The fight for Labour Party democracy

The pre-planned, unbelievably poorly timed and staggeringly inept coup attempt against Jeremy Corbyn wasn't just an attack on a decent principled man designed to bully him into resigning so that the plotters didn't have to fight him in a democratic election (which they knew he would likely beat them in), it was also an attack on the concept of Labour Party democracy.

Hacks at the Guardian had already tried to set the narrative that Jeremy Corbyn and Labour Party democracy were a "failed experiment", but the grubby little coup they were supporting floundered and failed when Corbyn refused to resign.

If the plotters want to depose their leader (the guy with by far the biggest properly democratic mandate of any UK party leader in history) and then set about restructuring the Labour Party away from democracy, then they have to take him on in a democratic election.

The forthcoming Labour Party leadership election is going to be about more than Jeremy Corbyn or his social democratic policies. It's going to be about protecting Labour Party democracy from those who view it as a "failed experiment" because it didn't return their favoured Tory-lite candidates like Liz Kendall or Yvette Cooper (the wife of the guy who devised Labour's catastrophically uninspiring austerity-lite campaign for the 2015 General Election).

There are Labour MPs who furiously resent the choices of the party membership, and sincerely believe that if only they could install their own Blair clone as leader, they'd storm to victory at the next General Election like Tony Blair did in 1997. They're delusional because the world has moved on from 1997. People don't want a watered down version of "more of the same", they want radical change. Perhaps these MPs were too busy plotting and executing their failed coup attempt to even bother considering the actual reasons that people voted for Brexit? (hint - it wasn't Jeremy Corbyn's fault)

If you support the idea of increased democracy and accountability within the Labour Party, and in the country as a whole, then Jeremy Corbyn is your man. Handing more political power to ordinary people, not taking it away, is one of Jeremy Corbyn's core principles.

If you support the Labour MPs who think their 172 votes in their unconstitutional vote of no confidence outweigh the 250,000+ votes of the Labour Party membership who elected Jeremy Corbyn to a landslide victory just 10 months ago, then throw your weight behind their "Anyone But Corbyn" (ABC) candidate the 172 pick between them. But maybe ask them to hurry up about picking one, because their prolonged failure to put up a candidate is making them look weak and frightened of democracy.

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OR

A question about Pizza

Do I dislike Pizza?

An intriguing question to ask someone like me that mainly writes about politics, economics and theology. How did it come to be asked?

Well I was asked the pizza question by a guy called Caleb Cutler after I described Michael Gorbachev as a "corporate whore" for appearing in a Pizza Hut advert in the late 1990s. I made the comment in the context that it was a pity to see a great statesman of the 20th century reduced to the status of a celebrity pizza salesman. A sad spectacle in my opinion.



Caleb's written comment read:

"Ah so you don't like pizza? Got something against free enterprise?" 

So to answer his questions one at a time:

I actually really like Pizza, commercial pizza not so much, but it is usually edible so I wont complain. What I don't like is seeing one of the great statesman of the 20th century ending up hawking corporate pizza, given that I share Bill Hicks' absolute contempt for the advertising industry.



Another saddening aspect to Gorbachev's reduction to the status of a celebrity pizza salesman is the fact that his democratic mixed economy vision for Russia was hijacked by a pisshead called Boris who implemented a devastating neoliberalisation process at the behest of a bunch of American economists instead. The Russian free-market experiment was an absolute disaster. The neoliberal shock therapy session administered to post-communist Russia was one of the most obvious failures of neoliberal free-market ideology in a very long list of failures. The free market ideology managed to make Russia less productive and created more extreme poverty than the communist regime they so hastily replaced.

From this fire sale of state infrastructure and unregulated chaos there emerged a tiny minority of "winners" of course. Whilst millions of ordinary Russians were reduced to abject poverty, oligarchs like Roman Abramovich siphoned £billions out of the Russian economy to invest in absurd vanity projects like Chelsea FC and ridiculously over sized yachts.

What a warped view of the 20th Century would it take to simply ignore the fact that Russian neoliberal shock therapy ended up crippling the Russian economy, causing what was one of two great superpower less than a decade before to default on it's debts in 1998.

This brings me to the question about free enterprise, which is a lot more tricky than the question about pizza. Whether I have anything against "free enterprise" depends a lot on how "free enterprise" is defined doesn't it?

Should small businesses be free to compete on an even playing field with their competitors? Of course they should.

Should corporations be free to exploit their workers, destroy the environment, commit fraud, or use financial doping to eliminate their competition in the pursuit of vast profits and obscene executive pay? I don't think so.

I believe that the state has a vital role to play in protecting "free enterprise". If it takes the intervention of the state to ensure that there are several players competing in every sector in order to ensure competition and stimulate greater efficiency this is significantly better than allowing single enterprises to financially dope their way into markets, annihilate their competition through price fixing then exploit their monopoly position to maximise profits, going on to form international price fixing cartels with similar enterprises in order to eradicate market plurality.  If "free enterprise" is defined as a right to annihilate competition in order to maximise profits, this is actually an anti-competitive and inefficient economic ideology.

I believe in freedom to compete but I do not believe in the freedom to form economically damaging monopoly interests; the freedom to abuse information asymmetry; the freedom to form cartels; the freedom to corruptly influence governments and regulators; the freedom to profit on human suffering; the freedom to trade on insider information; the freedom to ruin the environment for insignificant economic gains; the freedom to debase the entire economic system for profit; or the freedom to use financial doping to destroy market competition and eradicate market plurality (Market plurality is a very important concept, I'll address this in a later post).

I actually believe that an efficiently regulated market can achieve much greater market freedom by the active stimulation of competition through progressive funding of infant industries. Adam Smith, the "godfather" of free-market economists also believed in infant industry protection, however free-market fundamentalists tend to completely ignore this aspect of his work, using the same selective reading strategies to read their favourite economics books as the fundamentalist American Christian right use to cherry pick passages from the Bible to justify anti-Christian attitudes such as intolerance and greed-worship.

In my opinion strong reliable and adaptable state sector is necessary to ensure a fair and level playing field. The state should intervene to support and protect infant industries. The state must also maintain the capacity to step in at short notice and intervene to prevent market failure, should the need arise. These measures are necessary in order to create a highly efficient and competitive private sector; a private sector best prepared to take entrepreneurial risk because progressive legislation would protect them from the risks of market domination by profit driven monopoly interests.

So in conclusion: I really like pizza, I'd much rather have a homemade one than a Pizza Hut one though. I don't have anything against "free trade", unless of course we are talking about the free-market, anarcho-capitalist definition of "free trade"; that corporations should have the absolute freedom to do whatever the hell they want in pursuit of profits, no matter what the harms they inflict on others in order to make them.

I don't believe in the anarcho-capitalist definition of  "free trade" because I believe in a social-democratic form of regulated free trade. However anyone that properly understands the right-wing libertarian position should also oppose the anarcho-capitalist definition of "free trade" given the importance of non-aggression in libertarian theory. The only people that would buy into this "deregulate everything, let corporations do whatever the hell they like" definition of "free trade" are economic illiterates that buy into absurd simplifications (private always good, state always bad) because they are incapable of actually understanding any kind of complex, pragmatic or even vaguely realistic economic theory.

See also

3D economics

   
Argentine recovery economics
  

Mixed Economy vs Neoliberalism

  

The Great Neoliberal Lie

Comparing Nordic apples with American oranges

The supporter of ideologically driven right-wing economic orthodoxy will often come up with truly pathetic arguments to justify their position. Sometimes it is because they hold their audience in such contempt that they think that they can get away with making rubbish arguments, but often, it seems the proponent has such low intellect that they can't even understand why their own arguments are so fundamentally flawed.

Simplistic direct comparisons between these economies are
bound to provide plenty of misleading conclusions

The argument by false analogy (comparing apples and oranges) is one of the most pathetic forms of fallacy used by thick people, or by people hoping to convince an audience that they assume to be thick. One of the finest displays of right wing argument by false analogy can be found in a Daily Telegraph article by Tim Stanley, in which he  lamely attempts to diminish the Scandinavian social democratic model.

After a lot of fairly predictable hot air about how he believes that high taxation, strong social mobility, high welfare standards, high general incomes and greater equality are all bad things he concludes with a quite remarkable paragraph.

"The sad fact is that sometimes the relentless pursuit of fairness in outcome imperils the creation of an atmosphere of opportunity. Put crudely, yes Scandinavia probably does ferry a child safely from cradle to grave with the result that levels of poverty and crime are conceivably lower. But where is the Swedish Facebook? How many Danes have walked on the moon? Does Norway have a Commonwealth? How’s that Finnish movie industry doing?"

The first thing to note about the four questions he asks in his concluding paragraph is the vast population disparity between the social democratic Nordic countries he is criticising and the neoliberal Anglo countries he is eulogising. To make direct comparisons between the outputs of such vastly differing economies is transparently misleading. Much fairer comparisons could be made between places with similar populations.

• Finland vs Scotland
• Norway vs Colorado
• Denmark vs Wisconsin
• Sweden vs North Carolina

It is clear that the pro-neoliberalism argument would be lost using fair comparisons, both in terms of actual wealth (GDP per capita) and in terms of utterly absurd questions (where is North Carolina's Ikea? Does Colorado have a coastline? How's that Scottish mobile phone manufacturing industry doing?) hence Stanleys's decision to use fallacious and absurdly disproportionate ones instead.

Returning to the remarkable display of fallacious reasoning in the quoted paragraph, let me address Tim Stanley's four questions in order:

"Where is the Swedish Facebook?"

Sweden doesn't have a Facebook but it does have another very famous website called The Pirate Bay, (which has more visitors than any British based website other than the state controlled BBC). Sweden also has a global retail brand with a turnover of €25bn called Ikea, which is surely of more economic significance than a website that produces nothing apart from spamvertizing revenue, costs the "real economy" billions in lost productivity (as millions of workers skive off work to check their updates on their smartphones on a daily basis) and which just provided one of the most farcical IPOs in recent history, hardly a glowing example of neoliberalism at work.

"How many Danes have walked on the moon?"

Ask yourself this; how many Americans have walked on the moon?  The answer is 12, making a ratio of 1 for every 28 million of their citizens. Given this ratio you would have expected less than 1/4 of a Dane to have made it to the moon so far. This question about moon walking is nothing more than a boast about American economic might which utterly disregards the vital bit of information that not a single American has walked on the moon since Apollo was cancelled in the early 1970s, meaning that since the rise of neoliberalism as the economic orthodoxy in the United States since the late 1970s, as many Danes as Americans have walked on the moon (none).

"Does Norway have a Commonwealth?"

This question is even more absurd than the moon walking one. Norway does not have a Commonwealth because it did not have an empire established during the mercantilist era and strenghtened during the era of industrialisation. Using the fact that Norway weren't successful mercantilists and empire builders several Centuries ago as a criticism for their social democratic stance over the last 50 odd years is just bizarre. Noting that Norway has not retained the remnants of an empire built up centuries ago and using that as an implied criticism of modern Norwegian economic policy is either the work of an idiot, or the work of a man that assumes his audience to be idiots. One remarkable bit of information that Stanley completely failed to mention in his article, is that Norway a country with a population of only 5.01 million (or 1.6% of the US population if you like) has the largest sovereign wealth fund in the entire world ($573bn), which contrasts sharply with the vast unfunded welfare deficits in the US and the UK.

"How’s that Finnish movie industry doing?"

Again, another apples and oranges comparison. Finland has actually produced some quite good films in recent years, but expecting a country with a 60th of the population of the USA to compete with Hollywood in terms of output and revenues would be utterly absurd. One way in which the Nordic film industry does out compete the US is in quality of output. For every genuinely well made and thought provoking film out of Hollywood, there are at least a dozen lazy, stereotype riddled, mindless action or romcom films. The discerning viewer of World cinema knows that "Scandinavian film" (lets incorrectly refer to Finland as a Scandinavian country instead of a Nordic one, as Stanley does throughout his article) has a long tradition of producing engaging dramas, which generally demonstrate much better grasps of realism, nuance and ambiguity than their cash addled US counterparts.

The lameness of these points in Stanley's concluding paragraph demonstrate what a weak case against social democracy he had managed to construct. The economic evidence is absolutely clear, the social democratic mixed economy model provides greater economic stability, greater productivity, greater social mobility and an equatable share of the growing national wealth for the vast majority of citizens. Neoliberalism on the other hand allows the inflation of vast speculative bubbles which result in severe economic crises, creates the illusion of growth through the creation of debt throughout all sectors of society, damages social mobility and is has only ever been proven successful at transferring wealth from ordinary working people to the tiny economic elite.

That a defender of neoliberalism would resort to misleadingly comparing Nordic apples and Anglo-American oranges in the conclusion to his attack on social democracy speaks volumes about the intellectual poverty of his position. The absurdity of Stanley's arguments underline the fact that he is either an idiot himself, or someone that believes he is preaching to an audience of idiots. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about the intellectual capabilities of his audience of Telegraph readers.

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