Socialism vs Capitalism containment thread

[peekpok]

I find that its usually very difficult to untangle the concept of "socialism" from "regulation" in online conversations. Many people who purport to be anti-socialist have long supported or at least ignored massive government subsidies for agriculture, fossil fuels, and defense contractors. The US has invaded parts of the world to secure oil, but it was apparently a cardinal sin when the US government bailed out General Motors after 2008. This is pretty interesting when you consider how closely linked these two industries are.

I feel that if some people in congress introduced legislation to ban corporations from renting out single family houses, it would be criticized as being "socialist" even though it would really just be a regulation on the market. After all the government wouldn't be owning those houses either, they will still be privately owned.

It can be very hard to suss out what "socialism" is until you know very well the person you are talking to. Unless we're talking about the right-wing where socialism is just anything they personally dislike.

[wjfox]

[caltrek]

Socialist Internationalism Versus Capitalist Nationalism
by Eugene Debs
January 1916

Introduction:

(Janata Weekly) [In 1916, with World War I raging, socialist leader Eugene V. Debs wrote a short piece condemning the nationalism that had thrown soldiers into trench warfare and machine-gun slaughter.

Debs’s article appeared in the January 1916 issue of the National Rip-Saw, a mass-circulation socialist newspaper based in St Louis. The United States still hadn’t entered the war, and Debs wanted to keep it that way. He reminded his US comrades of their duty to oppose the conflict — the fetid fruit of the ruling class — and excoriated the many European socialists who had fallen in line behind their nations’ leaders.

“True socialists,” Debs wrote, “cannot at the same time be nationalists, militarists and capitalist ‘patriots.’ . . . The self-called socialists who are nationalists first and who set the ‘fatherland’ of their masters above the whole earth and above all the workers of the world are not socialists at all but either mild and harmless capitalist reformers and stool pigeons or traitors to the cause.”

Strong words. More than a hundred years later, it’s a reminder that the best way to honor those killed in war is to fight the ruling-class forces that repeatedly send soldiers off to die. We are republishing this epic article.

Introductory Comments by Debs:

(Reprinted in Jacobin) If the principles of socialism have not international application and if the socialist movement is not an international movement then its whole philosophy is false and the movement has no reason for existence.

Karl Marx, founder of the modern socialist movement, based his whole theory upon the internationality of the working class and called upon the workers of all countries to unite in the struggle for their emancipation.

Before the war broke out in Europe there was no question about the international character of the socialist movement, but when the tocsin sounded, international obligation was swept away, or forgotten, and in the frenzy aroused by the military clackers, thousands of socialist party members became the intensest of nationalists and “patriots,” utterly denying their international principles and obligations and turning traitors to the movement to which they had solemnly pledged their honor and their lives.

Read more here: https://janataweekly.org/socialist-int ... ionalism/ or here: https://jacobin.com/2022/05/eugene-v-d ... tionalism

[weatheriscool]

I support a hybrid system that has capitalism as the engine but is regulated

[wjfox]

[erowind]

I support a hybrid system that has capitalism as the engine but is regulated

Not a "hybrid" that's just capitalism.

Either the means of production are privately owned or they are not. There is no grey area or inbetween.

[wjfox]

[erowind]

It's so infuriating. The narrative pushed in the mainstream media and government isn't even consistent with capitalist economics theory. In a system of ideal capitalism (which doesn't and will never exist) more jobs than unemployed people "should" mean the economy trends towards almost full employment as businesses "should" be efficient in hiring that labor pool. The price of labor "should" rise, rather rapidly as it is in high demand until most of that demand is filled at which point it "should" level off.

The price of goods "should" not rise as a result of higher labor costs. Businesses "should" be COMPETING to lower prices (and build more quality products/services) and make their operations more efficient regardless of labor costs! Labor costs are to be factored into the cost of operations, but in an ideal state of competition proper operation "should" always mean outcompeting one's competitors on both price and quality. And lack of said competition to lower prices and increase quality "should" mean that the business fails. Rising prices as a broad phenomena is fundamentally antithetical to economics theory on "efficient" "free" markets.

When prices are consistently rising, products are losing quality, wages are falling relative to true cost of living increases over decades, and corporate bureaucrats in businesses are running free with a larger and larger share of profits that describes nothing less than a failed economic system. Everything in the theory that is so espoused is turned on its head. In times past only the most cynical rats of monarchist schools of thought ever dared to publicly advocate for gross concentration of wealth in the hands of a financial elite. Yet, our culture today has taken such a character that even the pundits who would dare to lay claim to the words "liberal," "libertarian," "capitalism," in their understanding of and advocation of a given economic theory on capitalist economy have done just that, most foolishly, they are often not even self-aware of their blunder.

[wjfox]

Haven't had time to read this yet, but I'm posting the link for follow up later.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 0X22002169

[R8Z]

Interesting video on market forces.