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:
- 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
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.
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?
