alcoholism, an HIV epidemic etc.
Let’s begin with Piketty’s analysis of the inequality situation in Russia:
Today, the postcommunist societies of Russia, China, and to a certain extent Eastern Europe (despite their different historical trajectories) have become hypercapitalism’s staunchest allies. (p. 13)
The world’s largest fortunes have grown since 1980 at even faster rates than the world’s top incomes <..> Great fortunes grew extremely rapidly in all parts of the world: among the leading beneficiaries were Russian oligarchs, Mexican magnates, Chinese billionaires, Indonesian financiers, Saudi investors, Indian industrialists, European rentiers, and wealthy Americans. In the period 1980–2018, large fortunes grew at rates three to four times the growth rate of the global economy. Such phenomenal growth cannot continue indefinitely, unless one is prepared to believe that nearly all global wealth is destined to end up in the hands of billionaires. Nevertheless, the gap between top fortunes and the rest continued to grow even in the decade after the financial crisis of 2008 at virtually the same rate as in the two previous decades, which suggests that we may not yet have seen the end of a massive change in the structure of the world’s wealth. (p. 26)
After three-quarters of a century as a country that had abolished private property, Russia now stood out as the home of the new oligarchs of offshore wealth—that is, wealth held in opaque entities with headquarters in foreign tax havens: in the game of global tax evasion, Russia became a world leader. More generally, postcommunism in its Russian, Chinese, and East European variants has today become hypercapitalism’s best ally. It has also inspired a new kind of disillusionment, a pervasive doubt about the very possibility of a just economy, which encourages identitarian disengagement. (p. 419)
In contrast to the Soviet Union, a “society of petty thieves,” postcommunist Russia is a society of oligarchs engaged in grand larceny of public assets. (p. 431)
Thus, in less than ten years, from 1990 to 2000, postcommunist Russia went from being a country that had reduced monetary inequality to one of the lowest levels ever observed to being one of the most inegalitarian countries in the world.
The rapidity of postcommunist Russia’s transition from equality to inequality between 1990 and 2000—a transition without precedent anywhere else in the world according to the historical data in the WID.world database—attests to the uniqueness of Russia’s strategy for managing the transition from communism to capitalism. Whereas other communist countries such as China privatized in stages and preserved important elements of state control and a mixed economy (a gradualist strategy that one also finds in one form or another in Eastern Europe), Russia chose to inflict on itself the famous “shock therapy,” whose goal was to privatize nearly all public assets within a few years’ time by means of a “voucher” system (1991–1995). The idea was that Russian citizens would be given vouchers entitling them to become shareholders in a firm of their choosing. In practice, in a context of hyperinflation (prices rose by more than 2,500 percent in 1992) that left many workers and retirees with very low real incomes and forced thousands of the elderly and unemployed to sell their personal effects on the streets of Moscow while the government offered large blocks of stock on generous terms to selected individuals, what had to happen did happen. Many Russian firms, especially in the energy sector, soon fell into the hands of small groups of cunning shareholders who contrived to gain control of the vouchers of millions of Russians; within a short period of time these people became the country’s new “oligarchs.”
According to the classifications published by Forbes, Russia thus became within a few years the world leader in billionaires of all categories. In 1990, Russia quite logically had no billionaires, because all property was publicly owned. By the 2000s, the total wealth of Russian billionaires listed in Forbes amounted to 30–40 percent of the country’s national income, three or four times the level observed in the United States, Germany, France, and China. Also according to Forbes, the vast majority of these billionaires live in Russia, and they have done particularly well since Vladimir Putin came to power in the early 2000s. Note, moreover, that these figures do not include all the Russians who have accumulated not billions but merely tens or hundreds of millions of dollars; these Russians are far more numerous and more significant in macroeconomic terms. (p. 432)
Thomas Piketty (2020) – Capital And Ideology
Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has experienced spectacular leaps of privatisation, where the well-known stratum of oligarchs appeared. Naomi Klein furthers these points speaking about events in the 1990s and notices how western interests were implicated:
In Russia, the referendum was widely seen as a propaganda exercise, and a failed one at that. The reality was that Yeltsin and Washington were still stuck with a parliament that had the constitutional right to do what it was doing: slowing down the shock therapy transformation. An intense pressure campaign began. Lawrence Summers, then U.S. Treasury undersecretary, warned that “the momentum for Russian reform must be reinvigorated and intensified to ensure sustained multilateral support.” The IMF got the message, and an unnamed official leaked to the press that a promised $1.5 billion loan was being rescinded because the IMF was “unhappy with Russia’s backtracking on reforms.” Pyotr Aven, the former Yeltsin minister, said, “The maniacal obsession of the IMF with budgetary and monetary policy, and its absolutely superficial and formal attitude to everything else . . . played not a small role in what happened. (p. 226)
A clear signal from Washington or the EU could have forced Yeltsin to engage in serious negotiations with the parliamentarians, but he received only encouragement. Finally, on the morning of October 4, 1993, Yeltsin fulfilled his long-prescribed destiny and became Russia’s very own Pinochet, unleashing a series of violent events with unmistakable echoes of the coup in Chile exactly twenty years earlier. In what was the third traumatic shock inflicted by Yeltsin on the Russian people, he ordered a reluctant army to storm the Russian White House, setting it on fire and leaving charred the very building he had built his reputation defending just two years earlier. Communism may have collapsed without the firing of a single shot, but Chicago-style capitalism, it turned out, required a great deal of gunfire to defend itself: Yeltsin called in five thousand soldiers, dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers, helicopters and elite shock troops armed with automatic machine guns—all to defend Russia’s new capitalist economy from the grave threat of democracy. (p. 228)
But Russia wasn’t a repeat of Chile —it was Chile in reverse order: Pinochet staged a coup, dissolved the institutions of democracy and then imposed shock therapy; Yeltsin imposed shock therapy in a democracy, then could defend it only by dissolving democracy and staging a coup. Both scenarios earned enthusiastic support from the West. (p. 229)
When it was no longer possible to hide the failures of Russia’s shock therapy program, the spin turned to Russia’s “culture of corruption,” as well as speculation that Russians “aren’t ready” for genuine democracy because of their long history of authoritarianism. Washington’s think- tank economists hastily disavowed the Frankenstein economy they helped create in Russia, deriding it as “mafia capitalism”—supposedly a phenomenon peculiar to the Russian character. (p. 240)
Naomi Klein (2007) – The Shock Doctrine
All in all, Russia is a deeply unequal society – firstly politically but most importantly economically. Such unequal concentration of power never bodes well for citizens in the country and abroad.
Ukraine
Ukraine’s socio-economic fate following the fall of the Soviet Union was comparable to Russia. As is often the case for smaller countries, Ukraine with the rest of Eastern Europe is often discussed in the sphere of it’s dominating neighbor – Russia. The “Borderland” (literally Ukraine) is historically a heavily disputed and conflict ridden land. The local vocabulary attests to this:
To conclude our rapid schedule of the differences between the two peoples [Ukrainians and Russians], let us note that there has always been a certain animosity between them, as is often the case between Northerners and Southerners, and this has led them to give each other rather pejorative names like Katsapy (Russians) and sometimes Moscaly (Muscovites), and Khakly (Ukrainians).
Alexandre Skirda (2004, p. 9) – Nestor Makhno: Anarchy’s Cossack
Speaking more widely about nationalism in the 19th century:
A different sort of nationalism arose alongside and in opposition to this old variant, propagated from above both by old monarchies and by newer capitalist rulers. So Bismarck embraced a form of German nationalism; the Russian tsars tried to ‘Russify’ their Finnish, Ukrainian, Polish, and Turkic speaking subjects; the French upper classes attempted to direct people’s energies towards ‘revenge’ against Germany and enthusiasm for the conquest of North Africa and Indochina; and Britain’s rulers proclaimed their mission to ‘rule the waves’ and ‘civilise the natives’.
Chris Harman (1999, p. 400) – A Peoples History of the World
Returning to the economic aspect:
In some cases, such as the territories of the ex-Soviet Union and those countries in central Europe that submitted to neoliberal ‘shock therapy’, there have been catastrophic losses. During the 1990s, Russian per capita income declined at the rate of 3.5 per cent annually. A large proportion of the population fell into poverty, and male life expectancy declined by five years as a result. Ukraine’s experience was similar. Only Poland, which flouted IMF advice, showed any marked improvement.
David Harvey (2005, p. 153) – A Brief History of Neoliberalism
The background for conflict between Russian and Ukraine is economic and military divergence. Since at least 2014, Ukraine has been shifting towards the west and NATO. Without de jure joining, John Mearsheimer would even go so far as saying that de facto Ukraine was already a NATO member as there were military exercises in Ukraine with NATO troops prior to the 2022 war. Another interesting point made by Mearsheimer is regarding Ukraine as a border state. What if Canada or Mexico would make a perfectly legal agreement with China to bring weapons to US borders? Would it be taken lightly? The same can be applied in Ukraine and Russia.
Speaking about specific reasons for the current war, the following may be singled out:
Russian naval base in Sevastopol, Crimea. As mentioned above, Ukraine was closing in on NATO membership. For Russia, having a naval base in a NATO country would be hardly possible.
Oil reserves in Crimea and the Black Sea.
Ukraine’s steppes and the famous black soil (chernozem) – Ukraine is a significant producer and exporter of wheat and other food products.
Coal mines in the Donbas region.
Shale gas reserves in the Donbas region.
Forests in the territory of Ukraine.
Nuclear power plants – among them – Zaporizhzhia which is the most powerful in Europe.
Oil pipeline control.
The boiling point
To put the 21st century tensions into context, we may look back at the geopolitical situation a hundred years ago. Basically, the income and wealth inequalities – first of all in the Gulf Region, South Africa, Russia, the USA – are approaching the ones on the eve of World War I. The period called Belle Epoque (1870-1914) was marked by extreme levels of wealth concenration:
It was World War I that spelled the end of the so-called Belle Époque (1880–1914), which was belle only when compared with the explosion of violence that followed. In fact, it was belle primarily for those who owned property, especially if they were white males. If we do not radically transform the present economic system to make it less inegalitarian, more equitable, and more sustainable, xenophobic “populism” could well triumph at the ballot box and initiate changes that will destroy the global, hypercapitalist, digital economy that has dominated the world since 1990.
Thomas Piketty (2020, p. 9) – Capital And Ideology
One may note that before the Great War the Balkan region was called the geopolitical boiling pot – most famously depicted in the cartoon:
It would be naive to think that political and social issues in the Belle Epoque were not affected by wealth inequality. Given this context, imperialism, militarisation, nationalism and war seem inevitable.
In a similar vein, the western border region of Russia can be denoted as the the boiling point of our times. The current societal tensions and the Russian invasion of Ukraine should be understood as a consequence of income/wealth and power inequality. Even without Putin, the course of events would arguably be similar – as the Ukrainian presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych claims.
What does the future hold?
Turning our attention to future prospects, they should appear quite grim. In the context of vigorous spread of nationalistic rhetoric, increased military spending (e.g. 100 billion euro in Germany), widening public support in Finland and Sweden joining NATO, progressive political decisions, the ecological course and wealth redistribution does not seem upcoming.
Once again – behavior happens for a reason, including aggresive behavior. As I attempt to lay out in this post, conditions are ripe for that type of behavior. The times are worrying and without addressing fundamental economic problems we are speeding towards an abyss.
An interesting perspective on social power and the legal system is provided by the controversial French philosopher Michel Foucault. Let’s visit his views on courts and the implementation of popular justice and see them through the lens of radical behaviorism.
We must ask whether such acts of popular justice can or cannot be organised in the form of a court. Now my hypothesis is not so much that the court is the natural expression of popular justice, but rather that its historical function is to ensnare it, to control it and to strangle it, by re-inscribing it within institutions which are typical of a state apparatus. (p. 1)
What is this arrangement? [Of a court] A table, and behind this table, which distances them from the two litigants, the ‘third party’, that is, the judges. Their position indicates firstly that they are neutral with respect to each litigant, and secondly this implies that their decision is not already arrived at in advance, that it will be made after an aural investigation of the two parties, on the basis of a certain conception of truth and a certain number of ideas concerning what is just and unjust, and thirdly that they have the authority to enforce their decision. This is ultimately the meaning of this simple arrangement. Now this idea that there can be people who are neutral in relation to the two parties, that they can make judgments about them on the basis of ideas of justice which have absolute validity, and that their decisions must be acted upon, I believe that all this is far removed from and quite foreign to the very idea of popular justice. (p. 8)
Here the problem becomes very difficult. It is from the point of view of property that there are thieves and stealing. (p. 36)
Michel Foucault (1980) – Power. Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977
Stated succinctly, Foucault identifies three aspects of the arrangement of a court:
The court is a third neutral party besides the litigants
Decisions are implemented by virtue and by reference to objective truth, justice, fairness, common sense
The court has a backing – power to enforce the judgement
What can be said about these aspects from the RBL perspective?
Third neutral element
The proclaimed neutrality of courts is hardly possible. One must remember that the parties, their struggles, the court itself all don’t exist in a vacuum. The institutions, the political situation, socio-economic conditions form a system that inevitably affect the actors. One has to ask who is in power, what enables and maintains the courts and their functioning. We can see that laws in modern western “democracies” are heavily in favour for property rights – Thomas Piketty calls this neo-proprietarian ideology.
Speaking about judges, they also act in accordance to their environment and context. There is always a long individual process of education and work – this results in a significant filter in possible judge behavior. Jobs in the legal system always require a law degree and the education system tends to favor the already more well-off. The conditioning along the way, the written laws and any Constitution which form the foundation for legal judgement do not make a progressive mechanism.
Basically, a neutral side is a preposterous notion. Herman & Chomsky (2002) have something to say about this in Manufacturing Consent regarding the media, but the same can be applied to the courts:
A propaganda model also helps us to understand how media personnel adapt, and are adapted, to systemic demands. Given the imperatives of corporate organization and the workings of the various filters, conformity to the needs and interests of privileged sectors is essential to success. In the media, as in other major institutions, those who do not display the requisite values and perspectives will be regarded as “irresponsible,” “ideological,” or otherwise aberrant, and will tend to fall by the wayside. While there may be a small number of exceptions, the pattern is pervasive, and expected. Those who adapt, perhaps quite honestly, will then be free to express themselves with little managerial control, and they will be able to assert, accurately, that they perceive no pressures to conform. The media are indeed free—for those who adopt the principles required for their “societal purpose.”
Herman & Chomsky (2002) – Manufacturing Consent (p. 272)
Objective justice
As with neutrality, no such thing as an all-encompassing “objective” justice, as in separate from any person or system, can exist. We are once again dealing with human behavior and only behavior. The philosophical notions, i.e. Platonian ideals are true only in the eye of the observer (or the behaver in our case). Every person has a history and behavior happens because of this history of reinforcement.
Unavoidably implicit in the objectivity scheme is the definition of “crime”, i.e. what’s legal and what’s not. The question to ask here – who determines which behavior is a punishable crime and which isn’t. Why is stealing from a store a crime while wage labour where most of the created value is appropriated by capital owners is not? An answer suggests itself – power (most often economic) dictates what is legal, objective, just, fair etc. We can once again turn to a fitting quote:
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
Anatole France (1894) – Le Lys rouge
One may return to the last sentence of the Foucault citation above. People experience different economic conditions, different contexts, different pressures. Even though we “equally” apply the same laws to everyone, this will have non-equal effects. It is convenient for the “haves” to label some of the “have-nots” as thieves and we must see this as a defensive mechanism. Both the origin of property and the definition of property should not be overlooked. To keep things simple here, let Varoufakis do the talking:
Wealth is like a language.
Yanis Varoufakis (2020) – Another Now: Dispatches From An Alternative Present (p. 47)
Power relations
Finally, there are at least two relations of power required in the functioning of any court. I would like to designate an individual blog post on power, but for now it might be understood as the possibility of controlling not only the availability of ones own reinforcers (of course behavior is reinforced, not organisms), but also the availability of reinforcers and punishers for others – power is behavior control.
First is the power to enforce decisions – there has to be an apparatus stronger than both litigants to make sure the judgement is followed. In practice though, the court might not be stronger than a party in court, as some corporations are actually larger than individual countries. In any case, the state which requires a legal system is itself ruled by more wealthy interests and businesses (also called capital). Perhaps we need a reminder of problems with elections and their results.
The second power relation is more philosophical. In the three party arrangement, the court is placed above the litigants with it’s own set of criteria of justice. The resolution is that of the court and the parties must agree to the process and result. We already established that the criteria depend on individual context – the legal system does not allow a flexible way of contesting the rules of the court.
In the quoted interview, Foucault layed out illuminating insight into the court arrangement. These excursions into philosophy under influence of a radical behaviorist philosophy seems to me as a fruitful endeavour and I have no doubt there will be much more such commentary in the future.
The election season is again upon us – this year’s parliamentary elections in Lithuania and the presidential elections in the US (2020-11-03) are only two of the more prominent examples for me. It is almost inevitable that in our democracies once elections are near, one will hear vigorous repeated statements of the importance of voting. There will be no better time to examine the context and implications of such outings. Let’s start at the relationship of elections and democracy:
Democracy and elections are improperly conflated.
The first problem we have to consider is how political power is allegedly implemented in our countries. Most of this is covered in this Guardian article Why elections are bad for democracy. A point worth to make again is the absurdity that elections are included in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
(3) The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) – Article 21
Why is the particular way to express the will of the people included in these so called “universal” laws? Is it implied that other systems are not allowed or automatically worse? Furthermore, is the current electoral system the best system we could come up with with current technology? Are elections, i.e. going to the voting booth once every other year a good system to know the political position of most people, to empower most people politically? Some questions beg the answer and these certainly suggest a resounding “No”.
Elections contain additional problems – who determines the lists of candidates or the questions of referenda? The repertoire of possible behavior is as important as the behaviors themselves. When people don’t have power in controlling the questions posed, what kind of “choice” in any liberal sense is this? The cherry on top is that the elected officials have no obligation to do as they said or “promised” in their election campaigns – whatever is proclaimed, the same is afterwards discarded. Thomas Piketty adds:
First, equal political rights are illusory when the news media are captured by the power of money, which gives the wealthy control over minds and political ideology and thus tends to perpetuate inequality. The second criticism is closely related to the first: political equality remains purely theoretical if the way political parties are financed allows the wealthy to influence political platforms and policies.
Thomas Piketty (2020) – Capital And Ideology (p. 451-452)
Despite all this, let’s say elections are a good way to implement democracy and ensure the will of the people. We come to another problem:
Decisions are not made in the political sphere:
According to the words of the president of the German Bundestag and former German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble in one of the (still) unrecorded Eurogroup meetings retold by Yanis Varoufakis in this video:
Elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy.
Wolfgang Schäuble (2015) as reported by Yanis Varoufakis
So, on the one hand we have pompous declarations of the importance of elections, of critical decisions made, turning-points, while in Realpolitik behind closed doors (no wonder one of Varoufakis books is called Adults in the Room) it is admitted otherwise. Most important decisions are made by the rich and powerful, while elections are a facade to mask this.
Once again, despite this, let’s say decisions are made in the political sphere and affected by elections. We encounter yet another problem regarding the nature of the decisions.
Economic/political decisions are predominantly made according to the interests of the richest.
Most middle-income Americans think that public officials do not care much about the preferences of “people like me.” Sadly, the results presented above suggest they may be right. Whether or not elected officials and other decision makers “care” about middle-class Americans, influence over actual policy outcomes appears to be reserved almost exclusively for those at the top of the income distribution.
Gilens (2005) – Inequality and Democratic Responsiveness (p. 794)
Therefore for the first time for Germany we could show that political decisions correspond with the attitudes of higher income groups with a higher probability, whereas for low income groups either no systemic correspondence can be shown or even a negative relationship.
Elsässer, Hense & Schäfer (2016) – Systematisch verzerrte Entscheidungen? Die Responsivität der deutschen Politik von 1998 bis 2015 (p. 42)
Research has shown that both parties [Republicans and Democrats] tend to respond more to the preferences of elites than to those of more modest voters.
Thomas Piketty (2020) – Capital and Ideology (p. 619)
So much for the liberal fetishization of round-table discussions where all interested parties (stakeholders in corporate parlance) sit and work out the course of actions most beneficial for all. We can go so far and say that any discussions of public interest that take interests of the powerful into account (in other words of private interests) are already lost. The best example here would be policy change agreements with the smoking or alcohol industry.
In simpler words, we see that rich groups get what they want, while poor or even middle-income groups have practically no say in politics. This is a proper place to mention the infamous and thorny issue of populism that is discussed in Paul Schreyer’s (2018) book Die Angst der Eliten (The Fear of the Elites). Populism is most often presented as a big evil, that it’s seeking cheap popularity. But come to think of it – what’s in essence wrong with representing the interests of the many, of the ordinary people? Shouldn’t democracy be the rule of the people? Shouldn’t the interests of the weak be defended against strong, against the overpowered businesses and corporations?
Despite this, let’s say then that decisions that are made in the political sphere are adequate and represent the views and attitudes of most people. We meet, finally, the “Go vote!” crowd. Now, as we have established the context, the futility of this discourse should be clear.
Calls to vote always carry an implicit meaning of a “correct” candidate
We have all heard this – voting is presented as the most important civic duty. Claims include both that it is a right/a privilege and a duty (paradoxically). Specifically one can hear: “let’s create the country together”, “every vote counts”, “the almighty pen” etc.
Beyond this, we have the actual invitations to go and make a decision and vote. But things are stranger than they appear – explicitly or implicitly an additional meaning is lurking. One has to make the correct choice, vote for the “normal” candidate, not vote for the minorities, not vote for the populists etc. More egregious statements include saying that minorities, old people, people from rural areas vote nonsensically and don’t know what they are voting for. We can discover even that the youth votes correctly and they should drug their grandparents or take their IDs away to prevent them from voting.
Surprisingly, this often comes from self-proclaimed liberals. All of these things are radically different from the declarations to “make one’s own mind and decisions”. This is the highest level of cynicism – while adamantly preaching that there is free will, that people decide for themselves, the same pundits assert that there are correct decisions in elections or referenda.
Nevertheless, let’s say that statements as “go vote” have no implicit meaning to vote for the “correct” candidates/parties. That still leaves us with a problem that takes us back to the beginning:
Voting is presented as the only proper way to participate in politics.
“You vote, you have your say” – right? People are encouraged to vote, while not encouraged or actively discouraged to take part in unions, local communities, to protest, strike because it is bad for the economy, employers, finances etc. Furthermore, we have this:
The next point is especially important: it is striking to note that turnout rates are linked to inequality. Turnout remains high among socially advantaged voters but declines among less advantaged voters.
Thomas Piketty (2020) – Capital and Ideology (p. 536)
Declining turnout rates among the non-privileged in society removes any doubt from the fact that their interests are not adequately taken into account. Of course, the only response from the liberal pundits and apologists is to blame the people themselves – “no voting, no bitching”, without looking into the reasons why voting turnout might be low.
We come to the following conclusions – what is the worth of this so called “freedom” and “democracy” when voting doesn’t really matter, policy is decided not by the people, communities, but by the richest and most powerful. The only illustration needed here is that political “leaders” go to the yearly economic conference DAVOS for consultations from businessmen and capital owners.
How can we claim, finally, that we live in democracies when most of our waking time is spent in totalitarian dictatorships that we call our workplaces? Even if elections mattered, can political power exercised a few times every few years instead be called a functioning democracy? Piketty agrees:
What is more, traditional representative mechanisms need to be complemented by arrangements allowing for true deliberation and participation rather than just casting a ballot every four or five years.
Thomas Piketty (2020) – Capital and Ideology (p. 455)
As Yanis Varoufakis says: our times are of Twin Authoritarianism – the Liberal Establishment on the one side and the Nationalist International on the other. Thomas Piketty (2020) refers to these as Brahmin Left and Merchant Right.
In this short post, I would like to provide an observation about the Nationalist International that sometimes is called alt-right. This movement can be recognized by nationalist policies, homophobia, “family values”, “taking one’s country back” (as Reagan, Trump, Brexit etc.), as well as ultra-rich donors hiding behind the scenes. What is interesting, is that this side often peddles to the views of the unprivileged people. The rhetoric is often brazen and direct. Among various nonsense, they talk about oligarchs controlling the government or media, mention failures of the system, they also identify the helplessness and hopelessness of the people and the systemic inability of the liberal establishment to improve the quality of life of most people. These are basically the things that many people in the context of deepening inequality so desperately want to hear. Alas, the nationalist international are not saviours as it stems from a very rich background and only represent the interests of the privileged.
Now, this post is no way a promotion of the right wingers, nor of the liberals, because it is true that they are incapable of properly addressing inequality issues – both liberals and nationalists are different sides of the same establishment coin. Nevertheless, it seems interesting to me, to listen to what the right-wingers sometimes say.
Christian Lüth
The first example, is the former press officer of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party in Germany – Christian Lüth. Let’s see his statements from the documentary Rechts. Deutsch. Radikal, and reported in this Zeit article (from German):
The worse it is for Germany, the better it is for the AfD.
If everything went fine <…>, then the AfD would be at 3%. That’s not what we want. Therefore, we have to come up with a strategy: How bad can it be for Germany? And: How can we provoke it? It is so. <..> It’s difficult, very difficult.
It does seem so, that it would be in your interest, that more migrants came? Lüth’s answer: “Yes. Because then it goes better for the AfD. Afterwards, we can shoot all of them. That is no problem. Or gassing them, however you want. It’s all the same to me!”
Christian Lüth (2020)
Now, we can more clearly see the schism between public declarations of hate for the immigrants and silent Realpolitik. The AfD and right-wing pundits (which are often obscenely rich from propaganda, dirty money, worker exploitation) need the immigrants for cheap labor, social unrest and scapegoating. The problems of society are not caused by immigrants but by systemic exploitation and undercutting of wages. The only way to fix this is to address socio-economic inequality, improve conditions for all workers, as well as ensuring a proper minimum wage in the immigrant’s countries of origin.
Roger Stone
The second example, is the infamous political consultant for the Republican Party in the US – Roger Stone. Some quotes from the movie Get me Roger Stone (2017) for closer inspection:
This is the elites of the Republican and Democratic party who have driven this country into the ditch versus Donald J. Trump and the rest of America.
I’m proud of the job I did at Black, Manafort & Stone [lobbying organisation], because I made a lot of money, and I can’t think of anything I did that was either illegal or immoral. You play by the rules as they’re written. When they change the rules, you change the way you play the game.
Donald Trump is riding a crest of voter anger over 30 years of failed policies. Voter anger explains the entire rise of Trump.
If you look at the crime rate in place like Chicago, it’s out of control, yes. Trump is the law and order candidate. He does speak to the silent majority.
He (Alex Jones) has a bully pulpit that allows him to reach millions of people and they are Trump’s people. They are outsiders, skeptical about government, skeptical about the bullshit government is always trying to peddle you. Sure, it’s a non-elitist crowd, but they’re Americans and they vote.
Get me Roger Stone (2017)
As mentioned in the introduction, we see loads of references to the failing establishment and the discontent of many people. Also, we see the tautological, but in the mainstream presented as cynical, admission that one acts according to one’s conditions, order of society and power imbalances – “rules of the game”.
The conclusion
These were just a few excerpts of their statements and we can find many more that are ridiculous and preposterous. Talking about these statements, they provide reflection on political and social conditions. There is no useless talk about choice, morality, ethics, no ill-founded thoughts that elections and “going to vote” may challenge those in power. Right-wingers know (as do marketing specialists), despite their public statements to the contrary (choice etc.), that people are influenced by their living conditions and by advertisements and act accordingly. If the system is failing us, right-wing, nationalist, fascist movements will inevitably spring up and gather support.
One may call these people racist, sexist, homophobic, fascist etc., but it would be missing the point. In this case let’s listen to what these people say – they know the system, they know that the system is not working for most and they know that the worse it gets, the better it is for them. The only way forward is to end the psychologisation of all the issues and to focus on the socio-economic conditions. It’s not racism/sexism/homophobia that causes the proliferation of hate and violence – it’s the gaping social/political/economic inequalities.
Recently, I have finished reading the book “Capital and Ideology” by the influential French economist Thomas Piketty. Right at the beginning of the book the author provides an interesting figure and this post is about it.
So, the graphic can be found in the book and in the online appendix:
It is striking to discover the degree to which access to a university education in the United States depends on parental income. It has been shown that the probability of access to higher education (including two-year junior college degrees) was just slightly above 20 percent for the 10 percent of young adults whose parents had the lowest income, increasing linearly to more than 90 percent for those whose parents had the highest income (p. 34)
These results are striking because they illustrate the wide gap that separates official meritocratic pronouncements (which emphasize—theoretically and rhetorically, at any rate—equality of opportunity) from the realities facing the most disadvantaged students. (p. 35)
Thomas Piketty (2020) – Capital and Ideology
We can see that the data (red dots) are approximated very well by the black line that can be expressed with a formula: Rate of access to higher education = 0,67 * Percentile of parental income + 25%
I just wanted to reflect on this striking (as the author calls it) information in this blog because such relationships in social sciences are very rarely seen. Let’s approach the review in 2 steps – methodological and social.
Methodological – in scientific studies, when we have a relationship between two variables that can be expressed by the formula of the form y = k*x + b, we are generally speaking about the same thing. In other words, variation in one variable (in this case parental income) explains almost 100% of variation in the other (access to higher education). So, explaining the relationship, we can say that no other variables or dimensions are needed, all the required information to predict whether a child will enter higher education can be found in his family finances.
Social – as the author already noted, meritocratic statements such as “those who study hard/are motivated, achieve good results” are misleading. One’s educational attainment is not a function of “motivation”, “perseverance”, “grit” etc., but of one’s socioeconomic status. If we illustrate the differences in conditions between high SES and low SES children, it will be clearer – obviously living conditions are different, a richer, safer environment from early childhood is provided to the child of richer parents, better nutrition, more attention, higher educational attainment of parents, more books, better schools leading to higher examination results etc. With different backgrounds, one hour of learning is not equivalent between groups of people – the playing field is not level.
We can think about access to higher education in Europe where inequality, though rising, is lower than in the US. In the US, higher education is generally not financed, whereas in Europe free higher education in more common. While the rising trend should still exist, we would expect to see that the lower SES groups have a somewhat higher access rate and the curve less steep (Links to some studies below). This theme is closely related and can be discussed together with social mobility.
Solutions: After acquainting oneself with such data, be careful in searching for and accepting solutions because proposals to “invest more in education” are toothless. Rather, let’s try to even out the conditions of families – take care of the widening economic/income/wealth gap that is actually responsible for the differences in educational attainment.
Radical behaviorist leftist 