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Is Communism good? This poll is closed. |
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| No |
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asdf32 posted:What if they don't for cultural reasons? Neither of these scenarios are based on an assumption about human nature either, but thank you for killing your own dumbshit argument due to sheer contrarianism.
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Mar 30, 2017 19:29
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asdf32 posted:What if they don't for cultural reasons? Where have cultural factors changed the functioning of capitalism? Capitalism is pervasive throughout all societies, a corporation from Paraguay can start trading in Thailand and find little to no obstacles in doing so. If the equilibrium of optimal economic choices is displaced by regulations, businesses will flock to a new equilibrium. THat is not rocket science. We are still talking about aggregate behavior, not about individual character traits.
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Mar 30, 2017 19:29
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The communism we got in the 20th century was a disaster, but I believe that was due to it being part of the Bolshevik tradition. Since the Bolsheviks and their successors managed to establish the first major communist state (which is an oxymoron!), it makes sense that they're promote states like them and other revolutionaries would model themselves after what works. Thus, syndicalism, mutualism, market socialism, et al never got their chance to work. Bolshevism is part of the authoritarian tradition of "absolute power corrupts absolutely", and my belief (which you're free to completely disregard since I'm wrong about just about everything) is that authoritarianism is like the 'dominant allele' of human social/economic production. You can't have authoritarian government and an libertarian/democratic economic system (or vice versa). Sooner or later, both become authoritarian. Hence why anarcho-capitalism isn't going to work and why Chavismo and Titoism collapsed so spectacularly. If you have a democratic government and economic system, you're much more likely to see success.
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Mar 30, 2017 19:33
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rudatron posted:The labor theory of value isn't exclusive with marginal theory, in fact most every single criticism leveled at the ltv can be leveled against marginal theory. Most? And what is marginal theory exactly? price equal marginal cost? If that is the level of Marxist theory, then it is dead. rudatron posted:Also marxist theory as a whole isn't inconsistent, and i'm going to need proof from you of that claim of yours. Read any book on the matter? I like Schumpeter but take your pick. rudatron posted:Claims of a 'religion following' is also nothing but ideological propaganda. Even in it's heyday, marx was treated as a major scientific figure of the marxist theory, not a prophet. Saying that marxism is 'religious' is based on absolutely nothing, and the only reason the accusation is leveled is pure ideology. Well if you had read my post you would know that claims of religion are leveled not against Marx's contemporaries, that is when he actually was inline with the science, but people today. I am not going to rewrite my argument but your point is none here. steinrokkan posted:Do people who claim Marx is a prophet of the radical left not realize that during his lifetime, Marx was only one of many competing socialist theorists and activists, engaged in a perpetual struggle to defend himself against intellectual opposition on the left as well as finding it hard to make any headway with leftist politicians of his day? So? What does this have to do with his position now? His theories on concrete communist institutions are just as questionable now as they were then, but they are not questioned anymore, are they? Which contemporary of Marx has such as following, and which contemporary has its own industry trying to revive and reinterpret his contributions? rudatron posted:The USSR didn't fall because of a clerical error, if fell because people lost faith in the system. Central planning as a method worked continuously for ~60 years. The fall occurred when people stopped believing it could maintain competitiveness with the West. It stopped because states like the GDR were bankrupt ten years before their fall. And USSR was based on sucking dry its surrounding neighbours. rudatron posted:But there's plenty of room for improvement. A belief that a planned system can do no better than what the USSR achieved, no matter what other variables you changed, has no empirical basis. That's the point though. It WOULD be interesting to think about central planning in a scientific context. We know much better WHY the USSR planned economy did not work out today, just as we know that p=mc is not true. But who would do the research? Social scientists are often Marxists. Since with introduction of communism, according to Marx, social issues and incentives literally disappear from the earth (see my effortquotes above), Marxists do not actually research anything (new). Sociologists and political scientists currently do not have the analytic chops and interest to think about centralized versus decentralized allocation mechanisms. This exact topic is of course a big issue in economics, and is researched quite deeply in terms of market microstructure, mechanism design, auction theory and somesuch. Sadly, there is no audience for grand theories in political economics at the moment. OwlFancier posted:Because megacorporations aren't a thing. OwlFancier posted:I mean sure there are companies with employees numbering several times the population of iceland that somehow don't operate on some kind of per-building feudal system but central planning clearly cannot work on a national level. Megacorps are actually built on a spectrum from market to hierarchy and there are reasons for that. Could I interest you in a throughout analysis of the supplier network setup for Daimler company? It's based on Theory of the Firm and New Institutional Economics, I know this because I have met the guy who did it, as alumni, at a presentation about this exact topic at my school of which the institute is researching exactly when markets are more or less efficient or better at X. Like, loads of people doing just that. So I could enlighten you on that but since every discourse here is dumb as hell and non-Marxist effortposts are trolled, you can research it yourself. So is it conceivable some parts of the economy could be planned? Of course, economic theory 100% supports this idea. But again, this simplistic argument "lol there's big companies, so we can have communism" is extremely dumb. And this intellectual level of the left is thanks to utopian, marxist ideology. Let me remind you, Marx was an actual scientists who engaged with the state-of-the-art research of his area. Leftists are ignorant about it and talk about stuff like "Marginal Cost Theory" and "Neoclassical Economics", things which don't even exist except in self-managed categories of the left. Which is why the left is dead or dying. rudatron posted:The debate isn't over, and contemporary economists like Piketty are essentially having to rediscover Marx. bullshit. You are a person who has not read Piketty, I take it? rudatron posted:I'll agree it's never a good idea to idealize people, but ideas can stick, and the idea that capitalism itself produces inequality, rather than merely being subject to it, matches what we have in the real world. Marx model is refuted by reality, from his price theory to his conclusions on profits. If a model is wrong, it is wrong. You can not argue a logic point from false premises. That is why it is dead, even if people find ideas in it. rudatron posted:The fantasy of capitalism as a pure meritocracy is nothing but self-serving Literally no one believes this strawman but you. White Rock posted:Holy poo poo! Cuba sure is doing better since the market reforms, and social democrats have nothing to do with communism. Weird BIAS posted:Wow that sounds like nothing of the Marx I read. Can you source where he says that or a commentator who drew those conclusions? Oh come the gently caress on Piketty==Marx yeah lol steinrokkan posted:Interesting you should say that, seeing as it has been radical capitalist apologists who tend to make most confident judgments about human nature (while opposing empiricism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_School#Fundamental_tenets), Congrats, Austrians are as much of a joke as Marxists in a scientific sense. WE agreeeeeeeee steinrokkan posted:while non-authoritarian socialism trends towards an uncertain vision of society that is progressively managed in a deliberative fashion rather than set in stone based on a grand theory of the individual human nature. Venezuelan socialist after seizing a bakery literally "We are not perfect, but we will figure it out as we go along". I am serious, check the thread. Venezuela is exactly the thing that happens when you "wing it" as a political economic system. It's not exogenous, it's not surprising, it's just incentives. Wow. So deep. Cerebral Bore posted:Marx does not ascribe the aggregate behaviour of capitalists to human nature, but rather to material necessity brought on by the inherent logic of capitalist economy. yeah he also requires subsistence wages and labor cost price transformation and a uniform rate of profit which declines and a consistency between labor value prices of actual labor which he can not generate in his model, all of which are wrong, which is why he is wrong, and why everyone arguing solely on the basis of his model is wrong and on top of that just as much an idiot as an Austrian, scientifically speaking. Well, it would be time for a new theory which is actually not wrong, right? Well let's look at the intellectual output of left wing econ in the past 50 years. Nothing? poo poo let's try to revive Marx again. Hey, I the transformation problem is not a problem because... look at this accounting matrix. loving disgrace to Marx' memory actually Haramstufe Rot fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Mar 30, 2017 |
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Mar 30, 2017 19:34
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The first Marxists who discovers that centralized mechanisms can actually do better in some cases is gonna become a loving superstar. So many verbal theories and case studies to write. Now if only they could read econ journals
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Mar 30, 2017 19:38
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wateroverfire posted:And that's why the proletariat is so much poorer today than it was two centuries ago and capitalism has collapsed. I mean there might have been a pretty big thing that happened in the early and middle 20th century that made governments think that maybe they needed to change their governing approach.
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Mar 30, 2017 19:45
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caps on caps on caps posted:Well, it would be time for a new theory which is actually not wrong, right? Just because you're ignorant of it doesn't mean that no further work within Marxist economics has taken place since Marx. People like Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran were adressing your list of problems over half a century ago, and in addition you've got a whole bunch of japanese Marxist economists like Okishio who have some pretty solid refinements of Marx. Problem is, these threads never get that far because you have to explain babby's first Marx to a buncha bad-faith morons. caps on caps on caps posted:The first Marxists who discovers that centralized mechanisms can actually do better in some cases is gonna become a loving superstar. So many verbal theories and case studies to write. Now if only they could read econ journals I sometimes have to read orthodox econ journals, but I prefer not to since I've got real science to do.
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Mar 30, 2017 20:17
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i don't know about theoretical foundations of marx but africa did pretty poorly 1960 onwards with self professed marxist governments and now that a lot of them liberalised around 20 years ago they've done a lot better so that must say something about marxism
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Mar 30, 2017 20:21
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Bulgogi Hoagie posted:i don't know about theoretical foundations of marx but africa did pretty poorly 1960 onwards with self professed marxist governments and now that a lot of them liberalised around 20 years ago they've done a lot better so that must say something about marxism Economic growth in Subsaharan Africa was more or less zero while African governments held to the Washington Consensus, as opposed to the 3-4% annually during the non-liberal period immediately after decolonization, and retreating from full liberalization in the 2000s seems far more correlated to recent economic growth than a hypothetical decades-long lag time for the free market to work. In addition, no country that has adopted fully liberal economic policies has seen substantial economic growth. Even fairly liberal Hong Kong and Singapore retained state control of massive sectors of the economy, among other departures from liberalism.
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Mar 30, 2017 20:32
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Bulgogi Hoagie posted:i don't know about theoretical foundations of marx but africa did pretty poorly 1960 onwards with self professed marxist governments and now that a lot of them liberalised around 20 years ago they've done a lot better so that must say something about marxism ahahhahahah yes keep disproving ideology with examples. Also the french revolution proved that democracy is unsustainable. caps on caps on caps posted:
In a spectrum between "full command economy" to "laissez faire, private fire departments", they've pretty far in the command direction.
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Mar 30, 2017 21:13
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Cerebral Bore posted:Just because you're ignorant of it doesn't mean that no further work within Marxist economics has taken place since Marx. People like Paul Sweezy and Paul Baran were adressing your list of problems over half a century ago, and in addition you've got a whole bunch of japanese Marxist economists like Okishio who have some pretty solid refinements of Marx. the problem is you can't because addressing the old paradigm is not the same as progress which is why Marxist econ has zero impact, while Piketty is making big bucks galore (hint: nothing to do with ideology. PSE is heterodox and red as gently caress) Marxism is dead and good thing it is Cerebral Bore posted:I sometimes have to read orthodox econ journals, but I prefer not to since I've got real science to do. this is why leftism is dying its u White Rock posted:I think most social democrats, at least of the old sort would disagree, since most of their party programs until the 90's had "work toward establishing a socialist state" as a major point until they all went the way of the dung pile that is "third way socialism". isn't one of the largest social democratic parties the SPD? They don't seem to fit your framework like at all which parties do you mean concretely? Haramstufe Rot fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Mar 30, 2017 |
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Mar 30, 2017 21:24
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caps on caps on caps posted:the problem is you can't because addressing the old paradigm is not the same as progress So you don't actually know poo poo about Marxist economics fresher than Marx himself while pontificating on the subject, and yet you try to call others intellectully shallow?  caps on caps on caps posted:this is why leftism is dying Truly some thrilling intellectual prowess on display right here.
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Mar 30, 2017 21:44
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marxism is the poison that is destroying intellectualism and any chances it will take root in the wider population of the world
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Mar 30, 2017 21:56
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Yeah, it's marxism, and not the crippling, oppressive centrist attitude of you cant change anything, leave thinking to your betters and occupy yourselves with being good consumers.
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Mar 30, 2017 22:06
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Bulgogi Hoagie posted:marxism is the poison that is destroying intellectualism and any chances it will take root in the wider population of the world Are you ever going to get around to your epic thread about how trans people are insane or are you just gonna keep regurgitating posts like these?
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Mar 30, 2017 22:09
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steinrokkan posted:Yeah, it's marxism, and not the crippling, oppressive centrist attitude of you cant change anything, leave thinking to your betters and occupy yourselves with being good consumers. thats not limited to intellectualism though
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Mar 30, 2017 22:10
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Wait, now I'm confused, is Marxism supposed to be the irrelevant dead ideology or the insiduous conspiracy that secretly runs the world here?
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Mar 30, 2017 22:14
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Cerebral Bore posted:Wait, now I'm confused, is Marxism supposed to be the irrelevant dead ideology or the insiduous conspiracy that secretly runs the world here? where is this mythical planet you live on where self professed intellectuals run the world lol
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Mar 30, 2017 22:17
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Does the poster "Bulgogi Hoagie" molest farm animals, or not? What can the free market tell us about the effects of his sexual assaults on the price of mutton?
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Mar 30, 2017 22:18
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Bulgogi Hoagie posted:where is this mythical planet you live on where self professed intellectuals run the world lol Hey buddy, I just want to know which conspiracy theory we're running with here.
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Mar 30, 2017 22:23
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Cerebral Bore posted:Hey buddy, I just want to know which conspiracy theory we're running with here. it's the one where brainiac fives weak-rear end burns are actually ghostwritten by a rural nk farmer in a kolkhoz
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Mar 30, 2017 22:25
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caps on caps on caps posted:
well for one... Twenty seconds on wikipedia yeilds: posted:The SPD was established as a Marxist party in 1875. However, the SPD underwent a major shift in policies reflected in the differences between the Heidelberg Program of 1925, which "called for the transformation of the capitalist system of private ownership of the means of production to social ownership", Take Swedish Social Democrats, or Labour in UK which both had bringing about a socialist state as a stated party goal, but which was removed in the latest two decades. Social Democrats in Sweden for example has serious suggestions to bring about public ownership of companies, it was however rejected: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_funds caps on caps on caps posted:
You seem to favor leftism, yet have a stiffy for opposing marxism, what is your ideology, pray tell? A capitalist with a progressive face? "I stand with her"?
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Mar 30, 2017 22:33
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Funny how communism is "dead" when globalist capitalism is on the retreat all across the western world.
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Mar 31, 2017 00:46
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Cerebral Bore posted:So you don't actually know poo poo about Marxist economics fresher than Marx himself while pontificating on the subject, and yet you try to call others intellectully shallow? This isn't really a thing. Labor Theory of Value is historically interesting, but isn't seriously used in modern econ. If you think I'm wrong, show me the "Marxist Economics" research that's actually happening. Since anyone can write a book, let's talk papers that have been published in a top-40 journal in the last 20 years. If "Marxist Economics" is actually a thing, there should be a whole bunch of LTV-related papers to pick from. E: Just to be clear, I'm sure Google Scholar will find "Marx" in some papers. He's mentioned. I'm looking for a paper that uses LTV to answer a question that modern economists are actually working on. falcon2424 fucked around with this message at 01:07 on Mar 31, 2017 |
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Mar 31, 2017 01:04
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I'm not sure how Marxian economics being fringe in a capitalist society is meant to prove their objective irrelevance, unless economists have deluded themselves into thinking they're genuinely objective thinkers.
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Mar 31, 2017 01:09
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Brainiac Five posted:I'm not sure how Marxian economics being fringe in a capitalist society is meant to prove their objective irrelevance, unless economists have deluded themselves into thinking they're genuinely objective thinkers. Who's talking about "capitalist society"? I'm asking about academics. Academics are all about the esoteric fringe.
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Mar 31, 2017 01:13
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falcon2424 posted:Who's talking about "capitalist society"? I'm asking about academics. So, what, did books women wrote suddenly become worthy of interest in the 70s, then? Otherwise there surely would have been women's studies departments before that point.
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Mar 31, 2017 01:20
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There's a reason economists, even academics, only stick to a specific prescribed set of ideological parameters. http://evonomics.com/ruthless-network-super-rich-ideologues-killed-choice-destroyed-peoples-faith-politics/
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Mar 31, 2017 01:26
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Brainiac Five posted:I'm not sure how Marxian economics being fringe in a capitalist society is meant to prove their objective irrelevance, unless economists have deluded themselves into thinking they're genuinely objective thinkers. It's a famous critique of capitalism. If it was good it would highly useful not just to academics but to capitalist themselves. steinrokkan posted:No, it takes assumption about the system. Individual capitalists can give up the cycle, but in the aggregate they will be replaced by others because the mechanics of the system promote actors following one pattern of behavior to positions of power. Why are you sure capitalists won't collude to prevent catastrophe? Or that democratic checks on power can't hold it balance.The only way to be sure that capitalism leads to marxist collapse under every scenario in any culture is if that specific behavior is baked into human nature.
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Mar 31, 2017 03:49
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Or that sufficient numbers of capitalists are willing to pursue destructive methods to enhance their own power under the belief that they won't incur resistance from the workers. Why assume perfect knowledge on the part of the capitalists? If they had perfect knowledge then we wouldn't have recessions.
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Mar 31, 2017 03:51
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Is this hallucination about the "retreat of capitalism across the western world" a testable hypothesis? Like, would right wing governments in the UK and US and surging right wing nationalist movement across europe be evidence it was true or evidence it wasn't true?
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Mar 31, 2017 04:57
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hakimashou posted:Is this hallucination about the "retreat of capitalism across the western world" a testable hypothesis? The right like the left is a conglomeration of very different people. There are plenty of unionists and what a nerd would probably call socialists (though they don't realise they are for state controlled wealth distribution) that are firmly affixed in the right with regards to race and social issues. I am left wing, but I also get behind coal power as well as mass animal farming because that poo poo creates jobs and will keep doing so until there is a majority shift in perspective.
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Mar 31, 2017 05:44
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asdf32 posted:Why are you sure capitalists won't collude to prevent catastrophe? Or that democratic checks on power can't hold it balance.The only way to be sure that capitalism leads to marxist collapse under every scenario in any culture is if that specific behavior is baked into human nature. In Marxist theory, and particular in Engels, that's called the state. Again, it's not dependent on the ethical motivations of individuals or even on actions of capitalists in the economic system, but on having a superstructure to the raw economic system which tries to counteract the material impetus to contradiction and crisis inherent in capitalism. Capitalists still act as one would expect them, but they have delegated - not through deliberate individual decisions, but rather through historical processes of dialectical nature - some regulatory powers to a different, non-market actor because they recognize their inability to overcome the structural issues of free market from the inside. steinrokkan fucked around with this message at 07:46 on Mar 31, 2017 |
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Mar 31, 2017 07:43
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the SPD isn't social democratic btw, ever since Schröder they are traitors to their own cause 
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Mar 31, 2017 09:40
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falcon2424 posted:This isn't really a thing. Labor Theory of Value is historically interesting, but isn't seriously used in modern econ. If you think I'm wrong, show me the "Marxist Economics" research that's actually happening. It's because orthodox econ, despite its pretense of being on the same level as the natural sciences, is a super politicized subject. While there is some good work that gets done regardless, it has to fall within the acceptable ideological spectrum to be considered. Also if you have a problem with the law of value, you might want to explain exactly what that is rather than just toss out the term. falcon2424 posted:Who's talking about "capitalist society"? I'm asking about academics. This is wrong. Academics at the top level are mostly about the desire for personal fame with a larger or smaller side dish of intellectual curiosity. This is usually not a bad combo for motivating people, but unfortunately orthodox econ has a shortcut to fame and fortune which is saying things that very rich people want to hear. Goa Tse-tung posted:the SPD isn't social democratic btw, ever since Fixed that for you.
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Mar 31, 2017 10:08
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Goa Tse-tung posted:the SPD isn't social democratic btw, ever since Schröder they are traitors to their own cause Man, gently caress third way socialism.
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Mar 31, 2017 12:11
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Cerebral Bore posted:It's because orthodox econ, despite its pretense of being on the same level as the natural sciences, is a super politicized subject. While there is some good work that gets done regardless, it has to fall within the acceptable ideological spectrum to be considered. Of course this reads like an idiot right winger explaining away mainstream media facts but besides that it's transparently wrong. This is economics and the way to make money is to be right. If a modern Marxist research could predict or solve anything it would make money. Especially since all the other sheep are following the mainstream.
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Mar 31, 2017 12:29
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Economics is an exact science preoccupied with effectiveness *points at an empty picture frame with the label "List of unfalsified economic theories"* *nervously pushes pile of economic crises under the carpet* *closes door to the government bailout room*
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Mar 31, 2017 12:36
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Command economies probably could be more effective using modern technology, but a) their economic weaknesses seem to usually stem from ideological stubbornness/blindness (with the price controls that Ardennes brought up being a good example), not lack of access to the right tools, and b) the bigger problem is that every country with a fully socialized economy and every country with a government that's trying to get there, always seems to become authoritarian (Venezuela being the latest example). Capitalist countries have a variety of successes and failures with democracy, but communist countries always seem to fail at permitting actual representative government.Yuli Ban posted:The communism we got in the 20th century was a disaster, but I believe that was due to it being part of the Bolshevik tradition. Since the Bolsheviks and their successors managed to establish the first major communist state (which is an oxymoron!), it makes sense that they're promote states like them and other revolutionaries would model themselves after what works.
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Mar 31, 2017 13:00
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Capitalist Economies are very good at producing large quantities of consumer goods, i don't really think any marxist dogma refutes that? It's their problem of dealing with externalities of production, such as the wellbeing of the workers (and later on, environment) that is critiqued, and that the inevitable accumulation and concentration of wealth into a single point is inherently destabilizing. Then there are inherent paradoxes resulting from profit minded thinking, such as the 2008 housing crisis, where we saw a rapid increase in both empty houses and homelessness...
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Mar 31, 2017 13:30
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