Re: There are no taxes in socialism

Several points to ponder there, and I might come back to one or two other things you say, but I just want to make an observation about the notion that the difference between capitalism and socialism is that the latter socialises risk, whereas the former does not, so that with socialism, unlike capitalism, "The whole society either succeeds or fails together." You see, I am sure that exactly the same is true of capitalism. As you know, capitalist films are very keen indeed to socialise both their costs and their risks, and the larger they are, the more likely they are to succeed. So things are not so clear cut. Nor can modern societies allow sectors like banking to fail, as we saw in 2008. But I also want to point out another aspect to all this. Even a failing business is an opportunity cost to the rest of society, not just the capitalist. When people talk of capitalists and entrepreneurship they always think of successful businesses. But the majority of businesses actually fail. For example, in the UK, around 60 per cent of small business start-ups fail within three years. If we include larger business start-ups then the success rate is higher, but around half of all businesses will still fail within five years. Now all this represents a waste. The labour that went into providing whatever the business tried to sell was not spent on making useful commodities or providing useful services, or at least not sufficiently useful to cover the costs of production. If the businessman, instead of spending his money on a failing business, had instead spent his money on (say) providing parties for his friends, his friends (one assumes) would have enjoyed the parties, and the money would have been spent on something worthwhile. Capitalism, therefore, since it involves the direction of labour, is inevitably a social decision and involves the socialisation of risk through the opportunity costs to society represented by failure, which is actually more common than success. The socialisation of risk is seen whenever there is a crash. Everyone suffers, even though not everyone is responsible for the economic decisions that led to it. Just on the subject of postwar welfare capitalism, I would say that it provided a pretty decent standard of living for the vast majority in the postwar period. Social democracy is surely more likely than a wholesale replacement of the entirety of capitalism by something else. The Greens are already succeeding in changing the conversation in my country, and are piling up impressive support in the polls. With politicians like Mamdani we are seeing what can actually be achieved by a practical socialism that is social-democratic. In contrast, the more uncompromising socialism of the UK's Your Party - or should I call it Her Party, given that Zarah Sultana managed to get her way on everything, even preventing Corbyn from being leader? - seems well on its way to being a leftist corpuscle of zero significance. Surely the way ahead for those of us who want to prevent fascists taking power is clear. I am not saying that capitalism might not one day be superseded in its entirety - I cannot predict the far future - but my attitude is: let us solve the practical problems we face first. We might find as we tackle these problems that they require us to be more radical in certain directions than we anticipated, but I feel the solutions should grow out of our experience with tackling real social problems. Otherwise, we end up like Your Party and the moral purity of permanent opposition.