Comment by pcthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pcthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

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If social programs don't provide luxuries, but just essentials, people are still going to want luxuries, and there can be markets around those. I'm not convinced that communism or even complete socialism are better than what I've described, which I think is somewhere between demsoc and socdem, but not entirely those things either.

We haven't really seen socialism/communism without a high degree of authoritarianism, which I also don't really like, so I'm inclined to support working towards socialism democratically rather than trying to overthrow the government in a bloody revolution.

I do think we need a radical rethinking of the role of state in this in order to make it work though; ideally the state and worker collectives benefit from advantages that make it difficult for the capitalists to steamroll over them on the market, which over time leads to the weakening of capital. An example would be high property taxes for people/businesses owning a house that isn't their primary residence, which would go to fund social housing.

> We haven't really seen socialism/communism without a high degree of authoritarianism, which I also don't really like, so I'm inclined to support working towards socialism democratically rather than trying to overthrow the government in a bloody revolution.

And we haven't had capitalism without rampant homelessness, corruption, systemic violence, exploitation of the global poor, and various other forms of avoidable misery. The status quo is bloody too, just not for people like me (and I assume like you).

> I do think we need a radical rethinking of the role of state in this in order to make it work though; ideally the state and worker collectives benefit from advantages that make it difficult for the capitalists to steamroll over them on the market, which over time leads to the weakening of capital

I want the same thing, but my understanding is that you can't get the state to align with workers against capital because capital will always outcompete workers at amassing resources simply through scale. One capitalist can extract surplus value from many many many workers at once, and use that value to buy more workers, to the ultimate end of buying the state through lobbying and funding campaigns.

Is there some way we don't end up back where we began?

We have many instances where the state ostensibly aligns with workers against capital. Minimum wage. 40 hr weeks. Vacation days. Social health care. Food stamps.

You may say these things can be considered to benefit capital (because workers who get vacation work better) and I don't necessarily disagree with that point. But the truth is, the existence of a social safety net makes workers unwilling to tolerate some degree of abuse from capital (instead they now have to use undocumented workers if they really need a pool of workers who will tolerate high levels of abuse.)

So if the working class can organize to revolutionize the role of state, and have it compete in the markets for things like social housing, social food, etc, then the state is now working for the people, and aligning with capital will go against the state's interests in addition to the interests of proletarians.

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