To round off Communism Week let's talk about what needs to be done.
We have seen that Marx, for all his knowledge of the classical economists, got his economics wrong, because the dichotomy between use value and exchange value was exploded in the marginal revolution, and because he was wrong that the market economy would subside into a steady state with all the profits and opportunities squeezed out of it.
We have seen that Marx's war on the bourgeoisie was foolish because the bourgeoisie is not that interested in power. You want to help the poor, or the workers, or women or minorities? Sure, the bourgeoisie will grumble about it, but it will always listen to reason.
We have seen that socialism and fascism are best seen as nostalgic movements that want to return to a pre-industrial Garden of Eden, but that goes against the eternal truth that once you have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge you can never go back, not unless you forget what you have learned.
And we have seen that the nature of the market economy and its foundational uncertainty bears an uncanny resemblance to the uncertainties and probabilities at the center of modern physics where daily-life concepts cannot be used as a direct understanding of things in themselves.
So what do we do?
Thank you Senator, I am glad you asked that. As a help to policy professionals I have devised the following Perfect Plan to right the ship of state and steer it in the right direction.
In Part One of my Perfect Plan, I propose that the basic fact of our age is the world-wide migration of people from the country to the city. So the question is: how can we help the migrants learn, first, how to cope with their new life in the city, and then learn to wive and thrive in the city culture and economy with the best of them and become city people?
I have said that the French for city people is bourgeoisie, and that the left has declared war on the bourgeoisie. Obviously this is madness. Instead of enrolling the migrants to the city as soldiers in a war on the bourgeoisie, we should be sending the migrants to cultural appropriation boot camp so the migrants can steal the culture of the bourgeoisie root and branch and learn how to become the bourgeoisie.
We know what not to do. Don't teach the migrants that by joining a union they can stave off the sovereignty of the market. Don't entangle them in the nets of the welfare state which is bound to run out of other peoples' money. Don't subsidize failure and give people lifetime pensions for not working or not marrying. Don't poison them with identity politics and teach them to separate themselves from the majority culture and keep their pre-industrial culture.
So what to do? Teach people the culture of The Road to the Middle Class, which means religion, education, mutual aid, and living under law.
There is a lot to learn about how to become a stick-in-the-mud bourgeois. You need to learn to trust other people; you need to learn how to serve your fellow humans with a useful skill and keep updating it; you need to learn to accept the verdict of the market with a good will. Above all you need to live and let live.
Part Two of my Perfect Plan is even more sensible. It is to institute a culture of tolerance among the People of the Creative Self, the artists and writers and activists that presently rule the the culture of the world. Right now, artists and writers and activists learn that there is nothing worse than the responsible culture of the bourgeoisie unless it is the racist sexist homophobic culture of the white working class. They learn that the stick-in-the-mud bourgeois is the very thing that is preventing the arc of history from bending towards justice.
Now I accept that the People of the Creative Self are the wonder of the age, that their creative culture is what differentiates us from the animals. But not all of us are ready, willing, and able to ascend the golden staircase to the ethereal heights of the creative culture. Moreover, as in many things, many are called to be creative, but few are chosen. What happens to those that would like to be creative but just can't quite make the grade? The answer is obvious. For those of us without the crown of laurels we must live as ordinary people that go to work, obey the law, and follow the rules. And the Olympian gods that wear the laurel should understand that but for the grace of God they would be ordinary people going to work, obeying the law, and following the rules.
You would think that this notion of tolerance for other people would be a no-brainer, but it obviously isn't, not when a presidential candidate can go around telling her creative-class supporters that half the country is composed of racist sexist homophobic deplorables. But I get where this comes from. In the old days, the creative class felt themselves to be an embattled minority that had to defend each others' backs, although even back in those days there were actresses like Mrs. Patrick Campbell that advised creatives not to frighten the horses in the street. But that is no more. Today the People of the Creative Self can swarm around anyone they don't like and get them fired from their job. They have the power, in other words, to dominate the public square.
This power, I suggest, is a Bad Thing. The whole point of laws and tolerance and live-and-let-live is that it is not a good idea for anyone to so dominate the public square that they can deny it to other people. In fact this sort of power is only warranted in times of genuine emergency, when a nation or a people are threatened with an existential peril. The rest of the time we should all combine to name and shame those people who want to name and shame people that don't agree with them.
Imagine a world that does all it can to teach people how to adopt the culture of the city.
Imagine a world in which people do not try to seize political power so they can give the products of other peoples' work to their political supporters.
Imagine a world in which people did not hang on like grim death to jobs and wages and pensions that cannot be sustained.
Imagine a world in which the educated and cultural elite did not sneer at those less evolved and less fortunate than themselves.
Imagine a world that has escaped from the present deplorable situation still riddled with the exploded ideas of Marx and the Bolshevik Revolution and a naive faith in political power and has moved forward, with the aid of my Perfect Plan, into broad sunlit uplands.
It's easy if you try.
We have seen that Marx, for all his knowledge of the classical economists, got his economics wrong, because the dichotomy between use value and exchange value was exploded in the marginal revolution, and because he was wrong that the market economy would subside into a steady state with all the profits and opportunities squeezed out of it.
We have seen that Marx's war on the bourgeoisie was foolish because the bourgeoisie is not that interested in power. You want to help the poor, or the workers, or women or minorities? Sure, the bourgeoisie will grumble about it, but it will always listen to reason.
We have seen that socialism and fascism are best seen as nostalgic movements that want to return to a pre-industrial Garden of Eden, but that goes against the eternal truth that once you have eaten of the Tree of Knowledge you can never go back, not unless you forget what you have learned.
And we have seen that the nature of the market economy and its foundational uncertainty bears an uncanny resemblance to the uncertainties and probabilities at the center of modern physics where daily-life concepts cannot be used as a direct understanding of things in themselves.
So what do we do?
Thank you Senator, I am glad you asked that. As a help to policy professionals I have devised the following Perfect Plan to right the ship of state and steer it in the right direction.
In Part One of my Perfect Plan, I propose that the basic fact of our age is the world-wide migration of people from the country to the city. So the question is: how can we help the migrants learn, first, how to cope with their new life in the city, and then learn to wive and thrive in the city culture and economy with the best of them and become city people?
I have said that the French for city people is bourgeoisie, and that the left has declared war on the bourgeoisie. Obviously this is madness. Instead of enrolling the migrants to the city as soldiers in a war on the bourgeoisie, we should be sending the migrants to cultural appropriation boot camp so the migrants can steal the culture of the bourgeoisie root and branch and learn how to become the bourgeoisie.
We know what not to do. Don't teach the migrants that by joining a union they can stave off the sovereignty of the market. Don't entangle them in the nets of the welfare state which is bound to run out of other peoples' money. Don't subsidize failure and give people lifetime pensions for not working or not marrying. Don't poison them with identity politics and teach them to separate themselves from the majority culture and keep their pre-industrial culture.
So what to do? Teach people the culture of The Road to the Middle Class, which means religion, education, mutual aid, and living under law.
There is a lot to learn about how to become a stick-in-the-mud bourgeois. You need to learn to trust other people; you need to learn how to serve your fellow humans with a useful skill and keep updating it; you need to learn to accept the verdict of the market with a good will. Above all you need to live and let live.
Part Two of my Perfect Plan is even more sensible. It is to institute a culture of tolerance among the People of the Creative Self, the artists and writers and activists that presently rule the the culture of the world. Right now, artists and writers and activists learn that there is nothing worse than the responsible culture of the bourgeoisie unless it is the racist sexist homophobic culture of the white working class. They learn that the stick-in-the-mud bourgeois is the very thing that is preventing the arc of history from bending towards justice.
Now I accept that the People of the Creative Self are the wonder of the age, that their creative culture is what differentiates us from the animals. But not all of us are ready, willing, and able to ascend the golden staircase to the ethereal heights of the creative culture. Moreover, as in many things, many are called to be creative, but few are chosen. What happens to those that would like to be creative but just can't quite make the grade? The answer is obvious. For those of us without the crown of laurels we must live as ordinary people that go to work, obey the law, and follow the rules. And the Olympian gods that wear the laurel should understand that but for the grace of God they would be ordinary people going to work, obeying the law, and following the rules.
You would think that this notion of tolerance for other people would be a no-brainer, but it obviously isn't, not when a presidential candidate can go around telling her creative-class supporters that half the country is composed of racist sexist homophobic deplorables. But I get where this comes from. In the old days, the creative class felt themselves to be an embattled minority that had to defend each others' backs, although even back in those days there were actresses like Mrs. Patrick Campbell that advised creatives not to frighten the horses in the street. But that is no more. Today the People of the Creative Self can swarm around anyone they don't like and get them fired from their job. They have the power, in other words, to dominate the public square.
This power, I suggest, is a Bad Thing. The whole point of laws and tolerance and live-and-let-live is that it is not a good idea for anyone to so dominate the public square that they can deny it to other people. In fact this sort of power is only warranted in times of genuine emergency, when a nation or a people are threatened with an existential peril. The rest of the time we should all combine to name and shame those people who want to name and shame people that don't agree with them.
Imagine a world that does all it can to teach people how to adopt the culture of the city.
Imagine a world in which people do not try to seize political power so they can give the products of other peoples' work to their political supporters.
Imagine a world in which people did not hang on like grim death to jobs and wages and pensions that cannot be sustained.
Imagine a world in which the educated and cultural elite did not sneer at those less evolved and less fortunate than themselves.
Imagine a world that has escaped from the present deplorable situation still riddled with the exploded ideas of Marx and the Bolshevik Revolution and a naive faith in political power and has moved forward, with the aid of my Perfect Plan, into broad sunlit uplands.
It's easy if you try.
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