Nor, contrary to today’s conventional ‘wisdom’, is there anything inevitable about capitalism. It is also extremely questionable in my view whether capitalism can be ‘socialised’ in the way advocates of this strategy suggest. Dispossession, exploitation, environmental destruction, growth, hierarchy, materialism, alienation driven by the need for profit are not incidental, or accidental, features of capitalism – they are its inherent design features. Pointing out examples of western social democracy as counterfactual evidence doesn’t wash for me – it was/is only something possible within an overarching system of brutal capitalist exploitation – a good life and apparent freedom bought at others expense – and the expense of nature.

Capitalism can only *appear* to be socialised – underneath it will always remain a beast and destroyer of men’s bodies and souls, other creatures, and the earth we depend on. Is this what we really want? If some of us actually managed to get it would we, like all victors before, obliterate knowledge and memory of the misery and destruction on which our comfort was built?

The second course is to construct communities and businesses today that embody our preferred ways of doing things, building the relational social fabric that we want in the here and now, dismantling the agit-prop culture that has paralysed left movements for a century, and accepting the world-wide evidence around us that methodologies based on concentrations of power produce outcomes characterised by concentrations of power.

These are the two options that have confronted left movements since the 1890s. Having opted for the latter for the last 130 years and watched concentrations of capital, wealth and power grow steadily over that time, perhaps it is time for the left to concede defeat for that strategy and try the alternative.

You can see more of it here:

http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2017/838-paul-mason-and-the-grand-propaganda-narratives.html

All the rest of his suggestions would either be more easily introduced or rendered unnecessary if we could simply restrict the flow of capital to that which supports the real economy and curtail it otherwise.

Land value tax would have been a reasonable idea some decades ago: it is now no solution at all. You can call it implementation, if you like , but the fact is that we do not start from a hypothetical zero. We start from where the UK is now.

Pseudo-leftist radicals like Mason need to be called out – they are insidious because they not only appeal to the right wing activist and politicians of course but, because of their fake radical reputation, might also fool many/some left wing inclined. Unfortunately Mason is being given a lot of space to propagate his conservative and dangerous liberal views and, as far as I know, he is not being publicly criticised even by intellectuals I respect. I think it’s a typical English thing – open, clear criticism of those seen as close in some way is seen as impolite. Thus their views dont’ get challenged or confronted. Sad …

I agree with you, it looks like Mason is hellbent on shaping the national policy of a prospective Labour government, and he’s been making many moves to the right on various issues, from migration to defense policy. Here he’s doing the same but on wealth distribution and internationalism.

All the marxist references are only little side dishes to the main course which isn’t progressive at all, more like a bold leap into the status quo, which clearly is in need of solutions to its expanding crisis.

As Paul Mason makes clear it is the power of big finance to terrorise a country (see Greece) that is the significant external non-democratic Controller. How can we take back control of our own money from these shadowy rootless institutions who will fight dirty, and don’t give a fig for the hardships they impose.

Can I suggest TWO policies that would shrink the banks (given that Positive Money’s Sovereign Money proposal might be too dangerous to implement)

1. Increase the rate of George Osborne’s Bank Levy, a neglected yet highly intelligent Tax brought in by the Coalition Government.

2. Introduce Land Value Taxation on housing as fast as is practical. This will deprive the banks of most of their mortgage lending opportunities, and force them to look elsewhere to make loans to productive enterprises.

Both of these policies will shrink the banks’ balance sheets, and consequently their power to terrorise. Neither policy need be trumpeted in advance and could be brought in swiftly during the first Crisis.

I wonder why you think Shenzhen, Bombay and Dubai would accept that and let Wigan, Newport and
Kirkcaldy get away with it. Doesn’t appear very realistic to me.

Some thoughts in no particular order:

1) Getting gig economy back into the Labour force is not the answer. The Uber drivers themselves report that they prefer their flexible working style. An agile, flexible labour force is a positive thing for both people and trade. It gives people control over their lives (a very under-rated driver of wellbeing) and it gives businesses flexibility to expand and contract. Presently, the transaction balance between producers and employers is uneven because of the power of the Corporation. This article proposes re-tethering this agile workforce to the Corporation but surely this is equivalent to putting You-tubers on the News International payroll. Stifling for both sides. The question for the Left (and Right) is what is the future of the Corporation? Most global technology companies are run with skeleton management teams with production outsourced to users or free agents. What happens when the managers become dis-intermediated by AI? What is a Corporation then? The question for the Left is how to empower Labour in a post corporation world. To put it another way (sorry for this cultural reference): “there is no spoon”.

2) The dignity of work. Left thinking gets this all wrong. I like the idea of minimum wage and free services. It feels like an attractive baseline of human dignity in modern societies. But what’s the point in an education or healthcare if the Left is just using this as an opiate? Surely health and education without meaningful employment is one of the things that’s so wrong in our society. Why did we ever think that health, housing and welfare would be a decent substitute for working class, blue collar employment? This is what is killing communities and family life. The lack of secure, stable, dependable blue collar employment to sustain relationships. The State has become our mother, father, husband, wife and while that safety net is a damn sight better than the poorhouse, when did the Left give up on employment? About the same time we decided to outsource Labour to third world countries.

3) Cost of Labour. This seems to me to be the crux challenge for Left policy making and the reason for all the cognitive dissonance in the Labour party today. One side of the party says: globalise, trickle down, lots of social liberalism. The other side says: medicate the poor with benefits, old fashioned Labour supply and demand, more regulation and protection. All this misses the message of the Nationalists : bring back jobs, cost in the unfair advantages of third countries by using tariffs, give working people real work. This is EXACTLY why populism is so persuasive. Why can’t the Left in Europe see this? When we outsourced cheap Labour to third countries and got rid of tariffs, we systematically lowered all our prices. Great, we think. Except this is why we have had salary stagflation. Because we will never get our Labour costs down to the cost of children shelling prawns in Thailand or an online chatbot answering customer queries. So how do we price this in? Probably through tariffs on third countries and taxes on global corporates. Actually, I don’t know the answer but it isn’t through unregulated global trade and it isn’t through benefits and raised Labour regulation. This is what Trump sees and channels. Higher prices are what will empower the Labour force (author’s ‘skin in the game’). Prices rising will force up wages – or there’ll be a mass recessions as businesses fail. This is how you reset the balance.

Plenty more to say on this but I really have to rush …

This
is a question not just for the Western left, which Mason speaks to, but
for the global left, which clearly needs rebuilding and reorienting,
with a large role in this for its non-Western parts. The momentous
current crisis which is ecological as much as it is economic and social,
requires a strategy at that level, to create a sane mode of production
which is both sustainable, and offers socio-economic freedom, good
standards of living and non-alienated work. Capitalism as opposed to forms of working class democracy can only worsen our ability to deal with all of these questions, as it excludes workers from all levels of decision making which affect their lives.

It seems clear that
Mason’s strategy can only result in doubling down on a distorted global
system where a huge mass of unproductive consumers (in the West, but not
exclusively) depend on global domination, robbery of resources and
exploitation in all other parts of the world. We need to break with the
system that has created this, instead of stabilising it yet again for
another round, and even presenting that stabilisation as something the
left should take upon itself.

Incidentally, could someone help me out here and tell me if the above is an example of the concept of *projection* or *splitting*?

Two questions/concerns:
1: assumptions about need for, and impact of growth in the economy. Is this compatible with impact on climate change- can ‘growth’ for majority come from great equity and redistribution?
2: that we have to put Wigan ahead of Mumbai ( Bombay as it used to be!) Can we achieve what works for UK by supporting greater global equity- why does it have to be at the expense of?

democratic institutions and values in the developed world by reversing
the 30-year policy of enriching the bottom 60% and the top 1% of the
world’s population.

It is a programme to deliver growth and prosperity in Wigan, Newport
and Kirkcaldy – if necessary at the price of not delivering them to
Shenzhen, Bombay and Dubai.”

An absolute waste of time that will lead to nowhere while exacerbating the environmental crisis.

I am surprised this sort of ecologically ignorant zombie-social-democracy still passes as serious thinking.

We face a system crisis. Mason’s proposed solution is to deny the problem by breaking part of the system. It reminded me of this parable : https://sufiways.com/2017/08/13/questions-terrorism-and-nasruddins-beard/

We have to leave this zero-sum game mindset. Sustainable and humane living requires the end of international economic competition. That may need the end of capitalism. In any case it will necessarily means the end of growth. This is the discussion we should be having.

Those capitalist bastards, eh. “Enriching” the bottom 60%.

An absolutely remarkable comment. Socialism in one country lives.

I think you are wasting your time with articles on oD, but there is a deficit of serious places to post radical left thinking.