Tuesday 28 June 2016

Interesting

A good piece on 'Progressives'. Here

Personally I think (on the definitions in the piece) that the progressives are right.  We will end up with some sort of global universalism.  It's just that I don't think that trying to speed it up by coercion and' based on a model established by a small cabal, is at all acceptable.  And especially where it needs to be made and 'run' by a huge unaccountable specially privileged bureaucracy.

13 comments:

Bayard said...

It's easy to see how progressivism became so entrenched. For those who lived through WWII, things will have seemed to get better and better as the years passed. However, this is not much different in reality to those who were born in the seventies and eighties believing that house prices would always go up. It's where on the curve that your direct experience puts you.

So yes, it is a shock for some of the less cynical to realise that, as a nation, we are not getting better and nicer, but worse and nastier, as we revert towards the mean that we left after the traumatic experience of two world wars, and a mean mean it is, too.

Lola said...

B. I don't quite agree with that. I agree that we are getting meaner, but that's because of progressives plus keynsiaism and socialism, that always coarseness society.

Lola said...

B. I don't quite agree with that. I agree that we are getting meaner, but that's because of progressives plus keynsiaism and socialism, that always coarseness society.

Bayard said...

If there's one thing that you can learn from the Bible, it is that human nature doesn't change. It was the same thousands of years ago when the Bible started to be written as it was fifty or sixty years ago. Why should it have changed in those intervening fifty or sixty years? Absent a religious revival, which we had in the late C19th and two world wars which we had in the first half of the C20th, the less pleasant sides of human nature are bound to reassert themselves. I think things like modern socialism are a symptom, not a cause.

MikeW said...

Bayard,

You are surely correct to look for historical tests rather than dogmatic, apriori economic theory at every turn. And stawman constructs about terms such as 'progressive' (even one invoking Kant and the Enlightement!)in this case.

I notice some time ago, Paul156 here, I think, tried to discuss, The Great Transformation, by Karl Polanyi. We had no discussion just silly name calling: the'PollyAnna' episode. I really could not be bothered with this sort of bar-room attitude. But....

If you want to understand a discussion of 'fictional commodities', of which Henry George's land is but one. If you want to understand how society defends itself as it is transformed closer and closer to a 'pure market'. If you want to understand that progressives see economics as 'embbeded' in the society, not above it, and if you want to understand how the symptoms of fascism/communism/socialism could emerge in so many countries at the same time (1930s and 2008 onwards), your point I believe, then here is you answer. I think that is what you sense.I recommend the recent edition with the Stiglitz essay.
If you cannot be bothered with the heavy First and Second Transformations( I would have called the book, The Two Transformations) Go straight to the concluding three chapters.Would be keen to hear what you and others think.The recent post here by the German Journalist who fled to England, Helwig? (sorry cannot credit the poster) makes the same point as HG and KP it seems to me.

DCB Reed, that is my answer to your recent posts too.No Nationalism not Thugism, is often not nice, but it is part of the understandable script on the Polanyi account.Is it not?

Bayard said...

Mike W, you don't happen to have a link, do you?

MikeW said...

Bayard,

Here you go. It is Amazon. You cannot read the first page of Stiglitz's Forward. However, luck would have it you can read the bulk of his Introduction. The only thing you need know is that he rightly says that it is hard to do the GT justice in such a short space and that KP is hard to understand (ie his writing is very dense to the modern reader).

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Great-Transformation-Political-Economic-Origins/dp/080705643X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1467141723&sr=1-1&keywords=polanyi+the+great+transformation#reader_080705643X

DBC Reed said...

@MW
You are saying that the "Yes we won.Now send them back" people are just part of some nationalist back-lash according to Polyani and not really important .Apart from all the immigrant people who are traumatised and their children radicalised to become anti- British.
This is a land tax site. People who have been bribed to rely on inflated land and property prices will fairly obviously vote against any change to make land, thence property, taxable. We should see them as one of the manifestations of the anti-working people problem and not shrug about their malign influence.

MikeW said...

Mr Reed,

'You are saying that the "Yes we won.Now send them back" people are just part of some nationalist back-lash according to Polyani and not really important'

Really, can you tell me how you deduce that from my discussion above?

Yes I voted for exit but who do you mean 'we'? You seem to feel there is a block of folks here who all believe the same Neo Lib/ worse Rightist doctrine and act in accord. Rubbish.
You know, as well as I do, there is a long standing left distrust of the EU. I acted on that, TTIP, and what I think of what the Neo Libs in Europe did to Greece et al. Plus, of course, distrust of 99 percent of the political class here.

My point to you Mr Reed, made as a note at the end, and given your comments was: surely better to understand events from Polyani's perspective than Marx. Nothing else!

As to shrugging, I will be on the streets this Saturday, in my northern city, with my European wife fighting for Democracy and our/your future in this country. If I have to go into excile with her so be it. What are you doing?

DBC Reed said...

@MW Best of luck.
Pro UKIP Tory subversives have engineered a situation where our negotiating stance with Europe under the so-called Tories is : we want to be part of a free trade zone but we deny all the other partners freedom of movement. Straight fascism. We either put the nasty little fascists back in their political pen or they continue to do the same to us.

Bayard said...

Given that most of the anti-European immigration is froth whipped up by papers like the Daily Fail, long on xenophobia but short on actual substance, I suspect the aversion to free movement will be the first thing to go in the on-coming negotiations.

I would have thought you would be hard-pressed to find a xenophobe who doesn't think that there are too many Muslims or blacks in the country and very few Muslims and blacks come from Europe, so it's hardly the fault of the EU that they are here. (I suppose that's why UKIP was so keen on banging on about Turkey's possible membership of the EU - it's the nearest possible source of demon jihadi Muslim EU-sanctioned immigrants to terrify people with.)

Mark Wadsworth said...

B: "very few Muslims and blacks come from Europe, so it's hardly the fault of the EU that they are here."

Exactly! Europeans are white Christians, so being anti-EU is a completely different concept from being racist. I'm half German FFS and I certainly don't hate myself. The people who racists really don't like are here courtesy of the UK government and the UK government alone, very very little to do with the EU.

Barnacle Bill said...

@ MW

"The people who racists really don't like are here courtesy of the UK government and the UK government alone, ..."

And we all know who has been in charge of the Home Office whilst most of this has been going on - a certain Saint Theresa of May.

Who has now come out of her forty days and forty nights hiding behind the referendum settee to tell us about her Road to Damascus conversion to a Brexiteer.