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Cpt_Obvious posted:OK, so there's a lot to unpack here: Government bureaucrats also do no productive labor in the strictly Marxist sense (I believe he says as much explicitly in Vol 2 or 3 somewhere; hopefully someone can clarify this one) because they aren't actually involved in the creation of surplus value. They just foam the runway to make sure that surplus value is generated and captured by other actors. Nevertheless, their unions are real. Separately, those unions are valuable, because most government workers aren't actually direct enemies of the working class (and often the people who mediate those benefits the working class has managed to win for the time being). Production could obviously occur without cops. Capitalist production, though? Certainly not, I'm not putting up with that poo poo if my attempting to not pay my rent wouldn't ultimately get my head caved in. I think you just tie yourself into stupid knots if you try to use special, different words to describe your enemies. Yeah, cops don't have unions, they just have collective bargaining institutions which secure them higher wages and better benefits. It's not a union, though, it's uh, a blunion. It's not even like police unions are the only bad unions! Do you support business unions because the workers that get ensnared in them are involved in directly productive labor? Kanine posted:im glad that abolitionism/acab/decolonization/etc. are the primary currents in american leftism right now because it gives me hope that we won't be repeating the same bullshit that led to what happened with the ussr/china/etc. Don't take it from me, take it from a famous prison abolitionist: quote:Lastly, only communism makes the state absolutely unnecessary, for there is nobody to be suppressed--“nobody” in the sense of a class, of a systematic struggle against a definite section of the population. We are not utopians, and do not in the least deny the possibility and inevitability of excesses on the part of individual persons, or the need to stop such excesses. In the first place, however, no special machine, no special apparatus of suppression, is needed for this: this will be done by the armed people themselves, as simply and as readily as any crowd of civilized people, even in modern society, interferes to put a stop to a scuffle or to prevent a woman from being assaulted. And, secondly, we know that the fundamental social cause of excesses, which consist in the violation of the rules of social intercourse, is the exploitation of the people, their want and their poverty. With the removal of this chief cause, excesses will inevitably begin to "wither away". We do not know how quickly and in what succession, but we do know they will wither away. With their withering away the state will also wither away.
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Dec 22, 2020 22:26
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seriously hope all current authcoms will still be fine as they're being dragged away to a prison camp after they successfully install a "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the new ruling party needs a shakeup so it purges (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 22, 2020 22:27
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The consistent characterisation by authcoms of people who are suspicious of "actually when we control the cops the cops will be good" as starry eyed fools with a martyrdom complex is extremely annoying, given that the skepticism is actually centered in not wanting to get beat to poo poo by the cops.
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Dec 22, 2020 22:28
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i do not trust the motivations people who seek out the ability to monopolize violence and wield it at those less powerful then them, regardless of if they have a hammer and sickle on their badge, actually
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Dec 22, 2020 22:32
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Cops are a historically contingent phenomenon. Like I mentioned above, they only showed up pretty recently, and long after the development and global domination of capitalism: https://plsonline.eku.edu/insideloo...0Lynch%201984). Obviously, every state has something, whether it's knights or praetorian guards or night watchmen, to dissuade the working class from simply ignoring or overturning its ruling class. But the idea of dudes who'd actively patrol the streets in search of crime, and even of prisons - like, a place where you're held for years or decades as your punishment, rather than a jail in which you're held a day or two before a trial of some sort - only showed up a few centuries prior, if that. Given that the most likely, possibly the only, issue that could drive a full-on proletarian revolution in the States is black liberation, I'd have to guess that whatever protects the gains that revolution made against, I don't know, spies sent by Canada and the EU is going to look nothing like modern-day police officers. But you do need something, because as Mike Davis likes to say, "we are the 99%" is a very misleading slogan. In fact a good 30-40% of the US population is a likely source for full-on reaction.
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Dec 22, 2020 22:35
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looks at north korea: "see its ok because this hereditary monarchy has class character"
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Dec 22, 2020 22:35
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i know saying "read theory" is pointless because nobody ever will when you ask them but people in this thread really should read Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin he was a Black Panther who became disillusioned with authcom after his experiences in the US left and in Cuba.
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Dec 22, 2020 22:37
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Kanine posted:looks at north korea: "see its ok because this hereditary monarchy has class character" (nodding, smiling)
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Dec 22, 2020 22:39
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I would say that cop unions are more like guilds then unions. Not because of any class character, but because of the way they organize and interact with other unions and guilds. Unions are distinct from other organisation of collective bargaining because they act in solidarity, because they support the rights of non-union workers and because they also fight for people with different jobs. Because cop unions would never even consider assisting the station's janitor they are not real unions.
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Dec 22, 2020 22:48
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Kanine posted:chinese factory worker getting beaten by a cop after trying to organize a strike for better pay/conditions/etc: "this is all fine because the cop has class character" I'm always reluctant to speak much about China because I'm generally not a big fan, but I think this is an interesting go-to example because it displays the assumption that because class consciousness and worker militancy is lacking in the western world, it must therefore be even worse in places like China, when in fact this isn't the case.
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Dec 22, 2020 23:47
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Your article explicitly states that the leaders of the protests end up in prison and the effect is limited to unseating local officials, which is a slightly worse performance than a regular trade union manages to achieve. I also don't really see what "worker miltiancy" has to do with it if the contention is that the police and state are capable of shutting down effective action, which they apparently are?
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Dec 23, 2020 00:04
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OwlFancier posted:Your article explicitly states that the leaders of the protests end up in prison and the effect is limited to unseating local officials, which is a slightly worse performance than a regular trade union manages to achieve. I also don't really see what "worker miltiancy" has to do with it if the contention is that the police and state are capable of shutting down effective action, which they apparently are? Is it "shutting down effective action" if you do so by giving the workers what they want? I mean, it's the Atlantic so it's going to have a conservative spin (aka the House Always Wins), but the article itself notes that these worker actions are often successful at achieving their ends - beyond unseating local officials. How could they not? They (were, at least) happen(ing) five hundred times a day, some of them are bound to be successful. But here's a more recent article if you'd like, from noted left-wing rag the Economist. quote:THE last tweet sent by Lu Yuyu before his arrest two years ago was typically terse. “Monday June 13th 2016, 94 incidents” it read. Appended was a link to a page on his Blogspot website (newsworthknowingcn) listing details of those cases. They included a protest by more than 100 parents complaining about a local-government decision to make their children attend a distant school instead of a nearby one; another by dozens of farmers enraged by the seizure of their land by village officials; and a demonstration in Beijing by around 2,100 ex-servicemen demanding better benefits. Again, I'm not saying China is some worker's utopia (dear god is it ever anything but), but the caricature that gets painted in the west and which I replied to is inaccurate. Workers in China absolutely agitate for better conditions constantly, and are often successful. Yes, there is repression and pushback by the authorities, but 1) it doesn't stop them, and 2) that happens in the west, as well.
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Dec 23, 2020 00:50
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The article clearly states that worker militancy also secures higher pensions and wage increases and so on - and that's from 2012 or something by an obviously liberal source which is just chomping at the bit for the CCP's downfall. The Chinese working class is simply bolder and more militant than the USA's, which makes a lot of sense. Can you imagine the US government's COVID response would look anything like it does if our leaders actually thought they had anything to fear?
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Dec 23, 2020 00:53
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None of which is remotely relevant to the argument that the police and the state in china are not representing the class interests of the workers, as evidenced by the apparent fact that they keep putting them in prison and there are constant protests to secure basic improvements to working conditions. Nor does that observation suggest that the chinese people are uniquely servile or whatever poo poo you decided to bring up out of nowhere.
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Dec 23, 2020 01:05
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OwlFancier posted:None of which is remotely relevant to the argument that the police and the state in china are not representing the class interests of the workers, as evidenced by the apparent fact that they keep putting them in prison and there are constant protests to secure basic improvements to working conditions. Nor does that observation suggest that the chinese people are uniquely servile or whatever poo poo you decided to bring up out of nowhere.
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Dec 23, 2020 01:09
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As I understand it, police abolition, at bottom, has to do deal with the problem that cops are the institution that are going to enforce private property and enclosure under capitalism. Broadly speaking, if you don't have enough money to buy food, the cops are the ones who are supposed to make sure you starve rather than be able to just take food that you didn't pay for. If you can't afford rent, the cops are the ones who are supposed to make sure you remain homeless rather than be able to just squat in an unoccupied house. Even if they guard the food and disperse the homeless tent communes non-racistly and without "excessive force", for however that's defined, that they're enforcing the built-in cruelties of capitalism means that they're a problem even if they're "only" inflicting the "soft" violence of denying people food and shelter from lack of ability to pay. This is why the police need to be abolished even if the police were merely only doing their jobs as politely as possible (again, as hypothetical and as unlikely as that sounds), because their job itself is the issue, but more broadly that's why capitalism needs to be abolished, because the problem isn't just that the police are enforcing private property and enclosure, but also that private property and enclosure are themselves an unjust concept that shouldn't be enforced by anyone to begin with, and even if you went as far as abolishing the police, the next Thing that's tasked with that enforcement is still going to be problematic.
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Dec 23, 2020 01:37
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Which is why I prefer that abolitionism as the vehicle to abolishing capitalism, if we make the enforcement itself abhorrent, if we put the focus on the violence and cruelty inherent in the act then it necessitates the development of non-coercive or minimally coercive structures, the more people internalize the need to live without being forced to work, to pay rent, to starve, to freeze, the more people will work to build a new kind of society, a society that they have a visceral need for.
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Dec 23, 2020 01:44
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OwlFancier posted:None of which is remotely relevant to the argument that the police and the state in china are not representing the class interests of the workers, as evidenced by the apparent fact that they keep putting them in prison and there are constant protests to secure basic improvements to working conditions. Nor does that observation suggest that the chinese people are uniquely servile or whatever poo poo you decided to bring up out of nowhere. Even given that the CCP has been completely overtaken from within by capitalist roaders who can only - and must - be defeated by a resurgence of Maoism and a second revolution, the Chinese state is actually less tyrannical and repressive than ours, as demonstrated by the prevalence and many successes of worker militancy and the state's visibly higher investment in maintaining its workers' freedom and quality of life. And, guess what - once the true communists defeat the "C"CP capitalist pretenders and institute real socialism, they're going to have to defend that socialism with some kind of internal repressive apparatus that keeps saboteurs too scared to act.
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Dec 23, 2020 03:18
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Perhaps, one might deduce, there is something about the structure of the state that leads the people in charge of it to stop being true communists once they take control of it. How many "true" revolutions being overthrown by even truer ones would it take to make that inference? If that even happens, of course, and it does not simply collapse and become even more capitalist? If all it has thus far achieved is something that a lot of middle of the road social democratic countries have achieved I'm not exactly convinced of the superiority of the system. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 03:34 on Dec 23, 2020 |
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Dec 23, 2020 03:23
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Even if we write off China in specific, it's simply not true across the board that communists stop being true communists when they seize state power. It's also very wrong to claim that socialist countries have only achieved the same sorts of things that middle of the road social democracies have achieved; there's not really a historical parallel for the speed and scope of the massive gains in health and industry seem in the two classic examples of the USSR and China, and all that was without the imperialist plunder that your Swedens and Norways suckle comfortably at the teat of.
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Dec 23, 2020 04:49
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And if I need to industrialize a country very rapidly I will certainly consider adopting that model, but I don't need to do that, the question is what it offers me and others like me who already live in industrialized or even post-industrialized countries, and if it's "you might win your strike actions sometimes and only some people involved end up in prison" that's not a very good offer. It isn't a good offer when the liberals make it either. I'm also not convinced that there are a plethora of true revolutionary communist societies hiding out that have not undergone economic liberalization and/or collapsed back into capitalism. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Dec 23, 2020 |
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Dec 23, 2020 05:21
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It was you, not me, who said "all it has thus far achieved is something that a lot of middle of the road social democratic countries have achieved", but that's actually incredibly false and a classic liberal anticommunist talking point to boot. Overthrowing the Tsar was a waste of time! You would have gotten those years of life expectancy anyway! Nope. Second, health, industrial capacity, and egalitarian social policy are all downstream from overthrowing the Tsar. If you can't construct a movement that can defeat him and his forces, and then prevent his devotees and sympathizers both national and international from de facto returning him to power, you've got nothing. And even if he is returned to power - even if, and obviously I don't actually believe this but I'll grant it for the sake of argument, China is a full-on dictatorship of the bourgeoisie devoted to nothing more than the valorization of capital - what you leave behind as the legacy of such a project is higher levels of worker militancy, greater widespread understanding and acceptance of Marxism and socialism generally, a state that's significantly more responsive to worker's needs, and perhaps most importantly reams of empirical historical data to draw on for the next generation of revolutionaries. Capitalism didn't actually achieve world domination after overthrowing the aristocracy in a single country over the span of a single generation either.
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Dec 23, 2020 05:44
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Overthrowing monarchs is not the sole purview of communist revolutions, however, and nor is it something that every country has bothered to do, and many of them have still managed to achieve significant improvements in quality of life for their citizens, through a combination of capitalist industrialization and various left wing efforts to rein in the excesses of it, the combination of which is what I am glibly calling social democracy. This does not suggest that that all happened "by itself" or whatever, it suggests that there are multiple historical processes that can produce the result of a capitalist economy with better quality of life than has hitherto been seen on earth. It's not like if you don't overthrow the tsar at the exact time and in the exact manner of the russian revolution then you end up in 2020 with 100 years of societal stasis? It again, may well be that revolutions are the fastest way to achieve industrialization and a comparable type of society with similar systems for providing for the needs of the citizenry but that, again, is not particularly useful to me, now. The question is "where do we go from here?" and I don't see much to suggest that there is a vast difference between where former soviet societies, china, and the west are at as far as being in thrall to capitalists. Which therefore leaves me asking why this particular model is something we must all emulate. Or why it is even applicable to the societies we now live in. We don't live in places where most people are illiterate and communication is difficult, or where there is a rural peasant population to take into account. I don't think that a revolutionary vanguard is a necessary thing, or that we should be putting them in charge of a state which is structurally designed to facilitate capitalist hegemony, rather than attacking that state itself and its ability to enforce anything on us. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 06:16 on Dec 23, 2020 |
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Dec 23, 2020 06:10
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Again, what you're feeding me right now is capitalist propaganda. We have ready-made, side-by-side examples of countries throwing off imperial rule and either going communist or not in India and China and the difference is staggeringly clear. It's an eternal thorn in capitalism's side that communism can promise better, faster development and a more complete fulfillment of the needs of the citizenry, and that's why people will constantly try to wave away the achievements of socialist states as something that capitalism would have done anyway while desperately praying that you haven't done your reading. Also, while the Russian revolution took the initial form of the overthrow of a monarch, the Chinese, Cuban, Vietnamese, Upper Voltan, etc. communist uprisings weren't aimed at ancient aristocrats, but bourgeois nationalists and imperial satraps, all acting at the behest of global finance capital. So, in fact, the tools and methods of revolution remain extremely relevant across the world because while monarchic dictatorships have fallen by the wayside bourgeois dictatorships continue to reign. If those methods aren't applicable to the first world specifically, then most likely nothing is because first world workers are simply too pampered by imperial spoils to ever defect. Personally, I believe they are applicable, because the USA for instance is in practice a settler colony whose internal subject nations are ripe for revolt. As to the final line of your post, this seems to be a willful misreading of everything I've written and indeed a hundred-odd years of communist theory, because "a state which is structurally designed to facilitate capitalist hegemony" is not a worker's state.
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Dec 23, 2020 06:45
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To extend the cop unions question, is a Union of Executives (similar to the Institute of Directors in the UK) a valid union? Technically a company director doesn’t need to also be a shareholder, and in many large organisations they may or may not hold shares by virtue of their position, but you can say the same about most members of the managerial class. If a cop union (having bourgeois class character) is invalid then it seems straightforward that a Union of Executives is also invalid, but this also complicates the inclusion of middle managers and even low level line managers in a union. If a cop union is a valid union despite its role in supporting the bourgeois class, then what differentiates it from a union of company directors? My suspicion is that the simplest answer to this is that it’s a semantic argument; unions are merely one type of syndicate operating in society, and an institute of directors is the mirror image of, say, a miner’s union, and represents opposite class interests. E: as with much of Theory contingent and specific examples often cause problems for the elegance and coherence of the overall idea of Marxist class struggle - I think this is why the Frankfurt School and the New Left ultimately parted ways from orthodox Marxist and Marxist-Leninist thought. Purple Prince fucked around with this message at 06:54 on Dec 23, 2020 |
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Dec 23, 2020 06:49
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OwlFancier posted:Overthrowing monarchs is not the sole purview of communist revolutions, however, and nor is it something that every country has bothered to do, and many of them have still managed to achieve significant improvements in quality of life for their citizens, through a combination of capitalist industrialization and various left wing efforts to rein in the excesses of it, the combination of which is what I am glibly calling social democracy. This does not suggest that that all happened "by itself" or whatever, it suggests that there are multiple historical processes that can produce the result of a capitalist economy with better quality of life than has hitherto been seen on earth. It's not like if you don't overthrow the tsar at the exact time and in the exact manner of the russian revolution then you end up in 2020 with 100 years of societal stasis? It again, may well be that revolutions are the fastest way to achieve industrialization and a comparable type of society with similar systems for providing for the needs of the citizenry but that, again, is not particularly useful to me, now. The question is "where do we go from here?" and I don't see much to suggest that there is a vast difference between where former soviet societies, china, and the west are at as far as being in thrall to capitalists. I want to know what you mean by "particular model", because of course what has been done in the past was historically contingent and wouldn't wholly make sense anymore. Countries can't really get away long term with not doing things at least as well as previously. The whole discipline&terror stuff is relative, It's not really like socialists would take a society that doesn't execute people for crimes and re-establish executions, or a society that has a rehabilitative approach to justice and replace that with some forced labor prison camp thing. On the other hand, there's this question of general principles. The vanguard couldn't be the same in a country where everyone is educated, but that's not enough to argue that it's outmoded. Of course I do agree that in today's advanced societies, it's not necessary to establish a structure where a vanguard tries to herd some kind of oppositional bureaucracy mainly made up of the executives of the previous society. If the bureaucrats' responsibilities can be filled by actual allies, then vanguard wouldn't need to take over that direct commanding position over the system. Historical decisions to put the vanguard in command of society were based on the idea that the system initially established by them, left to run on its own, would have a counterrevolutionary character. Vanguard are moral leaders raised to that position through self-sacrifice to beat unlikely odds, not the smartest and most capable people in society. But yeah, all the anarchists you see out there doing that sort of thing are (potential) vanguard too (and much more so than the "vanguardists" of PSL and so on), they just set this limit on themselves that they must always lead by example, without ever relying on direct command. But in practice, that hasn't really been helpful in connecting a vanguard to the masses. Reasonably successful anarchist-influenced movements practice command-style vanguardism on the struggle against the enemy side of things, and the people thank them for it, as it makes them accountable to known policy. Reliable, in a word. Someone who joins struggle orgs, especially the military, subjects themselves to punishment for insubordination.
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Dec 23, 2020 07:15
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I'm not really convinced that reversion to capitalism is an inherent structural failure of statehood as an institution, rather than a failure to eliminate a heritable ruling class (heritable in this case can refer to either actual political dynasties or entrenched systems of patronage). I'm also unconvinced that in the absense of a state that said a de facto ruling class won't emerge anyway, just through normal social dynamics, especially once groups grow too large for a single coherent community.
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Dec 23, 2020 19:53
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fool of sound posted:I'm not really convinced that reversion to capitalism is an inherent structural failure of statehood as an institution, rather than a failure to eliminate a heritable ruling class (heritable in this case can refer to either actual political dynasties or entrenched systems of patronage). I'm also unconvinced that in the absense of a state that said a de facto ruling class won't emerge anyway, just through normal social dynamics, especially once groups grow too large for a single coherent community. Historically, settled human societies without an identifiable ruling class have existed stably for hundreds and in a couple cases thousands of years at a scale of at least tens of thousands of people. So it's not like there's not precedent.
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Dec 23, 2020 20:37
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fool of sound posted:I'm not really convinced that reversion to capitalism is an inherent structural failure of statehood as an institution, rather than a failure to eliminate a heritable ruling class (heritable in this case can refer to either actual political dynasties or entrenched systems of patronage). I think that the reversion to capitalism is due to the fact that capitalists currently run the world and are incredibly hostile to non-capitalist countries. I hate to keep bringing them up, but Vietnam made a very real attempt to go full blown space communism and was strangled to death by exclusion from the market. As a result, Vietnam adopted aspects of capitalism out of necessity: If they didn't open their markets, they were going to starve because the capitalists who owned all the poo poo refused to do business with them. To me, if feels more like an external pressure than a "natural" course.
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Dec 23, 2020 20:51
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Ferrinus posted:Again, what you're feeding me right now is capitalist propaganda. We have ready-made, side-by-side examples of countries throwing off imperial rule and either going communist or not in India and China and the difference is staggeringly clear. It's an eternal thorn in capitalism's side that communism can promise better, faster development and a more complete fulfillment of the needs of the citizenry, and that's why people will constantly try to wave away the achievements of socialist states as something that capitalism would have done anyway while desperately praying that you haven't done your reading. Out of curiosity what makes India and China a better comparison than North and South Korea? With India and China one is a post-colonial country, one has 20 odd (30 odd?) different languages, one has many minority groups that get into violent conflict, etc. It's not a particularly natural experiment since there's huge differences.
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Dec 23, 2020 21:50
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regarding NK/SK, intentional sabotage by the global top dog of one and the intentional grooming by the same top dog of the other seems like a huge difference as well
Doktor Avalanche fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Dec 24, 2020 |
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Dec 23, 2020 22:03
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Yeah, like, offhand if there IS a country whose spectacular growth might even rival that of the USSR and communist China it's post-WW2 Japan, but there's an obvious extenuating factor there.
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Dec 23, 2020 22:29
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NovemberMike posted:Out of curiosity what makes India and China a better comparison than North and South Korea? With India and China one is a post-colonial country, one has 20 odd (30 odd?) different languages, one has many minority groups that get into violent conflict, etc. It's not a particularly natural experiment since there's huge differences. The amount of wealth that was deprived from NK vs. the amount of wealth poured into SK makes the comparison unhelpful. However, it is a great example of how material conditions guide history.
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Dec 23, 2020 23:55
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a question about capitalism and its history: every example of capitalism and the commodification of labour that I've found compares it to feudalism, but even in feudalism there were cities. Granted the vast majority of people were peasants, but how was production organised within cities anno 1500 that is so fundamentally different from today? basically I guess I don't understand the distinction between capital pre french revolution and capitalism post revolution double nine fucked around with this message at 00:01 on Dec 24, 2020 |
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Dec 23, 2020 23:59
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Cpt_Obvious posted:The amount of wealth that was deprived from NK vs. the amount of wealth poured into SK makes the comparison unhelpful. In what sense? My recollection is that in the immediate post-war time frame SK did receive billions of dollars in aid but NK actually received more from China and the USSR. It's been a bit since I looked it up but I remember one year China sent something like 3% of its economic output to NK. NK was also able to trade with its immediate neighbors. I think you'd need to provide evidence of the wealth that was deprived from NK and whether it received less aid than SK in this comparison. I'm also not actually that interested in SK vs NK, that's a whole complex thing that goes into more than just whether Marx was right. I'm more curious how India vs China is the most natural comparison for this.
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Dec 24, 2020 00:15
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NovemberMike posted:Out of curiosity what makes India and China a better comparison than North and South Korea? With India and China one is a post-colonial country, one has 20 odd (30 odd?) different languages, one has many minority groups that get into violent conflict, etc. It's not a particularly natural experiment since there's huge differences. 1) China is post-colonial; it wasn’t fully colonised like India under the Raj, but sections of it were constantly being taken by Russia, Japan, and the UK at different stages. 2) China has a bunch of regional languages which are mutually unintelligible (Min, Mandarin, and Cantonese being 3 that spring to mind). The writing system is shared, but literacy was hardly universal in the Imperial era. 3) China does have a bunch of minority groups albeit they tend not to fight each other: this is arguably because of the presence of the Chinese state and the somewhat more relaxed attitude to religion in China, followed by secularisation under the Communists. In the warlord era China was divided into a bunch of different states which were reunified by the Nationalists just in time for the Communists to seize power. Now it’s true that the particularities of the two countries differ substantially, but I’m not sure that these three points are the best ones to highlight the differences. Also see above about the difficulties with historical arguments in theory. Moreover they’re fundamentally idealist arguments about language and culture. It would be interesting to see a materialist analysis of China and India’s economic development in the 20th century including natural resources, foreign aid, etc but I’m pretty sure I don’t have the knowledge to write one, and China’s side would be pretty hard to research in a balanced way.
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Dec 24, 2020 01:55
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Well, I guess the classic three examples are FRG vs. GDR, ROK vs. DPRK, and India vs. China. Differences between east and west Germany are instructive but don't really speak to socialism's ability to build up an undeveloped country. ROK and DPRK came out of a proxy war and received immediate aid from that war's respective sides (as you say, the DPRK got more to start, which tracks with the fact that it also developed more quickly; I don't know offhand how the ratio of aid vs. aid compares to the ratio of growth vs. growth, but even if DPRK got 20% more aid but actually grew 30% faster (or whatever) it's hard to really peel those things apart) but ended up on very uneven footing in terms of the world market post-70s. Meanwhile I think there are fewer (though obviously not none) confounding factors in the comparison of two big countries, side by side, that threw off colonial rule at about the same time but didn't both engage in communist central planning.
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Dec 24, 2020 02:00
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Purple Prince posted:1) China is post-colonial; it wasn’t fully colonised like India under the Raj, but sections of it were constantly being taken by Russia, Japan, and the UK at different stages. I'm going to be honest here, those look like nit picks to me. Sure you could make an argument about calling China post-colonial because of Macau and Hong Kong but India was literally ruled over by the British. Sure China has some different languages but everything you listed is in the same Sino-Tibetan subgroup IIRC and India has something like 6 or 7 different language families with significant populations. I'm not saying that Indians are Moon people and Chinese are from Saturn and you can't compare them at all but you're downplaying the things that make a direct comparison difficult.
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Dec 24, 2020 02:58
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double nine posted:a question about capitalism and its history: every example of capitalism and the commodification of labour that I've found compares it to feudalism, but even in feudalism there were cities. Granted the vast majority of people were peasants, but how was production organised within cities anno 1500 that is so fundamentally different from today? In feudal cities, private enterprise was mostly very small scale: individual craftspeople and small collectives. Guilds acted as the main anti-market force: they rather successfully monopolised specific crafts within a city, and basically set the price of labor. When there were a lot of potential workers, they muscled most out of the market so that pay wouldn't be lowered. When there were few, they muscled out people trying to raise their prices. Nepotist favoritism caused many crafts to become largely hereditary, because masters would give the limited positions to people they knew. Basically, the labor market was suppressed both in terms of pay and in terms of freedom to work. The urban bourgeoisie rose partially from guildmasters, and as the scale of manufacture grew, the guilds went from institutions for the old to fleece the young on the basis of paternalistic privileges into institutions for the pre-industrial bourgeoisie to fleece their manufacturers: strike-breaking institutions that could threaten to shut out workers from work entirely, anti-competition institutions that could shut out external bourgeoisie etc. In the 18th century and onward, the industrial bourgeoisie (whose business was deskilling crafts using machinery) defeated what was left of the old manufacturing bourgeoisie, grew powerful enough to break the guild monopolies, and established laissez faire labor markets. They commodified labor power by breaking down the stratification of laborers into protected crafts and ranks. They made them interchangeable, freely fireable and hireable by anyone who had the money to.
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Dec 24, 2020 11:03
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NovemberMike posted:I'm going to be honest here, those look like nit picks to me. Sure you could make an argument about calling China post-colonial because of Macau and Hong Kong but India was literally ruled over by the British. Sure China has some different languages but everything you listed is in the same Sino-Tibetan subgroup IIRC and India has something like 6 or 7 different language families with significant populations. I'm not saying that Indians are Moon people and Chinese are from Saturn and you can't compare them at all but you're downplaying the things that make a direct comparison difficult. I mean, there was also the Japanese invasion. The two countries also had extremely similar vital statistics as they moved into their respective periods of independence, although offhand I don't know how exactly much industry or cultivated land or whatever that left each country with at t=0.
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Dec 24, 2020 19:26
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