Notes on the News

By Gwy dion M. Williams

From Russia, With Scorn

Shallow Democracy

China’s Successful Leninism

Snippets

You know nothing, Bill Gates

Replacement Americans

Sad With Libertarian Freedoms

Swiss Remain Human

From Russia, With Scorn

(Written before the terrorist attack of 22 March.)

Making an enemy of post-Soviet Russia was a massive error by the New Right.

Proof that their libertarian ideas were complete trash.

But the West’s state-dominated and heavily taxed economies are still run as if libertarian ideas were true. Allowing enormous gains by the rich, despite no overall improvement in wealth creation.

Reagan called it ‘the miracle of the market’. It was actually the miracle of the Mixed Economy, after the West borrowed a lot from both fascism and communism.

To be exact, the elite borrowed the Mixed Economy ideas of Mussolini, an ex-socialist who had merged socialist ideas of planning, welfare and state control with reactionary social values.

Mussolini showed that non-capitalist advanced economics was separate from socialist ideas of equality and a non-Christian social morality. Acceptable to the centre-right, who had anyway been drifting in that direction.

Winston Churchill was an admirer of Mussolini – something that has been carefully written out of history.^[1] Most Tories felt the same.^[2] But Churchill thought it unsafe to take the same view of Hitler.

A strong Italy was not a threat to the British Empire, still the world’s superpower, at a time when the USA had no interest in that role. But with Hitler, most Britons thought a compromise was possible, with the Soviet Union the likely loser.

Perhaps the war was a misunderstanding. It was not moral revulsion, as the elite now claim. Britain’s centre-right had been happy to pretend not to notice the massive German and Italian intervention that gave right-wing militarists victory over a democratically elected government in Spain. But Hitler failed to understand why splitting Czechoslovakia and taking over the Czech half would be seen as unacceptable by Poland and by the British Empire. So Britain and France told the Poles that they need not accept Hitler’s modest demands to integrate into Germany the Free City of Danzig, which had a strong ethnic-German majority.

Poland was seen as a strong ally, and the Soviet Union a weak country.

Given that Poland had defeated the early Soviet Union back in 1921, this was not an unreasonable belief.

It just failed to notice Stalin’s success, which has also been written out of history. Orthodoxy is that he was a cruel mad bungler who quite accidentally made his country vastly stronger than Poland had been.

The Soviet Union ended up destroying more than half the German army.^[3] The USA strained to take its share against the lesser portion of the German army left to fight on the Western front.

From the 1940s to 1960s, the Soviet Union was an attractive model.

What then went wrong?

For me it was Khrushchev’s blunders, consolidated by Brezhnev. Stalin’s system was perfectly viable, and was in fact growing faster than the USA at the time. As indeed was Mao’s China, another fact written out of Western histories. Much ranting about setbacks in 1959-61,^[4] ignoring many more years of remarkable success.^[5]

Khrushchev created a pseudo-market that worked badly. Confused everything by treating Stalin’s rule as criminal, rather than as necessary harshness for very tough times.

Failed to expect pressure for more fundamental changes.

Invaded Hungary in 1956, whereas Stalin had held back from invading Yugoslavia when Tito broke with him. An error that Brezhnev repeated in 1968, ending the last chance of the Moscow-orientated Leninist states reforming themselves.^[6]

Meantime post-Mao China showed how a Leninist state could adapt to the success of the Mixed Economy.

Most of the Western left misunderstood. Some loyal to Moscow in its blundering decline. Others saw Trotsky as a lost hero. But no anti-Stalin branch of Leninism achieved anything positive. Even Che Guevara was never anti-Stalin.^[7]

There was also another way. Among moderate socialists, the increasing strength of trade unions could have been transformed into an incomes policy. The state negotiating fair wages, rather than the strongest grabbing what they could. There was also much talk about workers control, and Arthur Scargill flatly rejected it for the coal industry. His idea was to go on fighting management and hope for an eventual socialist apocalypse.

Thatcherism won almost by default, after most socialists rejected new economics that would have been a big advance towards the socialist ideal.

Most of them wanted the immediate ideal or nothing. Sad.

But the Thatcher / Reagan answer was just as foolish. 19^th-century capitalism was cruel and slow-growing by modern standards.

The New Right wonderful liberation from a tax-funded and state-dominated economy has never happened. Short of total social breakdown, it never will. But the pretence has to be kept up, to keep the flow of state funding to the rich. To deny it to the needy, as far as the public will allow.

And to present Russia as a menacing enemy.

It cannot be admitted that leaders like Thatcher, Bush, Tony Blair and Clinton turned Russian friends into enemies by ignoring competent advice and listening to New Right trash.

To a degree, the liars fool themselves. They worked hard to create the current Ukraine War.

The new anti-Russian government in Kiev could have lived with Crimea’s successful decision to reunite with Russia – it had been part of Russia till the 1950s.

They could have honoured the Minsk Agreement, which would have given the two regions of the Donbass enough autonomy to keep the peace.^[8] ^[9]

They were offended by some of the anti-Russian minorities having to accept the will of Russia-friendly majorities. But they might have lived with it, if the West had urged it on them.

They never asked for a second vote in Crimea. The vote on secession and union with Russia was disputed by the West. But Kiev’s lack of interest in a second properly-supervised vote must mean they know that anti-Russian citizens of Crimea are a small minority.

The Western wish to ‘fight to the last Ukrainian’ could be seen as callous realism, except it has all backfired. Russia now knows that it will not be allowed to flourish by copying the West or compromising with the West.

It’s the end of an illusion that began under Khrushchev, and flourished under Brezhnev. Brezhnev favoured inferior copies of Western products rather than accepting it had to be home-grown.

When Yeltsin tried total surrender, Western advice led to a growth in criminality and a decline from Brezhnev’s comfortable stagnation.

George Soros complains that he got laughed at when he proposed a Marshall Plan for Russia after the Soviet collapse. Laughed at by believers in libertarian fantasies: people who thought that their lies about Communism were a deep truth.

Soros also fails to follow the logic of his best idea. He fails to see Putin’s policies as reasonable.

He boasts of having learned philosophy from Karl Popper, but did the man have much to teach? Popper’s famous book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, might have been called A Society Very Nice for Rich Exiled Austrian Jews, and My Bitter Hatred at Being Inconvenienced By Authoritarian Demands for Social Justice.

A common failing of Market Minorities across the world.^[10] I call ‘Market Minorities’ ethnic minorities in many different societies who are mostly richer than the majority, but not former rulers. Amy Chua in her book World On Firementions how her rich Filipino-Chinese aunt had been murdered by one of her badly-paid servants. To me, it seemed odd that the woman had not kept herself safe by paying them well. And it was a point that most of the British ruling class understood: I suppose the insight seeps into people in the same society who were never part of it. Yet it seems beyond most members of Market Minorities. And now seems beyond most of the post-Thatcher Tories, at least at a national level.

Mainstream US politics, with Jews a small but influential part of it, remains wrapped up in evasions and distortions.

Nixon probably knew he’d lied about Chinese Communism having been given power by US traitors denying aid to anti-Communists. At the time, those lies were convenient to defeat the left in the USA. Just like his better-known lies about being given a little dog as a gift successfully covered up the truth about him giving special favors to rich contributors.^[11] But in the 1970s, he realised that China would make a convenient counter-weight at a time when the Soviet Union seemed on the verge of global victory.

The worrying thing about the present Western leadership is that they seem unclear about the difference between lies, fantasy, and unwelcome reality.

I assume enough realism to avoid a nuclear war.

The possibility of a Russian or Chinese nuclear bomb in their back yard should activate their sense of selfish survival.

But for the rest, who knows?

Shallow Democracy

Western media treat an insignificant pro-Western opposition as if it were the Real Russia.

Weak in their 1993 peak. Going downhill ever since.

Yabloko, pro-capitalist oppositionists, fell from 7.86% in the 1993 parliamentary election to 1.34% in 2021.^[12]

Democratic Choice of Russia, part of Yeltsin’s government and initially backing Putin, fell from 15.51% to 8.52% in 1999.^[13] Then merged with others as Union of Right Forces, but fell to 3.97% in 2003. Dissolved after a derisory 0.96% in 2007.

New People are a new party of hazy liberals that got 5.32% and 13 seats in 2021.^[14] And supports the Ukraine war.

Alexei Navalny was a member of Yabloko till its decline in 2007, when it got just 1.6% of the votes. He then had much more success with a rather mindless populism. It was this that Putin found dangerous: but since it was also very hazy, it was not hard to suppress.

Putin continues to offer coherent politics at a time of great danger for Russia. And most of the world backs him:

“Who congratulated Putin on his election victory and what does it say about global alliances?

“While the Russian election results were condemned in the west, the reaction across Asia, Africa and Latin America shows a new global dynamic is emerging.”^[15]

Western journalists in Russia must know that Putin has vast popular support. Occasionally they admit it:

“When I asked a Russia expert what he thought would be the true tally of electoral support for Putin’s dictatorship, his view squared with this survey. He suggested it would be about 60%, though lower in Moscow and St Petersburg. This sounded much like my visits to Moscow in the post-communist 1990s. Russians would concede the virtues of western democracy, but they pleaded the more urgent need for order, security and prosperity.”^[16]

I’d be blunter – the Western parliamentary system was designed in mediaeval times to give the upper middle class a small say in government. But then the rest of the society started demanding the same: first lower-class men, and then women also.

Most men in the British Isles got the vote in the 1880s.^[17] Most women from 1918. But substantial voting rights were only for people classed as part of the White Race in the rest of the British Empire.

And everywhere, the ruling class kept control. Commerce had taught advertisers how to manipulate good feelings for almost any end.

Mostly selfish ends.

Anti-establishment feelings are made servile to the actual establishment by misleading labels like the Deep State.

The state always serves ruling class interests. Much of this is by the classic ‘revolving door’ – people make a reputation in public service, and then get much better-paid jobs in the private sector.

How does this happen, when we all have the vote?

In debates on Quora, the world’s best English-language question-and-answer forum, I get told that as a Briton, I can choose who I am governed by. That I should pity the poor Chinese, who have no such right.

But of course I don’t choose. I regularly vote, as a social duty. But not once has my individual vote made a specific difference. And that would be just as true if my views were mainstream rather than Hard Left.

For voting, the concept of ‘you’ slides incoherently from you (item of a collective) to you (specific individual). So I (specific individual) am to feel oppressed if I (item of a collective) cannot decide the struggles between rival elites in the leadership of political parties.

I must be deluded if I see merits in a system where they (specific individuals) are expected to go along with a single meritocratic elite that has a genuine wish to benefit the whole assembly of them (items of a collective).

This is part of the monstrous muddle expressed within liberalism by the common term ‘The Individual’.^[18]

What I actually see is that the British electorate are easily misled. Most recently and disastrously with Brexit.

Electors in the Republic of India are being led in directions I don’t like at all. But it’s not my country.

Citizens of China get government that works well, and delivers what most of them want. Voting is indirect and under strict control. But they mostly feel that good outcomes are more important.

China’s Successful Leninism

Chinese success is an embarrassment for the New Right. It undermines their story that the Wondrous Persons of the New Right know it all.

That wealth only flows when business people are given as much freedom as possible.

What’s actually happening is that the USA is losing its technical advantage. And then self-harms;

“CATL, the little-known Chinese battery maker that has the US worried…

“Dunne says there is now a ‘sense of urgency’ in the US to build up domestic battery capacity but that it would take between five and 10 years to catch up with China. That may not be fast – or cheap – enough to achieve Biden’s goal of two-thirds of new car sales being EVs by 2032.”^[19]

China invests heavily in science. It also requires industrialists to do something useful, rather than assuming the ‘miracle of the market’. Which is actually the miracle of the mixed economy, as I said earlier.

“How China Came to Dominate the World in Solar Energy…

“With China’s economy stumbling, the ramped-up spending on renewable energy, mainly solar, is a cornerstone of a big bet on emerging technologies. China’s leaders say that a ‘new trio’ of industries — solar panels, electric cars and lithium batteries — has replaced an ‘old trio’ of clothing, furniture and appliances…

“Officials are bitter that a dozen years ago, China subsidized its factories to make solar panels while European governments offered subsidies to buy panels made anywhere. That led to an explosion of consumer purchases from China that hurt Europe’s solar industry.

“A wave of bankruptcies swept the European industry, leaving the continent largely dependent on Chinese products…

“China’s cost advantage is formidable. A research unit of the European Commission calculated in a report in January that Chinese companies could make solar panels for 16 to 18.9 cents per watt of generating capacity. By contrast, it cost European companies 24.3 to 30 cents per watt, and American companies about 28 cents.

“The difference partly reflects lower wages in China. Chinese cities have also provided land for solar panel factories at a fraction of market prices. State-owned banks have lent heavily at low interest rates even though solar companies have lost money and some went bankrupt. And Chinese companies have figured out how to build and equip factories inexpensively.

“Low electricity prices in China make a big difference.”^[20]

Sn ippets

You know nothing, Bill Gates

Likewise Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and the rest of them.

The USA’s success in IT was a late bloom of the original version of the Mixed Economy. The US domination of computers, mostly established by IBM. And helped for both Microsoft and Intel by anti-trust suits that persuaded IBM not to buy out Microsoft and Intel when they were still small and would have sold the relevant parts of their business.

The current successes are not wise outside of their own little areas.

Someone commented that Gates’s book The Road Ahead expected the future to be much like the present, only with more computers.

My own observation was that the cover of the book shows him standing alone, and the road is going nowhere.

It’s a mostly-overlooked fact that almost all of the successes happened after two individuals with considerable and complementary skills happened to form a smooth partnership. I’ve done a detailed study, Outliers – 101 Candidates To Be Bill Gates.^[21]

They are often fools outside their own area. The late Steve Jobs, brilliant co-founder of Apple, shortened his own life by preferring Alternative Medicine to stuff that was known to work.^[22]

Meantime Boeing, a success from the older generation, goes steadily downhill in the vital area of passenger aircraft.^[23]

Replacement Americans

Once again, the Financial Times includes unwelcome truths that business people need to know :+

“Immigrants get the job done

“It’s the kind of headline that the worst people alive will probably warp to fit their narratives, but Goldman Sachs thinks that the answer to some puzzling US economic data is a jump in immigration.

“US economic growth was far stronger than most people expected last year, thanks to some absolutely monster jobs reports and consumer spending that made a mockery of fears that bad vibes might cause a recession.

“However, despite robust job creation the US unemployment rate has actually edged up from a five-decade low of 3.4 per a year ago to 3.9 per cent. At the same time, employment surveys of companies and households have been diverging sharply, further confounding many economists.”^[24]

I’ve long assumed that immigration was what kept them going. Their system for the last few decades has been bad at producing ordinary workers, though it does produce small numbers of very creative people fit for top jobs. The gap is filled by foreigners, many with education systems much better at producing ordinary workers, and sometimes also extraordinary workers.

Continuing immigration gets the older workers voting for the centre-right. That includes increasing numbers of Latinos and African-Americans.^[25]

This might sound like right-wing Replacement Theory. But the stark realities are that immigration is needed, not because existing populations are superior, but because many of them are useless.

Also incapable of producing a movement that would actually look after their interests. Globally and historically, the Far Right norm.

Sad With Libertarian Freedoms

“Young people becoming less happy than older generations, research shows

“America’s top doctor says governments’ failure to better regulate social media is ‘insane’…

“After 12 years in which people aged 15 to 24 were measured as being happier than older generations in the US, the trend appears to have flipped in 2017. The gap has also narrowed in western Europe and the same change could happen in the coming year or two, it is thought.

“Murthy described the report findings as a ‘red flag that young people are really struggling in the US and now increasingly around the world’. He said he was still waiting to see data that proved social media platforms were safe for children and adolescents, and called for international action to improve real-life social connections for young people.”^[26]

Libertarian fantasies once again disproved.

Swiss Remain Human

“Swiss vote to give themselves a bigger pension”.^[27]

They’ve ignored claims that the society cannot afford it.

It is a matter of ordinary people securing a decent old age for themselves. If fewer working-age people are creating the same or increasing social wealth, that should not be a problem.

Just a problem for the rich, who hate paying taxes.

Old newsnotes at the magazine websites. I also write regular blogs – https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams

^[1] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/44-fascism-and-world-war-2/why-churchill-admired-mussolini/

^[2] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/problems-magazine-past-issues/mussolinis-links-to-the-british-centre-right/

^[3] https://www.quora.com/q/mrgwydionmwilliams/Nazi-Germany-Was-Defeated-in-Russia

^[4] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/m-articles-by-topic/42-china/china-three-bitter-years-1959-to-1961/

^[5] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/recent-issues/2019-11-magazine/2019-11/

^[6] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/very-old-issues-images/magazine-001-to-010/magazine-007-july-1988-2/the-1968-invasion-of-czechoslovakia-doomed-the-soviet-union/

^[7] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/the-soviet-past/why-che-guavara-approved-of-stalin/

^[8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minsk_agreements

^[9] https://mrgwydionmwilliams.quora.com/Ukraine-Mariupol-and-the-War-for-the-Oblasts

^[10] https://labouraffairsmagazine.com/past-issues/before-2018/labour-affairs-before-2014/market-minorities-across-the-world/