AOC on capitalism and capitalists
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“To me, capitalism… is the absolute pursuit of profit at all human, environmental, and social cost.” Rep. @AOC says. “What we’re also discussing is the ability for a very small group of actual capitalists… [to] capture governments. … That is not a redeemable system for us…” pic.twitter.com/U7RS2hkiJs
— Yahoo Finance (@YahooFinance) February 3, 2022
It’s good that capitalism has become a dirty word — that’s grist to our mill — but she is using it to mean unrestrained free market capitalism. Which leaves her open to the interpretation in one of the comments:
FaceTheClimateEmergency
@DorothyBeach
3 Feb
#AOC is talking about a movement towards a more humane #capitalism that many democracies in Europe have. She said extremist people are pushing an agenda for extreme capitalism and because that have money are overly influential (a Putin model btw).As an elected Democratic Party representative that’s what she’s doing in practice. And, as the Yahoo article mentions, the long-term alternative to which she is committed is a market economy of workers’ co-operatives which, whatever it is, is not socialism.
As been identified several times by the Party, we have a problem that Richard Wolff, is popularly declared as an anti-capitalist Marxist economist and he is a proliferate proponent of cooperatives or as he calls them Workers Self-Directed Enterprises
https://www.democracyatwork.info/democratizing_the_workplace
His message is widespread across the USA and is commonly interpreted as socialism and it is this misunderstanding AOC is reflecting.
We are not of any sufficient influence to combat Wolff and even those such as Andrew Kliman do not possess the weight to shift the leftist perception of Wolff as representing Marxist economics.
Yes, it is surprising that Wolff is regarded as the most important contemporary exponent of Marxian economics in the US whereas he puts forward a theory of exploitation which he himself admits is not that of Marx.
We have been pointing this out for years, on the theoretical as well as polemical level as here and here.
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