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John Roemer, "What is Twenty-First-Century Socialism?" (2020)
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Jeffrey Rubard
Apr 14, 2023, 3:56:50 PM4/14/23
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What Is Twenty-First-Century Socialism?
Feb 11, 2020
JOHN E. ROEMER
The failures of communism in the twentieth century were an indictment not of socialism but of autocracy and central planning. After four decades of Gilded Age-style capitalism, it is time to give cooperative production and egalitarian distribution another try, this time through a democratic "sharing economy."
NEW HAVEN – Socialism is back on the political agenda in the United States. Two household names on the American left, US Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are self-declared socialists. And most of the current crop of Democratic Party presidential candidates support policies that many call socialist – single-payer health insurance, guaranteed employment, massive infrastructural investment, universal pre-school, and state-financed tertiary education. Moreover, around half of younger Americans tell pollsters that they prefer socialism to capitalism (though what they have in mind is more akin to social democracy than socialist central planning).
Socialism can be thought of as consisting of three linked pillars: 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.
DEFINING SOCIALISM
The behavioral ethos of socialism is cooperation. Citizens of a socialist society should recognize that they are engaged in a cooperative enterprise to transform nature in order to improve the lives of all. A socialist society’s distributive ethic is one that favors pervasive equality of opportunity.
The philosopher John Rawls argued that no one deserves to benefit or suffer by dint of the resources they are assigned in the “birth lottery.” These resources include not only the wealth of the family into which a child is born, but all the possible advantages that accrue to a person by virtue of birth, including a fortunate endowment of inborn traits.
This view does not imply that socialists advocate genetic engineering, only that those with more fortunate endowments (both material and genetic) do not deserve to receive higher incomes than those who are less fortunate. Equality of opportunity requires compensating those who suffered bad luck in the birth lottery with substantial education and training.
To that end, the property relations of socialism are meant to implement pervasive equality of opportunity, so far as this is possible in a market economy, and to reflect the cooperative ethos of economic behavior. Large firms (although not small ones) would not have owners to whom profits accrue. Rather, the entire income of firms would be distributed to those who contribute production inputs of labor and capital.
GOING IT ALONE
It is useful to contrast these socialist pillars with the analogous pillars of capitalism. The behavioral ethos of capitalism is individualism: economic activity is characterized as the struggle of each person against all other persons and nature. The distributive ethic of capitalism is laissez-faire: it is right and admirable for individuals to prosper materially without limit, as long as they do not interfere with the opportunity of others to likewise. Children may rightly gain by virtue of everything they receive in the birth lottery, and others may duly suffer by sheer bad luck. Freedom of contract is paramount, even if its consequences are to impede equality of opportunity (as inheritance of vast wealth surely does). Property relations in firms are private: individuals own firms, and their profits accrue to the owners after the costs of production are met, including the payment of wages to labor and rent or interest to investors.
The contrast between the behavioral ethos of socialism and that of capitalism was smartly summarized by Benjamin Franklin, although in a different context. “We must all hang together,” he told colonial delegates at the height of the American Revolution, “or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” Of course, the parallel between Franklin’s pithy statement of the necessity of cooperation and the contrast between socialism and capitalism is imperfect. Under capitalism, some rugged individuals really will succeed dramatically. Yet many more will fail in the competitive brawl, owing largely to the fact that they were not equally placed at the starting gate.
To be sure, in the post-World War II period, many came to believe that capitalism had entered a more benign phase. According to Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley, between 1946 and 1980 – encompassing the period the French call the Trente Glorieuses – real (inflation-adjusted) GDP almost doubled in the United States, and the benefits of this growth were distributed relatively equally. The income of those in the bottom half of the income distribution doubled (an increase of 102%), while the income of those in the top 1% increased by 47%.
But now consider what followed this period. Between 1980 and 2014, real growth was decidedly weaker. Total income grew by just 61%, and the income of those in the bottom half increased by a measly 1%. But the income of those in the top 1% tripled! It is obvious why we remember the Trente Glorieuses as being so benign.
PAST EXPERIMENTS
As for socialist variants, the most obvious is social democracy, the approach implicitly advocated by Sanders and US Senator Elizabeth Warren. Under social democracy, property relations remain capitalist, but there is substantial income and wealth taxation, to finance social insurance of various kinds and investments in people and public goods.
The principal examples of contemporary social democracy are the Nordic countries. Although these countries collect approximately half of their gross national product in taxes (primarily on income and value added), almost all their large firms are private corporations, owned predominantly by rich households. Still, the richest Nordic households are not as wealthy as their American counterparts: in Sweden, the top 1% owns 21% of the country’s wealth, while in the US, it owns 42%.
Moreover, income distribution in the Nordic countries is far more equal than in the US. In 2014, the top 10% of US households received 47% of total income, while the bottom half received 20%. In other words, the average household in the top decile took home 12 times more than the average household in the bottom half, before taxes.
But social democracy is only one variant of what socialism might mean today. The twentieth-century variant of socialism – what was practiced in China until 1979 and in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe until a decade later – combined political autocracy and central allocation of resources and commodities, with only a limited role for the market. These two features account for the eventual failure of those systems.
To be sure, autocracy and central command were reasonably effective in the Soviet Union in pulling the economy out of its semi-feudal state in the 1920s and 1930s, when the key economic task was moving semi-employed peasants from the countryside to urban factories. Indeed, rapid industrialization in this period accounts for the Soviet Union’s successful repulsion of Hitler’s invasion. But autocracy and fear of markets became tight fetters on economic growth when the subtler problem of technological innovation became the key to progress in the last third of the twentieth century.1
A NEW MODEL
What, then, can socialism mean, if not social democracy or central planning? Consider a system of property relations in which large firms are not owned by private equity holders, but rather by those who contribute inputs– labor and capital – for production.
Under capitalism, after workers and investors are paid wages and interest for their contributions to production, what remains – profit – is either distributed to owners (as dividends) or remains in the firm’s bank account (as property of the owners). By contrast, in what I call a sharing economy, markets would continue to allocate resources, and firms would continue to maximize profits, but workers and investors would receive the entire revenue of the firm. After paying the market price of labor (the wage) to workers and the price of capital (the rent/interest rate) to investors, profits would be distributed to workers and investors in proportion to their contributions to the firm.
Under this variant of socialism, the entire product of large firms would thus be allocated to those who contribute to production. There would be no class of non-contributing shareholders, nor would there be a stock market through which ownership in firms could be traded. Large firms would effectively be owned by those who directly contribute the factors of production.
Paying investors for their contributions to production might strike some socialists as contradicting Karl Marx’s view that, under socialism, income should be distributed entirely to workers. Marx’s view was appropriate in Britain in 1850, when essentially all financial wealth was owned by the richest few centiles of the citizenry, who mainly had acquired their wealth as landed aristocrats. Today, however, 56% of financial wealth in America is owned by the middle and upper-middle classes (the 50th-99th percentiles), and the amount of capital invested per worker in the American corporate sector is over $400,000.
Thus, any form of democratic socialism now or in the future must induce citizens to invest their wealth as well as their labor profitably. The obscene wealth of those at the very top should be taxed away: the top 1% today own 42% of American financial wealth. But the wealth of today’s middle class is not all “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” as Marx wrote of capital accumulation in early-capitalist Britain, and it must not be expropriated.
EFFICIENT SHARING
One of the principal advertisements for the capitalist economic mechanism – markets plus competition plus private ownership of firms – is that, under somewhat idealized conditions, it delivers a “Pareto efficient” allocation of commodities and resources. No resources are being wasted or squandered, because it is impossible to find another allocation that improves one person’s welfare unless some other person’s welfare is decreased. But the same is true of a sharing economy. Indeed, Pareto efficiency follows directly from the socialist cooperative ethos. As anticipated in Franklin’s quip, “hanging together” gives workers and investors a precise recipe for making economic decisions.
By my calculation, in a sharing economy, taxing and redistributing the wealth that the top 5% holds in excess of the bottom 95% would reduce the average income of a household in the top decile to around 5.4 times that of an average household in the bottom half – which is roughly the ratio in Sweden today. And this scenario considers just a wealth tax, not further redistribution through income and value-added taxation.
A sharing economy has important advantages over social democracy, starting with the fact that a class of non-productive owners would cease to exist. The distribution of the entire income of large firms (most of which are currently held in the corporate form) to those who contribute the factors of production would enhance the ethos of cooperation that is central to socialism. Of course, there would still be a need for a welfare state to provide temporary social insurance and to support those who cannot work.
Skeptics will argue that it is utopian to postulate a society in which workers and investors are motivated by a desire to cooperate. But this wrongly assumes that “going it alone” is human nature. In fact, evolutionary psychologists now argue that the capacity for cooperation is the principal feature of homo sapiens that explains our economic success. Ten thousand years ago, the largest human society in which peace flourished was the band, consisting of at most several hundred people. The modal form of interaction between such bands was war, which took the lives of 25-50% of all men. Today, generally peaceful societies comprising millions, hundreds of millions, or even more than one billion people are now the norm. In Europe, the death rate from homicide and war has fallen to one in 100,000. What more evidence do we need for the innate human capacity for cooperation?
SOCIALISM IN PRACTICE
The question, then, is how a country can move from capitalism to the kind of sharing economy I have outlined. In Europe, quite a few countries have already included workers and other stakeholders on corporate boards. This is a first step. Equally important is wealth taxation, especially on billionaires, so that the top 1% of households do not own over 40% of financial assets. At most, this cohort should not own more than 10% of a country’s financial wealth. As for the distribution of corporate income entirely to those who contribute labor and capital to the firm, there is no technological hurdle standing in the way. Corporate law would have to be changed.
Wouldn’t the economy suffer from the gradual disappearance of the stock market? Not according to thoughtful economists like John Maynard Keynes, who likened stock exchanges to a casino, or former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker, who quipped in 2009 that the most important financial innovation of the previous years was the ATM. After all, firms would continue to maximize profits. But in the absence of a small class of equity holders whose income depends largely on profits, the choices made by corporate boards would change for the better, just as firms today that include non-owner stakeholders pay more attention to the negative externalities of unmitigated profiteering.
Finally, on the question of whether we can easily replace the individualist ethos with a cooperative one, to point out that millennia of history attest to our species’ cooperative capacity does not settle the matter. One also must understand why so many people accept cutthroat competition as if it were some sort of physical law: fostering the ethos of individualism is and always has been a primary ideological task of the capitalist class.
That class and its spokespeople have been remarkably successful in altering public consciousness, such that we have forgotten the relatively more cooperative society of the postwar era. The reversal was engineered in no small part by charismatic politicians like US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and by a financially beholden press. Individualism and consumerism have been fostered through the media, while trade unions – cooperative institutions par excellence – have been smashed.
In 1949, Albert Einstein described socialism as mankind’s attempt to advance beyond the predatory phase of human development. In many cases, the socialist experiments of the twentieth century were just that. The recent rekindling of interest in socialism in America indicates that a new generation – one that hardly recalls those experiments – is looking for an attractive alternative to our new Gilded Age and its attendant pathologies. They should look to the sharing economy. 1
Feb 11, 2020
JOHN E. ROEMER
The failures of communism in the twentieth century were an indictment not of socialism but of autocracy and central planning. After four decades of Gilded Age-style capitalism, it is time to give cooperative production and egalitarian distribution another try, this time through a democratic "sharing economy."
NEW HAVEN – Socialism is back on the political agenda in the United States. Two household names on the American left, US Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are self-declared socialists. And most of the current crop of Democratic Party presidential candidates support policies that many call socialist – single-payer health insurance, guaranteed employment, massive infrastructural investment, universal pre-school, and state-financed tertiary education. Moreover, around half of younger Americans tell pollsters that they prefer socialism to capitalism (though what they have in mind is more akin to social democracy than socialist central planning).
Socialism can be thought of as consisting of three linked pillars: 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.
DEFINING SOCIALISM
The behavioral ethos of socialism is cooperation. Citizens of a socialist society should recognize that they are engaged in a cooperative enterprise to transform nature in order to improve the lives of all. A socialist society’s distributive ethic is one that favors pervasive equality of opportunity.
The philosopher John Rawls argued that no one deserves to benefit or suffer by dint of the resources they are assigned in the “birth lottery.” These resources include not only the wealth of the family into which a child is born, but all the possible advantages that accrue to a person by virtue of birth, including a fortunate endowment of inborn traits.
This view does not imply that socialists advocate genetic engineering, only that those with more fortunate endowments (both material and genetic) do not deserve to receive higher incomes than those who are less fortunate. Equality of opportunity requires compensating those who suffered bad luck in the birth lottery with substantial education and training.
To that end, the property relations of socialism are meant to implement pervasive equality of opportunity, so far as this is possible in a market economy, and to reflect the cooperative ethos of economic behavior. Large firms (although not small ones) would not have owners to whom profits accrue. Rather, the entire income of firms would be distributed to those who contribute production inputs of labor and capital.
GOING IT ALONE
It is useful to contrast these socialist pillars with the analogous pillars of capitalism. The behavioral ethos of capitalism is individualism: economic activity is characterized as the struggle of each person against all other persons and nature. The distributive ethic of capitalism is laissez-faire: it is right and admirable for individuals to prosper materially without limit, as long as they do not interfere with the opportunity of others to likewise. Children may rightly gain by virtue of everything they receive in the birth lottery, and others may duly suffer by sheer bad luck. Freedom of contract is paramount, even if its consequences are to impede equality of opportunity (as inheritance of vast wealth surely does). Property relations in firms are private: individuals own firms, and their profits accrue to the owners after the costs of production are met, including the payment of wages to labor and rent or interest to investors.
The contrast between the behavioral ethos of socialism and that of capitalism was smartly summarized by Benjamin Franklin, although in a different context. “We must all hang together,” he told colonial delegates at the height of the American Revolution, “or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.” Of course, the parallel between Franklin’s pithy statement of the necessity of cooperation and the contrast between socialism and capitalism is imperfect. Under capitalism, some rugged individuals really will succeed dramatically. Yet many more will fail in the competitive brawl, owing largely to the fact that they were not equally placed at the starting gate.
To be sure, in the post-World War II period, many came to believe that capitalism had entered a more benign phase. According to Thomas Piketty of the Paris School of Economics and Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman of the University of California, Berkeley, between 1946 and 1980 – encompassing the period the French call the Trente Glorieuses – real (inflation-adjusted) GDP almost doubled in the United States, and the benefits of this growth were distributed relatively equally. The income of those in the bottom half of the income distribution doubled (an increase of 102%), while the income of those in the top 1% increased by 47%.
But now consider what followed this period. Between 1980 and 2014, real growth was decidedly weaker. Total income grew by just 61%, and the income of those in the bottom half increased by a measly 1%. But the income of those in the top 1% tripled! It is obvious why we remember the Trente Glorieuses as being so benign.
PAST EXPERIMENTS
As for socialist variants, the most obvious is social democracy, the approach implicitly advocated by Sanders and US Senator Elizabeth Warren. Under social democracy, property relations remain capitalist, but there is substantial income and wealth taxation, to finance social insurance of various kinds and investments in people and public goods.
The principal examples of contemporary social democracy are the Nordic countries. Although these countries collect approximately half of their gross national product in taxes (primarily on income and value added), almost all their large firms are private corporations, owned predominantly by rich households. Still, the richest Nordic households are not as wealthy as their American counterparts: in Sweden, the top 1% owns 21% of the country’s wealth, while in the US, it owns 42%.
Moreover, income distribution in the Nordic countries is far more equal than in the US. In 2014, the top 10% of US households received 47% of total income, while the bottom half received 20%. In other words, the average household in the top decile took home 12 times more than the average household in the bottom half, before taxes.
But social democracy is only one variant of what socialism might mean today. The twentieth-century variant of socialism – what was practiced in China until 1979 and in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe until a decade later – combined political autocracy and central allocation of resources and commodities, with only a limited role for the market. These two features account for the eventual failure of those systems.
To be sure, autocracy and central command were reasonably effective in the Soviet Union in pulling the economy out of its semi-feudal state in the 1920s and 1930s, when the key economic task was moving semi-employed peasants from the countryside to urban factories. Indeed, rapid industrialization in this period accounts for the Soviet Union’s successful repulsion of Hitler’s invasion. But autocracy and fear of markets became tight fetters on economic growth when the subtler problem of technological innovation became the key to progress in the last third of the twentieth century.1
A NEW MODEL
What, then, can socialism mean, if not social democracy or central planning? Consider a system of property relations in which large firms are not owned by private equity holders, but rather by those who contribute inputs– labor and capital – for production.
Under capitalism, after workers and investors are paid wages and interest for their contributions to production, what remains – profit – is either distributed to owners (as dividends) or remains in the firm’s bank account (as property of the owners). By contrast, in what I call a sharing economy, markets would continue to allocate resources, and firms would continue to maximize profits, but workers and investors would receive the entire revenue of the firm. After paying the market price of labor (the wage) to workers and the price of capital (the rent/interest rate) to investors, profits would be distributed to workers and investors in proportion to their contributions to the firm.
Under this variant of socialism, the entire product of large firms would thus be allocated to those who contribute to production. There would be no class of non-contributing shareholders, nor would there be a stock market through which ownership in firms could be traded. Large firms would effectively be owned by those who directly contribute the factors of production.
Paying investors for their contributions to production might strike some socialists as contradicting Karl Marx’s view that, under socialism, income should be distributed entirely to workers. Marx’s view was appropriate in Britain in 1850, when essentially all financial wealth was owned by the richest few centiles of the citizenry, who mainly had acquired their wealth as landed aristocrats. Today, however, 56% of financial wealth in America is owned by the middle and upper-middle classes (the 50th-99th percentiles), and the amount of capital invested per worker in the American corporate sector is over $400,000.
Thus, any form of democratic socialism now or in the future must induce citizens to invest their wealth as well as their labor profitably. The obscene wealth of those at the very top should be taxed away: the top 1% today own 42% of American financial wealth. But the wealth of today’s middle class is not all “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt,” as Marx wrote of capital accumulation in early-capitalist Britain, and it must not be expropriated.
EFFICIENT SHARING
One of the principal advertisements for the capitalist economic mechanism – markets plus competition plus private ownership of firms – is that, under somewhat idealized conditions, it delivers a “Pareto efficient” allocation of commodities and resources. No resources are being wasted or squandered, because it is impossible to find another allocation that improves one person’s welfare unless some other person’s welfare is decreased. But the same is true of a sharing economy. Indeed, Pareto efficiency follows directly from the socialist cooperative ethos. As anticipated in Franklin’s quip, “hanging together” gives workers and investors a precise recipe for making economic decisions.
By my calculation, in a sharing economy, taxing and redistributing the wealth that the top 5% holds in excess of the bottom 95% would reduce the average income of a household in the top decile to around 5.4 times that of an average household in the bottom half – which is roughly the ratio in Sweden today. And this scenario considers just a wealth tax, not further redistribution through income and value-added taxation.
A sharing economy has important advantages over social democracy, starting with the fact that a class of non-productive owners would cease to exist. The distribution of the entire income of large firms (most of which are currently held in the corporate form) to those who contribute the factors of production would enhance the ethos of cooperation that is central to socialism. Of course, there would still be a need for a welfare state to provide temporary social insurance and to support those who cannot work.
Skeptics will argue that it is utopian to postulate a society in which workers and investors are motivated by a desire to cooperate. But this wrongly assumes that “going it alone” is human nature. In fact, evolutionary psychologists now argue that the capacity for cooperation is the principal feature of homo sapiens that explains our economic success. Ten thousand years ago, the largest human society in which peace flourished was the band, consisting of at most several hundred people. The modal form of interaction between such bands was war, which took the lives of 25-50% of all men. Today, generally peaceful societies comprising millions, hundreds of millions, or even more than one billion people are now the norm. In Europe, the death rate from homicide and war has fallen to one in 100,000. What more evidence do we need for the innate human capacity for cooperation?
SOCIALISM IN PRACTICE
The question, then, is how a country can move from capitalism to the kind of sharing economy I have outlined. In Europe, quite a few countries have already included workers and other stakeholders on corporate boards. This is a first step. Equally important is wealth taxation, especially on billionaires, so that the top 1% of households do not own over 40% of financial assets. At most, this cohort should not own more than 10% of a country’s financial wealth. As for the distribution of corporate income entirely to those who contribute labor and capital to the firm, there is no technological hurdle standing in the way. Corporate law would have to be changed.
Wouldn’t the economy suffer from the gradual disappearance of the stock market? Not according to thoughtful economists like John Maynard Keynes, who likened stock exchanges to a casino, or former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker, who quipped in 2009 that the most important financial innovation of the previous years was the ATM. After all, firms would continue to maximize profits. But in the absence of a small class of equity holders whose income depends largely on profits, the choices made by corporate boards would change for the better, just as firms today that include non-owner stakeholders pay more attention to the negative externalities of unmitigated profiteering.
Finally, on the question of whether we can easily replace the individualist ethos with a cooperative one, to point out that millennia of history attest to our species’ cooperative capacity does not settle the matter. One also must understand why so many people accept cutthroat competition as if it were some sort of physical law: fostering the ethos of individualism is and always has been a primary ideological task of the capitalist class.
That class and its spokespeople have been remarkably successful in altering public consciousness, such that we have forgotten the relatively more cooperative society of the postwar era. The reversal was engineered in no small part by charismatic politicians like US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, and by a financially beholden press. Individualism and consumerism have been fostered through the media, while trade unions – cooperative institutions par excellence – have been smashed.
In 1949, Albert Einstein described socialism as mankind’s attempt to advance beyond the predatory phase of human development. In many cases, the socialist experiments of the twentieth century were just that. The recent rekindling of interest in socialism in America indicates that a new generation – one that hardly recalls those experiments – is looking for an attractive alternative to our new Gilded Age and its attendant pathologies. They should look to the sharing economy. 1
Jeffrey Rubard
Apr 22, 2023, 11:38:42 AM4/22/23
to
"Maybe he does a lot of roaming."
Jeffrey Rubard
Apr 26, 2023, 6:02:54 PM4/26/23
to
"Not very good-looking is what he's like, apparently."
Jeffrey Rubard
Apr 27, 2023, 11:29:48 AM4/27/23
to
"Maybe he's not as attractive today now that he's older, though."
Jeffrey Rubard
Jun 2, 2023, 11:27:11 AM6/2/23
to
Jeffrey Rubard
Jul 30, 2023, 5:53:59 PM7/30/23
to
Jeffrey Rubard
Aug 3, 2023, 12:04:43 PM8/3/23
to
Jeffrey Rubard
Aug 5, 2023, 11:28:27 AM8/5/23
to
To whom? Who would be interested in the thought?
Jeffrey Rubard
Aug 6, 2023, 11:39:17 AM8/6/23
to
Do you mean like in criminal lingo?
Jeffrey Rubard
Aug 7, 2023, 11:36:42 AM8/7/23
to
Jeffrey Rubard
Aug 7, 2023, 4:15:55 PM8/7/23
to
He didn't.
Jeffrey Rubard
Aug 8, 2023, 3:16:54 PM8/8/23
to
What, am I supposed to ask her?
"You know John Roemer's mom?"
We don't hang out.
Jeffrey Rubard
Aug 9, 2023, 12:09:27 PM8/9/23
to
Yeah, no kidding. She's alive, but I haven't seen her in ages.
Jeffrey Rubard
Aug 14, 2023, 4:39:37 PM8/14/23
to
I don't know, maybe we would hang out sometimes?
Jeffrey Rubard
Aug 18, 2023, 4:17:57 PM8/18/23
to
Jeffrey Rubard
Aug 21, 2023, 11:46:25 AM8/21/23
to
No, I really don't.
Jeffrey Rubard
Aug 26, 2023, 5:12:23 PM8/26/23
to
In the past, in the past I may have done this.
Jeffrey Rubard
Aug 27, 2023, 5:40:04 PM8/27/23
to
Perhaps she knew my mother? Anyhow...
Jeffrey Rubard
Oct 2, 2023, 11:57:56 AM10/2/23
to
I guess you'd probably be right?
Jeffrey Rubard
Oct 3, 2023, 2:25:22 PM10/3/23
to
That's not my name, sorry. Plus, I'm forty-four years old in 2023.
Jeffrey Rubard
Oct 5, 2023, 2:51:15 PM10/5/23
to
Maybe.
Jeffrey Rubard
Oct 7, 2023, 7:41:22 PM10/7/23
to
Maybe not.
"Pretty maybe not!"
That's not actually good enough probabilistic reasoning, and it shows.
Jeffrey Rubard
Oct 12, 2023, 11:36:33 AM10/12/23
to
What is the probability of it being Thursday, October 12?
"I get it."
Jeffrey Rubard
Oct 19, 2023, 5:46:48 PM10/19/23
to
Yeah, I guess I could think that. #noseriously
Jeffrey Rubard
Oct 22, 2023, 2:23:30 PM10/22/23
to
Sure, trends in the social sciences are actually away from that sort of thinking.
Jeffrey Rubard
Oct 25, 2023, 7:08:36 PM10/25/23
to
Do you suppose John Roemer might think so, too?
"I see, the 'name game'."
Jeffrey Rubard
Oct 31, 2023, 11:27:51 AM10/31/23
to
"What could that mean?"
We could figure it out, bit by bit. But I also would think the reader would already 'get' the intended meaning.
Jeffrey Rubard
Oct 31, 2023, 4:03:13 PM10/31/23
to
Jeffrey Rubard
Nov 14, 2023, 3:16:36 PM11/14/23
to
A phrase localized strictly to one part of the Eastern US. Rather, "don't remember about it".
Jeffrey Rubard
Nov 14, 2023, 5:23:05 PM11/14/23
to
Hmm?
Jeffrey Rubard
Nov 16, 2023, 11:31:03 AM11/16/23
to
"Who's he?"
A French leftist politician.
Jeffrey Rubard
Nov 17, 2023, 11:16:23 AM11/17/23
to
Mostly people think so, I guess.
"Mostly they think so?"
That's how thought works, douter.
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 2, 2023, 11:43:34 AM12/2/23
to
"Does John Roemer talk to Bernie Sanders, really?"
Not anymore. (Bernie turns out to not be a 'bro', IRL, but you can't say it.)
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 5, 2023, 3:43:40 PM12/5/23
to
It has 'untoward pragmatic effects'.
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 7, 2023, 11:33:03 AM12/7/23
to
People 'performatively contradict' themselves all the time.
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 9, 2023, 11:22:14 AM12/9/23
to
It's not 'a good idea', no.
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 10, 2023, 11:37:56 AM12/10/23
to
It's a well-explored rhetorical 'ambiguity', dude.
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 11, 2023, 11:23:19 AM12/11/23
to
Right, and according to some normal standard I *really shouldn't* have.
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 12, 2023, 11:33:08 AM12/12/23
to
Yeah, that's what would happen.
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 12, 2023, 4:46:31 PM12/12/23
to
'Contradictions multiply', so to speak.
"That doesn't sound that bad."
In a way, it isn't...
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 14, 2023, 11:44:04 AM12/14/23
to
"Do you today reject the views of John Roemer?"
No - you're still "Free to Lose"...
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 14, 2023, 11:44:46 AM12/14/23
to
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 15, 2023, 11:30:55 AM12/15/23
to
Well, maybe things are sometimes well-enough understood when they're not 'given an airing', too.
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 15, 2023, 4:46:28 PM12/15/23
to
"You know, maybe the ideas of Marx have not yet been given a..."
Are you just really a 'contrarian' investor, dude?
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 16, 2023, 11:31:08 AM12/16/23
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Maybe we should *just* talk about something else.)
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 17, 2023, 11:36:02 AM12/17/23
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And not in *Theories of Surplus-Value*?
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 19, 2023, 11:54:29 AM12/19/23
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It really amounts to "well, it's a dog-eat-dog world" - which is not what a leftist progressive would have to say to you,
were they to have anything worth saying.
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 19, 2023, 5:38:57 PM12/19/23
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Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 28, 2023, 4:45:48 PM12/28/23
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Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 29, 2023, 5:11:04 PM12/29/23
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*Jacobin* magazine, stuff like that. You've gotta stay on Earth.
"I guess you would know."
Yeah, I would.
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 30, 2023, 5:09:36 PM12/30/23
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That means something else, people demented by Fox News.
"Okay, 'Bernie bros'."
Yeah, "Bernie bros" and their more sincere dupes, you could skip them.
Jeffrey Rubard
Dec 31, 2023, 2:24:18 PM12/31/23
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Yeah, it turns out not to be much that is 'good for people'.
Jeffrey Rubard
Jan 2, 2024, 3:37:24 PMJan 2
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You don't discuss that, it 'isn't done', really.
Jeffrey Rubard
Jan 4, 2024, 11:51:05 AMJan 4
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It's 'beneath public scrutiny', it's not for discussions with strangers.
Jeffrey Rubard
Jan 5, 2024, 2:37:38 PMJan 5
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It sure looks like that, yes. #wouldbekiddingbutamnot
Jeffrey Rubard
Jan 13, 2024, 12:16:27 PMJan 13
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They're pretty much all "deepfakers", really.
Jeffrey Rubard
Jan 14, 2024, 2:28:30 PMJan 14
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Yes, not even *Theories of Surplus-Value*. #wheresmywags
Jeffrey Rubard
Jan 15, 2024, 2:17:16 PMJan 15
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There's not much in them, really.
Jeffrey Rubard
Jan 18, 2024, 11:56:19 AMJan 18
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I guess we know enough independently about its subject-matter by now.
Jeffrey Rubard
Jan 19, 2024, 11:55:45 AMJan 19
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I think other people are viewed to have written about the topics more eloquently and reasonably.
#saynotoberniebros
Jeffrey Rubard
Jan 20, 2024, 12:01:43 PMJan 20
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Do you really have that much free time?
"Haha... no."
They're not too cogent, either.
Jeffrey Rubard
Jan 22, 2024, 11:53:33 AMJan 22
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"Maybe you should read the better translations."
Maybe you shouldn't 'over-construe' things and people.
Jeffrey Rubard
Jan 22, 2024, 7:18:38 PMJan 22
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Jeffrey Rubard
Jan 26, 2024, 3:22:48 PMJan 26
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I read a German collected edition of the published works some years ago, yes.
Jeffrey Rubard
Jan 28, 2024, 6:10:09 PMJan 28
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That's the one, I think.
Jeffrey Rubard
Jan 30, 2024, 11:43:38 AMJan 30
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"Hey... no, wait... what about the *Grundrisse*?"
It's 'unreadable', as they say.
"Why do they say that?"
They don't know what else to say.
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 2, 2024, 11:30:20 AMFeb 2
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"What about *The Condition of the Working Class in England*?"
That's by Friedrich Engels, isn't it?
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 2, 2024, 3:32:24 PMFeb 2
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"As was *The Peasant War in Germany*."
I think we're boring people.
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 3, 2024, 11:42:11 AMFeb 3
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I don't think the claim is commonly disputed, no.
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 3, 2024, 4:36:56 PMFeb 3
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"What about Joseph Dietzgen?"
What about him?
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 4, 2024, 12:13:29 PMFeb 4
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I guess the answer is 'no, they don't'. #maybenotsomanypseudointellectuals
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 4, 2024, 5:02:09 PMFeb 4
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I can't remember ever reading it myself. The thing from 1859, right?
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 5, 2024, 11:55:27 AMFeb 5
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You know what... maybe you can give that 'Jacques Attali stuff' a break, really.
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 7, 2024, 2:51:19 PMFeb 7
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"Do you think Eduard Bernstein was 'Jacques Attali stuff', really?"
Eduard Bernstein? Maybe not Eduard Bernstein.
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 8, 2024, 11:25:32 AMFeb 8
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"Oh, and were we supposed to remember about Karl Kautsky too? You, with your this-is-the-21st-century stuff..."
Maybe it looked like a good idea at the time, yeah.
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 9, 2024, 4:03:05 PMFeb 9
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It's not a *joke* about Husserlian phenomenology. #lookatthepicturecloser
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 10, 2024, 4:08:18 PMFeb 10
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"Oh, are you saying Karl Marx wrote the texts of Edmund Husserl years before they were published? The genius, everybody..."
No, but Husserl had probably *read Marx very carefully*, if you know what I mean.
"I don't."
The 'Little Dictators', everybody.
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 14, 2024, 11:51:24 AMFeb 14
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"Oh, I prefer *Theories of Surplus-Value to Husserl by far."
Husserl is one of the most famous modern philosophers; basically not even Marxists think much of *Theories of Surplus-Value* as published.
"Oh, I go somewhere with it..."
To *Jacobin*-style ultraleft fakery? "Is that you, Bernie?"
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 15, 2024, 11:37:20 AMFeb 15
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"What does Husserl have to do with all of this?"
Well, did you ever ask Husserl what he thought of Marx?
"Ha ha, very funny, oh, oh..."
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 15, 2024, 3:12:01 PMFeb 15
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He really did look like Karl Kautsky the socialist politician, though. Perhaps they could have shared *some* views?
#fregeanfailforrealdept
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 16, 2024, 11:32:34 AMFeb 16
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"What about Husserl and Frege?"
I'm not about Husserl and Frege. #discretionisavirtuedept
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 17, 2024, 11:53:37 AMFeb 17
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"What about Eugene Vodolazkin? Is he some kind of 'alt-left faker', or what?"
The novelist? It's... it's hard to explain.
Jeffrey Rubard
Feb 18, 2024, 11:47:27 AMFeb 18
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"Oh. I... I've got something to do."
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