Late Soviet Britain: why materialist utopias fail
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- Опубліковано 8 лют 2024
- This event launched Abby Innes's new book, Late Soviet Britain: Why Materialist Utopias Fail.
Why has the United Kingdom, historically one of the strongest democracies in the world, become so unstable? What changed?
In Late Soviet Britain Abby Innes argues that a major part of the answer lies in the transformation of the British state. The book shows how Britain championed radical economic liberalisation only to weaken and ultimately break its own governing institutions. The crisis of democracy in rich countries has brought forward many urgent analyses of neoliberal capitalism, but Abby Innes explores for the first time how the 'governing science' in Leninist and neoliberal revolutions fails for many of the same reasons. The Thatcherite - or ‘neoliberal’ - project of withdrawing the state from the market rests on the same fallacy as Soviet planning: that a self-regulating materialist utopia is possible. The practical result in both systems is stifling bureaucratic overreach, economic stagnation, and ultimately political and state failure, only this time around the crisis is of liberal democracy. Soviet and neoliberal regimes may have been utterly opposed in their political values, but as Abby explains, when we grasp the kinship in their closed-system, deterministic forms of economic reasoning and their strategies for government, we may better understand the causes of state failure in Britain today, in what remains an inescapably open-system reality.
Meet our Speakers and Chair
Abby Innes (@innes_abby) is Associate Professor of Political Economy in the European Institute at LSE. She has published widely on the political economy of Central Europe and drew on this background for the comparison of Soviet and neoliberal economic regimes in Late Soviet Britain. In more recent years Abby has focused her research and teaching on the political economy of the green transition in Europe..
Rafael Behr (@rafaelbehr) is a journalist and political columnist for the Guardian. He is the author of the book Politics: A Survivor's Guide: How to stay Engaged without Getting Enraged.
Simon Glendinning (@lonanglo) is Head of the European Institute and Professor in European Philosophy at LSE. His current research interests include the question of European identity. He is the author of Europe: A Philosophical History - Beyond Modernity.
More about this event
The European Institute (@LSEEI) is a centre for research and graduate teaching on the processes of integration and fragmentation within Europe.
Twitter hashtag: #LSEEI
Did anyone else click on this? Just because the title seemed fascinating
And the speaker's delivery is the least of her problems.
I've been calling Airstrip One (UK) Soviet Union 2.0 (or Soviet Britain) for decades, since I lived for a while in the first Soviet Union 🤔 I'm glad people are catching up now 😅
5:55
Thanks.
But the echo is so bad the whole thing is unlistenable, so the hell with it all.
Wonderfully articulated by both speakers. Abby is clearly a blessing for the next revolutionary changes to come. And summed the situation up astutely with her conclusive response. Thank you.
The way she interprets Brexit is laughable.
She says that the introduction of bureaucratic systems from Blair onwards are an indicator of neoliberal failure, yet in no way includes the bureaucratic regulatory frameworks imposed by the EU in that diagnosis.
I don't necessarily disagree with the notion that neoliberalism is far too attached to an ideal system which cannot work in practice, but to willfully ignore the part which the EU plays throughout the entire neoliberal period is incredibly disingenuous.
Couldn't agree more. Excellent point. This airy exoneration of the anti-progressive, Neoliberal regulations of the EU, institutionalizing austerity, product & service dumping across borders, brain drain with no compensation, etc., is all too typical of the controlled center left in the UK.
Couldn't agree more. This airy exoneration of the anti-progressive, Neoliberal regulations of the EU, institutionalizing austerity, product & service dumping across borders, brain drain with no compensation, etc., is all too typical of the controlled center left in the UK.
Really, as she correctly pointed out, Brexit was a symptom of a late stage Neo-Liberal system that has failed. A failure currently supported and actively encouraged by both major parties. Bureaucratic over reach and cost centers, infected every aspect of the UK state, NHS, Education, Social services, Transport, Energy, under Thatcher thanks to her failed economic ideology. If any evidence of this disaster were required, look no further than the Infestation of the NHS by managers and administrators,
which cost the NHS 35-40% more in administration charges & wages than it did before Thatcher came to power. And lets not get started on Privatisation of the NHS, which has trebled and quadrupled the cost of providing healthcare in the UK. The EU was a convenient scapegoat, a justification for Brexit. The Brexit project died, with LIz Truss & Kwasi Kwarteng and their attempt to double down on a Failed Neo-Liberal project...
While this is excellent, I hate the reference to Kuhn's dishonest and old book. Of course science approaches the truth. Does the speaker seriously doubt that electromagnetism and QM are true? How does she think all the electronic paraphernalia we use daily work? When men went to the moon, were they not correct in thinking that it was "true" that the moon was about 250,000 miles away? Kuhn was stupid, or more probably just on the make, so he did not write that relativity included Newtonian mechanics, in the sense that Newtonian mechanics is relativity at low speeds.
This is epistemology. Related, but not exactly philosophy of science. You can believe that we can manipulate electromagnetism without having to believe the "knowledge" we create is "true".
@@DMGrass-gb9kg And men went to to the moon with the knowledge that the moon is about 250,000 miles away, but they did not believe that knowledge was true? They thought it was false? They were not sure about it? Maybe the moon was 250 million miles away?
@johnnygate3399 its a form of skepticism. It's not wrong, its not right. Sounds absurd to some, reasonable to others. However, how could science exist without skepticism?
Margaret Thatcher was obsessed with something called “Wagner’s Law”, which predicted an inherent, inertial tendency for the state’s share of GDP to grow inexorably if not checked. It took her 10 years to lower it from 40% to 35%, but two years after she left office it was back up to 40% again. It’s currently at over 45%, the highest it’s ever been in peacetime. The UK is not a small-state economy by comparison with other OECD countries.
Our neighbour Ireland really is a small-state economy. There the government accounts for just 25% of GDP, there’s no single-payer health system like the NHS, and corporate taxes are half what they are in the UK. I’m not advocating the Irish approach for the UK. But if the word “neoliberalism” has any stable meaning, Ireland is a far better example of it than the UK is.
What Thatcher probably misunderstood is that Wagner’s Law is not a cynical complaint about a political failure, but rather describes a necessity within successful capitalism. Due to industrial progress (machines, automation, rationalization), production of goods is continuously getting cheaper and requires less human work. But work is the major source of income, so naturally we shift focus to human services, which on the other hand become increasingly expensive because they don’t benefit that much from industrial progress. It’s only natural that this has to be organized by the society as a whole. The state organizing, ordering and purchasing services for us all is a way to redistribute value to the people, and as such also a way to actually realize the profit of growth for the society as a whole. It would otherwise become unstable. As industrial progress goes on, we are increasingly dependent on the state organizing the distribution of value since markets alone would fail. It’s important to distinguish capitalism and free markets. That’s the mistake of Neoliberal. Capitalism goes well with strong state. Free markets alone and capitalism ruin each other in the end. That the biggest fans of capitalism don’t understand this system at all, is a huge tragedy.
@@LiebeGruesse Thank you for your comment. I don’t think I agree with you completely (or with Margaret Thatcher), though you make some good points. Just to make clear, I’m not a small-state ideologue, but nor do I think having a large state sector is automatically awesome.
1) Wagner died in 1917, so he never experienced the Stalinist or Maoist command economy, which aimed at the state handling 100% of all economic activity. Even Stalin and Mao never achieved this total Orwellian state, because they could never completely eliminate the black market. But it was understandable if someone of Margaret Thatcher’s generation viewed the possible slow-motion transition to such an economy with dread.
2) Margaret Thatcher’s determined attempt to shrink the state was a temporary blip lasting no more than ten years. It took her Conservative successor just two years to undo her work. The post-2010 Conservative governments haven’t tried to revive it. The Cameron government imposed austerity for a time, but I don’t think this was out of an ideological imperative to permanently shrink the state; they just thought - incorrectly - that it was a necessary temporary response to the 2007 crash. During the Covid crisis, the Johnson government instigated a temporary version of Leninist War Communism. I don’t think they were actually Leninists.
3) Somehow the UK today has wound up with the worst of both worlds. There are small state economies which are dynamic and high growth (e.g. Ireland, Singapore, South Korea). And there are economies like the USA where state programs promote business success (Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” program funded much of the research which makes the US tech sector so dominant today, for instance). We’ve would up with our largest ever state sector in peacetime. But it’s not producing any of those US-style Keynesian multipliers, and people feel state provision is inadequate.
@@georgesdelatour Very inspiring insights. Thank you! I have to reply, cause it all seems to make sense together taken. I’m German with no insight into UK, so my knowledge is based on foreign reading and pure theory :)
Examples like Ireland are like as if you would draw a border around Frankfurt or City of London. They successfully exploit global specialization. Those economies seem to occupy a large share of certain global service markets. Of course, while oversimplifying I missed that redistribution of profits happens with numerous mechanisms - not all need the state. The famous “trickling down” effect does exist. But it’s so insufficient at large scales that it’s keeps sounding cynical to glorify its impact: the suit-wearing banker takes the money from the rich for making them richer and when he smokes a cigar, the money is trickling down to a tobacco farmer in Honduras, to avoid mentioning his house cleaning staff.
Most “trickling down” needs to be supported with big splashes by the state’s ladle to reach everyone’s glass. And while the state as such is small in Ireland, the state is kinda paying a lot for attracting a fair share of global or European wealth - by not taxing. Same in Switzerland - where I live. And attracting global “paper” capital also creates an environment for extremely shareholder-dependent, cause investment-heavy, businesses like Pharma or Software (huge Google Campus in Zürich).
South Korea is a very interesting case though, cause it initiated its growth with massive protectionist policies by a strong interventionist state. I would expect that South Korea needs a larger state share in the long run as well. State share statistics might also be misleading: what if private companies or even financial institutions are actually owned by the state? Strong regulations and directives are also much cheaper than just using Keynesian methods of tax, loans and expenditure. The book “Kicking away the ladder” by Ha-Joon Chang is probably providing some answers.
@@georgesdelatour Needless to say, I agree on the overall failure of total state controlled economies in Soviet style states. Though it’s actually rarely acknowledged that they did grow and did industrialize, alone following the state’s planning - of course, inspired by the capitalist neighborhood’s innovations.
Considering the planetary boundaries to growth though, I guess, we should better learn how to organize prosperity without the capitalism-specific cycle of loan, investments, productivity and growth. There is so far no empirical nor theoretical evidence that self-contained unlimited Green Growth can exist. Lots of people forget that occasionally decreasing environmental impact is completely different from having Zero Net Impact forever.
@@LiebeGruesse Concerning state redistribution verses trickle down economics:
In the UK, Ed Miliband’s political career was a failure. But while he was leader of the Labour Party, he actually toyed with a good idea which needs to be revived. It’s called “predistribution”.
Left wing governments typically think of reducing inequality via redistribution through the tax and benefit system. But there are problems with this. For one thing, you need the rich to stay rich (and stay in your country) for you to be able to tax them and transfer some of their wealth to the poor year after year. For another, you’re not actually raising the earning capacity of the poor this way. They’re completely dependent on you for their income. And as soon as you hit some financial crisis, you’ll wind up being forced to cut back on benefit spending, with disastrous consequences for the poor.
Predistribution starts by noticing that there are some countries where pre-tax, pre-redistribution inequality is very low: Iceland and Slovenia, for instance. Both those countries redistribute through the tax system as well. But even if they didn’t, they’d still be less unequal than, say, France. No doubt there are many specific factors making these two countries relatively equal which we can’t copy. They’re both very small and very ethnically homogenous for one thing. But a big one is that their economies ensure that their poorer citizens have a higher pre-tax earning capacity.
i think lecturers should declare their own loyalty/reference? what they vote for ..at the outset.
You just have to read the brief associations listed above for each presenter to know that. If you disagree perhaps you won't listen, if you do there's no need to.
This lady doesnt understand even the very basics of leninism. Marxism leninism is a process, a method, not a place. The contributions of Lenin, Mao and such is that of developing a method not reaching a deterministic place. Quite obviously they errered. The amount of ahistorical mental gymnastics She has to go through to justify her point of view is astounding.
Thank you
"Corporate state capture as a pillar of state policy" -- exactly, that's been the plan in the UK since 1979 & in the US since a good deal before then.
Yeah, I'm sure going further left in 1970s, Britain, really Would have worked
@@davidwestwater2219 Can't it be a reasonable middle ground? I agree with Thatcher on the shipbuilding privatisation but not on the others. I agree with her program of letting ppl buy their council houses but think the gov should have been more involved in building more flats for ppl to buy. A healthy middle ground, my friend.
'Corporate'--nonsense, this is a pure Communist/socialist agenda, filtered through Lenin, Marcuse, and a dozen others in the US as well.