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Friendly reminder to any lurkers, irrespective of which arguments in this thread are making the most sense to you: it is absolutely imperative that you hate your boss.
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Nov 14, 2020 01:21
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Crumbskull posted:Not trying to attack you but I just cracked myself up inagining someone going 'o.k. wait so one guy "owns" all of this land and we can only do anything on it with his permission and we have to give him half of everything we produce and he'll kill us if we don't??? I fail to see how that would ever actually work for an entire country...' The problem I see with communism is that making everyone equal is a flawed premise when people are not, in fact, equal. Some people have the mentality of leaders, some people have the mentality of followers. While it's important to remember that doesn't make one group inherently "better" than the other, it does make it inevitable that some people are going to be in charge because that's how human social dynamics work. Everything falls apart when someone with a leader's mentality decides they're more equal than everyone else. We can all name authoritarian socialists who held actual power, but can you name libertarian socialists or anarchists or whatever that have?
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Nov 14, 2020 01:28
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Acerbatus posted:Some people have the mentality of leaders, some people have the mentality of followers. While it's important to remember that doesn't make one group inherently "better" than the other, it does make it inevitable that some people are going to be in charge because that's how human social dynamics work. Absolutely gigantic citation needed.
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Nov 14, 2020 01:34
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Acerbatus posted:The problem I see with communism is that making everyone equal is a flawed premise when people are not, in fact, equal. Despite me strongly dissagreeing with your premise, I'm going to run with it. First of all, socialism doesn't lack leaders, it just means that workplace leaders are democratically elected. So, instead of you taking orders from some rich rear end in a top hat on wall street who gets richer by cutting your wages, you'd hold an election to choose your leader. Or maybe you'd just make all the big decisions in a large meeting by vote. Don't think of socialism as a world without leaders, think of it as democracy in the workplace. You would have to power to hire or fire your boss just as you would in a democracy. You'd have input on your own wages, your own hours, your own benefits, and you'd also own all the things you produced.
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Nov 14, 2020 01:37
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OwlFancier posted:Absolutely gigantic citation needed. I mean have you ever been on a team or in a club or anything?  You can also observe it by just looking at a lot of political debate. People don't really like having to research things and form their own opinions, they like being told what to say by catchy headlines or twitter posts. It's why people like Trump get elected; They say they have all the answers, just leave it to them and they'll make it so you don't need to think critically because they're so in control. Unless you meant the "being a leader doesn't make someone inherently better than a follower" thing in which case I can't really prove that, I guess it's just personal opinion. Cpt_Obvious posted:Despite me strongly dissagreeing with your premise, I'm going to run with it. I don't think socialism is inherently unworkable, I think communism is.
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Nov 14, 2020 01:39
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It is extremely weird to me to treat things that happen in our society as if they are loving  People are perfectly capable of making decisions for themselves, what varies is the number of areas they are willing to make decisions about, which probably has a great deal to do with the fact that we live in a society that actively discourages many people from making decisions in many areas. Paolo Friere has a good book that is applicable, pedagogy of the oppressed, and one of the points he makes is that people are indoctrinated not to think about politics. That a necessary component for people's emancipation is for them to realise, in a way that makes sense to them, that they are entirely enitled and capable to make decisions about things that affect their lives, that they are capable of constructing ways of looking at the world that are rooted in their true experience and that when they come together with others who have similar experiences, they can form coherent views of how their society works, and engage in the act of self liberation from their conditions that they might previously have felt they had no control over. It's like posting 200 years ago and saying that women are just naturally demure and need the hand of the husband to tell them what to do, or slaves and their masters, or any other loving time someone has come along and said "some people are just naturally there to be told what to do and some people are just naturally there to tell them what to do" as an excuse to uphold lovely societal norms.
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Nov 14, 2020 01:45
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Acerbatus posted:Some people have the mentality of leaders, some people have the mentality of followers. Which people specifically would you say have the mentality of leaders and followers respectively 
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Nov 14, 2020 01:48
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I have literally never encountered anybody I would describe as either a natural leader or a natural follower. I have encountered some massive bellends who seem convinced they are god's gift to this earth, and I have encountered people who are a bit shyer than others but who are nonetheless entirely capable of contributing as well as anybody else given the opportunity, but nobody that I am aware of is "naturally" either a leader or a follower and if you view the world that way it might suggest an inability on your part to perceive the full range of what the people around you are capable of.
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Nov 14, 2020 01:56
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Anyone with a "leader mentality" should absolutely be kept as far away from power as possible. What's even the difference between socialism and communism? The problem with concentrating power is that power has gravity and will attract more power until you've concentrated enough power to recreate capitalism which, we've seen, results in catastrophic outcomes like fascism and mass extinction. Like... We know that capitalism is completely disastrous. It's really a question, then, of how to construct a system that will progress, rather than regress back to the class stratification that so much blood and toil went into disrupting. The experiments so far seem to suggest that concentrating a lot of power amongst a (heritable) party elite is a Bad Idea so it seems pretty logical to come up with systems that have a strong antagonism to that baked in.
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Nov 14, 2020 02:15
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dex_sda posted:Stuff like the NKVD gaining power etc. You could argue that was more Beria but I mean Stalin and his inner circle. This is very loose language. What does it mean to "gain power" here? If the NKVD just increased its numbers on the order of Stalin, or Beria, or whatever, then that means that guy already had the authority to rally or draw down the NKVD and was just choosing to use it in one direction or another - the capacity existed regardless. Certainly Beria, the individual mortal, gained power when he ascended to head of the NKVD, but at the very same instant the previous occupier of that position lost that very same power, so how was power being consolidated or centralized further than from the NKVD's inception? quote:By... individual regions agreeing to it? If someone decides that he's just got to go visit his mate in the next town and that this lockdown isn't that big a deal and anyway he knows he's not sick, as inevitably happens in any lockdown situation, he will have to be intercepted and stopped, perhaps by main force if he just refuses to take the injunction to stay put seriously. If for whatever reason local authorities are not enough to stop him (maybe lots of people are having an illicit party and can't easily be cowed by just a couple guys, then greater and greater assemblages of force from more regions are going to have to be assembled in order to make sure everyone stays put. There's an order handed down from on high (maybe you'd prefer to say that it's handed out from the center?), and that order needs to be enforced because it's literally a matter of life or death. That order was democratically deliberated on by representatives from across the region before being promulgated, sure! But so were lots of plans, orders, etc in other socialist societies. Now the decision is made, and power in the ELZN will be centralized/consolidated/increased/whatever other scary word to whatever extent is necessary to give that decision weight.
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Nov 14, 2020 02:19
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Don't need a centrally wielded stick when individual regions agree to work together.
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Disnesquick posted:What's even the difference between socialism and communism? According to Marxism, socialism has a material incentive to work, while communism doesn't. That's pretty much it (second post in this thread explains why.) I'm not sure what Acerbatus means by those terms, though - might help if they defined their terms.
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Nov 14, 2020 02:23
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Ferrinus posted:If someone decides that he's just got to go visit his mate in the next town and that this lockdown isn't that big a deal and anyway he knows he's not sick, as inevitably happens in any lockdown situation, he will have to be intercepted and stopped, perhaps by main force if he just refuses to take the injunction to stay put seriously. If for whatever reason local authorities are not enough to stop him (maybe lots of people are having an illicit party and can't easily be cowed by just a couple guys, then greater and greater assemblages of force from more regions are going to have to be assembled in order to make sure everyone stays put. What you're describing here is effectively one region deciding to invade another with sufficient force to overwhelm the defence force of that region. So yeah, if an invasion happens then multiple allied regions can assemble enough force together to repel this extreme coercive behavior. Thatbdoeant require the formation of a hierarchy or a permanent Central command, it just required cooperation and solidarity under the principle that a threat to one is a threat to all. Falstaff posted:According to Marxism, socialism has a material incentive to work, while communism doesn't. That's pretty much it (second post in this thread explains why.) I'm pretty sure that Marx never made a distinction between the two terms, himself. If I'm wrong about that, then it would be good to know where he talks about it. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 02:29 on Nov 14, 2020 |
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Nov 14, 2020 02:25
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OwlFancier posted:I have literally never encountered anybody I would describe as either a natural leader or a natural follower. I have encountered some massive bellends who seem convinced they are god's gift to this earth, and I have encountered people who are a bit shyer than others but who are nonetheless entirely capable of contributing as well as anybody else given the opportunity, but nobody that I am aware of is "naturally" either a leader or a follower and if you view the world that way it might suggest an inability on your part to perceive the full range of what the people around you are capable of. A certain sort of person takes charge in a crisis and starts organising people instead of behaving like a normal person and shutting down or panicking, and I believe militaries, firefighters and so on try to select for that quality when picking officers. I don’t know if that has anything to do with the drive some people have to seek out more and more control over other people when there isn’t a crisis but it’s definitely a real, and quite useful, thing.
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Nov 14, 2020 02:56
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Even if I were to believe in that, and suggest that it has anything to do with how society organizes into hierarchies, there is nothing to suggest that that quality is somehow innate rather than learned or that it is desirable most of the time.
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Nov 14, 2020 03:03
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Beefeater1980 posted:A certain sort of person takes charge in a crisis and starts organising people instead of behaving like a normal person and shutting down or panicking, and I believe militaries, firefighters and so on try to select for that quality when picking officers. You also find this same type of person taking charge in situations where they are absolutely counterproductive. The last thing you need in a medical emergency is a business manager who watches a lot of medical drama. I have encountered this exact situation.
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Nov 14, 2020 03:20
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OwlFancier posted:Even if I were to believe in that, and suggest that it has anything to do with how society organizes into hierarchies, there is nothing to suggest that that quality is somehow innate rather than learned or that it is desirable most of the time. Oh sure, it’s just not completely imaginary.
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Nov 14, 2020 03:37
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Personally, I vote for the candidate who has the most leaderly skull shape
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Nov 14, 2020 04:35
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OwlFancier posted:Even if I were to believe in that, and suggest that it has anything to do with how society organizes into hierarchies, there is nothing to suggest that that quality is somehow innate rather than learned or that it is desirable most of the time. So are you denying that natural talent exists entirely or is leadership just a totally unique exception?
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Nov 14, 2020 05:12
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Are we really arguing that Stalinism wasn't actually a thing? That the man didn't rule the country with an iron grip, during and after the "Great Patriotic War"? That Lenin didn't explicitly slag him off and told his supporters that Stalin was bad news in his testament? Okay then!
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Nov 14, 2020 05:14
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Part of my job is utilizing popular education techniques (Horton and Freire style) to empower people to participate in governing and managing democratically owned property/businesses. Some of the worst 'leaders' are the self-confident and decisive folks who 'naturally' step into the role and some of the best are folks who start the process totally passive and demure and grow into the role. Radically participatory democracy creates 'leaders' and empowers 'followers' to prevent the kind of people you are describing from abusing or exploiting them. Socialization matters and most of us are currently socialized to passively consume and be exploited. People can learn things.
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Nov 14, 2020 05:24
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Acerbatus posted:So are you denying that natural talent exists entirely or is leadership just a totally unique exception? Bro, this is a really goofy line of argumentation. Its fine if it seems to you like 'communism won't work because some people are natural leaders' if that comports with your experience. Its also an unfalsifiable arm chair style thought and you continuing to press the point is, in my opinion, not particularly helpful to the thread.
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Nov 14, 2020 05:26
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Acerbatus posted:So are you denying that natural talent exists entirely or is leadership just a totally unique exception? For the second time, this does not have any impact on whether communism is feasible because leaders can still be elected.
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Nov 14, 2020 05:44
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I was doing a bad job at explaining myself so I'll try to do a better one. Communism has everyone equal, and elects leaders. Everyone has equal say. However some people are naturally going to be better at getting elected; The ones more drawn to wanting to lead, the ones with more charisma. This doesn't mean they're better at actually LEADING, but they're better at getting the vote. Now, demoracy has that issue too obviously - look at Trump or Biden. In theory at least, the opposition has a voice. To my knowledge, no communist government in history has had an actual more than single party system, because doing so goes against the idea of everyone being equal within the community by drawing explicit lines. We can see the end result of that with China, North Korea, etc being dictatorships. How, then, does communism improve on the current system where a cult of personality can dictate everything?
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Nov 14, 2020 05:59
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Disnesquick posted:What you're describing here is effectively one region deciding to invade another with sufficient force to overwhelm the defence force of that region. So yeah, if an invasion happens then multiple allied regions can assemble enough force together to repel this extreme coercive behavior. Thatbdoeant require the formation of a hierarchy or a permanent Central command, it just required cooperation and solidarity under the principle that a threat to one is a threat to all. The hierarchy and central command already exist. They're the institution that assembled, decided on the no-travel-between-villages rule in the first place, proclaimed that rule territory wide, and serve as the last resort if that rule is broken. Did literally every citizen cast a vote determining whether to enforce a lockdown and moratorium on inter-region travel? No, a few experts consulted with an assembly. Was the decision a democratic and wholly legitimate one? Yes. Will it be enforced by coercive means, as communities marshal and consolidate enough force to block any violation (a couple guys for one straggler, an entire village for an illicit party, etc)? Also yes.
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Nov 14, 2020 06:06
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Acerbatus posted:How, then, does communism improve on the current system where a cult of personality can dictate everything? Under capitalism, wealthy people are automatically "leaders" in that they control the lives of their workers. We call them employers: How many resources are allocated to them, what times they work, etc. and those "leaders(employers)" are motivated to make their worker's lives as lovely as possible. Everything that "leaders(employers)" want hurts the worker. If they cut workers pay, that means more money for "leaders(employers)". If they force longer hours, that's more labor for "leaders(employers)" to profit off of. If they(employers) want to speed up an assembly line to make more products, that means a more hazardous environment for the worker. Communism helps in two ways: 1. You can get rid of lovely "leaders' by voting them out. Under capitalism, you can't get rid of your boss (and no, quitting doesn't count because many people MUST stay in their lovely job or suffer further impoverishment). 2. It removes the incentive to treat workers like poo poo because workers and leaders share the same source of income. No longer does the leader prosper off of the suffering of the workers. EVERYONE prospers off of the success of the their shared endeavor. Cpt_Obvious fucked around with this message at 06:15 on Nov 14, 2020 |
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Nov 14, 2020 06:10
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And just to be clear: it's not a perfect system because humans are imperfect. But it's a MASSIVE improvement over our modern system.
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Nov 14, 2020 06:13
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Rappaport posted:Are we really arguing that Stalinism wasn't actually a thing? That the man didn't rule the country with an iron grip, during and after the "Great Patriotic War"? That Lenin didn't explicitly slag him off and told his supporters that Stalin was bad news in his testament? Okay then! The "Lenin's testament" you're talking about is mostly likely a fake (per Kotkin). The other stuff Ferrinus is claiming is off though, as Stalin definitely did leverage his position as party secretary and close confidant of Lenin to consolidate power even before his formal ascension to leader of the USSR. Characterizing the succession as an open referendum ignores that it was pretty much a factional struggle among the elite central committee. The other thing about the NKVD remaining stagnant also has me scratching my head when it was disbanded in 1930 and then reconstituted wholesale in 1934 with the OGPU rolled into it to boot.
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Nov 14, 2020 06:48
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Acerbatus posted:I was doing a bad job at explaining myself so I'll try to do a better one. Which communism?
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Nov 14, 2020 08:19
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So, I'm not a socialist or a communist and have real no interest in debating it as I'm enjoying reading the discussion, but I thought I'd ask this question here because I figure someone has the answer: Why, when speaking to communists and socialists, so many of them use factories as the examples of potential democratic workforces when most people today don't work in factories? I rarely see socialists or communists talking about how their model would work within a services business, like a consultancy or something, or in a company led by the vision of a sole founder. It's always factories. I don't know why.
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Nov 14, 2020 08:42
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I’ve read EZLN described as libertarian socialist (on Wikipedia fwiw  ). Is that an accurate descriptor? It makes me go back to the questions I had at the beginning of the thread around Liberalism and its relationship to socialism (and capitalism). Is libertarian socialism an example of liberalism “done right” (I.e. liberalism doesn’t necessitate capitalism and critiques of the latter aren’t necessarily also wholly applicable to the former)? Or is it just a bad description on Wiki
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Nov 14, 2020 09:15
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Disnesquick posted:I'm pretty sure that Marx never made a distinction between the two terms, himself. If I'm wrong about that, then it would be good to know where he talks about it. You're correct, but Marx does distinguish between lower-phase and higher-phase communism. Lenin referred to the former as socialism, and the latter as communism, but that's just terminology - albeit widely-accepted terminology among orthodox Marxism, as far as I've been able to tell. Again, see the second post in the thread. Sorry if that was confusing. CelestialScribe posted:So, I'm not a socialist or a communist and have real no interest in debating it as I'm enjoying reading the discussion, but I thought I'd ask this question here because I figure someone has the answer: Because factories make for pretty straight-forward examples, and because commodities are easiest to understand when they're material things being produced by workers. Most service businesses would work similarly - worker ownership, workplace democracy, etc. Whatever value the service has on the market would be equally (or at least democratically) distributed. Most consultancies wouldn't exist, I don't expect. No "company led by the vision of a sole founder" could possibly exist, even within market socialism, because that's not a mode of production that socialism allows for. Falstaff fucked around with this message at 12:29 on Nov 14, 2020 |
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Nov 14, 2020 11:38
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witchy posted:The "Lenin's testament" you're talking about is mostly likely a fake (per Kotkin). The other stuff Ferrinus is claiming is off though, as Stalin definitely did leverage his position as party secretary and close confidant of Lenin to consolidate power even before his formal ascension to leader of the USSR. Characterizing the succession as an open referendum ignores that it was pretty much a factional struggle among the elite central committee. The other thing about the NKVD remaining stagnant also has me scratching my head when it was disbanded in 1930 and then reconstituted wholesale in 1934 with the OGPU rolled into it to boot. My bad on the testament. Though writers like Lewin have argued that there's other evidence of Lenin's disillusionment about Stalin, but I suppose it doesn't really matter either way since Josif made his way to the top anyway, and killed off pretty much everyone who could've even tried to stop him. Acerbatus posted:How, then, does communism improve on the current system where a cult of personality can dictate everything? These probably aren't the best of examples, but Brezhnev was a joke while he was still alive, despite attempting to manufacture a cult of personality (which obviously didn't turn out so great), and Andropov was very much a faceless technocrat leader, though his earlier actions may have given him an "aura" of Bad Dude, Do Not Mess With, I suppose. At the same time, "Western democracy" was enraptured by the likes of Reagan, Bush 1 and Thatcher, not exactly shining examples of humanity there. And if that is too whataboutey, we could just posit that the end goal of full luxury communism would be installing an AI to actually govern human affairs, but there's a lot of cultural baggage against that sort of thing.
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Nov 14, 2020 12:38
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Acerbatus posted:To my knowledge, no communist government in history has had an actual more than single party system, because doing so goes against the idea of everyone being equal within the community by drawing explicit lines. We can see the end result of that with China, North Korea, etc being dictatorships. Communist nations are one-party states not out of an egalitarian ideal, but rather because conflicting parties are only ever going to be representative of the interests of certain classes. Given that the Communist party represents the class of the workers and of peasants, and since the goal of a socialist revolution is to establish a proletarian state, there would be no need nor reason to allow for other parties, since that would only ever allow for the seizure of political power by... the bourgeoisie, since they'd be the only class whose interests wouldn't be represented by the worker's party. Acerbatus posted:How, then, does communism improve on the current system where a cult of personality can dictate everything? By democratization within the party. To make a very clumsy analogy, an America that was only ever ruled by a president who is a Democrat, and a Congress composed of Democrats, would not necessarily be a dictatorship, nor would it be a cult of personality, nor would it be undemocratic, in the sense that you'd still have various underlying trends and forces within the party that we see today. Obviously there are problems with this analogy as far as the Democrats being so ideologically varied as a "big tent", but the incompatibility of the politics of Joe Manchin versus that of Bernie Sanders would mean that even under as a "one-party" state, a Democrat-controlled USA would still indeed have diversity of opinion. And given that the Democrats would presumably run primaries in this hypothetical scenario, there would still be democratic input by the people, there would still be elections, and people could still choose whether they'd like to be represented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Pete Buttigeig (again, allowing for the stretch in ideological spectrum of a democratic socialist versus a liberal, vis-a-vis the example of Stalin and Trotsky being on the Right-Opposition and Left-Opposition of the SOVNARKOM). ___ One further thing I'd like to touch on here is that the economic context under which a communist state would operate would also necessarily inform its democratic traditions, i.e., you wouldn't have a Joe Biden-esque candidacy happen because you presumably also wouldn't have the kind of oligarchical media that blows up his image and sabotages those of his opponents, or direct oligarchical investments into electioneering to accomplish the same. CelestialScribe posted:Why, when speaking to communists and socialists, so many of them use factories as the examples of potential democratic workforces when most people today don't work in factories? Part of it is because of the context in which most socialist texts were written, as in Marx analyzing the conditions of factory work in 19th century Europe. Besides that, it's a rather direct and simple/physical way to express the point: a worker applies their labor to assemble a chair (or a part of a chair), and the combination of raw materials + labor creates value in the form of a fully-assembled chair, but the capitalist appropriates the surplus value of that interaction. I suppose in a modern context you could just as easily put this in the form of a call center: the capitalist invests in the capital of renting office space, workstations, internet connectivity, etc. They hire a call center agent. The agent's labor in the form of answering calls, when combined with the capital invested in the phone and the computer used to perform that service, creates value. Except the call center has a contract with the capitalist for 9 dollars per hour per agent, but the agent is only getting paid 2 dollars per hour. The other 7 dollars goes into the capitalist's pocket.
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Nov 14, 2020 13:08
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gradenko_2000 posted:Communist nations are one-party states not out of an egalitarian ideal, but rather because conflicting parties are only ever going to be representative of the interests of certain classes. Given that the Communist party represents the class of the workers and of peasants, and since the goal of a socialist revolution is to establish a proletarian state, there would be no need nor reason to allow for other parties, since that would only ever allow for the seizure of political power by... the bourgeoisie, since they'd be the only class whose interests wouldn't be represented by the worker's party. I have a hard time getting behind this. It seems plainly evident to me that different sorts of workers might have different workplace conditions, concerns, and different political outlooks on how things could be solved (for an example, see the approximately 8 bajillion different flavours of socialism that people support, all of which are wholly concerned with workers first and foremost). I don't want to be uncharitable, but this sounds like "You have democracy. It's just that the party chosen what the correct outcome is ahead of time, and you can vote on that." quote:By democratization within the party. To make a very clumsy analogy, an America that was only ever ruled by a president who is a Democrat, and a Congress composed of Democrats, would not necessarily be a dictatorship, nor would it be a cult of personality, nor would it be undemocratic, in the sense that you'd still have various underlying trends and forces within the party that we see today. Obviously there are problems with this analogy as far as the Democrats being so ideologically varied as a "big tent", but the incompatibility of the politics of Joe Manchin versus that of Bernie Sanders would mean that even under as a "one-party" state, a Democrat-controlled USA would still indeed have diversity of opinion. What would be the mechanism for these differing opinions to effect change, and in particular, for citizens to support those positions? It feels like any solution that would allow for genuinely different approaches to flourish would just re-create an ad-hoc set of parties underneath the "one" party. quote:And given that the Democrats would presumably run primaries in this hypothetical scenario, there would still be democratic input by the people, there would still be elections, and people could still choose whether they'd like to be represented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Pete Buttigeig (again, allowing for the stretch in ideological spectrum of a democratic socialist versus a liberal, vis-a-vis the example of Stalin and Trotsky being on the Right-Opposition and Left-Opposition of the SOVNARKOM). Again, this just feels like you're describing a proto-party system, so why not just dispense with the theatrics about one party and let people advocate for what they want? What does this actually achieve in practice?
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Nov 14, 2020 13:27
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gradenko_2000 posted:Communist nations are one-party states not out of an egalitarian ideal, but rather because conflicting parties are only ever going to be representative of the interests of certain classes. Given that the Communist party represents the class of the workers and of peasants, and since the goal of a socialist revolution is to establish a proletarian state, there would be no need nor reason to allow for other parties, since that would only ever allow for the seizure of political power by... the bourgeoisie, since they'd be the only class whose interests wouldn't be represented by the worker's party. And that is without acknowledging the fact that most bourgeois democracies have at least two bourgeois parties. I think formalized parties are the best defence against cults of personalities. I prefer deciding between "green socialist party" and "cyberpunk socialist party" over deciding between president bob and paul.
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Nov 14, 2020 14:07
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Can I ask, is there any good literature on public service jobs under socialism? I ask for a couple of reasons: 1) While being a doctor or a teacher are essentially public service jobs that serve a greater good, we live in a Capitalist culture and that still shades these fields both in terms of things like actual for profit schools, but also in terms of mental models for management. It's interesting right now in the program I'm in because a lot the literature supports distributed and collaborative leadership, but often goes to corporate examples. 2) I've been struggling, especially in terms of Covid, how people in such fields respond to emergency situations. Let me put it this way, if someone in this thread worked in a ladder factory, "My boss says that we're behind quotas and I need to work all this weekend with no promise of pay to get there" we would all tell that person they were being screwed over. But for COVID, I am finding myself sacrificing a lot of my personal time to work not out of a sense of compliance to my manager, but out of responsibility to vulnerable kids in precarious situation. I guess what I'm asking is what does socialism say for you when your boss is the people?
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Nov 14, 2020 14:10
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enki42 posted:I have a hard time getting behind this. It seems plainly evident to me that different sorts of workers might have different workplace conditions, concerns, and different political outlooks on how things could be solved (for an example, see the approximately 8 bajillion different flavours of socialism that people support, all of which are wholly concerned with workers first and foremost). VictualSquid posted:Assuming all the peasants have died out, there is no long term unemployment, there are no career soldiers or politicians, there are no local experiments further along in abolishing the worker/employer distinction. And your country is an ethnostate without any regions considering increased independence. I want to be clear that what I was pointing out was that the reason for one-party statehood was, as I said, not out of egalitarianism, but rather... what I'd posted is the general gist of the rationale. This is not to say that this reasoning is to be taken on its face as an absolute, or an established consensus among communists. What the both of you have pointed out, that there is heterogeneity of views even within the single class of proletarians, and that such heterogeneity should be sufficient justification for a diversity of parties, was identified by other communist thinkers as well Trotsky, in The Revolution Betrayed posted:In reality classes are heterogeneous; they are torn by inner antagonisms, and arrive at the solution of common problems no otherwise than through an inner struggle of tendencies, groups, and parties. It is possible, with certain qualifications, to concede that “a party is a part of a class.” But since a class has many “parts”—some look forward and some back—one and the same class may create several parties. For the same reason one party may rest upon parts of different classes. An example of only one party corresponding to one class is not to be found on the whole course of political history—provided, of course, you do not take the police appearance for the reality.
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Nov 14, 2020 14:22
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Timeless Appeal posted:Can I ask, is there any good literature on public service jobs under socialism? So you would have nurses, doctors and hospital infrastructure going underused (or taking the holidays they earned during the last emergency) in normal times so that during covid there is enough care capacity available without putting all the effort on the workers. Another part is that over-education is the most common anarchist solution to prevent the formation of guilds and other informal hierarchies, so there are extra trained nurses and doctors available from there, too. For example in Germany, the remnants of the socialized healthcare system lead to lots of underutilized clinics and rural doctor's offices which lead to unusual low covid deaths/case. Even while liberal politicans are complaining that we have too much medical capacity and they should be fired in the name of profit.
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Nov 14, 2020 14:23
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Timeless Appeal posted:2) I've been struggling, especially in terms of Covid, how people in such fields respond to emergency situations. Let me put it this way, if someone in this thread worked in a ladder factory, "My boss says that we're behind quotas and I need to work all this weekend with no promise of pay to get there" we would all tell that person they were being screwed over. But for COVID, I am finding myself sacrificing a lot of my personal time to work not out of a sense of compliance to my manager, but out of responsibility to vulnerable kids in precarious situation. It is a fundamentally unjust situation for you to be rendering additional work, out of a sense of responsibility and obligation (or even personal pride in one's work), and then not be adequately compensated for it. In a capitalist context, we tend to say that we shouldn't work beyond what we're paid to do, because we recognize that you're only exploiting yourself further. When it comes to public service / emergency situations, it's difficult to reconcile this impulse with the fact that lives are on the line. For a lot of people, this does just mean rendering more unpaid work and chalking it up to karma. Under socialism, the intent would be that not only would such additional work be compensated appropriately*, but that additional capacity would be built** so that you wouldn't need to do the extra work. * capitalism does not do this because your salary is already planned out ahead of time with respect to its cost as a part of the budget. Paying you more would lead to less profits, so capitalism will not do that, and especially since you have no leverage as an individual, and in fact will rationalize the extra work to yourself even without capitalist propaganda, just because your work saves lives. ** as VictualSquid said, capitalism does not do this because it doesn't believe in having slack capacity over the long term, since anything not needed right now is simply a cost waiting to be cut.
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Nov 14, 2020 14:41
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enki42 posted:I don't want to be uncharitable, but this sounds like "You have democracy. It's just that the party chosen what the correct outcome is ahead of time, and you can vote on that." This is basically what we have under Liberalism right now. There's no meaningful avenue to vote for a decrease in profits or anything other than marginal cultural signifiers, really. That's not to say that it's ok to ignore this issue forever but that if other things improve and not this aspect then that's still a better system overall. However I don't actually think that need be the case: enki42 posted:What would be the mechanism for these differing opinions to effect change, and in particular, for citizens to support those positions? It feels like any solution that would allow for genuinely different approaches to flourish would just re-create an ad-hoc set of parties underneath the "one" party. I mean, we don't actually need parties at all. They are very much a construct of an incredibly antiquated semi-democratic system designed to support the management of a country by an established elite. In the case of the Anglosphere, these systems were designed somewhere in the 14th century. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest using 14th century technology to solve 21st century problems is pretty dumb. One piece of social tech I've seen used in an anarcho-syndicalist setting is the concept of a transferrable vote: Every decision is made by direct vote but if you don't have time to understand the issues involved then you can recallably transfer your vote to a trusted individual who will cast it on your behalf. They too can transfer the votes they've accumulated e.g. for national rather than local issues. You can always recall your vote if you lose faith or simply if some specific issue has particular importance to you. With modern communication and information-sotrage systems this seems scalable to a truly global scale. In terms of the "discussion forum" aspect of a parliament, well we already have hundreds of those. I'm posting this to one right now and various lower tech forums for the demos have always existed e.g. shouting at people in a tavern. It's been my observation that this approach also deprivileges the idea of political decision-making so has a psychological benefit that discourages the reconstruction of career politicians into a secular priesthood. Edit: I guess one other theme id add to the above is the casting of systems as "democracy technology" which creates a further psychological treatment of those systems as subject to change and improvement. We don't have that at the moment, hence why you still get dumb institutions like the British Parliament being treated with near-religuous reverence. The people who designed those systems were stupider (due to nutrition) and far less educated than modern folks. We shouldn't be relying on their rusty tech. Active Quasar fucked around with this message at 16:23 on Nov 14, 2020 |
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Nov 14, 2020 16:01
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