Tag: Socialism
What Is Marxism?
Capitalism vs. Socialism | Glenn Loury, LaJuan Loury & Richard Wolff | The Glenn Show
The Pilgrims Dreamed of Socialism. Then Socialism Almost Killed Them.
“the Pilgrims attempted collective farming. The whole community decided when and how much to plant, when to harvest, and who would do the work.”
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“Soon, there wasn’t enough food.”
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“no one wanted to work. Everyone relied on others to do the work. Some people pretended to be injured. Others stole food.”
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“Young men complained they had to “spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense.”
Strong men thought it was an “injustice” they had to do more than weaker men without more compensation.
Older men thought that working as much as young men was “indignity and disrespect.”
Women who cooked and cleaned “deemed it a kind of slavery.”
The Pilgrims had run into the “tragedy of the commons.” No individual Pilgrim owned crops they grew, so no individual had much incentive to work.
Bradford’s solution: private property.
He assigned every family a parcel of land so they could grow their own corn. “It made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been,” he wrote.
People who had claimed that “weakness and inability” made them unable to work now were eager to work. “Women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn,” wrote Bradford.
The Pilgrims learned an important lesson about private property.
Unfortunately, people keep repeating the Pilgrims’ mistakes.”
With Lula’s Win in Brazil, the Left Dominates Latin America
“With Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva’s narrow victory over president Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil—the two-time former president defeated the incumbent by a 1.8 percent margin (50.9 to 49.1)—the Latin American left has completed its strategic dominance over the region’s seven largest countries.
In the 2000s, much was made of Latin America’s so-called “Pink Tide,” which began with Hugo Chávez’s first electoral victory in Venezuela (1998) and da Silva’s first term in Brazil (2002–2006). There followed an unprecedented rise of left-wing governments across the region. However, there were still important holdouts at the time; Mexico and Colombia didn’t veer left at all; Chile maintained its post-Pinochet social democracy; Peru’s original “Pink Tider,” Ollanta Humala, initially scared the markets in 2011 but proved to be mostly moderate in power.
By late 2022, however, hard leftists—often in cahoots with local communist parties—had handily won the last elections in each of these countries and in Argentina, which returned to Peronist Kirchnerism in 2019. Bolsonaro was the last right-winger standing”
When Karl Marx Made the Case for Capitalism
“According to Marx, history unfolded in a grand series of stages, each defined by its dominant mode of economic production and each specifically arising to replace the one that preceded it. “In broad outlines,” he wrote in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, “ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic formation of society.” Capitalism, in other words, was a historically necessary step in human progress.
The great revolutionary forces unleashed by capitalism, Marx thought, would in turn form and shape a self-aware proletariat class that would ultimately lead humanity into a glorious communist future. But that would happen only after capitalism had worked its magic. “No social order ever perishes,” Marx maintained, “before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed.””
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“Marx not only welcomed capitalism’s creative destruction of feudalism and slavery; he recognized and even championed capitalism’s essential role in human advancement. With free labor on the march, Marx argued in his 1861 essay “The North American Civil War,” the peculiar institution faced ultimate extinction “according to economic law.””
Declining Faith in Both Capitalism and Socialism Leaves … What?
“”I know that some people in the U.S. associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy,” then-Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen commented in 2015. “The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security for its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.”
“So, what is the catch you might ask. The most obvious one, of course, is the high taxes. The top income tax in Denmark is almost 60 percent. We have a 25 percent sales tax and on cars the incise duties are up to 180 percent. In total, Danish taxes come to almost half of our national income compared to around 25 percent in the U.S.””
Chile’s Proposed Left-Wing Constitution Could Spell Chaos
“Chile’s draft constitution is even longer than Venezuela’s, which was redrafted by Hugo Chávez’ administration during his first year in office and set the stage for the country’s socialist revolution, descent into dictatorship, and ensuing economic collapse.
Venezuela has had 26 constitutions in a little over two centuries. In general, the practice of scrapping and rewriting constitutions helps to explain Latin America’s relentless political turmoil.
A constitution provides legal stability and predictability—like a computer operating system. Tampering with any foundational code creates security holes that are easily exploited by political opportunists looking to amplify their own power and overturn the established order.
Even if Chileans reject the new constitution—and, thankfully, polls indicate that they probably will—Boric can choose to start the process again with the election of yet another constitutional assembly to draft yet another version.
That could bring years of chaos, economic stagnation, and legal uncertainty. Now that Latin America’s free market experiment and “economic miracle” may be coming to an end, hopefully, the rest of the world can learn from the experience of Chile once again: Beware leftist pipe dreams.”
Global Capitalism: US Capitalism’s Decline Accelerates [September 2021]
How Mass Immigration Stopped American Socialism
“Friedrich Engels wrote that immigrants in the United States “are divided into different nationalities and understand neither one another nor, for the most part, the language of the country.” Furthermore, the American “bourgeoisie knows…how to play off one nationality against the other: Jews, Italians, Bohemians, etc., against Germans and Irish, and each one against the other.” He argued that open immigration would delay the socialist revolution for a long time as the American bourgeoisie understood that “‘there will be plenty more, and more than we want, of these damned Dutchmen, Irishmen, Italians, Jews and Hungarians’; and, to cap it all, John Chinaman stands in the background.”
Indeed, American meatpackers and steelmakers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries intentionally hired workers from diverse national, ethnic, and racial backgrounds to inhibit their ability to form labor unions: More diverse backgrounds increased transaction costs among organizing workers. Meanwhile, union members in the United States generally opposed immigration and took nearly every opportunity to argue for closed borders.”
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“Although immigration increased the number of socialists in the United States, it also increased the perception that socialism was an alien and foreign ideology that was distinctly un-American.”
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“There are several potential explanations for why immigrants did not grow government expenditures in the United States. The likeliest theory is that the high levels of American ethnic, racial, religious, and linguistic diversity caused by immigration hobbled the rise of an American labor movement and reduced overall voter demand for bigger government. This is the essence of the complaint voiced by Marx, who warned that immigrant-induced ethnic and racial differences reduced worker solidarity, slowing his efforts to stoke a revolution in the United States and elsewhere.”
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“All in all, immigration did more to slow the growth of government in the 19th and early 20th centuries and to frustrate the goals of left-wing reformers than it did to overturn the fundamental economic and political institutions of the American founding. With few exceptions, immigrants helped preserve, protect, defend, and expand American free markets.”