Interesting. It still blows my mind you’re a Bernie Bro but I can see the appeal. I’m sure there’s worse people to support, I just can’t think of them, haha.
I’d say I’m even to the left of Sanders, honestly. I’d likely support him if he ran again but I’ve become a full blown socialist in the past year or so. Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky redpilled me pretty bad (good).
Im a little curious about your view of an optimal socialist environment in the country. What would it look like? Can you give some examples of what you would like to see?
Haha wow. Hard for me to fathom. Is there a country / model you have in mind?
Please start a thread with your argument for socialism?
i personally want to see ubi! Every US Citizen past 18 yo gets a card from the us government. the government deposits $5/day to this card, and it accrues (everyone has a bank account), you receive it when you file a tax return and it is sent to your home! BAM! total cost is about 2k per citizen, roughly 228m is 18+ so cost is about $500b.
but the issue right now is we are at a 1 trillion deficit for 2018. so that needs to be fixed first before adding further debt.
Wait, UBI is $2k a year???
well just to test it out. essentially its enough to feed everyone. and digitize it.
God I hope this doesn’t happen.
That’s a great question and one I’d say I’m still figuring out in my head as I read more and more on the subject. At a high level though we’re looking at a planned economy with public ownership of current big business and free healthcare, education, housing. I don’t think the free market has the ability to see beyond the profit motive and will simply never address the fact that the planet is being inexorably destroyed, endless wars make certain people a buttload of money and that depressing wages is a great way to increase net income.
Trotsky and the Fourth International wrote about the transitional method, which is the idea that we’re simply not ready for full blown socialism as a whole but you can still make intermediate gains on the way there. So what that looks like today is supporting all the labor movements happening across the country, the fight for $15/min wage, the push for affordable housing, single payer healthcare, taxing the crap out of Amazon. Protest the failed and racist war on drugs, the failed and racist war on “terror”.
I guess the biggest thing is getting corporate money out of politics, which has effectively given your average person zero political power. The fact that the USA hails itself as a democracy is laughable. There already seems to be a trend on the progressive left about not accepting corporate PAC money which is a start, but we’ll see where that goes.
Not really. Still theoretical in nature. The fact that the CIA has undermined every attempt at a foreign socialist regime hasn’t really helped matters.
Yeah, the CIA has really done a number on Sweden.
The CIA lover has logged on.
Sweden isn’t a socialist country, but nice snark bud.
CIA lover? Not sure how you jumped to that conclusion. By most modern standards, people would consider Sweden, Finland, and Norway to be socialist. However, you’re right that they don’t self-identify as socialist so it’s really a matter of perspective. For those countries that do call themselves socialist, see the link below and let me know where you’d prefer to raise a family other than here. They all seem like paradises.
I’m always amazed at how people forget that when you make changes to a system, you don’t just fix the current systems problems. You also mess with the current systems strengths. People seem to think that only things that will change is the negatives will go away. It’s really weird.
Well, I suppose on one hand you proved my point. Without CIA intervention, the country has done pretty well comparatively. I won’t argue with you in that Sweden seems like an awesome place to live.
Along the Trotsky framework, Sweden would undoubtedly be further along the transition as their living standards for everyone are quite good and what we c(sh)ould target going forward. But they still are a capitalist country, just with more of a New Deal on steroids compromise between the working class and the capitalists… which have been slowly eroded over the past few decades by neoliberal policies like everywhere else.
https://socialistworker.org/2015/11/24/you-mean-socialism-like-in-sweden
SWEDEN’S ECONOMIC model was based on its special position in the world economy and a deal struck by the Social Democrats with the country’s capitalists. The latter were promised high profits based on exporting to the world market, and in exchange, workers received social reforms and a high social wage.
But what the Swedish Social Democrats did not do is also significant. By and large, the SAP has made no attempt to challenge capitalist ownership and control of industry.
Indeed, the Social Democrats have always taken the capitalist framework for granted, with the exception of a brief period of radicalization in the 1970s when the SAP advocated the gradual replacement of capitalist control of industry with a form of working-class ownership and control.
I feel like I’d go to a 90% tax rate above $5M-10M in annual personal aggregate income (includes capital gains and investment income) before I turned over the keys to the business ala the 50’s-70’s or whenever that was. You keep the structure that works while capping incentives to game the system and increasing govt “ownership” of the business cash flows and redistributing. I think when you turn over the keys to the government you really pervert incentives and move to added power struggles and bureaucracy. People generally just aren’t good, the problem is if you spend a lot of time in low income areas you will loose faith in some of the socialist ideals.
That’s an interesting take on the tax rate, I dig that.
I get this perspective, I do. But then I read books like The New Jim Crow (Alexander) and I’m just like… these people had no shot to begin with. It’s effectively a ghetto to prison pipeline. You don’t want to remove agency from the conversation entirely, but they’re living in an completely different world. The war on drugs really, really screwed things up.
To that end as well, Matt Taibbi wrote a book called The Divide that lays out how crime is prosecuted according to class (and to a logical extension, race) in America that I loved. People suck, no doubt, but if you’re a rich white dude sitting at a Manhattan bank sucking the wealth out of ordinary people… well we don’t seem to care about that as much as poor people jumping turnstiles or smoking joints in NYC ghettos.
I guess my constant question is how much of the responsibility in low income areas lay with the system built over it. I don’t love the answers.
Well, I grew up in a very poor area and subsequently spent a lot of time in Appalachia. There’s a lot of good people and definitely a lot of blame to be laid on the system (hence my point about the tax rates) but it’s a massive over simplification to say it’s anything more than shared blame. I read an article about redlining in Philly and it makes you understand the depth of the issue from the system. But at the same time imagining something as dysfunctional as a government can fix the system with more control is completely missing the point about power, wealth, humanity and abuse as well as just sheer incompetence through government. You can believe that putting assets under government control and concentrating power among populism will bring more competence but the reality in those scenarios is that a competent person in government is somehow even worse because they will consolidate power and ultimately you’ll be back where you started but with more class barriers, power moats and inefficiency. Hence the hybrid. It’s historically false to blame the lack of success of all socialist regimes on the CIA, it’s pure scapegoating and ignoring that in each case you’re still stuck with humans as the helm. In the same vein it’s a very one sided sociology 101 view to think all of the lower classes problems are the result of the system. There are major cultural flaws at work that aren’t isolated to the U.S.
I mean Venezuela is a great example of the anti-US socialist nationalizing assets that are now completely non-functional amid a corrupt govt that served itself and failed the people. The problem is all of these naive utopias rely on this myth of benevolent leaders. Your government leadership factually will be human and thus selfish and corrupt and you have to prepare for that and control for it and putting private sector and public sector together removes barriers and consolidates power. The west is far from innocent but many of the worst humanitarian abuses happened under socialist and communist leadership.
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
I mean, take this from the CDC / Census:
Race / non-marital births (mirrors single parent homes) / median income
Asian Americans 17% $80,720
Non-Hispanic white 29% $61,349
Hispanic 53% $46,882
American Indian 66% $39,719
African American 73% $38,555
You can certainly argue chicken and the egg there, but even adjusting for that, studies overwhelmingly show the negative impact of single parent homes on the outlook for the kids. But this gets brought up and Don Lemon nearly gets run off the air. To be clear my first kid was out of wedlock so don’t take this as a moral judgement.