They're both awful. Which is objectively worse is only of utility if you're trying to defend one.
I guess I look at it like:
OK, grant your every capitalist evil. And yet here we are, in the most enlightened, technologically advanced moment ever - taken together things have still never been better for humans than they are right now. Criticism of capitalism must take into account that despite it all, here we are. The discussion of whether we should stop capitalism is one where we can look at all the good stuff and say "the new thing needs to be at least that".
Are there any socialist evils? The conversation seems to continually have reasons why all the bad things are really not, or else they're really because capitalism, it can only be failed, etc. How do I evaluate your new thing? The times people have claimed to try it have been uniformly horrible with no human progress to mitigate the attempts.
I dunno how to evaluate claims! All the examples are either drowning in blood or are dismissed as not being real examples. I keep finding myself nodding along and then running into phrases like TLDR's "... any such reforms that exist without a fundamentally revolutionary framework are bound to face later dismantling as capital re-exerts influence over society." and that just reads to me like admitting we're gonna need to kill a bunch of people to even get started.
I mean... we make reforms, and then we have to fix everything again later because people want power. Or we take away all the capital and then... "establish a revolutionary framework"? And that stops us from having to still fix everything again because people want power... how?
argh. I want to approach this in good faith but I have no idea how.
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
At the end of the day the only real protection against anything is an informed, active, and invested public. You can have laws that prevent your socialist worker collectives from back sliding into capitalist structures but they won't mean anything in the long term if they're not paired with a public that abhors the values of capitalism.
Just like the global transition to republican government required changing how people thought and what they valued, you can't shortcut your way into a stable paradigm shift.
They're both awful. Which is objectively worse is only of utility if you're trying to defend one.
I guess I look at it like:
OK, grant your every capitalist evil. And yet here we are, in the most enlightened, technologically advanced moment ever - taken together things have still never been better for humans than they are right now. Criticism of capitalism must take into account that despite it all, here we are. The discussion of whether we should stop capitalism is one where we can look at all the good stuff and say "the new thing needs to be at least that".
Every system has been objectively an improvement over what came before it, if we're willing to reasonably overlook high profile exceptions. Subsistence farming was an aggressively shitty way to live but it also allowed for civilization to form etc etc.
I've said it in other threads before, but we shouldn't evaluate the system we live in now based on how much better it is than the past but by how it stacks up to what we believe to be possible in the present.
As to your question about socialism's weak points, the simple answer is "I don't know!". I don't doubt it'll present new organizational and bureaucratic challenges. Its never really been done at massive scale before. I'm not saying a socialist state is the end of history.
They're both awful. Which is objectively worse is only of utility if you're trying to defend one.
I guess I look at it like:
OK, grant your every capitalist evil. And yet here we are, in the most enlightened, technologically advanced moment ever - taken together things have still never been better for humans than they are right now. Criticism of capitalism must take into account that despite it all, here we are. The discussion of whether we should stop capitalism is one where we can look at all the good stuff and say "the new thing needs to be at least that".
Are there any socialist evils? The conversation seems to continually have reasons why all the bad things are really not, or else they're really because capitalism, it can only be failed, etc. How do I evaluate your new thing? The times people have claimed to try it have been uniformly horrible with no human progress to mitigate the attempts.
I dunno how to evaluate claims! All the examples are either drowning in blood or are dismissed as not being real examples. I keep finding myself nodding along and then running into phrases like TLDR's "... any such reforms that exist without a fundamentally revolutionary framework are bound to face later dismantling as capital re-exerts influence over society." and that just reads to me like admitting we're gonna need to kill a bunch of people to even get started.
I mean... we make reforms, and then we have to fix everything again later because people want power. Or we take away all the capital and then... "establish a revolutionary framework"? And that stops us from having to still fix everything again because people want power... how?
argh. I want to approach this in good faith but I have no idea how.
Things are great if you're at the top of the capitalist pyramid like we are in the west. If you're not on the top of the pyramid, you're living in a world that is being polluted and destroyed utterly for western prosperity. Our prosperity is built on the backs of the third world and humanity's future.
Bangladesh for example may not exist in half a century, it will near completely disappear under the rising oceans.
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!".
+12
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
They're both awful. Which is objectively worse is only of utility if you're trying to defend one.
I guess I look at it like:
OK, grant your every capitalist evil. And yet here we are, in the most enlightened, technologically advanced moment ever - taken together things have still never been better for humans than they are right now. Criticism of capitalism must take into account that despite it all, here we are. The discussion of whether we should stop capitalism is one where we can look at all the good stuff and say "the new thing needs to be at least that".
Are there any socialist evils? The conversation seems to continually have reasons why all the bad things are really not, or else they're really because capitalism, it can only be failed, etc. How do I evaluate your new thing? The times people have claimed to try it have been uniformly horrible with no human progress to mitigate the attempts.
I dunno how to evaluate claims! All the examples are either drowning in blood or are dismissed as not being real examples. I keep finding myself nodding along and then running into phrases like TLDR's "... any such reforms that exist without a fundamentally revolutionary framework are bound to face later dismantling as capital re-exerts influence over society." and that just reads to me like admitting we're gonna need to kill a bunch of people to even get started.
I mean... we make reforms, and then we have to fix everything again later because people want power. Or we take away all the capital and then... "establish a revolutionary framework"? And that stops us from having to still fix everything again because people want power... how?
argh. I want to approach this in good faith but I have no idea how.
This is a difficult conversation in large part because we have fundamentally different perspectives. You see an enlightened moment where things have never been better, and I see layers of coerced labor and resource extraction that have resulted in a collective delusion wherein we accept that it's moral for people to starve while billionaires exist, and why people on this side of a national border have freedom of movement and the ability to survive climate change, but people from the other side should have had the good fortune to be born rich, white, and American.
That's another reason why Social Democratic reforms are insufficient; an exemplary, Nordic standard of living for Americans is still brutal imperialism if it's propped up by our same policy of endless war and destabilization.
How do I evaluate your new thing? The times people have claimed to try it have been uniformly horrible with no human progress to mitigate the attempts.
This feels disingenuous! For instance, even setting aside debate about the Chinese Famine, dismissing the industrialization of the country seems inconsistent with the rest of your post.
I would contest the notion that humanity is doing better than ever before.
Living standards are higher and continue to climb even globally, yes. But we are on the brink of a possible climate apocalypse, which will interact in troubling ways with the familiar existential threat of nuclear war. The intensification of technological power also leads to more intense consequences when things are mismanaged. Is there any other time in the history of our species when total extinction was more plausible?
On top of that, our massive population means that the population of people suffering in absolute numbers is greater than almost all of history. Not all ethical systems would agree that the proportion of people lifted from abject misery is sufficient to declare we are riding a shining arc of progress.
+7
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
They're both awful. Which is objectively worse is only of utility if you're trying to defend one.
I guess I look at it like:
OK, grant your every capitalist evil. And yet here we are, in the most enlightened, technologically advanced moment ever - taken together things have still never been better for humans than they are right now. Criticism of capitalism must take into account that despite it all, here we are. The discussion of whether we should stop capitalism is one where we can look at all the good stuff and say "the new thing needs to be at least that".
Every system has been objectively an improvement over what came before it, if we're willing to reasonably overlook high profile exceptions. Subsistence farming was an aggressively shitty way to live but it also allowed for civilization to form etc etc.
I've said it in other threads before, but we shouldn't evaluate the system we live in now based on how much better it is than the past but by how it stacks up to what we believe to be possible in the present.
As to your question about socialism's weak points, the simple answer is "I don't know!". I don't doubt it'll present new organizational and bureaucratic challenges. Its never really been done at massive scale before. I'm not saying a socialist state is the end of history.
They're both awful. Which is objectively worse is only of utility if you're trying to defend one.
I guess I look at it like:
OK, grant your every capitalist evil. And yet here we are, in the most enlightened, technologically advanced moment ever - taken together things have still never been better for humans than they are right now. Criticism of capitalism must take into account that despite it all, here we are. The discussion of whether we should stop capitalism is one where we can look at all the good stuff and say "the new thing needs to be at least that".
Every system has been objectively an improvement over what came before it, if we're willing to reasonably overlook high profile exceptions. Subsistence farming was an aggressively shitty way to live but it also allowed for civilization to form etc etc.
I've said it in other threads before, but we shouldn't evaluate the system we live in now based on how much better it is than the past but by how it stacks up to what we believe to be possible in the present.
As to your question about socialism's weak points, the simple answer is "I don't know!". I don't doubt it'll present new organizational and bureaucratic challenges. Its never really been done at massive scale before. I'm not saying a socialist state is the end of history.
What?
The bolded is a bit glib but humanity has been on a general upswing in terms of living standards and technological achievement since long before capitalism. "Capitalism got us all this" I think misses greater context and gives undue credit.
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've been one of those wondering aloud if socialism is inherently vulnerable, but I'll be perfectly honest: I'm not sure socialism is any more vulnerable than any other political ideology in need of a revolution. The French Revolution was actually like 4 different revolutions, and Napoleon took over in two of them. Radical change of political systems may simply require centralized movements with major concentrations of power that could, given the wrong people, turn into tyranny at any moment, regardless of what the actual purported goal of that change was. If the US had the wrong Founding Fathers....
Also the trouble with comparing capitalist and non-capitalist nations is that they aren't the same country
You can't compare capitalist America and communist Russia. You should be looking at what capitalist Russia at the same time would have looked like.
Stalinism is it's own horror, but let's look at say, Kruschez's time. Would a capitalist Russia have been better? I don't know that I can say it would be. And I don't think you can necessarily use post USSR Russia as am example either, much as that might be appealing to a socialist commentator.
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TL DRNot at all confident in his reflexive opinions of thingsRegistered Userregular
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've been one of those wondering aloud if socialism is inherently vulnerable, but I'll be perfectly honest: I'm not sure socialism is any more vulnerable than any other political ideology in need of a revolution. The French Revolution was actually like 4 different revolutions, and Napoleon took over in two of them. Radical change of political systems may simply require centralized movements with major concentrations of power that could, given the wrong people, turn into tyranny at any moment, regardless of what the actual purported goal of that change was. If the US had the wrong Founding Fathers....
After the war, a series of brilliantly victorious revolutions occurred in Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and later in Spain. But it was only in Russia that the proletariat took full power into its hands, expropriated its exploiters, and knew how to create and maintain a workers' state. Everywhere else the proletariat, despite its victory, stopped halfway because of the mistakes of its leadership. As a result, power slipped from its hands, shifted from left to right, and fell prey to fascism. In a series of other countries, power passed into the hands of a military dictatorship. Nowhere were the parliaments capable of reconciling class contradictions and assuring the peaceful development of events. Conflicts were solved arms in hand.
The French people for a long time thought that fascism had nothing whatever to do with them. They had a republic in which all questions were dealt with by the sovereign people through the exercise of universal suffrage. But on February 6, 1934, several thousand fascists and royalists, armed with revolvers, clubs, and razors, imposed upon the country the reactionary government of Doumergue, under whose protection the fascist bands continue to grow and arm themselves. What does tomorrow hold?
They're both awful. Which is objectively worse is only of utility if you're trying to defend one.
I guess I look at it like:
OK, grant your every capitalist evil. And yet here we are, in the most enlightened, technologically advanced moment ever - taken together things have still never been better for humans than they are right now. Criticism of capitalism must take into account that despite it all, here we are. The discussion of whether we should stop capitalism is one where we can look at all the good stuff and say "the new thing needs to be at least that".
Are there any socialist evils? The conversation seems to continually have reasons why all the bad things are really not, or else they're really because capitalism, it can only be failed, etc. How do I evaluate your new thing? The times people have claimed to try it have been uniformly horrible with no human progress to mitigate the attempts.
I dunno how to evaluate claims! All the examples are either drowning in blood or are dismissed as not being real examples. I keep finding myself nodding along and then running into phrases like TLDR's "... any such reforms that exist without a fundamentally revolutionary framework are bound to face later dismantling as capital re-exerts influence over society." and that just reads to me like admitting we're gonna need to kill a bunch of people to even get started.
I mean... we make reforms, and then we have to fix everything again later because people want power. Or we take away all the capital and then... "establish a revolutionary framework"? And that stops us from having to still fix everything again because people want power... how?
argh. I want to approach this in good faith but I have no idea how.
This is a difficult conversation in large part because we have fundamentally different perspectives. You see an enlightened moment where things have never been better, and I see layers of coerced labor and resource extraction that have resulted in a collective delusion wherein we accept that it's moral for people to starve while billionaires exist, and why people on this side of a national border have freedom of movement and the ability to survive climate change, but people from the other side should have had the good fortune to be born rich, white, and American.
That's another reason why Social Democratic reforms are insufficient; an exemplary, Nordic standard of living for Americans is still brutal imperialism if it's propped up by our same policy of endless war and destabilization.
How do I evaluate your new thing? The times people have claimed to try it have been uniformly horrible with no human progress to mitigate the attempts.
This feels disingenuous! For instance, even setting aside debate about the Chinese Famine, dismissing the industrialization of the country seems inconsistent with the rest of your post.
It's quite difficult to even reach a starting point. There's less poverty and and hunger worldwide than ever, billionaires notwithstanding. If the argument is that socialism would solve world hunger, it needs to come with some kind of guarantee that getting there won't make things worse or at least consideration of how we transition in a way that doesn't end up being another Great Leap Forward.
I'm not sure how an open borders argument fits in at all! Socialism can't happen unless we abolish the nation-state?
Also I guess it's another example of a fundamental disagreement - it would only be inconsistent when viewed from the position that Chinese industrialization could only have been reached through the greatest period of mass bloodshed in human history. They could have just become capitalists instead!
They're both awful. Which is objectively worse is only of utility if you're trying to defend one.
I guess I look at it like:
OK, grant your every capitalist evil. And yet here we are, in the most enlightened, technologically advanced moment ever - taken together things have still never been better for humans than they are right now. Criticism of capitalism must take into account that despite it all, here we are. The discussion of whether we should stop capitalism is one where we can look at all the good stuff and say "the new thing needs to be at least that".
Are there any socialist evils? The conversation seems to continually have reasons why all the bad things are really not, or else they're really because capitalism, it can only be failed, etc. How do I evaluate your new thing? The times people have claimed to try it have been uniformly horrible with no human progress to mitigate the attempts.
I dunno how to evaluate claims! All the examples are either drowning in blood or are dismissed as not being real examples. I keep finding myself nodding along and then running into phrases like TLDR's "... any such reforms that exist without a fundamentally revolutionary framework are bound to face later dismantling as capital re-exerts influence over society." and that just reads to me like admitting we're gonna need to kill a bunch of people to even get started.
I mean... we make reforms, and then we have to fix everything again later because people want power. Or we take away all the capital and then... "establish a revolutionary framework"? And that stops us from having to still fix everything again because people want power... how?
argh. I want to approach this in good faith but I have no idea how.
This is a difficult conversation in large part because we have fundamentally different perspectives. You see an enlightened moment where things have never been better, and I see layers of coerced labor and resource extraction that have resulted in a collective delusion wherein we accept that it's moral for people to starve while billionaires exist, and why people on this side of a national border have freedom of movement and the ability to survive climate change, but people from the other side should have had the good fortune to be born rich, white, and American.
That's another reason why Social Democratic reforms are insufficient; an exemplary, Nordic standard of living for Americans is still brutal imperialism if it's propped up by our same policy of endless war and destabilization.
How do I evaluate your new thing? The times people have claimed to try it have been uniformly horrible with no human progress to mitigate the attempts.
This feels disingenuous! For instance, even setting aside debate about the Chinese Famine, dismissing the industrialization of the country seems inconsistent with the rest of your post.
It's quite difficult to even reach a starting point. There's less poverty and and hunger worldwide than ever, billionaires notwithstanding. If the argument is that socialism would solve world hunger, it needs to come with some kind of guarantee that getting there won't make things worse or at least consideration of how we transition in a way that doesn't end up being another Great Leap Forward.
I'm not sure how an open borders argument fits in at all! Socialism can't happen unless we abolish the nation-state?
Also I guess it's another example of a fundamental disagreement - it would only be inconsistent when viewed from the position that Chinese industrialization could only have been reached through the greatest period of mass bloodshed in human history. They could have just become capitalists instead!
I would contest the notion that humanity is doing better than ever before.
Living standards are higher and continue to climb even globally, yes. But we are on the brink of a possible climate apocalypse, which will interact in troubling ways with the familiar existential threat of nuclear war. The intensification of technological power also leads to more intense consequences when things are mismanaged. Is there any other time in the history of our species when total extinction was more plausible?
On top of that, our massive population means that the population of people suffering in absolute numbers is greater than almost all of history. Not all ethical systems would agree that the proportion of people lifted from abject misery is sufficient to declare we are riding a shining arc of progress.
They're both awful. Which is objectively worse is only of utility if you're trying to defend one.
I guess I look at it like:
OK, grant your every capitalist evil. And yet here we are, in the most enlightened, technologically advanced moment ever - taken together things have still never been better for humans than they are right now. Criticism of capitalism must take into account that despite it all, here we are. The discussion of whether we should stop capitalism is one where we can look at all the good stuff and say "the new thing needs to be at least that".
Are there any socialist evils? The conversation seems to continually have reasons why all the bad things are really not, or else they're really because capitalism, it can only be failed, etc. How do I evaluate your new thing? The times people have claimed to try it have been uniformly horrible with no human progress to mitigate the attempts.
I dunno how to evaluate claims! All the examples are either drowning in blood or are dismissed as not being real examples. I keep finding myself nodding along and then running into phrases like TLDR's "... any such reforms that exist without a fundamentally revolutionary framework are bound to face later dismantling as capital re-exerts influence over society." and that just reads to me like admitting we're gonna need to kill a bunch of people to even get started.
I mean... we make reforms, and then we have to fix everything again later because people want power. Or we take away all the capital and then... "establish a revolutionary framework"? And that stops us from having to still fix everything again because people want power... how?
argh. I want to approach this in good faith but I have no idea how.
This is a difficult conversation in large part because we have fundamentally different perspectives. You see an enlightened moment where things have never been better, and I see layers of coerced labor and resource extraction that have resulted in a collective delusion wherein we accept that it's moral for people to starve while billionaires exist, and why people on this side of a national border have freedom of movement and the ability to survive climate change, but people from the other side should have had the good fortune to be born rich, white, and American.
That's another reason why Social Democratic reforms are insufficient; an exemplary, Nordic standard of living for Americans is still brutal imperialism if it's propped up by our same policy of endless war and destabilization.
How do I evaluate your new thing? The times people have claimed to try it have been uniformly horrible with no human progress to mitigate the attempts.
This feels disingenuous! For instance, even setting aside debate about the Chinese Famine, dismissing the industrialization of the country seems inconsistent with the rest of your post.
It's quite difficult to even reach a starting point. There's less poverty and and hunger worldwide than ever, billionaires notwithstanding. If the argument is that socialism would solve world hunger, it needs to come with some kind of guarantee that getting there won't make things worse or at least consideration of how we transition in a way that doesn't end up being another Great Leap Forward.
I'm not sure how an open borders argument fits in at all! Socialism can't happen unless we abolish the nation-state?
Also I guess it's another example of a fundamental disagreement - it would only be inconsistent when viewed from the position that Chinese industrialization could only have been reached through the greatest period of mass bloodshed in human history. They could have just become capitalists instead!
I would contest the notion that humanity is doing better than ever before.
Living standards are higher and continue to climb even globally, yes. But we are on the brink of a possible climate apocalypse, which will interact in troubling ways with the familiar existential threat of nuclear war. The intensification of technological power also leads to more intense consequences when things are mismanaged. Is there any other time in the history of our species when total extinction was more plausible?
On top of that, our massive population means that the population of people suffering in absolute numbers is greater than almost all of history. Not all ethical systems would agree that the proportion of people lifted from abject misery is sufficient to declare we are riding a shining arc of progress.
Black Death says hi.
Nah. It took us from 450 million down to 350–375 million globally. It was bad, but it never got us close to extinction.
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've been one of those wondering aloud if socialism is inherently vulnerable, but I'll be perfectly honest: I'm not sure socialism is any more vulnerable than any other political ideology in need of a revolution. The French Revolution was actually like 4 different revolutions, and Napoleon took over in two of them. Radical change of political systems may simply require centralized movements with major concentrations of power that could, given the wrong people, turn into tyranny at any moment, regardless of what the actual purported goal of that change was. If the US had the wrong Founding Fathers....
We still did honestly.
America was the Land of the Free only if you were a wealthy land owning white man.
If not, you had little or no say in politics and were at the mercy of wealthy land owning white men or the systems they controlled
Also spool, freedom of movement does not necessitate the abolishment of the nation state.
The EU has it, and I don’t think anyone here could present a compelling argument that they have dissolved their status as individually sovereign nation states. Arguably its their status as individually sovereign nation-states that causes much of the friction within the EU.
They're both awful. Which is objectively worse is only of utility if you're trying to defend one.
I guess I look at it like:
OK, grant your every capitalist evil. And yet here we are, in the most enlightened, technologically advanced moment ever - taken together things have still never been better for humans than they are right now. Criticism of capitalism must take into account that despite it all, here we are. The discussion of whether we should stop capitalism is one where we can look at all the good stuff and say "the new thing needs to be at least that".
Are there any socialist evils? The conversation seems to continually have reasons why all the bad things are really not, or else they're really because capitalism, it can only be failed, etc. How do I evaluate your new thing? The times people have claimed to try it have been uniformly horrible with no human progress to mitigate the attempts.
I dunno how to evaluate claims! All the examples are either drowning in blood or are dismissed as not being real examples. I keep finding myself nodding along and then running into phrases like TLDR's "... any such reforms that exist without a fundamentally revolutionary framework are bound to face later dismantling as capital re-exerts influence over society." and that just reads to me like admitting we're gonna need to kill a bunch of people to even get started.
I mean... we make reforms, and then we have to fix everything again later because people want power. Or we take away all the capital and then... "establish a revolutionary framework"? And that stops us from having to still fix everything again because people want power... how?
argh. I want to approach this in good faith but I have no idea how.
This is a difficult conversation in large part because we have fundamentally different perspectives. You see an enlightened moment where things have never been better, and I see layers of coerced labor and resource extraction that have resulted in a collective delusion wherein we accept that it's moral for people to starve while billionaires exist, and why people on this side of a national border have freedom of movement and the ability to survive climate change, but people from the other side should have had the good fortune to be born rich, white, and American.
That's another reason why Social Democratic reforms are insufficient; an exemplary, Nordic standard of living for Americans is still brutal imperialism if it's propped up by our same policy of endless war and destabilization.
How do I evaluate your new thing? The times people have claimed to try it have been uniformly horrible with no human progress to mitigate the attempts.
This feels disingenuous! For instance, even setting aside debate about the Chinese Famine, dismissing the industrialization of the country seems inconsistent with the rest of your post.
It's quite difficult to even reach a starting point. There's less poverty and and hunger worldwide than ever, billionaires notwithstanding. If the argument is that socialism would solve world hunger, it needs to come with some kind of guarantee that getting there won't make things worse or at least consideration of how we transition in a way that doesn't end up being another Great Leap Forward.
I'm not sure how an open borders argument fits in at all! Socialism can't happen unless we abolish the nation-state?
Also I guess it's another example of a fundamental disagreement - it would only be inconsistent when viewed from the position that Chinese industrialization could only have been reached through the greatest period of mass bloodshed in human history. They could have just become capitalists instead!
Whether there is really less poverty worldwide is an argument to be had. The poverty line used by such metrics has been whittled down multiple times so global institutions could pat themselves on the back.
Also the framing is pretty bad: a substance farmer who could live happily making zero dollars a year in the past is suddenly above the poverty line once hes forced to move to a city and paid a pittance just above that line.
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!".
There are a lot of reasons that socialists want open borders and they're not all explicitly related to socialism itself, but the general umbrella could be described as "people should be maximally free".
I would contest the notion that humanity is doing better than ever before.
Living standards are higher and continue to climb even globally, yes. But we are on the brink of a possible climate apocalypse, which will interact in troubling ways with the familiar existential threat of nuclear war. The intensification of technological power also leads to more intense consequences when things are mismanaged. Is there any other time in the history of our species when total extinction was more plausible?
On top of that, our massive population means that the population of people suffering in absolute numbers is greater than almost all of history. Not all ethical systems would agree that the proportion of people lifted from abject misery is sufficient to declare we are riding a shining arc of progress.
The plague says hi.
He brought his musician friend Black Death too. And the drummer polio.
Oh also wants to know if you've seen WW1 and WW2 around anywhere? They owe him money.
What. I mean... four of those were pretty much literally incapable of causing human extinction: the three diseases due to basic epidemeology and WWI due to the lack of WMDs and its geographic concentration. I'd say WWII's ability to cause the extinction of humankind is pretty debatable too, depending on what sort of timeline you thought nuclear weapons development might take.
There are a lot of reasons that socialists want open borders and they're not all explicitly related to socialism itself, but the general umbrella could be described as "people should be maximally free".
There's also the fact that as long as capital can cross borders freely and workers cannot, the game will be playing nations against each other in a race to the bottom.
There are a lot of reasons that socialists want open borders and they're not all explicitly related to socialism itself, but the general umbrella could be described as "people should be maximally free".
There's also the fact that as long as capital can cross borders freely and workers cannot, the game will be playing nations against each other in a race to the bottom.
A big one for me is that hard borders under clinate change mean mass violence and genocide.
+7
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited December 2018
i mean in the end there just arent that many straight up socialist revolutionaries any more
almost all the self-described "democratic socialists" in the us are really just vary degrees of social democrat.
if you look at the policy proposals many arent even uniquely socialist; people proposing a minimum income would be on the same page as, for example, noted socialist revolutionary friedrich hayek - who believed in any "great society" employers and families should not have undue influence over individuals as part of his conception of liberty, and thus everybody needed an independently guaranteed minimum so that employers and families could not exploit them by threatening them with loss of shelter and food via income withdrawal.
single-payer healthcare, free higher education, higher levels of public investment in things (eg green new deal)...
abolishing the wage system it aint. we arent negotiating with lenin over the ukrainian soviet. there arent hordes of baying maoists. nobody is even suggesting a return to the 90% eisenhower top tax rate! the actual political question as it exists is almost entirely which incrementalist socdem policy should america choose; can be debated on the merits of each policy, and none of it is particularly threatening. its just part of the slow negotiation of the past with the future that characterises societies
I think that says more about how far from socialism we currently are than anything else.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
edited December 2018
it also tells you, i think, how well the lessons of the authoritarian societies of the 20th century have been learned. aoc isnt thousand year gulaging anybody... mores the shame...
in a very fundamental and benign sense most western societies are much more (lower-case) libertarian and sceptical of raw state power than 100 years ago. perhaps they will begin to apply that same intuitive scepticism to private power as well
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.
Wouldn't that make communism more of a philosophy than a grounded ideology in the real world then? So far socialist attempts at addressing theses concerns in the real world have been very flawed or thrived in hybrid systems. Socialists are never going to reach their goal of communism or whatever if they don't actually try to attempt it that often. Starting with rebuilding capitalist countries from the ground up in their image hasn't exactly been a successful idea. They should put more effort in working on the smaller scale and/or small towns/cities whatever in places in the world which are less obstructive to their gaols - which would help set the stage for the big stuff as concrete examples that it can work.
PA has plenty of left posters, they're just not socialists or communists. Much like the right the forums don't tend to attract them in large numbers, but they'd be more than welcome if they did come.
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.
Socialism is not immune from being abused, corruption, nepotism, being inefficient or installing petty tyrants. If workers elect executives to be management, they'd still be management. Though I'm curious, how would they elect those positions? Would it be from their own in-group? Since that relies on popularity to get their votes, would that not mean it would be more vulnerable to charismatic people getting elected over people with the proper administration skill set?
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.
The Democrats aren't centre- right, they're centre-left. While many of those things may be what socialists desire, the attempts at doing that have not been anywhere close to achieving it. Homeless pervades socialist societies just like capitalism ones, as well as poverty. The biggest threat to socialism is the various failures of the attempts in the real world at replicating it, and the US didn't have to make up everything to plausibly dissuade populaces of why it can be a bad idea. Nor did countries which have tried socialism get rid of their populaces love of entertainment or luxury, after the USSR many countries under their umbrella quickly fell under the sway of the US cultural appeal. If it ever left in the first place.
The Western political systems are democratic, and yes, it has many flaws and can be corrupt but socialists don't have good history of successfully navigating that to their political advantage. They've been focused on being only concerned on influencing politics from the outside, which has left them more powerless than they should be. It hasn't been until recently they actually tried working within the government, and now they have some congress(wo)men in there for their agenda. Nor have they been excellent at thinking creatively or addressing their flaws at attacking the capitalist lead political groups. They hold their principals above all, and will gladly cripple their organisations or candidates financially and not integrate themselves with the party structure which naturally doesn't get anywhere near where they want to go because it is a terrain they aren't built for thriving in. Maybe this'll change in the future, it'll have to otherwise they need to wildly adapt if they want any significant power within the government.
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.
We are, except the socialists in the west have been utterly useless in competently standing up to capitalist forces - and I'm supposed to think they have the ability to counteract where capitalism has failed? If they can't compete with capitalism how are they going to fix climate change? They have been outwitted and outgunned at every stage as long as climate change has been a thing. While I agree with many goals socialists have, one of their biggest faults is competency and achieving things politically in the real world within politics. Over the last few weeks I've been lurking on various socialist and communist forums and they have little priority on climate change. They're not that engaged in the political area, either. Maybe its different with the ones academia but the followers aren't doing what you're suggesting by any stretch.
AOC has been a breath of fresh air, but even if she lives up to her hype politically it'll take time. Socialism needed hundreds of AOC's to get elected, instead they got one or two.
In order for socialists to be the wall against barbarism it'd have be able to be the line, which it hasn't been in modern western countries, excluding Corbyn's Labor. Which is also unprepared for climate change.
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.
You want to get rid of police? I'd love to see them get severely reformed, but even socialist countries have police. For a good reason. What's worrying is that you haven't mentioned what you're replacing them with.
it also tells you, i think, how well the lessons of the authoritarian societies of the 20th century have been learned. aoc isnt thousand year gulaging anybody... mores the shame...
in a very fundamental and benign sense most western societies are much more (lower-case) libertarian and sceptical of raw state power than 100 years ago. perhaps they will begin to apply that same intuitive scepticism to private power as well
Except for those Western societies flirting with fascism.
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surrealitychecklonely, but not unloveddreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered Userregular
it also tells you, i think, how well the lessons of the authoritarian societies of the 20th century have been learned. aoc isnt thousand year gulaging anybody... mores the shame...
in a very fundamental and benign sense most western societies are much more (lower-case) libertarian and sceptical of raw state power than 100 years ago. perhaps they will begin to apply that same intuitive scepticism to private power as well
Except for those Western societies flirting with fascism.
put it in the context of the early 20th c, where both the uk and the us were mass sterilising those they deemed unfit to breed. is there some retrograde motion? sure. are we still several steps away from where societies were willing to go in the past? god yes
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered 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 think there are pretty direct, and unflattering, connections between Communism and the disaster that was collectivization. As you note, it was the project of ending capitalism in the countryside (for both political and ideological reasons). But the project of ending capitalism in the countryside required forcefully taking possession of all the private holdings, and this by nature could not have been a bloodless project. It met with resistance and sabotage, which met with brutal retaliation from the state, in a cycle that was both a harrowing tour of human misery and which at the same time grievously wounded the very productive capacities that the state was attempting to requisition. Production was devastated. Furthermore, the recovery was very slow in light of the failure of central planning as an economic organizing principle. Russia, previously a huge grain exporter, became an importer and experienced famines.
I'd agree that acting like everything left of Clinton might as well be Stalinism is both tiresome and deeply silly. But, like, collectivization was bad. If the sell is "collectivization was good, actually" then yikes no.
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JuliusCaptain of Serenityon my shipRegistered 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.
I don't want to be accused of snark here, but thinking the word communism is scary just betrays a misunderstanding of communism.
The communist society is no doubt utopic (though I note that people defend capitalism with appeals to ideal forms of it very often), but it is not actually a scary idea. In fact, the communist society is the ultimate society anyone should want. People refer to Star Trek as space communism for a reason, it simply means a society of pure equality. There is no class or state, and everyone's wants and needs are met.
like, even if you are not a socialist you should still be a communist. Because it is the only truly fair society. It is literally just people in fully equal relations towards each other. Socialism has an inherent moral aspect, because rejection of this concept means a commitment to inequality. It means saying that, for whatever reason, some people just deserve more than others. Which is an incredibly arrogant thing to say for someone just randomly allocated one of the seven billion lives currently present on this planet.
Its worth noting that "hey look the good guy capitalists haven't been forcibly sterilizing homosexuals for like 70 years" isn't far from "look its been at least a generation since we've had a mad tyrant king" to a certain frame of mind. To a socialist all the societal mechanisms of the bad old days are still there.
There are a lot of reasons that socialists want open borders and they're not all explicitly related to socialism itself, but the general umbrella could be described as "people should be maximally free".
There's also the fact that as long as capital can cross borders freely and workers cannot, the game will be playing nations against each other in a race to the bottom.
Open borders won't really solve that. We can already see why within countries. As much as people move where the work is, they also don't and instead wallow in failing deindustrializing towns. And they get kinda pissed off about the whole situation too.
Like, even if you could just move to China or Mexico to keep working in a factory making widgets like you used to back home in Michigan, would you actually want to?
shryke on
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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 think there are pretty direct, and unflattering, connections between Communism and the disaster that was collectivization. As you note, it was the project of ending capitalism in the countryside (for both political and ideological reasons). But the project of ending capitalism in the countryside required forcefully taking possession of all the private holdings, and this by nature could not have been a bloodless project. It met with resistance and sabotage, which met with brutal retaliation from the state, in a cycle that was both a harrowing tour of human misery and which at the same time grievously wounded the very productive capacities that the state was attempting to requisition. Production was devastated. Furthermore, the recovery was very slow in light of the failure of central planning as an economic organizing principle. Russia, previously a huge grain exporter, became an importer and experienced famines.
I'd agree that acting like everything left of Clinton might as well be Stalinism is both tiresome and deeply silly. But, like, collectivization was bad. If the sell is "collectivization was good, actually" then yikes no.
ya thats exactly what i meant. stalin was acting exactly in line with a particular interpretation of a strain of communism, and the internal communications show that there was very little confusion on this point or cynicism - capitalism delenda est. i was simply pointing out that it can only be used as a critique of what it actually represents rather than the totalising critique-by-substitution it is usually used as instead!
There are a lot of reasons that socialists want open borders and they're not all explicitly related to socialism itself, but the general umbrella could be described as "people should be maximally free".
There's also the fact that as long as capital can cross borders freely and workers cannot, the game will be playing nations against each other in a race to the bottom.
Open borders won't really solve that. We can already see why within countries. As much as people move where the work is, they also don't and instead wallow in failing deindustrializing towns. And they get kinda pissed off about the whole situation too.
We're already seeing international borders causing problems in the face of mass climate fueled migration. Of course opening borders won't solve everything, no one is saying so, but they're a serious impediment.
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.
I don't want to be accused of snark here, but thinking the word communism is scary just betrays a misunderstanding of communism.
The communist society is no doubt utopic (though I note that people defend capitalism with appeals to ideal forms of it very often), but it is not actually a scary idea. In fact, the communist society is the ultimate society anyone should want. People refer to Star Trek as space communism for a reason, it simply means a society of pure equality. There is no class or state, and everyone's wants and needs are met.
like, even if you are not a socialist you should still be a communist. Because it is the only truly fair society. It is literally just people in fully equal relations towards each other. Socialism has an inherent moral aspect, because rejection of this concept means a commitment to inequality. It means saying that, for whatever reason, some people just deserve more than others. Which is an incredibly arrogant thing to say for someone just randomly allocated one of the seven billion lives currently present on this planet.
In theory communism sounds fine, plenty there to love, the problem is it’s never like that in reality. Star Trek is fiction, it’s not a place communists can take people to in the real world. And that still has problems with corruption, nepotism and promoting terrible people to very high positions which effect numerous lives. If communism was truly reachable Star Trek millions of people would turn communist immediately, but that’s not a world we live in. Instead we get the USSR, PRC, North Korea etc.
Not gave socialists got a perfect record on equality, some organisations have terrible problem so with sexual harassment and toxic masculinity.
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.
I don't want to be accused of snark here, but thinking the word communism is scary just betrays a misunderstanding of communism.
The communist society is no doubt utopic (though I note that people defend capitalism with appeals to ideal forms of it very often), but it is not actually a scary idea. In fact, the communist society is the ultimate society anyone should want. People refer to Star Trek as space communism for a reason, it simply means a society of pure equality. There is no class or state, and everyone's wants and needs are met.
like, even if you are not a socialist you should still be a communist. Because it is the only truly fair society. It is literally just people in fully equal relations towards each other. Socialism has an inherent moral aspect, because rejection of this concept means a commitment to inequality. It means saying that, for whatever reason, some people just deserve more than others. Which is an incredibly arrogant thing to say for someone just randomly allocated one of the seven billion lives currently present on this planet.
In theory communism sounds fine, plenty there to love, the problem is it’s never like that in reality. Star Trek is fiction, it’s not a place communists can take people to in the real world. And that still has problems with corruption, nepotism and promoting terrible people to very high positions which effect numerous lives. If communism was truly reachable Star Trek millions of people would turn communist immediately, but that’s not a world we live in. Instead we get the USSR, PRC, North Korea etc.
Not gave socialists got a perfect record on equality, some organisations have terrible problem so with sexual harassment and toxic masculinity.
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I guess I look at it like:
OK, grant your every capitalist evil. And yet here we are, in the most enlightened, technologically advanced moment ever - taken together things have still never been better for humans than they are right now. Criticism of capitalism must take into account that despite it all, here we are. The discussion of whether we should stop capitalism is one where we can look at all the good stuff and say "the new thing needs to be at least that".
Are there any socialist evils? The conversation seems to continually have reasons why all the bad things are really not, or else they're really because capitalism, it can only be failed, etc. How do I evaluate your new thing? The times people have claimed to try it have been uniformly horrible with no human progress to mitigate the attempts.
I dunno how to evaluate claims! All the examples are either drowning in blood or are dismissed as not being real examples. I keep finding myself nodding along and then running into phrases like TLDR's "... any such reforms that exist without a fundamentally revolutionary framework are bound to face later dismantling as capital re-exerts influence over society." and that just reads to me like admitting we're gonna need to kill a bunch of people to even get started.
I mean... we make reforms, and then we have to fix everything again later because people want power. Or we take away all the capital and then... "establish a revolutionary framework"? And that stops us from having to still fix everything again because people want power... how?
argh. I want to approach this in good faith but I have no idea how.
At the end of the day the only real protection against anything is an informed, active, and invested public. You can have laws that prevent your socialist worker collectives from back sliding into capitalist structures but they won't mean anything in the long term if they're not paired with a public that abhors the values of capitalism.
Just like the global transition to republican government required changing how people thought and what they valued, you can't shortcut your way into a stable paradigm shift.
Every system has been objectively an improvement over what came before it, if we're willing to reasonably overlook high profile exceptions. Subsistence farming was an aggressively shitty way to live but it also allowed for civilization to form etc etc.
I've said it in other threads before, but we shouldn't evaluate the system we live in now based on how much better it is than the past but by how it stacks up to what we believe to be possible in the present.
As to your question about socialism's weak points, the simple answer is "I don't know!". I don't doubt it'll present new organizational and bureaucratic challenges. Its never really been done at massive scale before. I'm not saying a socialist state is the end of history.
Things are great if you're at the top of the capitalist pyramid like we are in the west. If you're not on the top of the pyramid, you're living in a world that is being polluted and destroyed utterly for western prosperity. Our prosperity is built on the backs of the third world and humanity's future.
Bangladesh for example may not exist in half a century, it will near completely disappear under the rising oceans.
"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!".
This is a difficult conversation in large part because we have fundamentally different perspectives. You see an enlightened moment where things have never been better, and I see layers of coerced labor and resource extraction that have resulted in a collective delusion wherein we accept that it's moral for people to starve while billionaires exist, and why people on this side of a national border have freedom of movement and the ability to survive climate change, but people from the other side should have had the good fortune to be born rich, white, and American.
That's another reason why Social Democratic reforms are insufficient; an exemplary, Nordic standard of living for Americans is still brutal imperialism if it's propped up by our same policy of endless war and destabilization.
This feels disingenuous! For instance, even setting aside debate about the Chinese Famine, dismissing the industrialization of the country seems inconsistent with the rest of your post.
Living standards are higher and continue to climb even globally, yes. But we are on the brink of a possible climate apocalypse, which will interact in troubling ways with the familiar existential threat of nuclear war. The intensification of technological power also leads to more intense consequences when things are mismanaged. Is there any other time in the history of our species when total extinction was more plausible?
On top of that, our massive population means that the population of people suffering in absolute numbers is greater than almost all of history. Not all ethical systems would agree that the proportion of people lifted from abject misery is sufficient to declare we are riding a shining arc of progress.
What?
The bolded is a bit glib but humanity has been on a general upswing in terms of living standards and technological achievement since long before capitalism. "Capitalism got us all this" I think misses greater context and gives undue credit.
I've been one of those wondering aloud if socialism is inherently vulnerable, but I'll be perfectly honest: I'm not sure socialism is any more vulnerable than any other political ideology in need of a revolution. The French Revolution was actually like 4 different revolutions, and Napoleon took over in two of them. Radical change of political systems may simply require centralized movements with major concentrations of power that could, given the wrong people, turn into tyranny at any moment, regardless of what the actual purported goal of that change was. If the US had the wrong Founding Fathers....
Also the trouble with comparing capitalist and non-capitalist nations is that they aren't the same country
You can't compare capitalist America and communist Russia. You should be looking at what capitalist Russia at the same time would have looked like.
Stalinism is it's own horror, but let's look at say, Kruschez's time. Would a capitalist Russia have been better? I don't know that I can say it would be. And I don't think you can necessarily use post USSR Russia as am example either, much as that might be appealing to a socialist commentator.
It's quite difficult to even reach a starting point. There's less poverty and and hunger worldwide than ever, billionaires notwithstanding. If the argument is that socialism would solve world hunger, it needs to come with some kind of guarantee that getting there won't make things worse or at least consideration of how we transition in a way that doesn't end up being another Great Leap Forward.
I'm not sure how an open borders argument fits in at all! Socialism can't happen unless we abolish the nation-state?
Also I guess it's another example of a fundamental disagreement - it would only be inconsistent when viewed from the position that Chinese industrialization could only have been reached through the greatest period of mass bloodshed in human history. They could have just become capitalists instead!
Man, there's some bad news there re: human rights
Black Death says hi.
The West Virginia Mine Wars
Seriously, this should be required viewing; it’s free because PBS
Nah. It took us from 450 million down to 350–375 million globally. It was bad, but it never got us close to extinction.
The closest we've come is due to climate change. The ice age caused by Toba eruption took us down to somewhere between 40 and 1,000.
John Sayles' Matewan is a good movie version.
We still did honestly.
America was the Land of the Free only if you were a wealthy land owning white man.
If not, you had little or no say in politics and were at the mercy of wealthy land owning white men or the systems they controlled
The EU has it, and I don’t think anyone here could present a compelling argument that they have dissolved their status as individually sovereign nation states. Arguably its their status as individually sovereign nation-states that causes much of the friction within the EU.
Whether there is really less poverty worldwide is an argument to be had. The poverty line used by such metrics has been whittled down multiple times so global institutions could pat themselves on the back.
Also the framing is pretty bad: a substance farmer who could live happily making zero dollars a year in the past is suddenly above the poverty line once hes forced to move to a city and paid a pittance just above that line.
"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. I mean... four of those were pretty much literally incapable of causing human extinction: the three diseases due to basic epidemeology and WWI due to the lack of WMDs and its geographic concentration. I'd say WWII's ability to cause the extinction of humankind is pretty debatable too, depending on what sort of timeline you thought nuclear weapons development might take.
There's also the fact that as long as capital can cross borders freely and workers cannot, the game will be playing nations against each other in a race to the bottom.
A big one for me is that hard borders under clinate change mean mass violence and genocide.
almost all the self-described "democratic socialists" in the us are really just vary degrees of social democrat.
if you look at the policy proposals many arent even uniquely socialist; people proposing a minimum income would be on the same page as, for example, noted socialist revolutionary friedrich hayek - who believed in any "great society" employers and families should not have undue influence over individuals as part of his conception of liberty, and thus everybody needed an independently guaranteed minimum so that employers and families could not exploit them by threatening them with loss of shelter and food via income withdrawal.
single-payer healthcare, free higher education, higher levels of public investment in things (eg green new deal)...
abolishing the wage system it aint. we arent negotiating with lenin over the ukrainian soviet. there arent hordes of baying maoists. nobody is even suggesting a return to the 90% eisenhower top tax rate! the actual political question as it exists is almost entirely which incrementalist socdem policy should america choose; can be debated on the merits of each policy, and none of it is particularly threatening. its just part of the slow negotiation of the past with the future that characterises societies
in a very fundamental and benign sense most western societies are much more (lower-case) libertarian and sceptical of raw state power than 100 years ago. perhaps they will begin to apply that same intuitive scepticism to private power as well
Wouldn't that make communism more of a philosophy than a grounded ideology in the real world then? So far socialist attempts at addressing theses concerns in the real world have been very flawed or thrived in hybrid systems. Socialists are never going to reach their goal of communism or whatever if they don't actually try to attempt it that often. Starting with rebuilding capitalist countries from the ground up in their image hasn't exactly been a successful idea. They should put more effort in working on the smaller scale and/or small towns/cities whatever in places in the world which are less obstructive to their gaols - which would help set the stage for the big stuff as concrete examples that it can work.
PA has plenty of left posters, they're just not socialists or communists. Much like the right the forums don't tend to attract them in large numbers, but they'd be more than welcome if they did come.
Socialism is not immune from being abused, corruption, nepotism, being inefficient or installing petty tyrants. If workers elect executives to be management, they'd still be management. Though I'm curious, how would they elect those positions? Would it be from their own in-group? Since that relies on popularity to get their votes, would that not mean it would be more vulnerable to charismatic people getting elected over people with the proper administration skill set?
The Democrats aren't centre- right, they're centre-left. While many of those things may be what socialists desire, the attempts at doing that have not been anywhere close to achieving it. Homeless pervades socialist societies just like capitalism ones, as well as poverty. The biggest threat to socialism is the various failures of the attempts in the real world at replicating it, and the US didn't have to make up everything to plausibly dissuade populaces of why it can be a bad idea. Nor did countries which have tried socialism get rid of their populaces love of entertainment or luxury, after the USSR many countries under their umbrella quickly fell under the sway of the US cultural appeal. If it ever left in the first place.
The Western political systems are democratic, and yes, it has many flaws and can be corrupt but socialists don't have good history of successfully navigating that to their political advantage. They've been focused on being only concerned on influencing politics from the outside, which has left them more powerless than they should be. It hasn't been until recently they actually tried working within the government, and now they have some congress(wo)men in there for their agenda. Nor have they been excellent at thinking creatively or addressing their flaws at attacking the capitalist lead political groups. They hold their principals above all, and will gladly cripple their organisations or candidates financially and not integrate themselves with the party structure which naturally doesn't get anywhere near where they want to go because it is a terrain they aren't built for thriving in. Maybe this'll change in the future, it'll have to otherwise they need to wildly adapt if they want any significant power within the government.
We are, except the socialists in the west have been utterly useless in competently standing up to capitalist forces - and I'm supposed to think they have the ability to counteract where capitalism has failed? If they can't compete with capitalism how are they going to fix climate change? They have been outwitted and outgunned at every stage as long as climate change has been a thing. While I agree with many goals socialists have, one of their biggest faults is competency and achieving things politically in the real world within politics. Over the last few weeks I've been lurking on various socialist and communist forums and they have little priority on climate change. They're not that engaged in the political area, either. Maybe its different with the ones academia but the followers aren't doing what you're suggesting by any stretch.
AOC has been a breath of fresh air, but even if she lives up to her hype politically it'll take time. Socialism needed hundreds of AOC's to get elected, instead they got one or two.
In order for socialists to be the wall against barbarism it'd have be able to be the line, which it hasn't been in modern western countries, excluding Corbyn's Labor. Which is also unprepared for climate change.
You want to get rid of police? I'd love to see them get severely reformed, but even socialist countries have police. For a good reason. What's worrying is that you haven't mentioned what you're replacing them with.
Except for those Western societies flirting with fascism.
put it in the context of the early 20th c, where both the uk and the us were mass sterilising those they deemed unfit to breed. is there some retrograde motion? sure. are we still several steps away from where societies were willing to go in the past? god yes
I think there are pretty direct, and unflattering, connections between Communism and the disaster that was collectivization. As you note, it was the project of ending capitalism in the countryside (for both political and ideological reasons). But the project of ending capitalism in the countryside required forcefully taking possession of all the private holdings, and this by nature could not have been a bloodless project. It met with resistance and sabotage, which met with brutal retaliation from the state, in a cycle that was both a harrowing tour of human misery and which at the same time grievously wounded the very productive capacities that the state was attempting to requisition. Production was devastated. Furthermore, the recovery was very slow in light of the failure of central planning as an economic organizing principle. Russia, previously a huge grain exporter, became an importer and experienced famines.
I'd agree that acting like everything left of Clinton might as well be Stalinism is both tiresome and deeply silly. But, like, collectivization was bad. If the sell is "collectivization was good, actually" then yikes no.
I don't want to be accused of snark here, but thinking the word communism is scary just betrays a misunderstanding of communism.
The communist society is no doubt utopic (though I note that people defend capitalism with appeals to ideal forms of it very often), but it is not actually a scary idea. In fact, the communist society is the ultimate society anyone should want. People refer to Star Trek as space communism for a reason, it simply means a society of pure equality. There is no class or state, and everyone's wants and needs are met.
like, even if you are not a socialist you should still be a communist. Because it is the only truly fair society. It is literally just people in fully equal relations towards each other. Socialism has an inherent moral aspect, because rejection of this concept means a commitment to inequality. It means saying that, for whatever reason, some people just deserve more than others. Which is an incredibly arrogant thing to say for someone just randomly allocated one of the seven billion lives currently present on this planet.
Open borders won't really solve that. We can already see why within countries. As much as people move where the work is, they also don't and instead wallow in failing deindustrializing towns. And they get kinda pissed off about the whole situation too.
Like, even if you could just move to China or Mexico to keep working in a factory making widgets like you used to back home in Michigan, would you actually want to?
ya thats exactly what i meant. stalin was acting exactly in line with a particular interpretation of a strain of communism, and the internal communications show that there was very little confusion on this point or cynicism - capitalism delenda est. i was simply pointing out that it can only be used as a critique of what it actually represents rather than the totalising critique-by-substitution it is usually used as instead!
We're already seeing international borders causing problems in the face of mass climate fueled migration. Of course opening borders won't solve everything, no one is saying so, but they're a serious impediment.
In theory communism sounds fine, plenty there to love, the problem is it’s never like that in reality. Star Trek is fiction, it’s not a place communists can take people to in the real world. And that still has problems with corruption, nepotism and promoting terrible people to very high positions which effect numerous lives. If communism was truly reachable Star Trek millions of people would turn communist immediately, but that’s not a world we live in. Instead we get the USSR, PRC, North Korea etc.
Not gave socialists got a perfect record on equality, some organisations have terrible problem so with sexual harassment and toxic masculinity.
Come on dude