The piece describes the gradient accurately but does not name what produces and maintains its angle. The systems approaching their respective hard limits are not doing so at random or by historical necessity. They were built with specific institutional architectures by specific class formations whose interests those architectures serve, what Aristotle identified as the most durable of the deviant constitutions and what Zephyr Teachout's network analysis documents in its contemporary expression: the accumulation of economic advantage converting into the political power to protect and extend that advantage, without requiring conscious coordination, because the structural incentives produce the alignment automatically.
The 1920s are the missing genealogy. The spectre of Bolshevism after 1917 did not merely frighten the European bourgeoisie into supporting strong-man politics. It produced the specific decision by the oligarchic class formations of Germany, Italy, and Spain to fund and organise fascism as the specific instrument for destroying the labour movements, the communist parties, and the social democratic parties that were threatening the accumulation dynamic. Brüning's austerity was not mere stupidity, it was the specific policy instrument that the German financial and industrial class required to break the unions and destroy the wage gains of the Weimar period, and that Brüning's particular incompetence turned into a political catastrophe nobody had planned for. The austerity and the fascism were not separate phenomena. They were the same class response to the same threat, deployed simultaneously through different institutional channels. The current austerity and the current rise of the authoritarian right are the same pattern in a different generation, and naming the pattern is the prerequisite for addressing it rather than merely documenting it.
The gangs passage is the piece's most important omission rather than its most important observation. Organised crime is not the only formation that fills governance vacuums as the state retreats, it is the formation that fills them when no alternative institutional architecture has been built in advance. The Zapatista communities in Chiapas, the Mondragon cooperative network in the Basque Country, the Irish Citizens' Assembly, these are documented contemporary exhibits of a different filling: commons governance institutions built in the space between the retreating state and the advancing gang, providing education, healthcare, economic security, and deliberative governance without waiting for either the state to function or the market to provide. The question is not whether the gang or the state fills the vacuum. It is whether civil society has built the institutional architecture that makes the gang unnecessary before the trigger event removes the option.
The renationalisation point requires the specific institutional design question that the piece leaves open: what makes renationalisation produce commons recovery rather than reproduce the Oligarchic System's extraction dynamic under public ownership? The Soviet collectivisation that produced the Aral Sea and the Ostrom commons governance that produces the sustainable fishery are both forms of public management of shared resources. The institutional design that distinguishes them is the specific work that the current moment requires, and it is not being done at the scale or speed that the approaching hard limits demand.
Everyone analyses the present. The harder and more urgent work is constitutionalising the specific institutional alternatives that can fill the governance vacuum before the gang does. The time between the underlying situation and the trigger event is not a period of waiting. It is the specific window in which the alternative architecture can be built.
A thoughtful piece as usual. But it occurred to me that the moral aspect is given short shrift, because it goes much deeper than the impotent cry of an exasperated observer. I do believe that there is a shared moral order, however amorphous and, as a pluralist would point out, varied in application. You describe hard limits and inherent instability as separate from and seemingly unaffected by the moral order, but I think it is foundational to both, though possibly to differing degrees.
The Iran war offers fresh and vivid demonstrations of both hard limits and inherent instability, and how both are affected by the moral order. Strictly as a hypothetical for purposes of this discussion, I will posit that as among Iran, the United States, and Israel, Iran currently holds the high moral ground over the U.S and Israel, and that Iran is extremely cognizant of holding that high moral ground. But why?
Neither the U.S. nor Israel seem to care. The U.S. has broken many long standing diplomatic norms – unilaterally tearing up a treaty, attacking Iran twice despite being in the midst of negotiation, changing and withdrawing offers willy nilly, to name just a few. Both countries have ignored longstanding wartime prohibitions such as attacking civilian infrastructure, deliberately murdering non-combatants, and assassinating religious leaders. Yet Iran is unbowed. Far from creating instability and “regime change,” Iran’s resolve has hardened, its people more determined, despite the continuing hardships caused by the hard limits the actions of the US and Israel have imposed upon them.
There is political instability now in the US, with support for the Trump administration collapsing at the polls and the Republican party facing disaster in the midterms. I believe this is directly traceable to President Trump breaking troth with his voters, a moral failure. Israel too is facing serious internal dissension from what I have read. I am not so familiar with that as to draw a direct line, but I suspect Israel not caring about holding the high moral ground is a factor. Furthermore, the world is heading toward serious and possibly disastrous economic hardships that the world quite likely will blame directly on the US and Israel, potentially making them pariah nations further increasing their instability.
Both the US and Israel are facing unavoidable hard limits, both in war materiel and economic resources. I believe their moral blindness also made them blind to those limits, whereas Iran, which has suffered under hard limits for decades, has coped in part because its people understood those limits were being imposed artificially and to them unfairly.
I will have to think about whether neoliberalism’s failure is also fundamentally a moral failure, but enough for today.
This is a realistic account of what we face.Politicians can make decisions we do not as a majority agree with but if those decisions do not make sense or help corruption or help the rich at the expense of the poor we can and we do , eventually boot those politicians out of power.The corruption that is embedded in neoliberalism is that for a few decades they have planned and shaped and filled all political perties with politicians that are all neoliberal politicians they are happy to wear the colours they detest they are happy to avoid the truth and tell lies repeatedly because they are all in it together there is no contest between political parties no choice for voters , the answer to this is for a new political party to arise with politicians who are genuinely local who live where their voters live and they will have to prove they live amongst their voters or be kicked out, its the truth we demand now , we have been and are still being tricked by them , they present themselves with names other than the name they were born with they often tell you where they were "brought up " which invariably turns out to be somewhere they lived for a very very short time and not where they were born , sometimes not even the country in which they were born , their whole identity presentation is a lie to fool the people, often they join a political party but do not beleive in the politics of that political party , they are planted there to gain trust then spring into action against the party they represent and jump ship at an opportune time in cahoots with the media to bring down a particular leader or policy, yes its that corrupt and that organised.
The first sign of change if there is to be a change is a tightening of law relating to the practices of the media because the media is controlled by right wing neoliberal politics , it lies continually it deprives you of important information and never appologises on the front page.
These are interesting thoughts for me; thank you, Aurelien. I’d like to add a simple observation of my own. Why I believe that, for example, the political direction and guiding principles of the government (including its war policy) in my country will change significantly in the near future—an analogy: In my lifetime (*1956), there have been massive, sometimes disruptive upheavals in more than 15 European countries, bringing new forms of government, constitutions, and “new” policies—most importantly for Germans, the “collapse” of the GDR and reunification. Even though everyone is wiser in hindsight—this development was NOT foreseeable as late as 1988! Prominent examples from the rest of Europe: Portugal, Spain, Greece, and the entire former Eastern Bloc. Message: The end of current political policies is foreseeable—but unfortunately, those changes always required hardship and oppression as a catalyst. On that path, however, I see my country... Cheers Marc
A long time ago, I used to teach game theory at a large but not too academically strong (but still a flagship) state university in US. The thing that always amused me about game theory is that students mostly thought that it somehow was supposed to teach them how to "win," but, in practice, what game theory described was what would happen if people who understood risk took precautions against it to the best of their ability. In fact, it's almost exact mathematical analogue to the idea of building a well-balanced portfolio (in fact, it's (almost) literally the same math--not even an analogue--I wondered if should even add the word "almost.") In investing or gambling, this is exactly the wrong way to make the most money: the most "efficient" way is to bet everything on one "sure thing"--which is easy if you know what the sure thing is. Indeed, game theory has the exact equivalent of this, too: make your choice under the assumption that the other side is stupid and predictable--which, again, is easy if the other side is indeed stupid and predictable.
Needless to say that both things are ruled out by assumption when you start looking at portfolio theory or game theory seriously from day 1, so we don't deal with this seriously, but perhaps we should have, since the students who enter the intro course (especially the intro course) never really abandon this idea until the end of the class--they will have learned how to deal with simple probability theory and do calculations--that's pretty much it. But trying to deal with the basic problem that they are starting the whole thing with a fundamentally misguided sense of what they are supposedly studying is a surefire way to alienate the students from day 1. They are taking the course with the thinking that they will somehow magically learn how to "win." If they are told form day 1 that they will learn nothing of the sort, why do they bother? Indeed, why should they bother with the real thing?
That the idea of finding some sure thing to bet everything on, or thinking that the adversary is stupid and predictable and all you need to do is to find some magical "weak point" to win everything is so widespread is probably reason enough to not take Stein's Law too seriously. Even if you are wrong to think that your adversaries are stupid and predictable, if you are the only one with the Maxim Gun, it does not matter what the adversaries do, for example, or if your parents or Uncle Sam can cover your losses when you made bad bets--or, in other words, material advarntage can cover up a lot of problems arising form your mistaken assumptions. Your beliefs about why and how you "won" remain unchallenged--that is, if you "won." Even if hte costs are rather high, it doesn't need to be borne by "you": it takes a long time to repay "every drop of blood drawn by the lash" with "another drawn by blood," and even then, it's not clear if that's enough for the sordid episode to "end."
1. "The coming to power of Margaret Thatcher was presented even at the time, and is now nearly always accepted, to be of epoch-making importance: the final nail in the coffin of a postwar consensus that had outlived its time. Yet in fact the General Election victory of May 1979 was a combination of stupidity (Callaghan, the Labour Party leader, postponing calling an election he might have won) coincidence (an unusually severe winter) and of course the luck that brought Thatcher to the Party leadership by accident in the first place. She would have been thrown out at the next election anyway, had the Labour Party not sportingly decided to destroy its chances of winning by splitting into two separate parties fighting each other. "
Hell, had Perot not run in 1992, dropped out, dropped in again, Bill Clinton would have been a footnote in history.
For that matter, in 1996, Perot siphoned enough votes away from an unpopular Clinton as to potentially have altered that race as well.
2. "In theory, a robust political system could survive these challenges. But over the last couple of generations, careerist neoliberal politics has destroyed the traditional major parties of Left and Right, leaving them hollow shells. The result has been the growth of what are essentially new protest parties, often based around individuals, with incoherent aims and little institutional capacity, rising and falling quickly, at a time when the level of the political class has never been so low, and the class itself so despised."
It doesn't matter that the politicians, the political parties, and their platforms are all incredibly unpopular. Nobody cares. What matters is that the orders given in those politicians' names still have the force of law, and the police and army are still ready to shoot.
Sure, europe and the US will increasingly resemble a glorified Brasil, but the Brasilian situation suits the elites in Brasil just dandy.
The protest parties are themselves easily dealt with. If the Establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good at determining whom to co-opt, whom to buy off, whom to neutralize, whom to ignore.
Meloni in Italy, Trump, hell, Zelenskii all provide sterling examples.
The average politician in Washington, DC believes that the Ukrainian Army will march upon Moscow in the immanent future and the regime of Iran will be overthrown when better leadership plans the overthrowing.
For other foreign policy and too, domestic issues, their lucidity is equally sound and considered.
Nobody actually believes that. What they believe is that Russia will be made to collapse.
Suppose, for instance, Putin were to die. Most politicians are not immortal. Regardless of any constitutional provision, a dozen contenders for the atop job would be sure to appear and they would be encouraged to fight each other, at the expense of the Ukrainian adventure.
The piece describes the gradient accurately but does not name what produces and maintains its angle. The systems approaching their respective hard limits are not doing so at random or by historical necessity. They were built with specific institutional architectures by specific class formations whose interests those architectures serve, what Aristotle identified as the most durable of the deviant constitutions and what Zephyr Teachout's network analysis documents in its contemporary expression: the accumulation of economic advantage converting into the political power to protect and extend that advantage, without requiring conscious coordination, because the structural incentives produce the alignment automatically.
The 1920s are the missing genealogy. The spectre of Bolshevism after 1917 did not merely frighten the European bourgeoisie into supporting strong-man politics. It produced the specific decision by the oligarchic class formations of Germany, Italy, and Spain to fund and organise fascism as the specific instrument for destroying the labour movements, the communist parties, and the social democratic parties that were threatening the accumulation dynamic. Brüning's austerity was not mere stupidity, it was the specific policy instrument that the German financial and industrial class required to break the unions and destroy the wage gains of the Weimar period, and that Brüning's particular incompetence turned into a political catastrophe nobody had planned for. The austerity and the fascism were not separate phenomena. They were the same class response to the same threat, deployed simultaneously through different institutional channels. The current austerity and the current rise of the authoritarian right are the same pattern in a different generation, and naming the pattern is the prerequisite for addressing it rather than merely documenting it.
The gangs passage is the piece's most important omission rather than its most important observation. Organised crime is not the only formation that fills governance vacuums as the state retreats, it is the formation that fills them when no alternative institutional architecture has been built in advance. The Zapatista communities in Chiapas, the Mondragon cooperative network in the Basque Country, the Irish Citizens' Assembly, these are documented contemporary exhibits of a different filling: commons governance institutions built in the space between the retreating state and the advancing gang, providing education, healthcare, economic security, and deliberative governance without waiting for either the state to function or the market to provide. The question is not whether the gang or the state fills the vacuum. It is whether civil society has built the institutional architecture that makes the gang unnecessary before the trigger event removes the option.
The renationalisation point requires the specific institutional design question that the piece leaves open: what makes renationalisation produce commons recovery rather than reproduce the Oligarchic System's extraction dynamic under public ownership? The Soviet collectivisation that produced the Aral Sea and the Ostrom commons governance that produces the sustainable fishery are both forms of public management of shared resources. The institutional design that distinguishes them is the specific work that the current moment requires, and it is not being done at the scale or speed that the approaching hard limits demand.
Everyone analyses the present. The harder and more urgent work is constitutionalising the specific institutional alternatives that can fill the governance vacuum before the gang does. The time between the underlying situation and the trigger event is not a period of waiting. It is the specific window in which the alternative architecture can be built.
A thoughtful piece as usual. But it occurred to me that the moral aspect is given short shrift, because it goes much deeper than the impotent cry of an exasperated observer. I do believe that there is a shared moral order, however amorphous and, as a pluralist would point out, varied in application. You describe hard limits and inherent instability as separate from and seemingly unaffected by the moral order, but I think it is foundational to both, though possibly to differing degrees.
The Iran war offers fresh and vivid demonstrations of both hard limits and inherent instability, and how both are affected by the moral order. Strictly as a hypothetical for purposes of this discussion, I will posit that as among Iran, the United States, and Israel, Iran currently holds the high moral ground over the U.S and Israel, and that Iran is extremely cognizant of holding that high moral ground. But why?
Neither the U.S. nor Israel seem to care. The U.S. has broken many long standing diplomatic norms – unilaterally tearing up a treaty, attacking Iran twice despite being in the midst of negotiation, changing and withdrawing offers willy nilly, to name just a few. Both countries have ignored longstanding wartime prohibitions such as attacking civilian infrastructure, deliberately murdering non-combatants, and assassinating religious leaders. Yet Iran is unbowed. Far from creating instability and “regime change,” Iran’s resolve has hardened, its people more determined, despite the continuing hardships caused by the hard limits the actions of the US and Israel have imposed upon them.
There is political instability now in the US, with support for the Trump administration collapsing at the polls and the Republican party facing disaster in the midterms. I believe this is directly traceable to President Trump breaking troth with his voters, a moral failure. Israel too is facing serious internal dissension from what I have read. I am not so familiar with that as to draw a direct line, but I suspect Israel not caring about holding the high moral ground is a factor. Furthermore, the world is heading toward serious and possibly disastrous economic hardships that the world quite likely will blame directly on the US and Israel, potentially making them pariah nations further increasing their instability.
Both the US and Israel are facing unavoidable hard limits, both in war materiel and economic resources. I believe their moral blindness also made them blind to those limits, whereas Iran, which has suffered under hard limits for decades, has coped in part because its people understood those limits were being imposed artificially and to them unfairly.
I will have to think about whether neoliberalism’s failure is also fundamentally a moral failure, but enough for today.
This is a realistic account of what we face.Politicians can make decisions we do not as a majority agree with but if those decisions do not make sense or help corruption or help the rich at the expense of the poor we can and we do , eventually boot those politicians out of power.The corruption that is embedded in neoliberalism is that for a few decades they have planned and shaped and filled all political perties with politicians that are all neoliberal politicians they are happy to wear the colours they detest they are happy to avoid the truth and tell lies repeatedly because they are all in it together there is no contest between political parties no choice for voters , the answer to this is for a new political party to arise with politicians who are genuinely local who live where their voters live and they will have to prove they live amongst their voters or be kicked out, its the truth we demand now , we have been and are still being tricked by them , they present themselves with names other than the name they were born with they often tell you where they were "brought up " which invariably turns out to be somewhere they lived for a very very short time and not where they were born , sometimes not even the country in which they were born , their whole identity presentation is a lie to fool the people, often they join a political party but do not beleive in the politics of that political party , they are planted there to gain trust then spring into action against the party they represent and jump ship at an opportune time in cahoots with the media to bring down a particular leader or policy, yes its that corrupt and that organised.
The first sign of change if there is to be a change is a tightening of law relating to the practices of the media because the media is controlled by right wing neoliberal politics , it lies continually it deprives you of important information and never appologises on the front page.
Oh, how your analysis resonates Aurelien. I feel the slope is getting steeper and the pace is accelerating.
These are interesting thoughts for me; thank you, Aurelien. I’d like to add a simple observation of my own. Why I believe that, for example, the political direction and guiding principles of the government (including its war policy) in my country will change significantly in the near future—an analogy: In my lifetime (*1956), there have been massive, sometimes disruptive upheavals in more than 15 European countries, bringing new forms of government, constitutions, and “new” policies—most importantly for Germans, the “collapse” of the GDR and reunification. Even though everyone is wiser in hindsight—this development was NOT foreseeable as late as 1988! Prominent examples from the rest of Europe: Portugal, Spain, Greece, and the entire former Eastern Bloc. Message: The end of current political policies is foreseeable—but unfortunately, those changes always required hardship and oppression as a catalyst. On that path, however, I see my country... Cheers Marc
A long time ago, I used to teach game theory at a large but not too academically strong (but still a flagship) state university in US. The thing that always amused me about game theory is that students mostly thought that it somehow was supposed to teach them how to "win," but, in practice, what game theory described was what would happen if people who understood risk took precautions against it to the best of their ability. In fact, it's almost exact mathematical analogue to the idea of building a well-balanced portfolio (in fact, it's (almost) literally the same math--not even an analogue--I wondered if should even add the word "almost.") In investing or gambling, this is exactly the wrong way to make the most money: the most "efficient" way is to bet everything on one "sure thing"--which is easy if you know what the sure thing is. Indeed, game theory has the exact equivalent of this, too: make your choice under the assumption that the other side is stupid and predictable--which, again, is easy if the other side is indeed stupid and predictable.
Needless to say that both things are ruled out by assumption when you start looking at portfolio theory or game theory seriously from day 1, so we don't deal with this seriously, but perhaps we should have, since the students who enter the intro course (especially the intro course) never really abandon this idea until the end of the class--they will have learned how to deal with simple probability theory and do calculations--that's pretty much it. But trying to deal with the basic problem that they are starting the whole thing with a fundamentally misguided sense of what they are supposedly studying is a surefire way to alienate the students from day 1. They are taking the course with the thinking that they will somehow magically learn how to "win." If they are told form day 1 that they will learn nothing of the sort, why do they bother? Indeed, why should they bother with the real thing?
That the idea of finding some sure thing to bet everything on, or thinking that the adversary is stupid and predictable and all you need to do is to find some magical "weak point" to win everything is so widespread is probably reason enough to not take Stein's Law too seriously. Even if you are wrong to think that your adversaries are stupid and predictable, if you are the only one with the Maxim Gun, it does not matter what the adversaries do, for example, or if your parents or Uncle Sam can cover your losses when you made bad bets--or, in other words, material advarntage can cover up a lot of problems arising form your mistaken assumptions. Your beliefs about why and how you "won" remain unchallenged--that is, if you "won." Even if hte costs are rather high, it doesn't need to be borne by "you": it takes a long time to repay "every drop of blood drawn by the lash" with "another drawn by blood," and even then, it's not clear if that's enough for the sordid episode to "end."
Thanks for this. On point throughout, and you've left good tools to sort the tumbled mess.
I was kind of hoping that this essay would stop.
1. "The coming to power of Margaret Thatcher was presented even at the time, and is now nearly always accepted, to be of epoch-making importance: the final nail in the coffin of a postwar consensus that had outlived its time. Yet in fact the General Election victory of May 1979 was a combination of stupidity (Callaghan, the Labour Party leader, postponing calling an election he might have won) coincidence (an unusually severe winter) and of course the luck that brought Thatcher to the Party leadership by accident in the first place. She would have been thrown out at the next election anyway, had the Labour Party not sportingly decided to destroy its chances of winning by splitting into two separate parties fighting each other. "
Hell, had Perot not run in 1992, dropped out, dropped in again, Bill Clinton would have been a footnote in history.
For that matter, in 1996, Perot siphoned enough votes away from an unpopular Clinton as to potentially have altered that race as well.
2. "In theory, a robust political system could survive these challenges. But over the last couple of generations, careerist neoliberal politics has destroyed the traditional major parties of Left and Right, leaving them hollow shells. The result has been the growth of what are essentially new protest parties, often based around individuals, with incoherent aims and little institutional capacity, rising and falling quickly, at a time when the level of the political class has never been so low, and the class itself so despised."
It doesn't matter that the politicians, the political parties, and their platforms are all incredibly unpopular. Nobody cares. What matters is that the orders given in those politicians' names still have the force of law, and the police and army are still ready to shoot.
Sure, europe and the US will increasingly resemble a glorified Brasil, but the Brasilian situation suits the elites in Brasil just dandy.
The protest parties are themselves easily dealt with. If the Establishment is good at nothing else, it is very good at determining whom to co-opt, whom to buy off, whom to neutralize, whom to ignore.
Meloni in Italy, Trump, hell, Zelenskii all provide sterling examples.
The average politician in Washington, DC believes that the Ukrainian Army will march upon Moscow in the immanent future and the regime of Iran will be overthrown when better leadership plans the overthrowing.
For other foreign policy and too, domestic issues, their lucidity is equally sound and considered.
Nobody actually believes that. What they believe is that Russia will be made to collapse.
Suppose, for instance, Putin were to die. Most politicians are not immortal. Regardless of any constitutional provision, a dozen contenders for the atop job would be sure to appear and they would be encouraged to fight each other, at the expense of the Ukrainian adventure.
A dozen other such scenarios can be imagined.