The Democratic Socialists of America pulled its endorsement of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York this week, accusing the progressive congresswoman of being insufficiently supportive of the Palestinian cause and efforts to end the war in Gaza…
Her approach has increasingly strained her relationship with some of the left’s most strident critics of Israel. When she rallied last month in the Bronx with Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Jamaal Bowman, dozens of pro-Palestinian demonstrators angry over her endorsement of Mr. Biden chanted “You’re a fraud, A.O.C.”
Let me ask you this, why can’t we regulate capitalism to work for us? Just think of what we can do:
- Greatly expand and enforce strong environmental regulations
- Expand and enforce anti trust laws to break monopolies
- Improve working conditions
- Remove money from politics
- Ban lobbying
- Increase the minimum wage to something livable and tie it to inflation
- Improve the justice system to hold CEOs and other big executives accountable for any crimes they commit and punish them accordingly
- Tie worker wages to CEO salaries or company revenue
- Fix all the tax loopholes and have corporations and billionaires pay their fair share
- Improve the social safety net so people can have their basic needs met
- Expand regulations to protect consumers
- Expand regulations for price gouging and enforce them
- Update our outdated zoning laws to allow for the building of more houses
- Remove the shitty regulations that prevent public transport from being built
- Ban any attempts to equate corporations with people
- Implement ranked choice voting and get rid of first past the vote
- Change the way we measure the health of the economy from GDP and stock market trends to things like median income, life expectancy, levels of happiness, mental and physical health, childhood success rate, rates of substance abuse, crime rates, social mobility, and so on
- Incentivize companies and people that do more to help their communities and punish those that actively harm them
These are not radical ideas and they’re not new, these are all already in place in capitalist societies all around the world. We know they work and we know capitalism works, so why not make it better? Capitalism doesn’t have to be this dystopian reality where corporations own everything and everybody else lives in poverty struggling to make ends meet. It could also be this great system that is centered around humanity and works to the benefit of the people. A system where the value of a person matters more than a dollar amount. These ideas aren’t antithetical to capitalism. Capitalism is just tool, it’s a flexible one too, there’s nothing stopping us from shaping it to serve us and our values. Why not pursue that instead of trying to pursue some an ideology that has literally failed? After so many attempts, so many failures, so many people killed, when is it time to move on? Marxist socialism isn’t the way forward, it’s a way of the past.
Because Warren Buffet wasn’t joking when he said:
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
He also wasn’t attempting to raise awareness of the issue as evidenced by his disowning his granddaughter when she did try to raise awareness of the issue by being interviewed for the documentary The 1% by one of the Johnson kids.
They won’t allow us to regulate them, and have each killed hundreds of millions of us so far. I believe the phrase is believe someone when they tell you who they are, these people are unrepentant murderers, thieves, and environmental terrorists at an unprecedented level. They woke up and chose violence, we can only choose self defense at this point.
Because all that is absolute and total fantasy. Capitalism does not allow for any of it. And even if you can succeed temporarily and installing any of it capitalism will find the crack and destroy it. You’re trying to fight against the nature of a thing. The absolute core tenant capitalism is the exploitation and enslavement of the working class. The only incentive, only, is more short-term profit. That’s it. Anyone who thinks you can do anything else is dreaming. Capitalism is incapable of surviving in a pluralistic society. Capital is incapable of adjusting to the needs of a society as a whole. Capitalism is incapable of taking into account the needs of the many versus the needs of the single. You cannot fight against that, that’s its purpose.
There is a reason that capitalism tends to lead to fascism.
Because the employing class and their political power won’t let us.
Capitalism denies people their humanity and treats people like things. For example, 1 test for whether a system recognizes people’s humanity is whether or not it holds them responsible for the positive and/or negative results of their action. Capitalism fails there because it holds the employer solely legally responsible for workers’ joint de facto actions in the workplace.
Marxism is not the only alternative @politics
