Liberalism has become (maybe it always was) a Totalitarian ideology in the sense that it starts from certain unfounded assumptions such as the perfectibility of mankind and then takes these to their logical conclusion, which entails 100% control to achieve that end. Anyone who disagrees is then automatically evil.
Progress genuinely has slowed down. My grandfather was born in an east London tenement that lacked a bathroom. My father grew up in the 1930s in a terraced London County Council house that had electricity, hot water and inside plumbing. I grew up in a semi detached privately built house in the 60s-70s that my parents had been able to buy, and they now owned a car, a freezer and a washing machine. Our street was populated entirely by working class people who had seen similar improvements across two generations with commensurate reductions in infant mortality and longer expected lifespans. iPhones and the internet are nowhere near as significant as these developments when it comes to real lives. Anyone who died in (say) 1960 and came back to life now would question what has been achieved since. After all, cartoons such as the Jetsons were intended as a forecast and were no so outlandish given the achievements of the previous century.
The west has stagnated politically, economically, technologically and culturally. I read earlier week, for example, that the last reservoir built in the U.K. was in 1992 and the US has thousands of structurally deficient bridges that will not be fixed for decades, whereas China builds that number of new bridges per year. I am sure we all have many other examples. The stagnation has not “cut through” to mainstream dialogue though, although a few commentators are starting to compare us to the latter day USSR. Deep down, I think it is recognised sub consciously by many members of the elite but no individual has an incentive to fix it nor knows how to. Much easier to go with the flow. It will not be addressed until there is a system collapse (which I think will happen but not sure how or when) that means we have to fix ourselves. Until then we are boiling frogs. Hopefully, the collapse will not be too painful but I fear it will be.
Some of us have a rather more compressed family experience of the bewildering technological changes of modernity. My father was himself born in a farmhouse with neither central heating nor running water, and died a mere 7 years ago, having had a career in computer science for the better part of 40 years as an electrical engineer beginning in the mid-60s. It's kind of ridiculous when you think how much changed just in his own lifetime alone. And then I sometimes marvel that my grandfather in turn was born into circumstances probably not terribly unrecognizable to all of the generations of my forebears since the Neolithic era.
According to some we reached peak oil this year, and with consumption continuing to rise we should expect it to run out in around 50 years. Further discoveries will not change things by more than a few years, and such discoveries are increasingly more difficult to extract. With the end of diesel fuel, mining (also increasingly difficult) will stop. Electrical or hydrogen power is not capable of substituting for diesel in crucial areas such as mining. Re-cycling of metals etc can never be 100% and this will also cease. This means the end of industrial civilisation, no more cars, computers, electricity etc. We won't know what sort of civilisation(s) will succeed ours, what level of sophistication they will retain, hopefully a more enlightened Athens or Gandhara, and maybe some kind of fascism in North America - they are most of the way there already, but . . .
1 "Rather, the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) whose ultimate origins lie in these Years of Plenty, dismisses their memory with accusations of excessive nostalgia, of overlooking the asserted horrors of the era, or indeed of outright reactionary politics (“I suppose you think that women should stay at home and do the housework!)."
The PMC never has had it so good. Which is why the left will not do anything about it, even though a competent populist leftist could get elected over and over for generations.
2. "I am increasingly wondering what the point of Starmer actually is."
The point of Starmer is to service America, Israel and Ukraine (more or less in that order) at British expense. Or rather, to service America, which then passes Starmer around to Israel and Ukraine.
3. You may not that there are plenty of American teenagers who listen to Led Zeppelin. Led Zep's first album came out in 1968, almost 60 years ago.
Imagine what kind of weirdo teenager in 1968 was a fan of the popular music of 1908.
For that matter, Nirvana's "Nevermind" came out in 1991. That was 35 years ago, and Nirvana still has a big youth following.
In Italy there was the largest communist party in western Europe. Now, the so called Left is mockingly known as the ZTL party (traffic-restricted zone), to indicate how distant they are from ordinary people, their needs and interests. When it was in power, the left enacted policies that dismantled what was left of the welfare State. And the result of all this is that the real extreme right is now in power, with all the consequences that were to be expected.
And, on a different note, I have a difficult time trying to choose a new book when, as I often do, I roam in a bookstore. I always end up buying "old" literature and poetry. Am I a conservative? I don't think so. I'm just someone who loves beauty and complexity of thought.
The most charming story of 'social change' I know is one from Zen poet Gary Snyder. He attended a Zen training temple in Japan. He noticed during the periodic work periods that the monks were rather inefficient doing their jobs, and being an American, he decided to offer some more efficient ways. When he approached the temple's Work Leader with his ideas, the monk replied,
"Gary-san, you are right. We could get the work done faster. But then we would have to go back to the Zendo (meditation hall) and sit more zazen (sitting meditation) much sooner. Then our knees would hurt more."
It looks to me that we have already entered neo-feudalism. Except the princes no longer care to defend their principalities from invaders, and instead of valuing their peasants for providing the wherewithal (and squeezing them for it as well), they are openly supporting the invaders while keeping the peasants quiet with handouts. Their disconnection from reality has driven them mad.
Meanwhile, who governs? Not the "elite" clowns we see doing their puppet theater everyday, prancing this way and that, trying to outdo each other in ridiculous nonsense as they work to keep the peasants' eyes fixed on them.
In whose interest is it that everything around us is falling apart into strife and filth and mayhem? Cui bono?
Have you seen any huge multinational financial corporations losing power & profits bigly yet? Or are they somehow buying up lots of PHYSICAL things at fire sale rates as currencies and the economies which generated them mysteriously have an apparently endless series of financial (& other) crises?
It's what happened during the Roman Republic. Big land-owners expelled local peasants and imported slaves. They got immensely rich and the Republic crashed.
Well, that was fun. My feeling is that there is no longer any real ideology. And with farewell to the working class, Andre Gortz predictions having been prescient, the bad guys run the show. The last gasp of the real ideology was Corbyn. The bad guys got him. Governments are now puppets of the banks. A child could construct a good working system, indeed I did so some years ago, choose administrators and leaders from a lottery, give a citizen income, work one third of the time in real necessary jobs, lots of good ideas we had in the early Green Party. The bad guys killed the Green Party by infiltrating it. Now we are left with the Idiocracy, and probably nuclear war. Well, so it goes.
"Some time in the 1980s, this started to change”. See the BBC's "The Age of Fear", by Adam Curtis, on this topic.
The CPC has the best feedback loop and the best response mechanism of any government. 85% of Chinese say their government responds to their needs and over 90% say it's heading in the right direction. But then, theirs is a people's republic..
But who is then this Left that could kick the ball in?
The old Left was a kind of political arm of gerat social movements, of course particularly in our part of the world the Labour movement, mostly trade unions. But even they have been instrumentalized away as employed pseudo-social servants climbing a carreer ladder. Are there any organized Labour groupings with a foot in an ordinary workplace who contemplate about, and fight for, political changes? If not, they must be created before any ball can be kicked in.
The tools of technological society are better then ever, the appliance of their results is misdirected, the PMC is in catching-up mode. We now live a period of chasing updates as to our "quality of desire", our goal-setting, the PMC is at a loss as what to do with the agency they have access to. The plebs as much. The whole of the global environment is toxic and nihilistic. We live the limits to our analog capacities being dwarfed by the tools of no trade. AI, genetic engineering, technical prowess's other, all are squandered and misdirected by part incompetence, and part greed driven societies. Come Russia, come China ...more of the same. Too many variables, too much overlap, lack of cognitive potential applied, ...we are wide open to serious hick-ups, long-duration fall outs.
“I am increasingly wondering what the point of Starmer actually is.”
The point of Starmer is pretty clear. He takes up the role of faithful under-manager when the owner of the shop is indisposed (a.k.a. too unpopular to be seen behind the counter). This is the traditional role of the ‘Labour’ Party, as exemplified in its purest form by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who built upon the less dedicated examples of Harold Wilson, Clement Attlee and Ramsay MacDonald and in the deep past, the Fabian Society. (Jeremy Corby, by way of harking back to the scarcely radical policies of Harold Wilson and not believing in the infallibility of Zionism, was clearly not fit for purpose, and so was replaced). This is what such people are actually doing. What they either believe or profess to be doing is neither here nor there.
There a number of contentious opinions outlined in this essay (not including the immigration problem, or the decrepitude of liberalism, which are more or less as described), but I will confine myself to the most interesting to me - the cultural one.
It seems to me that the dearth of works which are both contemporary and genuinely ‘new’ reflects the fact that almost every possible mode or form which can be conceived has already been produced. Contemporary popular music, perhaps because of its limited, mostly US, origins shows this clearly - every time you hear something recent you are almost always reminded of something you heard fifty years ago. In ‘classical’ music too, almost everything conceivable has been tried, including random sounds and no sound at all. The only possibility of fresh new forms (and this is in music only, really) is by borrowing from the indigenous traditional music of alien cultures (Berber, Thai, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Mongolian etc.), but this can only go on for so long.
Painting and sculpture have only four possible modes - abstract and figurative, small to gigantic, and these have all been comprehensively explored.
Literature is limited by the requirement of readability, and Joyce has gone as far as one can feasibly go in opposition to that, while others (Marcel Proust, Henry James, Virginia Wolf, e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, James Merrill & etc. & ad infinitum) have explored most of the other nooks and crannies. Literature even in its less exotic modes is however potentially endless, as the social customs it sits within perpetually change and mutate - unless we descend into one uniform world culture, which seems less and less likely as global industrial society nears its end. Perhaps when that end comes it will result in the obliteration of current cultural deposits, and it can all begin afresh.
At least in the case of the USA, neither the "populism" of the Left or the "populism" of the Right are populist at all. The Left, at least in the USA, even if its wanted to protect the voting franchise, has since the 1970s worked over time to destroy democratic governance structures which are the other half of the democracy framework, and I would say is perhaps the more important half. And they can exist without the vote, both half can exist without the other. China, at least between the early 1980s until recent years has had democratic governance structures to great effect, Xi et al. are working over time to destroy them, hopefully they fail; it can even be argues that the very anti democratic regime in Nazi Germany had them to a extent through the forms and structures of the NSDAP.
The USA used to have political federalism, this federalism was quite real in domestic policy and for the first 100+ years its effects of foreign policy, while intentionally limited were larger then would appear from a headline reading, in part because it was genuinely in the economic interests of most people and businesses to conquer the bottom half of the North America continent.
Part and parcel with true political federalism, the USA genuinely used to have federalism, with far reaching structures that were profound in their effects, in the economic sphere and in the scientific/engineering sphere.
Much of what I referred to above is related to democratic governance structures which, along with the vote, are the other half of democracies framework. The USA used to have very imperfect but still genuinely democratic governance structures that were enable by political, economic, and scientific decentralization and based around its old, and completely different than today’s versions, decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. They have, for fifty years now, been replaced by centralized and publicly inaccessible exclusionary member ship parties. And this makes their very names a lie. We no longer have a small “r” republican Republican Party and small “d” democratic Democratic Party, we have a conservative party and a technocracy party. Neither of which has much to do with republicanism or democracy.
There has been no political project since 1980 except "let's leave it to the market" and "cut". The more the market – or rather the businesses – decides, the less there is for "democracy" to do. And the more democratic bodies are required by their rulers to cut, the more ordinary people stay out of them.
There has been no 'left' in the USA for 80 or so years now, apart from a few street fighters and ideologues who have no political presence in state or federal governments. There are only Liberals and Conservatives. Neither of these are in any way 'left' - which implies anti-capitalism. Both parties have minor differences with regard to domestic politics, but in effect they are a uni-party as far as foreign relations go. (Minor differences re [for example] the Ukraine are functionally irrelevant to long term proposed goals).
Another great essay.
Liberalism has become (maybe it always was) a Totalitarian ideology in the sense that it starts from certain unfounded assumptions such as the perfectibility of mankind and then takes these to their logical conclusion, which entails 100% control to achieve that end. Anyone who disagrees is then automatically evil.
Progress genuinely has slowed down. My grandfather was born in an east London tenement that lacked a bathroom. My father grew up in the 1930s in a terraced London County Council house that had electricity, hot water and inside plumbing. I grew up in a semi detached privately built house in the 60s-70s that my parents had been able to buy, and they now owned a car, a freezer and a washing machine. Our street was populated entirely by working class people who had seen similar improvements across two generations with commensurate reductions in infant mortality and longer expected lifespans. iPhones and the internet are nowhere near as significant as these developments when it comes to real lives. Anyone who died in (say) 1960 and came back to life now would question what has been achieved since. After all, cartoons such as the Jetsons were intended as a forecast and were no so outlandish given the achievements of the previous century.
The west has stagnated politically, economically, technologically and culturally. I read earlier week, for example, that the last reservoir built in the U.K. was in 1992 and the US has thousands of structurally deficient bridges that will not be fixed for decades, whereas China builds that number of new bridges per year. I am sure we all have many other examples. The stagnation has not “cut through” to mainstream dialogue though, although a few commentators are starting to compare us to the latter day USSR. Deep down, I think it is recognised sub consciously by many members of the elite but no individual has an incentive to fix it nor knows how to. Much easier to go with the flow. It will not be addressed until there is a system collapse (which I think will happen but not sure how or when) that means we have to fix ourselves. Until then we are boiling frogs. Hopefully, the collapse will not be too painful but I fear it will be.
Indeed but I suspect before the collapse we will have what Oswald Spengler called Caesariam.
Some of us have a rather more compressed family experience of the bewildering technological changes of modernity. My father was himself born in a farmhouse with neither central heating nor running water, and died a mere 7 years ago, having had a career in computer science for the better part of 40 years as an electrical engineer beginning in the mid-60s. It's kind of ridiculous when you think how much changed just in his own lifetime alone. And then I sometimes marvel that my grandfather in turn was born into circumstances probably not terribly unrecognizable to all of the generations of my forebears since the Neolithic era.
Your comment recalls to my mind Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
According to some we reached peak oil this year, and with consumption continuing to rise we should expect it to run out in around 50 years. Further discoveries will not change things by more than a few years, and such discoveries are increasingly more difficult to extract. With the end of diesel fuel, mining (also increasingly difficult) will stop. Electrical or hydrogen power is not capable of substituting for diesel in crucial areas such as mining. Re-cycling of metals etc can never be 100% and this will also cease. This means the end of industrial civilisation, no more cars, computers, electricity etc. We won't know what sort of civilisation(s) will succeed ours, what level of sophistication they will retain, hopefully a more enlightened Athens or Gandhara, and maybe some kind of fascism in North America - they are most of the way there already, but . . .
A Swedish economist coined the word "Scientific Liberalism", of course a pun referring to the Soviet Union.
1 "Rather, the Professional and Managerial Caste (PMC) whose ultimate origins lie in these Years of Plenty, dismisses their memory with accusations of excessive nostalgia, of overlooking the asserted horrors of the era, or indeed of outright reactionary politics (“I suppose you think that women should stay at home and do the housework!)."
The PMC never has had it so good. Which is why the left will not do anything about it, even though a competent populist leftist could get elected over and over for generations.
2. "I am increasingly wondering what the point of Starmer actually is."
The point of Starmer is to service America, Israel and Ukraine (more or less in that order) at British expense. Or rather, to service America, which then passes Starmer around to Israel and Ukraine.
3. You may not that there are plenty of American teenagers who listen to Led Zeppelin. Led Zep's first album came out in 1968, almost 60 years ago.
Imagine what kind of weirdo teenager in 1968 was a fan of the popular music of 1908.
For that matter, Nirvana's "Nevermind" came out in 1991. That was 35 years ago, and Nirvana still has a big youth following.
This was a great essay!
In Italy there was the largest communist party in western Europe. Now, the so called Left is mockingly known as the ZTL party (traffic-restricted zone), to indicate how distant they are from ordinary people, their needs and interests. When it was in power, the left enacted policies that dismantled what was left of the welfare State. And the result of all this is that the real extreme right is now in power, with all the consequences that were to be expected.
And, on a different note, I have a difficult time trying to choose a new book when, as I often do, I roam in a bookstore. I always end up buying "old" literature and poetry. Am I a conservative? I don't think so. I'm just someone who loves beauty and complexity of thought.
The most charming story of 'social change' I know is one from Zen poet Gary Snyder. He attended a Zen training temple in Japan. He noticed during the periodic work periods that the monks were rather inefficient doing their jobs, and being an American, he decided to offer some more efficient ways. When he approached the temple's Work Leader with his ideas, the monk replied,
"Gary-san, you are right. We could get the work done faster. But then we would have to go back to the Zendo (meditation hall) and sit more zazen (sitting meditation) much sooner. Then our knees would hurt more."
It looks to me that we have already entered neo-feudalism. Except the princes no longer care to defend their principalities from invaders, and instead of valuing their peasants for providing the wherewithal (and squeezing them for it as well), they are openly supporting the invaders while keeping the peasants quiet with handouts. Their disconnection from reality has driven them mad.
Meanwhile, who governs? Not the "elite" clowns we see doing their puppet theater everyday, prancing this way and that, trying to outdo each other in ridiculous nonsense as they work to keep the peasants' eyes fixed on them.
In whose interest is it that everything around us is falling apart into strife and filth and mayhem? Cui bono?
@erin
Have you seen any huge multinational financial corporations losing power & profits bigly yet? Or are they somehow buying up lots of PHYSICAL things at fire sale rates as currencies and the economies which generated them mysteriously have an apparently endless series of financial (& other) crises?
That seems to be the plan, forever and ever.
Madame Guillotine says hi.
It's what happened during the Roman Republic. Big land-owners expelled local peasants and imported slaves. They got immensely rich and the Republic crashed.
Well, that was fun. My feeling is that there is no longer any real ideology. And with farewell to the working class, Andre Gortz predictions having been prescient, the bad guys run the show. The last gasp of the real ideology was Corbyn. The bad guys got him. Governments are now puppets of the banks. A child could construct a good working system, indeed I did so some years ago, choose administrators and leaders from a lottery, give a citizen income, work one third of the time in real necessary jobs, lots of good ideas we had in the early Green Party. The bad guys killed the Green Party by infiltrating it. Now we are left with the Idiocracy, and probably nuclear war. Well, so it goes.
"Some time in the 1980s, this started to change”. See the BBC's "The Age of Fear", by Adam Curtis, on this topic.
The CPC has the best feedback loop and the best response mechanism of any government. 85% of Chinese say their government responds to their needs and over 90% say it's heading in the right direction. But then, theirs is a people's republic..
"I am increasingly wondering what the point of Starmer actually is."
Maybe to give Nigel Farage the time he needs...? :-)
My usual italian translation here:
Le cose non vanno sempre meglio.
E "Contro il Recentismo", già che ci siamo.
https://trying2understandw.blogspot.com/2024/10/le-cose-non-vanno-sempre-meglio-e.html
Thanks as always, Marco
But who is then this Left that could kick the ball in?
The old Left was a kind of political arm of gerat social movements, of course particularly in our part of the world the Labour movement, mostly trade unions. But even they have been instrumentalized away as employed pseudo-social servants climbing a carreer ladder. Are there any organized Labour groupings with a foot in an ordinary workplace who contemplate about, and fight for, political changes? If not, they must be created before any ball can be kicked in.
"Progress"
The tools of technological society are better then ever, the appliance of their results is misdirected, the PMC is in catching-up mode. We now live a period of chasing updates as to our "quality of desire", our goal-setting, the PMC is at a loss as what to do with the agency they have access to. The plebs as much. The whole of the global environment is toxic and nihilistic. We live the limits to our analog capacities being dwarfed by the tools of no trade. AI, genetic engineering, technical prowess's other, all are squandered and misdirected by part incompetence, and part greed driven societies. Come Russia, come China ...more of the same. Too many variables, too much overlap, lack of cognitive potential applied, ...we are wide open to serious hick-ups, long-duration fall outs.
Progress is a myth.
“I am increasingly wondering what the point of Starmer actually is.”
The point of Starmer is pretty clear. He takes up the role of faithful under-manager when the owner of the shop is indisposed (a.k.a. too unpopular to be seen behind the counter). This is the traditional role of the ‘Labour’ Party, as exemplified in its purest form by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who built upon the less dedicated examples of Harold Wilson, Clement Attlee and Ramsay MacDonald and in the deep past, the Fabian Society. (Jeremy Corby, by way of harking back to the scarcely radical policies of Harold Wilson and not believing in the infallibility of Zionism, was clearly not fit for purpose, and so was replaced). This is what such people are actually doing. What they either believe or profess to be doing is neither here nor there.
There a number of contentious opinions outlined in this essay (not including the immigration problem, or the decrepitude of liberalism, which are more or less as described), but I will confine myself to the most interesting to me - the cultural one.
It seems to me that the dearth of works which are both contemporary and genuinely ‘new’ reflects the fact that almost every possible mode or form which can be conceived has already been produced. Contemporary popular music, perhaps because of its limited, mostly US, origins shows this clearly - every time you hear something recent you are almost always reminded of something you heard fifty years ago. In ‘classical’ music too, almost everything conceivable has been tried, including random sounds and no sound at all. The only possibility of fresh new forms (and this is in music only, really) is by borrowing from the indigenous traditional music of alien cultures (Berber, Thai, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Mongolian etc.), but this can only go on for so long.
Painting and sculpture have only four possible modes - abstract and figurative, small to gigantic, and these have all been comprehensively explored.
Literature is limited by the requirement of readability, and Joyce has gone as far as one can feasibly go in opposition to that, while others (Marcel Proust, Henry James, Virginia Wolf, e.e. cummings, Ezra Pound, James Merrill & etc. & ad infinitum) have explored most of the other nooks and crannies. Literature even in its less exotic modes is however potentially endless, as the social customs it sits within perpetually change and mutate - unless we descend into one uniform world culture, which seems less and less likely as global industrial society nears its end. Perhaps when that end comes it will result in the obliteration of current cultural deposits, and it can all begin afresh.
The "point" of Starmer is UK Labour's capitulation to neoliberalism, full stop.
That happened long before Starmer, and under compradors with much more (misplaced) brain power.
A very clear and concise analysis not only of public policy in Britain and France but also in the US.
Well written and interesting!
At least in the case of the USA, neither the "populism" of the Left or the "populism" of the Right are populist at all. The Left, at least in the USA, even if its wanted to protect the voting franchise, has since the 1970s worked over time to destroy democratic governance structures which are the other half of the democracy framework, and I would say is perhaps the more important half. And they can exist without the vote, both half can exist without the other. China, at least between the early 1980s until recent years has had democratic governance structures to great effect, Xi et al. are working over time to destroy them, hopefully they fail; it can even be argues that the very anti democratic regime in Nazi Germany had them to a extent through the forms and structures of the NSDAP.
The USA used to have political federalism, this federalism was quite real in domestic policy and for the first 100+ years its effects of foreign policy, while intentionally limited were larger then would appear from a headline reading, in part because it was genuinely in the economic interests of most people and businesses to conquer the bottom half of the North America continent.
Part and parcel with true political federalism, the USA genuinely used to have federalism, with far reaching structures that were profound in their effects, in the economic sphere and in the scientific/engineering sphere.
Much of what I referred to above is related to democratic governance structures which, along with the vote, are the other half of democracies framework. The USA used to have very imperfect but still genuinely democratic governance structures that were enable by political, economic, and scientific decentralization and based around its old, and completely different than today’s versions, decentralized and publicly accessible mass-member parties. They have, for fifty years now, been replaced by centralized and publicly inaccessible exclusionary member ship parties. And this makes their very names a lie. We no longer have a small “r” republican Republican Party and small “d” democratic Democratic Party, we have a conservative party and a technocracy party. Neither of which has much to do with republicanism or democracy.
Of course.
There has been no political project since 1980 except "let's leave it to the market" and "cut". The more the market – or rather the businesses – decides, the less there is for "democracy" to do. And the more democratic bodies are required by their rulers to cut, the more ordinary people stay out of them.
There has been no 'left' in the USA for 80 or so years now, apart from a few street fighters and ideologues who have no political presence in state or federal governments. There are only Liberals and Conservatives. Neither of these are in any way 'left' - which implies anti-capitalism. Both parties have minor differences with regard to domestic politics, but in effect they are a uni-party as far as foreign relations go. (Minor differences re [for example] the Ukraine are functionally irrelevant to long term proposed goals).