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the smugness is always the worst part.
“Um, have you considered (facile bullshit we all heard ten thousand times before even becoming leftists)?”if only i could do a mental -“then thousand times comment”; my sanity would be much improved. lol
Yes, people should have that, but it’s not that simple. Some liberals, particularly classical liberals, think a free market would bring those things to everyone. I don’t necessarily disagree, though I think free markets can only ever be free under communism/socialism, not capitalism. The issue with centrally planned, universal healthcare is that a hostile government could refuse to provide you care, much like insurance companies that don’t approve coverage for many things. Additionally, there needs to be strong medical privacy protections.
I like to take a Mutualist position on it. Things should only be socialized to their direct stakeholders. So most companies would be worker coöps. Utilities would be consumer worker coöps. And large interstate transit would be federal. Universal healthcare would fall into the later as a largescale consumer coöp.
To make clear the point Cowbee made, consider these three scenarios:-
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The different parts of the country have different levels of natural resources / infrastructure / educational facilities. Co-ops i the wealthier areas are doing well, and all their employees are prospering. But those in the poorer areas are struggling, and all their employees are struggling.
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There are five co-ops making the same type of product (say, radios). They each have their own design office, factory, sales networks and marketing. Would it not be more efficient to consolidate them?
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There is a co-op that works in digging coal and running a thermal power plant. The society as a whole would benefit from switching to solar panels, but this co-op keeps blocking all such efforts since it would hurt them.
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This doesn’t really solve the problems of capitalism, competing cooperatives still gives rise to class distinctions and creates an economy oriented around competition over collective interest. Cooperatives can play a part of a broader, developing socialist society, but should always be intended on being phased out. You can have local units of broader contexts without soley giving ownership to the local.
As a Mutualist, I firmly disagree. Coöps are essentially a democratic alternative to top-down coercive management styles or forms of ownership. It is a mutualist system that is antithetical to competition.
Take a renter’s coöp for example. Essentially everyone owns their building and they aren’t competing with other buildings or have shareholders would expect a return on investment.
With coöps you can actually respect locality. Large auth-socialist systems will often have with people competing interests who have undo control over local systems. That isn’t to say broader standards shouldn’t exist, but that they should be done thru voluntary industry wide syndication.
The problem with cooperative ownership is it puts local interests over global interests, and gives rise to class distinctions. Local councils can play a part in a broader system, but local coops forming the basis of organization works directly against collectivized planning and production. The Soviet Union, early on, experienced directly the consequences of having too much local control, resulting in some local factories “gaming the system.”
Not all forms of managament and administration are coercive or bad. Trying to solve the issues of management under capitalism and replicating the competitive class structure in a horizontalist fashion misanalyzes the problem and thus provides a faulty conclusion.
Market-based healthcare favors perpetual treatment over permanent cures or preventative medicine, like dialysis over kidney transplants, insulin instead of diet and exercise. If you have rare disease than you are just fucked, because pharmaceutical companies just want to sell dick pills. A market’s purpose is to maximize revenue, not patient well-being.
Not if it is a socialized market that disallows corporate ownership in favor of consumer coöperative ownership.
Markets are fundamentally profit driven, and services like healthcare or housing need to be provided regardless of the profit motive. These are a natural fit for the state owned industries. Where markets can have a role is providing nice to have things that improve general quality of life, but aren’t living essentials.
*Capital markets. Commodity markets are fine as long as you align stakeholders with ownership. So worker and consumer coöps. Rental and housing coöps are a great example.
How do you prevent the commodities turning into capital?
You don’t have to. If it becomes capital, then it is subject to the same multi-stakeholder analysis.
If I bought a printer, it would just be a commodity. If I start selling products made from said printer and hire more people, then it would need to be a worker coöp.
How would an authoritarian socialist system handle someone wanting a printer given that it could be used as capital?
Depending on the stage of socialist construction, private ownership is either limited, or no longer possible to begin with.
I mean that’s the potential problem with any service: that the faction running it could decide they don’t like you. I don’t think that’s a good enough reason not to build things that help society though. A government could decide not to let you on a train, i still think there should be trains
I’ve never encountered this type of liberal. Neolib, sure.
Liberalism is an ideology with two main parts. First is political liberalism which focuses on individual freedoms, democracy, and human rights. Second is economic liberalism which centers around free markets, private property, and wealth accumulation. These two aspects form a contradiction. Political liberalism purports to support everyone’s freedom, while economic liberalism enshrines private property rights as sacred in laws and constitutions, effectively removing them from political debate.
Liberalism justifies the use of state violence to safeguard property rights even when they come into direct conflict with providing necessities such as food, shelter, and healthcare. The idea that private property is a key part of individual freedom provides the foundational justification for the rich to keep their wealth while ignoring the needs of everyone else. Thus, all the talk of promoting freedom and democracy is nothing more than a fig leaf to provide cover for justifying capitalist relations.
This is an excellent primer on the subject https://orgrad.wordpress.com/articles/liberalism-the-two-faced-tyranny-of-wealth/
I very much understand all of this. Do you truly prefer maga? You would rather have ICE raids than student loan forgiveness? You would rather have Medicaid cuts than the CHIPS act. I am not a liberal but I have to admit I am extremely embarrassed by the short sightedness and lack of care from modern leftists. Letting Trump won is causing so much harm to people who don’t deserve it. Is the DNC the answer, fuck no. But letting republicans win everything is clearly pushing America to the far right.
Exhibit number 6,631 of liberals refusing to process the existence of people to their left and just pretending everyone who disagrees with their preferred form of polite fascism must secretly just be a different type of fascist.
Also lol if you think the dems are ever going to do student loan forgiveness. They’ll be dangling that scrap over your head to get you to vote for the next bipartisan genocide until the day you die.
How on earth did you come to the conclusion the comment you were responding to was supporting MAGA? Honestly baffling
Because it doesn’t support Democrats and anything that doesn’t support them must be supporting MAGA. Politics is black and white like that.
Because leftists are pushing the youth towards the right. There are way more lil Nazis then there ever have been. Y’all are the reactionary assholes that assume I have to love the DNC, quite the opposite. I can however, see reality.
You vote for a genocide and tell yourself it’s because you’re anti-fascist… you sure that’s reality you can see?
I don’t vote for a genocide. Neither party is going to fully control Israel. Allowing Trump to take office was the true worst case scenario for Gaza and it’s people and that is proven more true everyday. The only reality is that more Palestinians are dead because Trump is the President and they now have no shot at any sort of future as an independent nation because Trump became President. If you didn’t vote for Kamala and could have you are responsible for that but your fanatascism and lack of awareness allow you to lie to yourself. If you actually gave a shit about the people over your narrative . . .
In what possible way are leftists pushing youth towards the right? The opposite is happening, the left is growing rapidly. There is also a surge in the far-right, driven by the US Empire crumbling. You’re baselessly accusing the left of being responsible for the right, while sitting on a high horse pretending you’re the one that can see reality? Come on.
The far right seems to be winning both the culture war and the political war. This was unimaginable 15 years ago.
Because in the US not voting always favors the conservative party. Do any of you have any knowledge history?
Not only are you creating a false dichotomy here, but you’re ignoring the fact that Trump coming to power is itself is a direct product of decades of liberal policies.
It’s not though. He came to power through a strong propaganda network, he is actually just continuing liberal policies.
The question you need to ask yourself is what made his message resonate with people now when this sort of rhetoric was ignored before. People are falling out of the liberal mainstream because they see their material conditions decline, this makes them lose faith in the system and mainstream media. This is what creates room for opportunists like Trump to come in and promise change like draining the swamp, and so on. Obviously, he is continuing the same policies that benefit the ruling class, but the same people who were fooled by the liberal message for decades prior, are now fooled by his promises.
Because NYC has proof the DNC is not far enough left to achieve their goals. Everywhere else the DNC can be used as a leftist Boogeyman.
The dem party as a whole is fundamentally a right wing party. The NYC is proof that there is demand for left wing policies in the US, but they cannot be implemented sustainably within the capitalist system.
Neolibs are just a subcategory of liberal, though.
I’m not actually sure that’s true.
Why wouldn’t it be? Liberalism is the ideological superstructure of capitalism, Neoliberals are a particular type.
You said liberalism is the ideological superstructure of capitalism, as if it was the only one. But there is also fascism, right? Were you imprecise, or am I missing something?
I’d say imprecise, for the sake of short convo. Liberalism in my view is the “normal” ideological superstructure of capitalism, and fascism is the ideological superstructure of capitalism in crisis, when capital needs to violently assert itself to maintain the existing way of things. It’s what happens when the rulers can’t rule in the old way, and/or the people can’t live in the old way, but when the proletariat is without a vanguard, or a weak one.
There’s a little bit more nuance than that isn’t there? You can provide these things, but we still need to produce things right? Because we haven’t yet reached full automation. So the question is if we provide those things and a significant part of the population decide that they are happy with the minimum and thus they don’t want to work, and we start having massive labor shortages such that the goods needed to sustain the economy cannot be produced, what do we do? Well the only solution at that point is to make labor mandatory, and forced if the individual is noncompliant. Which is why the labor market as it exists is seen as the lesser evil. This is a bit of an oversimplification because I’m not looking to write an essay here but that covers the gist of why a liberal may oppose full on socialism.
For me, the imperative is achieving that automation. Only then is full socialism viable.
We don’t need to reach full automation. We throw away half the food we produce right now, there is more empty housing having been bought up for speculation than there are people in the US or Canada. The problem is with the economic system that fails to distribute according to need. The solution is to ensure that workers are the primary beneficiaries of their own labour as opposed to the oligarchs who own capital.
