I’m getting whiplash from the changes in Ben Burgis’ positions between January 2023 and November 2023 when it comes the nature of exploitation in Capitalism. I’m sure that Burgis will claim that he’s not morphed drastically on these issues but he has. And it is strange to think that essentially the core of th Burgis’ Socialism isn’t about the how exploitation of employees is something that occurs unilaterally across capitalism, but is related to your paystubs. Ben Burgis’ latest article for Jacobin magazine about Sabine Hossenfelder’s two month old video “Capitalism is Good: Let Me Explain” called “Capitalism Isn’t Just Buying and Selling Things. It’s a System of Domination” presents a totally different view of socialism than his castigation of the Steven Crowder debacle.
Now, there isn’t much good you can say about Steven Crowder but his fight against employers does outline a fundamental contradiction in the Socialist thinking that is a by-product of the white-collar blue-collar dichotomy. That contradiction is that some how the amount of money in your salary negates the fundamental flaw of capitalism’ s inherent asymmetrical power relationships between employee and employer.
To address this issue I wrote an article called” With Friends Like Ben Burgis Socialism Doesn’t Need Enemies” critiquing Burgis’ positions about socialism. Specifically, I was attacking Burgis’ positions about “slave contracts” and “work place democracy”. I found it bizarre that Ben Burgis’ primary thesis in his article “Right-Wingers Like Steven Crowder Need Billionaire Funders Because Their Ideas Are So Bad” is that Steven Crowder as an employee with free agency cannot be forced into a contract that approximates power distribution that is totally in favor of his employers. In fact here is a direct quote from Dr. Burgis: “On its face, there’s something absurd about the phrase “slave contracts.” Contracts are things you sign when you’re a free citizen who gets to decide whether to accept or reject a particular job offer. It’s not like literal slaves ended up in chains because they didn’t read over the proposed language in their employment contracts carefully enough.” So, first off Dr. Burgis makes this claim that essentially contract law prevents the self-determining people from ever actually being in such a power dynamic that one would find themselves completely exploited by their employers. Any good socialist would know that Dr. Burgis is really trying to white wash the exploitive contracts that employers have used for decades especially clauses when it comes to worker recourse in the case of employer abuses. A great example of this abuse is my article about Jimmy Dore’s contract with his employees and outside contractors that forces them into binding arbitration and a NDA. So, you can see my surprise when I read Ben Burgis’ latest Article for Jacobin Magazine: “Capitalism Isn’t Just Buying and Selling Things. It’s a System of Domination” presents this position now:
Marx’s actual point is that, under capitalism, there’s a class of people who own the means of production — everything from factories and farms to restaurants and grocery stores — and a much larger class of people who have no realistic way of making a living except renting out their working hours to capitalists. This means that, whether we’re talking about Victorian England or Sweden in 1970s (in many ways the high-water mark of social democratic welfare states in human history so far), there’s still a deep power asymmetry between workers and capitalists.
Capitalism Isn’t Just Buying and Selling Things. It’s a System of Domination
Dr. Ben Burgis Jacobin
I have to say what happened to Dr. Burgis? Who is this man that is now talking about a “deep power asymmetry between workers an capitalists”? After all at the start of the year this was Dr. Burgis’ position: “even if you accept Marx’s argument, you might still think that calling any legally voluntary employment contract a “slave contract” involves an unhelpful amount of hyperbole.” Of course Burgis tempers this argument with the following statement: “And it might seem particularly absurd given the amount of money that the Daily Wire was offering Crowder.” Thus, we see the crux of my argument against Burgis’ understanding of this entire concept of slave contracts.
For argument’s sake let’s say that persons x are making $500,000 per year for their software company working 80hrs per week for 5 years on a project that makes company Y $300 million per year in profits. Let’s say that Person X’s entire team only of 10 software engineers only make $5 million per year in salary and perhaps let’s say they get another $2.5 million in combined benefits and bonuses. So, now $7.5 million dollars is the total amount the company spends on the team. But, that is still 40 times less than the $300 million the software generates in profits per year. Now, if we take Burgis’ position it becomes an issue of comparing pay-stubs to understand the power differential in the economic system. For example it is easy to see that a person making $12.50 per hour working at a fast-food company is being exploited. It becomes less intuitively relational for us to say that the same 4000% return for the software developers is exploitative. But, once you say that same team of 10 employees are paid only $26,000 per year per employee with no benefits is $260, 000 salary for the company. There for if they create the same profit of 40 times their team’s salary it would be $10.40 Million. The scale is smaller than a team that makes a combined $7.5 million but of that same factor of 40 is now applied to it we end up with $300 million in surplus value. In both cases the team members are contributing 40 times their salary and compensation to make the company a profit. And that fact is what Marx is really talking about.
And that tends to give us a problem intuitively when we discuss these issues about power dynamics in contracts. We say well person x making $500,000 per year plus benefits is not being exploited. This is a dangerous trap that people fall into when they are discussing exploitation of employees. This same type of argument has been used for years by the Capitalists to tell us that Workers are improving. It’s subtle argument and as I’ve stated in my original article Burgis falls into this same type of thinking that people with higher salaries cannot be exploited by their employers. Which is blatantly untrue.
“Exploitation” refers to one class’s involuntary extraction of a “surplus” created by another. Under feudalism, Marx pointed out, this extraction happened right out in the open. Serfs might have their own little plot of land they were allowed to work part of the time, but there were designated periods of time in which they were coercively required to farm the lord’s field.
Capitalism Isn’t Just Buying and Selling Things. It’s a System of Domination
Dr. Ben Burgis Jacobin
Funny thing to me is that basically capitalism is a spectrum not a discrete point in time. One of the big problems with Marx’s concept of capitalism is that he is focused on a discrete point in time and space called the Industrial Revolution and the type of capitalism that this specific form of production creates in Europe and then the rest of the world. The backbone of the Industrial Revolution is found in Mercantilist and Physiocrats who saw the primary capital mode in the form actually natural resources and the trade they generated not the mass production generated by industrialization. In Marx’s vision of capitalism these discrete points have nice little edges around their time periods. But that doesn’t mean industry didn’t exist in the Mercantilist system or prior to it. There certainly were such innovations during these early periods of time. The first real industrial system in the world occurred with the creation of automation in milling grains into flour or even cutting stone existed even during ancient Roman Period. The fact is that industry is just a specific relationship between resources and the means of producing commodities in mass.
Industry’s goals from Ancient Roman to Modern Day is the same reduce the amount of labor necessary to accomplish a specific task to produce a given commodity. To use the phrase that all economist love to talk about it is about improving the efficiency of the production process, streamlining the amount of labor used to produce one unit of commodity. Now, during the Roman Empire period that efficiency of production was less important of course given the amount of slavery that was prevalent in society at the time. And you would be hard pressed to not claim that the US Civil War wasn’t in many ways a war between Capitalists: those who saw free competitive labor and owned labor as primary issue of the war.
I think you could make an excellent argument that really the first true capitalist empire in Europe was not Britain but the Roman Empire. And that really humans have been under the thumb of some type of proton-capitalist state since the creation of long term agricultural assets in the late Neo-Lithic Age. As soon as our communities turned from egalitarianism to an ordered formed of class structures— proto-capitalism was being practiced in its most basic form. Once you start to divide the up the resources of your community into owners and laborers you have a capitalist mode of production. You have a division of labor and Ownership that yields a natural power imbalance in your society between the classes of that society. It doesn’t matter what you call a person that owns the capital resources in your society “patrician”, “Baron”, “King”, “Emperor”, “Investor”, “Boss” or “CEO” the results are the same— a massive power asymmetry that favors those with the capital resources and the subordinating of those in the society who only have labor to either sell on an open market or are forced to use their labor to secure the minimum standard of living. And that is what makes system work no matter what you call it.
Marx’s analysis to me has always focused like so many 19th century projects on the critical aspect of the time of creating a complete picture of the universe by categorizing and classifying developments into discrete units. A great example of this thinking would be the Periodic Table that neatly and correctly divided the elements between gases, metals, non-metals, metalloids and so on. Thus allowing each piece of the elemental puzzle to paint the picture of the next piece needed to fill in the gaps. This type of extrapolation allowed the table’s creator Medelev to predict future elements and their necessary properties. The idea continued over to anthropological research as well. Researchers like the idea of craving up time into ages of materials they could manipulate like the Neo-lithic , , copper, bronze, and iron ages— all discretely demarcated the technological advances of a civilization. Thus one could predict and see a trend in human development. And there is no doubt that Marx himself utilized this idea of discrete periods of time with specific features that would allow him to predict the coming of the next age.
The question to me becomes more important when Burgis is commenting on Hossenfelder’s video on Capitalism. First off it’s not clear that Hossenfelder’s understanding of capitalism or even economics is all that deep. Hossenfelder’s understanding of capitalism seems to be from the video at least based on the idea that capitalism is the most efficient means of allocating resources specifically to her finance resources i.e. money. And there is no doubt that money is a critical part of the Industrial Capitalism Story we are still living in. But we could also have capitalism based solely on hereditary estates that thrive on a purely formalized social credit system. There is reason to believe that informal credit systems created the bedrock that would later develop into our entire monetary system we use today couldn’t also achieve this system of production. Informal credit between neighbors is a system that works well. You know your neighbor, you and your neighbor can have multiple interactions so there is a reason to not break the trust it requires to maintain credit systems. However, with complete strangers and few interactions between each trust between the individual is not easily created. Thus the creation of a socially accepted medium of exchange takes the guess work out of trusting your neighbor—all you have to do is trust your money!
I have to admit that Burgis puts up a good argument against Hossenfelder’s feeble arguments for financially based capitalism as the root of capitalism. Burgis’ makes a similar point that I would also make: “the relationship between a feudal lord and a peasant is one production relation, the relationship between a Roman patrician and his slaves is another, and the relationship between capitalists and workers is a third” (Jacobin). However, I would make a very different conclusion that essentially all these relationships contain the same asymmetrical power relationship of “the means of production” be it land, water, air , machines or fiat currency to another group, that can only exist by selling labor or by some social convention that compels them to use their labor in the service of masters. In the end these are just different types of the same relationship between those that can control the means of production and those that are forced to exchange this labor for their own existence.
This is where it gets tricky for me to applaud Burgis— after all in January of this year he was applauding the Capitalists mocking Steven Crowder for not being an independent employee:
Steven, the whole time I’ve known him, has worked for someone else. He was paid by PJTV, when I met him, which was owned by a billionaire at the time. Then he was paid by CRTV for a number of years, which was owned by a billionaire at the time. Then he worked for The Blaze, which was subsidized by a billionaire
Burgis uses this quote from Jeremy Boreing about Steven Crowder never having independence in his working career as a means to justify the asymmetrical power in this relationship between capital and employee. In this case the Daily Wire that controls the ability to produce and distribute Crowder’s content to a wide audience, to that of Crowder the producer of the content. It is bizarre to think that Burgis’ entire argument here is based on the fact that he disagrees with Crowder’s idiotic positions—which I am not defending— but, I am defending Crowder’s right to workplace democracy. We must accept that workplace democracy isn’t for only people making below a certain pay scale. This sort of white-collar blue-collar dichotomy will only undermine a socialist project in America. As we all know the tech sector is going to be the holy grail of unionizing for this century. Unions in the Tech Sector will determine the path of AI growth not only in the computer industry; but, in all industries.
If we accept the Burgis of January 2023 we have to ask ourselves the same question what does democracy in the workplace look like for white-collar workers? Do we as socialists tell them “so, sorry” you don’t qualify for democracy in the workplace? But this logic also extends to the blue-collar workers as well that work in so many industries— “So, sorry” workers of Tesla you never asked for workplace democracy in 15 years so we cannot unionize with you? You see it is extremely odd when I see Burgis making this claim now:
Workers can go work for some other capitalist, but the basic shape of the deal will be the same. If they want to have a job and not beg for change on the streets or go on welfare for as long as they can or live in the woods, they have to consent to this arrangement.
Ben Burgis, Jacobin
It’s a far cry from aggreeing with Jeremy Boering that “Crowder insists that the issue is “independence.” But as Boreing pointed out in his response video, Steven Crowder has never been “independent.” Which brings up the issues of what exactly is Burgis’ position on workplace democracy? In many articles Burgis claims that he’s a strong proponent of workplace democracy but in this case he wasn’t why? Supposedly, because it is absurd to think that a person with $12 million dollar per year contract can be a victim of workplace exploitation. Which is just false.
As I pointed out in my critique of his work in January— the question of societal worth should be about impact of the work on the whole of society. That might mean that film stars no longer rake in multi-million dollar contracts or that companies making addictive applications for Silicon Valley are the most profitable companies any more. The reality is we still have to understand that paychecks and health benefits don’t necessarily make up for the lack of control of one’s surplus labor in the society.
Another interesting part of the New Burgis article from Jacobin is this statement:
There were also real problems with economic efficiency, particularly with aligning production priorities with fine-grained consumer preferences, that can’t be reduced to the lack of democracy. Even if we added a free press and multiparty elections to the basic structure of the Soviet economy, so that whichever party won each election got to appoint the head of the state planning office, I see little reason to think that would have taken away the day-to-day frustrations of consumers at Soviet grocery stores.
In this statement we see Burgis’ puts forth an interesting argument against a command economy—which I must disimbue Burgis follows of the concept of a free market. The fact is that all markets are tightly controlled and planned by the participants that act with in them. Free markets are more myth than reality with Adam Smith’s dogmatic belief in the “Invisible Hand” like some form of capitalist apostle’s creed. At the helm of the Free Markets lies the “Board of Directors” who do everything in their power to create, mold, and ensure that markets do their bidding. So, it seems to me that essentially Burgis wants to repeat the same stories about Soviet Command Economy failures. These failures are always repeated in the same format that Burgis takes here that some how the Soviet’s economy collapsed because it couldn’t keep up with consumer demand. That isn’t exactly true in fact the Soviet Union’s economy in 1990 was still valued at $2.650 Trillion US dollars (GNP) according the the World Fact Book from the CIA.
So, when Burgis claims that “free multi-party elections” wouldn’t change the face the Soviet Economics I’m puzzled to say the least. Because of course a multi-party election system with control over the economic planning would totally change the entire face of Soviet Economics. Think of it this way what would happen to Soviet Cold War if instead of fighting the American Imperialism with an ever larger and more important defense budget— the Soviets decided to market their most important assets lower labor costs and an abundance of natural resources? What if instead of the US dominating world trade in the 1950’s and 1960’s the USSR decided to create cheap affordable home goods (i.e. like Japan was famous for) and export Steel and Titanium (Russia has the largest known reserves of Titanium)— imagine what would have happened?
We might not be driving around in Honda’s , Subaru’s (part of the Nakajima Aircraft Corporation) Mitsubishi, or Toyota’s instead we might be driving around Lada’s (aka AutoVaz) , GAZ , ZIL , Ural, etc so on. All because of a change in policy that could have happened if the Soviet’s had free and open multi-party elections. It isn’t beyond the realm of reason that if Communist China under Mao could be turned into an economic partner of the West in the late 1970’s and the most important trading partner in the 2000’s that Soviets couldn’t have done it. And for the most part the Chinese still have an inefficient economy in many ways.
By inefficient I am talking about the number of employees in the manufacturing sector alone. In 2022 the total output of Chinese manufacturing was $4.0 trillion with a 112 million employed. In America during the same period was $1.86 trillion with about 12.1 million employed in manufacturing. The fact is that with almost 10 times the population engaged in manufacturing the fact that China doesn’t produce 10 times the revenue from manufacturing shows the productive aka efficiency of the system is not as great as the productive of the US workers. Thus the holy grail of the modern economist hasn’t been found in China either just yet. Yes, their raw numbers are great until you start to reflect on the size of the work force.
So, it is clear that you can run a very successful economy system with vast inefficiencies by many respects if you can maintain a favorable exchange rate. That’s been the key to China’s success for decades to maintain a favorable currency relationship between the Yuan and the US dollar. When it takes 7.42 CNY per 1 US dollar the savings add up quickly. And the point is if the USSR had maintained a low Rubble of say 8-10 per US dollar in the 1960’s and 1970’s and opened up their economy to producing European goods for export— they would have greatly increased their economy and in doing so would have opened up their markets to imports of many things as well. It would have totally destroyed the isolated narrative of West about the Soviets and their backwards command economy.
In many ways a command economy has many benefits to it especially when it comes to understanding the fragility of the ecological impact on the planet itself. Command Economies are ideally suited to generate the best outcomes from a steady state economic position. Carefully, accessing the output of the economy and the long term ecological disasters that pro-growth so-called free market economies ignore in the name of unlimited profits. So, you can understand why I am puzzled at these comments by Dr. Burgis? Yes, the Soviet Command Economy was poorly managed. However, businesses in pro-growth market based economics are often poorly managed see Enron, Sears & Roebuck Co. , J.C. Penny’s , Studebaker, Packard, Atari , Inc. and the list goes on and on. In each of these failures no one blames the economic system even on as unstable and destructive as Capitalism. Instead we point the finger at the individual member that failed in the system. No, calls out Capitalism for the its numerous recessions and depressions. For example what if the US decided after the Panic of 1837 that lead to a nearly 6 year depression that lasted until 1844. No one says that was a sign of Capitalism’s failures. It’s just another blip on the Capitalist list of failures from the 1800’s to present that shows how unstable the economy really is. We should view the Soviet Failure in the same manner and learn from its mistakes.
So, it is odd that after Burgis tells us that he doesn’t see how a democratically controlled command economy will yield better results than the Soviet’s authoritarian model his next statement in the article is the following:
It could be that, at least at this phase of history, we don’t know how to organize an efficient modern economy without some market mechanisms of the kind that the USSR lacked. But that doesn’t mean we need capitalist property relations that disenfranchise most the population at the workplace and create a small elite of capitalists with outsize political power.
Why not have, for example, a system where the “institution” that “provides capital to those who want to launch a new business” is a state-owned bank, and it only provides capital to internally democratic workers collectives? This would still provide market mechanisms where they are needed. Meanwhile, the “commanding heights” of the economy — like energy, finance, and transportation — could be taken into public ownership. Sectors like health care and education could be taken outside of the market altogether and provided as public goods, free at the point of service — as indeed they already are, to one extent or another, in actually existing social democracies.
It’s hard to understand how Burgis doesn’t understand that a large part of his proposal here would look exactly like what might have happened if the Soviets of 1924, had actually allowed the workers to control the means of production and create their own production boards? Then wouldn’t it have looked much more like Mondragon Cooperative than drudgery? The problem with the statement by Good Ol Professor Burgis is that ultimately it would seem he believes in his buddy Professor Mike Begg’s who’s research is more in Monetary Policy than in the underpinnings of Socialist thought from his website has written several articles on the issues of workplace democracy for Jacobin’s faux academic journal “Catalyst” and is not a fan of total workplace democracy. If this quote from Beggs’ article “We Can Craft A Workable Workplace Democracy For a Socialist Future”:
And there you have it the magic words “Specialist Professional Workers”! Which oddly is the crux of most of the adherents to Democratic Socialism and it is even more accepted by those who fetishize the idea of a socialist-technocracy. It is really no different than Lenin or Mao or even Deng Xiaoping the fact is that once people have built themselves up to a certain level of prestige in their society they don’t wish to relinquish this control. At least Keynes was honest when he said this about working class socialism: “How can I adopt a creed which, preferring the mud to the fish, exalts the boorish proletariat above the bourgeois and the intelligentsia who, with whatever faults, are the quality in life and surely carry the seeds of all human advancement?”(The Collected Works of John Maynard Keynes , 1972). In many ways that is what Burgis’ claim really is about when he declares that we cannot possible have a planned economy by the proletariat. It’s because the entire concept is antithetical to his technocratic view of the world. The problem is that at the core of these these people’s beliefs is the need for a nucleus of experts to guide and mold the democratic trends within these corporations.
And it might be this sort of philosopher-king type of mentality that drives so many in the Democratic Socialist Camp. It might be also why individuals like Burgis and Beggs ultimately seem to recoil from a truly direct democracy in the work place. There are plenty of examples of direct democracy working in worker-collectives for a long period of time. So, I’m not clear why Beggs writes as if the idea of the direct democracy is antithetical to socialism in mid-large firms in the first place?
This is even more interesting when you consider that Burgis starts off his democracy workplace argument with an anti-command economy position and a statement about market based mechanisms being required for a successful position. It befuddles me to say the least. As if the belief in markets, as I’ve stated before isn’t any less fraught with mystical beliefs in the power of fore-knowledge, good luck, better quality, etc and so on, that has made people view those in the economic ascendent class of the society appear like Ancient Greek Demi-Gods. The facts are simple markets are easily manipulated. And it would be hard for me to accept that socialism if it is going to truly liberate the population from workplace exploitation can really occur in a totally market based economy!
The ultimate driving force of market based economics is that of competition—capturing consumers—which leads economics into a war of efficiencies namely reducing production costs, offsetting those costs to others in society, and finally manipulation of the market itself through careful mergers and acquisitions of competitors. In the end we see some of this behavior has tainted the operations of the Mondragon Cooperative in Spain. While, in Spain Mondragon is a massive worker-cooperative in nature with effective but not direct democratic control of the operations with management and workers — it is however not a global fact, later foreign acquisitions are run in a more traditional corporate fashion, that lacks workplace democracy for its international workers completely. The official Mondragon mantra for why this is the case is that “you cannot impose cooperative values where non existed before”. This sort of circular argument seems to be also at the root of Burgis’ anti-centrally planned economic policies— and yet he negates this by arguing that large portions of the economy should be excised from the market structure and replaced with public control?
I think the fundamental problem with Burgis’ thinking here is that he is captivated by the present narrative that free markets seem to have magical powers to allocate resources with total efficient means to those that want them. And yet we see free markets breakdown all the time during times of extreme pressures. A classic example is you go to a Supermarket looking for weekly sale item and find out that your $0.99 per pound Chicken Breasts are all sold—now, two things can happen they can be a limited first come first serve arrangement which means you’re out of luck; or, the store might adjust their mid-week order to account for more demand. In both cases you’re not looking at magical powers of the market but the hand of managers looking at raw data making an Bayesian like calculation about future demand from past demand and guessing what market will bare. The only difference between the two options is that some where in the supply chain more chicken breasts exist at such a price wholesale price that it is possible to restock and continue the sales of the item at the sale price through out the week.
This is a common breakdown of the free market system we deal with all the time. The other common breakdown is when you face a major crisis like a Hurricane. This breakdown looks far more like a classic Soviet style situation. You go to a store to buy water and you find out that literally the entire bottled water supply is depleted. (I have to say , I’m bit perplexed why more people in Florida’s non-city areas don’t invest in cistern systems to store hundreds of gallons of water during hurricanes???) Here is a classic system where demand is pushed so beyond normal expectations that supply chain fails.
One of the reasons why Soviet supply chains failed so frequently wasn’t because they couldn’t supply things. But was due to the fact that people would blindly get on long lines because of the anticipation of a failure was so great. If the Soviet supply chains were better trusted by their population they might not have had these issues. For example in my first example of the market breaking down most people don’t stand inline for 8hrs attempting to get a chicken—why? Because the consumers believe that chickens will be ordered when they run out and they will show up on some day before the sale and all will be corrected. But in my second example we see that our free-market supply chain is also acceptable to same behavior as Soviet Supplies were. Namely in a big enough crisis we know that it will take days or weeks to really restock a store. This creates the same behavior you see historical presented in the Soviet Union— empty shelves , long lines, and stockpiling of resources even those with little use by consumers. The thing is we know why the Soviets failed so miserably— bad management. And bad management isn’t the same as a systemic failure that Capitalism is so often victim of.
Systemic failures, I attribute directly to the pressures of a competitive market based economic system. When the goal becomes market share and let’s face it when you start talking about the efficiency of free-markets in the allocation function of the resources, goods, and services competition is the key. This totally and fundamentally takes over the economic system and shifts the goals into exploitation. And this isn’t going to change just because you’ve broaden the base of those benefiting from this type of exploitation. The corporations even if they are owned by their own employees will be forced into cycles of extreme competition and exploitation. We can see that Mondragon even has fallen victim to this problem in their development of international corporations that lack their worker-cooperative business model. The same will be true for any system that accepts competition of products is the only way to achieve their overall goals.
The question becomes where does this exploitation take place ultimately? Do you exploit your resources locations i.e. search out the lowest coast raw materials ? Or do you exploit other labor intensive types of operations by outsource difficult to automate aspects of manufacturing processing like the inspection process of turbine blades in gas turbines? Perhaps, you subcontract your customer service and Human Resources departments to a low paying developing nation? Perhaps, the answer is to automate your workforce at home and pretend that robots owned by worker-cooperatives isn’t a form of exploiting workers? At some point you realize that if competition is playing out in these so-called free markets then some type of specific and calculated means of capturing the market share with very specific strategies of cost cutting must be present.
Then we have to ask ourselves the important question can socialism truly exist in a competitive market environment? I would say no. At least not any meaningful type of socialism that provides for a truly democratic workplace environment. So, as you can see I’m not really sold on Dr. Burgis’ economic policies and I’m certainly not impressed that Burgis’ is writing a book with Bhashkar Sunkara President of “The Nation” now (formerly founding editor of Jacobin) who still has never adequately answered about the firing of employees of the British Paper Tribune in 2018. So, you can see why I’m skeptical about Burgis’ as the great truth teller of Socialism he has repeatedly worked for faux-Socialists like Sunkara and Nathan J. Robinson in the past and will continue to do so it seems in the future. So, I cannot help but wonder what does Burgis stand for? I think it is simple that Burgis wants just a very well developed well-fare state with a nice place for the Technocratic Elite to appear needed.
Keep in mind that America’s economy isn’t more efficient and China’s less efficient. It’s that much of China’s and America’s economies are entangled so that China labors for America as well as itself, while American capital profits at both ends.