So do you believe that the regular 4-9% unemployment rate in the US since the 1990s actually consists of "temporarily" unemployed workers? And that's just U3. U5 ranges from 4.9% to 11%.
No, not at all. But I also wouldn't claim that the US follows orthodox economic theory in any sense. If we did, Paul Krugman wouldn't find something to complain about in NYT each and every week.
Also, yeah, no, unemployed people aren't taken care of. I explicitly mentioned that I was referring to capitalist economics in practice. It's true that in theory, unemployed people can be taken care of, but that's not how capitalist economics has actually manifested in today's capitalist societies, is it?
Yes, it is practiced that way in some countries. But that brings us back to the well-worn discussion about whether the Nordic model is "capitalist" or "socialist."
I'm not entirely on board with the recurring theme of the thread that "welfare" = "socialism."
This was in starkest relief in the last Presidential election when the Prime Minister of Denmark tried to put to rest Bernie Sanders's claims that Denmark is socialist:
"I know that some people in the US associate the Nordic model with some sort of socialism. Therefore, I would like to make one thing clear. Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy."
The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state which provides a high level of security to its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish."
As I've said multiple times, my position is that mixed economies are best, capitalism requires regulations and redistribution to keep it in check, and the only remaining reasonable questions are about how and what to regulate and redistribute, not whether to do so.
So, yes, I totally agree that capitalist nations must grapple with questions like "How do you prevent the oligarchs from taking over and ruining everything?" But I'd also argue that this is a problem every society needs to grapple with, regardless of their economic system.
I don't disagree. You'll note me pressing Styrofoam Sammich on basically the same question right now. But I do want to pressure both schools of thought and see what gets squeezed out.
Unfortunately, I'm not familiar enough with Nordic economics to push much further. I don't know enough to, for example, question whether their welfare system actually does take care of everybody who's unemployed, or whether their system is floated by, like, oil reserves (for Norway, anyways), etc..
This seems like a really weird argument to be having. I'm literally a card carrying member of the DSA, and most of the members I've spoken to (with the exception of the Refoundation Caucus, which recently folded because their ideas weren't popular with the larger org) aren't huge fans of planned economies because of how terribly they fall apart when mismanaged. Syndicalism is pretty dope tho. Requires minimum changes to our society to implement (basically just democratization of business via unions) and is very Socialist in nature.
I’m a staff writer at the socialist magazine Jacobin and a member of DSA, and here’s the truth: In the long run, democratic socialists want to end capitalism.
...
A robust welfare state in an economy that’s still organized around capitalists’ profits can mitigate the worst inequalities for a while, but it’s at best a temporary truce between bosses and workers — and one that the former will look to scrap as soon as they can.
...
Medicare-for-all is an instructive example. Winning single-payer health care in the US would be an enormous relief to the millions of Americans who, even with insurance, find themselves stymied by claims denials and crushed by medical debt. Many progressives and an increasing number of centrist liberals — hell, even a few Trump voters — want the private insurance industry to be replaced by a single comprehensive public insurance program, one we all pay into with our taxes to relieve everyone of financial stress in times of illness. We want that too.
But we also know that Medicare-for-all is not socialism. It would only nationalize insurance, not the whole health care system. Doctors would remain private employees, for example, though under some plans they would be required to restructure their businesses into nonprofit entities. Democratic socialists ultimately want something more like the British National Health Service (NHS), in which everyone pays taxes to fund not just insurance but doctors and hospitals and medicine as well.
So why are democratic socialists not demanding an NHS right now? Because we currently don’t have the support to push for and win such an ambitious program. Social democratic reforms like Medicare-for-all are, in the eyes of DSA, part of the long, uneven process of building that support, and eventually overthrowing capitalism.
This doesn't sound like somebody who is suspicious of planned economies and just wants to implement minimum changes to our society.
Nah dude. You're making the mistake of conflating capitalism with free markets.
Socialists definitely want to end capitalism, but all that really means is stopping business owners from acting like lords over their own personal fiefdom. A worker owned business isn't capitalist, and there's no reason they can't compete in a free market.
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
I found another reason socialism is a scary word in that glossary
If you are a Socialist, you are most likely a Communist as well; think of Communism as the “end goal,” and Socialism as the (r)evolutionary stage(s) or pathway that gets us there.
the final goal of anarcho-communism is so distant it's not even worth mentioning imo
Communism as an end state is essentially utopian imagining. We don't know what it would look like, because we can't see there from here any more than the Wright brothers could have given meaningful input on the modern hub layout and air traffic control systems that we rely on for flight. Socialism is a fight for justice that we believe will lead us to a place where Communism is possible.
I've been notably absent from the forums for a little over a year now (an absence began in large part due to dissatisfaction with the allowed range of political discourse at the time), during which I've been increasingly working with and inspired by the DSA. Since this thread (and forum) suffers from a tragic lack of left thought, I want to help address some misconceptions. Although DSA varies a lot by chapter from Social Democrat (Bernie) to Communist, my perspective is from working within a Marxist-Leninist framework.
Socialism simply means to democratize the economy and the workplace; it does not mean an abolition of markets as a tool. Right now, things are organized by capital via markets; owners and bosses select employees and exert undemocratic, centralized control over how firms operate and how employees are allowed to conduct themselves inside and outside of the workplace. Alternatively, imagine if workers could elect executives to perform the work of management, without the corruption, nepotism, and inefficiency that come with the 'petty bourgeoisie' managerial class. We all can think of people who would otherwise be failures but for their family connections, who instead are allowed to be wealthy and inept petty tyrants.
Regarding why many on the left view Social Democracy and the welfare state as counter-revolutionary: this is a longstanding orthodox position. The New Deal was literally created as a desperate attempt to put a halt to leftist revolution, and served primarily to take the wind out of the sails of the ascendant labor movement. Socialists recognize that, while such programs are undeniably good at improving peoples' material conditions, welfare programs fail to address the fundamental injustices at the root of capitalism, and since the New Deal we've all seen how capital inevitably exerts its power over the state to roll back such protections in the absence of a strong, organized, and militant labor force.
So, why is 'Socialism' such a scary word? Because Socialism offers substantive critique of the injustices in our society in a way that liberalism cannot abide. Our current political discourse has been rendered myopic to the degree that most people are identified with one or the other faction within the Capitalist party; the far-right regressives and the center-right neoliberals. 'Socialism' is a scary word because it encourages people to imagine alternative societies in which owners are not able to appropriate the surplus value of workers' labor, which has caused wages to stagnate for 40 years while productivity and costs of living have increased. A society where the commodification of basic human needs like water and housing is not allowed and where the reproduction of homelessness is not an ongoing political choice. It encourages people to ask why the wealthiest country the world has ever known endures homelessness at all, and provides the political education to see how capitalism relies entirely on hierarchies of coerced labor; homelessness and poverty exist as a threat to those who might otherwise choose not to participate. Socialism encourages people to identify not with cultural affectations like whether you drive a Prius or an F-150, but in line with their material conditions; are we workers, or owners? It's immediately threatening to the broad range of American fictions, including the paragon of small business owners. It illuminates the lie that our current government, prone to unchecked influence by capital, is at all democratic.
Why is Socialism urgently necessary? Because we're running out of time. Climate change is here, and the alternative to drastic and immediate change is to rely on turning out the vote in increasingly-dire midterm elections for liberals who (as the recent Bush funeral has shown), identify more with their fellow political and media class than they do with working people. The current system is not ignoring climate change, it is building walls. The right-wing position has been to begin justifying why, as increasing numbers of refugees from climate disasters and destabilization due to American imperialism arrive at our borders, it's ok to turn them away. The humane position, the position that is not only just but also frees us as individuals from a precarious position in brutal hierarchy, is that all human life is valuable and that we are all in this together. It's Socialism or barbarism, folks.
So, to recap:
-abolish borders and the police
-abolish private property and rent
-the only ethical consumption under capitalism is eating ass
-join a union or a socialist organization immediately; your involvement with politics is so much more than voting
-Recommended reading Jacobin's ABCs of Soclialism (PDF), The Communist Manifesto
As an aside, I'd love to hear folks' critiques of Cuba. Despite the embargo and decades of other violence by an adjacent superpower, their life expectancy is higher than the US and they have the lowest HIV rate in the region.
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
Cuba avoided importing HIV through mandatory testing and the imprisonment of the HIV positive populations in sanitariums.
They’ve since relaxed the controls, and the maternal-fetal stuff is impressive, but it’s a particularly fraught go-to example.
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Donovan PuppyfuckerA dagger in the dark isworth a thousand swords in the morningRegistered Userregular
edited December 2018
I'd just like to add on to TL DR's post, more recommended reading:
The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845, Freidrich Engels)
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (first published 1914 but read the 1955 edition, Robert Tressell)
I am kind of slightly suspicious of a lot of health statistics being compared between countries because it is relatively easy to massage them a bit. Not necessarily enough to make bad outcomes into very good outcomes in statistics, mind you, but pressures on doctors can have an effect, even if it is just doctors greatly encouraging women who might otherwise undergo a risky pregnancy to get an abortion or other things that can prevent the doctors from getting in trouble for any negative statistics in a district. Pressuring people to undergo abortions can reduce infant mortality, but a ton of people besides pro-life people would have huge ethical issues with it.
There are also some statistical quirks that could skew the data that we can't be certain of because of lack of data behind the statistics.
We did find one area of agreement: Cuba puts a lot of emphasis on its health data. Richard H Streiffer, dean of the College of Community Health Sciences at the University of Alabama, said his conclusion from two visits to Cuba is that Cuban health practitioners are "very compulsive about collecting data and reporting it regularly."
On a recent trip, Streiffer said, he spent time with a family doctor in a neighborhood clinic. "Family doctors are mandated to collect certain data," he said. "He had right on his wall a ‘dashboard’ of data characterizing his practice -- an age/sex distribution; an age/sex distribution of the top 10 chronic diseases in his practice; a map of where his patients lived in the neighborhood. You don't find that in the US."
However, some experts said that this obsession with statistics can be a two-edged sword when it comes to reliability. Some say Cuba is so concerned with its infant mortality and life-expectancy statistics that the government takes heavy-handed actions to protect their international rankings.
"Cuba does have a very low infant mortality rate, but pregnant women are treated with very authoritarian tactics to maintain these favorable statistics," said Tassie Katherine Hirschfeld, the chair of the department of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma who spent nine months living in Cuba to study the nation's health system. "They are pressured to undergo abortions that they may not want if prenatal screening detects fetal abnormalities. If pregnant women develop complications, they are placed in ‘Casas de Maternidad’ for monitoring, even if they would prefer to be at home. Individual doctors are pressured by their superiors to reach certain statistical targets. If there is a spike in infant mortality in a certain district, doctors may be fired. There is pressure to falsify statistics."
Hirschfeld said she’s "a little skeptical" about the longevity data too, since Cuba has so many risk factors that cause early death in other countries, from unfiltered cigarettes to contaminated water to a meat-heavy diet. In a more benign statistical quirk, Carmelo Mesa-Lago, a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Pittsburgh, suggests that the flow of refugees could skew longevity statistics, since those births are recorded but the deaths are not.
Transparency would help give the data more credibility, but the Cuban government doesn’t offer much, experts said.
"I would take all Cuban health statistics with a grain of salt," Hirschfeld said. Organizations like the Pan-American Health Organization "rely on national self-reports for data, and Cuba does not allow independent verification of its health claims."
Rodolfo J. Stusser -- a physician and former adviser to the Cuban Ministry of Public Health's Informatics and Tele-Health Division who left for Miami at age 64 -- is another skeptic. While Stusser acknowledges that Cuba has improved some of its health numbers since the revolution, the post-revolution data has been "overestimated," he said. "The showcasing of infant mortality and life expectancy at birth has been done for ideological reasons," he said.
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
Can we go back to personal vs private property? It seems exceptionally vague to me why my house, which I did not build, gets to be mine, and I get as much farmland as I can work myself, but no more than that, but my factory isn't mine.
If I want someone to come clean my house and mow my grass do I lose possession of it? Why is that different from the metal fab shop I own across town?
Its physical ownership. Obviously you don't literally hold the house, but you go there after work, sleep, raise your kids there. It is, in a very animal sense, your house. Why would paying someone to do something to it change the clearly understood nature of that relationship any more than paying someone to fix your shoes would change the understood ownership of that object?
The fabrication shop starts to get into some of the cases discussed where maybe minor localized businesses stay privately held because they're not a real threat regarding the private accumulation of productive means.
But either way, assuming we're talking about a business where your employees outnumber you, you don't have the same physical relationship to that auto shop that you have to your house or your laptop or your favorite coat.
There's also an assumption being made there Spool that your personal property is the same as the property of your business which I think is incorrectly held.
Well, if it's a sole proprietorship rather than a corporate entity, all the stuff in the business is definitely just your stuff.
I still don't see the shape of it though. I mean, dude spends 14 hours a day in the fab, he's got a change of clothes there because shit goes late all the time, photos of his family on the walls... it's his business, built from the ground up out of his garage.
Why isn't that his personal property just as much as the house? And if he expands and now there's 10 people there, why isn't it still his? At what point does the business owner need to say whoa... if I get any more successful I have to give it all to the government.
To pull back from this one guy - why are only local businesses safe, but as soon as they get to a certain scale we have to take possession of them? Efficiency is critical to modern society - if we build vast inefficiencies into the economy we end up starving people to death in the worst cases and building fuckin Yugos in the best ones.
Nobody wants a Yugo, even if they get to collectively own the factory where it was spawned.
Because he expanded and now there’s ten people there who are producing value for the business just as much, if not more so, than he does.
And again, it doesn’t have to go to the government. Market Socialism is a thing. It can be owned simply within the labor group that compromises the business.
Think of it less as the scary propaganda of the Cold War and more “what if we made the workplace some form of democracy?”
I want to hash this out some, but here we are again at Soviet apologetics. Why frame it as scary propaganda when it was actually scary literal truth that starved millions of people to death?
Once again! Why is socialism scary? Because when somebody tries to figure out how peoperty rights work, four comments in there's a person shrugging off concerns about state ownership by handwaving away the disaster of the USSR as propaganda!
Is Soviet Collectivization meaningfully less disastrous as western European Encroachment, though? It's certainly shocking in that it was compressed into a few years, but by and large seems to be another indictment of industrialization and centralization and not something unique to the USSR.
The 'millions of people died to communism' thing is problematic, because it ignores the legitimate problems with eg Stalinism that we might otherwise learn from to paint with a broad brush and attribute to a category of ideologies the deaths resulting from war, famine, political violence, outside aggression, and any number of things which of course themselves are resultant from myriad causes. Were people never starved or disappeared in Czarist Russia?
I could start attributing deaths to capitalism and people might nod their heads when I cite the 40,000 people/year in the US who die unnecessarily due to a lack of healthcare, giving credence for the sake of argument when I attribute the whole of poverty to capital accumulation, and checking out entirely were I to start tallying death counts from World War 1; the categorization is so broad as to make it impossible to derive any benefit from the discussion. It's intended to stop debate, not further it.
Can we go back to personal vs private property? It seems exceptionally vague to me why my house, which I did not build, gets to be mine, and I get as much farmland as I can work myself, but no more than that, but my factory isn't mine.
If I want someone to come clean my house and mow my grass do I lose possession of it? Why is that different from the metal fab shop I own across town?
Its physical ownership. Obviously you don't literally hold the house, but you go there after work, sleep, raise your kids there. It is, in a very animal sense, your house. Why would paying someone to do something to it change the clearly understood nature of that relationship any more than paying someone to fix your shoes would change the understood ownership of that object?
The fabrication shop starts to get into some of the cases discussed where maybe minor localized businesses stay privately held because they're not a real threat regarding the private accumulation of productive means.
But either way, assuming we're talking about a business where your employees outnumber you, you don't have the same physical relationship to that auto shop that you have to your house or your laptop or your favorite coat.
There's also an assumption being made there Spool that your personal property is the same as the property of your business which I think is incorrectly held.
Well, if it's a sole proprietorship rather than a corporate entity, all the stuff in the business is definitely just your stuff.
I still don't see the shape of it though. I mean, dude spends 14 hours a day in the fab, he's got a change of clothes there because shit goes late all the time, photos of his family on the walls... it's his business, built from the ground up out of his garage.
Why isn't that his personal property just as much as the house? And if he expands and now there's 10 people there, why isn't it still his? At what point does the business owner need to say whoa... if I get any more successful I have to give it all to the government.
To pull back from this one guy - why are only local businesses safe, but as soon as they get to a certain scale we have to take possession of them? Efficiency is critical to modern society - if we build vast inefficiencies into the economy we end up starving people to death in the worst cases and building fuckin Yugos in the best ones.
Nobody wants a Yugo, even if they get to collectively own the factory where it was spawned.
Because he expanded and now there’s ten people there who are producing value for the business just as much, if not more so, than he does.
And again, it doesn’t have to go to the government. Market Socialism is a thing. It can be owned simply within the labor group that compromises the business.
Think of it less as the scary propaganda of the Cold War and more “what if we made the workplace some form of democracy?”
I want to hash this out some, but here we are again at Soviet apologetics. Why frame it as scary propaganda when it was actually scary literal truth that starved millions of people to death?
Once again! Why is socialism scary? Because when somebody tries to figure out how peoperty rights work, four comments in there's a person shrugging off concerns about state ownership by handwaving away the disaster of the USSR as propaganda!
Is Soviet Collectivization meaningfully less disastrous as western European Encroachment, though? It's certainly shocking in that it was compressed into a few years, but by and large seems to be another indictment of industrialization and centralization and not something unique to the USSR.
The 'millions of people died to communism' thing is problematic, because it ignores the legitimate problems with eg Stalinism that we might otherwise learn from to paint with a broad brush and attribute to a category of ideologies the deaths resulting from war, famine, political violence, outside aggression, and any number of things which of course themselves are resultant from myriad causes. Were people never starved or disappeared in Czarist Russia?
I could start attributing deaths to capitalism and people might nod their heads when I cite the 40,000 people/year in the US who die unnecessarily due to a lack of healthcare, giving credence for the sake of argument when I attribute the whole of poverty to capital accumulation, and checking out entirely were I to start tallying death counts from World War 1; the categorization is so broad as to make it impossible to derive any benefit from the discussion. It's intended to stop debate, not further it.
The American myopia about colonialism also helps, since that death toll gets shrugged off as distant history - 2-3 million for the Indian famine during WWII, 8 million in the Belgian Congo, 20-70 million Native American deaths during American settlement, 90+ percent of Australian Aboriginals vanishing after first contact, 100+ million deaths during slavery, and a stable casualty count in colonial territories due to a constant state of unrest and oppression that was equivalent to a modern warzone. Even the millions of civilian deaths during the Cold War from the actions of the West and allies has been airbrushed out, due to the majority being the result of active wars (which the majority roll their eyes at when it gets brought up) or the result of totalitarian proxies acting on our behalf and with our intelligence directing them (3 million in Indonesia, 60k-80k Operation Condor, 70k-80k Salvadoran Civil War, 10-25 million overall on both sides).
It all just fades into statistics, after awhile, but the idea that capitalism is more humane than communism basically relies on whether you define people outside of the European and North American "safe" zones as human beings.
There still seems to be weird disagreement over socialism and market economies.
In Denmark's rejection of the label of socialism, they say it's not a "planned socialist economy," it's a "market economy." The intimation seems to be that socialist economies are necessarily planned.
I don't think that's accurate. It seems to be well-demonstrated that completely planned economies tend to be disastrous (as do completely unregulated ones), and planned economies do not seem essential to the project of socialism at all. It's not so inflexible an ideology.
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
There still seems to be weird disagreement over socialism and market economies.
In Denmark's rejection of the label of socialism, they say it's not a "planned socialist economy," it's a "market economy." The intimation seems to be that socialist economies are, necessarily planned.
I don't think that's accurate. It seems to be well-demonstrated that completely planned economies tend to be disastrous (as do completely unregulated ones), and planned economies do not seem essential the project of socialism at all. It's not so inflexible an ideology.
True that socialism can make use of markets, but Denmark is not a socialist country. They have high unionization rates, good social safety net, etc, but this is getting into the important distinctions between Socialism and Social Democracy. If people can still subsist just by having ownership stake in corporations and aren't required to contribute to society, it's capitalism bb
I would say Denmark is not socialist because the workers don't really control or own the means of production for the most part. Even when it comes to state owned enterprises, a lot of those are mostly independent by design with most of the representative government usually not having that heavy of a hand over what they do. The trend in most countries has been turning regular government organizations into state owned corporations rather than the reverse.
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Irond WillWARNING: NO HURTFUL COMMENTS, PLEASE!!!!!Cambridge. MAModeratormod
Is there any country in the world in which no one subsides by having an ownership stake in a business or company?
Oh I don't think Denmark is a socialist nation--I just mean that their response was characteristic of a common perception of socialism.
So the common criticism of the welfare state, iterated above, is that the gains they make for the welfare of the people are necessarily 1) limited, because people are still being exploited for their labour to various degrees, and 2) temporary, because capital retains structural power and will always work to degrade regulation, labour rights, social programs, etc. out of self-interest and because the system works to incentivize that behaviour.
Reformers would respond, I think, that both of these issues can be addressed without revolutionary politics. If it's possible to alter the system fundamentally, it's also possible to fix the existing system, possibly with less collateral damage to institutions.
Greater labour protections (and greater power for organized labour), better tax systems, better-funded and better-administered social programs can all be established within a capitalist state. Maintenance is required, and systems to maintain/refine/protect those achievements need to be established, but it's possible. Even bigger steps like guaranteed basic income, partially or fully nationalized healthcare/child care, etc can happen in this context, and have.
This leads to the other aspect of a reformer response, which is that maintenance of social programs and protection from powerful classes is also required in socialist states--that the allegedly fundamental difference of vulnerability to corruption and control by capital is not as dramatic as all that, because the struggle against power-seeking behaviour will plague any system. The idea is that socializing ownership of the means will disrupt the power base of capital, but people are very good at gathering and centralizing power, and building systems to entrench themselves.
I don't often hear responses to these arguments because the issue gets bogged down in questions of historical atrocity, planned economies, etc. I'm especially curious about hard, empirical data on the argument that capitalism necessarily backslides into more exploitative modes no matter how much progress it makes as a welfare state.
There still seems to be weird disagreement over socialism and market economies.
In Denmark's rejection of the label of socialism, they say it's not a "planned socialist economy," it's a "market economy." The intimation seems to be that socialist economies are necessarily planned.
I don't think that's accurate. It seems to be well-demonstrated that completely planned economies tend to be disastrous (as do completely unregulated ones), and planned economies do not seem essential to the project of socialism at all. It's not so inflexible an ideology.
I mean, we might just need to assume that Denmark said that to address all the fanatics who think socialism is necessarily planned. Sometimes shit be political and sometimes you just gotta defend yourself from insane accusations of "Socialism!!!!" in order to get good shit done.
Oh I don't think Denmark is a socialist nation--I just mean that their response was characteristic of a common perception of socialism.
So the common criticism of the welfare state, iterated above, is that the gains they make for the welfare of the people are necessarily 1) limited, because people are still being exploited for their labour to various degrees, and 2) temporary, because capital retains structural power and will always work to degrade regulation, labour rights, social programs, etc. out of self-interest and because the system works to incentivize that behaviour.
Reformers would respond, I think, that both of these issues can be addressed without revolutionary politics. If it's possible to alter the system fundamentally, it's also possible to fix the existing system, possibly with less collateral damage to institutions.
Greater labour protections (and greater power for organized labour), better tax systems, better-funded and better-administered social programs can all be established within a capitalist state. Maintenance is required, and systems to maintain/refine/protect those achievements need to be established, but it's possible. Even bigger steps like guaranteed basic income, partially or fully nationalized healthcare/child care, etc can happen in this context, and have.
This leads to the other aspect of a reformer response, which is that maintenance of social programs and protection from powerful classes is also required in socialist states--that the allegedly fundamental difference of vulnerability to corruption and control by capital is not as dramatic as all that, because the struggle against power-seeking behaviour will plague any system. The idea is that socializing ownership of the means will disrupt the power base of capital, but people are very good at gathering and centralizing power, and building systems to entrench themselves.
I don't often hear responses to these arguments because the issue gets bogged down in questions of historical atrocity, planned economies, etc. I'm especially curious about hard, empirical data on the argument that capitalism necessarily backslides into more exploitative modes no matter how much progress it makes as a welfare state.
I think the most disturbing issues with syndicalism in particular comes from the worker experience in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. One of the issues with factory democratization was that, like HOAs in American suburbs, they have a tendency to get taken over by small-scale authoritarians and busybodies. Once this happens, the communal pressure to do more starts to mean workers are forced into longer shifts, spying on slackers becomes endemic and often retaliatory for personal slights, and the culture shifts from being exploited by the owners to being exploited by other co-workers.
That's always led me to think that a state with strong labor laws is going to be necessary under any model.
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
Is there any country in the world in which no one subsides by having an ownership stake in a business or company?
Eh, probably not, but I meant as the rule and not the exception. To again lean on Cuba as a convenient reference, there are certainly folks who get a better deal due to being politically connected or, crucially, by having connections abroad that send in money. The difference is that this is the exception, not the rule. There's a meaningful difference between your family owning a second home that they cheekily rent out to tourists (often but not always contributing labor in the form of housekeeping, etc) and a thriving finance industry and landlords.
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Irond WillWARNING: NO HURTFUL COMMENTS, PLEASE!!!!!Cambridge. MAModeratormod
I guess I’m cautioning about getting too fancy with our definitions of “socialism”. The more we insist on hewing to pure definitions of the term, the more abstract and less meaningful it becomes.
And also less useful or attractive for anyone but the most devoted
Sweden and Denmark are super nice places to live in many ways, but they have their own distinct problems and many of their successes would be really challenging to implement in more pluralistic or ethnically/ culturally diverse locales.
Meanwhile, places like North Korea, most of the Warsaw Pact countries during the Cold War and various socialist-themed banana republics were straight up hellscapes.
Let’s strive for a better society with a critical eye. Devotion to socialism as an ideal is the new evangelism and just as tiresome/ ridiculous imo
Can we go back to personal vs private property? It seems exceptionally vague to me why my house, which I did not build, gets to be mine, and I get as much farmland as I can work myself, but no more than that, but my factory isn't mine.
If I want someone to come clean my house and mow my grass do I lose possession of it? Why is that different from the metal fab shop I own across town?
Its physical ownership. Obviously you don't literally hold the house, but you go there after work, sleep, raise your kids there. It is, in a very animal sense, your house. Why would paying someone to do something to it change the clearly understood nature of that relationship any more than paying someone to fix your shoes would change the understood ownership of that object?
The fabrication shop starts to get into some of the cases discussed where maybe minor localized businesses stay privately held because they're not a real threat regarding the private accumulation of productive means.
But either way, assuming we're talking about a business where your employees outnumber you, you don't have the same physical relationship to that auto shop that you have to your house or your laptop or your favorite coat.
There's also an assumption being made there Spool that your personal property is the same as the property of your business which I think is incorrectly held.
Well, if it's a sole proprietorship rather than a corporate entity, all the stuff in the business is definitely just your stuff.
I still don't see the shape of it though. I mean, dude spends 14 hours a day in the fab, he's got a change of clothes there because shit goes late all the time, photos of his family on the walls... it's his business, built from the ground up out of his garage.
Why isn't that his personal property just as much as the house? And if he expands and now there's 10 people there, why isn't it still his? At what point does the business owner need to say whoa... if I get any more successful I have to give it all to the government.
To pull back from this one guy - why are only local businesses safe, but as soon as they get to a certain scale we have to take possession of them? Efficiency is critical to modern society - if we build vast inefficiencies into the economy we end up starving people to death in the worst cases and building fuckin Yugos in the best ones.
Nobody wants a Yugo, even if they get to collectively own the factory where it was spawned.
Because he expanded and now there’s ten people there who are producing value for the business just as much, if not more so, than he does.
And again, it doesn’t have to go to the government. Market Socialism is a thing. It can be owned simply within the labor group that compromises the business.
Think of it less as the scary propaganda of the Cold War and more “what if we made the workplace some form of democracy?”
I want to hash this out some, but here we are again at Soviet apologetics. Why frame it as scary propaganda when it was actually scary literal truth that starved millions of people to death?
Once again! Why is socialism scary? Because when somebody tries to figure out how peoperty rights work, four comments in there's a person shrugging off concerns about state ownership by handwaving away the disaster of the USSR as propaganda!
Is Soviet Collectivization meaningfully less disastrous as western European Encroachment, though? It's certainly shocking in that it was compressed into a few years, but by and large seems to be another indictment of industrialization and centralization and not something unique to the USSR.
The 'millions of people died to communism' thing is problematic, because it ignores the legitimate problems with eg Stalinism that we might otherwise learn from to paint with a broad brush and attribute to a category of ideologies the deaths resulting from war, famine, political violence, outside aggression, and any number of things which of course themselves are resultant from myriad causes. Were people never starved or disappeared in Czarist Russia?
I could start attributing deaths to capitalism and people might nod their heads when I cite the 40,000 people/year in the US who die unnecessarily due to a lack of healthcare, giving credence for the sake of argument when I attribute the whole of poverty to capital accumulation, and checking out entirely were I to start tallying death counts from World War 1; the categorization is so broad as to make it impossible to derive any benefit from the discussion. It's intended to stop debate, not further it.
It was the millions of people dying as a direct result of Stalin's decisions and orders part tho. That was the problem! Brushing it aside or suggesting that it serves as a block to discussing the real lessons of the Soviet disaster can't be allowed, because it's central to the question of whether we should or can attempt similar actions.
Comparisons to US national healthcare are an enormous red herring - you don't need to get rid of capitalism to fix healthcare, as demonstrated elsewhere in the western capitalist world. To prevent Mao from killing 45 million people in 4 years to enact the Great Leap Forward, you need to address the ideological underpinning that allowed it to happen.
To tie this back into the quotes, the reason I brought it up originally is that it seems like a reflex - I'm trying to make a mental shift where I can understand why my business suddenly isn't mine anymore and how that's just or fair to me, and suddenly we're referring to cold war fears as propaganda?
The Soviets Communist Party was really fuckin horrible, you guys! Mao was the most unimaginably bloody leader that existed in the entire history of humanity! Why not square up and address the parts of communist philosophy that seem to end up with somebody orchestrating Great Leaps Forward? If it it's unconnected, it's on socialists to demonstrate how and why, or at least demonstrate that socialism isn't a stepping stone and fully communist societies aren't a necessary endpoint.
+4
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
Can we go back to personal vs private property? It seems exceptionally vague to me why my house, which I did not build, gets to be mine, and I get as much farmland as I can work myself, but no more than that, but my factory isn't mine.
If I want someone to come clean my house and mow my grass do I lose possession of it? Why is that different from the metal fab shop I own across town?
Its physical ownership. Obviously you don't literally hold the house, but you go there after work, sleep, raise your kids there. It is, in a very animal sense, your house. Why would paying someone to do something to it change the clearly understood nature of that relationship any more than paying someone to fix your shoes would change the understood ownership of that object?
The fabrication shop starts to get into some of the cases discussed where maybe minor localized businesses stay privately held because they're not a real threat regarding the private accumulation of productive means.
But either way, assuming we're talking about a business where your employees outnumber you, you don't have the same physical relationship to that auto shop that you have to your house or your laptop or your favorite coat.
There's also an assumption being made there Spool that your personal property is the same as the property of your business which I think is incorrectly held.
Well, if it's a sole proprietorship rather than a corporate entity, all the stuff in the business is definitely just your stuff.
I still don't see the shape of it though. I mean, dude spends 14 hours a day in the fab, he's got a change of clothes there because shit goes late all the time, photos of his family on the walls... it's his business, built from the ground up out of his garage.
Why isn't that his personal property just as much as the house? And if he expands and now there's 10 people there, why isn't it still his? At what point does the business owner need to say whoa... if I get any more successful I have to give it all to the government.
To pull back from this one guy - why are only local businesses safe, but as soon as they get to a certain scale we have to take possession of them? Efficiency is critical to modern society - if we build vast inefficiencies into the economy we end up starving people to death in the worst cases and building fuckin Yugos in the best ones.
Nobody wants a Yugo, even if they get to collectively own the factory where it was spawned.
Because he expanded and now there’s ten people there who are producing value for the business just as much, if not more so, than he does.
And again, it doesn’t have to go to the government. Market Socialism is a thing. It can be owned simply within the labor group that compromises the business.
Think of it less as the scary propaganda of the Cold War and more “what if we made the workplace some form of democracy?”
I want to hash this out some, but here we are again at Soviet apologetics. Why frame it as scary propaganda when it was actually scary literal truth that starved millions of people to death?
Once again! Why is socialism scary? Because when somebody tries to figure out how peoperty rights work, four comments in there's a person shrugging off concerns about state ownership by handwaving away the disaster of the USSR as propaganda!
Is Soviet Collectivization meaningfully less disastrous as western European Encroachment, though? It's certainly shocking in that it was compressed into a few years, but by and large seems to be another indictment of industrialization and centralization and not something unique to the USSR.
The 'millions of people died to communism' thing is problematic, because it ignores the legitimate problems with eg Stalinism that we might otherwise learn from to paint with a broad brush and attribute to a category of ideologies the deaths resulting from war, famine, political violence, outside aggression, and any number of things which of course themselves are resultant from myriad causes. Were people never starved or disappeared in Czarist Russia?
I could start attributing deaths to capitalism and people might nod their heads when I cite the 40,000 people/year in the US who die unnecessarily due to a lack of healthcare, giving credence for the sake of argument when I attribute the whole of poverty to capital accumulation, and checking out entirely were I to start tallying death counts from World War 1; the categorization is so broad as to make it impossible to derive any benefit from the discussion. It's intended to stop debate, not further it.
i think you can make a reasonably thorough argument, based on internal soviet communications, that the collectivisation of soviet farming was a very much "communist" phenomenon, inasmuch as it was 1) ideologically directly related to the idea that capitalism per se in the countryside had to be ended 2) partly a response to only 5%-ish of the farmers voluntarily collectivising 3) a specifically soviet response to the particular countryside arrangements that existed.
how much stock you place in it depends how much you want to dive into chomskyan "m-l was a right-wing aberration of libertarian socialism position" vs "capitalism is not a unified system either, these problems arose in other social arrangements and cannot be uniquely tracked back to market economies blahblahblah"
the fairest version of the critique is, i think, that you can render it as an example of a particular peril of a certain literalist response to certain marxist ideas in a particular authoritarian framework. does that damn socialism? not in any totalising sense, no. is it nonetheless related? sure.
both capitalism and communism broadly construed produce a broad set of possible social and political arrangements with particular perils, some with quite substantial overlap. stalinism being used as a stick with which to dismiss any socialist or marxist critique of anything is a boring and played-out intellectual trope anyway, so i feel it can be placed in the bin on the basis that it is neither long-term informative or interesting... eg its trivially obvious it tells you not much about the value or risks of luxemburgism or the value of marxist critique of current labour relations, etc
I guess I’m cautioning about getting too fancy with our definitions of “socialism”. The more we insist on hewing to pure definitions of the term, the more abstract and less meaningful it becomes.
And also less useful or attractive for anyone but the most devoted
Sweden and Denmark are super nice places to live in many ways, but they have their own distinct problems and many of their successes would be really challenging to implement in more pluralistic or ethnically/ culturally diverse locales.
Meanwhile, places like North Korea, most of the Warsaw Pact countries during the Cold War and various socialist-themed banana republics were straight up hellscapes.
Let’s strive for a better society with a critical eye. Devotion to socialism as an ideal is the new evangelism and just as tiresome/ ridiculous imo
What does this look like in policy terms?
Comparisons to US national healthcare are an enormous red herring - you don't need to get rid of capitalism to fix healthcare, as demonstrated elsewhere in the western capitalist world. To prevent Mao from killing 45 million people in 4 years to enact the Great Leap Forward, you need to address the ideological underpinning that allowed it to happen.
Honestly when I read this I see someone who knows what they want said and is trying to get people to say it. Mao was an authoritarian who thought you could just reorder fundamental societal mechanisms like a thought experiment made real. I don't see why people who advocate for more worker owned businesses or whatever are constantly told they need to account for the Great Leap Forward.
Its like demanding every local chamber of commerce flagellate themselves over the Pinkertons before each meeting.
To tie this back into the quotes, the reason I brought it up originally is that it seems like a reflex - I'm trying to make a mental shift where I can understand why my business suddenly isn't mine anymore and how that's just or fair to me, and suddenly we're referring to cold war fears as propaganda?
Its yours and its every else's who works to make it viable. Socialism rewards labor, not abstract ownership.
Styrofoam Sammich on
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
Sure, Scandanavian capitalism is great and the Soviet flag is a small comfort in a Siberian winter. The fact remains that we're in a period of global crises, that attempts to paper over the contradictions of capitalism are wearing thin, and that the climate apocalypse has already begun. We should reject decision-making via pure ideology, but if a materialist analysis leads to the conclusion that socialism is the solution, then we should make socialism happen.
I'm less interested in making socialism refer to something palatable, and more interested in making people interested in legitimate disruption.
Alternatively, I'm open to suggestions on ways to shift from a system that requires constant economic expansion to one that can de-grow the economy such that our grandkids can still breathe the outside air in the future. Again, reforms like a 100% inheritance tax seem dramatic within the narrow scope of normalized political discourse, but any such reforms that exist without a fundamentally revolutionary framework are bound to face later dismantling as capital re-exerts influence over society.
+6
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
Can we go back to personal vs private property? It seems exceptionally vague to me why my house, which I did not build, gets to be mine, and I get as much farmland as I can work myself, but no more than that, but my factory isn't mine.
If I want someone to come clean my house and mow my grass do I lose possession of it? Why is that different from the metal fab shop I own across town?
Its physical ownership. Obviously you don't literally hold the house, but you go there after work, sleep, raise your kids there. It is, in a very animal sense, your house. Why would paying someone to do something to it change the clearly understood nature of that relationship any more than paying someone to fix your shoes would change the understood ownership of that object?
The fabrication shop starts to get into some of the cases discussed where maybe minor localized businesses stay privately held because they're not a real threat regarding the private accumulation of productive means.
But either way, assuming we're talking about a business where your employees outnumber you, you don't have the same physical relationship to that auto shop that you have to your house or your laptop or your favorite coat.
There's also an assumption being made there Spool that your personal property is the same as the property of your business which I think is incorrectly held.
Well, if it's a sole proprietorship rather than a corporate entity, all the stuff in the business is definitely just your stuff.
I still don't see the shape of it though. I mean, dude spends 14 hours a day in the fab, he's got a change of clothes there because shit goes late all the time, photos of his family on the walls... it's his business, built from the ground up out of his garage.
Why isn't that his personal property just as much as the house? And if he expands and now there's 10 people there, why isn't it still his? At what point does the business owner need to say whoa... if I get any more successful I have to give it all to the government.
To pull back from this one guy - why are only local businesses safe, but as soon as they get to a certain scale we have to take possession of them? Efficiency is critical to modern society - if we build vast inefficiencies into the economy we end up starving people to death in the worst cases and building fuckin Yugos in the best ones.
Nobody wants a Yugo, even if they get to collectively own the factory where it was spawned.
Because he expanded and now there’s ten people there who are producing value for the business just as much, if not more so, than he does.
And again, it doesn’t have to go to the government. Market Socialism is a thing. It can be owned simply within the labor group that compromises the business.
Think of it less as the scary propaganda of the Cold War and more “what if we made the workplace some form of democracy?”
I want to hash this out some, but here we are again at Soviet apologetics. Why frame it as scary propaganda when it was actually scary literal truth that starved millions of people to death?
Once again! Why is socialism scary? Because when somebody tries to figure out how peoperty rights work, four comments in there's a person shrugging off concerns about state ownership by handwaving away the disaster of the USSR as propaganda!
Is Soviet Collectivization meaningfully less disastrous as western European Encroachment, though? It's certainly shocking in that it was compressed into a few years, but by and large seems to be another indictment of industrialization and centralization and not something unique to the USSR.
The 'millions of people died to communism' thing is problematic, because it ignores the legitimate problems with eg Stalinism that we might otherwise learn from to paint with a broad brush and attribute to a category of ideologies the deaths resulting from war, famine, political violence, outside aggression, and any number of things which of course themselves are resultant from myriad causes. Were people never starved or disappeared in Czarist Russia?
I could start attributing deaths to capitalism and people might nod their heads when I cite the 40,000 people/year in the US who die unnecessarily due to a lack of healthcare, giving credence for the sake of argument when I attribute the whole of poverty to capital accumulation, and checking out entirely were I to start tallying death counts from World War 1; the categorization is so broad as to make it impossible to derive any benefit from the discussion. It's intended to stop debate, not further it.
It was the millions of people dying as a direct result of Stalin's decisions and orders part tho. That was the problem! Brushing it aside or suggesting that it serves as a block to discussing the real lessons of the Soviet disaster can't be allowed, because it's central to the question of whether we should or can attempt similar actions.
Comparisons to US national healthcare are an enormous red herring - you don't need to get rid of capitalism to fix healthcare, as demonstrated elsewhere in the western capitalist world. To prevent Mao from killing 45 million people in 4 years to enact the Great Leap Forward, you need to address the ideological underpinning that allowed it to happen.
To tie this back into the quotes, the reason I brought it up originally is that it seems like a reflex - I'm trying to make a mental shift where I can understand why my business suddenly isn't mine anymore and how that's just or fair to me, and suddenly we're referring to cold war fears as propaganda?
The Soviets Communist Party was really fuckin horrible, you guys! Mao was the most unimaginably bloody leader that existed in the entire history of humanity! Why not square up and address the parts of communist philosophy that seem to end up with somebody orchestrating Great Leaps Forward? If it it's unconnected, it's on socialists to demonstrate how and why, or at least demonstrate that socialism isn't a stepping stone and fully communist societies aren't a necessary endpoint.
Sure, you don't need to abolish capitalism to enact single-payer healthcare, but we only have our current system because capital interests have control of the state.
Again, this is reductionist. I could counter "45 million under Mao" with "130 million indigenous people in what became the United States", but it's meaningless! We both end up saying "Yeah I like [my team], but only the good things and not any of the bad things." Awesome, good talk.
I'll conclude my thoughts on this with an anecdote which I think encapsulates how common people relate to communism. I was at a local restaurant, and the cook who brought out our food was wearing a t-shirt with Mao's face on it. I complimented it, to which he replied something like 'yeah, he killed millions of people but people still like him?'. I, wanting to get back to my conversation, just quipped that 'to be fair, a lot of those people were landlords.' He paused for a moment and just said "Yeah, I'd kill my landlord" and walked away.
+11
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited December 2018
it also seems slightly strange to me how much this discussion also ignores how much we know about the risks of particular approaches to policy implementation. in the west there is broadly an understanding of the risk of authoritarian measures of any sort. when you look at the family of policy ideas you can come up with from eg a marxist starting point, we have 150 years of history and democratic and philosophical developments to help winnow out the really obviously egregious ones...
you dont even need to criticise eg stalinism on the grounds "it was bad because communism". you can criticise it for not being incrementalist enough, too authoritarian, too risky, too brutal, too undemocratic, etc etc etc
to take a recent example in british politics; the british labour party under john mcdonnell has a suggestion that companies should put 10% of their stock into an employee ownership fund and employees should get a £500 dividend from that and some measure of consequent control from that. this is an idea that has its roots in marxist critique; it is about addressing ownership in the british economy, which is a pretty old-school marxist take. but its also just a straightforward policy that can co-exist with current british arrangements; so we should be asking what does it actually do? what are its good or bad features? with concrete policy proposals there are so many other lenses to use and levers to pull in the end...
Can we go back to personal vs private property? It seems exceptionally vague to me why my house, which I did not build, gets to be mine, and I get as much farmland as I can work myself, but no more than that, but my factory isn't mine.
If I want someone to come clean my house and mow my grass do I lose possession of it? Why is that different from the metal fab shop I own across town?
Its physical ownership. Obviously you don't literally hold the house, but you go there after work, sleep, raise your kids there. It is, in a very animal sense, your house. Why would paying someone to do something to it change the clearly understood nature of that relationship any more than paying someone to fix your shoes would change the understood ownership of that object?
The fabrication shop starts to get into some of the cases discussed where maybe minor localized businesses stay privately held because they're not a real threat regarding the private accumulation of productive means.
But either way, assuming we're talking about a business where your employees outnumber you, you don't have the same physical relationship to that auto shop that you have to your house or your laptop or your favorite coat.
There's also an assumption being made there Spool that your personal property is the same as the property of your business which I think is incorrectly held.
Well, if it's a sole proprietorship rather than a corporate entity, all the stuff in the business is definitely just your stuff.
I still don't see the shape of it though. I mean, dude spends 14 hours a day in the fab, he's got a change of clothes there because shit goes late all the time, photos of his family on the walls... it's his business, built from the ground up out of his garage.
Why isn't that his personal property just as much as the house? And if he expands and now there's 10 people there, why isn't it still his? At what point does the business owner need to say whoa... if I get any more successful I have to give it all to the government.
To pull back from this one guy - why are only local businesses safe, but as soon as they get to a certain scale we have to take possession of them? Efficiency is critical to modern society - if we build vast inefficiencies into the economy we end up starving people to death in the worst cases and building fuckin Yugos in the best ones.
Nobody wants a Yugo, even if they get to collectively own the factory where it was spawned.
Because he expanded and now there’s ten people there who are producing value for the business just as much, if not more so, than he does.
And again, it doesn’t have to go to the government. Market Socialism is a thing. It can be owned simply within the labor group that compromises the business.
Think of it less as the scary propaganda of the Cold War and more “what if we made the workplace some form of democracy?”
I want to hash this out some, but here we are again at Soviet apologetics. Why frame it as scary propaganda when it was actually scary literal truth that starved millions of people to death?
Once again! Why is socialism scary? Because when somebody tries to figure out how peoperty rights work, four comments in there's a person shrugging off concerns about state ownership by handwaving away the disaster of the USSR as propaganda!
Is Soviet Collectivization meaningfully less disastrous as western European Encroachment, though? It's certainly shocking in that it was compressed into a few years, but by and large seems to be another indictment of industrialization and centralization and not something unique to the USSR.
The 'millions of people died to communism' thing is problematic, because it ignores the legitimate problems with eg Stalinism that we might otherwise learn from to paint with a broad brush and attribute to a category of ideologies the deaths resulting from war, famine, political violence, outside aggression, and any number of things which of course themselves are resultant from myriad causes. Were people never starved or disappeared in Czarist Russia?
I could start attributing deaths to capitalism and people might nod their heads when I cite the 40,000 people/year in the US who die unnecessarily due to a lack of healthcare, giving credence for the sake of argument when I attribute the whole of poverty to capital accumulation, and checking out entirely were I to start tallying death counts from World War 1; the categorization is so broad as to make it impossible to derive any benefit from the discussion. It's intended to stop debate, not further it.
It was the millions of people dying as a direct result of Stalin's decisions and orders part tho. That was the problem! Brushing it aside or suggesting that it serves as a block to discussing the real lessons of the Soviet disaster can't be allowed, because it's central to the question of whether we should or can attempt similar actions.
Comparisons to US national healthcare are an enormous red herring - you don't need to get rid of capitalism to fix healthcare, as demonstrated elsewhere in the western capitalist world. To prevent Mao from killing 45 million people in 4 years to enact the Great Leap Forward, you need to address the ideological underpinning that allowed it to happen.
To tie this back into the quotes, the reason I brought it up originally is that it seems like a reflex - I'm trying to make a mental shift where I can understand why my business suddenly isn't mine anymore and how that's just or fair to me, and suddenly we're referring to cold war fears as propaganda?
The Soviets Communist Party was really fuckin horrible, you guys! Mao was the most unimaginably bloody leader that existed in the entire history of humanity! Why not square up and address the parts of communist philosophy that seem to end up with somebody orchestrating Great Leaps Forward? If it it's unconnected, it's on socialists to demonstrate how and why, or at least demonstrate that socialism isn't a stepping stone and fully communist societies aren't a necessary endpoint.
Sure, you don't need to abolish capitalism to enact single-payer healthcare, but we only have our current system because capital interests have control of the state.
Again, this is reductionist. I could counter "45 million under Mao" with "130 million indigenous people in what became the United States", but it's meaningless! We both end up saying "Yeah I like [my team], but only the good things and not any of the bad things." Awesome, good talk.
I'll conclude my thoughts on this with an anecdote which I think encapsulates how common people relate to communism. I was at a local restaurant, and the cook who brought out our food was wearing a t-shirt with Mao's face on it. I complimented it, to which he replied something like 'yeah, he killed millions of people but people still like him?'. I, wanting to get back to my conversation, just quipped that 'to be fair, a lot of those people were landlords.' He paused for a moment and just said "Yeah, I'd kill my landlord" and walked away.
My go to at the moment is that capitalism is going to end up killing the entire human race at its current pace. No ones come up with a real counter other than that communism would kill the human race too.
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
A near total ignorance of the particular history and mechanics of policy or policy families is very common, and does not preclude having very strong opinions about government, ideology or economy
it also seems slightly strange to me how much this discussion also ignores how much we know about the risks of particular approaches to policy implementation. in the west there is broadly an understanding of the risk of authoritarian measures of any sort. when you look at the family of policy ideas you can come up with from eg a marxist starting point, we have 150 years of history and democratic and philosophical developments to help winnow out the really obviously egregious ones...
you dont even need to criticise eg stalinism on the grounds "it was bad because communism". you can criticise it for not being incrementalist enough, too authoritarian, too risky, too brutal, too undemocratic, etc etc etc
to take a recent example in british politics; the british labour party under john mcdonnell has a suggestion that companies should put 10% of their stock into an employee ownership fund and employees should get a £500 dividend from that and some measure of consequent control from that. this is an idea that has its roots in marxist critique; it is about addressing ownership in the british economy, which is a pretty old-school marxist take. but its also just a straightforward policy that can co-exist with current british arrangements; so we should be asking what does it actually do? what are its good or bad features? with concrete policy proposals there are so many other lenses to use and levers to pull in the end...
The slippery slope is a real traumatic obstacle in some people's psychologies. Things that are vaguely in the direction of communism must be feared because any movement in that direction will lead to communist pogroms and death camps, even an Internet discussion about how we might avoid those outcomes. Legalizing gay marriage will lead to people marrying their dogs and the end of human reproduction. Legalizing marijuana will mean all our kids will be hooked on heroin. Letting blacks and whites intermarry will result in the eradication of the white race. Etc..
The ideas of going slower, taking fewer steps, etc.. can't really satisfy such people who think that any step leads inevitably to death.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
it also seems slightly strange to me how much this discussion also ignores how much we know about the risks of particular approaches to policy implementation. in the west there is broadly an understanding of the risk of authoritarian measures of any sort. when you look at the family of policy ideas you can come up with from eg a marxist starting point, we have 150 years of history and democratic and philosophical developments to help winnow out the really obviously egregious ones...
you dont even need to criticise eg stalinism on the grounds "it was bad because communism". you can criticise it for not being incrementalist enough, too authoritarian, too risky, too brutal, too undemocratic, etc etc etc
to take a recent example in british politics; the british labour party under john mcdonnell has a suggestion that companies should put 10% of their stock into an employee ownership fund and employees should get a £500 dividend from that and some measure of consequent control from that. this is an idea that has its roots in marxist critique; it is about addressing ownership in the british economy, which is a pretty old-school marxist take. but its also just a straightforward policy that can co-exist with current british arrangements; so we should be asking what does it actually do? what are its good or bad features? with concrete policy proposals there are so many other lenses to use and levers to pull in the end...
The slippery slope is a real traumatic obstacle in some people's psychologies. Things that are vaguely in the direction of communism must be feared because any movement in that direction will lead to communist pogroms and death camps, even an Internet discussion about how we might avoid those outcomes. Legalizing gay marriage will lead to people marrying their dogs and the end of human reproduction. Legalizing marijuana will mean all our kids will be hooked on heroin. Letting blacks and whites intermarry will result in the eradication of the white race. Etc..
The ideas of going slower, taking fewer steps, etc.. can't really satisfy such people who think that any step leads inevitably to death.
yeah i definitely think there is something in the idea that building a huge floating field of disgust around the entire root ideas of a particular ideology to constrain the kinds of things people are interested in changing around the social order has turned out to make life enormously easier for people who are quite happy with the way things are. its not even a matter of it being a conspiracy, its just... easier. and stabler. but if those ideas have any critical validity whatsoever and you have been systematically excluding them from serious (political) consideration for a long time, you might end up being systematically vulnerable to, for example, massive inequality
huh, weird that
replace the hard question of "to what extent is this critique valid? and how should we respond to the bits of it that are?" with the easier question of "is it the Bad Thing? Oh, it is? Excellent, banish it from consideration"
it also seems slightly strange to me how much this discussion also ignores how much we know about the risks of particular approaches to policy implementation. in the west there is broadly an understanding of the risk of authoritarian measures of any sort. when you look at the family of policy ideas you can come up with from eg a marxist starting point, we have 150 years of history and democratic and philosophical developments to help winnow out the really obviously egregious ones...
you dont even need to criticise eg stalinism on the grounds "it was bad because communism". you can criticise it for not being incrementalist enough, too authoritarian, too risky, too brutal, too undemocratic, etc etc etc
to take a recent example in british politics; the british labour party under john mcdonnell has a suggestion that companies should put 10% of their stock into an employee ownership fund and employees should get a £500 dividend from that and some measure of consequent control from that. this is an idea that has its roots in marxist critique; it is about addressing ownership in the british economy, which is a pretty old-school marxist take. but its also just a straightforward policy that can co-exist with current british arrangements; so we should be asking what does it actually do? what are its good or bad features? with concrete policy proposals there are so many other lenses to use and levers to pull in the end...
The slippery slope is a real traumatic obstacle in some people's psychologies. Things that are vaguely in the direction of communism must be feared because any movement in that direction will lead to communist pogroms and death camps, even an Internet discussion about how we might avoid those outcomes. Legalizing gay marriage will lead to people marrying their dogs and the end of human reproduction. Legalizing marijuana will mean all our kids will be hooked on heroin. Letting blacks and whites intermarry will result in the eradication of the white race. Etc..
The ideas of going slower, taking fewer steps, etc.. can't really satisfy such people who think that any step leads inevitably to death.
it also seems slightly strange to me how much this discussion also ignores how much we know about the risks of particular approaches to policy implementation. in the west there is broadly an understanding of the risk of authoritarian measures of any sort. when you look at the family of policy ideas you can come up with from eg a marxist starting point, we have 150 years of history and democratic and philosophical developments to help winnow out the really obviously egregious ones...
you dont even need to criticise eg stalinism on the grounds "it was bad because communism". you can criticise it for not being incrementalist enough, too authoritarian, too risky, too brutal, too undemocratic, etc etc etc
to take a recent example in british politics; the british labour party under john mcdonnell has a suggestion that companies should put 10% of their stock into an employee ownership fund and employees should get a £500 dividend from that and some measure of consequent control from that. this is an idea that has its roots in marxist critique; it is about addressing ownership in the british economy, which is a pretty old-school marxist take. but its also just a straightforward policy that can co-exist with current british arrangements; so we should be asking what does it actually do? what are its good or bad features? with concrete policy proposals there are so many other lenses to use and levers to pull in the end...
The slippery slope is a real traumatic obstacle in some people's psychologies. Things that are vaguely in the direction of communism must be feared because any movement in that direction will lead to communist pogroms and death camps, even an Internet discussion about how we might avoid those outcomes. Legalizing gay marriage will lead to people marrying their dogs and the end of human reproduction. Legalizing marijuana will mean all our kids will be hooked on heroin. Letting blacks and whites intermarry will result in the eradication of the white race. Etc..
The ideas of going slower, taking fewer steps, etc.. can't really satisfy such people who think that any step leads inevitably to death.
yeah i definitely think there is something in the idea that building a huge floating field of disgust around the entire root ideas of a particular ideology to constrain the kinds of things people are interested in changing around the social order has turned out to make life enormously easier for people who are quite happy with the way things are. its not even a matter of it being a conspiracy, its just... easier. and stabler. but if those ideas have any critical validity whatsoever and you have been systematically excluding from serious consideration for a long time, you might end up being systematically vulnerable to, for example, massive inequality
huh, weird that
replace the hard question of "to what extent is this critique valid? and how should we respond to the bits of it that are?" with the easier question of "is it the Bad Thing? Oh, it is? Excellent, banish it from consideration"
Well, yes, because communism is bad and communism is vaguely associated with equality, so anything that might lead to equality might also lead to communism which is bad, so it too is bad, so we just run run run away from equality forever. We even lie to ourselves that maybe if we run away from equality long enough we might somehow loop back around and find equality again (e.g. trickle-down economics) like some weird moebius loop of ideology.
+1
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
it also seems slightly strange to me how much this discussion also ignores how much we know about the risks of particular approaches to policy implementation. in the west there is broadly an understanding of the risk of authoritarian measures of any sort. when you look at the family of policy ideas you can come up with from eg a marxist starting point, we have 150 years of history and democratic and philosophical developments to help winnow out the really obviously egregious ones...
you dont even need to criticise eg stalinism on the grounds "it was bad because communism". you can criticise it for not being incrementalist enough, too authoritarian, too risky, too brutal, too undemocratic, etc etc etc
to take a recent example in british politics; the british labour party under john mcdonnell has a suggestion that companies should put 10% of their stock into an employee ownership fund and employees should get a £500 dividend from that and some measure of consequent control from that. this is an idea that has its roots in marxist critique; it is about addressing ownership in the british economy, which is a pretty old-school marxist take. but its also just a straightforward policy that can co-exist with current british arrangements; so we should be asking what does it actually do? what are its good or bad features? with concrete policy proposals there are so many other lenses to use and levers to pull in the end...
The slippery slope is a real traumatic obstacle in some people's psychologies. Things that are vaguely in the direction of communism must be feared because any movement in that direction will lead to communist pogroms and death camps, even an Internet discussion about how we might avoid those outcomes. Legalizing gay marriage will lead to people marrying their dogs and the end of human reproduction. Legalizing marijuana will mean all our kids will be hooked on heroin. Letting blacks and whites intermarry will result in the eradication of the white race. Etc..
The ideas of going slower, taking fewer steps, etc.. can't really satisfy such people who think that any step leads inevitably to death.
yeah i definitely think there is something in the idea that building a huge floating field of disgust around the entire root ideas of a particular ideology to constrain the kinds of things people are interested in changing around the social order has turned out to make life enormously easier for people who are quite happy with the way things are. its not even a matter of it being a conspiracy, its just... easier. and stabler. but if those ideas have any critical validity whatsoever and you have been systematically excluding from serious consideration for a long time, you might end up being systematically vulnerable to, for example, massive inequality
huh, weird that
replace the hard question of "to what extent is this critique valid? and how should we respond to the bits of it that are?" with the easier question of "is it the Bad Thing? Oh, it is? Excellent, banish it from consideration"
Well, yes, because communism is bad and communism is vaguely associated with equality, so anything that might lead to equality might also lead to communism which is bad, so it too is bad, so we just run run run away from equality forever. We even lie to ourselves that maybe if we run away from equality long enough we might somehow loop back around and find equality again (e.g. trickle-down economics) like some weird moebius loop of ideology.
it also seems slightly strange to me how much this discussion also ignores how much we know about the risks of particular approaches to policy implementation. in the west there is broadly an understanding of the risk of authoritarian measures of any sort. when you look at the family of policy ideas you can come up with from eg a marxist starting point, we have 150 years of history and democratic and philosophical developments to help winnow out the really obviously egregious ones...
you dont even need to criticise eg stalinism on the grounds "it was bad because communism". you can criticise it for not being incrementalist enough, too authoritarian, too risky, too brutal, too undemocratic, etc etc etc
to take a recent example in british politics; the british labour party under john mcdonnell has a suggestion that companies should put 10% of their stock into an employee ownership fund and employees should get a £500 dividend from that and some measure of consequent control from that. this is an idea that has its roots in marxist critique; it is about addressing ownership in the british economy, which is a pretty old-school marxist take. but its also just a straightforward policy that can co-exist with current british arrangements; so we should be asking what does it actually do? what are its good or bad features? with concrete policy proposals there are so many other lenses to use and levers to pull in the end...
The slippery slope is a real traumatic obstacle in some people's psychologies. Things that are vaguely in the direction of communism must be feared because any movement in that direction will lead to communist pogroms and death camps, even an Internet discussion about how we might avoid those outcomes. Legalizing gay marriage will lead to people marrying their dogs and the end of human reproduction. Legalizing marijuana will mean all our kids will be hooked on heroin. Letting blacks and whites intermarry will result in the eradication of the white race. Etc..
The ideas of going slower, taking fewer steps, etc.. can't really satisfy such people who think that any step leads inevitably to death.
yeah i definitely think there is something in the idea that building a huge floating field of disgust around the entire root ideas of a particular ideology to constrain the kinds of things people are interested in changing around the social order has turned out to make life enormously easier for people who are quite happy with the way things are. its not even a matter of it being a conspiracy, its just... easier. and stabler. but if those ideas have any critical validity whatsoever and you have been systematically excluding from serious consideration for a long time, you might end up being systematically vulnerable to, for example, massive inequality
huh, weird that
replace the hard question of "to what extent is this critique valid? and how should we respond to the bits of it that are?" with the easier question of "is it the Bad Thing? Oh, it is? Excellent, banish it from consideration"
Well, yes, because communism is bad and communism is vaguely associated with equality, so anything that might lead to equality might also lead to communism which is bad, so it too is bad, so we just run run run away from equality forever. We even lie to ourselves that maybe if we run away from equality long enough we might somehow loop back around and find equality again (e.g. trickle-down economics) like some weird moebius loop of ideology.
TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
Oh I meant to mention, Prof Richard Wolff's Economic Update is a good 101-level current events podcast specializing in economics from a socialist perspective. It's enjoyable and accessible.
I keep feeling like, thanks to the repeated “BUT WHAT ABOUT MAO AND STALIN?!” I have to reiterate my question from earlier in the thread, but amended: I’m sorry, but have you mistaken us for tankies?
Can we go back to personal vs private property? It seems exceptionally vague to me why my house, which I did not build, gets to be mine, and I get as much farmland as I can work myself, but no more than that, but my factory isn't mine.
If I want someone to come clean my house and mow my grass do I lose possession of it? Why is that different from the metal fab shop I own across town?
Its physical ownership. Obviously you don't literally hold the house, but you go there after work, sleep, raise your kids there. It is, in a very animal sense, your house. Why would paying someone to do something to it change the clearly understood nature of that relationship any more than paying someone to fix your shoes would change the understood ownership of that object?
The fabrication shop starts to get into some of the cases discussed where maybe minor localized businesses stay privately held because they're not a real threat regarding the private accumulation of productive means.
But either way, assuming we're talking about a business where your employees outnumber you, you don't have the same physical relationship to that auto shop that you have to your house or your laptop or your favorite coat.
There's also an assumption being made there Spool that your personal property is the same as the property of your business which I think is incorrectly held.
Well, if it's a sole proprietorship rather than a corporate entity, all the stuff in the business is definitely just your stuff.
I still don't see the shape of it though. I mean, dude spends 14 hours a day in the fab, he's got a change of clothes there because shit goes late all the time, photos of his family on the walls... it's his business, built from the ground up out of his garage.
Why isn't that his personal property just as much as the house? And if he expands and now there's 10 people there, why isn't it still his? At what point does the business owner need to say whoa... if I get any more successful I have to give it all to the government.
To pull back from this one guy - why are only local businesses safe, but as soon as they get to a certain scale we have to take possession of them? Efficiency is critical to modern society - if we build vast inefficiencies into the economy we end up starving people to death in the worst cases and building fuckin Yugos in the best ones.
Nobody wants a Yugo, even if they get to collectively own the factory where it was spawned.
Because he expanded and now there’s ten people there who are producing value for the business just as much, if not more so, than he does.
And again, it doesn’t have to go to the government. Market Socialism is a thing. It can be owned simply within the labor group that compromises the business.
Think of it less as the scary propaganda of the Cold War and more “what if we made the workplace some form of democracy?”
I want to hash this out some, but here we are again at Soviet apologetics. Why frame it as scary propaganda when it was actually scary literal truth that starved millions of people to death?
Once again! Why is socialism scary? Because when somebody tries to figure out how peoperty rights work, four comments in there's a person shrugging off concerns about state ownership by handwaving away the disaster of the USSR as propaganda!
Is Soviet Collectivization meaningfully less disastrous as western European Encroachment, though? It's certainly shocking in that it was compressed into a few years, but by and large seems to be another indictment of industrialization and centralization and not something unique to the USSR.
The 'millions of people died to communism' thing is problematic, because it ignores the legitimate problems with eg Stalinism that we might otherwise learn from to paint with a broad brush and attribute to a category of ideologies the deaths resulting from war, famine, political violence, outside aggression, and any number of things which of course themselves are resultant from myriad causes. Were people never starved or disappeared in Czarist Russia?
I could start attributing deaths to capitalism and people might nod their heads when I cite the 40,000 people/year in the US who die unnecessarily due to a lack of healthcare, giving credence for the sake of argument when I attribute the whole of poverty to capital accumulation, and checking out entirely were I to start tallying death counts from World War 1; the categorization is so broad as to make it impossible to derive any benefit from the discussion. It's intended to stop debate, not further it.
It was the millions of people dying as a direct result of Stalin's decisions and orders part tho. That was the problem! Brushing it aside or suggesting that it serves as a block to discussing the real lessons of the Soviet disaster can't be allowed, because it's central to the question of whether we should or can attempt similar actions.
Comparisons to US national healthcare are an enormous red herring - you don't need to get rid of capitalism to fix healthcare, as demonstrated elsewhere in the western capitalist world. To prevent Mao from killing 45 million people in 4 years to enact the Great Leap Forward, you need to address the ideological underpinning that allowed it to happen.
To tie this back into the quotes, the reason I brought it up originally is that it seems like a reflex - I'm trying to make a mental shift where I can understand why my business suddenly isn't mine anymore and how that's just or fair to me, and suddenly we're referring to cold war fears as propaganda?
The Soviets Communist Party was really fuckin horrible, you guys! Mao was the most unimaginably bloody leader that existed in the entire history of humanity! Why not square up and address the parts of communist philosophy that seem to end up with somebody orchestrating Great Leaps Forward? If it it's unconnected, it's on socialists to demonstrate how and why, or at least demonstrate that socialism isn't a stepping stone and fully communist societies aren't a necessary endpoint.
Sure, you don't need to abolish capitalism to enact single-payer healthcare, but we only have our current system because capital interests have control of the state.
Again, this is reductionist. I could counter "45 million under Mao" with "130 million indigenous people in what became the United States", but it's meaningless! We both end up saying "Yeah I like [my team], but only the good things and not any of the bad things." Awesome, good talk.
I'll conclude my thoughts on this with an anecdote which I think encapsulates how common people relate to communism. I was at a local restaurant, and the cook who brought out our food was wearing a t-shirt with Mao's face on it. I complimented it, to which he replied something like 'yeah, he killed millions of people but people still like him?'. I, wanting to get back to my conversation, just quipped that 'to be fair, a lot of those people were landlords.' He paused for a moment and just said "Yeah, I'd kill my landlord" and walked away.
45 million under Mao are due to his idiotic 5 year plans and great leap forward. That 130 million you quote, greater than 85% of those deaths were from incidental contact with European diseases laying waste to the Americas. So yeah apples and orangutans.
Can we go back to personal vs private property? It seems exceptionally vague to me why my house, which I did not build, gets to be mine, and I get as much farmland as I can work myself, but no more than that, but my factory isn't mine.
If I want someone to come clean my house and mow my grass do I lose possession of it? Why is that different from the metal fab shop I own across town?
Its physical ownership. Obviously you don't literally hold the house, but you go there after work, sleep, raise your kids there. It is, in a very animal sense, your house. Why would paying someone to do something to it change the clearly understood nature of that relationship any more than paying someone to fix your shoes would change the understood ownership of that object?
The fabrication shop starts to get into some of the cases discussed where maybe minor localized businesses stay privately held because they're not a real threat regarding the private accumulation of productive means.
But either way, assuming we're talking about a business where your employees outnumber you, you don't have the same physical relationship to that auto shop that you have to your house or your laptop or your favorite coat.
There's also an assumption being made there Spool that your personal property is the same as the property of your business which I think is incorrectly held.
Well, if it's a sole proprietorship rather than a corporate entity, all the stuff in the business is definitely just your stuff.
I still don't see the shape of it though. I mean, dude spends 14 hours a day in the fab, he's got a change of clothes there because shit goes late all the time, photos of his family on the walls... it's his business, built from the ground up out of his garage.
Why isn't that his personal property just as much as the house? And if he expands and now there's 10 people there, why isn't it still his? At what point does the business owner need to say whoa... if I get any more successful I have to give it all to the government.
To pull back from this one guy - why are only local businesses safe, but as soon as they get to a certain scale we have to take possession of them? Efficiency is critical to modern society - if we build vast inefficiencies into the economy we end up starving people to death in the worst cases and building fuckin Yugos in the best ones.
Nobody wants a Yugo, even if they get to collectively own the factory where it was spawned.
Because he expanded and now there’s ten people there who are producing value for the business just as much, if not more so, than he does.
And again, it doesn’t have to go to the government. Market Socialism is a thing. It can be owned simply within the labor group that compromises the business.
Think of it less as the scary propaganda of the Cold War and more “what if we made the workplace some form of democracy?”
I want to hash this out some, but here we are again at Soviet apologetics. Why frame it as scary propaganda when it was actually scary literal truth that starved millions of people to death?
Once again! Why is socialism scary? Because when somebody tries to figure out how peoperty rights work, four comments in there's a person shrugging off concerns about state ownership by handwaving away the disaster of the USSR as propaganda!
Is Soviet Collectivization meaningfully less disastrous as western European Encroachment, though? It's certainly shocking in that it was compressed into a few years, but by and large seems to be another indictment of industrialization and centralization and not something unique to the USSR.
The 'millions of people died to communism' thing is problematic, because it ignores the legitimate problems with eg Stalinism that we might otherwise learn from to paint with a broad brush and attribute to a category of ideologies the deaths resulting from war, famine, political violence, outside aggression, and any number of things which of course themselves are resultant from myriad causes. Were people never starved or disappeared in Czarist Russia?
I could start attributing deaths to capitalism and people might nod their heads when I cite the 40,000 people/year in the US who die unnecessarily due to a lack of healthcare, giving credence for the sake of argument when I attribute the whole of poverty to capital accumulation, and checking out entirely were I to start tallying death counts from World War 1; the categorization is so broad as to make it impossible to derive any benefit from the discussion. It's intended to stop debate, not further it.
It was the millions of people dying as a direct result of Stalin's decisions and orders part tho. That was the problem! Brushing it aside or suggesting that it serves as a block to discussing the real lessons of the Soviet disaster can't be allowed, because it's central to the question of whether we should or can attempt similar actions.
Comparisons to US national healthcare are an enormous red herring - you don't need to get rid of capitalism to fix healthcare, as demonstrated elsewhere in the western capitalist world. To prevent Mao from killing 45 million people in 4 years to enact the Great Leap Forward, you need to address the ideological underpinning that allowed it to happen.
To tie this back into the quotes, the reason I brought it up originally is that it seems like a reflex - I'm trying to make a mental shift where I can understand why my business suddenly isn't mine anymore and how that's just or fair to me, and suddenly we're referring to cold war fears as propaganda?
The Soviets Communist Party was really fuckin horrible, you guys! Mao was the most unimaginably bloody leader that existed in the entire history of humanity! Why not square up and address the parts of communist philosophy that seem to end up with somebody orchestrating Great Leaps Forward? If it it's unconnected, it's on socialists to demonstrate how and why, or at least demonstrate that socialism isn't a stepping stone and fully communist societies aren't a necessary endpoint.
Sure, you don't need to abolish capitalism to enact single-payer healthcare, but we only have our current system because capital interests have control of the state.
Again, this is reductionist. I could counter "45 million under Mao" with "130 million indigenous people in what became the United States", but it's meaningless! We both end up saying "Yeah I like [my team], but only the good things and not any of the bad things." Awesome, good talk.
I'll conclude my thoughts on this with an anecdote which I think encapsulates how common people relate to communism. I was at a local restaurant, and the cook who brought out our food was wearing a t-shirt with Mao's face on it. I complimented it, to which he replied something like 'yeah, he killed millions of people but people still like him?'. I, wanting to get back to my conversation, just quipped that 'to be fair, a lot of those people were landlords.' He paused for a moment and just said "Yeah, I'd kill my landlord" and walked away.
45 million under Mao are due to his idiotic 5 year plans and great leap forward. That 130 million you quote, greater than 85% of those deaths were from incidental contact with European diseases laying waste to the Americas. So yeah apples and orangutans.
Arguing about the specifics of the Native American genocide isn't going to do capitalism any favors. Especially if we include slavery under the South-Central American colonial empires.
But really that misses TL:DR's point in the first place. The conversation goes no where fast.
Jephery on
}
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
I think this conversation of "socialism is inherently vulnerable to authoritarians and therefore horrific violence" vs "that is socialism in name only/the conditions that make the state vulnerable are simply disaster, economic collapse, revolution, etc." is just going to keep spinning around unless it latches onto concrete particulars
What in particular about socialism allegedly makes it vulnerable? What would prevent true, contemporary socialism from sliding into "state capitalism" calling itself socialism? What disrupts power-seeking behaviour in a socialist system? Etc
I think this conversation of "socialism is inherently vulnerable to authoritarians and therefore horrific violence" vs "that is socialism in name only/the conditions that make the state vulnerable are simply disaster, economic collapse, revolution, etc." is just going to keep spinning around unless it latches onto concrete particulars
What in particular about socialism allegedly makes it vulnerable? What would prevent true, contemporary socialism from sliding into "state capitalism" calling itself socialism? What disrupts power-seeking behaviour in a socialist system? Etc
I feel like what we’d need to look at is the history of revolutionary movements, and the specific crises of early 20th century Russia and China, as well as the personal histories of Mao, Lenin and Stalin to understand how those went down
The socialism part I imagine is the same reason the Nazis called themselves a “national socialist” party despite socialists being one of the major hated political groups of fascists: the promises of socialism are useful for convincing people to join your cause, even if you have no intent to deliver on them.
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Nah dude. You're making the mistake of conflating capitalism with free markets.
Socialists definitely want to end capitalism, but all that really means is stopping business owners from acting like lords over their own personal fiefdom. A worker owned business isn't capitalist, and there's no reason they can't compete in a free market.
Are definitions in politics not opinions, to some degree? "The goal of socialism is communism." - Vladimir Lenin
Communism as an end state is essentially utopian imagining. We don't know what it would look like, because we can't see there from here any more than the Wright brothers could have given meaningful input on the modern hub layout and air traffic control systems that we rely on for flight. Socialism is a fight for justice that we believe will lead us to a place where Communism is possible.
I've been notably absent from the forums for a little over a year now (an absence began in large part due to dissatisfaction with the allowed range of political discourse at the time), during which I've been increasingly working with and inspired by the DSA. Since this thread (and forum) suffers from a tragic lack of left thought, I want to help address some misconceptions. Although DSA varies a lot by chapter from Social Democrat (Bernie) to Communist, my perspective is from working within a Marxist-Leninist framework.
Socialism simply means to democratize the economy and the workplace; it does not mean an abolition of markets as a tool. Right now, things are organized by capital via markets; owners and bosses select employees and exert undemocratic, centralized control over how firms operate and how employees are allowed to conduct themselves inside and outside of the workplace. Alternatively, imagine if workers could elect executives to perform the work of management, without the corruption, nepotism, and inefficiency that come with the 'petty bourgeoisie' managerial class. We all can think of people who would otherwise be failures but for their family connections, who instead are allowed to be wealthy and inept petty tyrants.
Regarding why many on the left view Social Democracy and the welfare state as counter-revolutionary: this is a longstanding orthodox position. The New Deal was literally created as a desperate attempt to put a halt to leftist revolution, and served primarily to take the wind out of the sails of the ascendant labor movement. Socialists recognize that, while such programs are undeniably good at improving peoples' material conditions, welfare programs fail to address the fundamental injustices at the root of capitalism, and since the New Deal we've all seen how capital inevitably exerts its power over the state to roll back such protections in the absence of a strong, organized, and militant labor force.
So, why is 'Socialism' such a scary word? Because Socialism offers substantive critique of the injustices in our society in a way that liberalism cannot abide. Our current political discourse has been rendered myopic to the degree that most people are identified with one or the other faction within the Capitalist party; the far-right regressives and the center-right neoliberals. 'Socialism' is a scary word because it encourages people to imagine alternative societies in which owners are not able to appropriate the surplus value of workers' labor, which has caused wages to stagnate for 40 years while productivity and costs of living have increased. A society where the commodification of basic human needs like water and housing is not allowed and where the reproduction of homelessness is not an ongoing political choice. It encourages people to ask why the wealthiest country the world has ever known endures homelessness at all, and provides the political education to see how capitalism relies entirely on hierarchies of coerced labor; homelessness and poverty exist as a threat to those who might otherwise choose not to participate. Socialism encourages people to identify not with cultural affectations like whether you drive a Prius or an F-150, but in line with their material conditions; are we workers, or owners? It's immediately threatening to the broad range of American fictions, including the paragon of small business owners. It illuminates the lie that our current government, prone to unchecked influence by capital, is at all democratic.
Why is Socialism urgently necessary? Because we're running out of time. Climate change is here, and the alternative to drastic and immediate change is to rely on turning out the vote in increasingly-dire midterm elections for liberals who (as the recent Bush funeral has shown), identify more with their fellow political and media class than they do with working people. The current system is not ignoring climate change, it is building walls. The right-wing position has been to begin justifying why, as increasing numbers of refugees from climate disasters and destabilization due to American imperialism arrive at our borders, it's ok to turn them away. The humane position, the position that is not only just but also frees us as individuals from a precarious position in brutal hierarchy, is that all human life is valuable and that we are all in this together. It's Socialism or barbarism, folks.
So, to recap:
-abolish borders and the police
-abolish private property and rent
-the only ethical consumption under capitalism is eating ass
-join a union or a socialist organization immediately; your involvement with politics is so much more than voting
-Recommended reading Jacobin's ABCs of Soclialism (PDF), The Communist Manifesto
As an aside, I'd love to hear folks' critiques of Cuba. Despite the embargo and decades of other violence by an adjacent superpower, their life expectancy is higher than the US and they have the lowest HIV rate in the region.
They’ve since relaxed the controls, and the maternal-fetal stuff is impressive, but it’s a particularly fraught go-to example.
The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845, Freidrich Engels)
The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists (first published 1914 but read the 1955 edition, Robert Tressell)
There are also some statistical quirks that could skew the data that we can't be certain of because of lack of data behind the statistics.
https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2014/jan/31/tom-harkin/sen-tom-harkin-says-cuba-has-lower-child-mortality/
Is Soviet Collectivization meaningfully less disastrous as western European Encroachment, though? It's certainly shocking in that it was compressed into a few years, but by and large seems to be another indictment of industrialization and centralization and not something unique to the USSR.
The 'millions of people died to communism' thing is problematic, because it ignores the legitimate problems with eg Stalinism that we might otherwise learn from to paint with a broad brush and attribute to a category of ideologies the deaths resulting from war, famine, political violence, outside aggression, and any number of things which of course themselves are resultant from myriad causes. Were people never starved or disappeared in Czarist Russia?
I could start attributing deaths to capitalism and people might nod their heads when I cite the 40,000 people/year in the US who die unnecessarily due to a lack of healthcare, giving credence for the sake of argument when I attribute the whole of poverty to capital accumulation, and checking out entirely were I to start tallying death counts from World War 1; the categorization is so broad as to make it impossible to derive any benefit from the discussion. It's intended to stop debate, not further it.
The American myopia about colonialism also helps, since that death toll gets shrugged off as distant history - 2-3 million for the Indian famine during WWII, 8 million in the Belgian Congo, 20-70 million Native American deaths during American settlement, 90+ percent of Australian Aboriginals vanishing after first contact, 100+ million deaths during slavery, and a stable casualty count in colonial territories due to a constant state of unrest and oppression that was equivalent to a modern warzone. Even the millions of civilian deaths during the Cold War from the actions of the West and allies has been airbrushed out, due to the majority being the result of active wars (which the majority roll their eyes at when it gets brought up) or the result of totalitarian proxies acting on our behalf and with our intelligence directing them (3 million in Indonesia, 60k-80k Operation Condor, 70k-80k Salvadoran Civil War, 10-25 million overall on both sides).
It all just fades into statistics, after awhile, but the idea that capitalism is more humane than communism basically relies on whether you define people outside of the European and North American "safe" zones as human beings.
In Denmark's rejection of the label of socialism, they say it's not a "planned socialist economy," it's a "market economy." The intimation seems to be that socialist economies are necessarily planned.
I don't think that's accurate. It seems to be well-demonstrated that completely planned economies tend to be disastrous (as do completely unregulated ones), and planned economies do not seem essential to the project of socialism at all. It's not so inflexible an ideology.
True that socialism can make use of markets, but Denmark is not a socialist country. They have high unionization rates, good social safety net, etc, but this is getting into the important distinctions between Socialism and Social Democracy. If people can still subsist just by having ownership stake in corporations and aren't required to contribute to society, it's capitalism bb
So the common criticism of the welfare state, iterated above, is that the gains they make for the welfare of the people are necessarily 1) limited, because people are still being exploited for their labour to various degrees, and 2) temporary, because capital retains structural power and will always work to degrade regulation, labour rights, social programs, etc. out of self-interest and because the system works to incentivize that behaviour.
Reformers would respond, I think, that both of these issues can be addressed without revolutionary politics. If it's possible to alter the system fundamentally, it's also possible to fix the existing system, possibly with less collateral damage to institutions.
Greater labour protections (and greater power for organized labour), better tax systems, better-funded and better-administered social programs can all be established within a capitalist state. Maintenance is required, and systems to maintain/refine/protect those achievements need to be established, but it's possible. Even bigger steps like guaranteed basic income, partially or fully nationalized healthcare/child care, etc can happen in this context, and have.
This leads to the other aspect of a reformer response, which is that maintenance of social programs and protection from powerful classes is also required in socialist states--that the allegedly fundamental difference of vulnerability to corruption and control by capital is not as dramatic as all that, because the struggle against power-seeking behaviour will plague any system. The idea is that socializing ownership of the means will disrupt the power base of capital, but people are very good at gathering and centralizing power, and building systems to entrench themselves.
I don't often hear responses to these arguments because the issue gets bogged down in questions of historical atrocity, planned economies, etc. I'm especially curious about hard, empirical data on the argument that capitalism necessarily backslides into more exploitative modes no matter how much progress it makes as a welfare state.
I mean, we might just need to assume that Denmark said that to address all the fanatics who think socialism is necessarily planned. Sometimes shit be political and sometimes you just gotta defend yourself from insane accusations of "Socialism!!!!" in order to get good shit done.
nope
I think the most disturbing issues with syndicalism in particular comes from the worker experience in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War. One of the issues with factory democratization was that, like HOAs in American suburbs, they have a tendency to get taken over by small-scale authoritarians and busybodies. Once this happens, the communal pressure to do more starts to mean workers are forced into longer shifts, spying on slackers becomes endemic and often retaliatory for personal slights, and the culture shifts from being exploited by the owners to being exploited by other co-workers.
That's always led me to think that a state with strong labor laws is going to be necessary under any model.
Eh, probably not, but I meant as the rule and not the exception. To again lean on Cuba as a convenient reference, there are certainly folks who get a better deal due to being politically connected or, crucially, by having connections abroad that send in money. The difference is that this is the exception, not the rule. There's a meaningful difference between your family owning a second home that they cheekily rent out to tourists (often but not always contributing labor in the form of housekeeping, etc) and a thriving finance industry and landlords.
And also less useful or attractive for anyone but the most devoted
Sweden and Denmark are super nice places to live in many ways, but they have their own distinct problems and many of their successes would be really challenging to implement in more pluralistic or ethnically/ culturally diverse locales.
Meanwhile, places like North Korea, most of the Warsaw Pact countries during the Cold War and various socialist-themed banana republics were straight up hellscapes.
Let’s strive for a better society with a critical eye. Devotion to socialism as an ideal is the new evangelism and just as tiresome/ ridiculous imo
It was the millions of people dying as a direct result of Stalin's decisions and orders part tho. That was the problem! Brushing it aside or suggesting that it serves as a block to discussing the real lessons of the Soviet disaster can't be allowed, because it's central to the question of whether we should or can attempt similar actions.
Comparisons to US national healthcare are an enormous red herring - you don't need to get rid of capitalism to fix healthcare, as demonstrated elsewhere in the western capitalist world. To prevent Mao from killing 45 million people in 4 years to enact the Great Leap Forward, you need to address the ideological underpinning that allowed it to happen.
To tie this back into the quotes, the reason I brought it up originally is that it seems like a reflex - I'm trying to make a mental shift where I can understand why my business suddenly isn't mine anymore and how that's just or fair to me, and suddenly we're referring to cold war fears as propaganda?
The Soviets Communist Party was really fuckin horrible, you guys! Mao was the most unimaginably bloody leader that existed in the entire history of humanity! Why not square up and address the parts of communist philosophy that seem to end up with somebody orchestrating Great Leaps Forward? If it it's unconnected, it's on socialists to demonstrate how and why, or at least demonstrate that socialism isn't a stepping stone and fully communist societies aren't a necessary endpoint.
i think you can make a reasonably thorough argument, based on internal soviet communications, that the collectivisation of soviet farming was a very much "communist" phenomenon, inasmuch as it was 1) ideologically directly related to the idea that capitalism per se in the countryside had to be ended 2) partly a response to only 5%-ish of the farmers voluntarily collectivising 3) a specifically soviet response to the particular countryside arrangements that existed.
how much stock you place in it depends how much you want to dive into chomskyan "m-l was a right-wing aberration of libertarian socialism position" vs "capitalism is not a unified system either, these problems arose in other social arrangements and cannot be uniquely tracked back to market economies blahblahblah"
the fairest version of the critique is, i think, that you can render it as an example of a particular peril of a certain literalist response to certain marxist ideas in a particular authoritarian framework. does that damn socialism? not in any totalising sense, no. is it nonetheless related? sure.
both capitalism and communism broadly construed produce a broad set of possible social and political arrangements with particular perils, some with quite substantial overlap. stalinism being used as a stick with which to dismiss any socialist or marxist critique of anything is a boring and played-out intellectual trope anyway, so i feel it can be placed in the bin on the basis that it is neither long-term informative or interesting... eg its trivially obvious it tells you not much about the value or risks of luxemburgism or the value of marxist critique of current labour relations, etc
What does this look like in policy terms?
Honestly when I read this I see someone who knows what they want said and is trying to get people to say it. Mao was an authoritarian who thought you could just reorder fundamental societal mechanisms like a thought experiment made real. I don't see why people who advocate for more worker owned businesses or whatever are constantly told they need to account for the Great Leap Forward.
Its like demanding every local chamber of commerce flagellate themselves over the Pinkertons before each meeting.
Its yours and its every else's who works to make it viable. Socialism rewards labor, not abstract ownership.
I'm less interested in making socialism refer to something palatable, and more interested in making people interested in legitimate disruption.
Alternatively, I'm open to suggestions on ways to shift from a system that requires constant economic expansion to one that can de-grow the economy such that our grandkids can still breathe the outside air in the future. Again, reforms like a 100% inheritance tax seem dramatic within the narrow scope of normalized political discourse, but any such reforms that exist without a fundamentally revolutionary framework are bound to face later dismantling as capital re-exerts influence over society.
Sure, you don't need to abolish capitalism to enact single-payer healthcare, but we only have our current system because capital interests have control of the state.
Again, this is reductionist. I could counter "45 million under Mao" with "130 million indigenous people in what became the United States", but it's meaningless! We both end up saying "Yeah I like [my team], but only the good things and not any of the bad things." Awesome, good talk.
I'll conclude my thoughts on this with an anecdote which I think encapsulates how common people relate to communism. I was at a local restaurant, and the cook who brought out our food was wearing a t-shirt with Mao's face on it. I complimented it, to which he replied something like 'yeah, he killed millions of people but people still like him?'. I, wanting to get back to my conversation, just quipped that 'to be fair, a lot of those people were landlords.' He paused for a moment and just said "Yeah, I'd kill my landlord" and walked away.
you dont even need to criticise eg stalinism on the grounds "it was bad because communism". you can criticise it for not being incrementalist enough, too authoritarian, too risky, too brutal, too undemocratic, etc etc etc
to take a recent example in british politics; the british labour party under john mcdonnell has a suggestion that companies should put 10% of their stock into an employee ownership fund and employees should get a £500 dividend from that and some measure of consequent control from that. this is an idea that has its roots in marxist critique; it is about addressing ownership in the british economy, which is a pretty old-school marxist take. but its also just a straightforward policy that can co-exist with current british arrangements; so we should be asking what does it actually do? what are its good or bad features? with concrete policy proposals there are so many other lenses to use and levers to pull in the end...
My go to at the moment is that capitalism is going to end up killing the entire human race at its current pace. No ones come up with a real counter other than that communism would kill the human race too.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
(I am describing myself here hth)
The slippery slope is a real traumatic obstacle in some people's psychologies. Things that are vaguely in the direction of communism must be feared because any movement in that direction will lead to communist pogroms and death camps, even an Internet discussion about how we might avoid those outcomes. Legalizing gay marriage will lead to people marrying their dogs and the end of human reproduction. Legalizing marijuana will mean all our kids will be hooked on heroin. Letting blacks and whites intermarry will result in the eradication of the white race. Etc..
The ideas of going slower, taking fewer steps, etc.. can't really satisfy such people who think that any step leads inevitably to death.
yeah i definitely think there is something in the idea that building a huge floating field of disgust around the entire root ideas of a particular ideology to constrain the kinds of things people are interested in changing around the social order has turned out to make life enormously easier for people who are quite happy with the way things are. its not even a matter of it being a conspiracy, its just... easier. and stabler. but if those ideas have any critical validity whatsoever and you have been systematically excluding them from serious (political) consideration for a long time, you might end up being systematically vulnerable to, for example, massive inequality
huh, weird that
replace the hard question of "to what extent is this critique valid? and how should we respond to the bits of it that are?" with the easier question of "is it the Bad Thing? Oh, it is? Excellent, banish it from consideration"
They call them reactionaries for a reason.
Well, yes, because communism is bad and communism is vaguely associated with equality, so anything that might lead to equality might also lead to communism which is bad, so it too is bad, so we just run run run away from equality forever. We even lie to ourselves that maybe if we run away from equality long enough we might somehow loop back around and find equality again (e.g. trickle-down economics) like some weird moebius loop of ideology.
luckily a friend can assist us
https://media1.tenor.com/images/15202c1f14c92994af990617cb4c4709/tenor.gif
https://us.v-cdn.net/5018289/uploads/editor/0m/vknfaq3oywrg.gif
EDIT: fk too big curse u zizek
*sniff*
45 million under Mao are due to his idiotic 5 year plans and great leap forward. That 130 million you quote, greater than 85% of those deaths were from incidental contact with European diseases laying waste to the Americas. So yeah apples and orangutans.
Arguing about the specifics of the Native American genocide isn't going to do capitalism any favors. Especially if we include slavery under the South-Central American colonial empires.
But really that misses TL:DR's point in the first place. The conversation goes no where fast.
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
What in particular about socialism allegedly makes it vulnerable? What would prevent true, contemporary socialism from sliding into "state capitalism" calling itself socialism? What disrupts power-seeking behaviour in a socialist system? Etc
I feel like what we’d need to look at is the history of revolutionary movements, and the specific crises of early 20th century Russia and China, as well as the personal histories of Mao, Lenin and Stalin to understand how those went down
The socialism part I imagine is the same reason the Nazis called themselves a “national socialist” party despite socialists being one of the major hated political groups of fascists: the promises of socialism are useful for convincing people to join your cause, even if you have no intent to deliver on them.