Like never forget our successful capitalist society is built on a beginning that was absolutely as cruel as the beginning of the Soviet union. We had slaves and we genocided the native population. The blood on our hands is just so old it dried.
The argument is not "capitalist states are more imperialist than socialist states." It's "you can't accuse a state's economic system of being a failure when it was specifically, deliberately undermined by other, powerful imperialist states."
What I am saying is that, a state's economic system is being deliberately undermined by other powerful states is an existing condition and is happening regardless of government type. It is happening to almost all governments, all the time, and it is regardless of economic system.
Its not an equally existing condition. When a capitalist government/economy in Latin America wants to sell off their crop lands to American business interests we're their best friend and hey would you like some aid money?
When a socialist government in Latin America wants to sell off their crop lands to American business interests, we're their best friend as well. We're pretty universal when it comes to exploitation.
But if an economic system can't survived being deliberately undermined, it is a failure, because that is the status quo. There is no socialism that is in a bubble.
So literally every system, never mind economic?
Yeah. Every system at some point fails. It's the nature of entropy and whatever, but any system, economic or government wise needs to be robust enough to defend against it.
Looking at the US right now, wouldn't the conclusion be that democracy is just as much a "failure" as socialism then?
Yeah. Maybe we'll get it right eventually.
I mean, in principle, I don't disagree with you, but in practice, this means that we have no standard to judge any system of societal organization. All societies fail inevitably, and, in their failure, it often always involves external actors, except in those extremely rare cases of utterly isolated societies. The Carthaginians fell to the Romans. The Romans fell to the Goths. The Song fell to the Mongols. (Sometimes it's internal rebellion, admittedly.)
Even the societies that exist today are likely to fail at some point in the future, unless you're one of those "We've reached the endpoint of all civilization" people. It's just yet to happen because time is linear.
So then what exactly is a viable metric here?
My whole point, if y'all had read on to the next post in my exchange with zepherin, was that seizing on individual examples to broadly condemn the whole is pointless, a grave error of generalization, stumbling directly into the problem of induction. 100 years from now, 1000 years from now, 5000 years from now, people will look back on this society of ours the same way we look at the Soviet Union. One data point or, a handful of data points, we still only have one timeline, one history, one post from which we can observe the rest of human history. That which survives now does not mean it will survive always, nor would have survived in all circumstances.
They super won't, though. The simple existence of the soviet gulag guarantees that. In a single year, one single year, Stalinist Russia executed over 680,000 people in a purge of the Communist party!
It's comments like this that answer the original question in the OP for me - socialism is a scary word because as the conversation goes on, people who support it keep saying stuff like this. Stuff like the dude a few pages back who compared Soviet labor camps to the modern prison system, as if 1.7 million people literally worked to death in 25 years compares to the US modern death toll of a smidge over 17k/year from all causes. Suggested that he could put the crimes of a US President up against Pol Pot's ~2 million slaughtered or starved to death in a decade... not to mention that decade was 1968 to 1978!!
All the folks who are saying that there's a better socialist model and a way toward it that isn't just a masquerade for incredible bloody suffering, this is what keeps sinking the idea. Somebody needs to stuff comments like this in a locker and bang loudly on the door every time a sound comes from inside. Whenever the well-intentioned folks who just want to help society start off going "C'mon guys, socialism can be great! Just look at-", a guy grabs the mic like Kanye and yells "-the blood on American hands! Soviet Russia was a worker's paradise!" or some shit like that and anybody who doesn't like being purged goes "naaah I'll take capitalist suffering thanks".
I mean 400 years of slavery but like whatever i guess that's not on our capitalistic hands or anything.
Of course it is, and it's some shit we have to atone for, reconcile, recognize at the very least. I think 400 years is worth arguing as the mid 15th century wasn't terribly 'capitalist' by anyone's metric, and it's at least arguably fair to use the roughly 360,000 Union dead to draw a red line under 1865 as the end of slavery.
But even all war dead during that conflict doesn't compare with Stalin's purge in a single year. No one who is trying to promote a better method than capitalism should let the USSR within shouting distance of their plan. A full throated, unqualified, unequivocal denouncement is and ought to be the cover charge for any socialist suggestions.
The argument is not "capitalist states are more imperialist than socialist states." It's "you can't accuse a state's economic system of being a failure when it was specifically, deliberately undermined by other, powerful imperialist states."
What I am saying is that, a state's economic system is being deliberately undermined by other powerful states is an existing condition and is happening regardless of government type. It is happening to almost all governments, all the time, and it is regardless of economic system.
Its not an equally existing condition. When a capitalist government/economy in Latin America wants to sell off their crop lands to American business interests we're their best friend and hey would you like some aid money?
When a socialist government in Latin America wants to sell off their crop lands to American business interests, we're their best friend as well. We're pretty universal when it comes to exploitation.
But if an economic system can't survived being deliberately undermined, it is a failure, because that is the status quo. There is no socialism that is in a bubble.
So literally every system, never mind economic?
Yeah. Every system at some point fails. It's the nature of entropy and whatever, but any system, economic or government wise needs to be robust enough to defend against it.
Looking at the US right now, wouldn't the conclusion be that democracy is just as much a "failure" as socialism then?
Yeah. Maybe we'll get it right eventually.
I mean, in principle, I don't disagree with you, but in practice, this means that we have no standard to judge any system of societal organization. All societies fail inevitably, and, in their failure, it often always involves external actors, except in those extremely rare cases of utterly isolated societies. The Carthaginians fell to the Romans. The Romans fell to the Goths. The Song fell to the Mongols. (Sometimes it's internal rebellion, admittedly.)
Even the societies that exist today are likely to fail at some point in the future, unless you're one of those "We've reached the endpoint of all civilization" people. It's just yet to happen because time is linear.
So then what exactly is a viable metric here?
My whole point, if y'all had read on to the next post in my exchange with zepherin, was that seizing on individual examples to broadly condemn the whole is pointless, a grave error of generalization, stumbling directly into the problem of induction. 100 years from now, 1000 years from now, 5000 years from now, people will look back on this society of ours the same way we look at the Soviet Union. One data point or, a handful of data points, we still only have one timeline, one history, one post from which we can observe the rest of human history. That which survives now does not mean it will survive always, nor would have survived in all circumstances.
They super won't, though. The simple existence of the soviet gulag guarantees that. In a single year, one single year, Stalinist Russia executed over 680,000 people in a purge of the Communist party!
It's comments like this that answer the original question in the OP for me - socialism is a scary word because as the conversation goes on, people who support it keep saying stuff like this. Stuff like the dude a few pages back who compared Soviet labor camps to the modern prison system, as if 1.7 million people literally worked to death in 25 years compares to the US modern death toll of a smidge over 17k/year from all causes. Suggested that he could put the crimes of a US President up against Pol Pot's ~2 million slaughtered or starved to death in a decade... not to mention that decade was 1968 to 1978!!
All the folks who are saying that there's a better socialist model and a way toward it that isn't just a masquerade for incredible bloody suffering, this is what keeps sinking the idea. Somebody needs to stuff comments like this in a locker and bang loudly on the door every time a sound comes from inside. Whenever the well-intentioned folks who just want to help society start off going "C'mon guys, socialism can be great! Just look at-", a guy grabs the mic like Kanye and yells "-the blood on American hands! Soviet Russia was a worker's paradise!" or some shit like that and anybody who doesn't like being purged goes "naaah I'll take capitalist suffering thanks".
Oh yeah sure, people all talk all the time about how the Romans kept slaves, how they regularly exterminated their enemies, how they burned and salted Carthage. Some 150 000 - 350 000 people died at Carthage, and the remaining 50 000 enslaved. And this is in fucking 149 BC, not the late 20th century. (https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/first_genocide.pdf <--- Note, the name of the file.)
No wait oops, actually, people venerate Rome as the greatest civilization of Western history, fought over the title Holy Roman Emperor, and then established entire nations based on Roman history and symbology, COUGH COUGH.
Come the fuck on, man. Yeah, it's me who's hypocritically whitewashing history here. If you're going to fling numbers around as though they matter, at least it took the Soviets a year to kill 680 000 people; the republic your nation is founded to resemble killed half that in days. E pluribus unum doesn't mean "take vague shots at people's morality so you can pretend your ignorance is actually virtue."
The argument is not "capitalist states are more imperialist than socialist states." It's "you can't accuse a state's economic system of being a failure when it was specifically, deliberately undermined by other, powerful imperialist states."
What I am saying is that, a state's economic system is being deliberately undermined by other powerful states is an existing condition and is happening regardless of government type. It is happening to almost all governments, all the time, and it is regardless of economic system.
Its not an equally existing condition. When a capitalist government/economy in Latin America wants to sell off their crop lands to American business interests we're their best friend and hey would you like some aid money?
When a socialist government in Latin America wants to sell off their crop lands to American business interests, we're their best friend as well. We're pretty universal when it comes to exploitation.
But if an economic system can't survived being deliberately undermined, it is a failure, because that is the status quo. There is no socialism that is in a bubble.
So literally every system, never mind economic?
Yeah. Every system at some point fails. It's the nature of entropy and whatever, but any system, economic or government wise needs to be robust enough to defend against it.
Looking at the US right now, wouldn't the conclusion be that democracy is just as much a "failure" as socialism then?
Yeah. Maybe we'll get it right eventually.
I mean, in principle, I don't disagree with you, but in practice, this means that we have no standard to judge any system of societal organization. All societies fail inevitably, and, in their failure, it often always involves external actors, except in those extremely rare cases of utterly isolated societies. The Carthaginians fell to the Romans. The Romans fell to the Goths. The Song fell to the Mongols. (Sometimes it's internal rebellion, admittedly.)
Even the societies that exist today are likely to fail at some point in the future, unless you're one of those "We've reached the endpoint of all civilization" people. It's just yet to happen because time is linear.
So then what exactly is a viable metric here?
My whole point, if y'all had read on to the next post in my exchange with zepherin, was that seizing on individual examples to broadly condemn the whole is pointless, a grave error of generalization, stumbling directly into the problem of induction. 100 years from now, 1000 years from now, 5000 years from now, people will look back on this society of ours the same way we look at the Soviet Union. One data point or, a handful of data points, we still only have one timeline, one history, one post from which we can observe the rest of human history. That which survives now does not mean it will survive always, nor would have survived in all circumstances.
They super won't, though. The simple existence of the soviet gulag guarantees that. In a single year, one single year, Stalinist Russia executed over 680,000 people in a purge of the Communist party!
It's comments like this that answer the original question in the OP for me - socialism is a scary word because as the conversation goes on, people who support it keep saying stuff like this. Stuff like the dude a few pages back who compared Soviet labor camps to the modern prison system, as if 1.7 million people literally worked to death in 25 years compares to the US modern death toll of a smidge over 17k/year from all causes. Suggested that he could put the crimes of a US President up against Pol Pot's ~2 million slaughtered or starved to death in a decade... not to mention that decade was 1968 to 1978!!
All the folks who are saying that there's a better socialist model and a way toward it that isn't just a masquerade for incredible bloody suffering, this is what keeps sinking the idea. Somebody needs to stuff comments like this in a locker and bang loudly on the door every time a sound comes from inside. Whenever the well-intentioned folks who just want to help society start off going "C'mon guys, socialism can be great! Just look at-", a guy grabs the mic like Kanye and yells "-the blood on American hands! Soviet Russia was a worker's paradise!" or some shit like that and anybody who doesn't like being purged goes "naaah I'll take capitalist suffering thanks".
I mean 400 years of slavery but like whatever i guess that's not on our capitalistic hands or anything.
I think you're confusing closed market colonial systems which were under a authoritarian system of monarchy=capitalism under a democratic system. Socialism has to answer for its crimes and failures because its a direct line in the political and economic spheres for the last 100 years. Industrialization and democracy grew together; workers rights in the U.S. under a Republican President, suffrage for woman, the abolition of slavery in Europe and later the United States. Capitalism with democracy at least attempts at self correction and adopts socialist precepts if they work and are divorced from the destructive purges and such. Socialism just keeps up the greatest hits.
The argument is not "capitalist states are more imperialist than socialist states." It's "you can't accuse a state's economic system of being a failure when it was specifically, deliberately undermined by other, powerful imperialist states."
What I am saying is that, a state's economic system is being deliberately undermined by other powerful states is an existing condition and is happening regardless of government type. It is happening to almost all governments, all the time, and it is regardless of economic system.
Its not an equally existing condition. When a capitalist government/economy in Latin America wants to sell off their crop lands to American business interests we're their best friend and hey would you like some aid money?
When a socialist government in Latin America wants to sell off their crop lands to American business interests, we're their best friend as well. We're pretty universal when it comes to exploitation.
But if an economic system can't survived being deliberately undermined, it is a failure, because that is the status quo. There is no socialism that is in a bubble.
So literally every system, never mind economic?
Yeah. Every system at some point fails. It's the nature of entropy and whatever, but any system, economic or government wise needs to be robust enough to defend against it.
Looking at the US right now, wouldn't the conclusion be that democracy is just as much a "failure" as socialism then?
Yeah. Maybe we'll get it right eventually.
I mean, in principle, I don't disagree with you, but in practice, this means that we have no standard to judge any system of societal organization. All societies fail inevitably, and, in their failure, it often always involves external actors, except in those extremely rare cases of utterly isolated societies. The Carthaginians fell to the Romans. The Romans fell to the Goths. The Song fell to the Mongols. (Sometimes it's internal rebellion, admittedly.)
Even the societies that exist today are likely to fail at some point in the future, unless you're one of those "We've reached the endpoint of all civilization" people. It's just yet to happen because time is linear.
So then what exactly is a viable metric here?
My whole point, if y'all had read on to the next post in my exchange with zepherin, was that seizing on individual examples to broadly condemn the whole is pointless, a grave error of generalization, stumbling directly into the problem of induction. 100 years from now, 1000 years from now, 5000 years from now, people will look back on this society of ours the same way we look at the Soviet Union. One data point or, a handful of data points, we still only have one timeline, one history, one post from which we can observe the rest of human history. That which survives now does not mean it will survive always, nor would have survived in all circumstances.
They super won't, though. The simple existence of the soviet gulag guarantees that. In a single year, one single year, Stalinist Russia executed over 680,000 people in a purge of the Communist party!
It's comments like this that answer the original question in the OP for me - socialism is a scary word because as the conversation goes on, people who support it keep saying stuff like this. Stuff like the dude a few pages back who compared Soviet labor camps to the modern prison system, as if 1.7 million people literally worked to death in 25 years compares to the US modern death toll of a smidge over 17k/year from all causes. Suggested that he could put the crimes of a US President up against Pol Pot's ~2 million slaughtered or starved to death in a decade... not to mention that decade was 1968 to 1978!!
All the folks who are saying that there's a better socialist model and a way toward it that isn't just a masquerade for incredible bloody suffering, this is what keeps sinking the idea. Somebody needs to stuff comments like this in a locker and bang loudly on the door every time a sound comes from inside. Whenever the well-intentioned folks who just want to help society start off going "C'mon guys, socialism can be great! Just look at-", a guy grabs the mic like Kanye and yells "-the blood on American hands! Soviet Russia was a worker's paradise!" or some shit like that and anybody who doesn't like being purged goes "naaah I'll take capitalist suffering thanks".
..
Aside from what Spool has said you realize that's a comically bad take on that quote tree, right? The point seems to have gone so far over your head it's on orbit.
The point there is you can't say "Well socialism can't withstand outside meddling therefore it fails always" as a valid point because given enough outside meddling *every* system collapses and given enough time every system...also collapses.
We supported them at the UN, primarily because Vietnam- a communist county- wouldn't commit to stop fighting them.
We armed all sorts of vicious dictators and it's mostly luck none of *them* pulled a Pol Pot. We're selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, who's actions in Yemen would make Stalin proud. We suport Durete, despite the tens of thousands of dead at his hands.
The US's hands aren't clean.
And on 500 years the history books may well be talking about how what the USSR did was a tiny fraction of what the US did. Because there are large factions on the right that are all in favor of genocide. Several different flavors of it no less.
hey everyone, how many times we're gonna have this circle of "socialism is unpopular" and "that's why we fucking talk about it and educate ourselves"
y'all keep bringing up Pol Pot and Stalin; I got a long list of U.S. presidents culpable for war crimes
y'all bring up labor camps; I raise you modern prisons
y'all talk about all the terrible violence that will happen if socialism succeeds; I'm looking at the slow genocide of the U.S. justice system
must be nice being all isolated and safe from all the horrible shit that capitalism pulls
"Why is Socialism a scary word? U.S. Presidents committed war crimes!!"
Stalin and Pol Pot committed genocide against their own people. That"s why electing socialists is scarier. Nixon didn't Arc Light the kulaks in Ohio. Why the hell would I pick socialists when their track record is of murdering the people who picked them?
I hear the Swedish death camps are quite cozy this time of year.
Disingenuous snark is not a particularly effective rhetorical style. You very well know he mean't 1917 on Bolshevism. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pot, Le Duan etc... All monsters who killed tens of millions of civilians in the name of reach utopian socialist state.
That's not why they were killed. If you think, like, Stalin was trying to reach a utopian socialist state, you don't know wtf you are talking about.
incorrect, read any biography. that is the exact language he used.
And Trump says he's working for the little guy. Strongmen say a lot of things to justify their pursuit of power. You should think more critically about the context of statements by these people.
We should look at what Stalin actually tried to do rather then what his propaganda claimed.
You don't get to divorce the rhetoric and philosophy from the real politik, when the goons enforcing it in the NKVD absolutely at the soldier guard, mid level manager level bought hook line and sinker into that. You don't get people turning on each other and a gulag system without that class envy crap that led to kulaks becoming the scape goat for societies ills, and degradation's of engineering and the science's because political ideology trumped western objective empiricism. The modern far left are outright asking to return to those days, with the denouncement of basic western societal pillars as "problematic". The left are so dogmatic and ignorant of history I don't want a bunch of people who's primary virtues are grievances anywhere near the reigns of power.
Under this logic North Korea is a republic because that’s the party line, instead of being a totalitarian monarchy helmed by the Kim family
The argument is not "capitalist states are more imperialist than socialist states." It's "you can't accuse a state's economic system of being a failure when it was specifically, deliberately undermined by other, powerful imperialist states."
What I am saying is that, a state's economic system is being deliberately undermined by other powerful states is an existing condition and is happening regardless of government type. It is happening to almost all governments, all the time, and it is regardless of economic system.
Its not an equally existing condition. When a capitalist government/economy in Latin America wants to sell off their crop lands to American business interests we're their best friend and hey would you like some aid money?
When a socialist government in Latin America wants to sell off their crop lands to American business interests, we're their best friend as well. We're pretty universal when it comes to exploitation.
But if an economic system can't survived being deliberately undermined, it is a failure, because that is the status quo. There is no socialism that is in a bubble.
So literally every system, never mind economic?
Yeah. Every system at some point fails. It's the nature of entropy and whatever, but any system, economic or government wise needs to be robust enough to defend against it.
Looking at the US right now, wouldn't the conclusion be that democracy is just as much a "failure" as socialism then?
Yeah. Maybe we'll get it right eventually.
I mean, in principle, I don't disagree with you, but in practice, this means that we have no standard to judge any system of societal organization. All societies fail inevitably, and, in their failure, it often always involves external actors, except in those extremely rare cases of utterly isolated societies. The Carthaginians fell to the Romans. The Romans fell to the Goths. The Song fell to the Mongols. (Sometimes it's internal rebellion, admittedly.)
Even the societies that exist today are likely to fail at some point in the future, unless you're one of those "We've reached the endpoint of all civilization" people. It's just yet to happen because time is linear.
So then what exactly is a viable metric here?
My whole point, if y'all had read on to the next post in my exchange with zepherin, was that seizing on individual examples to broadly condemn the whole is pointless, a grave error of generalization, stumbling directly into the problem of induction. 100 years from now, 1000 years from now, 5000 years from now, people will look back on this society of ours the same way we look at the Soviet Union. One data point or, a handful of data points, we still only have one timeline, one history, one post from which we can observe the rest of human history. That which survives now does not mean it will survive always, nor would have survived in all circumstances.
They super won't, though. The simple existence of the soviet gulag guarantees that. In a single year, one single year, Stalinist Russia executed over 680,000 people in a purge of the Communist party!
It's comments like this that answer the original question in the OP for me - socialism is a scary word because as the conversation goes on, people who support it keep saying stuff like this. Stuff like the dude a few pages back who compared Soviet labor camps to the modern prison system, as if 1.7 million people literally worked to death in 25 years compares to the US modern death toll of a smidge over 17k/year from all causes. Suggested that he could put the crimes of a US President up against Pol Pot's ~2 million slaughtered or starved to death in a decade... not to mention that decade was 1968 to 1978!!
All the folks who are saying that there's a better socialist model and a way toward it that isn't just a masquerade for incredible bloody suffering, this is what keeps sinking the idea. Somebody needs to stuff comments like this in a locker and bang loudly on the door every time a sound comes from inside. Whenever the well-intentioned folks who just want to help society start off going "C'mon guys, socialism can be great! Just look at-", a guy grabs the mic like Kanye and yells "-the blood on American hands! Soviet Russia was a worker's paradise!" or some shit like that and anybody who doesn't like being purged goes "naaah I'll take capitalist suffering thanks".
..
Aside from what Spool has said you realize that's a comically bad take on that quote tree, right? The point seems to have gone so far over your head it's on orbit.
The point there is you can't say "Well socialism can't withstand outside meddling therefore it fails always" as a valid point because given enough outside meddling *every* system collapses and given enough time every system...also collapses.
We supported them at the UN, primarily because Vietnam- a communist county- wouldn't commit to stop fighting them.
We armed all sorts of vicious dictators and it's mostly luck none of *them* pulled a Pol Pot. We're selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, who's actions in Yemen would make Stalin proud. We suport Durete, despite the tens of thousands of dead at his hands.
The US's hands aren't clean.
And on 500 years the history books may well be talking about how what the USSR did was a tiny fraction of what the US did. Because there are large factions on the right that are all in favor of genocide. Several different flavors of it no less.
If 5000 years from now, human society hasn't progressed to a point where they can actually look back at United States history and condemn it for all its evils, if humans still need to whitewash their own history to maintain their illusion of moral superiority over other humans, if humans still believe that the moral superiority of "their people" translates into their own individual moral superiority, if humans still need to minimize the evils they cause by pointing at the evils of others and imagining them to be "greater," if humans can't decompartmentalize the deaths and injuries they cause to people far around the world even in their passivity, then I don't want to live on this planet any more, cuz what the fuck's the point?
We’ve been over this time and time again earlier in the thread, where it’s been pointed out despite the party line of “we’re communists! Really! See, we talk about the worker and how shitty the bougiousie are!” That the USSR and China weren’t actually, you know, socialist states but that their actual process was State Capitalism with the political leadership as the new capital class, a leadership that exercised authoritarian control over the populace.
You cannot have a socialist system if the people comprisingnhe group in question do not actually govern it’s operation! That’s the entire point! If the state does not answer to the people, then how can it be socialist! It’s like arguing dictatorship is a democracy because they have sham elections the dictator just always happens to win!
If your pitch for socialism is "we're actually as bad or worse than the Soviets/Pol Pot/Mao/etc so we better follow those footsteps before history judges us harshly", it should be unsurprising people don't bite. A better way forward seems to be a complete and full denounciation of socialism in those forms, and a concrete explanaition of how your socialist paradise will not fall into those same traps.
Like never forget our successful capitalist society is built on a beginning that was absolutely as cruel as the beginning of the Soviet union. We had slaves and we genocided the native population. The blood on our hands is just so old it dried.
See this is what I mean. In the late 1700s there were (estimates are very hard) maybe 600,000 natives remaining in what became the US. That's down from a population of anywhere between 2 and 18 million at the time of the first European explorers, a loss of life attributed almost entirely due to disease in North America. Central and South America is a different story as the Spanish were unbelievably bloody-minded. Anyhow, in a hundred years that population dropped to maybe around 200,000, also at least partly from disease, and continued to decline into the 30s when that trend reversed.
This is a horrible thing. American genocide of the native populations is a shameful and embarrassing blot on our national history, a disgrace that can never be fully made right.
It does not compare in either scope, time, or loss of life to the horrors of 20th century postwar communist/socialist massacres. It's not even close.
If your pitch for socialism is "we're actually as bad or worse than the Soviets/Pol Pot/Mao/etc so we better follow those footsteps before history judges us harshly", it should be unsurprising people don't bite. A better way forward seems to be a complete and full denounciation of socialism in those forms, and a concrete explanaition of how your socialist paradise will not fall into those same traps.
K. But that's not the pitch, and if you'd read the thread, you'll note that many of us have been discussing your "suggestion" for pages now, with varying levels of optimism.
If your pitch for socialism is "we're actually as bad or worse than the Soviets/Pol Pot/Mao/etc so we better follow those footsteps before history judges us harshly", it should be unsurprising people don't bite. A better way forward seems to be a complete and full denounciation of socialism in those forms, and a concrete explanaition of how your socialist paradise will not fall into those same traps.
I think you have misread the pitch
The former is not what anyone here is saying, and the latter is exactly what people are trying to establish.
If your pitch for socialism is "we're actually as bad or worse than the Soviets/Pol Pot/Mao/etc so we better follow those footsteps before history judges us harshly", it should be unsurprising people don't bite. A better way forward seems to be a complete and full denounciation of socialism in those forms, and a concrete explanaition of how your socialist paradise will not fall into those same traps.
Pretty sure we can decry the horrors of American History and Stalin and Mao at the same time.
The problem tends to come more that the argument issued is “these were such terrible people! It’s proof socialism is evil to the core if these men could destroy so many lives in its name, not like us good, valiant Americans and our capitalism.”
Which is the thing that keeps happening, because 20th and 21st Century American History is still based on America as Captain America from the day the Declaration was signed, ignoring the genocides, the slavery, the oppression used to build the country.
For Christ’s sakes we’re barely a hundred years removed from the time when coal mine operators literally air bombed their workers with improvised explosives made out of cobbled together WWI munitions!
I don't get why capitalism gets to wash off the stank of genocide and forced labor camps when no other ideology does. At best you're at sunk cost in that we already went through the genocide and forced labor for the transition to capitalism, which I'd argue is patently untrue given global capitalism's current performance.
I don't get why capitalism gets to wash off the stank of genocide and forced labor camps when no other ideology does. At best you're at sunk cost in that we already went through the genocide and forced labor for the transition to capitalism, which I'd argue is patently untrue given global capitalism's current performance.
No one arguing how great capitalism is and how freeing it is for a populace wants to know where their phone or tablet’s constituent resources came from
Like never forget our successful capitalist society is built on a beginning that was absolutely as cruel as the beginning of the Soviet union. We had slaves and we genocided the native population. The blood on our hands is just so old it dried.
See this is what I mean. In the late 1700s there were (estimates are very hard) maybe 600,000 natives remaining in what became the US. That's down from a population of anywhere between 2 and 18 million at the time of the first European explorers, a loss of life attributed almost entirely due to disease in North America. Central and South America is a different story as the Spanish were unbelievably bloody-minded. Anyhow, in a hundred years that population dropped to maybe around 200,000, also at least partly from disease, and continued to decline into the 30s when that trend reversed.
This is a horrible thing. American genocide of the native populations is a shameful and embarrassing blot on our national history, a disgrace that can never be fully made right.
It does not compare in either scope, time, or loss of life to the horrors of 20th century postwar communist/socialist massacres. It's not even close.
So, what, your rule is that mass murder is okay up to a certain number, and then past that number it's too horrendous and anything relating to that event can't be seriously discussed ever as a practical system, but below that number, it's a-okay totally cool let's establish our society around it?
Man, the sheer hypocrisy here as you vaguely shift around the standards here for what can and cannot be discussed "morally". What's that number, by the way? Can you spit it out for us? What is the exact number of deaths that is too much for spool32? What's the maximum number of deaths that's a-okay by spool32?
And I ain't even gotten around to asking you to justify how a capitalist, liberal democracy turned into the Third Reich yet, aw gee how come you haven't held democracy to answer for that? Or what about the First World War? 18 million dead? Aww gee, maybe we shouldn't ever talk about nation-states any more, obviously Westphalia was a terrible idea, and anybody who talks about Westphalian nation states is just secretly advocating for mindless slaughter on the battlefield.
Like never forget our successful capitalist society is built on a beginning that was absolutely as cruel as the beginning of the Soviet union. We had slaves and we genocided the native population. The blood on our hands is just so old it dried.
See this is what I mean. In the late 1700s there were (estimates are very hard) maybe 600,000 natives remaining in what became the US. That's down from a population of anywhere between 2 and 18 million at the time of the first European explorers, a loss of life attributed almost entirely due to disease in North America. Central and South America is a different story as the Spanish were unbelievably bloody-minded. Anyhow, in a hundred years that population dropped to maybe around 200,000, also at least partly from disease, and continued to decline into the 30s when that trend reversed.
This is a horrible thing. American genocide of the native populations is a shameful and embarrassing blot on our national history, a disgrace that can never be fully made right.
It does not compare in either scope, time, or loss of life to the horrors of 20th century postwar communist/socialist massacres. It's not even close.
The colonists would happily have wiped native populations out in a shorter period if they could have, it seems to me. This seems to be more of a difference of capacity for mass murder than actual moral difference or structural imperatives.
If your pitch for socialism is "we're actually as bad or worse than the Soviets/Pol Pot/Mao/etc so we better follow those footsteps before history judges us harshly", it should be unsurprising people don't bite. A better way forward seems to be a complete and full denounciation of socialism in those forms, and a concrete explanaition of how your socialist paradise will not fall into those same traps.
oddly, constantly reassuring every stranger I meet that I'm not a crazed deviant axe murderer has not had the very clear intended effect.
Fun facts: did you know that while your government in the US couldn’t just, you know, Storm into your house and search the place on a whim, that in a late 19th century and early 20th century company town, if your company thought that you just might be pressing for one of these new fangled “unions” that workers across the country thought we’re all the rage that they’d send in goons to ransack your home for any union related materials and there wasn’t a damn thing you were able to do about it, because the company practically owned your life and paid enough hired guns to keep it that way?
But nah, America, rah rah, land of the free, democracy, Apple pie, not a single totalitarian act of the powerful against the weak ever, and if it was it was all in the antebellum past and everything after was just peace, harmony and freedom
Like never forget our successful capitalist society is built on a beginning that was absolutely as cruel as the beginning of the Soviet union. We had slaves and we genocided the native population. The blood on our hands is just so old it dried.
See this is what I mean. In the late 1700s there were (estimates are very hard) maybe 600,000 natives remaining in what became the US. That's down from a population of anywhere between 2 and 18 million at the time of the first European explorers, a loss of life attributed almost entirely due to disease in North America. Central and South America is a different story as the Spanish were unbelievably bloody-minded. Anyhow, in a hundred years that population dropped to maybe around 200,000, also at least partly from disease, and continued to decline into the 30s when that trend reversed.
This is a horrible thing. American genocide of the native populations is a shameful and embarrassing blot on our national history, a disgrace that can never be fully made right.
It does not compare in either scope, time, or loss of life to the horrors of 20th century postwar communist/socialist massacres. It's not even close.
So, what, your rule is that mass murder is okay up to a certain number, and then past that number it's too horrendous and anything relating to that event can't be seriously discussed ever as a practical system, but below that number, it's a-okay totally cool let's establish our society around it?
Man, the sheer hypocrisy here as you vaguely shift around the standards here for what can and cannot be discussed "morally". What's that number, by the way? Can you spit it out for us? What is the exact number of deaths that is too much for spool32? What's the maximum number of deaths that's a-okay by spool32?
And I ain't even gotten around to asking you to justify how a capitalist, liberal democracy turned into the Third Reich yet, aw gee how come you haven't held democracy to answer for that? Or what about the First World War? 18 million dead? Aww gee, maybe we shouldn't ever talk about nation-states any more, obviously Westphalia was a terrible idea, and anybody who talks about Westphalian nation states is just secretly advocating for mindless slaughter on the battlefield.
Yes, when I say that something is a horrible, shameful disgrace, what I mean is that it's OK up to a certain number.
Come on dude. I'm very very comfortable denouncing slavery and native American genocide without qualification as the entry fee for a discussion of how we can use a capitalist system to make life better for people and drive progress as a species. I've already done it even! Just now!
It ought not create such consternation to suggest that socialists stop bothsidesing when Soviet, PRC, and KR atrocities are objectively far worse, and instead get comfortable shitting on those regimes as the price of admission.
Like never forget our successful capitalist society is built on a beginning that was absolutely as cruel as the beginning of the Soviet union. We had slaves and we genocided the native population. The blood on our hands is just so old it dried.
See this is what I mean. In the late 1700s there were (estimates are very hard) maybe 600,000 natives remaining in what became the US. That's down from a population of anywhere between 2 and 18 million at the time of the first European explorers, a loss of life attributed almost entirely due to disease in North America. Central and South America is a different story as the Spanish were unbelievably bloody-minded. Anyhow, in a hundred years that population dropped to maybe around 200,000, also at least partly from disease, and continued to decline into the 30s when that trend reversed.
This is a horrible thing. American genocide of the native populations is a shameful and embarrassing blot on our national history, a disgrace that can never be fully made right.
It does not compare in either scope, time, or loss of life to the horrors of 20th century postwar communist/socialist massacres. It's not even close.
The colonists would happily have wiped native populations out in a shorter period if they could have, it seems to me. This seems to be more of a difference of capacity for mass murder than actual moral difference or structural imperatives.
I'm not sure that's true at all, but I think it's outside the scope of the thread to chase the tangent down.
Like never forget our successful capitalist society is built on a beginning that was absolutely as cruel as the beginning of the Soviet union. We had slaves and we genocided the native population. The blood on our hands is just so old it dried.
See this is what I mean. In the late 1700s there were (estimates are very hard) maybe 600,000 natives remaining in what became the US. That's down from a population of anywhere between 2 and 18 million at the time of the first European explorers, a loss of life attributed almost entirely due to disease in North America. Central and South America is a different story as the Spanish were unbelievably bloody-minded. Anyhow, in a hundred years that population dropped to maybe around 200,000, also at least partly from disease, and continued to decline into the 30s when that trend reversed.
This is a horrible thing. American genocide of the native populations is a shameful and embarrassing blot on our national history, a disgrace that can never be fully made right.
It does not compare in either scope, time, or loss of life to the horrors of 20th century postwar communist/socialist massacres. It's not even close.
So, what, your rule is that mass murder is okay up to a certain number, and then past that number it's too horrendous and anything relating to that event can't be seriously discussed ever as a practical system, but below that number, it's a-okay totally cool let's establish our society around it?
Man, the sheer hypocrisy here as you vaguely shift around the standards here for what can and cannot be discussed "morally". What's that number, by the way? Can you spit it out for us? What is the exact number of deaths that is too much for spool32? What's the maximum number of deaths that's a-okay by spool32?
And I ain't even gotten around to asking you to justify how a capitalist, liberal democracy turned into the Third Reich yet, aw gee how come you haven't held democracy to answer for that? Or what about the First World War? 18 million dead? Aww gee, maybe we shouldn't ever talk about nation-states any more, obviously Westphalia was a terrible idea, and anybody who talks about Westphalian nation states is just secretly advocating for mindless slaughter on the battlefield.
Yes, when I say that something is a horrible, shameful disgrace, what I mean is that it's OK up to a certain number.
Come on dude. I'm very very comfortable denouncing slavery and native American genocide without qualification as the entry fee for a discussion of how we can use a capitalist system to make life better for people and drive progress as a species. I've already done it even! Just now!
It ought not create such consternation to suggest that socialists stop bothsidesing when Soviet, PRC, and KR atrocities are objectively far worse, and instead get comfortable shitting on those regimes as the price of admission.
This isn't a chicken and egg thing. Socialists have to point out that all of human history has been a garbage fire because every time we suggest notOligarchy and maybe dragging Larry Kudlow from his home in the dead of night we are supposed to answer for Mao.
We'd be perfectly happy to discuss socialism without having to constantly talk about how America is soaked in indigenous blood or how unappealing Siberia is.
Like never forget our successful capitalist society is built on a beginning that was absolutely as cruel as the beginning of the Soviet union. We had slaves and we genocided the native population. The blood on our hands is just so old it dried.
See this is what I mean. In the late 1700s there were (estimates are very hard) maybe 600,000 natives remaining in what became the US. That's down from a population of anywhere between 2 and 18 million at the time of the first European explorers, a loss of life attributed almost entirely due to disease in North America. Central and South America is a different story as the Spanish were unbelievably bloody-minded. Anyhow, in a hundred years that population dropped to maybe around 200,000, also at least partly from disease, and continued to decline into the 30s when that trend reversed.
This is a horrible thing. American genocide of the native populations is a shameful and embarrassing blot on our national history, a disgrace that can never be fully made right.
It does not compare in either scope, time, or loss of life to the horrors of 20th century postwar communist/socialist massacres. It's not even close.
So, what, your rule is that mass murder is okay up to a certain number, and then past that number it's too horrendous and anything relating to that event can't be seriously discussed ever as a practical system, but below that number, it's a-okay totally cool let's establish our society around it?
Man, the sheer hypocrisy here as you vaguely shift around the standards here for what can and cannot be discussed "morally". What's that number, by the way? Can you spit it out for us? What is the exact number of deaths that is too much for spool32? What's the maximum number of deaths that's a-okay by spool32?
And I ain't even gotten around to asking you to justify how a capitalist, liberal democracy turned into the Third Reich yet, aw gee how come you haven't held democracy to answer for that? Or what about the First World War? 18 million dead? Aww gee, maybe we shouldn't ever talk about nation-states any more, obviously Westphalia was a terrible idea, and anybody who talks about Westphalian nation states is just secretly advocating for mindless slaughter on the battlefield.
Yes, when I say that something is a horrible, shameful disgrace, what I mean is that it's OK up to a certain number.
Come on dude. I'm very very comfortable denouncing slavery and native American genocide without qualification as the entry fee for a discussion of how we can use a capitalist system to make life better for people and drive progress as a species. I've already done it even! Just now!
It ought not create such consternation to suggest that socialists stop bothsidesing when Soviet, PRC, and KR atrocities are objectively far worse, and instead get comfortable shitting on those regimes as the price of admission.
How are they objectively worse?
Capitalism is built on the back of over 400 years of slavery and genocide. It still includes slavery in its model!
That these new regimes have the joy of technological advancement so they can get their genocides on quicker than we did is wholly immaterial.
More to the point i don't see how there could be any stronger denouncement than, "those were not honest implementations of socialism"
If your pitch for socialism is "we're actually as bad or worse than the Soviets/Pol Pot/Mao/etc so we better follow those footsteps before history judges us harshly", it should be unsurprising people don't bite. A better way forward seems to be a complete and full denounciation of socialism in those forms, and a concrete explanaition of how your socialist paradise will not fall into those same traps.
K. But that's not the pitch, and if you'd read the thread, you'll note that many of us have been discussing your "suggestion" for pages now, with varying levels of optimism.
Broadly, I've seen alot of people making excuses for the the socialist failures, often while simultaniously trying to make comparisons to capitalism and its failures. I've seen very little "yes, this happened and here's how we will avoid it." Just a lot of blame shifting and "well actually the USA is totally just as bad as..."
If your pitch for socialism is "we're actually as bad or worse than the Soviets/Pol Pot/Mao/etc so we better follow those footsteps before history judges us harshly", it should be unsurprising people don't bite. A better way forward seems to be a complete and full denounciation of socialism in those forms, and a concrete explanaition of how your socialist paradise will not fall into those same traps.
K. But that's not the pitch, and if you'd read the thread, you'll note that many of us have been discussing your "suggestion" for pages now, with varying levels of optimism.
Broadly, I've seen alot of people making excuses for the the socialist failures, often while simultaniously trying to make comparisons to capitalism and its failures. I've seen very little "yes, this happened and here's how we will avoid it." Just a lot of blame shifting and "well actually the USA is totally just as bad as..."
The only difference between and excuse and an explanation here is how convenient the answer is.
+2
Options
Shortytouching the meatIntergalactic Cool CourtRegistered Userregular
Like never forget our successful capitalist society is built on a beginning that was absolutely as cruel as the beginning of the Soviet union. We had slaves and we genocided the native population. The blood on our hands is just so old it dried.
See this is what I mean. In the late 1700s there were (estimates are very hard) maybe 600,000 natives remaining in what became the US. That's down from a population of anywhere between 2 and 18 million at the time of the first European explorers, a loss of life attributed almost entirely due to disease in North America. Central and South America is a different story as the Spanish were unbelievably bloody-minded. Anyhow, in a hundred years that population dropped to maybe around 200,000, also at least partly from disease, and continued to decline into the 30s when that trend reversed.
This is a horrible thing. American genocide of the native populations is a shameful and embarrassing blot on our national history, a disgrace that can never be fully made right.
It does not compare in either scope, time, or loss of life to the horrors of 20th century postwar communist/socialist massacres. It's not even close.
the only reason one of those numbers is smaller than the other is because there were more Russians to start with
if there were still millions of native folk here after 1776, the US government would have been way more proactive in its genocide than it was, and it's childish to pretend otherwise
it's a valid comparison, and the need to say "this genocide wasn't quite as bad as this other one" is bizarre
Fun facts: did you know that while your government in the US couldn’t just, you know, Storm into your house and search the place on a whim, that in a late 19th century and early 20th century company town, if your company thought that you just might be pressing for one of these new fangled “unions” that workers across the country thought we’re all the rage that they’d send in goons to ransack your home for any union related materials and there wasn’t a damn thing you were able to do about it, because the company practically owned your life and paid enough hired guns to keep it that way?
freedom of speech functionally did not exist for union organizers in the American west until at least the mid-1920's
the goons who'd club you for trying to organize in public were usually police
Like never forget our successful capitalist society is built on a beginning that was absolutely as cruel as the beginning of the Soviet union. We had slaves and we genocided the native population. The blood on our hands is just so old it dried.
See this is what I mean. In the late 1700s there were (estimates are very hard) maybe 600,000 natives remaining in what became the US. That's down from a population of anywhere between 2 and 18 million at the time of the first European explorers, a loss of life attributed almost entirely due to disease in North America. Central and South America is a different story as the Spanish were unbelievably bloody-minded. Anyhow, in a hundred years that population dropped to maybe around 200,000, also at least partly from disease, and continued to decline into the 30s when that trend reversed.
This is a horrible thing. American genocide of the native populations is a shameful and embarrassing blot on our national history, a disgrace that can never be fully made right.
It does not compare in either scope, time, or loss of life to the horrors of 20th century postwar communist/socialist massacres. It's not even close.
So, what, your rule is that mass murder is okay up to a certain number, and then past that number it's too horrendous and anything relating to that event can't be seriously discussed ever as a practical system, but below that number, it's a-okay totally cool let's establish our society around it?
Man, the sheer hypocrisy here as you vaguely shift around the standards here for what can and cannot be discussed "morally". What's that number, by the way? Can you spit it out for us? What is the exact number of deaths that is too much for spool32? What's the maximum number of deaths that's a-okay by spool32?
And I ain't even gotten around to asking you to justify how a capitalist, liberal democracy turned into the Third Reich yet, aw gee how come you haven't held democracy to answer for that? Or what about the First World War? 18 million dead? Aww gee, maybe we shouldn't ever talk about nation-states any more, obviously Westphalia was a terrible idea, and anybody who talks about Westphalian nation states is just secretly advocating for mindless slaughter on the battlefield.
Yes, when I say that something is a horrible, shameful disgrace, what I mean is that it's OK up to a certain number.
Come on dude. I'm very very comfortable denouncing slavery and native American genocide without qualification as the entry fee for a discussion of how we can use a capitalist system to make life better for people and drive progress as a species. I've already done it even! Just now!
It ought not create such consternation to suggest that socialists stop bothsidesing when Soviet, PRC, and KR atrocities are objectively far worse, and instead get comfortable shitting on those regimes as the price of admission.
Nobody's bothsidesing shit. You're the one jumping in and saying that one sides' atrocities are "objectively far worse,"* which is... just... like... honestly, an infantile conception of morality. As though the number of deaths properly captures the depths of one's evil. 6 million is not an accurate measure of Hitler's evil. It's a measure of his will, 20th century technology, German efficiency, and the speed at which the Allies ended him. Like if Allies had dallied another year, Hitler wouldn't have killed 7 million? Or 8? 6 million is not how evil he was. You think if the Axis had won WWII and Hitler had found 7 million Jews (and others), he'd be like, naaaaah, 6 million is as evil as I get?
There's a difference between 0 and 1. And there's a difference, usually, between say 1 and 10. But after a certain point, mass murder is just mass murder and the number stops mattering. If you're willing to kill 1 million, you're willing to kill 10 million. The only question is whether you're capable of doing it and whether there are 9 million more targets of your ire.
Like, the moral schema you're working with here is ridiculous. This whole thread could just derail into me picking it apart piece by piece here. Like, why does socialism have to answer for the 680 000 Soviet deaths, but liberal democracy doesn't have to answer for Hitler's 6 million? Why do you think we must never forget the 680 000 Soviet deaths, to the extent that socialism must be abandoned as a concept, when the Roman Republic killed 300 000 Carthaginians, but we can still establish an entire modern western order based on democracy/republicanism? Why is killing 680 000 people disqualifying for socialism, but enslaving millions upon millions of blacks not disqualifying for, I dunno, everything American ever? Is that just how it works in your mind, the immorality of 1 death > the immorality of 100 slaves? Is this how you conceptualize morality, that it's numbers-based, that people just evil up to their personal "evil limit" and then they just stop eviling, that there's even "objective comparisons" to be made between numerically smaller evils and numerically larger evils? Like if you break the 2nd Commandment, how many times worse is that than breaking the 8th Commandment? If someone murders 5 people, that makes them objectively 25% more evil than someone who murdered 4?
Your moral picture of the world is either incomplete, or you're being a hypocrite when you say that socialism must morally answer for 680 000 Soviet deaths while you absolve all these other political systems of all the evils they've caused.
* My point was simply that given enough time, human conceptions of history tend to erase scale. People don't remember how many Carthaginians died. They just remember that Carthage was sacked and salted, if that at all. People don't remember how many people the Romans killed and enslaved, just that the Romans had a vast empire. Both the evils and accomplishments of societies are abstracted, their corners rounded off, until they fit into neat little circular holes in our mental schemas, though it's a little more concerning when it's happening live before us about the society that we live in right now.
Like never forget our successful capitalist society is built on a beginning that was absolutely as cruel as the beginning of the Soviet union. We had slaves and we genocided the native population. The blood on our hands is just so old it dried.
See this is what I mean. In the late 1700s there were (estimates are very hard) maybe 600,000 natives remaining in what became the US. That's down from a population of anywhere between 2 and 18 million at the time of the first European explorers, a loss of life attributed almost entirely due to disease in North America. Central and South America is a different story as the Spanish were unbelievably bloody-minded. Anyhow, in a hundred years that population dropped to maybe around 200,000, also at least partly from disease, and continued to decline into the 30s when that trend reversed.
This is a horrible thing. American genocide of the native populations is a shameful and embarrassing blot on our national history, a disgrace that can never be fully made right.
It does not compare in either scope, time, or loss of life to the horrors of 20th century postwar communist/socialist massacres. It's not even close.
the only reason one of those numbers is smaller than the other is because there were more Russians to start with
if there were still millions of native folk here after 1776, the US government would have been way more proactive in its genocide than it was, and it's childish to pretend otherwise
it's a valid comparison, and the need to say "this genocide wasn't quite as bad as this other one" is bizarre
Fun facts: did you know that while your government in the US couldn’t just, you know, Storm into your house and search the place on a whim, that in a late 19th century and early 20th century company town, if your company thought that you just might be pressing for one of these new fangled “unions” that workers across the country thought we’re all the rage that they’d send in goons to ransack your home for any union related materials and there wasn’t a damn thing you were able to do about it, because the company practically owned your life and paid enough hired guns to keep it that way?
freedom of speech functionally did not exist for union organizers in the American west until at least the mid-1920's
the goons who'd club you for trying to organize in public were usually police
Now now
Sometimes they were privately hired agents, like the Pinkertons!
Reminder: Back in the day you could hire privately organized agents of violence to beat and kill your employees in America!
But also yeah, the government wasn't above backing the the actions of Capitalists as they maimed and murdered their employees. Hell, even in the Battle of Blair Mountain the mine operators had the backing of the government for a time.
I would like to point out to all those that try to denounce the Nordic Model with how Scandinavia has Oil and Natural gas, that only Norway has significant resources of either, and the Nordic Model predates the discovery of North Sea Oil by 40 years. It was started in Sweden in the Early 30s and oil in the Norwegian part of the North Sea was only found in 1968. Even then, it took over a decade to actually build it out enough to get the wealth ashore.
It should also be pointed out that for most of history past the Viking Age, the Nordic Countries where a backwater in European politics/economics. Want easy proof? Name one Nordic colony outside of the Danish Virgin Island(now the US Virgin Island) and Greenland(if it can called it that). When even Fucking Belgium had the Congo(and boy howdy is Fucking Belgium an appropriate name considering their behavior).
Finland was especially Turbofucked, what with being run like a subject duchy by Sweden and invaded by Russia on the regular.
The Nordic Model works and the fact that three of the nations are Monarchies is a non sequitur. The Monarchs have less power then President of Germany, which is not Angela Merkel by the way.
The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
The Nordic Model works and the fact that three of the nations are Monarchies is a non sequitur. The Monarchs have less power then President of Germany, which is not Angela Merkel by the way.
There's been a notably frustrating strand running through the thread where every Scandinavian nation isn't really socialist so you guys can't lean on that as an example but also socialists have to answer for the obviously also not socialist USSR.
I think it is disingenuous to suggest that Soviet socialism was not socialist. It was--it was an attempt to build a centrally controlled economy, with the notion that individual experts and bureaucratic systems could effectively organize a productive economy. Public ownership, as in government ownership, is still socialism (though certainly the question of how a singular Party can be legitimately considered a representative of the people is important).
I think it's also disingenuous or propagandist to diminish the atrocities committed in the name of profit, colonization, expansion, accrual of wealth in the establishment of what are now contemporary capitalist regimes.
I also don't think there's a direct relationship between socialism and atrocity--but there is a relationship between atrocity and revolution, or massive instability, or political collapse and transition. I tire of people diverting the conversation from the mechanics of socialist systems to Soviet atrocities, but on the other hand it is important even for people far to the left to keep an ear open for people who seriously talk about purges, counter revolutionaries, eugenics, disenfranchisement, displacement, etc. (as it should be for people on the right...). Because they do exist.
I would like to point out to all those that try to denounce the Nordic Model with how Scandinavia has Oil and Natural gas, that only Norway has significant resources of either, and the Nordic Model predates the discovery of North Sea Oil by 40 years. It was started in Sweden in the Early 30s and oil in the Norwegian part of the North Sea was only found in 1968. Even then, it took over a decade to actually build it out enough to get the wealth ashore.
It should also be pointed out that for most of history past the Viking Age, the Nordic Countries where a backwater in European politics/economics. Want easy proof? Name one Nordic colony outside of the Danish Virgin Island(now the US Virgin Island) and Greenland(if it can called it that). When even Fucking Belgium had the Congo(and boy howdy is Fucking Belgium an appropriate name considering their behavior).
Finland was especially Turbofucked, what with being run like a subject duchy by Sweden and invaded by Russia on the regular.
The Nordic Model works and the fact that three of the nations are Monarchies is a non sequitur. The Monarchs have less power then President of Germany, which is not Angela Merkel by the way.
Wasn't Sweden one of the leading European powers in the 1700s? Or did Europa Universalis lead me wrong? Or was that not long enough to register against "most of history past the Viking Age?"
Posts
Of course it is, and it's some shit we have to atone for, reconcile, recognize at the very least. I think 400 years is worth arguing as the mid 15th century wasn't terribly 'capitalist' by anyone's metric, and it's at least arguably fair to use the roughly 360,000 Union dead to draw a red line under 1865 as the end of slavery.
But even all war dead during that conflict doesn't compare with Stalin's purge in a single year. No one who is trying to promote a better method than capitalism should let the USSR within shouting distance of their plan. A full throated, unqualified, unequivocal denouncement is and ought to be the cover charge for any socialist suggestions.
Oh yeah sure, people all talk all the time about how the Romans kept slaves, how they regularly exterminated their enemies, how they burned and salted Carthage. Some 150 000 - 350 000 people died at Carthage, and the remaining 50 000 enslaved. And this is in fucking 149 BC, not the late 20th century. (https://gsp.yale.edu/sites/default/files/first_genocide.pdf <--- Note, the name of the file.)
No wait oops, actually, people venerate Rome as the greatest civilization of Western history, fought over the title Holy Roman Emperor, and then established entire nations based on Roman history and symbology, COUGH COUGH.
Come the fuck on, man. Yeah, it's me who's hypocritically whitewashing history here. If you're going to fling numbers around as though they matter, at least it took the Soviets a year to kill 680 000 people; the republic your nation is founded to resemble killed half that in days. E pluribus unum doesn't mean "take vague shots at people's morality so you can pretend your ignorance is actually virtue."
I think you're confusing closed market colonial systems which were under a authoritarian system of monarchy=capitalism under a democratic system. Socialism has to answer for its crimes and failures because its a direct line in the political and economic spheres for the last 100 years. Industrialization and democracy grew together; workers rights in the U.S. under a Republican President, suffrage for woman, the abolition of slavery in Europe and later the United States. Capitalism with democracy at least attempts at self correction and adopts socialist precepts if they work and are divorced from the destructive purges and such. Socialism just keeps up the greatest hits.
Ah, the old 1 death a tragedy a million a statistic line of argument.
No. You're just imagining a straw man.
..
Aside from what Spool has said you realize that's a comically bad take on that quote tree, right? The point seems to have gone so far over your head it's on orbit.
The point there is you can't say "Well socialism can't withstand outside meddling therefore it fails always" as a valid point because given enough outside meddling *every* system collapses and given enough time every system...also collapses.
Beyond that to your post:
So about Pol Pot
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1980/09/16/us-to-support-pol-pot-regime-for-un-seat/58b8b124-7dd7-448f-b4f7-80231683ec57/
We supported them at the UN, primarily because Vietnam- a communist county- wouldn't commit to stop fighting them.
We armed all sorts of vicious dictators and it's mostly luck none of *them* pulled a Pol Pot. We're selling weapons to Saudi Arabia, who's actions in Yemen would make Stalin proud. We suport Durete, despite the tens of thousands of dead at his hands.
The US's hands aren't clean.
And on 500 years the history books may well be talking about how what the USSR did was a tiny fraction of what the US did. Because there are large factions on the right that are all in favor of genocide. Several different flavors of it no less.
Under this logic North Korea is a republic because that’s the party line, instead of being a totalitarian monarchy helmed by the Kim family
If 5000 years from now, human society hasn't progressed to a point where they can actually look back at United States history and condemn it for all its evils, if humans still need to whitewash their own history to maintain their illusion of moral superiority over other humans, if humans still believe that the moral superiority of "their people" translates into their own individual moral superiority, if humans still need to minimize the evils they cause by pointing at the evils of others and imagining them to be "greater," if humans can't decompartmentalize the deaths and injuries they cause to people far around the world even in their passivity, then I don't want to live on this planet any more, cuz what the fuck's the point?
Seriously
We’ve been over this time and time again earlier in the thread, where it’s been pointed out despite the party line of “we’re communists! Really! See, we talk about the worker and how shitty the bougiousie are!” That the USSR and China weren’t actually, you know, socialist states but that their actual process was State Capitalism with the political leadership as the new capital class, a leadership that exercised authoritarian control over the populace.
You cannot have a socialist system if the people comprisingnhe group in question do not actually govern it’s operation! That’s the entire point! If the state does not answer to the people, then how can it be socialist! It’s like arguing dictatorship is a democracy because they have sham elections the dictator just always happens to win!
See this is what I mean. In the late 1700s there were (estimates are very hard) maybe 600,000 natives remaining in what became the US. That's down from a population of anywhere between 2 and 18 million at the time of the first European explorers, a loss of life attributed almost entirely due to disease in North America. Central and South America is a different story as the Spanish were unbelievably bloody-minded. Anyhow, in a hundred years that population dropped to maybe around 200,000, also at least partly from disease, and continued to decline into the 30s when that trend reversed.
This is a horrible thing. American genocide of the native populations is a shameful and embarrassing blot on our national history, a disgrace that can never be fully made right.
It does not compare in either scope, time, or loss of life to the horrors of 20th century postwar communist/socialist massacres. It's not even close.
K. But that's not the pitch, and if you'd read the thread, you'll note that many of us have been discussing your "suggestion" for pages now, with varying levels of optimism.
I think you have misread the pitch
The former is not what anyone here is saying, and the latter is exactly what people are trying to establish.
Pretty sure we can decry the horrors of American History and Stalin and Mao at the same time.
The problem tends to come more that the argument issued is “these were such terrible people! It’s proof socialism is evil to the core if these men could destroy so many lives in its name, not like us good, valiant Americans and our capitalism.”
Which is the thing that keeps happening, because 20th and 21st Century American History is still based on America as Captain America from the day the Declaration was signed, ignoring the genocides, the slavery, the oppression used to build the country.
For Christ’s sakes we’re barely a hundred years removed from the time when coal mine operators literally air bombed their workers with improvised explosives made out of cobbled together WWI munitions!
No one arguing how great capitalism is and how freeing it is for a populace wants to know where their phone or tablet’s constituent resources came from
So, what, your rule is that mass murder is okay up to a certain number, and then past that number it's too horrendous and anything relating to that event can't be seriously discussed ever as a practical system, but below that number, it's a-okay totally cool let's establish our society around it?
Man, the sheer hypocrisy here as you vaguely shift around the standards here for what can and cannot be discussed "morally". What's that number, by the way? Can you spit it out for us? What is the exact number of deaths that is too much for spool32? What's the maximum number of deaths that's a-okay by spool32?
And I ain't even gotten around to asking you to justify how a capitalist, liberal democracy turned into the Third Reich yet, aw gee how come you haven't held democracy to answer for that? Or what about the First World War? 18 million dead? Aww gee, maybe we shouldn't ever talk about nation-states any more, obviously Westphalia was a terrible idea, and anybody who talks about Westphalian nation states is just secretly advocating for mindless slaughter on the battlefield.
The colonists would happily have wiped native populations out in a shorter period if they could have, it seems to me. This seems to be more of a difference of capacity for mass murder than actual moral difference or structural imperatives.
oddly, constantly reassuring every stranger I meet that I'm not a crazed deviant axe murderer has not had the very clear intended effect.
That was in 1921
Yes, when I say that something is a horrible, shameful disgrace, what I mean is that it's OK up to a certain number.
Come on dude. I'm very very comfortable denouncing slavery and native American genocide without qualification as the entry fee for a discussion of how we can use a capitalist system to make life better for people and drive progress as a species. I've already done it even! Just now!
It ought not create such consternation to suggest that socialists stop bothsidesing when Soviet, PRC, and KR atrocities are objectively far worse, and instead get comfortable shitting on those regimes as the price of admission.
I'm not sure that's true at all, but I think it's outside the scope of the thread to chase the tangent down.
This isn't a chicken and egg thing. Socialists have to point out that all of human history has been a garbage fire because every time we suggest notOligarchy and maybe dragging Larry Kudlow from his home in the dead of night we are supposed to answer for Mao.
We'd be perfectly happy to discuss socialism without having to constantly talk about how America is soaked in indigenous blood or how unappealing Siberia is.
How are they objectively worse?
Capitalism is built on the back of over 400 years of slavery and genocide. It still includes slavery in its model!
That these new regimes have the joy of technological advancement so they can get their genocides on quicker than we did is wholly immaterial.
More to the point i don't see how there could be any stronger denouncement than, "those were not honest implementations of socialism"
Broadly, I've seen alot of people making excuses for the the socialist failures, often while simultaniously trying to make comparisons to capitalism and its failures. I've seen very little "yes, this happened and here's how we will avoid it." Just a lot of blame shifting and "well actually the USA is totally just as bad as..."
The only difference between and excuse and an explanation here is how convenient the answer is.
the only reason one of those numbers is smaller than the other is because there were more Russians to start with
if there were still millions of native folk here after 1776, the US government would have been way more proactive in its genocide than it was, and it's childish to pretend otherwise
it's a valid comparison, and the need to say "this genocide wasn't quite as bad as this other one" is bizarre
freedom of speech functionally did not exist for union organizers in the American west until at least the mid-1920's
the goons who'd club you for trying to organize in public were usually police
Measure it against the population of the Ukrainian SSR.
Nobody's bothsidesing shit. You're the one jumping in and saying that one sides' atrocities are "objectively far worse,"* which is... just... like... honestly, an infantile conception of morality. As though the number of deaths properly captures the depths of one's evil. 6 million is not an accurate measure of Hitler's evil. It's a measure of his will, 20th century technology, German efficiency, and the speed at which the Allies ended him. Like if Allies had dallied another year, Hitler wouldn't have killed 7 million? Or 8? 6 million is not how evil he was. You think if the Axis had won WWII and Hitler had found 7 million Jews (and others), he'd be like, naaaaah, 6 million is as evil as I get?
There's a difference between 0 and 1. And there's a difference, usually, between say 1 and 10. But after a certain point, mass murder is just mass murder and the number stops mattering. If you're willing to kill 1 million, you're willing to kill 10 million. The only question is whether you're capable of doing it and whether there are 9 million more targets of your ire.
Like, the moral schema you're working with here is ridiculous. This whole thread could just derail into me picking it apart piece by piece here. Like, why does socialism have to answer for the 680 000 Soviet deaths, but liberal democracy doesn't have to answer for Hitler's 6 million? Why do you think we must never forget the 680 000 Soviet deaths, to the extent that socialism must be abandoned as a concept, when the Roman Republic killed 300 000 Carthaginians, but we can still establish an entire modern western order based on democracy/republicanism? Why is killing 680 000 people disqualifying for socialism, but enslaving millions upon millions of blacks not disqualifying for, I dunno, everything American ever? Is that just how it works in your mind, the immorality of 1 death > the immorality of 100 slaves? Is this how you conceptualize morality, that it's numbers-based, that people just evil up to their personal "evil limit" and then they just stop eviling, that there's even "objective comparisons" to be made between numerically smaller evils and numerically larger evils? Like if you break the 2nd Commandment, how many times worse is that than breaking the 8th Commandment? If someone murders 5 people, that makes them objectively 25% more evil than someone who murdered 4?
Your moral picture of the world is either incomplete, or you're being a hypocrite when you say that socialism must morally answer for 680 000 Soviet deaths while you absolve all these other political systems of all the evils they've caused.
* My point was simply that given enough time, human conceptions of history tend to erase scale. People don't remember how many Carthaginians died. They just remember that Carthage was sacked and salted, if that at all. People don't remember how many people the Romans killed and enslaved, just that the Romans had a vast empire. Both the evils and accomplishments of societies are abstracted, their corners rounded off, until they fit into neat little circular holes in our mental schemas, though it's a little more concerning when it's happening live before us about the society that we live in right now.
Now now
Sometimes they were privately hired agents, like the Pinkertons!
Reminder: Back in the day you could hire privately organized agents of violence to beat and kill your employees in America!
But also yeah, the government wasn't above backing the the actions of Capitalists as they maimed and murdered their employees. Hell, even in the Battle of Blair Mountain the mine operators had the backing of the government for a time.
It should also be pointed out that for most of history past the Viking Age, the Nordic Countries where a backwater in European politics/economics. Want easy proof? Name one Nordic colony outside of the Danish Virgin Island(now the US Virgin Island) and Greenland(if it can called it that). When even Fucking Belgium had the Congo(and boy howdy is Fucking Belgium an appropriate name considering their behavior).
Finland was especially Turbofucked, what with being run like a subject duchy by Sweden and invaded by Russia on the regular.
The Nordic Model works and the fact that three of the nations are Monarchies is a non sequitur. The Monarchs have less power then President of Germany, which is not Angela Merkel by the way.
There's been a notably frustrating strand running through the thread where every Scandinavian nation isn't really socialist so you guys can't lean on that as an example but also socialists have to answer for the obviously also not socialist USSR.
I think it's also disingenuous or propagandist to diminish the atrocities committed in the name of profit, colonization, expansion, accrual of wealth in the establishment of what are now contemporary capitalist regimes.
I also don't think there's a direct relationship between socialism and atrocity--but there is a relationship between atrocity and revolution, or massive instability, or political collapse and transition. I tire of people diverting the conversation from the mechanics of socialist systems to Soviet atrocities, but on the other hand it is important even for people far to the left to keep an ear open for people who seriously talk about purges, counter revolutionaries, eugenics, disenfranchisement, displacement, etc. (as it should be for people on the right...). Because they do exist.
Wasn't Sweden one of the leading European powers in the 1700s? Or did Europa Universalis lead me wrong? Or was that not long enough to register against "most of history past the Viking Age?"