Defeating Materialism Is Defeating Neoliberalism

There was a Democracy at Work episode on Marx Volume 2. A good old leftipol might think this is excellent and relevant. But I have a slightly divergent view, which I will offer if you don’t mind.

These guys seem to think K. Marx was some sort of genius, which puts them in the same mind as Nassim Taleb (who, very seriously and unironically, in a Google Tech Talk said to a shocked libertarian in the audience that “Marx was a genius”). Gold is the money right? 🤣

(Taleb also praised J.M. Keynes in almost the same breath, which was hilarious. Gold is both the money and not the money?)

Marx was a fool by modern standards, but in his day, yes a relative genius. He did not understand half the problem though, which is the monetary system, not the “free market”. The monetary system is a simple public monopoly. Failure to understand will have you becoming a Thatcherite like Prof Wolff (“It’s the tax payers money"🤣🤡).

Anyone thinking a commodity is the currency is retarded, and in league with the decrepit Austrian School of economics and monetarist neoliberals. If you are interested in economic justice this matters, it’s not merely monetary operations nerd-out, the state currency is a unit of account for records of credit and debit, so a way to maintain social reciprocity. Corrupt it and you get obscenely regressive policy like “taxing to ‘pay for’…” stupidity, and horrific outcomes for the have-nots (welfarism needs the rich and the have-nots to exist for political football, I do not want that kind of welfare).

You may disagree, but unfortunately it is not an “each to their own” on public policy. Because it is public policy. We have to hash out our differences and work out compromises.

Eliminating needless poverty is an elimination of a vast amount of government welfare. But to frame it more progressively, I would say this is enhancing welfare, but by giving people public purpose work to do, not with a hand-out. The more people working sincerely, in non-ꕗꖹꝆꝆꕷꖾꕯꖡ jobs, the fewer hours any one person needs to work for getting an infinitesimal fraction if the infinite number of good things done we would like to get done. Note, it is not for the government authority to tell us what work to do! The essence of the Job Guarantee is that the local community figures out what needs to be done. It is not a stretch to say the JG is the State sponsoring a bit of local communism. Also, the proper MMT frame, is that the State should hire at proper public sector wages for any necessary work, meaning the JG is going to be not-so-necessary work, but merely desirable work (grow more avocados, or whatever), and should be a very tiny program which any residual libertarians left who still think it is their “hard earned tax dollars at work” should not worry about.

What about: “infinite number of good things done we would like to get done”?

Exaggeration? No. I would like to solve the riddles of the universe, and that might just in fact (who knows?) require infinite numbers of workers. As old Bill Mitchell says, we wake up every day to severe labour shortages. Yes, we also wake up to millions of unnecessary ꕗꖹꝆꝆꕷꖾꕯꖡ jobs. But getting rid of all the ꕗꖹꝆꝆꕷꖾꕯꖡ jobs will not eliminate a fraction of the socially necessary jobs, it will merely ease the burden. The other thing is, we can take it really slow and easy. Like 3 hour work days. Without anyone starving or missing out on Netflix.

Corey Robins is good to read, but it is not just the Reactionary (Conservative) Mind that has a need to whinge and complain. Dopey lefties are not immune (what else am I doing here?), and Centrists are perhaps the worst — always complaining about our lack of Identity affirmations (what??). Dudes! It is good to complain, but only if the complaint is meaningful and progressively oriented.

Seriously.

What is the difference between Maggie Thatcher and Richard Wolff here? Oh, yeah, Thatcher wanted to militarily solve the Falklands and would’ve invaded Russia had the Brits a decent army. I mean apart from that!

Because the false concept of the need to tax to “get the money” is inextricably linked to imperialism and neoliberalism— which is the need to plunder instead of fair trade. Thatcher, like Trump, wanted to lose the trade war (send China more UK goods than Chinese goods the UK receives.) Same damn mindset as Wolff. Just Commies and Marxists are a bit more civilized about it, and only want to “tax the rich”. And when “the rich” disappear they’ll “tax the middle class”. When the middle class disappear they will “tax the poor!”

I hope I am mostly wrong here and that my “Prof Wolff” is a strawman. But it always seems to me, like the horrifically ignorant Chinese TikTokers, Wolff wants the Chinese factory worker to continue being the USA consumer slave. Trump almost has things right … if you are Chinese that is, not American! He wants the USA to start losing the trade war. Xi wants China to lose.

Prof Wolff is a good guy. But stupidity can turn good to bad innocently. With MMT knowledge “out there”, there is increasingly no excuse for idiocy and the innocence is hard to maintain. You start to become regressive, with less and less innocence.

His worker cooperative advocacy still (marginally) makes up for his other brainworms. Basically, on the “national debt” (private savings) he is in league with the Mars King.

Associations are not of course indication of spiritual ineptitude, but sometimes they are. Like the association between Crypto and UBI. Or UBI and Andrew Yang. Or Crypto and Ayn Rand acolytes. Ai and Crypto. Mars travel and Ai. Advertising and AI. Ai and Privatizing education. (Almost phreakin’ anything rotten and Ai🤣) Need I go on? The fetid network of individualism, selfishness, technocracy and the NerdReich. It’s ironically a highly social network of individualists and fake-freedom lovers. The collectivity of greed.

Social networks are good tools, but like nuclear power or machine algorithms, can be put to evil ends.

Sometimes it is worth thinking about disassociation dudes. Because the close associations might be hinting at something… don’t you think? (Yes, is the answer.) It’s just an aphorism I am going to make up here, but it holds as a kind of moral principle, that from polluted waters fresh ideas will not spring…. except by accidental quantum fluctuations.

Anyhow, this brings me to my main point today which I almost forgot.

It was partly prompted by this weird Communist boomer I heard on an otherwise decent podcast. Avorkian or something(?). He sounded like he wants to modernize communism. But he also went backwards into the 19th century Laplacian daemon dark ages, because he trotted out the old myth that “Communism is Materialist and Scientific.”

Lordy. You cannot get worse than this! What hurts us the most is not the harm of our enemies, but the acts of our friends which cause our hearts to lament.

Not only is he spitting in the face of millions of decent honest workers who have a religious or spiritual worldview, and are damn good socialists, he is just being stupid and false and nasty.

Communism — of that form — is not scientific bro.

What about my headline thesis?

Well, neoliberalism is underpinned by materialism. It is contradictory, because neoliberalism is based on Idealist ideology, but it is fake, since it makes too many false assumptions (about how markets operate, about what “money” is, and so on and so forth, the list of false propositions of neolberalism and neoclassical economics is vast.)

Just like fighting terrorism, a critical power we have is to remove the underpinnings. Thus, defeating materialism does more than defeat neoliberalism, it makes neoliberal resurgence impossible, we’ll have removed their fuel. Just to be clear I am not an Idealist. I am a theoretical physicist, and I trust there is a real external material world, but just this is not the sum total of reality. Electrons are real and they are physical, they do not exist just in our minds. I also think the Integers and Rationals are real as well, but just not physical. On most days I also think the Transfinite sets are real too (clearly non-physical).

Science proper is entirely agnostic on matters of religion and spirituality. (See my recent rant about Sabina Hossenfelder and her idiot materialism.) The scientist professional person on the other hand can have any weird or wonderful worldview, who cares? … they’re not arbiters of truth, and not even necessarily truth-adjacent outside their highly limited domain of expertise. When an epidemiologist tells you C19 is a super threat, maybe take notice y’all. If a rocket scientist trying to get to Mars says C19 is fake, maybe don’t.

Should we all be more a sharing community? Hellyeah.

But Materialism is the antithesis of proper decent socialism and communism. (What? Too much a dialectical contradiction of ideas for you?🤣) It is the pursuit of material wealth which is the source of all the madness. Why else are we exceeding planetary boundaries? People want more stuff. True communism is when you realize you do not need all that stuff (just some of it) — and that you need something immaterial more, which money cannot buy, like genuine love.${}^\ddagger$

${}^\ddagger$That’s in the $\aleph_{\Omega}$ chapter of Marx.