Book Review: A Future For Socialism by John Roemer

Carl N's Reviews > A Future for Socialism 

  A Future for Socialism by John E. Roemer 

Carl N's review Sep 30, 2021 · 

 edit really liked it bookshelves: politics 

 A difficult book but one that probably ought to be read and then reread by anyone serious about bringing socialism to reality. Roemer argues convincingly that socialism is not defined by the ownership or management of the factors of production but by the human freedoms it institutes, guarantees & protects, those being an ethos of economic behavior, an ethic of distributive justice, and a set of property relations that conform to the ethos and implement the ethic. 

If people behave according to the ethos, and implement the property relations, the distributive ethic should be realized. Our understanding of these three pillars evolves as history unfolds. To determine what twenty-first-century socialism is, we should identify its philosophical underpinnings, compare them with capitalism, and then present several socialist variants. 

 Roemer further argues that socialism as attempted in the past has failed for 2 primary reasons: a failure to innovate which is explained by the absence of competition, and the failure to cope efficiently with the complexities of resource allocation. His solution for this problem is twofold: the employment of modern "big data" computing systems & reliance on the signals generated by the market. 

 So to what extent does socialism affect the firm? How is the will of the public enforced? The banking industry, according to Roemer, should be completely owned and controlled by the public, the government in fact as the voice of the public. Investment comes exclusively through the banking system and thus, the will of the people is expressed, in cash! 

 There is much more & that in part explains by recommendation for in depth study. Further, Roemer is only building a hypothetical "starter" or transitional system to establish the seeds of socialism. Finally, it is appropriate to recognize that Roemer stated intention if to change the rules of the physical - nuts & bolts - system rather than depending on human nature to undergo fundamental change.

Real National Security

Rep. Mark Pocan has introduced a bill that would redirect 1.3 percent of the US military budget, or $9.6 billion, to vaccinating another 30 percent of the world’s population in the coming year. That is a good first step but will the US Congress, many of whose members are bought and paid for by the pharmaceutical industry, pony up that much? Or more – by my calculation 4% of our military budget should pay to vaccinate close to 100% of the world’s population?

 

Of course, there are other ways to achieve this, like forcing the big pharmaceutical companies to get off their patent asses and allow (no, now that I think about it – “help” would be even better) counties in the Global South to produce the vaccines. For free! They’ve already made obscene profits from the vaccine; to quote Bernie Sanders, “Enough is enough”.

 

With the US death toll over 600,000 and climbing, with the increasing possibility of further mutations, which could very well be more deadly and vaccine resistant, and with the virus devastating people in the Global South, what could be more important for national security? More and “better” drones?

 

We don’t even have to appeal to the moral obligation to our fellow human beings (although that would be a welcome relief from the extreme self-indulgence that has become an overreaching cultural norm) since it is in the interest of everyone to end this plague. NOW!  

 

And think of the good will it would produce around the world. It might even undo some of the effects of the US’s War on Terror, although I would argue that it will take a lot more than that. But as I noted in the beginning, it would be a good first step.

Actual Event from September 2017

This just happened. I could barely wait to get back to my confuser & FB to tell you about it. I went up the street for something to eat. I ordered at the counter & brought my food outside to a sidewalk table. Just then a big truck came by. It was a garbage truck & it was painted in a strange way, I guess it was camouflage paint and in big letters on the side of this garbage truck was the message "SUPPORT OUR TROOPS". The idea flashed thru my mind that maybe it would have been proper for me to rise & salute this garbage truck but it was past me before I was able to do anything. But it did cause me to think about the message on the side of the garbage truck: SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. Do I SUPPORT OUR TROOPS? Well certainly; I pay taxes & the lion's share of my taxes go to paying for the salaries, equipment, facilities, & operations of our military and I'm not even asking for a tax reduction - the opposite in fact. But do I support the role of our troops & the missions they are committed to? Well, that's more complicated. When they are protecting my person, my rights, my property & those of the men & women of my country from malign & violent forces, I'm gratitude & support personified but if the beneficiaries of their heroism are entities like Halliburton, Exxon-Mobil, Northrup-Grumman or Blackwater, not so much! And if the point is to prevent people in other countries from choosing their own governments or how to use their resources then again, not so much. In general, I prefer to show support by recommending that they be kept safe & out of harm's way. Then there's the question of do I support authoritarian, regimented & hierarchical organizations? Honestly, not very much. I wish there were fewer of them, that they had less power in the world & that they commanded the loyalties of fewer people - no more than would be absolutely necessary as a deterrent. Finally, if we must have troops & if people must serve, then I believe that ALL people should serve. I'm uncomfortable with a military composed solely of people who desire to be part of the military.

On the possibility of bipartisan legislation

 

Who said:

“Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the war on drugs.”

Who said:

“Can any policy, however high-minded, be moral if it leads to widespread corruption, imprisons so many, has so racist an effect, destroys our inner cities, wreaks havoc on misguided and vulnerable individuals and brings death and destruction to foreign countries.”

Okay, the first one is easy – it’s Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow. But the second quote might surprise you; it’s from Milton Friedman, the guru of conservative economics and neoliberalism.

Now, why am I posting this. Everyone knows that a large majority of Americans favor some decriminalization of drug use. So, here’s my proposal to Manchin and Sinema: if you truly want some bipartisan legislation, forget trying to get it on voting rights or the infrastructure plan (the Republicans will never support either) and propose bipartisan legislation on decriminalization of drug use. Then you can have your bipartisanship and follow it up with cramming voting rights and infrastructure down their throats.

It’s long past time to stop playing games and get serious about the changes we, the people, need and want.

Book Review: Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

 Very informative & entertaining, the story of the many, many people who are aging, lack a fiscal safety net, & have low incomes & net worth. They can afford neither a fixed address nor a traditional retirement. This books tells how they live. One can view it as depressing - & it is - but there is something to admire about the spirit these people exhibit. They are definitely showing resilience & fortitude in the light of a nearly impossible situation. There but by the grace of god, go any number of us & things are more likely to get worse than better in the absence of a significant political change of direction.

Invitation To The World of Blogging

 As you're probably aware, we're trying to revive & improve the blog.  I've connected with some very knowledgeable technical advice & that advice has already resulted in correcting problems we were having with reader comments - try it & see!  I'm working right now on improving the blog's automatic distributional performance.  George has been doing most if not quite all of the authoring but that is definitely not part of the plan.  We know there are other people with important things to say & we want to pull all the stops to enlist them to do some occasional authoring.  I've already sent out a few invitations.  People who were previously listed as authors will find that they are receiving invitations too.  For technical reasons, I've had to delete their previous authorizations.  So, please, let's have some volunteers!  This means you.  If you have any interest or willingness at all to do a bit of authoring, please let me know so I can add you to the authorized author list.  We want posts that are about peace, justice, & freedom issues and are inclusive as opposed to divisive.  Public health is fair game, economics is fair game, history, sociology, law, anthropology, etc. all have the potential of relevance.  Posts can be long or short, frequent or rare & on specific topics of your choice.  Reposts of relevant material are also OK.  You are also hereby encouraged to let me know who you'd like to see added to the distribution list - email addresses please.

The Times They Are A-Changin'?

"Ten years ago Occupy Wall Street introduced us to the 1%. Prior to Occupy, no mainstream legislator in Washington dared to criticize capitalism's thorough corruption of our politics, the obscene wealth gap, the laws designed by corporations, the billionaires evading taxes, and the revolving door that keeps the 1% in charge. All that changed with Occupy." from Inequality.org

While the conversation may have changed, unfortunately we have a long way to go to undo the 40+ years of neoliberalism, which has resulted in runaway inequality and the failure to address the multiple crises our country and the world face.

Is it time to Occupy Washington?

Merchants of Death

 

Almost one-half of the estimated $14 trillion that the Pentagon has spent since 9/11 has gone to private military contractors, among them Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and General Dynamics.

A report written by William Hartung, the director of the Arms and Security Program at the Center for International Policy, documents how corporations large and small have been, by far, the largest beneficiaries of the post – 9/11 surge in military spending.

“The magnitude of Pentagon spending in the wake of the 9/11 attacks was remarkable. The increase in U.S. military spending between the Fiscal Year 2002 and Fiscal Year 2003 was more than the entire military budget of any other country, including major powers like China, Russia, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France.”

These “merchants of death” have spent $2.5 billion on lobbying over the past two decades, employing, on average, over 700 lobbyists per year over the past five years. That is more than one for every member of Congress.

The US military budget has been increased year after year, no matter who is in the White House or who has a majority in Congress. It appears that Democrats and Republicans can agree on one thing, siphoning off our tax money to reward the “merchants of death”.

Did all of this money make the world a safer, better place? Did it protect Americans from the multiple crises we face today? Perhaps we should ask the families of the more than 600,000 Americans who have died of COVID and the countless number who have died deaths of despair since 9/11. Or the residents of the Gulf Coast recently devastated by Hurricane Ida (again). Or the veterans who can’t get necessary care because the VA isn’t adequately funded. Or, better yet, the tens of millions who have died or become refugees as a result of the US wars and drone strikes in the Middle East and elsewhere.

Following the carnage of WWI, in both the press and in Congress, voices were raised about the “merchants of death”. Where are they now???

Surprise, surprise

There have been no COVID-19 outbreaks in San Francisco schools since students and educators went back into classrooms on Aug. 16, where 90% of children aged 12-17 are fully vaccinated. 

Enough said!

On revising history and CRT

 

I am reposting part of a blog entry I made six years ago, because of its relevance to the attack on teaching about systemic racism, which is the real target of the rightwing nuts who are passing legislation to ban the teaching of Critical Race Theory or anything else that points to the real history of these United States with regard to those whose story has traditionally be left out of our history books, that is, anyone but rich, straight white males.

On the Revised Revision of the APUS Curriculum

The following is a short response to an article which appeared in Ed Week on the 2015 revision of the AP US curriculum guide. This revision was produced by the College Board after a barrage of criticism from the right about the 2014 revision of the curriculum. The author of the article praises the latest revision as "balanced, neutral and contextual" - ie, sanitized.

I wish to respectfully disagree with Mr. Stern who has argued that the US Advanced Placement curriculum should be revised to eliminate certain aspects of US history.  To teach history in a "balanced, neutral and contextual" manner is to rip out any real value in the study of the past (and probably to bore students to death in the process). That is precisely why the right has attacked the history taught, not only in AP classes, but in all public schools. Mr. Stern might want to "contextualize" that.

The study of history is only relevant if we can utilize it to understand the present. Those who seek to sanitize history do so because they want to control the narrative today. For example: to gloss over the immorality of slavery and to give Jefferson a pass when he writes "all men are created equal" while living off the backs of his slaves, to fail to address the why and how of the overthrow of Reconstruction, to fail to condemn the KKK (while excoriating their brothers-in-arms in Nazi Germany) gives cover to those today who continue to deny the legitimate demands of groups like BlackLivesMatter.

Speaking of "all MEN are created equal", was it merely an oversight that it didn't read "all women and men are created equal"? Nope. In fact, not only were women not considered equal in Jefferson's time, they actually experienced a well documented decline in status in the period following 1800 as a result of industrialization. Should we look at that as an unfortunate "side" effect of "progress"? Too bad ladies, but our economic development necessitates 78 cents on the dollar.

What exactly is the "balanced" approach to the exploitation of workers in the Gilded Age? How can one be "neutral" when teaching about how settlers gave blankets laced with TB to Native Americans or find justification for "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" slogan that guided policy during westward expansion.

Speaking of expansion, what exactly is the "context" of American Imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? All the other European countries (i.e., whites) were doing it?

I taught APUS History for 18 years, scored tests for the College Board for 6 of those years. In the classroom I presented what the right would consider an obviously "biased" analysis of our history with lessons for today, while at the same time emphasizing to my students that they should not accept anything that I said, that they read in the text or that they heard outside of class without thoroughly analyzing it themselves. I hope that today's teachers will do the same regardless of the tea party attacks or the College Board cave.

History does repeat, doesn't it.

AOC Rules!

 

The US War in Afghanistan is Ended - So what is our moral obligation now?

 

Excerpted from an op/ed in Common Dreams

"First, Washington needs to stop killing people. Not only in Afghanistan but in Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and in all the places where U.S. troops, CIA operatives, and U.S. mercenaries work in the shadows and kill people. It needs to stop. We all also have a moral obligation to help the refugees and displaced peoples from these conflicts, and we owe debts of compensation and reparations to the people who remain in their war-torn countries.

"Next, we have a moral obligation to challenge our nation’s assumptions and priorities. Certainly, we must challenge the regressive and misogynist acts of the Taliban and hope that the transformations of the last 20 years—in the people of Afghanistan and their relationship with the rest of the world—will lead to major changes. But that does not diminish our own obligations, rooted in recognition of the harm that U.S. actions have brought to so many innocent Afghans.

"We have to reverse the popular assumption that having the most powerful military and the biggest nuclear arsenal in the world somehow makes us a better, “exceptional” country. We have to challenge the notion that maintaining more than 800 environmentally and socially destructive military bases across the globe somehow wins us friends and allies among the world’s peoples. 

"And finally, we have to broaden the understanding that spending more on the U.S. military budget than the next 10 countries combined represents a huge part of the reason we have to struggle so hard to fund crucial social needs—from healthcare to climate to education and more.

"Many Afghans, though of course not all, agree with Mahbooba Seraj, founder of the Afghan Women’s Network, when she said the end of Washington’s long war in Afghanistan brought her “an absolute sense of relief.” For Afghans, the end of the U.S. war doesn’t mean an end of conflict and struggle. But it does mean the end of bombing of their hospitals, the end of missile strikes on wedding parties and funerals, the end of Special Forces operatives kicking down doors and killing people in their own homes. It means starting to reclaim their country.

"And maybe, just maybe, this might mean the beginning of reclaiming our country, too—for people, for the planet, for jobs, for healthcare, for education, and more. For our democracy. 

"Ending the war in Afghanistan is a start, but our movements still have a lot of work left to do."

REV. DR. WILLIAM J. BARBER II,  TOPE FOLARIN

September 11, 2021

Personal Reflections on 9/11

 

On September 11, 2001 I watched the smoke rising from the attack on the Pentagon with my students from the 3^rd floor of Montgomery Blair HS in Silver Spring, MD. As we followed the news on the TV in our room a sense of doom settled on us. Watching video of the second plane crashing into the World Trade Center left an indelible mark on all of us.

 

Little did we realize that the consequence of this tragedy would engulf us in what has become the forever war that followed. In the 20 years since 9/11, the United States has launched two wars, engaged in military conflict in dozens of countries, gutted civil liberties at home and abroad, spent more than $8 trillion, killed more than 900,000 people, engaged in torture, and imprisoned tens of thousands of people without a hint of due process.

 

Fourteen million people in Afghanistan and Iraq alone became war refugees or were internally displaced by war. Over 7,000 U.S. soldiers died in the wars, as did more than 8,000 American contractors and more than 30,000 active-duty personnel and war veterans of post-9/11 conflicts have died of suicide.

 

In the 10 years between the end of the cold war and 9/11, there had been hope that this country, and the world, would see a peace dividend; that, as the sole world superpower, the US could lead the world into a new era of peace and prosperity.

 

But instead, we were fed the “War on Terrorism”.

 

Less than two years later, as George Bush launched a war against Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with the terrorist attack on 9/11, I watched as approximately 1800 students at that same high school walked out into a cold rain and picketed for over an hour, in protest against that war. How is it that these 14–18-year-old students had a much clearer understanding than the decision makers in Washington about the insanity of a war on terrorism?

 

In a tragic sense, the terrorists won. They dealt a far greater blow to the US than they could have imagined. And it was self-inflicted.

To my unvaccinated and maskless friends, not that I have many:

 

In the 7-2 ruling handed down by the US Supreme Court in 1905 in the case of a mandated smallpox vaccination, the honorable justices declared that one man’s liberty, cannot deprive his neighbors of their own liberty — in this case by allowing the spread of disease.

Writing for the majority, Justice John Marshall Harlan noted that “real liberty for all could not exist under the operation of a principle which recognizes the right of each individual person to use his own, whether in respect of his person or his property, regardless of the injury that may be done to others.”

Put in a simpler way which you might understand:

Your rights end where my nose begins.

Winning the Hearts and Minds

From Richard (RJ) Eskow at The Zero Hour

“During the past 20 years, the United States government spent $2.26 trillion toward its war and occupation of Afghanistan … Meanwhile, it is shocking to note that there was barely any construction of infrastructure to advance basic needs during these 20 years. Afghanistan’s power company ... reports that only 35 percent of the population has access to electricity and that 70 percent of the power is imported at inflated rates.

“Half of Afghanistan lives in poverty, 14 million Afghans are food insecure, and 2 million Afghan children are severely hungry. The roaring sound of hunger was combined—during these past 20 years—with the roaring sound of bombers. This is what the occupation looked like from the ground."

So much for "nation building". This war and all the wars the US has fought since 1945 have been about maintaining US power to protect US "interests", or more accurately, the interests of the capitalist class. I'm reminded of one of the chants at antiwar demonstrations in the 1960s - it's a rich man's war, but poor men (and women) fight and die - on both sides.

Things Fall Apart - It's Time to Put Them Back Together Again

 

On last Sunday the two biggest stories in the media were the evacuations in Kabul and the super storm Ida, crashing into the Gulf Coast. After digesting the news, one might conclude that the threat posed to us by one is much greater than that posed by the other.

While this is undoubtedly true, in general, the media is pointing the finger in the wrong direction. They hype the sudden collapse of the Afghan government that the US spent 20 years trying to impose on that country (attempting to win the hearts and minds of the Afghani people by killing them) and the entirely predictable chaos that ensued, while giving short shrift to the current effects of global warming, which in the lifetime of our children will cause chaos over the entire globe that could possibly dwarf anything humans have ever experienced….

I started this post a few days ago, thinking these stories would be the most significant items for the next few days and then things would calm down. I was wrong!!!

I was in New York in the early morning hours of Sept. 2, when the skies opened up and Ida dumped almost 4 inches of water in one hour, setting an all-time record, and breaking the former record which had been set just 2 weeks earlier. Then came the SCOTUS ruling on abortion which opens the floodgates (pardon the pun) to overturning Roe. Coupled with an earlier ruling ending the moratorium on evictions during the pandemic and the failure of the Biden administration to extend the pandemic unemployment benefits (Is the pandemic over? Did I miss that story?), it appears to me that our leaders in the federal government are not up to the tasks for which they were elected.

Not to mention the fact that the most villainous drug pushers and mass murderers in our nation’s history secured personal immunity for their crimes for a pittance of their ill-gotten fortune.

“These are the time that try men’s souls”. The crises that we are facing require bold action, not tinkering around the edges. The Republicans will do anything they can to delay, obstruct and sabotage any efforts to make headway in dealing with these issues. They are no longer a political party interested in governing, they are a cult. Their goal is to prove that government does not work by keeping it from doing anything to meet peoples’ needs.

The only way forward is to marginalize them (get rid of the filibuster and expand the Supreme Court), to out organize them (2022 here we come) and eventually to consign them to the scrap heap of history.