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01486: Re: what is "leftist economy" - Re: Deciding the future course of action

From: "M. Kolar" <wddm(at)mkolar.org>
Date: Wed, 19 Sep 2007 02:45:04 -0500
Subject: Re: what is "leftist economy" - Re: Deciding the future course of action

Answer to 'What is "left" to you?' - see below:

Traditionally left (leftist) means progressive and right (rightist)
conservative, i.e., since the 1789 French Revolution when the
progressive forces were seated on the left side of the parliament, and
the conservative forces were seated on the right.

I was talking specifically only about "leftist economy", or "economic
left" in relation to the economical axis of political compass that PVR
introduced to us. On that axis "left" also seems to be a synonym for
"progressive." Thus by "leftist economy" I meant progressive or
democratic economy. In other words, an economy controlled democratically
by its users, that is both by producers and consumers. When I was
thinking about the above question, I came with another possible
definition: It is an economy the primary concern of which is the
well-being and satisfaction of the needs of the consumers, and possible
profit is only a secondary matter. Rightist economy on the other hand is
economy motivated solely by profit (or personal greed as it is often
openly proclaimed here in North America) with the belief that the needs
and well-being of consumers will be satisfied as a by-product of
generating profit. A good example that this does not work (at least not
all the time) is the present state of food industry in North America. In
an effort to sustain high profit levels in a very competitive
environment, food companies are launching all the time new
highly-processed food products that contain ever less healthy and
nutritional components, and are targeting young children with
advertising campaigns for unhealthy snacks in the hope to hook them up
on their brands for the whole life. The result is ever higher percentage
of obese (while often malnourished at the same time) people in the
population with accompanying health problems that put an ever increasing
strain on the health system. Even the physical handling of such obese
patients presents new challenges: for example rather recently a special
ambulance had to be introduced at great cost in Calgary that can handle
transportation of patients weighing up to 1000 pounds (454 kg).

An example of (proposal how to organize a) leftist, consumer and
producer controlled, economy, called "mixed economy" can be found in the
link recently discussed here, at
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/worldwidemovements/reform.html,
in about the middle of that paper under the heading "A NEO-PROUDHONIST
PROGRAM." It seems to be realizable if people really wanted it.

In this context, let me present the just published (about 10 days ago),
provocative book by a Canadian proponent of a left economy, Noami Klein.
The title of the book is "The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism". 662 pages; publisher" Knopf Canada. It is a very severe
critique of the Milton Friedman's school of economics and his "Chicago
boys" who rely on natural and social disasters (spontaneous, anticipated
or engineered) to ram down the throats of people their version of
market-fundamentalist capitalism that the people would otherwise refuse
if not shocked to submission by those disasters. Here is a YouTube
companion film for this book: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kieyjfZDUIc.
So far I have mainly heard and read several reviews of this book,
including from Klein's opponents. One of them wrote that she is
romantic, biased, exaggerates, but agreed that her book still contains a
lot of important facts ("Strip Klein's arguments of intentionality and
diabolical foresight, and a weaker form of her argument is right and
important"). From his review it seems that Klein devotes only one
closing chapter to the discussion of better alternative to Friedman
economics (that seem to have conquered most of the world in the last
two decades), and her proposals are similar to the above
anarchist-proposed mixed economy - locally controlled economy,
worker-controlled co-operatives.
The reviewer then asks valid questions: "But what if workers don't want
them? What if they have divergent interests that set them at odds? What
if workers and peasants clash?"

Thus "democratic economy", similarly as the "true democracy" seems for
now to be an ideal that is definitely better in theory than the present
state of affairs, but it can be realized (at least partly) only if a
large number of people are ready to embrace it. Here we are back to the
necessity of "new way of thinking" to get to that state.

Mirek


echarp wrote:
On Sat, Sep 01, 2007 at 01:19:55AM -0500, M. Kolar wrote:

echarp wrote:

Where do you get that democratically minded people are mostly
economically left?

Real democracy would be possible only if there are equal opportunities for
all in all spheres of human life, including economy. To realize this, you
have to have some sort of "leftist" economy - see e.g. the project of mixed
economy from the link in my previous mailing.


What is "left" to you?

To me, economic orientations and social freedom are two /mostly/
orthogonal matters.

Of course they do interact, but people could democratically choose a
"right" policy or just as well a "left" one (whatever left and right
exactly are).


"Left" dost not mean at all what existed in Eastern Europe till 1990, that
was at best a caricature of a left economy, essentially it was an
absolute-monopoly (statist) variation of capitalist economy.


It was definitely a statist system, same as now really. Both completely
contrary to liberalism and/or anarchism.

echarp - http://leparlement.org


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