Richard Wolff Versus Steven ("Destiny") Bonnell

A Debate on Socialism versus Capitalism

I suppose Destiny entered this debate in good faith. But why did he have to lie about what Wolff was saying? Wolff certainly never repudiated the labor theory of value in his opening remarks. And later Wolff explicitly argued that the Democrats are not socialist. One may not understand or agree with Wolff, but why lie?

Apparently "Destiny" feels he lost badly and has been trying to find somebody less eminent to contrast his ignorance with. (I also stumbled upon a debate last December between "Socialism Done Left" and Victor Magarino.) Maybe it is not too interesting to watch somebody with a twitch stream try to educate himself. I probably have all sorts of disagreements with those here drawing on Cockshott and Cottrell or on Shaikh. But I certainly do not understand this subculture of Twitch and Discord streamers, whatever that means.

I wish Wolff had been more concrete sometimes. When he was talking about the arguments within the second international that led to the third international splitting off, he could have named Eduard Bernstein and mentioned Rosa Luxemburg's pamphet Reform or Revolution? I would like to hear more about the Portugese communist party. Did they evolve during the Eurocommunism debate in the 1970s? Does providing such details conflict with Wolff's approach of trying to present these ideas in a popular format? It does give those who want to, some keywords on which to search.

I follow Wolff in taking people in the tradition of struggle at their word. For much of the twentieth century, those parties improving the lives of western European countries called themselves socialist. For decades, many have said that the Democratic Party in the USA is not that. Of course, if I take Lenin at his word, those trying to set up a government of a vanguard party implementing central planning are also socialists.

I get that Mondagon has existed for a half-century or more. I suppose Wolff could explain more about where the tradition of worker-managed cooperatives come from. Would he point to pre-Marist utopian socialists? Has he ever commented on Yugoslavia under the communists? I think of dairy products, but, apparently, cooperatives widely exist for residential apartments in some countries today.

Some think that socialist institutions will grow inside capitalist societies until they become dominant. Examining how capitalist institutions grew inside Feudalism, without initially being dominant, is obviously apropos when debating socialism versus capitalism. (Here Wolff talks about how Paul Baran taught him that to consider how a post-capitalist society might grow up under capitalism, one might want to consider how capitalism grew under feudalism.)

In explaining how co-ops can obtain outside investment without ceding control from the workers, Wolff might have mentioned non-voting stock, which many corporations have issued now. Has Wolff ever commented on the possibility of co-ops issuing bonds? Formally, creditors do not control organizations that they lend to, but practically they can. I would also like to hear from Wolff how the law might be changed to encourage co-ops. (This is not, presumably, a matter of prohibiting small proprietors.)

I happen to know that PlayStations are optimized for the mathematics used in demonstrating that the labor theory of value, surprisingly, is empirically valid. Linear algebra is useful for graphics.