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I have a question for Bernie, AOC, the DSA, and all the Ivy League professors who are convinced 21st-century America is the optimum time and place for “real” socialism to be tried.
Marx wrote his rant during the Age of Machinery. It was a time that, had the workers seized the means of production, they would have little or no trouble keeping the factory running. Any shop foreman had all the technical knowledge needed. We were still in the Age of Machinery in 1918 when Lenin took over the means of production. But because socialism can't innovate, change did not come fast in the Age of Machinery. The U.S.S.R.'s strategy of relying on copying Western innovations was a tolerable strategy. They were always behind the West, but the gap was not too big.
After WWII, America began to leave the Age of Machinery and transition into the Age of Computers. The pace of innovation increased, and the gap between the West and the U.S.S.R. increased. Reagan pushed for a huge technological advance in defense. The U.S.S.R. strained to respond, and collapsed.
Since the collapse of the world’s most advanced socialist country, the pace of change has steadily accelerated. The Age of Machinery exists only in museums. The shop foreman with good mechanical talent still exists, but he is ill-equipped to run the factory full of robots. In 21st-century America, the most important means of production are not factories. Microsoft is a collection of highly trained and highly rewarded coders. Apple has its factories overseas. Apple in America is a collection of highly trained, and highly rewarded, engineers forever devoted to designing something better than they designed the year before.
A socialist takeover of Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, or any other of America’s top companies ends in instant disaster. The common worker couldn’t take over squat. The highly paid elite engineer or programmer is essential and not replaceable. These folks are all very big winners under capitalism. They will not start saying Comrade to everyone and continue working under socialism.
Marx was convinced factory workers were woefully underpaid. Therefore, a worker revolt would result in higher wages. Essential workers in 21st-century America are not underpaid. A worker revolt today would do nothing more than piss off the workers.
Here are other people not buying the dog food. Union electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and welders. Unionized teachers and government workers. Truckers, teamster or otherwise. Auto workers, UAW, or otherwise. When the worry of the day is that adult children will not do as well as their parents, that is a pretty strong clue that the parents are doing pretty damn good.
There was once a time and place when telling workers they should unite to throw off their chains might resonate. Here and now is not that place. In 21st-century America, capitalism has produced many more winners than losers. Those winners will let Elon have his billions as long as they have their house, their lake house, their boat, and their 401k filled with Tesla stock.
So, again, a question for Mamdani and the Ivy professors. Socialism was proven to be a crock, even if tried during the age of underpaid mechanics. Please explain how socialism could even be attempted in the age of highly paid engineers, coders, scientists, plumbers, teachers, electricians, truckers, welders, and factory workers. Oh, and Farmers, they also want no part of your revolution.
A 21st-century American socialist should be cruelly mocked, not elected to Congress. Today’s rallying cry for socialists is “Non-workers of the World Unite, fight the Workers to increase the size of your welfare check.”
G-Pub
ps: All the above raises serious questions. Why isn’t 21st-century American socialism mocked? Why are our college students being taught utter crappola? And finally, why is 21st century American journalism so utterly incapable of exposing the socialist myth?
pps: Here is the answer to above questions. The issue is never the issue. Jealousy, envy, and revenge will use any tool available.
Discussion (25)
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Here’s the “real socialism” problem …it concedes as a fact the fiction that “real socialism” is theoretically possible…it’s just been misapplied. And that’s Wrong. Socialism never works because the theory is wrongheaded. And it’s wrongheaded on the one crucial, keystone, foundational issue … where prices come from. Socialism contends that prices come from the amount of labor contained in a thing…aka the Labor Theory of Value. All of Marx depends on LTV being correct. If LTV is correct, Marx has exposed the fatal flaws at the heart of capitalism. Laborers create the value that gets expropriated by the capitalists. Capitalists aren’t bad guys bending the rules to enrich themselves. They are playing by the rules. It’s the very nature of the game that’s skewed against the workers. There’s no way to play it fairly. The only way to achieve a fair outcome for laborers is to sweep the game board and all the pieces from the table and toss the entire game in the trash. “Real socialism” requires that LTV is correct. If it’s not, then everything that comes after it is just plain fantasy. And arguing about the ins and outs of the mechanics is just plain silly…it’s like having a serious scientific argument about the aerodynamics of witches brooms or the locomotive technique of Frosty the Snowman. And LTV is wrong. That’s NOT where prices come from. Prices come from the interplay of supply and demand. Thats why salaries in the WNBA are lower than I hide in the NBA. It’s not sexism, it’s lack of demand. Why did ARod make so much more money than Michael Phelps? Because love him or hate him Arod sold lots more tickets than Phelps. It had nothing to do with how much labor it takes to achieve that level of performance. There’s tons of examples showing that LTV is wrong. And they are the real nails in real socialisms coffin.
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Real Socialism had been tried, and has been working great for centuries. Dante even wrote a book about it— The Inferno.
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Marxists want to control and distribute but are incurious (in denial?) about where all that wealth came from. Worse, they put people in charge whose skill set is internal bureaucratic politics and suppression of others to thus guarantee a complete absence of creativity, innovation, growth and change.
To marry the world's two most economically retarded systems (Marxism and Islam) into a governing ideology is to go full retard, and you never go full retard.
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Communism versus Capitalism?
Let's give the floor to the great Milton Friedman... who schools Phil Donahue on Capitalism.
Milton Friedman and Phil Donahue On Socialism v. Capitalism
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If we do (and should) use the argument of practicality to counter calls for Socialism, we should also remember that it's the messy reality of the place we live that young Socialists are comparing their ideals to; and our best practical examples of Capitalism are not without flaws. In a nod to Sowell, we should admit to the trade offs we are willing to make, and the ones we are not.
In our society, writing the laws to your favor is also a rewarded activity, (Car Dealerships, Taxi Medallions, Barber License, Electrical Utility, Bank bail outs). Real utility isn't the only thing that pays. In some cases a Tesla, SpaceX, Uber can shake up a regulated area, but that appears to be more the exception than the rule. The accusations of public cost and private gain are not hollow.
We also allow 'pump and dump' crypto and penny stock schemes. If the cost of allowing legitimate fundraising for small companies are rules that also allow for crypto scammers, then I'm okay with that exchange. Similarly, the 'pro-energy' laws in Texas allowed them to outbuild California in wind and solar, despite being ideologically neutral on the prospect.
That I think is the real point of practicality, that societies and laws that protect individual agency and free markets have consistently been able to outgrow the ones that don't do those things. It may be ideologically neutral on the subject of helping the poor, but similar to the TX / CA energy comparison: a prosperous country can do a lot more charitable works than a relatively poor country that calls those some works rights.
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