Process
Status Items Output None Questions None Claims None Highlights Done See section below
Highlights
id591482052
capitalism is inherently exploitative. Because capitalists have a monopoly over the resources needed to produce goods and services, workers must hire themselves out for a wage if they don’t want to starve; the capitalists then sell what their employees produce on the market and pocket a large share of the products’ value as profit. This “surplus value” that owners extract from workers is the fruit of exploitation.
✏️ Basics of capitalism 🔗 View Highlight
id591483148
Socialists aren’t committed to the view that any extraction of a surplus from workers is exploitative or unjust. Even in a society where all firms are collectively owned, some of the surplus produced by workers must be reinvested in production or diverted to pay for public education, health care, and the like.
✏️ People sometimes argue that not all extraction of surplus value from workers is unjust. Sometimes you use surplus to build new businesses and hire more people… or you take surplus and tax it to provide social benefits. Socialists don’t say that all extractions are exploitation.. we say that there are exploitative extractions which are the problem.. the ones that dominate working class. 🔗 View Highlight
id591483737
What socialists object to is how capitalism allows the ruling class to use its ownership of the means of production to dominate or subordinate the working class, undemocratically deploying their power to force workers to labor for capitalists’ benefit.
id591484372
strict limits on campaign finance and the public funding of political parties; breaking up and regulating private media corporations and promoting the growth of publicly funded media sources; expanding public childcare and education at all levels; a universal basic income (UBI); reforms to increase the power of trade unions, such as sectoral bargaining; and various forms of state intervention in the economy to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
✏️ Some socialist (I think) initiatives 🔗 View Highlight
id591484500
He does, however, recite the familiar arguments for the importance of the efficiency provided by markets as opposed to top-down state planning, which I would not dispute. Markets may be combined with public ownership of firms, though, as Rawls and indeed Chandler himself acknowledge. It is unfortunate, then, that Chandler does not engage with the many proposals for market or quasi–market socialism that have been developed in recent years, which aim to capture the benefits of both collective ownership and market efficiency.
✏️ So something I guess I need to read more about.. the debate around state planning vs market planning, and somehow finding a way to do market-socialism. The argument being that state planning is too inefficient and slow compared to market ones, but also you have to reign in market ones lest you screw over the majority of people. #followup 🔗 View Highlight
id591484892
the creation of citizens’ wealth funds, similar to sovereign wealth funds found in Norway and other Scandinavian countries, in which the state would buy up shares in private companies and distribute the earnings to citizens as a UBI.
✏️ Another cool socialist initiative idea 🔗 View Highlight
id591484914
Sweden’s ill-fated Meidner plan, which would have eventually put a majority of the country’s stock market in the hands of worker-owned wage-earner funds
✏️ Need to followup on this one.. why did this fail, and wouldn’t this be an ideal situation? 🔗 View Highlight
id591485403
first, the state relies on revenue generated by taxes on private economic activity; and second, because elected officials can govern only with some degree of support from the public, who will become unhappy if insufficient investment is happening (i.e., if there is a recession).
✏️ Reasons why capitalists wield outsized power over the state. They hold the lever as to whether they invest, depending on how they feel about the government and its degree of “capitalist-friendly” environment. If it isn’t friendly enough, they hold the lever back (capital strike), there’s no taxes, no investments and the government goes insolvent or gets kicked out. 🔗 View Highlight
id591485963
This structural leverage allows capitalists to beat back ambitious reforms that threaten their profits or their control over investment and production. In France, capital strikes helped lead to the failure of socialist Léon Blum’s government in 1937 and to the reversal of François Mitterrand’s ambitious pro-worker program in 1982–83. In Chile in the early 1970s, capital strikes eventually led to the violent overthrow of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government.
id591485994
it is worth pointing out that capitalists’ control over investment gives them an extremely powerful lever with which to resist or roll back the sorts of policies that Chandler thinks a just society requires.
id591485998
Once we recognize that power, we should recognize the necessity of taking it from them, by putting control of investment in public hands.
✏️ All of this as an argument for fuller socialization of enterprise. 🔗 View Highlight