It seems ludicrous to imagine that these vitalresources incapable of further expansionwould become essentially free of charge.

ll this raises the question of what “capitalism” is to begin with, aquestion on which there is no consensus at all. The word wasoriginally invented by socialists, who saw capitalism as that systemwhereby those who own capital command the labor of those who donot.

This dilemma was reflected in the furor over a second round of Chinese simplification in 1977, an effort that was rescinded in 1986.

Last fall, I spent several days in New York City, during which time I visited a home owned by a group of pacifist Christians that lives from a common purse—meaning the members do not have privately held property but share their property and money. Their simple life and shared finances allow their schedules to be more flexible, making for a thicker immediate community and greater generosity to neighbors, as well as a richer life of prayer and private devotion to God, all supported by a deep commitment to their church.This is, admittedly, an extreme example. But this community was thriving not because it found ways to scale down what it asked of its members but because it found a way to scale up what they provided to one another.

As socialist realism was imposed on Soviet writers, one form of permissible resistance, of finding an inner freedom, was to read translations of foreign writers. No private library was complete without Hemingway, Faulkner, London, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, Salinger—all officially permitted as “progressive writers” exposing the “ulcers of the capitalist world.”

fighting the fear of not having enough money

“I’m going to carry you. I’m going to carry you.”

Well, there are needy people everywhere, and maybe you’re just a little bit ahead of them, and you have something good to do. You can do good to them. So that would be number three: to free you from being self-preoccupied and to serve.

Observing the wider world, Beatrice wrote of "Russian communism and Italian Fascism" as "two sides of the worship of force and the practice of cruel intolerance" and she was disturbed that "this spirit is creeping into the USA and even ... into Great Britain."[16]

Smith recognizes the role of bargaining by the workers as an important determinant of real wages (Aspromourgos, 2010, p. 1173; Stirati, 1994, p. 51; WN, p. 85). Thus, there is a central role for history and institutions to determine real wages (see Aspromourgos, 2009, pp. 248–249). Smith is also open to the possibility of workers’ wages rising significantly above customary subsistence such that it enables them to engage in “conveniences” consumption—especially when the economy is growing. This rise in wages, for Smith, occurs through strengthening of workers’ bargaining power (Aspromourgos, 2010, p. 1179). Smith believes that competition generates innovation which causes productivity growth and subsequently perhaps higher real wages (Aspromourgos, 2009, p. 208).

Oscar Wilde declared he was an advocateof socialism because he didn’t like having to look at poor people orlisten to their stories

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.” ― Dom Helder Camara, Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings

Should Biden push a “socialist agenda, I don’t think you’ll have seen the end of Donald Trump,” Corey Lewandowski, a senior Trump-campaign adviser, told me ahead of Election Day.

are woefully underfunded. And many haven't quite found the egalitarian ideal that can really sustain them in the long term

Piketty’s account of the past 40 years is less a story of capital being unleashed (as most histories of neoliberalism have it) than of progressive ideologies running out of steam. The failure of communism played a crucial role in this, producing a new fatalism about the capacity of politics to deliver equality. Globalisation eroded national borders, while “hypercapitalism” delivered concentrations of wealth not witnessed since 1914. In the context of post-socialist ideological cynicism

Socialist economies can also be also more efficient, in the sense that there’s less of a need to sell goods to consumers who might not need them, resulting in less money spent on product promotion and marketing efforts.

Most socialists, however, tend to find the profit motive problematic.

socialists do not support capitalism, meaning they want workers to control the means of production

it seems very possible to get the same improving life expectancies as the US without octupling health care spending.

Système de Politique Positive

But those who believe that the future must inevitably be socialist tend to be very old, or very marginal to the real political discourse of their societies.

Leading thinkers in China argue that putting government in charge of technology has one big advantage: the state can distribute the fruits of AI, which would otherwise go to the owners of algorithms.

Participatory decision-making involves the participation of all persons in deciding issues in proportion to the impact such decisions have on their lives.

we all deserve to have a safety net when we need it

Helen Keller became a member of the Socialist Pary in 1909 and by 1912, she had become a national voice for socialism and working class solidarity.

Castro’s commitment to fighting racism in Cuba wasn’t as much an explicit mission as it was a convenient byproduct of adopting the Soviet model of governance — when you start to eliminate private property, mechanisms of systemic racism are rendered impotent.

But second, a sense of what could have been. What if Stalin hadn’t murdered most of the competent people? What if entire fields of science hadn’t been banned for silly reasons? What if Kantorovich had been able to make the Soviet leadership base its economic planning around linear programming? How might history have turned out differently?

First, amazement that the Soviet economy got as far as it did, given how incredibly screwed up it was.

When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for, that is the beginning of the end of any nation.

“O sistema do marxismo é fundado em princípios morais, enquanto o capitalismo só está relacionado a ganho e rentabilidade... Não considero a ex-URSS, ou a China, ou mesmo o Vietnã, verdadeiros regimes marxistas... Penso que [sua] falha principal é que eles colocaram muita ênfase na necessidade para destruir a classe governante, na luta de classe, e isto encoraja o ódio e negligencia a compaixão... Penso em mim como meio marxista, meio budista.”

Stockholm City Council now has an official housing queue, where 1 day waiting = 1 point. To get an apartment you need both money for the rent and enough points to be the first in line. Recently an apartment in inner Stockholm became available. In just 5 days, 2000 people had applied for the apartment. The person who got the apartment had been waiting in the official housing queue since 1989!