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Weiye Loh

Libertarianism Is Marxism of the Right - 4 views

http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t21933.html "Because 95 percent of the libertarianism one encounters at cocktail parties, on editorial pages, and on Capitol Hil...

Libertarianism Marxism

started by Weiye Loh on 28 Aug 09 no follow-up yet
Weiye Loh

Balderdash: Links - 26th March 2012 - 0 views

gssq.blogspot.com/...links-26th-march-2012.html

Technology Marxism Proletariat Revolution

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 26 Mar 12
     
    "We are in the midst of a technological upheaval; and financial rewards are flowing to the elites who create and control the new machines. Almost everybody else is threatened - including sophisticated bank executives at Citi and WellPoint's healthcare analysts... Even if displaced workers do find jobs, will these jobs be dignified? A society divided between master-programmers and servants may not appeal to the servants, who will be the majority. But neo-Marxist visions of burger flippers on the barricades seem a touch too paranoid. In the 19th century, the shift from farm to factory was decried as dehumanising. But the supposedly alienated proletariat soon morphed into proud welders and machinists and today it is the decline of factories that is perceived as a problem. The lesson is that attitudes adjust and job status is elastic. There may be real unhappiness during the adjustment phase, but eventually the nannies of yesterday will be the respected childcare professionals of tomorrow. Cooks will turn into executive chefs. And so, in the last analysis, Watson's most enduring impact will be to accentuate the trade-off between equity and growth"
Weiye Loh

Review: What Rawls Hath Wrought | The National Interest - 0 views

nationalinterest.org/...what-rawls-hath-wrought-4570

Rights Human Philosophy Ethics

shared by Weiye Loh on 02 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • THE primacy of this ideal is very recent. In the late 1970s, clearly a full thirty years after World War II, it all came about quite abruptly. And the ascendancy of rights as we now understand them came as a response, in part, to developments in the academy.
  • There were versions of utilitarianism, some scornful of rights (with Jeremy Bentham describing them as “nonsense upon stilts”), others that accepted that rights have important social functions (as in John Stuart Mill), but none of them asserted that rights were fundamental in ethical and political thinking.
  • There were various kinds of historicism—the English thinker Michael Oakeshott’s conservative traditionalism and the American scholar Richard Rorty’s postmodern liberalism, for example—that viewed human values as cultural creations, whose contents varied significantly from society to society. There was British theorist Isaiah Berlin’s value pluralism, which held that while some values are universally human, they conflict with one another in ways that do not always have a single rational solution. There were also varieties of Marxism which understood rights in explicitly historical terms.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • human rights were discussed—when they were mentioned at all—as demands made in particular times and places. Some of these demands might be universal in scope—that torture be prohibited everywhere was frequently (though not always) formulated in terms of an all-encompassing necessity, but no one imagined that human rights comprised the only possible universal morality.
  • the notion that rights are the foundation of society came only with the rise of the Harvard philosopher John Rawls’s vastly influential A Theory of Justice (1971). In the years following, it slowly came to be accepted that human rights were the bottom line in political morality.
Weiye Loh

Breakthrough Europe: A (Heterodox) Lesson in Economics from Ha-Joon Chang - 0 views

breakthrougheurope.org/...on_in_economics_from_haj.shtml

Economist Economics Free Market Activism Sustainability Cultural Industries Capitalism Marxism

shared by Weiye Loh on 16 Apr 11 - No Cached
  • But, to the surprise of the West, that steel mill grew out to be POSCO, the world's third-largest and Asia's most profitable steel maker.
  • South Korea's developmental state, which relied on active government investment in R&D and crucial support for capital-intensive sectors in the form of start-up subsidies and infant industry protection, transformed the country into the richest on the Asian continent (with the exception of Singapore and Hong Kong). LG and Hyundai are similar legacies of Korea's spectacular industrial policy success.
  • Even though they were not trained as economists, the economic officials of East Asia knew some economics. However, especially until the 1970s, the economics they knew was mostly not of the free-market variety. The economics they happened to know was the economics of Karl Marx, Friedrich List, Joseph Schumpeter, Nicholas Kaldor and Albert Hirschman. Of course, these economists lived in different times, contended with different problems and had radically differing political views (ranging from the very right-wing List to the very left-wing Marx). However, there was a commonality between their economics. It was the recognition that capitalism develops through long-term investments and technological innovations that transform the productive structure, and not merely an expansion of existing structures, like inflating a balloon.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Arguing that governments can pick winners, Professor Chang urges us to reclaim economic planning, not as a token of centrally-planned communism, but rather as the simple reality behind our market economies today:
  • Capitalist economies are in large part planned. Governments in capitalist economies practice planning too, albeit on a more limited basis than under communist central planning. All of them finance a significant share of investment in R&D and infrastructure. Most of them plan a significant chunk of the economy through the planning of the activities of state-owned enterprises. Many capitalist governments plan the future shape of individual industrial sectors through sectoral industrial policy or even that of the national economy through indicative planning. More importantly, modern capitalist economies are made up of large, hierarchical corporations that plan their activities in great detail, even across national borders. Therefore, the question is not whether you plan or not. It is about planning the right things at the right levels.
  • Drawing a clear distinction between communist central planning and capitalist 'indicative' planning, Chang notes that the latter: ... involves the government ... setting some broad targets concerning key economic variables (e.g., investments in strategic industries, infrastructure development, exports) and working with, not against, the private sector to achieve them. Unlike under central planning, these targets are not legally binding; hence the adjective 'indicative'. However, the government will do its best to achieve them by mobilizing various carrots (e.g., subsidies, granting of monopoly rights) and sticks (e.g., regulations, influence through state-owned banks) at its disposal.
  • Chang observes that: France had great success in promoting investment and technological innovation through indicative planning in the 1950s and 60s, thereby overtaking the British economy as Europe's second industrial power. Other European countries, such as Finland, Norway and Austria, also successfully used indicative planning to upgrade their economies between the 1950s and the 1970s. The East Asian miracle economies of Japan, Korea and Taiwan used indicative planning too between the 1950s and 1980s. This is not to say that all indicative planning exercises have been successful; in India, for example, it has not. Nevertheless, the European and East Asian examples show that planning in certain forms is not incompatible with capitalism and may even promote capitalist development very well.
  • As we have argued before, the current crisis raging through Europe (in large part caused by free-market economics), forces us to reconsider our economic options. More than ever before, now is the time to rehabilitate indicative planning and industrial policy as key levers in our arsenal of policy tools.
  • Weiye Loh on 16 Apr 11
     
    heterodox Cambridge economist exposes 23 myths behind the neoliberal free-market dogma and urges us to recognize that "capitalism develops through long-term investments and technological innovations," spearheaded by an activist state committed to sustainable economic development.
Weiye Loh

Stricter Marxist Training Signals Mass Re-Education for China's Reporters - China Real ... - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...education-for-chinas-reporters

China Journalism Propaganda Marxism

shared by Weiye Loh on 24 Dec 13 - No Cached
  • Weiye Loh on 24 Dec 13
     
    "In a feature story published Tuesday, the English-language version of the state-run Global Times reports that 250,000 Chinese journalists are being made to attend weekly training sessions ahead of a certification exam scheduled for next year. All journalists are technically required to be certified in order to be able to legally conduct interviews or otherwise gather information. Such certification must be renewed every five years, the newspaper said, though such intensive and mandatory training sessions are new. The aim of such training is to reinforce the "Marxist view of journalism," the report said."
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