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While I think it is important to consider arguments across the entire political spectrum, reading Jacobin takes effort. It promotes a fictional world view wher
by Dowwie 8y ago
While I think it is important to consider arguments across the entire political spectrum, reading Jacobin takes effort. It promotes a fictional world view where a command and control society makes purely altruistic, utilitarian decisions to maximize economic and social equality. Good and evil are too quickly ascribed to actors without consideration of attribution error. There is too much black and white thinking..
- djrobstep 8y agoIf your version of "across the political spectrum" stops short of democratic socialism, perhaps it's time to try harder to expand your mind.
- testrun 8y agoWhat is democratic socialism?
- djrobstep 8y agoIf you'd like to find out more I can recommend a great magazine.
- rayiner 8y agoWhat people call “democratic socialism” is more accurately called “welfare capitalism” (where the means of production remain private). That’s not what Jacobin espouses.
- orhmeh09 8y agoThat describes social democracy. I found an explanation of the differences on the magazine’s website: https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/democratic-socialism-social-democracy-nordic-countries https://jacobinmag.com/2018/08/democratic-socialism-social-d...
- bitwize 8y agoYou're thinking of "social democracy". Democratic socialism is where the people decide how resources are to be allocated, not the elite few. See: https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/democratic-socialism-bernie-sanders-social-democracy-alexandria-ocasio-cortez https://jacobinmag.com/2018/07/democratic-socialism-bernie-s...
- peisistratos 8y ago> a command and control society If peacetime USA 2018 is not an industrialized command and control society, I don't know what is. The difference is all is geared towards the heirs who expropriate surplus labor time, instead of those of us who work and create wealth.
- zozbot123 8y agoVery true, of course. I'd like to see less expropriation of labor effort, and more expropriation of unavoidable natural resource rents (as well as an institutional framework that's less vulnerable to rent-seeking in general!). But it's not clear that the radical left - even the 'pragmatic' radical left that's reflected by Jacobin Mag - meaningfully shares these policy goals.
- uxp100 8y ago> If peacetime USA 2018 is not an industrialized command and control society, I don't know what is. I don't know if you're developing some difference between command economy and command society, but since you're talking about surplus labor I don't think so. The term command economy was developed to refer to soviet style socialist economy in the early days. Public ownership plus government allocation and production quotas. It seems like a weird self own for a presumed leftist to say, "Oh yeah, capitalism is so bad we basically already have communism."
- icebraining 8y agoSome on the left consider both the US and the USSR to be capitalist (the term used for the latter is often "state capitalism"), not communist.
- uxp100 8y agoThat's true, though I think mainly because of things that changed as the decades went along, but people were calling the USSR economy a "command" economy since nearly the beginning.