The system is broken, the system has to change.
Curiosity killed
Shipmate
in Purgatory
This question has been raised by a Guardian long read entitled The new elite’s phoney crusade to save the world – without changing anything (link). One of the questions the article poses is:
In this country that image suggests a return to the Victorian age, where philanthropic factory owners provided art galleries for the future on the back of the labour of their workers. Where the Labour party fought for democracy, but it took WW1 to really change the class system.
Have we returned to a plutocracy ruling the world? And what will it take to change things?
andAre we ready to hand over our future to the plutocratic elites, one supposedly world-changing initiative at a time? Are we ready to call participatory democracy a failure, and to declare these other, private forms of change-making the new way forward? Is the decrepit state of American self-government an excuse to work around it and let it further atrophy? Or is meaningful democracy, in which we all potentially have a voice, worth fighting for?
What is at stake is whether the reform of our common life is led by governments elected by and accountable to the people, or rather by wealthy elites claiming to know our best interests. We must decide whether, in the name of ascendant values such as efficiency and scale, we are willing to allow democratic purpose to be usurped by private actors who often genuinely aspire to improve things but, first things first, seek to protect themselves.
In this country that image suggests a return to the Victorian age, where philanthropic factory owners provided art galleries for the future on the back of the labour of their workers. Where the Labour party fought for democracy, but it took WW1 to really change the class system.
Have we returned to a plutocracy ruling the world? And what will it take to change things?
Comments
Seizing back government of the people by the people for the people? I suppose the US experiment is ongoing, just not in a very good place presently. An ideal corrupted by money and powerful interest groups.
I keep on praying "your kingdom come, your will be done" and doing my best to work towards that where I am. That's also work in progress and globally it doesn't appear to be in a very good place either. But it's the best I've got.
Human activity is driving the Earth’s entire insect population to extinction. This is due to big companies, intensive agriculture and climate change. In other words the money makers for those plutocratic elites.
It’s looking more and more like my generation has lived through a golden age. I feel grateful for that and sad for the future of humankind and the planet.
Once upon a time, we fought dragons that hoarded wealth. Now we beg them for money.
My guess is that in a free and fair election, the Muslim Brotherhood was elected. From the perspective of the West and Egyptians who are Coptic Christians, that was very very bad. It was felt that the Muslim Brotherhood did not intend to practice democratic norms as we understand them, but instead to impose a system which was supported by the majority, but which trampled on the rights and probably the lives of a minority.
The army staged a coup, and things more or less returned to normal, unless you are associated with Al Jazeera, the Muslim Brotherhood, or speak out against the new Government.
Please note that I am pulling this out of my arse and I may well be mis-remembering or indeed misrepresenting what happened.
In Britain and the United States, full-franchise de jure has been in operation for roughly 100 years. Our transfers of power are smooth and follow established patterns. When election results happen that we don't like, we just wait, because in a few years we will get to vote again and we know that the outcome will be respected. Since the scourge of McCarthyism, nobody has sought to lock anybody up for their political views. Civil liberties are so strong in the UK and its political system so robust that a bare majority decision to pummel the country's economy and reduce its influence in world affairs is being implemented as we speak despite the fact that the elites don't want it to happen.
Democracy is alive and well in the Anglosphere. You might well say that it is a little too robust for our own good. Where it is desperately needed, in corrupt developing countries where the elites actually participate in the looting of their own national wealth, it is barely breathing. However, in Indonesia and Malaysia, they appear to be making a welcome yet still shaky transition from autocratic countries with klepto-elites to stable democracies.
Democracy is weird. I suspect that many people who are currently insisting on the need for the democracy of the Referendum vote to be reverenced so highly, are the same people who previously complained bitterly every time a democratic vote went against them; or perhaps were even the same people who would whinge about the uselessness of bothering to vote at all, choosing to stay at home and opt out unless something on the ballot sheet tickled their fancy.
Democracy has its limitations, and its flaws. Especially when the democratic choice of a referendum is between the 'potentially unappealing continuance of the too complex to describe and understand ' option, and the 'complete pig in a poke with no-one in charge' option. Bit like computer programming: crap in, crap out. It was a shit choice to begin with; good probability of a shit result.
It is possible for a dictatorship to be elected, as in Egypt. However, a dictatorship cannot be a pluralist democracy because dictatorship is exclusively and repressively self-perpetuating. As such, it fails the unspoken part of the test, though it passes the spoken one.
They'd hardly be alone in that. Far too many people at all points of the political spectrum only really like democracy when it delivers the result they want.
The problem with referendums is that no-one knows what the threshold should actually be. 50% +1 is hardly sufficient. If I understand the Brexit vote, it was won by the "leave" side by the majority who voted, but apparently not by the majority of the people of the UK.
This was apparently controversial.
This is OK as far as it goes in describing Liberal Democracy. Pluralism, however, is not simply about the existence of a number of parties more or less independent of the state, but of the independence and autonomy of social and economic institutions whose interests those parties represent and articulate. This raises the question as to whether there can be Liberal Democracy without capitalism, though there can, of course, be capitalism without Democracy. Liberal Democracy also implies that there are legitimate centres of power having political consequences outside the formal democratic institutions, pressure groups, for example.
What has not been discussed is the notion of Representative Democracy and the relationship between political elites (elected politicians, especially executives) and the democratic multitude. Experience suggests that good government is not compatible with plebiscitary democracy because the electorate is ignorant of the issues involved in just about all political decisions and does not have to deal with the consequences. Representative Democracy is better, though it rests on elected politicians retaining the confidence of electorates in their superior capacities to make informed decisions. The current political crisis in western democracies arises from a collapse of confidence in and deference to political elites, exposing them to demagoguery and populism. The centre may have 'fallen apart', 'the best [may] lack all conviction' but the 'worst are full of passionate intensity'.
I am reminded of the wise words of Tony Benn:
As things currently stand? Revolution and bloody uprising. Nothing else will do it.
Tax wealth including all investment transactions. And all robots. All automation even. Based on energy consumption in part. TAX!!!
A Dutch historian who was invited to Davos by some fluke talked about precisely this: all initiatives by the wealthy to change the world are moot if they are not paying their fair share in tax. Suffice to say that he did not have the most receptive audience. Here is an article about the speech and here is a video of his speech. The speech has gone viral and I have already heard him interviewed twice on the radio.
And that won't do it either. There is no gain that could possibly be worth it in the developed world. Or anywhere else I can think of. What it takes to change things is what we've been doing for two hundred thousand years. Changing things. Pluralism is a western luxury that cannot ever touch China, the Islamic world, Russia and has reached its limits in the West. It's now up to liberals to work with conservatives. That's what's got to change. Smart ones always have. In making everyone consumers first.
So unavoidable costs - fixed costs for housing, local taxes, energy, water, insurance, transport, (health care and education were applicable) - rise in order to milk the maximum money from the system. Even if wages are rising, fixed costs will rise faster. Most people from the middle classes to the poorest are worse off, and will continue to be worse off, as more of their disposable income is milked.
There are obviously things households can do to stop the milking. Owning property moves money away from rentier landlords, but requires a formidable amount of capital and/or a high household income. Solar panels can be installed, but the FIT is being ended, and will only make sense in conjunction with storage - another capital cost. Transport alternatives do exist, but if you've a long commute by train, or live in a rural area, you usually only have one choice. There's not enough suitable land for everyone to have a smallholding and a well and a septic tank, and as much as I like my neighbours, cholera isn't nice.
I'm agreeing with ThunderBunk. We need a radically different, collective, plan. This isn't something that individuals can do.
You will certainly know more than me about the elites in the UK and how to define them. I would be surprised though if many British academics or members of the professions are in support of Brexit. I don't think many of your light entertainment stars are for Brexit, but I haven't made inquiries.
Also, are there that many businesses that support Brexit? I know a bloke who owns a chain of pubs supports it. What about Richard Branson? I genuinely don't know his position. I am reliably informed by Miles Jupp that the bloke who owns Dyson Vacuum Cleaners supports Brexit and has copped some criticism for opening a factory in Singapore.
As for the Parliamentary elites, I understand that Labor MP's as a whole would prefer it if Brexit didn't happen, but their objections are muted by an Opposition Leader who is probably pro- but mostly ambivalent and anyway, they have a game of political brinkmanship to win. I also understand that a fair whack of the Conservative Party's MP's, though probably not a majority, are ambivalent about Brexit, and only support it publicly because of the perceived political need to implement the referendum result. My understanding is broad-brush and mostly derived from British political satire and the occasional front page from Private Eye.
On the subject of British Big Business, are there any still around? Virgin qualifies I suppose. We have a petrol company here that used to be British - BP. Is it still? Australia is similar. There aren't really all that many 'national' big businesses any more. Banks, maybe grocery chains might qualify, I don't know. Payday lenders? Betting shops?
I think Brexit is a very good example of democracy at work, a decision being implemented by your representatives despite its lunacy. I don't know if the original vote was unduly swayed by money politics. Certainly the margin was narrow enough for it to potentially matter. I do know that I saw a heap of purple signs in England when I was there, and met a few racist arseholes who spoilt my breakfast in a couple of B&B's. So I'm thinking that there was a fair amount of actual and not confected support, and that is what our systems of Government are all about.
Personally, I would find a way to prevent the democratic will of the People as expressed in that non-binding plebiscite from being implemented. The EU seems keen to help in that project. But I'm sure most British shipmates are with me on that one, or rather I'm with you.
We have a lot of things going on in the background, including this one, on Brexit - and it won't take much filibustering to take us into a no deal Brexit.
Big business is generally self-protective, anti-regulation
The future is Africa. Getting up to India's level in a generation.
And there I was thinking that faith in an infinitely generous God might motivate something other than mindless consumption. How hum.
The challenge, of course, is how to ensure that the massive corporations do not simply take control of the means of production, and how to keep the knowledge open-source.
But for me, I don't think we are a long way off locally 3d printing goods, including tech like mobile phones.
Of course there is an issue about availability of the raw materials - but again I have hope that the poorest might leap-frog into using the good stuff.
Chill TB. Our eusociality is evolving fast. And that's the spirit mr cheesy.
There's a name for something that continually grows. There's a thread for it down in Hell.
Oh yeah, Trump is so right on free trade deals, but for the wrong reasons. They suck for working people and anyone operating on a small to medium scale. They usually have these disgusting arbitration clauses and clauses the limit 'local' governments from changing laws in a way that adversely impacts upon international businesses. How is a free trade deal between the US and EU less of a problem?
@Martin54 the news over the last couple of days has been full of a report that insects are likely to die out in 100 years (Guardian link)
In case my point is lost, it is that the EU can't resist the demands of global capitalism any more than Australia or the UK as individual entities. Global capitalism is not the USA, it is the West. The USA is just the weakest link, from our perspective.
Far from being a tangent, the struggle for worldwide economic justice is intimately linked to the protection of democracy (or whatever you want to call it) in the developed world. Free Trade agreements are one of the ways in which our enemies seek to undermine our democracies by having us cede sovereignty not to international organisations of nations, but international business. Its woeful, its frightening, and the solution might well be found in the empowerment of the teeming millions to which Martin refers. The next time I get a fraudster ring me from the under-developed world, I'm going to shout at them, "Go you good thing!"
To put it another way, my conception of Government is a shield against the rapacious capitalism we use to create wealth. The purpose of Government is to protect the weaker against exploitation by the stronger. I think that's what you believe too CK. Rapacious capitalists know this, and use whatever tools they deem fit to puncture our shield. The promotion of cynicism has been a very successful tool in the USA. Free Trade Agreements with these woeful clauses are the next.
No. Just in our small bailiwick. They've been here a while longer than us. Ants. Roaches. Wasps. Termites. Moths (which is why we're not knee deep in horn).
It's another sign that we're in the middle of one of the great extinction cycles.
Life on Earth won’t survive without them.
Climate change could be small beer compared to this.
That's an inevitable outcome of people perceiving that politics doesn't actually change anything important in their lives. If how you use your vote isn't going to matter, you may as well use it to have some laughs.
Bees, by the way, account for 7-8% of pollination of human cultivated crops. The 1/3 figure often cited is about the paid pollination. (went to a lecture series last summer re this, info like this was provided.
Well I've read the paper, and that's not exactly what it says.
It claims that 40% of insect species are in decline, which doesn't necessarily mean that overall numbers are going down. Nor, in fact, does it mean that new species will not emerge to occupy ecological functions if/when some go extinct.
I mean, it is shocking if true - but some of the news stories about this paper are vastly overstating what the impact might be when that's very much unknown.
I hate to agree...
That one thinks one can take insect splatters on a windscreen as indicative is beyond ridiculous.
That you think insect splatters are the only scientific evidence quoted indicates you didn't read the paper. It cites 73 studies. Are you saying they were all of windshield splatters? How about we stop thinking we know what something says unless we read it?
No, that's observational science, and people take it very seriously indeed.
When I was a lad (first driving in 1984), there was the phenomenon of driving along country lanes and being blinded by the blizzard of insects throwing themselves at the car's headlights.
Driving those same lanes 35 years later... barely anything.
The insects haven't changed their behaviour. They've just gone.
The paper says nothing about insect splatter on windscreens that I've read. Someone above mentioned it as somehow indicative evidence.
This is bullshit.
You can't seriously pretend that someone untrained in insect ecology can possibly know anything about global insect decline based on what they've seen on their own car windscreen in England.
It's exactly the same as those idiots who say that the planet is not warning because the winters they experience in San Marino have been cooler than they recall 40 years ago.
That's not science, that's drivel.
I'm not pretending anything. This is observational science. It has a very long and noble pedigree. Someone untrained in climate science can note first bud and last leaf fall over many years and make a critical contribution. Or the arrival of migrating birds. Or fruit ripening.
Just because you've never heard of it.