Liberal Lefties with Leechy Leanings
The Good, the Bad and the Acronyms
The number of liberals who are in Luigi mode and demanding revolutionary actions is perhaps on the rise, and that’s not a bad thing. But if we learn anything from history about revolutions it is that those who are prepared end up governing. The lefties always lose, because they are never prepared (or almost always never). This means we do get leftist tendency across the arc of history, but it is slow and incremental. That’s also not a bad thing. It is just frustrating to us because we only live 70 to 90 years. Part of the preparation is knowing the policy space of a government that issues its own I.O.U when it spends, the tax credit. Know this, and a revolution can be dramatically hastened, no blood.
Scott Galloway, a slimy investor, but who nevertheless seems like a half-decent bloke who innocently “only wants to protect capitalism,”1 (like an FDR,… hey, who can be mad?) was doing some neolib media rounds recently, and many breadtubers picked up on it joyously. And yes, it was righteous stuff.
The clip I unfortunately clicked on unfortunately demanded that I write an anti-UBI note. Sorry to say. Apologies in advance to Ghost. UBI is (or would be) a leech sucking the blood of the working class.
A UBI policy is a blight, a cancer, growing in the minds of the liberals, both left-wing and right-wing. I am so not in favour these days that anyone advocating UBI is to my mind a neoliberal, regardless of any other policy they advocate. Too extreme? Well, hey, it’s just my dumb opinion. Don’t be triggered. Not gonna win me friends? So be it. No one pays to read Ōhanga Pai, so I’m not losing much. There are plenty of other MMT’ers on The Left to placate the liberals with their, “Oh, yeah, ok, UBI is ok in moderation…” bs.
Mr Luigi the CEO Terminator would not have been better off with a UBI. His family needed decent public healthcare. How do we get that? You have to pay decent wages to healthcare workers and train the unemployed by fully employing them, but mostly at minimum pay the wages. Or, failing that, hold workers to gunpoint and slave labour them in the hospitals (that’s also called the “capitalist mode”).
It is not my personal responsibility to prop up leftist-Thatcherism (is that the first use of that phrase ever?). The only reason we need a “Nanny” welfare state is because conservatives want it, to perpetually laud it over the working class. (I do not consider pensions, disability benefits and basic income for people who should not or who are unable to work, to be “nanny welfare”. Yeah, those programs are part of the welfare state, but they are in the non-Conservative sector, it is called “wanting a decent society”, so anti-Thatcher.)
The other 🍇 I had with the breadtuber, was the hair-on-fire dire predictions of a soon-to-be future Great Depression. “My God,…” I thought, this time capital “G” for the real God here! “…what is wrong with these lefties?”
I wrote:
(a) stop fear-mongering. There is no Great Depression ahead unless it is a climate/ecological crisis. Governments learned how to bail out anyone in debt (they hate to say the system is an MMT system, but that's what they use). we need to focus in the real problem, which is ecological sustainability, not “the money”.
(b) Stop advocating for an ultra-neoliberal right-wing policy like UBI. People (the decent sort at least) want to contribute to their community, so a Job Guarantee is infinitely better than a pittance of a ubi which all goes to the rentiers. UBI = universal "f-you" to the workers, it is a claim on someone else's labour. A JG is a claim we have on the State. Stop being neoliberal. That's the first thing we can all do for a more peaceful revolution. Hell nah to the neoliberal Trojan Horse of UBI. Be smarter.
These (a) & (b) are related. A focus on UBI-style welfare is a focus on “the money”, the completely wrong focus. We need decent public services and infrastrucutre for a decent society. To achieve these goals some people are going to have to do a mountain of hard work2, it’d be a grave injustice to pay them a pittance, and the more who are working the less burden any one worker has. We can use a UBI to lessen the hours people want/need to work, but then the services drop off and someone misses out, always the poorest families, which is the neoliberal model (“market efficiency” don’t you know! 𝔘ℭ𝔎ℑ𝔑𝔊 ℭ𝔘𝔑𝔗𝔰).
About the “great depression”: if you are that far gone a doomer, and are so ignorant of MMT, just stay on youtube, please. Don’t get into actual policy formation for heavens sake. Know that such predictions become out-right lies when you have an MMT understanding, because — all probabilistic dynamics considered — a financial crisis is simply not a thing that ever has to occur, it is a policy choice. A famine and mass starvation from an ecological crisis is one thing that might occur, but really, that is also a policy choice! Nature is not out to “get us”. All Nature does3 is keep us honest.
I put those words in Galloway’s mouth, but you judge for yourself.
Even if it gets to the point of directing Robots, which I hope it does — I hope that is one day considered laborious work
Note for Hossenfelder: the physical cosmos does not have a Mind. (I could not bear to watch her recent “galactic filaments might be neurons for the cosmos ‘thinking’…” insanity. She was probably taking the piss. But just in case not I have to avoid such clickbait. No time to goof off these days.
You do yourself no favours by posturing: "ultra-neoliberal right-wing policy like UBI" makes no sense, regardless of the merits / demerits of UBI vs Job Guarantee. Neither does claiming that conservatives want to laud the welfare state over workers. This defies both the origin of the welfare state as an achievement of the Labour movement and the rationale for attempts by conservatives to undermine it.
Job Guarantee is predicated on the existence of productive but low skilled work that can be bought by the state at a wage sufficiently low that it doesn't attract workers with higher skill-levels from the private sector. No such work exists.
Observe the workers on any roadworks site. I feel qualified to speak about this since I have laid drains, shovelled and raked tarmac for two years, 56 hours a week for a roading contractor, in the UK 25-30 years ago, and supervised similar (but railway) work 40-45 years ago. The heavy lifting is now done by machines and skilled operators (even the most basic task like 'dig a little hole' has now been mechanised by expensive-to-hire hydrovac machines). The small amount of semi-skilled handwork is done by middle-aged men and occasionally women. Then there's a small army of youths doing nothing in particular- maybe shuffling cones around, sweeping up occasionally. Their job is simply to turn up and be counted. The few that turn up reliably and show aptitude will eventually be selected to learn actual skills.
These youths won't do actual hard work if you ask them, which as a site-manager you dare not. There are youths that will however- farm boys that will dig and fence and do all sorts of private-sector grunt-work- as client you will pay handsomely for their services- way more than any Job Guarantee could afford, but not as handsomely as LTNZ and local councils must pay for equivalent work done by a 'certified contractor'.
Anecdotally, I remember seeing in Wanganui a couple of years ago, two old pakeha greybeards stripped to the waist down a hole digging with trenching fork and shovel, with three brown youths up-top, clad head to toe in the compulsory hi-viz sun-protection gear leaning on the safety-fence watching them. The youths were H&S compliant, thus incapable of doing physical work. The greybeards were in breach of H&S regs.
The only way Job Guarantee is achievable in the way it is envisaged by MMT is to roll back H&S regs and working practices (and work-ethic tbh) to the norms of 40, 50, 60 years ago. This may prove to be difficult without gunpoint and the whip- third-reich style.