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> On Dec 17, 2019, at 8:47 PM, Louis Proyect via Marxism
> wrote:
>
> https://novaramedia.com/2019/12/17/labours-economic-plans-what-went-wrong/
Meadway makes an odd slip at a crucial point. Here’s the salient passage:
"The economy is a zero-sum game.
"This is the starting point. Understanding this was critical to the success of
the 2017 manifesto. Failing to understand it was critical to the failure of
2019. The economy has grown, weakly, since 2008. Real wages have not and
public services have disintegrated. An economy that behaves like this, in which
some people get richer but most very visibly do not, is one in which the broad
promise of growth has broken down. Many people perceive the economy to be,
broadly speaking, a racket in which a minority at the top are doing well at the
expense of others, and they are, broadly speaking, quite correct.
"To see the economy like this is to see it as a zero-sum game whose brutal
logic is this: I can only do better if somebody else does worse. If I want to
be better off, someone else must be worse off. There are, of course, plenty of
‘Keynesians’ out there who might see that improving the functioning of the
economy – through investment and so on – can produce gains for everybody, and
that the question is the distribution of the gains from this growth. But for
significant numbers of people, and particularly for those people who have found
themselves on the wrong side of a zero-sum game for a long period of time, such
arguments don’t work. Note that austerity reinforces these arguments: the worse
things get, the harder it can seem to imagine things getting better. (I made a
barebones version of this argument in a piece I wrote back before Jeremy was
first elected.)”
There’s an ambiguity in this argument which Meadway leaves unresolved: Is he
arguing that every economy (or at least the UK’s economy) is, as a matter of
political-economic law, a “zero-sum game,” or is he arguing that *people
perceive the economy* to be a “zero-sum game,” and therefore that’s the social
/ psychological reality in relation to which electoral political strategy has
to be formulated? The reference to “Keynesians” suggests that the former isn’t
really the case (although the reference itself is unhelpfully flippant), but
then the rest of his argument seems to assume the contrary: It’s always
necessary, not just as a matter of politics but as a matter of economics, to
show “how things will be paid for,” and this is understood in terms of *who
will be taxed to pay for them*.
So this seems like another example of an ostensibly left thinker perpetuating
the (false) premise that social programs are paid for out of taxes — rather
than, as the author seems to want to be credited for doing, *strategizing in
light of the fact that many people (falsely) believe that social programs are
paid for out of taxes* (which leaves open the possibility of pointing towards
another horizon).
To the extent that left forces engage in electoral politics, our message should
be, “Don’t worry; we’ll tax the shit out of the rich in due course — but that
will be easier once you’ve got what you need, so making sure of that is our
first priority, and we don’t need their money to do that.” Or words to that
effect.
We need to stop perpetuating the enabling myths of ruling class rule. We need
to stop making their war against us so easy for them.
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