The Revolutionary Socialist Network, Workers
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- Redistribution of Wealth
2NC -- Ext -- SocialismSocialism solves the coming crises while also maintaining stable growthConor Payne and Chris Stewart, authors for MR online who talk against capitalism, Irish socialist party leaders, 2-7-2022, "The end of growth? The capitalist economy & ecological crisis,” MR Online, https://mronline.org/2022/02/07/the-end-of-growth/)- FT Socialist planning can ensure the rational development of the quality of our lives without increasing environmental intensity. Only on this basis can we restructure our society around need, not profit, creating countless socially necessary jobs in pursuit of building a sustainable system. Socialists stand for massive investment in low carbon jobs and sustainable infrastructure, as well as the introduction of a four-day work-week with no loss of pay. This would not only solve the problem of permanent unemployment under capitalism by distributing work to all those who need it, but would also free workers up to participate in political and economic decision-making, and would achieve a better balance between work, our social lives and leisure. Redistribution of Wealth1NC -- Alt -- Redistribution of WealthRedistribution of wealth is keyPadilla ’21 [Luis-Alberto; 2021; president of the board of the Guatemalan International Relations & Peace Research Institute (IRIPAZ), member of the International Peace Research Association (IPRA), former Secretary General of the Latin American Council on Peace Research (CLAIP), Director of the Diplomatic Academy, Former Vice Minister, former ambassador in Chile, former permanent representative to the United Nations at the Vienna International Centre, former ambassador to Austria, former ambassador to the Russian Federation, former ambassador to the Netherlands, permanent representative to the UN in Geneva, and professor of the Seminar of World Geopolitics at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Catholic University Rafael Landivar (URL) of Guatemala; Sustainable Development in the Anthropocene, “Thomas Picketty,” Ch. 5.3.2, p. 229-231] SPark Indeed, Piketty argues that the concentration of wealth in these rentier elites of owners of capital has in turn led to an exaggerated increase in social inequalities, a phenomenon that is undermining and threatening democracy itself among the member countries of the European Union. Given that the structure of social inequality is the central problem of twenty-first-century capitalism, Piketty dedicates his book to the study of it in several special chapters which deal with issues such as inequality and the concentration of wealth; the inequality of income at work; inequality in the ownership of capital; merit and inheritance in the long term; and inequality on a global scale. According to Piketty, the market economy based on private property needs to be regulated by the State, otherwise, without rules and a legal order, very much in Habermas’ analytical line, “powerful forces of divergence … threaten democratic societies and the social justice values on which they are based” (Piketty 2014: 571). Piketty also emphasizes the fact that the main destabilizing force of capitalism is that the private rate of capital gains can be considerably higher than the income growth of wage earners, small and medium entrepreneurs and the rest of society. This means that wealth accumulated in the past grows faster than production and wages. Such inequality therefore expresses “a fundamental logical contradiction”, which inevitably leads the owners of capital to become rentiers with increasing dominance over those who rely on employment or their workforce. This is how a situation that favours luxury consumption and small market niches of luxury goods and services for these elites is generated, to the detriment of productive investment and employment. The fact is that once capital works, it reproduces much faster than production, and the consequences in the long term lead to a brutal concentration of wealth so that on a global scale the problem becomes enormous and without simple solutions. During the twentieth century, two World Wars were necessary to reduce the excessive profits of capital, somewhat creating the illusion that the fundamental structural contradiction of capitalism had been overcome. With the current average of profits (4-5%) wars will hopefully not become the central phenomenon of the twenty-first century, as they were during the twentieth century (Piketty 2013: 572). Consequently, for wealth not to continue concentrating excessively, Piketty proposes creating an annual tax on capital in order to stop this “spiral of infinite inequality”. The rates suggested by Piketty are in the order of 0.1-0.5% for fortunes under 1 million Euros; 1% for capital of between 1 and 5 million Euros; 2% for the scale of 5-10 million and between 5 and 10% for fortunes of between several hundred and several thousand million Euros: This would stop the unlimited growth of inequality in the distribution of global wealth that is expanding at a rate that cannot be sustained in the long term, and that should worry even the most fervent self-regulated market champions. Historical experience also shows that these immense inequalities in [the distribution of] wealth have very little to do with entrepreneurship and are not useful for promoting growth … The difficulty is that this solution, a progressive tax on capital, requires a high level of international cooperation and regional political integration. It is not within the reach of nation-states where social commitments are negotiated. Many worry that moving in the direction of greater cooperation and political integration, as seen within the European Union, only subverts the achievements already made … Although the risk is real, I do not see any genuine alternative: if we are to recover the control over capitalism we have to bet everything on democracy - and in Europe, democracy on a European scale. Larger political communities such as the United States and China may have a broader range of options, but for small European countries, which will soon appear smaller in relation to the global economy, retreating to national borders can only lead to worse frustrations and dislikes than those that already exist. The nation-state is still the appropriate level to modernize any number of social and fiscal policies and develop new forms of governance as well as shared ownership between public and private, which is one of the greatest challenges for the remainder of the century. But only regional political integration can lead to an effective regulation of the globalized patrimonial capitalism of the twenty-first century (Piketty 2013: 572-573). The previous lines were written by Piketty in 2013, the year of the first edition of his book in French. It is worrisome that since then the situation has worsened with the unfortunate vote for Brexit by British people exasperated by EU regulations; Trump’s election by disenchanted American unemployed workers; the huge flow of refugees resulting from the wars in the Middle East, especially Syria; terrorism menacing European cities; the racism and xenophobia that these last phenomena have aroused throughout Europe; and, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020/21. To all this should be added the populist neo-nationalism in spite of Biden’s election, the damage caused by former. Trump administration, unchaining a new cold war against China, threatening Iran, Venezuela and North Korea, intimidating Mexico and the Latin American countries with his racism and xenophobia, distancing the US from its EU and NATO allies, and so on. Thus the picture could not be grimmer now in relation to the scenarios outlined by Piketty in the conclusions of his book. In any case, it is clear that there is no way out other than betting on democracy and the reform of capitalism at macro-economic level. At least in the European case, it is from their own institutions that Brussels must make appropriate decisions - such as the circular economy and the European Green Deal - to impose effective regulations on this “globalized patrimonial capitalism” which characterize these early decades of the twenty-first century. In any case, the prospect of new concord in the European leadership and the possible reconstitution of the Paris-Berlin axis looms on the horizon thanks to the crisis provoked by the pandemic. Thus in a recent interview Piketty (2020) stated that it is now necessary to change the economic system because even though, after the fall of communism, changing the system was no longer fashionable, the pandemic has again put this issue on the agenda. It is clear that a different economic system is absolutely necessary if the EU really wants to solve both the social inequality crisis and the climate change threat produced by what Piketty calls ‘hyper-capitalism’. He is in favour of a participatory socialist system based on reforms such as sharing power with workers within big corporations and enterprises in order to give workers the right to vote on strategies; the establishment of a basic income; and the “permanent circulation” of wealth through fiscal reform, including a progressive tax on patrimony and heritage in order to change the current situation where in France and Italy, for instance, 50% of the population owns just 5% of the real estate, financial and professional assets whereas the richest 10% in those countries own 50% of the assets and another 1% owns 25% of the wealth. Download 2.09 Mb. Share with your friends:
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