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FDR's second bill to Congress after taking office during the Great Depression was cutting government expenditures. Most things were cut including Congress's salaries and benefits. Congress quickly vetoed that, FDR introduced it again and this time Congress really dumped it.That old GOP corporate crony rhetoric is not going to work for many more years as jobs dry upDemocratic Socialism allows you to make money before taking it away. Marxism prevents you from making money in the first place.
You know, when 60% of Americans start to vote for Socialist candidates instead of open borders free trading Globaloney Republicans that sort of thing isnt going to help anyone.
For Americans to do well we have to figure out what about socialism is compatible and what is not and why, adopt what is compatible with American culture and oppose the rest.
The problem is that Republicans are very, very good at making people afraid. Fear is their bread and butter. And the moment you say 'socialism', they compare it to Nazis.
Universal healthcare? Nazis.
Paid maternity leave? Nazis.
Or some equally hysteric equivalent.
Sure it will. You just blame the liberals. Or 'socialism'. Or the federal government. The poor. 'Entitlements'.
The list of boogeymen is endless. And they're experts at sowing fear and distrust. All they need is a single anecdotal example and their constituency will nod without question. I mean, how many times have conservatives played the Obamaphone lady?
And she's just one lady.
Remember the black panthers at all the voting locations keeping white people away? With Fox News playing videos of it again and again for years?
It was one guy. At one polling station. One time. And he didn't stop anyone from voting.
The message of the GOP is anger and fear. And they're really, really good at it. The advantage they have is that humans are hardwired to pay closer attention to the negative. As an abundance of berries won't kill you. But the lack of any food eventually will.
This link below should open the eyes of the Reagan Republicans and the rest of the hoi polloi (i.e. the common people) that a vote for the current iteration of Republicans is a vote against their best interest and the best interests of the country.
Of further note, the Tea Party Republican's want to cut Social Security Benefits for their vote to increase the debt limit, or they'll shut down the government costing the taxpayers billions, YET
not one of them has suggest the pay and benefits of Members of Congress be cut.
Retirement: CEOs Have Millions More Put Aside Than Their Workers - Fortune
This link below should open the eyes of the Reagan Republicans and the rest of the hoi polloi (i.e. the common people) that a vote for the current iteration of Republicans is a vote against their best interest and the best interests of the country.
Of further note, the Tea Party Republican's want to cut Social Security Benefits for their vote to increase the debt limit, or they'll shut down the government costing the taxpayers billions, YET
not one of them has suggest the pay and benefits of Members of Congress be cut.
Retirement: CEOs Have Millions More Put Aside Than Their Workers - Fortune
How so? If so, Socialism works. It keeps people alive, fed and sheltered who might otherwise sleep on sidewalks.
How so? If so, Socialism works. It keeps people alive, fed and sheltered who might otherwise sleep on sidewalks.
Yes, there are Socialist elements in our government and ahve been for some time, the biggest being put in by FDR.
I do not believe that Democratic Socialism is a bad thing, and Huey Long is as American as Ronald Reagan, the problem was that Long wanted too much change too fast and got cashiered.
By 'Socialism' I mean programs that pool people collective interest together at a government level to aid or assist people during times of trouble. Our entire set of 'safety net' programs should be considered socialist and I think most people know that.
IT is not MARXIST, but I think that Socialism is a bigger set of ideas than just Marxism and its derivatives.
The first people to use the word 'communism' to describe their ideal way of life were early American Christians in the 17th through 18th centuries trying to recreate the Christian Church of the Book of Acts.[
I agree, and as bigger I consider it to be a product of Judeo-Christian ethics.
While there are other catalytic factors and heavy handed approaches that will levae plenty of blame for both sides while in power, the final situation iis that Socialissm is being re-appraised and rebranded. As Democratic Socialism it is a winner down the road, but as the Marxist variant it wont get very far at all.Sure it will. You just blame the liberals. Or 'socialism'. Or the federal government. The poor. 'Entitlements'..
My point is that anecdotal examples will galvanize ideologues. You don't need systemic problems or 'catalytic factors'. You need a lone emotional example.
And a boogeyman.
This is an incredibly important topic as the election of Paul Ryan as the new House Dictator has cemented in the control of corporate America on Congress. Both parties cannot kiss corporate lobbyists hands fast enough as those hands hand out election funds. Our political system is spiraling into a hard landing.
This means that there will be a continued slide down in wages and employment for American workers unless Trump can manipulate the corporate system toward another more populist direction, but that is not the track record of corporate cronyism in this country, so I will leave that for some pleasant fantasy.
This slide in jobs and wages I think is almost inevitable anyway, due to changes in our technology, and this will ultimately lead the socialist movement back into popularity, driving a stake through the heart of the 'rugged individualism of Reagan' in the US.
Since Socialism is now our inevitable future, the question is which form of socialism will that be? Will it be Marxism warmed over or genuine Democratic Socialism of FDR, Truman and JFK?
There is a huge difference between the two, despite what my libertarian friends may say. Ayn Rand's personal experience with communism in Russia left her unable to distinguish between the two, and that is one of the reasons that Whittaker Chambers slammed 'Atlas Shrugged' so badly in a review in the National Review. Chambers was over-reacting to a much broader category of economics than the Communism in Russia she had come rightly to fear.
Democratic Socialism predates Marxism.
"Fenner Brockway, a leading British democratic socialist of the Independent Labour Party, wrote in his book Britain's First Socialists:
"The Levellers were pioneers of political democracy and the sovereignty of the people; the Agitators were the pioneers of participatory control by the ranks at their workplace; and the Diggers were pioneers of communal ownership, cooperation and egalitarianism. All three equate to democratic socialism.[21]
"The tradition of the Diggers and the Levellers was continued in the period described by EP Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class by Jacobin groups like the London Corresponding Society and by polemicists such as Thomas Paine. Their concern for both democracy and social justice marks them out as key precursors of democratic socialism.[22]
"The term "socialist" was first used in English in the British Cooperative Magazine in 1827[23] and came to be associated with the followers of the Welsh reformer Robert Owen, such as the Rochdale Pioneers who founded the co-operative movement. Owen's followers again stressed both participatory democracy and economic socialisation, in the form of consumer co-operatives, credit unions and mutual aid societies. The Chartists similarly combined a working class politics with a call for greater democracy. Many countries have this." - Democratic socialism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The essential principles of Democratic Socialism in the Anglo tradition were:
1. Democracy and the soverienty of the People of a Nation, which is embodied in our declaration of Independence. This includes the principles of Free speech and thought, respect for dissent and the abolition of political crimes.
2. Promotion of Working Class interests encapsulated in theories on 'social justice'.
3. Economic cooperation based on voluntary participation for the mutual benefit of all participants
It may shock some conservatives to know that the term Communism was first used by Christians to describe the form of government among first century Christians, and was the inspiration of many church communities that flourished in the US, and some still do. Robert Owen wanted to mimic this success with secular communes and failed each time, but that didn't stop him from promoting secular communes anyway, lol.
Marxism, on the other hand began with the publication of the first volume of 'das Kapital' by Marx in 1859.
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This was much later than the formation of Social Democracy in England and 31 years after the coinage of the word in Cooperative Magazine.
Marx tried to weave a sort of unitary theory of politics, social theory, philosophy and economics into Marxism. He promoted a new set of theories that included Historical Materialism, capital formation economic theories, and more, summed up here:
"Marx's main ideas included:
As anyone can see, the most noticeable difference between Marxism and Democratic Socialism are the many ideological systems of thought Marx promoted that were entirely tangential to his main economic theories and many of these beliefs were openly hostile to religious thought. Americans being a very religious and/or spiritual people alienates them from Marxism and any theory of Socialism that drinks deeply from a Marxist world view.
- alienation: Marx refers to the alienation of people from aspects of their "human nature" ("Gattungswesen", usually translated as 'species-essence' or 'species-being'). He believed that alienation is a systematic result of capitalism. Under capitalism, the fruits of production belong to the employers, who expropriate the surplus created by others and in so doing generate alienated labour.[6] Alienation describes objective features of a person's situation in capitalism - it isn't necessary for them to believe or feel that they are alienated.
- base and superstructure: Marx and Engels use the “base-structure” concept to explain the idea that the totality of relations among people with regard to “the social production of their existence” forms the economic basis, on which arises a superstructure of political and legal institutions. To the base corresponds the social consciousness which includes religious, philosophical, and other main ideas. The base conditions both, the superstructure and the social consciousness. A conflict between the development of material productive forces and the relations of production causes social revolutions, and the resulting change in the economic basis will sooner or later lead to the transformation of the superstructure.[7] For Marx, though, this relationship is not a one way process - it is reflexive; the base determines the superstructure in the first instance at the same time as it remains the foundation of a form of social organization which is itself transformed as an element in the overall dialectical process. The relationship between superstructure and base is considered to be a dialectical one, ineffable in a sense except as it unfolds in its material reality in the actual historical process (which scientific socialism aims to explain and, ultimately, to guide).
- class consciousness: Class consciousness refers to the awareness, both of itself and of the social world around it, that a social class possesses, and its capacity to act in its own rational interests based on this awareness. Thus class consciousness must be attained before the class may mount a successful revolution. Other methods of revolutionary action have been developed however, such as vanguardism.
- exploitation: Marx refers to the exploitation of an entire segment or class of society by another. He sees it as being an inherent feature and key element of capitalism and free markets. The profit gained by the capitalist is the difference between the value of the product made by the worker and the actual wage that the worker receives; in other words, capitalism functions on the basis of paying workers less than the full value of their labor, in order to enable the capitalist class to turn a profit.
- historical materialism: Historical materialism was first articulated by Marx, although he himself never used the term. It looks for the causes of developments and changes in human societies in the way in which humans collectively make the means to life, thus giving an emphasis, through economic analysis, to everything that co-exists with the economic base of society (e.g. social classes, political structures, ideologies).
- means of production: The means of production are a combination of the means of labor and the subject of labor used by workers to make products. The means of labor include machines, tools, equipment, infrastructure, and "all those things with the aid of which man acts upon the subject of labor, and transforms it".[8] The subject of labor includes raw materials and materials directly taken from nature. Means of production by themselves produce nothing -- labor power is needed for production to take place.
- ideology: Without offering a general definition for ideology,[9] Marx on several instances has used the term to designate the production of images of social reality. According to Engels, “ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces”.[10] Because the ruling class controls the society's means of production, the superstructure of society, as well as its ruling ideas, will be determined according to what is in the ruling class's best interests. As Marx said famously in The German Ideology, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force”.[11] Therefore, the ideology of a society is of enormous importance since it confuses the alienated groups and can create false consciousness such as commodity fetishism (perceiving labor as capital ~ a degradation of human life).
- mode of production: The mode of production is a specific combination of productive forces (including human the means of production and labour power, tools, equipment, buildings and technologies, materials, and improved land) and social and technical relations of production (including the property, power and control relations governing society's productive assets, often codified in law, cooperative work relations and forms of association, relations between people and the objects of their work, and the relations between social classes).
- political economy: The term "political economy" originally meant the study of the conditions under which production was organized in the nation-states of the new-born capitalist system. Political economy, then, studies the mechanism of human activity in organizing material, and the mechanism of distributing the surplus or deficit that is the result of that activity. Political economy studies the means of production, specifically capital, and how this manifests itself in economic activity. -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Marxism#Main_ideas
Economic Marxism, if one can entirely isolate it from the rest of the system, is focused on the developments within a particular industry (though I dont think Marx would describe it that way) and how capitalism, that is the increase in efficiency of production through better processes, faster machinery, substitution of cheaper and better materials, etc, all lead to a reduction of pay for the manual labor as the requirements for said worker get simpler over time and laborers are easier to find and train. Thus the over-supply of potential labor is the critical factor in driving the price of labor down and leaving laborers in persistent poverty. Marxian economics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
What it appears to me that Marx over looked was that the technological advances also introduce new technologies. Those new technologies produced new industries that began the capitalization process all over, with costly labor at the top of the gradual slide down, but costly nonetheless. So the son of a fifth generation water mill worker might become the first generation of an automated lumber mill working family. This still required a move on the part of the laborers family and weakened the idea of extended family and broader community as time went on, but it kept the professional skilled working class in tall grass for some time.
But that is changing with a global economy. Now India's professional classes can swarm to our shores with resume's prefit to published job positions quicker than unions can come to realize that management has decided to have their workers train their new Indian replacements.
The public is going to react to this final end stage degeneration of global capitalism with fear and anger. They will look for anyone who will promise a fix, whether it is B. H. Obama or Donald Trump and they will be increasingly willing to disregard any issue that is not a pocket book matter as irrelevant.
So what are the forms of Democratic Socialism that the majority of America can accept? How can it get paid for? Where does the money come from in a shrinking economy? Are we all doomed to flip burgers at McDonalds?
Democratic socialists won't resort to mass murder….marxists see that as a necessary step.
A lot of it boils down to semantics. If a government was "democratic socialism" that would mean that the means of production were collectively owned, and democratically directed.
Often people misuse the term when they mean "social democracy" which is a mixed market system regulated by a democratically elected government.
Some social democratic parties are marxist in philosophy, while others draw on other philosophies.
then there is the term "communist" which historically referred to countries in which all the economic and political power was held in a few hands. Such countries were essentially plutocracies, and shared the same abuses that one could expect in a plutocracy which did not operate under the guise of egalitarianism.
I hate Marxists but Marx said some things that were right. For example he saw the great power of machines and said that humanity must use these machines to replace many jobs so that people can have more time to enjoy life. It was a time when people worked 18 hours everyday.
Jobs like flipping burgers are useless and can easily be replaced by robots.
The difference is nomenclature, nothing more.This is an incredibly important topic as the election of Paul Ryan as the new House Dictator has cemented in the control of corporate America on Congress. Both parties cannot kiss corporate lobbyists hands fast enough as those hands hand out election funds. Our political system is spiraling into a hard landing.
This means that there will be a continued slide down in wages and employment for American workers unless Trump can manipulate the corporate system toward another more populist direction, but that is not the track record of corporate cronyism in this country, so I will leave that for some pleasant fantasy.
This slide in jobs and wages I think is almost inevitable anyway, due to changes in our technology, and this will ultimately lead the socialist movement back into popularity, driving a stake through the heart of the 'rugged individualism of Reagan' in the US.
Since Socialism is now our inevitable future, the question is which form of socialism will that be? Will it be Marxism warmed over or genuine Democratic Socialism of FDR, Truman and JFK?
There is a huge difference between the two, despite what my libertarian friends may say. Ayn Rand's personal experience with communism in Russia left her unable to distinguish between the two, and that is one of the reasons that Whittaker Chambers slammed 'Atlas Shrugged' so badly in a review in the National Review. Chambers was over-reacting to a much broader category of economics than the Communism in Russia she had come rightly to fear.
Democratic Socialism predates Marxism.
"Fenner Brockway, a leading British democratic socialist of the Independent Labour Party, wrote in his book Britain's First Socialists:
"The Levellers were pioneers of political democracy and the sovereignty of the people; the Agitators were the pioneers of participatory control by the ranks at their workplace; and the Diggers were pioneers of communal ownership, cooperation and egalitarianism. All three equate to democratic socialism.[21]
"The tradition of the Diggers and the Levellers was continued in the period described by EP Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class by Jacobin groups like the London Corresponding Society and by polemicists such as Thomas Paine. Their concern for both democracy and social justice marks them out as key precursors of democratic socialism.[22]
"The term "socialist" was first used in English in the British Cooperative Magazine in 1827[23] and came to be associated with the followers of the Welsh reformer Robert Owen, such as the Rochdale Pioneers who founded the co-operative movement. Owen's followers again stressed both participatory democracy and economic socialisation, in the form of consumer co-operatives, credit unions and mutual aid societies. The Chartists similarly combined a working class politics with a call for greater democracy. Many countries have this." - Democratic socialism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The essential principles of Democratic Socialism in the Anglo tradition were:
1. Democracy and the soverienty of the People of a Nation, which is embodied in our declaration of Independence. This includes the principles of Free speech and thought, respect for dissent and the abolition of political crimes.
2. Promotion of Working Class interests encapsulated in theories on 'social justice'.
3. Economic cooperation based on voluntary participation for the mutual benefit of all participants
It may shock some conservatives to know that the term Communism was first used by Christians to describe the form of government among first century Christians, and was the inspiration of many church communities that flourished in the US, and some still do. Robert Owen wanted to mimic this success with secular communes and failed each time, but that didn't stop him from promoting secular communes anyway, lol.
Marxism, on the other hand began with the publication of the first volume of 'das Kapital' by Marx in 1859.
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This was much later than the formation of Social Democracy in England and 31 years after the coinage of the word in Cooperative Magazine.
Marx tried to weave a sort of unitary theory of politics, social theory, philosophy and economics into Marxism. He promoted a new set of theories that included Historical Materialism, capital formation economic theories, and more, summed up here:
"Marx's main ideas included:
As anyone can see, the most noticeable difference between Marxism and Democratic Socialism are the many ideological systems of thought Marx promoted that were entirely tangential to his main economic theories and many of these beliefs were openly hostile to religious thought. Americans being a very religious and/or spiritual people alienates them from Marxism and any theory of Socialism that drinks deeply from a Marxist world view.
- alienation: Marx refers to the alienation of people from aspects of their "human nature" ("Gattungswesen", usually translated as 'species-essence' or 'species-being'). He believed that alienation is a systematic result of capitalism. Under capitalism, the fruits of production belong to the employers, who expropriate the surplus created by others and in so doing generate alienated labour.[6] Alienation describes objective features of a person's situation in capitalism - it isn't necessary for them to believe or feel that they are alienated.
- base and superstructure: Marx and Engels use the “base-structure” concept to explain the idea that the totality of relations among people with regard to “the social production of their existence” forms the economic basis, on which arises a superstructure of political and legal institutions. To the base corresponds the social consciousness which includes religious, philosophical, and other main ideas. The base conditions both, the superstructure and the social consciousness. A conflict between the development of material productive forces and the relations of production causes social revolutions, and the resulting change in the economic basis will sooner or later lead to the transformation of the superstructure.[7] For Marx, though, this relationship is not a one way process - it is reflexive; the base determines the superstructure in the first instance at the same time as it remains the foundation of a form of social organization which is itself transformed as an element in the overall dialectical process. The relationship between superstructure and base is considered to be a dialectical one, ineffable in a sense except as it unfolds in its material reality in the actual historical process (which scientific socialism aims to explain and, ultimately, to guide).
- class consciousness: Class consciousness refers to the awareness, both of itself and of the social world around it, that a social class possesses, and its capacity to act in its own rational interests based on this awareness. Thus class consciousness must be attained before the class may mount a successful revolution. Other methods of revolutionary action have been developed however, such as vanguardism.
- exploitation: Marx refers to the exploitation of an entire segment or class of society by another. He sees it as being an inherent feature and key element of capitalism and free markets. The profit gained by the capitalist is the difference between the value of the product made by the worker and the actual wage that the worker receives; in other words, capitalism functions on the basis of paying workers less than the full value of their labor, in order to enable the capitalist class to turn a profit.
- historical materialism: Historical materialism was first articulated by Marx, although he himself never used the term. It looks for the causes of developments and changes in human societies in the way in which humans collectively make the means to life, thus giving an emphasis, through economic analysis, to everything that co-exists with the economic base of society (e.g. social classes, political structures, ideologies).
- means of production: The means of production are a combination of the means of labor and the subject of labor used by workers to make products. The means of labor include machines, tools, equipment, infrastructure, and "all those things with the aid of which man acts upon the subject of labor, and transforms it".[8] The subject of labor includes raw materials and materials directly taken from nature. Means of production by themselves produce nothing -- labor power is needed for production to take place.
- ideology: Without offering a general definition for ideology,[9] Marx on several instances has used the term to designate the production of images of social reality. According to Engels, “ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces”.[10] Because the ruling class controls the society's means of production, the superstructure of society, as well as its ruling ideas, will be determined according to what is in the ruling class's best interests. As Marx said famously in The German Ideology, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force”.[11] Therefore, the ideology of a society is of enormous importance since it confuses the alienated groups and can create false consciousness such as commodity fetishism (perceiving labor as capital ~ a degradation of human life).
- mode of production: The mode of production is a specific combination of productive forces (including human the means of production and labour power, tools, equipment, buildings and technologies, materials, and improved land) and social and technical relations of production (including the property, power and control relations governing society's productive assets, often codified in law, cooperative work relations and forms of association, relations between people and the objects of their work, and the relations between social classes).
- political economy: The term "political economy" originally meant the study of the conditions under which production was organized in the nation-states of the new-born capitalist system. Political economy, then, studies the mechanism of human activity in organizing material, and the mechanism of distributing the surplus or deficit that is the result of that activity. Political economy studies the means of production, specifically capital, and how this manifests itself in economic activity. -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Marxism#Main_ideas
Economic Marxism, if one can entirely isolate it from the rest of the system, is focused on the developments within a particular industry (though I dont think Marx would describe it that way) and how capitalism, that is the increase in efficiency of production through better processes, faster machinery, substitution of cheaper and better materials, etc, all lead to a reduction of pay for the manual labor as the requirements for said worker get simpler over time and laborers are easier to find and train. Thus the over-supply of potential labor is the critical factor in driving the price of labor down and leaving laborers in persistent poverty. Marxian economics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
What it appears to me that Marx over looked was that the technological advances also introduce new technologies. Those new technologies produced new industries that began the capitalization process all over, with costly labor at the top of the gradual slide down, but costly nonetheless. So the son of a fifth generation water mill worker might become the first generation of an automated lumber mill working family. This still required a move on the part of the laborers family and weakened the idea of extended family and broader community as time went on, but it kept the professional skilled working class in tall grass for some time.
But that is changing with a global economy. Now India's professional classes can swarm to our shores with resume's prefit to published job positions quicker than unions can come to realize that management has decided to have their workers train their new Indian replacements.
The public is going to react to this final end stage degeneration of global capitalism with fear and anger. They will look for anyone who will promise a fix, whether it is B. H. Obama or Donald Trump and they will be increasingly willing to disregard any issue that is not a pocket book matter as irrelevant.
So what are the forms of Democratic Socialism that the majority of America can accept? How can it get paid for? Where does the money come from in a shrinking economy? Are we all doomed to flip burgers at McDonalds?
So the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and genuine democratic-Republicanism are inconsequential?The difference is nomenclature, nothing more.This is an incredibly important topic as the election of Paul Ryan as the new House Dictator has cemented in the control of corporate America on Congress. Both parties cannot kiss corporate lobbyists hands fast enough as those hands hand out election funds. Our political system is spiraling into a hard landing.
This means that there will be a continued slide down in wages and employment for American workers unless Trump can manipulate the corporate system toward another more populist direction, but that is not the track record of corporate cronyism in this country, so I will leave that for some pleasant fantasy.
This slide in jobs and wages I think is almost inevitable anyway, due to changes in our technology, and this will ultimately lead the socialist movement back into popularity, driving a stake through the heart of the 'rugged individualism of Reagan' in the US.
Since Socialism is now our inevitable future, the question is which form of socialism will that be? Will it be Marxism warmed over or genuine Democratic Socialism of FDR, Truman and JFK?
There is a huge difference between the two, despite what my libertarian friends may say. Ayn Rand's personal experience with communism in Russia left her unable to distinguish between the two, and that is one of the reasons that Whittaker Chambers slammed 'Atlas Shrugged' so badly in a review in the National Review. Chambers was over-reacting to a much broader category of economics than the Communism in Russia she had come rightly to fear.
Democratic Socialism predates Marxism.
"Fenner Brockway, a leading British democratic socialist of the Independent Labour Party, wrote in his book Britain's First Socialists:
"The Levellers were pioneers of political democracy and the sovereignty of the people; the Agitators were the pioneers of participatory control by the ranks at their workplace; and the Diggers were pioneers of communal ownership, cooperation and egalitarianism. All three equate to democratic socialism.[21]
"The tradition of the Diggers and the Levellers was continued in the period described by EP Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class by Jacobin groups like the London Corresponding Society and by polemicists such as Thomas Paine. Their concern for both democracy and social justice marks them out as key precursors of democratic socialism.[22]
"The term "socialist" was first used in English in the British Cooperative Magazine in 1827[23] and came to be associated with the followers of the Welsh reformer Robert Owen, such as the Rochdale Pioneers who founded the co-operative movement. Owen's followers again stressed both participatory democracy and economic socialisation, in the form of consumer co-operatives, credit unions and mutual aid societies. The Chartists similarly combined a working class politics with a call for greater democracy. Many countries have this." - Democratic socialism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The essential principles of Democratic Socialism in the Anglo tradition were:
1. Democracy and the soverienty of the People of a Nation, which is embodied in our declaration of Independence. This includes the principles of Free speech and thought, respect for dissent and the abolition of political crimes.
2. Promotion of Working Class interests encapsulated in theories on 'social justice'.
3. Economic cooperation based on voluntary participation for the mutual benefit of all participants
It may shock some conservatives to know that the term Communism was first used by Christians to describe the form of government among first century Christians, and was the inspiration of many church communities that flourished in the US, and some still do. Robert Owen wanted to mimic this success with secular communes and failed each time, but that didn't stop him from promoting secular communes anyway, lol.
Marxism, on the other hand began with the publication of the first volume of 'das Kapital' by Marx in 1859.
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This was much later than the formation of Social Democracy in England and 31 years after the coinage of the word in Cooperative Magazine.
Marx tried to weave a sort of unitary theory of politics, social theory, philosophy and economics into Marxism. He promoted a new set of theories that included Historical Materialism, capital formation economic theories, and more, summed up here:
"Marx's main ideas included:
As anyone can see, the most noticeable difference between Marxism and Democratic Socialism are the many ideological systems of thought Marx promoted that were entirely tangential to his main economic theories and many of these beliefs were openly hostile to religious thought. Americans being a very religious and/or spiritual people alienates them from Marxism and any theory of Socialism that drinks deeply from a Marxist world view.
- alienation: Marx refers to the alienation of people from aspects of their "human nature" ("Gattungswesen", usually translated as 'species-essence' or 'species-being'). He believed that alienation is a systematic result of capitalism. Under capitalism, the fruits of production belong to the employers, who expropriate the surplus created by others and in so doing generate alienated labour.[6] Alienation describes objective features of a person's situation in capitalism - it isn't necessary for them to believe or feel that they are alienated.
- base and superstructure: Marx and Engels use the “base-structure” concept to explain the idea that the totality of relations among people with regard to “the social production of their existence” forms the economic basis, on which arises a superstructure of political and legal institutions. To the base corresponds the social consciousness which includes religious, philosophical, and other main ideas. The base conditions both, the superstructure and the social consciousness. A conflict between the development of material productive forces and the relations of production causes social revolutions, and the resulting change in the economic basis will sooner or later lead to the transformation of the superstructure.[7] For Marx, though, this relationship is not a one way process - it is reflexive; the base determines the superstructure in the first instance at the same time as it remains the foundation of a form of social organization which is itself transformed as an element in the overall dialectical process. The relationship between superstructure and base is considered to be a dialectical one, ineffable in a sense except as it unfolds in its material reality in the actual historical process (which scientific socialism aims to explain and, ultimately, to guide).
- class consciousness: Class consciousness refers to the awareness, both of itself and of the social world around it, that a social class possesses, and its capacity to act in its own rational interests based on this awareness. Thus class consciousness must be attained before the class may mount a successful revolution. Other methods of revolutionary action have been developed however, such as vanguardism.
- exploitation: Marx refers to the exploitation of an entire segment or class of society by another. He sees it as being an inherent feature and key element of capitalism and free markets. The profit gained by the capitalist is the difference between the value of the product made by the worker and the actual wage that the worker receives; in other words, capitalism functions on the basis of paying workers less than the full value of their labor, in order to enable the capitalist class to turn a profit.
- historical materialism: Historical materialism was first articulated by Marx, although he himself never used the term. It looks for the causes of developments and changes in human societies in the way in which humans collectively make the means to life, thus giving an emphasis, through economic analysis, to everything that co-exists with the economic base of society (e.g. social classes, political structures, ideologies).
- means of production: The means of production are a combination of the means of labor and the subject of labor used by workers to make products. The means of labor include machines, tools, equipment, infrastructure, and "all those things with the aid of which man acts upon the subject of labor, and transforms it".[8] The subject of labor includes raw materials and materials directly taken from nature. Means of production by themselves produce nothing -- labor power is needed for production to take place.
- ideology: Without offering a general definition for ideology,[9] Marx on several instances has used the term to designate the production of images of social reality. According to Engels, “ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, it is true, but with a false consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to him; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or seeming motive forces”.[10] Because the ruling class controls the society's means of production, the superstructure of society, as well as its ruling ideas, will be determined according to what is in the ruling class's best interests. As Marx said famously in The German Ideology, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force”.[11] Therefore, the ideology of a society is of enormous importance since it confuses the alienated groups and can create false consciousness such as commodity fetishism (perceiving labor as capital ~ a degradation of human life).
- mode of production: The mode of production is a specific combination of productive forces (including human the means of production and labour power, tools, equipment, buildings and technologies, materials, and improved land) and social and technical relations of production (including the property, power and control relations governing society's productive assets, often codified in law, cooperative work relations and forms of association, relations between people and the objects of their work, and the relations between social classes).
- political economy: The term "political economy" originally meant the study of the conditions under which production was organized in the nation-states of the new-born capitalist system. Political economy, then, studies the mechanism of human activity in organizing material, and the mechanism of distributing the surplus or deficit that is the result of that activity. Political economy studies the means of production, specifically capital, and how this manifests itself in economic activity. -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_Marxism#Main_ideas
Economic Marxism, if one can entirely isolate it from the rest of the system, is focused on the developments within a particular industry (though I dont think Marx would describe it that way) and how capitalism, that is the increase in efficiency of production through better processes, faster machinery, substitution of cheaper and better materials, etc, all lead to a reduction of pay for the manual labor as the requirements for said worker get simpler over time and laborers are easier to find and train. Thus the over-supply of potential labor is the critical factor in driving the price of labor down and leaving laborers in persistent poverty. Marxian economics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
What it appears to me that Marx over looked was that the technological advances also introduce new technologies. Those new technologies produced new industries that began the capitalization process all over, with costly labor at the top of the gradual slide down, but costly nonetheless. So the son of a fifth generation water mill worker might become the first generation of an automated lumber mill working family. This still required a move on the part of the laborers family and weakened the idea of extended family and broader community as time went on, but it kept the professional skilled working class in tall grass for some time.
But that is changing with a global economy. Now India's professional classes can swarm to our shores with resume's prefit to published job positions quicker than unions can come to realize that management has decided to have their workers train their new Indian replacements.
The public is going to react to this final end stage degeneration of global capitalism with fear and anger. They will look for anyone who will promise a fix, whether it is B. H. Obama or Donald Trump and they will be increasingly willing to disregard any issue that is not a pocket book matter as irrelevant.
So what are the forms of Democratic Socialism that the majority of America can accept? How can it get paid for? Where does the money come from in a shrinking economy? Are we all doomed to flip burgers at McDonalds?
a statist is a statist...the other labels are moot and meaningless.
a statist is a statist...the other labels are moot and meaningless.
So there is no difference between one kind of state and another kind?
Do you define statist as anyone who wants any government at all? If not, then what is your working definition of a statist?
What exactly do you mean?
