David Harvey: The Limits of Social Democracy and of the Welfare State (2/2)

1. Wikipedia is not a good example.

2. FREE DAVID HARVEY!

3. The idea of a big state and Marxism always failed because it ends up with all the power being in the hand of some extremely violent people Stalin, Mao, Che, Kim, Xi… More than 100 Million innocent casualties, labour camps, locking people up in their state…
   Without violence, there is no way to break up the system in this way, the most violent people will automatically become the leaders of the revolution that brings the break up and after having churned up the system, turn against its own people.
   History is the only real teacher, no confused man with funny hair and funny beard.
   Labour unions, smart, maybe forced investments by people in their own work places taking power of them and a tax system that balances international trade, harmful ways of making business and slave labour are the way to go.

4. Screw you and this antiquated neo-fuedalistic class social order. Man is about to be removed from 80% of the occupations. The machines have beaten demand. The only reason money exists is to solve the issue of scarcity in the environment. Today with our technology we can meet Maslow's hierarchy of needs for every soul on the planet if we chose. All we have to do is give up this antiquated system of resource management that is doing nothing but allow all of the problems of inequality that exist to continue. Money exists to create inequality, not solve it!. http://www.resourcebasedeconomy.org

5. Not the welfare state but the subsistence state, to allow ownership of access to the resource of the state, the property of all people of the state, the state must ensure a proper state of subsistence is provided for those citizens. The State under capitalism basically allows the theft of access to the resources of the state and further the salaried enslavement of citizens by they active under threat of extremes of violence unfettered access to the states resources. To allow for ownership and capitalism, the privileges of the few, the state steals rights and enslaves the many to the few under the threat of extremes of violence.
   To morally allow for ownership the state is morally required to make subsistence payments to all citizens to make up for the denial of access to the resources of THEIR state, their right of access, their right to SURVIVE. All else in a psychopathic enslavement of the majority lie, of feeding the insatiable psychopathic and egoistic greed of the psychopaths that control capitalism and to feed the suffering of the majority to nourish the lusts of an insane minority.
   This to the extent, where now they talk of robotics as rendering citizens useless and to be condemned to work camps with a tiny minority owning the robots to create an obscene opulence for them, including their ability to abuse the bodies and minds of their victims regardless of age.

6. How much limits are there if corporations pay the same tax rate as me 30 percent no deductions and wealthy pay social security taxes on 100 percent of their income like me.
   And capital gains treated like any other income. Hmmmm

7. I don't know if there are any U.S. people in this comment section, but you live in a country where you can live and work on a socialist farm, be a worker/owner in a cooperative, live/work in a commune, work for youself, work for someone else or a company, do contract work or subcontract work, be a farmer/rancher/artisan grower, bum off the state, be a bum on the street, bust up monopolies, indict the CEO/The Board under the RICO laws, get in a ship and sail away, work for a company with generous profit sharing, start a union, fight the union, start a cottage industry movement, own a cottage industry, join a milk co-op by buying a share in the cow, go live on BLM land in your van, be a member in an electricity co-op, buy 5 acres and be self-sufficient, and you are only limited by your imagination. I would claim and participate in building your freedom while you still can and champion the individual. Screw the state AND the rich!

8. In other words there is no half way. The entire globe needs to stomp on capitalism to have a chance not falling into slavery. Bleak as fuck.

9. I hope that I'm misunderstanding David Harvey's resignation to the ideological assumptions of incrementalism. The most harmful of assumptions is that the global population will not reach detente through consensus but must rather revert to appeasement due to an inability to transcend injustice through systemic revolution. Is a realization of a mutual plurality that easily dismissed?

10. D That ‘prison jumper orange’ shirt certainly adds an extra dimension, especially against that post-mortem institutional backdrop… 😏

11. What the hell is this guy talking about…. Millions of Brits were put on the dole and sick by the welfare state and replaced with foreign workers. This greatly effected British kids… The War on The Masses by the left and right will never end because it's a Nazti world run by Nazti control freak types of various competing Nazti factions on the whole.

12. Indulge me, whilst you listen, in being oversimplistic.

    The ordering of the Polity may be one of two broad clades, with many species.

    The one is Arthashastrian, evolved from the rule of kings, martial ascendancy. This generally mellows into some social compact where the rulers acknowledge, in principle, some duty to the governed, which may be limited, or extensive. The Arthashastra counsels the Ruler to attend to the welfare of the people, the widows, the orphans, and to levy amercements upon those who neglect their duty to their dependants.

    The other is Republicanism, Fascism, if you like it.

    There is an archaic species of Republicanism, for example, the Icelandic Republic, based on an underlying culture and custom.

    Then there is the Roman Republican model, the inspiration for Fascism, where in theory the people unite to form a social compact, overthrowing the Ruler. In practice, some Patrician class or party will dominate this, imposing the general tenor of mutual duty and obligations.

    If the latter has a strong social sense, National Socialism if you like, then Welfare is a matter for the Res Publica.

    If the latter has a weak social sense, then welfare is largely a private matter. This is the Neo-liberal genus of the Republican clade.

13. would just like to follow on with some points raised.
    Progressives unconsciously following the path beaten out before them by the neoliberals. The neoliberals in their early days spoke of the 'war of ideas'. Of course in war of ideas, the defeated adopt the ideology of the victors. The tool for projecting ideas is language and vocabulary. What the neoliberals have done is flood the media with their catch phrases such as 'buying in' to an idea, policy, project, reform.
    This is the language of the market place which when placed in a democratic setting should reek of corruption.
    Neoliberals talked about the market place of policies. 'They bought into that'. We seem to have accepted, although grudgingly, that governments place the interests of private businesses over the public well being on the pretext of maintaining a strong economy.

    Replacing 'state housing' or 'council housing' with 'social housing' .Sounds similar but is fundamentally different. Social housing is the privatization of housing the poor, often by subsidizing exploitative landlords. . The concept of 'social entrepreneurs to turn social or environmental problems into a business propositions. A concept promoted by right wing think tanks.

    Another trick is for high profile people to adopt market based expressions that sound similar to concepts of public good. So the public good concept slips out of existence unnoticed. With a similar sounding name such as 'social housing,' people can speak in support of neoliberal concepts without meaning to, and without realizing how they are undermining their own cause.
    There is also a certain kudos attached to 'early adopters', so well meaning people in their exuberance to be up with the play adopt language and through that the concepts of their adversaries.
    The language of neoliberals and the concepts they disperse become frame works that capture the boundaries of discourse which deliberately stifle broader views from being considered.
    Progressives would hold a stronger position if a vocabulary, a style of presentation, and an overview is adopted that shows understanding, consideration, human and environmentally based values, so it is made absolutely clear that there is no overlap or intersection with market based concepts. So it is abundantly clear to all, that the progressives and neoliberals are different peoples, speaking different languages and in doing so expose the neoliberals as the econo-babbling outliers that they really are.
    Once you engage with them on their terms you are immediately constrained. If you are engaged in a war of ideas where words have become weaponized, choose your weapons tactically and strategically.

14. cant hear either one of them, (probably just as well

15. read- winners take all by annand g….

16. Except for the last-minute question, almost the whole of Harvey's answers were about reenacting the traditional ways the Left has been navigating within capitalism without managing to get out of it: in short, the Left is kind of trying to make capitalism better, and indeed has been inadvertently working to 'improve' it. I guess that the mistake here is not that the Left doesn't understand the role of money, capital for the system (pun obviously intended), but that it likely tries to teach the public a gradual abandonment of its use, which is a historical yet ever silly provision, to say the least, tantamount to helping one try and quit a hard drug by keeping the use of it. Unless the rules inhering in money be rigorously described, thus showing that there is no other way for it to behave than this well known very one, there is no way for getting rid of the capitalism, as the people wouldn't ever understand the links between their choice for continuing to use money and the continuously miserable state of their lives – and, I dare to say, no matter which class one belongs to.

17. How did that work out of south Africa???????????????????

18. Policies and procedures keep up down. We need to learn about money. The rich do not work for money. The poor and middle class are taught to work for it. Our school systems only teach us to be workers only!!

19. Excellent interview

20. What does he mean by the welfare state recreates ( or restores) class relations. Didn't that already exist before FDR?

21. It seems when we get into the discussion of expropriating the property of data that we get into more assassination heavy territory. Merely moving the ownership of data-extracting to the workers of that company instead of moving it to public domain is literally how anti-capitalism would work.

22. Just the worst interviewer

23. Wow, I learned a lot… Thx Mr. Harvey and The Real News

24. Ya know what a state takeover often leads to under neoliberalism? Privatization. It's very likely a short term fix, same as breaking em up. Worker owned, worker managed seems to have the best shot at not backsliding so much. But we keep waiting on politicians that will never be that brave.

25. The social democracy model is better than the current trash. Of course we must restructure beyond capitalism. We should strive and organize toward a techno socialistic society that moves humans away from working to live and toward work for species/planetary advancement

26. 'the ultimate goal of the Left must be to break up capitalist power.'

    There is no halfway.

27. Harvey says that expropriate of land by peasants in South America represented a real attack up class relations because it represented taking power (productive power and assets) away from the landed gentry. Very well, I would argue that something he would probably call a social Democractic reform in the U.S.–Medicare for All as described in Congressional bill HR 1384–does the same thing. It transfers (expropriates?) a huge stream of income, about $1.25 trillion annually, out of the hands of American private investor owned corporations, and turns that money over to a public entity. So passing that bill would in effect break the power of private insurers (one of Wall Street's biggest blocks) and relieve ordinary people of the high cost of health insurance premiums, deductibles and co-insurance, etc. Sounds like a real attack on class relations.

28. Essential and important interview with one of the world's foremost economic thinkers. Also some of the most intelligent comments on YouTube.

29. Your right about Jeremy Corbyn and thats why the ones in power will destroy him or get rid of him. They will not share, they have wealth and land and will never lose it. The future is walled communities for the wealthy and the poor will left outside fighting each other for scraps.

30. 06:54 Complete Capitalist Class Expropriation.

31. Greg looks maaaad nervous interviewing Harvey. Really important question he asked though, and, of course, a great response.

32. Neoliberal persists because it was never an experiment. It's an experiment to the extent that whales are helping Japan do science.
    And yes, the vestigial "left" has now been completely absorbed into neoliberalism. There can never be social justice without economic justice while achieving economic justice automatically increases social justice, but the left surrendered any fight for economic justice and allowed itself to be reshaped into a social justice movement which only serves to steangthen neoliberalism. It does this in 2 ways. Those social policies allowed into the Overton window are those which potentially increase the market (such as gay marriage or corporatising marijuana). Meanwhile the social justice movement divides and alienates people, driving them back to the social right, which is also even more economically right. So the political cycle is now a ratchet, a python coil, which ever tightens the grip of neoliberalism.As for the point about the welfare state having entrenched class systems. Having lived in one of the stronger welfare states of last century that sounds like complete bollocks. The welfare state was what made social mobility possible. Class barriers almost entirely disappeared here under the welfare state but quickly re-emerged with its demise.

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