it's actually sort of wrong to call this capitalism, and i don't mean in the real vs really existing sense that you used to hear however many years ago. this system is the exact system that the initial capitalists were trying to overturn! and, what they called it was feudalism. i used to have these debates with these hayekian right-libertarians ten years ago, about what policies would really bring us back to serfdom. but, we're almost there...

for that reason, i acknowledge what hannah appel is saying, and would extrapolate that something like paine or locke might be more useful in the next few decades than something like marx. marx was attempting to reapply liberalism to an economy designed around socialized production, as the basic assumptions underlying liberalism collapsed with the advent of factory work. but, to an extent, the factory is just a different kind of plantation. i've been asking "what's the way to maximize freedom in a post-industrial economy?", and deduced some kind of superproduction, but this isn't the first time somebody has told me we're on a direct course back to feudalism, and then the theory flips over - the left needs to re-embrace liberalism. i'm not so sure...

and, this is what i'm left with regarding debtors' unions - they're no doubt going to be useful to help alleviate suffering, if you hold to the premises underlying the system. should debtors get a new deal? no doubt.

but, what you really want if you're a revolutionary is to abolish the debt, and i'm not sure i see the utility of this type of union for that purpose. rather, i want to suggest pointing to the production of parallel systems. and, in the end, the only solution is ever through democratization of the institutions, and public ownership of the services they offer.

the end result is that you have to support these unions, but you shouldn't be naive about them - they're not a revolutionary tactic, but a stop-gap reformist measure to make things a little bit better. and, they will tend towards conservative tendencies in the end, like unions always do...

in the end, the best thing that can come out of these kinds of things is the seeds for a more revolutionary movement.

but, you have the bombs. so, why not use them to build schools? what else are they good for?

yes - mmt is a pragmatic way to get some actual, concrete, meaningful change on the ground, it's not a revolutionary theory. but, you are the fucking empire. why not be a little pragmatic about it to get your living standards up to the rest of the world?

the talking point from bernie was that every other country in the world has universal health care, and there's just a bit of a reality check here as to why. you might imagine that these concessions were won through broad working class movements, but they actually had more to do with the realities underlying the corporate welfare that is inherently attached to state funded insurance monopolies - and there's actually an argument that the reason that never happened in the united states was because it didn't have to, because the amount of wealth in the period was so immense anyways...

in canada, what is being cynically written off as impossible actually did happen - the conservatives, ndp & liberals all got together and decided to build a system modeled on the british nhs. how did we get the conservatives to vote for universal health care? the reason is that the insurance lobby supported it. for the liberals, it had a lot to do with the auto pact - a 1965 agreement between the united states and canada to consolidate tariffs through the automobile sector. do you know the actual, technical reason that the liberals in canada supported universal health care? it was to support the automotive sector, by downloading health care costs to the state. so, if ford set up a factory in detroit, it would have to pay it's employees health care (ironically because the unions won it), whereas if they set up here in canada, the government would pay for it.

i'm as cynical a person as you'll meet, but the whole fucking world has this stuff; it is only the empire that doesn't. it's bizarre. and, you really shouldn't be cynical about basic rights that the rest of the world has had for decades. if we can figure it out, so can you.

that's not to discount the value of struggle but every other legislature in the world has given it's people access to these services, and you're selling yourself short by discarding it as impossible. that's too much cynicism.

and just to clarify a point - what modern monetary theory is is an argument that the theory that exists today is not reflective of how money is created in real life. so, it's correct that it doesn't change anything - the point is that it doesn't change anything. it just helps us better understand what already is, and how to best utilize it to our advantage.