Socialism vs Capitalism containment thread

[peekpok]

I find that its usually very difficult to untangle the concept of "socialism" from "regulation" in online conversations. Many people who purport to be anti-socialist have long supported or at least ignored massive government subsidies for agriculture, fossil fuels, and defense contractors. The US has invaded parts of the world to secure oil, but it was apparently a cardinal sin when the US government bailed out General Motors after 2008. This is pretty interesting when you consider how closely linked these two industries are.

I feel that if some people in congress introduced legislation to ban corporations from renting out single family houses, it would be criticized as being "socialist" even though it would really just be a regulation on the market. After all the government wouldn't be owning those houses either, they will still be privately owned.

It can be very hard to suss out what "socialism" is until you know very well the person you are talking to. Unless we're talking about the right-wing where socialism is just anything they personally dislike.

[wjfox]

[caltrek]

Socialist Internationalism Versus Capitalist Nationalism
by Eugene Debs
January 1916

Introduction:

(Janata Weekly) [In 1916, with World War I raging, socialist leader Eugene V. Debs wrote a short piece condemning the nationalism that had thrown soldiers into trench warfare and machine-gun slaughter.

Debs’s article appeared in the January 1916 issue of the National Rip-Saw, a mass-circulation socialist newspaper based in St Louis. The United States still hadn’t entered the war, and Debs wanted to keep it that way. He reminded his US comrades of their duty to oppose the conflict — the fetid fruit of the ruling class — and excoriated the many European socialists who had fallen in line behind their nations’ leaders.

“True socialists,” Debs wrote, “cannot at the same time be nationalists, militarists and capitalist ‘patriots.’ . . . The self-called socialists who are nationalists first and who set the ‘fatherland’ of their masters above the whole earth and above all the workers of the world are not socialists at all but either mild and harmless capitalist reformers and stool pigeons or traitors to the cause.”

Strong words. More than a hundred years later, it’s a reminder that the best way to honor those killed in war is to fight the ruling-class forces that repeatedly send soldiers off to die. We are republishing this epic article.

Introductory Comments by Debs:

(Reprinted in Jacobin) If the principles of socialism have not international application and if the socialist movement is not an international movement then its whole philosophy is false and the movement has no reason for existence.

Karl Marx, founder of the modern socialist movement, based his whole theory upon the internationality of the working class and called upon the workers of all countries to unite in the struggle for their emancipation.

Before the war broke out in Europe there was no question about the international character of the socialist movement, but when the tocsin sounded, international obligation was swept away, or forgotten, and in the frenzy aroused by the military clackers, thousands of socialist party members became the intensest of nationalists and “patriots,” utterly denying their international principles and obligations and turning traitors to the movement to which they had solemnly pledged their honor and their lives.

Read more here: https://janataweekly.org/socialist-int ... ionalism/ or here: https://jacobin.com/2022/05/eugene-v-d ... tionalism

[weatheriscool]

I support a hybrid system that has capitalism as the engine but is regulated

[wjfox]

[erowind]

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[wjfox]

[erowind]

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[wjfox]

Haven't had time to read this yet, but I'm posting the link for follow up later.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 0X22002169

[R8Z]

Interesting video on market forces.

[wjfox]

[caltrek]

What Is Exploitation?
by Daniel Taylor
October 2, 2022

Introduction:

(Janata Weekly) The word “exploitation” is special for Socialists because it contains a unique insight about the way wealth is produced in class societies. It’s the key to the Socialist argument that a revolution to end oppression won’t just require a change in the political system, but a deep transformation in the way we work.

In everyday life, the word is used in a few different ways. It usually describes those times when powerful people or institutions degrade or abuse someone, or use their power to take advantage in an extreme and unfair way. The label is often applied to especially unethical capitalist behaviour. You might say that when landlords use the desperation of unemployed tenants to demand sex instead of rent, it’s exploitation. When multi-national mining companies destroy ecosystems and leave the local economies of underdeveloped countries devastated while making off with their natural resources, or when big name clothing brands use sweatshop labour policed by violent dictatorships, these are also types of “exploitation” in the everyday sense of the word.

Those things certainly are examples of the moral depravity of capitalists. But when Socialists talk about “exploitation”, we are using it to describe a process that happens at a more fundamental level, one that even the most “ethical” capitalists participate in—a process that makes our society flawed and demands a revolution.

Human beings use technology and organise to produce wealth collectively. As we develop more advanced technology and more sophisticated social organisations, we can produce more wealth than we need to live; we can produce enough for some people, at least, to have comfortable lives. At a certain point in human history, societies became internally divided; a minority of the population began to control the majority’s labour, how they produced wealth, and where the product went. Social classes emerged. A minority controlling the processes that we use to create wealth, using their control to dominate the work and lives of others, and deciding what happens to the extra wealth that has been produced—the “surplus”—is what Socialists refer to as “exploitation”.

Read more here: https://janataweekly.org/what-is-exploitation/

caltrek’s comment: Actually, “surplus” involves a little bit more than just “exploitation.” Still, the cited essay is a very good back-to-basics description of “socialism.”

[caltrek]

What You Don’t Have and Why: The Crushing of American Socialism
by Adam Hochschild
October 6, 2022

Extract:

(Alternet) Why hasn’t our country done better, compared to so many others? There are certainly many reasons, not least among them the relentless, decades-long propaganda barrage from the American right, painting every proposed strengthening of public health and welfare — from unemployment insurance to Social Security to Medicare to Obamacare — as an ominous step down the road to socialism.

This is nonsense, of course, since the classic definition of socialism is public ownership of the means of production, an agenda item not on any imaginable American political horizon. In another sense, though, the charge is historically accurate because, both here and abroad, significant advances in health and welfare have often been spearheaded by socialist parties.

The globe’s first national healthcare system, in Imperial Germany, was, for example, muscled through the Reichstag by Chancellor Otto von Bismarck in 1883 precisely to outflank the German socialists, who had long been advocating similar measures. Nor was it surprising that Britain’s National Health Service was installed by the Labour Party when it took power after the Second World War.

And in the United States, early in the last century, some of President Theodore Roosevelt’s modest moves to regulate business and break up trusts were, in fact, designed to steal a march on this country’s socialists, whom he feared, as he wrote to a friend, were “far more ominous than any populist or similar movement in times past.”
...
Not faintly content with this (finding Eugene Debs guilty under the 1917 Espionage Act), the Wilson administration would attack the Socialists on many other fronts as well. There were then more than 100 socialist dailies, weeklies, and monthlies and the Espionage Act gave Wilson’s postmaster general, segregationist Albert Burleson of Texas, the power to deem such publications “unmailable.” Before long, Burleson would bar from the mail virtually the entire socialist press, which, in the prewar years, had a combined circulation of two million. A few dailies, which did not need the Post Office to reach their readers, survived, but for most of them such a banning was a death blow.

Read more here: https://www.alternet.org/2022/10/the-c ... ocialism/

[caltrek]

Us and Them
by Chantal Mouffe
November 6, 2022

Introduction:

(Janata Weekly) Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s strong result in the first round of this year’s French presidential elections showed that left populism is not a short ‘parenthesis’ to be followed by a return to a more traditional form of class politics. Of course, the ‘hot’ populist moment we witnessed in the last decade in Western Europe has now passed, and several of its standard-bearers – Syriza, Podemos, Corbyn’s Labour – have suffered setbacks. But that does not mean left populism has become obsolete. It would be wrong to dismiss a political strategy solely because some of its adherents did not achieve their objectives on the first attempt. Politics, as Max Weber reminds us, is a ‘strong and slow boring of hard boards’.

To be sure, Mélenchon was defeated in the presidential elections of 10 April, but he improved on his 2017 result, winning 21.95% against Marine Le Pen’s 23.15%, and missed qualifying for the final round by only 420,000 votes. If the Parti communiste français had not insisted in running its own candidate, Mélenchon may well have closed this narrow gap. It could of course be argued that Mélenchon achieved this vote share because he relinquished his previous populist strategy in favour of the classical one of left unity. From this perspective, the creation of the Nouvelle Union Populaire Ecologique et Sociale (NUPES), the electoral alliance which brought together Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise (LFI), the Socialists (PS), the Greens (EELV) and the Communists (PCF), could be seen as proof that he is no longer pursuing a populist rupture.

To assess the validity of this claim, it is necessary to clarify the meaning of ‘left populism’. We could start with the formal approach developed by Ernesto Laclau in On Populist Reason (2005).

Conclusion:

A Green Democratic Revolution would defend society and its conditions of existence in a way that empowers people, instead of encouraging them to retreat into defensive nationalism or passive acceptance of algorithmic forms of governmentality. With neoliberals trying to exploit socio-economic and climatic crises to impose authoritarian technological solutions, such a vision could resonate with a wide range of democratic demands and enhance the attraction of LFI’s programme.

Read more here: https://janataweekly.org/us-and-them/

[caltrek]

Can Increases in The Supply Of Gold Lead To Boom-Bust Cycles?
by Frank Shostak
November 13, 2022

Introduction:

()According to the Austrian business cycle theory, the boom-bust cycle emerges in response to a deviation in the market interest rate from the natural interest rate, or the equilibrium interest rate. As a rule, it is held, the tampering with market interest rates by the central bank sets the boom-bust cycle in motion.
Given this viewpoint, one might suggest that even with a gold standard without a central bank, an increase in the supply of gold money will lead to the lowering of market interest rates. This in turn is likely to cause the deviation of the market interest rates from the natural or the equilibrium interest rate. Consequently, this could set in motion the boom-bust cycle.

Murray Rothbard, however, believed that increases in the supply of gold could not set in motion boom-bust cycle. For him, the key reason behind boom-bust cycles is loose monetary policy of the central bank, which expands the money supply out of “thin air.”
Rothbard writes: “Inflation, in this work, is explicitly defined to exclude increases in the stock of specie. While these increases have such similar effects as raising the prices of goods, they also differ sharply in other effects: (a) simple increases in specie do not constitute an intervention in the free market, penalizing one group and subsidizing another; and (b) they do not lead to the processes of the business cycle.”1

Read more here: https://www.eurasiareview.com/13112022 ... analysis/

caltrek’s comment: I think there are a couple of flaws here:

1. Later in the article: a miner “mines gold because he believes that there is a market for it”. Does not the government print money “because there is a market for it.” Sure, printing money is easier than mining gold, but there also other uses of labor involved. For example, provisions to guard against counterfeit.
2. “Gold supplies an additional benefit by serving as a medium of exchange.” Does not printing money also offer a “medium of exchange”?
Of course, printing excessive amounts of money will result in inflation. The same can be said for a sudden dump of gold on the market.

[wjfox]

[R8Z]

I thought it might be interesting to share.

Are the UK socialists more nationalists, internationalists or they have no clue?

[ººº]

Are the UK socialists more nationalists, internationalists or they have no clue?

Apparently all of them but oficially internationalists (Labour party).

[wjfox]

[Ozzie guy]

You can see a stark difference in the performance of the USSR/Eastern bloc pre and post 1956 out competing capitalism to losing momentum and underperforming capitalism.

Early 1956 was Nikia Khrushchev's secret speech which is seen as the point revisionists had control of the USSR. A revisionist is basically someone who revises Marxism, so it is not Marxism. E.g. Xi Jinping and the current CPC uphold a capitalist state whist calling themselves Marxists. Worth noting for the context of the video the USSR was state capitalist until 1928 with the first 5-year plan announced late 1928 the year state capitalism led to a recession.