Socialism's Failures: Modernization and Productivist Marxism

Okay, so this episode was initially going to cover an area Weeks identifies as failures of Productivist Marxism; Socialist Modernization and Socialist Humanism, but we're going to be addressing the latter in the next episode. This one ran long enough as is. We're also going to be taking a minute to address, and correct, a mistake I made in the last episode as regards the conservative, capitalist approach to the if, then clause regarding waged work and profit maximazation that has some surprising implications, and we'll take look down the rabit hole of progressive taxation and the Trump tax cuts. We've, um, got a lot to go over.

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Obligatory bibliography, or books (and articles) you may also want to check out:

Klein, Ezra, and Derek Thompson, Abundance. Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, 2025.

Tucker, Robert C., Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels. 1978. The Marx-Engels Reader. Second edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. P.538

Weeks, Kathi. 2011. The Problem with Work : Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Durham: Duke University Press.

Links:

"Current Population Reports; Consumer Income” U.S. Department of Commerce. May 1953

"Historical U.S. Federal Individual Income Tax Rates & Brackets, 1862-2021” 8/24/2021. Tax Foundation

Fry, Richard. “Are You in the American Middle Class? Find out with Our Income Calculator.” Pew Research Center, September 16, 2024.

Picci, Aimee. “Do you know what you pay in taxes? Here's who pays the most and least to the IRS.” 4/15/2025

York, Erica. “Summary of the Latest Federal Income Tax Data, 2024 Update.” 3/13/2024. Tax Foundation

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