Conservatives Winning in Europe

[Agnapostate]

Wow, I gotta give it to that "social democracy slogan department" , George Orwell himself couldn't have come up with anything better than that.

You'll likely never understand Orwell. You certainly seem ignorant of his own socialism.

How about the silly old notion of actual capitalism sustaining capitalism, you know like people voluntary entering into transactions without coercion because they believe that doing so is in their own best interests? Why must you "social <fill in the blank for whatever nonsense distracting adverb is the flavor of the decade here>" always resort to the use of force as a means to promote your statist ideas.

Social democratic capitalism is a form of capitalism, alongside the two other major Western variants, the more centrist liberal democratic capitalism and the more rightist Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Empirical research has validated the belief that the more expansive welfare state policies present in social democratic capitalism certainly play no role in undermining the system in terms of efficiency, and provide other benefits that boost it in additional ways. As to voluntary transactions without coercion, that can never be an element of capitalism, considering that capital accumulation is based on theft through extraction of surplus labor.

As for myself, I'm neither a capitalist nor a statist. I'm an anarcho-communist. In fact, I'm fully willing to embrace your laissez-faire ideology as a means of destabilizing capitalism, causing an eventual collapse.

 

[Sinatra]

Wow, I gotta give it to that "social democracy slogan department" , George Orwell himself couldn't have come up with anything better than that.

You'll likely never understand Orwell. You certainly seem ignorant of his own socialism.

How about the silly old notion of actual capitalism sustaining capitalism, you know like people voluntary entering into transactions without coercion because they believe that doing so is in their own best interests? Why must you "social <fill in the blank for whatever nonsense distracting adverb is the flavor of the decade here>" always resort to the use of force as a means to promote your statist ideas.

Social democratic capitalism is a form of capitalism, alongside the two other major Western variants, the more centrist liberal democratic capitalism and the more rightist Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Empirical research has validated the belief that the more expansive welfare state policies present in social democratic capitalism certainly play no role in undermining the system in terms of efficiency, and provide other benefits that boost it in additional ways. As to voluntary transactions without coercion, that can never be an element of capitalism, considering that capital accumulation is based on theft through extraction of surplus labor.

As for myself, I'm neither a capitalist nor a statist. I'm an anarcho-communist. In fact, I'm fully willing to embrace your laissez-faire ideology as a means of destabilizing capitalism, causing an eventual collapse.

NERD!!!

Agna declares his anarcho communist beliefs with the resounding authority of the most dedicated Star Wars action figure collector!!!

 

[Agnapostate]

Pffft, try again, slappy.

Top Left: Mexican anarchist revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.
Top Right: Soldiers of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine or the "Black Army," a group of anarchist militants organized by the anarcho-communist Nestor Makhno.
Bottom Left: Anarchist fighter and military leader Buenaventura Durruti, high-profile participant in the Spanish Revolution, which resulted in the largest establishment of anarchism in history.
Bottom Right: Members of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, named after the aforementioned Zapata and still in control of municipalities of Chiapas today.

 

[STAND4LIBERTY]

You'll likely never understand Orwell. You certainly seem ignorant of his own socialism.

Care to explain your assertion in any detail? Just so you know I'm very familiar with Orwell and his work, he's no particular hero of mine but that doesn't mean I haven't read his work and yes the slogans you spout are very ORWELLIAN.

Social democratic capitalism is a form of capitalism, alongside the two other major Western variants, the more centrist liberal democratic capitalism and the more rightist Anglo-Saxon capitalism. Empirical research has validated the belief that the more expansive welfare state policies present in social democratic capitalism certainly play no role in undermining the system in terms of efficiency, and provide other benefits that boost it in additional ways.

And said "Empirical Research" would be found where, authored by whom and peer reviewed when?

As to voluntary transactions without coercion, that can never be an element of capitalism, considering that capital accumulation is based on theft through extraction of surplus labor.

That's complete and utter nonsense, unless of course you subscribe to the fallacy that individuals cannot possibly make informed decisions about the desirability of outcomes from their own actions. This my friend is the very same nanny state propaganda that supposes vast swaths of the population are utterly incapable of seeing to their own best interests and thus must have their freedom of action limited by the state for their own good. It's the same sort of rubbish the Catholic Church used to oppress the people of Europe for hundreds of years.

As for myself, I'm neither a capitalist nor a statist. I'm an anarcho-communist.

Anarcho-communist, huh? Personally it all sounds like just another warmed over marxist ideology with the worst aspects of both democracy and communism thrown in for good measure, but whatever floats your boat I suppose.

In fact, I'm fully willing to embrace your laissez-faire ideology as a means of destabilizing capitalism, causing an eventual collapse.

Personally I could care less what you choose to embrace or not to embrace to satisfy whatever objective you wish to achieve, it's your right to do as you wish as long as it doesn't violate my rights to do as I wish or attempt to confiscate by liberty or property by force.

 

[Sinatra]

Pffft, try again, slappy.

Top Left: Mexican anarchist revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.
Top Right: Soldiers of the Revolutionary Insurrectionary Army of Ukraine or the "Black Army," a group of anarchist militants organized by the anarcho-communist Nestor Makhno.
Bottom Left: Anarchist fighter and military leader Buenaventura Durruti, high-profile participant in the Spanish Revolution, which resulted in the largest establishment of anarchism in history.
Bottom Right: Members of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation, named after the aforementioned Zapata and still in control of municipalities of Chiapas today.

TOTAL NERD.

Agno is a hardcore intergalactic anarchist! Chiapas Baby!!!!!

 

[Agnapostate]

Care to explain your assertion in any detail? Just so you know I'm very familiar with Orwell and his work, he's no particular hero of mine but that doesn't mean I haven't read his work and yes the slogans you spout are very ORWELLIAN.

If you were legitimately "very familiar with Orwell and his work," you wouldn't be asking me to "explain [my] assertion"; you'd be exceedingly familiar with it yourself. But I can understand your sentiments; you're of the school that has blatantly mischaracterized Orwell's anti-Stalinism. The only other historical figure who's been so badly mischaracterized is Adam Smith, perhaps. What I refer to is the blatant distortion of the political philosophy of George Orwell by free marketers, who erroneously cite him at every turn in order to justify their failed philosophy and criticize "socialism," which is misidentified as everything from government preservation of capitalism to Soviet state capitalism.

Excerpts and quotes from Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four provide a basis for an effective misappropriation of Orwell's work. Orwell was an ardent anti-authoritarian and anti-Stalinist, of course, but free marketers with little knowledge of political economy often mistakenly use his advocacy on that front to "argue" against libertarian variants of socialism, an enormous irony given Orwell's own democratic socialism and support of the anarchists and other libertarian socialists in the Spanish Revolution, combined with his military service in the Spanish Civil War. In Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, he expresses support for the aforementioned social revolution, in which horizontal federations of anarchist collectives were formed in several regions of Spain, and the means of production were collectivized and a libertarian socialist economy was established. He has this to say of the heavily anarchist region of Aragon.

I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life--snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.--had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master.

His support is not isolated to the region of Aragon, as he has similar words of support regarding the anarchist region of Catalonia, and the city of Barcelona, then placed in the control of anarchist workers and citizens rather than capitalists or Stalinists. Here's another passage that's indicative of his support for an economic program of libertarian socialism.

This was in late December 1936, less than seven months ago as I write, and yet it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance. Later events have obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or 1905, for that matter. I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags and with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Senor' or 'Don' or even 'Ústed'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos días'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.

More than that, Orwell is known to have served in the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM in Spanish), an anti-Stalinist libertarian Marxist militia that was later disbanded by the "democratic" government. Orwell is believed to be the tall figure near the back in this photo that stands a head above his comrades.

Assuredly, you'll be hard-pressed to distort Orwell's clear advocacy here if you wish to maintain any semblance of credibility, though I don't doubt that you'll attempt it nonetheless.

And said "Empirical Research" would be found where, authored by whom and peer reviewed when?

In Volume 50, pp. 115-157 of Social Indicators Research, authored by Bruce Headey, Robert E. Goodin, Ruud Muffels and Henk-Jan Dirven, subjected to peer review shortly after submission and prior to publication in 2000, in keeping with the rigorous academic standards of Springer Netherlands publications. We of the empirically-minded sort refer to it as Is There a Trade-Off Between Economic Efficiency and a Generous Welfare State? A Comparison of Best Cases of `The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism’.

A crucial debate in policy-making as well as academic circles is whether there is a trade-off between economic efficiency and the size/generosity of the welfare state. One way to contribute to this debate is to compare the performance of best cases of different types of state. Arguably, in the decade 1985-94, the US, West Germany and the Netherlands were best cases - best economic performers - in what G. Esping-Andersen calls the three worlds of welfare capitalism. The US is a liberal welfare-capitalist state, West Germany a corporatist state, and the Netherlands is social democratic in its tax-transfer system, although not its labor market policies. These three countries had rates of economic growth per capita as high or higher than other rich countries of their type, and the lowest rates of unemployment. At a normative or ideological level the three types of state have the same goals but prioritise them differently. The liberal state prioritises economic growth and efficiency, avoids work disincentives, and targets welfare benefits only to those in greatest need. The corporatist state aims to give priority to social stability, especially household income stability, and social integration. The social democratic welfare state claims high priority for minimising poverty, inequality and unemployment. Using ten years of panel data for each country, we assess indicators of their short (one year), medium (five year) and longer term (ten year) performance in achieving economic and welfare goals. Overall, in this time period, the Netherlands achieved the best performance on the welfare goals to which it gave priority, and equalled the other two states on most of the goals to which they gave priority. This result supports the view that there is no necessary trade-off between economic efficiency and a generous welfare state.

That said, I'd still refer to the failures of social democracy to eliminate the inefficiencies spawned by a capitalist economy. Only a legitimately socialist economy and the radical re-organization of property rights that it entails could ensure that.

That's complete and utter nonsense, unless of course you subscribe to the fallacy that individuals cannot possibly make informed decisions about the desirability of outcomes from their own actions. This my friend is the very same nanny state propaganda that supposes vast swaths of the population are utterly incapable of seeing to their own best interests and thus must have their freedom of action limited by the state for their own good. It's the same sort of rubbish the Catholic Church used to oppress the people of Europe for hundreds of years.

It's indeed true that the capitalist economy is characterized by an unfortunately high prevalence of information asymmetries, and thus, the related agency problems (adverse selection, moral hazard, etc.), that would not exist were less imperfect information available, but that's not especially relevant to my observation about capital accumulation being based on theft through the unjust extraction of surplus labor. To support that point, I'd merely note that the economic framework of capitalism involves a scheme in which the private ownership of the means of production (acquired through a coercive process of "primitive accumulation") and consequent hierarchical subordination of labor under capital enables the extraction of surplus labor from the working class in the production process through the use of wage labor and subsequent utilization in the circulation process in order to perpetuate a vicious cycle of capital accumulation. In visually pleasing terms:

Anarcho-communist, huh? Personally it all sounds like just another warmed over marxist ideology with the worst aspects of both democracy and communism thrown in for good measure, but whatever floats your boat I suppose.

You merely continue to expose your ignorance of the historical record by making such blatantly fallacious remarks. The nature of the sharp divergence between Marxism and anarchism is well-known by all informed analysts of socialism (which inclines me to believe that you are not one, obviously), and was most critically illustrated by the expulsion of Mikhail Bakunin and the other anarchists from the First International by Marx and his followers. Bakunin was instrumental in forming an early anarchist critique of Marxism and the state capitalism that he believed would emerge from it. As he wrote in his 1871 manuscript Statism and Anarchy:

Idealists of all kinds – metaphysicians, positivists, those who support the rule of science over life, doctrinaire revolutionists – all defend the idea of state and state power with equal eloquence, because they see in it, as a consequence of their own systems, the only salvation for society...This fiction of a pseudo-representative government serves to conceal the domination of the masses by a handful of privileged elite; an elite elected by hordes of people who are rounded up and do not know for whom or for what they vote. Upon this artificial and abstract expression of what they falsely imagine to be the will of the people and of which the real living people have not the least idea, they construct both the theory of statism as well as the theory of so-called revolutionary dictatorship.

The differences between revolutionary dictatorship and statism are superficial. Fundamentally they both represent the same principle of minority rule over the majority in the name of the alleged “stupidity” of the latter and the alleged “intelligence” of the former. Therefore they are both equally reactionary since both directly and inevitably must preserve and perpetuate the political and economic privileges of the ruling minority and the political and economic subjugation of the masses of the people.

Now it is clear why the dictatorial revolutionists, who aim to overthrow the existing powers and social structures in order to erect upon their ruins their own dictatorships, never were or will be the enemies of government, but, to the contrary, always will be the most ardent promoters of the government idea. They are the enemies only of contemporary governments, because they wish to replace them. They are the enemies of the present governmental structure, because it excludes the possibility of their dictatorship. At the same time they are the most devoted friends of governmental power. For if the revolution destroyed this power by actually freeing the masses, it would deprive this pseudo-revolutionary minority of any hope to harness the masses in order to make them the beneficiaries of their own government policy.

We have already expressed several times our deep aversion to the theory of Lassalle and Marx, which recommends to the workers, if not as a final ideal at least as the next immediate goal, the founding of a people’s state, which according to their interpretation will be nothing but “the proletariat elevated to the status of the governing class."

If I were you, I'd commit some more time to study and appropriate consultation of the historical record before making such flagrantly inaccurate assertions about the relationship of Marxism and anarchism.

Personally I could care less what you choose to embrace or not to embrace to satisfy whatever objective you wish to achieve, it's your right to do as you wish as long as it doesn't violate my rights to do as I wish or attempt to confiscate by liberty or property by force.

Your anti-libertarian propertarian delusions are all based on precisely that, and are based on the coercive establishment of hierarchical and authoritarian institutions. Capitalism is necessarily antithetical to freedom. The hierarchical organization of the capitalist firm (a necessary demand of the financial and coordinator classes), necessitates the subordination of workers under bosses and higher-level employers, depriving them of the right to democratically manage a major aspect of their own lives. Nor is answering "you can simply change jobs" a sufficient response to this criticism, because just as the right to migrate between an island chain of kingdoms but not outside of them would not free one from monarchy, neither can the right to select specific masters in a capitalist economy free one from that tyranny. As accurately noted by Bob Black:

The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phoneys and hypocrites. . . You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. . . A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called 'insubordination,' just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. . .The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are 'free' is lying or stupid.

Nor are external economic conditions based on freedom, so long as privileged and elite segments of the population (namely the financial class, as they have more dominance than the coordinator class outside of the internal structure of the firm), to make decisions that affect the rest of the population without their democratic input. After the unjust consolidation of the means of production and the resulting power that comes as a result of it during a stage of primitive accumulation (the state had a major role in class creation), the financial class, characterized by a small and elite segment of the population is thereby able to use their control over the means of production to drastically affect the vast majority of the population in whatever way they please, which is obviously a significant rationale for collectivizing the means of production, decentralizing them, and subjecting them to direct democratic management. The fact that even the confused propertarian would condemn a state of affairs wherein a tiny and privileged elite control such vast resources as the means of production as an authoritarian one were it manifested through the vessel of a state and the tiny elite were a ruling party only lends credence to my analysis.

In our present state of affairs, this private ownership of the means of production permits the aforementioned utilization of wage labor, which is a critical element in the coercive nature of capitalism. Since the means of production are privately owned, large components of the public have no alternative but to subordinate themselves under an employer. The best way to illustrate this form of authoritarianism is to use the "robbery analogy." If a person were to be violently tackled by an assailant and have his/her valuables torn out of his/her pockets, we would accurately call this a robbery. Now, if the assailant were to instead point a gun at the victim and demand that the valuables be surrendered, we would still call this a robbery, as coercion was used to gain the valuables, if not outright physical violence. The fact that the victim technically "consented" to surrender his/her valuables is not pertinent, since it was consent yielded while under duress. The former example represents the direct tyranny of statism, often blunt, direct, and brutal, whereas the latter represents the more subtle tyranny of capitalism, specifically wage labor, in which a person technically "consents" to work for an employer, but does this only because he/she has no other alternative for sustenance.

Your entire propertarian philosophy is based on misappropriation of legitimate libertarianism. As I've so often mentioned, the term "libertarian" was first utilized by anarcho-socialists to circumvent French anti-anarchist laws; the first written usage of the term is attributed to the French anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque in an 1857 letter that he wrote. Conversely, the U.S. "Libertarian" Party has only existed since the early 1970's, which effectively means that socialists used the term "libertarian" as a self-describing label a century before its misappropriation. And the authoritarian social hierarchies that capitalism involves necessitates that libertarianism and all principled libertarians be opposed to its establishment and nature. Conversely, you and your propertarian ilk are merely inconsistent and confused rightists, and lend credence to the observation of a fellow socialist of mine that most American "libertarians" are merely conservatives seeking an exotic label. For example, this socialist comrade recommended a look at Tilman (2001, Ideology and Utopia in the Social Philosophy of the Libertarian Economists, London: Greenwood Press). An insightful analysis is provided by Toruño's (2002, Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 36 Issue 1, pp 211-213) book review:

The Libertarians, Tilman argues, are driven by a vision of society that is so unrealistic that it can only be defined as utopian, while at the same time providing such elaborate rationalizations for the distribution of material privilege that one has no choice but to define them as ideological. What's more, and contrary to their professed commitment to freedom and democracy, the Libertarians are actually elitists who are unsympathetic to majority rule, hostile to political movements that push for the expansion of civil rights, and predisposed to support right-wing dictatorships...Perhaps his most damaging criticism is that Hayek's and Friedman's "road-to-serfdom" thesis is imprecise, tautological, and inaccurate. Both of them argue that expanding government beyond the minimal, night watchman, functions, would have the effect of eroding economic freedom and, consequently, all the other freedoms they believe depend upon it. But the problem with this argument is that they never specify the thesis by making it amenable to empirical testing. At what point does government expansion begin to erode freedom?...The most delicious part of this book is when Tillman turns the tables on the Libertarians by exploring the role which self-interest has served in their own lives. After all, since Libertarians insist that behavior must be explained in terms of self-interest, the same should apply to them. Yet, when explaining their own motives they often claim that they're driven by a sense of civic duty, desire to influence public policy, or aesthetic pleasure, suggesting that self-interest applies to everyone but the Libertarians. But a more telling inference can be made by noting that the lucrative fellowships, grants, and endowed chairs in free market economics are overwhelmingly funded by wealthy individuals, conservative foundations, and rightwing corporations.

In the future, please attempt to consult the historical record and the empirical literature to a greater degree.

 

[Sinatra]

Care to explain your assertion in any detail? Just so you know I'm very familiar with Orwell and his work, he's no particular hero of mine but that doesn't mean I haven't read his work and yes the slogans you spout are very ORWELLIAN.

If you were legitimately "very familiar with Orwell and his work," you wouldn't be asking me to "explain [my] assertion"; you'd be exceedingly familiar with it yourself. But I can understand your sentiments; you're of the school that has blatantly mischaracterized Orwell's anti-Stalinism. The only other historical figure who's been so badly mischaracterized is Adam Smith, perhaps. What I refer to is the blatant distortion of the political philosophy of George Orwell by free marketers, who erroneously cite him at every turn in order to justify their failed philosophy and criticize "socialism," which is misidentified as everything from government preservation of capitalism to Soviet state capitalism.

Excerpts and quotes from Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four provide a basis for an effective misappropriation of Orwell's work. Orwell was an ardent anti-authoritarian and anti-Stalinist, of course, but free marketers with little knowledge of political economy often mistakenly use his advocacy on that front to "argue" against libertarian variants of socialism, an enormous irony given Orwell's own democratic socialism and support of the anarchists and other libertarian socialists in the Spanish Revolution, combined with his military service in the Spanish Civil War. In Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, he expresses support for the aforementioned social revolution, in which horizontal federations of anarchist collectives were formed in several regions of Spain, and the means of production were collectivized and a libertarian socialist economy was established. He has this to say of the heavily anarchist region of Aragon.

I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life--snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.--had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master.

His support is not isolated to the region of Aragon, as he has similar words of support regarding the anarchist region of Catalonia, and the city of Barcelona, then placed in the control of anarchist workers and citizens rather than capitalists or Stalinists. Here's another passage that's indicative of his support for an economic program of libertarian socialism.



More than that, Orwell is known to have served in the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM in Spanish), an anti-Stalinist libertarian Marxist militia that was later disbanded by the "democratic" government. Orwell is believed to be the tall figure near the back in this photo that stands a head above his comrades.

Assuredly, you'll be hard-pressed to distort Orwell's clear advocacy here if you wish to maintain any semblance of credibility, though I don't doubt that you'll attempt it nonetheless.



In Volume 50, pp. 115-157 of Social Indicators Research, authored by Bruce Headey, Robert E. Goodin, Ruud Muffels and Henk-Jan Dirven, subjected to peer review shortly after submission and prior to publication in 2000, in keeping with the rigorous academic standards of Springer Netherlands publications. We of the empirically-minded sort refer to it as Is There a Trade-Off Between Economic Efficiency and a Generous Welfare State? A Comparison of Best Cases of `The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism’.



That said, I'd still refer to the failures of social democracy to eliminate the inefficiencies spawned by a capitalist economy. Only a legitimately socialist economy and the radical re-organization of property rights that it entails could ensure that.



It's indeed true that the capitalist economy is characterized by an unfortunately high prevalence of information asymmetries, and thus, the related agency problems (adverse selection, moral hazard, etc.), that would not exist were less imperfect information available, but that's not especially relevant to my observation about capital accumulation being based on theft through the unjust extraction of surplus labor. To support that point, I'd merely note that the economic framework of capitalism involves a scheme in which the private ownership of the means of production (acquired through a coercive process of "primitive accumulation") and consequent hierarchical subordination of labor under capital enables the extraction of surplus labor from the working class in the production process through the use of wage labor and subsequent utilization in the circulation process in order to perpetuate a vicious cycle of capital accumulation. In visually pleasing terms:

You merely continue to expose your ignorance of the historical record by making such blatantly fallacious remarks. The nature of the sharp divergence between Marxism and anarchism is well-known by all informed analysts of socialism (which inclines me to believe that you are not one, obviously), and was most critically illustrated by the expulsion of Mikhail Bakunin and the other anarchists from the First International by Marx and his followers. Bakunin was instrumental in forming an early anarchist critique of Marxism and the state capitalism that he believed would emerge from it. As he wrote in his 1871 manuscript Statism and Anarchy:



If I were you, I'd commit some more time to study and appropriate consultation of the historical record before making such flagrantly inaccurate assertions about the relationship of Marxism and anarchism.



Your anti-libertarian propertarian delusions are all based on precisely that, and are based on the coercive establishment of hierarchical and authoritarian institutions. Capitalism is necessarily antithetical to freedom. The hierarchical organization of the capitalist firm (a necessary demand of the financial and coordinator classes), necessitates the subordination of workers under bosses and higher-level employers, depriving them of the right to democratically manage a major aspect of their own lives. Nor is answering "you can simply change jobs" a sufficient response to this criticism, because just as the right to migrate between an island chain of kingdoms but not outside of them would not free one from monarchy, neither can the right to select specific masters in a capitalist economy free one from that tyranny. As accurately noted by Bob Black:

The liberals and conservatives and Libertarians who lament totalitarianism are phoneys and hypocrites. . . You find the same sort of hierarchy and discipline in an office or factory as you do in a prison or a monastery. . . A worker is a part-time slave. The boss says when to show up, when to leave, and what to do in the meantime. He tells you how much work to do and how fast. He is free to carry his control to humiliating extremes, regulating, if he feels like it, the clothes you wear or how often you go to the bathroom. With a few exceptions he can fire you for any reason, or no reason. He has you spied on by snitches and supervisors, he amasses a dossier on every employee. Talking back is called 'insubordination,' just as if a worker is a naughty child, and it not only gets you fired, it disqualifies you for unemployment compensation. . .The demeaning system of domination I've described rules over half the waking hours of a majority of women and the vast majority of men for decades, for most of their lifespans. For certain purposes it's not too misleading to call our system democracy or capitalism or -- better still -- industrialism, but its real names are factory fascism and office oligarchy. Anybody who says these people are 'free' is lying or stupid.

Nor are external economic conditions based on freedom, so long as privileged and elite segments of the population (namely the financial class, as they have more dominance than the coordinator class outside of the internal structure of the firm), to make decisions that affect the rest of the population without their democratic input. After the unjust consolidation of the means of production and the resulting power that comes as a result of it during a stage of primitive accumulation (the state had a major role in class creation), the financial class, characterized by a small and elite segment of the population is thereby able to use their control over the means of production to drastically affect the vast majority of the population in whatever way they please, which is obviously a significant rationale for collectivizing the means of production, decentralizing them, and subjecting them to direct democratic management. The fact that even the confused propertarian would condemn a state of affairs wherein a tiny and privileged elite control such vast resources as the means of production as an authoritarian one were it manifested through the vessel of a state and the tiny elite were a ruling party only lends credence to my analysis.

In our present state of affairs, this private ownership of the means of production permits the aforementioned utilization of wage labor, which is a critical element in the coercive nature of capitalism. Since the means of production are privately owned, large components of the public have no alternative but to subordinate themselves under an employer. The best way to illustrate this form of authoritarianism is to use the "robbery analogy." If a person were to be violently tackled by an assailant and have his/her valuables torn out of his/her pockets, we would accurately call this a robbery. Now, if the assailant were to instead point a gun at the victim and demand that the valuables be surrendered, we would still call this a robbery, as coercion was used to gain the valuables, if not outright physical violence. The fact that the victim technically "consented" to surrender his/her valuables is not pertinent, since it was consent yielded while under duress. The former example represents the direct tyranny of statism, often blunt, direct, and brutal, whereas the latter represents the more subtle tyranny of capitalism, specifically wage labor, in which a person technically "consents" to work for an employer, but does this only because he/she has no other alternative for sustenance.

Your entire propertarian philosophy is based on misappropriation of legitimate libertarianism. As I've so often mentioned, the term "libertarian" was first utilized by anarcho-socialists to circumvent French anti-anarchist laws; the first written usage of the term is attributed to the French anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque in an 1857 letter that he wrote. Conversely, the U.S. "Libertarian" Party has only existed since the early 1970's, which effectively means that socialists used the term "libertarian" as a self-describing label a century before its misappropriation. And the authoritarian social hierarchies that capitalism involves necessitates that libertarianism and all principled libertarians be opposed to its establishment and nature. Conversely, you and your propertarian ilk are merely inconsistent and confused rightists, and lend credence to the observation of a fellow socialist of mine that most American "libertarians" are merely conservatives seeking an exotic label. For example, this socialist comrade recommended a look at Tilman (2001, Ideology and Utopia in the Social Philosophy of the Libertarian Economists, London: Greenwood Press). An insightful analysis is provided by Toruño's (2002, Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 36 Issue 1, pp 211-213) book review:

The Libertarians, Tilman argues, are driven by a vision of society that is so unrealistic that it can only be defined as utopian, while at the same time providing such elaborate rationalizations for the distribution of material privilege that one has no choice but to define them as ideological. What's more, and contrary to their professed commitment to freedom and democracy, the Libertarians are actually elitists who are unsympathetic to majority rule, hostile to political movements that push for the expansion of civil rights, and predisposed to support right-wing dictatorships...Perhaps his most damaging criticism is that Hayek's and Friedman's "road-to-serfdom" thesis is imprecise, tautological, and inaccurate. Both of them argue that expanding government beyond the minimal, night watchman, functions, would have the effect of eroding economic freedom and, consequently, all the other freedoms they believe depend upon it. But the problem with this argument is that they never specify the thesis by making it amenable to empirical testing. At what point does government expansion begin to erode freedom?...The most delicious part of this book is when Tillman turns the tables on the Libertarians by exploring the role which self-interest has served in their own lives. After all, since Libertarians insist that behavior must be explained in terms of self-interest, the same should apply to them. Yet, when explaining their own motives they often claim that they're driven by a sense of civic duty, desire to influence public policy, or aesthetic pleasure, suggesting that self-interest applies to everyone but the Libertarians. But a more telling inference can be made by noting that the lucrative fellowships, grants, and endowed chairs in free market economics are overwhelmingly funded by wealthy individuals, conservative foundations, and rightwing corporations.

In the future, please attempt to consult the historical record and the empirical literature to a greater degree.

Agno has spoken!!

 

[Agnapostate]

Fuck, dude, you clam baked or what?

 

[KMAN]

If Socialism is so great why is there a move to the right???? Doesn't make any sense... Perhaps jillian or booboo can explain this...

Socialism does not exist in Europe; social democracy does.

LOL, yes when an "ism" becomes unpalatable to the general public the appropriate thing to do is just change the name ... collectivism by any other name is still collectivism.

These guys are ridiculous aren't they... They just can't admit that socialism is failing and we (the US) are heading down the same path...

 

[Agnapostate]

These guys are ridiculous aren't they... They just can't admit that socialism is failing and we (the US) are heading down the same path...

Yeah...gotta tell you, slappy, I'd be happy to admit the failure of socialism if it existed in Europe. Unfortunately for you, it doesn't.

 

[STAND4LIBERTY]

If you were legitimately "very familiar with Orwell and his work," you wouldn't be asking me to "explain [my] assertion"; you'd be exceedingly familiar with it yourself. But I can understand your sentiments; you're of the school that has blatantly mischaracterized Orwell's anti-Stalinism.

Jeepers, Creepers where'd you get those leapers ?.... I didn't even mention anti-stalinism when I pointed out your slogans were Orwellian, I was actually picturing a scene from 1984 and the big screen but I guess you read what you wanted to hear, typical.

 

[Agnapostate]

Jeepers, Creepers where'd you get those leapers ?.... I didn't even mention anti-stalinism when I pointed out your slogans were Orwellian, I was actually picturing a scene from 1984 and the big screen but I guess you read what you wanted to hear, typical.

Damn, is that as far as you got?

 

[STAND4LIBERTY]

Damn, is that as far as you got?

Never fear lad, I shall do my duty and tear apart your wall of text when time permits.....

 

[Toro]

The centre-left seemed to have fared poorly, regardless of whether it was in power or in opposition. Despite the economic crisis and failure of laisser faire capitalism, it has struggled to articulate an alternative response as such centre-right leaders as Nicolas Sarkozy in France or Angela Merkel in Germany have moved into their territory by pledging tighter regulation and more state.

In Germany, the Social Democratic party, junior partner in the “grand coalition” of Ms Merkel, chancellor, scored 20.8 per cent, its worst result in a European election and in any national ballot since the end of the second world war.

France’s Socialist party, the main opposition, slumped to a historic defeat, despite the economic crisis and low popularity ratings of Mr Sarkozy, president. The party won only 16.5 per cent, its worst European election for 30 years, apart from the disaster in 1994.

In Italy, leaders of the centre-left Democrats had such low expectations that they came close to rejoicing at their 26.1 per cent share of the vote – seven percentage points less than they took in last year’s general elections, and well adrift of Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Liberty party on 35.3 per cent.

In the Nordic region, traditionally a leftwing stronghold, social democrats failed to make headway against centre-right governments that are perceived as having performed adroitly in the global financial crisis. The centre-left did poorly in Finland, and though it led in Sweden and Denmark it was not by enough to give it confidence for the next national polls.

Even when in power, social democrats have been stuck in an incomplete transition between the post-ideological centrism of a Tony Blair or a Gerhard Schröder and a new, yet-to-be-defined approach more in line with the times.

In Spain, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the Socialist prime minister, suffered a setback at the hands of Mariano Rajoy’s Popular party, the rightwing opposition.

FT.com / Europe - Centre-left takes a hammering

 

[PoliticalChic]

With recent victories in Spain and the EU elections, conservatives are making up significant ground throughout Europe.

The Conservative Party won its first national election Spain for the first time since 2000, with voters showing their collective disgust at their nation's high unemployment rate - the highest in the EU. (Coincidentally, Spain also spearheaded the Go-Green jobs economy in Europe as well, with disastrous economic results)

Conservatives also picked up seats in the EU via Germany, Brittain, and Portugal.

It would appear a majority of Europe is starting to lean center-right, with various Socialist Party members receiving decisive defeats throughout the EU.

Spain's conservatives win Euro election | Reuters

The Himalayan Times - Conservatives win EU polls - Detail News

Do you know why they are winning? Nationalism, Muslims, Illegal immigration, safety.

Is this one of the signs of the apocalypse? Mattress-boy has hit the nail on the head.

In large measure, the move to the right in Europe is related to Muslim immigration and its deleterious effects.

"The shift has two principal, and related, causes. The more significant one is that over the last three decades, social-democratic Europe’s political, cultural, academic, and media elites have presided over, and vigorously defended, a vast wave of immigration from the Muslim world—the largest such influx in human history. According to Foreign Affairs, Muslims in Western Europe numbered between 15 and 20 million in 2005. One source estimates that Britain’s Muslim population rose from about 82,000 in 1961 to 553,000 in 1981 to 2 million in 2000—a demographic change roughly representative of Western Europe as a whole during that period. According to the London Times, the number of Muslims in the U.K. climbed by half a million between 2004 and 2008 alone—a rate of growth ten times that of the rest of that country’s population.

…European cities increasingly dangerous for non-Muslims—especially women, Jews, and gays. In 2001, 65 percent of rapes in Norway were committed by what the country’s police call “non-Western” men—a category consisting overwhelmingly of Muslims, who make up just 2 percent of that country’s population. In 2005, 82 percent of crimes in Copenhagen were committed by members of immigrant groups, the majority of them Muslims. In Germany, reports Der Spiegel, “a disproportionately high percentage of women who flee to women’s shelters are Muslim”; in 2006, 56 percent of the women at Norwegian shelters were of foreign origin; Deborah Scroggins wrote in The Nation in 2005 that “Muslims make up only 5.5 percent of the Dutch population, but they account for more than half the women in battered women’s shelters.”

The other major reason for the turn against the Left is economic. Western Europeans have long paid sky-high taxes for a social safety net that seems increasingly not worth the price. "
Heirs to Fortuyn? by Bruce Bawer, City Journal Spring 2009

 

[Agnapostate]

Never fear lad, I shall do my duty and tear apart your wall of text when time permits.....

Somehow I don't think you'll do very...spiffingly. The Hayek sig indicates that you might try and drag out something as mundane as the economic calculation problem, not realizing that this never applied to decentralized participatory planning in the first place, and that market socialism has taken on board a "post-Hayekian" element (see Theodore Burczak's work, for instance), that permits it to bypass this.

 

[STAND4LIBERTY]

Never fear lad, I shall do my duty and tear apart your wall of text when time permits.....

Somehow I don't think you'll do very...spiffingly. The Hayek sig indicates that you might try and drag out something as mundane as the economic calculation problem, not realizing that this never applied to decentralized participatory planning in the first place, and that market socialism has taken on board a "post-Hayekian" element (see Theodore Burczak's work, for instance), that permits it to bypass this.

I guess I was under the impression you wanted some discussion on that post you worked so hard to put up, since apparently you've already made up your mind what I'm gonna say, I won't bother reading the rest of it let alone taking any time to comment on it.

Have a good one

 

[Agnapostate]

I guess I was under the impression you wanted some discussion on that post you worked so hard to put up, since apparently you've already made up your mind what I'm gonna say, I won't bother reading the rest of it let alone taking any time to comment on it.

Have a good one

That's not a very clever escape mechanism; you'll have to think of a better excuse than that!

 

[STAND4LIBERTY]

I guess I was under the impression you wanted some discussion on that post you worked so hard to put up, since apparently you've already made up your mind what I'm gonna say, I won't bother reading the rest of it let alone taking any time to comment on it.

Have a good one

That's not a very clever escape mechanism; you'll have to think of a better excuse than that!

- No longer worth the effort
- No longer interested
- Not worth my time

Pick one that suits your fancy

 

[Agnapostate]

- No longer worth the effort
- No longer interested
- Not worth my time

Pick one that suits your fancy

- Realized that my lame talking points from mises.org wouldn't work against someone actually familiar with the topic.

That one good?