Capitalism, socialism, communism, democracy etc.

I think that in China there is a percentage of the population that wants to change their political system. I think in Canada there is a percentage of the population that wants to change their political system, I am one of them. Where you and I seem to differ is what those percentages are. I think that the vast majority of both Canadian and Chinese citizens don't ever think much about politics because they are too busy making a living and trying to raise families. The majority of the population in both countries accept the undemocratic representative system on offer in the country of their birth.

In China they have a far higher turnout for their municipal level elections than we do so it seems they think their system gives them more say in local affairs than ours does. You also seem to think that Chinese people don't bitch about their government on line and in person. All the ex-pats say that there are clear lines that cannot be crossed because they are considered treasonous however petty officials being arrogant and incompetent are considered fair game.

India and China set off on their paths to lift their people out of poverty after shedding off colonial rule after WWII. The Indian revolution gave them a liberal democracy and an immediate descent into chaos and religious violence on an unprecedented scale. The Chinese revolution gave them a one party communist government with a starving population and a US blockade of their government. Over the course of the next thirty years the people of both countries suffered greatly. The CPC seems to have righted the ship of state while the Indian democracy is still violent and religious based. The women in India have a shorter life expectancy and are far more likely to be raped and have a higher rate of illiteracy than their counter parts in China. Both women get to vote for their local municipal officials.

In China if you want to be involved in making political decisions about public policy you try and join the CPC. Most CPC members are recruited from the best universities and it is a elite club. They do not spend their time and energy on getting elected they spend their time discussing and voting on public policy matters. In India they have elections every few years, that include riots where hundreds are killed in partisan violence, including opposition candidates. Like in Canada the main focus of the political process is for one party to gain a majority. That is where all the energy goes and not into ongoing public planning for the people.

So as far as I can tell the focus in Canada, as shown by unnecessary elections in BC and then Canada, is on winning a one party state for four years. In BC that immediately led to the "progressive" government using closure and other majority tools to ram through legislation that limits peoples ability to access FOI processes. Instead of working with all politicians in the country to deal with climate change and other pressing issues federally we spend all our political capital trying to become a one party state. Nothing gets done by our political class while our ruling elite goes abut its business as usual. In China their political class is reigning in their billionaires because they have the authority to do so. In Canada we need a majority government that is willing to go against the corporate media in any fight against our billionaires. I actually understand why most Chinese people are happy to let the CPC take care of business.

Pondering wrote:

I don't understand why being against communism seems to be interpreted as being against socialism. 

It's because most people today who say they are communists are actually socialists, and most people today who say they are socialists are actually social democrats.

Marx and Engels viewed socialism as a transitionary phase between capitalism and communism, in which the proletariat would take power from the bourgeoisie, establish a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' and bring all of the productive forces of society under state control so that they benefit society as a whole, rather than simply benefiting the private owners of the productive forces as under capitalism.

Marx and Engels conceived of communism as a second phase after socialism, in which the state would whither away. The Soviet Union and the other large C Communist countries abandoned this definition of communism and instead used Communism to describe the politial systems they implemented, while socialism was used to describe their economic systems.

Because of this, and because most people who want to abolish capitalism no longer believe that it's possible for the state to whither away, very few people today believe in Marx and Egnels conception of communism in which the state whithers away; and those that do are typically derided as ultra-leftists (which means people whose political positions do not take into account the objective conditions of the moment in which we live).

After WWI, most of the large socialist parties in existence at the time abandoned socialism in favor of social democracy, though they mostly continued to identify as socialists or democratic socialists. Social Democracy aims to achieve social justice within a capitalist context, through a mixed economy in which some parts are owned by the government and other parts are privately owned.

Some social democrats believe in promoting co-operative businesses within the non-government part of the economy, while others place a greater emphasis on private for-profit businesses with healthy profit margins.

Today, the large majority of people who identify as socialists or democratic socialists (at least in the advanced capitalist countries) reject the idea of state planning that was central to the functioning of the large C Communist countries during the cold war (even the remaining large C Communist countries -- China, Cuba, North Korea and Vietnam -- have moved away from a fully state planned economies to varying degrees). These socialists and democratic socialists who reject state planning have been aided by the capitalist propaganda since the end of the cold war that uses the collapse of the Soviet Union and the other eastern European Communist countries as proof that state planned economies don't work, when in reality the truth is much more complicated.

Some so-called socialists of today who reject state planning believe in market socialism. They generally believe in using one or more of the possible mechanisms available to hand control of large for-profit businesses over to their workers to be run as worker-owned enterprises.

Other so-called socialists of today are social democrats who believe in a greater role for government in meeting people's basic needs (housing, health care, education, utilities, universal basic income, etc.) but who believe that a healthy private sector is a necessary component of society. Either that or they believe that it's not possible to get rid of the private for-profit nature of most of the economy (as much as they might find it desirable if it could be achieved), and so they don't advocate for it.

Having said that, these so-called socialists do still tend to believe in greater equality of outcomes, to the extent that can be achieved under the systems they advocate.

Most people today who identify as social democrats are in fact small-l social liberals. By this I mean folks who believe that an enhanced state intervention is necessary to level the playing field to provide equality of opportunity for all people, but who are not really concerned with improving equality of outcomes.

..imho

..except for things that ken mentioned it all vanguard politics. top down politics. the party will take care of you. i saw this thinking begin to go out in the 70's but still hangs on but changes very little. i'm sure it began long before i became aware of it. but to sum it up..we are no longer monkeys hanging from trees and perfectly capable of making our own decisions. we don't need "the party" to do this for us. the indignados of spain and greece never allowed parties into their meetings for good reason. 

..look at the european socialist parties that have been in power. some for years. look at labour in the uk. look at france. look at greece. look at spain. look at mugabe in africa. and many more over the years. a few more rubles for the masses but the ruling class remains firmly in power.

..you have to change how decisions are made. not what you call it. from top down to bottom up. and that will never happen from top down. that can only happen from the bottom up. 

..so changing the systems means changing more than who sits in the parliaments.

..the 56' hungarian revolution at one point was successful. it was exciting to read about. city and farm came together. the collaboration of forces decided to put a popular person in as head of gov. he immediately created a proclamation legitimising those forces. they sent him a message back something like this. you do not legitimise us. we put you there we'll take you out. this is bottom up power.

..and then the soviet military moved in with their tanks and guns. top down communists. but really state capitalists. 

..i have long argued that we need administrators and tech people to carry out decisions made at the local level. those local level decision can also be coordinated with other locals across canada for instance. new structures need to be built for this to happen. or maybe existing ones. 

..what we don't need is politicians beholden to their party, benefactors and beliefs taking it upon themselves to pretend to speak for all of us. which is in reality not possible considering the diversity of this country.

..so we need real democracy beginning with real choices, community participation to the widest extent possible.  

..now while these are my thoughts on what is possible there are existing models to look at. indigenous folk for one have their own processes in arriving at decisions that are quite democratic. there is the co-op model. there are worker models. there are models around the world that we could draw ideas from. participatory budgeting that a city does in brazil by dividing the city into sections and then asking that community to decide what they wanted their share of tax money to be spent on. that being decided in open community meetings. for example. 

..what i'm saying is it doesn't have to be one thing. the same thing across the board. different experiences brings different conclusions. inclusion will bring in more of those experiences, i have no doubt.

..but it wouldn't be the cookie cutter approach of the corporate structure. the pyramid model that has brought us this world that we so love and admire.     

NDPP wrote:

You can't and shouldn't attempt to build any sort of political utopia in places that may not belong to you.

Nationalizing large capitalist enterprises doesn't usher in any sort of utopia. If that were ever possible, and I'm skeptical that it ever was, the climate crisis has surely foreclosed any chance of building any sort of political utopia going forwards.

If we nationalize large capitalist enterprises we remove the profit motive, at which point we can run them on behalf of everyone, including the indigenous peoples on whose stolen land we live.

State owned enterprises can and should be run democratically. They don't have to be sites of autocracy.

Pondering wrote:

I want minimal state owned businesses or crown corporations. I prefer stongly regulated co-ops. 

Strongly regulated co-ops are certainly better than for-profit enterprises, I'll give you that. Though I have a hard time believing that we could turn a company like Amazon into a co-op that would not still be abusing it's workers, or that we could turn every for-profit business into a co-op.

Case in point: I'm a board member at the People's Co-Op Bookstore in Vancouver, and while we have some advantages over for-profit bookstores in that our members get a bit of a say in how the store is run, we also don't bring in enough money every month to be able to pay our staff a living wage. So co-ops are not necessarily the be all and end all as a business model.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

On a planet with limited resources it makes sense to plan on only producing what is necessary to meet people's needs.

 

In my opinion this is a very good argument in favor of at least some degree of central planning. We need to ensure that we allocate our increasingly limited resources to those products that will meet human needs, rather than all this plastic junk that Capitalism produces that people don't need and which is wrecking our planet.

....

..while i agree with the above i don't think there is a need to build a gov to achieve some form of central planning.

..what is needed is the ability to stop bad decisions from being made. for instance one of the most efficient ways of doing this is to block site c from flooding some of the best farming land in bc. and poisoning our waters with pipelines and mines. as another example.

..rather than looking to build a party that could take power that would take more time than we have to get things done. all the time understanding that it's the same processes, platforms and global interrelationship that currently exists for governments that got us into this mess in the first place. 

..i'm not saying that this will work in all cases, not even close, but there will be no shortage of ideas whatever the problem if we could do so collectively. 

Ken Burch wrote:

The concepts of "democratic centralism"(i.e., unquestioning obedience to 'the line') and "preserving the leading role of the party" have done little but damage.

I get the impression that you have not looked closely at modern China. I am reading a lot since the new cold war started. I find that there is a lot that I like. The Chinese system does not seem like the rigid, top down model you seem to envision. I agree with this assessment of the poverty alleviation campaign and think it more clearly describes the Chinese governance model. "Rather, it should be seen as a mass mobilisation across multiple sectors of Chinese society using diverse and decentralised methodologies at a breadth and scale that is unprecedented in human history."

This piece by Tricontental has a lot of embedded facts about how China's society and economy actually works. The poverty alleviation program was all about empowering poor working class and peasant families to start small businesses and larger cooperatives to work together. This is one of the stories that tell the story of the program but the stats in the article are even better for people like me. who are results oriented. Circle jerks do not provide safe drinking water to remote villages. In Canada we give our remote poverty stricken indigenous communities endless promises that result in bureaucrats pushing paper and nothing much else.

"Grandmother Peng Lanhua lives in a two-hundred-year-old rickety wooden house in a remote village of Guizhou Province. Born in 1935, she grew up in a China that was under Japanese occupation and entered adolescence during the Chinese Revolution.

Peng is one of the few people in her community who did not want to relocate as part of the government’s poverty alleviation programme when the government designated her house unsafe to live in. Since 2013, eighty-six other households whose houses were deemed too dangerous or for whom jobs could not be generated locally were moved to a newly built community an hour’s drive away. But Peng has her reasons for not moving. She is eighty-six years-old and lives with Alzheimer’s disease. In addition to low-income insurance and a modest pension, she receives supplemental income from a new grapefruit company that leased her family’s land. The company, whose dividends are distributed to villagers like Peng as part of the national anti-poverty efforts, was established to develop the local agricultural industry. Peng’s daughter and son-in-law live next door in a two-storey house they built with government subsidies. Her children are employed. In other words, her basic needs are cared for, and relocation is voluntary.

‘We can’t force anyone to move, but we still have to provide the “three guarantees and two assurances”’, says Liu Yuanxue, the Party cadre sent to live in the village to see that every household emerges from extreme poverty. He is referring to the government poverty alleviation programme’s guarantee of safe housing, health care, and education, as well as being fed and clothed. Liu visits Peng on a monthly basis, as he does with all the households in the village. Through these visits, he comes to know the details of each person’s life."

https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/

Ken Burch wrote:

If there is a wish to revive the original, genuinely liberating vision of small-c "communism", it is imperative to totally renounce the toxic, paranoid, absurdly over-repressive legacy of "Large C-Communism".

The concepts of "democratic centralism"(i.e., unquestioning obedience to 'the line') and "preserving the leading role of the party" have done little but damage.

'Unquestioning obedience to the line' is undemocratic, and I oppose it. Free, full and informed debate is necessary to a healthy democracy. People need to be free to oppose a political line that they think is incorrect, in the hopes of changing it.

But once we go down the path of arguing against having a party with a political line (ie. not taking a stand on issues of the day), we have abandoned revolutionary politics and gone down the road of reformism.

Ken Burch wrote:

What was good in the USSR and China what is good in Cuba- there were & are elements of good in each- never required the forms of leadership those revolutions ended up with, or the obsessions with stamping out "deviationism" and the non-state institutions- cooperatives and worker-controlled factories, mutual aid associations, every liberating structure that was banned by Lenin- and what needs to come now, in the view of much of what I call "The Next Left", is a general democratization of life, and the creation of democratic, egalitarian creative economic models and structures outside of the old bureaucratic state.

p

Two points here. The first is that I don't believe in telling other countries what sort of governmental structures they should choose, although I'll generally support them when they pick ones that govern in the interest of everyone in society, not in the interests of the bourgeoises, or worse, in the interests of foreign imperialist powers and their bourgeoisie.

As such, I'm a supporter of the governments of Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia, and I'm not about to tell them that they're making the wrong choice when the only other choice on offer is a return to imperialist domination.

The second point concerns the Canadian context. I'm against things such as an unaccountable leadership caste; I'm against any obsession with stamping out 'deviationism'; and I'm against nationalizing co-ops if it's not supported by their memberships.

I am in favor of expropriating the business holdings of our large capitalists such as Jim Pattison, Galen Weston and the Irving family, and running them in the interest of all canadians and in harmony with nature -- which, in the case of the Irvings business holdings, most likely means a controlled shut down of their business holdings.

Ken Burch wrote:

The key to a transformative future is the immediate empowerment of the many, the transfer, at the earliest possible moment, of economic and at least local governance decisions to the many, at the grassroots levels- as the Zapatistas, the people struggling to build and defend a secular, egalitarian libertarian socialis society in Rojava, and those who organize worker cooperatives and push for people's assemblies rather than the inherently reactionary and anti-democratic structures of "representative democracy"- a model which has now been officially and permanently killed in much of the U.S. by the voter suppression laws and the permanent, unchangeable gerrymandering of most Congressional districts and most state legislatures.

I'm all in favor of giving workers more democracy, and indigenous nations more sovereignty.

I'm also in favor of getting us off of fossil fuels ASAP in order to try to mitigate as much of the damage as possible coming our way from climate change. That involves nationalizing the oil companies and shutting them down, while ensuring that we don't throw workers in the fossil fuel sectors of our economy into absolute poverty, and other people who rely on fossil fuels to live their lives into energy poverty.

This almost certainly involves nationalizing the auto plants and transit manufacturing facilities so we can pump out the zero emission vehicles and public transit (including high speed trains) that we're going to need if we want to avoid energy poverty for a large portion of our population.

Ken Burch wrote:

Vanguardism, "democratic centralism" and "preserving the leading role of the party" have no valid roles to play in any movement for radical transformation- and neither does the right-wing, essentially conservative concept of "modernizing social democracy" the British Labour Party's far-right leader, Keir Starmer, the dying social democratic parties of Europe and the so-called New Democratic Party are universally insisting is the furthest-left political model that can be achieved- social democracy is SUPPOSED to defend the welfare state and to be viscerally on the side of the poor and dispossessed, and the "modernizers" have now totally a and permanently renounced any solidarity with the poor at all, replacing it with the useless and heartless concepts of paternalism and Victorian sanctimony.

I'm not in favor of undemocratic parties with undemocratic leadership structures, and I'm certainly not in favor of "modernizing social-democracy".

I am in favor of electing eco-socialists to government who will do what is necessary to put Canada on the best footing when it comes to dealing with the climate crisis, and I've already outlined what some of that looks like. And I don't see any way of getting eco-socialist politicians elected to do what's needed without some kind of a political party.

kropotkin1951 wrote:

Ken Burch wrote:

The concepts of "democratic centralism"(i.e., unquestioning obedience to 'the line') and "preserving the leading role of the party" have done little but damage.

I get the impression that you have not looked closely at modern China. I am reading a lot since the new cold war started. I find that there is a lot that I like. The Chinese system does not seem like the rigid, top down model you seem to envision. I agree with this assessment of the poverty alleviation campaign and think it more clearly describes the Chinese governance model. "Rather, it should be seen as a mass mobilisation across multiple sectors of Chinese society using diverse and decentralised methodologies at a breadth and scale that is unprecedented in human history."

This piece by Tricontental has a lot of embedded facts about how China's society and economy actually works. The poverty alleviation program was all about empowering poor working class and peasant families to start small businesses and larger cooperatives to work together. This is one of the stories that tell the story of the program but the stats in the article are even better for people like me. who are results oriented. Circle jerks do not provide safe drinking water to remote villages. In Canada we give our remote poverty stricken indigenous communities endless promises that result in bureaucrats pushing paper and nothing much else.

"Grandmother Peng Lanhua lives in a two-hundred-year-old rickety wooden house in a remote village of Guizhou Province. Born in 1935, she grew up in a China that was under Japanese occupation and entered adolescence during the Chinese Revolution.

Peng is one of the few people in her community who did not want to relocate as part of the government’s poverty alleviation programme when the government designated her house unsafe to live in. Since 2013, eighty-six other households whose houses were deemed too dangerous or for whom jobs could not be generated locally were moved to a newly built community an hour’s drive away. But Peng has her reasons for not moving. She is eighty-six years-old and lives with Alzheimer’s disease. In addition to low-income insurance and a modest pension, she receives supplemental income from a new grapefruit company that leased her family’s land. The company, whose dividends are distributed to villagers like Peng as part of the national anti-poverty efforts, was established to develop the local agricultural industry. Peng’s daughter and son-in-law live next door in a two-storey house they built with government subsidies. Her children are employed. In other words, her basic needs are cared for, and relocation is voluntary.

‘We can’t force anyone to move, but we still have to provide the “three guarantees and two assurances”’, says Liu Yuanxue, the Party cadre sent to live in the village to see that every household emerges from extreme poverty. He is referring to the government poverty alleviation programme’s guarantee of safe housing, health care, and education, as well as being fed and clothed. Liu visits Peng on a monthly basis, as he does with all the households in the village. Through these visits, he comes to know the details of each person’s life."

https://thetricontinental.org/studies-1-socialist-construction/[/quote]
I will look at that link. And I do not want the Chinese government overthrown- just that it move past the paranoia and internal security fetishism of "socialism with Chinese characteristics" rubric- just as no other government needs to suppress dissent, neither do they. And quite frankly, they are insulting there own country by implying that repression is somehow an intrinsic part of the Chinese national character.

Pondering wrote:

It just occured to me Trudeau and Kropotkin are alike in their admiration for the Chinese government.

Canada's Prime Minister Pierre E. Trudeau, right, shakes hands with Mao Zedong on Oct.13,1973. The two met at Chungnanhai while Trudeau was on an official visit to China. PHOTO BY CP PHOTO

..i don't know if anyone followed the link to read more but this followed my previous post from the autonomy thread. my bold below.

FROM BETRAYAL TO DECEPTION: THE LEFT TURNS RIGHT

quote:

Hence the frustration with political parties. Hence the autonomous forms of self-organization. Indeed, it seems that today the only substantive domain of politics where the state still has some power to affect a change in outcomes is the cultural politics of identity: it may no longer be able to stem flows of money across borders, but at least the state can still to some extent stop the flow of human beings — and so it does, with brutal effect, cracking down on refugees and migrants as if its life depended on it. When it comes to the economy, however, the state is structurally constrained by the ability of bankers and businessmen to move their investments around as they please: stuffing away trillions of dollars worth in profits in remote tax havens while moving investments to whoever offers the easiest regulation and greatest returns. Politicians, meanwhile, are structurally dependent on these private investors to maintain adequate growth and employment levels, otherwise they simply risk being ousted from office in the next elections. As a result, all politicians ultimately have to cater to business interests — if they do not, the market will just discipline them through divestment.

People may therefore have the right to vote, but what is the point in voting if all you get to decide upon is who will implement the policies that favor big business anyway? Populists like Beppe Grillo in Italy may scream “they’re all crooks, kick them all out!”, but what we are really seeing is not corrupt politicians betraying their voters, or the left betraying the workers, but capital gradually expanding its structural power. As the dual processes of globalization and financialization continue apace, elected politicians — both corrupt and honest ones — are simply being reduced to managers: they just take care of the state apparatus while the bankers and businessmen move their money around. This is not a problem of “betrayal”. Even if liberal voters may feel betrayed by Obama’s swing to the right, this is not just about power corrupting people (it is also about that, but not alone). Similarly, it is not just that the Workers’ Party betrayed workers in Brazil, or PASOK betrayed voters in Greece. Cornelius Castoriadis, the Greek philosopher of autonomy, was prescient when he wrote in 1955 that left-wing parties have never truly represented working people:

[S]aying that they ‘are betraying us’ makes no sense. If, in order to sell his junk, a merchant tells me some load of crap and tries to persuade me that it is in my interest to buy it, I can say that he is trying to deceive me but not that he is betraying me. Likewise, the Socialist or Stalinist party, in trying to persuade the proletariat that it represents its interests, is trying to deceive it but is not betraying it; they betrayed it once and for all a long time ago, and since then they are not traitors to the working class but faithful and consistent servants of other interests.

THE REVOLUTION’S GRADUAL RETREAT INTO REFORMISM

It is therefore not that today’s movements are refusing to confront the difficult concept of power, but precisely the opposite. More and more people around the world are beginning to recognize that the democratic capitalist state plays a critical role in stabilizing the diffuse global system of capitalist power relations, and that the parties of the left in turn play a critical role in stabilizing the authority and legitimacy of the capitalist state. As John Holloway put it in a recent ROAR interview, “one thing that’s become clear in the crisis to more and more people is the distance of the state from society, and the degree to which the state is integrated into the movement of money, so that the state even loses the appearance of being pulled in two directions.” Whereas the temporary fixes of Keynesian demand management in the post-war years and cheap credit in the last three decades may have led voters to believe that the state did care about ordinary people, such illusions have all but disappeared in the present conjuncture of widespread capitalist crisis: not just in the eurozone but everywhere.

The position of the institutional left in this respect is extremely self-defeating. On the one hand, most state-oriented radicals, revolutionary socialists and communists would agree with the analysis that the power of capital has grown exponentially under neoliberalism and that the state is becoming increasingly submissive to the dictatorship of the markets. As Žižek himself puts it, the left’s reactionary defense of the welfare state is ultimately a hopeless endeavor: “the utopia [of today’s left] is not a radical change of the system, but the idea that one can maintain a welfare state within the system.” In fact, he even argues that “if we remain within the confines of the global capitalist system, then measures to wring further sums from workers, students and pensioners are, effectively, necessary.” Clearly such views are difficult to square with Žižek’s support for SYRIZA, the Coalition of the Radical Left in Greece, and the latter’s defense of the welfare state. One day, Žižek’s own theoretical reflections on the Greek debt crisis force him to conclude that the prospects for leftist regimes in general are “‘objectively’ hopeless”; the next day he finds himself praising SYRIZA for its “courage to take over [and] banish the left’s fear of taking power.”

The best that leftists can hope for in such an “objectively hopeless” situation is for some modest reform: an Argentina-style debt default, the re-nationalization of some public utilities or perhaps a bank, maybe some family allowances or subsidies to help uplift the poor or bring education to the excluded; not much more. Žižek even ends up enthusiastically praising Obama’s disastrous healthcare reforms, not realizing that they basically stripped away hundreds of billions of dollars from hospitals and donated them as profits to Big Pharma and Wall Street insurance companies. Whatever happened to the good old revolutionary idea of socialism as the “social ownership of the means of production and co-operative management of the economy”? It is now clear that all state-oriented forms of revolutionary theory and practice have long since retreated into a defeatist reformism. This is not simply a sectarian jab at the institutional left: the leading radicals themselves recognize it. Speaking at the Subversive Festival in Zagreb this year, Richard Seymour — author of the blog Lenin’s Tomb — admitted that “in practical terms we are all reformists now.” As a result, radical thinkers generally end up supporting political parties whose final policies will be all but radical. In fact, with enough time spent in power, their principal function inevitably becomes the stabilization of the liberal democratic state that anchors the social relations of the global capitalist order. In the process, the cycle of deception that Castoriadis identified — really a cycle of collective self-delusion — continues unabated.

While Slavoj Žižek expresses his unconditional support for a young and charismatic comrade like Alexis Tsipras — the leader of SYRIZA upon whom all radical hopes are now pinned — the latter actually goes to visit Wolfgang Schäuble in Berlin to tell the German Finance Minister that he need not fear a Greek euro exit, before embarking on a charm offensive in the United States to assure the IMF and private bankers of the same, even telling an audience of businessmen, US officials and policy wonks at the Brookings Institution that “I hope to convince you that I’m not as dangerous as some are trying to say.” Apparently the disciplinary power of markets is so great that it even exerts its influence on opposition parties. “Is there anything to fear of the left wing in Greece?” the leader of the Coalition of the Radical Left asked his audience of liberals rhetorically. “In what way are we radical?” By now, the answer should be clear to everyone: in name only.

To me socialism is not about the end of capitalism but the control of capital. When the financiers take over policy making nothing much gets built because there are so many other speculative ventures. Building a business that employs people in family supporting jobs becomes a losing proposition when I can hang on to an empty condo and earn twenty to thirty percent returns yearly.

Governments need to invest in housing and transportation infrastructure and in Canada that is not happening because we are building pipelines LNG infrastructure instead. Much of the money is coming from pension plans which one would think could be used as instruments for good but are now one of the big problems.

..for the biggest chunk of my life i've been engaged in trying and get govs to do the right thing. engaged in the labour movement to try and make this happen. engaged in the left. and there were moments when it looked liked things could change. but today it's farther away than it's ever been. i see no electoral path on the face of the earth that has the capacity to stop/control capital. 

 ..the party orientated left will probably continue to push the line that they can do it but never how/when exactly. how/when they will take control of capital in the shadow of the us. there is no leverage that i can see. certainly not the law. the left can't even stop a pipeline. rcmp runs roughshod at even a hint of an uprising let alone take control of the state.

..so once again i want to put the idea out that there is the possibility of building a new world inside the old. we have the possibility of taking control of cities. but this is just an idea that i push. there are many attempts being made around the world to create autonomous areas, autonomous cities. but much more has to be done. 

I think finance has an important role to play in increasing productivity and living standards.

Alternative Futures: Yanis Varoufakis at Antidote 2021 (podcast)

https://twitter.com/IdeasattheHouse/status/1470269259108466692

"Things could be very different. That is the most progressive and subversive thought. We need to intervene, actually..."

Pondering wrote:

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I have done the vote compass but I am still wrapping my brain around it. 

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