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Billionaire close to tears amid fears of "lefties" like AOC, Bernie Sanders
(www.newsweek.com)
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this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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Politics
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There are two groups of people:
Those that think there are two groups of people, and those that don't.
The premise that socialism is better relies on the government not becoming corrupt. When it fails, it's really bad.
Capitalism also functions great when the government isn't corrupt ... it gives consumers choice and fails much more softly.
If you look at examples of cooperatives, socialist utopia projects, etc.. they break down much for the same reason capitalism has broken down for the majority of people in the US... The largest party is the party that doesn't vote, and of those that vote half of them don't know what they're voting for, and of those that know what they're voting for half of them are basing their votes on misinformation.
Managing society takes work from everybody in society. There's no easy button that keeps the train on the tracks.
To be fair, you did qualify "as it exists today" and that makes a difference. However, the point is it's not capitalism that failed us, in many ways it's ourselves, our parents, and/or our grandparents not paying attention and elected the right people. Similarly those same people buy the cheapest thing in Walmart and don't stop to ask themselves why it's so cheap.
Union busting, the manufacturing exodus, etc, it all could've been stopped if people had just paid more attention. You'll never get me to trust that by moving to socialism as an economic model people are suddenly going to pay more attention and not fuck it up.
I don't think the US needs to go full socialist (mostly because I think it's impossible and as you said, still corruptible), but we need to lean more towards socialism to start clawing our way back to having a middle class. If we could get affordable universal healthcare and affordable colleges, I would be beyond thrilled. Even though these are things that many, many other countries have had for a long time.
I think a universal basic income would also make a ton of sense, as we potentially enter the era of AI taking over a lot of our jobs. At some point, hopefully we become so efficient at "work" that we can use UBI to help people survive who want to do something outside the usual 9-5 (or who have been automated out of their job).
I agree.
I don't really believe AI is going to come for that many jobs ... at least not in its current generation/family. It's more of a story teller than a serious threat (it's like a robot that builds caricatures of products that occasionally are correctly assembled).
That said, I'm not entirely opposed to a universal basic income or a universal supplementary income (a point my father made is that rather than trying to raise the minimum wage, why not progressively subsidize people below a certain threshold).
Personally, I'd prefer to see the efficiency gains result in a 3 or 4 day work week for most people. Lots of people would decline without anything to do and society in general could miss out on some great minds that instead of creating simply consumed.
Yes, I think we should already be at a 4 day work week for many jobs. If you look at productivity and efficiency growth since the 40 hour work week was invented, it's off the charts.
However, that's one of the problems with unbridled capitalism. The market demands constant growth, which is hard to sustain and doesn't reward easing up on employees.
This is why every country with a better lifestyle than the US is not a fully communist one, but a capitalist one with some key socialist programs like universal healthcare, free college education, generous paid maternal leave, standard 5 weeks of holiday for all workers, etc. These should be considered basic necessities in any relatively wealthy country.
Unfortunately I live in a country where "social wages" and an actual wage freeze were later used to suppress labour actions, and then retracted anyway. There's a homeless crisis and mental illness suicide pandemic now. Oh yeah and Canada is euthanising "lost cause" disabled people, and Sweden let COVID cull off some of the elderly population...
Social safety nets can always be retracted. Social liberalism has run its course as a viable strategy, much like vanguardism (which is what people mean when they think of "communism"). We need perdurable systems, and as far as I'm concerned, confederalist systems are the only empirically successful systems, although even then it's hit or miss; see the collapse of syndicalism in Catalunya due to socialist infighting.
Anyway I'm a Bookchinite and currently making peace with the idea I may not live to see 2024, so that's my context.
Say what you will, but the countries with a good balance of socialist and capitalist policies are still on the top of every list, from happiness to life expectancy, to income equality to health to education, etc.
You can say what you want about Canada and Sweden, but when compared to the US' far more "anarchist" approach, both have far longer life spans and higher rates of health than the US does.
As you use very ambiguous terms like Bookchinite, and confederalist which are open to massive amounts of interpretation, it's not really clear what you are proposing (government is a form of confederation, after all). But I suppose you are hinting at being a Libertarian Socialist. It's a view which I am very sympathetic to, but one in which the upheaval needed to implement would end us up back at some form of fascism, similar to the previous attempts at communism. I would love to see such a system someday, but I think the only way it could ever come about is by starting from social democracy and gradually working towards it. It could likely take centuries.
Social democracy is the best system we have managed to date by just about any yardstick we have for measurement. That's not to say it's perfect, I can imagine many types of organizational systems which could be considered far superior should we actually be able to implement them correctly, but unfortunatley human nature is a massive blocking point to so many things, and the tendency is always towards some form of fascism if things become unstable. So IMO, we have to first get as much of the world onto the "Scandanavian model" of stable social democracy with good rule of law, and then work from that point of stability to something even better (I'm a fan of UBI personally as it's far easier to implement than any sort of system which gets rid of property rights and achieves much the same thing when widely implemented).
Sorry if my tone isn't exactly right. You have my unconditional respect. I'm learning that I'm just not always a clear communicator, sometimes I get fired up and sound harsher than what I mean, etc.
I think this is actually a major mental blinder put in by the supposed "evidentiary basis" of modern neoliberalism. If you're receptive to philosophy, I think you might like Rawls's "veil of ignorance". And then following from that, statistics mean nothing to the worst off in society. I'm currently fighting Australia's health system for my human rights, why does it matter to me or people like me that statistics say Australia is doing okay? If I die, then what? What value are statistics to my corpse, and all the others who have been killed before me?
I think it's also important to distinguish "social liberalism" from "socialism". This is another instance of tricky words that have distorted people's understanding of history and the trajectory of societies in crisis. Fifty years ago, what you are calling "socialist policies" were just liberalism, social liberalism in particular. This authoritarian meatgrinder we live in is also liberalism, albeit the neoliberal strain.
Socialism isn't when you have your rights accepted and provided for, it's the destratification of society along lines of resource ownership. Also, as an anarchist-adjacent I would say a further goal is the collective custodianship of the natural world and the proliferation of a culture of symbiosis and egalitarianism :) (but that's me).
I don't mean this as a slight, but I'm very sick and don't have much energy, so I'll just make some other offtopic remarks related to what you said, if you're interested in personal research:
"Confederalist" is different from "federalist". For instance, Catalunyan syndicalists were federated, in a confederalist system. The Kingdom of Spain is a Federalist system of government--and one that has very recently blocked Catalunyan autonomy. Also, the Fediverse is "federated" but confederalist in character. But you're right, it is ambiguous.
I say "Bookchinite" because I'm somewhere hanging around the anarchists, but I'm not totally married to anarchism, and there are anarchist tendencies that I have mutual antagonism with; much like Marxists I'll never be friends with. I'll take whatever I can get so there is less horrific evil in the world. Social liberals, social democrats, Marxists, anarchists, whatever. Bookchin's post-anarchist writings are the most aligned with my beliefs, values, and personal context.
I just have a dim view of liberalism as a durable and stable system with the way the world has turned out. Same way I think vanguardists are misguided.
You have such a limited understanding of everything you profess to know about. It’s disheartening. Read Marx. Read Kropotkin. Read Lenin. Read Mao. These people aren’t the demons capitalist want you to see them as. They weren’t perfect either. But reading The NY Times, Washington Post, Forbes, and Wall Street Journal aren’t gonna give you the full understanding of economics. Socialism can work, but capitalism won’t let it.
Read my post. I never made any of them out to be demons. I'm pretty far left on the spectrum myself.
My only argument with any of those philosophies is that they are so hard to implement in the world that we live in. That if we try, I don't believe we will end up anywhere near what they wanted, and that we will end with something a lot worse than what we have now, something much more like fascism.
History bears this out pretty well. Now I know you will say "but those weren't real Marxist Leninist implementations". No, but they espoused to be in the beginning and degraded into something pretty close to fascism.
That is my concern. Not that I think the original ideas are evil incarnate.
I don’t feel like debunking this crap, but you’re wrong and placing the blame on individuals.
Cooperations aren't people, but society sure as heck is.