acargitz

I would assume these kinds of meetings are scheduled weeks or months in advance.

I guess I’m helping by articulating my understanding?

Otherwise, yes we seem to not be disagreeing.

Nobody has ever reached a point where that was actually a practical decision to make. So nobody has ever said oh yea this is enough we should stop :)

Edouard Bernstein, the first theoretical of social democracy famously said that the “the final goal of socialism is nothing, the movement is everything”. I think it’s a matter of perspective, of what you choose to care about. My most sympathetic read of this position is that actually abandoning capitalist relations is not something that you can “choose” to realistically do because capitalism is too tied up with the survival needs of people.

Well, when it comes to practice there are a few things:

• People should not be scared to call themselves socialists and still lay claim to liberal democratic bona fides. That combination is not a ruse and a fraud as the Right would like to insist but a real current in socialist thought since the beginning. The newly elected leader of the NDP here in Canada actually came out and called it recently.

• I would actually also argue that honest social democrats, can in practice be more radical than self proclaimed socialists, if in practical politics they propose and achieve deeper reforms. I’ll trade an effective Mamdani for a high falutin big mouth talking European self proclaimed socialist that does fuck all (looking at Tsipras) any day of the week. It’s easy to talk a big game and do nothing and we shouldn’t underestimate the transformative power of promising modest reform and delivering.

• It’s also important to keep reminding so called moderates eg in the Democratic Party that DSs and SDs can very much coexist in a left of centre party and that cosplaying the red scare all the time is extremely self defeating. Common ground exists.

• Finally, I would say it is also important to not cede the socialist vision to the MLs as if they are the sole and rightful owners of it. They are not, never have been, and liberal democracy is not as alien a concept to socialist thought as they pretend it to be. Political liberalism is not only reconcilable with socialism but there are very legitimate currents of Marxist thought that assert it. Nicos Poulantzas famously argued that “socialism will be democratic or it will not be at all”, asserting that institutions of representative democracy are essential for a socialist transition to avoid authoritarian state-socialism.

Yes it is very different from Leninism. But what you’re describing are still “how” elements not “what”. And to call a spade a spade, Democratic socialism and social democracy are both deeply rooted in the Marxist tradition. The former in the thought of Karl Kautsky, the latter in the thought of Eduard Bernstein.

Bernstein is exactly who Rosa Luxemburg is responding to in “Social Reform or Revolution?”. Kautsky positioned himself in the centre between Bernstein’s revisionist reformism and what he saw as Luxembourg’s adventurism. He was in fact a huge influence on Lenin himself, who considered Kautsky a real authority in Marxism but disagreed on his tactical analysis and ultimately he ended up rejecting it.

Long story short, democratic socialism is not external to the body of Marxist thought. It played a key role in its intellectual development. For Leninists it became the anvil on which they hammered their own understanding. But since the fall of the Soviet experiment and the dengist/nationalist turn of the Chinese one, taking a serious second look at democratic socialism is, I think, the intellectually robust thing to do.

Social democracy and democratic socialism are not the same.

Social democracy, yes, is what you describe: try to regulate capitalism and make it livable via labor protections, public services and a welfare state. The end horizon is something like the Scandinavian dream.

Democratic socialism is different: the end horizon is indeed full blown socialism, with social ownership of the means of production and ultimately with abolition of capitalist relations altogether. However, for democratic socialists, the path to that horizon does not pass via revolution but via the democratic process.

In practice social-democrats and democratic-socialists end up finding it easy to agree on a political program for the here and now and so very often they coexist. Both want to reform capitalism.They just don’t agree as to how deep that reform can go. For the democratic socialists, the things social-democrats want are in fact the means towards the end result. For the social-democrats that end result is not necessary considered possible or even desirable. But the two have never won that much that their differences would actually come to a head.

Like the guy who threw a sandwich at ICE?

What I’m saying is just take the existing price, add the sales tax, add a 15% tip, and show the resulting price to the tourists. Same result, less head math for the tourists.

If you want proper wages for workers, you need unionization.

A very simple solution is for restaurants to offer a second all-inclusive version of the menu with taxes and suggested tipping included in the prices. Can’t cost more than a half hour of work and the price of ten printed pieces of paper.