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12 days agoI think you have a good initiative and I support your goals but I have one fundamental disagreement: these proposals are essentially “tax the rich, raise minimum wage”, and they’ve been the bread and butter of Socialdemocrats all over the western world for the past half century and never really meaningfully improved things anywhere.
Wealth redistributions historically have only happened either as a consequence of revolutions, or as a consequence of fear of revolution as a form of concession by the capitalist owners. If revolution is the prerequisite in any case, why not just aim for revolution anyway?
But the history of mass, peaceful protest in the west leading nowhere is endless. In the very US you had the occupy wall street movement. In Spain we had the 15-M protests, in France the Gilets Jeunes, in Greece they had massive protests too, literal millions on the streets… and nothing happened. And I’m only talking about the past 15 years or so. You could go back further to see the tens of millions of people all over the west who protested against the Iraq invasion to no avail, if you go just a few years further back.
The problem isn’t that nobody over the past 50 years of the western world has come up with a clear enough slogan, the problem is that quite literally every institution in the west is designed around maintaining the status quo, and when the time comes they won’t be afraid to use violence to maintain it. If you somehow get a big enough following of peaceful protesters/voters who want to tax the rich, the rich will respond with violence, as it happened for example in my home country Spain in 1936 when the fascists did a coup to a relatively non-revolutionary leftist government.
The list of countries where fascists or otherwise violence were summoned to stop otherwise peaceful social leftist movements is endless: you have Nazi Germany (born after the murder of Rosa Luxembourg by the socialdemocrats), Fascist Spain, Allende being murdered in Chile and Pinochet taking control, you have Iran under Mosaddegh being toppled in the 50s… The list goes on and on and on and on all over the world. The countries which actually managed to reduce wealth inequality aren’t mainly Socialdemocrats ones: you have the Soviet Union, Cuba or Maoist China solving wealth inequality for about a billion people, saving hundreds of millions of lives from hunger and exploitation in the process. There are a few counter-example mini-states such as Finland or Norway but they’re a minority, and historically the reason why they managed to achieve these victories was because of the example (and threat) of the Soviet Union.
Again: I fundamentally agree that the richest among the top 1% must be extremely taxed (ideally their capital expropriated and nationalised or redistributed), but I don’t think that’s happening unless under threat of socialism or directly under socialism. You make a valid point when you say “Full blown revolution is relatively unlikely to occur, or I think we would have seen it by now”, but in my opinion that’s just because the west has been happily exploiting the work and resources of the global south. This dynamic is coming to a halt thanks to China and to the multipolarity of the world, and in the process, the west will collectively lose a lot (as it already happened in Europe and will keep happening, purchase power in Spain as of 2023 was 10 less than in 2006). With the decrease of material wealth in the west, fascism will pop up to keep the profits of the ultra-rich at the expense of the working class, and only socialism can defeat fascism.