We could have paid for everyone to go to college. We could have eliminated medical bankruptcy. We could have switched to renewable energy. We could have rebuilt our nation's schools. But we did this, instead.
But @davelab6 (who retweeted it): If Marx LTV is correct, then current military and police state spending can not be replaced by gov't spending on health care, education, etc. It won't work.
A "realization crisis" aka a crisis of over-accumulation means, at the moment it hits, that large portions of output can not transformed, through a process of "realization", into an expansion of the aggregate capital.
Growth becomes stalled, in over-accumulation, because continued production at capacity will just cause a deflationary spiral. Of course, throttling production back also causes a deflationary spiral. That's how such a crisis begins.
Our government responds to that crisis by buying commodities in a purely consumptive way, producing no new capital. Buying weapons and police state equipment fit that bill. Lots of output is purchased. None of it is transformed into new capital.
(Arguably, medicare and social security for only some people similarly buys without producing new capital. A retired senior, for example, is not on average a significant source of labor power.)
By way of contrast, universal healthcare, universal education, etc.: These are transformed into labor power. Borrowing more modern language, those kinds of spending are transformed into capital in the form of bodies that produce labor power. That is, bodies as capital.
Social welfare programs of that latter sort are not "unproductive spending". The opposite. They produce tremendous amounts of new capital.
If, during a realization crisis / crisis of over-accumulation the state steps in to solve a social need in a way that creates more capital, then ... over-accumulation gets, by definition, worse. The crisis is apt to worsen.
Thus, the only way to beef up those social programs would be to ALSO spend much more in non-productive ways -- so, bigger armies, more powerful stasi, etc.
The craving for "democratic socialism" in the sense social spending in the context of a capitalist state is the same thing as a craving for the authortarian, totalitarian, and militaristic aspects of the fascism / national socialism.
Furthermore, the democratic socialist craving is magical thinking even if it owns its fascistic aspects. The fascistic fix (stronger, more oppressive state, etc) postpones some precipitation from the crisis while accelerating the rate at which the magnitude of disaster grows.
That much we know for sure if we begin from the basics of LTV. There are still unknowns. Nature is increasingly helping with the destruction of capital and that is to some degree a counter-veiling tendency that helps capitalism.
1929, WWII, and 2008 show that the crises can manifest suddenly and systemically everywhere - but that capitalists can counter with extraordinary measures like world war, brutal austerity programs, regime change war, etc.
But the old liberal / progressive / democratic socialist trope that we can just blithely reprogram military spending as medicare for all (etc.) is naive as to the real movement of society. As an organizing rally call, it is a call for national socialism at best. </>
And finally RT'd his own thread with this summary:
Let me say that I think healthcare should be free. That said, what does Marx's Labor Theory of Value say about the idea of shifting, say, military spending to medicare for all. Can't we just change our priorities that way? Are we free to do that? Not necessarily:
I then asked,
Was about to reply asking 'why not' - but your following thread is a suitable explanation for me, having followed your thinking the last few years ;)
The next question is, 'what can work, then?' - and while voting in hours reduction on a ratchet makes sense, seems hopeless. So?
Well, let's talk about "electoral power". I keep thinking of doing a thread on that lately (and this won't be it) but the tl/dr of my conclusion is that "electoral power", "renter power", "homeowner power", etc. - all these categories - are grounded in a false concept of power.
The exception is "labor power": people organized as producers of labor power. (Also, since people seem to have so much anxiety about this I'll state the obvious that the category of labor power is necessarily intersectional, historic understandings notwithstanding.)
Labor power, not electoral power, is what can bring about changes like rabid reduction in working hours. Capitalists will fight that hard because if the reduction is done right, it is directly capital devaluation.
Labor power reduction must be fast enough so that it raises the organic composition of capital -- raises the ratio of constant capital to variable capital (living labor). Thus, hours reduction is accelerationist in a human way: it directly makes worse over-accumulation.
Left hours reduction is more like a ski-run to a new state of things than just a reform. It would require an ongoing, coordinated effort to reconfigure social relations to adapt to the change. Hence the need for organized labor.
I think it is pretty important to say here that by "organized labor" I do not mean simply increased union membership. Labor needs organized in areas not unionized, among the unemployed, among the lumpen, etc. (hence the intersectional aspect).
https://twitter.com/kenklippenstein/status/1039267691389968384 simply tweets 2 images of newspaper headlines:
Alex Wild (@Myrmecos) retweeted with this comment
Then I retweeted it without comment.
Then @thomas_lord replied
And finally RT'd his own thread with this summary:
I then asked,
Tom continued: