In this post I share an article on why Socialism is a turnoff for most of the people it might help.
I keep thinking that capitalism needs significant revision if not to be replaced by something altogether focused in a different direction. To me, it is obvious that the market capitalist system, built as it is on exploitation of resources and people, destroys as much value as it creates. Some form of socialism might help mitigate the situation and yet, working class and lower middle class American citizens have been taught that socialism is to their economic health as sunlight is to a vampire. Add to that the perception, not entirely unwarranted, that Democrats are elitist and out of touch with their issues.
Former Democratic Montana Gov. Steve Bullock has described the image of his party this way: “coastal, overly educated, elitist, judgmental, socialist — a bundle of identity groups and interests lacking any shared principles. The problem isn’t the candidates we nominate. It’s the perception of the party we belong to.”
In this post I share an article that explains the value proposition of capitalism, which is the pumping of wealth from “the periphery,”—cheap labor, undervalued resources—to the center where societies based on excessive appetite vacuum it up. The solution that is groped towards is to delink local economies by emphasizing the fulfillment of local needs with local and traditional production, while maintaining some international trade around things that might be unique to one place or another and of interest/value to a broader public because of its uniqueness, not a production cost difference.
It is important to note that delinking is often widely misunderstood to mean autarky, or a system of self-sufficiency and limited trade. But this is a misrepresentation. Delinking does not require cutting all ties to the rest of the global economy, but rather the refusal to submit national-development strategies to the imperatives of globalisation. It aims to compel a political economy suited to its needs, rather than simply going along with having to unilaterally adjust to the needs of the global system. To this goal of greater sovereignty, a county would develop its own productive systems and prioritise the needs of the people rather than the demands on international capital.
And then there was an article about the crisis of masculinity. What astonished me the most were the statistics about where women and men are, relatively, in the work force. It bares quoting again here.
Girls are now outperforming boys at nearly every level of education. They earn 60 percent of bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and comprise 70 percent of high school valedictorians. Women are also dominating many workplaces. Women today hold a majority of the nation’s jobs, including 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. They make up 54 percent of all accountants and hold about half of all banking and insurance jobs. As for men, they are dropping out at alarming rates. More prime age males are out of the labor force today than during the Great Depression.
That’s huge progress for women. It makes the blowback of the patriarchal structure even more comprehensible. Not only is the mostly white, male power structure under threat from minorities who collectively will be a majority in the country in the near future, but even more so by women in general who are overtaking men in every category. It is no surprise that there is a strong push by this patriarchal structure to overturn democracy, and to hammer women back to the dark ages where they had no control over their bodies. Thus, the increasingly draconian laws passed that criminalize abortion and the intention of the same conservatives in this crowd to outlaw birth control.
I posted one of my favorite Moby Dick quotes which I will re-quote here.
I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country.
It seems to me that this sentiment, I would say truth, underlies an awful lot of significant film making and literature. Think, the Wizard of Oz (there’s no place like home), or, fresh in the theaters, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. It also ties in with the delinking of local economies idea above. If the most important things are those that are close at hand, perhaps delinking is the way to go.