Please don't abuse Europe as projection screen for your simplistic mindset.
It's made up of a lot of different countries with different political mindsets, and for none of them your premise "left of America = Socialism" holds true.
I am either, nuts, or...
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It's made up of a lot of different countries with different political mindsets, and for none of them your premise "left of America = Socialism" holds true.
kochman
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What a terrible reply you have supplied.
Go back beyond 1981... tell me what you come up with regarding Congress... This debt didn't start in 1981.
Spending is the #1 contributor... if you cut taxes, you should be cutting spending, if you don't, you don't blame the cutting of taxes, you blame the continuation of spending.
If you take a pay cut, you cut your personal spending... if you don't, you go further into debt, but you didn't have to, because you could have cut spending.
Your approach assumes there is not only no limit to future spending increases, but that you just can't cut current spending...
Talk about highly disingenous. Cause and effect...
I am not blaming the left, FYI, I am just clearing up the nonsensical notion that it was all the right that did this...
Both parties have had an EQUAL hand in this mess.
kochman
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First, thanks for your insult.
Second, I was referring mainly to the core of Western Europe, which in my head I understood to be the case, but didn't make clear in my post. I believe you could have just asked me to define what I meant instead of insulting me though.
I should thank you for supplying me with the first line of my post.
The exponential ramp-up in debt we are seeing today started in the 80s. Before then, it peaked at 120% of GDP around WW2 and the Korean War, and had been in decline into the 70s, where it was roughly flat as a % of GDP. That's why I started my analysis in 1981. Strictly speaking, since the debt started with Hamilton, would you like me to go all the way back to the 1790s? Something tells me that will be unproductive.
As I posted before, spending is only half the equation. You can't just focus on what is happening with expenses without also paying attention to revenues. Would you agree that the people advocating the cut in taxes should cut the spending in the same bill or at least in the same fiscal year, so as to effect the change simultaneously? Would fiddling with one lever and not the other imply that they have a greater responsibility for the state we are in now?
This attempt to blame both parties equally sounds like some variation on the argumentum ad temperantiam fallacy. It's essentially refusing to assess the situation realistically by claiming everyone is responsible, what's done is done, etc.
My approach also assumed nothing about the spending levels increasing or decreasing, and if you can find the quote from my post that does, please highlight it. In any case, stop falsely attributing assumptions to me.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
It's becoming rapidly apparent that we are using both "concentration" and "capital" in very different senses. Allow me to try again.
Marx argued that capital, in the sense of the means of production (and as opposed to financial capital, although the current models of investment don't entirely free that from the same trends), would become concentrated under the control of a smaller and smaller number of economic actors, specifically under the institutions of collective capital, corporations. He acknowledged that the number of individuals staking a claim in any given accumulation of capital may vary depending on circumstances, but considered this a minor detail. For him, what is important is not whether MegaCorp is owned by one person or a thousand people, but that it is MegaCorp rather than a thousand Miniature & Sons that actually exist.
That, at least, should be difficult to argue with.
Now there's just nowhere we can go if you are going to call the Democratic party liberal.
What liberal positions have the Democrats not abandoned over the past 30 years?
Are they working to benefit labor? No.
Are they working to benefit consumers? No.
Are they working for expanded civil rights? No.
Are they working to improve the lot of minorities? No.
Are they trying to expand benefits for the poor? No.
Are they working to end government support for the Supply Side economics fraud? No.
Are they working to restore sound regulatory structure? No.
Did they pass the public option for health care reform? No.
The Democratic party is less liberal on all of the core issues of government than they were a couple decades ago. It is just flat out wrong to call them liberal. Not only does the party not trend liberal, but it hardly includes even handfuls of liberals any longer.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. You want me to argue with the socialists some more?
Liquidity at this point in time is especially not the issue.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here. You want me to argue with the socialists some more?
It was a reference to MantaRaven unsubscribing once this debate started; it was fun to read through and I said as much. I would have contributed if I had something substantive to say on it, but most of the points I was familiar with were already mentioned or I didn't feel like I had a good question.
Same reason why I lurk in the money thread, the no-WW thread over in history, and 'Ask a Red'.
I thought you did know enough to participate intelligently in the money thread....
My main problem with the socialists is that they can come up with fair criticisms of capitalism all day long. But when asked to really describe what would replace it, how it would work, and why people should chose it, they really don't have anything convincing to say.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
We don't have anything to say on the first two because we're not in the habit of constructing utopian blueprints, and I don't believe that anyone's actually asked the third one yet, at least in neither this thread or the Ask A Red thread.
(Seriously, I don't get how that works. One minute we're criticised as utopians, the next we're accused of having "no plan"? Make up your mind, liberals!
)We don't have anything to say on the first two because we're not in the habit of constructing utopian blueprints, and I don't believe that anyone's actually asked the third one yet, at least in neither this thread or the Ask A Red thread.
(Seriously, I don't get how that works. One minute we're criticised as utopians, the next we're accused of having "no plan"? Make up your mind, liberals!
You don't have a plan, you have an ideal and expect people to jump without a plan. That falls under utopian from my point of view.
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
You don't have a plan, you have an ideal and expect people to jump without a plan. That falls under utopian from my point of view.
For a people so fond of markets, you liberals do love your plans.
innonimatu
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That's because you think socialism is about state-owned, centrally planned enterprises. No, socialism is really, in fact, the mere absence of capitalism, the absence of the profit motive as the driving force of labor. What you replace it with is open to discussion. Many socialists in the past replaced it (supposedly transitory) with central state control. Other arrangements are possible, and will have to be tried. I don't pretend to know which will work. Ideas range from letting the state own or subsidize every business to letting a "free marked" run but outright distributing a "living wage" to everyone for spending, by simply creating money, and letting further money or any other motivator (there are many possible ones, above the minimum living income) drive people's actual choice of occupation.
I'm only telling you that the use of profit as the mover of economic decisions, which is the linchpin of capitalism, cannot continue much longer. In the most recent economic fashion, the "knowledge economy" which we keep being told is the future (...), it is plainly wasteful and can only be shoehorned in by creating artificial scarcity through legal monopolies. In the more dull "services economy" it turns into a creator of pointless services or it drives the commercialization of what would otherwise be freely traded/gifted services, just for the sake of keeling the money and profits flowing. One example is how noways parents complain that they or their family/friends have no time to care for their kids, yet they dump them with people employed specifically to care for other people's kids! Technically we could employ everybody as servants of somebody else, commercialize every human interaction, and have full employment and "grow" the GDP - it doesn't mean that is a desirable goal to pursuit! It's not even doable, because people's demand for services supposes that they'll have the time to enjoy those services,which they won't if they themselves are employed... serving someone else!
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Well, firstly, that's not how the term "utopian" has been historically used in this context. It refers to the design of allegedly perfect socio-political systems, the famous example being Plato's Republic. They're conceived of as intentional communities, brought into being by a process of planned, mechanical construction. Simply arguing for an "ideal", if that is what communists are doing, only makes one an idealist. Otherwise everyone from the Jacobins to the Nazis would be "utopian", which would quite frankly rob the word of any meaning beyond the rhetorical.You don't have a plan, you have an ideal and expect people to jump without a plan. That falls under utopian from my point of view.
Secondly, I'm not sure what you mean by an "ideal", in this case. Communism, in the Marxist conception, is not something that exists transcendently, waiting to be brought into concrete being, but is described as the culmination of certain historical processes. That's not really "idealism" as the term is traditionally used.
And that's even worse. You just assume this will happen. Well why would it? Why would people choose to go that way?
Cheezy the Wiz
Socialist In A Hurry
Because the driving force of social change is class conflict. There are only two classes now, capital owners and workers. One will necessarily subsume the other, because their exploitation will become intolerable. And it will become intolerable when the unstable system brings itself to the brink of collapse.
So they will choose it because people are not inherently slaves, and will accept nothing else. It will most likely happen without people even realizing that they're communists or enacting the principles advocated by communists.
You see that because you're angry. Well I'm angry too. But I also see a 3rd way. And I know that that 3rd way works. If people can be talked into doing it.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
It's not an assumption in the slightest. Capitalism contains certain internal antagonisms, namely the antagonisms between labour and capital. Material scarcity means that the two fight over a limited battlefield, and one which becomes progressively tighter over time (falling rate of profit), and within this broad tendency expands and contracts unpredictably (i.e. the business cycle). If this terrain becomes so tight that labour can not advance its interests against capital within that terrain, it has no choice but to either submit to capital, or to overthrow it. If the latter outcome occurs, a revolution of the worker-class, then we what emerges is a scenario in which the categories of labour and capital are still intact, but in which labour now dominates capital, rather than capital dominating labour. (This is Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat", in which class society still exists, but in which labour, rather than capital, is the hegemonic class.) Marx argues, however, that the very categories of labour and capital exist to permit the domination of capital by labour, so this state of affairs is self-contradictory. Labour would be obliged to voluntary sublimate itself to capital, to continue to labour under the conditions dictated by the demands of a commodity-based economy, and to construct a dummy-capital on which the system of wage labour can hang (this is the situation in which contemporary workers' cooperatives find themselves). So unless working class hegemony is so weak as to allow for collapse back into the old order (more or less what happened in Russia), the only way to resolve the contradiction is to dissolve its terms, which means the reorganisation of production and distribution in such a manner as to dissolve commodity production and the class structures which it produces. We can't see this society, for the simple fact that it does not exist, and any discussion of it can be no more than an educated guess, an attempt to infer from the process a set of feasible general terms. Our only real knowledge is negative, an understanding of what it isn't, what it by definition can't be; the positive details are yet to be decided.
Now, that is not as mechanical process as the generalised description may imply- personally, my communism is served with a side of Gramsci and a garnish of anarchism, so I would tend to stress the necessity of the subjective more than most- but that's the jist of it. You probably don't agree with it, and you may well think that it's all complete tripe, but there's clearly, or at least I hope I've argued well enough for it to be clear, an internal logic to it.
It's really more like an "eight way" at this point. They've been trying "third ways" for a century, and they can't all be "third".
lovett
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Did he? To quote from Das Kapital (Vol. 1 Ch.25):
Marx said:
This seems to predict that capital, or wealth, will become concentrated in the hands of fewer 'individual capitalists'.
Could he mean 'economic agent' rather than 'person' by 'individual capitalist? I find it unlikely. To quote from Ch.4:
Marx said:
It seems to give the impression that he thinks capitalists are people rather than firms. We don't usually talk about firms with gender pronouns, for instance. If so, his prediction seems clearly that capital will become concentrated in the hands of fewer people.
Indeed, later in Ch.25 he goes on to illustrate his assertions regarding capital accumulation by looking at income distribution data (derived from tax schedules) regarding the UK in 1854 and 1864. He believed growing inequality indicated increased capital accumulation.
If Marx were right on this, his prediction regarding capital accumulation are falsified by the observed result that income inequality has decreased significantly since Das Kapital was published and the modern day. Quite simply, Marx was wrong.
I can't say you start this post off in a promising way. You begin with two false sentences. I clearly don't think the only thing that could be described as socialism is an economy constituted by 'state-owned centrally planned' enterprises. I talk about 'worker co-operatives' in the very post you quote. Nor is it true that 'socialism is...the mere absence of capitalism'. A feudal state, for instance, is clearly a non-capitalist state. However it is definitely not a socialist state.
I would say that fortunately the rest of your argument doesn't rest on these two falsehoods, but I can't say I see much of an argument to be resting on anything at all. I am aware that you are 'telling me' that the profit-motive no longer provides possible motive for economic decisions, what I am saying is that you have not backed this up. You have digressed on more-or-less eloquent tirades against the capitalist system but failed to define a clear line of argument. When you have defined a line of argument you have failed to support it. You have still failed to support your assertion that 'demand for services is more volatile than that for capital' let alone the further assertion that 'capitalist firms cannot plan appropriately in service-economies'. I am sorry if this comes across as a bit harsh, but so far you have thoroughly failed to back up your assertion that the end of capitalism is historically inevitable (indeed, imminent). You have failed to evidence your premises and failed to put forward a coherent argument.
aelf
Ashen One
Eh. I find this observation somewhat uninteresting. Firstly, I find it pretty easy to accept that modern capitalism is significantly different from pre-modern capitalism in that the former has seen the rise of megacorporations as significant economic players that have taken the dominant spot that individual tycoons used to occupy. Did Marx fail to predict this trend? I think that's a very likely but unsurprising possibility.
Secondly, since Marx was concerned about the ownership of the means of production and not income inequality per se, a general decrease in income inequality alone doesn't prove him wrong. You might argue that the decrease in income inequality is attendant to the fact that ordinary people are increasingly able to become owners of the means of production through the purchase of shares and such - that's a pretty compelling argument, but it might need to be qualified. It's possible, for example, to have different ideas on what ownership entails, and one could say that even though smalltime shareholders may be entitled to receive dividends and may therefore be said to have a share of the profits of a business, they may not have any influence on how the business is run and are therefore not necessarily really owners of means of production. Besides, it does not necessarily change the relationship between workers and their employers and the alienation of the former from the labour that they expend for the benefit of the latter.
So, essentially, you're saying that Das Kapital is kind of dated, but that's completely unsurprising. It would take a lot more effort to argue that it is devoid of any point that is relevant to modern-day capitalism, as some people seem to believe.
