3/5- 3/7 Philosophy of Racism and White Supremacy

Text for these classes

Charles Mills, The Racial Contract

Notes on the Philosophy of Money and Banking

Money as a Flawed Technology 

Is money a thing(commodity) or is it an agreement(IOU)?

How does the use of different kinds of money affect the moral relationships between people?

Can morality be defined economically in terms of debt, what we owe each other?

Are we ethically-obligated to pay back our debts?

Is there an essential systemic connection between monetary systems and violence?

What is usury, and is it a sin?

Is global debt peonage a justifiable result of monetary systems or an ethical abomination?

Should commercial banks have the power to issue new money?

Should the FED be nationalized?

Should there be a global debt jubilee?

Presentation on the Philosophy of Money and HR6550 Monetary Reform Bill

Distributive Justice, Property Rights and the Commons 

PH1104 / J.Good / Spring 2019 UCONN

Theories of distributive justice seek to specify what is meant by a just distribution of goods among members of society.  

A. Nozick’s Entitlement Theory of Distributive Justice

1. If the world were wholly just, the following inductive definition would exhaustively cover the subject of justice in holdings:

1. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in acquisition is entitled to that holding.

2. A person who acquires a holding in accordance with the principle of justice in transfer, from someone else entitled to the holding, is entitled to the holding. (Nozick)

2. These principles supply the basis for denying the moral permissibility of theft, fraud, enslavement, or government interference unless to rectify violations of those first two principles. Egalitarian Redistribution of Income/wealth is unjust if it violates the principles of just acquisition and transfer

B. The Wilt Chamberlin Example: “…no end-state principle of distributional patterned principle of justice can be continuously realized without continuous interference with people’s lives.”  

4. “Taxation of earnings from labor is on a par with forced labor. Some persons find this claim obviously true: taking the earnings of n hours labor is like taking n hours from the person; it is like forcing the person to work n hours for another’s purpose. Others find the claim absurd. But even these, if they object to forced labor, would oppose forcing unemployed hippies to work for the benefit of the needy. And they would also object to forcing each person to work five extra hours each week for the benefit of the needy. But a system that takes five hours' wages in taxes does not seem to them like one that forces someone to work five hours, since it offers the person forced a wider range of choice in activities than does taxation in kind with the particular labor specified. (Nozick)

5. “The man who chooses to work longer to gain an income more than sufficient for his basic needs prefers some extra goods or services to the leisure and activities he could perform during the possible nonworking hours; whereas the man who chooses not to work the extra time prefers the leisure activities to the extra goods or services he could acquire by working more. Given this, if it would be illegitimate for a tax system to seize some of a man's leisure (forced labor) for the purpose of serving the needy, how can it be legitimate for a tax system to seize some of a man's goods for that purpose? Why should we treat the man whose happiness requires certain material goods or services differently from the man whose preferences and desires make such goods unnecessary for his happiness? (Nozick)

C. What is Just Acquisition?

6 .“If past injustice has shaped present holdings in various ways, some identifiable and some not, what now, if anything, ought to be done to rectify these injustices? What obligations do the performers of injustice have toward those whose position is worse than it would have been had the injustice not been done? Or, than it would have been had compensation been paid promptly?”

7. Self-ownership allows a person the freedom to mix his or her labor with natural resources, thus converting common property into private property. Locke concludes that people need to be able to protect the resources they are using to live on, their property, and that this is a natural right, provided others are not worse off.

8. Locke’s Theory of Acquisition: “A process normally giving rise to a permanent bequeathable property right in a previously unowned thing will not do so if the position of others no longer at liberty to use the thing is thereby worsened.” 

For he that leaves as much as another can make use of, does as good as take nothing at all. Nobody could think himself injured by the drinking of another man, though he took a good draught, who had a whole river of the same water left him to quench his thirst. And the case of land and water, where there is enough of both, is perfectly the same.

— John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, Chapter V, paragraph 33

9. Examples: 

• Appropriating the only watering hole in a dessert - NOT OK
• a pharmaceutical company which owns the total supply of a life-saving drug - OK

-   a water company which buys up the water supply to sell at profit - OK

• the owner of a private island ordering a castaway off the island - NOT OK
• when .01% own all land and productive assets while the rest have to work for whatever the rich are willing to pay? Is the impoverished wage worker better off than the medieval shepherd? OK or NOT OK?

D. Peter Barnes on the Commons

By the law of nature these things are common to mankind — the air, running water, the sea, and consequently the shore of the sea. — Institutes of Justinian (535 A.D.)

10. The Commons: The sum of all we inherit together and should pass on, undiminished, to our heirs. The Romans distinguished between three types of property: res privatae, res publicae and res communes. The first consisted of things capable of being possessed by an individual or family. The second consisted of things built and set aside for public use by the state, such as public buildings and roads. The third consisted of natural things used by all, such as air, water and wild animals. 

11. KEY FUNCTIONS OF THE COMMONS

Basic sustenance - supplies everyone’s food, water, fuel and medicines.

Ultimate source -  of all natural resources and nature’s many replenishing services.

Ultimate waste sink - recycles water, oxygen, carbon and everything else we excrete, exhale and throw away.

Knowledge bank and seedbed - holds humanity’s vast store of science, art, customs and laws, seedbed of all creativity.

Communication - through shared languages that are living products of many generations.

Travel - the commons for land, sea and air travel.

Community - the village tree, the public square, Main Street, the neighborhood and the Internet.   

E. The Market and the Commons

12. The economy is divided between the market and the commons. The market encompasses private things (which we mostly manage for short-term monetary gain), while the commons comprises shared things (which we manage, or should manage, for shared long-term life enhancement). Two basic problems with the market: unsustainability and wealth inequality.

13. Privatization (or Piratization) of the Commons by corporations for the past 300 years. Internalizing profits, externalizing costs The Corporation as a machine for internalizing profits and externalizing costs 

“If you steal $10 from a man’s wallet, you’re likely to get into a fight, but if you steal billions from the commons, co-owned by him and his descendants, he may not even notice.” - Former Republican Governor of Alaska Walter Hickel

14. With one hand, corporations take valuable stuff from the commons and privatize it. With the other hand, they dump bad stuff into the commons and pay nothing. The result is profits for corporations but a steady loss for everyone else, to whom the commons belong.

15. Example of corporate piracy of the commons: The government give-away of the ownership rights to the electromagnetic spectrum: In 1995, for example, Congress decided it was time for Americans to shift from analog to digital television. This required a new set of broadcast frequencies, and Congress obligingly gave them—free of charge—to the same media companies to which it had previously given analog frequencies free of charge, despite the fact that the airwaves belong to all of us. Republican Senate leader Bob Dole opposed the giveaway. “It makes no sense,” he said, “that Congress would create a giant corporate welfare program. . . . The bottom line is that the [broadcasting] spectrum is just as much a national resource as our national forests. That means it belongs to every American equally.”  

F. Principles of Commons Management

We abuse the land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949

16. Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay, The Tragedy of the Commons argued that that all commons are self-destructive, but there are many examples of successful commons management: public libraries, blood bands, the internet, sidewalks, parks, wildlife populations managed by hunting and fishing licenses, state and community land trusts, community gardens, public funds like the Texas Permanent School Fund and Alaska Permanent Fund, open source software.  

17. ”...A Community Land Trust is a not-for-profit organization with membership open to any resident of the geographical region or bioregion where it is located. The purpose of a CLT is to create a democratic institution to hold land and to retain the use-value of the land for the benefit of the community. The effect of a CLT is to provide affordable access to land for housing, farming, small businesses, and civic projects. This effect can be achieved when a significant portion of the land in an area is held by a CLT. - Bob Swann, “Land: Challenge and Opportunity”

18. The Sky Trust model: based on the premise that the sky belongs to everyone and must be held in trust for future generations. It requires polluters to purchase emission permits from a trust representing all citizens. The trust’s income can be used for public purposes and/or rebated to citizens through equal dividends.

G. Going Forward with a Commons-based economy  

19. Strengthen common property rights (for airspeeds, watersheds, other ecosystems), overhaul management, make polluters and broadcasters pay.

20. Solving Inequality: paying dividends to owners

21. The Idea for a Social Dividend: Thomas Paine’s Proposal for a “social dividend” 

(Compensation for an individual's loss of her portion of the Commons) Beyond social security, this idea is being explored currently with the concept of Universal Basic Income, related to a negative income tax.

22. A basic income (also called basic income guarantee, citizen's income, unconditional basic income, universal basic income (UBI), basic living stipend (BLS) or universal demogrant) is typically described as a new kind of welfare regime in which all citizens (or permanent residents) of a country receive a regular, liveable and unconditional sum of money, from the government. From that follows, among other things, that there is no state requirement to work or to look for work in such a society. The payment is also, in such a pure basic income, totally independent of any other income. An unconditional income that is sufficient to meet a person's basic needs (at or above the poverty line), is called full basic income, while if it is less than that amount, it is called partial. Basic income can be implemented nationally, regionally or locally. 

23. A view of the Commons supports Marx’s socialist principle of distributive justice: “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” Minimal needs: education, healthcare, housing?

2/26 Distributive Justice, Property Rights & The Commons

Readings for Tuesday 2/26

1. Selection from Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, Utopia
2. Peter Barnes, "The State of the Commons"

Notes on Nationalism

“You know, they have a word—it sort of became old-fashioned—it’s called, ‘a nationalist.’ And I say, ‘Really, we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, OK? I’m a nationalist.”  - Donald Trump (Oct 2018 rally in Texas)

A. The difference between a nation and a state

1. A State is a sovereign political structure, a political community governed by shared laws.

A Nation is a unified social group, a people with common origins, 

2. A nation-state is a political community governed by laws that unites a people with a supposedly common ancestry. When nation-states arose out of city-states and kingdoms and empires, they explained themselves by telling stories about their origins—stories meant to suggest that everyone in, say, “the French nation” had common ancestors, when they of course did not. 

3. While many states are nations in some sense, there are many nations which are not fully sovereign states. As an example, the Native American Iroquois constitute a nation but not a state, since they do not possess the requisite political authority over their internal or external affairs.  

B. Nationalism

4. the attitude that the members of a nation have when they care about their national identity

the actions that the members of a nation take when seeking to achieve (or sustain) self-determination.

But what determines the character of a nation (common origin, ethnicity, language, religion, cultural ties)? 

How is national identity determined and who gets left out of the story?

What makes people into a “We the People”?

When is the assertion of national self-determination a valid moral call (solidarity with oppressed national groups) and when is it an immoral call for the repression of ethnic minorities?   

C. The difference between civic/liberal nationalism and ethnic/reactionary nationalism

 5. “civic” nationalism: all citizens, regardless of their cultural background, count as members of the nation, 

“ethnic” nationalism: ancestry and language determine national identity.

D. Guiseppe Mazzini as the founder of Liberal Nationalism

6. National self-determination (freedom from foreign control) as an enlightenment value next to freedom and equality. The nation as an enlightenment alternative to other other doctrines of state legitimacy, such as  theocracy, the state should be ruled in the name of God (e.g. The Vatican or the caliphate of the Islamic State or ISIS); or dynastic kingdoms, in which the state is owned and ruled by a family, as in Saudi Arabia.  

E. Adolf Hitler & Benito Mussolini as champions of ethnic nationalism: fascism

7. The German Nation as constituted by its Aryan ancestry; the “Volksgemeinschaft” - the ‘people’s community’ to be ruled by an elite blood-order; promotes nationalism based on race and ethnicity

Opposed to classical liberalism which puts the individuals first, fascist nationalism puts the state first. Fascism as totalitarian - the state “interprets, develops and potentiates the whole life of a people” (Mussolini)

Opposed to Marxist socialism since it denies human equality, denies Marx’s materialistic view of history as class struggle, denies cosmopolitanism, denies the withering away of the state.

Opposed to democracy, which assumes human equality, government by consent and majority rule; “The great mass of workers… has no understanding of any kind of ideals and we will never be able to count on winning over the workers to any considerable degree. We want an elite of the new master class who will not be motivated by any morality of pity, but who will realise clearly that they are entitled to rule because of their superior race.” (Hitler)

Opposed to Internationalism/cosmopolitanism, rather promotes nationalism based on race and ethnicity (Aryanism or white supremacy)

8. Strategies: Anti-immigration and racial purity laws, e.g. Nuremberg Laws (1935) make Jews second-class citizens (denial of voting rights), criminalizes marriage between Jews and “Aryans” and calls for harsh punishment modeled on US Jim Crow laws (poll taxes and literacy tests) racist immigration policy; Use of state violence (military, secret police, intelligence agencies) to repress dissent and keep the working class and other undesirables in a state of forced disunity, dispersion and helplessness; The Nazi SS or “Schutzstaffel” (literally ‘protection squadron’) - major paramilitary organization under Hitler for policing in general and reinforcing racial policy in particular; responsible for the genocidal killing of 5.5 to 6 millions Jews and other victims.

F. American Nationalism

9. When the United States declared its independence, in 1776, it became a state, but what made it a nation? The fiction that its people shared a common ancestry was absurd on its face; they came from all over, and, after having waged a war against Great Britain, just about the last thing they wanted to celebrate was their Britishness; The American Civil War as a struggle over two competing ideas of the nation-state. This struggle has never ended; The North won the war. But the battle between liberal and illiberal nationalism rages on, especially during the debates over the 14th and 15th Amendments, which marked a second founding of the United States on terms set by liberal ideas about the rights of citizens and the powers of nation-states—namely, birthright citizenship, equal rights, universal (male) suffrage, and legal protections for noncitizens.

G. New Right Ethnic Nationalism in the US

10. Christian heterosexual whites as endangered, the traditional nuclear family is in peril, “Western civilization” is in decline, whites need to reassert themselves; “White genocide is underway and those responsible are Jews, Muslims, leftists, and non-whites.” Multiculturalism as racist: “‘diversity’ and ‘multiculturalism’ do not ultimately enrich white lives, but rather tend to make white societies poorer, more dangerous, and finally unlivable for whites.” - George Shaw, an editor at a leading new right publishing house

Daniel Friberg’s right wing manifesto, The Real Right Returns: A Handbook for the True defends the “relatively homogenous ethnic composition of the European nations” against “uncontrolled immigration,” “sexual liberalism,” equality, feminism, mass immigration, post-colonialism, anti-racism, and LGBT interests.

H. Fredrick Douglass on a Liberal view of American Nationalism (1869)

“A Government founded upon justice, and recognizing the equal rights of all men; claiming no higher authority for existence, or sanction for its laws, than nature, reason, and the regularly ascertained will of the people; steadily refusing to put its sword and purse in the service of any religious creed or family, is a standing offense to most of the Governments of the world, and to some narrow and bigoted people among ourselves.”

I. Tension between nationalism and neoliberal globalism

Nationalism as the right of states to intervene in the market in order to defend their citizens and control the malignant effects of hyperglobalism: bringing jobs back home, supporting domestic production, limiting immigration, and raising tariffs. Such policies collide with liberal beliefs in the primacy of free trade and the free movement of people.  

J. Israel, Zionism and the Palestinian Question

Israel and Zionism versus Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice and equality. BDS upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity. Are critiques of Zionism, e.g. the BDS Movement, a form of anti-semistism?

2/21 Nationalism and Fascism

Readings for class on 2/21

1. Herzl and Hitler in Great Theories, pp. 242-253.

2. Bernard Harcourt, “How Trump Fuels the Fascist Right” 

Notes on Anarchism

Anarchism, means “without rulers,” coined by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in 1840.

What would a perfectly free life look like?

What sort of organizations (matter, technologies) would emerge if free people were unfettered to use their imagination to actually solve collective problems rather than make them worse. 

What would it take to allow our political and economic systems to become a mode of collective problem-solving rather than a mode of collective war?

A. Anarchism as a social movement focussed on the self-organization of workers 

A Boss in Heaven is the best excuse for a boss on earth, therefore if God did exist, he would have to be abolished. - Bakunin

1. A movement that aims to bring about a genuinely free society where humans only enter those kinds of relations with one another that would not have to be enforced by the constant threat of violence; that is, “they would be limited to ones that could exist without anyone having the ability, at any point, to call on armed men to show up and say ‘I don’t care what you have to say about this, shut up and do what you’re told.’”

2. Works with the basic principles of self-organization, voluntary association, mutual aid, opposition to all forms of coercion, and so is anti-state, anti-authority and anti-capitalist.

3. Mikhail Bakunin (1814 –1876) Russian anarchist, founder of collectivist anarchism. Collectivist anarchists agree with Marxists on the evils of capitalism, both calling for the abolition of social inequality and economic democracy, but critique Marx on the question of the state and the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.” 

4. Instead of a "revolutionary" government ruling the masses from above in a centralised state, an anarchist revolution would be based on a federation of communes and workers' councils. The "federative Alliance of all working men's [sic!] associations . . . [would] constitute the Commune" and so the "future social organisation must be made solely from the bottom upwards, by the free association or federation of workers, firstly in their unions, then in the communes, regions, nations and finally in a great federation, international and universal."

5. “You need to build the new society in the shell of the old.” You will never achieve the ends unless the means are themselves a model for the world you wish to create. (E.g. radical labor unions like the IWW, kibbutz movement in Israel, Gandhi’s non-violence movement, Occupy Wall Street)

B. Anarchism as a non-cynical view of human nature

Sociability is as much a law of nature as mutual struggle. If we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: "Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?" we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development and bodily organization. - Peter Kopotkin

6. Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921) Challenges the enlightenment view of human beings as self-interested individuals out for themselves; cooperation and “mutual aid’ as illustrated in nature (contrary to cynical readings of Darwin); markets and wage labor as incentivizing selfish behavior - scarce jobs and scare money creates competition where before there was cooperation; governments as pacifying individuals and making them resentful - treat people like children and they will act like children. The liberal social contract tradition as projecting capitalistic selfishness into the interpretation of nature.

C. Anarchism as Direct Democracy (horizontal organization)

“Democracy was never really invented at all. Neither does it emerge from any particular tradition. It’s not even a really a mode of government. In its essence it is just the belief that humans are fundamentally equal and ought to be allowed to manage their collective affairs in an egalitarian fashion using whatever means appear most conducive. In this sense democracy is as old as history, as human intelligence itself.” 

David Graeber

8. For the Founding Fathers, ‘democracy’ was synonymous with anarchy. Nowhere in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence is the word ‘democracy’ mentioned, the obvious reason being that the Founding Fathers detested it, following every Greek philosopher in believing that ordinary people are too irrational, selfish, and ignorant, for self-rule. Britain as the model for the American Republic,  rulers elected by a vote of property-holding males, to representative assemblies (e.g. the Continental Congress). Voting as an aristocratic way of selecting rulers (from the professional class of superior men), versus rule by lottery (‘sortition’). Mass mobilizations, meetings and popular uprisings before and after the Revolutionary War - often focussed on the issue of debt and land redistribution - kept the Founding Fathers worried of democratic contagion. The word ‘democracy’ starts to have a positive meaning for the first time with Andrew Jackson (POTUS 1829-1837) to designate the electoral regime, a marketing ploy to appeal to the interests of small farmers and laborers against powerful bureaucrats. What the Founding Fathers had understood to be a republic was rebranded a democracy. 

9. David Graeber and Occupy Wall Street (2011) Modeling a prefigurative politics: the idea that the organizational form an activist group takes should embody the kind of society we wish to create.

10. The use of the National Assembly model of horizontal organization - building consensus through Anarchist Process: the idea that everyone should be able to weigh in equally on any decision, and no one should be bound by a decision they detest. Occupy Wall Street (OWS) as a movement without leaders or agendas, creates the new language for addressing the problem of government by bribery: “We Are The 99%” Who are the 99%? (http://wearethe99percent.tumblr.com) 

D. Anarchism as Defection from All Forms of Oppression 

Never before have people been so infantalized, made so dependent on the machine for everything; as the earth rapidly approaches its extinction due to technology, our souls are shrunk and flattened by its pervasive rule. Any sense of wholeness and freedom can only return by the undoing of the massive division of labour at the heart of technological progress. This is the liberatory project in all its depth. - John Zerzan

11. “Anarcho-Primitivism” Return to Gather-Hunter and non-domesticated ways of living. E.g. Separatist Movements: Fleeing from control of violent regimes to set up societies based on the rejection of all oppressive institutions (social conventions, technology), encouraging further masss defection, e.g. School of the Tillers, in China c. 400 BCE. 

12. Emma Goldman: Anarchism as Unconditional Love: “Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage? Free love? As if love is anything but free!”

2/19 Anarchism and the Critique of Hierarchy

Readings for class on 2/19

1. Bakunin and Kropotkin in Great Theories, pp. 352-358.

2. David Graeber, “What is Anarchism?”

Recommended

David Graeber, “Occupy Wall Street’s anarchist roots”

Notes on Marxism

Why Marx is becoming relevant again: “For thirty years after 1945 a high rate of growth in the advanced economies was accompanied by a rise in incomes that benefitted all classes. Severe wealth inequality came to seem a thing of the past (which is why, in 1980, people could quite reasonably call Marx’s predictions mistaken). It now appears that those thirty years were an anomaly. The Depression and the two world wars had effectively wiped out the owners of wealth, but the thirty years after 1945 rebooted the economic order. After 1945, wages rose as national incomes rose, but the income of the lowest earners peaked in 1969, when the minimum hourly wage in the United States was $1.60. That is the equivalent of $10.49 today, when the national minimum wage is $7.25.  And, as wages for service-sector jobs decline in earning power, the hours in the workweek increase, because people are forced to take more than one job.” - Louis Menand

A. Class Analysis

1. Marxist economic theory places class conflict at the center of the analysis, the most important phenomenon left out of classical economics.

New concept of class: 

not distinguished by wealth or power per se but defined in terms of means of production and distinction of resources to support human life. (173) That is, one’s class is defined in terms of one’s participation in the production of surplus labor. 

In the “fundamental class process,” some members of the society - direct laborers - produce both necessary and surplus goods and services. 

Necessary: what they need to survive

Surplus: what is produced over and above what is required to maintain the process.

2. Exploitation: 

a situation in which the laborers do not directly appropriate their own surplus labor. (slave to master, serf to lord, wage worker to capitalist boss)

Key question: How is this surplus distributed and who controls it?

3. The Dirty Secret of Capitalism: Surplus value is appropriated by the capitalist, a new form of slavery. Capitalism does not do away with classes but brings a new set of class relations, between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. 

B. Capitalism’s Contradictions

4. Ever greater exploitation

For exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.” (p.160-61) Capitalism destroys feudal society, a good thing, but its unfettered desire for ever more profit leads it to destroy itself. There is no natural limit to the appropriation of money. Endless growth leads to imperialism, economic centralization, every-increasing wealth inequality.

5. Alienation

The commodification of labor: Man’s own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him instead of being controlled by him. The medieval worker as individual producer, owns the fruits of his/her labor. the modern worker does not. Industrialization and mechanization as a tool for increasing exploitation. No democracy in the workplace. (164) 

6. Contradictions

Capitalism creates the conditions for its demise and transition to socialism, then communism

Increasing inequality destroys the means of its continued productivity.

Increasing misery of the proletariat leads to the “socialization of labor” - class consciousness, in the form of labor unions, worker’s political parties, socialist takeover of states, state takeover of productive resources. (168)

C. Marxist Prophesies

7. True Freedom

World history as moving towards freedom - self-mastery and self-understanding without illusions through the overcoming of contradictions, moving inexorably towards harmony.

8. The Promised Land

True communism would be a classless society governed by the principle of socialism: 

“To each according to their needs, from each according to their abilities.” 

- the social ethics of families, tribes, and communities not dominated by market exchange.

9. Withering away of the State

As a tool of capitalists, the state exists to maintain the capitalist mode of production, as having a monopoly on the use of force (police, judges, jails and prisons). In the transition to socialism, the state slowly makes itself unnecessary. (180) 

10. Many Marxisms, many Socialisms

Former Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Scandinavia, France/Germany/italy

But generally, socialists believe the government should provide a range of basic services to the public, such as health care and education. In the present day, "Democratic socialist" and "socialist" are often treated as interchangeable terms, which can be confusing given Democratic socialists don't necessarily think the government should immediately take control of all aspects of the economy.

They do, however, generally believe the government should help provide for people's most basic needs and help all people have an equal chance at achieving success. The call for universal health care as a right reflects the socialist view that since everyone needs health care, it should be provided to all out of the collective wealth of the society. 

11. Socialism as Economic Democracy

If the basic problem with capitalism is exploitation of workers, then the most simple Marxist solution is the democratization of the workplace by the dissolution of the class distinction between owners and workers. 

A worker cooperative is a cooperative that is owned and self-managed by its workers. This control may be exercised in a number of ways. A cooperative enterprise may mean a firm where every worker-owner participates in decision-making in a democratic fashion, or it may refer to one in which management is elected by every worker-owner, and it can refer to a situation in which managers are considered, and treated as, workers of the firm. In traditional forms of worker cooperative, all shares are held by the workforce with no outside or consumer owners, and each member has one voting share. In practice, control by worker-owners may be exercised through individual, collective, or majority ownership by the workforce; or the retention of individual, collective, or majority voting rights (exercised on a one-member one-vote basis). A worker cooperative, therefore, has the characteristic that each of its workers own one share, and all shares are owned by the workers.