WW2 is what the New Deal should have been in the first place: a program of unrestricted anti-austerity and moral hazard be damned. Full employment and put industry to work producing mass quantities of the highest technology of the day, then ship it all to the most remote corners of the globe and blow it to bits.

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, they swept away the political resistance to a properly realized program of economic stimulation. It wasn't a question of War vs. New Deal.

Socialism is about sharing and using the wealth for all the 99%. Take down the super rich. They cause wars and poverty worldwide.

Yeah, just wait until the yellow vests hit the streets, the state-run "new Green Deal" will vanish faster than you can say "next ice age is coming!".

@2 Ah yes, "just" the 1%.

"Scandinavian income taxes raise a lot of revenue because they are actually rather flat. In other words, they tax most people at these high rates, not just high-income taxpayers. The top marginal tax rate of 60 percent in Denmark applies to all income over 1.2 times the average income in Denmark. From the American perspective, this means that all income over $60,000 (1.2 times the average income of about $50,000 in the United States) would be taxed at 60 percent."

The nutso cranks hate it when Chas makes realistic points about their perceived "capitalism."
Not a darn one wingnut can tell you anything valid about capitalism.
They bluster pretty well and that's about it. No 3, looking in that direction....

AOC taking no prisoners: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h810bO-4LIs

"Neoliberalism is [...] a form of state capitalism"

Not really. Neoliberalism is close to unfettered capitalism given its reliance on deregulation, privatizing, asymmetric internationalization of trade in order to avoid national laws, etc.. The end result of neoliberalism, oligarchy and extreme wealth concentration at the top, are in fact the same as Laissez Faire capitalism of 1890-1930, which nobody would characterize as state capitalism

"But how does Ocasio-Cortez' green plan ensure the survival of capitalism? Because it has assumptions about the economy that only make sense under that system."

Why would anyone assume otherwise? I mean, is there a realistic expectation that the United States will abandon capitalism during the current Congress?

I think there is a third fate for capitalism not considered here: it gets smaller. What I mean by that is something like the dystopia in The Hunger Games: a micro elite, ensconced in their walled enclave, protected by paramilitaries. The vast multitudes outside, living like medieval serfs. I guess technically that might be more feudalism than capitalism but the border between those two isms is already pretty blurry.

10

I think this is the path we are currently on. I feel like that's the best case scenario for those in power.

@4 Sounds reasonable.

But what if capitalism does not die? What then?

For two hundred years, wise men have been pronouncing the imminent demise of capitalism-- and yet it has not died.

What will we do if it does not die this time, either? Pronounce it almost-dead again, and watch it continue to not-die?

@11 Really it is sort of the situation we have now, if you consider western industrialized countries to be the walled enclaves (which they are increasingly becoming). I'm envisioning the enclave just getting smaller. This seems like the most likely scenario as global warming/over-population/and resource scarcity really kick in. People (some people) are empathetic so long as they have it good. They start to feel threatened, then empathy is going to become very rare very fast.

I'll note that Charles Mudede has not tossed around the term 'late capitalism' much (of late anyway) but people who are fond of this term, many of them academics with tenure, are just about the laziest intellectual nitwits around. I've asked this before: what are you envisioning after capitalism? You seem to be reveling in this idea of 'late capitalism'. Are you a member of a millenarian cult? I'm reasonably sure that what comes after capitalism is going to look a lot more like The Road than a Jehovah Witness pamphlet (or Marxist fever dream).

@13 How could capitalism not die when faced with resource and ecosystem limits? Can capitalism be without growth?

Capitalism won't die. But it needs to be heavily regulated. Just like the rich should be taxed onerously. That's what keeps a society peaceful.

@13

In what definition of capitalism -- other than Marx's -- is continuous growth a requirement?

Is capitalism even a "system" at all, or is it something else, perhaps? Perhaps it is instead a label for a range of ideologies, or a loose collection of values. Perhaps capitalism is what in medicine would be called a syndrome; a condition with no single diagnostic feature, identified by having many but not necessarily all of a longer list of features.

Or more radically, perhaps Capitalism is not an ideology, nor a loose collection of values, but rather a rationalization. An excuse. An apology.

Adam Smith's most important work, "The Theory of Moral Sentiments," is a work of political and moral philosophy. "The Wealth of Nations" is just an application of that political philosophy to the world Smith saw around him in late eighteenth century England, addressing questions about the social conditions of the day; it is an exegisis, not a theory. It argues that the way that world worked -- with wealth concentrated in the hands of landowners and a new class of factory owners and bankers -- could be beneficial to the entire society, provided certain pitfalls were avoided. It does not spell out any fundamental requirements for the type of society under study; it just takes what existed then as a given, and applies philosophical argument to it.

Smith's moral philosophy was not one of unbridled self-interest, there were other Moral Sentiments in his Theory-- Justice, Virtue, Conscience, and Sympathy all contribute. Thus, he worried about the dangers to a Nations's Wealth that could arise from ignoring these sentiments, Justice particularly.

The key differences between the early thinkers in the field of of Political Economy were in what the greatest or likeliest dangers to a Nation's Wealth might be.

Smith thought they were monopoly and rent-seeking. Ricardo thought all wealth would flow to the landowners, stifling production. Malthus thought the order of the day would lead to unchecked population growth and then famine. John Stewart Mill thought the poor would grow ever poorer unless the outputs (and profits) of the factories were distributed differently.

And then we have Marx, and with him the greatest philosophical category error of the modern world.

In order to build his argument, Marx attempted to do what scientists at the time were doing-- create a simple model of a phenomenon in order to study it (or to prove it non-viable, in Marx's case). In doing so, Marx created an abstraction, a rigid formal system that of course did not describe any Nation at the time, and has not described any nation since. He took an ongoing argument about the morality of contemporary societal arrangements in Europe and tried to turn it into a scientific question, and in so doing he made things far worse, by replacing a debate about Society with an argument about the soundness of an arbitrarily-defined clockwork System.

There have been many thinkers, quite a lot of them anything but Marxist, who have since repeated this fundamental category error, not least the neo-conservative/liberal contingent who argue as if contemporary socioeconomic arrangements are the mathematically inevitable result of some as-yet-undiscovered Natural Law.

And yet still, at its root, capitalism is a rationalization. And rationalizations do not die of mathematical inevitiblities, nor of any other natural causes. Rationalizations have to be killed, and then killed again, for they are easily raised from their graves.

We are nowhere near killing capitalism today, and we will never be able to kill it if we do not understand (or remember) what it is, and why it is so foolish to stubbornly predict its imminent demise, over and over and over again.