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PeonForHer -> RE: Indoctrination (12/1/2012 3:55:27 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: meatcleaver
quote:
ORIGINAL: vincentML
Oh please. A textbook definition. There is regulated, social capitalism and there is the cruelty of laissez-faire capitalism.
You might also have a look at the Tennessee Valley Authority which owns and controls a significant amount of electric power production, established by FDR in 1935. As far as I know the Hoover Dam is also a state owned electric power production facility. So, are you tied to an all-or-nothing-at-all textbook definition?
Additionally, one might argue that corporate income taxes and property taxes give governments ownership stakes in production facilities.
What other definition do you want? If everyone makes up their own subjective definition, words become meaningless as do any debate.
The question is who controls capital and who profits from it and who gets exploited. I think Woody Guthrie put his finger on who was getting exploited and in whose favour the state skewed the economy in.
I think I see where you're coming from, MC. You're right that definitions can get so watered-down that they end up useless. Sometimes it helps to focus on the nuances, other times it helps to do exactly the opposite. The end point is always, of course, to avoid any discussion ending up in BS.
For me, though, and on this board particularly, I find myself qualifying terms like 'capitalism' quite frequently because there's a predominance of American political culture. For example, I asked, once, 'What do you understand by the term "social democracy"' - and the most common response was 'Eh? What's that?' (or similar). It's come to appear to me that amongst righties in the USA, especially, there's only capitalism, in the neo-liberal sense - and everything else is socialism/communism. And that 'socialism/communism' is how I've frequently seen it expressed. There's no difference between the two terms. You talk about state ownership, or control, in *any way at all* (beyond control of armed forces and the police, natch), and someone will raise the spectre of Bolshevism or even of Stalin, instantly. It really has been that crude, here.
I should say: I've taught politics, here in Britain. I've had American students - a few, even, with good first degrees in the social sciences. They've uniformly had trouble with what most Europeans would think of as absolute basics - like, for instance, what 'conservative' means in the sense of the UK Conservative Party; what 'liberal' means . . . and so on. It's odd.
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