cross-posted from: https://lemy.lol/post/23035781
People who still look for or look up to a strong leader still have this feudalistic mindset, a by-product of colonialism.
They are unaware that the true rulers in a democracy are the people themselves.
The public is the King in a democracy.
The government is our servant.
We pay their salaries via taxes. We decide whether to keep them or fire them every five years.
So if you want to improve your nation. You need a strong, responsible, educated and progressive voter. The true leaders of the country. The country will only go as far as the voters demand.
So, know your right. Know your power. And if the servant tries to walk all over you and steal your power, it’s time to kick them out.
Don’t settle for less. Don’t waste your vote on communal or racial comeraderie because that’s how conmen have conned the commonwealth for thousands of years.
Don’t give up your power unconditionally because the guy has the same religion or caste as you because then they can keep looting you unconditionally.
Remember it’s your job. You have to end corruption, you have to fix inflation, you have to make sure your women are safe, you have to make sure your everyone in your family and neighbourhood is employed, you have to make sure public schools and hospitals provides the highest quality of service. And the government is the servant you delegated these jobs to.
If that servant fails to make any progress. If they have made it worse. If they have hired corrupt subordinates instead of putting them in jail. If that servant ignores sexual violence based on caste or ethnicity. If that servant fails to provide the jobs they promised. How dare that servant stole all the power from the majority and lied to them that the minorities are stealing their power. It’s time to fire that servant before he comes for your freedom.
ignores the power the bourgeoisie has over means of production and ownership of mass media
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
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If you’re talking about within the context of a capitalist state, then this is misguided. We want to abolish capitalism, not reform it. And calling for the haute bourgeoisie to be abolished and replaced with petite bourgeoisie is complete folly.
Adding on to the other comment, big business is not the problem. Big businesses are necessary for taking on large scale projects. The problem is that big businesses are controlled by the bourgeoisie, not the proletariat.
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First off, any society which replaces the bourgeoise by the proletariat is pretty much by definition more democratic than any capitalist state. And Cuba is no failed state either. Onto your main points.
It’s true that a small cooperative cannot compete against a big business. This will remain true in many industries, because large-scale production is fundamentally more efficient than small scale production. The only way around this is by making cooperatives themselves larger.
As for cronyism, that can be solved through the democratic process, but not elections. You can create democratic mechanisms to mitigate corruption, but electing a new person to exploit you every few years will do nothing
We pay their salaries via taxes.
I know very little about India’s politics or economics, but I think India has fiat monetary sovereignty. Perhaps someone here can confirm or deny. If it does, then your national taxes don’t actually pay for anything (though your local taxes do). Here’s a succinct explainer: Why The Government Has Infinite Money. The show notes have good links to further information.
It should be noted that only the US government has “infinite” money. And even then, it’s only technically true. The US government can avoid inflation from “printing money” (that’s not exactly what it does) because the dollar is the world reserve currency. When the US treasury increases the dollar supply, it effectively taxes the whole world.
And let us set aside the technicality that taxes don’t actually fund government expenditure, but only suppress inflation. The labor embodied in your taxes absolutely is necessary to fund the government. If the government employs directly 10% of the population, and another 10% of the population is employed providing services/goods to the government, then the government is effectively taxing the country at a rate of 20%. Either through direct taxes, future debt, or inflation.
It’s true that the US is in a uniquely advantageous position at the moment as the world reserve currency. Fortunately the rest of the world is beginning to ditch the dollar now and reconfigure the global system. But it’s not true that only the has US “infinite” money: every country with fiat monetary sovereignty has it.
The labor embodied in your taxes absolutely is necessary to fund the government.
In a capitalist state, the government doesn’t need to tax the proletariat at all: it can just tax the bourgeoisie (maybe also tax the very richest labor aristocrats—whatever). The state won’t do this of course, because it’s a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
If the government employs directly 10% of the population, and another 10% of the population is employed providing services/goods to the government, then the government is effectively taxing the country at a rate of 20%. Either through direct taxes, future debt, or inflation.
I don’t see it. We went over (1) tax and (3) inflation already. As for (2) “future debt”: what debt do you mean? The state essentially has no debt in its own currency, because it can simply create the money to pay it. If you don’t believe me, take it from former US Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan.
I explained this further in another lemmygrad conversation just today, which links & quotes a conversation I had about the China’s exemplary use of fiat money.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
In any industrialised economy, the expenditure of money (on real goods and services, not financial “products”) comes at the expense of the working class. It is the working class which has to spend its finite amount of time to produce consumed items.
If either the government or bourgeoise are consuming items, for whatever purpose, then that is effectively a tax on the working class. The exact mechanism through which embodied labor is transfered from the working class to these entities is irrelevant. It represents the same loss of working class living standards (unless the government is spending on public services).
When a state prints money, inflation taxes the working class by eroding the value of their savings. When a state borrows money, it is borrowing embodied labor from other countries which has to be returned at a latter date. Even if you print money to pay back the debt, the money you send out can be used by other countries to buy goods from yours. And if you don’t have enough goods to sell, you get inflation again.
Another problem with inflation is that it raises the interest rates you have to borrow on. If lenders know that you keep printing money to pay back you loans, or if your currency is just naturally inflating for some other reason, they will want higher interest rates because they don’t want the value of their loans to drop.
Money hides the real workings of the economy, and thus cam make it seem as if the physical limits to economic production and consumption do not exist. But they do, and if you try to ignore them, you will be burned hard.
I don’t have the time or energy to go into how neoclassical economics is garbage or how their theory of inflation is garbage. Marxist economist Michael Hudson can do it infinitely better than I can, anyway.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
While the sentiment is good, the understanding of how democracy should work is itself flawed. It starts and stops at voting, which is how you get corruption and inaction.
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