Socialism - American Style

I don't find that a strong argument!

Weak as pish! The Tory Party here hated Tony Blair's national minimum wage. However, that was petty party politics. No one would suggest that the minimum wage was radical (indeed its typically supported by big business).

Its certainly the case that globalisation has provoked additional inequality concerns. However, this just means we need more radicalism. Looking back at a history where politicians failed the population doesn't help! And we know it was a failure as they needed World War to force Keynesian success.

 

Your post has violated the terms of minimum intelligence or contains content which violates the standards of rational conversation. Please try to post content of relevance and intelligence.

 

You clearly have not read Marx or Lenin.

You seem to think everything is instantaneous. Socialism is a transitory state, post-WW2 it has expanded incrementally in the West (including Western Europe). The end result of the expansion is tyrannical control by a small group of elites (call it communism or dictatorship or fascism or whatever label you want, they are all the same).

Read some history, including pre 1960 books so you can read accurate facts.

 

This amused me. You don't show any knowledge of Marxism.

 

Learn to read the previous posts before jumping into the middle of a conversation.

He argued that all authoritarianism is right wing, and that the political spectrum is linear (right and left). All false. Authoritarianism comes from across the spectrum (and the political spectrum is best described as 2 dimensional).

Thats why I listed only "left" wing authoritarians.

If you are going to be relevant, stop jumping to wild conclusions and making ignorant statements.

 

Your post has violated the terms of minimum intelligence or contains content which violates the standards of rational conversation. Please try to post content of relevance and intelligence.

 

Don't lie. I referred to the authoritarian personality and you demonstrated ignorance of the research.

 

Are you trying to show your Marxist knowledge again?

 

W O W !! THAT'S A "KEEPER"!

I knew the capitalists developed a strategy for preventing such things from happening again, but I never knew about the Powell Memorandum or Moyers' write-up on it. THANKS!!!

 

yah thanks

LOL!!!!!

 

But EarthSky, you showed how the capitalists were determined to crush the opposition of the people and organize that crushing secretly. If we allow capitalism to persist, it will continually work to crush any opposition that may arise. The fight will never end, and they have far more resources than we-the-people have.

I agree that we must do anything we can to rein in their excesses, but that must be done in the context of developing an alternative that eventually puts an end to all capitalist activities. We should use any democratic social and economic principles to buy us time to develop the alternative.

 

Do you have any idea of what such an alternative might be?

 

A hard push for all the organization needed to get pro-worker-co-op legislation passed in every state as has already been done in NY, R.I., MA, N.C, TX, and CA, get S.1O82 & HR.2357 passed in the U.S. Congress, and all the while work to start and develop worker-owned, worker-controlled cooperatives. In addition, build a People's Party to advocate for people's needs, like a thorough overhaul of our healthcare system, top to bottom, and a sane tax structure to claw back what the top 0.5% has taken, eliminate A.L.E.C., etc. etc. etc.

 

We will see when the Socialist Liberals take over America as it will happen eventually. Then, anyone who doesn't agree with them or post disagreements on message boards can be fined or imprisoned like they are doing in some Europeans countries. That would be the start of tyranny.

 

What European countries fine or imprison people for for disagreeing with worker ownership and control of the means of production?

 

My own opinion does not agree with his, and his is just an opinion. Economics is very political, and that is why you have leftist economists and rightish economists. You even have neo liberal globalist economists. All have their opinions that all too often is stated as fact. This is our reality. And that is my argument against the fellow. I do not accept his analysis and opinion.

Keynes had some things right, as others with a different ideological bent had some things right. And that is just reality. Being a pragmatist, I am not tied to any particular economic ideology. It if works, when tried, evidenced by results, I do not care what side of the political spectrum it falls on.

 

No they do not have to be mutually exclusive. You are basing this on entrenched theory from the 1800's. Thinking and practice have evolved and this is evidenced in the social democracies that exist today. Many modern theorists see democratic social policies as a way to mitigate the excesses and contradictions rather than a revolutionary ideal to replace capitalism all together - at least in the short term. There is a whole spectrum of thought on this probably best left for another thread. There is a reason why I titled the thread Socialism American style.

Well I could name several economists who describe New Deal policies as socialist starting with Richard Wolff, David Kennedy and even Krugman and Stiglitz. I am aware that there is more controversy and different opinions on this that I had perhaps taken into account and I have become aware that some commentators as you noted have tried to describe the New Deal as conservative movement. There seems to bed a lot of contention and disagreement between liberal and conservative historians and the different schools of thought between Keynesians and neo-cons and whoever else has an opinion. I try to stick to the facts as much as possible but of course my opinion can be influenced by my own interpretation as much as anyone else.

Bernstein's view on race in the new deal seems a bit jaundiced to me given that it did not end discrimination but at least addressed it and made reforms in housing as well as other sectors:

"Judged from the standards of today, of course, there is much we can criticize about the New Deal/Roosevelt era. It did not bring to an end the tremendous injustices that African Americans had to suffer on a day-to-day basis, and some of its activities, such as the work of the Federal Housing Administration, served to build rather than break down the walls of segregation that separated black from white in Jim Crow America. Yet as Mary McLeod Bethune once noted, the Roosevelt era represented “the first time in their history” that African Americans felt that they could communicate their grievances to their government with the “expectancy of sympathetic understanding and interpretation.” Indeed, it was during the New Deal, that the silent, invisible hand of racism was fully exposed as a national issue; as a problem that at the very least needed to be recognized; as something the county could no longer pretend did not exist.

This shift in attitude, as Havard Sitkoff, the noted historian of the African American experience in the New Deal observes, helped propel the issue of race relations onto the national stage and usher in a new political climate in which “Afro-Americans and their allies could begin to struggle with some expectation of success.” In short, the New Deal, and the rhetorical support given to the cause of civil rights by both Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt gave the African American community hope; the chance to dream of a better future, no matter how difficult the struggle might be along the way."

http://rooseveltinstitute.org/african-americans-and-new-deal-look-back-history/

As well, African Americans were able to work alongside any other workers in ND capital projects.

All due respect to Bernstein, I just disagree. Many of the reforms set in motion were classic platforms of the Socialist and Communist parties including the strengthening of the labour movement, the introduction of social security and pensions, public housing and minimum wages. As for not raising the impoverished, it brought relief to millions of Americans and provided employment and greased the economy with capital projects and by almost all accounts, including Robert Reich, Picketty, Kennedy and others, it represented the lowest era of economic equality in American history:

"The Great Compression refers to "a decade of extraordinary wage compression" in the United States in the early 1940s. During that time economic inequality as shown by wealth distribution and income distribution between the rich and poor became much smaller than it had been in preceding time periods. The term was reportedly coined by Claudia Goldin and Robert Margo[1] in a 1992 paper,[2] and is a takeoff on the Great Depression, an event during which the Great Compression started.


Share of pre-tax household income received by the top 1%, top 0.1% and top 0.01%, between 1917 and 2005.[3][4]
According to economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, analysis of personal income tax data shows that the compression ended in the 1970s and has now reversed in the United States, and to a lesser extent in Canada, and England where there is greater income inequality metrics and wealth concentration. In France and Japan, who have maintained progressive taxation there has not been an increase in inequality. In Switzerland, where progressive taxation was never implemented, compression never occurred.[5]

Economist Paul Krugman gives credit for the compression not only to progressive income taxation but to other New Deal and World War II policies of President Franklin Roosevelt. From about 1937 to 1947 highly progressive taxation, the strengthening of unions of the New Deal, and the wage and price controls of the National War Labor Board during World War II, raised the income of the poor and working class and lowered that of top earners. Krugman argues these explanation are more convincing than the conventional Kuznets curve cycle of inequality driven by market forces because a natural change would have been gradual and not sudden as the compression was.[6]

Explanation for the length of the compression's lasting have attributed to the lack of immigrant labor in the US during that time (immigrants often not being able to vote and so support their political interests) and the strength of unions, exemplified by Reuther's Treaty of Detroit—a landmark 1949 business-labor bargain struck between the United Auto Workers union and General Motors. Under that agreement, UAW members were guaranteed wages that rose with productivity, as well as health and retirement benefits. In return GM had relatively few strikes, slowdowns, etc. Unions helped limit increases in executive pay. Further, members of Congress in both political parties significantly overlapped in their voting records and relatively more politicians advocated centrist positions with a general acceptance of New Deal policies.[7]

The end of income compression has been credited to "impersonal forces", such as technological change and globalization, but also to political and policy changes that affected institutions (e.g., unions) and norms (e.g., acceptable executive pay). Krugman argues that the rise of "movement conservatism"—a "highly cohesive set of interlocking institutions that brought Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich to power"—beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s brought lower taxes on the rich and significant holes in the social safety net. The relative power of unions declined significantly along with union membership, and executive pay rose considerably relative to average worker pay.[8] The reversal of the great compression has been called "the Great Divergence" by Krugman and is the title of a Slate article and book by Timothy Noah.[9] Krugman also notes that era before the Great Divergence was one not only of relative equality but of economic growth far surpassing the "Great Divergence".[10]"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Compression

I know I shouldn't use wiki as a source here but I am running out of time working on this so.......

But I do appreciate the discussion and the detail you forced me to address on this subject. I just have to disagree with much of the revisionist thought that has come out since the sixties on this subject. While some may be valid, to describe the New Deal as a conservative phenom because it failed to overthrown the capitalist order or put workers in control of production just flies in the face of reason especially when traditionally it was the conservatives who opposed much of what FDR was trying to do.

I think there is an argument as to how Socialist or even Keynesian the New Deal was but in this case, leaving all the revisionism to others, I think it is telling where the largest effort to dismantle New Deal legislation has all come from the Neo-conservative movement or the corporate wing of the Democratic Party.

 

Actually I have studied Marx and Lenin in some detail. Why do you think I think everything is instantaneous? Socialism as it was first envisioned was a transitory state between revolution and actual communism where, as proposed by Marx and other theorists there would need to be authoritarian government to rule the transition from capitalists owning production to workers. Once this was achieved, there would be a democratic mechanism so that each factory and district would have a democratic vote in the nation. This never came to pass due to many factors but capitalism has not exactly had a smooth road either.

There is nothing explicitly tyrannical about socialism as it was written or theorized other than in your imagination which seems stilted in American style propaganda.

Democratic Socialist ideas have evolved and developed over time. Unfortunately, you thinking never will.

 

I read the posts. I didn't see him arguing that at all. What I saw was you painting all leftists as authoritarian and I attempted to correct you with examples.

 

Afraid you've confused yourself. The market isn't exclusive to capitalism (as illustrated by market socialism). Capitalism and socialism, however, are alternative economic paradigms. The best you have is social democracy. That isn't socialism. It is capitalism with greater redistribution as a means to stabilise capitalism (and allow the reproduction of capitalist profit).

Social democracy is not socialism. They are completely different. No one applies the socialist calculation debate to social democracy. There's no need. It is just further away from laissez faire than liberal democracy.

Happy to hear their comments. Let's have their quotes! I hope Krugman's comments are better than his new trade theory stuff. He essentially took intra-industry analysis trade to derive results similar to traditional inter-industry trade analysis to support orthodox trade policies. Perhaps his socialist analysis is more advanced?

The facts are straightforward. Its all summed up by one: FDR did not end the Great Depression; WW2 did.

Just a marginal change then and not the radical upheaval that you have suggested.

None of those policies are sufficient conditions for socialism. And the New Deal would be nothing compared to the changes provoked by WW2. Look to Britain, for example, rejecting Churchill in 1945. There's common ground here mind you. Britain now inflates Churchill's importance; Americans often inflate FDRs. There's a psychological need for that inflation. For FDR, its akin to learned helplessness. So many years of neo-liberalism, with dominance of the right wing, has led folk to think even marginal changes are radical.

There's nothing of note there. There's no structural break generated by the New Deal. There's merely a return to pre-depression outcome. That really just advertises the conservatism.

Its often easy to be corrupted by two party systems. The less conservative side can be deemed to be the world changers. In reality, its just one side is less rubbish than the other. That has naff all to do with socialism mind you.

It certainly wasn't Socialist or Keynesian. FDR did evolve over time. He did come to realise Keynesian basics. However, that was forced on him: through the reality of war, the failures of the New Deal and the success of Keynesian policies elsewhere.

 

A successful economy depends on fair practices, and free enterprise. The best thing a government can do is assure that regulation will be minimal- only what is required to "regulate" or make things run smoothly- Then, get the hell out of the way and let those who build great things do their thing. No government has ever done a job that can be done privately better than the private side will do it. It is productivity that makes us thrive, not regulation, not give-away programs that punish the producers and reward the free riders.

Latest news on a socialist disaster today:

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro carried out one of the greatest currency devaluations in history over the weekend -- a 95 per cent plunge that will test the capacity of an already beleaguered population to stomach even more pain. One likely outcome is that inflation, which already was forecast to reach 1 million per cent this year, will get fresh fuel from the measures. Prices are currently rising at an annualized rate of 108,000 percent.

30 years ago, I was managing a renovation of a 100 ft yacht in a Venezuelan boatyard at Cumana, when riots broke out over failing price controls and martial law was imposed. At that time, a US dollar would buy three Venezuelan dollars. Last week, it would buy 250,000. A roll of toilet paper was worth more than an equal weight of paper currency. With the new currency devaluation- One US Dollar will buy 6 million Venezuelan dollars. The crisis is so bad that people cannot afford to bury their dead- and mothers are giving away their children because they have no way to feed them. The stores are empty, the gas stations dry, and millions of people are fleeing the country. In 2012, the government banned private ownership of weapons, and moved to disarm the people; insuring they can't overthrow the government. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world, but has been destroyed by socialism.

 

No you did not read the posts. This is what he posted:

I pointed out Left wing examples of authoritarianism. Authoritarianism comes from across the spectrum.

Are you going to argue like he did that authoritarianism is only from the "right wing"?

 

All governments move toward accumulating more power until they become tyrannical. No matter how benign they are at the start, they always move to concentrate power until the nation is controlled by an small ruling elite which uses the govt for its own ends.

Thats all systems, from the pre-historic Egyptians through the Sumerians, Greeks, Romans, and USA.


Modern socialists ignore 2 huge flaws.
1 - They ignore human nature. There are always people who crave power and control, their motives differ but they want power to control others. Some think they can do it better, some think they are better than everyone else, some simply lust for power and wealth. These people will always gravitate to positions of power, and the govt is the ultimate position of power.

And there are always people willing to follow the "leaders". There are always people who can be bought with govt goodies or enticed to follow a leader as a movement or are simply lazy.

And socialism by its very mechanics of implementation is one step away from dictatorship.

2 - No system is static, and for socialism to work it has to remain static, it has to remain "socialism". It has to be immune to the influence of human nature, and thats impossible.

Thats always the excuse.

Socialists and communists always say that past systems have failed - and they have all failed - because they were not "true socialism", they were corrupted by individuals (there's that human nature thing).

But now the socialists claim they have learned, "this time" they can do it properly and it will work. "This time" they wont kill millions of their own people, commit genocide, and run slave camps.

Notice you state that in your eyes I am a lost cause, a person who you cannot sway to your arguement. So in your brave new world, what do you do with the millions of people like me? Re-education camps? Gulags? Take away our food ration cards? Or just murder us?

 

I have referred to the research. The phenomenon of right wing authoritarianism (RWA) has been repeatedly demonstrated, through empirical research and psychology experiment. You won't find one study that finds such authoritarianism exists for socialists. You will find analysis suggesting that RWA can be applied to Stalinists, but that has nothing to do with socialist political economy (who have been the strongest critics of such dictatorship)

 

Facts do seem to bother right wingers! It is a fact that RWA cannot be applied to socialists. It is a fact that socialists have always been active in critiquing the authoritarianism of Stalinism