Honestly, capitalism is pretty terrible at fairly pricing the economy if given it's way, and often gets to ignore externalities.
Better than all the rest though.
Citation Needed. Like seriously, people keep making this, but with absolutely no evidence to back it up. It's just truthy because it's what we've got.
You were saying nobody has tried anything else.
When it was pointed out the attempts to try something else last century fell flat on their face and resulted in mega deaths to unnecessary famine you kinda didnt even respond.
Like capitalism sucks and maybe some communist kumbaya end state is the best outcome, but so far nobody has even a semi-legitimate map how we get to an end state that is better than our fairly but not total shit status quo.
Cause tell you what. Just all out cards on the table. I'd rather be dealing with our shit capitalist system vs. some commissar sending me to the gulag because I didnt magic up enough wheat or steel.
End state sounds great but still dont believe the plan to get to this utopia is there.
Edit - and dont say marx because if 150 years doesnt get you there you need new material.
No in ours they just send you to the Not a Gulag Prison because you had a joint on you, where they still get free labor out of you because whoops! 19th century white folk put a loophole in the amendment that “ended” slavery
Like that’s the issue: the systems werent that fuckin’ different
As bad as the American prison system is, are you really really trying to equivalate it to the Stalin gulags or Mao's commissars?
Is that really the equivalence you are going with here?
“As bad as” makes me think you’re unaware of just how bad this shit is here
I am well aware how bad things are here. It is horrifically bad what the US does to prisoners and I'm doing all I can to change that.
I really think you lack understanding of how bad the things you are trying to make all the same actually were. The USSR and People's Republic are not something to emulate.
Edit - not gonna erase since people have gotten called out on edits but this is my last post on the topic since why living in a communist country sucks is only tangentially related to labor.
To reach communism, the means of production must be suitably advanced such that the people only need to work a fraction of the time; the less the better.
Honestly, capitalism is pretty terrible at fairly pricing the economy if given it's way, and often gets to ignore externalities.
Better than all the rest though.
Citation Needed. Like seriously, people keep making this, but with absolutely no evidence to back it up. It's just truthy because it's what we've got.
You were saying nobody has tried anything else.
When it was pointed out the attempts to try something else last century fell flat on their face and resulted in mega deaths to unnecessary famine you kinda didnt even respond.
Like capitalism sucks and maybe some communist kumbaya end state is the best outcome, but so far nobody has even a semi-legitimate map how we get to an end state that is better than our fairly but not total shit status quo.
Cause tell you what. Just all out cards on the table. I'd rather be dealing with our shit capitalist system vs. some commissar sending me to the gulag because I didnt magic up enough wheat or steel.
End state sounds great but still dont believe the plan to get to this utopia is there.
Edit - and dont say marx because if 150 years doesnt get you there you need new material.
No in ours they just send you to the Not a Gulag Prison because you had a joint on you, where they still get free labor out of you because whoops! 19th century white folk put a loophole in the amendment that “ended” slavery
Like that’s the issue: the systems werent that fuckin’ different
As bad as the American prison system is, are you really really trying to equivalate it to the Stalin gulags or Mao's commissars?
Is that really the equivalence you are going with here?
“As bad as” makes me think you’re unaware of just how bad this shit is here
I am well aware how bad things are here. It is horrifically bad what the US does to prisoners and I'm doing all I can to change that.
I really think you lack understanding of how bad the things you are trying to make all the same actually were. The USSR and People's Republic are not something to emulate.
Edit - not gonna erase since people have gotten called out on edits but this is my last post on the topic since why living in a communist country sucks is only tangentially related to labor.
Zag, it’s also important to remember that the imperial core was largely spared the horrors of capitalist exploitation. You mentioned being sent to a gulag because you couldn’t magic up some wheat. I would also not like to see my little girl’s hand cut off because I couldn’t magic up enough rubber for King Leopold.
I think it is important that we don’t try to gloss over the horrors of war communism, or totalitarianism more generally. You cannot, however, hold them up as a defence of the status quo when the status quo was just as, if not worse, than the atrocities in question.
To reach communism, the means of production must be suitably advanced such that the people only need to work a fraction of the time; the less the better.
But also see industrialization as a problem.
Industrialization as a concept is not the problem. The way our society allocates resources to the powerful and structures compensation for labor is the issue and has been since industrialization came onto the scene.
I honestly don't think anyone in this thread is arguing against the act of atomization, but instead arguing against how it had historically functioned under capitalism.
Honestly, capitalism is pretty terrible at fairly pricing the economy if given it's way, and often gets to ignore externalities.
Better than all the rest though.
Citation Needed. Like seriously, people keep making this, but with absolutely no evidence to back it up. It's just truthy because it's what we've got.
You were saying nobody has tried anything else.
When it was pointed out the attempts to try something else last century fell flat on their face and resulted in mega deaths to unnecessary famine you kinda didnt even respond.
Like capitalism sucks and maybe some communist kumbaya end state is the best outcome, but so far nobody has even a semi-legitimate map how we get to an end state that is better than our fairly but not total shit status quo.
Cause tell you what. Just all out cards on the table. I'd rather be dealing with our shit capitalist system vs. some commissar sending me to the gulag because I didnt magic up enough wheat or steel.
End state sounds great but still dont believe the plan to get to this utopia is there.
Edit - and dont say marx because if 150 years doesnt get you there you need new material.
No in ours they just send you to the Not a Gulag Prison because you had a joint on you, where they still get free labor out of you because whoops! 19th century white folk put a loophole in the amendment that “ended” slavery
Like that’s the issue: the systems werent that fuckin’ different
As bad as the American prison system is, are you really really trying to equivalate it to the Stalin gulags or Mao's commissars?
Is that really the equivalence you are going with here?
“As bad as” makes me think you’re unaware of just how bad this shit is here
Or that you have no concept of just how bad things got there. Just before WW2, the Soviets had in their gulags more people than we have in US prisons now. Despite the population being half the current US population.
Oh and the official "how many people died in the gulag this year" total was 3.9%. And that was a good year!
This isn't the "Who had it shittier Olympics". Things were bad in Soviet Russia, it's still pretty bad over there. Over here, it's bad (and worse in some ways than it had previously been. See with regards to healthcare and home ownership) and we have the ability/resources to make it better and we don't. We continue to plod along towards oblivion so a percentage of the populace can spend the final days in a fantasy land detached from reality. Why do you think that's ok to perpetuate? (Asked in general, not directed at one person here)
Matev on
"Go down, kick ass, and set yourselves up as gods, that's our Prime Directive!"
Honestly, capitalism is pretty terrible at fairly pricing the economy if given it's way, and often gets to ignore externalities.
Better than all the rest though.
Citation Needed. Like seriously, people keep making this, but with absolutely no evidence to back it up. It's just truthy because it's what we've got.
You were saying nobody has tried anything else.
When it was pointed out the attempts to try something else last century fell flat on their face and resulted in mega deaths to unnecessary famine you kinda didnt even respond.
Like capitalism sucks and maybe some communist kumbaya end state is the best outcome, but so far nobody has even a semi-legitimate map how we get to an end state that is better than our fairly but not total shit status quo.
Cause tell you what. Just all out cards on the table. I'd rather be dealing with our shit capitalist system vs. some commissar sending me to the gulag because I didnt magic up enough wheat or steel.
End state sounds great but still dont believe the plan to get to this utopia is there.
Edit - and dont say marx because if 150 years doesnt get you there you need new material.
No in ours they just send you to the Not a Gulag Prison because you had a joint on you, where they still get free labor out of you because whoops! 19th century white folk put a loophole in the amendment that “ended” slavery
Like that’s the issue: the systems werent that fuckin’ different
As bad as the American prison system is, are you really really trying to equivalate it to the Stalin gulags or Mao's commissars?
Is that really the equivalence you are going with here?
“As bad as” makes me think you’re unaware of just how bad this shit is here
Or that you have no concept of just how bad things got there. Just before WW2, the Soviets had in their gulags more people than we have in US prisons now. Despite the population being half the current US population.
Oh and the official "how many people died in the gulag this year" total was 3.9%. And that was a good year!
For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
…
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.
There is this frustrating tendency among my fellow Americans, a tendency that I feel is equally represented among both its conservative and its liberal factions, to repeatedly act as though every other nation’s sins are far greater than our own, as though our shit doesn’t stink just as horribly.
That’s why again I say: the systems are the fucking same. We’re not special, we’re not somehow better. We have the same travesties, the same tragedies, all born from the same core of an elite ruling class that privileges its wealth and it’s power over even the most basic humanity of the lower classes, and will find any and all excuse to rip that humanity and dignity away in order to better empower itself and keep any threat from the rabble at bay.
Honestly, capitalism is pretty terrible at fairly pricing the economy if given it's way, and often gets to ignore externalities.
Better than all the rest though.
Citation Needed. Like seriously, people keep making this, but with absolutely no evidence to back it up. It's just truthy because it's what we've got.
You were saying nobody has tried anything else.
When it was pointed out the attempts to try something else last century fell flat on their face and resulted in mega deaths to unnecessary famine you kinda didnt even respond.
Like capitalism sucks and maybe some communist kumbaya end state is the best outcome, but so far nobody has even a semi-legitimate map how we get to an end state that is better than our fairly but not total shit status quo.
Cause tell you what. Just all out cards on the table. I'd rather be dealing with our shit capitalist system vs. some commissar sending me to the gulag because I didnt magic up enough wheat or steel.
End state sounds great but still dont believe the plan to get to this utopia is there.
Edit - and dont say marx because if 150 years doesnt get you there you need new material.
As has been noted before, what we have largely seen are dictatorships with some of the facades of communism, but at best, often misapplied, and usually being strangled by the rest of the world eager to defend their capitalist ideology. I didn't respond because a number of other people did with most of the salient points. Didn't really feel the need to repeat what they'd already said, figured you got it. Even those that CLAIMED to be socialist (and weren't, for the record), had to attempt to try their system while being opposed and having to (or feeling the need to?) compete militarily with the largest post WW2 economy for DECADES.
But man, here's the thing, you're whole post here is playing the red scare propaganda highlight reel. "Commissars, gulags, planned economy, 'communist kumbaya'". Should I break out all the cliched old capitalist ones from previous centuries as well? Debtor's prisons and the like? It's disingenuous.
Shit, I don't even know that socialism IS the best answer, I'm just saying that while people keeping saying capitalism is the best, I'm saying it's the only game that's gotten a fair shake, and it's led us to a pretty shit place.
People look at these other countries they like and go, "Look at this distant land, where the people live in a totalitarian police state"
and I look left
look right
wh- ... you mean here? This totalitarian police state?
We are absolutely, completely conditioned to not see this shit, to understand how it seeps into us at every point, even if we believe ourselves so capable of seeing it when it is so glaring and obvious, but never once realizing the more subtle ways it influences us, directs us and gets us to accept as normal great and foundational societal evil.
By using mechanization in various forms to allow labor to increase productivity beyond what it was capable of before mechanical intervention.
And this means that they get productivity how? And like. Is it some dastardly plot? It sure seems like you think it’s some dastardly plot.
Also you keep skimming past the reason that wages rose was because of the efforts of labor movements to demand those increases, as well as attendant rights such as shorter hours, days off, the end of child labor, etc.
I did no such thing. That labor rights are distributional does not change the history of the world.
Your paradigm has no place for the suffering or costs borne by labor for decades at the demands and wonts of robber barons and would be lords, nor the sweat and blood that was spilled to correct it. You acknowledge that that compensation rose with productivity until the latter 20th century but you don’t interrogate why that is,
I cannot explain everything in every post. I am not God. I can only correct things one at a time.
So when you say that industrialization decreased wages I can explain that that is false. And when you say that it increased hours and made people worse off I can explain that that is false. But I cannot just like. Show you anything you want to gallop to at any particular moment.
I am most definitely aware of the pitfalls of “capitalism” and the value in labor organizing. But that we can use some less of the former and more of the latter does not mean that productivity is bad. Or that mechanization is bad. Just as much as the fact that luddites sacrificed did not make them right about technology. They were just wrong the whole time and sacrificed in service of that wrongness.
Honestly, capitalism is pretty terrible at fairly pricing the economy if given it's way, and often gets to ignore externalities.
Better than all the rest though.
Citation Needed. Like seriously, people keep making this, but with absolutely no evidence to back it up. It's just truthy because it's what we've got.
Typically the one making the extraordinary claim is the one who should bring proof. But I suppose we should clarify because a strict statement kind of implies “capitalism” is a thing. Markets price, not “capitalism”. And they’re pretty good about it.
But if you want proof stick your head outside to feel the acid rain that is coming down on your face. We used markets to fix that problem.
You are right. It was all capitalism, not at ALL the fact that there was an actual cap on emissions set in place by the very act that created the cap and trade system. So capitalism was the problem, regulation came into place, and then capitalism was allowed to play within a new defined set of bounds. That hardly sounds like the panacea people are making it out to be.
To reach communism, the means of production must be suitably advanced such that the people only need to work a fraction of the time; the less the better.
But also see industrialization as a problem.
[puts hands to mouth as a makeshift megaphone]
No One is saying this but yoooooooou.
You keep buildin’ this fuckin’ straw man Goum! No one is saying “industrialization was the problem,” we have, again and again, said that the way industrialization was utilized by the capitalist class to destroy the power of the laborer was the problem.
Will you for once actually engage with that instead of your misbegotten Man of Straw? Or are you going to move onto a wicker man to then try and shove us all into perhaps? Will we get fire or bees then, perhaps?
People look at these other countries they like and go, "Look at this distant land, where the people live in a totalitarian police state"
and I look left
look right
wh- ... you mean here? This totalitarian police state?
We are absolutely, completely conditioned to not see this shit, to understand how it seeps into us at every point, even if we believe ourselves so capable of seeing it when it is so glaring and obvious, but never once realizing the more subtle ways it influences us, directs us and gets us to accept as normal great and foundational societal evil.
To be fair, the normative effect of one’s own culture is part of the human condition. I don’t think it’s necessarily an active attempt at conditioning. To be fair to you, though, I do think conscious efforts are made to condition people too! Essentially, we assume that what we know and are familiar with is true, correct and good. Reading about Lenin and others describing the nature of chauvinism was ground breaking for me.
To also tie all this back to my central thesis, we cannot progress labour rights under a system that has such a knee jerk negative response to the idea of socialist theory. Socialism is what gave us our current benefits we enjoy. Perhaps more accurately to say, the things we enjoy now are the compromises the capitalists made with socialists to allow the capitalists their privileged place in society.
If our more moderate allies cannot at the very least read, understand, and entertain the idea of socialist ideology and policy, the battle is already lost.
By using mechanization in various forms to allow labor to increase productivity beyond what it was capable of before mechanical intervention.
And this means that they get productivity how? And like. Is it some dastardly plot? It sure seems like you think it’s some dastardly plot.
Also you keep skimming past the reason that wages rose was because of the efforts of labor movements to demand those increases, as well as attendant rights such as shorter hours, days off, the end of child labor, etc.
I did no such thing. That labor rights are distributional does not change the history of the world.
Your paradigm has no place for the suffering or costs borne by labor for decades at the demands and wonts of robber barons and would be lords, nor the sweat and blood that was spilled to correct it. You acknowledge that that compensation rose with productivity until the latter 20th century but you don’t interrogate why that is,
I cannot explain everything in every post. I am not God. I can only correct things one at a time.
So when you say that industrialization decreased wages I can explain that that is false. And when you say that it increased hours and made people worse off I can explain that that is false. But I cannot just like. Show you anything you want to gallop to at any particular moment.
I am most definitely aware of the pitfalls of “capitalism” and the value in labor organizing. But that we can use some less of the former and more of the latter does not mean that productivity is bad. Or that mechanization is bad. Just as much as the fact that luddites sacrificed did not make them right about technology. They were just wrong the whole time and sacrificed in service of that wrongness.
Honestly, capitalism is pretty terrible at fairly pricing the economy if given it's way, and often gets to ignore externalities.
Better than all the rest though.
Citation Needed. Like seriously, people keep making this, but with absolutely no evidence to back it up. It's just truthy because it's what we've got.
Typically the one making the extraordinary claim is the one who should bring proof. But I suppose we should clarify because a strict statement kind of implies “capitalism” is a thing. Markets price, not “capitalism”. And they’re pretty good about it.
But if you want proof stick your head outside to feel the acid rain that is coming down on your face. We used markets to fix that problem.
You are right. It was all capitalism, not at ALL the fact that there was an actual cap on emissions set in place by the very act that created the cap and trade system. So capitalism was the problem, regulation came into place, and then capitalism was allowed to play within a new defined set of bounds. That hardly sounds like the panacea people are making it out to be.
To build off what you said here, Hydro, I’m suddenly reminded about just how great Markets are at fixing things!
The New Urbanism–inspired policy on public housing was something like this: Step One: Make the housing, and the neighborhoods it is in, more pleasant. (Great!) Step Two: Subject it to market forces. (OK?) Step Three: Provide much less housing than you’re removing. (???) In the process of “reinventing” public housing, The Department of Housing and Urban Development urged Congress to repeal a rule that required it to replace one unit of housing for every unit it destroyed. The agency went on to replace existing housing projects in cities like Chicago with significantly less dense developments, with room for far fewer families. If you can see how that might lead to an urban housing crisis, then congratulations: You’re smarter than nearly every Democratic housing policy wonk of the 1990s.
The ostensible goal in providing less housing overall was to let the market do the work of integrating cities like Chicago, but HUD’s voucher program, [Lily] Geismer argues, assumed that people “would have no reason or desire to stay in the areas where they lived, would not face discrimination in more affluent housing markets, and would be able to move into safe and thriving middle-class communities.” In reality, in part because politicians simply didn’t put protections in place at the federal level, landlords nationwide routinely discriminate against people attempting to use vouchers to access housing.
Thus, the sublime technocratic idea that a lot of mixed-income New Urbanist development would be superior to traditional superblocks—a perfectly defensible one—became, after going through the Third Way policy wood chipper, the reality of mass displacement and inadequate housing support for the poor and working class. (The housing debacle also drives home the maddening ignorance and exceptionalism of U.S. policymaking, which never stops to ask if competing ideas—about housing, health care, industrial policy, transportation—might be imported from abroad. Seemingly at no point did anyone tasked with “fixing” public housing in U.S. cities stop to ask if perhaps Vienna or Tokyo might have any helpful answers.)
Honestly, capitalism is pretty terrible at fairly pricing the economy if given it's way, and often gets to ignore externalities.
Better than all the rest though.
Citation Needed. Like seriously, people keep making this, but with absolutely no evidence to back it up. It's just truthy because it's what we've got.
You were saying nobody has tried anything else.
When it was pointed out the attempts to try something else last century fell flat on their face and resulted in mega deaths to unnecessary famine you kinda didnt even respond.
Like capitalism sucks and maybe some communist kumbaya end state is the best outcome, but so far nobody has even a semi-legitimate map how we get to an end state that is better than our fairly but not total shit status quo.
Cause tell you what. Just all out cards on the table. I'd rather be dealing with our shit capitalist system vs. some commissar sending me to the gulag because I didnt magic up enough wheat or steel.
End state sounds great but still dont believe the plan to get to this utopia is there.
Edit - and dont say marx because if 150 years doesnt get you there you need new material.
No in ours they just send you to the Not a Gulag Prison because you had a joint on you, where they still get free labor out of you because whoops! 19th century white folk put a loophole in the amendment that “ended” slavery
Like that’s the issue: the systems werent that fuckin’ different
As bad as the American prison system is, are you really really trying to equivalate it to the Stalin gulags or Mao's commissars?
Is that really the equivalence you are going with here?
“As bad as” makes me think you’re unaware of just how bad this shit is here
Or that you have no concept of just how bad things got there. Just before WW2, the Soviets had in their gulags more people than we have in US prisons now. Despite the population being half the current US population.
Oh and the official "how many people died in the gulag this year" total was 3.9%. And that was a good year!
For most privileged, professional people, the experience of confinement is a mere brush, encountered after a kid’s arrest, say. For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.
…
The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized. Though we avoid looking directly at prisons, they seep obliquely into our fashions and manners. Wealthy white teen-agers in baggy jeans and laceless shoes and multiple tattoos show, unconsciously, the reality of incarceration that acts as a hidden foundation for the country.
How did we get here? How is it that our civilization, which rejects hanging and flogging and disembowelling, came to believe that caging vast numbers of people for decades is an acceptably humane sanction? There’s a fairly large recent scholarly literature on the history and sociology of crime and punishment, and it tends to trace the American zeal for punishment back to the nineteenth century, apportioning blame in two directions. There’s an essentially Northern explanation, focussing on the inheritance of the notorious Eastern State Penitentiary, in Philadelphia, and its “reformist” tradition; and a Southern explanation, which sees the prison system as essentially a slave plantation continued by other means. Robert Perkinson, the author of the Southern revisionist tract “Texas Tough: The Rise of America’s Prison Empire,” traces two ancestral lines, “from the North, the birthplace of rehabilitative penology, to the South, the fountainhead of subjugationist discipline.” In other words, there’s the scientific taste for reducing men to numbers and the slave owners’ urge to reduce blacks to brutes.
There is this frustrating tendency among my fellow Americans, a tendency that I feel is equally represented among both its conservative and its liberal factions, to repeatedly act as though every other nation’s sins are far greater than our own, as though our shit doesn’t stink just as horribly.
That’s why again I say: the systems are the fucking same. We’re not special, we’re not somehow better. We have the same travesties, the same tragedies, all born from the same core of an elite ruling class that privileges its wealth and it’s power over even the most basic humanity of the lower classes, and will find any and all excuse to rip that humanity and dignity away in order to better empower itself and keep any threat from the rabble at bay.
Did you read a single word I said? At all?
If the US prison system next year added two million prisoners, and killed 100,000 of them, would you say it got worse, better, or the same? Because right now you're arguing it's the same.
People look at these other countries they like and go, "Look at this distant land, where the people live in a totalitarian police state"
and I look left
look right
wh- ... you mean here? This totalitarian police state?
Considering that we have a user on these forums who actually lives in a totalitarian police state, and for whose well being several people on this board are truly concerned, could you please be less of a silly goose. All your comment tells me is that you have absolutely no clue what the terms "totalitarian" and "police state" actually mean (and that you are a silly goose).
Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion.
People look at these other countries they like and go, "Look at this distant land, where the people live in a totalitarian police state"
and I look left
look right
wh- ... you mean here? This totalitarian police state?
Considering that we have a user on these forums who actually lives in a totalitarian police state, and for whose well being several people on this board are truly concerned, could you please be less of a silly goose. All your comment tells me is that you have absolutely no clue what the terms "totalitarian" and "police state" actually mean (and that you are a silly goose).
No.
As for capitalists compromising for us to get the things we have now (IE a 5 day work week, an 8 hour work day) these were the result of very extensive and violent labor movements that have been papered over by history to encourage us to never try to make any efforts to get any more concessions. Most of the efforts of the state to fight against labor are either not taught or are actively taught incorrectly or have been made expressedly illegal.
People look at these other countries they like and go, "Look at this distant land, where the people live in a totalitarian police state"
and I look left
look right
wh- ... you mean here? This totalitarian police state?
Considering that we have a user on these forums who actually lives in a totalitarian police state, and for whose well being several people on this board are truly concerned, could you please be less of a silly goose. All your comment tells me is that you have absolutely no clue what the terms "totalitarian" and "police state" actually mean (and that you are a silly goose).
Everything I've ever heard about how black people have to interact with the police sounds a lot like living in a police state, frankly. Except that they're probably more likely to end up dead in the US.
Edit: Probably getting off topic there. But there's plenty of areas in the US where the police are the state. It's not quite a dictatorship, but it's bad enough that it's really silly to be going at someone for pointing out the similarities.
I’m just kind of astounded that the whole deal here seems to be “Their horrible nightmare prison system is worse than our horrible nightmare prison system! And That’s why we’re so much better as a people.”
As if that’s meant as some great defense of the American system!
Someone sets you on fire with white phosphorous, is that particularly worse than if they’d just poured gasoline on you and lit a match to do the same? They’re both still setting you on fire! They’re both still brutalizing states whose interests are in your oppression rather than your liberation at the expense of their wealth, power and prestige!
It’s the lingering after effects of Cold War propaganda to make out the imperial rival as a great evil not to actually impugn them for their (and let us be clear, very real!) sins, but to create a sense of rivalry and competition, to engender a sense of jingoistic patriotism in the local populace that inoculates the privileged against the crimes of their own ruling class or the historic atrocities that built the foundation for their modern lives! It’s a set of blinders not to the evil of the oppressor across the sea, but to the oppressor among us wreaking his terrible wrath upon the oppressed, now hidden to your sides. It serves only to make you complacent to the injustice that happens around you, because you are overwhelmed by the great evil you’ve been directed towards, that you may not look upon the ones being committed directly around you.
“See how much worse they have it over there,” the man tells you, “You have so much more freedom here, so long, of course, as you are a fine, upright, patriotic American.” And he smiles. “But of course, why would you be anything but?”
Also the really weird part here is, I’m not even defending the Soviet Union here! I’ve repeatedly decried them as state capitalist and utilizing the label of communist as a kind of social pablum to justify the exploitation of its ruling class!
But somehow a bunch of people still want to fuckin’ step up and go “OH SO YOU THINK RUSSIA AND CHINA ARE SO HOT, HUH?”
And I’m like “No, that’s why I said their governments were and are propagandistic liars who aren’t ideologically communist in their actual execution of policy and societal structure!”
But somehow that still sets off the McCarthy Alarms.
I’m just kind of astounded that the whole deal here seems to be “Their horrible nightmare prison system is worse than our horrible nightmare prison system! And That’s why we’re so much better as a people.”
As if that’s meant as some great defense of the American system!
Acknowledging reality is kind of the point of my posts. You are the one who started defending the Gulags by pretending they're totally just as bad as the US's prison system.
(especially as the USSR *also* had prisons on top of the gulags..)
Like this is the part of the post that triggered that long quote chain
Like capitalism sucks and maybe some communist kumbaya end state is the best outcome, but so far nobody has even a semi-legitimate map how we get to an end state that is better than our fairly but not total shit status quo.
Cause tell you what. Just all out cards on the table. I'd rather be dealing with our shit capitalist system vs. some commissar sending me to the gulag because I didnt magic up enough wheat or steel
to which you replied
No in ours they just send you to the Not a Gulag Prison because you had a joint on you, where they still get free labor out of you because whoops! 19th century white folk put a loophole in the amendment that “ended” slavery
Like that’s the issue: the systems werent that fuckin’ different
so yeah no shit people are going to point out that yeah, they're kind of fucking different. You are defending the Soviet Union a hell of a lot more than the initial post was defending US capitalism. Rather than engaging with the point
End state sounds great but still dont believe the plan to get to this utopia is there.
EDIT:
An easy response to the first post there would have been "you don't get that shit if people really do it instead of coopting it like they did". I think a lot of people wouldn't *agree* with you still, but it's a take that at least makes sense
I’m just kind of astounded that the whole deal here seems to be “Their horrible nightmare prison system is worse than our horrible nightmare prison system! And That’s why we’re so much better as a people.”
As if that’s meant as some great defense of the American system!
Acknowledging reality is kind of the point of my posts. You are the one who started defending the Gulags by pretending they're totally just as bad as the US's prison system.
(especially as the USSR *also* had prisons on top of the gulags..)
Like this is the part of the post that triggered that long quote chain
Like capitalism sucks and maybe some communist kumbaya end state is the best outcome, but so far nobody has even a semi-legitimate map how we get to an end state that is better than our fairly but not total shit status quo.
Cause tell you what. Just all out cards on the table. I'd rather be dealing with our shit capitalist system vs. some commissar sending me to the gulag because I didnt magic up enough wheat or steel
to which you replied
No in ours they just send you to the Not a Gulag Prison because you had a joint on you, where they still get free labor out of you because whoops! 19th century white folk put a loophole in the amendment that “ended” slavery
Like that’s the issue: the systems werent that fuckin’ different
so yeah no shit people are going to point out that yeah, they're kind of fucking different. You are defending the Soviet Union a hell of a lot more than the initial post was defending US capitalism. Rather than engaging with the point
End state sounds great but still dont believe the plan to get to this utopia is there.
EDIT:
An easy response to the first post there would have been "you don't get that shit if people really do it instead of coopting it like they did". I think a lot of people wouldn't *agree* with you still, but it's a take that at least makes sense
Because his entire point was “Listen, our stuff may be bad, but at least the state won’t ruin my life for no legitimate reason!”
When the United States has made an entire industry (literally! We made the carceral state into a for profit industry!) out of ruining lives, primarily black lives, for no legitimate reason!
Like, Zag’s fear here isn’t “oh no, the Soviet state’s woulda arrested me because they have a lot more prisoners!” It was the argument that somehow the soviet system was some how that much more capricious when it came to justifying what was an imprisonable crime! And it’s ridiculous to do that, when you live in the country that literally fucking developed law after law after law just to find new ways to send you into the carceral state because you were black or queer or any other form of being non-white and non-cishet!
It’s fucking ludicrous! And further more never even engages with the point I kept making: That the Soviet Union and China, as many scholars have argued, were not functionally communist states, but state capitalist!
The entire argument is based around “Well if you think the Soviet Union’s so great” when I don’t think the Soviet Union was great. I just don’t think we’re particularly better as a society, We just fucking arrange and prosecute our travesties differently. I think we’re both capitalist shitholes where the elite ruling class profit off the misery and suffering of the lower classes!
And you and I both know that wasn’t going to fly, and furthermore like I just said before this edit, ignores the fact that the point is bogus to begin with. It’s a simplistic pablum that dwells within the well cultivated American Imagination of how terrible the Soviet Union was as a means of creating an inaccurate distinction with regard to the systemic oppressions that have been foundational to American society, most of which we’re still struggling with today, and which we are on the threshold of seeing fully unleashed once again after barely over half a century of finally vaguely holding them in check. It’s trying to get to to see the evils of one society, focus exclusively on them, and ignore the parallels with the evils of your own society.
Like that’s the problem with Zag’s post! This isn’t some great defense of the Soviet Gulag, it’s pointing out that (general) you can’t go “well at least I’m not there, in the bad place where the evil and injustice was” when people are suffering massive injustice where you live! It just hasn’t hit you! It’s easier to say this shit when you’re insulated from it, but it doesn’t make that injustice any less real!
But hey, also, if you want a path to a socialist society better than either capitalist shithole? You want a suggestion of where to start? Start by opposing private ownership of the means of production. Start by opposing private ownership of housing. Demand that your work places function democratically, not just through the compromise of unionization but the out and out ownership by the worker, where power is accountable to the collective laborers who make up the business. Demand that collective housing be owned by the people who live there. Demand stronger workers rights, demand fair and equitable housing rights, demand the end of the carceral state and its attendant nightmare for-profit ghouls who enrich themselves off of millions of suffering souls.
They were a lot more capricious, Lanz. That's the entire point. Anything you want to take about how the US prison system is fucked, the Soviet system looked at it, went "hold my beer" and found like a dozen ways to do that and worse.
You're arguing that this
Cause tell you what. Just all out cards on the table. I'd rather be dealing with our shit capitalist system vs. some commissar sending me to the gulag because I didnt magic up enough wheat or steel
is some great defense of the American system
but this
No in ours they just send you to the Not a Gulag Prison because you had a joint on you, where they still get free labor out of you because whoops! 19th century white folk put a loophole in the amendment that “ended” slavery
Like that’s the issue: the systems werent that fuckin’ different
is not a defense of the Soviet system? When your post goes out of it's way to minimize atrocity and the other poster did not?
But hey, also, if you want a path to a socialist society better than either capitalist shithole? You want a suggestion of where to start? Start by opposing private ownership of the means of production. Start by opposing private ownership of housing. Demand that your work places function democratically, not just through the compromise of unionization but the out and out ownership by the worker, where power is accountable to the collective laborers who make up the business.
Those all sound like terrible ideas to me frankly.
While racing light mechs, your Urbanmech comes in second place, but only because it ran out of ammo.
To reach communism, the means of production must be suitably advanced such that the people only need to work a fraction of the time; the less the better.
But also see industrialization as a problem.
[puts hands to mouth as a makeshift megaphone]
No One is saying this but yoooooooou.
You keep buildin’ this fuckin’ straw man Goum! No one is saying “industrialization was the problem,” we have, again and again, said that the way industrialization was utilized by the capitalist class to destroy the power of the laborer was the problem.
Will you for once actually engage with that instead of your misbegotten Man of Straw? Or are you going to move onto a wicker man to then try and shove us all into perhaps? Will we get fire or bees then, perhaps?
You literally suggested industrial sabotage as a response to the automation of the 90s. And when people were like “wow that is a terrible idea” you went off on how bad industrialization was.
What are we supposed to think when the words that you type say those things?
Sometime, long after the fact, and after the discussion has morphed, with more specific aspects being discussed you will walk back things and say that no one ever said it but yea, you said it. And we read it.
By using mechanization in various forms to allow labor to increase productivity beyond what it was capable of before mechanical intervention.
And this means that they get productivity how? And like. Is it some dastardly plot? It sure seems like you think it’s some dastardly plot.
Also you keep skimming past the reason that wages rose was because of the efforts of labor movements to demand those increases, as well as attendant rights such as shorter hours, days off, the end of child labor, etc.
I did no such thing. That labor rights are distributional does not change the history of the world.
Your paradigm has no place for the suffering or costs borne by labor for decades at the demands and wonts of robber barons and would be lords, nor the sweat and blood that was spilled to correct it. You acknowledge that that compensation rose with productivity until the latter 20th century but you don’t interrogate why that is,
I cannot explain everything in every post. I am not God. I can only correct things one at a time.
So when you say that industrialization decreased wages I can explain that that is false. And when you say that it increased hours and made people worse off I can explain that that is false. But I cannot just like. Show you anything you want to gallop to at any particular moment.
I am most definitely aware of the pitfalls of “capitalism” and the value in labor organizing. But that we can use some less of the former and more of the latter does not mean that productivity is bad. Or that mechanization is bad. Just as much as the fact that luddites sacrificed did not make them right about technology. They were just wrong the whole time and sacrificed in service of that wrongness.
Honestly, capitalism is pretty terrible at fairly pricing the economy if given it's way, and often gets to ignore externalities.
Better than all the rest though.
Citation Needed. Like seriously, people keep making this, but with absolutely no evidence to back it up. It's just truthy because it's what we've got.
Typically the one making the extraordinary claim is the one who should bring proof. But I suppose we should clarify because a strict statement kind of implies “capitalism” is a thing. Markets price, not “capitalism”. And they’re pretty good about it.
But if you want proof stick your head outside to feel the acid rain that is coming down on your face. We used markets to fix that problem.
You are right. It was all capitalism, not at ALL the fact that there was an actual cap on emissions set in place by the very act that created the cap and trade system. So capitalism was the problem, regulation came into place, and then capitalism was allowed to play within a new defined set of bounds. That hardly sounds like the panacea people are making it out to be.
Ok so there was a problem and capitalist regulation fixed it… the point was that the market was used to find prices well… like. The thing that was being talked about…
Like. If you want to know what “capitalists” think capitalism is its a belief that markets can find prices well. Just as Lanz complains that the Soviet Union was not communist because it was “actually state capitalist”* the actual capitalists encompass a wide range of beliefs. Regulation is not “anti-capitalist”.
Probably the widest divide(in serious discussions, so not involving Ayn Rand type folks) is between first best and second best thinkers. First best thinkers are wrong, they believe that the best way to fix a market is to move it closer to the idealized form. Second best thinkers recognize that this does not always work and that introducing what would normally be an inefficiency can produce efficient results. (Edit) Vice taxes, minimum wages, and direct social spending/purchases are typical second best capitalist solutions. This has been the state of the discourse between actual capitalists for the last 90 ish years. Examine these policies and how they work, when they work, and why. (So they can be made better)
Cap and trade was a first(ish) best solution. A Republican solution to pollution. (At a time when Republicans still cared about things)
But it did work. The created market found prices. Sulfur dioxide output plummeted.
*it was not. At least not in the sense it was capitalism. While you can use that moniker if you want state capitalism isn’t capitalism as if there is any one tenet that unites capitalists it’s that central planning does not work. And the Soviet Union was absolutely centrally planned.
They were a lot more capricious, Lanz. That's the entire point. Anything you want to take about how the US prison system is fucked, the Soviet system looked at it, went "hold my beer" and found like a dozen ways to do that and worse.
You're arguing that this
Cause tell you what. Just all out cards on the table. I'd rather be dealing with our shit capitalist system vs. some commissar sending me to the gulag because I didnt magic up enough wheat or steel
is some great defense of the American system
but this
No in ours they just send you to the Not a Gulag Prison because you had a joint on you, where they still get free labor out of you because whoops! 19th century white folk put a loophole in the amendment that “ended” slavery
Like that’s the issue: the systems werent that fuckin’ different
is not a defense of the Soviet system? When your post goes out of it's way to minimize atrocity and the other poster did not?
From where I stand, zag’s post minimizes the atrocities of the American system.
I think more what you actually want is to play “punch the tankie” and you decided you found the leftist to play the role for you
A big chunk of the world, past and present, is worse than the current US and the West in general. We should not try to emulate those places and times. However, that does not change that things are not acceptable and are in need of change.
To reach communism, the means of production must be suitably advanced such that the people only need to work a fraction of the time; the less the better.
But also see industrialization as a problem.
[puts hands to mouth as a makeshift megaphone]
No One is saying this but yoooooooou.
You keep buildin’ this fuckin’ straw man Goum! No one is saying “industrialization was the problem,” we have, again and again, said that the way industrialization was utilized by the capitalist class to destroy the power of the laborer was the problem.
Will you for once actually engage with that instead of your misbegotten Man of Straw? Or are you going to move onto a wicker man to then try and shove us all into perhaps? Will we get fire or bees then, perhaps?
You literally suggested industrial sabotage as a response to the automation of the 90s. And when people were like “wow that is a terrible idea” you went off on how bad industrialization was.
What are we supposed to think when the words that you type say those things?
Sometime, long after the fact, and after the discussion has morphed, with more specific aspects being discussed you will walk back things and say that no one ever said it but yea, you said it. And we read it.
By using mechanization in various forms to allow labor to increase productivity beyond what it was capable of before mechanical intervention.
And this means that they get productivity how? And like. Is it some dastardly plot? It sure seems like you think it’s some dastardly plot.
Also you keep skimming past the reason that wages rose was because of the efforts of labor movements to demand those increases, as well as attendant rights such as shorter hours, days off, the end of child labor, etc.
I did no such thing. That labor rights are distributional does not change the history of the world.
Your paradigm has no place for the suffering or costs borne by labor for decades at the demands and wonts of robber barons and would be lords, nor the sweat and blood that was spilled to correct it. You acknowledge that that compensation rose with productivity until the latter 20th century but you don’t interrogate why that is,
I cannot explain everything in every post. I am not God. I can only correct things one at a time.
So when you say that industrialization decreased wages I can explain that that is false. And when you say that it increased hours and made people worse off I can explain that that is false. But I cannot just like. Show you anything you want to gallop to at any particular moment.
I am most definitely aware of the pitfalls of “capitalism” and the value in labor organizing. But that we can use some less of the former and more of the latter does not mean that productivity is bad. Or that mechanization is bad. Just as much as the fact that luddites sacrificed did not make them right about technology. They were just wrong the whole time and sacrificed in service of that wrongness.
Honestly, capitalism is pretty terrible at fairly pricing the economy if given it's way, and often gets to ignore externalities.
Better than all the rest though.
Citation Needed. Like seriously, people keep making this, but with absolutely no evidence to back it up. It's just truthy because it's what we've got.
Typically the one making the extraordinary claim is the one who should bring proof. But I suppose we should clarify because a strict statement kind of implies “capitalism” is a thing. Markets price, not “capitalism”. And they’re pretty good about it.
But if you want proof stick your head outside to feel the acid rain that is coming down on your face. We used markets to fix that problem.
You are right. It was all capitalism, not at ALL the fact that there was an actual cap on emissions set in place by the very act that created the cap and trade system. So capitalism was the problem, regulation came into place, and then capitalism was allowed to play within a new defined set of bounds. That hardly sounds like the panacea people are making it out to be.
Ok so there was a problem and capitalist regulation fixed it… the point was that the market was used to find prices well… like. The thing that was being talked about…
Like. If you want to know what “capitalists” think capitalism is its a belief that markets can find prices well. Just as Lanz complains that the Soviet Union was not communist because it was “actually state capitalist”* the actual capitalists encompass a wide range of beliefs. Regulation is not “anti-capitalist”.
Probably the widest divide(in serious discussions, so not involving Ayn Rand type folks) is between first best and second best thinkers. First best thinkers are wrong, they believe that the best way to fix a market is to move it closer to the idealized form. Second best thinkers recognize that this does not always work and that introducing what would normally be an inefficiency can produce efficient results. (Edit) Vice taxes, minimum wages, and direct social spending/purchases are typical second best capitalist solutions. This has been the state of the discourse between actual capitalists for the last 90 ish years. Examine these policies and how they work, when they work, and why. (So they can be made better)
Cap and trade was a first(ish) best solution. A Republican solution to pollution. (At a time when Republicans still cared about things)
But it did work. The created market found prices. Sulfur dioxide output plummeted.
*it was not. At least not in the sense it was capitalism. While you can use that moniker if you want state capitalism isn’t capitalism as if there is any one tenet that unites capitalists it’s that central planning does not work. And the Soviet Union was absolutely centrally planned.
You’re doing that thing where the defining trait of capitalism versus any other system is the relationship between the market and the state, rather than the power hierarchies between ownership and labor
A big chunk of the world, past and present, is worse than the current US and the West in general. We should not try to emulate those places and times. However, that does not change that things are not acceptable and are in need of change.
Which would be cool if people didn't constantly tried to defend those places just to dunk on the US. "Sure, the Soviet Union was every bit as imperialist as Tsarist Russia and inflicted some of the worst atrocities of colonialism in history to the rest of Eastern Europe*, but they were trying to save the world so is cool". The US has terrible healthcare? Fine! It doesn't give you the right to just constantly lie and whitewash the history of everywhere else.
*Which is particulary relevant right now for some reason.
They were a lot more capricious, Lanz. That's the entire point. Anything you want to take about how the US prison system is fucked, the Soviet system looked at it, went "hold my beer" and found like a dozen ways to do that and worse.
You're arguing that this
Cause tell you what. Just all out cards on the table. I'd rather be dealing with our shit capitalist system vs. some commissar sending me to the gulag because I didnt magic up enough wheat or steel
is some great defense of the American system
but this
No in ours they just send you to the Not a Gulag Prison because you had a joint on you, where they still get free labor out of you because whoops! 19th century white folk put a loophole in the amendment that “ended” slavery
Like that’s the issue: the systems werent that fuckin’ different
is not a defense of the Soviet system? When your post goes out of it's way to minimize atrocity and the other poster did not?
From where I stand, zag’s post minimizes the atrocities of the American system.
I think more what you actually want is to play “punch the tankie” and you decided you found the leftist to play the role for you
See the thing is zagdrob's post admits the US system is shitty and then is fearful of something much worse replacing it.
You, on the other hand, refuse to admit that "worse" is a category that exists. Since you're now down to weird accusations rather than engaging I'll leave it there.
Honestly, capitalism is pretty terrible at fairly pricing the economy if given it's way, and often gets to ignore externalities.
Better than all the rest though.
Citation Needed. Like seriously, people keep making this, but with absolutely no evidence to back it up. It's just truthy because it's what we've got.
You were saying nobody has tried anything else.
When it was pointed out the attempts to try something else last century fell flat on their face and resulted in mega deaths to unnecessary famine you kinda didnt even respond.
Like capitalism sucks and maybe some communist kumbaya end state is the best outcome, but so far nobody has even a semi-legitimate map how we get to an end state that is better than our fairly but not total shit status quo.
Cause tell you what. Just all out cards on the table. I'd rather be dealing with our shit capitalist system vs. some commissar sending me to the gulag because I didnt magic up enough wheat or steel.
End state sounds great but still dont believe the plan to get to this utopia is there.
Edit - and dont say marx because if 150 years doesnt get you there you need new material.
No in ours they just send you to the Not a Gulag Prison because you had a joint on you, where they still get free labor out of you because whoops! 19th century white folk put a loophole in the amendment that “ended” slavery
Like that’s the issue: the systems werent that fuckin’ different
As bad as the American prison system is, are you really really trying to equivalate it to the Stalin gulags or Mao's commissars?
Is that really the equivalence you are going with here?
“As bad as” makes me think you’re unaware of just how bad this shit is here
I am well aware how bad things are here. It is horrifically bad what the US does to prisoners and I'm doing all I can to change that.
I really think you lack understanding of how bad the things you are trying to make all the same actually were. The USSR and People's Republic are not something to emulate.
Edit - not gonna erase since people have gotten called out on edits but this is my last post on the topic since why living in a communist country sucks is only tangentially related to labor.
Zag, it’s also important to remember that the imperial core was largely spared the horrors of capitalist exploitation. You mentioned being sent to a gulag because you couldn’t magic up some wheat. I would also not like to see my little girl’s hand cut off because I couldn’t magic up enough rubber for King Leopold.
I think it is important that we don’t try to gloss over the horrors of war communism, or totalitarianism more generally. You cannot, however, hold them up as a defence of the status quo when the status quo was just as, if not worse, than the atrocities in question.
The status quo is not worse than the atrocities in question.
To reach communism, the means of production must be suitably advanced such that the people only need to work a fraction of the time; the less the better.
But also see industrialization as a problem.
[puts hands to mouth as a makeshift megaphone]
No One is saying this but yoooooooou.
You keep buildin’ this fuckin’ straw man Goum! No one is saying “industrialization was the problem,” we have, again and again, said that the way industrialization was utilized by the capitalist class to destroy the power of the laborer was the problem.
Will you for once actually engage with that instead of your misbegotten Man of Straw? Or are you going to move onto a wicker man to then try and shove us all into perhaps? Will we get fire or bees then, perhaps?
You literally suggested industrial sabotage as a response to the automation of the 90s. And when people were like “wow that is a terrible idea” you went off on how bad industrialization was.
What are we supposed to think when the words that you type say those things?
Sometime, long after the fact, and after the discussion has morphed, with more specific aspects being discussed you will walk back things and say that no one ever said it but yea, you said it. And we read it.
By using mechanization in various forms to allow labor to increase productivity beyond what it was capable of before mechanical intervention.
And this means that they get productivity how? And like. Is it some dastardly plot? It sure seems like you think it’s some dastardly plot.
Also you keep skimming past the reason that wages rose was because of the efforts of labor movements to demand those increases, as well as attendant rights such as shorter hours, days off, the end of child labor, etc.
I did no such thing. That labor rights are distributional does not change the history of the world.
Your paradigm has no place for the suffering or costs borne by labor for decades at the demands and wonts of robber barons and would be lords, nor the sweat and blood that was spilled to correct it. You acknowledge that that compensation rose with productivity until the latter 20th century but you don’t interrogate why that is,
I cannot explain everything in every post. I am not God. I can only correct things one at a time.
So when you say that industrialization decreased wages I can explain that that is false. And when you say that it increased hours and made people worse off I can explain that that is false. But I cannot just like. Show you anything you want to gallop to at any particular moment.
I am most definitely aware of the pitfalls of “capitalism” and the value in labor organizing. But that we can use some less of the former and more of the latter does not mean that productivity is bad. Or that mechanization is bad. Just as much as the fact that luddites sacrificed did not make them right about technology. They were just wrong the whole time and sacrificed in service of that wrongness.
Honestly, capitalism is pretty terrible at fairly pricing the economy if given it's way, and often gets to ignore externalities.
Better than all the rest though.
Citation Needed. Like seriously, people keep making this, but with absolutely no evidence to back it up. It's just truthy because it's what we've got.
Typically the one making the extraordinary claim is the one who should bring proof. But I suppose we should clarify because a strict statement kind of implies “capitalism” is a thing. Markets price, not “capitalism”. And they’re pretty good about it.
But if you want proof stick your head outside to feel the acid rain that is coming down on your face. We used markets to fix that problem.
You are right. It was all capitalism, not at ALL the fact that there was an actual cap on emissions set in place by the very act that created the cap and trade system. So capitalism was the problem, regulation came into place, and then capitalism was allowed to play within a new defined set of bounds. That hardly sounds like the panacea people are making it out to be.
Ok so there was a problem and capitalist regulation fixed it… the point was that the market was used to find prices well… like. The thing that was being talked about…
Like. If you want to know what “capitalists” think capitalism is its a belief that markets can find prices well. Just as Lanz complains that the Soviet Union was not communist because it was “actually state capitalist”* the actual capitalists encompass a wide range of beliefs. Regulation is not “anti-capitalist”.
Probably the widest divide(in serious discussions, so not involving Ayn Rand type folks) is between first best and second best thinkers. First best thinkers are wrong, they believe that the best way to fix a market is to move it closer to the idealized form. Second best thinkers recognize that this does not always work and that introducing what would normally be an inefficiency can produce efficient results. (Edit) Vice taxes, minimum wages, and direct social spending/purchases are typical second best capitalist solutions. This has been the state of the discourse between actual capitalists for the last 90 ish years. Examine these policies and how they work, when they work, and why. (So they can be made better)
Cap and trade was a first(ish) best solution. A Republican solution to pollution. (At a time when Republicans still cared about things)
But it did work. The created market found prices. Sulfur dioxide output plummeted.
*it was not. At least not in the sense it was capitalism. While you can use that moniker if you want state capitalism isn’t capitalism as if there is any one tenet that unites capitalists it’s that central planning does not work. And the Soviet Union was absolutely centrally planned.
You’re doing that thing where the defining trait of capitalism versus any other system is the relationship between the market and the state, rather than the power hierarchies between ownership and labor
Welcome to 1936 I guess? Like. I don’t know how to respond to this. (Partially because I do not understand which aspect you’re responding to or why and for what purpose). Should I get to define what communism is for you? If you get to define what capitalism means?(and to be honest I am not defining what capitalism means I am describing the majority belief of capitalists for the past 80+ years, both in theory and in practice)
Goum I have explained why the atrocities under capitalism were just as bad if not worse, under the frame of reference under which we were discussing them. See my earlier discussion with Zag. I would say go back and read that and come back with a substantive argument, but you and I both know it’s utterly pointless trying to debate each other so please save us both the time and grief and move on.
I would argue that the problems of communist states have largely been their inability to deal with legacy socio-economic issues that they inherited.
Like I don't believe the problems the USSR had came about due to state communism I believe they came about due to the legacy of lack of education, lack of competent political culture, lack of equality etc. Because if you look at what happened after they dropped state communism; inequality, inefficiency, corruption, criminal behaviour, a complete collapse of political culture, it all happened there too.
I mean I'm an anarchist so I can spit on all besuited managerial dickheads regardless of what flavour of authoritarian they are, but I'd say that when you look at nations with deep problems, I mean, how many capitalist nations are essentially a complete disaster, or have been in the last 50-70 years? Most of them
I will also say that appeals to the efficiency of the free market, again, are laughable. The free market keeps literally hundreds of millions of people in abject poverty, globally. Literally keeps, it facilitates and enables and creates that. Where we have managed to lift people from poverty it is through collective action I.e governments, flawed as they might be, not free enterprise.
Also it's definitely wild to see Americans talk about how great capitalism as a system is, when the US is wildly capitalist, and has vast resources, and has tens of millions of people living in conditions that are just absolutely horrifying, with no plan to sort that out, and a free market driving it to continue and expand.
Sorta feels like system is irrelevant. Especially in the labor thread.
If labor can organize and use its power to get what it deserves, if leftists and progressives and the left-leaning center can all decide and establish a better societal baseline of what's acceptable in terms of safety net and protections and wealth disparity, then the specifics of how we allocate resources and choose what to produce and distribute the value generated seem like things that can be worked out at our leisure without much suffering after the fact.
With weak labor and no such baseline, even a nominally socialist state will find ways to extract value from those it deems marginal for the benefit of those with power, even if the details of hierarchy and its enforcement change.
Any system that allows for in-group/out-group power monopolization is going to go in a bad direction given time. The economic systems just change the way it happens.
Sorta feels like system is irrelevant. Especially in the labor thread.
If labor can organize and use its power to get what it deserves, if leftists and progressives and the left-leaning center can all decide and establish a better societal baseline of what's acceptable in terms of safety net and protections and wealth disparity, then the specifics of how we allocate resources and choose what to produce and distribute the value generated seem like things that can be worked out at our leisure without much suffering after the fact.
With weak labor and no such baseline, even a nominally socialist state will find ways to extract value from those it deems marginal for the benefit of those with power, even if the details of hierarchy and its enforcement change.
the point was establishing the pivotal role of socialism and socialist theory in establishing workers' rights. some folks took issue with communism, and needed to establish that communism is less desirable than capitalism.
People look at these other countries they like and go, "Look at this distant land, where the people live in a totalitarian police state"
and I look left
look right
wh- ... you mean here? This totalitarian police state?
We are absolutely, completely conditioned to not see this shit, to understand how it seeps into us at every point, even if we believe ourselves so capable of seeing it when it is so glaring and obvious, but never once realizing the more subtle ways it influences us, directs us and gets us to accept as normal great and foundational societal evil.
To be fair, the normative effect of one’s own culture is part of the human condition. I don’t think it’s necessarily an active attempt at conditioning. To be fair to you, though, I do think conscious efforts are made to condition people too! Essentially, we assume that what we know and are familiar with is true, correct and good. Reading about Lenin and others describing the nature of chauvinism was ground breaking for me.
To also tie all this back to my central thesis, we cannot progress labour rights under a system that has such a knee jerk negative response to the idea of socialist theory. Socialism is what gave us our current benefits we enjoy. Perhaps more accurately to say, the things we enjoy now are the compromises the capitalists made with socialists to allow the capitalists their privileged place in society.
If our more moderate allies cannot at the very least read, understand, and entertain the idea of socialist ideology and policy, the battle is already lost.
Honestly, capitalism is pretty terrible at fairly pricing the economy if given it's way, and often gets to ignore externalities.
Better than all the rest though.
Citation Needed. Like seriously, people keep making this, but with absolutely no evidence to back it up. It's just truthy because it's what we've got.
You were saying nobody has tried anything else.
When it was pointed out the attempts to try something else last century fell flat on their face and resulted in mega deaths to unnecessary famine you kinda didnt even respond.
Like capitalism sucks and maybe some communist kumbaya end state is the best outcome, but so far nobody has even a semi-legitimate map how we get to an end state that is better than our fairly but not total shit status quo.
Cause tell you what. Just all out cards on the table. I'd rather be dealing with our shit capitalist system vs. some commissar sending me to the gulag because I didnt magic up enough wheat or steel.
End state sounds great but still dont believe the plan to get to this utopia is there.
Edit - and dont say marx because if 150 years doesnt get you there you need new material.
No in ours they just send you to the Not a Gulag Prison because you had a joint on you, where they still get free labor out of you because whoops! 19th century white folk put a loophole in the amendment that “ended” slavery
Like that’s the issue: the systems werent that fuckin’ different
As bad as the American prison system is, are you really really trying to equivalate it to the Stalin gulags or Mao's commissars?
Is that really the equivalence you are going with here?
“As bad as” makes me think you’re unaware of just how bad this shit is here
I am well aware how bad things are here. It is horrifically bad what the US does to prisoners and I'm doing all I can to change that.
I really think you lack understanding of how bad the things you are trying to make all the same actually were. The USSR and People's Republic are not something to emulate.
Edit - not gonna erase since people have gotten called out on edits but this is my last post on the topic since why living in a communist country sucks is only tangentially related to labor.
Zag, it’s also important to remember that the imperial core was largely spared the horrors of capitalist exploitation. You mentioned being sent to a gulag because you couldn’t magic up some wheat. I would also not like to see my little girl’s hand cut off because I couldn’t magic up enough rubber for King Leopold.
I think it is important that we don’t try to gloss over the horrors of war communism, or totalitarianism more generally. You cannot, however, hold them up as a defence of the status quo when the status quo was just as, if not worse, than the atrocities in question.
The status quo is not worse than the atrocities in question.
To reach communism, the means of production must be suitably advanced such that the people only need to work a fraction of the time; the less the better.
But also see industrialization as a problem.
[puts hands to mouth as a makeshift megaphone]
No One is saying this but yoooooooou.
You keep buildin’ this fuckin’ straw man Goum! No one is saying “industrialization was the problem,” we have, again and again, said that the way industrialization was utilized by the capitalist class to destroy the power of the laborer was the problem.
Will you for once actually engage with that instead of your misbegotten Man of Straw? Or are you going to move onto a wicker man to then try and shove us all into perhaps? Will we get fire or bees then, perhaps?
You literally suggested industrial sabotage as a response to the automation of the 90s. And when people were like “wow that is a terrible idea” you went off on how bad industrialization was.
What are we supposed to think when the words that you type say those things?
Sometime, long after the fact, and after the discussion has morphed, with more specific aspects being discussed you will walk back things and say that no one ever said it but yea, you said it. And we read it.
By using mechanization in various forms to allow labor to increase productivity beyond what it was capable of before mechanical intervention.
And this means that they get productivity how? And like. Is it some dastardly plot? It sure seems like you think it’s some dastardly plot.
Also you keep skimming past the reason that wages rose was because of the efforts of labor movements to demand those increases, as well as attendant rights such as shorter hours, days off, the end of child labor, etc.
I did no such thing. That labor rights are distributional does not change the history of the world.
Your paradigm has no place for the suffering or costs borne by labor for decades at the demands and wonts of robber barons and would be lords, nor the sweat and blood that was spilled to correct it. You acknowledge that that compensation rose with productivity until the latter 20th century but you don’t interrogate why that is,
I cannot explain everything in every post. I am not God. I can only correct things one at a time.
So when you say that industrialization decreased wages I can explain that that is false. And when you say that it increased hours and made people worse off I can explain that that is false. But I cannot just like. Show you anything you want to gallop to at any particular moment.
I am most definitely aware of the pitfalls of “capitalism” and the value in labor organizing. But that we can use some less of the former and more of the latter does not mean that productivity is bad. Or that mechanization is bad. Just as much as the fact that luddites sacrificed did not make them right about technology. They were just wrong the whole time and sacrificed in service of that wrongness.
Honestly, capitalism is pretty terrible at fairly pricing the economy if given it's way, and often gets to ignore externalities.
Better than all the rest though.
Citation Needed. Like seriously, people keep making this, but with absolutely no evidence to back it up. It's just truthy because it's what we've got.
Typically the one making the extraordinary claim is the one who should bring proof. But I suppose we should clarify because a strict statement kind of implies “capitalism” is a thing. Markets price, not “capitalism”. And they’re pretty good about it.
But if you want proof stick your head outside to feel the acid rain that is coming down on your face. We used markets to fix that problem.
You are right. It was all capitalism, not at ALL the fact that there was an actual cap on emissions set in place by the very act that created the cap and trade system. So capitalism was the problem, regulation came into place, and then capitalism was allowed to play within a new defined set of bounds. That hardly sounds like the panacea people are making it out to be.
Ok so there was a problem and capitalist regulation fixed it… the point was that the market was used to find prices well… like. The thing that was being talked about…
Like. If you want to know what “capitalists” think capitalism is its a belief that markets can find prices well. Just as Lanz complains that the Soviet Union was not communist because it was “actually state capitalist”* the actual capitalists encompass a wide range of beliefs. Regulation is not “anti-capitalist”.
Probably the widest divide(in serious discussions, so not involving Ayn Rand type folks) is between first best and second best thinkers. First best thinkers are wrong, they believe that the best way to fix a market is to move it closer to the idealized form. Second best thinkers recognize that this does not always work and that introducing what would normally be an inefficiency can produce efficient results. (Edit) Vice taxes, minimum wages, and direct social spending/purchases are typical second best capitalist solutions. This has been the state of the discourse between actual capitalists for the last 90 ish years. Examine these policies and how they work, when they work, and why. (So they can be made better)
Cap and trade was a first(ish) best solution. A Republican solution to pollution. (At a time when Republicans still cared about things)
But it did work. The created market found prices. Sulfur dioxide output plummeted.
*it was not. At least not in the sense it was capitalism. While you can use that moniker if you want state capitalism isn’t capitalism as if there is any one tenet that unites capitalists it’s that central planning does not work. And the Soviet Union was absolutely centrally planned.
You’re doing that thing where the defining trait of capitalism versus any other system is the relationship between the market and the state, rather than the power hierarchies between ownership and labor
Welcome to 1936 I guess? Like. I don’t know how to respond to this. (Partially because I do not understand which aspect you’re responding to or why and for what purpose). Should I get to define what communism is for you? If you get to define what capitalism means?(and to be honest I am not defining what capitalism means I am describing the majority belief of capitalists for the past 80+ years, both in theory and in practice)
I quite know what communism and capitalism are, as well as socialism.
The problem is, typically speaking, most Americans don’t particularly; we rely on inaccurate formations based in the market’s relationship to the applicable government of said society. But this isn’t really the case, otherwise you coudln’t have a state capitalist system, we’re capitalism purely, ast most Americans think, the operation of a market not centrally controlled or managed by teh state.
Capitalism is not this. Capitalism is an economic system defined by the ownership structure of private property and thus the relationship between the owners of that property and those who utilize it.
Now, before going any further, we should make a very important distinction; Private property and personal property. Often in American lay understanding, these two are conflated as one in the same, but this isn’t the case, not for economic discussions such as these. It’s why you’ll get ludicrous claims by right wingers suggesting that under a socialist system, you can’t own your own phone or toothbrush, or that a socialist system is the government coming along and taking everything you own to give away to so called moochers and lazy neerdowells.
No, Private Property is best conceptualized as those assets through which value may be extracted at scale, owned by a relative few, while personal property is, well, as the name implies, your personal belongings. A good way to think of this may be as follows: everything in your apartment is your personal property, but the apartment itself, to say nothing of the building, as currently structured is *private* property, owned by a third party that derives value not through the labor performed with the asset but by ownership of that asset. Likewise, as a worker in the Before Times where you worked in an office (or if you’re unlucky enough at the moment, to be put back in that virus ridden hellhole), perhaps you have your little cubicle full of knickknacks and such you’ve brought in from home to decorate your workstation and give it some semblance of personality. Those accoutrements are your personal property. But the computer? The chair? The desk, the building? Those are the private property of the company you work for, the leasing company for the building they themselves perhaps rent from, etc. etc. Despite the fact that you are the one doing the labor, you own none of it.
“But my company gives me a share in the company as part of my compensation package!”
Then you, hypothetical edge case that occurred to me as I wrote this, are a slight outlier, perhaps, but effectively, your share has little controlling power within the power hierarchy of your workplace. You have no voice, still operate at the whims of those who are above you in the hierarchy and have little recourse or ability to change things within it, as power is concentrated among a select few, most assuredly much more wealthy than you, owners who actually have a say in how your company is run. Despite, again, you actually being one of the collective workers who actually perform labor within the company, execute its business, etc. Such is the nature, after all of ownership: They own it and you, well, you don’t. Or at least no where ever near approaching enough.
Now, this structure can easily exist within government itself. Indeed, many nations have done this! All that need be done is have the government be the owner of the business, or more likely businesses in question! The power structures and your lack of ownership as a worker remain the same, the only difference is, well, we’ve changed whom the owner is: yet another powerful entity that has little to no accountability to you, the worker. And now, in this case, with the added bonus of the direct power of the state’s monopolization of violence should you get out of line (Zagrob’s fear of an angry commissar sending him to the gulag would go here).
So then, what, perchance, is socialism? If Government owning the means of production is still capitalist in nature, then what does it mean to be socialist?
Socialism exists then as a contrary to this structure of ownership and it’s attendant power hierarchies. If Capitalism is the practice of monopolizing ownership of the means of production to a select few, then socialism is the practice of expanding ownership to all involved with the means of production. It is the empowerment of the worker to self-manage, to have a real voice, to be able to practice self-determination (in so far as one may in any shared and collective society, anyway) within the context of their work.
If Capitalism says that your apartment building is owned by the individual landlord or leasing company, Socialism says that your apartment building belongs to you and your neighbors. If Capitalism says that your workplace is owned by a billionaire asshole, or a billionaire asshole and a bunch of wealthy shareholders who have a say in its operation while you get none, Socialism says that you share in the ownership of your business, in equal measure, with your co-workers, and that you the laborers determine its operation and direction instead of a group of people who don’t work, but extract value from the work you perform through their ownership of the means of production by which you do the work.
So then, what is Communism? Surely that has to be when the state owns everything, right?
Well, here’s a question: How do you reconcile that with the myriad schools of communist thought that are so anarchistic in nature that the final stage of communism is a stateless society?
Indeed, the key defining trait of Communism is a society where there is no private ownership, state, individual, conglomerate. It is an economic system where, like socialism, private property is abolished, but goes further than that, arguing that work and recompense be allotted via one’s capability and need, as well as dissolving class structures and, ultimately, the dissolution of the state itself (for example, Engles belief that the state would cease to serve a useful function once a socialist society had developed enough to no longer require coercive force to operate and cooperate).
But this is where things get trickier, because it turns out there’s no one single school of achieving communism, which is where so much of this confusion can come into play. For the purposes of this, we’ll go with the topic of Vanguardism, which what I think most folks here probably think of when they think of communism. Vanguardism is a revolutionary (or, technically, post-revolutionary) state where typically a single party controls the operation of the state. The Soviet system, for example, would be Vanguardist in nature. The job of the vanguard is, effectively, to overthrow the old, capitalist system, and stand athwart attempts to revert it while attempting to build a communist society.
Unfortunately, as we could see with the Soviet Union, and China, vanguardism has the drawback of being authoritarian in nature as a guard against counter-revolution through democratic systems. But it also means that when you get a new elite in place, and they decide they like to be the new elite power, you can’t really get them to let go of the reigns of power.
I am not, particularly, a fan of Vanguardism. Too much power concentrated into the hands of too few, too easily defeats the ultimate purpose of the reformation in the first place, easily transforms into (or, arguably, stalls out at) a State Capitalist system with the Vanguard as the new Capitalists.
In my own preference, I believe that at every step that the worker’s self-determination must be paramount, preferably through some form of democratic system to coordinate the collective. I’d say it’s maybe certain anarchistic tendencies to distrust the pooling of power in the hands of too few, or maybe having more of a syndicalist bent, but either way, I’d say that the important priorities of any socialist formation must be the empowerment of the worker while assuring that the members of collective society have equal say in their self-determination, while guarding against concentrating power in the hands of a few and thus making them less accountable to the collective.
I would argue that the problems of communist states have largely been their inability to deal with legacy socio-economic issues that they inherited.
Like I don't believe the problems the USSR had came about due to state communism I believe they came about due to the legacy of lack of education, lack of competent political culture, lack of equality etc. Because if you look at what happened after they dropped state communism; inequality, inefficiency, corruption, criminal behaviour, a complete collapse of political culture, it all happened there too.
I mean I'm an anarchist so I can spit on all besuited managerial dickheads regardless of what flavour of authoritarian they are, but I'd say that when you look at nations with deep problems, I mean, how many capitalist nations are essentially a complete disaster, or have been in the last 50-70 years? Most of them
Oh yeah, there’s like, a lot of scholarship on how Soviet Russia and China both pretty much inherited the power structures of their predecessors and essentially fell right back into the same roles and problems of the Tsarist state and Empire. It’s one of the reasons that I tend to be skeptical of the general “Communism’s to blame!” rationale. “New boss, same as the old boss” type shit.
In a similar way, America’s problems make a lot more sense when you look at it through the lens of our origin as a series of imperial colonies whose primary drive was the extraction of wealth, how our racism of today was birthed from the efforts of the colonial gentry to divide slave labor and free white labor from working together (see Bacon’s Rebellion) and to preserve ownership of a captive labor force (for example, in Protestant colonies*, profession of faith was grounds for emancipation, so the gentry needed a grounds for enslavement that could not be changed as easily as one’s faith; you could accept christ as savior far more easily, they realized, than you could change the color of your skin)
*I need to research this more, but Catholic colonies less so, but I am not sure why they didn’t practice this while the Protestant colonies did before the shift.
To reach communism, the means of production must be suitably advanced such that the people only need to work a fraction of the time; the less the better.
But also see industrialization as a problem.
[puts hands to mouth as a makeshift megaphone]
No One is saying this but yoooooooou.
You keep buildin’ this fuckin’ straw man Goum! No one is saying “industrialization was the problem,” we have, again and again, said that the way industrialization was utilized by the capitalist class to destroy the power of the laborer was the problem.
Will you for once actually engage with that instead of your misbegotten Man of Straw? Or are you going to move onto a wicker man to then try and shove us all into perhaps? Will we get fire or bees then, perhaps?
You literally suggested industrial sabotage as a response to the automation of the 90s. And when people were like “wow that is a terrible idea” you went off on how bad industrialization was.
What are we supposed to think when the words that you type say those things?
Sometime, long after the fact, and after the discussion has morphed, with more specific aspects being discussed you will walk back things and say that no one ever said it but yea, you said it. And we read it.
By using mechanization in various forms to allow labor to increase productivity beyond what it was capable of before mechanical intervention.
And this means that they get productivity how? And like. Is it some dastardly plot? It sure seems like you think it’s some dastardly plot.
Also you keep skimming past the reason that wages rose was because of the efforts of labor movements to demand those increases, as well as attendant rights such as shorter hours, days off, the end of child labor, etc.
I did no such thing. That labor rights are distributional does not change the history of the world.
Your paradigm has no place for the suffering or costs borne by labor for decades at the demands and wonts of robber barons and would be lords, nor the sweat and blood that was spilled to correct it. You acknowledge that that compensation rose with productivity until the latter 20th century but you don’t interrogate why that is,
I cannot explain everything in every post. I am not God. I can only correct things one at a time.
So when you say that industrialization decreased wages I can explain that that is false. And when you say that it increased hours and made people worse off I can explain that that is false. But I cannot just like. Show you anything you want to gallop to at any particular moment.
I am most definitely aware of the pitfalls of “capitalism” and the value in labor organizing. But that we can use some less of the former and more of the latter does not mean that productivity is bad. Or that mechanization is bad. Just as much as the fact that luddites sacrificed did not make them right about technology. They were just wrong the whole time and sacrificed in service of that wrongness.
Honestly, capitalism is pretty terrible at fairly pricing the economy if given it's way, and often gets to ignore externalities.
Better than all the rest though.
Citation Needed. Like seriously, people keep making this, but with absolutely no evidence to back it up. It's just truthy because it's what we've got.
Typically the one making the extraordinary claim is the one who should bring proof. But I suppose we should clarify because a strict statement kind of implies “capitalism” is a thing. Markets price, not “capitalism”. And they’re pretty good about it.
But if you want proof stick your head outside to feel the acid rain that is coming down on your face. We used markets to fix that problem.
You are right. It was all capitalism, not at ALL the fact that there was an actual cap on emissions set in place by the very act that created the cap and trade system. So capitalism was the problem, regulation came into place, and then capitalism was allowed to play within a new defined set of bounds. That hardly sounds like the panacea people are making it out to be.
Ok so there was a problem and capitalist regulation fixed it… the point was that the market was used to find prices well… like. The thing that was being talked about…
Like. If you want to know what “capitalists” think capitalism is its a belief that markets can find prices well. Just as Lanz complains that the Soviet Union was not communist because it was “actually state capitalist”* the actual capitalists encompass a wide range of beliefs. Regulation is not “anti-capitalist”.
Probably the widest divide(in serious discussions, so not involving Ayn Rand type folks) is between first best and second best thinkers. First best thinkers are wrong, they believe that the best way to fix a market is to move it closer to the idealized form. Second best thinkers recognize that this does not always work and that introducing what would normally be an inefficiency can produce efficient results. (Edit) Vice taxes, minimum wages, and direct social spending/purchases are typical second best capitalist solutions. This has been the state of the discourse between actual capitalists for the last 90 ish years. Examine these policies and how they work, when they work, and why. (So they can be made better)
Cap and trade was a first(ish) best solution. A Republican solution to pollution. (At a time when Republicans still cared about things)
But it did work. The created market found prices. Sulfur dioxide output plummeted.
*it was not. At least not in the sense it was capitalism. While you can use that moniker if you want state capitalism isn’t capitalism as if there is any one tenet that unites capitalists it’s that central planning does not work. And the Soviet Union was absolutely centrally planned.
Come the fuck on. Not only does your description not match what happened, it's nonsensical. If my toddler makes a disaster out of her room, and I tell her form now on she can only have 5 toys out at a time, but she can choose those toys freely, her mess now being clean isn't some kind of magical success of the free toddler market. Seriously. Her willingly accepting the regulation system MIGHT be, but the results are not the results of the free toddler market. Regulation is LITERALLY the opposite of free capitalism.
I will give Republicans of the yesteryears credit for being better about the environment, but that's damning with faint praise at this point.
Sulfer Dioxide output plummeted because there was a fucking cap put on it, what else would it do? Rise when the federal government put a limit on it? What the cap and trade system did was make it palatable to capitalists. It gave them a way to pawn off the costs of their mitigation efforts, rather than being forced to deal with the consequences of their own actions they had been doing for decades.
That being said, this thread isn't really the best place for this discussion. If you want to continue it, please feel free to @ me in whichever appropriate thread we should use, and let's let labor have this one back.
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MayabirdPecking at the keyboardRegistered Userregular
Connecticut National Guard will also be unionizing, BTW. The National Guards of the other 48 states (Texas has already started as I'd mentioned some months before) can and likely will follow, since the ruling is by the Department of Justice and all National Guard members on state duty are allowed to.
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I am well aware how bad things are here. It is horrifically bad what the US does to prisoners and I'm doing all I can to change that.
I really think you lack understanding of how bad the things you are trying to make all the same actually were. The USSR and People's Republic are not something to emulate.
Edit - not gonna erase since people have gotten called out on edits but this is my last post on the topic since why living in a communist country sucks is only tangentially related to labor.
But also see industrialization as a problem.
Zag, it’s also important to remember that the imperial core was largely spared the horrors of capitalist exploitation. You mentioned being sent to a gulag because you couldn’t magic up some wheat. I would also not like to see my little girl’s hand cut off because I couldn’t magic up enough rubber for King Leopold.
I think it is important that we don’t try to gloss over the horrors of war communism, or totalitarianism more generally. You cannot, however, hold them up as a defence of the status quo when the status quo was just as, if not worse, than the atrocities in question.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better
bit.ly/2XQM1ke
Industrialization as a concept is not the problem. The way our society allocates resources to the powerful and structures compensation for labor is the issue and has been since industrialization came onto the scene.
I honestly don't think anyone in this thread is arguing against the act of atomization, but instead arguing against how it had historically functioned under capitalism.
Or that you have no concept of just how bad things got there. Just before WW2, the Soviets had in their gulags more people than we have in US prisons now. Despite the population being half the current US population.
Oh and the official "how many people died in the gulag this year" total was 3.9%. And that was a good year!
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/30/the-caging-of-america
There is this frustrating tendency among my fellow Americans, a tendency that I feel is equally represented among both its conservative and its liberal factions, to repeatedly act as though every other nation’s sins are far greater than our own, as though our shit doesn’t stink just as horribly.
That’s why again I say: the systems are the fucking same. We’re not special, we’re not somehow better. We have the same travesties, the same tragedies, all born from the same core of an elite ruling class that privileges its wealth and it’s power over even the most basic humanity of the lower classes, and will find any and all excuse to rip that humanity and dignity away in order to better empower itself and keep any threat from the rabble at bay.
and I look left
look right
wh- ... you mean here? This totalitarian police state?
As has been noted before, what we have largely seen are dictatorships with some of the facades of communism, but at best, often misapplied, and usually being strangled by the rest of the world eager to defend their capitalist ideology. I didn't respond because a number of other people did with most of the salient points. Didn't really feel the need to repeat what they'd already said, figured you got it. Even those that CLAIMED to be socialist (and weren't, for the record), had to attempt to try their system while being opposed and having to (or feeling the need to?) compete militarily with the largest post WW2 economy for DECADES.
But man, here's the thing, you're whole post here is playing the red scare propaganda highlight reel. "Commissars, gulags, planned economy, 'communist kumbaya'". Should I break out all the cliched old capitalist ones from previous centuries as well? Debtor's prisons and the like? It's disingenuous.
Shit, I don't even know that socialism IS the best answer, I'm just saying that while people keeping saying capitalism is the best, I'm saying it's the only game that's gotten a fair shake, and it's led us to a pretty shit place.
We are absolutely, completely conditioned to not see this shit, to understand how it seeps into us at every point, even if we believe ourselves so capable of seeing it when it is so glaring and obvious, but never once realizing the more subtle ways it influences us, directs us and gets us to accept as normal great and foundational societal evil.
You are right. It was all capitalism, not at ALL the fact that there was an actual cap on emissions set in place by the very act that created the cap and trade system. So capitalism was the problem, regulation came into place, and then capitalism was allowed to play within a new defined set of bounds. That hardly sounds like the panacea people are making it out to be.
[puts hands to mouth as a makeshift megaphone]
No One is saying this but yoooooooou.
You keep buildin’ this fuckin’ straw man Goum! No one is saying “industrialization was the problem,” we have, again and again, said that the way industrialization was utilized by the capitalist class to destroy the power of the laborer was the problem.
Will you for once actually engage with that instead of your misbegotten Man of Straw? Or are you going to move onto a wicker man to then try and shove us all into perhaps? Will we get fire or bees then, perhaps?
To be fair, the normative effect of one’s own culture is part of the human condition. I don’t think it’s necessarily an active attempt at conditioning. To be fair to you, though, I do think conscious efforts are made to condition people too! Essentially, we assume that what we know and are familiar with is true, correct and good. Reading about Lenin and others describing the nature of chauvinism was ground breaking for me.
To also tie all this back to my central thesis, we cannot progress labour rights under a system that has such a knee jerk negative response to the idea of socialist theory. Socialism is what gave us our current benefits we enjoy. Perhaps more accurately to say, the things we enjoy now are the compromises the capitalists made with socialists to allow the capitalists their privileged place in society.
If our more moderate allies cannot at the very least read, understand, and entertain the idea of socialist ideology and policy, the battle is already lost.
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To build off what you said here, Hydro, I’m suddenly reminded about just how great Markets are at fixing things!
https://newrepublic.com/article/166358/disastrous-legacy-new-democrats
Behold, the wisdom of the Market! F’reem Ar’khett be praised!
Dear christ, Goum, it feels like arguing with an Objectivist when you say this nonsense
Did you read a single word I said? At all?
If the US prison system next year added two million prisoners, and killed 100,000 of them, would you say it got worse, better, or the same? Because right now you're arguing it's the same.
Considering that we have a user on these forums who actually lives in a totalitarian police state, and for whose well being several people on this board are truly concerned, could you please be less of a silly goose. All your comment tells me is that you have absolutely no clue what the terms "totalitarian" and "police state" actually mean (and that you are a silly goose).
- John Stuart Mill
No.
As for capitalists compromising for us to get the things we have now (IE a 5 day work week, an 8 hour work day) these were the result of very extensive and violent labor movements that have been papered over by history to encourage us to never try to make any efforts to get any more concessions. Most of the efforts of the state to fight against labor are either not taught or are actively taught incorrectly or have been made expressedly illegal.
Everything I've ever heard about how black people have to interact with the police sounds a lot like living in a police state, frankly. Except that they're probably more likely to end up dead in the US.
Edit: Probably getting off topic there. But there's plenty of areas in the US where the police are the state. It's not quite a dictatorship, but it's bad enough that it's really silly to be going at someone for pointing out the similarities.
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As if that’s meant as some great defense of the American system!
Someone sets you on fire with white phosphorous, is that particularly worse than if they’d just poured gasoline on you and lit a match to do the same? They’re both still setting you on fire! They’re both still brutalizing states whose interests are in your oppression rather than your liberation at the expense of their wealth, power and prestige!
It’s the lingering after effects of Cold War propaganda to make out the imperial rival as a great evil not to actually impugn them for their (and let us be clear, very real!) sins, but to create a sense of rivalry and competition, to engender a sense of jingoistic patriotism in the local populace that inoculates the privileged against the crimes of their own ruling class or the historic atrocities that built the foundation for their modern lives! It’s a set of blinders not to the evil of the oppressor across the sea, but to the oppressor among us wreaking his terrible wrath upon the oppressed, now hidden to your sides. It serves only to make you complacent to the injustice that happens around you, because you are overwhelmed by the great evil you’ve been directed towards, that you may not look upon the ones being committed directly around you.
“See how much worse they have it over there,” the man tells you, “You have so much more freedom here, so long, of course, as you are a fine, upright, patriotic American.” And he smiles. “But of course, why would you be anything but?”
But god help you, truly help you, should you not exist in any of the categories that “make” the “fine, upright, patriotic American.” Because then the hand of the oppressor will come down on you with just as much harshness and cruelty as the hand of any Soviet or Chinese Commisar, and just as them will they season your oppression, your torture, your eradication with the litany of culturally accepted, yet ultimately unjust, rationales for what a terrible person you were and why you deserved what happened to you.
Also the really weird part here is, I’m not even defending the Soviet Union here! I’ve repeatedly decried them as state capitalist and utilizing the label of communist as a kind of social pablum to justify the exploitation of its ruling class!
But somehow a bunch of people still want to fuckin’ step up and go “OH SO YOU THINK RUSSIA AND CHINA ARE SO HOT, HUH?”
And I’m like “No, that’s why I said their governments were and are propagandistic liars who aren’t ideologically communist in their actual execution of policy and societal structure!”
But somehow that still sets off the McCarthy Alarms.
Acknowledging reality is kind of the point of my posts. You are the one who started defending the Gulags by pretending they're totally just as bad as the US's prison system.
(especially as the USSR *also* had prisons on top of the gulags..)
Like this is the part of the post that triggered that long quote chain
to which you replied
so yeah no shit people are going to point out that yeah, they're kind of fucking different. You are defending the Soviet Union a hell of a lot more than the initial post was defending US capitalism. Rather than engaging with the point
EDIT:
An easy response to the first post there would have been "you don't get that shit if people really do it instead of coopting it like they did". I think a lot of people wouldn't *agree* with you still, but it's a take that at least makes sense
Because his entire point was “Listen, our stuff may be bad, but at least the state won’t ruin my life for no legitimate reason!”
When the United States has made an entire industry (literally! We made the carceral state into a for profit industry!) out of ruining lives, primarily black lives, for no legitimate reason!
Like, Zag’s fear here isn’t “oh no, the Soviet state’s woulda arrested me because they have a lot more prisoners!” It was the argument that somehow the soviet system was some how that much more capricious when it came to justifying what was an imprisonable crime! And it’s ridiculous to do that, when you live in the country that literally fucking developed law after law after law just to find new ways to send you into the carceral state because you were black or queer or any other form of being non-white and non-cishet!
It’s fucking ludicrous! And further more never even engages with the point I kept making: That the Soviet Union and China, as many scholars have argued, were not functionally communist states, but state capitalist!
The entire argument is based around “Well if you think the Soviet Union’s so great” when I don’t think the Soviet Union was great. I just don’t think we’re particularly better as a society, We just fucking arrange and prosecute our travesties differently. I think we’re both capitalist shitholes where the elite ruling class profit off the misery and suffering of the lower classes!
And you and I both know that wasn’t going to fly, and furthermore like I just said before this edit, ignores the fact that the point is bogus to begin with. It’s a simplistic pablum that dwells within the well cultivated American Imagination of how terrible the Soviet Union was as a means of creating an inaccurate distinction with regard to the systemic oppressions that have been foundational to American society, most of which we’re still struggling with today, and which we are on the threshold of seeing fully unleashed once again after barely over half a century of finally vaguely holding them in check. It’s trying to get to to see the evils of one society, focus exclusively on them, and ignore the parallels with the evils of your own society.
Like that’s the problem with Zag’s post! This isn’t some great defense of the Soviet Gulag, it’s pointing out that (general) you can’t go “well at least I’m not there, in the bad place where the evil and injustice was” when people are suffering massive injustice where you live! It just hasn’t hit you! It’s easier to say this shit when you’re insulated from it, but it doesn’t make that injustice any less real!
But hey, also, if you want a path to a socialist society better than either capitalist shithole? You want a suggestion of where to start? Start by opposing private ownership of the means of production. Start by opposing private ownership of housing. Demand that your work places function democratically, not just through the compromise of unionization but the out and out ownership by the worker, where power is accountable to the collective laborers who make up the business. Demand that collective housing be owned by the people who live there. Demand stronger workers rights, demand fair and equitable housing rights, demand the end of the carceral state and its attendant nightmare for-profit ghouls who enrich themselves off of millions of suffering souls.
You're arguing that this is some great defense of the American system
but this
is not a defense of the Soviet system? When your post goes out of it's way to minimize atrocity and the other poster did not?
Those all sound like terrible ideas to me frankly.
You literally suggested industrial sabotage as a response to the automation of the 90s. And when people were like “wow that is a terrible idea” you went off on how bad industrialization was.
What are we supposed to think when the words that you type say those things?
Sometime, long after the fact, and after the discussion has morphed, with more specific aspects being discussed you will walk back things and say that no one ever said it but yea, you said it. And we read it.
Ok so there was a problem and capitalist regulation fixed it… the point was that the market was used to find prices well… like. The thing that was being talked about…
Like. If you want to know what “capitalists” think capitalism is its a belief that markets can find prices well. Just as Lanz complains that the Soviet Union was not communist because it was “actually state capitalist”* the actual capitalists encompass a wide range of beliefs. Regulation is not “anti-capitalist”.
Probably the widest divide(in serious discussions, so not involving Ayn Rand type folks) is between first best and second best thinkers. First best thinkers are wrong, they believe that the best way to fix a market is to move it closer to the idealized form. Second best thinkers recognize that this does not always work and that introducing what would normally be an inefficiency can produce efficient results. (Edit) Vice taxes, minimum wages, and direct social spending/purchases are typical second best capitalist solutions. This has been the state of the discourse between actual capitalists for the last 90 ish years. Examine these policies and how they work, when they work, and why. (So they can be made better)
Cap and trade was a first(ish) best solution. A Republican solution to pollution. (At a time when Republicans still cared about things)
But it did work. The created market found prices. Sulfur dioxide output plummeted.
*it was not. At least not in the sense it was capitalism. While you can use that moniker if you want state capitalism isn’t capitalism as if there is any one tenet that unites capitalists it’s that central planning does not work. And the Soviet Union was absolutely centrally planned.
From where I stand, zag’s post minimizes the atrocities of the American system.
I think more what you actually want is to play “punch the tankie” and you decided you found the leftist to play the role for you
You’re doing that thing where the defining trait of capitalism versus any other system is the relationship between the market and the state, rather than the power hierarchies between ownership and labor
Which would be cool if people didn't constantly tried to defend those places just to dunk on the US. "Sure, the Soviet Union was every bit as imperialist as Tsarist Russia and inflicted some of the worst atrocities of colonialism in history to the rest of Eastern Europe*, but they were trying to save the world so is cool". The US has terrible healthcare? Fine! It doesn't give you the right to just constantly lie and whitewash the history of everywhere else.
*Which is particulary relevant right now for some reason.
See the thing is zagdrob's post admits the US system is shitty and then is fearful of something much worse replacing it.
You, on the other hand, refuse to admit that "worse" is a category that exists. Since you're now down to weird accusations rather than engaging I'll leave it there.
The status quo is not worse than the atrocities in question.
Welcome to 1936 I guess? Like. I don’t know how to respond to this. (Partially because I do not understand which aspect you’re responding to or why and for what purpose). Should I get to define what communism is for you? If you get to define what capitalism means?(and to be honest I am not defining what capitalism means I am describing the majority belief of capitalists for the past 80+ years, both in theory and in practice)
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Like I don't believe the problems the USSR had came about due to state communism I believe they came about due to the legacy of lack of education, lack of competent political culture, lack of equality etc. Because if you look at what happened after they dropped state communism; inequality, inefficiency, corruption, criminal behaviour, a complete collapse of political culture, it all happened there too.
I mean I'm an anarchist so I can spit on all besuited managerial dickheads regardless of what flavour of authoritarian they are, but I'd say that when you look at nations with deep problems, I mean, how many capitalist nations are essentially a complete disaster, or have been in the last 50-70 years? Most of them
Also it's definitely wild to see Americans talk about how great capitalism as a system is, when the US is wildly capitalist, and has vast resources, and has tens of millions of people living in conditions that are just absolutely horrifying, with no plan to sort that out, and a free market driving it to continue and expand.
If labor can organize and use its power to get what it deserves, if leftists and progressives and the left-leaning center can all decide and establish a better societal baseline of what's acceptable in terms of safety net and protections and wealth disparity, then the specifics of how we allocate resources and choose what to produce and distribute the value generated seem like things that can be worked out at our leisure without much suffering after the fact.
With weak labor and no such baseline, even a nominally socialist state will find ways to extract value from those it deems marginal for the benefit of those with power, even if the details of hierarchy and its enforcement change.
the point was establishing the pivotal role of socialism and socialist theory in establishing workers' rights. some folks took issue with communism, and needed to establish that communism is less desirable than capitalism.
See this post for a summary:
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I quite know what communism and capitalism are, as well as socialism.
The problem is, typically speaking, most Americans don’t particularly; we rely on inaccurate formations based in the market’s relationship to the applicable government of said society. But this isn’t really the case, otherwise you coudln’t have a state capitalist system, we’re capitalism purely, ast most Americans think, the operation of a market not centrally controlled or managed by teh state.
Capitalism is not this. Capitalism is an economic system defined by the ownership structure of private property and thus the relationship between the owners of that property and those who utilize it.
Now, before going any further, we should make a very important distinction; Private property and personal property. Often in American lay understanding, these two are conflated as one in the same, but this isn’t the case, not for economic discussions such as these. It’s why you’ll get ludicrous claims by right wingers suggesting that under a socialist system, you can’t own your own phone or toothbrush, or that a socialist system is the government coming along and taking everything you own to give away to so called moochers and lazy neerdowells.
No, Private Property is best conceptualized as those assets through which value may be extracted at scale, owned by a relative few, while personal property is, well, as the name implies, your personal belongings. A good way to think of this may be as follows: everything in your apartment is your personal property, but the apartment itself, to say nothing of the building, as currently structured is *private* property, owned by a third party that derives value not through the labor performed with the asset but by ownership of that asset. Likewise, as a worker in the Before Times where you worked in an office (or if you’re unlucky enough at the moment, to be put back in that virus ridden hellhole), perhaps you have your little cubicle full of knickknacks and such you’ve brought in from home to decorate your workstation and give it some semblance of personality. Those accoutrements are your personal property. But the computer? The chair? The desk, the building? Those are the private property of the company you work for, the leasing company for the building they themselves perhaps rent from, etc. etc. Despite the fact that you are the one doing the labor, you own none of it.
“But my company gives me a share in the company as part of my compensation package!”
Then you, hypothetical edge case that occurred to me as I wrote this, are a slight outlier, perhaps, but effectively, your share has little controlling power within the power hierarchy of your workplace. You have no voice, still operate at the whims of those who are above you in the hierarchy and have little recourse or ability to change things within it, as power is concentrated among a select few, most assuredly much more wealthy than you, owners who actually have a say in how your company is run. Despite, again, you actually being one of the collective workers who actually perform labor within the company, execute its business, etc. Such is the nature, after all of ownership: They own it and you, well, you don’t. Or at least no where ever near approaching enough.
Now, this structure can easily exist within government itself. Indeed, many nations have done this! All that need be done is have the government be the owner of the business, or more likely businesses in question! The power structures and your lack of ownership as a worker remain the same, the only difference is, well, we’ve changed whom the owner is: yet another powerful entity that has little to no accountability to you, the worker. And now, in this case, with the added bonus of the direct power of the state’s monopolization of violence should you get out of line (Zagrob’s fear of an angry commissar sending him to the gulag would go here).
So then, what, perchance, is socialism? If Government owning the means of production is still capitalist in nature, then what does it mean to be socialist?
Socialism exists then as a contrary to this structure of ownership and it’s attendant power hierarchies. If Capitalism is the practice of monopolizing ownership of the means of production to a select few, then socialism is the practice of expanding ownership to all involved with the means of production. It is the empowerment of the worker to self-manage, to have a real voice, to be able to practice self-determination (in so far as one may in any shared and collective society, anyway) within the context of their work.
If Capitalism says that your apartment building is owned by the individual landlord or leasing company, Socialism says that your apartment building belongs to you and your neighbors. If Capitalism says that your workplace is owned by a billionaire asshole, or a billionaire asshole and a bunch of wealthy shareholders who have a say in its operation while you get none, Socialism says that you share in the ownership of your business, in equal measure, with your co-workers, and that you the laborers determine its operation and direction instead of a group of people who don’t work, but extract value from the work you perform through their ownership of the means of production by which you do the work.
So then, what is Communism? Surely that has to be when the state owns everything, right?
Well, here’s a question: How do you reconcile that with the myriad schools of communist thought that are so anarchistic in nature that the final stage of communism is a stateless society?
Indeed, the key defining trait of Communism is a society where there is no private ownership, state, individual, conglomerate. It is an economic system where, like socialism, private property is abolished, but goes further than that, arguing that work and recompense be allotted via one’s capability and need, as well as dissolving class structures and, ultimately, the dissolution of the state itself (for example, Engles belief that the state would cease to serve a useful function once a socialist society had developed enough to no longer require coercive force to operate and cooperate).
But this is where things get trickier, because it turns out there’s no one single school of achieving communism, which is where so much of this confusion can come into play. For the purposes of this, we’ll go with the topic of Vanguardism, which what I think most folks here probably think of when they think of communism. Vanguardism is a revolutionary (or, technically, post-revolutionary) state where typically a single party controls the operation of the state. The Soviet system, for example, would be Vanguardist in nature. The job of the vanguard is, effectively, to overthrow the old, capitalist system, and stand athwart attempts to revert it while attempting to build a communist society.
Unfortunately, as we could see with the Soviet Union, and China, vanguardism has the drawback of being authoritarian in nature as a guard against counter-revolution through democratic systems. But it also means that when you get a new elite in place, and they decide they like to be the new elite power, you can’t really get them to let go of the reigns of power.
I am not, particularly, a fan of Vanguardism. Too much power concentrated into the hands of too few, too easily defeats the ultimate purpose of the reformation in the first place, easily transforms into (or, arguably, stalls out at) a State Capitalist system with the Vanguard as the new Capitalists.
In my own preference, I believe that at every step that the worker’s self-determination must be paramount, preferably through some form of democratic system to coordinate the collective. I’d say it’s maybe certain anarchistic tendencies to distrust the pooling of power in the hands of too few, or maybe having more of a syndicalist bent, but either way, I’d say that the important priorities of any socialist formation must be the empowerment of the worker while assuring that the members of collective society have equal say in their self-determination, while guarding against concentrating power in the hands of a few and thus making them less accountable to the collective.
Oh yeah, there’s like, a lot of scholarship on how Soviet Russia and China both pretty much inherited the power structures of their predecessors and essentially fell right back into the same roles and problems of the Tsarist state and Empire. It’s one of the reasons that I tend to be skeptical of the general “Communism’s to blame!” rationale. “New boss, same as the old boss” type shit.
In a similar way, America’s problems make a lot more sense when you look at it through the lens of our origin as a series of imperial colonies whose primary drive was the extraction of wealth, how our racism of today was birthed from the efforts of the colonial gentry to divide slave labor and free white labor from working together (see Bacon’s Rebellion) and to preserve ownership of a captive labor force (for example, in Protestant colonies*, profession of faith was grounds for emancipation, so the gentry needed a grounds for enslavement that could not be changed as easily as one’s faith; you could accept christ as savior far more easily, they realized, than you could change the color of your skin)
*I need to research this more, but Catholic colonies less so, but I am not sure why they didn’t practice this while the Protestant colonies did before the shift.
Come the fuck on. Not only does your description not match what happened, it's nonsensical. If my toddler makes a disaster out of her room, and I tell her form now on she can only have 5 toys out at a time, but she can choose those toys freely, her mess now being clean isn't some kind of magical success of the free toddler market. Seriously. Her willingly accepting the regulation system MIGHT be, but the results are not the results of the free toddler market. Regulation is LITERALLY the opposite of free capitalism.
I will give Republicans of the yesteryears credit for being better about the environment, but that's damning with faint praise at this point.
Sulfer Dioxide output plummeted because there was a fucking cap put on it, what else would it do? Rise when the federal government put a limit on it? What the cap and trade system did was make it palatable to capitalists. It gave them a way to pawn off the costs of their mitigation efforts, rather than being forced to deal with the consequences of their own actions they had been doing for decades.
That being said, this thread isn't really the best place for this discussion. If you want to continue it, please feel free to @ me in whichever appropriate thread we should use, and let's let labor have this one back.