Lostconfused posted:

Well nobody tried posadism yet, so let's give that a shot I guess.

mila kunis posted:

- critiques neoliberalism, the state giving away its powers to bankers and things along those lines
- there's a few times he talks about how individualism leads to disaster, and how change is only possible by giving up your comforts for a collective cause

KaptainKrunk posted:

drat you mean building a new society overnight from the wreckage of civil war and depression while simultaneously facing off against a technologically superior and wealthier bloc of powers out to destroy you is tough?

Goatson posted:

It's almost as if humans have a habit of oversimplifying the world to justify the societies they force upon themselves. Then when the systems inevitably fail because they have no relation to reality, people construct narratives to explain away the paradoxes.

As in the movie, so in this thread. Communism cannot fail, only be failed. Surely if we try the original theory again and again a different result emerges.

Goatson posted:

Communism cannot fail, only be failed. Surely if we try the original theory again and again a different result emerges.

Ardennes posted:

Yeah critiquing aspects of neoliberalism doesn’t really mean too much if you don’t really have much of an answer to it. «Waiting around for the next big idea” just seems like another argument for the status quo.

History doesn’t just happen when everything lines up perfectly, it just happens. For example, geopolitical center of the world is going to shift to Asia, it isn’t going to require a big idea or be stopped by it.

I mean you can have all the production values in the world, but his argument seems really like more great man theory than actually materialist. How important was Jiang Qing compared to China being economically isolated by both the Soviets and the West from the late 1950s to the 1970s? I guess having some boring charts on exports would harsh the vibe.

mila kunis posted:

Snip

rockear posted:

it would also be foolish to deny that the USSR suffered plenty of structural issues that had nothing to do with outside interference.

quote:

We have been taught that people living under communism suffer from "the totalitarian control over every aspect oflife," as Time mag­azine (5/27/96) still tells us. Talking to the people themselves, one found that they complained less about overbearing control than about the absence of responsible control.

quote:

There was the manager who regularly pilfered the till, the workers who filched foodstuffs and goods from state stores or supplies from factories in order to service private homes for personal gain, the peasants on col­lective farms who stripped parts from tractors to sell them on the black market, the director who accepted bribes to place people at the top of a waiting list to buy cars, and the farmers who hoarded live­stock which they sold to townspeople at three times the govern­ment's low procurement price. All this was hardly the behavior of people trembling under a totalitarian rule of terror.

quote:

Not surprisingly, work discipline left much to be desired. There was the clerk who chatted endlessly with a friend on the telephone while a long line of people waited resentfully for service, the two workers who took three days to paint a hotel wall that should have taken a few hours, the many who would walk off their jobs to go shopping.

quote:

If fired, an individual had a constitutional guarantee to another job and seldom had any difficulty finding one. The labor market was a seller's market. Workers did not fe ar losing their jobs but managers fe ared losing their best workers and sometimes overpaid them to prevent them from leaving.

quote:

Communist economies had a kind of Wonderland quality in that " prices seldom bore any relation to actual cost or value. Many expen-sive services were provided almost entirely free, such as education, medical care, and most recreational, sporting, and cultural events. Housing, transportation, utilities, and basic foods were heavily sub­sidized.



I listened to an East German friend complain of poor services and inferior products; the system did not work, he concluded. But what of the numerous social benefits so lacking in much of the world, I asked, aren't these to be valued? His response was revealing: "Oh, nobody ever talks about that." People took for granted what they had in the way of human services and entitlements while hungering for the consumer goods

quote:

Most people living under socialism had little understanding of cap­italism in practice. Workers interviewed in Poland believed that if their factory were to be closed down in the transition to the free market, "the state will find us some other work" (New Yorker, 11/ 13/89). They thought they would have it both ways. In the Soviet Union, many who argued for privatization also expected the government to continue providing them with collective benefits and subsidies.

Reality sometimes hit home. In 1990, during the glasnost period, when the Soviet government announced that the price of newsprint would be raised 300 percent to make it commensurate with its actual cost, the new procapitalist publications complained bitterly. They were angry that state socialism would no longer subsidize their denunciations of state socialism. They were being subjected to the same free-market realities they so enthusiastically advocated for everyone else, and they did not like it.

quote:

They discovered they could no longer leave their jobs during the day to go shopping, that their employers provided no company doc­tor when they fe ll ill on the job, that they were subject to severe rep­rimands when tardy, that they could not walk the streets and parks late at night without fear, that they might not be able to afford med­ical services for their family or college tuition for their children, and that they had no guarantee of a job and might experience unem­ployment at any time.

quote:

even if one were to stipulate that the failures of the USSR were entirely caused by sabotage from the west... that problem hasn't gone away and is in fact way worse than it was in the post-war era, owing particularly to the fact the the USSR and China are now capitalist.

Goatson posted:

My tummyfeel is that the documentary isn't just about historical events. My tummyfeel is that the main idea is to point to a paradox inside human psyche that is prevalent in all of us: that the world is chaotic and unpredictable place and human minds by nature perceive through patterns and narratives, simplifying everything in the process. What emerges when people become isolated, feeling powerless or otherwise detached from the reality are narratives and stories that no longer make sense. A mindset that believes that cabal of small elite rule the world and communicates its intent through patterns and signs. Or that soviet collapse happened actually, not because of underlying chaos and human incompetence, but because of external forces working against it that were at the same time all-powerful, but still somehow utterly incompetent.

Bootleg Trunks posted:

Adam Curtis good or Adam Curtis bad

mila kunis posted:

China does seem to want to follow the path of wanting to grow the per capita GDP / purchasing power of their populace and supplant the west as the world's most important consumer market. Which means higher wages relative to profits and I don't see how you do that without the similar contradictions that led to neoliberalism, jobs flowing out of the country, and rising costs of living + capitalists chasing rents and returns leading to extreme debts and rent obligations placed on the population.

The question is whether the CCP has studied this and sees it as something to avoid, or whether they seem themselves, personally, enriched enough by it in the short term to do it anyway.

Doctor Jeep posted:

is it possible that b&r and their various investments are preparing africa to be their "china" when it comes to cheap labor etc

mila kunis posted:

this is something to learn from, build and iterate on rather than throwing everything away with an idiotic "communism failed, nothing to see here" kind of rabbit hole adam curtis would lead you down.

mila kunis posted:

The west had two choices; socialism or neoliberalism and chose the latter. I don't know enough about the mentality of the establishment, governing cliques, and the future leadership that's being groomed in China to know which way they'll go when they'll run into the same problems.

China does seem to want to follow the path of wanting to grow the per capita GDP / purchasing power of their populace and supplant the west as the world's most important consumer market. Which means higher wages relative to profits and I don't see how you do that without the similar contradictions that led to neoliberalism, jobs flowing out of the country, and rising costs of living + capitalists chasing rents and returns leading to extreme debts and rent obligations placed on the population.

The question is whether the CCP has studied this and sees it as something to avoid, or whether they seem themselves, personally, enriched enough by it in the short term to do it anyway.

lollontee posted:

what makes you think the CCP would have any solutions or ways to avoid taking the same path that led to neoliberalism?

lollontee posted:

what makes you think the CCP would have any solutions or ways to avoid taking the same path that led to neoliberalism?

mila kunis posted:

it's something that's up in the air, and nothing can be guaranteed.

but there's a few reasons they might do so: because they can learn from history and see what that's led to in the west - decay and slow death. and also because their political economy and actions are considerably different. when opening up, they could have gone down the route of russia/latin america, just let america completely in and rape their country but they established a system where they forced western capital to have to partner with local sponsors, do knowledge transfers, build up their own technical and productive forces. things got pretty bad under jiang zemin, with lots of corruption and capital flight, but they reversed that course and have massively cut down on both. under xi, they've launched (successfully) a huge rural poverty alleviation program. their current policy (dual circulation or whatever) intends to raise living standards and wages so china becomes the biggest consumer market in the world.

i can only be forced to conclude that they are interested in the material well being and prosperity of their citizens. but so were the keynesians and new dealers - those guys ended up being replaced by different people who looted their own countries when capital fought back. but capital's political power in china is severely limited and crippled, and the capitalists who hosed with state policy and found out can attest to that. they also already have a massive public sector that controls the commanding heights of the economy, no such equivalent ever existed in the US/UK/most european countries outside of the war economies they ran under ww2.

Antonymous posted:

curtis is a lot like chomsky imo

can repeat a lot of facts I didn't know that makes me go 'woah drat, holy poo poo really' and reinforces my world view but then no really impactful thesis comes out of it and I think they would tell me to vote for Biden

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

3/4s of way through part 6 curtis asserts that liberal elites in america "don't know" how to help people, as if giving people healthcare has really, honestly never occurred to them

what the gently caress are you talking about

mila kunis posted:

Fat-Lip-Sum-41.mp3 posted:

3/4s of way through part 6 curtis asserts that liberal elites in america "don't know" how to help people, as if giving people healthcare has really, honestly never occurred to them

what the gently caress are you talking about