But THIS time, we'd get it right!
But THIS time, we'd get it right!
Curious about how this goes but not masochistic enough to enable comment notifications...
Hope some enjoy!
Comments
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And how is capitalism working? We never want to talk about the needless wars, deaths, dictators, and literal slavery sanctioned by capitalism. Capitalism has been the dominant system for some time now: it has had every opportunity to reform itself into a fair and equitable system. Instead it exploits the global south, prioritizes profits over people, and puts a paywall on necessities that we now mass produce-- forcing the working class to generate more profits for the wealthy. It is a barbaric, corrupt, hypocritical system that forces us to sell ourselves, by the year or by the hour.
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This feels like a post hoc fallacy. Capitalism is not the cause of those things, societies that organize into dominance hierarchies, regardless of economic organization, cause those things. Slavery, wars, dictators, barbarism, deaths, corruption, and hypocritical systems were present before and in absence of capitalism. The Soviet Union formed into a dominance hierarchy (bureaucrat class instead of capitalist class), and inevitably displayed the same attributes.
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No, it is not a post hoc fallacy. The claim is not simply that death and dictators occurred after capitalism rose to dominance. The claim is that the economic incentive of infinite profit explains why these events happened. Specific wars were fought in to protect the interests of multinational corporations; the CIA installed dictators (e.g., South America, Africa), in order to stop the spread of socialism; there are slave laborers mining minerals in the Congo so that Tim Cook can make another billion.
If you want to get philosophical, perhaps we could agree that it is a category error to say that an economic system of commodity production caused death and dictators in the technical sense of causation. It would be better to say that these events find their ground or explanation in the incentives of capitalism. But I doubt most people care about this distinction.
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So if we argue against hierarchies, we're still arguing against capitalism and still arguing for communism, just more of an anarchocommunism. Communism isn't just the countries that tried, just like capitalism isn't just the usa
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The USSR had plenty of issues, but they most certainly did not display the same attributes as capitalism.
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Marx never intended for communist revolutions to start with agrarian nations such as Russia and China. Marxism was built on the assumption of a nation that had spent centuries developing its capitalism, such as France or England.
The nations that attempted socialist revolutions were the ones that were liberating themselves from colonisation and imperialism that was performed for profit under capitalist and mercantilist systems.
Also, no large-scale modern society has ever been communist. Many have proclaimed themselves to be so, and nations like the USSR claimed themselves to stride towards it, but communism is fundamentally an ideology with an absence of the state.
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He modified his views later when speaking to Russian revolutionaries such as Vera Zasulich. He entertained the possibility of an agregarian society skipping over capitalism if, and only if, it was accompanied by a socialist revolution of capitalist societies.
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Marx envisioned seizing the means of production when that was a big industrial machine, an object which could be seized.
What would the “means of production” even be in a modern services economy? The workers themselves? Critical infrastructure?
Marx never intended his ideas for agrarianism, nor for modern services economies. You might conclude that the time for his ideas came and went, and those ideas never manifested as anything good during that time.
But they’ll be appealing fantasies forever.
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The idea is that all businesses are cooperative ones. Every worker is the owner of the business, being it an industry or a restaurant or a radio station or...
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Marx distinguishes between abstract and concrete labor in Capital Vol. 1. After developing his concepts using concrete labor, be returns to abstract labor in Volume 3. After all, they had scientist and teachers who created surplus value.
So what would be the means of production? Not the workers since they are the ones who uses the means to produce something of social value. The means of production are still made of instruments and subjects. Let's take teachers as the workers. They work to educate their students. The students are the subjects of labor. The instruments used to do this are textbooks, classrooms, desk, school yards and more.
As I answered in another comment, Marx was open to an agrarian to socialist revolution under specific conditions. He was cautious though.
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Marxism also treats women as property
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Yeah, that part was weird. Communal women was where I went "wait, this guy makes some good points, but maybe he doesn't have all the answers"
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But actual Marxist Communism has never existed in practice.
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Communism could never exist in practice. You need to be able to distribute political power so that any given person has exactly the same sociopolitical power as any other given person. And while we can absolutely level the playing field more than we do we can't ever get it that level without some magitech we haven't yet conceived.
...and then the technicians who understand the system will still have an advantage we can only hope they don't utilize.
Maybe in a participatory democracy run by supercomputer that has some super-amazing indexing so that everyone can set up default voting positions easily and then customize them as they go forward. It presumes they'll also get informed about the customizations they make so they consistently vote in their own best interests.
Until you can distribute power that evenly, you can't have communism. You can have command economics, but not communism.
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As much as tankies are imperialist shitheads, this entire post is just starting shit for no good reason. Fascists are killing people. Liberals abandoned pretenses of valuing popular politics over donors and democracy abroad for genocide enabling imperial interest. The only "socialist" states are major contributors to global capitalism and sliding deeper into fascist culture war bullshit like everywhere else on earth.
Ideology never fucking mattered. The Cold War era "horrors of communism" were caused by the boring old tactics of genocide and violence to strengthen the imperial core. The democracy that America brought the world was only for a small minority, while everyone else got dictators we trained and paid for. There is no "moral state" and the least bad one is based on circumstance, not the philosophy they tell you matters.
When hierarchy minded people gaze upon this nihilism, they decide they might as well join in on the collective rape of humanity. They decide to be the "strong men" who only see negative sum solutions where they have more power than the rest. They give up on peace and embrace brutality as the winning move; never wondering if maybe they're breaking themselves as they break other people to keep some king atop his throne. And that's assuming they're on the winning side in the war of the empires; that the fighting never comes home.
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Maybe making the rich richer will work this time
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Communism is young. At this point in capitalism's history, it was all colonization, genocide, and slavery. Apples to apples, I'd rather live in the Soviet Union under Stalin than a South Asian under the Dutch East India company.
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Not to mention that many capitalists nations had the benefit of established industry whereas the Russians and Chinese had to transition from an agrarian society into socialism.
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Soviet Union was a colonial state. North Asia (also known as Siberia) were its colonies and continue to be colonized by modern day Russia
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I'd rather live in the Soviet Union under Stalin than a South Asian under the Dutch East India company.
Congrats this is the dumbest and least useful take I’ve ever seen on the subject. I can’t argue with it, really. It’s so absurd I’m speechless.
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Why is it absurd
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There is a whole party of communists right across from my room rn, and I have been wondering the whole time I've been here what kind of communists they really are. They are taking donations for Ukraine, so 🤷♂️
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Show me the country that attempted communism and I'll point out why it wasn't communism.
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My uncle Angus is a true Scotsman
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No country attempted comunism. Communism is a type of socirty, not a regime stance. Various countries attempted socialism, with varying degrees of success. The same thing can be said for capitalism. How many capitalist countries do you see succeeded? Because if I'm not mistaken, no capitalist country that "succeded" did it without exploiting other countries. Although, to be fair, it is more easy for the later to suceed, since it is not designed to make a life worth living, just to make money for very few hands.
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Exactly. “That wasn’t really communism!”
But then communism fans have another problem. Then they’re advocating for a system that’s never been tested, never succeeded anywhere, and which can’t even really be described in much detail because we have no working examples to look to.
But it’s still the solution! Capitalism is the fantasy! LOL
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It feels like "communist" can mean a lot of things (or many of those things (or nothing at all?)) depending on who says it. Additional clarification is required! If an old colonizer is referring to people as "pagans" that doesn't really convey much about the pagans in question.
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The struggle is not with the intent to successfully achieve post-scarcity communism, but to get as close as we possibly can, and once we get past efforts by the elite to sabotage those efforts, we can get pretty far (and have done so).
Think similarly to the objective to eliminate all petty crime in a society. You may never succeed, but you can reduce crime so that the rates are the lowest ever, and then go lower, and so on.
It's not all that hard. We already have (or had -- we're in regime change now) socialist programs that target low-income demographics (e.g. SNAP) and we have socialist programs that provide for everyone (e.g. CDC) and socialist programs that provide for general use (e.g. the NHTSA). We have libraries, the post office, the space program, and so on.
Communism happens by extending this communal infrastructure as far and wide as possible without privatizing it (the way George W. Bush did with Social Security pharma coverage), up to and including things like food and home production, mass transit and so on.
We've seen the Soviet Union fail to make communism work before corruption (and sabotage by the elites) overran their infrastructure. Similar we've seen the US fail to make democracy work before corruption (and sabotage by elites) overran the elections.
We try, try, again until we get over that damn hill.
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Replace the word "communists" with "capitalists", and the joke works every bit as well.
My own views are a bit idiosyncratic, but I don't think capitalism has ever existed as a real thing in practice. The framework of ideas of what it's ostensibly supposed to be has never matched any real existing system, and I see communism in the same way (albeit at least in the case of communism they explicitly state that a system must be socialist first before evolving to their ideal endpoint).
But whatever you want to call the prevailing system that does exist, it needs to go, and it should be perfectly clear that the framework of capitalism as a template is long overdue to be scrapped. How many times does an idea have to fail before everyone recognizes it's time to move on?
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but I don't think capitalism has ever existed as a real thing in practice
What an absurd claim. Stop fooling yourself. We are living in the "best" form of capitalism. This is the end game for capitalism. It always has been.
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Steel-manning the argument, there is the notion that we could create a functional well-regulated capitalist society that is robust against capture by companies and elites. The problems we haven't solved are twofold:
One, company officials will do what they want rather than what maximizes profit, usually because the shareholders and watchdogs don't always know what maximizes profit in the long term, so they can't demand upper management to do that.
This is why we still have crunching in media development. This it's why we have poor treatment of employees generally. (It's established by data now that crunching doesn't speed the way to meeting deadlines, and well-treated workers produce more value at a rate that exceeds the cost of treating them well in contrast to treating them poorly. Companies treat them like shit anyway.) This is also why we have a lot of bullshit jobs which are office clerks being used and treated more as courtiers and garden hermits than office staff.
And two is that once government is partially captured, it always moves towards getting more captured and serving companies over the public. This is the fundamental failure in the system that Marx defines in Das Kapital.
So far we've not figured out a way to counter these properties of capitalism as practiced worldwide. Should we ever, then regulated capitalism will be a viable economic model, but not yet. This isn't to say a solution doesn't exist, only we haven't found it yet.
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Capitalism is based. Democracy is based. Government is based. Regulation is based. Liberalism is based. Diversity is based.
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Capitalism has caused more deaths by far
The main issue with these online communism vs capitalism debates is that people seem to always take the most extremist position of each ideology.
Marx was in favor of being paid for your hard work, and Adam Smith hated monopolies and the accumulation of wealth.
We can both agree that we hate oligarchs and dictators and find a common ground in between.
I really like this take. I pray it's the attitude we adopt for the midterms.
I wish it were that easy, but how do you find a common ground with a group that sucks Putin's dick and genuinely believes that censorship is a good thing? Can't even agree with them on the most universally agreeable concept that both are awful.
Censorship / free speech is hard to get right, especially in the online world.
I'm for an individual standing on a pulpit and expressing their views, so long as they can be held to account. If they put the lives of others at risk, spread dangerous lies or harrass others unjustly, and there is legal recourse through an independent legal system(s) .. no problem, because there are checks and balances. Many countries have a healthy foundation to support free speech.
OTOH, I am for restricting mis/dis-information campaigns by governments (also my own), corporations, special interest groups, and billionaires. We know it's possible to effectively manipulate people and it's really just another form of psychological warfare. The challenge is how to police such things (and when/what/how to educate/censor/fine/ban), with so much money and influence working against it ... all without infringing on citizen's rights.
Shit, we can't even get like 30% to agree with literal objective reality.
Everything from AI bubbles to private equity to healthcare issues isn't coming from some version of capitalism that leftists only have in their heads. It's the system we have right in front of us.
Yes. I never said oligarchy was a positive thing.
All the capitalism haters around here kill me. Ahem.
What you are experiencing is not capitalism, it is oligarchy.
Always get downvoted, never got a single answer: Tell me about your economic system where the money doesn't flow to the top.
Is oligarchy not the logical result of capitalism with inadequate restraint?
Capitalism is inherently unsustainable. It's chasing infinite growth that cannot continue on finite resources.
Yes and the US is much more socialist than the pure capitalist hell people claim it to be, while Europe’s great social democracies still run on capitalism.
There’s NO exemplar of pure capitalism or pure socialism to point to. Anything worth having is a blend of the two, and 99.99% of what is needed on this topic is to figure out how to move the US from 12% socialist to 18% socialist, while Europe contends with how it’s going to pay for 22% socialism.
Any actually helpful words on that? Anybody?! … Back to arguing about ridiculous ideals then.
I think it's a little funny that you're arguing for percentages while claiming we already have that and look how great that is.
A key element that makes it socialism is worker ownership of the means of production, we don't have close to that in any of the countries you're talking about. Social programs are not socialism