Billionaire Leon Cooperman was on the verge of tears while speaking about his concern about “the lefties” and their progressive outlook on capitalism.
“I’ve lived the American dream. I’m trying to convince people like [Senators] Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and AOC (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)—don’t move away from capitalism. Capitalism is the best system,” Cooperman said on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Friday while holding back tears. “I get choked up when I talk about it because basically, my father came to America at the age of 12 as a plumber’s apprentice. No education.”
“I went to public school in the Bronx, high school in the Bronx, college in the Bronx. I started my career in Wall Street the day after I got my MBA from Columbia. I had no money. I couldn’t afford a vacation. I made a lot of money. I’m giving it all back,” Cooperman said before co-anchor Rebecca Quick stepped in as he choked up.
“Giving it all back?” Give me a fucking break, asshole.
Unfortunately I live in a country where “social wages” and an actual wage freeze were later used to suppress labour actions, and then retracted anyway. There’s a homeless crisis and mental illness suicide pandemic now. Oh yeah and Canada is euthanising “lost cause” disabled people, and Sweden let COVID cull off some of the elderly population…
Social safety nets can always be retracted. Social liberalism has run its course as a viable strategy, much like vanguardism (which is what people mean when they think of “communism”). We need perdurable systems, and as far as I’m concerned, confederalist systems are the only empirically successful systems, although even then it’s hit or miss; see the collapse of syndicalism in Catalunya due to socialist infighting.
Anyway I’m a Bookchinite and currently making peace with the idea I may not live to see 2024, so that’s my context.
Say what you will, but the countries with a good balance of socialist and capitalist policies are still on the top of every list, from happiness to life expectancy, to income equality to health to education, etc.
You can say what you want about Canada and Sweden, but when compared to the US’ far more “anarchist” approach, both have far longer life spans and higher rates of health than the US does.
As you use very ambiguous terms like Bookchinite, and confederalist which are open to massive amounts of interpretation, it’s not really clear what you are proposing (government is a form of confederation, after all). But I suppose you are hinting at being a Libertarian Socialist. It’s a view which I am very sympathetic to, but one in which the upheaval needed to implement would end us up back at some form of fascism, similar to the previous attempts at communism. I would love to see such a system someday, but I think the only way it could ever come about is by starting from social democracy and gradually working towards it. It could likely take centuries.
Social democracy is the best system we have managed to date by just about any yardstick we have for measurement. That’s not to say it’s perfect, I can imagine many types of organizational systems which could be considered far superior should we actually be able to implement them correctly, but unfortunatley human nature is a massive blocking point to so many things, and the tendency is always towards some form of fascism if things become unstable. So IMO, we have to first get as much of the world onto the “Scandanavian model” of stable social democracy with good rule of law, and then work from that point of stability to something even better (I’m a fan of UBI personally as it’s far easier to implement than any sort of system which gets rid of property rights and achieves much the same thing when widely implemented).
Sorry if my tone isn’t exactly right. You have my unconditional respect. I’m learning that I’m just not always a clear communicator, sometimes I get fired up and sound harsher than what I mean, etc.
I think this is actually a major mental blinder put in by the supposed “evidentiary basis” of modern neoliberalism. If you’re receptive to philosophy, I think you might like Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”. And then following from that, statistics mean nothing to the worst off in society. I’m currently fighting Australia’s health system for my human rights, why does it matter to me or people like me that statistics say Australia is doing okay? If I die, then what? What value are statistics to my corpse, and all the others who have been killed before me?
I think it’s also important to distinguish “social liberalism” from “socialism”. This is another instance of tricky words that have distorted people’s understanding of history and the trajectory of societies in crisis. Fifty years ago, what you are calling “socialist policies” were just liberalism, social liberalism in particular. This authoritarian meatgrinder we live in is also liberalism, albeit the neoliberal strain.
Socialism isn’t when you have your rights accepted and provided for, it’s the destratification of society along lines of resource ownership. Also, as an anarchist-adjacent I would say a further goal is the collective custodianship of the natural world and the proliferation of a culture of symbiosis and egalitarianism :) (but that’s me).
I don’t mean this as a slight, but I’m very sick and don’t have much energy, so I’ll just make some other offtopic remarks related to what you said, if you’re interested in personal research:
“Confederalist” is different from “federalist”. For instance, Catalunyan syndicalists were federated, in a confederalist system. The Kingdom of Spain is a Federalist system of government–and one that has very recently blocked Catalunyan autonomy. Also, the Fediverse is “federated” but confederalist in character. But you’re right, it is ambiguous.
I say “Bookchinite” because I’m somewhere hanging around the anarchists, but I’m not totally married to anarchism, and there are anarchist tendencies that I have mutual antagonism with; much like Marxists I’ll never be friends with. I’ll take whatever I can get so there is less horrific evil in the world. Social liberals, social democrats, Marxists, anarchists, whatever. Bookchin’s post-anarchist writings are the most aligned with my beliefs, values, and personal context.
I just have a dim view of liberalism as a durable and stable system with the way the world has turned out. Same way I think vanguardists are misguided.
You have such a limited understanding of everything you profess to know about. It’s disheartening. Read Marx. Read Kropotkin. Read Lenin. Read Mao. These people aren’t the demons capitalist want you to see them as. They weren’t perfect either. But reading The NY Times, Washington Post, Forbes, and Wall Street Journal aren’t gonna give you the full understanding of economics. Socialism can work, but capitalism won’t let it.
Read my post. I never made any of them out to be demons. I’m pretty far left on the spectrum myself.
My only argument with any of those philosophies is that they are so hard to implement in the world that we live in. That if we try, I don’t believe we will end up anywhere near what they wanted, and that we will end with something a lot worse than what we have now, something much more like fascism.
History bears this out pretty well. Now I know you will say “but those weren’t real Marxist Leninist implementations”. No, but they espoused to be in the beginning and degraded into something pretty close to fascism.
That is my concern. Not that I think the original ideas are evil incarnate.