It is interesting to see the defense of China and CCP in one of the comments - with a lot of examples that are apt, but don't absolve China and CCP. If anything, Lorenzo was soft on China and it eternal road to perdition. I am not going to engage on China, thus, this is a comment not a response to Dragonlord, as it would take a book to list the reasons of China's inevitable self-destruction from within - sooner or later. Many books are written already...
However, it appears Dragonlord ignored Lorenzo's conclusions even about term "capitalism" and just plowed forward with a long copy-paste critique passage with vague if any conclusions.
Rise and rise of Anthropic, from billions of investment (deferred consumption) and no revenue to Goliath in 3 years. Incredible. (Yet another) Epitome of Capitalism.
Manifestation of tech booms and their curious uncertainties: not sure how much it is an “epitome” of anything broader. It is true that tech booms are a manifestation of commerce in technologically dynamic societies, but we do not really have any experience of technologically dynamic societies without commerce and commerce needs the ordering capacities of states to reach any level of scale.
It wasn't the tech boom specifically, just the huge annual "losses" that investors are willing to bear (and thus capital to risk) before returns appear. It was the same with railways, power stations, long-distance commerce. A key feature for me of "Capitalism" is these remarkably huge capital investments made at the capital-owners risk. Of course, there are many others, like spontaneous order, prices as coordination, etc, etc, but countering Marx and Marxists about the huge benefits of capital investments is important.
It is startling for me to read all of this, realizing how much we agree on so many things, yet you diverge so significantly on the conclusions. In particular your critique of China and CCP is very forced and irrational.
There is no reason why whatever happened in Wuhan could not have happened in Texas. Accountability is not something which the leadership or people in Western states have any kind of monopoly over. This is Liberal goyslop rhetoric to argue for the superiority of their system.
Bureaucracy, which is always Technocratic (which is to say it is Professional and Skilled), is an essential element of governance, and the focus of this entity should be on maximizing its productivity at its job, which is directed at the society it commands over, in general. (Unless the ideology of an individual who regards these things, does not think that the welfare of the people is of importance at all; they're not altruistic).
The Bureaucracy is the managerial and accounting part of the State. The ultimate decision-making power always (and ideally) rests with the Political class, or Politicians. This is true for both Liberal Democracy and Leninist party-states specifically, who since the time of Lenin have been keen on ensuring that the Communist Vanguard maintains its command over the Bureaucracy.
When we discussed this in your previous post, I maintained the position that Western Democratic system has been compromised and cannot be saved, because Liberal Democracy as a system was always designed in that way: to be compromised by the merchant-class, i.e, the “Capitalists” — whose definition you deny the legitimacy of by using rationalization, and yet this sophisticated denial will not make the existence of the Capitalists redundant.
Your diagnosis that the Bureaucratic part of the European Union is responsible for its deterioration, is correct, but is gravely lacking to me when you don't account for the fact that this was destined to happen due to the flawed nature of Liberal Democracy:
1. Liberal Democratic states will turn into Managerial states, this is destined, and it is a systematic issue. This happens because the Political class in Liberal Democracies is handicapped by:
a) institutional controls. The separation of powers theory ensures that the Executive is always on the edge. The West's obsession with Constitutionalism and Rule of Law ensures that the Judicial branch (which is a bureaucratic institution) can always strike down the Executive for taking bold decisions, on the grounds of what is essentially the modern version of "scriptural orthodoxy" (except the Bible is replaced with the Constitution). In the name of accountability and transparent governance, the only thing that is generated is weak leadership.
b) the irrational nature of mass voting in which visionary leaders are compromised by mediocre or horrid leaders. We know few to none Bismarcks or great statesmen having been born out of a Democratic system. This system is anti-aristocracy and high-culture values, which is why Virtues are compromised and why the Elite in Liberal societies are exceptionally degenerate because they have no incentive to be otherwise;
c) and the financial powers of the money-making class—the Capitalists and their Corporates—who influence and puppet not just the Politicians, but also the Bureaucrats as a neccesity for the overall well-being of their business; to produce beneficial policies for their enterprises.
The temporary and the chaotic state of existence of the Political leadership (instituted by representative Democracy) ensured that the so-called "permanent leadership" (Bureaucracy) entrenches its powers and influence on the state machine, which is directly the result of it holding its Office for a lifetime, in contrast to the temporary, and systematically weakened office of the elected political executive.
Max Weber diagnosed this problem back in 1918. He was very good at his diagnosis. We created the term "Weberian Bureaucracy" in his name for this reason, which is a Bureaucracy that tends to be so detached from the people, yet is so strong so as to create a Governance environment which is cold and dispassionate. Only the Political representative has the power to curtail such mechanical tendencies of the Bureaucratic machine — Weber was nevertheless a believer in the Democratic myth. He, during his time, could not come to the holistic conclusion that the system itself is flawed. But after more than a century of the Hegemony of this depraved system, our generation can confidently come to this conclusion.
2. The problem of the EU or any other Liberal Democracy is not even that it has become a Managerial state, but rather the fact that the overall leadership (both political and bureaucratic) has embraced an Ideology (which is nothing but the modern version of Religion) that is anti-society, anti-native culture, and overall narcisstic in its conception of the world. It is the basic tendency of an Authority to enforce its own worldview on its populace, and scarcely, if ever, is this model inverted in our world. The Enlightenment wanted to achieve this inversion, but it was a flawed endeavour, because it was a rebellion against God, so it failed.
Unless you execute the Anglo-Liberal within you, you're not going to reach satisfying conclusions.
I don't know why you have such a line of thinking when you're a self-labelled Medievalist, who should therefore remember that the priority of the King is separate and completely contradictory from the priority of the Merchant. The King has to take into account the welfare of the whole, the people under his religiously-ordained Patriarchal rule. He is their Father, and his loyalty to them is thus unconditional. This aristocratic virtue is absent from the modern democratic Politician; this altruistic virtue is compromised by the whims of equality, the flawed nature of the democratic system, and the money-power of the merchant class of today (the Capitalist).
The Merchant only looks to maximize his profits. Billionaires are not Gods, yet they feel like Gods because they are so free in the Liberal state. The Liberal state machine is open to being compromised by their financial prowess, which opens the door for them to instrumentalize the system to serve their own ideological aims. Billionaires and Corporate CEOs are not Politicians, and yet they have the means to play Politics. What do you not see wrong here? Your system is enabling them to play the game.
The Political class has been degraded, so has the profession and field of Politics as a whole. The Bureaucratic and Capitalist class on the other hand, has been elevated beyond proportions. The state of the West is the result of this inversion. The old power dynamics have been ruined.
Yet this old power arrangement unintentionally restored itself in Leninist party-states through the institution of the Communist Party. The Communist Political Cadre is today's Aristocracy, centralized into a single organization akin to a Religious Order—with a Religion of its own to guide the psychology of its members. The paramount leader of the Communist state is its King.
The Vanguard is engaged, absolutely and completely, in the field of Politics and the act of Politicking—and you're both flabbergasted and terrified by this, because you're still spiritually a Liberal.
“... Xi seemed set on economic liberalization early on in his leadership. He promised to overhaul bloated state firms and boost private industry. His administration talked up equity markets, eased controls on the yuan, and even flirted with proposals to allow professional managers to handle day-to-day operations in state businesses—an approach modeled after Singapore’s state-investment company Temasek Holdings. Nicholas Lardy, a respected China analyst at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, described this trend in a 2014 book titled Markets Over Mao, documenting how private firms superseded a retreating state sector as the dominant driver of China’s economy.
The 2015 meltdown upended this trajectory, turning the party’s perennial skepticism of market forces into full-blown distrust. For Xi, the capitalist principles that spurred breakneck growth had become too fraught, seeding more disorder than prosperity and overwhelming government overseers. The vagaries of boom-bust cycles and excesses of private capital clashed with Xi’s instincts for control, jeopardized social stability, and—if unchecked—could threaten the party’s hold on power.
Chen Yun, a revered revolutionary regarded as China’s second most powerful leader during the Deng era, once likened the economy to “a bird in a cage.” If the cage of state control was too small, the bird would suffocate. But without the cage, the bird would fly away. As Xi saw it, decades of market-oriented reforms had expanded the cage so much that the bird was flying free. Unless he shrunk the cage and restored the party’s dominance over the commanding heights of the economy, his China Dream of ennobling a new superpower could come to naught.
Since taking power in late 2012, Xi has discarded his predecessors’ hands-off approach to economic management and doubled down on “top-level design,” whereby Beijing supervises policy down to the grassroots. He’s unveiled grandiose development programs, from the Belt and Road initiative to build global trade infrastructure to his “thousand-year project” to create a new megacity known as the Xiong’an New Area. He declared economic affairs a key component of national security, and demanded compliance with his development agenda as a matter of patriotic duty. State planners sought to engineer economic outcomes, from raw-material prices to stock and currency values. Beijing directed a wave of mergers and acquisitions that turned state-run giants into global behemoths that could dominate sectors such as train manufacturing, shipbuilding, steel, and power utilities.14 State companies received preferential access to credit, land, and other resources, squeezing out private-sector rivals. Party cells in private firms sought bigger roles in management that allow them to align corporate priorities with government goals. As Xi told a group of business leaders, they must honor the “glorious tradition of listening to the party’s words and following the party’s path.”
There are seven paragraphs that mention China in a post that has more critical comment on Western polities. Even the criticisms of Marx are mainly aimed at his Western admirers.
Two of those posts are just neutral comments (about labour force and EU falling behind both US and China in tech), one explicitly notes similarity with Japan, one is on Covid and follows a critique of Fauci. Clearly, it is not a central concern of the post.
The point about Xi having a more suppressive policy than his predecessors is hardly controversial. That the CCP is cleverer than the CPSU is also hardly controversial: that it is predatory should not be an odd claim. Nor is the description of CCP industrial policy controversial, and leads immediately into a criticism of mainstream Economics, critiquing of which is a much bigger concern of the post.
I take what Xi and the CCP say (and do) seriously. I do not take them at their own estimation.
In Brazil left-wingers are positively dazzled by private jet travel, though one does not hear too much about private jet travel in China. Any ideas as to why left-wingers love flying around in private jets?
Doesn’t everyone who gets the chance like flying around in a private jet? I am not sure any special motive is required. Yes, there may be some hypocrisy involved, but that is a pervasive issue.
Yes, a nice clip by Bill Maher from a few years ago:
"There are two kinds of people in the world: those who fly private and those who would if they could. A third category, those who could but do not does not exist."
Watch the video about Huawei. You will never buy Huawei again. Great insight into the nature of China. Incisive presenter.
It's a portrait of state/corporate totalitarianism and we should not underestimate the risks involved in making this video.
"It is perfectly possible to create value-subtracting economic processes, even firms, that produce less value than they use."
That might be a perfect description of the advertising industry.
Jaguar and Bud Light would agree.
Brilliant continuation!
It is interesting to see the defense of China and CCP in one of the comments - with a lot of examples that are apt, but don't absolve China and CCP. If anything, Lorenzo was soft on China and it eternal road to perdition. I am not going to engage on China, thus, this is a comment not a response to Dragonlord, as it would take a book to list the reasons of China's inevitable self-destruction from within - sooner or later. Many books are written already...
However, it appears Dragonlord ignored Lorenzo's conclusions even about term "capitalism" and just plowed forward with a long copy-paste critique passage with vague if any conclusions.
Rise and rise of Anthropic, from billions of investment (deferred consumption) and no revenue to Goliath in 3 years. Incredible. (Yet another) Epitome of Capitalism.
https://global.morningstar.com/en-gb/markets/pitchbook-anthropics-leaked-financials-reflect-fast-growth-not-2-trillion-valuation?utm_source=eloqua&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=UK_Morning_Digest&utm_content=None_78091&utm_id=40976
Manifestation of tech booms and their curious uncertainties: not sure how much it is an “epitome” of anything broader. It is true that tech booms are a manifestation of commerce in technologically dynamic societies, but we do not really have any experience of technologically dynamic societies without commerce and commerce needs the ordering capacities of states to reach any level of scale.
It wasn't the tech boom specifically, just the huge annual "losses" that investors are willing to bear (and thus capital to risk) before returns appear. It was the same with railways, power stations, long-distance commerce. A key feature for me of "Capitalism" is these remarkably huge capital investments made at the capital-owners risk. Of course, there are many others, like spontaneous order, prices as coordination, etc, etc, but countering Marx and Marxists about the huge benefits of capital investments is important.
It is startling for me to read all of this, realizing how much we agree on so many things, yet you diverge so significantly on the conclusions. In particular your critique of China and CCP is very forced and irrational.
There is no reason why whatever happened in Wuhan could not have happened in Texas. Accountability is not something which the leadership or people in Western states have any kind of monopoly over. This is Liberal goyslop rhetoric to argue for the superiority of their system.
Bureaucracy, which is always Technocratic (which is to say it is Professional and Skilled), is an essential element of governance, and the focus of this entity should be on maximizing its productivity at its job, which is directed at the society it commands over, in general. (Unless the ideology of an individual who regards these things, does not think that the welfare of the people is of importance at all; they're not altruistic).
The Bureaucracy is the managerial and accounting part of the State. The ultimate decision-making power always (and ideally) rests with the Political class, or Politicians. This is true for both Liberal Democracy and Leninist party-states specifically, who since the time of Lenin have been keen on ensuring that the Communist Vanguard maintains its command over the Bureaucracy.
When we discussed this in your previous post, I maintained the position that Western Democratic system has been compromised and cannot be saved, because Liberal Democracy as a system was always designed in that way: to be compromised by the merchant-class, i.e, the “Capitalists” — whose definition you deny the legitimacy of by using rationalization, and yet this sophisticated denial will not make the existence of the Capitalists redundant.
Your diagnosis that the Bureaucratic part of the European Union is responsible for its deterioration, is correct, but is gravely lacking to me when you don't account for the fact that this was destined to happen due to the flawed nature of Liberal Democracy:
1. Liberal Democratic states will turn into Managerial states, this is destined, and it is a systematic issue. This happens because the Political class in Liberal Democracies is handicapped by:
a) institutional controls. The separation of powers theory ensures that the Executive is always on the edge. The West's obsession with Constitutionalism and Rule of Law ensures that the Judicial branch (which is a bureaucratic institution) can always strike down the Executive for taking bold decisions, on the grounds of what is essentially the modern version of "scriptural orthodoxy" (except the Bible is replaced with the Constitution). In the name of accountability and transparent governance, the only thing that is generated is weak leadership.
b) the irrational nature of mass voting in which visionary leaders are compromised by mediocre or horrid leaders. We know few to none Bismarcks or great statesmen having been born out of a Democratic system. This system is anti-aristocracy and high-culture values, which is why Virtues are compromised and why the Elite in Liberal societies are exceptionally degenerate because they have no incentive to be otherwise;
c) and the financial powers of the money-making class—the Capitalists and their Corporates—who influence and puppet not just the Politicians, but also the Bureaucrats as a neccesity for the overall well-being of their business; to produce beneficial policies for their enterprises.
The temporary and the chaotic state of existence of the Political leadership (instituted by representative Democracy) ensured that the so-called "permanent leadership" (Bureaucracy) entrenches its powers and influence on the state machine, which is directly the result of it holding its Office for a lifetime, in contrast to the temporary, and systematically weakened office of the elected political executive.
Max Weber diagnosed this problem back in 1918. He was very good at his diagnosis. We created the term "Weberian Bureaucracy" in his name for this reason, which is a Bureaucracy that tends to be so detached from the people, yet is so strong so as to create a Governance environment which is cold and dispassionate. Only the Political representative has the power to curtail such mechanical tendencies of the Bureaucratic machine — Weber was nevertheless a believer in the Democratic myth. He, during his time, could not come to the holistic conclusion that the system itself is flawed. But after more than a century of the Hegemony of this depraved system, our generation can confidently come to this conclusion.
2. The problem of the EU or any other Liberal Democracy is not even that it has become a Managerial state, but rather the fact that the overall leadership (both political and bureaucratic) has embraced an Ideology (which is nothing but the modern version of Religion) that is anti-society, anti-native culture, and overall narcisstic in its conception of the world. It is the basic tendency of an Authority to enforce its own worldview on its populace, and scarcely, if ever, is this model inverted in our world. The Enlightenment wanted to achieve this inversion, but it was a flawed endeavour, because it was a rebellion against God, so it failed.
Unless you execute the Anglo-Liberal within you, you're not going to reach satisfying conclusions.
I don't know why you have such a line of thinking when you're a self-labelled Medievalist, who should therefore remember that the priority of the King is separate and completely contradictory from the priority of the Merchant. The King has to take into account the welfare of the whole, the people under his religiously-ordained Patriarchal rule. He is their Father, and his loyalty to them is thus unconditional. This aristocratic virtue is absent from the modern democratic Politician; this altruistic virtue is compromised by the whims of equality, the flawed nature of the democratic system, and the money-power of the merchant class of today (the Capitalist).
The Merchant only looks to maximize his profits. Billionaires are not Gods, yet they feel like Gods because they are so free in the Liberal state. The Liberal state machine is open to being compromised by their financial prowess, which opens the door for them to instrumentalize the system to serve their own ideological aims. Billionaires and Corporate CEOs are not Politicians, and yet they have the means to play Politics. What do you not see wrong here? Your system is enabling them to play the game.
The Political class has been degraded, so has the profession and field of Politics as a whole. The Bureaucratic and Capitalist class on the other hand, has been elevated beyond proportions. The state of the West is the result of this inversion. The old power dynamics have been ruined.
(Continuation of the main comment);
Yet this old power arrangement unintentionally restored itself in Leninist party-states through the institution of the Communist Party. The Communist Political Cadre is today's Aristocracy, centralized into a single organization akin to a Religious Order—with a Religion of its own to guide the psychology of its members. The paramount leader of the Communist state is its King.
The Vanguard is engaged, absolutely and completely, in the field of Politics and the act of Politicking—and you're both flabbergasted and terrified by this, because you're still spiritually a Liberal.
“... Xi seemed set on economic liberalization early on in his leadership. He promised to overhaul bloated state firms and boost private industry. His administration talked up equity markets, eased controls on the yuan, and even flirted with proposals to allow professional managers to handle day-to-day operations in state businesses—an approach modeled after Singapore’s state-investment company Temasek Holdings. Nicholas Lardy, a respected China analyst at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, described this trend in a 2014 book titled Markets Over Mao, documenting how private firms superseded a retreating state sector as the dominant driver of China’s economy.
The 2015 meltdown upended this trajectory, turning the party’s perennial skepticism of market forces into full-blown distrust. For Xi, the capitalist principles that spurred breakneck growth had become too fraught, seeding more disorder than prosperity and overwhelming government overseers. The vagaries of boom-bust cycles and excesses of private capital clashed with Xi’s instincts for control, jeopardized social stability, and—if unchecked—could threaten the party’s hold on power.
Chen Yun, a revered revolutionary regarded as China’s second most powerful leader during the Deng era, once likened the economy to “a bird in a cage.” If the cage of state control was too small, the bird would suffocate. But without the cage, the bird would fly away. As Xi saw it, decades of market-oriented reforms had expanded the cage so much that the bird was flying free. Unless he shrunk the cage and restored the party’s dominance over the commanding heights of the economy, his China Dream of ennobling a new superpower could come to naught.
Since taking power in late 2012, Xi has discarded his predecessors’ hands-off approach to economic management and doubled down on “top-level design,” whereby Beijing supervises policy down to the grassroots. He’s unveiled grandiose development programs, from the Belt and Road initiative to build global trade infrastructure to his “thousand-year project” to create a new megacity known as the Xiong’an New Area. He declared economic affairs a key component of national security, and demanded compliance with his development agenda as a matter of patriotic duty. State planners sought to engineer economic outcomes, from raw-material prices to stock and currency values. Beijing directed a wave of mergers and acquisitions that turned state-run giants into global behemoths that could dominate sectors such as train manufacturing, shipbuilding, steel, and power utilities.14 State companies received preferential access to credit, land, and other resources, squeezing out private-sector rivals. Party cells in private firms sought bigger roles in management that allow them to align corporate priorities with government goals. As Xi told a group of business leaders, they must honor the “glorious tradition of listening to the party’s words and following the party’s path.”
— Chun Han Wong, Party of One
There are seven paragraphs that mention China in a post that has more critical comment on Western polities. Even the criticisms of Marx are mainly aimed at his Western admirers.
Two of those posts are just neutral comments (about labour force and EU falling behind both US and China in tech), one explicitly notes similarity with Japan, one is on Covid and follows a critique of Fauci. Clearly, it is not a central concern of the post.
The point about Xi having a more suppressive policy than his predecessors is hardly controversial. That the CCP is cleverer than the CPSU is also hardly controversial: that it is predatory should not be an odd claim. Nor is the description of CCP industrial policy controversial, and leads immediately into a criticism of mainstream Economics, critiquing of which is a much bigger concern of the post.
I take what Xi and the CCP say (and do) seriously. I do not take them at their own estimation.
In Brazil left-wingers are positively dazzled by private jet travel, though one does not hear too much about private jet travel in China. Any ideas as to why left-wingers love flying around in private jets?
Doesn’t everyone who gets the chance like flying around in a private jet? I am not sure any special motive is required. Yes, there may be some hypocrisy involved, but that is a pervasive issue.
Yes, a nice clip by Bill Maher from a few years ago:
"There are two kinds of people in the world: those who fly private and those who would if they could. A third category, those who could but do not does not exist."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vG1rhJ_abYw