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First world social democracy has only been in decline since dissolution of USSR and rise of neoliberalism. The threat of socialist revolution kept capitalists from being too exploitative. It is unsustainable, capitalists will want their power back. Look at what happened to NHS in the U.K.
Also ‘freedoms’ for private enterprises and ‘rights’ for workers are straight up contradictory.
Exactly. Marx said “between equal rights, force decides.” We have a class dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. It doesn’t matter if your form of government is a so-called “multiparty liberal democracy” or a “parliamentary representative republic” when 95+% of the people who hold office are bourgeois and primarily make money through owning means of production or speculating on financial assets, rather than selling their labor power like everyone else. If the bourgeoisie guarantees rights for the worker, it is only because they have cynically calculated that it is in their long term interests to allow some crumbs to fall from their table. They will withdraw those “rights” as soon as they see fit. As soon as capitalism’s immune system detects a threat. You can only get so far with liberal democracy, trade unions, and worker-owned cooperatives, because, while those things are nice, and certainly better than feudalism, you still fundamentally have a bourgeois class-dictatorship where all the so called “rights” of the worker are granted by the bourgeoisie and enforced through their class’s monopoly on violence. They decide when rules can be bent, broken, changed, or ignored. The police and the military exist purely to enforce their ownership over the means and conditions of production.
You really have to ignore the entire history of capitalist theory and history to pretend this is remotely a coherent take, besides the ancaps, social liberals are the most utopian of all liberal sects, they are willfully blind to the contradictions of class, property ownership, and the functions of the state
They fundamentally don’t understand the social basis for the ideology they claim to uphold, it was only with the rise of socialism that liberals began to construct these social fantasies of class harmony and submission under capitalism, in the old days they were more sober about this shit as Adam Smith readily admitted
Civil government, so far as it is instituted for the security of property, is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all
But avarice and ambition in the rich, in the poor the hatred of labour and the love of present ease and enjoyment, are the passions which prompt to invade property, passions much more steady in their operation, and much more universal in their influence. Wherever there is great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy, to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security. He is at all times surrounded by unknown enemies, whom, though he never provoked, he can never appease, and from whose injustice he can be protected only by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate continually held up to chastise it. The acquisition of valuable and extensive property, therefore, necessarily requires the establishment of civil government. Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the value of two or three days labour, civil government is not so necessary. (WN V.ii.2)
regarding the Adam Smith quote, I love the number of Adam Smith quotes that sound like Marx quotes. you can really break a person’s brain with those.
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This is why I like Theories of Surplus Value so much. It was going to be volume 4 of Capital but Marx died before Volume 2 was even finished and Engels died before compiling volume 4 from Marx’s notes. Eventually Kautsky got a hold of these notes, but his edition of Theories of Surplus Value is no longer in print. Then Riazanov in the Soviet Union bought them from Germany just in time to avoid them getting burned by the nazis. He compiled them into a serviceable 3 volumes. Theories of Surplus Value is basically Marx going over all the famous European bourgeois political economists leading up to him. He goes over the French physiocrats. He goes over Adam Smith. He goes over Ricardo. He goes over Malthus. He goes over Mill. He builds an entire history of the concept of Surplus value (i.e. unpaid labor, i.e. exploitation) and how it was understood and misunderstood prior to his writing capital. I wish he had lived long enough to actually give us the full version. Marx’s take on Adam Smith is that he basically figured out surplus value, but couldn’t grapple with the concept properly, and thus “reverts” to being a “mere physiocrat” in much of his writing:
Quoting Marx talking about Adam Smith:
Adam Smith very acutely notes that the really great development of the productive power of labour starts only from the moment when it is transformed into wage-labour, and the conditions of labour confront it on the one hand as landed property and on the other as capital. The development of the productive power of labour thus begins only under conditions in which the labourer himself can no longer appropriate its result. It is therefore quite useless to investigate how this growth of productive powers might have influenced or would influence “wages”, taken here as equal to the product of labour, on the hypothesis that the product of labour (or the value of this product) belongedto the labourer himself.
Adam Smith is very copiously infected with the conceptions of the Physiocrats, and often whole strata run through his work which belong to the Physiocrats and are in complete contradiction with the views specifically advanced by him. This is so, for example, in the theory of rent, etc. For our present purpose we can completely disregard these passages in his writings, which are not characteristic of himself, but in which he is a mere Physiocrat.
Till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor. In this age of shepherds, if one man possessed 500 oxen, and another had none at all, unless there were some government to secure them to him, he would not be allowed to possess them.”
Adam Smith, “ Lectures on Jurisprudence” 1766
guaranteeing rights for Workers
and how is that going, hmmm?
guaranteeing Healthcare and Services
lol. lmao
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Boomer capitalization Detected, where words are capitalized for arbitrarily chosen Emphasis with no academic considerations because only wokes care about Literacy.
Don’t you Know? The more Words you capitalize In the middle of your sentences, the More Academic and therefore Correct you Are!
Almost as bad as the ones that CAPITALISE random WORDS in a SENTENCE like they’re writing the a clickbait YouTube TITLE.
Ever heard chud radio when a chud is driving somewhere? It’s even spoken like that.
Chud radio hosts in the UK are all inbred aristocrats, they all speak with recieved pronounciation because they think it makes them sound smart.
It’s like that here in Burgerland, too, especially on words of reverence or hatred, such as THE SHERIFFS, LAW AND ORDER, THE CRIMINAL THUGS, and so on.
And the angrier they are the louder that emphasis seems get, right?
Like the rest of the
is just connective tissue holding together the things they’re incandescent with rage over.“The PRESIDENT, the COMMANDER IN CHIEF, is BETRAYING this GREAT NATION by allowing THE WOKE MOB to DESTROY our FAMILIES”
Might also just not have English as a first language. My autocorrect does the same when I write English on it
I see it enough on clearly WASPy boomer small business tyrant printout signs that say stuff like "because ❄ Snowflakes ❄ want Everything handed to them and dont want to Work anymore the price of our combo lunch special is up $0.10. Thank a liberal Today!!! 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣 🤣
Oh yeah for sure, I don’t know why your boomers do it, but I’d just like to say that when you encounter users doing it here for example, it might also just be that they’re not Anglos.
Out of curiosity, what language capitalizes words like this? I know German capitalizes every noun, but this post seems arbitrary in the way it uses uppercase letters.
I honestly don’t know, my phone does it for english, but it doesn’t do it for my native language - because we don’t do it in Danish. I think it’s just some sort of “foreigner” setting inherent to a lot of keyboards on phones
So your keyboard makes you type with an accent? lmao
This is one of the best posts I’ve seen in a while.
Fuckhead vampire. Suck the vast majority of the planet dry for a few small yards with high fences
and those privileged enough to reap the rewards. Also deny those same supposed “rights and services for the public” to that same majority they feed on.Is it perfect? No, certainly not, and I don’t want it to be. I like it just the way it is. It has its flaws depending on Class and Government, and I’m in a very privileged position so I’d much prefer it over communism
Communism will win and you cannot stop it.
My preferred form of Capitalism is present in all first-world nations: guaranteeing rights for Workers and Individuals, Healthcare and Services for the Public, and Freedoms for Individuals
Those so-called “first-world” nations have already lost or are actively losing all their social safety nets, affordable housing opportunities, manufacturing base, and public services to privatization and outsourcing. What you mean is you’re privileged and likely wealthy enough to be in an exceptional position of being able to benefit from whatever’s left of them. They’re also all cracking down on dissent brought about by civil unrest, and arbitrarily oppressing vulnerable groups in an ever escalating war on happiness and prosperity. What freedoms?
These posts do nothing but further antagonize and gaslight people who know full well their material and social conditions directly contradict your sick-to-death narratives about “capitalist exceptionalism”.
These doofers have never had to experience how costly realizing those “rights” under bourgeois capitalism is.
People who say things like this often have investments in real estate or something. Being a private landowner makes a person’s brain go haywire.
It has its flaws depending on Class
Literally saying ‘‘not my problem’’
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While I maintain you don’t have to read theory to have a reasonable understanding of things it is very clear it really really help some folk’s understanding. Like just read the manifesto, it’s short and a little outdated by this point but it gives you the basic gist of things and dispells some of the more inane counter arguments.
