Matt Bruenig Spreads the Wealth Around
The Dig
Daniel Denvir
4.8 • 1.7K Ratings
🗓️ 9 September 2018
⏱️ 52 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode of The Dig is brought to you by our listeners who support us at patreon.com |
| 0:04.7 | and by Verso Books, which has loads of great left-wing titles, perfect for dig listeners like you. |
| 0:12.9 | One that you might like is Prisoners of the American Dream, Politics and Economy in the History of the U.S. working class. |
| 0:20.1 | By Mike Davis, out now in a new edition. |
| 0:23.8 | Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis' brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists. |
| 0:33.4 | Why has the world's most industrially advanced nation never spawned a mass party of the working class? |
| 0:41.3 | This series of essays surveys the history of the American bourgeois Democratic Revolution, |
| 0:46.3 | from its Jacksonian beginnings to the rise of the new right and the re-election of Ronald Reagan, |
| 0:51.3 | concluding with some bracing thoughts on the prospects for progressive politics |
| 0:55.7 | in the United States. Prisoners of the American Dream, Politics and Economy in the History of |
| 1:02.0 | the U.S. working class by Mike Davis. Out now in a new edition from Verso Books. |
| 1:20.1 | Welcome to The Dig, a podcast from Jacobin Magazine. |
| 1:24.3 | My name is Daniel Denver, and I'm broadcasting from Providence, Rhode Island. |
| 1:25.9 | Socialism. |
| 1:29.0 | It, of course, entails the democratic ownership of the means of production. This is one reason that a minimalist liberal approach to social welfare, |
| 1:34.8 | resting entirely on progressive taxation, falls short. It leaves ownership in the political |
| 1:41.0 | economic power embedded in that ownership in the hands of capitalists. |
| 1:45.5 | At worst, a liberal program merely offers workers the means for the social reproduction of their labor power. |
| 1:52.4 | At best, it can offer a more decent life, including lengthy paid vacations and parental leave. |
| 1:59.3 | This is, I think, one of the major shortcomings of some universal basic income proposals. |
| 2:04.8 | It leaves capitalist relations of production intact while providing an expanded welfare state |
| 2:10.3 | to cushion the blow. |
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