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When Republicans in Congress passed a big, fat tax break bill in December, they insisted it meant American workers would be singing "Happy Days Are Here Again" all the way to the bank. The payoff from the tax cut would be raises totaling $4,000 to $9,000, the President's Council of Economic Advisers assured workers. But something bad happened to workers on their way to the repository. They never got that money.
In fact, their real wages declined because of higher inflation. At the same time, the amount workers had to pay in interest on loans for cars and credit cards increased. And, to top it off, Republicans threatened to make workers pay for the tax break with cuts to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. So now, workers across America are wondering, "Where's that raise?". It's nowhere to be found.
The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported this week that wages for production and nonsupervisory workers decreased by 0.1 percent from May 2017 to May 2018 when inflation is factored in. The compensation for all workers together, including supervisors, rose an underwhelming 0.1 percent from April 2018 to May 2018.
That's not what congressional Republicans promised workers. They said corporations, which got the biggest, fattest tax cuts of all, would use that extra money to increase wages. Some workers got one-time bonuses and an even smaller number received raises. But not many. The group Americans for Tax Fairness estimates it's 4.3 percent of all U.S. workers.
The New York Times story about this record breaker describes the phenomena this way: "Companies buy back their shares when they believe they have nothing better to do with their money than to return capital to shareholders." So despite promises from the GOP and the President's Council of Economic Advisers, corporations believed further enriching their own executives and shareholders was a much better way to use the money than increasing workers' wages--wages that have been stagnant for decades.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 21 2018, @10:58PM (21 children)
Can't you Reactionaries find the name ONE other rich non-GOPer to mention?
...perhaps one that doesn't show your bigotry.
(He's a Jew and and an immigrant, so Fox so-called News trots out his name continually--though no one can seem to point to something he's actually done in the last decade.)
...and you're partially correct (though your focus is far too narrow).
The root of the problem -is- Capitalism and how it tends to buy up government and turn it into Plutocracy.
Thomas Pikitty wrote a 696-page book on the topic.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 21 2018, @11:07PM (2 children)
Poe's Law [wikipedia.org] is in full effect!
Original AC (not _gewg_) here. WTF is wrong with you people?
How blatant does my satire need to be to be obvious?
Sheesh!
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 22 2018, @01:16AM
Part of the problem these days, so many crazies have been given free reign that it is no longer safe to assume sarcasm.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday June 22 2018, @02:04AM
Back off, I have a ™ on grin-ing to counter Poe's
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Friday June 22 2018, @06:49PM (17 children)
While Capitalism has major problems, it's not clear to me that any of the other extreme options are any better. Dictatorship is just as bad, and Communism is so unworkable it's never been tried on larger than a small village scale.
Socialism is currently the least-bad choice, but I don't think it's stable. Perhaps it's meta-stable, but I think it tends to collapse into dictatorship.
OTOH, given the current situation, meta-stable may be the best we can hope for. I still expect a technological singularity before 2035, though by the nature of the event I can't predict what form it will take. It depends sensitively on initial conditions and it also depends on the detailed technical possibilities, which can't be known ahead of time. But it's possible to make some predictions about the ramp-up to it. Things to expect are increased unrest, things (like jobs) suddenly changing in ways impossible to prepare for ahead of time. Middle management declining, with the "supervisory role" increasingly constrained by automated choices. Impossible technical challenges suddenly being accomplished. It's worth noting that in each case there were actually a long series of "trials" and "tests" and "prototypes", but the news was buried in other news of other things that crowed it out of attention. So some people predicted it, but others issued palliative reassurances, and only a few noticed any particular change ahead of time, or even in its initial stages of implementation. But those few were blindsided by other changes in areas that *they* weren't paying attention to.
A hopeful result could be erosion of the control of middle management with top management being constrained by AI to only making good choices if they didn't want their enterprise to fail. Of course this is only hopeful if the top layer of controlling AI has a beneficial-to-humans goal set. The odds even is this scenario are probably slightly less than 50%. (But with the existing weaponry, and the current system, the long-term chances of survival approach 0 as a limit, so "slightly less than 50%" is extremely hopeful.)
OTOH, my estimates are based on stuff I've read over the decades, most of which appeared either here or on Slashdot, though some is on other sites, and some is on popular print publications. Clearly an insufficient base to come to any firm conclusion. And I have a strong programmer mindset, which has its own biases. But don't get your mind set into any one form that you expect the coming singularity to take. About all you can guarantee about that is that it will be wrong.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 22 2018, @07:55PM
Oh, look.
Another someone who has slipped back into Cold War bullshit.
Capitalism and Dictatorship are on COMPLETELY DIFFERENT AXES of the "political" palate.
Your first thing is an economic system (every worker is NOT an owner of the means of production); the opposite of that is Socialism.
Your other thing deals with personal liberty e.g. the right (or lack thereof) to criticize the government.
...and Capitalism can co-exist with dictatorship, no problem..
Don't make the error that a lot of fools make.
Capitalism != Democracy (At best, it's just more Oligarchy.)
Socialism [...] I don't think it's stable
...because you don't know what the word means.
Here that is once again:
Socialism is the collective ownership of the means of production by The Workers.
Socialism is Democracy extended to the workplace.
Socialism is DEMOCRACY EVERYWHERE.
...and Socialism has worked great continuously at Mondragon for 62 years.
An awesome operation. [soylentnews.org]
In that same comment is a mention of the thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of worker-owned cooperatives in Italy.
Socialism works just fine, thank you very much.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Sunday June 24 2018, @04:56PM (15 children)
Actually, communism has been tried successfully in a larger than small village scale, but at least in America most students are purposely never taught about it in school. Look up the Free Ukraine in late 19-teens Ukraine (independent, communist, millions of people) which stood until it was invaded and conquered by the Bolsheviks. Or look up the Spanish revolution of the 1930s - sections of Spain with millions of people had a successful communist model until they too were conquered by outsiders.
The key difference is authoritarianism. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and so forth believed that an elected committee would have to centrally manage the communist/socialist economy until the conditions were right for individual communities to run themselves. Libertarian socialists, also known as anarcho-communists like Mikhail Bakunin and much later George Orwell believed that a central committee controlling a socialist/communist party would inevitably become corrupt and seize power for itself, and instead they wanted economies where they individual communities had democratic control of their own domain and nothing was delegated to a central authority. In school nobody taught me that Orwell was a socialist, I thought he was a capitalist and anti-socialist. But in fact he was a socialist and anti-authoritarian, he actually fought for the anarcho-communists in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell's book "Animal Farm" bears that out - it starts with capitalism where the oligarch (the farmer) uses the population like powerless livestock, and then transitions to authoritarian socialism where the central government (the pigs) use the rest of the population like powerless livestock. The lesson is not that capitalism is good, but that authoritarianism is bad.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday June 24 2018, @05:32PM (6 children)
It sounds like you're saying "It can't work on larger than a village scale, but you can have multiple villages". That's an interesting point, but the actual communist communities that I'm aware of were dependent on a charismatic leader, and faded as soon as he departed (or got too tired to be charismatic).
I believe the "exceptions" that you are considering all lasted considerably less than a generation. Some smaller communist groups have lasted multiple generations, but not without huge social changes and eventually they stopped being communist. Partially was that the talented and skilled people resent not being valued (in their estimation) properly and partially was the hanger-on problem. In order to deal with those problems you need really vigorous social mechanisms of some sort or other. Religion has occasionally been used successfully. Some religious communists have lasted over a century before stopping their communism. (I don't know of any on-going examples.) Fast communication works against the success of this, as the religious hierarchy tends to step in and take control.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Monday June 25 2018, @02:39AM (5 children)
The exceptions I listed lasted only a few years before they were conquered by invaders. That's a serious problem, of course, but not collapse from within.
Your examples of why communism failed are the typical propaganda we got in schools - the hard workers and intelligent workers were effectively punished for their competence with extra work while the lazy people and the inept ones were rewarded for their incompetence with fewer responsibilities. But again, that seems to rely upon a model of central control where someone else is deciding who does what. I'm not so sure it would work out that way in a communal group - if the community asks someone to work too hard, he (or she, whatever) is free to quit.
Consider two aspects of communism. First, since work is shared the goal of the community is to reduce the amount of work required for everyone. There is no baron or robber baron with butlers, maids, and chefs and a family living in luxurious ease, but even though nobody will have a mansion the hope is that the average work week is 35 hours, or 30. Or less. That frees everyone to pursue more of the things they genuinely care about in their free time, whether it's cooking, gardening, education, music, or enhancing their own house. Second, communism makes a distinction between personal property and private property. Personal property are things you own like your home, your clothes, your books, your food, your tools, your car. Private property, which they reject, is one person having ownership of land, tools, or other resources they cannot use and engaging in capitalism for that. The details and rules around personal property are not, as far as I know, rigidly defined across all flavors of communism but I would expect that doctors or especially skilled cooks or musicians or anyone else could have nicer possessions than most other community members because of their contributions. They just can't have an extra house they charge money for occupying or a section of land they do not farm but that they let others farm upon for a share of the crops. You can benefit from your own work, you just can't benefit from other people's work solely because their work required use of some of your property.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday June 25 2018, @05:10PM (4 children)
In the Oneida colony no one was forced to become a silversmith. The payoff was that silversmiths got higher social status. But the best silversmiths weren't really satisfied.
Sorry, but that's not just propaganda. The Oneida colony changed to rules to make them happier, but changing the rules made them less communist..and the rules kept changing this way and that (as is normal) with a mean variation that caused them to drift further and further from their original philosophy. It wasn't monotonic, but it also wasn't a drunkards walk.
P.S.: The same problem can be observed in colonies of bacteria, where only some bacteria produce a compound necessary for the survival of the colony. They tend to drift in one of two directions. Among bacteria this often results in the colony fracturing into multiple colonies, some of which overproduce the chemical and others of which underproduce it. Depending on the purpose of the colony this can determine which colonies survive (often the overproducers), but in the colonies that overproduce the individual bacteria that don't bother to produce the chemical have an advantage, so they reproduce more quickly.
IOW, this isn't a purely human social phenomenon. This is a basic nature of communal organisms.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Wednesday June 27 2018, @01:49PM (3 children)
But there's a colossal fundamental difference between "the town doctors get better treatment than then people working at the laundromat" and "the town doctors own trucks they rent out and factories where other people work". Not all socialists and communists agree on all terms and conditions of socialist society. I don't have any problem with paying people that do more important work extra money because of that. My problem is with capitalism: making money because you own something that other people use to work. So no interest on loans. No rental fees or percentage of profits from letting someone else use your truck to ship goods. No fees or percentage for lending people farming implements or tractors. No fees or percentage for letting people farm on land you're not using. No fees or percentage from part or total ownership of a factory. And further, no denying access to resources that you are not using but others can use. Your house and your car are your own, but if you own 500 acres of land and farm 100, then the other 400 revert to the community and other farmers can use them. The only driver of wealth should be what you personally do, but people doing jobs most others cannot (like a doctor) or doing jobs most others will not (like cleaning sewage systems) can pay better than other occupations.
Some other communists or socialists would disagree with me and go further, and insist that everyone be paid the same amount (or be entitled to the equivalent amount of community resources, or whatever) without respecting whether they are the best brain surgeon on the planet or a well-meaning but spectacularly incompetent hair stylist. I don't see how that model would work now, or any time in the near future for the same reasons you state with your silversmith example.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday June 27 2018, @05:33PM (2 children)
Well, the Catholic Church of the middle ages would agree with you about financial dealings (at least for non-church finances). They were against usury, etc. But, except for a few religious communes, I'd hardly call the communist, or even socialist.
So I guess I need to know how you would recognize a communist social group if you saw one. What the distinguishing characteristics are. No title to land or tools when you're not using them needs to be quantified: How frequently do you need to use it to maintain ownership (or whatever term you prefer instead...I've heard stewardship used, but that usually had implications for how you could use it as well as what dominance-priority you possessed).
And you might want to consider how you would handle an apartment building...how does it get paid for and why is it built. Even a good house with wiring and plumbing is more than can be put up by a neighborhood house raising, so you're going to need some other mechanism to get the thing built. This thing in capitalist societies involved debt financing, and in avowedly-Communist societies involves governmental control. Neither of which is compatible with traditional communism.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 28 2018, @05:43AM (1 child)
The way it's already being done in a bunch of places.
Gee, Emily. Do you have to make everything such a big production out of everything? [google.com]
Can't we just copy what's already working.
http://www.google.com/search?q=Poland+cooperatives+housing+-3.millions [google.com]
Is this NIH thing uniquely USAian?
No title to land or tools when you're not using them needs to be quantified: How frequently do you need to use it to maintain ownership
In Venezuela, this isn't even a question.
When a "commune" finds farmland or factory not in production, they take it over and put it into production.
There was a tire factory in Mexico that the Capitalist owners didn't want to be a Mexican tire factory any more and The Workers occupied it and turned it into a Socialist worker-owned cooperative.
Same deal with a doors & windows factory in Ohio.
Same deal with a tea factory in France. [google.com]
Like they say: Possession is 9/10 of the law.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Thursday June 28 2018, @06:56PM
Thanks for answering for me. I don't see why there needs to be any magic or capitalist model for community home building to work. The Amish build homes for each other, and while they don't install electrical wiring I don't see how the addition of that would be any different. Likewise for apartment buildings. If fifteen families collaborate to erect an apartment building and then each take one of the fifteen apartments, it should work fine.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 24 2018, @10:33PM (7 children)
Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, and so forth believed that an elected committee would have to centrally manage the communist/socialist economy until the conditions were right for individual communities to run themselves
For Lenin and Trotsky, implementation of that came later.
Those 2 did recognize the importance of the feedback loop[1] [google.com] between the central-management thing [google.com] and The Workers.
[1] A soviet is a council: workers council, consumers council, town council, whatever.
.
Orwell was a socialist
Yup. So was Einstein and a whole flock of really smart folks.
They knew how Capitalism could buy up even a democratic gov't and turn it into Fascism/Oligarchy.
How that dreaded state of affairs differs from USAian gov't's current thing with contracts and subsidies and trade policy evades me.
he actually fought for the anarcho-communists in the Spanish Civil War
Yup. He carried a rifle and was wounded in the neck. [google.com]
He wrote about his time there in Homage to Catalonia. [wikipedia.org]
In 1936 - 1937, the region in which Barcelona is found declared itself a Socialist workers republic.
Stalinists worked to undermine that. (Look for "NKVD" in the Wikipedia page.)
A significant pocket of Socialist fervor exists there to this day.
27 percent of Spaniards are out of work. Yet in one town everyone has a job [archive.li]
Marinaleda is run along the lines of a communist Utopia and boasts collectivised lands
Spanish Communists Village: Life in red Utopia [archive.li]
The People In The Socialist Village Of Marinaleda Have Jobs, Affordable Homes, Gardens, & Parks
The Socialist Village Of Marinaleda (In The Autonomous Region Of Andalusia) Is So Great They Abolished The Police [googleusercontent.com] (Cache is currently broken for me) (orig) [jacobinmag.com]
.
...and Dunbar [wikipedia.org] says that more than 150 humans can't congregate without problems.
...with others who have studied the thing not putting the number above 250.
The notion of a "nation" seems counterintuitive.
.
In addition, Marx expected Socialism to take off in an industrialized place like Germany, not a place that was still feudal and populated by peasants like Russia.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Monday June 25 2018, @02:49AM (5 children)
Thanks, that was interesting. I was aware of some of this, but not all of it.
I think having Marx-style centrally controlled socialism take off in an industrialized place would have helped with some problems the USSR experienced, but not the core problem of the Communist Party rapidly transitioning from a tool of communism into a bureaucracy that exists only to support itself by exploiting the rest of the population.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @04:13AM (4 children)
Stalin kept the universal free education and universal free healthcare going, so there was a veneer of the old thing.
Actual Socialists there also continued to train folks from around the globe in Socialist ways and Revolutionary techniques.
.
Having about a dozen Capitalist nations trying to overrun your experiment in egalitarianism truly puts a crimp in your effort.
The Failure Of The Soviet Economy Was Due To The Military Threats From Capitalist Countries Starting In 1918 [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [criticalenquiry.org]
N.B. His use of "democratic" is incomplete and is therefor inaccurate.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Monday June 25 2018, @01:24PM (3 children)
But there are two separate issues here. The first is whether the rest of the world attacked socialism every way they could and left the Soviet Union as the only haven for socialism for decades. That's true. But unrelated to that is the Soviet purges and similar horrors in communist China or the situation now in North Korea. That form of socialism didn't improve upon capitalism, it just changed the particular way the people with power abused the rest of the population. Under capitalism I starve, under Soviet communism I get sent to the gulag or maybe have my entire community massacred on suspicion of treason. That doesn't make capitalism good, but it doesn't make "the dictatorship of the proletariat" good either. If socialist revolutions had happened and succeeded in Germany or the United States, there would have been no issues of economic problems. But that wouldn't change the near-guarantee that the government would eventually transition to oppress the population every bit as much as the 19th century robber barons dominated the US.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 25 2018, @08:04PM (2 children)
Marx described Democracy extended to the workplace AKA DEMOCRACY EVERYWHERE.
Neither of those places has that.
If you go out into the countryside in China, you might be able to still find some collective farms.
OTOH, their industry has been Capitalist since shortly after Nixon's visit.
...and both places have extremely top-down governments[1].
(In Korea, it's a familial dynasty; in China, Xi recently effectively made himself leader for life.)
That's using words with meanings to describe yourself and doing the exact opposite in practice.
This "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" sort of thing is a recurring theme at this site.
...and it's fed by USAian and other Western "news" media repeating the nonsense.
(Same deal with Lamestream Media calling USA a "Democracy" when it's clearly an Oligarchy.)
"Communist" came to be used (incorrectly) as "doesn't embrace USAian hegemony".
[1] ...and to even have a say in their sham "government", you have to be a member of their single-party thing.
Where a feedback loop from the governed even exists, it's like an easily-ignored suggestion box.
Soviet purges
You misspelled "Stalinist".
Those folks (after Lenin died) weren't Communist at all.
They were counterrevolutionary.
...and, as already mention with "NKVD", they tried to spread their counterrevolutionary scheme.
The Fraud of Stalinism [googleusercontent.com] (orig) [redflag.org.au]
None of this is what Marx described as a better system.
Using his terms to describe something that is completely opposite to his ideas is simply propaganda.
Repeating that stuff shows that you still have Cold War bullshit stuck in your head.
Enough years have passed since the end of that thing that there are plenty of places that have useful information on the topics.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by bobthecimmerian on Wednesday June 27 2018, @01:35PM (1 child)
No, you're missing the core point. In the USSR, in China, in Korea a core group of leaders got control, and then the bureaucracy moved away from being a tool of the population to being a tool of the bureaucrats. If Stalin and Mao had not existed, other people would have done more or less the exact same thing. You can't say, "Marx told them what to do, it's just that every time someone screwed it up!" Marx's criticism of capitalism was flawless. His plan for a replacement was flawed. Mikhail Bakunin was the most famous of the 19th century political philosophers that agreed with Marx's criticism of capitalism, agreed with Marx's ideas for communism, but emphatically disagreed with his plans for how to implement communism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin#Critique_of_Marxism [wikipedia.org]
I read your "Fraud of Stalinism" link, and it jumps in the timeline past the points I just wrote. The bureaucracy took control of everything because Lenin and Trotsky built the bureaucracy in the first place. They built it with the best intentions, and then lost control of it. Members of the bureaucracy could not have seized power if the bureaucracy never existed. Bakunin and others make the point, which I am coming to agree with, that there is no workable way to build a bureaucracy to manage and safeguard a socialist/communist country. The only way to maintain equality is to abolish hierarchy completely. Each town cedes no authority to any other body, and thus managers/leaders/'voices of the people'/whatever in those other bodies are never in a position to change policy or rig vote-counting or impose standards that abuse their position for personal gain and oppress the population.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 28 2018, @01:59AM
That's definitely something plottable on the political palate.
This guy chose a whole bunch of folks and ran those through the wringer [politicalcompass.org] to see what came out.
(I think Sanders, Stein, and perhaps Chomsky are placed farther Left than their actual stances and think that Hitler isn't far enough Right, but anyway...)
Among people who had positions of great influence (and among those chosen by him), that leaves Mandela and Gandhi coming closest to the stance we think might work best.
(Rucker appears to be Randall R. Rucker, who never appeared on my radar before that page.)
.
WRT anarchy (on the bottom edge, i.e. the smallest amount of organization necessary to get something done), it's worth noting that corporations were once incorporated to accomplish a thing and when that thing was done they were disbanded.
Bringing that notion back doesn't seem like such a bad idea.
Applying a similar thing to gov't also sounds like it might be good--or at least establishing a sunset clause for -ALL- funding so that it has to be reconsidered periodically.
...though trying any of that in the current global Capitalist Oligarchical framework seems a great challenge.
...not to mention the Imperialist nation states that come along with Capitalism.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 28 2018, @01:05AM
Google dropped the ball WRT their Cache of the page.
They have recovered since I reported it.
The Socialist Village Of Marinaleda (In The Autonomous Region Of Andalusia) Is So Great They Abolished The Police [googleusercontent.com]
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]