Quote:
Originally Posted by Mzyxptlk
Agreed. If we compare what we call leftist now to what it was 50 or even 30 years ago, you see some serious shifts in ideology, but not without reason. Authoritarian socialism was gotten rid of, in two ways. The Soviet Union fell apart, putting an end to socialism as a world power, and socialists in the West became more desillusioned with it, putting an end to socialism as a ideology, especially among intellectuals.
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This would warrant a new thread but let's be honest here, I don't think we have much viewers apart from you, me, and Paisley, and maybe he's keen on this subject too.
I suppose the discussion here in nordics is a little bit different. We've not had a serious party that'd support the idea of expanding the work force (the Marxist ideal of 'everyone' having a job) which was the core of local communist politics. I don't agree with socialism as a economical/political system, but I do see a point here. However, we've essentially split the field in two: the social subsidies' supporters (the left) and the others (the right). The right is concerned about the state of the capitalists, of course in it's due right. The left is, not as you'd expect, concerned on how to get unemployed people employed, or what the effective tax burden of a middle-class worker is (as you'd assume they'd be), but are the social subsidies sufficient to provide an idle pair of hands for a living. I'm writing in a sharp fashion, but it's there.
I'll work my way from the middle to the bottom and back to the top. It's my favourite dog toy I chew each time an artistic liberal feminist or arts student starts rambling to me about it. They consider "socialism" sancrosanct. In a double-standard fashion. They will blame to empirical failures of socialist systems mostly on corruption (which is unarguably true): the authoritarian Soviet socialism didn't fail because communism/socialism would be a bad idea, it failed because it was implemented poorly. Then they proceed to blame "capitalism" for the flaws of the current system. However, here they perceive capitalism or neo-liberalism as something that's been implemented "as it should be", unlike socialism which was implemented "wrong". Thus, capitalism is inherently bad: socialism is inherently good, but was implemented wrong. This is just confirmation bias and double standards - capitalism needs to be able to measure up against both the market as such and corruption as such, but socialism doesn't - if capitalism suffers from corruption, it's the fault of capitalism. If socialism suffers from corruption, people are evil and don't fund art enough.
Unlike Marxist theory, however, where the point was to underline the value of work, these people would prefer underlining the value of hobbies. A lot of especially the young political left (I've been there, sadly) aren't very keen on entering work force. They don't want to: they're arguing that they're doing productive work (ergo paintings, small-community hangarounds, voluntary work) but it's simply not being paid for since capitalism doesn't appreciate it. They're asking for a citizen wage system to fix this. This involves the fundamental flaw that Soviet socialism also met. All work just isn't worth the dollars. Nobody can afford to put grannies to guard every single painting of a museum with a reasonable wage without going bust. In fact, since the share of capitol income in compared to earnings income is so shy, the only reason to fund such citizen wage systems (or generally 'heighten' the level of the social security to a point where a person could go through his life without a day in the work force and still have a 'reasonable' living) is to do what Marx wouldn't have done.
Ergo punish the average labourer through taxes. This is really the ploy of the left right now: they want to raise the level of social subsidies (in order to allow independent liberty to those who don't want to work in the "capitalist work system"), they know they can't afford to do it in any other fashion than to increase the tax burden on the employee-emplyoer -side, which obviously yields a degree of unemployment especially if pushing costs on the employer side.
I don't see what this has to do with the idea of "everyone having work and getting paid reasonably for it". One of socialism's failures (apart from the obvious ball of corruption) was the inability to put people working into jobs that'd been productive. We're headed the same way, just taking a different path. The right doesn't care too much about the size of the labour force and the unemployment rate, and the left is more concerned about the subsidy level of the unemployed rather than how to get them employed.
It's shit. It's difficult to say whether it's like communism in the 70s Finland - popular, but once they all grew up adults they shrugged and laughed at their past idiocy - or is it a trend. The truth really is, no matter how much general adoration across the globe is put on the nordic model of running things, it's all pre-emptive. The model hasn't yet lasted through a single generation, let alone two. Until it does that, it's not very purposeful to be admiring it since it could equally well just be another bubble waiting to go bust.
The verb "feel" is a good one. Politics, the way I see it, is moving rapidly away from the "logical objective approach" where the reasonability of a system would be judge on how the ends meet (expenses, incomes, incentives), not how it would "feel" right and humane. To me, politics is just a system that makes the work of field experts more difficult than it should be: it's not much more than a hindrance. Modern democratic decision making is slow, clumsy, and prone to short term rend-seeking and fallibility to lobbyists.