Hacker News Reader

Comment by random314 | Hacker News Reader

> As with seemingly most things, we are witnessing a reemergence of a system similar to what existed before the American Revolution, the feudalistic, aristocratic, monarchical system where you must show fealty to your vassal lord corporation.

This is not something new, but has always been the case. Capitalism is the 2nd iteration of feudalism. When the French revolution threw feudalism into jeopardy, the feudal lords - conservatives who sat in the right wing of the French parliament- hoped capitalism would rescue feudalism and help maintain social hierarchies. Democracy is seen as anti feudal and anti capitalist in its genesis, by giving everyone one vote independent of wealth. Earliest proposals for elections were only for Male land owners.

The founding fathers were capitalists for the most part.

View on HN

Hell, some states required land ownership to vote in the USA up to the 1850s.

> "While constitutionally given the right to vote by the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 and 19th Amendment in 1920, the reality of the country was such that most African Americans and some poor whites could not vote until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_suffrage#cite_note-V...

Most of them owned rather than rented their labor, but yes they did start the US with the idea of suppressing mass universal democracy, calling it mob rule.

What kind of ahistorical criticism is this?

The US was the first modern democracy. Were they supposed to go from dictatorial monarchy to universal suffrage in one day or be condemned forever?

If you want to criticize something, criticize the fact that we still don't have universal suffrage. In many states, felons can't vote. Which is cynically claimed as denying them something as punishment for their crimes, but in reality is done to prevent the victims of mass incarceration from becoming a large voting bloc to end it.

It is true that the French Revolution and subsequent counter-revolution were not as successful as the American Revolution was, and that the non-democratic features of the American system are a major reason for that.

> that the non-democratic features of the American system are a major reason for that

It's unfortunately unpopular to point out that we have ample evidence, from history and contemporaneously, that democracy per se doesn't work. It devolves into a populist, majoritarian and often authoritarian mess as reliably as (non-monarchical) dictators fall into chaos.

The men who founded our Republic understood this, which is why they explicitly created a system that balances the strengths and weaknesses of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. (Hint: they're our three branches of government.) At some point, we wrote that balance out of our cultural history, and we're partly paying the price now.

There are many liberal republics and socialist republics doing fine all over the world. This is just trendy neo-feudalist rhetoric. The US is dissolving due to inadequate democracy where people feel they have no control over their government or life's destiny.

Are there any democratic 'socialist republics' not social democratic (or social market economy) ones but actually socialist? Scandinavian countries are definitely not socialist they have strong social safety nets and high taxes which results in a relatively high government spending to GDP ratio (44% in the US vs 58%, 54%, 53% in Norway, Denmark and Sweden) but that's about it. And if we're talking about "neo-feudalism" Sweden for instance has one the highest wealth inequality coefficients in Europe, it's even slightly higher than in the US, so from a purely cynical perspective they are just giving their 'peasants' enough to keep them quiet while a huge proportion of all private wealth in the country is held by a few families.

According to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_..., the US is higher than Sweden now, before taxes and transfers, and that gap only widens if taxes and transfers, the primary mechanism governments have to reduce inequality, are taken into account.

I meant wealth inequality rather than income inequality.

The US and European social democracies are not that different. Sure, the US government and the insurance/university lobbies screwed up education and healthcare prices - but all western countries steal an inordinate amount of money to profit creating citizens and waste them around giving little back to the country.

They're parasitic institutions

Socialism is more of a process than a particular governmental form, but it does mean that the workers have control of society to the point that the capitalists are powerless (an inversion of the current situation). Other socialists would criticize me sharply for this, but I'm still trying to decide if stateless communism is practically achievable.

I was thinking in mind Cuba or Vietnam. I'm still trying to decide if China is still socialist or not, but there are good arguments in favor (they still control the commanding heights of the economy and are improving life for ordinary people at a rapid pace but things are far from perfect).

> liberal republics and socialist republics doing fine all over the world

These are policy preferences. One can have a liberal, conservative, socialist and/or capitalist monarchy, oligarchy or democracy. The latter talk to how power is divided. The former to how it used.

Naturally, some power divisions tend to lead to certain policy preferences. But that is a correlation

> just trendy neo-feudalist rhetoric

This is the cultural amnesia I'm talking about. These ideas aren't new. From Federalist No. 10:

"From this view of the subject it may be concluded that a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is that such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths. Theoretic politicians, who have patronized this species of government, have erroneously supposed that by reducing mankind to a perfect equality in their political rights, they would, at the same time, be perfectly equalized and assimilated in their possessions, their opinions, and their passions.

A republic, by which I mean a government in which the scheme of representation takes place, opens a different prospect, and promises the cure for which we are seeking. Let us examine the points in which it varies from pure democracy, and we shall comprehend both the nature of the cure and the efficacy which it must derive from the Union.

The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.

The effect of the first difference is, on the one hand, to refine and enlarge the public views, by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations. Under such a regulation, it may well happen that the public voice, pronounced by the representatives of the people, will be more consonant to the public good than if pronounced by the people themselves, convened for the purpose. On the other hand, the effect may be inverted. Men of factious tempers, of local prejudices, or of sinister designs, may, by intrigue, by corruption, or by other means, first obtain the suffrages, and then betray the interests, of the people."

[1] https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-1-10#s-lg-box-...

> One can have a liberal, conservative, socialist and/or capitalist monarchy, oligarchy or democracy. The latter talk to how power is divided. The former to how it used.

I don't think you can make such a separation so easily. Legislative power is almost dwarfed by the power of capital. When you have a “liberal democracy”, the two parts are in constant conflict. (I don't mean to say socialist democracy wouldn't have similar problems, just that the structure of power is deeper than just elections.)

You are right, but these are the very ideas I've been complaining are part of the US's constitutional DNA in this thread, so we'll have to disagree.

> these are the very ideas I've been complaining are part of the US's constitutional DNA in this thread, so we'll have to disagree

I think we agree. There is meat between the archetypal framework and the working, practical government. The framework is neutral. But the implementation details are not.

My core point is that more democracy = good is a misreading of American, and in fact world, history. We have a mixed system. Denouncing one system over another for being less democratic is thus a straw man.

This isn’t really true. Before the declaration of independence the people of the American colonies couldn’t vote in British general elections, yet the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain (as it was known then) had full legal rights to legislate for the colonies. This is due to the way the British constitution works, where Parliament has supreme power over everything, including the the Monarch, the Monarch’s government and any territories outside of the United Kingdom. This remains the same for all existing British overseas territories such as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands where there is no representation in Parliament.

The individual American colonies had legislatures for their own territory, with limited powers as defined in their charters. One example is the legislature of Virginia which has had elected members since its inception 150 years before American Independence and still continues to hold elections to this day.

This is kind of my point. Should we condemn the Magna Carta as well?

We should spend less time whinging about the people who did better than their fathers and more time doing better than ours.

The people allowing themselves to be consumed by "hate your neighbor" propaganda and mistaking that for a protest movement are getting played. Fight who's above you, not who's beside you.

I take issue only with the characterisation of colonial America as authoritarian. It was democratic and the King and his Governors had limited power. The issues leading to revolution arose mostly from the lack of representation in Parliament and a series of unforunate blunders in handling greivences on the part of HM Government.

Even now, things do eventually change:

"the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain [...] had full legal rights to legislate for the colonies. [...] This remains the same for all existing British overseas territories such as Bermuda and the Cayman Islands [...]"

You may wish to read this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Overseas_Territories#G...

specifically "Following the Lords' decision in Ex parte Quark, 2005, [...] To comply with the court's decision, the territorial governors now act on the advice of each territory's executive and the UK government can no longer disallow legislation passed by territorial legislatures."

and the sections sketching the legislatures in Bermuda and Gibraltar.

e.g. "Individual overseas territories have legislative independence over immigration"

That is referring to the executive functions of the Crown. In some cases it was possible for a Government to create or block an ordinance for a territory without legislative approval.

There is no limit over Parliamentary power. The House of Lords had judicial functions (now The Supreme Court) which allowed it to act as the second highest court in the land under the Privy Council. No court can revoke an act of Parliament. Any limits on Parliamentary power over these territories is by convention. Another interesting aspect of the British constitution is that institutions generally follow agreements even if they lack a legal basis.

Something that might confuse Americans in particular is the use of the term “government”, which, within a British context, refers only to the executive branch of government. Also the idea of a strongly defined clear constitution is rather alien… as are checks and balances on the legislature.

The US was the first of the series of republican revolutions of that era and the most conservative of all of them (compare with the radicalism of 1789 France for example). There are things to admire about it, but I think it is better to call it a war of independence than a proper social revolution.

The reason to be critical today is we are _still_ living in that framework! We have to do better.

> We have to do better

What would a better structure look like? And I don't think things like national healthcare, less racism, etc. are included, because those could be implemented in the current structure. I think history shows that we have a demonstratively good system. We have high social mobility, high political stability (peaceful transfers of power, Trump notwithstanding), consistently strong economics, world-class institutions, etc. Our system has scaled fairly smoothly from 2.5 million to 325 million and has lasted almost 250 years. Which system has done better?

It's not clear if our system can survive the current polarization, which could be seen as city values vs rural values, and the system is specifically designed to balance those. So if the cities and the rurals both take up opposing, fundamentalist positions and refuse to cooperate, the system is not designed to handle that. But we've had a history of craziness, and so far, comes the times, comes the man. I'll bet on our system over a lot of other extant systems! And change is not always better. (And if the electorate has a lot ideological-driven motivations, as present, the odds of change being worse is pretty high. Ideological-driven change has historically been pretty bad.)

I'm a communist so take that for what you will.

I do think that if you stay within the system of liberal democracy, at minimum we need to implement a more modern constitutional order. We've learned a lot about liberal constitutions in 200 years.

However, practically speaking, the political machinery is so ossified that I think only marginal structural changes within the framework are possible (like court packing, electoral vote compacts etc). Political radicals have to do a lot of organizing to build a mass constituency that can make really dramatic alterations without empowering the right wing.

this is patently not true. It would do to remember that we are currently in version 2.x of the US, the US was started, mostly by the same framers, not with that idea of suppressing universal democracy (articles of confederation), and then they rolled back a tad bit on democracy (constituion).

Articles of confederation vs. constitution related to compact between the states vs the strength of the federal government. Most of the people who signed the decl. of independence owned slaves or were lawyers for people who do. I'll grant maybe a few more people in the constitutional convention might not have been slave holders.

However, it would be good to recall that during the era of good feelings, a huge number of presidents were slave holders from Virginia. That's who held the balance of power in the country. The constitution itself was a compromise over slavery, modeled after English government (house/senate -> commons/lords, pres/vice pres -> king/heir apparent). Voters were landed white male adults, senators were elected indirectly by the states, as was the president (and still is though we have papered over it!). Supreme court judges were given life terms to enable disruption from below to be smoothed out by prior appointments.

The whole idea of the country was to guarantee rights to the upper class and place the country under new management and diffuse lower class energy via grants of land in westward expansion. The "genius" of the constitution became apparent when the entire thing broke down only ~70 years later in a bloodbath over the issue, slavery, they papered over at the convention which was a direct affront to the rhetoric of the revolution.

> diffuse lower class energy via grants of land in westward expansion

Which would make them property owners, and therefore eventually able to vote via the statehood process. Your premise is self-contradictory.

The Jeffersonian idea was to create a nation of self-sufficient yeoman farmers (they thought slavery would go away over time due to its heavy tobacco emphasis that was depleting the soil). The industrial revolution, the cotton gin, and other world historical factors made this vision (which was a vision of a faction, not the entire elite) implausible.

They wanted to do this to relieve popular pressure from below by creating "responsible" landowners that had a stake in the system. The landowners would continue to be white and male, but with an expansion of who gets to participate. The American system repeatedly does this under stress. A system that was actually liberatoratory would work in the interest of the people, not simply respond to threats.

> The landowners would continue to be white and male, but with an expansion of who gets to participate.

I also don't think this is quite right, either. There were black landowners, specifically in virginia, but other states too like maryland and louisiana, many of whom were yeoman farmers, and even a few who owned slaves, and were successful petitioners to suits heard at the house of burgesses, until the late 18th-century, but eventually it just became too convenient to be lazy and label "black == slave".

You could be a black landowner in connecticut and vote until 1814, well after the constitution was passed. It's kind of a common narrative that the US was born in racism, but I think it was more "the US did not know what to do with the issue of race and grew into racism" which is scarier, if you ask me.

correction: until the early 18th century, which is when the black codes were passed in Virginia. However, several other states allowed free blacks to vote around the time of the constitution.

By modern standards, we view their actions as morally wrong. Owning slaves is morally wrong. Only permitting white males to vote is morally wrong.

Yet, we also forget that the world then was not like the world today. Who received comprehensive education back then, the kind needed to run states and countries? Typically, the rich, and within that, men. The inequalities of the world in those times were immense and could not be mended in even one generation. Liberal countries such as USA fought against the powerful forces of British imperialism, with the promise of a better tomorrow for all citizens, however long that takes.

>The constitution itself was a compromise over slavery

If you've ever tried to make significant change in an organization of any type and size (including government), you MUST take inertia into account. What you claim was willful choice, I claim was inertia. Slavery was not banned in the Constitution because a few Southern states would have refused to sign it, their claim being such action would render economic devastation. The very day it became possible, the importation of slaves was federally prohibited by Jefferson. As slavery became increasingly restricted by the federal, the southern states dug in their heels and refused to change their labor practices. The eventual Civil War was one of economics, with the general population heavily propagandized by those wealthy slaveowners wanting to preserve their livelihood.

>diffuse lower class energy via grants of land in westward expansion

Your analysis is overly simplistic. Those grants of land to lower-class citizens ensured the new Western lands would be worked by citizens. It was great opportunity many lower-class citizens jumped on, especially those who didn't own land before. By relocating to a smaller community, a lower-class citizen became immediately more influential in their local community by numbers alone. Yes, it diffuses that energy, but that's not inherently bad. In different terms, I see that decentralization as an intentional, value-adding feature, not an unintentional bug.

> Yet, we also forget that the world then was not like the world today.

False. Contemporary preachers were regularly commenting that slavers were going to hell. They didn't have a different morality, just different economic incentives (i.e. they thought they could get away with it). Luminaries such as Jefferson even expressed that slavery was wrong, though he didn't actually free his slaves during his lifetime. Show respect for people of the past, they weren't stupid. It wasn't even that far into the future that the slavery abolition movement got going in other countries such as the UK.

> Those grants of land to lower-class citizens ensured the new Western lands would be worked by citizens.

The land was Native American land and this was only achieved via genocidal means.

>They didn't have a different morality, just different economic incentives (i.e. they thought they could get away with it).

Exactly, slavery was a significant economic factor in the world back then. It is no longer a significant economic factor in the world today. Also, don't think that preachers speak their message without understanding the nature of their congregation. The preacher chooses a message they feel the congregation should hear. Rare is the sermon which chastises the economic means of that church body's membership.

>The land was Native American land and this was only achieved via genocidal means.

Native American tribes were weakened by disease, defeated by technology, and subdued by law (the title of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" captures this point nicely, though I don't agree with all of Diamond's arguments). Would you judge one Native American tribe similarly should they commit genocide upon another tribe and take their lands? Based on your comments here, I suspect no, and I also suspect such is still considered morally wrong but less morally wrong than Western expansion through kinetic force.

Racist laws are morally wrong and must be eschewed. There is no doubt that Native Americans were eventually subdued by such laws, but it took decades of fighting for Native Americans to reach their low point. So, I submit to you a serious question to ponder: if two warring entities are technological equals, is their fighting "better" in some sense?

Don't forget that many of Japan's large zaibatsu corporations were founded by former samurai clans during the Meiji Restoration.

Capitilism and feudalism share little in common. One is a means of exchange allowing basically any government to implement it. the other is an entire philosophy and implementation of governance and interaction.

> Capitalism is the 2nd iteration of feudalism.

The Whigs and Tories opposed each other in the UK parliament for a long time precisely because this is not the case.

There is a divide in the UK Conservative Party between Tories and Liberals.

The Communist Manifesto certainly sees things that way, but I don’t think capitalism has been like that in the USA since roughly Roosevelt’s New Deal. (I don’t want to suggest this happened everywhere at the same time: weirdly, my British history lessons don’t cover anything the British did or experienced between the two World Wars other than “Chamberlain was naïve”).

The iconic images of the downfall of Communism was the economic catastrophe, shops with empty shelves, etc.; Capitalism had a similar experience in the Great Depression, was changed by it, but the name remained.

> Capitalism had a similar experience in the Great Depression, was changed by it, but the name remained.

Unfortunately a lot of those New Deal changes were reverted since then. For one, the minimum wage was supposed to be a living wage one could raise a family on.

> the minimum wage was supposed to be a living wage one could raise a family on.

Do you have a source?

It's not capitalism, the reason we ended up with massive accumulation of wealth (which changed shape and form across time - Rockefeller is not Zuckerberg) is because of government corruption, intervention and monopoly creation.

New governments don't do anything but waste public money and create regulations which entrench the current lobbyists as the de-facto standard and prevent new competition from popping up.

All this is done in service to the capitalists, though. A stateless capitalism would be more direct, and do away with the few silly laws remaining that stand in the way of profits.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com