At some point it is inevitable that this blog will veer into some kind of comment about politics. Not yet. Not today. I've talked a lot about economics and what's going on in the Market as a proxy for politics because it's more quantitative and is a more fundamental force because of its interaction with the natural world. In other words, it's where the rubber of society meets the road of physical reality. Economics and the operation of the Market has additionally been a huge feeding ground in the development of modern political ideologies, especially in the twentieth century, but at present we have a staid .
Political ideology can be seen as a philosophical set of principles which form the basis for reasoned and consistent political action. A durable ideology includes a plausible description of a reality that informs the political animal. I'll define "a plausible description of reality" as beliefs and convictions about how the world works and how it should work. Thus armed, the political animal engages the world in a manner consistent with being an animal.
It's important to make a distinction between politics, political ideology, and the intellectual feedstock which informs ideology. A good statement on this I read a while back comes from James Howard Kunstler who had this to say about capitalism: I don't really see capitalism as an ideology...I see it more as a set of laws and principles around the allocation and management of surplus. This to me is a refreshingly boring statement. By boring I mean sober. He hadn't smoked anything before he said it. And by "smoked" I mean the statement didn't spring from an overly-impassioned or rigidly adhered to determination of capitalism's existence based on a political ideology. Kunstler is not a closeted Marxist.
This is not to say that capitalism doesn't inform political ideology or that its tenets aren't used as a political platform. By saying this, Kunstler is pointing to an historical observation that hinges on what he means by "surplus". Traditionally capitalism is defined, as Marx observed, as surplus capital. It's why he coined the term "capitalism". The term is purely descriptive based on this feature. Kunstler, however, did not say "surplus capital", he said "surplus". All the extra stuff left over once the producing's done that can be reinvested to produce more stuff. Money represents this stuff, as I've said before, but it is not the stuff. The amount of money rose with the amount of stuff.
Capitalism emerged as the Industrial Revolution literally picked up steam, setting the conditions from which capitalism could emerge. As we all well know, the Industrial Revolution was really an energy revolution. Surplus energy allowed the formation of surplus capital. It isn't an accident that capitalism is new on the historical scene and, by extension, neither is it an accident that modern political ideologies (the biggies of Fascism, Marxism, Communism, Nationalism, Socialism, Libertarianism, Progressivism, etc.) emerged as well over the course of the modern era starting about 200 years ago*. This is a distinct phase of history with distinct political characteristics driven by the interpretations of contemporaneous participants (political animals). Except for maybe Nationalism, all of the above ideologies had a sophisticated position towards and critique of capitalist production.
Every relevant contemporary ideology takes a position on or incorporates capitalism. Capitalism is the water all us fishes swim in. The question of whether it works or is the best system rarely gets asked publicly any more, and is never asked among the ruling elite. The question for all of us in the non-ruling non-elite is whether capitalism as a going concern can really survive the loss of surplus. As the banquet of natural resources get munched down the depletion curve is it possible for a system that is growth dependent to be viable? I say categorically "no". Is this position ideological? Not now, not today. But I think it will be, and the first stirrings are already happening. For example, Naomi Klein in her latest book "This Changes Everything" raises the question in light of climate change. A fair number of Libertarian Market animals believe capitalism is already dead, killed by John Maynard Keynes and the Federal Reserve. My position is that it is a Type II diabetic staggering on to the next sugar buzz.
My position is not ideological partly because it has no current political expression. It is an observation and a prediction. Markets will go on for as long as there is human society, but capitalism will not return in my lifetime once it has left in my lifetime. As the prospects darken for capitalism, the response to it will have major implications for the ruling ideologies, and even the non-ruling ones. New ideologies will form from the interpretations of the most active political animals and these interpretations will likely be varied. But the non-ideological force behind them all, whether they will choose to acknowledge it or not, will be the profoundly impersonal non-human rest-of-existence acting on our most cherished means of production.
So, let's call my position a pre-ideological one. I am deliberately and consciously non-committal regarding political positions in this blog. That may not always be the case but that's what I do now. Somewhere some lunkhead said once "everything's political". I know what was meant by it and he did not mean every tiny motion anywhere in the universe is political. However, this kind of thinking leads to the mentality that the only thing worth doing or considering is political. Things become political when their import is recognized by the society. Climate change is not inherently political. It is the non-human world intruding into the human world. The same holds for resource depletion. Ideologies which do not account for this are doomed to fail, as are societal systems based on the expectation of growth. Capitalism and democracy are the two foundational institutions of the Western liberal tradition. Democracy can live without capitalism and the reverse seems to be true. But can democracy survive the aftermath of the failure of capitalism? I think it depends on how prepared people are. Forming an ideology around this probable outcome is a good place to start.
*Of these listed ideologies, the two that use(d) capitalism systematically as a basis for their respective ideologies are Libertarianism and Fascism, Libertarianism being the purest expression of a capitalistic ethic of probably any ideology.
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