Cowbee

Even the harshest critics of the DPRK acknowledge that it has universal healthcare, housing, pretty much no unemployment (if any), and at this point, food. The Arduous March is over. That doesn't mean the DPRK is a magical paradise or anything, but that's in a state that was bombed into oblivion and was the target of genocide. If the US adopted more DPRK economic policies, then it would indeed see the improvements Yogthos listed.

I don't really think you're owning anyone here, it's just coming across as you jumping to insults when you've been confronted with an alternate viewpoint instead of trying to do any research or understanding. You just jump to "Marxism bad, Marxists unintelligent."

It's perfectly valid to think Marxism is dense. A lot has been written by many Marxists, many with older or flowery prose, and there's also the concept of dialectics and historical materialism that can be difficult to grasp for beginners. A big challenge any Marxist org has to go through is effectively communicating the core aspects. However, I don't think that people need to understand all of its intricacies to agree with the basic premiss, that public, rather than private, should be the principle form of production, and that to get that the working class needs to organize and overthrow the existing system.

A 12B wealth cap is a simple enough goal, the crux of my critique of just stating the goal and not the method of getting there is that that's where many movements started and stopped. Without the vehicle of change, you can't actually get there. From my point of view, there is little evidence to support the idea of convincing a lower segment of the bourgeoisie against the higher, so your strategy needs to revolve around labor organizing and directly struggling against the system through revolution, a mass strike, or other forms of labor organizing.

That's why I suggested you refocus. Either add the vehicle to your plan, or be more flexible with the goals itself, as the 12B wealth cap is merely one step in a many step process, and is neither the first nor the last.

1. Sure, I agree 100%. I think that path is actually revolutionary Socialism, because I believe that based on historical evidence, it is the surest way to actually bring about the desires of the working class.

2. I don't think that the 1% will ally with the 99% against the .1%. Historically, such a movement hasn't happened. Further, I don't think money is the obstacle, but physical, material control of the processes of production. Mass strikes, labor organizing, and armed revolution all have had a great deal of success, and money played a far smaller role in their success than labor power. The rich are acutely aware of the fall in purchasing power, historically wages have been anchored to the cost of reproducing labor, ie keeping people alive to come back into work, and when that number falls below it's necessity, wages recieve upward pressure. However, this is only up to a certain point, as the rate of profit has downward pressure, meaning Imperialism, itself a decaying system, is what props this up. Taxes alone, in my opinion, cannot save the system, only prolong it a bit more.

Yep, exactly. The closest you can get is nationalist bourgeoisie in imperialized nations combatting Imperialist bourgeoisie of their oppressor nations, but even then you have compradors.

I avoided giving you the answers that I believe are correct specifically because I didn't want to talk down to you. In the other thread I did give answers, but tried to keep them relatively light. This isn't a Marxist community, after all, so my goal isn't to get you to change your stated end goal so much as use Marxism as a means to help you back up your answers more.

As far as the "start of your political journey," I didn't mean to imply you've had no growth, that wasn't my intention. I started my "political journey" well-below where you are now. I do think I have spent a good deal of time studying Capitalism and critiques of Capitalism, though, so I do think I shouldn't be entirely brushed aside and insulted.

I guess, let me ask: what is this community? Is it specifically about a 12B dollar wealth cap? Or is it trying to spark a broader conversation around how to best go about fixing the problems caused by Capitalism today? If it's the former, then you're probably correct, I don't think I'll be very useful here. If it's the latter, however, I really do enjoy having conversations with people about how to best go about tackling the problems caused by Capitalism.

I'm not talking down to you, I'm trying to engage with your ideas constructively. I'm participating how you ask people to, by discussing the feasibility of these changes. How do we get from A to B? This is a critical question, and I'm trying to help you see how to better address the critics you have, how to engage with their counters, and how to develop to a higher level of understanding through dialogue.

If you don't want discussion, or engagement, then this is your community to do with as you wish. If you just want to insult people taking you seriously, though, I don't see this going very far. But, maybe I'm wrong.

There are 2 issues here:

1. Nobody is asking for complete societal collapse for progress, not Marxists, not even Anarchists.

2. Having a goal but not a vehicle to achieve the goal is the core issue here. It's fine and dandy to ask for a wealth tax, but what's more important is being able to get that wealth tax. That's why movements like the Bernie Sanders movement run into issues, they depend on asking a system resistant to change to go against its nature.

I understand that you got the 12B from Getty, but that's just symbolism, it isn't attached to a scientific reasoning. That's why it's getting pushback.

I understand that you're just one person trying to spark a discussion. That in and of itself is admirable, and is the start of your personal political growth and development. However, you are stumbling into very old and developed arguments with a solution that is just as old. I understand that the idea would be government intervention, but the lack of a way to get from step 1 to government intervention is drawing criticism, as that process is more important than picking a good outcome to shoot for.

Again, this traces back to Marx. Utopian Socialists picked an endpoint and tried to convince everyone of it, rather than analyzing the trajectory of society and mastering the laws of social development in order to better guide that development.

My advice is to take a step back, and try to familiarize yourself with common arguments and strategies picked by various critics of Capitalism, such as Marxism, Anarchism, and even the Social Democrats that want Capitalism with tweaks, like you're advocating for. Look into the history of these movements and their successes and failures. Capitalism + tweaks is not a new idea, so its arguments for and against have been ongoing for centuries.

Classes exist not because of levels of wealth, but relations to production. Capitalists are in the level they are at because they exist in the M-C-M' mode of existence, and that does not change at a fundamental level between the less than 12B and the higher than 12B crowd. Capitalism is a system of motion based on material production and valorization of Capital, Capitalists are not a class due to choices but material structures, and as such simply trying to convince a subsection of them to go against another subsection does not work as it does not address the system.

You're running into a few problems.

1. The arbitrary nature of 12B. People take issue with it because there isn't any materialist analysis in deciding that number outside of saying that other billionaires are worse, which is hurting your "big-tent" philosophy.

2. You call this a pragmatic first step, but there's no analysis of how change happens in the first place. This is Utopianism, you cannot create a better world by simply trying to convince everyone of a better way. This is why Robert Owen and Saint-Simon failed, and why Marxists have made far more progress.

3. You're strawmanning your critics. Nobody is letting perfection be the enemy of progress, people are pointing out how this isn't an actionable plan in the first place, and you're calling them naive because of it. This further hurts your argument.

4. You're focused on money, not actual production. This means you have a flawed understanding of how we can actually solve problems. You can't just throw money at a hospital to make it develop, you have to physically develop it. This is important because your view of taxation is heavily financialized, when what matters most is actual resources and production. You can't take billions of dollars from Bezos and magically turn it into new industrial Capital, this kind of a change requires central planning and the labor and resources to do so.

The creation of a single, secular state with minority protections. Former Israelis could stay, but the people of Palestine that were oppressed for a century will be, at least for a time, the driving factor of reconstruction. Any terrorist cells made up of former IDF would be rooted out, but former Israelis that comply with the demands of Palestinians would not need to be deported, most likely.

Ah fair, maybe pile in some execution vans and Stalin's copiously large spoon