Your ideology is blinding you to what I am saying, again.
Every time you pull out this canard, my friend, it makes me laugh, I have to admit. One of us is doctrinaire in his thinking, but that is not the one I see when I look in my mirror. It reminds me of Donald Trump's "rubber-glue" argumentation. So, let's get back to substance...
I never said Mixed Economy doesn't exist...
I did say it is Capitalism in a party hat, not unlike Intelligent Design.
(Now
that, I think, is where "opinion without substance" resides...)
I maintain that Marx's view of socialism
as a transition to communism is a pipe dream that even he did not fully embrace. Empirically-speaking, his view of the transformation
has never occurred in the real world and for myriad reasons. (I'm open to counter-examples.) Instead, of course, governments and economies have adjusted to address
the concerns he raised. Your arguments seem to fixate on doctrinaire application of his dialectic - my perception - rather than to address how his theories have been absorbed and adjusted within the world economy and economic thinking. The conflict, I think, it putting Marx into context. For example, your reference to "modes of production" - which, like "social classes", is a nascent concept that he never really fully fleshed out.
Das Kapital like Adam Smith's
The Wealth of Nations is a seminal work of economic thinking, but neither is the denouement of the subject.
Marx sought to put a framework around his theories, and did a very good job of doing so, but not all of reality fits within the framework. For example: take a "public-private partnership" in a stadium. Is that a socialist construction (since it is paid for by bonds, and the state shares the revenues and ownership), or is it a capitalist one (since the activities within it and surrounding it are private in nature)? Or is it, as I would maintain,
mixed. These kinds of activities were not imagined in Marx's works. Public universities? Public hospitals? Similarly, how about ESOPs? When the
workers own, partially or fully, the
means of production, how does that fit into Marx's paradigm? Now you've mixed both class AND mode.
My objection is the desire to pigeonhole - again, the either/or mindset "You cannot reconcile Capitalist Accumulation with Labor. Clear?" UBI is a different paradigm because it
changes the nature of the relationship between citizens, government, and private capital. It's an amalgamation. Since it doesn't fit neatly into a pigeonhole it raises an objection.
In an effort to discredit my approach, moreover, it is you, my friend, not I, who "put words in my mouth." E.g. "how Capitalism is going to help labor." Where in the world did that come from? Certainly not from anything I said. I certainly never made any such argument.
The fundamental question is: who is to control the means of production?
I disagree. That is your question, not mine (because I am not about the pigeonhole). I am much more interested in the second of those questions:
And how does the conflict between concentration of wealth, an indispensable tenet of Capitalism, and the equitable distribution of said wealth occur?
My answer is multi-fold. ESOPs are one solution, UBI is another. I don't disagree that the fundamental defect of capitalism is the inevitable concentration of wealth - I rail about it often enough myself. In my view, however, it is the role of government not to
usurp private ownership (e.g., communism), but to
ameliorate the effects that protection of such ownership implies. That is where government socialism applies - and it comes in many forms: Social Security, unemployment compensation, universal health care, government ownership of resources (e.g., mineral rights, forests, managed lands, etc.), environmental protection regimes, national parks - there can be many more.
My approach is not to focus on labels but effects. Like Smith I take the broader view of the
Wealth of the Nation. On the individual level we can be both labor
AND investor (as I have been my whole life). We are all, however, citizens and participants in the economy
of the nation and should be allowed to share in the fruits of that progress. The mechanism for that is the government that we share. Some of it involves the redistribution of wealth, some of it involves the sequestration of resources, some of it involves collective action to restrict or mitigate private commercial activity. The same instinct that is activated in protecting private civil rights should inform our approach to protecting our economic rights as citizens, but that doesn't imply taking those rights away.
