Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

You can paste full URL like: https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649
or just the ID like: 1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
Tri🌹 Profile picture
Tri🌹
@TristamPratori1
19. Social democrat 🌹 Socialist 🚩 Labor movement supporter 🔨 ✊ 🇺🇦 🇵🇸 Fan of Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, August Bebel and Robert Grimm.
Jan 22, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The pro-welfare 'neoliberals' have no concept of class, they are trained in the pseudo-wonkish 'policy shop' model. They think they can just pick their desired combinations off the shelf.

In reality, the welfare states were made possible by class-conscious labor movements. Sweden's welfare state was erected when the ministry was occupied by the social democrat Gustav Moller, who was also a Marxist and used that theory base to inform the policies (anti-bureaucratic welfare state, avoid the bourgeois civil service)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustav_M%…
Nov 21, 2022 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
Here's a great article on how nearly all socialists were in favor of free trade and were against economic nationalism.

This includes Marx and Engels, as well as Hilferding, Kautsky, Lenin, Bernstein, Bebel and Hillquit.

imperialglobalexeter.com/2021/03/10/rec…
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10… German Social Democratic Party, 1925: ''Dismantling of the protective tariff system...''

marxists.org/deutsch/geschi…

Swedish Communist Party, 1917: ''That is why we in the Riksdag alone have had to fight...for full and complete free trade''

snd.gu.se/sv/vivill/part…
Nov 21, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The version of ''universal healthcare'' implemented by Bismarck was a total half measure.

A proper universal healthcare system is something like what socialist governments did in Britain, Scandinavia and the Soviet Union: public ownership of hospitals and public financing. Here's an excellent interview from Tribune of Aneurin Bevan, the founder of the British National Health Service.

tribunemag.co.uk/2020/07/aneuri…
May 21, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The national-conservatives are very silly.

They are befuddled about idealism and materialism in their worldview so frequently, hence why everything to them are immaterial things such as ''cathedrals'' and not the form of production and means of survival. The natcon ideology (at least at face value) wants to affect the immaterial, its nothing more than a cope.

Viktor Orban and others are swinging their bats in the dark, because very little of this cultural preservationism can form of tangible legislative agenda.
Apr 24, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Have these writers considered that democracy seems to be breaking down because of material changes in society, not because of abstract and immeasurable ideals?

This is a weak critique and is filled with lowballing.

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi… ''...unconcerned with individual rights.''

Has Jonathan Haidt considered that this extremely narrow bourgeois view is the problem, because it denies the necessary role of collective action in maintaining democracy?
Apr 21, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
He's correct in some sense, but the decisions of developers and real estate interests of where to build those units matter, too!

It might not be profitable to build in one area and the opposite in another, market forces are entrenching a type of inequality between locations. The problem is that a surplus nationally is not always a surplus in each area.

But it does demonstrate we have the capacity and ability to build units as such, but allocation and investment decisions ignore the things that are necessary for people.
Apr 19, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Starbucks workers are actual proletarians, they sell their labor to Starbucks in return for a wage.

Farmers are petit-bourgeois, they own property.

This style thinking where the working-class is only macho and avoids ''feminine'' things such as Starbucks is outdated. Modern capitalism is a service economy, not an industrial economy.
Apr 18, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Labor is called the ''value'' because the labor process itself represents the scarcity of goods and services.

The labor process creates the want for commodities, and the existence of human labor is a necessary condition for commodities. Imagine if everything was automated. Marxism is economics is based on sociological analysis, that should help clear the confusion.

Its not really that confusing. Its just a way of thinking of how a society works, but it misaligns so much with other forms of thought because its framework of analysis is unique.
Mar 22, 2022 • 12 tweets • 2 min read
One thing that really irks me is the tendency to take all the wrong conclusions from modern social problems.

I hear moderate commentators talk about democratic crisis, and in the very same breath they rally to the defense of established institutions such as capitalism. This is totally the wrong lesson from history.

The moderate right-wing approach of defending democratic institutions as bundled up with other established hierarchies is just so wrong. The problems of the latter metastasizes into the former.
Mar 16, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The left has, but that’s just my opinion!

The left has always warned that the social inequalities of capital combined with the contradiction between globalized production and national states will bring countries into conflict. Meanwhile, a socialist had to run twice just to kick the “normie liberal” politics into gear.
Mar 16, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
You don't get it. It isn't just about goods and services, it is about a form of social relations.

Many people believe in social ownership, or want these ''goods and services'' to be decommodified so they can enjoy them even more fully. That's the whole argument Marx made. The social relations of capitalism function on exploitation of the labor force and severe disunity of social priorities, i.e profit opportunities rather than conscious decisions.

Constraining the economy is not in capitalism's MO, but socialism is supposed to help enable that.
Mar 16, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This is so lame.

Imagine if an anti-monarchy activist said, ''actually, they don't believe in god. I believe in god.'' Maybe, but the point is that religion justifies monarchy.

How ''free'' it is doesn't matter, the point is that something being free conceals actual problems. Hypocrisy-mongering demonstrates weakness.

The point of the left's critique is not that the right-wing is all semantics, the problem is that the right-wing represents bad ideals that are widely accepted and justifiable. Not a falsehood, but a poor *reality.* That's the point.
Feb 7, 2022 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Industrial policy is good, actually.

Reagan abolished shipbuilding subsidies in the 1981 budget and it paralyzed production and merchant shipping on the supply-side.

But spurring “creative destruction” and forcing workers into low-wage sectors was the goal back then. Ironically, the idea of scaling back industrial policy and public investment has been justified on populist and pseudo-egalitarian grounds i.e stops the state from picking winners and makes industry independent from the government or whatever.

But it isn’t that.
Feb 7, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The idea of ''third-way'' social democracy is not only suboptimal for social democratic ideals, it is incoherent.

A welfare state with a liberal economy is more or less the status quo in most countries, the focus must also be on production.

Don't fight mostly finished battles. What kind of political ideology doesn't fight the battles that its own rivals are fighting?

Conservatives fight over fundamental ideas of production and class, so if you refuse to consider production, then what does that make you? An enabler.
Jan 30, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
We should promote a collective housing system where not only are the housing units and land public property, but housing complexes also have an array of services and even industries in them, such as co-operative grocers or public pharmacies. While its not mandatory or ''barracks socialism,'' this is a type of healthy, communal living.
Jan 30, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
On socialism and YIMBY.

My ultimate goal is not to have a market-based housing system, to socialize the overwhelming majority of it at the least. That can agree with and complement YIMBY reforms that streamline planning, but I wouldn't label it a ''YIMBY'' goal per se. The abundance of goods and services is very good, but we know that abundance under industrialized capitalism creates new injustices. That's why the socialist movement was founded, because the move to industry and formal equality on the market did not eradicate oppression.
Jan 28, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
YouTube is completely insufferable.

I decided to watch David Pakman again and it was like living in a 2016 warp all over again.

I just heard the nonsense about ''just'' wanting ''intermediate'' Nordic social democracy, conflating socialism with revolutionary insurrection etc. Youtube is ruinously inflexible, dogmatic and stifling.

Twitter is freedom.
Jan 27, 2022 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Things I want for housing:

- Build publicly-owned, mixed-income social housing
- Publicly-owned development as such
- Cities acquire most land, lease as needed
- End single-family zoning
- Expropriate large lords into public ownership (Ă  la Berlin in 2021 or Birmingham in 1953) In the United Kingdom in the 1950s, the Labour government of Birmingham did this.

jacobinmag.com/2020/07/labour…
Jan 25, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The Plumb Plan was extremely based.

In 1919, labor unions wanted to nationalize the railroad industry with workers’ self-management.

I still hope the left today can push to socialize important industries (especially in transportation) this way. In terms of reforming transportation, the socialist approach of socialization and worker control is superior to regulation.

Utility regulation of transportation (before the 1980s) was grossly schizophrenic and shipper lobbies got it dismantled anyway under Carter and Reagan.
Jan 23, 2022 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
Supply-side socialism and using economic planning to solve problems is extremely based.

The only concern I have is that appropriating ''supply-side'' rhetoric for the left could unwittingly degenerate into the free-market dogma on the right. In particular, capital is always looking for labor supply. The question is, the supply of what, how and when?

Labor unions are certainly not ''supply-side,'' by definition they restrict the supply of labor and rely on periodic threats of shutting down production to be effective.
Jan 13, 2022 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
I was reading about the “clash of civilizations” theory from the 1996 book and I think it unfortunately has descriptive merit.

The basic premise is that the “end of history” eradicated politics based on class.

The prediction was that politics would polarize along culture. In essence, the problem of nationalism and authoritarianism are caused by the tremendous weakness of leftist ideology in the 21st century compared to the two previous.