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LINK Capitalism Isn’t Working. But What Would a Viable Socialist System Look Like?

"We can say that we want radically democratic and decentralized planning rather than top-down planning, but consideration of what this would look like can make socialism sound even less attractive to ordinary people. Few of us want to spend hours of our free time in meetings. We can hold out hope that technological developments will allow us to outsource some of the heavy lifting to computers, but do we really want to delay the transition to socialism until the singularity is upon us? Or just reassure ourselves that calculation problems will sort themselves out by the time we’re ready to move beyond capitalism?

A much more grounded approach starts from the recognition that we need to at least start with what’s often called “market socialism.” This doesn’t mean a form of socialism where markets dominate every sector of the economy, but one in which at least a big chunk of economic transactions still involve market transactions between worker-controlled firms. The “commanding heights” of the economy — think, for example, about the finance sector or the power companies — can be moved out of the market entirely. So can vital services like health care and education. The remaining “private” sector can be made up of cooperative firms."

WilliamCharles 8 Apr 17
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6 comments

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Just finished watching The Big Short.

It reminded me of Dr. King's observation. Socialism for the rich, rugged individualism for the poor.

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Democratic socialism would be 'capitalism with a heart.'

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A mixed economy, with employees owning the companies they work for. The latest info I have, 2007, said there were about eleven thousand such companies in the US.

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It used to be the tax structure was set up to encourage reinvestment in the company and workers to avoid otherwise onerous taxes. That has gone out the window resulting in supervillian level wealth.Health benefits and other perks came about during WWII to get around wage caps.

It is clear to me that capitalism is embodied in the observation, "To a capitalist, the forest only has value by cutting it down."

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The choice is not capitalism and socialist. It never has been. All countries that are remotely democratic, including the US (remotely) have mixed economies, public and private enterprise, regulation, business enterprise, and government intervention into the economy. The point is getting the balance right. In the US the balance has been skewered against the population in favour of big business and wealth. The choice is not between capitalism and socialism, but getting a better fairer balance in the social democratic mixed economies we now have. It's conservatives who foster this false socialism - capitalism debate. They hijacked the political debate back in the 1970s and are still doing it, constantly attacking government while all the time ruthlessly pursuing political power to use the levers of government to enrich their class and class interests.

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For models, try western "European nations. They, in general are viable mixed economies, including both regulated capitalism and social democrat economies and governments.

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