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Cpt_Obvious posted:A good way to think about classes is that they are defined by the relationship they have with other classes. So, a worker still has an adversarial relationship with his employer regardless of whether or not he has a 401K: the worker wants higher wages, safe work environments and better benefits. The employer wants the opposite. Whether the worker has a humble investment doesn't really make him want his own wages go down. You can find out if someone is middle class is by asking them to pick between higher wages, a safer work environment, and better benefits, versus higher house prices, and a rising stock market. If they have to think about their answer, they are middle class. For plenty of people, arguably a plurality of the US and UK electorate, working out what their rational class interest actually is requires a spreadsheet. For example, the median house price rise in the UK was last year higher than the median wage. That’s exceptional, and presumably unsustainable. But money for nothing is _way_ better than money for working. And so that influences people’s interests and identity in ways simple income statistics that treat the two as the same fail to capture.
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Sep 7, 2021 01:32
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VictualSquid posted:Co-ops are temporary and should do something good before they fail. That gets confusing because the word ‘revolution’ in used in two different ways, in the conventional one, as a specific event, and also to refer to the, presumably desirable, status quo _after_ the revolution. You seem to be claiming that Bernstein supported reform as a means to revolution as an end in the former sense, not the latter. I don’t think this is true. Bernstein seems to me to be talking about the ‘social revolution’ as a goal,; laying out the Social Democrat position that progressive reform has no a priori limit in the status quo it can eventually achieve. This is different to the 1930s version of Democratic Socialism, which was based on the idea that you_ first_ win a vote, _then_ fight a war, as in Spain. And then the other strands which regarded winning a vote as a distraction from what actually mattered. Which as the modern Taliban have shown, can be an entirely successful tactical choice in the right circumstances. Just not, as it turned out, interwar Germany. Not much of this has any relevance to the modern left, where none of the words involved mean anything like the same thing. Except, perhaps; fascism, and even that is probably as much a source of confusion as Insight.
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Sep 8, 2021 12:44
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Seems basically right, only nitpick is that, while Rosa was initially part of the _Social_ Democratic Party, she left it to become what is generally called a _Socialist_ Democrat. Which afaik is the same as _democratic socialist_, at least as the term was used at the time (I.e. ‘after the revolution, there will still be elections’). It is the latter period, after she broke with the Second Internationale, that anyone who talks about her politics are usually referencing.
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Sep 8, 2021 16:47
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gradenko_2000 posted:
That part doesn’t really make sense; is there a part of the argument skipped? Any landlord already has an incentive to raise rents, because more money. There is no equivalent of company shareholders who will force management to accept a hostile takeover because it will end up as more profitable. So what is the actual change supposed to be here?
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Sep 13, 2021 11:28
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