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Odobenidae posted:*misrepresents someone's position every time they make a coherent argument* yeah it is pretty annoying when the communists in this thread misrepresent the positions of people wish it'd stop At least that weirdo who was unironically arguing for a return to racial segregation and being obtuse towards any discussion against it stopped posting
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Sep 2, 2016 00:02
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but... he just replied to my post... in this thread...
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Sep 2, 2016 00:26
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A second communist trumper has hit the forum thread, prepare to here more about how cyberstalking chris-chan is socially beneficial labour.
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Sep 2, 2016 01:16
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:I don't know a ton about the transitions in Czech or Poland, but from what little I do know:
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Sep 2, 2016 01:55
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Russia lost a lot of geopolitical power as well as having its politics internally compromised and its economy looted. It's not a surprise that the ensuing kleptocracy didn't go so hot compared to that of the place which cracked the seal in the first place by liberalizing.
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Sep 2, 2016 02:05
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The influence of centuries of German domination helped civilize the Czechs so their minds were better able to accept capitalism. The Russians meanwhile were most influenced by the Tartars so they were unable to adapt to capitalism.
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Sep 2, 2016 02:20
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:The Soviets didn't measure incomes and expenditures in blat, but rubles. A popular way for households to earn supplementary income was to grow and sell flowers for kopeks, not favors. quote:Yes, and things on the black market were also bought with money. By Alena V. Ledeneva  The black market you are talking about is a subset of of the consumer goods market, i.e flowers. Even the paper you linked estimated its worth at 5-90 billion out of an economy which had a gdp of 1.5-2 trillion in the 1980s. The problem is that this is a fairly small part of the actual economy and doesn't include poo poo like apartments or even medical care because those were state owned and you needed blat with the bureaucrat in charge to get the state to assign you a non-lovely apartment or move your mother to a better hospital. It might have led some Russians (how much % of them took part on a regular basis in those transactions?) to figure out how to deal with buying everyday consumer goods post-1991 but it doesn't prepare them to deal with the capital or labor markets. There's also the fact that even with the goods being sold on the black market for rubles the cost of production is often not a necessary component of the price: for instance morphine were sold on the black market by doctors but since the state is taking the lose you don't have to worry about how much it cost to produce. That's not a sustainable practice for businesses which has to pay for things to be produced. Incidentally: it does teach people how to steal better from the state so ummmm, welp come the 90s. quote:This is all, basically, an essentializing argument which blames Russians for their own failure of Liberal rule during Yeltsin's administration, which was all being advised by Americans. Typo fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Sep 2, 2016 |
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Sep 2, 2016 02:22
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Typo posted:The black market you are talking about is a subset of of the consumer goods market, i.e flowers. Even the paper you linked estimated its worth at 5-90 billion out of an economy which had a gdp of ~1.5 trillion in the 1980s. The problem is that this is a fairly small part of the actual economy and doesn't include poo poo like apartments or even medical care because those were state owned and you needed blat with the bureaucrat in charge to get the state to assign you a non-lovely apartment or move your mother to a better hospital. It might have led the average Russian to figure out how to deal with buying consumer goods post-1991 but it doesn't prepare them to deal with the capital or labor markets. idk, understanding the importance of connections and "who you know" seems pretty useful on a job hunt.
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Sep 2, 2016 02:44
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GunnerJ posted:idk, understanding the importance of connections and "who you know" seems pretty useful on a job hunt. Yes, granted though it's actually less important today than it was 15 years ago because the internet made information a lot more freely available
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Sep 2, 2016 02:45
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Typo posted:Yes, granted though it's actually less important today than it was 15 years ago because the internet made information a lot more freely available OK but I mean, if we're following a chain of logic that goes "Russians learned from living under socialism how to get what they needed by making the right connections with the right people and were therefore unequipped to navigate a market economy in the 1990s," this whole thing starts to look suspicious when you consider the labor market especially. Knowing the right people is still really really useful whether they right person is a bureaucrat who can get your mom in a better hospital or an employer who can enable you to get your mom in a better hospital. Not having had to look for a job doesn't seem like it would obscure the key insight of "know people who can get you want you need" whether that's a job or something else. I mean unless they were literally too loving dumb to understand the concept of "this person will give you money for work if you convince him" due to this being a completely esoteric mental task compared to "this person will give you things you want or need if you can convince him."
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Sep 2, 2016 02:53
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Typo posted:it doesn't prepare them to deal with the capital or labor markets. GunnerJ already covered the labor markets, but just how many Americans do you believe are prepared to deal with capital markets? http://www.ibtimes.com/market-mayhem-grips-investors-fewer-americans-have-stake-what-happens-wall-street-2067673 quote:One is more likely to encounter a daily tea drinker in the United States than someone with money invested in the stock market -- and that includes so-called nondirect investments like mutual funds held in 401(k) accounts. Even fewer Americans, about 14 percent, own individual stocks like Apple or Microsoft. About twice as many people own dogs or tablet computers. More smoke cigarettes than own individual shares in publicly traded companies. And of that 14 percent, not all of them are going to make good investments or even know how to read the market. That's why there's an entire field of specialization for managing capital. If all of a sudden everyone in the country was given vouchers which represented a share of a government enterprise, which was being sold off, they wouldn't know what to do with it. quote:Oh yes, the Russians failed in their reform process during Yeltsin era and the elites were to blame. The chaos of the 90s was not preordained. You've literally been arguing otherwise for pages now.
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Sep 2, 2016 03:50
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GunnerJ posted:OK but I mean, if we're following a chain of logic that goes "Russians learned from living under socialism how to get what they needed by making the right connections with the right people and were therefore unequipped to navigate a market economy in the 1990s," this whole thing starts to look suspicious when you consider the labor market especially. Knowing the right people is still really really useful whether they right person is a bureaucrat who can get your mom in a better hospital or an employer who can enable you to get your mom in a better hospital. Not having had to look for a job doesn't seem like it would obscure the key insight of "know people who can get you want you need" whether that's a job or something else. I mean unless they were literally too loving dumb to understand the concept of "this person will give you money for work if you convince him" due to this being a completely esoteric mental task compared to "this person will give you things you want or need if you can convince him." This is actually a pretty good question: if connections and networking is advantageous in a capitalist labor market, shouldn't it make transition to a capitalist labor market easier? The answer is that maybe, Ceteris Paribus, it does. But the Soviet labor market looked very different from a capitalist one. Each soviet firms were incentivized to hire as much as possible, even if there was nothing for the hires to do. And there was no bottom line because the state will always bail out state owned bureaus through transfer of wealth from productive sectors. The result is a massive misallocation of labor in which labor went to sectors which didn't need them and denied them to sectors which did need them, thus the proverb "they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work": because firms hired people they didn't need, overall productivity dropped. Maybe experience with networking helped some, but it would be overshadow by a larger change.
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Sep 2, 2016 04:14
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:
quote:You've literally been arguing otherwise for pages now.
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Sep 2, 2016 04:21
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You're wrong, because you haven't demonstrated at all that Russians didn't know how a market works. You refused to even demonstrate that you know what a market even is.
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Sep 2, 2016 04:26
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:You're wrong, because you haven't demonstrated at all that Russians didn't know how a market works. You refused to even demonstrate that you know what a market even is. you were actually a pretty interesting discussion partner for a couple of posts
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Sep 2, 2016 04:27
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All a Russian knows: cyka blat
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Sep 2, 2016 04:34
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:All a Russian knows: cyka blat Even as German bombers strafed Kiev and Sebastopol and as their troops crossed the borders, Stalin’s courtiers were still trying to bully away reality. Malenkov rang off and called Sebastopol to check the story. Timoshenko was not alone in his office: Mekhlis, “the Shark,” spent the night with the generals. Like Malenkov, he was determined that there would be no invasion that night. When the head of anti-aircraft artillery, Voronov, hurried in to report, Timoshenko was so nervous that he handed him a notebook and absurdly “told me to present my report in writing” so that if they were all arrested for treason, he would be responsible for his crimes. Mekhlis sidled up behind him and read over his shoulder to check that he was writing exactly what he had said. Then Mekhlis made him sign it. Timoshenko ordered anti-aircraft forces not to respond: Voronov realized “he did not believe the war had begun.” Timoshenko was called by the Deputy Commander of the Western Special Military District, Boldin, who frantically reported that the Germans were advancing. Timoshenko ordered him not to react. “What do you mean?” shouted Boldin. “Our troops are retreating, towns are in flames, people are dying…” “Joseph Vissarionovich believes this could be a provocation by some German generals.” Timoshenko’s instinct was to persuade someone else to break the news to Stalin. He asked Budyonny: “The Germans are bombing Sebastopol. Should I or shouldn’t I tell Stalin?” “Inform him immediately!” “You call him,” beseeched Timoshenko. “I’m afraid.” “No, you call him,” retorted Budyonny. “You’re Defence Commissar!” Finally, Budyonny agreed and started calling Kuntsevo. Timoshenko, who could not spread this task widely enough, ordered Zhukov to telephone Stalin too.
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Sep 2, 2016 04:39
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https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/770369952910106624 Hell yeah fam we did it. We've subverted the NFL.
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Sep 2, 2016 04:49
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Typo posted:This is actually a pretty good question: if connections and networking is advantageous in a capitalist labor market, shouldn't it make transition to a capitalist labor market easier? I'm not even asking that question because it doesn't have to make it easier. The claim I'm dealing with is that reliance on connections and networking supposedly makes it harder. quote:The answer is that maybe, Ceteris Paribus, it does. But the Soviet labor market looked very different from a capitalist one. Each soviet firms were incentivized to hire as much as possible, even if there was nothing for the hires to do. And there was no bottom line because the state will always bail out state owned bureaus through transfer of wealth from productive sectors. The result is a massive misallocation of labor in which labor went to sectors which didn't need them and denied them to sectors which did need them, thus the proverb "they pretend to pay us, we pretend to work": because firms hired people they didn't need, overall productivity dropped. Maybe experience with networking helped some, but it would be overshadow by a larger change. This is a disorienting shift in the argument, and it's not the first. I'm actually having a little trouble following your point now, so I'll recap the argument as I've seen you present it so that maybe you can help me straighten it out. The basic form of the argument is that former citizens of the USSR were simply unprepared for the change to a market economy and the use of money. Initially, this is because they legally weren't allowed to have markets mediated by money. This is, as you put it, "the baggage the Communist model of development." Rather, you initially said, they relied on "a state bureaucracy assigning" goods and services rather than a market. Thus, the troubles a newly-capitalist Russia faced in the 90s "was partially a function of" this ingrained ignorance. I quoted that, by the way, to point out that it's kind of an uninteresting claim because the bar it sets is low enough that the part it played could be so small as to be insignificant. Once someone mentioned black markets and the actual existence of money in the USSR, an interesting new development in the nature of the argument occurred. At that point, you had to acknowledge that markets mediated by money existed in spite of legal prohibitions against them. The transformation is that while citizens of the USSR did have money and markets, money wasn't as important as "connections with the right people and quid-pro-quos which left people awfully unprepared to deal with a system where private ownership and monetary exchanges were meaningful and prices adjusted." This is interesting for a subtle reason: initially, they relied on a state bureaucracy to "assign" goods and services. To me, this implies a general passivity to the working out of a central plan. That's a very different picture from the active and illicit leveraging of connections with politically powerful people to make things happen. (Incidentally, this is starting to sound like a very important skill for entrepreneurs in a capitalist economy with any kind of government to lobby for advantages.) My point is basically that this claim about the practice of getting what you need through connections doesn't have anything like the impact of the original formulation of the argument, which was that since citizens of the USSR were not allowed to participate in money-mediated markets and relied on central planning, they weren't prepared for capitalism. But once you granted that there were markets with money, in which you also admit citizens of the USSR may have learned "to figure out how to deal with buying everyday consumer goods," it was necessary to change passive drones in a central planning machine into canny favor-brokers and networkers, which is supposedly not helpful in the labor market. Which is absurd. These are in fact pretty goddamn transferable skills to job hunting. So now you're shaking things up again, asking about whether these skills should make a transition easier, which is irrelevant because the original contention was about factors that made the transition harder, and also suggesting (unless I'm misunderstanding you) that the nature of work in the USSR made Russians lovely employers/managers. But this has nothing to do with whether favor trading on a black market made Russians lovely job-hunters and shoppers or whether reliance on central planning and a lack of experience with money-mediated markets did the same. So I'm really not sure where you're going with this. Is there a definite claim or just a vague idea that communism conditioned people in any number of ways that made them poor economic actors in capitalism? Because it's not that this is implausible so much as that it looks to me less like some baggage of a particular system than a specific manifestation of a general pattern: sudden, large-scale changes in the socioeconomic structure of society are difficult to manage in ways that are beneficial to those experiencing them (a claim that applies also to, say, a socialist revolution). Also, how big a part does this chimera have to play in the transition function before we can dismiss any other factor?
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Sep 2, 2016 05:03
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I lost the meaning of this thread, so can Typo or whoever state what they believe because I can't tell if they're serious or shitposting
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Sep 2, 2016 22:06
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Now that fall is approaching, I am excited to get into the PSL in a big way.
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Sep 2, 2016 22:17
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Homework Explainer posted:when there aren't smug moron driveby posts and people are genuinely interested in what we have to say we DO make posts like that Buddy you're a communist and north korea/stalin apologist. You're like one of those jesus freaks wearing posters handing out pamphlets in front of the public venue. Those guys are thrilled when anyone engages with them for any reason. You should be too. I have zero respect for your position but am genuinely interested in understanding why a human adult (assumption) chooses to act like you do. I still assume it's post post modern upper middle class narcissist detachment from reality. But I still have more to learn and my daughter's future may depend on figuring out how to prevent you.
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Sep 3, 2016 00:50
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asdf32 posted:Buddy you're a communist and north korea/stalin apologist. You're like one of those jesus freaks wearing posters handing out pamphlets in front of the public venue. Those guys are thrilled when anyone engages with them for any reason. You should be too. well when you put it THAT unbelievably condescending and inaccurate way i can see no reason not to engage you on a web forum, as there is no other way for me to spend my time
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Sep 3, 2016 01:00
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Your daughter will be a communist when she grows up, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.
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Sep 3, 2016 01:04
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Your daughter will be a communist when she grows up, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. I've said before that some form of post scarcity socialism is a likely and possibly necessary scenario in my daughter's lifetime. But rather than ideological religion and a pathological attachment to violent historical figures that transformation is going to depend on a population that can respond cooly and rationally the problems in front of them.
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Sep 3, 2016 01:29
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I will be the commissar who works at your child's school. Hope she doesn't share any counter-revolutionary or bourgeois sentiments that she might pick up around the house.
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Sep 3, 2016 01:30
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Tbf we will probably all be communists when forced in line to be processed at Amazon's blood extraction facilities, but it'll probably be too late at that point.
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Sep 3, 2016 01:55
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asdf32 posted:I've said before that some form of post scarcity socialism is a likely and possibly necessary scenario in my daughter's lifetime. But rather than ideological religion and a pathological attachment to violent historical figures that transformation is going to depend on a population that can respond cooly and rationally the problems in front of them. As the oceans engulf our cities, diseases ravage our bodies, and masses of refugees arrive willing to fight to become a part of what is still a relatively privileged existence in the West, our economic masters will finely sit down and coolly and rationally determine that now is the time to implement FULL COMMUNISM.
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Sep 3, 2016 01:59
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Communism is the post-scarcity state. Socialisms are designed to deal with the immediate reality of scarcity.
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Sep 3, 2016 03:01
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Communism is the post-scarcity state. Socialisms are designed to deal with the immediate reality of scarcity. Lysenkoism
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Sep 3, 2016 03:31
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Al! posted:Lysenkoism Hell yeah, I loving love non-sequitors.
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Sep 3, 2016 03:38
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quote:40 percent of food in the United States today goes uneaten. This not only means that Americans are throwing out the equivalent of $165 billion each year, but also that the uneaten food ends up rotting in landfills as the single largest component of U.S. municipal solid waste where it accounts for a large portion of U.S. methane emissions. Reducing food losses by just 15 percent would be enough food to feed more than 25 million Americans every year at a time when one in six Americans lack a secure supply of food to their tables.
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Sep 3, 2016 03:39
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Atrocious Joe posted:Hell yeah fam we did it. We've subverted the NFL. Stop appropriating black british culture by saying fam
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Sep 3, 2016 18:00
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Chill out, fammo.
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Sep 3, 2016 19:27
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Atrocious Joe posted:https://twitter.com/DailyCaller/status/770369952910106624 Is his gf Henry Krinkle?
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Sep 4, 2016 05:51
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i see this got missed through all the other babby-level and factually incorrect """arguments""" but drat dude, do you just spout dumb poo poo to rile this thread up or are you incapable of any text analysis? for lurkers of this thread who want to know a bit more about the marxist analysis of the state: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1884/origin-family/index.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm belgend fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Sep 4, 2016 |
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Sep 4, 2016 21:06
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belgend posted:i see this got missed through all the other babby-level and factually incorrect """arguments""" but drat dude, do you just spout dumb poo poo to rile this thread up or are you incapable of any text analysis? that's kind of c-ham's thing generally. good links friend
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Sep 4, 2016 21:40
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belgend posted:i see this got missed through all the other babby-level and factually incorrect """arguments""" but drat dude, do you just spout dumb poo poo to rile this thread up or are you incapable of any text analysis? is that some marxists dot org there friend? very nice
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Sep 4, 2016 21:41
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until you read the collected works of lenin, stalin and mao don't even think of shitposting on the internet about my dead ideology u ignoramous
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Sep 4, 2016 21:43
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there's nothing stopping someone from making bad, ignorant posts besides the poster's own sense of shame or lack of self-awareness for the record my monitor switch has been permanently fused to "on" and i don't own a single mirror
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Sep 4, 2016 21:46
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