The Chinese are by far the most surveyed people on Earth. Says Beijing author Jeff J. Brown, “My Beijing neighborhood committee and town hall are constantly putting up announcements, inviting groups of people–renters, homeowners, over seventies, women under forty, those with or without medical insurance, retirees–to answer surveys. The CPC is the world’s biggest pollster for a reason: China’s democratic ‘dictatorship of the people’ is highly engaged at the day-to-day, citizen-on-the-street level. I know, because I live in a middle class Chinese community and I question them all the time. I find their government much more responsive and democratic than the dog-and-pony shows back home, and I mean that seriously”.
Almost 90% of Chinese say the government is responsive to the results of these surveys.
Godfree Roberts, I couldn't agree more! China, a one-party system, is responsible to the people, and one of the reasons why, who else to blame when things are not running or working well.
The mandate of heaven is still a core concept in Chinese politics. The government realizes that it has to deliver on people's wants and needs or it will lose the mandate and be replaced.
Thank you hatter. I used to be connected to advisors to the prior government. They always said what you are saying--- that the Chinese government is acutely aware that it serves at the behest of the people and can be replaced. Compare this to the democratic US, where the government spends its days figuring out how to get rid of its citizens.
Yep. The idea of "the consent of the governed" is the best benchmark for democratic principles, and China has that way more than the US, and is considered "authoritarian".
Just an interesting note. China and Russia are conspicuously absent on several of the rankings in the AoD report. I suspect that they were omitted because it would have made the west look bad in comparison, but I can't know that for certain because they don't link to the raw data.
This is an interesting and useful article. I had not heard of the Alliance of Democracies or the Democracy Perception Index.
The article does not define it's usage of "socialism". I would guess the writer does not mean that the world wants a government to own and manage all assets and be the decision maker for the entire distribution of all wealth. More likely the article is endorsing the idea that a government guarantee certain aspects of life like healthcare, education and equal opportunity which includes taking steps to make that guarantee a reality.
I cannot agree that the American type of government has completely failed or could not attain a highly beneficial system with effective guarantees of social needs for all. Indeed the US had made considerable progress in that direction from the end of WWII until the Vietnam War. Eventually Reagan with monied interests captured the government. This was aided and abetted by the increasingly ill advised amnesia of the middle class as to the basic laws of life which were made plain during the Depression. The middle class seemed to forget that an individual is no match for a corporation in terms of power and to believe that their status was assured by slogans and feints and by the so-called wealthiest country the world had seen. Unfortunately our body politic has been dumbed down sufficiently to elect an ignorant TV personality who is a serial bankrupt and now a criminal convicted by a jury after taking the Fifth or declining to testify at his own trials.
Thomas Piketty has shown how this can be done again. The economy's essence is a legal system. It can privilege the wealthy or restrain the wealthy from gathering the overwhelming share of wealth and power. But the people must know where their legitimate interests lie and not be hoodwinked by people who as candidates will not disclose their tax returns and as officeholders commit crimes against the people and government while whining at length.
The people can be hoodwinked under socialism or capitalism, especially if the allure of imperialism and domination of other countries has infected the political
class. Then authoritarianism enters into the country's blood stream and infects the country domestically. This seems to be a law of politics.
Another eloquently written enjoyable read! The USA once had real, despite being quite imperfect, actual small "d" democratic governance structures, not just in theory, but institutionally embedded through its decentralized, federated architecture and it mass-member political parties. From the Jacksonian era through most of the 19th century, democratic control was far more participatory and structurally enabled than anything that exists today. And importantly it wasnt just elections (a dictatorships can have elections); it was a system of decentralized capital deployment, locally-semi-controlled banking, citizen-driven public works, actual citizen populated civil society, a diversified and pluralistic and decentralized information ecosystem (for domestic matters that is) including the Academe, and state and local level policymaking autonomy in real economic matters. These structures gave real material power to citizens across regions, allowing a variability different communities to within limits pursue bespoke economic strategies, something modern centralized systems deny outright. The demos actually had levers to pull.
Your essay persuasively names the rot:: centralized capital, elite misrule, and faux-democracy. The next convo is about the architecture needed to reverse trend. Its good so many people, such as yourself in this essay, agree we need to reverse from deeply centralized planning. Your right to point how the he destruction of are old power and decision making distribution mechanisms, especially, as you noted, from the late 1970s onward, coincides perfectly with the rise of the “choice without control” democracy (well put, btw). The good news that if we have a crises big enough, given the state of the zeitgeist, there may be a real chance of re-empowering local and regional institutions that were once active participants in economic life.
What better explains China’s success relative to the Soviet Union? Perhaps China harnessed domestic capitalists (and perhaps some of those capitalists appreciate the harnessing after the unleashing of oligarchs in Russia). More importantly, what better explains China’s success relative to the US?
The US grants too much credit to it's capitalists. The barbaric consequence of maintaining their credit is the systemic saturation of conflict-making, conflict-mongering, etc. Of course people prefer socialism; they are existentially trapped in supporting barbarism. While they probably don't understand the depth of the capitalist fraud, they want to escape its abusive manipulation.
Moreover, ¡the capitalist himself is driven insane by the fantasy! At least the prisoners have the dream of democratic liberation (which their wardens must suppress.)
All to say that "Socialism" is not a preference; it is a necessity.
Interestingly, China from the 1980s on (although I've read Xi et al are trying hard to change this) has more closely resembled the USA's Old Republic's economic and governance structures in some if not most of the key ways than contemporary America does. Its had local policy variability, local light trade protectionism, local partial capital market fragmentation, and so on; those were key aspects of the American economic and political system from the transformations of the Jacksonians until they were undone during the Neoliberal Era
So, in crisis, neoliberalism was the departure for the USA because the Old Republic gave too much credit to capitalists. Won't Xi et al (or the CCP) avoid this like they avoided the errors of the SU? Or will they succumb to barbarism?
Well, Xi et al dont seem to be very representative of the CPC, the are using aggressive methods to de-democratize its its decision making functions.
Can you explain what you mean by "credit to capitalists"? I'm unclear there.
I decided to revisit the period of American history known as the 'Bank War'. After having read five books on it, in order to find out what it was really about I had to pay to access a wide partisan range of papers from the time and then also look through us state level legislative records, and theres something telling about that.
The 'Bank War' was about capital formation, banking and finance regulations, and development economics. California was very close to having a development economics program applied to it that was almost the same as the one that has been applied to the Congo for the past fifty years. Complete with "regulatory harmonization", strict and nonnegotiable economic/legal structures that asserted the concepts of comparative advantage and a highly precise American continental division of labor. Well, we've seen the results in both cases.
Using Massachusetts as microcosm, Worcester Ma -- a socio-economic political community -- gaining the ability to, within limits, for the most part dictate the deployment of its own area capital led to huge investments in everything from new infrastructure and businesses and a high quality technical academy called WPI (at first a predecessor programs(s) to it) and lots else.
By credit to capitalists, I am referring to a) worthiness and b) reward (profit) for production/development and NOT financial credit (although they get that too.) Please forgive the ambiguity (detournement). "The chief business of the American people is business"; the US placed the capitalist's concerns first when world economic dominance faltered.
I am unfamiliar with the term "Old Republic". Wouldn't you say that when it was undone there was still continuity in the primacy of capitalists' concerns?
I suppose the development in Worcester you reference can be credited to the era as well as the independence of its political economy. Where was it led when economic crisis hit?
I forgot to say that Worcester likely benefited from a great deal of trade and it's economic development can be credited to those dynamics as well as the economic autonomy of it's leaders.
The Old Republic was something different, as Marx noted in he Grundrisse, and various journalistic writings (especially for the New York Daily Tribune), and Engels as well in correspondence. But neither never really seemed to ever engage with it analytically, but that makes sense given how focused they were on European matters and that -- and one noted this -- they were real sharp and they picked up that their info sources for the country were corrupted
Everyone who has ever done well had benefited from trade because in 100% of instances across space and time there is always trade. Worcester, along with several other parts of the US's Northeast, in the aggregate has done better than most since the Neoliberal Era began because both the continental and planetary economic central planning has directed much activity there, but at the direct loss of most all other places on the planet and at the indirect loss of many sub-areas within the Northeast, including sub-areas of localities such as Worcester. Capital extraction from the Congo in part hits Massachusetts.
As mentioned before California was very close to having "free trade" type theories forced upon it (including in its relations with the other USA constituent states) in a way it would never be able to escape from and being locked into a role similar to what’s been done to the Congo: a supplier of inputs with no decision rights. 200 years ago, before California even began, was given a choice, it was given to them 200 by the generation 1.0 Jacksonian Democratic Party, which actually was a small "d" democratic party, but just prior to the advent of the Neoliberal Era, and necessarily so for its advent to occur, it was transformed into a small "t" technocracy party.
It was just something different, it turns out parties, when they had a technical classifier as a name, that name actually meant something in a technical sense, so it if it was just one technical classifier -- e.g. "socialist, "conservative", "communist", "republican", "democrat", "monarchist", "labor", etc -- it actually meant something, and then you could have a dual name with a modifier on it like "democratic-socialist" and so on.
But our understanding of these things, in some ways our very knowledge of the Enlightenment, among other things, has been stripped from us by a deeply centralized and corrupted information ecosystem. It replaced the American Academe, wiped its existence from memory, and replaced its curriculum with a modified version of a mix of some curriculums from Old Europe, curriculums that many parts of Europe had spent hundreds of years working to expel, and then after WW2, various dark forces backdoored their way into eventually controlling America were they were then eventually able to re-boot that curriculum and use the USA (as the necessary one) to boot up planetary central planning and then eventually re-infect New Europe with Old Europe's curriculum and the give it to most of the rest of the world as well. Its a civilizational tragedy.
No, that's just it, not a man of words myself.... Nothing to add, you covered the topic extensively and exhaustively, just encouraging you to keep up the good work of which I am a huge fan...
The Chinese are by far the most surveyed people on Earth. Says Beijing author Jeff J. Brown, “My Beijing neighborhood committee and town hall are constantly putting up announcements, inviting groups of people–renters, homeowners, over seventies, women under forty, those with or without medical insurance, retirees–to answer surveys. The CPC is the world’s biggest pollster for a reason: China’s democratic ‘dictatorship of the people’ is highly engaged at the day-to-day, citizen-on-the-street level. I know, because I live in a middle class Chinese community and I question them all the time. I find their government much more responsive and democratic than the dog-and-pony shows back home, and I mean that seriously”.
Almost 90% of Chinese say the government is responsive to the results of these surveys.
Godfree Roberts, I couldn't agree more! China, a one-party system, is responsible to the people, and one of the reasons why, who else to blame when things are not running or working well.
The mandate of heaven is still a core concept in Chinese politics. The government realizes that it has to deliver on people's wants and needs or it will lose the mandate and be replaced.
Thank you hatter. I used to be connected to advisors to the prior government. They always said what you are saying--- that the Chinese government is acutely aware that it serves at the behest of the people and can be replaced. Compare this to the democratic US, where the government spends its days figuring out how to get rid of its citizens.
Yep. The idea of "the consent of the governed" is the best benchmark for democratic principles, and China has that way more than the US, and is considered "authoritarian".
Just an interesting note. China and Russia are conspicuously absent on several of the rankings in the AoD report. I suspect that they were omitted because it would have made the west look bad in comparison, but I can't know that for certain because they don't link to the raw data.
This is an interesting and useful article. I had not heard of the Alliance of Democracies or the Democracy Perception Index.
The article does not define it's usage of "socialism". I would guess the writer does not mean that the world wants a government to own and manage all assets and be the decision maker for the entire distribution of all wealth. More likely the article is endorsing the idea that a government guarantee certain aspects of life like healthcare, education and equal opportunity which includes taking steps to make that guarantee a reality.
I cannot agree that the American type of government has completely failed or could not attain a highly beneficial system with effective guarantees of social needs for all. Indeed the US had made considerable progress in that direction from the end of WWII until the Vietnam War. Eventually Reagan with monied interests captured the government. This was aided and abetted by the increasingly ill advised amnesia of the middle class as to the basic laws of life which were made plain during the Depression. The middle class seemed to forget that an individual is no match for a corporation in terms of power and to believe that their status was assured by slogans and feints and by the so-called wealthiest country the world had seen. Unfortunately our body politic has been dumbed down sufficiently to elect an ignorant TV personality who is a serial bankrupt and now a criminal convicted by a jury after taking the Fifth or declining to testify at his own trials.
Thomas Piketty has shown how this can be done again. The economy's essence is a legal system. It can privilege the wealthy or restrain the wealthy from gathering the overwhelming share of wealth and power. But the people must know where their legitimate interests lie and not be hoodwinked by people who as candidates will not disclose their tax returns and as officeholders commit crimes against the people and government while whining at length.
The people can be hoodwinked under socialism or capitalism, especially if the allure of imperialism and domination of other countries has infected the political
class. Then authoritarianism enters into the country's blood stream and infects the country domestically. This seems to be a law of politics.
This is absolutely brilliant. A perfect distillation of the modern capitalist era. Thank you so much.
Another eloquently written enjoyable read! The USA once had real, despite being quite imperfect, actual small "d" democratic governance structures, not just in theory, but institutionally embedded through its decentralized, federated architecture and it mass-member political parties. From the Jacksonian era through most of the 19th century, democratic control was far more participatory and structurally enabled than anything that exists today. And importantly it wasnt just elections (a dictatorships can have elections); it was a system of decentralized capital deployment, locally-semi-controlled banking, citizen-driven public works, actual citizen populated civil society, a diversified and pluralistic and decentralized information ecosystem (for domestic matters that is) including the Academe, and state and local level policymaking autonomy in real economic matters. These structures gave real material power to citizens across regions, allowing a variability different communities to within limits pursue bespoke economic strategies, something modern centralized systems deny outright. The demos actually had levers to pull.
Your essay persuasively names the rot:: centralized capital, elite misrule, and faux-democracy. The next convo is about the architecture needed to reverse trend. Its good so many people, such as yourself in this essay, agree we need to reverse from deeply centralized planning. Your right to point how the he destruction of are old power and decision making distribution mechanisms, especially, as you noted, from the late 1970s onward, coincides perfectly with the rise of the “choice without control” democracy (well put, btw). The good news that if we have a crises big enough, given the state of the zeitgeist, there may be a real chance of re-empowering local and regional institutions that were once active participants in economic life.
What better explains China’s success relative to the Soviet Union? Perhaps China harnessed domestic capitalists (and perhaps some of those capitalists appreciate the harnessing after the unleashing of oligarchs in Russia). More importantly, what better explains China’s success relative to the US?
The US grants too much credit to it's capitalists. The barbaric consequence of maintaining their credit is the systemic saturation of conflict-making, conflict-mongering, etc. Of course people prefer socialism; they are existentially trapped in supporting barbarism. While they probably don't understand the depth of the capitalist fraud, they want to escape its abusive manipulation.
Moreover, ¡the capitalist himself is driven insane by the fantasy! At least the prisoners have the dream of democratic liberation (which their wardens must suppress.)
All to say that "Socialism" is not a preference; it is a necessity.
Interestingly, China from the 1980s on (although I've read Xi et al are trying hard to change this) has more closely resembled the USA's Old Republic's economic and governance structures in some if not most of the key ways than contemporary America does. Its had local policy variability, local light trade protectionism, local partial capital market fragmentation, and so on; those were key aspects of the American economic and political system from the transformations of the Jacksonians until they were undone during the Neoliberal Era
So, in crisis, neoliberalism was the departure for the USA because the Old Republic gave too much credit to capitalists. Won't Xi et al (or the CCP) avoid this like they avoided the errors of the SU? Or will they succumb to barbarism?
Well, Xi et al dont seem to be very representative of the CPC, the are using aggressive methods to de-democratize its its decision making functions.
Can you explain what you mean by "credit to capitalists"? I'm unclear there.
I decided to revisit the period of American history known as the 'Bank War'. After having read five books on it, in order to find out what it was really about I had to pay to access a wide partisan range of papers from the time and then also look through us state level legislative records, and theres something telling about that.
The 'Bank War' was about capital formation, banking and finance regulations, and development economics. California was very close to having a development economics program applied to it that was almost the same as the one that has been applied to the Congo for the past fifty years. Complete with "regulatory harmonization", strict and nonnegotiable economic/legal structures that asserted the concepts of comparative advantage and a highly precise American continental division of labor. Well, we've seen the results in both cases.
Using Massachusetts as microcosm, Worcester Ma -- a socio-economic political community -- gaining the ability to, within limits, for the most part dictate the deployment of its own area capital led to huge investments in everything from new infrastructure and businesses and a high quality technical academy called WPI (at first a predecessor programs(s) to it) and lots else.
"Xi et al dont seem to be very representative of the CPC, the are using aggressive methods to de-democratize its its decision making functions”??
Maybe that's true in the country our media created, Bad China, but there's zero evidence of it in actual, existing China.
Unless, of course you can provide us with an example of de-democratizing and not just another allegation.
By credit to capitalists, I am referring to a) worthiness and b) reward (profit) for production/development and NOT financial credit (although they get that too.) Please forgive the ambiguity (detournement). "The chief business of the American people is business"; the US placed the capitalist's concerns first when world economic dominance faltered.
I am unfamiliar with the term "Old Republic". Wouldn't you say that when it was undone there was still continuity in the primacy of capitalists' concerns?
I suppose the development in Worcester you reference can be credited to the era as well as the independence of its political economy. Where was it led when economic crisis hit?
I forgot to say that Worcester likely benefited from a great deal of trade and it's economic development can be credited to those dynamics as well as the economic autonomy of it's leaders.
The Old Republic was something different, as Marx noted in he Grundrisse, and various journalistic writings (especially for the New York Daily Tribune), and Engels as well in correspondence. But neither never really seemed to ever engage with it analytically, but that makes sense given how focused they were on European matters and that -- and one noted this -- they were real sharp and they picked up that their info sources for the country were corrupted
Everyone who has ever done well had benefited from trade because in 100% of instances across space and time there is always trade. Worcester, along with several other parts of the US's Northeast, in the aggregate has done better than most since the Neoliberal Era began because both the continental and planetary economic central planning has directed much activity there, but at the direct loss of most all other places on the planet and at the indirect loss of many sub-areas within the Northeast, including sub-areas of localities such as Worcester. Capital extraction from the Congo in part hits Massachusetts.
As mentioned before California was very close to having "free trade" type theories forced upon it (including in its relations with the other USA constituent states) in a way it would never be able to escape from and being locked into a role similar to what’s been done to the Congo: a supplier of inputs with no decision rights. 200 years ago, before California even began, was given a choice, it was given to them 200 by the generation 1.0 Jacksonian Democratic Party, which actually was a small "d" democratic party, but just prior to the advent of the Neoliberal Era, and necessarily so for its advent to occur, it was transformed into a small "t" technocracy party.
It was just something different, it turns out parties, when they had a technical classifier as a name, that name actually meant something in a technical sense, so it if it was just one technical classifier -- e.g. "socialist, "conservative", "communist", "republican", "democrat", "monarchist", "labor", etc -- it actually meant something, and then you could have a dual name with a modifier on it like "democratic-socialist" and so on.
But our understanding of these things, in some ways our very knowledge of the Enlightenment, among other things, has been stripped from us by a deeply centralized and corrupted information ecosystem. It replaced the American Academe, wiped its existence from memory, and replaced its curriculum with a modified version of a mix of some curriculums from Old Europe, curriculums that many parts of Europe had spent hundreds of years working to expel, and then after WW2, various dark forces backdoored their way into eventually controlling America were they were then eventually able to re-boot that curriculum and use the USA (as the necessary one) to boot up planetary central planning and then eventually re-infect New Europe with Old Europe's curriculum and the give it to most of the rest of the world as well. Its a civilizational tragedy.
This
Your comment appears to have been cut off Youlian.
No, that's just it, not a man of words myself.... Nothing to add, you covered the topic extensively and exhaustively, just encouraging you to keep up the good work of which I am a huge fan...
Thank you Youlian.