h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

No need to apologise. I'm somewhat of the viw that *Managed* Capitalism is the way ahead.

I'm not sure about this Mythology/Ideology thing, though. In the case of Capitalism...well, Capital just *is*. It's an emergent property of developed economies. The ideology is Free Market Capitalism, that economic processes should remain unregulated irrespective of possible negative consequences for some - as opposed to being managed for the good of society as a whole.

Similarly...Marxism isn't a mythology. It's the idea that (broadly) economic processes determine the place of humans in society. I will freely grant that Marx (mistakenly!) postulated a narrative that saw Capitalism falling apart (followed by revolution followed by Dictatorship of the proletariat) and that many 'primitive Marxists' have taken this as a mythology and built an ideology on it. Well......what can I say? I'm not one of them.

Effers,

Political ideologies are different to myths. It is true that both are unsupported by facts, but there's more to life than facts. Political ideologies define what you believe to be right, that is what is good or bad. There is no 'fact' about that, only a choice of what to believe. They're also political programmes, more or less. These are also necessary and can't be entirely based on fact, because we can't predict what will happen, but we still need to make decisions about what to do.

Christopher,

> And unfortunately (sorry Ed) capitalism is the most obvious path to take. It's the logical extension of evolution by natural selection. I don't like it, but I understand it. You're healthy - you thrive. You're not - you die. Simple as that.

It's not as simple as that, that's wrong in very many ways. First of all, if capitalism had anything to do with evolution, then we'd find that rich people would have more children than poor, whereas actually you find the opposite. Secondly, capitalism is itself not 'obvious' - it's the result of hundreds of years of determined effort to create it. It's not a natural system. Just think about property - how can you own land, companies, ideas, etc.? Unless there was an enormous state apparatus devoted to maintaining these structures, there would be no capital, and hence no capitalism.

> Pedro.

Bought the spirit level whilst waiting to record a podcast with Liberty in London today... will report back later.

FB

>but there's more to life than facts. Political ideologies define what you believe to be right, that is what is good or bad.<

I agree Dogster. But I still think they are myths/memes or whatever...And I think it is absolutely fine to admit that people come to some agreement about how we want society to be run.

But they are no more true or false in absolute sense than religion. It could be argued that the basics of Christianity are a good way to run a society...providing you accept it as a provisional myth that works and people agree is a good thing.

It's when people start to insist on abolutism that things go wrong, whether that be about God or Marx. IMO they are both provisional myths that may work for a while, if people so choose.

The other refutation to the evolution/capitalism comparison is that there's nothing to say that natural selection only acts at the level of the individual organism. Survival strategies can favour group selection. And economies can be run for everyone and not inevitably for the few.

>>It's when people start to insist on abolutism that things go wrong, whether that be about God or Marx.

Or The Spirit of the Blitz.

As the bailouts have no doubt proved.

That was a reply to... it doesn't matter, I'm only here for the sun.

Effers, I think we're in agreement.

Although I would say that religious belief is already really provisional, as is political ideology, even if we don't say it is. (Am about to do a post on this on the Buddhism thread.)

R4 'Head To Head' last night on the debate between Monetarist and Keynsian economics.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00js7vp
Some support for pedro's suggestion that the balance will now shift in favour of regulation and social responsibility.

(note to self to listen to last weeks on US foreign policy. Chomsky vs William F Buckley)

the balance will now shift in favour of regulation and social responsibility.<<<
¡Ojalá! I wish sanity rules.

::
Next May there will be an international meeting in Spain to discuss about economy. One of the topic will be Social Economy. It refers to those small companies or cooperatives ruled by the same workers. It has been shown that they are resisting the crisis better than bigger companies.
The Spanish goverment has said today that they are going to do a law to protect and foster those kind of bussiness.

I´ve always liked that idea of cooperatives.

Most of my recent political discussions have been with a couple of American libertarians I know, so I'm finding this interesting. (Also, it's being brought home to me how ignorant I am of history.) I own The Spirit Level, but haven't read it yet. It's on the list.

We don't have a decent left wing in Ireland either.

TRiG.

Has the Political Left given up in the UK?

no they are waiting to get elected after the far right labour party lose the next election

>The ideology is Free Market Capitalism, that economic processes should remain unregulated irrespective of possible negative consequences for some - as opposed to being managed for the good of society as a whole.

It's more complicated than that, there's an ideology which argues that deregulated capitalism is *positive* for society *as a whole*. It's built more on theory than the real world, of course (most ideologies are) but a lot of people believe in it, and the fact that it can be used to take a moral high ground means that a lot of the "nothing wrong with selfishness" capitalists of the '80s have started to co-opt it to try and strengthen their overall arguments.

<> zagreb

This really interests me. The fact is that most of the inventions that make life good/better (like telephones/ipods/armani jeans*) have sprung from the 'market'.

But... once a certain standard of living is attained, does, say, an Ipod make life better? I had an MP3 player which broke, and when it did I read books from the library commuting to work instead. My quality of life didn't suffer, cos I love reading, except for the fact that most of my friends had 'stuff' that I didn't. If I really cared about that, then the quality of my life would have been improved, not by having an Ipod, but because I had something my friends had.

That's one of points of The Spirit Level, that we derive status and satisfaction, not from having 'things', but from having things that give us status, that our friends (and, maybe more importantly, our peers who we *aren't* friends with) have.

The market can't provide us with better relationships or quality of life things like job satisfaction (and is maybe inimcal to them). When the left makes convincing arguments about this, they've got a good chance of winning.






*ok, there's obvious limits to that argument.

"This really interests me. The fact is that most of the inventions that make life good/better (like telephones/ipods/armani jeans*) have sprung from the 'market'."

I agree with this, and this is largely the underpinning basis of the "deregulation as a social good" argument. We need things, the market provides them out of necessity, people make money, people are employed, everyone wins. That's the *theory*

"But... once a certain standard of living is attained, does, say, an Ipod make life better? I had an MP3 player which broke, and when it did I read books from the library commuting to work instead. My quality of life didn't suffer, cos I love reading, except for the fact that most of my friends had 'stuff' that I didn't. If I really cared about that, then the quality of my life would have been improved, not by having an Ipod, but because I had something my friends haderm."

The books are the product of a market too, though, you. I don't think the myth of consumerism-as-ideology is the problem with market fundamentalism (the market doesn't mould us, quite the opposite, the preponderance of naffness and disposable rubbish says more about us and our collective psychology than it does about capitalism).


"That's one of points of The Spirit Level, that we derive status and satisfaction, not from having 'things', but from having things that give us status, that our friends (and, maybe more importantly, our peers who we *aren't* friends with) have.

The market can't provide us with better relationships or quality of life things like job satisfaction (and is maybe inimcal to them). When the left makes convincing arguments about this, they've got a good chance of winning."

Very true, and this is where I think ideologies tend to fall down. Money can't buy you happiness is a great truism, as is the fact that freedom can't be accurately measured on ideological grounds (as libertarians of left and right constantly try to define it) but on how liberated the individual feels. A businessman might find employer laws constricting, his employees probably find them liberating.

Part of the reason we buy so much consumer junk is that we don't ever feel happy or content enough: we always want more stuff and the market provides us with it. The market (or rather the producers) are often accused of artificially creating desire through advertising and this is partly true, but ultimately there's a human need they feed into that advertising can't create out of nothing. I see dozens of adverts every day demanding I buy things but which don't make me buy anything because they're not tapping into that basic desire. On the other hand, I *have* bought things without any advertising "prompting" simply because I was pursuing "needs" created elsewhere (spur-of-the-moment, peer-pressure, etc etc).

One problem with market fundamentalism is that we don't have a real free-market and probably never will. An example is the debate over commercial broadcasting. Ideologues constantly cast it as the "free market" but it isn't because of IP laws and their resultant monopolies. Take football, for example. In a true free market, each channel would broadcast the football and the channel with the best coverage (as far as the public was concerned) would win-out. But because we don't have a free market, this isn't what happens. Instead, companies bid for the *rights* to *exclusively* show the football and so viewers are forced to their buy their coverage (however ropey) or go without. This *is* capitalism, but it's *not* free-market capitalism. The distinction is important.

>>The market can't provide us with better relationships or quality of life things like job satisfaction (and is maybe inimcal to them). When the left makes convincing arguments about this, they've got a good chance of winning.

Well...dare I say...that's what yer man Marx said. The idea that Labour becomes commodified, with effects upon the familial and social relationships of the individual. (Norman Tebbit may well have wished unemployed fathers to get on their bikes - but what does this do to family stability?) He also wrote mch about how the demands of Cspitalism inevitably impact on working conditions.

On a wider scale - throughout the developing world we can see the effects that have been wrought on societies as a whole as communities and cultures have become uprooted in the service of Capitalism.



The HIV/AIDS epidemic is one symptom of this. Previously there was an assumption (still held by some) that there must be something particular to Africans that allowed infection to spread. What we have in reality is a sudden mass urbanisation and a breakdown of family structres as traditional, rural means of existence become unsustainable, swamped by the demands of export dumping and foreign-owned cash cropping. So...how's a dirt poor woman living in a cardboard shack on the edge of Lagos to get by? And what use is a male migrant worker to make of her?

Oh...and..

>>The fact is that most of the inventions that make life good/better (like telephones/ipods/armani jeans*) have sprung from the 'market'.

nnn...yes...but public services such as health and education provide the market with the intellectal labour.

Posted too soon:

I get particularly incensed when employers representatives bleat on about universities not providing stdents with the right skill sets. Training should be *their* overhead.