Demands the current left should be making but aren't

Like the title says, what are some demands that socialist should be making but aren't. I'd like to see more of emphasis on restructuring the current state like in the old Socialist Party of America's program. Pushing for more participatory democracy should be high up on the list. Things like a right to referendum on the national level, abolishing the senate, electing the house proportionally, removing presidential veto power, getting rid of plurality voting etc. are things that socialists in America need to push to the forefront. What demands do you all think are being ignored that should be brought back?

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Tbh all of that should be included with demsoc reforms. People don’t care about a national referendum, but they care about M4A, free education and T R A I N S.

We got babooned again boys.

I agree, but those reforms are already being pushed. And I think a lot of people would be pretty welcoming to a national referendum, it would do a lot towards raising confidence in their power as a whole. Plus, if you could start getting socialist parties writing referendums and getting signatures you could pass way more radical things than congress would ever pass even if we had a lot of friendlies in it. With the small but growing movement and the right guidance from socialist parties it could be a powerful tool.

A shorter work week and guaranteed employment are big ones, although I don't see those actually happening under capitalism

state issued gf

Heavily agree with OP positions, those are strategic reforms that if implemented would reveal the inherent contradictions of a bourgeois state, which is the kind of reform we should push for in tandem with base building.

More liberal bashing

succdem policies only kill revolutionary potential

You can't polish a turd, full Direct Democracy is the only choice

Elimination of trusts and foundations.

Absolute massive destruction of first world countries with nuclear weaponry.

Ban on lobbying

Wouldn't direct democracy just end up with lumpenprole masses voting for creature comforts rather than actual socialist policies.

Also rosa luxemburg was center-right. Prove me wrong.

1. More research and development of improved energy sources - fission, fusion, ground- and space-based solar. Any strategy or rhetoric that diverts funds to these endeavors is acceptable.

2. More and greater labor automation - all automatable jobs should be automated, and active measures should be deployed to help automate the rest. Strike actions are an excellent tactic to increase the cost of labor enough to make automation attractive. Any measure that increases the cost of labor or decreases the cost of automation is acceptable.

3. An overhaul of the inefficient, rent-seeking scientific funding and publishing systems. 50% of a research scientist's time is wasted seeking grants - an institutional funding model is both preferable and amenable to capitalist interests (eg, Bell Labs). The taxpayer-sourced 30% profit margins enjoyed by the likes of Elsevier are ripe for undercutting by a competitor that can improve the discoverability of scientific results. These measures have the potential to improve the rate of scientific and technological innovation, and thus aid the first two demands.

As Marxists, we understand the transformation of quantity into quality. When bourgeois commentators talk with confused tones about 'energy too cheap to meter' and ask 'what are we going to do about automation?', we understand that their confusion stems from the fact that they are trying and failing to think about concrete changes in material conditions that are fundamentally incompatible with the self-reproduction of capital. Just as a hunter-gatherer couldn't conceive of the full consequences of being able to cultivate food, and a Roman couldn't possibly predict what'd happen if someone significantly improved an aeolipile, so too is the capitalist unable to understand a world where energy is as abundant as fresh air, and men can't be yoked into wage slavery for lack of yokes.

Communists, too, can't conceive of a society in which changes to material conditions have broken the self-reproduction of capital in favor of a new social order more suited to the new material conditions. They do have a word for the situation, though: Communism. Communists are those people who have set themselves the goal of bringing this situation about. My contention is that our activity should be focused around accelerating the development of material conditions incompatible with the self-reproduction of capital. Hence my three-point action plan.

While capitalists will resist this plan, they are unable to resist it entirely, and are substantially forced to work toward it themselves. It is true that the capitalists fear these developments, because they understand that they wouldn't be the masters of a Communist society. Nonetheless, the logic of capital forces them to pursue these developments, for fear of being vanquished by a less fearful competitor. The rate of progress toward communism, then, is dependent on the balance of two capitalist fears: a distant fear of communism, and an immediate fear of being out-competed. This balance is the perfect leverage point for communists. The measures I propose above are intended to stoke capitalist fears of competition, in order to drive them to increase the rate at which they develop energy sources and automate labor.

As Marxists, we understand that you can't keep adding quantity forever. As you add energy and automation into the system, its fundamental premises will break down, quantity will turn into quality, and a revolutionary moment will arise.

1. Communism

Reduction in work hours, since real wages aren't rising

Democratization is a big one. It's a helpful tool to flush out those that hate and fear the masses vs those who stand with the masses.

Socialists should also purge all anti-nuclear power attitudes from its ranks. pro nuclear should be the default socialist poistion

Instead of credit unions, why not just propose Proudhon's mutual bank?

Abolishing right to work for starters

three day weekend
three day weekend
three day weekend

"You don't hate Mondays. You hate capitalism!"

Complete end to intellectual property, which is eminently more achievable than material property. Scientific and academic publications might not be the biggest money spinners, but their profit margin is nothing short of obscene, because it costs them next to nothing to operate. And no one says a thing, because we're so used to scarcity that we don't even notice when a handful of organizations create a wholly artificial scarcity on the distribution of scientific data all over the world. This "industry" is flat-out a cartel, who makes money out of stopping knowledge from spreading. They are, plain and simple, holding knowledge for ransom.

It's no secret that, in order to keep growing, capitalism will generate new problems and new solutions to go with them. The drug war is, by far, the most glaring case, and the same could be said of the obesity epidemic and terrible dietary habits – an industry based on consumption has a direct profit motive to get people to consume more, after all, and few seem to have made this connection. But I'd say the worst case is the pharmaceutical industry, which, in turn is enabled by intellectual property. I take it we're all familiar with Big Pharma's schemes to "evergreen" their drugs, enforce ridiculous patents, harm efforts to make drugs cheaper etc. Like the aforementioned scientific and academic publishing business, pharmaceuticals have absurd profit margins as well, since patents are, and indeed are designed to be, temporary monopolies, which, as a rule, fuck the people over. Pair this with evergreening and other game-rigging tactics, and we're always at the mercy of execs playing roulette with our lives, each time with a different medicine. Martin Shkreli made the news not for being abusive, but for being sincere about the routine abuse. He cried out loud that the emperor was naked, not out of conscience, but just the opposite. It was, ironically, his flagrant psychopathy which brought attention to the monstrous daily practices of Big Pharma, and that's why he got busted. Without fail, bougies will punish among them only the ones that harm their collective theft.

I mentioned this in other threads, but the left must grow beyond the purely material scope of class struggle, and incorporate fully the other scopes of life, because all of them are being destroyed. It's not enough for capitalism to raze the planet and try to move, locust-like, to other planets. It's also making human existence pointlessly miserable in a "psychic" level in the process, with the pandemic levels of depression, alienation and other myriad forms of anomie. The left must grow beyond its material demands and make clear its moral core, and its incompatibility with that of the world so far, if it can be said to have morals at all. In other words, we must grow beyond material demands and claim the entire human condition for ourselves, because capitalism is growing increasingly inhuman, to the point that Rosa's famous cry of "socialism or barbarism" has given way to "socialism or extinction". It's no longer just a matter of giving everyone a life worth living, but of having a life at all.

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The Abolishment of Usury

Excellent. You have a brain, thank you.

That's not what's happening in Switzerland. The people regularly turn down proposals with additional paid vacations or wage increase. I actually think they are wrong to do so but at least it proves people won't just vote for personal comfort without thinking about the consequences.

???

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This. No more than 4 hours per day. If the employers need to get shit done they can hire more workers or just pay the existing workers a fair wage to work more hours.

There ought to be more argumentative stances on the basic quality of life for everyone. In order to raise consciousness among libs we need to connect basic social / affective problems back to Capitalism. We need a way to show how Loneliness, depression, anxiety, hopelessness are necessarily products of Capitalism in a way that doesn't rely on Marx quotes, or is done in a way that gives libs an opportunity to relegate it back to the purely social realm. Chomsky, Curtis, and Fisher have done tons of work on this.

Universal employment should really be it primary demand
Second is Mass transit

Adding on to this: there ought to be a focus on how the lack of infrastructure is killing us socially

Universal demand, assuming it's even possible, will just plain not be tolerated by Porky. The much-touted reserve army of labor is a linchpin of capitalism. It's all about abusing or downright creating scarcity, and unemployment is deliberately kept high in most of the world in order to create such an artifical scarcity for employment opportunities. The mathematics of it is rather unusual too, being highly non-linear. Porky tries to keep unemployment as high as possible so that the price of labor can tend towards zero, and by the same token, full employment would make the price of labor tend towards infinity. A horribly flawed model of the real situation, of course, but just like high unemployment doesn't depress wages all the way to zero, full employment really would still create the conditions for permanent upwards pressure on salaries.

As for mass transit, I think that, frankly, modern cities are unsustainable. Simply put, urban agglomerations can't grow indefinitely, which is obvious, but the point is, the biggest cities, even in the most developed countries, are have already reached a full-stop in some areas.

Again, it's a matter of linearity. For reasons obvious, the inflow of people in a city can continue unabated with time, but the capacity to provide basic services to them doesn't. It might be their relationship might be considered linear, depending of the technology available at the time, the available budget, and the political will to apply it. For example, Japanese cities obviously provide much, much better living conditions for X people crammed into Y square kilometers than the Phillipines do. Regardless, eventually, any city will lose this linearity, and then they get diminishing returns for their investments into those services. Part of it is connected to the commons. Hong Kong is quite literally sinking into the Earth because of all the water they have to suck up from the water, coupled with the ever-raising skyline. The other part is sheer limitation of physics. Urban transportation has been stalled for ages, having reached its peak with the subway, invented well over a century ago. What was once a "miracle cure" for the low population levels of the time is now a tin of sardines around the globe. Even Japan, considered a model of urban development, has to get its workers to literally cram people inside the cars as much as possible. So as far as transportation goes, cities have a hard and rather low cap already. Then there are other issues like crime, zoning etc. Much like with the environment being ruined beyond repair, the system refuses to face up to the fact that peaceful, orderly urbanization has its limits, and on both areas, we're past the point of living in equilibrium and already face a permanent state of crises and unsustainability. This wouldn't be such a problem if Porky didn't insist on having a growing populace, but tha't more or less necessary for capitalism to exist, so it's not like he'll ever entertain other choices.

A counter narrative should be developed then that questions the use and quality of life in the modern mega-city, instead positing a world of interconnected smaller towns that have their own unique sense of place (something that is quickly fading in the West: all cities feel like versions of NYC or London). Imo, we shouldn't then shy away from utopianism here. If our ultimate goal is to develop a new and humane way of life that can support everyone, we ought to be optimistic about it, it can't be defined in just the negative.

If you take out everything car-related (roads and parking spaces) from a city you suddenly have twice the amount of space you did before. And while as you say cities can't reach infinite density, they definitely haven't hit the limit yet. And when they hit the limit on density they can expand. In an optimal city, everybody has access to everything they need (work, stores, entertainment) within some time-limit, say 30 minutes. In big American cities, some people end up not having access to any grocery stores because they don't own cars, and grocery stores only exist very far away from each other because they are as big as possible to make more profit. And people have to take time everyday before and after work to do a long commute by car. But if you look in Japanese cities, people have access to work and such by mass transit, which can handle many times more people per density compared to cars, and access to small neighborhood stores and entertainment within walking distance. If you simply manage the layout of the cities right so that everybody has access to what they need, then cities can grow much more dense then they are in the US without sacrificing quality of life.

If living in a country with heavy gun control, promote freer and more relaxed gun laws, pushing for workplace democracy, calling out the bullshit that representative democracy is, workers' self-management, freedom of conscience, etc.

ancient fossilized dinosaur dung known as coprolites can be polished…

The end of intellectual property should not mean that creators lose all moral claim to their creations.

They should be entitled to have their name associated with their creation in perpetuity, with everyone else being forbidden by law from claiming property that they have not created as their creation.

Yes you can polish a turd.

youtube.com/watch?v=yiJ9fy1qSFI

The Green New Deal but with less succdem bullshit and more nuclear power

this

Cooperativisation of Pubs.

TOTAL COOPISM

D E V E L O P P R O D U C T I V E F O R C E S

ONE BELT
ONE ROAD

Counter start-up culture with co-op culture

I only drink prints poured by liberated proletarians.

*pints, fuck.

When you're 16 and read MacKinder.

Universal conscription to ensure that the military will be filled with workers that dont want to be there.

Internal Combustion Engines shouldn't be banned if electric vehicles become feasible

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Individual car ownership should be banned.

Agreed. However, there still should be public car services.

4 hours a day in a 24 hour business, but you gotta keep paying the same wages? That's going to be a x5 increase in wage payouts for a single position in a company. Every single small to medium business in the country would immediately shut down.

And pay them more to work more hours? Again, all small to medium businesses would shut down. But I guess that's the goal right? Get rid of all private businesses and have the utopian state provide everything.

Centralization of production is a good thing.

not if it's used for transportation as it is another tool for work

tools should also be private property btw

Can't tell if you're gaslighting or not with this one.

You wanna get your food from Walmart?, after it merges into Google, and after Google becomes absorbed by the government? One vitamin fortified soy pellet for you goyim.

Centralization of nothing is a good thing. Centralization just makes people fat, lazy and incompetent.

We get to keep our hammers and sickles for ourselves? Oh boy.

All transportation should be public transportation. All tools should be communally owned. Fuck private property.

Literally yes. Let all companies monopolize, and then nationalize them.

t. white collar liberals

fuck you faggot I'm not letting you use my 10mm socket, you always lose it

Yeah, it's much better for everyone to own their own 10mm socket. Who cares about efficiency? It's not like resources are limited or we are rapidly hurtling to our own deaths over economic waste produced by your egotistical demands for individual private ownership

yeah but your peabrain loses every tool given to you

that is true, do your part and kys

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I guess you'd have to live in a corporate country without many nationalised industries to fetishize them without actually experiencing their failings. The more nationalized your country is, the less competent people there are to manage those institutions. Since they're all working in the private sector (for better pay), or in other countries or both.

Private companies have problems too, sure. But regulating them isn't the rocket science people make it out to be. Over-regulate and they will leave your country, but if you hit them with harsh enough import tariifs, they will choose the lesser evil.

Services is another matter. I'm in favour of a hybrid system of having private and nationalized industries, but one that allows individuals to opt out of paying for and using services (like healthcare) if they prefer the privatized alternative. Hybrid is just better since it offers choice to everyone instead of forcing them to live under totalitarianism, and it would also provide competition between the two sectors, which might push the nationalized sector to up their game and actually provide a decent service.

Do you think tools don't get lost when they're privately owned?

Competition produces vast amounts of waste

You liberals need to kys

What is this shit? Meme socdem garbage (we need a mix of capitalism and "socialism" lmao) and complete non understanding of socialism.

yeah I actually never lose or damage my tools, nor my vehicles

ownership of the MoP should be based on how much of a brainlet you are, if you are too stupid to lose a socket or a bolt you should be left to die for being such a brainlet

The economic waste doesn't come from everyone wanting their own tool, the waste happens because planned obsolescence is a thing, tools are designed to break so you have to buy multiple tools over your lifetime rather than one good tool that lasts forever.

But I hear you cry, our glorious state can regulate those private industries that produce inferior tools, or just nationalize them. Indeed so, and then what? You produce good tools that last forever, there's no waste, but now the demand for tools is at 10% of previous, and those workers have no jobs.

So the nationalized tool production simply mimicks the privatized one, and creates shoddy tools to ensure their workers always have a job.

Running out of work to do under socialism is a good thing you retard. It means we have more time for leisure.

Like I said, you probably live in a corporate country (America) to fetishize socialism so much. You need to really experience something to understand it, rather than just read about it in books.

back to Zig Forums

Read my post again. You don't run out of work because you're always making shitty tools to create fake demand.

Or in the scenario where the state allows you to make good tools, which drives down demand, resulting in "free time". Spoiler alert, you don't get free time, your department gets downsized instead.

Hurts doesn't it? There's nothing to envy about living in a socialist country.

back to plebbit

you don't live in a socialist country tho

Couldn't see this one coming at all. And before I even state where I live no less. But by your metric there are no socialist countries. Especially not the ones that are failing.

thanks for proving me right

now just for the lulz, tell us where do you live that is "socialism"

Proving you right? I proved my own a priori assumption about you right. Your cookie cutter reply didn't even get baked in the oven first.

I think if one has the opinion that someone else doesn't live in a socialist country, without actually knowing where someone else lives, then any debate is over by that point.

so every single man and woman alive right now?

The only way it works is if you have a hive mind, or a tyrant.

There's a small handful of countries with ruling socialist/communist parties, none of which speak English or waste their time arguing for liberal economics on Zig Forums. But please, tell us about your "socialist" country.

Oh really? Name some. Then name some that aren't failing shitholes.

Please say China.

Which is why we should continue to let the capitalists' profit motive push us ever closer to climate catastrophe and an ever-increasing concentration of capital in the hands of a few literal psychopaths

Hmm, I think you're confusing capitalists with corporatists. Not really surprising though.

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Hmm, I think you think that there's any real difference between the two in the real world. The notion of a perfect market that's independent from political forces is a convenient fiction for neoclassical economists or delusional libertarians. Such a market have never, and will never, exist in real life.

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You can be a poor capitalist, but you can't really be a poor corporatist.

Also, you can be a socialist and be the CEO of the worst company in America, and make billions of dollars by any means necessary, but that doesn't make you a capitalist.

...

Maybe you should start by explaining what you mean by "corporatist", "corporatism", "capitalism" and "capitalist", because I don't understand what you're trying to say at all.