I know China is nominally ruled by a Communist Party, but that doesn't make it "Marxist-Leninist" in practice. We hear over and over that America is the "world's greatest democracy", but that doesn't make it so.
Any hybrid system is ultimately capitalist so long as the commanding heights of the economy remain in private hands. The biggest industries in China today are privately-owned, just like in the USA.
My beef with this is that the public can't control what it doesn't own, and under private ownership the broader economy will always be geared toward private profit rather than social need.
I appreciate your open-mindedness.
Conservatives like to paint anyone on the left as being in favour of "big government", but there's an interesting quote by Karl Marx when he's talking about the Paris Commune of 1870, the first workers' state in history, and says the following:
"The Commune made the catchword of all bourgeois revolutions, cheap government, a reality, by abolishing the two greatest sources of expenditure - the army and the officialdom."
In the final analysis, the state is nothing but armed bodies of men in defense of property relations. You have bloated budgets for the army and the police force, and you have a whole layer of privileged bureaucrats in government, all so a minority of people can control the means of production.
Now if instead, you had working people running society themselves, the need for a state would disappear as classes themselves disappeared. Instead of a separate army and police force, you would have an armed people. Instead of Parliaments and Congresses - talk shops for the bureaucrats who represent the ruling class - you would have people democratically deciding their own fate through workers' councils.
The welfare state is a tool by which governments can mitigate the negative effects of capitalism such as unemployment. But in a planned economy with full employment, there would be no such need.
However, socialized medicine is still far cheaper than the private alternative. Why do you think most countries have single-payer health systems and only America sticks with its chaotic and expensive private system? Health care is a lot cheaper when you don't have to include things like CEO salaries in the cost.
Deregulation contributed to the current crisis, but it didn't cause it. Eventually in every business cycle, the market becomes saturated and demand slows down. When that happens, businesses are producing more goods than they can sell. This is overproduction, and so they have to start making cuts and laying off people until they restore equilibrium.
We need to take a broader view of the economic cycle. The world got out of the Great Depression through the stimulus of World War II, which led to a postwar boom with new technologies and new markets. Around 1968 things started to slow down and you got stagflation in the 70s. What deregulation, along with easy credit, did in the 80s was artificially prolong the postwar boom for another few decades. But this just meant that when the crisis eventually hit (as it did in 2008), the recession would be even worse.
Actually, I
am advocating socialism and Marxism.
t: What I meant earlier was that I didn't want people to think this thread was only about a socialist revolution in the USA, because I wanted to get people thinking about the idea of revolution in general. Other people might be in favour or revolution, but not socialism, and I just wanted to hear their take.
What I mean by a planned, democratically-run economy is what workers in Paris came up with during the Commune. Economically that means taking the heights of the economy (for example, the Fortune 500 in the States) and putting them under public ownership, and under democratic control.
Politically, that means workers' councils, where employees in the workplace elect delegates and send them to higher legislative bodies (one for the city, state, country, continent, etc.). Conditions include:
1. Free and democratic elections to all positions
2. Right of recall of all elected officials at any time
3. No official to receive a higher wage than an average skilled worker
4. Gradually, all the tasks of running society and the state are to be performed by everyone in turn, or as Lenin put it, "Any cook should be able to be prime minister."
To put it bluntly, who would you rather have running the American steel industry: Ivy League MBAs (the same ones who ran their companies into the ground and escaped with golden parachutes)...or steelworkers?
There might not be a bubble, but if not, then we have a decade of stagnant, barely existent growth to look forward to.
The reason I disagree with you on these points is that things like regulation are just tinkering around the edges, and don't address the central problem: that as long as industry is in private hands, it will be geared towards profit, not social need.
Right now there are millions and millions of unemployed, people who are willing and eager to work but can't because the market has no need for them. I say this is a stupid way to run an economy, and a tremendous waste of human potential. Production should be oriented towards making things people need - and in that approach, the sky's the limit, because we can always use more stuff.
I feel where you're coming from. Of course the president ignored Occupy; like all American presidents, he works for the 1%. But just because Occupy failed to seriously alter the status quo doesn't mean people are going to stop trying. And as time goes on, not only will they become better organized (they need to link up with the labor movement), but Americans will be angrier, because the economy is not going to improve significantly in the next several years, and something like a war with Iran could easily intensify those feelings of resentment.
The GI Bill is a good example of providing for people's needs based on the work they've done. I don't see why we should limit that to soldiers. The funny thing is, when you ignore what it's mostly used for, the U.S. military is pretty socialist. It brings together recruits from all ethnic backgrounds and treats them equally; invests in their education and training; provides them with health care and child care; and wage differentials between generals and privates are incomparably smaller than in the private sector.
If I went to Africa or East Timor, I'm sure I'd come back with the same opinions I have now, only more intense. The reason those countries are so poor compared to advanced capitalist countries is because we have historically exploited them to build our own economies. Europe colonized Africa to obtain cheap raw materials and used those for its own industries, and even after decolonialization, the richest countries still exploit the poorest ones: as a source of cheap labour, for raw materials, and as markets for Western goods (which usually involves crushing potential rivals in the poor country).
You really think people care more about bringing down the deficit than having jobs, homes and enough money to feed their families?
Cameron won with 36% of the vote - a lot like Harper in Canada, who got a majority with 39% of the vote. But in each case, most people in the country were against the Conservatives.
