Episode 42
Transcript:
MLK:
At the very same time that America refused to give the Negro any land, through an act of Congress, our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest, which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor. But not only did they give the land, they built land grant colleges with government money to teach them how to farm. Not only that, they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming. Not only that, they provided low interest rates in order that they could mechanize their farms. Not only that, today many of these people are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies not to farm, and they are the very people telling the black man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. And this is what we are faced with.
Peter Joseph:
Good afternoon, good evening. Good morning everybody. This is Peter Joseph once again and welcome to Revolution Now, episode 42. The opening audio is of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Commenting on the post Reconstruction era highlighting the underlying racism and hypocrisy surrounding state support or lack thereof between whites and blacks in that Reconstruction transition - versus, holistically, free market perseverance as he indicates at the end using the classic colloquialism "lift himself up by his own bootstraps," which is a phrase I think most of us have heard in one form or another. The classic "you get what you work for" mythology within market capitalism. And the reason I've included this is less about the specifics of historical reconstruction and more about the underlying deeper assumption of the nature of "working" and "earning" and what it means to "earn a living" in this system, ultimately begging perhaps the most divisive economic question we endure in our scarcity perpetuating society: "Who deserves what and why?"
This question will be the overall theme of today's podcast. And of course we're all familiar with the idea of self-reliance about developing skills to make one capable of handling problems as they come, accomplishing goals as independently as one can. A basic philosophical virtue. Most would agree. Personal qualities such as vigilance, fortitude, gaining confidence in one's ability. It's part of a maturation process and we tend to respect people that when faced with a challenge can work things out with minimal appeal to the external for assistance. Of course, it's not to deny the need to network in life in the interest to problem solve or create, such as the old cliche of the father figure, driving around lost with the family, refusing to ask for directions because he has too much pride to admit he doesn't know what he's doing. So naturally there's a threshold of knowing your own vulnerability, your own ignorances, strengths and weaknesses.
Nobody is an island. And also recognizing the limitations of the structure you exist in, as we will talk about at length. Unfortunately, the more traditional or conservative worldview kind of disregards the vulnerability, it disregards structural relationships, which is why a very derisive tone is often taken. People use phrases like the "nanny state" and the "welfare queens" and so on. And hence the notion of economic self-reliance. Going back to Dr. King's comments, it is the myth of economic self-reliance that, in part, masks the overall structural bigotry we see across the world. So entrenched in fact that there is no need, at least to a certain degree, to acknowledge color of skin, gender, or any such group identification because the bigotry or discrimination in question really only needs one demographic framing or context. And that is low socioeconomic status. And it's from that point, generally speaking, that all the other forms of group-based bigotry tend to arise consequentially, including the development of cultures that are literally directly bigoted against groups as a sociological consequence over generational time.
Which is why once again, if you really want to improve so-called race relations or any kind of group relations, reduce economic inequality and create more egalitarianism. That will alter the precondition leading to a whole spectrum of alleviations in the battle for human rights. So anyway, coming back to our central point here, the idea of economic self-reliance. It's a powerful psychological disposition. Needless to say, if a marginalized community is convinced that they are the authors of their own poverty or prosperity, as is endlessly expressed by culture today, once again, they will be far more docile. In fact, they will not only be docile, they will be more likely to actually condemn others in exactly the same way, self perpetuating the mythology. So imagine an historically oppressed minority, born into deep inner city poverty, who indeed works hard, gets multiple jobs to pay for college, gets a good job in the corporate hierarchy and works his way up, achieving a upper middle class lifestyle, having a nice house in a nice neighborhood, two cars in the garage, the family, the white picket fence, the American dream.
Now, do you think someone like that, remembering and feeling the stress, the difficult struggle in their life experience, hearing most likely their entire lives that they "get what they work for," would be prone maybe to look at others from their original poor environment who did not achieve that middle class dream as perhaps just not applying themselves as they did? You see this kind of thing everywhere. There was an interview with Morgan Freeman, of all people, who said this about him being black, talking to another commentator about being black and how they were examples of how race really isn't as significant anymore, implying once again it's all up to the individual-- which is completely statistically oblivious. While the actual racial issue may not be significant in some cases because we're dealing with economic bigotry which fosters the structure of division, which eventually carries over into racially defined pockets, it's just coming at it from a different angle rather than direct racism.
The lack of social mobility and options are still very much there. Another and current example is right now in the states, they're trying to forgive some student loan debt, which needs to be forgiven because it's outrageous. And if you know anything about the debt system, you have to forgive debt or at least erase it somehow even through bankruptcy because there's always more debt than there is money to pay for it on this planet. But you'll notice that people are angry because they don't wanna see other people's debt get paid off because they had to work hard and pay off their debt. Therefore it's not fair. And of course, this applies to the general stigma that we see out there because people have this reaction that when they see others get something for nothing, they say, "Well, that's not fair. I had to work hard," at least in their own mind.
And of course it's all very subjective and ignorant. If one, of course, were educated on the issue, they would realize that the entire system, the economic system of market capitalism, is structurally slanted on multiple levels by which those in poverty are far more statistically inclined to remain in poverty throughout their entire lives, regardless of their efforts. Rather than achieve such dramatic upward social mobility. Wide social mobility in the market ecosystem is the exception, not the rule. There's a John Hopkins sociologist named Karl Alexander, who conducted a 30 year study on social mobility published in 2014 called "The Long Shadow, Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood" as titled, if anyone wishes to read it, with basically the conclusion drawn that people born into low income families have an extremely high probability of staying within that poor income bracket. The researcher's summational quote was "where you start in life is where you end up in life."
In fact, I would go so far to say that class stratification, given the lack of mobility in general, really takes on the form of a cast system locked in. The sobering reality that people need to understand, once again, about market dynamics and personal success is that the central mechanism isn't exactly work. Obviously you have to do something, but really it's about preexisting advantage and luck, which Dr. King understood intuitively, which is why he pushed the Poor People's Campaign seeking an economic bill of rights and universal basic income before his death. He recognized explicitly that the system cannot self-regulate to eliminate poverty. Beyond that, you see this, "you get what you work for" myth in all sorts of other arenas such as Affirmative Action, which I bring up only because I was just reading earlier about the US Supreme Court currently judging the value of the historical practice in universities.
So here you have a country that enslaved an entire group of people eventually fostering social and legal inclusion over time, where today the chain reactions affecting the black community, still without dispute, restrict improvements to their public health and wellbeing. And at the heart of the anti-affirmative action argument is once again the idea of meritocracy- "You get what you work for." Basically, it's the convenient notion of just pretending that it's all over and there are no systemic racist effects anymore, institutional or otherwise. The tragic fact is, without such brute force inclusion policies over the past decades, the black community would be far more marginalized. I mean, it's not sociological rocket science. Without legal force toward integration. Do you think any of, say, the Southern states would've lifted a finger to create a condition of equality between blacks and whites? Shit, it's these states to this very day that continue to push back against basic civil rights progress and common sense policy.
Affirmative action may be crude and transitional, but once again, it's compensating for the system. It's needed to compensate for the systemic bigotry, not only persistent by way of cultural bias, but reinforced by our scarcity based competitive economic model, which motivates economic agents in ways that systemically continue underclass oppression. This is why, for example, even to this day, as decades prior, with the rise of suburbia, black families are still considered a negative influence on affluent property values. And again, that's not conjecture. These are statistics that have been run and God forbid anybody builds some lower class housing to help people - subsidized housing anywhere near an upper class neighborhood because the affluent will run to their municipality leaders and demand nothing of that nature in their neighborhood because they want to keep their property values up. And that is just one example of how economic motivations produce outcomes that are group discriminatory, even though the motivation isn't overtly bigoted.
Rather it's a self-preservation response to feedback from the economic system. It's like that old organization, NIMBY: "not in my backyard." And again, that's just one of many examples of systemic economic discrimination that fosters broad demographic oppression, usually of course of minorities, at least historically. But that's too complicated for most people it seems. Instead they move against affirmative action and just say it is racism, as if that's all that needs to be said. These are also folks that will manipulatively use phrases like, Oh, but we want a "colorless society". On a certain level, the invocation of a colorless society seems poetic, right? As if we could just snap our fingers and no one would regard such differences ever again without any systemic institutional forces that benefit one perceived group over another. But that's not the reality. In fact, I'll put it this way: If you were able to magically reset the total consciousness of every human being on the planet, sending them back in motion to their normal day to day routine, removing any sense of division, the economic system's mechanics would foster the outcome of division from the ground up as we see it perpetuating today.
And again, I can't emphasize enough that you could sidestep the entire problem by ending vast unequal distributions of income and wealth, which is again, endogenously consequential to the structure of market economics, removing the mechanics itself that continue to drive up disparities and create division. And after a few generations, most of this group versus group; in group -- out group conflict would no doubt dissipate. And as a point of frustration, while we all understand the sickness of the political revolving door and how most of these values or observations are purposefully sidelined because they don't support establishment preservation, the same elite value systems that once again say that you "get what you work for" and it's "all up to you" and so on. But that aside, where the fuck are the activists talking about this basic sociological truth that deal with race or group relations, or in fact the entire whole of the human rights movement?
Forget social programs, forget charities, even forget reparations. They are all fleeting and have nothing to do with structure, and hence they're not corrective in the long term. I'm unaware of any activist organization of high notoriety, globally,that is saying "we have to reduce socioeconomic inequality because it's destabilizing our societies." Yes, we do have the Nordic countries that do a little bit better, but all of the gini coefficients continue to move towards more inequality even though there has been a little bit of stability in some regions. But even that's not enough. Sorry to rant about it. It just kind of blows my mind that we have all of this movement towards human rights equality and everyone just stops at the economy not understanding that economic inequality is at the root of most all of the problems we see and has been for a long, long time. And not only is there no political initiative to try and do something about it, clearly -- there's no concentrated activist initiative to do it. And again, it's a consequence of not only reinforcement from the system naturally, cuz people are gaining and trying to pretend like they actually deserve what they've "earned," but the "you get what you work" for, equal playing field, "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" propaganda has completely polluted even the most seemingly forward thinking people. And they'll say things like, "Well, we want equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome." Which, of course, is completely impossible in this system.
Now how would you model this to people in explaining that there's a fallacy to all of this, aside from recognizing the empirical hierarchical reality as born from the system and other more general acknowledgements. The best way to argue it is to say the market is a "near zero sum game," which it is. A zero sum game means that for somebody to win, somebody has to lose, such as gambling in the game of poker. The difference is that the market has essentially two additional features that differentiate it as such, bringing it to a near zero sum game. The first feature has to do with creation in the mechanism, serial development of scientific information and technology, which is crudely associated to "economic growth," by the way, but we won't entertain that for now. Meaning that the creation of utility gets built upon, producing higher levels of utility as a creative, innovative process, facilitating the potential for one idea to evolve into a better idea, hopefully affecting public health for the better.
This is just recognition of knowledge being built on knowledge. And remember that the notion of the system creating wealth, I'm sure we've all heard this, right? "Oh, no other system has created more wealth and prosperity." This term wealth is a kind of co-opting of the fruits of innovation through networked creativity and the advancement of science and technology. Hence, can you create wealth with capitalism without science and technology? Obviously not. Can science and technology create wealth without capitalism? Absolutely. Something to keep in mind because this is thrown out there all the time by pro-market people. They say, well, we create wealth in this system. No science and technology creates wealth, hence wealth itself means to create increased efficiency. True wealth is about actual efficiency mechanisms built into an economy that can produce more with less, simply put. Now, I'm gonna come back to this elusive notion of wealth in a second, but let's wrap up the current point.
The second thing that qualifies the market game as "near zero sum" is the money supply itself, which is not fixed. In our growth economy, endogenously rooted, which requires a non-fixed variable money supply to operate flexibly...something the gold standard people or the cryptocurrency people don't seem to understand. Standards of living are in fact, actually tied to the amount of money in circulation as a holistic phenomenon. More money generally means economic growth. Lifting all boats. Economic contraction or recession generally means money is being taken out of the system or limited, such as elevated interest rates designed to curb inflation. It's like a poker game with a pool of money being gambled upon across all players, watching the value of that money pool increase and decrease in value as they play due to forces out of their control. Of course, it's a macroeconomic phenomenon, if you will.
So put more simply, there isn't a fixed amount of money, there isn't a fixed kitty, there isn't a fixed pool as you expect in a zero sum game. Instead there's this ebb and flow generally around a mean. Anyway, I hope all that makes sense. Those are the two basic factors of why you look at this kind of economy as near zero sum. And let me emphasize that this qualification of "near" -- is pretty much irrelevant when it comes to the mythology once again of an equal playing field and everyone being able to achieve the same level of prosperity. It's mathematically impossible for everyone to win, in other words. The so-called American dream is not an equal opportunity outcome, nor is it possible for it to be. And I really wish people thoroughly understood that because the general psychology out there is everyone's striving to basically screw over everyone else because that's the outcome.
There's no moral issue there. It's just what the hierarchical... the contrived hierarchical structure does. Okay, so that's stated. Now, let's return to this concept of wealth and wrap things up there. One characteristic in the historical literature prior to the Adam Smith or Smithian Revolution, if you will, is that wealth was associated to precious metals generally. It wasn't the only definition of wealth, but a strong one in the mercantilist period. Precious metals such as gold and silver. And the interesting thing is, is that built into this crudeness is an attempt to build upon value that is mirrored in the real world, trying to create a link of economic behavior to the real world through precious metals as if the metals mirror the wealth of the natural world in general. Pragmatically, of course, it's all very, very vague, but the conception is still interesting. It's an attempt to link an economy to the resources of the planet, even if by proxy through the scarcity and durability of precious metals.
Hence a kind of fundamental intuition in our economic evolution that obviously we can't just arbitrarily make things up and pretend the system is going to be sustainable. Of course, today, that is precisely what the evolution has done: a complete detachment from everything, even though it has always been a fundamental characteristic of market economics deep down structurally. Because the entire theory is pure abstraction, which is why economists aren't really economists at all. They're just propagandists of the model. Hence, of course the phrase "resource based economy" used to describe a scientific approach to earthly management, means of production and the very concept of value and wealth, emphasizing the critical necessity to move into actual tangible territory when it comes to economic behavior. And while that logic is certainly there, especially with people talking about sustainability, climate destabilization, all of these conferences about biodiversity and so on, you don't really see it manifest in anything.
In fact, things have gotten increasingly detached, which is the ultimate symbology of Wall Street. While one can look at Wall Street as a kind of Frankenstein monster, if you really, really look at what it is, it's actually the bare bones of the system. A detached proxy game that has no connection to anything real. And the Main street economy is not that much different. But going back to the notion of associating precious metals, there at least has been an intuition there, right? So then the physiocrats come along in the 18th century who are historically noted to have formalized a conception of wealth as related to natural resources or real-world processes, primarily associated to agriculture back then. And they were very influential to Adam Smith and his conceptions of wealth, the "wealth of nations." All Adam Smith really did was continue the general vaguery, simply saying that the wealth of a nation is what it outputs.
The aggregate produce coming from resources and labor, basically just a minimal form of what we call gross domestic product today. But the implication of this is of aggregate creation - about society fostering higher levels of improvement, which affects everyone - the "wealth of nations." In other words, the technical distinction is static and the conception of producing stuff and selling stuff, gross domestic product, aggregate output or produce. But the implication is that there's something larger that's being affected, and that is where the true conception of wealth philosophically rests, once again, because fleeting productions, material productions, are just that - fleeting. Therefore the materialist conception of wealth. Even though it's pop culture today, it really doesn't hold up from a philosophical standpoint. What does hold up is efficiency: more with less. Buckminster Fuller's ephemeralization - the ability to produce an abundance with the least amount of environmental impact or labor. So wealth becomes a mechanism, not an outcome.
And the point I'm trying to make here, going back to the broad theme of this podcast is if you follow that logic, you begin to understand that the fruits of society are fundamentally collective and the conception of who deserves what and entitlement becomes extremely muddy. In fact, I'll put it this way, in order for you to "get what you work" for in pure principle, it would mean that the moment you're born and throughout your entire life, there should be no preexisting designs or infrastructure or anything which you build upon. Because if you're building upon something that's provided for you, you didn't work for it, right? The idea of earning a living becomes deeply confused from that standpoint unless you subjectively say that existing conditions are irrelevant and you earn your standard of living abstractly by paying for whatever has already existed, as if it's just another commodity, regardless of the intellectual and physical labor that was expelled before your time.
Instead of earning money to buy a computer, saying you earned the computer, you "get what you work for," You would have to build the computer from the ground up without any prior scientific discovery or work. Hence, the incredible productive affluence possible. And I know it's based on terrible methods and we're not gonna worry about that for this particular philosophical point -- is a collective wealth outcome that cannot be just diffused to argue that everyone has to now fight amongst each other because we're creating wealth, we're creating knowledge, we're creating innovations as a unit, and therefore as a unit, we all deserve those fruits. So the stigma needs to go -- the idea that society collectively working to provide the necessities of life for everyone at a high standard of living, which we know is actually doable, sustainably, with proper redesign, feeding, clothing, housing, everyone -- that is not some outcome where a bunch of people do all the work and other people are freeloaders as the conservative mindset would have you believe.
So all of this is to say that this value system we have is awful. There has to be a way to break through to get people to realize that providing an economic floor, as Martin Luther King Jr would say, is not a bad thing. That a society that actually engineers and provides resources to people directly such as, Oh, I don't know, food and water without cost-- that would be a good first step-- is a good thing. It is a natural consequence of the efficiencies or wealth that we've created. All right, folks, I had a whole other section here that I'm gonna take on next time in two weeks, most likely, Uh, regarding institutionalization and activism. I've been developing this for a while, getting back into the frameworks of solutions. And I know a lot of people out there are sick of hearing about all this analysis, but you really need to understand it.
People need to be able to argue this stuff. All the holes have to be poked in this system for people to see the need in the merit for something new. And while the sustainability issues are obviously at the forefront, and we don't really need to say anything else beyond that, it's important to remember that the system falters from its own general philosophy. It doesn't hold up even by its own internal logic. In fact, I'll end the show with one final example of this. Market externalities are in the trillions and trillions of dollars every single year. If you're a company in general and you sell something and you have an inventory and for whatever reason you're spending more than you're making - your company is a failure, you're not profitable. But what if I was to tell you that the entire market economy is not profitable? It's not profitable when you actually take into account natural capital, specifically the effects of market externalities that are outputting out the other side of the machine. The environmental costs are so staggering and almost incalculable, but we do know that they are in the epic amounts of monetary value when we attempt to put a price tag on them.
The whole capitalist economy fails by its own logic. It's not profitable in its own global structure. It's a shitty business. This program is brought to you by my Patreon. I really appreciate people's ongoing support, even though my output has been sparse. Lots of work on the new film and I'm actually gonna be... I'm tentatively slated to speak at a conference, in January on systems change. I'll keep everyone apprised of that. That's probably where my full presentation promoted long ago, which I postponed, titled On The Future of Civilization will take shape. But because of the complexity of that project in terms of its solution orientation, I haven't wanted to rush it or release anything sort of in a preliminary sense as I don't wanna generate confusion or vagueness. But I will keep everybody posted and everyone take care out there.