It’s not a public square until it is controlled by the public democratically. Anything less is a substitute, a stand in for The Big Conversation we probably should be having.
The fears people have about “collective action for the common good” aren’t trivial. The potential for corruption, cheating and diversion of the public will to private whims is real.
Too many people are more comfortable letting some powerful man tell them “I’ll take care of people like you” and screw the Big Conversation.
The fragmented fake public square, is an obstacle to really getting anything big enough done.
Maybe the maximal size of a human society that can act together is just not able to be that big. (I don’t really buy this)
The social media problem and the inability to seriously face climate change problems are linked by common cause. Are we going to hope someone powerful will just fix it for us? That’s the current ‘plan.’
Are we really this terrified of what a real public square might produce?
@futurebird Our culture has devolved into hearing what we want to hear, bearing what we want to bear and kicking cans down the road... instant gratification.
Folks have been perfecting making sure somebody else gets the hard consequences... except that's not working so well now for many of us -- but we need to figure that out and get togehter...
@futurebird yes! Solving our own problems for real is not very popular! It means facing very hard problems (people who like puzzles are ok with this part) with a great likelihood of having to willingly accept pain or at least discomfort (prob only the masochists interested here). This means the target audience for fixing our own problems is just the puzzle-loving masochists. That is just not very many people!!
@futurebird This reminds me of a study examining the optimal size of a long lasting cooperative and mutually beneficial human society by studying human history. That number was ~150 people. I wish I could remember the authors, but read it ~13 yrs ago. That snippet from their conclusion, however, I never will forget.
@futurebird Religion managed to bind together (more or less) about a billion people each, with some fantasy stories. I'm thinking there must be a bigger story, that encompasses more people. But grounded in reality, and lifting us out of the dark future we're currently facing.
Uh-huh, so you’re against one thing, which means you’re for an alternative. But you don’t want to say what it is.
Thing is, we know. The alternative to capitalism is communism. If that’s not the alternative you intend, then it’s on you to provide an alternate alternative.
Sorry, I didn’t see your toot in my notifications because I blocked sarfeo (for refusing to answer). I’ll respond now:
Yes, in fact there were various economic systems that predated capitalism, and none of them were communism, but they featured all the same flaws that are currently ascribed to capitalism.
That’s why I’m always saying that if you’re blaming capitalism for, say, greed or bigotry or environmental harm, you’re blaming the wrong thing.
The blame belongs with the root economic causes, which are universal issues, not an aspect of any single system. It’s the fault of resource scarcity combined with human nature.
So, for example, the colonialism that we’re still fighting the vestiges of happened under feudalism and mercantilism, not modern capitalism.
However, we’re not going back to any of these historical systems, and there are no viable modern alternatives to capitalism.
The USSR and China, for example, ran under a command economy and that was a huge failure.
What actually works, and what you actually find in the real world, are mixed economies, which is to say regulated capitalism.
Capitalism is terrible, but it’s better than everything else, so maybe it’s not so terrible. It’s the very best thing we’ve got for creating wealth. Of course, it needs some help with the distribution side, which is where taxation and regulation comes in.
But we’re way past the point where we can take the idea of communism seriously. It’s been tried and it’s always failed, with no sign that it will ever do anything but fail again. It never even came close to working, not even a little, not even for a little while.
@TruthSandwich@futurebird
Feudalism was terrible, but at the time it was better than everything else that had been tried. That does not mean it'd have been valid to conclude "maybe it's not so terrible".
I don't actually think it's very interesting whether or not people think socialism or communism can work.
I think it's more interesting why people think capitalism can survive, and why they think capitalism is somehow unique in not having failure mode that will eventually end it.
OK but if you maintain a system by violence you can't claim it's the best system ever because it naturally eliminated the alternatives by being better.
It eliminated the alternatives just as the early kings. By killing them off.
Socialism is based on violence. As I point out in that essay, the first communist nation was built on the bones of millions of its own people (and this pattern repeated for the others).
So if your objection is that capitalism can’t be valid because it’s violent, then you can’t reasonably defend communism.
You can’t end monarchy by killing kings because more can always be created. You can’t end capitalism by killing capitalists, for the same reason.
As opposed to the violence and repression of the USSR?
I can point to more enlightened versions of capitalism, such as in the Nordic states. Can you point to any enlightened or even marginally successful versions of Marxism?
(That’s a rhetorical question: we both know the answer.)
@vidar@TruthSandwich@futurebird What do you mean, better than everything else that had been tried? There were systems of free labor in medieval Europe contemporary with serfdom. There were so many peasants fleeing to cities with free labor that there were rules for how long lords had to fetch the peasants back (a year and a day). There were peripheral regions that never quite adopted manorialism and it was fine; Russia only went manorial as the Early Modern tsardom was reestablishing serfdom.
If you want an argument for why capitalism is better than anything before it that I fully agree with, read chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto. Marx was a massive fanboy of capitalism..
He just expected it to eventually give way to something else, like every preceding system.
@vidar@TruthSandwich@futurebird Yeah, and he was wrong. Historiography marches on, and at this point historians don't even like talking about feudalism as a thing that existed. There were a lot of coexisting different systems in medieval Europe and while manorialism was the most common, it was deeply parasitic on revenue generated by urban market economies.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird Wait - none of what I'm talking about is communism. I don't think it really makes sense to speak of communism or socialism before the industrial era. The point of socialism was to replicate egalitarian communal structures at scale; that's not really a thing in a preindustrial society.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird Yeah, during early industrialization, in explicit reaction against it while still trying to have capitalist manufactures.
(P.S. the "Sanders is a Russophile" line in the post is complete bunk; Sanders has supported weapons deliveries and other aid to Ukraine. Nor did he equate Democrats and Republicans - he caucused with Democrats throughout his tenure, and strongly endorsed Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020.)
Sanders honeymooned in Russia and has allowed himself to be used for Russian propaganda at least as far back as the 1980’s. (See linked article.) His recent criticism is focused on the fact that Russia is no longer communist and is instead run by oligarchs. In other words, he loves Russia and wants to bring back the good old days.
Sanders has recently carried water for Putin, arguing that he has “legitimate concerns about NATO expansion) while his allies (the JD’s) have voted against Ukrainian aid.
As for endorsing Clinton “strongly”, that’s a lie. He claimed his loss was due to rigging and he had his surrogates pimp for spoiler Stein. (Receipts below.)
Like I said, I’m not the first to recognize him as our Thalmann.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird Okay, so Ilhan Omar voted against aid to Ukraine. But Bernie Sanders voted for aid to Ukraine. And Briebrie is a lot of things but she is not currently employed by Sanders; she and Sirota were bad at their jobs during the primary and therefore ended up not getting hired by the Biden campaign, White House, or Sanders' Senate office.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird These are not Bernie Sanders. Stop it. Sanders is notably not endorsing Cornel West's presidential run, for example. The issue with Ernst Thälmann wasn't that he publicly endorsed a united front over some internal KPD objections. He did no such thing. He personally, loudly, called SPD the moderate wing of fascism and refused to engage in any social action until Stalin permitted it, by which point it was too late.
They’re people Sanders endorses to this very day. Nina Turner, for example, equated liberals with feces and she’s still a Fellow of his BS Institute.
I’m pretty sure there isn’t much distance between Bernie and his wife, either.
So, no, I do not accept your attempt to excuse him for what his surrogates did at his command. Nor for the fact that he personally spread the “rigged” blood libel, as well as having at least two surrogates do it.
What Thalmann did was to equate social democracy with fascism. But, actually, that was just Stalin’s own doctrine of social fascism. And Bernie’s been equating the DNC and RNC for fucking decades now.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird He stopped having surrogates when he stopped running for president. That's when Briebrie switched from incompetent press secretary to open wrecker. The surrogate system in the US is specific to presidential politics; senators don't have any of that (who's a surrogate for Chuck Schumer?). The rest is... quotes from 1990 complaining that the Democratic Party was ideologically bankrupt? Which it was, in 1990; it was Democrats like Moynihan who scuttled Hillarycare.
He never stopped running for president. His 2016 campaign became his 2020 campaign. They just switched from stanning for Sanders to taking over the DNC. (See attached.)
But as I’ve pointed out, Sanders himself repeated the “rigged” blood libel. It wasn’t just his surrogates giving him cover, he gave voice to it.
It's quite telling when you first argue for regulated capitalism, and then get all worked up over someone who by European standards is a mildly centre-left (at best) social democrat.
If you want to look at "somewhat functioning" capitalism, such as in Scandinavia, we all have economic systems far to the left of anything Bernie has pushed.
@vidar@TruthSandwich@futurebird What are the features of Sweden and Norway that you're thinking of right now? Because (ignoring the existence of Anders Tegnell for a moment) I think of universal health care, free education, sectoral collective bargaining, high union density, and high taxes on the middle class. Main difference I see from Sanders is that he disagrees with the socdem-neoliberal compromises that cut taxes on capital income while leaving high labor incomes heavily taxed.
E.g. in Norway, the state owns about 1/3 of the market cap of the Oslo Stock Exchange, and that ignores the bulk of state owned companies which are not listed.
Even the Norwegian conservative party leader stated some years back that for the state to own 34% of the largest banking group was a strategic long-term goal.
@vidar@TruthSandwich@futurebird That's specific to Norway and the oil revenues. It's not core to the model; Singapore has a state investment arm and is in no way socialist (look at its inequality, or at how it handles losses in this investment arm), while Sweden has no sovereign wealth fund like that.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird We have tankie politicians here and what they do not do, ever, is vote in favor of more military aid to Ukraine. Quite to the contrary - they're loudly against it, figuring that this is their chance to stake a position that has limited public support but even less elite support. In that sense, Bernie's views of the conflict are more like those of the left flank of SPD than like those of Die Linke.
Recent-Bernie is less of a tankie than previous-Bernie, but not by much. I believe you can find attached receipts of him making assorted excuses for Putin’s invasion, and I can easily show you receipts of others in his circle continuing to do so.
I’m not a right-wing American, so I couldn’t say. What’s funny is that the Republicans have been falsely accusing Democrats of being “socialists” for decades.
But since 2015 or so, we’ve had morons like AOC run as Democrats and brag about being socialists. She’s doing her level best to give the Republicans ammo against Democrats.
America is not Norway. The specifics of what works there would not necessarily work here. And the Nordic states are, by any measure, far from perfect. (I shared this blog post just a minute ago, in a parallel thread, but I’ll repeat it: https://truth-sandwich.com/2021/01/09/why-arent-we-sweden/)
I’m fine with more regulation, more taxation, and a better social safety net. However, none of that is really on the menu right now.
Right now, we’re trying to stave off a fascist takeover. We can argue over policy once the fascists are defeated again.
Well, you're far to the right of me, anyway. Then again, most Americans are right-wing by European standards.
Also, always love the exceptionalist argument where nothing that works elsewhere - no matter how many places - will work in America, followed by an argument for basically giving up and not trying for anything better.
To think there was a time when America was leading the push for more worker rights and improved conditions for people...
Yeah, no. This is a lie that the far left in America loves to spread, but it’s a lie. Trying to directly compare parties across nations is fraught with difficulties, and winds up being a reflection of your criteria, not reality. For example, UHC is taken for granted in some parts of Europe, but so is anti-immigration.
Every country is exceptional. Every system has to be tailored to the specifics of the country it’s in.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird FYI, in the 2010s, even before 2015, the US was taking in something like a quarter the per capita admissions of refugees of the total of Western Europe. The "Europe is so anti-immigration" line from Americans is mostly "I am treated worse as an immigrant in Europe than as a native-born citizen in the US." In reality, there's way more openness to immigration here.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird The thing that fries everyone's brains is that most Swedes say that immigration creates social problems but they support keeping it anyway as a personal sacrifice for global human rights, whereas most Americans say that immigration is good for the country but they support limiting it anyway because something something border security.
As a European, I don't give a shit what the far left in America loves to say. What I can say, is that in my personal experience most Americans are right-wing not just by my standards, but by those of most people I know.
And again, the exceptionalist argument is comical.
E.g. universal healthcare is a thing in almost every developed country. It's taken for granted everywhere in the developed world other than the US. But yes, they're tailored.
So this notion that the fact that the US is different makes UHC an issue is comical. UHC systems in Europe alone ranges from almost fully state-run single-payer over tax, via significantly private single-payer over tax, to significantly private but regulated insurance with state funding to those who can't afford private ensuring universality.
Europe alone does not have two remotely identical systems.
What it does have is dozens of tailored UHC systems.
Again, UHC has been part of the Democratic platform for ages now. Clinton attempted it; I mean Hillary, back when she was just first lady. Obama’s ACA attempted it, but got watered down by scum like Lieberman.
The entire left knows we need it. The difference is that the sane left wants to finish the job Obama started while the far left wants a system that would be destroyed faster than the NHS.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird What do you mean "the sane left"? If you mean the institutional Democratic Party, then it gave up on health care reform after seeing the results of the 2010 and 2014 midterms. There's been no serious effort to plug the holes, e.g. to introduce a public option. There's some line in the party platform about it but the actual political capital of 2021-2 went to the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the spending bill that became the Inflation Reduction Act.
The sane left is the liberal left. It’s defined by its rejection of populism and Marxism, but not a rejection of leftism. Ironically, the sane left is more consistently to the left than the far left is.
For example, the sane left supports gun control, but the far left doesn’t. The sane left is profoundly antiracist (and antibigotry, in general), but the far left isn’t.
The sane left voted for the Bipartisan Infrastructure bill that you mentioned, but the far left didn’t.
As for the public option, it’s explicitly in Biden’s platform, but we don’t have the votes for it. I know that such boring political realities are routinely ignored by the far left, but the sane left has to deal with what’s possible.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird "We don't have the votes for it" is kinda horseshit in this context. The Biden administration spent an entire year coaxing Manchin to vote for the spending bill that became the IRA, because those investments were a priority. The stuff they didn't care about, like path to citizenship, they were all too happy to say "the Senate Parliamentarian said no" about. The public option I don't think they even perfunctorily tried the way they did with path to citizenship.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird And, like, fine, I get prioritization. I think they were wrong to prioritize the IRA over path to citizenship (tl;dr: politicos always underestimate how pro-immigration the electorate is, on both sides of the Pond), but I get that the IRA is doing cool things. But that's not the same as "they didn't have the votes for the public option."
“We don’t have the votes for it” is the equivalent of “thanks for the invitation, but I’m busy”. It means that you have other priorities and only limited political capital to spend.
When we got the ACA passed, it results in Democrats losing their seats. We knew it would happen, but we did it anyway.
Manchin’s support for the IRA is going to result in him losing his seat, which is why he’s messing around with the No Labels spoilers now. He’s trying to cash out as his career ends.
So, yeah, expanding ACA will cause us to lose seats we can’t afford to. You’ll have to forgive me for shortening this down to “we don’t have the votes”.
American liberals are not neoliberals. Reagan was a neoliberal. Thatcher, too. We are modern liberals, which has nothing to do with neoliberalism, despite having that l-word in common.
The DNC platform includes universal health care, but in a realistic form. Sanders is a populist, so he panders with empty promises, such as M4A and GND.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird I'm not talking about the Democrats. I was @-ing Vidar, who's Norwegian, about neoliberal parties in the Nordic countries, like the Center Parties (originally farmer parties, since transformed into neoliberal ones), or the Liberal Parties (which are also neoliberal and generally to the right of the Center). Various compromises all over Scandinavia resulted in a system with low capital income taxation while keeping upper middle-class labor income heavily taxed.
I have a shortish blog post about Sweden and why they were able to get away with the sort of social programs that are lacking in America. Maybe it will address your points.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird It's a bad blog post and you should feel bad. So many words that could be summarized as "you can't have social democracy in a multiracial country." But that, too, is just false. For example, it's notable how the increase in inequality in Sweden in the peak era of neoliberalism happened before mass immigration. The voucherization of the school system did not come about because of racism; at the time, the Sweden Democrats weren't even in the Riksdag.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird And what since mass immigration, starting in the 2000s? Well, after the 2014 election, there was a cordon sanitaire agreement to keep the Sweden Democrats out of power. It lasted until 2022. The Liberals and Moderates broke it - and immediately after they did there was such massive voter backlash that the polls over the last 10 months have shown an all-left majority, which Sweden last had in the 2002 election.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird Can you not explain Sweden to a Norwegian and a former resident of Sweden? The truth is that the left always thinks the social safety net is under attack. One of the things that most infuriates me about the radical left today is that in a time of falling inequality thanks to full employment, it instead chooses to make Thatcherite arguments for why inflation is immoral.
The Sanders people here are embracing (a broken version of) MMT precisely because it promises the ability to print endless amounts of money without risk of inflation.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird Some are, yes. But the main of American left-populist media (say, the Prospect, which published Lee Harris's Putinist screeds for way too long) instead talks about greedflation.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird Yeah, Guillotine specifically is very special and keeps running those Ukraine's-Jewish-president-is-a-Nazi articles. They are also not Bernie Sanders. (The Intercept is a mixed bag, because a lot of its anti-liberalism is just outright right-wing, like those "antifa kills grandma" pieces. And then separately there are all the people there who want the place to be more normal and less Greenwaldian.)
You can be forgiven for thinking the far left’s anti-liberalism is right-wing, because it uses so many of the same talking points, but it’s not. It’s just that the far left is barely distinguishable from the far right due to their shared populism. This is the horseshoe that you’ve probably heard about.
The far-left Justice Democrats are anti-Ukraine as is the far-right Republican Party. It’s the liberals who are pro-Ukraine.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird Yeah, I'm aware, re Ukraine. But I'm making a separate claim here: that the Intercept specifically has these takes that aren't just horseshoe theory anti-NATO, but also anti-BLM and anti-Antifa (whereas on Guillotine the takes have been pro-BLM, just occasionally lamenting that it was a nonviolent movement).
P.S. in Germany we don't have a horseshoe but an M-curve: far left, far right, and center love Putin; mainline left and mainline right support Ukraine.
In a sense, we have that here, except that the center right is so beaten down that it’s hard to even tell.
The far left and far right loves Putin because he pays their bills. The center is apathetic about foreign policy and generally opposed to spending money outside of our borders.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird The center here isn't apathetic. It likes the gas deals with Putin. The more left-wing a member of SPD is, the likelier they are to support Ukraine - but Die Linke is tankie. On the right, Armin Laschet is pro-Assad, whereas more right-wing pols like Markus Söder and Friedrich Merz are better on this and right-wing media is very pro-Ukraine - but AfD loves anyone who'd bring back Nazism, like Putin.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird Yeah, there's a reason Die Linke is polling at the electoral threshold and AfD is polling at 21%. There's no communist alternative to European democracy, but there is a fascist alternative, with new washing machines even...
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird Um... okay? This is not a take that's recognizable to anyone who actually lives in a multiparty system. Yeah, we have nuts. So do two-party systems (what do you think Trump is?). Generally, multiparty systems make it easier to form cordon sanitaire agreements, as in Belgium (again, the breaking of the agreement in Sweden and now Finland is leading to electoral backlash).
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird What do you mean, disempowered and silenced? William Buckley specifically hugged the Birchers for as long as he needed them for political muscle. That far right element was way more empowered in 1960s America than the neo-Nazis were here, outside the specific case of FPÖ, in what is by most accounts Northern Europe's racism capital.
The Birchers were given the mushroom treatment for decades by the RNC. They were taken for granted and silenced, as they ought to be.
Not anymore, of course. Now they’re the moderates at CPAC. That’s because the Tea Party Movement was explicitly Bircher. The Koch Bro’s dad founded the JBS.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird The DNC and RNC as organizations are powerless; that's why political scientists refer to the American system with the expression "weak parties and strong partisanship." Party power is held in informal places, like partisan thinktanks and media, and thus Buckley was a lot more influential than anything the formal RNC did. (This is also why I aggressively don't care what was or wasn't in Biden's platform. In the US, the platform committee is a sinecure.)
The factions that control these organizations, however, are quite powerful. Movement Conservatism kept the Birchers under wraps for decades. But Trumpism (following the TPM) unseated that faction.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird Except that they didn't - movement conservatism (which is largely William Buckley Thought) specifically hugged the Birchers for as long as they were useful to its early growth.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird Bucklet gave them a lot of what they wanted in terms of e.g. rejection of multiracial democracy; in the 1950s, it was not at all obvious that the Republicans would end up happily owning the white supremacist vote, and Buckley plays a big role in legitimizing what would later happen in the 1960s.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird The Republican caucus overwhelmingly voted for the civil rights acts (since nearly the only opposition by 1964 was from the White South and they were largely Democrats; the few Republicans there were anti-civil rights too). Nixon was trying to pass a stronger civil rights act in the 1950s than the one LBJ took credit for in 1957.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird Right, and Buckley was wedding general conservatism with white supremacy in the 1950s, before the Southern Strategy. The point is that party pseudo-intellectuals have a big influence on party positioning in the future, and Buckley specifically used his influence to make the GOP amenable to the Southern Strategy in the 1950s already.
The US system doesn't remove the power of the fringe groups, it just shifts them inside the big parties and turns it into a "least evil" contest. The US system is fundamentally undemocratic (as it is in the UK, and France) because of how it effectively makes it untenable for a huge proportion of voters to actually vote for the representation they want instead of against the one they fear.
It's the only sane framing. You have exemplified it over and over in this thread by focusing on how pushing for what people think is good is damaging your change of getting something that can pass in terms of UHC for example.
This is only a problem because of your effectively two-party system. It's a discussion that hardly never happens in places with proportional systems.
No, it shows a profound absence of understanding with regard to politics.
In parliamentary systems, you get to vote for your faction and it forms a coalition with other factions in order to rule.
So even if (or in your case, when) you vote for some idiotic fringe, they retain only proportional influence, not rule.
In FpTP, you get two major parties via Divurger’s, and you vote for faction in the primaries but for the party in the general election.
The idea of “lesser evil” is based on the mistaken notion that a system that lets you cast a vote for an extremism is somehow good. Or, worse, that compromise is “evil”.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird The UK doesn't have American-style primaries. Labour tried introducing something like them, and got Corbyn as a result; the Tories pick their PMs by a vote of the members of Parliament. France has presidential primaries, more UK-style than US-style, but then the legislative slate is not at all subject to primary.
No, it has a parliamentary system which lets you vote for some tiny party that represents your views precisely, only to find it swallowed up as a minor player in the ruling coalition.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird The UK, you mean? It has a two-party system, tyvm. France used to have a two-bloc system with strong right vs. left idpol; it will probably reassert itself after Macron is termed out, but we'll see. Vote-for-small-party is a feature of proportional systems, and then what happens is that there are coalition agreements (hi from Germany), and that's fine.
That’s desperately misleading. The ruling coalition always forms around Labour or Conservatives, but includes all these other parties.
In the US, we literally have two parties. If you vote for Green or Libertarian, you’re simply throwing your vote away in protest.
The “big win” of parliamentary and other proportional systems, included ranked choice, is that you can pretend you voted for your preferred candidate but it gets converted into support for a coalition.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird There's no ruling coalition in the UK. Please, stop. The UK had a coalition, once, with far less power for the junior partner than is normal in proportional systems (because in proportional systems the junior partners can defect whereas from the second Nick Clegg signed the agreement with the Tories, he was dead - his voters didn't want that).
Yes, you've just explained in the first 3 tree paragraphs: 1) why it's more democratic, 2) why it tends to counter extremism.
You've then described in the 4th paragraph why FPTP fails to contain extremism, and forces "lesser evil" voting because for a large proportion of the electorate, their preferred option will have been eliminated and so is not represented at all in the final vote.
Thank you for thoroughly explaining why FPTP is fucked up.
Voting for the best candidate who can win is voting for the best candidate.
The “lesser evil” framing is rooted in a misunderstanding of what voting is for. Hint: it’s not a place for you to express your individuality and personal opinions, it’s a fight for power.
Voting for the "best" candidate remaining after your preferred option is off the table is also voting for the lesser evil
The lesser evil framing is rooted in understanding that when you constrain choices, you prevent an accurate representation of what people want.
Yes, it's a fight for power, and with FPTP it's a fight that is thoroughly rigged, to the point it's utterly vile and disgusting to see people defend the effective disenfranchisement they cause.
You're arguing against representation of views you don't like. You're arguing for outright authoritarianism.
The favorite argument of authoritarians everywhere is to try to dismiss voters' right to representation if they don't hold the views you like the way you're doing here.
It's fascinating to me just how terrified right-wingers like you are of ensuring people's views are properly represented.
I’m arguing against extremists taking over the country. Any functioning government has to rest somewhere above the political center of gravity. Otherwise, there’s no enough overlap for compromise and you actually do get unrepresentative government.
Representation means they have influence proportional to their number. This is provided by any democracy. The failure point is when a group too extreme to represent the nation as a whole somehow gets power despite this.
America found out what happens when the extremists take over a major party. In fact, we almost lost the DNC to its extremist wing, too.
Representation proportional to your number is explicitly not provided by FPTP.
You know this, and you explain what a horrific risk it causes, and that you understand how this system deprives groups of representation, and you try to present this as a feature.
But all you're achieving is laying bare a typical anti-democratic attitude. A commitment to democracy is measured by how willing you are for those you label extreme to be represented too.
Nobody wants extremists in charge. Not even the people you consider extremists. But FPTP does not just prevent them from being in charge, but prevents a whole of people meaningful representation. Some of those will be extremists. Some of those will be people who consider you extremists. Democracy is allowing all of them representation on equal terms, and FPTP inherently gives disproportionate outcomes.
I thought you were talking about “communists” now it’s “American socialists” — placed as equal & opposite to a growing fascist movement that nearly took over the country. Really? This is irresponsible and either disingenuous (or if not disingenuous, ignorant.)
There is no American Socialist Movement.
Social democrats … exist and are politically marginalized.
To call even the group of five or six college students who think they are Communists as power hungry as fascists is absurd.
Europe has, not only marginal, social democrats and socialists in many countries.
It is high time that the US arrive at least in the 20th, if not in the 21st century.
This is a bad joke.
Really very generally speaking, most US "leftists" appear to be at center, if not "right-of-center" by Continental European standards.
There are already two McCarthys that have done considerable damage to the American Experiment.
...leadership was discussing #nationalization of key companies. Fortunatelly, the Pandemic did not lead to the nationalization of all of these companies.
Furthermore, the adminstration of national natural resources has proven exploitative and to the detriment of the national interests in many Western countries (e.g. #BigOil, water privatiziation in the #UK, etc.)
Just this week, the CA state government successfully...
...halted an abusive water-extraction practice that had persisted for decades. And you only need 5 minutes what #Nestlé ist doing globally.
I am not in favor of #socialism, however equating #socialism with #nationalization is just incorrect (see second screenshot)
Home European Socialists and the State in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Chapter
European Socialists and the...
...State: A Comparative and Transnational Approach
Mathieu Fulla & Marc Lazar
Chapter
First Online: 06 August 2020
290 Accesses
Part of the Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements book series (PSHSM)
"Abstract
Many political observers in Western democratic countries equate socialism with statism. From the late 1970s onwards, numerous socialist elites and experts have helped to nurture this widespread belief. This...
...chapter aims to dispel this reductive, indeed incorrect, account of the relationship between West European socialism and the idea, form, and use of the state. It challenges what remains a dominant interpretation of the left’s propensity for state intervention in political and journalistic debates." *
Now, I do agree that there have been huge #DarkMoney flows...
..from the #Kremlin to the #US. Much of it has been documented to go to the #NRA. And we all know which party they generally support. (Of course, that is not the whole picture - see e.g. Sen. #Whitehouse's investigation.)
I’m not the one associating nationalization with socialism, Bernie Sanders is. He’s saying he’s a socialist and this socialism is the basis for his (prior?) support for forcible confiscation of entire industries.
To be clear, this is not about the government regulating them further or even getting involved as a competitor, both of which are within the pale.
Instead, the historical precedent he’s invoking is that of Cuba or the USSR, in which the rise of communism was immediately followed by confiscation of businesses.
This is a pretty extreme view that is way outside the Overton window for a major party, but not atypical among fringe parties such as the Greens.
In particular, he repeats the standard talking points of communist sympathizers everywhere, hailing the very narrowly-defined successes of these nations while carefully avoiding any mention of the human rights disasters that accompanied them.
So, for example, he praises Cuban literacy without mentioning that their primers were pro-Castro propaganda, and that their freedom to use their literacy to criticize the government was nonexistent.
He praises Chinese economic growth but is silent about the harsh working conditions, massive pollution, or overall repression.
Essentially, this is the commie version of the fascist “but he keeps the trains running on time” line. I literally blocked someone today for pulling the same schtick here.
As for whether socialism is statism, maybe not, but Marxism-Leninism certainly is and the various socialist nations he praises follow that mold. This is the sort of socialism that Sanders supports.
Now, I’ve been focusing on Sanders because he is the face of the American far left. He is supported by the DSA and CPUSA. His own people founded the JD’s (and BNC and PCCC). So while he does not speak for all socialist populists, I think it’s entirely fair to judge this faction on the statements of its leader.
Globally, Russia has been aiding the populist right as of late. This is true in America, where the RNC has gone from its heyday of kneejerk anti-Russian sentiment (like Reagan’s) to tankie rejection of Ukrainian aid.
However, this rests on top of a long history of propping up communist satellite parties, from the KPD in pre-Hitler Germany to the American Greens. Putin is playing both populist extremes in parallel, for maximum damage.
So, no, the Kremlin does not generally support one party or another. Putin helped Trump and Bernie alike; we know this for a fact. And, yes, of course he propped up spoiler fringe candidates like Stein. Russia’s support is a means to an end and takes a shotgun approach.
@futurebird
I mean, yeah, let’s be clear: authoritarian communist movements of the mid-20th century — Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot — were brutal, horrific, and unconscionable, and if •they• were the ones who were politically ascendant now, my anti-authoritarian principles would mobilize me just as I’m mobilized again fascism. But right now, Hitlerism is ascendant, and Stalinism is not even off the horizon beyond the distant shore beyond the horizon of current politics. That’s the fact of this moment.
@TruthSandwich@Alon@vidar@futurebird
I despise Sanders, who is a grifting egomaniac who deliberately kneecapped Clinton and gave us Trump, but MMT is useful and more accurately reflects reality than the gold buggers. For example, the covid pandemic payments and unemployment compensations and their effect on the economy and inflation. We had a short term bought of 8% but that is now back down.
@Okanogen@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird Telling me MMT is more accurate than Austrian economics is like telling me that you believe Princess Diana was assassinated because it's more plausible than she faked her death.
@Alon@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird
I bet you thought you were really cute with that dumb analogy. I know what it's like to drunk post, so, you go kiddo!
@HeavenlyPossum@TruthSandwich@futurebird Vastly better than absolute monarchies preceding it, and smaller societies unable to sustain any major economic growth? Yes, it's a hill I would die on.
It was a big step forward in creating structures that enabled lasting growth, just like capitalism was a big step forward later.
@HeavenlyPossum@TruthSandwich@futurebird Feudalism developed as a necessity of empires unable to assert direct power, weakening absolute power from their creation.
The notion that any of the monarchies rising later were absolute is nonsense - instead, the abolition came with the widening of influence. We see this in how most of the major feudal systems in Europe were ended by laws passed by parliaments rather than by decree by monarchs.
Absolute monarchy was developed in theory and in practice in Europe in the early modern period, roughly the 1500s to the late 1700s to early 1800s. There was certainly contestation between monarchs and wealthy elites acting in corporate through legislatures—such as the Glorious Revolution that replaced monarchical supremacy with parliamentary supremacy in England in 1688—but contestation and defeat are not evidence of absence.
The example sine qua non of absolute monarchy was Louis XIV’s “l'état, c'est moi,” attributed to him in 1655.
The systems that feudalism replaced—such as electoral German tribal monarchies and Rome’s oligarchical apparatus—were not absolute monarchies. Absolute monarchy is not a synonym for “an empire that can assert direct power” over its subjects.
Feudalism was also not a “necessity.” No one needed parasitic military elites to assert localized control over self-managed agrarian communities and extract surpluses from them at sword-point.
Read it as "inevitable" or a "pre-requisite for growth" then. In the sense that society would have ended, of course they were not necessary. But that was not the point.
Society doesn’t end because a parasitic state vanishes, and it’s often the case that daily life for most people improves in the absence of metropolitan power. Feudalism was neither inevitable (it was the product of choices made by violent people to steal things) nor a prerequisite for “growth.”
@HeavenlyPossum@TruthSandwich@futurebird The extraction and use of surplus to drive more efficient communication and move of forces was necessary to growth, and the motivation for that was extending the area possible to rule, but insufficient to maintain control without a variation of feudal delegation of influence, and so without that the former is not worth the expense - they go hand in hand.
Latency in other words. A large part of the development of civilization is shaped by latency.
I have no idea what you’re saying here, though it sounds something like “theft is good in the long-run because someone might do something useful with what they stole.” Is that roughly right?
It’s not really clear to me at all why you think theft would be necessary or why you think feudal theft—personal and localized—would produce the sorts of latent network effects you’re claiming.
No, that is not even remotely close to what I've said. I'm saying that without it, the effects of it wouldn't have happened. I took care not to imply it was a moral good, because it was not, and that was not the point.
In fact, the point I originally made was not about feudalism at all, just an illustration to argue against the notion that believing a system (rightly or wrongly doesn't matter) is better than what came before doesn't make it good
To the second point, if you don't believe the expansion of communications drives growth, and don't believe attempts to assert control drive efforts to improve communications, then that's your choice. I don't have the patience or interest to try to convince you (but I would point out the irony of having this discussion via tech that's an offshoot of DARPA investments).
I would argue that a failure to understand feudalism and its role in history has been a central component of capitalism’s hegemonic ideological package, and that capitalism is dramatically less different from feudalism than in popular perceptions of history.
And let me point out that because feudalism came before (some poorly defined “growth”) does not mean that (poorly defined “growth”) happened because of feudalism. Post hoc is not propter hoc.
“I'm saying that without it, the effects of it wouldn't have happened.”
This directly contradicts what I said about post hoc not implying proper hoc, so I’m not sure how you could agree with my post while holding this contradictory position.
We clearly have different ideas of absolute monarchy.
In the UK, feudal lords had recognised legal rights since the Magna Carta.
In France, Louis XIV's likely apocryphal, while often a symbol of absolute monarchy, nevertheless if it happened happened as part of a power struggle with the feudal lords of the parliament of Paris. No absolute power there.
Absolute monarchy was never literally absolute, as evidenced by the fact that most of them were overthrown and replaced by capitalist oligarchies.
When you talk about the Magna Carta as if it defines the British monarchy from the time of its inception until now, you’re doing so anachronistically. The feudal monarchy was constrained in all sorts of ways as a sort of prima Inter pares. From roughly the Tudor period until the late 1600s, the monarchy sought to consolidate control at the expense of traditional feudal elites and the burgeoning capital class, until Charles I lost his head and James II was decisively removed in favor of oligarchical rule via parliament.
You’re skipping over lots of historical developments to try to make this argument of absolute monarchs -> weak dispersed feudal monarchs -> liberal democracy.
Yes, I could not cover all of history in a one-line throwaway quip.
Yes, you're right, there's nuance, and it wasn't a straight line of monarchs diminishing power through the entire period.
But neither did the feudal system give way to unchecked power.
We can disagree over the terms to use, but all of this is entirely and utterly irrelevant to the point you butted into, and doesn't change the argument in the slightest.
And to me the notion that you've hyper-focused on your own interpretation of my wording of this and failed to get the point is also absurd, so I guess we'll just both think the other is absurd.
I’m sorry that, as an historian, I objected to your ahistorical use of a term that conveys specific meaning.
I also object to your other ahistorical assertions about feudalism, and believe that knowing actual history rather than making it up is deeply satisfying and also deeply radicalizing.
I'm happy to accept that there might be other ways to word my point. It does not change the point being made, however, and so this has been an utterly pointless exercise.
@TruthSandwich@vidar@futurebird Marx was spot on with his critique of capitalism, but completely off the board with his theory of history. He thought you could predict social evolution when it is a chaotic system that can be blown one way or the other by random events. For example, feudalism was doomed by the Black Plague and the increased value of labor that came from depopulation, but aMarx posited that it was an inevitable step in social evolution.
Marx’s various criticisms of capitalism had factual errors, such as his much-repeated claim that capitalism requires endless growth.
This isn’t a minor mistake, it’s used to justify his theory of history. If capitalism literally requires the impossible, then it’s obviously doomed.
Since at least the days of Marx, communists have been insisting that communism is inevitable and we shouldn’t even try to avoid it. This triumphalism reeks of the Borg’s “You Will Be Assimilated, Resistance Is Futile” intimidation technique.
And yet, each time it’s tried, it fails. It fails hard. Maybe we should take a lesson from this.
One of the stranger strawman arguments applied to me elsewhere in this thread is that I’m denying that capitalism can be replaced.
As I said, we can imagine post-capitalist economies driven by technological innovations we currently lack, such as a post-scarcity world where labor and wealth are disconnected. If anything, ChatGPT has forced us to think about this.
But curiosity about such possibilities is not the same thing as a belief in their inevitability, or even their goodness. I can think of at least two SF stories describing post-scarcity dystopias, for example.
@TruthSandwich@jhavok@futurebird His argument isn't that capitalism requires endless growth, but that capitalism running out of new markets has to compete on cost of production rather than expansion, and that this 1) will drive us towards post-scarcity, 2) will drive the demand for labour towards zero. His contention is then a) that society won't address 2 (e.g. by redistribution, UBI, or whatever), because the state represents the ruling classes, and b) this will eventually cause upheaval.
You can of course reject all of that, or whatever subset. 1 and 2 is basically Marx taking capitalists at face value, and agreeing with them that capitalism great at driving down costs. While a and b reflects his belief that the ruling classes are motivated to protect their profits in the short run, and in doing so will prevent reforms that could make capitalism survive or at least delay change. Plenty of socialists, including some Marxists reject a/b too.
It’s nonsense on every level. The fact that a system can drive down costs doesn’t mean it can drive them down to zero. And that’s not what we’re seeing anywhere. It also says nothing about the cost of resources for labor to convert to goods.
Moreover, all societies engage in distribution (I reject the notion of “re”-distribution because that falsely implies that any initial distribution was somehow natural). although no society has ever gotten UBI to work on any scale.
Towards zero, not to zero. The point is not that it will succeed in getting rid of all labour, but that the more survival for companies depends on taking market share rather than developing new markets, the stronger the pressure is to drive down cost, and eventually the labour element will be the easiest to cut.
The only way this doesn't happen is if capitalism fails to do what its supporter claims it excels at. It's possible.
That's great. For capitalism to survive this needs to continue forever without labour costs ever getting high enough to make automation of a sufficient set of jobs possible.
Of course not. Automation is an inherent driver of capitalist productive improvements. It's one of the things Marx cheered on like a massive fanboy in the Communist Manifesto. However sufficient automation either requires infinite growth to provide additional jobs, or will eventually reduce the demand for labor.
Whether that means the end of capitalism depends on whether Marx was too cynical about society's ability redistribute or not.
I'm not sold on automation being the important part here. During my lifetime, the main driver of capitalist "productive" improvements (productive being in scare quotes because it increases shareholder value but not meaningful production) has been reorganisation, not automation.
I've worked for some very big companies and the rise of office software hasn't led to the decrease in head office staff or management, just the rise in what Graeber called bullshit jobs. Airbnb, Uber, WeWork and the other tech unicorns haven't created leisure, just precarity.
Meanwhile, my clothes are made by child slaves in whatever country won the race to the bottom, and my food is picked by undocumented people whom farmers employ because they can threaten them with migration authorities if they unionise.
Maybe it's because I'm under 40, but I think Marx's belief that capitalism would drive automation is one of the things that's aged worst about his beliefs.
@passenger@vidar@TruthSandwich@jhavok@futurebird I see the rise and rise of the use of AI as 'automation'. Control of most of infrastructure is via various automated processes, electricity supply, banking, trains...it already reached it's peak in factories long ago.
I see tens of thousands of tech workers being laid off because AI has come for their jobs. Those were good jobs. With the rise in AI we should all be fighting for UBI.
The rise of data science (and more recently, LLMs) has seen tens of thousands of workers hired to do data cleansing and labelling. This is boring, badly-paid work, but without it such statistical models rapidly collapse.
They're mostly hired in places like Colombia and the Philippines, where they can be paid worse wages than in the imperial core.
As such, I'm not sure I agree with you that LLMs and other generative methods have led to the loss of tech jobs. I think it's fairer to say that those jobs have been changed into ones that have lower wages and less job security, while preserving roughly the same number of humans employed.
Agree to disagree. Until recently, I lived in Silicon Valley, California. The hub of the tech world. Hundreds (not tens) of thousands of people have been laid off there thanks to AI.
We sold our house and moved to Minnesota. Since then, the value of our prior home has dropped. Just like I knew it would. Because so many workers were laid off.
Workers at Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter are losing their homes. Not all of them had boring jobs. I know, because they are my friends.
@passenger@vidar@TruthSandwich@jhavok@futurebird
Most of the big gains in automation were before your (and my) time. We never worked in offices with typists, drafting departments, mail rooms. It's almost like you can take any widely used office program as assume it used to be a whole department (80s and earlier)
Indeed. E.g. "computer" used to be a title. You'd have whole rooms of people manually doing calculations. Up until the 1980's my dad worked jobs where he had secretaries etc. to do things software does now.
My job existed back then - people still had to move data around - but not to the same degree. "Moving data" would have meant carrying forklift-pallets of punchcards.
Did you know US manufacturing output is higher than ever?
Despite that US manufacturing jobs have declined from above 32% in 1946 to 8.5% in 2018.
Similarly, US agriculture employment is around 2%, while in most developing countries it's in the tens of percent, some above half, without proportionately higher economic output.
Modern life is as it is in rich countries because we've automated away the vast majority of the labour we used to do.
Is it that manufacturing jobs globally have declined due to automation, or is it that factory jobs have moved out of the US and Europe, and into lower-wage countries?
This is what I mean by the race to the bottom: my clothes aren't getting made by a robot in Europe, they're getting made by a child in Bangladesh or Indonesia.
No, that is the US proportion of workers who work in manufacturing.
The point was that while the US exported a lot of manufacturing, US manufacturing output has still grown massively, but without an according growth in manufacturing jobs.
The amount of value produced per person has increased dramatically, and that is down to automation.
@passenger@futurebird@vidar@TruthSandwich@jhavok And with that vast increase in productivity, in the USA, we saw steady gains in wages and the standard of living until Reagan and the GOP broke our economy for the benefit of the oligarchs in the 1980s. Since then, we have continued to have rapid growth of GDP, but most of the wealth has gone to a select few families and wages have stagnated in real terms.
All I want to add is that Marx came along right at the tail end of Jacobite and Luddite failures. He blamed the machines, but of course he was wrong. It is people exploiting market opportunities, such as paying workers as little as possible because you can. Or putting out garbage products because that’s all low wage workers can afford.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton was asked an interview question about UBI. Her answer was that she found the idea interesting and had her staff work out the numbers. They were unable to come up with a fiscally viable plan.
I doubt you can do any better, which is why you’re showing me penny-ante “pilot” programs.
Even worse, there’s a dark side of UBI: libertarians who want to use it to destroy the welfare state.
@futurebird@TruthSandwich@InkySchwartz@vidar You see, if a leftist idea half-heartedly applied half works, that proves it's a failure. And if a right-wing idea vigorously applied is a miserable failure, that proves we need to try harder.
@TruthSandwich Nope. It’s a vanilla Mac setup. Nothing fancy. Not even iCloud proxy.
Funnily enough, it’s showing up fine on my iPhone. Not sure what’s going on, or why it’s even giving me JSON (which looks like the input to the blog rendering engine).
I honestly have no idea. My best guess is that Wordpress is getting some sort of header in your HTTP request that’s telling it to return the document formatted as JSON, not HTML.
@EricCarroll@TruthSandwich Another data point: it’s only behaving this way for this specific url. Other posts are loading fine.
I wonder if my ActivityPub client (Mona) requested that page, and it was cached by some CDN instance near my IP address. If that’s the case, turning on a VPN might let me get served a fresh page from a different CDN instance. Let’s see…
Welp, turning on iCloud Private Relay didn’t help.
Tethering to my phone didn’t help.
Clearing Safari’s cache FIXED IT.
Clearing Chrome’s cache FIXED IT.
Clearing Firefox’s cache does NOT fix it.
curl continues to report application/activity+json responses.
It’s possible that this was some sort of race condition.
When I post a link, I often open a tab to it and read it over, myself, so that I’m literally on the same page as the person I’m talking to.
All too often, I find a typo and quickly fix it. That’s what happened today. So maybe you downloaded the page just as it was being updated. If you clear your cache (for that domain, anyhow) and try again, I expect it’ll work.
@TruthSandwich@futurebird I read your blog post, it has raised no arguments against communism I haven’t seen plenty of other places. It seems you misunderstand communism and many of the people you mention. You quote Einstein, but Einstein was a socialist https://archive.org/details/AlbertEinsteinWhySocialism he was an incredibly smart guy, and he realized the “trying something over and over again = insanity” is what capitalism is doing.
You claim socialism never worked, but it did produce better quality of life metrics for millions (when controlling for levels of economic development) https://www.jstor.org/stable/45130965?read-now=1
I’d recommend doing a bit more research before making claims and quotes
Einstein died in 1955, which was just a couple of years after the socialists in America split into pro and anti Russia factions. He died long before the USSR collapsed.
The most successful nations in the world are capitalist. Yes, it’s well-regulated capitalism, but it’s definitely not socialism.
@TruthSandwich@futurebird maternal mortality rates are lower in Cuba than the USA. That is a fact, not nonsense. And they achieved that while under a brutal embargo and sanctions. The study (not article) I linked measured quality of life across many nations while they were more stable, before the west murdered huge swathes of people there. China is an incredibly successful nation today and it is far more socialist than capitalist. Most enterprises are state owned or worker led. China has lifted the most people out of poverty in history
Yeah, I’m going to block you now because I have no patience for anyone who takes communism seriously in 2023 and makes excuses for it. Go back to Russia.
All Clay did was point out a few well-known facts about mortality. It would be wise to understand them even if you, like me, have grown up in a country saturated with anti-communist propaganda. (Heck I don’t even like to say the word “communist” — but cultural aversion shouldn’t stand in the way of understanding.) Perhaps these statistics are flawed. But blocking out facts that don’t align with our expectations? Not very scientific.
@futurebird@TruthSandwich@clayrosenthal Related, this is the first time I've blocked an entire domain (qoto.org seems to be a domain specifically for reply guys) and I have to say this is a pretty great feature!
@clayrosenthal@TruthSandwich@futurebird The PRC has higher economic inequality than the US, to the point that American tech moguls like how much corporate control over workers China has. Check https://www.lisdatacenter.org/lis-ikf-webapp/app/search-ikf-figures and click on Gini index on the right and nothing on the left (you'll get all countries and years that way). It's democratic East Asia that has lower inequality, universal health care (Taiwan's single-payer system is great), independent unions, etc.
@Alon@TruthSandwich@futurebird Does seem to be slightly higher, but that site did not have much data on China. Only 3 datapoints. On world bank here: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?locations=CN-US it shows china starting higher, then dipping below the US in more recent years. Im no expert on which is better, but China seems to be trending down, America either steady or increasing.
@clayrosenthal@TruthSandwich@futurebird The LIS specifically makes sure to be comparable - everything is disposable income. Other indicators aren't always comparable.
@Alon@TruthSandwich@futurebird on what time frame are you referring to? From the LIS source you linked it’s only declining since 2019 and only to similar levels as a few years prior. The lowest point in that data is the 1960-70s by a long shot
@Alon@TruthSandwich@futurebird declining for 2 years is noise not a pattern. It’s been hovering around the same value since 93, well past Reagan. I’d like to see it decline for a minimum of one presidential term, ideally a decade or two
@clayrosenthal@TruthSandwich@futurebird No, it's not noise. Full employment has led to increases in the real incomes of the poor and decreases in the real incomes of the rich. This is why you get all the assholes who think "help wanted" signs indicate a bad economy.
@Alon@TruthSandwich@futurebird I agree full employment would increase real wages for the poor, and reduce inequality, but what makes you think we are anywhere near full employment? Reported unemployment is above 0 and underemployment is rampant.
@clayrosenthal@TruthSandwich@futurebird 3.5% is full employment. Full employment is not actually 0, because people move into and out of the labor force rapidly. To see if there's full employment, you should check whether low-wage employers are raising wages to compete for workers, which they are. Xi'an Famous Foods in New York is advertising $21/hour wages for food service workers; in 3% unemployment Germany, Aldi and Lidl are raising wages for retail workers.
@Alon@TruthSandwich@futurebird full employment is by definition 0 unemployment. We can call 3.5% reasonably low, but not full employment. If it is achieving the goals of raising low wages, good, great even. But it is not full employment. I don’t agree with the notion we need some amount of people unemployed. That only serves to bring wages down by letting companies getting away with less competition for workers
@Alon@TruthSandwich@futurebird also unemployment misses underemployment. There are plenty of people working low wage jobs with advanced degrees because they couldn’t find those better jobs in reasonable time. That is a tragic waste of talent and resources that went into educating them.
@clayrosenthal@TruthSandwich@futurebird The underemployment rate in the US is at a multidecade low, I think lowest since the statistic even began to be collected (I believe in 1990). You can look at employment-to-population ratios, and they're at a peak.
And re people taking jobs below their perceived skill level, that's not unemployment, nor is it unique to capitalism - if anything, things like the Cuban drive to produce sugar do it a lot more than capitalist systems.
The UK would beg to differ with you on that. They put all their healthcare in a single NHS basket, and then the Tories smashed it.
Whether a particular service is best provided by the public sector, private sector, or (most likely) some combination is a practical matter and the answer may differ under different circumstanes.
In the USA, only something like ACA could work. M4A would repeat the error of the NHS; it would put our eggs into a basket for Republicans to break.
@TruthSandwich@dave@futurebird But the NHS is a lot better than the private American system, even after Thatcher defunded it. The life expectancy gap in the UK by class (defined by education or social definitions, not pure income) is much narrower than in the US, for one.
@TruthSandwich@dave@futurebird Canada has big problems of its own, but it too has better health outcomes than the US. The sort of sabotage Conservative premiers do only realigns Canada with preexisting American badness, like what Doug Ford is doing with infrastructure construction in Ontario.
@futurebird@TruthSandwich Jason Hickel's book "Less is more" was really eye-opening to me in that regard. How what we accept as "normal" or "natura" is a phenomenon of the last 500 years.
@futurebird I agree that people should be able to act together as groups beyond directly connected subnets but it's a fun question to each figure out our own boundaries of free association, mutual aid, shared interests, etc. and also to find ways our subnets can help one another.
Your second point really strikes me as the heart of it: do we trust the so-called public or not? Are we going to support each other's agency or try to control and bottle one another?
@futurebird This may sound cynical, but many? people prefer being told what to do (often couched in vagueness). Then they don’t have to think. Ironically, this was also vocalized by a MD frustrated with his diabetic patients who refused to learn about bow they became a diabetic and how to improve their health.
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