Maher on socialism

Zooey wrote:

He is hit and miss. That socialism rant isn’t even about socialism, and he ignores the obvious fact that many countries have those things AND MORE all without Santa Claus’ intercession.

He is hit or miss. He’ll say something fairly intelligent about capitalism and then come back and say something truly ignorant about socialism. Very few Americans know that the Soviets never implemented it. Lenin said he had to institute capitalism first to pull Russia into the 20th century, and no subsequent dictator there altered that.

They had State Capitalism, not socialism. For more than two centuries, socialists have described what it means, and it’s abundantly clear it’s never been tried ANYWHERE in the modern world on a national basis. But folks still think Soviet Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, China, etc. etc. had “socialism.” Not even remotely close.

Socialism means the economy is democratized, the people — not political parties, juntas or dictators — own the means of production, and the surplus value of what they generate belongs to the people, not “the state.” The Soviet model is “capitalism” for a host of reasons, but primarily because the people don’t own what they produce, the surplus value they generate is appropriated from them by non-workers, and there isn’t any democracy.

Mr. Chomsky still has one of the best short videos on the abuse and misuse of the word, evah:

Billy_T wrote:

On the “millennials want free stuff” nonsense.

Right. And Maher is just perpetuating the fraud that getting services from the government in exchange for your tax money is “mooching.” Americans have been brainwashed into resenting the sliver of the budget that goes to people who pay less in taxes than they do while never noticing that the lion’s share of their taxes are being directed into corporate profits, very often corporations who are harming society in significant ways.

What a world.

I just don’t know what little guys are supposed to do about a political and economic system which is completely rigged for the benefit of a tiny minority when the vast majority of the victims of the system believe to their cores that the problems are caused by other victims of the system.

Quick addendum to the above: In America, especially, we don’t have much — if anything — in the way of a pure public sector exchange. The private sector has lobbied for and won inroads on virtually everything, including Medicare, so that the potential for amazing tax and share deals is at least a bit watered down. If . . . if we had a system where the private sector could NOT do this, and that our public goods and services were truly non-profit, without an iota of privatization of ANY kind, it would be even more amazing.

As in, all non-profit, and universal, all public, without ANY influence from the private sector, and the bang for the buck goes up even more.

I don’t think the private sector can compete against a model like that, which is why they fight to the death to prevent it everywhere. It’s also why our government actually fights to prevent this in other nations too. The capitalist elite simply don’t want any unfettered examples of a fully functioning non-profit, public sector operating, any place on the planet.