I insist upon declaring solidarity with John Quiggin, the Australian economist, here. I too am a socialist and proud to declare myself as such:
In the decade since the Global Financial Crisis, things have changed. Socialism still describes an aspiration, rather than a concrete political program, but an aspiration to a better society is what we need now as a positive response to the evident failure of neoliberalism.
Entirely so. For as 2008 proved neoliberalism is puppy dog tails, socialism sweetness and spice.
Sugar and spice versus puppy dog tails, no one can claim not to be a socialist, can they?
My political position can be summed up as, I want better outcomes for everyone, especially the poor. Once upon a time this would have made me a sort of a socialist. Now apparently I am hard right.
Socialism still describes an aspiration, rather than a concrete political program. This means that socialists get elected espousing no particular actions once in office (just their own virtue, like Southerner above, as though there were a faction that espouses worse outcomes for the poor), and enact actions without hard evidence that those actions will get us any closer to the aspiration. And the aspiration (the rosy intention) is still the defense when a new program does not deliver results and all efforts to repeal it fail. Come to think of it, nothing has changed at all since the early days… Read more »
PS — Neither American banking circa 2008, nor Geithner’s whim-based decision on which firms to bail out and which to let go bankrupt, nor the Republican TARP slush fund to make government the investor-of-last-resort, describes a market economy. Neoliberalism did not fail, socialism did. And socialists spun the resulting crisis as an event to which to spin their more-of-the-same as the solution. (Where the U.S. is now: https://www.continentaltelegraph.com/2018/04/17/consumers-are-not-protected/)
‘Socialism still describes an aspiration, rather than a concrete political program…’
Or: people who know no history believe Socialism is an aspiration, rather than a concrete political program.
I don’t see how this cascade can be dissociated from socialism. The one that goes socialism>Collectivism>coercion>compulsion. There is no place for independence of spirit in this system and generally it discourages personal responsibility too.
Might work with 100% Swedes, for a while.
There are some people who compare Communism (with a dictator representing the proletariat) with the loving sharing community described in Acts IV & V whereas in reality the nearest parallel is the deaths (probably heart attacks) of Ananias and Saphira to the re-introduction of the death penalty in European Russia (which had been abolished by the Tsars) by Lenin. Most of the Russian oligarchs graduated from Komsomol (or, at least, that was the case last time I checked); Ralph Miliband’s £million+ resulting in his heirs juggling the rules to cut down on IHT, Billy Bragg’s multi-£million mansion, Scargill’s £million+ flat… Read more »