Fox Business News brought out a guest to bash Bernie Sanders for being a socialist. Little did they know, it was about to go HORRIBLY wrong for them. Instead of bashing Bernie Sanders, he explained what socialism is, and actually ENDORSED Bernie Sanders.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5chvH69P1M
When Kudlow had his show still he had Mike on the one time and Mike ended up pissing off Kudlow .... I remember Kudlow muttering 'fucking Keynesian...' under his breath on mic...
ReplyDeleteHilarious !
ReplyDeleteSanders is not a socialist, so no worries.
ReplyDeleteLet's be clear. In Soviet Union there was socialism. The party leaders were always saying that we live in socialism and we are building communism. That is what socialism is IMO, no private means of production. Bernie is a social democrat, and he is not the kind of social democrat we are so used to in Europe for example. Most of the social democrats are neoliberals. You have not heard them during the European debt crises or austerity madness. They are not in the picture at all.
ReplyDeleteThere are many varieties of socialism as social or common ownership of the means of production. In fact, the USSR was arguably not socialist but totalitarian, as I point out in another comment. The Nazi Party was an acronym of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (German: Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei). Names don't necessarily mean much. Look at the behavior.
ReplyDeleteRegarding his view of property, what Marx was against is the owner-wage laborer relationship, which he regarded as variety of the master-slave, or master-servant relationship, that is, a relationship of dominance-submission involving exploitation and alienation for the purpose of rent extraction. The basis was legal and institutionalized in property and contract law by a class in its own interests. Marx was not against personal ownership based on use, common ownership based on common use, and social ownership of concentrated means of production (technology) for cooperative use. Nor was Marx against governance. He was against separating government from government of the people, by the people and for the people and placing it in the institutional state. Analogously, Marx was trying to do politically and economically what the Protestant Reformation had done religiously in attacking the institutional Church as intermediary. Socially, the two projects were closely related in returning power to the people themselves.
These topics were the subject of intense debate in Marx's day and it is impossible to understand Marx's project other than in relation to this debate, in which he couched his writings. See " socialism ," "anarchism," " mutualism " and communism"for example.
These issues are no longer understood, the debate has moved on, history written by the victors, and so Marx has become a caricature of himself.
Maybe Bernie will spark a rekindling of this debate, but probably not since Bernie is a social democrat rather than a democratic socialist.
Karl Marx on private property:
ReplyDeleteIt is important to keep in mind that private property, as Marx defined it, is different from the far broader meaning the term has today. In this sense, the basic premise of Galambos' assertion is in error. Marx differentiated between private property and personal property. When Marx refers to private property, he is referring to the means of production (factories for example) owned by capitalists, and resulting in state of socio-economic relations based on wage labor. Personal property, as defined by Marx, constitutes what we think of as consumer goods, as well as "goods produced by an individual." Marx advocated the abolition of private property, but not personal property.
In The Manifesto of the Communist Party, Marx is presupposing a working knowledge of the distinction I have made above. What he says there is:
The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property. But modern bourgeois private property is the final and most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few.
In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.
By "bourgeois property" he means private property as he has defined it, i.e. private ownership of the means of production. Marx viewed personal property as something that people today might call a human right. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party he says: "When, therefore, capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society, personal property is not thereby transformed into social property." {italics mine}
What I have offered above is a simplistic explanation of Marx's conception of property, based on his advocacy of an economy of production for use rather than production for profit. He first elucidated these concepts of property on a very theoretical level in The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, later in Wage, Labor, and Capital, and in the greatest detail in Capital, Volume 1 (Chapter 32 and elsewhere). These works give a detailed explanation of his concept of property. They are based in the theory of use-value vs. exchange value, and a particular overall conception of the structure and nature of capitalist socioeconomic relations as Marx saw them.
Marx viewed communism as the final stage in the evolution of human social relations, ultimately centered upon each individual realizing their full potential. In The Manifesto of the Communist Party, he summed his vision up in this way:
In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.
Robert Palermo, Kellogg Institute PhD Fellow at the Notre Dame, at Quora