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We have social democracy in the United States
but it’s exclusionary and funded by regressive property taxes
Like many a middle-class kid before me, I found radicalism through books.
Marxism provided a framework for understanding why reforms won within capitalism were so hard to sustain and why there was so much suffering in societies filled with abundance.
a radicalism that is aware of the difficulty of revolutionary change and, at the same time, of how profound the gains of reform can be.
we live in a world marked by extreme inequality, by unnecessary pain and suffering,
that a better one can be constructed.
Our current politics don’t seem to offer much of a future at all.
ordinary people can shape the systems that shape their lives.
it’s really unfair that Debra is paid so much less than me for doing basically the same work.
Plus, she’s never asked for a raise the way you did.
those in charge are getting paid fifty times more than you.
There have been markets for thousands of years, but, as we will see, capitalism is a relatively new development.
Without land to sow, your labor power by itself isn’t going to produce any commodities.
So you rent yourself to Mr. Bongiovi,
Though Mr. Bongiovi needs workers, he needs you as an individual employee less than you need grocery money.
Better to be exploited in a capitalist society than unemployed and destitute.
But if you had a reasonable alternative to submitting to someone else’s power, wouldn’t you take it?
Without such luck or a trust fund to fall back on, you’re stuck subordinating yourself to capitalists who own private property and can make wealth out of your labor.
We can do better than this capitalist reality you’re stuck in.
Capitalism is a social system based on private ownership of the means of production and wage labor.
Outside of theory, there’s no such thing as a “free market”
capitalism requires both planning and a regulated market.
If Walmart was a country, it’d have a larger GDP than the whole of East Germany in 1989, and much of its activity is consciously planned, without crippling inefficiencies.6
workers should control their firms and that they should no longer receive a wage (though there would still be minimum incomes based on job classification), becoming real stakeholders in their companies instead.8
You just have to pay a tax on its capital assets (the building and the land it’s on, machinery, and so forth), in effect renting it from society as a whole.
Georgism?
they’re required to spend at least two weeks a year on the shop floor.
workers don’t get a wage; instead they get a share of the profits.
if someone thinks a supervisor is acting improperly or wants things to be run differently, they have democratic recourses to do something about it.
they have the freedom to leave.
This is over of the most significant benefits!
your enterprise’s goal is no longer to maximize total profits but rather to maximize profit-per-worker.
At its core, to be a socialist is to assert the moral worth of every person, no matter who they are, where they’re from, or what they did.
The deluge of bad poetry, strange philosophical blog posts, and terrible abstract art will be a sure sign of progress.
For socialists, to the extent that some hierarchies linger, they have to be constantly justified and held in check.
social democracy bolstered the power of labor to degrees few thought possible,
but still left capital structurally dominant.
capitalists were able to hold democratic governments hostage an...
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with our animal problems solved, we can begin to solve our human ones.
Today there is much talk of “democratic socialism,” and indeed I see that term as synonymous with “socialism.”
we must place our faith in the ability of people to save themselves and each other.
