Why are leftists so ambivalent about substantive economics?

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Every time I read this I realize there are thousands of young American teenagers who actually think their memes have political influence. Kill me.

That might be because the memes had a political influence upon them

Free market economy is like throwing bones to tell the future, I wish we'd stop pretending its scientific in any way. Nobody can predict that shit.

Yeah, and 999 others didn't. When everyone shouts something, one guy will be correct, by chance.

They're not exactly wrong.

No one besides a small subset of pasty teenagers cares about memes and they aren't old enough to vote anyways (not that voting matters).

Then why are the US and UK governments researching memetic warfare and internet culture

It should be clear that I'm not talking about targeted Facebook ads but smug pepes

In the UK and US, trapped under the "third way" behemoth that New Labour and Clinton had set up. (Fundamentally, Obama just got lucky the bomb technically exploded under Bush.)

New Labour simply couldn't think beyond neoliberalism, it had been accepted as reality. Not as ideology, but as a simple fait-accompli.

Have a play with this blog: k-punk.org/ and read the bits on Labour. There was a piece that really drove this home for me, but I can't find it now. The most important thing to note, though, is that when Clinton and Blair took power for the "left" by accepting certain parts of their predecessor's project, they didn't set about trying to rebuild the left in a stronger position for the future. They didn't try to rebuild the trade unions, capitalize on the internet to set up an alternative media power-base, or anything else. They simply continued to manage the decline of the left that had begun under Thatcher/Reagan (Being a bit sentimental and cheeky here: Carter was a dyed in the wool neoliberal and Callaghan was forced by the IMF at proverbial and perhaps physical gunpoint - I mean, if they were plotting to coup Wilson…) accepting that it was inevitable and they had to work with it. Blair himself doubtless believed the problems of 1970s Britain were caused by trade union militancy and overspending, (as opposed to international energy and currency crises.)

Which is part of the problem. I mean, I hazard to say even your average communist prefers a Labour and to some extent Democrat government over a Conservative/Republican one, even if that Labour government has an awful policy platform. So when those parties are bled dry (as Labour was at the grassroots, can't comment on the democrats.) they take a lot of energy with them.

And since Labour (and the British press) still believe the "Too left wing" myth as the explanation for why Labour loses elections, getting a serious hearing for any alternative economic ideas is impossible. So they accept neoliberal ones a-priori, and Ed Miliband rides off into The Sun-light to be lanced by the Kinnock Effect.

Only tangentially related book, but very good. (Written by the guy who did the blog I linked.)

The ones who get credit usually made a falsifiable claim.
One look at the economies of many countries just before 2008 and you should've known there was a problem. (iirc at one point the Sydney housing market was worth more than a year of Australian GDP. If that's not a sign something has fucked up, I'm an anthropomorphic watermelon.)

There's no complete explanation, nor anything approximating the state of other sciences, but you can obtain a degree of predictive value in some hetorodox schools. (I mean, even proving that certain models don't work has value. Sraffa ftw, neoclassical school on suicide watch.)

Land is a stock, GDP is an annual flow of transactions. Australia has less than 25 mill people, over five mill live in Sydney.

Why does Callaghan get a bad rap in the UK? He seems pretty based

I'm too tired to deduce what your point is. You're not pretending it was reasonable at the time, are you?
(As the fact the bubble burst can attest, it clearly wasn't.)
Or is it a pedantic point that it can't be worth more than GDP because it *is* GDP?

Two primary reasons:
1. As his biography was titled: "Time and Chance" - he came to power at basically the worst time possible, with the global economy a shambles (notice how people dislike Carter's presidency too, even though his policies were neoliberal and he was happy about it?) and his government without a commons majority.
2. He had to balance Tony Benn on the left with the future-SDP breakaways on the right, so both wings of the Labour party have things to hate about him. This actually ties into a wider reason he's disliked: New Labour fundamentally has to accept that he was wrong in order to exist. 1979 has to be the definitive death of old Labour. (That the 1979 manifesto was moderate social-democracy, "Callaghan's final victory over Tony Benn", doesn't matter.) If it isn't, then the fact the project wasn't necessary (it wasn't) follows almost immediately.

I quite like him. It's interesting because "career politician" is an insult, but I'd rank him personally as among the top postwar PMs, and he was definitely a "career politician" of sorts. (Obviously not in it for money without any conviction, but an able compromiser and fixer who bounced around important cabinet posts before getting the top job. You can attack compromise all you want, but nothing else would limp a Labour government in those circumstances within months of the term limit.)

Also it fits in with the general (moronic) narrative of British politics that "Labour wrecks the economy and Conservatives fix it" (Edward Who?), which is naturally very convenient for capital to bonk along with.

I'm going to have to agree with OP. Leftists in Scandinavia in the 20th century had their shit together and created a Beta NEET paradise for a few decades.

Intelligent people who don't invest in their economic advisors are destroying leftism. Maduro was shit at picking economic advisors for Venezuela.

The small left parties in the United States can't be asked to keep up with heterodox economics (with the exception of some conspiratorial bullshit) and are just rotting in their outdated feces.

Bring up economics in any meeting of your standard leftists, and you can see their attention instantly drop.

It didn't used to be this way, but we gotta step up our economic game.

The Left doesn't have the structure necessary to sustain thousands of aggressive pundits and shitposters, so we tend to lag behind on those things.

For example, would there really be a libertarian surge after 2008 if these libertarian think-thanks were not dumping millions of daddy's money into producing videos, employment pundits, creating podcasts, etc? Probably not. But the Left has no equivalent of this, there's no network or organization, let alone billionaire donors, only individual grassroots effort.

So instead of asking "where is the Left", which is understandable sentiment, you need to realise that there's no cohesive entity out there to fill those holes, only a loose mass of people who are just as impotent as you are. Our instinctive reaction to these shortcomings can't be "why isn't anybody doing anything?", it has to be "if no one's doing anything, I will."

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OP here
I like you because you understand the problem
I would work in a propaganda department with you.

Bikeshedding. To be conversant in economics (real economics, not that priesthood of capital neoclassical shite) requires you to read extensively and grasp mathematical concepts. There is a much lower barrier of entry to understanding in politics and philosophy and history, so you find that every swinging dick has an opinion on those subjects. Meanwhile, the economics goes largely ignored.

This site is a case in point - people go on and fucking on about stupid political 'theory' usually without having the first clue about economics, despite the fact that such understanding is crucial both for reasonable discussion of political matters and for determining the correct way forward.

God, don't I fucking know it. When I was still doing activism the only way you could get people to read economics was to staple their faces to the fucking page. The whole time they'd whine about wanting to go back to muh philosophy and muh history readings because the big scary equations like M - C - M' were too much for them.

You don't need to know math to get the basic differences between the different economic religions -cough- fields, the political implications of each, how to argue the basic points etc…

Marxian and anarchist economics are the only two on the same plane because they discuss what goes on at the point of production as opposed to the meaningless realm of prices. Normal economics is a "choose your religion" kind of thing, yes. No one actually knows how prices are determined. That normal economists obsess over strawmen such as "Marx advocated the LTV which means that labor time translates directly to market price, therefore mudpie argument works against him" is proof of this - they can't understand that economics extends far beyond "why does this cup of tea cost what it does?". They cannot comprehend Smith or Ricardo or Marx, they are mentally incapable of doing so due to their staggering cognitive dissonance. It's such an irrelevant and harmful line of discussion that I want to go back in time and punch Jevons and Marshall in the face, repeatedly. The only bourgeois economists since to accurately address economics in any meaningful way have been Keynes and the Post-Keynesians. Yes, Keynes was trying to defend capitalism (and succeeded), but in order to do so, he needed to abandon the neoclassical-Austrian priesthood of reality denial and market fundamentalism while making a real analysis of capitalism's problems. Microeconomics is a hall of mirrors which leads in circles of tortured logic, and that it's incompatible with what Keynes actually wrote (fuck off, Krugman) is proof that he's at least different. Even then, he found himself tiptoeing around the issue of workplace relations and the theory of the firm because it is this relation which both reveals the actual root of capitalism's problems (seeing as anarchists and Marx came to the same basic conclusions independently) and which underlies the whole functioning of capitalism as we know it. His vulgar underconsumptionist thought had already been considered and surpassed by Marx with his ideas on how it is exploitation at the point of production which creates the wealth differentials which make it impossible for the many to buy the goods which they have produced. Sraffa made further progress within the realm of bourgeois economics without descending into vulgar apologeticism, but he still played second fiddle to Marx IMO.

Source for that and anything else you think is worth reading?

Of course it can be worth more than GDP. The point was that the GDP-land market comparison is arbitrary. Land is a stock, GDP is a flow. If you want to sensibly compare something going on in a country with the country's GDP, you have to make a comparison of flows, X % of the aggregate flow is of this type. Likewise, you can look at what % of some aggregate stock, measured in money, is made of this or that part. If you want to be pedantic, you can go on about aggregation problems in concepts of aggregate flows or aggregate stocks. It's not pedantic to point out that stock-flow comparisons are usually entirely pointless.

And if our only task as communists was to pissfart around all day 'arguing the basic points' I might agree with you.

However, I'm of the opinion that a moneyless, classless system of production globally coordinated to meet human need isn't going to fold itself into existence out of the sheer will of activists wishing it were so. We're going to need a viable alternative method of organising the economy if we're ever going to make a revolution that doesn't descend into authoritarian bullshit. The development of such a method will require us to 'know math'.

I shill this everywhere, but check out the cybernetics thread for more on this argument

Because they have abundance of resources and want to control everything, always. So not only chan culture is another part to control, it can potentially grow over time, and teaching a baby since birth can be very effective.

how about just knowing the basic points?
Unless you're starting from scratch (and we all know how well that usually works), you HAVE to understand how existing systems work.