Why is socialism becoming increasingly popular in the United States?

SOCIALISM? I never said any such thing. I said WORKERS' CO-OPS hire and have CEOs.

OH! You "assure" me eh? What will you do when I show you you're full of bullshit and actually know nothing about it? Will you admit you were wrong? Or will you just ignore it and go on with the next subject due to being unable to stand making a mistake? Which will it be?

"Wage equality: With a salary range tending to even out the highest and lowest incomes and a wage scale ranging from 1-6 between the minimum and maximum salaries".
https://www.mondragon-corporation.com/urtekotxostena/dist/docs/en/informe-anual-2022-en.pdf

The range of CEO pay in workers' co-ops is from 1 to 6 and up to 1 to 8 and that can depend on whether they tie CEO pay to a multiple of the LOWEST-PAID WORKER, or to the MEDIAN-PAID WORKER.

Go ahead and ask me how CEO pay is kept to such a range.

And that CEO is "a class above the regular workers" only if s/he controls the business and hires employees for a paycheck. But they don't.

So you're still trying to pass China off as "socialist". Slow on the up-take.

Well, if you have bee reading and digesting my posts on this you know that I agree that capitalism with socially-beneficial programs is still capitalism, and socialism with a few capitalist-type programs is still socialism.

 

If it does, then it's no longer socialism. DO YOU AGREE?

 

No, it's just a worse form of collectivist oppression.

 

....FROM A CAPITALIST'S POINT OF VIEW. In class society, economics is class-based. You cannot escape this fact! All I ever hear about "human behavior" from capitalists is that "humans are self-centered and family-centered". Their nature is to "own property" and to be competitive. All good capitalist characteristics but not a valid human nature.

And I answered that.

Wow. That's quite a creative spin! But it conflicts with revolutionary governments warning about "capitalist roaders" and arresting and executing them.

You asked "I've helped partnerships--is that what these are?" So I told you what "these are". You find that confusing?

I answered that. Did you miss my answer?

What's your point?

 

There's your capitalist economics that you said were not "capitalist" but were "neutral". Capitalist economics presents LTV in a way that makes it absurd, but it's not at all what Marx wrote. I'll bet you never took an economics class that was given from a Marxian perspective in order to develop an understanding of Marx (IOW not critical and not designed to denigrate it.)

 

Then try constructive conversation free of "gotchya" crap and attempts to corner the poster.

 

Do you deny class struggle? Do you deny that counter-revolutionaries and revisionists always show up to undermine and prevent politics of the left?

 

Where were my answers tried?

Feel free to elaborate.

IOW you didn't watch them. Got it.

 

No I didn't.

 

Yes, that is a fairly typical price ratio between the free market and the monopoly rent collection privilege market. Sometimes it's three orders of magnitude. When you have to pay greedy, idle rent seekers full "market" value for permission to live, it gets expensive.

 

Indeed it was the early source of wealth.

Right. Once all the useful land was privately owned, landless workers could legally be treated like slaves without all the bother of actually owning them, as was common in Europe.

 

Spoken like a true ideologue. You have no idea

Because functionally they may be closer to partnerships if they're small.

I find it hard to believe you've created successful large co-ops, but perhaps you have.

 

The Labor Theory of Value is absurd. It has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism.

It is absurd and it has nothing to do with how it's presented.

 

It depends upon how you define class.

 

European history and the closing of their frontier areas is an interesting study.

 

Yes. The middle and lower classes are not even aware of the privileges that define the upper class, much less struggling against them. You are a perfect example: you think owning a factory or being an employer -- a "capitalist" -- makes you upper class, and so seek to stop people from doing those things. I have known enough factory owners and employers personally to know it doesn't. Your Marxist-socialist "class struggle" is a pathetic, misguided farce that only distracts honest working people from the real struggle against the massive, systematic, institutionalized, and wholly gratuitous injustice of privilege.

Is that what you call them? I just call them political opportunists and power seekers. Socialism inevitably implies that production -- wealth -- will be distributed according to a political process. The political operators you call "counter-revolutionaries and revisionists" just have the skills and motivation to take advantage of that situation and manipulate it for their own advantage. Some people are just like that, and socialism can never change that fact.

 

The only legitimate discussion of LTV is one that includes the WHOLE Marxian theory of value.

I'll bet you never took an economics class that was given from a Marxian perspective in order to develop an understanding of Marx (IOW not critical and not designed to denigrate it.)

 

Right. If you define "middle class" from "upper class" as being the arbitrary difference between $80,000/year and $81,000+/year then there's no class struggle. But if you define classes on the basis of their relations to production, then you have class struggle.

The first only has the struggle of trying to hide the class struggle.

 

Garbage. The LTV antedates Marx by centuries, and his theory of value is absurd tripe, as already proved.

I know, right? I never took a geophysics class that was given from a flat earth perspective, either...

 

@Kode is stuck in Marxist analyses. He couldn't even begin to explain how a drug here costs $400+ and $5 in India.

Often, yes. There are instances, however, when revolutionaries call upon experts he identifies as "counter-revolutionaries and revisionists" to rebuild what revolutionaries may even have all by themselves turned into a crisis. Mao collectivizing agriculture and having an incompetent industrial policy come to mind. The revolutionaries, unable to run the economy themselves, are likewise incapable of identifying who can.

This is the fatal flaw in their thinking. Markets are real and socialists damage their economy by politically modifying outcomes without much thought to how people might react--well, except to devise ways to force compliance.

The intelligentsia can be an effective tool or they can do you in.

 

It doesn't matter if you wade through Marx--it's nonsense.

 

I'm to remember when I've ever heard about a union steward or "boss" making less money than the other workers.

 

No. Authoritarianism or non-authoritarianism does not define socialism. Socialism is not the same thing as authoritarianism, socialism just needs authoritarianism to succeed.

 

Of course I can! duh. The average monthly pay in India is equivalent to about $400. So in both countries the price is set to as much as the market will bear. Price is never set to "cost to produce and distribute plus a reasonable 10% profit".

I know you can't prove that so I'll just chalk it up to "bullshit". Mao was also trying to transform an agrarian society to the next step which would be a capitalist society with capitalist production by employing a method, strategy, ideology, and organization of production intended and designed for a socialist economic system. duh.

Nope. You're describing a totalitarian dictatorship, which is what plenty of attempts at socialism became in the hands of communists. But a totalitarian dictatorship isn't socialism, by definition.

 

...according to a staunch defender of capitalism, which makes the opinion entirely ideological and therefore not objective.