Doctor suspects that Vlad Vexler has been poisoned by the Kremlin

[nerdspeak]

2 hours ago, Basman said:

Could you elaborate on your criticism? What about his political theory or philosophy do you think is bad?

He thinks the problem is populism, I think the problem is the capitalist state. 

He thinks the rise of populism is due to “democratic decline” in the West. I disagree, and think the last fifteen years of crises have exposed just how illiberal supposedly democratic states are when capitalism gets put under stress. See what French and German banks did to Greece during the Eurozone crisis, Obama’s decision to bail out the banks without conditions but evict the homeowners, etc. 

I don’t think real democracy is possible under capitalism. Both because you cannot have true democracy if your workplace is under the authoritarian control of the owners, and because the capitalists will capture the state and the media and manipulate conditions to serve their interests, even if the institutions are nominally democratic.

Edited May 4 by nerdspeak

[Basman]

6 minutes ago, nerdspeak said:

He thinks the problem is populism, I think the problem is the capitalist state. 

He thinks the rise of populism is due to “democratic decline” in the West. I disagree, and think the last fifteen years of crises have exposed just how illiberal supposedly democratic states are when capitalism gets put under stress. See what French and German banks did to Greece during the Eurozone crisis, Obama’s decision to bail out the banks without conditions but evict the homeowners, etc.

Are these two ideas necessarily incompatible, the notion that populism is due to "democratic decline" versus capitalist corruption undermining the ability for common people to meaningfully participate in society and therefor eroding trust in institutions (did I get that right?)? I can see this critique of capitalism being in fact complimentary to Vexlers commentary and you could critique him for not acknowledging this dimension enough.

9 minutes ago, nerdspeak said:

I don’t think real democracy is possible under capitalism. Both because you cannot have true democracy if your workplace is under the authoritarian control of the owners, and because the capitalists will capture the state and the media and manipulate conditions to serve their interests, even if the institutions are nominally democratic.

I guess this would be an ideological fork in the road between your ideas and Vexlers assuming he believes in capitalism.

I don't see that you disagree on the diagnosis necessarily but perhaps more on the solution.

[nerdspeak]

12 hours ago, Basman said:

Are these two ideas necessarily incompatible, the notion that populism is due to "democratic decline" versus capitalist corruption undermining the ability for common people to meaningfully participate in society and therefor eroding trust in institutions (did I get that right?)? I can see this critique of capitalism being in fact complimentary to Vexlers commentary and you could critique him for not acknowledging this dimension enough.

I guess this would be an ideological fork in the road between your ideas and Vexlers assuming he believes in capitalism.

I don't see that you disagree on the diagnosis necessarily but perhaps more on the solution.

Short answer

The disagreement about diagnosis would be that Vlad believes the decline in democratic institutions is a sui generis problem, caused by a multiple factors -- technological changes, the GFC and its aftermath, etc. Whereas my view is that democratic political institutions in an undemocratic economy is inherently unstable. 

Moreover, his periodization is very different from mine. He has stated that democratic decline began in ~2005. Whereas I would put the starting point a lot earlier, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, when capitalist elites in the West started to think maybe they had offered too many concessions to workers in the postwar era, and it was undermining their power over production. So, they dropped the goal of full employment and decided they needed to use the threat of the sack to get their power back. 

Longer answer 

I think you could characterize Vlad’s views in two ways, both seriously flawed from my perspective.

The uncharitable view of Vlad is that he’s a neoliberal. Vlad has said Western democratic institutions are presently in  “decline” relative to the ~2005 period. This suggests that things were healthy during the War on Terror, and while the banks were fueling a huge speculative bubble.

I disagree and think there was just as much corruption then, but it’s become more visible in recent years.  For various reasons capital has had to take a harsher stance with people and cut their living standards, and this has provoked a revolt. Although, unfortunately that revolt has been co-opted by skillful propagandists who are using it to impose an even harsher neoliberal/authoritarian regime. 

The more charitable view of Vlad is that this statement about 2005 was an anomaly, and that he’s a social democrat. He believes it is sustainable to have a capitalist economic system but with certain public goods, like healthcare, education, a media sector dedicated to actual journalism, and basic housing rights guaranteed to all citizens by the state.

I disagree. Not because I don’t think such a society is unappealing. However, my view is that social democracy will always fall apart. The major capitalists will find ways to rebuild their societal domination by removing those social rights. This is because those rights threaten their power, particularly in the workplace.

Bosses don’t like it if workers can easily walk out of the factory and still meet their basic needs. It increases wages and workers’ demands for better conditions, including control over the workplace. When these conflicts reach a certain level, the capitalists will move their capital abroad and/or plot to take over the government to weaken the workers' power (usually some combination). This has happened a lot of times. The collapse of Swedish social democracy, Thatcherism in the UK, the threatened capital strike under the Mitterand government in France, etc.

This has been written about a lot, by Leo Panitch in "Impasse of Social Democratic Politics," by Pontusson specifically on the Swedish case, by Peter Frase. The instability of full employment welfare states was predicted by Kalecki in the 1940s, in "Political Aspects of Full Employment." 

As a result of this fundamental disagreement about the sustainability of social democracy, we have very different ideas about what is to be done. Social democrats think you can protect social rights through careful attention to institutions. Democratic socialists are more pessimistic about the power of institutions to control big asymmetries in economic power, and that the only way to guarantee social rights long-term is to use the state to make economic power more equally distributed.

That doesn’t mean you can’t have people owning their own houses or small businesses under democratic socialism, but huge intergenerational fortunes and private control over hospitals, banks, etc., need to be prohibited, because that kind of economic power inherently translates into political power. 

 

[Leo Gura]

19 hours ago, nerdspeak said:

He thinks the problem is populism

Populism is definitely a problem.

[Lyubov]

Russia poisoned people on British soil already and nothing happened. It happened in 2018, look up the Salisbury Poisoning. Russia definitely has the reach and resources to fund assassinations like this. 

[nerdspeak]

22 hours ago, Lyubov said:

Russia poisoned people on British soil already and nothing happened. It happened in 2018, look up the Salisbury Poisoning. Russia definitely has the reach and resources to fund assassinations like this. 

The Salisbury Poisonings were targeting a former FSB double agent. Putin cares way more about maintaining fear and escalation dominance within his state security apparatus than he does about a YouTuber who hasn't lived in Russia for thirty years.