I'm studying politics in Sheffield, England..lve been discussing and trying to find out about the labour movement and socialist ideas for a while. I'm tempted to get involved in my local socialist party branch as I largely empathise with their campaigns, but I'm unsure about actually working to bring about a socialist society under a planned economy.
On every leftist party website, their aims and beliefs are always bound with heavy rhetoric and don't deal with the intellectual challenges pointed at marxist theory, so I don't find that too helpful...
I try to discuss with different people different ideas... my brother for instance goes on about the stagnation of human prosperity under command economy, my militant socialist friend about increasing production through unalienated labour under democratically owned industry etc. But neither brings me that close to making up my own mind
I thought It might be useful to get hold of books that outline the 3 main economic models (keynes, hayek, marx) and in turn criticise one another.
Could anyone recommend any such books, and any other loosely related texts to enrich my understanding? Works from across the political spectrum are welcome
Thanks!
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Adam Smith, the godfather of capitalism, disapproved of what he called joint stock companies.
A joint stock company is what we now call a corporation.
In 1886 the US Supreme Court decided that a corporation was a "person" in a case involving Santa Clara county and a railroad.
A corporation with tens of thousands of stock holders where no one owns even 1% of the stock is not private ownership. It is collective ownership. Communism for the wealthy.
Karl Marx died in 1883. Adam Smith died in 1790. Neither of them knew about corporations being persons.
What did Marx say about the effect of planned obsolescence on the Gross National Product? The concept of GNP was developed in the 1930's. Keynes and all that depressing crap. The term planned obsolescence was coined in 1940. Keynes died in 1946 and had to deal with managing the British WWII economy before his death. As far as I know he never said anything about planned obsolescence.
We now have computers coming out of our ears and robots running around on Mars so why waste time debating obsolescent economic ideas.
The so called capitalists want the workers to be dumb consumers so they don't want them to know accounting because they might start thinking like capitalists. The so called communists and socialists have the same motive. People understanding things and thinking for themselves are a threat to morons on ego power trips.
Capitalism is garbage based on a lie and communism is trash based on a delusion.
BOOKS:
THE AFFLUENT SOCIETY by John Kenneth Galbraith
THE SCREWING OF THE AVERAGE MAN by David Hapgood
THE HIDDEN PERSUADERS & THE WASTE MAKERS by Vance Packard
YOUR MONEY OR YOUR LIFE by Joe Dominguez
Dal Timgar
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