sure, yes, but the money isn’t (just) coming from the domestic working class. it’s ultimately being funded by the exploitation of the 3rd world. If you, for example, take venezuela’s oil by hook and crook and give it to exxon for pennies on the dollar and forbid venezuela from operating domestic refineries, setting their economy up to be a miserable client state, then no amount of redirecting the exxon employees’ tax dollars from the military to social welfare will solve that problem, and in fact, building a society with a high standard of living atop such exploitative global relations, gives that society great incentives to at best, maintain those relations, if not continue to worsen them. It will build public support for imperialism, the MIC will be back with a vengeance next time there’s a crisis.
It’s a non-solution that only takes care of imperial core workers, and even them only in the short term. The anti-imperialism has to come first.
I feel like you’re kind of pigeon holing the argument by sayingg all money is by definition the result of exploitation.
Nobody is going to argue that ExxonMobil should be able to do that, I still don’t see why that makes taxes going towards good things instead of bad a bad thing if those taxes weren’t the result of exploitation.
Like if the argument is that it’s impossible to make money without exploiting somebody were still missing a few steps in how we go from some of the clueless capitalism the world has ever seen to an egalitarian society with no intermediate step.
Proves aren’t getting the means of production without taking them from the people whoncutrently have them and i think getting a government to enforce that redistribution is a lot more likely than them giving it up willingly or forming an insurgent labor army that doesn’t immedoatly get lut down by those well funded police forces.
all money is by definition the result of exploitation.
certainly not all, but like, a major amount of the US’ economic prosperity does come from that. In some other countries it’s an even bigger fraction, in some it’s much less.
I still don’t see why that makes taxes going towards good things instead of bad a bad thing if those taxes weren’t the result of exploitation.
That “if” is doing a lot of work here. I agree, if the US economy was free of foreign exploitation, if we traded on equal footing with other nations and did not interfere in their affairs, and weren’t coasting along benefitting from several lifetimes of doing so historically, then it wouldn’t be odious to build a welfare state on our tax dollars, and there would be no added structural incentives to start doing imperialist exploitation. But that’s a big if, and if we had a magic button (or, sufficient political power) to get rid of imperialism, we could probably do better than just social democracy.
I’m not opposed to welfare states in principle, but I’m going to be a lot more supportive of one in the periphery than the current imperial core for all the reasons I’ve been laying out.
Frankly I don’t know what the path to socialism in the imperial core will be, but it’s a lot easier to imagine it involving a transitional period in which the spoils of imperialism are lost by some outside mechanism amid declining global influence, and the nation having to make a choice between declining living standards vs maintaining capitalism, than to imagine a scenario in which the spoils of imperialism are used to build a prosperous welfare state that then abolishes the source of (a large percentage of) its own funding (aka imperialism).
And doing social democracy with taxation has nothing to do with “getting the means of production”. It’s forcing a concession, at best. But I agree that a straight up uprising in current day US is not likely to succeed (though that may change as conditions worsen).
Social democracy as practiced in the west just entrenches capitalism, and leaves the door wide open for any gains made to be clawed back. I won’t say it’s a bad thing, it helps (some) people, but it isn’t my goal, nor part of my vision for how we get to communism
If we had the political power to get rid of or reduce imperialism, a good place for the profits of that stuff to go is back to the countries we stole it from. That would just be pulling out the knife, helping them develop their own productive forces and independence would be a start at healing
