Arturo Perez Reverte’s 2015 novel Hombres Buenos (“Good Men”) recounts the true story of a dangerous trip to Paris by a group of Spaniards seeking to buy a copy of Diderot’s Encyclopaedia etc etc…
LOL! Please, next time do not cite works of fiction as if they were historic facts!
Perez Reverte is a Black Legendarian who gloats in the darkest cliches of anti Spanish propaganda. Any Spanish gentleman who at that time wanted to read Diderot didn’t need to travel to France, there were LOTS of copies circulating in Spain at the time and people were not skinned alive or similar if the authorities found a forbidden book in one’s home.
P-R misrepresents a trip to Paris by some wealthy Spanish dudes with too much free time as a kind of Enlightenment adventure.
As for the compass and sextant thing, this is beyond moronic. Spanish navigators were routinely crossing the Pacific Ocean in the Galeon de Manila route almost 2 CENTURIES before Cook trekked with the Beagle around that region. Pleeeeeezzzzeeeee!
It was not the Spanish who lost the navigation skills, it was the rest who did catch up!
As for the main topic of the article: things go fast downhill once 1) corporations have captive customers 2) there is no accountability for the people in charge (no “skin in the game” as Nassim Taleb would say). Both are the end result of a culture where Capitalism is the state religion. Amen.
I believe, though, that there is a kernel of truth in the story. Science on the whole died with the counter-reformation. Empirical science wasn't in vogue any more, and it was looked down at by the authorities. It was not for nothing the "enlightenment" people, valued "constitutionalism, Newton and industry", attacked the catholic church; they really believed it stood in the way for all these.
And the Inquisition in catholic countries really was a kind of KGB of its days that tried to shut down any new thinking.
What an excellent read. Being of a similar age, growing up in the 50s and 60s in southern England, I concur with everything in the article about that period. I was born in a house with only a shared outside toilet. To the question of why things changed so rapidly for the better in the post war years the most convincing argument I have heard is because of what was happening in the communist countries regarding social welfare. The elite had to swallow their pride and give the British working class similar benefits, or else who knows what might have happened...
I have now lived in Japan for the last 15 years, where things actually do work, people still answer the phone, infrastructure is always being maintained and upgraded, etc. The situation is very similar in China and other SE Asian countries I have visited. The only thing that doesn't work (by Western standards) is democracy. The LDP in Japan have been in power as long as the CCP in China, and let us not even talk about Singapore. Well that was the case in the Soviet Union also but it didn't stop Western Europe from copying many of its welfare ideas.
So here is my ray of hope. The current generation of politicians, with their elite backers, is obviously hopeless. But the next generation will be well traveled in countries where things do work, and wonder why Western countries are not able to learn a thing a two from these "authoritarians" about how to run a country.
Dear Aurelien, can you present a source for the assertion that "the Church forbad Spanish mariners of the time [XVIII century] from using modern inventions like the compass and the sextant, asserting that they should trust in God to get them to the right place. This meant, among other things, that the Spaniards fell behind in the exploration stakes"?
Considering that at the time the Spanish fleet was busy colonising Hispanic America, the Philippines and a few parts of Africa, and trading Andean silver for Chinese goods over the Pacific, among other exploits, this seem to me highly unlikely. The Spanish fleet no longer ruled the waves like in the time of Charles V, but it was not until Trafalgar that it ceased to be an important factor of power in Europe.
You literally use the words "true story" and cite it as an example of how anti-modernism produces quantifiable effects. This is so egregious an error I'd say it warrants retracting the whole article until you can purge mentions of it since you also refer back to it later on.
There are also some other dubious facts in the text, like
- peasants in Vendée fighting for religious slavery, while they as well could be said fought against conscription, new taxes, and voting censuses excluding all but the wealthiest
- enlightenment as a creation by non-religious middle class people when it – according to Margaret Jacob – was a creation by the English puritans, largely artisans and taught in their reading-rooms a century before it was shipped over to the Continent by free-masons.
But let's not be niggard. The main picture is good enough.
“ Arturo Perez Reverte’s 2015 novel Hombres Buenos (“Good Men”) recounts the true story of a dangerous trip to Paris by a group of Spaniards seeking to buy a copy of Diderot’s Encyclopaedia, and opposed at every stage by the Church, which distrusted anything not found in the Bible and the writings officially accepted by the Church. That Church forbad Spanish mariners of the time from using modern inventions like the compass and the sextant, asserting that they should trust in God to get them to the right place. This meant, among other things, that the Spaniards fell behind in the exploration stakes, so let nobody suggest that dogmatic anti-modernism never has quantifiable effects.”
Let us let readers decide about the truthness - apud S. Colbert - of the excerpt.
Well I would not go so far. Competition is intense in this category. And Aurelien usually writes insightful and pertinent things, which is the reason I read his stuff. It is probably just the effect of the Black Legend created by (mostly) British propagandists about their Spanish adversaries. There were obviously many things to properly criticize in Spain from the XVI to the XIX centuries, as well as in all other nations and centuries. But if you are heavily invested, as a society, in a effort to demonize your competitor or opponent, the risk is that you will end up believing your own side's propaganda. It is curious that Aurelien is very lucid about contemporary demonization of Russia (carefully conducted by British publicists and propagandists since the XIX century), but cannot identify the same phenomenon in Russia's predecessor as the British' bugbear, Spain.
All good points… I guess Russophobia is a relatively recent development in the UK, while contempt against Spain has become with time just part of British pop culture…
I guess in the case of Russophobia it is easier to balance hatred with some respect when the other guy has enough megatons to wipe out your islands many times over.
As a qualified nautical navigator trained in celestial navigation, I’d like to point out that the navigation of oceans before the mid-19th century largely lay in following safe routes: maintaining a steady course along a fixed line of latitude by measuring the altitude of the sun at local noon, until they made landfall. Those ‘safe’ latitudes had been proved over time by repeated success. Those following a different course didn’t report back!
Navigating the coast of Africa was simple in comparison - you just follow the coast
The brilliant insight of French navigator Saint-Hilaire in 1873 finally allowed precision from the combined use of the chronometer, sextant, charts and sight reduction tables for the first time. This was distrusted by the British and only accepted by the navy in 1908 - ‘not invented here’.
Instead of sailing to Santander and engaging the Spanish fleet there, he somehow ended up attacking La Coruña, a place he thought would be easy to plunder and were he was thoroughly kicked in the teeth…
'when you no longer believe a better future is possible, you lose all interest in safeguarding the present'...in the 60's 'Beyond the superficial mythology of flying cars and spaceships was an excitement about the possibilities of the future and the belief that it could be better than the past.' I just assumed that things would improve and I wanted to be part of it. Now I KNOW that it's only when Britain and the USA are flat on their backs that there'll be any change. I watch China and think - that's the kind of world we should have made.
The situation in the USA is not quite the same as that in the UK. Mr. Trump, for all his peculiarities, is attempting to restore an economy based on real work producing real things of value as well as restoring some classical virtues to America's common culture. . . for instance, the family as the basic economic-political unit; a consensus that crime is not a privilege for so-called 'oppressed' people; and that relations between men and women must start with the acknowledgment that there are two biological sexes (and the rest are forms of pretend).
You can't truly believe that the cunning huckster Trump stands for any particular values, can you? This must be Edgelord-level sarcasm because there's no other explanation.
Trump himself of course does not, but Trumpism (for the lack of better word), which is certainly there to stay after Trump, has a mix of both good and bad ideas, while its opponents have only bad ones. It's a choice between grey and black.
" Mr. Trump, for all his peculiarities, is attempting to restore an economy based on real work producing real things of value"
Well, whether or not Trump is trying to do that, it is an impossibility. The US ruling strata are wedded (but not 'welded' - see below) immovably to making more dollars for themselves to the exclusion of everything else, hence the 'financialisation' of firms like Boeing, which were once upon a time dependent on engineers - now they are dependent on lawyers and bond traders, and there is no feasible way of going back, as it would mean financial losses for the bosses.
Additionally, look, for example, at naval-capable shipyards - the Chinese have around 600, while the US has 6, and they still can't get as many welders and other technical workers as they need to actually produce reliable products in a finite time. The dustbin of history awaits. Kruschev's ghost is smiling broadly.
Wanting to re-industrialize America is a laudable initiative – but there is a way to do it, and putting a custom on everything isn't it. As Alexander Hamilton well knew, you put on a custom to help your own fledgling industries, but if you haven't got any, there is no use to.
And there are many other ways. Robert Wade wrote about how the Taiwanese did it (Ruling the market, 1992, new edition 2001). Chalmers Johnson wrote about how the Japanese did it (MITI and the Japanese miracle, 1982), and Alice Amsden has written about how all the Asians do it (The rise of the rest, 2001). It is not about taxbreaks on billionaires, it is about killing the rentiers and governing the market.
The American economy, and increasingly the Europeans, suffer from rentierization. Billioniaires profit not from producing or organizing production chains, they earn money from money – except the two classical ways real estate and finance (Trump by coincidence is a real estate man), there are new kinds: platforms, patents & copyrights, government contracts, raw materials and infrastructures. Michael Hudson calls it "tollbooth capitalism"; it is not about producing new things but to write up the value of the existing to make people pay more for that.
There is literature about that too, I suggest Brett Christophers: Rentier capialism, 2020. But actually, there is nothing new with it, Adam Smith and David Ricardo had rentiers a their main culprits. But rentiers had little to say during the Keynesian era, it's only after the 70s they have come back with a vengeance.
And by the way about families: American talk a lot about family values but Europeans practice them, as Paul Krugman said. We work eight hours a day and take a month holidays to spend time with our families; Americans think that they should work day and night the whole year through and spend as little time as possible with the family.
There is also a way to strenghten families, and that is raise salaries so they can afford free time. And to do this you must have strong trade unions, they are the only power that can. And you must build affordable housing so young people can start a family. You don't strengthen families by talking shit about people who hasn't any.
As noted in the comments there are a couple statements of historical fact that are useful to the narrative in the essay but, wrong. This said, I haven't read social criticism of this high standard since Gore Vidal's heart stopped pounding. Chapeau.
"No society built on the Cult of Can’t can actually endure very long."
What do you mean? The West is simply becoming Brazilianized (is that a word?).
In a place such as Brazil or Ukraine, the things that the elites want to work generally work, at least for the elites' purposes, and nobody cares whether things work for the unwashed masses.
Excellent Aurelien, you have nailed the current crop of useless, dangerous Western politicians. I think that there's a way to go before an upheaval occurs as people aren't yet starving, but we are getting there.
There are a couple of sayings that I like that briefly cover the situation :
"If you stand for nothing you will fall for anything"
"The situation is hopeless. We must take the next step"
My Corbyn point is that there really is someone manipulating the machine. It's not accidental that the Commission is stuffed full of Baltic and other fixers and van Der Leyen. There IS CLEARLY an operation. But as Marx or someone said: philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it. Lenin changed it. Putin is changing it. Corbyn tried to change it.
Do not read naked capitalism. There is a thread )water cooler) which provides statistics on covid and makes no mention of vaccines. Asked simple question as to why no mention of vaccines. Was promptly banned from commenting. Site engaged in censorship and likely echo chamber.
For me the most salient and destructive example of the “we can’t improve things so you’ll just have to put up with it” problem canvassed here is taxing wealth in order to reverse runaway inequality. We are constantly told by “our betters” that this is somehow impossible.
I can’t take seriously someone who believe that the compass and sextant were banned in Spain because of Catholicism or Spanishness or something like that, and that the 2,000 ships of the Spanish merchant fleet in the 18th century sailed the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Pacific consulting a Ouija board. Or that owning an encyclopedia could get you killed. Unsubscribed..
The historicism of this passage of Aurelien may be somewhat questionable (he says it came from a novel) but when I read it, I thought there might be a substantial nugget of truth that the Counter-Reformation and the Catholic "KGB" inhibited science in places like Spain, Italy and France, while science in Northern Europe and Protestant Germany flourished. I can't recall any major scientific discoveries in Italy during the centuries after Galileo, until Alessandro Volta in the 1740's. French science didn't really flower until after the Revolution (Laplace, Ampere, Carnot, Lavoisier). Copernicus, who was a Catholic official of some rank (who preceded Galileo), couldn't publish his magnum opus until after he died -- this gives you an idea of the temper of the times. Ideology (Naziism being a recent example) can be very successful at snuffing out science. Trump may well clobber climate science in the U.S. We'll see. We are living in dark times.
When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, we simply assumed that "things would get better and better," and for a while, they did. Then "things got better and better" in certain areas, such as technology, while in others -- such as education (where I ended up working) -- they didn't, and since I quit, institutions have fallen into dysfunction.
Now, of course, a lot of the technology available to us peasants has fallen into dysfunction, with built-in obsolescence ensuring that any particular device will have a life span of 2 to 3 years. (I had a CD player quit on me after 2 and a half years of use.)
As an avid science fiction reader and watcher, I noticed the change from "better and better" in that (1960s, 1970s) to Dystopia (1980s and beyond, with rare exceptions).
Now that we're all online paying credit cards, other bills, etc., every upgrade makes a website harder to use ... and I've come to realize, someone is usually making money from the enshittification of everything (Cory Doctorow's colorful term).
My most recent anecdote:
Last month, I received a bill from Citibank, to a credit card I hadn't used in roughly a year. When I tried to log on to pay it, I was blocked with a cryptic message reading, "Our system is experiencing temporary delays. Please try again later." So I did ... for days on end.
Finally I had to call, which meant navigating their complex and annoying phone tree and dealing with a bot that couldn't find my account. Amazingly, I was able to speak to a human being within 20 minutes or so, and the human being couldn't find the account at first, either. I had to jump through all the authentication hoops that have become familiar: address on file, last 4 digits of my SSN, mother's maiden name, the name of my first pet, etc., etc. Then he wanted to text my phone. I told him I'm on a Magic Jack number because I don't live in the U.S., and that number can't receive a text. "We're sorry, we're unable to authenticate this account."
Then he told me it had probably been suspended due to inactivity.
"Not so suspended that someone couldn't bill to it!" I retorted.
Shortening this tale of woe: he said he would send me a letter with a reference number that I was to call back and give them. "You'll email it, right?" I said nonchalantly.
"No, email isn't 'secure.'"
"So how do I get this number?"
"Do we have your physical address on file?"
"Yes, I gave it to you earlier, but you're not going to snail-mail this number, are you?"
"We have to, it's our policy."
"You're effing kidding me, right?This is 2025, not 1980!"
"We have to send this by regular mail, and you have to call back and prove that you're you."
That, of course, meant emailing the person who monitors my U.S. address, a PO box ... who has yet to reply.
The bill was due October 6 (I had a perfect record of on-time payments!) and I'm still waiting....
Zero trust in institutions here ... no more than they trust me!
I agree with others that there are several illustrations that are incorrect in this essay. However, the general point of it is very good. I would not say that we are "regressing" however. Instead, the idea of "Progress" has always been faulty, especially with the mindset of a Utopian goal, and we are moving towards the logical end of the system we have built without any sense of human-centered restraint.
"For the historian, the general progress is not in doubt: but no less the fact that it is never a question of continuous, uniform, determined progress."
“ The king of France is emperor in his kingdom . . . his will has the force of law”— such principles, at the time they were proclaimed, were purely utopian; but nothing is more common in world history than to see utopias become realities. In this case, some
two hundred years were necessary."
--- historian Regine Pernoud (1977) pp.171 and 77, respectively
Well, if Naked Capitalism only can be supported through Paypal, that's a good reason not to support them, isn't it? (There is a name for it: enshittification, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)
But about the Can't Syndrome, why dig up French philosophers from the 60s, when Neo-Classic economics is so much more the Ideology of The Party? Its core, remember, is that one must not do anything that can upset or even interfere with "the market". Its hard-core, the Neo-liberals, even depicted the market as God, something we mortals shouldn't ever try to understand. But even mainstream neo-classics are not far from that. And that is what is taught in all our universities and what all in the Elite have learned. And most of their underlings as well. How could one expect them to do things different?
But apart from that, government is all about making good compromises between the mobilized forces (see Susan Strange). In the forties, say, labour movements and colonial liberation movements were very mobilized and whoever sat in governments then had to take them into consideration. Now they don't. Cuts and outsourcings have effectively killed the labour movements, and capitalism is now essentially about making money on money. That doesn't require many employees, so they can be bribed. The rest has no power. Governments don't need to consider them because they can't make the lives of the government and their acolytes any troubled. Or at least they can't imagine how they can make it.
New forms of struggle and new organizations to carry them out must be invented before the Can't Syndrome will die. Perhaps that will happen when some day we compare our own lives with that of Asians and see the other as better?
Arturo Perez Reverte’s 2015 novel Hombres Buenos (“Good Men”) recounts the true story of a dangerous trip to Paris by a group of Spaniards seeking to buy a copy of Diderot’s Encyclopaedia etc etc…
LOL! Please, next time do not cite works of fiction as if they were historic facts!
Perez Reverte is a Black Legendarian who gloats in the darkest cliches of anti Spanish propaganda. Any Spanish gentleman who at that time wanted to read Diderot didn’t need to travel to France, there were LOTS of copies circulating in Spain at the time and people were not skinned alive or similar if the authorities found a forbidden book in one’s home.
P-R misrepresents a trip to Paris by some wealthy Spanish dudes with too much free time as a kind of Enlightenment adventure.
As for the compass and sextant thing, this is beyond moronic. Spanish navigators were routinely crossing the Pacific Ocean in the Galeon de Manila route almost 2 CENTURIES before Cook trekked with the Beagle around that region. Pleeeeeezzzzeeeee!
It was not the Spanish who lost the navigation skills, it was the rest who did catch up!
As for the main topic of the article: things go fast downhill once 1) corporations have captive customers 2) there is no accountability for the people in charge (no “skin in the game” as Nassim Taleb would say). Both are the end result of a culture where Capitalism is the state religion. Amen.
I believe, though, that there is a kernel of truth in the story. Science on the whole died with the counter-reformation. Empirical science wasn't in vogue any more, and it was looked down at by the authorities. It was not for nothing the "enlightenment" people, valued "constitutionalism, Newton and industry", attacked the catholic church; they really believed it stood in the way for all these.
And the Inquisition in catholic countries really was a kind of KGB of its days that tried to shut down any new thinking.
What an excellent read. Being of a similar age, growing up in the 50s and 60s in southern England, I concur with everything in the article about that period. I was born in a house with only a shared outside toilet. To the question of why things changed so rapidly for the better in the post war years the most convincing argument I have heard is because of what was happening in the communist countries regarding social welfare. The elite had to swallow their pride and give the British working class similar benefits, or else who knows what might have happened...
I have now lived in Japan for the last 15 years, where things actually do work, people still answer the phone, infrastructure is always being maintained and upgraded, etc. The situation is very similar in China and other SE Asian countries I have visited. The only thing that doesn't work (by Western standards) is democracy. The LDP in Japan have been in power as long as the CCP in China, and let us not even talk about Singapore. Well that was the case in the Soviet Union also but it didn't stop Western Europe from copying many of its welfare ideas.
So here is my ray of hope. The current generation of politicians, with their elite backers, is obviously hopeless. But the next generation will be well traveled in countries where things do work, and wonder why Western countries are not able to learn a thing a two from these "authoritarians" about how to run a country.
Your reference to covid and climate change leave me at a bit of a loss. Read up Ivor Cummings and get an idea of an alternative.
Thank you for letting me know.
Dear Aurelien, can you present a source for the assertion that "the Church forbad Spanish mariners of the time [XVIII century] from using modern inventions like the compass and the sextant, asserting that they should trust in God to get them to the right place. This meant, among other things, that the Spaniards fell behind in the exploration stakes"?
Considering that at the time the Spanish fleet was busy colonising Hispanic America, the Philippines and a few parts of Africa, and trading Andean silver for Chinese goods over the Pacific, among other exploits, this seem to me highly unlikely. The Spanish fleet no longer ruled the waves like in the time of Charles V, but it was not until Trafalgar that it ceased to be an important factor of power in Europe.
I think I made it clear that it was an episode in a novel by a Spanish writer.
You literally use the words "true story" and cite it as an example of how anti-modernism produces quantifiable effects. This is so egregious an error I'd say it warrants retracting the whole article until you can purge mentions of it since you also refer back to it later on.
There are also some other dubious facts in the text, like
- peasants in Vendée fighting for religious slavery, while they as well could be said fought against conscription, new taxes, and voting censuses excluding all but the wealthiest
- enlightenment as a creation by non-religious middle class people when it – according to Margaret Jacob – was a creation by the English puritans, largely artisans and taught in their reading-rooms a century before it was shipped over to the Continent by free-masons.
But let's not be niggard. The main picture is good enough.
“ Arturo Perez Reverte’s 2015 novel Hombres Buenos (“Good Men”) recounts the true story of a dangerous trip to Paris by a group of Spaniards seeking to buy a copy of Diderot’s Encyclopaedia, and opposed at every stage by the Church, which distrusted anything not found in the Bible and the writings officially accepted by the Church. That Church forbad Spanish mariners of the time from using modern inventions like the compass and the sextant, asserting that they should trust in God to get them to the right place. This meant, among other things, that the Spaniards fell behind in the exploration stakes, so let nobody suggest that dogmatic anti-modernism never has quantifiable effects.”
Let us let readers decide about the truthness - apud S. Colbert - of the excerpt.
I don’t know where Aurelien got this but I put it in the “most retarded things I’ve read in a long time” category.
Well I would not go so far. Competition is intense in this category. And Aurelien usually writes insightful and pertinent things, which is the reason I read his stuff. It is probably just the effect of the Black Legend created by (mostly) British propagandists about their Spanish adversaries. There were obviously many things to properly criticize in Spain from the XVI to the XIX centuries, as well as in all other nations and centuries. But if you are heavily invested, as a society, in a effort to demonize your competitor or opponent, the risk is that you will end up believing your own side's propaganda. It is curious that Aurelien is very lucid about contemporary demonization of Russia (carefully conducted by British publicists and propagandists since the XIX century), but cannot identify the same phenomenon in Russia's predecessor as the British' bugbear, Spain.
All good points… I guess Russophobia is a relatively recent development in the UK, while contempt against Spain has become with time just part of British pop culture…
I guess in the case of Russophobia it is easier to balance hatred with some respect when the other guy has enough megatons to wipe out your islands many times over.
The author also broadcasts English legends about Russia. This is very noticeable if you live in Moscow )
As a qualified nautical navigator trained in celestial navigation, I’d like to point out that the navigation of oceans before the mid-19th century largely lay in following safe routes: maintaining a steady course along a fixed line of latitude by measuring the altitude of the sun at local noon, until they made landfall. Those ‘safe’ latitudes had been proved over time by repeated success. Those following a different course didn’t report back!
Navigating the coast of Africa was simple in comparison - you just follow the coast
The brilliant insight of French navigator Saint-Hilaire in 1873 finally allowed precision from the combined use of the chronometer, sextant, charts and sight reduction tables for the first time. This was distrusted by the British and only accepted by the navy in 1908 - ‘not invented here’.
I cannot imagine Don Juan de Austria on the galley "La Real" without a compass )
Actually, it can be argued that it was Pirate Drake the one who didn’t have compass or charts. When commanding the Counter Armada
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_Armada
Instead of sailing to Santander and engaging the Spanish fleet there, he somehow ended up attacking La Coruña, a place he thought would be easy to plunder and were he was thoroughly kicked in the teeth…
'when you no longer believe a better future is possible, you lose all interest in safeguarding the present'...in the 60's 'Beyond the superficial mythology of flying cars and spaceships was an excitement about the possibilities of the future and the belief that it could be better than the past.' I just assumed that things would improve and I wanted to be part of it. Now I KNOW that it's only when Britain and the USA are flat on their backs that there'll be any change. I watch China and think - that's the kind of world we should have made.
we should hitch our wagon to that bullet train, for sure! who knows, one day we may invent something useful again.
The situation in the USA is not quite the same as that in the UK. Mr. Trump, for all his peculiarities, is attempting to restore an economy based on real work producing real things of value as well as restoring some classical virtues to America's common culture. . . for instance, the family as the basic economic-political unit; a consensus that crime is not a privilege for so-called 'oppressed' people; and that relations between men and women must start with the acknowledgment that there are two biological sexes (and the rest are forms of pretend).
You can't truly believe that the cunning huckster Trump stands for any particular values, can you? This must be Edgelord-level sarcasm because there's no other explanation.
Trump himself of course does not, but Trumpism (for the lack of better word), which is certainly there to stay after Trump, has a mix of both good and bad ideas, while its opponents have only bad ones. It's a choice between grey and black.
" Mr. Trump, for all his peculiarities, is attempting to restore an economy based on real work producing real things of value"
Well, whether or not Trump is trying to do that, it is an impossibility. The US ruling strata are wedded (but not 'welded' - see below) immovably to making more dollars for themselves to the exclusion of everything else, hence the 'financialisation' of firms like Boeing, which were once upon a time dependent on engineers - now they are dependent on lawyers and bond traders, and there is no feasible way of going back, as it would mean financial losses for the bosses.
Additionally, look, for example, at naval-capable shipyards - the Chinese have around 600, while the US has 6, and they still can't get as many welders and other technical workers as they need to actually produce reliable products in a finite time. The dustbin of history awaits. Kruschev's ghost is smiling broadly.
Wanting to re-industrialize America is a laudable initiative – but there is a way to do it, and putting a custom on everything isn't it. As Alexander Hamilton well knew, you put on a custom to help your own fledgling industries, but if you haven't got any, there is no use to.
And there are many other ways. Robert Wade wrote about how the Taiwanese did it (Ruling the market, 1992, new edition 2001). Chalmers Johnson wrote about how the Japanese did it (MITI and the Japanese miracle, 1982), and Alice Amsden has written about how all the Asians do it (The rise of the rest, 2001). It is not about taxbreaks on billionaires, it is about killing the rentiers and governing the market.
The American economy, and increasingly the Europeans, suffer from rentierization. Billioniaires profit not from producing or organizing production chains, they earn money from money – except the two classical ways real estate and finance (Trump by coincidence is a real estate man), there are new kinds: platforms, patents & copyrights, government contracts, raw materials and infrastructures. Michael Hudson calls it "tollbooth capitalism"; it is not about producing new things but to write up the value of the existing to make people pay more for that.
There is literature about that too, I suggest Brett Christophers: Rentier capialism, 2020. But actually, there is nothing new with it, Adam Smith and David Ricardo had rentiers a their main culprits. But rentiers had little to say during the Keynesian era, it's only after the 70s they have come back with a vengeance.
And by the way about families: American talk a lot about family values but Europeans practice them, as Paul Krugman said. We work eight hours a day and take a month holidays to spend time with our families; Americans think that they should work day and night the whole year through and spend as little time as possible with the family.
There is also a way to strenghten families, and that is raise salaries so they can afford free time. And to do this you must have strong trade unions, they are the only power that can. And you must build affordable housing so young people can start a family. You don't strengthen families by talking shit about people who hasn't any.
"Mr. Trump, for all his peculiarities, is attempting to restore an economy based on real work producing real things of value . . ."
Like Trumpcoins, those represent "real work", right?
As noted in the comments there are a couple statements of historical fact that are useful to the narrative in the essay but, wrong. This said, I haven't read social criticism of this high standard since Gore Vidal's heart stopped pounding. Chapeau.
"No society built on the Cult of Can’t can actually endure very long."
What do you mean? The West is simply becoming Brazilianized (is that a word?).
In a place such as Brazil or Ukraine, the things that the elites want to work generally work, at least for the elites' purposes, and nobody cares whether things work for the unwashed masses.
Excellent Aurelien, you have nailed the current crop of useless, dangerous Western politicians. I think that there's a way to go before an upheaval occurs as people aren't yet starving, but we are getting there.
There are a couple of sayings that I like that briefly cover the situation :
"If you stand for nothing you will fall for anything"
"The situation is hopeless. We must take the next step"
It's time for the next step, no matter how small.
You have set out much to think about. Thank you.
My Corbyn point is that there really is someone manipulating the machine. It's not accidental that the Commission is stuffed full of Baltic and other fixers and van Der Leyen. There IS CLEARLY an operation. But as Marx or someone said: philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it. Lenin changed it. Putin is changing it. Corbyn tried to change it.
Do not read naked capitalism. There is a thread )water cooler) which provides statistics on covid and makes no mention of vaccines. Asked simple question as to why no mention of vaccines. Was promptly banned from commenting. Site engaged in censorship and likely echo chamber.
Yes. 'nc' is operated under a totalitarian regime where dissent leads to disenfranchisement.
For me the most salient and destructive example of the “we can’t improve things so you’ll just have to put up with it” problem canvassed here is taxing wealth in order to reverse runaway inequality. We are constantly told by “our betters” that this is somehow impossible.
They are surely lying.
I can’t take seriously someone who believe that the compass and sextant were banned in Spain because of Catholicism or Spanishness or something like that, and that the 2,000 ships of the Spanish merchant fleet in the 18th century sailed the Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Pacific consulting a Ouija board. Or that owning an encyclopedia could get you killed. Unsubscribed..
The historicism of this passage of Aurelien may be somewhat questionable (he says it came from a novel) but when I read it, I thought there might be a substantial nugget of truth that the Counter-Reformation and the Catholic "KGB" inhibited science in places like Spain, Italy and France, while science in Northern Europe and Protestant Germany flourished. I can't recall any major scientific discoveries in Italy during the centuries after Galileo, until Alessandro Volta in the 1740's. French science didn't really flower until after the Revolution (Laplace, Ampere, Carnot, Lavoisier). Copernicus, who was a Catholic official of some rank (who preceded Galileo), couldn't publish his magnum opus until after he died -- this gives you an idea of the temper of the times. Ideology (Naziism being a recent example) can be very successful at snuffing out science. Trump may well clobber climate science in the U.S. We'll see. We are living in dark times.
Catholic KGB...
Ok, bye.
Riveting, unputdownable essay!
When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, we simply assumed that "things would get better and better," and for a while, they did. Then "things got better and better" in certain areas, such as technology, while in others -- such as education (where I ended up working) -- they didn't, and since I quit, institutions have fallen into dysfunction.
Now, of course, a lot of the technology available to us peasants has fallen into dysfunction, with built-in obsolescence ensuring that any particular device will have a life span of 2 to 3 years. (I had a CD player quit on me after 2 and a half years of use.)
As an avid science fiction reader and watcher, I noticed the change from "better and better" in that (1960s, 1970s) to Dystopia (1980s and beyond, with rare exceptions).
Now that we're all online paying credit cards, other bills, etc., every upgrade makes a website harder to use ... and I've come to realize, someone is usually making money from the enshittification of everything (Cory Doctorow's colorful term).
My most recent anecdote:
Last month, I received a bill from Citibank, to a credit card I hadn't used in roughly a year. When I tried to log on to pay it, I was blocked with a cryptic message reading, "Our system is experiencing temporary delays. Please try again later." So I did ... for days on end.
Finally I had to call, which meant navigating their complex and annoying phone tree and dealing with a bot that couldn't find my account. Amazingly, I was able to speak to a human being within 20 minutes or so, and the human being couldn't find the account at first, either. I had to jump through all the authentication hoops that have become familiar: address on file, last 4 digits of my SSN, mother's maiden name, the name of my first pet, etc., etc. Then he wanted to text my phone. I told him I'm on a Magic Jack number because I don't live in the U.S., and that number can't receive a text. "We're sorry, we're unable to authenticate this account."
Then he told me it had probably been suspended due to inactivity.
"Not so suspended that someone couldn't bill to it!" I retorted.
Shortening this tale of woe: he said he would send me a letter with a reference number that I was to call back and give them. "You'll email it, right?" I said nonchalantly.
"No, email isn't 'secure.'"
"So how do I get this number?"
"Do we have your physical address on file?"
"Yes, I gave it to you earlier, but you're not going to snail-mail this number, are you?"
"We have to, it's our policy."
"You're effing kidding me, right?This is 2025, not 1980!"
"We have to send this by regular mail, and you have to call back and prove that you're you."
That, of course, meant emailing the person who monitors my U.S. address, a PO box ... who has yet to reply.
The bill was due October 6 (I had a perfect record of on-time payments!) and I'm still waiting....
Zero trust in institutions here ... no more than they trust me!
I agree with others that there are several illustrations that are incorrect in this essay. However, the general point of it is very good. I would not say that we are "regressing" however. Instead, the idea of "Progress" has always been faulty, especially with the mindset of a Utopian goal, and we are moving towards the logical end of the system we have built without any sense of human-centered restraint.
"For the historian, the general progress is not in doubt: but no less the fact that it is never a question of continuous, uniform, determined progress."
“ The king of France is emperor in his kingdom . . . his will has the force of law”— such principles, at the time they were proclaimed, were purely utopian; but nothing is more common in world history than to see utopias become realities. In this case, some
two hundred years were necessary."
--- historian Regine Pernoud (1977) pp.171 and 77, respectively
Well, if Naked Capitalism only can be supported through Paypal, that's a good reason not to support them, isn't it? (There is a name for it: enshittification, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification)
But about the Can't Syndrome, why dig up French philosophers from the 60s, when Neo-Classic economics is so much more the Ideology of The Party? Its core, remember, is that one must not do anything that can upset or even interfere with "the market". Its hard-core, the Neo-liberals, even depicted the market as God, something we mortals shouldn't ever try to understand. But even mainstream neo-classics are not far from that. And that is what is taught in all our universities and what all in the Elite have learned. And most of their underlings as well. How could one expect them to do things different?
But apart from that, government is all about making good compromises between the mobilized forces (see Susan Strange). In the forties, say, labour movements and colonial liberation movements were very mobilized and whoever sat in governments then had to take them into consideration. Now they don't. Cuts and outsourcings have effectively killed the labour movements, and capitalism is now essentially about making money on money. That doesn't require many employees, so they can be bribed. The rest has no power. Governments don't need to consider them because they can't make the lives of the government and their acolytes any troubled. Or at least they can't imagine how they can make it.
New forms of struggle and new organizations to carry them out must be invented before the Can't Syndrome will die. Perhaps that will happen when some day we compare our own lives with that of Asians and see the other as better?