Hey people, I'm new to Daily Kos. I enjoy your website and your comments/views on things. Hopefully I'll find this place lively enough to engage with.
I've been thinking a lot about life over the past couple of years and have really struggled to put into a coherent framework what is meant by all the Ism's: socialism, capitalism, communism, libertarianism, anarchism, etc. By typing my thoughts into the leftist void of the internet, I hope to cut my teeth on this subject and get a negative or positive reaction.
This journey of mine began with the seemingly simple prospect of finding out what the difference between liberal and conservative is. It seemed like a simple endeavor at the time and ended up taking some time for me to understand things in what I would consider a coherent way. However, I have come a long way in finding out what my position is on things by digging deeply into the darkest corners of the internet.
A few caveats before I jump into my long-winded approach to politics and life:
1. I believe the Tea Party is correct about many things (read below)
2. I find Karl Marx particularly interesting and find his ideas pretty relevant
3. I have a pretty simplistic approach to life that tends to guide my opinions more often than anything else
4. I consider myself mainly an aspiring anarchist, inspired first and foremost by David Graeber and also other ideals that are espoused by people who perhaps don't consider themselves as such, yet I can see anarchistic tendencies in their thought processes.
Having said all that..........
I don't like the Tea Party much, but they tend to hold my views on limited government. There is actually a pretty simple proposition here: is the government able to aptly do the things it purports to be able to do, or is it not? Here I'm not talking about a local or state government, as clumsy at it might be. I'm talking about the federal government.
The federal government is a lot like modern banking; they lost sight of the central and simple idea of knowing the customer/citizen and knowing the true costs of engagement with their patrons/constituencies. Yes, you could say that the government is too big, mainly because if the government, as large as it is, tries to rectify problems, there arises already another problem, dual in nature. This problem is the idea that neither the citizen nor the government can realistically keep track of if problems are ably rectified. The citizen, feeling no personal obligation, emotional or otherwise, to be responsible when receiving help from an impersonal government, doesn't always take things seriously. He/she becomes a form or a blob of numbers and statistics to the government, which is so big, they many times cannot meet on a personal enough level to respond in an effective way.
You can think of the government like a church: you expect the church's leaders to respond to you, but you don't get a response because they don't have enough people on the ground to meet with you. Out of a congress of 535 members and 60 senators, and a country of 300 million people, yeah, you can expect that no one will EVER be happy with what they do. Hence, you should LIMIT what the government does so that your problems can be solved more locally. Hopefully, this will also make government simpler to understand, since one of the main problems I have with politics is that it is its own art form and has its own logic, just about as complicated at learning a new language - you may be able to understand it, but to engage in a two-way with it becomes next to impossible for the un-dedicated.
For the sake of making this more clear, if your attention was always focused on some other country to make your own personal circumstances better, would you take the initiative to do it yourself? This has been a well-known problem in supposed third-world countries, namely, waiting for the investments of capitalists to help them all out on the road to prosperity. Not all waited. This crazy attention to the nation's capital causes people to lose focus on the state and also on their cities. The point here is this:
we are a very diverse country and to expect what is voted on in Washington to affect so many states is very ham-handed and wrong. The Tea Party calls this the tyranny of the majority most often; I actually agree with this. Don't think for a second that imposing conservatism or liberalism on the whole country, whether it would work out well or not, would even be moral in the first place - it is not.
On to economics, more broadly, but focusing back onto why the government is a ham-handed monster: raising the minimum wage is a stupid idea. If you can somehow agree that wage controls need to be enforced, I would think a maximum wage would be better, but I would definitely think that a ratio would be always the most preferential. Capital/labor ratios were once considered to be sound at sixty-six percent labor, the rest capital. The rest is a highly fluid dynamic, with one state's standard wages, although nominally different from another's, can be the same in terms of goods; this is but one of the reasons why the government is a big bumbling oaf.
But you know what? Sometimes none of this matters, because to me, I try to break everything down to the smallest levels that would work. Let me give you an example:
To me, Karl Marx was interesting, but it took me a long time to understand what he was really getting at - maybe I still don't understand it fully, but I think I kind of get it.
What people don't really talk about much is the simplicity of his arguments. To name a few:
On his first page, he talked about how many bushels equals what and so on. To me, whatever the math is behind it, I tend to view this as an argument against the logic of capitalism's - or money-ism's - ever fluctuating exchange ratios between goods. Who the f*ck ever decided that selling 5,000 hamburgers equals one car? In a nation dominated by another ism - neoliberalism - the central idea is that everything that is produced must be reconnected back to its ability to sell. This is what capitalism basically is, buying to sell and selling to buy. It sounds simple on its face, until you realize that we have a lot more potential to build things for communal purposes than our money system many times would make us believe.
This brings me to yet more ism's: anarcho-syndicalism and communism. Marx's central thesis was that in a society not dominated by money, you could form new pacts or social contracts as syndicates, broadly agreeing to build things for the sake of community endeavors. He imagined these new forms of 'wealth' springing up to solve new problems. Ignoring all the definite difficulties arising from such arrangements, the point is to have new ways to solve problems.
This idea is a central thesis covered by Richard Epstein on Econtalk, just this last Monday, and I find it to be distinctively Marxist in nature, though he would cringe at the thought. If you are of the opinion that businesses are too difficult to start because of mandatory pay for work and that spontaneous alliances should be easier to form in society for the purpose of solving problems, then you might be a semi-Marxist. If you were at least able to freely sign a contract and defer payment until a business is going strongly enough, society and businesses would benefit greatly. This seems to border on the edge of Marxism and classical liberalism. One of the central problems in capitalism is the idea that wealth-assets, which are meant to be more communal in nature, are harder to come by because they are not readily bought and sold. In accounting terms, this would probably be called a non-performing asset. In order for non-performing assets to flourish, you must have communal forms of wealth-building. Though I don't know that much about accountancy, I tend to hold most of my economic views on the basis of how accountancy is done. If socialism and communism and capitalism mean ANYTHING AT ALL, to me they mean: who holds the assets, how are they created, and how is debt issued?
Speaking of socialism and communism, the great bears of Americans' nightmares: the only real thing that these terms mean to me personally is how cities are built. One of the reasons that Karl Marx was against private property was that he thought that it got in the way of city planning. And speaking as an aspiring Anarchist, if I care for signing ANY type of contract at all these days, it would most likely have to be a social contract. Perhaps we'll all have new ways in the future to live without the tyranny of contract law, which is the state, which is why life sucks in America these days, because the banks are the primary originators of money - needed to live and do anything, and always attached to a contract - and these are all enforced by the state. Needless to say, I've made it my goal to NOT sign contracts.
Therefore, the primary objective of society, I would hope, is to always aspire to a communist and socialist lifestyle. If you take what I said about Karl Marx at its face about how cities should be built, we made a tragic, tragic mistake in America. You can see capitalism's, (but also oil's, let's not kid ourselves) effects on EVERYTHING in America. Maybe the best way to understand what capitalism has done to America is to understand the cult of private property, and buying and selling.
If your nation is obsessed by ownership and generally must have a title for everything, then you would expect to have less and less of community projects and joint ventures for transportation and entertainment. Also, you perhaps could expect most assets in society to be small in one sense, (low-density housing, small, one-off restaurants for the sake of business ownership, [proliferations of the easiest types of businesses to run]), and big in another, (because of the capitalist looking for the highest return per person, creating sprawl, for instance).
Now, I've heard many economists say that Americans like sprawl, so it must be good. But here, I return to Karl Marx. In one iteration of the theory of dialectical materialism, he hypothesized that your material circumstances determine the way you live and your values. If you've known nothing BUT sprawl and car-mania, yeah, maybe you would be more likely to like it. One of my biggest pet peeves in American life is how our cities got built in the first place. Karl Marx is well known for his visceral dislike for the Burgeoise. Let's call them capitalists, or those who hold surplus capital, or whatever. Since money equals power, and social power, in the pursuit for more money, capitalists try to enforce habits and values on people to make more money. This concept is VERY real in America, judging by how much advertisement we are bombarded with. In other words, what made America America and why do we accept it? Was it capitalists setting off a chain reaction, based on the concept of dialectical materialism and the fact that capitalism is forced to grow at a certain rate? And how do we return to a more enjoyable life not stifled by alienation in the form of a lack of communal wealth and isolation by means of cars and single-family homes?
I do think that America could use a good dose of at least thinking along these lines, wherever the chips may fall. I firmly believe in planning of a socialist type, but only in the sense of city planning and let the market figure out the best way to do that. I also think that it would be better for us to think about life on a smaller scale. I lived in Poland for a time, and one thing that I think of often is how long it took to get across the country. If you're thinking about building train lines across America, as much as it would be so nice to think of ourselves as one big home, if our minds were changed to think in terms of regions of a smaller scale, connecting to cities which were more dense and had more personality, people would be probably more apt to want to build trains, figuring a state to be more like a country, times of travel corresponding to less distance.
Capitalism has developed the means of production to such an extent, that it should remain for us to think more in terms of how to make cities better, and with more resiliency. Take any approach you want, environmentalism, new urbanism, global warming fear-of ism, peak oil-ism....all of our problems should be looked at in terms of creating a life of lower consumption and with less systemic risk, which one could think of in terms of less demand for old and newer and up-coming exotic energy sources and less chance for things to go wrong. As an American, I feel forced to go on a treadmill everyday. It is not a real choice whether or not you can buy one car or another: a real choice would be a car, walking, or efficient transportation; a real choice would be suburban sprawl or denser cities with more aspects of life close-by, where you can form meaningful relationships. Capitalism, we're told, has given us so many choices - to be honest, sometimes I see only traps.
Long story short, I think that, in spite of the many things that supposedly divide Americans, these ideas for a simpler life should ideally unite everyone because of the many problems it would solve at the same exact time, but perhaps they don't know it yet, because the possibility has not been presented to them. America, meet Karl Marx.