Senate This thread is publicly owned (marxism, socialism, and left-wing ideologies)

I agree, it's sickening.

If we consider the highest marginal tax rate in US we notice that it used to be way larger in the past. It was about 90% in the 60s, then it got down to 70%, then Reagan quite suddenly put it down to as low as 28%. Later it slightly increased again but it has never gotten even close to the pre-Reagan era since then.

Spoiler: highest marginal tax rate over time

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/statistics/historical-highest-marginal-income-tax-rates

If we rather consider taxing the wealth directly, Warren and Sanders were proposing measures on that spirit. Warren for example proposed to put a tax of 2% on the wealth exceeding 50 million $ and an additional 1 % when the wealth gets bigger than 1 billion.

These proposals received huge backlash from the right 'cause they consider the wealth taxt to be a form of confiscation. I believe there can be also some issues concerning the legal basis for the tax. Of course I support it, but I'm not sure whether we can be optimistic.

Spoiler: Warren's idea

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/18/upshot/warren-wealth-tax.html

Btw, @Darth Punk have you heard about a labour proposal in Britain to push the companies to put part of their shares in a fund owned by workers? The devil is in the details, of course, but as a principle it sounded a valid idea to me. I was actually wondering why nobody was doing anything in that spirit.

Spoiler: ownership fund

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=cf5234cb-bf4c-40d4-92e7-b43a730fc8ac

Concerning the thread, I appreciate you upping this but I feel that if you want a good feedback it might be convenient to create one specifically for inequality because this thread has been having a rather low traffic since its creation. I don't know, up to you.

 

It's probably not considering the centrist they got to replace Corbyn.

 

I haven't followed UK politics for a while. Did they manage to shift the Labour Party back to the center ?

 

Yes, but not as much as under New Labour (arguably). Tony Blair's government existed in a bizarre reality, where the Liberal Democrats (traditionally centrist), were more left-wing than Labour. There is an infuriating narrative that still persists in the UK that the left cannot be trusted to run the country, even in the minds of many traditional Labour voters -hence the last election with Corbyn as leader. This attitude largely goes back to the late 70s when the Labour government of the day didn't exactly do a dazzling job of running the country. In the minds of the dull-witted and easily led, nothing as changed since then.

 

Indeed. A similar situation exists here in Aus. If laws favour housing speculation, then millions of people become tied into a lifestyle that relies on certain political forces to maintain it.

As I'm sure you know, mass home ownership in the both the UK and Aus creates all manner of market distortions, as well as economic uncertainties. This video sums up the inherent problems therein:

 

And to expound on my previous point: https://theintercept.com/2019/02/26/democratic-party-centrism-aoc-sanders-warren/

 

Corbyn's election slogan to the electorate in the UK was 'For the many'. It distills the very essence of what the 'far left' espouse, as it can be seen to ultimately benefit the majority to adopt that socio-economic model. Neo-liberalism, increasingly the mantra of the 'centre' as well as the right, does the opposite, as it only focusses on the economic benefits of a minority, and it pretty much ignores other benefits, such as welfare, health, education and the environment, entirely; except in specific instances where those things directly benefit certain groups in power, through say, private education, fee-paying health care, and so on.

So yes: Corbyn, Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Warren, et al, can be defined as sitting at the centre of things politically, as theirs isn't really fringe politics in that sense. One could draw a circle with them at the centre, with 'centre' and 'right' political movements existing further out in concentric circles, with the most 'extreme', politics (ie: traditionally far-right) being out towards the edge.

 

Sorry, sorry, I'll show myself out...

 

Did you post something via Tapatalk?

Half of images lately just look like [img ] for me

 

All right, guess I'll continue the discussion over in this thread.

The way I see it, there shouldn't be any inherent reason why patriotism and universal rights should be in conflict. Or at least, as long as you don't take that patriotism to its extremes the way conservatives have. I can cheer for my country at the Olympics or World Cup without wanting British or French people to die. Considering where we are at this moment, yes, we should be very much skeptical of "patriotism" as defined by conservatives. But in general, patriotism is like alcohol...it's not necessary to have, but it can be nice long as you keep it to modest doses. The problem is that conservatives are drunkards.

Coming back from that tangent though, what incentives or safeguards are there to prevent a socialist government from taking shortcuts that benefit their own people at the expense of weaker and poorer countries? Even with good intentions, can we stop such a thing from happening? Can exploitation be stopped with the international system we have, or will this require a world government?

 

Well, patriotism equates placing your sense of belonging in the people sharing a geographical area, whereas in the class struggle your sense of belonging is in your class. I will agree with you though, in the sense that they are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

There are different lines of thought. I'm not a fan of obsessing over complicated words, definitions and labeling, but a distinction here might be useful. Socialism is about workers owning and controlling what they produce. Then, the best society to have a similar organization of production is open to debate. There is a line of thought that advocates for a centralized, state-regulated system, that we might call Marxist-Leninism (then, experts might nitpick on definitions, but I'm doing a very rough distinction, so follow me here). Then there is the opposite philosophy, which instead favors non-governmental forms of organizations, like unions and syndicates. And this is what I broadly call anarcho-socialism (anarcho because the role of the state is less central).
You can see that the second form of socialism would not benefit people of specific countries because the accent is put on the workers rather than the sate apparatus.
It's true though, that it is not very clear how this would play out, on a practical level. There is a professor that is a big fan of worker cooperatives. And I'm good with it. However, when he was asked about tariffs, he basically answer that it is not a problem we should care about. In other words, he kind of dodged the question. So I'm still rather curious about the point you raised: in case you have cooperatives that are owned and controlled by all workers rather than by a small minority of capitalists, then you still have to determine how the relationship among different cooperatives would be handled. It's perfectly possible to imagine a situation in which two different worker cooperatives producing similar good would end up competing, exactly like capitalist enterprises do.

 

Thoughts on Kautsky and his views?

He's portrayed fairly negative in online articles I've read by left-wing sites, but I'm seeing a mixed bag. Would he be considered a social democrat? He seems to have been opposed to bourgeois rule but did not want a dictatorship.

 

@Emperor Ferus
Few posts ago I made a summary of Lenin's book about imperialism. He talks about Kautsky's positions rather often. In particular, in this chapter:

He is referring to a theory endorsed also by Kautsky according to which advanced countries would somehow split the spheres of influences over the colonized countries among themselves in a sort of peaceful way, putting aside their nationalist-based hostility. Lenin criticized this view, making the case that the balance keeps changing because the imperial powers do not grow at the same speed, and frictions inevitably arise whenever the differences in economic power are not faithfully reproduced in the differences in the spheres of influence.

I don't know much more than that about him.

 

El Commandante had a beautiful GMT-Master 6542. Don't hate people with taste.

Finish it off, though; "for the many, not the Jew"

This is where the utopian aspect falls over and ends up being a basket of failure that runs the gamut from looking like Venezuela through to looking like the Soviet Union. Ignoring the fact that it's never clearly explained where workers raise the capital for a new venture (and least not in any way that has actually been thought out beyond wanting to answer the question and avoid looking clueless), the issue this model faces is it needs majority to full participation. Anyone who doesn't want in then ends up appropriated and the state, acting as the vanguard of the workers because according remember to Lenin the best the workers can do is a union, they need paternalistic socialists running things for them with their big university brains, takes over the economy.

Then you get a brain drain as the people who understand the business cycle either leave the country or end up shot like the Cubans shot gay people. Per the points made earlier in this thread; those who are good at making money are good at making money, shockingly, so they'll have resources to get out and take that precious know how with them. Assuming they've not been shot or arrested, of course. You can appropriate what they had and redistribute it, but you can't make any more of it.

There's a reason everyone trying to implement socialism ends up ****ing it up and leaving the door open for the next round of idealistic but ultimately economically illiterate cohort of socialists to say "yes, but that wasn't real socialism".

And if they are competing, it's to provide the best product at the lowest cost to the consumer whilst still making enough income to cover operating expenses plus, ideally, the wickedly named capital expenditure to invest in improving the firm.

There's a economic model that already does this though, if only I could put my finger on its name.

It also strikes me that there's a model of capitalist state that has the lowest income inequality in the world and most comprehensive welfare programmes. I don't get why people look at social democracy and say "no, I'd rather ruin things for everyone else thanks, and aim for socialism". They're basically just that weird Hux scene in TROS.

 

Social democracy? Goddamn it where is vnc to tell Ender that he is endorsing the murder of Rosa Luxemburg?

 

Ah you have one of those. How quaint.

 

Hello.
I belong in this thread.
Somewhat.
I don't like labels.
But I like this meme:

Spoiler: Trickle Down Economics!

 

Capitalist countries have public health care and regulation though.

 

"Don't worry, Americans, one day you too will get to live in a Capitalist country"?

 

TIL Castro had an economist subscription