321–330 of 336 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Worth noting that the largest "regional" party, the SNP, has 54 MPs which is six times the 9 MPs that the Lib Dems have.
Yes, but their upside is limited. They already have almost all Scottish seats, and they are not going to win elsewhere.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like people were doing during the great depression? Or England before social democracy? Class is not about equality, it is about removing a power relationship. In the same way that the abolitionist movement removed the property relationship between master and slave, the Socialist movement seeks to remove the private property power relationship between bourgeois and proletariat in general.
Socialism has been attempted many many times and never succeeded in peace time without degrading into a hellish dystopia - it also almost always seems to be pushed by middle class people rather than the working class, who are generally somewhere between social democrat and nationalist. The idea that inequality can be solved by handing all property to the government, the single biggest source of corruption in existenc…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Socialism has been attempted many many times and never succeeded in peace time without degrading into a hellish dystopia - it also almost always seems to be pushed by middle class people rather than the working class, who are generally somewhere between social democrat and nationalist. The idea that inequality can be solved by handing all property to the government, the single biggest source of corruption in existenc…
But capitalism (or rather corporatism) doesn't seem to be doing much better for many people
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That still makes no sense.
Can you elaborate on what doesn't make sense?
There's a confused conspiracy theory that it means "adding extra votes to the Democrat column".
This doesn't even stand up to the most cursory of examinations, as if that was really happening then people would say "they're intentionally fudging the results to favor the Democrats" and kick up a fuss about it. Instead they say "oversampling Democrats", in the hope that people who don't know what that is will think it sounds like cheating while not actually looking like idiots to people who do know what it means. A classic dogwhistle approach to say two things to two audiences.
You claim to know what it is, yet you say it's an "issue" (which it isn't) and you say that at the end of a sentence claiming that there's a "shy voter" factor leading to an undercount of Trump support. Oversampling has no logical connection here unless you mean it in the "Democrats are cheating in the polls" meaning. You claim that you mean it in the actual statistical meaning. The two obvious explanations are that you don't know what it is and have been fooled by all the chatter around it, or that you're trying to fool others despite knowing it's nonsense. I think you don't know what it is, that's why I provided the explanatory link a couple of comment above.
Also, the polls did not materially undercount Trump voters. The polls were more accurate than at the last election. Some people badly mapped the accurately predicted 3 million popular vote win to electoral college results, but that's a different thing than polls being bad, Trump voters not wanting to admit who they were voting for, or being intentionally skewed. On a state by state basis polls were wrong in both directions, for various reasons, but that cancelled out overall.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like people were doing during the great depression? Or England before social democracy? Class is not about equality, it is about removing a power relationship. In the same way that the abolitionist movement removed the property relationship between master and slave, the Socialist movement seeks to remove the private property power relationship between bourgeois and proletariat in general.
Socialism has been attempted many many times and never succeeded in peace time without degrading into a hellish dystopia - it also almost always seems to be pushed by middle class people rather than the working class, who are generally somewhere between social democrat and nationalist. The idea that inequality can be solved by handing all property to the government, the single biggest source of corruption in existenc…
Why does that make it a bad idea? I'm of the belief that stigma surrounding Socialism has meant that only interested academics will talk about it, but this certainly wasn't the case in the 19th century. It is not only the working poor who are of concern, it is the workers as a whole. Class consciousness must be raised.
>The idea that inequality can be solved by handing all property to the government
That's not what I'm proposing; rather, I propose that private property (i.e property used for social commodity reproduction) be taken over by workers, and the powers of the state be transferred to people so that the state withers away, leaving behind it a government. Decentralised government is also possible.
>socialism and communism die out the closer we'll be to an actual approach to raising up the working poor.
Have you read The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell?[0] He himself was a working class man making the case for Socialism, and why capitalism, a system which is designed to keep one class below the other, is not favourable.
Capitalism has nothing to do with government, the idea that only 'corporatism' is bad is equivocation. The class structure still exists without a government, surplus labour is still extracted without a government, private property is still defended without a government.
The workers are raised up by ideals looking out for their interests rather than those ideals looking out for the interests of the bourgeoisie. The class system prevents realisation of a meritocracy in which each person is rewarded exactly according to his labour rather than paid by the hour.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But capitalism (or rather corporatism) doesn't seem to be doing much better for many people
but it's close enough that we can tweak the existing system through optimised taxes and regulations. It's like the political equivalent of saying "oh shit our web app is running a bit slow, best throw it all out and rebuild the whole thing in ". Except the hip framework almost always results in your co-workers getting genocided or dying in a famine.
Optimised taxes and regulations do not stop exploitation[0].
>"oh shit our web app is running a bit slow, best throw it all out and rebuild the whole thing in "
This is such a false analogy; there are problems inherent with capitalism, which is what the Socialists oppose - namely, the structure of unjustified authority of the State, the exploitation of labour, the class system, the internal contradictions and crises of capitalism, and being forced by threat of starvation to sell labour-power to the class of property owners. A better analogy would be if your web app is only serving 5% or less of customers, and the rest get an extremely slow connection, which they complain about to the web app owner, and you respond "We just need to make the website a few kB/s slower for the 5% and give that speed to you!"
[0] https://www.marxists.org/subject/japan/sakisaka/exploitation...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
but it's close enough that we can tweak the existing system through optimised taxes and regulations. It's like the political equivalent of saying "oh shit our web app is running a bit slow, best throw it all out and rebuild the whole thing in ". Except the hip framework almost always results in your co-workers getting genocided or dying in a famine.
>but it's close enough that we can tweak the existing system through optimised taxes and regulations Optimised taxes and regulations do not stop exploitation[0]. >"oh shit our web app is running a bit slow, best throw it all out and rebuild the whole thing in " This is such a false analogy; there are problems inherent with capitalism, which is what the Socialists oppose - namely, the structure of unjustified authorit…
> the structure of unjustified authority of the State
Socialism in all real world implementations has been in the form of an all-encompassing state. The idea that socialism can exist as a form of anarchy seems to be busted - the Soviets (as in the unions that initially formed during the Russian revolution) quickly formed into a hierarchal structure of abstract Soviets that looked just like government departments. I don't agree with the extent that the State has power either, but fundamentally it can provide security from criminal behaviour via the police, protection from outside groups via the military, and welfare via taxation. Those are all positives, imo.
> the exploitation of labour
"Ownership of the means of production" has less and less meaning every year. Everyone can start a business from a laptop, this isn't the Victorian era where most working class are forced to work in factories to escape the poor-house. It would seem that business people do provide real value after all - managing people and structuring organised work between individuals with separate skills is an incredible value-add to a workforce. Plus, the idea of the 1% owning the vast majority of the wealth in society can in large part be attributed to their owning a large share of their own businesses, which are built with their own work and hiring people at mutually-agreed-upon wages.
> the class system
The class system is becoming less and less relevant. I don't have to toil away as a serf on some rich noble's land any more. I started out very much lower-middle to working class, and now I live a very comfortable life. Economic mobility is pretty good these days, we don't live in Marx's time any more.
> the internal contradictions and crises of capitalism
... can be well-managed by a more competent state. Tragedy of the commons, neocolonialism, and such could be drastically reduced by improvements to the state. We know this because countries like Norway have good social standards and are military non-interventionist, and the USA is pretty much the only Western country that invades others any more.
> being forced by threat of starvation to sell labour-power to the class of property owners
You mean being forced to be a productive member of society? Work still needs to keep the world going, and if sitting at home consuming goods and providing absolutely no value were a viable option everyone would do it and society would collapse. For those who can't due to disability or unemployability we have welfare benefits to allow them to do exactly that.
Consider this - if people don't have to sell labour-power to earn money to buy things, but can still consume the fruits of others' labour, are they not being exploitative themselves?
> A better analogy would be if your web app is only serving 5% or less of customers, and the rest get an extremely slow connection, which they complain about to the web app owner, and you respond "We just need to make the website a few kB/s slower for the 5% and give that speed to you!"
You, like every other socialist I've spoken to, seem far more preoccupied with punishing the wealthy than actually helping the poor. If we can establish a dignified baseline for all people to live off of, what's wrong with those who are willing to work hard and sacrifice to provide better services to their customers being able to earn more? Without incentives we wouldn't have any innovation because people don't make sacrifices without incentives. Most innovation is born of personal sacrifices.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate on what doesn't make sense?
Oversampling is a standard thing to do with polling. There's a confused conspiracy theory that it means "adding extra votes to the Democrat column". This doesn't even stand up to the most cursory of examinations, as if that was really happening then people would say "they're intentionally fudging the results to favor the Democrats" and kick up a fuss about it. Instead they say "oversampling Democrats", in the hope th…
Your partisan paragraphs further make me think I will be wasting my time here, so let's just say we have different views on the polls :).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Socialism has been attempted many many times and never succeeded in peace time without degrading into a hellish dystopia - it also almost always seems to be pushed by middle class people rather than the working class, who are generally somewhere between social democrat and nationalist. The idea that inequality can be solved by handing all property to the government, the single biggest source of corruption in existenc…
>it also almost always seems to be pushed by middle class people rather than the working class, who are generally somewhere between social democrat and nationalist. Why does that make it a bad idea? I'm of the belief that stigma surrounding Socialism has meant that only interested academics will talk about it, but this certainly wasn't the case in the 19th century. It is not only the working poor who are of concern,…
I'm not saying it does - I'm saying that if the working class have rejected it then clearly they do not see it is in their benefit. The idea of "raising class consciousness" seems like a fancy way of saying "the working class are too stupid to know what's good for them".
> I propose that private property (i.e property used for social commodity reproduction) be taken over by workers
Such as what? Workers already own property. Most people have a TV, a house (that they own fully after their mortgage matures), a car and so on. Should we steal all of that stuff too? Or just the lambourghinis and yachts of the wealthy? Sounds like "lets just steal stuff we want from other people" to me.
> Decentralised government is also possible.
Sounds like an interesting idea, but I'm not sure what form of government you're referring to.
> Have you read The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell?[0] He himself was a working class man making the case for Socialism, and why capitalism, a system which is designed to keep one class below the other, is not favourable.
I haven't, I'll add it to my reading list. I doubt I'll be convinced though. The idea that capitalism exists to keep classes separate is one I disagree with - my understanding is that capitalism exists to allow people to compete to be the best at providing services people want. Naturally, people who are better at this will rise to the top. It's a form of talent sifting. I'd rather have competent people do things they're competent at or we'll end up with more Lysenkoism and bread lines.
> Capitalism has nothing to do with government, the idea that only 'corporatism' is bad is equivocation. The class structure still exists without a government, surplus labour is still extracted without a government, private property is still defended without a government.
Defense of private property makes sense though. If I own a car I like, I'm not going to just let you come and steal it from me. The idea that a community can own property that is shared seems bogus when you extend the argument to things that are scarce. Marx himself posited socialism and communism as being a state that requires a post-scarcity and automated society, which we do not have. Not even close.
> The workers are raised up by ideals looking out for their interests rather than those ideals looking out for the interests of the bourgeoisie. The class system prevents realisation of a meritocracy in which each person is rewarded exactly according to his labour rather than paid by the hour.
You can't calculate the value of a thing based on the labour required to create it. Otherwise what stops me spending years on some piece of junk and then demanding a reward? Value of a thing is determined by what it's worth to the person who wants to use it, i.e. utility pricing.