Calling all marxists

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Capitalism also created the employment that shrunk by 6.7 percent.

Do you think the government could run the economy and not have have all day standing in line for food and other stuff?

ruveyn

Last edited by ruveyn on 27 Apr 2012, 3:16 pm, edited 1 time in total.

excuse me, the 18% poverty rate is absolutely caused by insufficient wages!

just to be clear, this is 18% poverty in America....not some 3rd world hellhole... well, I guess maybe it is....

That's what asset bubbles and predatory loans are for. If you're not willing to provide spending money to consumers directly through wages, just give them lots of credit to work with. Then when it all comes crashing down unload the cost on government and proceed to attack said government that just bailed your ass out for "meddling in the markets and causing unemployment". Lather, rinse, and repeat. That's how the economy has worked for the past three decades.

It would be lower without the recession.

By the way, you do realize that what is considered poverty in America isn't even close to what 3rd world poverty looks like, right?

'3rd world poverty' is the standard by which we are measuring ourselves now?

Sounds like Hoover's high-wage doctrine, which exacerbated the recession in 1929. Under standard economic models, an exogenous decrease in wages actually shifts the aggregate supply curve to the right, increasing production.

Funny that people here should support this notion which has never been confirmed empirically or predicted using modern economic models. Intuition can be a dangerous thing when dealing with nonlinear dynamic systems.

Don't you think that it's still a bit too close to the financial crisis to be pretending that "standard economics models" is anything other than a branch of mathematics?

OP do you even realize how many people have died under Communist rule? Communism is good in theory but not in pracitce no country has been economically successful under communism. Communism is flawed at least in a democracy you have rights and you can own property thinks to Capitalism. While Capitalism is not a perfect system it is what helped America win the cold war because Communist Russia could not produce quality goods the way America did. And you can not pay every worker the same paying everyone the same hurts that countrys economy thats why Socialism never works spreading the wealth around is a bad economic idea.

All economic models have limitations, even under normal circumstances. I'm certainly not trying to argue that a mathematical model based on relatively few parameters can perfectly describe a dynamic system. The point is that GoonSquad's claims are completely baseless.

And you've certainly made that case by regurgitating libertarian propaganda.

No. Capitalists didn't create this economic crisis, incompetent government did. The US government housing programs had the result that they "coerced" banks into giving loans to people who were unable to pay the loans once teaser rates ran out. The fact that government regulators had failed to keep up with modern financial products such as mortgage backed securities and other derivatives was factor 2.

Factor 3 was that government regulators had failed to create and enforce sustainable levels of leverage.

Yes, capitalists were greedy and went for profits, however government failed to do its tasks of regulating.

Capitalism causing the global economy crisis is pure propaganda their was a lot of factors thats caused the crisis but Capitalism is not one of them Incompetent Government in general did.

Now now, blaming all of your problems on the rich isn't going to solve anything.

there are libertarians here, facists, capitalists, right wingers in general but the marxists, socialists/communists(same difference) and other anti capitalists are at the perifery. cant we just have one thread where we can talk by ourselves? like i wouldnt mind having the is capialism evil and socialism is the solution debate so much if it werent with the same rightwingers going over the same arguments about human nature, free market, welfare, workers control and state capitalism over and over but that wasnt even the purpose of this thread. this thread was supposed to be for marxists(was hoping to find more revolutionary types but everyone turns out to be a social democrat). rant over.

In the spirit of attempting to make this thread more left-wing, maybe we should talk about what exactly the difference between a Marxist and a social democrat is. Are they mutually exclusive? Are they even the same category?

I understand Marxism to be:
(a) A viewpoint for understanding history, where the "great man" and "national character" narratives are shunned, and instead history is interpreted as the result of material forces such as resources, power structures, etc.
(b) A prediction about the future, i.e. that capitalism is not sustainable and its inherent contradictions will eventually result in its collapse.
(c) A set of policy recommendations, e.g. that workers should be given direct control of the places in which they work and the tools which they work with. Modern Marxists tend to recommend a "bottom-up" approach involving workers' cooperatives, as opposed to the "top-down" approach that created the Soviet Union.

I understand social democracy to be simply a set of policy recommendations, which involve capitalism being restricted in various ways for the public good. The slogan of social democracy might be: "When capitalism and democracy are allies, then everyone is happy. When capitalism and democracy are in conflict, democracy should win."

Democracy becomes severely flawed if the people who vote are uneducated or ignorant.