Why are intellectuals overwhelmingly leftist?

Well, before we take this any further, maybe we should define what an intellectual is.  Is it any smart person?  Someone who has a career in academia?

I have a few thoughts on this subject. First, let me tell you a bit about my background: I grew up in a communist country (Romania), which made me rabidly anti-communist, at least the communism that I was familiar with. I then emigrated to Canada, was poor for a while, and still very much right-wing. I first studied engineering, started to work (increasingly dealing with business, not with technical issues), and then I started a part-time degree in history. Due to my job, my school and my interests, I also studied a lot about economics and geo-politics. By this time, I was more and more leftist. I am not however to the far left, because as I'm starting to make more money, I recognize that right-wing policies will ensure that I will stay in my increasingly privileged economic position. Intellectually however, I honestly believe that left-wing policies are better for the society as a whole.

So, since I've expererienced life in both the communist bloc and the first world; I've been both a right-winger and a left-winger; I have both technical and a humanities background, mixed in with business; for all those reasons, I think I'm quite qualified to have an informed opinion on this issue. So here are my thoughts:

1. Social and economic status is very important in determining a person's viewpoint. Rich people are concerned more about themselves paying less taxes than about the fate of their poor neighbor. Rich people either get so by inheritance, in which case they don't understand and don't care about poverty, or they get there through their luck and hard work, in which case most of them think that a poor person did not do the same because they are stupid or lazy, and usually prefer not to think farther than that.

Churchill said: "If a young man under 30 is not a liberal, he doesn't have a heart; if a man is over 30 and is not a conservative, he doesn't have a brain". That shouldn't really be taken that left-wingers are stupid, but rather that when people get over 30, they typically get more affluent, and have to learn to protect their own position through supporting conservative policies which separate the rich from the poor.

2. Garbage in, garbage out. The less information a person has to make a decision about their outlook of the world, the less accurate that outlook is going to be. Hence, intellectuals who deal with a lot of information about the outside world might seem to have a definite advantage over uneducated people, or over intellectuals such as physicists or engineers who are isolated from economic and social issues.

3. However, there is another factor at play, and that is propaganda. No one, including the intellectuals, is immune to propaganda. It is impossible to discern the truth (whatever that means), from the information we are presented with; the information will always have a bias one way or another. Right wing people get information with a right-wing slant, left-wing people get information with a left-wing slant. Both get a version of the truth, affected by propaganda. I would say however that as a rule from what I've seen, left-wing people tend to at least process more information about the world than the right-wingers; so while both sides suffer from a lack of quality of information, the left-wingers get a larger quantity. Whether that's better or worse, I'll leave it up to you to discuss. I tend to think that a larger quantity of information helps one discern the truth among the propaganda.

4. Communism, as it existed in the old Soviet Bloc has little in common with social-democracy and a lot more in common with fascism. It was simply totalitarianism with a mask of a communist agenda. Using it to show how much better the right is over the left is misleading. Also, it must be recognized that all the countries that suffered under communism were underdeveloped to begin with. Russia, China, Eastern Europe, Ethiopia, etc. were all at the periphery of the developed world in the first half of the 20th century. If one should compare such countries with capitalist countries, one should find proper comparisons. Thus, why compare underdeveloped Russia with the advanced US? A better comparison would be Russia with Brazil: one would note that they both started out from roughly the same level of resources, population and development after the first World War, and they are both at roughly the same stage now. Why compare Bulgaria with Belgium, when one should compare it instead with a country like Uruguay, and follow the logic above? Before someone points out places like the two Germanys and the two Koreas, I'd like to point out that in both cases, the capitalist country had more economic and demographic resources to begin with, and that there was a lot more capital invested in the capitalist countries, for geo-strategic reasons.

5. Coming back to propaganda, we in the western world are continually bombarded with statements that we take at face value and accept as word of gospel, without bothering to think about the statement, or check the issues. One blatant example is free trade, which we are being told will be beneficial for the third world countries. Most people, even many left-leaning intellectuals, accept this statement, without giving it a lot of thought, whereas the opposite is probably true. Anyway, since these messages and statements come from the upper echelons of business and the state, they are meant to serve the interests of the people they come from. In other words, people are continually being bombarded with right-wing messages that they accept without questioning. and which are meant to serve the interests of the upper class.

I would say that the propaganda of the state and business establishment is predominantly right-wing, while the propaganda of the academic establishment is predominantly left-wing. Uneducated people are unexposed or dismissive of the academic establishment propaganda, as are many in the middle class.

Haha, very funny Cywr

It's called stupidity.

The question is that we are most severely and maybe irreversibly damaging our planet, the only place where we can live in, with such waste of transportation, frigorifics, useless envasage, etc.

The question is that Capitalism transfer the costs of such procedures largely to the enviroment and this doctrine and behaviour is inefficient and most dangerous.

Funny, considering how the former Eastern block countries are among the most heavily polluted in the world.  You bash the West, but don't you recall how the Soviet Union destroyed the Aral Sea to irrigate massive cotton fields, or the radiation that was released when their unsafe reactor design melted down at Chernobyl?  The free market has a better track record of protecting the environment than planned economies have.

What a typical hypocritical Buregueois comment. Luxuries, by definition are things that aren't necessary. So you prefer to sacrify the needs to the caprice. What kind of attitude is that?

What a typical hypocritical armchair Marxist comment.  Everything except 2000 calories a day, shelter, and clothing aren't necessary.  If you're so adamant that luxuries should be given up, why don't you go live as a hermit or a hunter-gatherer?  Anything less would be hypocritical.

This is a criminal attitude and worth of a criminal process. What you are advocating is murder.

What I am accepting is natural selection.  Also very communist of you to suggest that I should be tried as a criminal for disagreeing with you.

They collapsed due to lack of democracy and flexibility.

There was a shy and very late (too late) attempt to restore the original soviet system as it was supposed to be: control of society via quasi-direct democracy at the soviets (elected councils), yet this attempt was aborted and market economy and a centralized authoritarian republic stabilished instead.

The problem of the planified economies wasn't so much in the planning but in the disconnection with the bases: the people, due to lack of effective democracy.

That system worked rather well anyhow during the disciplinary phase of Capitalism (Fordism) but was unable to adapt to the new demands of the full phase (Toyotism). Possibly if that aberration (socialism wasn never thought that would work in a pre-Capitalist country, though in the end it worked better than expected) would have been democratic, as the system was supposedly concieved to be, things would have been very different.

That's only half the story.  Gorbachev knew, and admitted that the Soviet Union was lagging behind the West, precisely because they had no market or price system to guide their central planners.  You can't just refer to Glasnost and ignore Perestroika.  Gorbachev was smart enough to see that even the most intelligent planners couldn't magically fine tune all the millions of prices and outputs without a price system in place.  That's why many of the things he did like the Enterprise Law were attempts to increase the private sector in the USSR.

And in general, you're just rationalizing Marx's failed predictions.  I can understand leftists more than I can Marxists because Marx made very specific predictions about what would happen that didn't come true, now most Marxists are just leftists who make up on-the-spot rationalizations for why Marx is still valid today even though his theories have not been born out by experience.

Edited by Genghis

Originally posted by Mila Big, butch, not-so-bright guys are usually not intellectuals, and more often than not they're fairly right-wing. Intellectuals are pansies. Therefore...left-wing intellectuals are the natural rebellion against the physical superiority of their mental inferiors. That's my theory. Someone send me money and I'll study it.

You are funny.  But I don't quite understand the last sentence ...

No, people are starving or dying of easily preventable causes in even the richest liberal market economy.

Yes, about 10% or so percent of people would be better off under communism because they could free ride on the rest of the society which they aren't able to do under capitalism.

This is precisely my point. You don't care about the society or individual at all. All you care for, or actually, all your masters in Wall Street care for is profit. If people are dying, well, too bad, like the Nazis say 'everyone gets what they deserve'...

I don't think this is criminal attitude. This is just Bourgois attitude. Called Liberalism in ideological terms. And class war is the struggle to defeat it.

I do care about the good of the collective, that's why some individuals must be harmed so some can be helped.

That's called industrialisation. No wonder you are confused about it, it never happens in American dependencies.

Industrialization almost always leads to greater consumption by most people, as it did in West Germany and China under Deng.  Communists like you always explain away the failures of forced industrialization with such nonsense about sacrificing consumption.

But not free market reforms. The world is full of countries which were forced to free their markets by the IMF and they were all devastated.

Yes, free market reforms, sale of products for profit was legalized and government planning and quota requirements were relaxed.  Quite playing semantic games and just answer me.

Because of mismanagement

For a while I thought you were beginning to get some sense

trying to keep up with the rich imperialists in arms race

and I even agree with that

and integrating to the world economic system by taking loans from the West, which turned USSR into a raw material exporter to the West, like Saudi Arabia, in the end. During the 50s and 60s USSR was industrialising and its economy was growing faster than the USA. The Americans were sh*tting themselves in fear. Just read anything about the American reaction to Sputnik, it was sheer hysteria. But after the Oil Crisis in the 70s petrol exports became very profitable and USSR stopped industrialising.

the oil crisis of the 1970's was a boon to the USSR and basically kept its economy afloat until the end of the 1980's.  And even if they were a raw materials exporter, that shouldn't have been a problem, look at the Saudis, they became filthy rich after the 1970's Oil Crisis, only an economic system as incompetent as the Soviet command system could have managed not to make a killing off of such a situation.

Government has to spend a lot of money to evacuate people. If you believe in markets, the people will pay the best service provider to leave. They sure as hell don't want to stay there during the storm. This an economic undertaking and it is more efficient with the free market like everything else. So American government does nothing and people drown.

So, you agree with me that it was the government and not the market's fault, that's what I've been saying.

But they are 'useless' niggers anyway, so no problem, it's natural selection at work!

That's just a ridiculous ad hominem attack.

Enjoy the moment, Genghis, because from now on it is all downhill for your kind.

Haven't you all been saying that since Marx first got published, that the enemies of the people were about to get their comeuppance very soon?  It also rings much more hollow after the fall of Communism in Europe and it's de facto end in China.  I'd say it's downhill for your kind, but I think you've all already hit rock bottom and can't fall much further.

Development in both cases was government driven, economic policies very Keynesian, protectionist, and they both have remarkably low social injustice. It is funny how the market fundamentalists claim that these Asian countries like Korea, Japan, Malaysia, and even China are neo-liberal success stories.

Countries like South Korea did have moderate amounts of domestic protection which every government pretty much does due to internal interest group pressure, but throughout the 60's and 70's they began to loosen their protection, not increase it.  That wasn't even the most important part of their industrialization, the key in all those countries' development has been integration into the world system, increasing exports, and gaining foreign direct investment.  Countries in Latin America which pursued autarkic Import Substitution Industrialization have been the failed tales of development.

Soviet-style aberrating pseudo-Marxist systems weren't created to stop or at least reduce the effort of economic growth but instead to catch up with an increased economic growth, which obviously costed dearly to the enviroment.

If that's true, then why do say private enterprise is worse than public enterprise when public enterprise, when public enterprise has been worse to the environment?

You don't know how I live. I have very few non-needs: computer, books, cigarrettes. I don't need much more: just access to knowledge and, of course, some petty vices.

I'm not the one who said luxuries were bad, you were.  Solid rationalization by the way.

My mention was not about Perestroika but about a proposal to re-stabilish the soviet system as it was concieved originally, without the meddling of the PC and the KGB. It wasn't Gorby's idea but I can't recall more details right now.

Yes, you ignored Perestroika because it destroys your argument.

About revolution, just as I told Beylerbeyi, you people have been saying revolution is a decade away for over a century, and that the inevitable march of history will overthrow capital.  Maybe the workers are just procrastinating?

Edited by Genghis

Nice, Constantine. Interesting views. Of course anecdotal information regarding one or two or three such cases cannot support a cohesive argument on the merits of the capitalist system whatsoever. But let�s take it a step further, shall we?

 

First, this comes by a person with a substantial income, a full-time employee and freelancer writer and technical writer and translator, graduate (but never actually practiced) of Sociology, working for the private sector for 19 years now (I was working as a freelancer even while in Uni) and paying a shetload of taxes too.

 

I am completely unused to such a welfare system as the one you describe. Essentially, a system that allows a person who has no incentive and no ambition in life, to live off the society until motivated or until dead of laziness. The welfare system here is completely different.

 

Only seriously impeded people receive it � that�s the one point. And they don�t get it easily, usually the paperwork is so darn time-consuming, that it might take years to get welfare. And � that�s the second point � when they get it, they find out that there is no way they can even barely survive on that kind of money: it tops (in few cases) 200 euros a month. And that in a country with a cost of living directly comparable to Belgium and Holland. So, no way to make a living out of it, not when a single room in a house like what you describe, costs about 180-220 Euros a month in Athens.

 

And the unemployment benefits� no professional lazybag can live off that either: you have to have worked a whole year to be entitled to one single year of unemployment benefits. Then you get cut off and the only way to get back on it (for one year maximum, again) is to actually work for a full year before becoming unemployed again. Not to mention that a) the only way to get it is to have been fired by your last job and b) it amounts top 330 euros a month. The cost of survival for a single person in Athens who has to pay rent, is estimated on 550 euros a month, and that estimation is moderate too.

 

So, that kind of �leeches� do not exist here. They are out of the picture. OTOH, we have free medical services and free education up to the higher levels (from pre-school to University) so those benefits are for the whole society. I know of such cases in Germany and the UK but here in Greece welfare state is not present.

 

I opened with this to illustrate the lack of images of such lazybags in our corner of the world. The only people actually living off welfare here are some marginal cases, who live in abandoned houses and literally feed on garbage. Those are extremely few and frankly, I don�t mind paying my taxes for such people to manage to make a living � they are unable to work anyway.

Let�s carry on with it. The lazybags you describe are just people who get a tiny share of the societies wealth and also are a tiny minority of the society workforce. Let�s talk about some other unproductive (and in most cases counterproductive) people who are parasitically living on the back of the society. Those people are usually referred to as �capital holders�.

 

They, like the people you mention, do not have to work to make a living. They have accumulated (god knows how and anyway that�s irrelevant) a starting capital and put their money to work for them. They have no skill, no expertise, no nothing, yet they accumulate � because money in our neat system generates money � a huge share of the social pie, by just sitting idle. In the same time, they also manage to acquire a disproportionably large amount of political power, because power goes with money. And they use that power to further the outcome of their investment. And so on. And this leads to a vicious cycle, eventually leading to the forming of a small elite that is not productive to the slightest, yet holds a huge proportion of the society�s income and power.

 

As an anarchist � even one of the Left � I am all for individuals who overachieve. I hate laziness (even though I can live with it, I won�t protest if my neighbor is lazy or feels unmotivated to overachieve) and I like to always strive for the best, in every conceivable way.  So, I am all for who excel in what they do and so get a larger share of the pie than what they are entitled to. A renowned doctor, a skilled engineer, a brilliant physicist, a great artist, a dexterous construction worker, a qualified instructor, a gifted teacher � those people should be able to get more money than the average because they are good at something and are useful to themselves and to society.

 

But those getting all the money are not the abovementioned. The moneymakers are people who have no skill and talent and expertise whatsoever but are just heavily taxing the environment, the natural resources, their fellow people (by alleviating the surplus value they produce or by getting huge tax cuts and benefits and incentive subsidies) not only shouldn�t get more money, but they should be put behind bars for being a menace to their fellow people and the planet.

 

That kind of parasites are those holding all the power and money in our lovely free market (or capitalism or however you wish to call it) economical system. Those parasites who live off the others. That makes me really angry. You are working hard to achieve a decent standard of living, while they don�t work at all and are living like bloody moguls. And it is your work, your skill and your effort that makes THEM wealthy!

 

How good is that?

 

Edited by Alkiviades

Point well taken, Alkiviades. The anecdote, which I normally shy away from, was simply to give people an understanding that a class of such people in my society does exist and that is a real problem.

You do have a very valid point with regards to those who do not earn their money but simply inherit it. However, one of the biggest incentives for people to gain cash is the knowledge that they can give their children a better existence by passing the capital on to them. I think alot of people would not try as hard if they knew their children were not going to benefit from such a sacrifice of time, effort and personal enjoyment of life.

When it comes to some airhead like Paris Hilton, no I do not think such people really deserve to inherit so much cash and pass their lives idlely away without productively reinvesting their capital for the benefit of society and the economy. A medium needs to be reached where sizeable benefits to one's children exist for those who work hard, but that excess capital is not so intensely concentrated in so few hands that society stops benefitting from it.

What I am advocating is not the hypercapitalism that I see in the USA. Across the Western world the gap between hyper wealthy and impoverished continues to grow, a trend I wish to see reversed. I am in favour of a welfare state perhaps closer to the model you anecdotally provided, one which will provide a little boost to those who need it without allowing them to sponge off society. I think the provision of free healthcare and education is a brilliant idea, better than simply giving people cash to pay for it and then the idiotic ones spend it on booze and drugs.

But organisations in capitalist societies, both not for profit and for profit, still have as one of their finest facets good leadership. Often such good leadership comes at a price, providing people with compensation for the lost time, expended energy and lost enjoyment of life they would otherwise have had if they didn't have such leadership responsibilities imposed on them. A system driven by an ultruistic desire to help one's fellow man and society as a whole will not work as human beings are innately selfish. Incentive systems must still be provided to get people out of bed at 5 in the morning, work late, conscientiously manage large responsibilities, take command of a team. I believe the incentives must still remain to appeal to one of humanities most innate instincts - selfishness. Because of that view I reject classical Marxism, though other features can be reconciled with society provided there is correct management.

Alkiviades wrote:
"How good is that?"
im very impressed

couldnt agree more