Socialism

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27241241

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27075135

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27068531

The ghosts of the 1930s are no longer mere shadows in history books. They walk among us, wearing suits instead of brown shirts, speaking of “immigration control” rather than racial purity, but their message remains fundamentally unchanged. In Germany, where the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) now commands support from one in five voters, we see one of the most chilling examples of fascism’s resurgence in the heart of Europe.

The AfD’s rise mirrors a broader pattern across the Western world – a pattern that liberal democracy seems powerless to stop, or worse, actively enables. Just as the Weimar Republic’s center-left SPD compromised with conservative forces in a misguided attempt to maintain stability, today’s liberal parties across Europe and America are legitimizing far-right discourse under the guise of “pragmatic politics.”

Liberals Prefer Nazism over Anti-Capitalism

What remains unspoken in polite society, yet becomes glaringly obvious through historical analysis, is liberalism’s consistent preference for fascism over genuine social and racial equality. When faced with a choice between Nazi collaboration and communist resistance during World War II, many liberal democracies chose the former. Today, this pattern repeats itself with chilling precision.

Consider how quickly liberal media accommodate far-right talking points in the name of “balance,” while consistently demonizing even modest left-wing proposals for economic justice. The New York Times will run sympathetic profiles of neo-Nazis to “understand their perspective,” while dismissing socialists as dangerous radicals. This is not accident or oversight – it is policy.

The liberal establishment’s response to the AfD in Germany epitomizes a broader European pattern. While publicly denouncing the party’s most extreme statements, mainstream parties have steadily absorbed and legitimized its anti-immigrant rhetoric and policies. This phenomenon stretches across the continent – from the Netherlands, where mainstream parties echo Wilders’ anti-Muslim sentiment, to France, where Macron’s government increasingly mirrors Le Pen’s harsh stance on immigration. In Britain, the Conservative Party has embraced Brexit’s nativist undertones, while Belgium’s traditional parties adopt ever-stricter immigration policies to compete with the far-right Vlaams Belang.

Yet these same liberal establishments react with unified horror at any serious proposal for wealth redistribution or challenge to corporate power, dismissing such ideas as dangerous radicalism. The asymmetry is stark: while far-right movements have been allowed to fester and grow, even within police forces, for the past decades liberal governments have expended enormous resources and energy to systematically dismantle left-wing movements and unions, criminalize anti-capitalist thought, and marginalize voices calling for economic justice.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/27021728

Already, as working class women in the U.S., we bear the heaviest burden of the lack of access to universal healthcare, universal daycare and living wages. But it’s not too late to reverse the tide.

Change is absolutely possible — but what we need most is political organization that can build a fighting movement for the future that we need.

This International Working Women’s Day, honor the struggle of the women who have come and fought before us — join the fight for a socialist future where all women can thrive!

https://www2.pslweb.org/join

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/26958484

First of all, assessing how much labour value each worker contributes to production is a very tricky business. Not only because skilled labour should create more value than; unskilled labour and hence because an adequate reduction procedure of complex to simple labour is being presupposed. But even more because how much value a worker contributes in a given time depends on how productive he is compared to other workers producing the same goods.And while this productivity can in principle be assessed in the case of workers who independently produce identifiable products, it cannot, even in principle, in the general case in which goods are the joint products of a large number of operations by a large number of workers. Conse- quently, it is in most cases impossible to say whether the socially necessary labour performed by a' particular worker (or group of workers) was smaller or larger than the number of hours he actually worked, or than the value embodied in the goods he consumes 1 2. Secondly and more fundamentally, choosing socially necessary labour, rather than actual labour, as an ethical principle of distri- bution, is highly questionable. Why should someone who happens to be less skilfull than average, or to work on particularly poor land, or in a firm using obsolete machinery, be morally entitled for that reason to a smaller part of the social product? Surely, if work is relevant at all to the determination of how much a particular worker is entitled to, it should be the work he has actually performed and not the work which would have been necessary to someone with average skill to produce the same goods under average technical conditions.

Just think of a situa- tion in which there are widely different kinds of labour: some labour is pleasant, interesting and safe, while some other labour is un- attractive, boring and dangerous. Would it not be deeply unfair to reward both sorts of labour at the same rate? Surely, some way of weighting different kinds of labour must be found if "To each according to his labour" is going to be at all plausible as an ethical principle. And what criterion could be found for this purpose other than the average disutility associated with each kind of labour? The proceeds of production, so the underlying principle should go, are to be distributed according to desert, and desert is determined by how much disutility each contributor to production has had to suffer 1 3

Furthermore, even under equilibrium conditions, standard exploitation need not derive from wealth ownership or coercion. For suppose wealth is equally distributed, but preferences for leisure vary across individuals. Some members of the society concerned may be lazy, or disabled, or scornful of worldly goods. And they may therefore be content to earn a modest living out of the interest they get from lending their share of wealth to others. Despite the fact that all are equally endowed (and hence that no one can take advantage of his superior wealth position), the latter are standardly exploited by the former. Indeed, such a situation could even arise if the' non- workers had less than average wealth. They would be standard exploiters, and still withdrawing with their per capita share of social wealth would make them better off, i.e. they would be capitalistically exploited in Roemer's sense 1 7. This shows that (equilibrium) standard exploitation may derive from differences in preferences as well as from differences in wealth or from coercion. Even at equilibrium, therefore, standard exploitation may be present while capitalist-or-feudal' exploitation is not. And even if it can be shown that there is something wrong with the latter, it would not ipso facto show that there is something intrinsically wrong with the former.