Maybe this is a good place to ask this, as I always think about it. I am all in favor of abolishing this nightmare of late stage capitalism and coporate ownership of government. However, how do you explain that any other form wont take away from those of us who are (admittedly lucky) home/land owners, that actually are sitting fine ? Those people don’t want to give up what they have so someone in an apartment can have more. Think of it this way: you have an acre of land you worked for, it wasn’t given. Someone else has a 2 bedroom apartment they also worked for. For reason (either laziness, or unfortunately events) the apartment owner can’t save enough for a house/land. Maybe their mental capability is maxed out (be honest, we know people like this) and they can’t get more schooling etc. Under a socialist system, it seems like anyone with their house/land would be forced to give it up and live in blocs of apartments, which no one I know actually wants. This is just one example. But it’s something that I feel like will always hold the US back from socialism, because those that currently have “the dream” don’t want it to be taken. Now, people living in shacks that vote for Musk because the immigrants will take their jerbs, those people are idiots. But I’m talking about people who work full time and are decently well off, probably have a decent amount in stocks etc. Those people don’t want corporations destroying us, but they also don’t want full socialism.
This is part of the myth of scarcity. There is currently already enough housing for everyone. It’s capitalism that’s keeping people out of it.
Many of these places have been left to rot by landlords that would rather let them sit empty than charge an affordable rent, or perform necessary maintenance. A big part of housing everyone would be using reallocated resources to refurbish dilapidated properties. That’s why we want to tax the rich
I agree. I still think regular peiple would view that as “the government stealing their property” though. For example i know a few people who buy places and fix them up to rent out. Are you saying they should get their properties taken away?
If you’re only referring to billionaires and corporations buying housing, i agree. But if any laws were put into place, we know how it always goes, it would only affect those regular Joe’s renting properties, and theyd further hate the government for too much regulation. I see no way to possibly stop the rich from buying all housing.
For example i know a few people who buy places and fix them up to rent out. Are you saying they should get their properties taken away?
Treating housing as a commodity is part of the problem for sure. I believe all humans have a right to safe shelter. No one’s income should come before another person’s life.
That said,
If you’re only referring to billionaires and corporations buying housing, i agree.
This would be the practical way to do it anyway. Some guy that rents out a ski chalet isn’t commiting some terrible crime. It’s charging people to live in their own homes that’s wrong.
There are a few important things, here.
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Socialism is not about equal wealth, or punishing labor. People have different needs and thus equal wealth is in fact unequal.
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The Soviet bloc-style apartments were largely a response to the utter devastation of World War II, and a need to address vast demand for homes. Socialism does not need to burn down existing housing in order to make new ones (unless particularly necessary).
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Even though the US working class is privledged and bribed by the ruling class with the spoils from Imperialism, the vast oceans of wealth are in the hands of the big bourgeoisie. Rather than forcibly redistributing the property of the small owners, the large ones would be the focus, and gradually building up the working class is the method.
If you want an intro Marxist-Leninist reading list, I have one here.
Nice, thanks for that.
It’s amazing how this is demonized in American culture. Really makes one think.
Now, to get rid of the 2 party system…
No problem! And for what it’s worth, Marxism is demonized everywhere outside of AES countries, like Cuba and the PRC. We can’t really vote Marxism in in the US, either, even without the 2 party system. Marxists have spend centuries testing what works and what doesn’t, and ultimately revolution has proven to be the most proven method. More on that in the reading list!
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I am personally weary of centralized planning, I think small scale cooperatives are the way to go instead of big corporations. With more centralized authority for things that require it, like law enforcement.
If we are to take Marx’s word for it, the advancement of industry necessitates its increasing scale, which necessitates increasing complexity and planning. Markets in every economy gradually centralize themselves over time, and since we cannot “freeze” an economy in time, we can’t expect the cooperatives to remain small forever.
Rather than fight centralization, we should study how it works and how we can best make it work in the favor of all.
The “small scale” part of my comment is a bit of an overstatement. Perhaps I should have said “smallest practical scale”.
I believe mostly in letting people make choices for themselves, which I think is best served by having organisations at a size where an individual voice has the opportunity to make a difference.
This can be achieved in many different ways, including having partially independent subdivisions within large scale organizations.
One of the (many) failings of the USSR was, at least for a long time at the start, insufficient flexibility and reactivity to local issues. But thinking about it, maybe this isn’t a good reason to think ill of centralized planning. The USSR had incompetent centralized planning (especially in the agricultural sector in the earlier days), the failures and famines could be argued to me more due to the incompetence than to core attributes of centralized planning.
In that case, I don’t really think we disagree. Many Socialist states have smaller cells for decision-making that doesn’t necessarily benefit from having more information or cooperation between cells. The Soviet model functioned much in the same way, though it had its own share of issues such as planning by hand, rather than computer, and trying to abolish market forces before they outlived their usefulness.
China presently does a good job juggling all of these complicated nuances, and their party structure plays a large part in that. Central planning works best in highly developed firms, and markets do a good job of reaching those levels of development.
Also, enormous monopolistic companies are centrally planned themselves. Companies like Walmart and Amazon have internal economies the size of some national economies, and their employees, teams, and departments aren’t buying and selling resources amongst themselves – the allocation of these resources is planned.
Attempting to run the internal operations of a large company like the free market was actually what killed Sears:
Lampert intended to use Sears as a grand free market experiment to show that the invisible hand would outperform the central planning typical of any firm.
He radically restructured operations, splitting the company into thirty, and later forty, different units that were to compete against each other. Instead of cooperating, as in a normal firm, divisions such as apparel, tools, appliances, human resources, IT and branding were now in essence to operate as autonomous businesses, each with their own president, board of directors, chief marketing officer and statement of profit or loss. An eye-popping 2013 series of interviews by Bloomberg Businessweek investigative journalist Mina Kimes with some forty former executives described Lampert’s Randian calculus: “If the company’s leaders were told to act selfishly, he argued, they would run their divisions in a rational manner, boosting overall performance.”
Anyone who’s worked at a large company could tell you that the plans they make aren’t flawless, but central planning at scale is not some scary untested idea, or a disproven relic of the past. It’s happening right now in large swaths of major industries.
Excellent work. This is the main good thing to take from The peoples republic of wal-mart.
I never knew that about Sears, that’s very interesting! Great comment, comrade!
Marx never had a computer.
His world view was based on the world he saw, a world that has vanished.
Marx predicted the invention of increasingly complex tools invented to facilitate the incredible complexity of production, which computers ended up playing a massive part in. Rather than going against Marx’s general observations, the invention of computers affirms them.
You are correct in that Marx observed his world and not ours. That’s why Marxists have continued to build on Marx’s observations as they grew and changed, such as when Lenin analyzed how Capitalism turns to Imperialism when there’s no more domestic markets to exploit.
Far from being rigid and outdated, Marxism is designed to be flexible, keeping what works and tossing what doesn’t.
No psychiatrist today calls themselves a ‘Freudian’ and no scientist calls themselves ‘Newtonian.’
Besides tradition, there’s no reason to stick with antiquated terms.
Scientist would absolutely consider themselves newtonians, as his theories have been so thoroughly proven and tested, as to be accepted as fact.
The scientific outlook is exactly the opposite of what you describe, which is to build on and extend previous terminology as becomes necessary.
That’s a lot of work to avoid dealing the actual issue at hand.
There’s a pretty big difference between those fields. Freud has been proven almost entirely wrong, while Marx has been proven almost entirely correct, as an example. Further, Marxists now have adopted different camps, by far the largest being Marxism-Leninism, but all consider themselves Socialists and Communists. Marx still forms the base of all Marxist branches of economics, unlike the realm of psychology, and further, Marxism refers to a stance within the broader field of Political Economy.
Have you actually engaged with Marx’s material? A huge portion of economists globally are Marxists of some sort, less common in Western countries but absolutely the norm in economies like China.
You haven’t given an actual reason to stick with the antiquated terms.
Most Americans hate Marxism and Communism.
If you want to get anything done in America, you’d do well to learn to read the room.
Again, give me one good reason to stick with the antiquated terms.
I’m not talking about program; I’m talking about presentation. Americans aren’t going to rally around a Red Flag, so why bother with it?
You’re changing the argument now, I feel. Either way, we can’t hide from being Communists or try to “trick” people into becoming Marxists, we should be honest rather than duplicitous so as to gain genuine support. Parties like PSL are doing just that, and their numbers are gradually swelling over time.
Excerpt is from Why Socialism?
Hobo Johnson did an decent job of putting it to music too, truly a beautiful essay
Could I get the name of the song, if that’s ok?
Cheers 😊
🫡
Yep! I think it’s a great springboard to get people to dig into Marxist theory who may be opposed to the very concept due to percieved baggage.
