> I fail to see how one can genuinely cherish freedom and tolerate capitalism.
Quote of the article, imo.
The framing of these questions is interesting in their bias, but the answers do a great job navigating them.
Quote of the article, imo.
The framing of these questions is interesting in their bias, but the answers do a great job navigating them.
Capitalism has plenty of flaws but alternative mechanisms for allocating labour seem far more against freedom.
There is no reason for the government to decide for you what your job is. Even the USSR since the 60s didn't have such a system. You would have to work for a set amount of years for a set job if you wanted to get an advanced education. After that, you were able to go look for available jobs and choose which one you wanted. Which is just a price-controlled labour market.
I doubt very much that the market socialist Varoufakis would want a more restrictive labour market than that of the USSR, so your accusation really seems to be a strawman.
Whatever system you use needs to somehow resolve the issue that 53% of the youth population wants to be a social media influencer yet far fewer than 1% of jobs are that. Permitting price gets you this but it seems to be a very weak form of socialism if you adopt a system in which some people will make millions and others will make peanuts.
Well nobody is saying that this possible short of a post-scarcity society. The Soviets themselves were certainly not making the claim that was how they were operating, simply that it was their goal and they were getting closer to it.
> Whatever system you use needs to somehow resolve the issue that 53% of the youth population wants to be a social media influencer yet far fewer than 1% of jobs are that. Permitting price gets you this but it seems to be a very weak form of socialism if you adopt a system in which some people will make millions and others will make peanuts.
The basic issue Marx-inspired people have with capitalism (I think Marxist is far too strong of a term) isn't necessarily with the fact that income inequality exists. Marx did write about how perfect egalitarianism is not a realistic nor desirable goal, and I don't think Varoufakis disagrees.
The issue that is seen with capitalism is rather the unfair social relations that capital forms against which society is inevitably structured, which leads to people making billions simply from being an owner, and having debilitating control over society.
As far as people making hundreds of thousands or even in the low millions because their work is particularly necessary to society's needs and few other people can fulfill those needs, there is nothing necessarily wrong with that. As long they don't get undue control and get to set up biased relations that are then independent of their ongoing contribution to society, I don't think this is a weak form of socialism at all, it would actually be a much stronger form of socialism than most that have been successful, and I think that this is also the kind of socialism Varoufakis would prefer. Short of a post-scarcity society in any case, I don't think any reasonable socialist, Marxist, or Communist has hopes for anything better.
As far as the people making peanuts, if it is because what their productive output is not useful to society and they can't adapt to produce anything useful, we can use redistribution and de-commodify necessities in order to make it so that at least richer people do not have too problematic a power differential. And of course, we should strive to make opportunities as absolutely equal as possible.
But what I'm trying to get at is that really socialists are fine with some degree of inequality if it simply comes from differences in productivity. The issue is not from the distribution of resources, but really the process of production and its impact on society.
Of course, from each according to his ability to each according to his need is on a spectrum. The more our abilities increase relative to our needs, the closer we can get to the ideal.
Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production, nothing more, nothing less. If someone really is able to produce 20x more than their peers, there's nothing wrong with them have a before tax income of 20x more.
He pretty much stated it in one of his answers: he'd want to get rid of tradable shares and replace ownership with 1 job = 1 share. The same open job market that's used today can remain in place, just with labor - not capital - owning the shares.
if you squint a bit, that's what has been happening in the past 4 or so years considering the the amount of money the feds pumped into money markets that filtered through venture capital funds. This is one of Yanis' postulation: that businesses that require capital don't have to rely on profits, and can instead benefit from money printing; and I'll put up Uber as exhibit A.
Profitability no longer drives the system-as-a-whole, even though it remains the be-all and end-all for individual entrepreneurs. Consider what happened in London on August 12, 2020. It was the day markets learned that the British economy shrank disastrously – and by far more than analysts had expected (more than 20% of national income had been lost in the first seven months of 2020). Upon hearing the grim news, financiers thought: ‘Great! The Bank of England, panicking, will print even more pounds and channel them to us to buy shares. Time to buy shares!’I sincerely doubt he's talking about a moneyless, classless, stateless society - what Communism is.
After all, there's (crypto)currencies and private (as opposed to personal) ownership rights. Sprinkle in some representative Democratic State that can build structures to isolate itself from the will of the people? And that's Liberalism, the thing Communists rebel against, critiquing to this day.
Platonically-Synthesizing these two opposites would prove challenging without undermining the premise of one or both halves.
While such a "Left" exists in more authoritarian contexts of international relations? They serve as examples of the failure of the previous "synthesis". Down here in the neighborhoods where life happens? Leftist action is often about showing each other that we're all we need.
Why pay for a plow to scrape the apartment building's lot when we can do it? Why submit to draconian rent hikes from Slumlords when we can form a Tenant's Union? Why let people go hungry when we can throw in on a professional kitchen and the food we need to held our neighbors?
There's plenty of work to do, even when there's no money. So damn the cash, full speed ahead! We have a better world to build. State be damned. Needless Social hierarchy be damned. Just do the things your neighbors need. And never act alone.
Learn from Rojava. Learn from the Zapatistas. Learn from Cospaia.
We don't need some magical thinking about how the Masters' Tools will dismantle the Masters' palace in the hands of some "great man". That same great man who, inevitably seeks - or is forced by necessity - to rise to dictatorship to keep the State together and potentially in line.
And somehow, this whole State apparatus is supposed to wither away on its own? When it is our crutch against "external threats" and the State's own internal corruption? Color me skeptical.
Abstract all the world's resources and how they're converted between each other into one big linked excel table. Everyone wants to know how resources are moving around, but nobody can be trusted to host "the diagram of everything". Different parts of the excel table correspond to different resources in different places, and have notions of data sovereignty over their resources in the table, with areas of joined access between separate entities along boundaries where they exchange resources.
Obviously you'd use something like soulbound NFT's, so its harder for people to sell off write permissions. But you could use all sorts of Sybil protection techniques.
It seems like one possible starting point for a decentralized communism.
He was fired from finance minister of Greece after only a few months on the job for the less-than-braggable achievement of completely sabotaging Greece's recovery and ensuring Greece was the only European country which failed to recover during their bailout process.
He resigned and for good reason and he proved to be correct in all his assessments. You clearly don't know what you're talking about, at least get your facts straight.
Who thinks this way? Credential-ism isn't a substitute for clearly stated arguments.
If he presents an argument reflecting his credentials that's great, but some useless platitude doesn't get a pass because he went to college or some nonsense
Also, credentialed doesn't just mean academic credentials.