| >I concur, there's nothing "communistic" about the idea of full employment, if anything it strikes me as something rather capitalistic in its nature: Full employment would mean there's an oversupply of labor, which means labor would be dirt cheap and easily replaceable. There have been nobel prizes on labour participation rate and unemployment rates. The reality is that you have so much population, you have requirements of productivity to produce things for your population. Cuba is an exception, they do still have government owned slaves. Mostly political prisoners, you can't say anything negative about the government. However, only 30% of their population has a job. What's the consequence? You only get about 1lb of meat a month. Literally I will eat 1 month's of food in a single meal. Also what's up with other consequences? Doctors are forced to work ~65hours/week while 2/3rds of the population stays home? Wow. While taxi drivers who work less hours earn more than you. >That would be the dream for anybody trying to exploit others labor for their own gains, something that's generally seen as a very capitalistic mindset. Not capitalistic at all, what capitalist society has enforced near full employment? I don't know of any. This is a communist thing. Only communism has ever done this. It's something Marx never said needed to happen. It's just the reality of productivity and how society works. >The USSR attempting to have full employment was yet another misplaced attempt at trying to "Beat the capitalistic West at their own game". The even more interesting thing. Graeber obviously says that communism is where you typically get all the bullshit jobs. Yet here they are in capitalism. The reality is that he's right. The reason for the rise of bullshit jobs in capitalism is all the socialism/communism being introduced. Japan isn't communist and yet they also have government slaves, 99.9% of people accused of a crime are forced to work in a gulag. Why? They implemented loads of socialist policies and blew up their debt. Their public debt to GDP is 266%. That's actually worse than Greece during their collapse. The only thing holding Japan together is the government slaves. Why does communism(or whatever name) always seem to come with full employment and government slaves in gulags? I actually don't fully understand why, but that's not a capitalism. |
"99.9% of people accused of a crime ..." -- this is a reference to the fact that the Japanese criminal system's conviction rate is a startlingly high 99.9%. But what's going on here is that about 60% of criminal cases in Japan get suspended without going to court; prosecutors only proceed in cases where they are nearly certain of getting a conviction, so their 99.9% figure isn't comparable to (say) the US's 93% (that's a figure from 2012; I couldn't readily find anything more recent).
(It may also be true that that 99.9% is artificially high, that substantially fewer than 99.9% of accused criminals who go to trial in Japan are actually guilty despite prosecutors' attempts to proceed only when sure of conviction. But even if say 10% of those convictions are wrongful, that's a much smaller effect than the fact that 60% of cases are abandoned without going to trial.)
"... are forced to work in a gulag" -- so the claim here is that literally every person convicted of a crime in Japan then does forced labour. This is not true, for the simple reason that the great majority of people convicted of crimes in Japan (just like everywhere else) don't go to prison. Only about 15% do.
(It is true that most prison sentences in Japan are imprisonment-with-labour. I'm not sure whether it's all of them; I've seen explicit claims that it is and explicit claims that it isn't. I shall not try to adjudicate whether "in a gulag" is a reasonable description of the life of those prisoners. Incidentally, they are mostly paid for the work they do in prison.)
"Why? They implemented loads of socialist policies and blew up their debt."
The Japanese debt-to-annual-GDP ratio hovered around 50% or so until about 1993 and then started rising rapidly, reaching its present level (the figure I've seen is 225%, not 266%, but in any case it's rather high) around 2012. But they had a policy of prison labour before their debt was large; e.g., here's http://www.jca.apc.org/cpr/kaido.html someone complaining about it in 1997 (debt-to-annual-GDP ratio about 70%) using prison labour figures from 1994 (debt-to-annual-GDP ratio about 60%).
(I shall not try to adjudicate whether Japan's big increase in public debt is the result of "socialist policies".)
"The only thing holding Japan together is the government slaves."
About 50k people are in prison in Japan. The population of Japan is about 125M. That 0.04% of the population would have to be incredibly productive for their labour to be "the only thing holding Japan together".