The old-fashioned future
Sep. 12th, 2005 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusIf we like something we tend to say that it represents the future and describe any movement towards it as "progress" and "modernization" and "success". We also make sure to call the opposite of the thing we like "conservative" and associate it with the past, and with failure. We describe our liked thing with swishy modern-sounding words like "streamlining" and "efficiency" even when the things being "streamlined" away are people losing their jobs, and it's not quite clear who exactly is benefitting from the "efficiency". Well, actually, it is clear, but we don't choose to dwell on that. It's divisive, you see.
The thing we like, if we're quite a sizeable majority of the press covering the Japanese election yesterday and the reasons leading up to it, is capitalism. Free markets, the international flow of capital, that sort of thing. We love that stuff, and we can't get enough of it. We love it when a politician gets that religion, because it means he's going to start handing over power and money locked up in the public sector to our guys in the private sector. So we call him a "reformist" and a "liberaliser" rather than "a man in the public sector who seems to be cutting off his nose to spite his face by handing power over to the private sector". And because we like him, we portray the conservative party he's in as a radical and liberal party, and his holding onto power as a radical shift in power. Yes, the Japanese people are sick of things as they are, and have spoken up loudly for change! And so the LDP, which has been in power in Japan almost without interruption for the last several decades,has been ousted is still in power! Hurrah for radical change, and hurrah for the-future-not-the-past!
In the past, of course, "reform" used to mean curbing the excesses of capitalism; passing legislation that stopped people employing children in their factories, widening suffrage, limiting working hours, building up adequate public health systems, and so on. But now "reform" means precisely the opposite. It means dismantling public assets and loosening up the legislation that restricts capital in its dealings with labour, the state, and the environment.
Koizumi won a landslide in yesterday's Japanese general election, an election he called in order to consolidate his power after losing a vote to privatize the Japanese post office. The Japanese post office is the world's largest publicly owned savings bank. It's a win-win situation for the government and the people of Japan; people know that because it's backed by the government, they won't lose their savings. And the government has a huge pile of cash with which to finance public building projects: bridges, dams, and so on. These pieces of infrastructure are often described as "unnecessary", but they keep people working and serve communities on remote islands, and so on. As do small post offices which would no doubt be closed down under a privatised system. What Koizumi proposes would simply funnel a lot of the cash being used currently for public projects like bridges into the profits of private shareholders in banks. Why is that "reform"?
So Koizumi lost the vote to privatise the post office in parliament. He then called the election and purged the rebel MPs and is going to do it all again. Why did he win the election? Not because a massive majority of people want postal privatisation, but because he enlisted a bunch of celebrities to replace the excluded rebel MPs. And also because of a vague sense that "modernisation" and "reform" are necessary. But again, what does "reform" mean when it's just a question of syphoning cash out of the public realm into the private one?
Here's a right wing thinktank licking its chops over the prospect of privatisation and explaining exactly who it helps:
"If the Japanese public abandons the caution fostered by unlimited government guarantees and preferential tax treatment for PSS [Postal Savings Bank] deposits, and begins to invest their savings in private banks and other investment vehicles -- the country's economy will never be the same. Huge amounts of pent-up capital would then be moved into private financial markets. This would help to bolster not only Japan's incipient economic recovery but, over time, financial markets around the world."
People (especially people who've read Alex Kerr's book "Dogs and Demons" uncritically) sometimes call Japan a "construction state" and deplore the fact that 97% of all major rivers in Japan are dammed and 100% are lined with concrete, and that 55% of Japan's coastlines are covered in concrete laid down by government programs. Government programs which will cease if the Post Office Savings Bank is privatised. Kerr's arguments are mostly aesthetic; he thinks concrete reinforcements on coasts and rivers are ugly: "The gray concrete of the once-natural beach lines is punctuated by piles of countless concrete and iron tetrapods — four-legged anti-erosion barriers that look like large jacks and are often as large as bulldozers."
But death by drowning is ugly too, as we've seen in New Orleans. Our vision of a future which can only get more and more "liberalized" (in other words, capitalist) might be blocking our view of a future climatologists tell us is now increasingly certain: a future in which global warming causes sea levels to rise and weather patterns to become more extreme. I suspect the people of New Orleans would have been happy to have a bit more "ugly" concrete between them and the sea. Each year Japan is experiencing more and more devastating typhoons, which endanger life by depositing huge amounts of rainfall in very brief periods, making rivers burst their banks. Are the private banks who profit from post office privatisation going to construct barriers against that?
It's not just because I don't like it that I call Kerr's notion that concretisation programs are "unnecessary" completely outdated. Concretization gets ever more necessary with every typhoon. The irony is that the unrestrained economic activity Koizumi thinks is the inevitable future will contribute directly to the rising sea levels. So what we're "progressing" towards is precisely the kind of world where we'll need huge government spending on exactly the things Kerr and Koizumi deplore: massive publicly-funded concretization schemes.
Tell me if you agree or disagree with this statement: "Capitalism prefers instability to stability and cure to prevention. Rather than letting governments prevent disasters by programs of public works, capitalists would prefer disasters to happen periodically, claiming lives, and the survivors be compensated afterwards from insurance schemes... assuming they've signed up for them."
Neo-Marxist theorist Kojin Karatani once described the Japanese system as "capitalist communism". The thinktank I link above uses the word "conservative" to describe the same phenomenon (it also uses the term "retail investor" to describe what I would call a "citizen"):
"The typical Japanese retail investor remains conservative in their outlook. Many confuse investment and speculation and equate the stock market with a casino. As a result, they have preferred the security of guaranteed bank deposits and especially that of the Postal Savings System (PSS), even though this has resulted in annual interest rate returns of less than 1%."
Let's have that again in English:
"The typical Japanese citizen remains somewhat capitalist-communist in attitude. Many correctly realise that if they invest their money in the private banking system it will be used for speculation in that international casino, the stock market, rather than being spent on projects they can see and appreciate in Japan; bridges, dams, post offices near where they live, and so on. As a result they have preferred the security of guaranteed bank deposits and especially that of the Postal Savings System (PSS), even though this has resulted in annual interest rate returns of less than 1%."
Putting security over percentage interest return, putting public works over private profit, putting utility over capitalist "streamlining" and "synergies" (which call themselves "efficiency" without saying who they're efficient for), and thinking of the international capitalist system as a "casino", these are what make the Japanese "communist capitalists". And what Koizumi—caving in with admirable "resolution" to the demands of international capital markets—is doing is trying to make the Japanese "capitalist capitalists". Great, just what the world needs, more capitalism.
The thing we like, if we're quite a sizeable majority of the press covering the Japanese election yesterday and the reasons leading up to it, is capitalism. Free markets, the international flow of capital, that sort of thing. We love that stuff, and we can't get enough of it. We love it when a politician gets that religion, because it means he's going to start handing over power and money locked up in the public sector to our guys in the private sector. So we call him a "reformist" and a "liberaliser" rather than "a man in the public sector who seems to be cutting off his nose to spite his face by handing power over to the private sector". And because we like him, we portray the conservative party he's in as a radical and liberal party, and his holding onto power as a radical shift in power. Yes, the Japanese people are sick of things as they are, and have spoken up loudly for change! And so the LDP, which has been in power in Japan almost without interruption for the last several decades,
In the past, of course, "reform" used to mean curbing the excesses of capitalism; passing legislation that stopped people employing children in their factories, widening suffrage, limiting working hours, building up adequate public health systems, and so on. But now "reform" means precisely the opposite. It means dismantling public assets and loosening up the legislation that restricts capital in its dealings with labour, the state, and the environment.
Koizumi won a landslide in yesterday's Japanese general election, an election he called in order to consolidate his power after losing a vote to privatize the Japanese post office. The Japanese post office is the world's largest publicly owned savings bank. It's a win-win situation for the government and the people of Japan; people know that because it's backed by the government, they won't lose their savings. And the government has a huge pile of cash with which to finance public building projects: bridges, dams, and so on. These pieces of infrastructure are often described as "unnecessary", but they keep people working and serve communities on remote islands, and so on. As do small post offices which would no doubt be closed down under a privatised system. What Koizumi proposes would simply funnel a lot of the cash being used currently for public projects like bridges into the profits of private shareholders in banks. Why is that "reform"?
So Koizumi lost the vote to privatise the post office in parliament. He then called the election and purged the rebel MPs and is going to do it all again. Why did he win the election? Not because a massive majority of people want postal privatisation, but because he enlisted a bunch of celebrities to replace the excluded rebel MPs. And also because of a vague sense that "modernisation" and "reform" are necessary. But again, what does "reform" mean when it's just a question of syphoning cash out of the public realm into the private one?
Here's a right wing thinktank licking its chops over the prospect of privatisation and explaining exactly who it helps:
"If the Japanese public abandons the caution fostered by unlimited government guarantees and preferential tax treatment for PSS [Postal Savings Bank] deposits, and begins to invest their savings in private banks and other investment vehicles -- the country's economy will never be the same. Huge amounts of pent-up capital would then be moved into private financial markets. This would help to bolster not only Japan's incipient economic recovery but, over time, financial markets around the world."
People (especially people who've read Alex Kerr's book "Dogs and Demons" uncritically) sometimes call Japan a "construction state" and deplore the fact that 97% of all major rivers in Japan are dammed and 100% are lined with concrete, and that 55% of Japan's coastlines are covered in concrete laid down by government programs. Government programs which will cease if the Post Office Savings Bank is privatised. Kerr's arguments are mostly aesthetic; he thinks concrete reinforcements on coasts and rivers are ugly: "The gray concrete of the once-natural beach lines is punctuated by piles of countless concrete and iron tetrapods — four-legged anti-erosion barriers that look like large jacks and are often as large as bulldozers."
But death by drowning is ugly too, as we've seen in New Orleans. Our vision of a future which can only get more and more "liberalized" (in other words, capitalist) might be blocking our view of a future climatologists tell us is now increasingly certain: a future in which global warming causes sea levels to rise and weather patterns to become more extreme. I suspect the people of New Orleans would have been happy to have a bit more "ugly" concrete between them and the sea. Each year Japan is experiencing more and more devastating typhoons, which endanger life by depositing huge amounts of rainfall in very brief periods, making rivers burst their banks. Are the private banks who profit from post office privatisation going to construct barriers against that?
It's not just because I don't like it that I call Kerr's notion that concretisation programs are "unnecessary" completely outdated. Concretization gets ever more necessary with every typhoon. The irony is that the unrestrained economic activity Koizumi thinks is the inevitable future will contribute directly to the rising sea levels. So what we're "progressing" towards is precisely the kind of world where we'll need huge government spending on exactly the things Kerr and Koizumi deplore: massive publicly-funded concretization schemes.
Tell me if you agree or disagree with this statement: "Capitalism prefers instability to stability and cure to prevention. Rather than letting governments prevent disasters by programs of public works, capitalists would prefer disasters to happen periodically, claiming lives, and the survivors be compensated afterwards from insurance schemes... assuming they've signed up for them."
Neo-Marxist theorist Kojin Karatani once described the Japanese system as "capitalist communism". The thinktank I link above uses the word "conservative" to describe the same phenomenon (it also uses the term "retail investor" to describe what I would call a "citizen"):
"The typical Japanese retail investor remains conservative in their outlook. Many confuse investment and speculation and equate the stock market with a casino. As a result, they have preferred the security of guaranteed bank deposits and especially that of the Postal Savings System (PSS), even though this has resulted in annual interest rate returns of less than 1%."
Let's have that again in English:
"The typical Japanese citizen remains somewhat capitalist-communist in attitude. Many correctly realise that if they invest their money in the private banking system it will be used for speculation in that international casino, the stock market, rather than being spent on projects they can see and appreciate in Japan; bridges, dams, post offices near where they live, and so on. As a result they have preferred the security of guaranteed bank deposits and especially that of the Postal Savings System (PSS), even though this has resulted in annual interest rate returns of less than 1%."
Putting security over percentage interest return, putting public works over private profit, putting utility over capitalist "streamlining" and "synergies" (which call themselves "efficiency" without saying who they're efficient for), and thinking of the international capitalist system as a "casino", these are what make the Japanese "communist capitalists". And what Koizumi—caving in with admirable "resolution" to the demands of international capital markets—is doing is trying to make the Japanese "capitalist capitalists". Great, just what the world needs, more capitalism.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-12 11:56 pm (UTC)I've had incredibly bad service from a lot of very big private companies.
In many cases, big companies have realised that hiring good advertising agencies is cheaper than fixing bad service, so your statement is incorrect.
> The more money a company makes, the more people it's able to hire, and the more it's
> able to pay them.
Wal Mart are one of the most profitable companies on the planet, yet they pay their cashiers incredibly low wages.
> As far as resources are concerned, a company is encouraged to use as few resources as it can in order to save cash.
Unless it's cheaper to use lots of cheap resources than change their processes.
> Companies also have incentive to be environmentally-conscious: when corporate watchdogs expose companies for bad practicies, it turns off potential customers and hurts their bottom line (along with governmentally-imposed fines).
No, companies will do whatever makes them the most money. If it's cheaper to pay the fines, or set up lobby groups to get corporate laws relaxed, as has been happening in the US since the election of Reagan, they'll do that.
'
This simplistic idea that capitalists will eventually do 'the right thing because it's in their and everyone else's interests severely underestimates how far capitalists will go to make money.
> The issue here is how long should the government prop up these would-be ghost towns with these completely inessential and wasteful projects?
I live at the edge of a town with a long history (mentioned in the 1086 Domesday book). The combination of the collapse of traditional industry, and heavy damage in WWII (the second most bombed town in the UK) hit the place hard. Are you saying the place should have been abandoned in the name of "efficiency"?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-13 08:37 am (UTC)It would seem that the real split here is a matter of scale. When a corporate entity is so large that it can exercise more control over the environment than that environment's citizens, there is obviously a problem But would anyone seriously argue that 1-to-1 transactions between individuals -- say, at a yard sale -- are inherently inequitable? Was I being exploited last year when I (and others) paid Momus to continue posting his MP3s to this blog?
People are throwing around references and aiming down their noses, and it's all a bit wanton. I think too many factors are being glossed over or ignored. Can we at least offer some examples of capitalism run amok that don't rely on entities whose status is blurred by subsidies from the tax base?
I'm certain that anyone reading this thread would be intensely interested in practical alternatives to whatever is identified as an ill. Meanwhile, back to firing catch phrases.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-13 01:30 pm (UTC)Anyway, focussing on the micro-micro-economics of a yard sale, and ignoring the likes of Wal Mart is an odd way to construct an argument about Capitalism. There are shades of grey between "hot dog vendor" and "Microsoft". Very few people on the Left want to stop *all* private transactions. They just don't want corporate feudalism.
> entities whose status is blurred by subsidies from the tax base
A bit of a convenient argument, that. Most, if not all, big corporations get tax breaks or subsidies from the state, because they use their size and power to pressure the government. They do this because it's easier and cheaper to nobble politicians than it is to compete on the 'level playing field' Libertarians are always banging on about. Is it a coincidence that almost all of the world's major corporations are based in the US and EU - the two biggest protectionists and subsidy-givers in the world?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-09-13 10:53 pm (UTC)I don't think it is a coincidence that the governments who host the largest corporations are the biggest protectionists and give the largest subsidies. That would seem to be an obvious example of the organism feeding itself. It's interesting that if you can track enough of the constituent parts (which we're starting to be able to do, thanks to computers), you can make reasonably accurate predictions about social structures using models borrowed from computational biology. In some ways, humanity is simply a carrier for the higher life form of political ideologies.
Lest you be mislead by my prattling; I have a hard time labeling the interplay between large corporations and governments capitalism in the first place. At that level I really think you get into an area of competing layers of socialism/fascism. I think the scale tips in either direction depending on how 'free' the market is portrayed as being. Perhaps fascism hinges on the illusion of freedom, while socialism is merely more honest about its internal structure? In any case, I don't think you've substantively addressed my points. I may be misusing terms here, but the 'mechanism' with which yard sales become Wal-Marts will probably always remain obscured, because both so-called capitalists and socialist/communist/facists have a vested interest in preserving the special relationship with the state that allows uncompetitive monopolies to emerge.
Are you taking the position that prostitution is a self-evidently bad thing for both its participants and for society?