Badger of Basra posted:

Is Kerala the one that ships their workers to various gulf states as slave labor

Jack of Hearts posted:

Just as a general rule, when making an argument, one ought to anticipate the counterarguments one is likely to see, acknowledge them, and address them somehow. It makes the argument stronger, not weaker.

G.C. Furr III posted:

Badger of Basra posted:

Is Kerala the one that ships their workers to various gulf states as slave labor

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

It's fascinating how far the goal posts were moved from "communism isn't a dead ideology in the Global South" to, "oh yeah? Well FARC is giving up their war with the Colombian state, so what about that?" As if communism isn't real if there's not an active militant insurgency.

quote:

And anyway, going by your own standard there are two notable exceptions I can think of, which were the successful Maoist insurgency in Nepal - which has led a leftist government in Parliament ever since, and the ongoing Naxalite insurgency in India. The Indian communist parties are also organizing a general strike planned for September, which is expected to have 150 million participants.

Typo posted:

pretty much, revolutionary socialism is, well, revolutionary. By laying down arms and accepting the legitimacy of parliamentary democracy your movement stops being revolutionary and you eventually become what the French and Italian Communist parties turned into.

The naxalites are losing their war against the Indian state just like FARC was 5 years ago vs Columbia. Their area of control has shrunk significantly over the last 10 years

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Most communist parties accept the legitimacy of parliamentary democracy, because they have assurances that they won't be murdered for trying to organize workers and achieve socialist policies. You're very narrowly confining the definition of communism as an ideology, to an active militant struggle to take control of the state. It doesn't matter if particular militant struggles are defeated, because the ideology lives on in political struggle.

Typo posted:

right so basically you are describing a generic social democratic party

quote:

A few months ago Babchenko was upset to see his daughter, a 3rd grader at a Moscow school, marching in a semi-military uniform and singing patriotic songs at a school event.
“We see examples of obscurantism all over the place: Communists running around with Stalin flags, Orthodox priests attending state events; but I still did not expect the appointment of an Orthodox fanatic and a Stalinist as the minister of education and science.”
During a recent visit to Crimea, President Putin named Olga Vasilyeva to the post. She seemed to be a deeply religious bureaucrat who devoted her academic research to the patriotic role of the Russian Orthodox Church in Soviet times.

Vasilyeva is also known for defending the record of Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator notorious for executing political dissidents, including hundreds of thousands of Orthodox believers. (According to an analysis by Prof. Nikolai Yemelyanov at the Russian Academy of Science, Soviet security agencies killed as many as 500,000 Orthodox Christians.)
The shadow of new repression is the reason many Russian professionals are leaving the country today. The new trend inspired by the Kremlin is to label its critics “russophobes.”

Typo posted:

right so basically you are describing a generic social democratic party

The Kingfish posted:

I'm getting the feeling that you don't really understand what you are posting about.

Typo posted:

How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

Typo posted:

lol triggered

Typo posted:

How do you tell a communist? Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an anti-Communist? It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin.

The Kingfish posted:

"Nice meltdown" seems like something a modern Ronald Reagan would say to win a debate. lol

Karl Barks posted:

I enjoy this writer quite a bit, and thought this article was pretty interesting. it's discussing how capitalism could end up solving the socialist calculation problem, rendering itself obsolete. don't necessarily agree with him, but curious to hear what other people think

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-24/are-index-funds-communist

Atrocious Joe posted:

Communists accidentally irradiate their own countries. Capitalists purposely irradiate countries where they wage wars of aggression.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Even assuming that financial "science" can eventually resolve the socialist calculation problem, that won't make capitalism obsolete, because capitalism exists as a system which reinforces the control of private interests over capital through the political economy. You could implement a Market Socialist model to resolve the socialist calculation problem, and in that sense capitalism is already obsolete without any further algorithmic & processing developments.

quote:

The real issue is fundamentally a political one, not mechanistic.

Typo posted:

The problem is that market socialism presumably don't have a capitals market, consumer goods are subjected to real prices but capital goods/investments are not
assumptions like this is why communism keeps losing

The Kingfish posted:

I'm getting the feeling that you don't really understand what you are posting about.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Even assuming that financial "science" can eventually resolve the socialist calculation problem, that won't make capitalism obsolete, because capitalism exists as a system which reinforces the control of private interests over capital through the political economy. You could implement a Market Socialist model to resolve the socialist calculation problem, and in that sense capitalism is already obsolete without any further algorithmic & processing developments. The real issue is fundamentally a political one, not mechanistic.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Dead Cosmonaut posted:

It's why the Soviets were so far ahead of us in optimization.

The Kingfish posted:

Are you implying that the USSR created a sizable pseudo middle class capable of purchasing automobiles out of a backwater slave nation,

quote:

but instead of focusing on manufacturing cars and improving its economy, the USSR put its meager resources towards improving its overall standard of living?

The Kingfish posted:

"Nice meltdown" seems like something a modern Ronald Reagan would say to win a debate. lol

Typo posted:

Yes, Communism was, indeed, able to industrialize and urbanize the USSR much like how capitalism urbanized and industrialized Japan or the US or the UK. The problem is that once the initial gains from moving peasants to factories is done the command system is unable to improving efficiency and growth sputters and stagnates at a standard of living below that of analogous capitalist countries. Which is what started happening after the 1950s.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

And now the standard of living in most former Soviet Republics is even lower than it was during the 80s, after almost 3 decades of capitalism. Perhaps there's a lot more to the success of First World economies thhan the inherent virtues of private capital management, like say, Imperialism and Neocolonial systems of exploitation?

Typo posted:

OTOH china and Vietnam post-Communism have risen living standards by like 10x by exporting goods to the west, which probably falls under " Neocolonial systems of exploitation". In Europe, some non-sovet Communist countries have done fairly well post-1989 (Czech and Poland comes to mind immediately)

When Gorbachev was talking to Deng about reform and Deng suggested that the USSR decollectivize agriculture like China did for example Gorby basically said "that's impossible for us, we spent 70 years beating all the independence out of the peasantry".

One of the baggage the Communist model of development comes with is that people aren't allowed to have markets operated with money. The result is that the adult population have no idea how an open market functions after a generation or so. In China and many of the warsaw pact countries reform came within 25-30 years the last time a market existed and thus a substantial % of the adult population remembered how things worked and thus made transitioning a lot easier. In the USSR almost everyone who was alive the last time a market existed (NEP during the 1920s which was ~70 years ago by the 90s) was dead and the chaos of the 1990s was partially a function of 90% of everybody have no idea how things worked without a state bureaucracy assigning everything.

Homework Explainer posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVFUgYfLhZI

Typo posted:

OTOH china and Vietnam post-Communism have risen living standards by like 10x by exporting goods to the west, which probably falls under " Neocolonial systems of exploitation". In Europe, some non-sovet Communist countries have done fairly well post-1989 (Czech and Poland comes to mind immediately)

When Gorbachev was talking to Deng about reform and Deng suggested that the USSR decollectivize agriculture like China did for example Gorby basically said "that's impossible for us, we spent 70 years beating all the independence out of the peasantry".

One of the baggage the Communist model of development comes with is that people aren't allowed to have markets operated with money. The result is that the adult population have no idea how an open market functions after a generation or so. In China and many of the warsaw pact countries reform came within 25-30 years the last time a market existed and thus a substantial % of the adult population remembered how things worked and thus made transitioning a lot easier. In the USSR almost everyone who was alive the last time a market existed (NEP during the 1920s which was ~70 years ago by the 90s) was dead and the chaos of the 1990s was partially a function of 90% of everybody have no idea how things worked without a state bureaucracy assigning everything.