|
in countries where democratic socialist parties are significant, the objectives are usually to set up mixed economies geared around goals like full employment and/or reducing to the greatest possible extent poverty. the state is what is typically is under capitalism--a mechanism for allocating resources (in a big-ish sense)--what the state ends up doing in a mixed economy is a function of the political goals that frame it.
in other words, the only political situation in which there would be arbitrary state functions is a neo-liberal dominated one, simply because the ideology a priori excludes thinking about the state as functional and so precludes developing goals for it--except of course for military procurement, repressive functions and other such things that benefit the particular interests of the neoliberals who happen to occupy power--but as we've all seen with the bush squad trying to cope with a significant financial crisis, because neoliberals are ideologically opposed to thinking about the state as part of a functional capitalist order, they have little idea what to do when they need to address problems that go beyond killing or controlling people (police functions)...
so the main political choice concerns the overall goals that shape system regulation. the state is a mechanism for adjusting the ways in which the capitalist systems operate in the direction of those goals.
i say it this way because it's not given in advance what such a system might look like, particularly in a context where a democratic-socialist style approach is unhinged from a strong trade union movement. i'm not sure that there is traditional democratic socialism without unions, frankly. that's one reason why i do not consider obama to be one. there are alot of others, but that's one.
the reason i did not really participate in the thread as it was framed up to now is simlpy that to wonder if the us will "become socialist" is a wholesale mis-statement of what democratic socialism was and is, has done and may do.
there are very specific historical reasons for this which go back to the splitting away of reformists and revolutionaries just before world war 1--the split ended up being pretty simple, but the jist of it is that the reformists (who became the german spd) iod not think revolution was coming any time soon, so the objective became to work to make the lives of working people materially better in the short run. if you think revolution is coming soon, there's no point in that--the revolution relies on contradictions within capitalism if you like and the outcome would eradicate the problems.
so democratic socialism in general produces a variant of capitalism, not something else, not something outside or beyond capitalism.
don't believe the american conservatives on this: they have no idea what they're talking about. they're mostly about scaring the shit out of their constituency. socialism is for them just another bogeyman. it only means "something scary" really. what they attribute to it is more about the collective psychology of american conservatism than about phenomena in the world beyond that.
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|