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Why is socialism such a scary word?

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  • Eat it You Nasty Pig.Eat it You Nasty Pig. tell homeland security 'we are the bomb'Registered User regular
    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

    the reality is that the mixed economy (or welfare capitalism, if you prefer) seems to have won the argument pretty decisively; it appears to simply be the best/most efficient way to organize an economy, at least until we approach the techno-singularity or master nuclear fusion. The most 'extreme' socialist measures that anybody in the west pays serious attention to are like, marginally more redistributive tax schema and stricter regulation of industry

    I don't particularly think that a 'socialist' government would respond any better to the problem of climate change; the same incentives to pollute/build/consume would still exist, the short term rewards would just be distributed a bit more broadly. And I think the second half of the 20th century provides a broad refutation of the idea that people will not vote to enrich themselves at the expense of future generations

    NREqxl5.jpg
    it was the smallest on the list but
    Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
  • Styrofoam SammichStyrofoam Sammich WANT. normal (not weird)Registered User regular
    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

    the reality is that the mixed economy (or welfare capitalism, if you prefer) seems to have won the argument pretty decisively; it appears to simply be the best/most efficient way to organize an economy, at least until we approach the techno-singularity or master nuclear fusion. The most 'extreme' socialist measures that anybody in the west pays serious attention to are like, marginally more redistributive tax schema and stricter regulation of industry

    I don't particularly think that a 'socialist' government would respond any better to the problem of climate change; the same incentives to pollute/build/consume would still exist, the short term rewards would just be distributed a bit more broadly. And I think the second half of the 20th century provides a broad refutation of the idea that people will not vote to enrich themselves at the expense of future generations

    The primary argument for socialism against climate change over capitalism is that the primary obstacle against action is monied interests. That's not to say that the logging co-op of Helena won't work against you, but its substantially less troublesome than Exxon.

    The profit motives of the working class simply don't have the same weight on society as the profit motives of Jeff Bezos and Sheldon Adelson.

    On the other point, I'm extremely wary of "end of history" arguments and this wouldn't be the first time in history that someone made one.

    Styrofoam Sammich on
    wq09t4opzrlc.jpg
  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    edited December 2018
    shryke wrote: »
    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.

    Is it the borders causing the problems or the people themselves? Like, Germany as an example let some refugees enter. And then those refugees get attacked. Because letting people through the border doesn't really solve the issue that underlies the border.

    This is also of course a separate issue from what Phillishere is talking about.

    shryke on
  • Styrofoam SammichStyrofoam Sammich WANT. normal (not weird)Registered User regular
    edited December 2018
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    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.

    Is it the borders causing the problems or the people themselves? Like, Germany as an example let some refugees enter. And then those refugees get attacked. Because letting people through the border doesn't really solve the issue that underlies the border.
    Of course opening borders won't solve everything

    Open borders obviously has to be accompanied by a population that supports that policy and what it means, these are democratic governments. Germany letting in some Syrians isn't open borders.

    Styrofoam Sammich on
    wq09t4opzrlc.jpg
  • Harry DresdenHarry Dresden Registered User regular
    Julius wrote: »
    spool32 wrote: »
    Lanz wrote: »

    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.

    Come on dude

    I'm not kidding, if something like Star Trek communism was real you'd get millions converted literally over night. The drawback is that in the real world communism never materialised such a feat, it's why Trek is fiction - an unreachable utopia.

  • MrMisterMrMister Jesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered User regular
    edited December 2018
    MrMister wrote: »
    TL DR wrote: »
    spool32 wrote: »
    Lanz wrote: »
    .
    spool32 wrote: »
    spool32 wrote: »
    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!

    I guess I see it as more broadly relevant? That establishing a central plan for a sector requires forceful requisitions, damaging lives & production, and production never recovers because central planning sux seems like its an indictment of more than just Stalin. (Though tbf Stalin probably did it ~more savagely~ than someone else would have).

    I agree that we are currently so far from central planning that there is plenty of room for incrementalist commies and unashamed neoliberals to agree on intermediate policy reforms.

    MrMister on
  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    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.

    Is it the borders causing the problems or the people themselves? Like, Germany as an example let some refugees enter. And then those refugees get attacked. Because letting people through the border doesn't really solve the issue that underlies the border.
    Of course opening borders won't solve everything

    Open borders obviously has to be accompanied by a population that supports that policy and what it means, these are democratic governments. Germany letting in some Syrians isn't open borders.

    They don't seem to be solving anything is the point, since I'm directly addressing the thing you are saying is the reason for them.

  • surrealitychecksurrealitycheck lonely, but not unloved dreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered User regular
    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.

    is not intended as a defense of capitalism. it is intended as an observation about a generic shift in the ideological nature of the west broadly-construed

    in any case i have always felt almost all the moral valence attached to "capitalism" or "communism" as such is confused; they provide varying degrees of potentiation and channels for a pretty standard set of human evils. we have found ingenious ways to do fucked up things in every conceivable set of social and political arrangements and probably always shall. similarly i am, pace hippofant, deeply unworried by the question of if socialist revolutions are particular vulnerable to hijack. it seems to me a much more satisfactory empirical approach is just to note that any time you break all the existing power relations and start again, you make possible commensurately large abuses in how things are restructured. dramatic changes lead to dramatic opportunities to do fucked up things.

    it, as ever, devolves into exciting questions about the specifics...!

    obF2Wuw.png
  • Styrofoam SammichStyrofoam Sammich WANT. normal (not weird)Registered User regular
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    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.

    Is it the borders causing the problems or the people themselves? Like, Germany as an example let some refugees enter. And then those refugees get attacked. Because letting people through the border doesn't really solve the issue that underlies the border.
    Of course opening borders won't solve everything

    Open borders obviously has to be accompanied by a population that supports that policy and what it means, these are democratic governments. Germany letting in some Syrians isn't open borders.

    They don't seem to be solving anything is the point, since I'm directly addressing the thing you are saying is the reason for them.

    You'll need to rephrase this.

    wq09t4opzrlc.jpg
  • surrealitychecksurrealitycheck lonely, but not unloved dreaming of faulty keys and latchesRegistered User regular
    edited December 2018
    MrMister wrote: »
    MrMister wrote: »
    TL DR wrote: »
    spool32 wrote: »
    Lanz wrote: »
    .
    spool32 wrote: »
    spool32 wrote: »
    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!

    I guess I see it as more broadly relevant? That establishing a central plan for a sector requires forceful requisitions, damaging lives & production, and production never recovers because central planning sux seems like its an indictment of more than just Stalin. (Though tbf Stalin probably did it ~more savagely~ than someone else would have).

    I agree that we are currently so far from central planning that there is plenty of room for incrementalist commies and unashamed neoliberals to agree on intermediate policy reforms.

    sure, but that is a very particular reading of communism. the classic critique would be that you have libertarian socialists as a tradition at the same time, marx being only one manifestation (communism existing before him), and so on. i broadly dont really care that much as i think the communist obsession with capital T Theory is the ridiculous navel-gazing that results from people being locked out of the actual rooms of power for 100 years and desperately trying to figure out why with deeply unsuited linguistic tools (sorry althusser) but even in a standard read of the family of theories there is lots that can be wholly divorced from stalin, the more centralised authoritarian versions etc

    cf the endless boring critiques from the left of marxism-leninism and the equally boring responses

    surrealitycheck on
    obF2Wuw.png
  • Styrofoam SammichStyrofoam Sammich WANT. normal (not weird)Registered User regular
    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.

    is not intended as a defense of capitalism. it is intended as an observation about a generic shift in the ideological nature of the west broadly-construed

    in any case i have always felt almost all the moral valence attached to "capitalism" or "communism" as such is confused; they provide varying degrees of potentiation and channels for a pretty standard set of human evils. we have found ingenious ways to do fucked up things in every conceivable set of social and political arrangements and probably always shall. similarly i am, pace hippofant, deeply unworried by the question of if socialist revolutions are particular vulnerable to hijack. it seems to me a much more satisfactory empirical approach is just to note that any time you break all the existing power relations and start again, you make possible commensurately large abuses in how things are restructured. dramatic changes lead to dramatic opportunities to do fucked up things.

    it, as ever, devolves into exciting questions about the specifics...!

    I can certainly agree that not every form of human evil is really directly attributable to a specific societal model, be it socialism, capitalism, feudalism, whatever, ignoring the degree to which unfulfilled human desires and needs drive crime, but that would also make the topic of forced sterilization fairly irrelevant to the topic. That said, I think my general point stands in that most of the "look we've ironed out the worst parts of capitalism" assumes its not living in a nice bubble.

    I agree revolutions are dangerous, history bears that out fairly clearly. One could argue that since the train is already moving you just have to decide if staying on or fighting your way off is worse though. Either way my personal opinion in so far as it relates to actual action is that there are plenty of non revolutionary non socialist (in strict terms) things we can do and fight for that move the needle in the right direction in our life times.

    wq09t4opzrlc.jpg
  • LanzLanz ...Za?Registered User regular
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    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.

    Is it the borders causing the problems or the people themselves? Like, Germany as an example let some refugees enter. And then those refugees get attacked. Because letting people through the border doesn't really solve the issue that underlies the border.
    Of course opening borders won't solve everything

    Open borders obviously has to be accompanied by a population that supports that policy and what it means, these are democratic governments. Germany letting in some Syrians isn't open borders.

    They don't seem to be solving anything is the point, since I'm directly addressing the thing you are saying is the reason for them.

    You'll need to rephrase this.

    Shryke seems to be implying that because right wing bigots exist, freedom of movement doesn’t solve problems.

    Which is distressingly similar to the strain of thought getting pushed now by liberal party elders that immigration is making societies more stressful and unstable as immigrant refugees move into European nations

    waNkm4k.jpg?1
  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    TL DR wrote: »
    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.

    This seems a false dichotomy and also kinda highlights this strange argument I keep seeing in here trying to tie socialism to a solution to climate change but without any clear reason as to why. It's not like environmental destruction started with capitalism. Humans been destroying their own environment for like all of human history. It's basically what all life does.

    It does not seem to me that a socialist society is any more likely to get people to give a shit about the long term effects of their actions which is more or less then fundamental problem of climate change.

    I mean, being a left-wing ideology and generally more willing to tackle things like externalities and collection-action problems you would definitely get better action on the issue but those aren't really ideas exclusive to socialism.

  • Styrofoam SammichStyrofoam Sammich WANT. normal (not weird)Registered User regular
    edited December 2018
    Its not reasonable to conflate all environmental damage when discussing climate change. Coal ash spills are certainly worth avoiding but they're not changing the composition of the atmosphere.

    The beauty of representative government though is that you don't need to get everyone to give a shit about long term effects, you just need to get the people who are fighting against you out of the way. In this case monied interests. Socialism has lots of answers for monied interests, capitalism is monied interests.

    Styrofoam Sammich on
    wq09t4opzrlc.jpg
  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    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.

    Is it the borders causing the problems or the people themselves? Like, Germany as an example let some refugees enter. And then those refugees get attacked. Because letting people through the border doesn't really solve the issue that underlies the border.
    Of course opening borders won't solve everything

    Open borders obviously has to be accompanied by a population that supports that policy and what it means, these are democratic governments. Germany letting in some Syrians isn't open borders.

    They don't seem to be solving anything is the point, since I'm directly addressing the thing you are saying is the reason for them.

    You'll need to rephrase this.

    Opening borders doesn't actually solve the issue. Because it might remove the physical border but not the idea of the border itself (ie - that these people don't belong here). The government can open the borders but it can't make people want the borders to be open. If your worry is "that hard borders under climate change mean mass violence and genocide" then I'm here to point out that open borders means the same because the physical border itself is not the issue.

  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    Its not reasonable to conflate all environmental damage when discussing climate change. Coal ash spills are certainly worth avoiding but they're not changing the composition of the atmosphere.

    The beauty of representative government though is that you don't need to get everyone to give a shit about long term effects, you just need to get the people who are fighting against you out of the way. In this case monied interests. Socialism has lots of answers for monied interests, capitalism is monied interests.

    But I already addressed both these points. Monied interests are not the only issue with climate change and the kinds of solutions you are suggesting here are not exclusive to socialism.

  • Styrofoam SammichStyrofoam Sammich WANT. normal (not weird)Registered User regular
    edited December 2018
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    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.

    Is it the borders causing the problems or the people themselves? Like, Germany as an example let some refugees enter. And then those refugees get attacked. Because letting people through the border doesn't really solve the issue that underlies the border.
    Of course opening borders won't solve everything

    Open borders obviously has to be accompanied by a population that supports that policy and what it means, these are democratic governments. Germany letting in some Syrians isn't open borders.

    They don't seem to be solving anything is the point, since I'm directly addressing the thing you are saying is the reason for them.

    You'll need to rephrase this.

    Opening borders doesn't actually solve the issue. Because it might remove the physical border but not the idea of the border itself (ie - that these people don't belong here). The government can open the borders but it can't make people want the borders to be open. If your worry is "that hard borders under climate change mean mass violence and genocide" then I'm here to point out that open borders means the same because the physical border itself is not the issue.

    Yes, the people in a republic have to approve of what the government does for it to go well. It seems fairly obtuse to not understand "we need open borders" would include campaigning for them like you would any other issue you want the public to support. This isn't the 20s any more, socialists are pretty keen on elections now.
    shryke wrote: »
    Its not reasonable to conflate all environmental damage when discussing climate change. Coal ash spills are certainly worth avoiding but they're not changing the composition of the atmosphere.

    The beauty of representative government though is that you don't need to get everyone to give a shit about long term effects, you just need to get the people who are fighting against you out of the way. In this case monied interests. Socialism has lots of answers for monied interests, capitalism is monied interests.

    But I already addressed both these points. Monied interests are not the only issue with climate change and the kinds of solutions you are suggesting here are not exclusive to socialism.

    They're by far the biggest issue and they're one that capitalism has no answer for as it directly embraces them.

    Styrofoam Sammich on
    wq09t4opzrlc.jpg
  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    shryke wrote: »
    Its not reasonable to conflate all environmental damage when discussing climate change. Coal ash spills are certainly worth avoiding but they're not changing the composition of the atmosphere.

    The beauty of representative government though is that you don't need to get everyone to give a shit about long term effects, you just need to get the people who are fighting against you out of the way. In this case monied interests. Socialism has lots of answers for monied interests, capitalism is monied interests.

    But I already addressed both these points. Monied interests are not the only issue with climate change and the kinds of solutions you are suggesting here are not exclusive to socialism.

    They're by far the biggest issue and they're one that capitalism has no answer for as it directly embrace them.

    Social democrats (as they are defined above in that post) have the same answers. That's the whole point. Not that socialism has no answers to the problem, they just have no unique answers.

  • Styrofoam SammichStyrofoam Sammich WANT. normal (not weird)Registered User regular
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Its not reasonable to conflate all environmental damage when discussing climate change. Coal ash spills are certainly worth avoiding but they're not changing the composition of the atmosphere.

    The beauty of representative government though is that you don't need to get everyone to give a shit about long term effects, you just need to get the people who are fighting against you out of the way. In this case monied interests. Socialism has lots of answers for monied interests, capitalism is monied interests.

    But I already addressed both these points. Monied interests are not the only issue with climate change and the kinds of solutions you are suggesting here are not exclusive to socialism.

    They're by far the biggest issue and they're one that capitalism has no answer for as it directly embrace them.

    Social democrats (as they are defined above in that post) have the same answers. That's the whole point. Not that socialism has no answers to the problem, they just have no unique answers.

    We've seen fairly clearly that social democrats aren't really going to break the monied interests fighting any step towards climate change regulation.

    wq09t4opzrlc.jpg
  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    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.

    Is it the borders causing the problems or the people themselves? Like, Germany as an example let some refugees enter. And then those refugees get attacked. Because letting people through the border doesn't really solve the issue that underlies the border.
    Of course opening borders won't solve everything

    Open borders obviously has to be accompanied by a population that supports that policy and what it means, these are democratic governments. Germany letting in some Syrians isn't open borders.

    They don't seem to be solving anything is the point, since I'm directly addressing the thing you are saying is the reason for them.

    You'll need to rephrase this.

    Opening borders doesn't actually solve the issue. Because it might remove the physical border but not the idea of the border itself (ie - that these people don't belong here). The government can open the borders but it can't make people want the borders to be open. If your worry is "that hard borders under climate change mean mass violence and genocide" then I'm here to point out that open borders means the same because the physical border itself is not the issue.

    Yes, the people in a republic have to approve of what the government does for it to go well. It seems fairly obtuse to not understand "we need open borders" would include campaigning for them like you would any other issue you want the public to support. This isn't the 20s any more, socialists are pretty keen on elections now.

    Except:
    The beauty of representative government though is that you don't need to get everyone to give a shit about long term effects, you just need to get the people who are fighting against you out of the way.
    Replace "climate change" with "refugees of climate change". It is not obtuse to recognize the difference between a government doing something based on winning an election and actually changing people's minds. As you do here.

  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    edited December 2018
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Its not reasonable to conflate all environmental damage when discussing climate change. Coal ash spills are certainly worth avoiding but they're not changing the composition of the atmosphere.

    The beauty of representative government though is that you don't need to get everyone to give a shit about long term effects, you just need to get the people who are fighting against you out of the way. In this case monied interests. Socialism has lots of answers for monied interests, capitalism is monied interests.

    But I already addressed both these points. Monied interests are not the only issue with climate change and the kinds of solutions you are suggesting here are not exclusive to socialism.

    They're by far the biggest issue and they're one that capitalism has no answer for as it directly embrace them.

    Social democrats (as they are defined above in that post) have the same answers. That's the whole point. Not that socialism has no answers to the problem, they just have no unique answers.

    We've seen fairly clearly that social democrats aren't really going to break the monied interests fighting any step towards climate change regulation.

    We have? Where? In what specific ways have they failed? And how is this different for what you are defining as socialists?

    shryke on
  • Styrofoam SammichStyrofoam Sammich WANT. normal (not weird)Registered User regular
    edited December 2018
    I'm not talking about the same thing in those posts Shryke. One is talking about political strategies re: open borders and the other for climate change legislation.
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Its not reasonable to conflate all environmental damage when discussing climate change. Coal ash spills are certainly worth avoiding but they're not changing the composition of the atmosphere.

    The beauty of representative government though is that you don't need to get everyone to give a shit about long term effects, you just need to get the people who are fighting against you out of the way. In this case monied interests. Socialism has lots of answers for monied interests, capitalism is monied interests.

    But I already addressed both these points. Monied interests are not the only issue with climate change and the kinds of solutions you are suggesting here are not exclusive to socialism.

    They're by far the biggest issue and they're one that capitalism has no answer for as it directly embrace them.

    Social democrats (as they are defined above in that post) have the same answers. That's the whole point. Not that socialism has no answers to the problem, they just have no unique answers.

    We've seen fairly clearly that social democrats aren't really going to break the monied interests fighting any step towards climate change regulation.

    We have? Where? In what specific ways have they failed? And how is this different for what you are defining as socialists?

    We have social democracies, we have for some time. If they're capable of crippling monied interests you'd think the needle would at least not be moving in the wrong direction like it is.

    Styrofoam Sammich on
    wq09t4opzrlc.jpg
  • KaputaKaputa Registered User regular
    shryke wrote: »
    TL DR wrote: »
    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.

    This seems a false dichotomy and also kinda highlights this strange argument I keep seeing in here trying to tie socialism to a solution to climate change but without any clear reason as to why. It's not like environmental destruction started with capitalism. Humans been destroying their own environment for like all of human history. It's basically what all life does.

    It does not seem to me that a socialist society is any more likely to get people to give a shit about the long term effects of their actions which is more or less then fundamental problem of climate change.

    I mean, being a left-wing ideology and generally more willing to tackle things like externalities and collection-action problems you would definitely get better action on the issue but those aren't really ideas exclusive to socialism.
    My thought on this is that the necessity to keep growing at all costs seems essentially hardwired into capitalism while potentially less inherent to socialism. Capitalism seems programmed to just keep eating everything until there is nothing.

  • Phoenix-DPhoenix-D Registered User regular
    Re monied interests and climate change:

    Flash back to the 70s. Instead of oil and coal companies we have whatever socialist equivalent you'd like to posit.

    Explain why they would have responded to climate change any differently.

  • JuliusJulius Captain of Serenity on my shipRegistered User regular
    spool32 wrote: »
    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 -

    i mean, it seems unlikely that this would not always have been true regardless of what the dominant economic system would have been.

    even Stalin wasn't a Ludddite. Technological advancement is not reliant on how we deal with ownership, we as humans can just recognize when things are beneficial to society. Whether sliced bread was thought up by some guy in a Soviet research group or by some guy who signed over all ownership of ideas he came up with to some company is irrelevant. Neither system, not even in practice, is fundamentally opposed to technological advancement. It wouldn't even make sense for them to be!


    You could claim that the current level of technological advancement is higher than it would have been if the world had mostly adopted a socialist system instead of a capitalist one, but that seems like quite the counterfactual. I think that requires some more proof or argument than just vaguely gesturing to our current level of technology, or global standard of living for that matter.

  • Kipling217Kipling217 Registered User regular
    Phoenix-D wrote: »
    Re monied interests and climate change:

    Flash back to the 70s. Instead of oil and coal companies we have whatever socialist equivalent you'd like to posit.

    Explain why they would have responded to climate change any differently.

    Simply because it would not be in their economic self-interest to deny it happening. Their sole purpose would be to provide power to the people, not make a profit. They would have to be accountable to the people, they wouldn't be able to fund propaganda and lies to obscure the issue.

    In short, they would have to confront reality and make changes because they would not be in a position to deny it.

    Shit, the reason the world is in such bad shape is because Oil Companies in capitalist society can dictate policy to politicians and subvert democratic accountability. Companies don't obey the law, they make the law. In a socialist society they are unable to do so, that alone is a huge game changer.

    The sky was full of stars, every star an exploding ship. One of ours.
  • JuliusJulius Captain of Serenity on my shipRegistered User regular
    Julius wrote: »
    spool32 wrote: »
    Lanz wrote: »

    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.

    You don't even seem to be engaging the point I was making. It is trivial and silly to note that utopia is not reality. But if I state a goal and you say that goal can never be reached you are not presenting an argument, you are just asserting something. But also again that is not the point. The point is that one needs a concept of an ideal society to coherently argue for changes in society, and I am saying that that concept should be the communist society. That the ideal society can never be reached is not relevant, it is simply besides the point.

    (Maybe it is clearer if we just think about the contrast to ideal societies of other ideologies? For example, it is better than an ideal Nazi society. Or the ideal Objectivist society where only selfish bastards get to live okay and everybody else should suffer. That we can't ultimately reach something does not mean we shouldn't strive for it.)

    also for the record this is communist society. It is not the USSR or PRC, who themselves would not have claimed to be it either. They claimed to be communist because their goal was to establish such a society, but they never actually got there. It is a classless, stateless society where the means of production are commonly owned and everyone has what they need. One can be a communist without even slightly endorsing the USSR. One can even be a communist while not even advocating any action at all! The only requirement is that you think the communist society is the only just one and that you think it should happen.

  • FeralFeral MEMETICHARIZARD interior crocodile alligator ⇔ ǝɹʇɐǝɥʇ ǝᴉʌoɯ ʇǝloɹʌǝɥɔ ɐ ǝʌᴉɹp ᴉRegistered User regular
    Kipling217 wrote: »
    Phoenix-D wrote: »
    Re monied interests and climate change:

    Flash back to the 70s. Instead of oil and coal companies we have whatever socialist equivalent you'd like to posit.

    Explain why they would have responded to climate change any differently.

    Simply because it would not be in their economic self-interest to deny it happening. Their sole purpose would be to provide power to the people, not make a profit. They would have to be accountable to the people, they wouldn't be able to fund propaganda and lies to obscure the issue.

    In short, they would have to confront reality and make changes because they would not be in a position to deny it.


    Shit, the reason the world is in such bad shape is because Oil Companies in capitalist society can dictate policy to politicians and subvert democratic accountability. Companies don't obey the law, they make the law. In a socialist society they are unable to do so, that alone is a huge game changer.

    The USSR promoted Lysenkoism, in part, to deny that there was actually a shortage of crops while Lysenkoist methods contributed to famines under Stalin.

    "Traditional" Chinese Medicine as it is practiced today was cobbled together by the Communist Party under Mao Zedong from a cornucopia of folk remedies and (mostly unproven or disproven) ancient texts. It was a form of nationalist propaganda aimed at addressing concerns about doctor shortages and reducing the attractiveness of Western education to Chinese citizens.

    Those are two enormous examples of Communists adopting flagrant denialism and pseudoscience, for ideological purposes, contributing to the deaths of their own citizens.

    every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.

    the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    I'm not talking about the same thing in those posts Shryke. One is talking about political strategies re: open borders and the other for climate change legislation.

    But the issue is the exact same in both cases. Well, not exactly but it's different in a way that actually disadvantages open borders as compared to climate change. Fixes for climate change are a lot easier to impose unilaterally.


    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    Its not reasonable to conflate all environmental damage when discussing climate change. Coal ash spills are certainly worth avoiding but they're not changing the composition of the atmosphere.

    The beauty of representative government though is that you don't need to get everyone to give a shit about long term effects, you just need to get the people who are fighting against you out of the way. In this case monied interests. Socialism has lots of answers for monied interests, capitalism is monied interests.

    But I already addressed both these points. Monied interests are not the only issue with climate change and the kinds of solutions you are suggesting here are not exclusive to socialism.

    They're by far the biggest issue and they're one that capitalism has no answer for as it directly embrace them.

    Social democrats (as they are defined above in that post) have the same answers. That's the whole point. Not that socialism has no answers to the problem, they just have no unique answers.

    We've seen fairly clearly that social democrats aren't really going to break the monied interests fighting any step towards climate change regulation.

    We have? Where? In what specific ways have they failed? And how is this different for what you are defining as socialists?

    We have social democracies, we have for some time. If they're capable of crippling monied interests you'd think the needle would at least not be moving in the wrong direction like it is.

    How would socialism be any better at getting around these issues?

    Like, the argument that "fixing the issue of monied interests in politics is too hard, therefore the easier solution is a socialist revolution" does not strike me as being particularly sound. I really don't think switching from a capitalist system to a socialist one is actually gonna be easier or more likely.

  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    Kaputa wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    TL DR wrote: »
    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.

    This seems a false dichotomy and also kinda highlights this strange argument I keep seeing in here trying to tie socialism to a solution to climate change but without any clear reason as to why. It's not like environmental destruction started with capitalism. Humans been destroying their own environment for like all of human history. It's basically what all life does.

    It does not seem to me that a socialist society is any more likely to get people to give a shit about the long term effects of their actions which is more or less then fundamental problem of climate change.

    I mean, being a left-wing ideology and generally more willing to tackle things like externalities and collection-action problems you would definitely get better action on the issue but those aren't really ideas exclusive to socialism.
    My thought on this is that the necessity to keep growing at all costs seems essentially hardwired into capitalism while potentially less inherent to socialism. Capitalism seems programmed to just keep eating everything until there is nothing.

    I don't see it being any less inherent to any other human setup. It's not like "keep growing" as a human drive only came about in the last 400-500 years or whatever time period you choose to define for it.

  • shrykeshryke Member of the Beast Registered User regular
    Kipling217 wrote: »
    Phoenix-D wrote: »
    Re monied interests and climate change:

    Flash back to the 70s. Instead of oil and coal companies we have whatever socialist equivalent you'd like to posit.

    Explain why they would have responded to climate change any differently.

    Simply because it would not be in their economic self-interest to deny it happening. Their sole purpose would be to provide power to the people, not make a profit. They would have to be accountable to the people, they wouldn't be able to fund propaganda and lies to obscure the issue.

    In short, they would have to confront reality and make changes because they would not be in a position to deny it.

    Shit, the reason the world is in such bad shape is because Oil Companies in capitalist society can dictate policy to politicians and subvert democratic accountability. Companies don't obey the law, they make the law. In a socialist society they are unable to do so, that alone is a huge game changer.

    Why would they have to confront reality exactly? It would absolutely be in their economic self-interest to deny it. It is in the economic self-interest of a ton of individuals to shrug and ignore climate change because doing something about it would hurt but doing nothing will mostly fuck other people, either far away or after they are dead.

    I think your last paragraph kinda spits out the core assumption here: that the problem is oil companies. And yeah, they are a problem. But it's not clear they are anything like the only problem.

  • spool32spool32 Contrary Library Registered User regular
    shryke wrote: »
    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.

    We aren't seeing a mass migration of Floridians moving to the Dakotas or anything like that, though. Even when there are open borders, as there are within the United States, there just isn't that much climate based migration.

  • Styrofoam SammichStyrofoam Sammich WANT. normal (not weird)Registered User regular
    spool32 wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    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.

    We aren't seeing a mass migration of Floridians moving to the Dakotas or anything like that, though. Even when there are open borders, as there are within the United States, there just isn't that much climate based migration.

    Its going to get worse, a lot worse.

    wq09t4opzrlc.jpg
  • hippofanthippofant ティンク Registered User regular
    spool32 wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    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.

    We aren't seeing a mass migration of Floridians moving to the Dakotas or anything like that, though. Even when there are open borders, as there are within the United States, there just isn't that much climate based migration.

    That would be because Florida is, and has been, above water.

    When that fact changes, you can expect the migration numbers to change too.

  • Styrofoam SammichStyrofoam Sammich WANT. normal (not weird)Registered User regular
    edited December 2018
    wrong thread

    Styrofoam Sammich on
    wq09t4opzrlc.jpg
  • JuliusJulius Captain of Serenity on my shipRegistered User regular
    hippofant wrote: »
    spool32 wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    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.

    We aren't seeing a mass migration of Floridians moving to the Dakotas or anything like that, though. Even when there are open borders, as there are within the United States, there just isn't that much climate based migration.

    That would be because Florida is, and has been, above water.

    When that fact changes, you can expect the migration numbers to change too.

    Yeah the worst hasn't happened yet. And also obviously socio-economic positions are still a large factor in decisions. If my country was poor instead of rich I would be out of here on the next flight, for example. Inter-US migration is less likely to increase your circumstances at the moment anyway.

  • LanzLanz ...Za?Registered User regular
    In related things: perhaps being a Billionaire is an unethical act of immense selfishness.


    In that vein, let’s explore what you could actually do if you were a man who had Way Too Much Wealth For Any Single Human To Possess, like, say, if you woke up one day and discovered that You Are Jeff Bezos

    https://direkris.itch.io/you-are-jeff-bezos

    waNkm4k.jpg?1
  • daveNYCdaveNYC Why universe hate Waspinator? Registered User regular
    spool32 wrote: »
    shryke wrote: »
    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.

    We aren't seeing a mass migration of Floridians moving to the Dakotas or anything like that, though. Even when there are open borders, as there are within the United States, there just isn't that much climate based migration.

    Most of the climate based migration is due to specific events. We're still at the point where our technology can overcome the the more chronic issues with climate change.

    New Orleans' population.
    2005: 454,845
    2018: 393,232

    Shut up, Mr. Burton! You were not brought upon this world to get it!
  • Harry DresdenHarry Dresden Registered User regular
    Julius wrote: »
    Julius wrote: »
    spool32 wrote: »
    Lanz wrote: »

    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.

    You don't even seem to be engaging the point I was making. It is trivial and silly to note that utopia is not reality. But if I state a goal and you say that goal can never be reached you are not presenting an argument, you are just asserting something. But also again that is not the point. The point is that one needs a concept of an ideal society to coherently argue for changes in society, and I am saying that that concept should be the communist society. That the ideal society can never be reached is not relevant, it is simply besides the point.

    The entire point for my argument was that I was given an example for communism working out, and I was give Star Trek from another poster, as if that was enough to sooth my questions about communism being a reasonable response to a political society working in the real world. It is an unconvincing argument it when Libertarians trying to win arguments of their philosophy in the real world with Atlas Shrugged, it inset anymore convincing when socialists or communists use that same tactic with a fictional tv show. We don't live in fiction, we live in the real world. If that society can never be reached why use that it at all to bolster arguments for your philosophy?
    (Maybe it is clearer if we just think about the contrast to ideal societies of other ideologies? For example, it is better than an ideal Nazi society. Or the ideal Objectivist society where only selfish bastards get to live okay and everybody else should suffer. That we can't ultimately reach something does not mean we shouldn't strive for it.)

    Except the default contrast with modern socialism today is capitalism, especially with counties like America, UK etc. Objectivist societies don't exist either, so it's not a society worth contrast being better than. In theory communism it is, but socialism is not meant to be in our minds it's meant to be lived in societies we belong to.

    You're right that it's not a bad thing to strive for a better future, and communism does have many lovely attributes I can get behind, where this falls apart is that it becomes meaningless if socialists can't manage to make anything close to that happen in the real world. Because the pitch isn't really selling that in the real world to non-socialists, it's whatever the socialists manage to create in the real world. I'm not saying that socialists should ditch using the communist theory to convert people entirely, but that shouldn't be the centrepiece of their argument. This is where many of the new socialist organisations in government lately have been able to structure their argument by explaining a bit more thoroughly how they'd change society if they had the power to do so. For example,

    https://ocasio2018.com/issues

    Ocasio-Cortez' platform is a vibrant, charismatic and somewhat detailed overview of what a socialist government would look like to getting there. It may not sway everyone but it's a start. The next stage really needs to be policy wonks for a more in-depth analysis so socialists have bills ready to go through congress which will pass muster. Other factions and the GOP have think tanks for this sort of process, however, socialists don't have access to them as far as I'm aware. This is a severe obstruction which will stop them in their tracks unless it is dealt with ASAP, the more the socialists became adept on the political side the more leverage they'll have within the Democrats and congress itself to make their vision happen.
    also for the record this is communist society. It is not the USSR or PRC, who themselves would not have claimed to be it either. They claimed to be communist because their goal was to establish such a society, but they never actually got there. It is a classless, stateless society where the means of production are commonly owned and everyone has what they need. One can be a communist without even slightly endorsing the USSR. One can even be a communist while not even advocating any action at all! The only requirement is that you think the communist society is the only just one and that you think it should happen.

    That is political theory, not a real world example. Both the USSR and PRC have claimed to be Communist from their beginnings of their revolutions. The USSR created the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), founded by Lenin himself and it ruled the Soviet Union completely, meanwhile China has the Communist Party in China (CPC).

    That they never actually got there is a huge flaw in communism. Every attempt that discovered needed some sort of hierarchy and classes to work, especially long term.

    You're right about the claims someone needs to be a communist are not limited to those specifications, yet when it comes to establishing communist nation states in the real world they don't come close to realising it. Nor have the defence of communism been that convincing that communists have learnt the lessons of not repeating those mistakes from the past. Earlier in the thread I've directly asked what lessons modern communists/socialists have learnt to be a stop gap from dictators taking control from transition periods to communist states only to be met with silence and lack of concern. There's a massive gap between communist academic theory and executing communism in the real world, and doing it wrong in the real world has dire consequences for all involved if it's done incorrectly. So far no-one has managed to do that correctly in all of history. Does this not concern you?

  • FANTOMASFANTOMAS Flan ArgentavisRegistered User regular
    Capitalism questioning communism about its failure.
    tenor.gif

    Yes, with a quick verbal "boom." You take a man's peko, you deny him his dab, all that is left is to rise up and tear down the walls of Jericho with a ".....not!" -TexiKen
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