After listening to Peter Joseph's commentary on one of the recent Bernie--Warren town hall meetings (http://tinyurl.com/y9jg5ex4) I posted a few thoughts on the YouTube for that video, but I want to echo more of my venting here on STEEM from now on, so this'll be my first release of steam on steemit. I guess a reader should first check out what Joseph has to say: "Critique: Bernie Sanders 'Inequality in America' Town Hall from 3.19.18, by Peter Joseph" http://tinyurl.com/y9jg5ex4
Joseph's urgent call for more radical structural solutions around @36 min is great to hear, and it is a breath of fresh air to listen to Joseph talk about endemic problems like welfare and wage slavery free from the conventional capitalist economic assumptions. I think it is almost hilarious --- if it was not so tragic --- how people in the USA do not think they have become like virtual slaves.
A big problem, I think, is how "welfare" is conceived and thought of, it is usually perceived as hand-out. In fact, even wages are regarded as a type of hand-put. No workers in the USA are really getting the full return from their time and labour, they are worked as slaves, then given a hand--out at the end of the month. Even taking a humanitarian systems view this is still the perception. A better more world-embracing view is a spiritual systems view-point. We do not need social welfare to help each other "up" if we instead acted socially in the first place and took it as our mandate to never allow poverty. Conservatives and Keynesians will argue that poverty and unemployment cannot be eradicated, but we have to reject that view and instead regard anyone meaningful engaged in society as "employed", and they should be granted a living wage or basic living conditions as part of our society.
A good model for this type of socialism is seen (although rarely) in education, when a free school allows students to choose subjects and teachers they become greatly empowered and their learning is massively boosted as they become more and more self-motivated and less reliant on teachers for affirmation. If you think of teachers handing out grades and educational "welfare" I think you can get the picture. We should not need such welfare. Instead, a decent society will have structures in place which guarantee freedom from want and need that current hand-out mentality welfare perpetuates. In education, the system should provide students with learning free from the tyranny of grades, just knowing you can do something well is the only "grade" one needs. Although economic social well-being is much more complicated than education, I do think something similar is possible economically . In this analogy, wages are a lot more like "grades" than they are like underlying learning. We can do without wages, just as students can do without grades, but we cannot do without learning just as people cannot do without constructive engagement in society. To get from here to there is likely not something a large structurally ossified nation like the USA can show us. I think smaller nations will have to show us the way. I guess it is possible small pockets of wage slave free socialism could arise within States of the USA.
Joseph also has a good book out, you can get it as an audio-book too, it is The New Human Rights Movement
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31212971-the-new-human-rights-movement
Here is the direct YouTube link: