vanveenada

it's a quadrilogy, not a book, but I'd pick Ada Palmer's _Terra Ignota_ series without hesitation. I'm comfortable arguing for it fitting within the constraint of the question, largely because it is making one sustained argument that's carried out throughout the entire series -- it's very much one book that happens to be like 4000 pages long rather than four separate books.

Anyway, Ada Palmer is a sci-fi writer whose day job is as a professor of Renaissance and Enlightenment-era European philosophy, and everything in this series (set in the 2500s in a world where the geographical nation state collapsed and world governments are now large voluntary organizations) is heavily informed by her training as a historian of philosophy.

She finished the series last year, and though each book has gotten nominated for the big awards, she's had the misfortune of publishing on more or less the same schedule as N.K. Jemisin, whose stuff typically wins the Hugo, Nebula, or both. The fandom is teensy tiny -- I've seen it described as "six people and a shoelace" -- but most people who read it get fanatically devoted to it.

I mean this is neither here nor there, but "communism could work if only it could be done without authoritarianism" is not a Marxist take, doctrinaire or otherwise. If you're a bolshevik, you believe that having and defending a revolution requires a vanguard of devoted party members who run shit. If you're a democratic socialist, likewise you think there needs to be a centralized group in control during the revolution -- you just think that this centralized group should be selected by vote rather than self-appointed. If you're an anarchist (and anarchists are typically not marxist), then you're someone who thinks that managing a revolution without centralized control is possible.

And you might be thinking: why on earth would someone argue that putting the centralized party in control is a good idea? There's a simple reason for that: the Paris Commune.

Why does the Paris Commune matter? They tried to run a revolution on anarchist lines... and so, instead of immediately marching on Versailles to take down the extant government, they just sort of faffed around in committee meetings until a couple of months later the extant government's army came and killed them all. Leninism (the centralized, essentially authoritarian stuff) was a reaction to that. Because they observed how thoroughly fucked over the Commune was, specifically due to the lack of the sort of centralized control that would get people to take up arms and march on Versailles, the bolsheviks decided that they would do everything they possibly could to centralize the fuck out of everything.

And I mean, they lasted for longer than the commune did? At the very least, the bolshevik experiment had some measure of democracy until Stalin came along 7 years after the revolution.

So, yeah. people don't believe "communism could work if it could be done without authoritarianism." Instead there's an active debate (running for a century and a half now) about what type and level of centralized control is necessary to do a revolution without being immediately killed by the old government, and what level of centralized control is so hyper-centralized that it makes a Stalin happen.

Do you knit?

Do you wear sweaters?

The sweaters you have -- did you knit them?

Do you wear shirts?

Did you sew them yourself?

If not, why are you so lazy?

Fortunately, when there's wage-driven inflation there's enough effective demand in the economy to produce enough supply to provide enough taxation headroom to offset the effects of wage-driven inflation on people with fixed incomes.

found the Georgist!

Correct, because nothing lasts forever in this fallen world. That said: the amount of time spent in a state of wage-driven inflation -- setting up the situation where temporary moments of price stickiness result in increases of effective demand that in turn hot up the economy as a whole -- is the thing we want to maximize.

this is an example of "price stickiness." People selling goods tend to let the price stay at whatever level it's currently at longer than is strictly rational. Because prices tend to be sticky, wage-driven inflation tends to result in real gains for wage-earners.

Yes, but because prices (including rents) are sticky -- it takes a while for them to adjust upwards to soak up the additional effective demand produced by increased wages. So long as wages are what's driving inflation, working people tend to reap the benefit. Workers only fall behind when prices grow faster than inflation, as in, for example, the oil shock back in the 1970s.

Even the small capitalist class benefits from the heated-up economy, because the increase in wages results in money being siphoned up from the pre-existing stockpiles of the wealthy, which is where money tends to fall when left to its own devices. When money gets siphoned out of stockpiles and up to people who have to spend it to live, the rise in effective demand makes it valuable to invest in providing more supply, instead of just sitting on the money and collecting interest.

The one major downside to wage-driven inflation is that it hits people living on fixed incomes in the shorts, since it makes pensions and government-provided supports less valuable. This is not a reason to support a heated-up, wage-driven-inflation-powered economy -- it's a reason to support government measures to increase funding for the elderly and disabled in order to match the new value of money.