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I just watched this recently, and totally recommend it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7COX-b3HK50
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Sep 8, 2020 22:32
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Finally some party purity. No libs, only proper bolshevik professional revolutionaries.
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Sep 8, 2020 22:43
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The Ellman book recommended earlier is really cool about cutting away the politics and history around the internal economic structure of the USSR and other socialist states and looking at what it did and why from the fundamental internal logic. All economic systems have drives and constraints and the soviet one was of serious expropriation and suppressed consumer goods production to fuel heavy industry expansion which allowed huge growth at major environmental and social cost. One of the particularly illuminating examples it had which really made me thing about how economic structures need to work was how Stalin boasted about how the drive to develop the economy would come from the peoples desire for more physical production for their needs but in reality that just meant a black market economy to acquire scarce goods, smuggling and social networks gatekeeping access to goods which economically and ideologically undermines the whole project. I think Cockshotts idea of the potential socialist economy is wrong but his core points about really clamping down on inflationary pressures from inbalances between consumer purchasing power and allowing some price variations at the point of final sale to consumers to balance that out and alter future production are important mechanisms to consider. Essentially either there is an abstract pricing mechanism or a social resolution somewhere to all kinds of these issues and the more that these mechanisms are obvious and accessible to the masses the stronger and more adaptive and I believe popular they will be. Project Cybersyn is good in terms of demonstrating that the technology of timely information isn't the issue, it's entirely the human dynamics within the system that is created which is the key to building a planned economy. People will still lie on forms under socialism, because it's going to be very hard to detect a small lie and that possibility is something a system needs to know how to limit automatically. Bankruptcy will eventually drive poo poo companies under (well, until 2008 anyway), what is a truly socialist mechanism to replace it?
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Sep 8, 2020 22:46
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cenotaph posted:I'm certainly no expert but my understanding is that part of that was the early focus on heavy industry due to the existential threat of Germany (Losurdo points out that Hitler's planned colonization of Eastern Europe was an idea going back to WW1) which central planning was good for because (and again I think this is in B&R) it's easy to figure out how many refrigerators or garbage trucks a city should need but consumer or luxury goods are trickier to determine appropriate production levels. In liberal economics this is the function the market provides, but poorly. A modern planned economy would be heavily computerized which should work, or at least that's the case made in The People's Republic of Wal-Mart. This is an over simplification. Planned production in soviet Russia and later USSR went through several different forms. There are many different reasons for why the economy failed. Some of the blame rests on the economic reforms that already happened in the 60s. In the later years USSR was being mismanaged by the party with the Army taking up large portions of labor and resources for useless vanity projects. Nobody inside the party was interested in pushing through potential reforms or fixes for the economic decline either. Central planning failed in part because it could not implement a plan in the first place. namesake posted:Project Cybersyn is good in terms of demonstrating that the technology of timely information isn't the issue, it's entirely the human dynamics within the system that is created which is the key to building a planned economy. People will still lie on forms under socialism, because it's going to be very hard to detect a small lie and that possibility is something a system needs to know how to limit automatically. Bankruptcy will eventually drive poo poo companies under (well, until 2008 anyway), what is a truly socialist mechanism to replace it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OGAS Lostconfused fucked around with this message at 22:57 on Sep 8, 2020 |
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Sep 8, 2020 22:53
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THS posted:people who get mad about china just stealing technology are so funny. stealing IP is objectively awesome we stole an asston of nazi IP lol
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Sep 8, 2020 22:54
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Lightning Knight posted:guyovich I concede you were right lol. 
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Sep 8, 2020 23:10
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Lostconfused posted:Nobody inside the party was interested in pushing through potential reforms or fixes for the economic decline either. why
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Sep 8, 2020 23:14
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indigi posted:why Ellman phrases it very well - planned economies are not teams all focused on a singular goal but coalitions with shared but not completely uniform goals. Separate ministries or regions or communities all have individual objectives which might all possibly be able to be achieved at the same time but could each be achieved faster if someone else doesn't get to reach their goal so there's all kinds of internal power dynamics at play. No matter how ideologically dedicated someone is this sort of thing will appear because it's their role to get their ministry what it wants and it doesn't wreck the shared goals of the socialist economy so they aren't wreckers or anything like that, they're fulfilling their role as it is designed. The act of understanding, directing and controlling this when the structure is being built is the best start and the ability to change this in a way that is satisfactory to the population but also maintains the integrity of the system against aggression is the art of socialist planning. There's a really cool section where Ellman talks about the nature of the soviet economy being investment starved which means all resources are heavily desired and how it explains all kinds of behaviour from fixers which worked within the plans to trade resources between groups, the existence of full employment beyond ideology because labour in any form was always needing to be retained for one project or another and also posits the existence of a 'business' cycle within the soviet system based on the approval and cancellation or completion of large scale investment projects. Seriously it's a loving good book. namesake fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Sep 8, 2020 |
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Sep 8, 2020 23:31
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indigi posted:why That's my generalization, I can't really answer this in a satisfactory manner. There's several different social causes/problems there. Constant demands from the military putting pressure on civilian production capacity. The internal bureaucratic structure of the communist party in USSR. Supposedly pure academia was more comfortable for economists/mathematicians, so the state planning committee suffered from lack of talent. The forward looking theoretical department in Gosplan, during 1980s, had no leverage within the organization so they couldn't push through any sort of forward thinking reforms. Obviously I don't know enough to give a good answer, but these are some of the reasons I saw mentioned. A lot of it seems like bureaucratic failure, and the people in charge of the state failed to do what was needed of them like any other time in history.
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Sep 8, 2020 23:32
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Lostconfused posted:This is an over simplification. Planned production in soviet Russia and later USSR went through several different forms. There are many different reasons for why the economy failed. Some of the blame rests on the economic reforms that already happened in the 60s. In the later years USSR was being mismanaged by the party with the Army taking up large portions of labor and resources for useless vanity projects. Nobody inside the party was interested in pushing through potential reforms or fixes for the economic decline either. Central planning failed in part because it could not implement a plan in the first place.
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Sep 8, 2020 23:41
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Oof ouch my sides, love to to build a society that loses to the Stalin period in terms of public perception of personal safety. I mean remember that it wasn’t only western propaganda that portrayed it as dangerous times to live in. Freedom!
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Sep 9, 2020 12:06
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they may have been funded by the cia but we must also express solidarity with striking workers so its impossible to say if its bad or not
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Sep 9, 2020 14:23
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Lostconfused posted:This is an over simplification. Planned production in soviet Russia and later USSR went through several different forms. There are many different reasons for why the economy failed. Some of the blame rests on the economic reforms that already happened in the 60s. In the later years USSR was being mismanaged by the party with the Army taking up large portions of labor and resources for useless vanity projects. Nobody inside the party was interested in pushing through potential reforms or fixes for the economic decline either. Central planning failed in part because it could not implement a plan in the first place. it's an oversimplification but it's basically right. the focus on heavy industry and by extension military hardware crowded out other industries. central planning is great for war time or if you have a specific goal (reaching space), not so great in peace time when the focus for a country like the USSR should have been exports/trade and having a flexible work force. you're definitely right about nobody in the party wanting to push through reforms tho. from my reading the USSR was sort of on auto-pilot from Brezhnev till the end euphemism posted:we stole an asston of nazi IP lol guess who also did that
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Sep 9, 2020 14:38
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lol
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Sep 9, 2020 15:09
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uncop posted:Oof ouch my sides, love to to build a society that loses to the Stalin period in terms of public perception of personal safety. I mean remember that it wasn’t only western propaganda that portrayed it as dangerous times to live in. Freedom! why were Stalin times so bad for public safety
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Sep 9, 2020 16:01
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yes, just what was so bad for public safety in the 1930s-1940s?
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Sep 9, 2020 23:01
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Karl Barks posted:it's an oversimplification but it's basically right. the focus on heavy industry and by extension military hardware crowded out other industries. central planning is great for war time or if you have a specific goal (reaching space), not so great in peace time when the focus for a country like the USSR should have been exports/trade and having a flexible work force. you're definitely right about nobody in the party wanting to push through reforms tho. from my reading the USSR was sort of on auto-pilot from Brezhnev till the end I would say even that is oversimplified, a lot of it is simply that the Soviet state was on the edge of being broke for most of its history and that much of the austerity and "poor central planning" that occurred the Soviet Union was at least partially intentional. Part of it is that the Soviet Union simply couldn't access Western markets easily (especially the US domestic market) and traditionally always struggled to promote enough exports to import the machinery and equipment they needed to keep on moving forward technologically. The original Lada is a good example which was a Fiat 124 that was re-engineered for Russian/Soviet conditions. It was a good design (for the time) that they just kept making because it was what they had access to. Often quality control was an issue less so that Soviet workers were lazy or central planners were idiots because between domestic quotas, price controls, and limited resources something had to give. Most of Soviet history was struggling to make do with what was available. The Soviet economy was on autopilot from the early 1970s to the late 1980s mostly because higher energy prices allowed them a little more flexibility during that era, but rather than desperately invest in export-centric industries they went into Afganistan. Gorbachev was out of his league and at least some of his advisors were actively compromised, perestroika took a rapidly deteriorating situation and made it worse. Yelstin decided to triple down on that. Putin got lucky energy prices were on the upswing for a good 15 years.
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Sep 10, 2020 00:21
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indigi posted:why were Stalin times so bad for public safety I don't know, you tell me! In this post-2016 world everyone should understand how tenuous the link between public perceptions and reality is.
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Sep 10, 2020 03:46
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i'm also not very well read up on the pre gorbachev situation. similar to ardennes, my understanding is: 1) pre-gorbachev, the planned economy in the ussr did work, warts and all like any other system in existence, and delivered housing, employment, education you got paid for, and decent living standards despite being under a blockade from capitalist nations that had a major headstart and access to far more resources under its direct military control. 2) having greatly increased life expectancy and population size within its borders, having to feed that population and maintain living standards was a major issue given most of russia is a frozen hellscape, so autarky was a no go - which meant trading for hard currency/resources in a pretty hostile environment, and the major thing they had for export was oil. when the sauds then crashed the price of oil and caused an economic shock, right wingers under gorbachev used that as a lever for privatization which led to all kinds of goods shortages, the infamous breadlines, the rise of the russian mafia, and was the direct cause of the collapse. is that a fair summary?
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Sep 10, 2020 07:37
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I apologize for the bad quality of the shot, but that's the best I could do trying to get a photo of this text: Gorbachev "liberalized" the economy in a deliberate response to try and "democratize" and reduce the top-down planned aspect of it, but doing so created these unintended consequences of market behavior that created the popular impression of a Soviet Union that was unable to produce consumer goods.
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Sep 10, 2020 08:03
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 It's from noted socialist intellectual HP Lovecraft
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Sep 11, 2020 16:13
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gradenko_2000 posted:I apologize for the bad quality of the shot, but that's the best I could do trying to get a photo of this text: I'm surprised you left the bottom of that unhighlighted, as that's the crux of the point being made "no more than 17% of breakfast cereals [...] needed. Less than a third of meat products [...]"
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Sep 11, 2020 16:15
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cenotaph posted:I'm certainly no expert but my understanding is that part of that was the early focus on heavy industry due to the existential threat of Germany (Losurdo points out that Hitler's planned colonization of Eastern Europe was an idea going back to WW1) which central planning was good for because (and again I think this is in B&R) it's easy to figure out how many refrigerators or garbage trucks a city should need but consumer or luxury goods are trickier to determine appropriate production levels. In liberal economics this is the function the market provides, but poorly. A modern planned economy would be heavily computerized which should work, or at least that's the case made in The People's Republic of Wal-Mart. There actually was a soviet academic clique pushing the idea of automation. Unfortunately this happened in the early 60s before the technology was feasible and the group was ultimately overshadowed by the market reformers, and we all know how that ended up
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Sep 11, 2020 16:29
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gradenko_2000 posted:Gorbachev "liberalized" the economy in a deliberate response to try and "democratize" and reduce the top-down planned aspect of it, but doing so created these unintended consequences of market behavior that created the popular impression of a Soviet Union that was unable to produce consumer goods. It is also he kept price controls intact (as it is implied in the text) so basic items suddenly disappeared because enterprises couldn't or wouldn't make those items since there was nothing in it for them and the result was a supply crisis. Granted, many of his advisors wanted to fully privatize state industries to begin with and arguably this was a half-step solution that only made the situation worse until Yeltsin could take it the full way there. Admittedly, part of it is that even during the late 70s/80s the Soviet Union was clearly running into issues that weren't or couldn't be solved including technological obsolesce and simply did not have the resources to take on the entire West (who shared its technology). High oil prices only kept them churning along until the Saudi deal sealed the Soviet Union's fate (but Gorbachev probably did accelerate it 4-5 years). Btw, through the Freedom of Information Act you can poke around some CIA reports from early-mid 1980s and while there isn't a smoking gun (someone does look at this stuff), thinking in the CIA was clearly evolving along the lines that oil exports were the Soviet's vulnerability and the only question was which tactic to choose.
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Sep 11, 2020 18:24
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The modern American workplace is a communist dictatorship — and we must admit it if we're going to fix it David Goldstein Sep 4, 2020, 9:07 AM If there is a silver lining to the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that it is finally opening the eyes of many Americans to the profoundly unfree and illiberal nature of the modern American workplace. For millions of essential workers forced back on the job in unsafe conditions without adequate personal protective equipment or hazard pay, the immense imbalance of power between employer and employee has never been more perilous or more stark. Meanwhile, millions of more fortunate Americans, suddenly getting their work done from home far from the prying eyes of the boss or the relentless tyranny of the clock, are beginning to question if the daily commute and the daily grind were ever as necessary as they seemed. Americans are waking up to the fact that there is something intuitively wrong with the modern American workplace. Not just the hours or the pay or the commute, but the institution itself. And it is something that we have all been blinded to for the past 150 years. In her book "Private Government," the political philosopher Elizabeth Anderson asks us to imagine a government that assigns all of us a superior who we must obey — a superior unaccountable to either the rule of law or to those they order around. This government can tell us what to do and what to wear, can snoop on our emails and record our phone conversations; it can sanction our behavior or our speech, and can even order us to submit to medical tests. This government offers us no say in how it governs or voice in electing its leaders; it owns all the means of production, and it organizes production through central planning. This government, Anderson provocatively asserts, is one of the many "communist dictatorships in our midst." And of course, what Anderson is referring to is the modern American firm. As Anderson explains on a recent episode of the podcast Pitchfork Economics, we've long been taught to equate markets with freedom. But the labor market is different from all other markets: "If I sell my apples that I own to you, I walk away as free as I was before my apples were sold. But if I sell my labor to you … I cannot walk away from that transaction. What I've really contracted into is a relationship of subordination to my employer." And, absent sufficient regulation or enforcement from our public government, the private government of the firm has accumulated immense power to dictate our lives both in the workplace and at home. "The biggest scam in the world is to think that deregulation is a thing," said Anderson. "There are regulations that favor the powerful people, and there are regulations that favor ordinary regular people, but there's no such thing as a market without any regulations at all." Within the context of the workplace, what neoliberal policymakers refer to as "deregulation" is merely a shift of regulatory power from the elected leaders of our public government to the unelected dictators of the firm. Of course, in a free market, we are always free to quit our jobs and go to work at a different communist dictatorship, but as Anderson asserts, this sort of "free market" is little more than a "rhetorical trick." It doesn't have to be this way. For the 6% of private sector workers who still benefit from collective bargaining, the power of their employer is less than absolute. And in many other industrialized nations, workers receive some sort of representation in company management and on corporate boards, without any negative impact on economic competitiveness. For example, German workers have long participated in the management of the firms they work through the statutory right of "codetermination," and German companies are some of the most competitive in the world. But by far the most important thing we can do now to genuinely move toward the sort of individual freedom and liberty the free market has long promised us, is to open our eyes and see the modern workplace for what it is: a private government that dictates far too much of our personal lives and our daily routine. Only then can we start to imagine a post-pandemic workplace that is more prosperous, more free, and more humane. This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author(s). SEE ALSO: At a time when authoritarianism is on the rise again, the lessons offered by world-renowned economist John Maynard Keynes are more timely than ever >>
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Sep 11, 2020 18:55
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gradenko_2000 posted:
wow i never knew he reformed before his death
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Sep 11, 2020 19:09
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Famous TV Dad posted:wow i never knew he reformed before his death in s.t. joshi's biography of lovecraft he included a few letters from the years before his death when he was poor as gently caress and forced to live in the city, and he noted a softening of his demeanor. seems that exposure was making him less racist. granted, we're talking about like italians here, so its not a huge leap, but progress is progress i guess
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Sep 11, 2020 19:18
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There's another half to the letter on twitter.
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Sep 11, 2020 19:25
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wow Ardennes posted:Admittedly, part of it is that even during the late 70s/80s the Soviet Union was clearly running into issues that weren't or couldn't be solved including technological obsolesce and simply did not have the resources to take on the entire West (who shared its technology). why couldn't they solve problems like technological obsolescence? that makes it sound like capitalism really is the only way innovation occurs
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Sep 11, 2020 22:14
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indigi posted:wow Don't know about the obsolescence stuff but they pretty clearly innovated considering they had a successful space program.
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Sep 11, 2020 22:27
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indigi posted:why couldn't they solve problems like technological obsolescence? that makes it sound like capitalism really is the only way innovation occurs A vastly larger group of economies outspent them cenotaph posted:Don't know about the obsolescence stuff but they pretty clearly innovated considering they had a successful space program. They did, it is just the Soviets had to try to do almost everything itself and could only bootstrap so far.
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Sep 11, 2020 23:22
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Ardennes posted:It is also he kept price controls intact (as it is implied in the text) so basic items suddenly disappeared because enterprises couldn't or wouldn't make those items since there was nothing in it for them and the result was a supply crisis. Granted, many of his advisors wanted to fully privatize state industries to begin with and arguably this was a half-step solution that only made the situation worse until Yeltsin could take it the full way there. I wouldn't say the soviet union was doomed though it definitely would've had to give up on its international ambitions and would've likely required some reforms ala vietnam in order to maintain it's economy. Of course this would've required an amount of political repression that gorbachev just didn't have the stomach for. The Soviet's geopolitical position was simply untenable long term, but I don't think the union itself necessarily was (though I'm willing to concede that the exploitation of nationalist sentiments would've probably torn off the non-core ssr irregardless of whatever reforms took place)
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Sep 11, 2020 23:49
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Dreddout posted:I wouldn't say the soviet union was doomed though it definitely would've had to give up on its international ambitions and would've likely required some reforms ala vietnam in order to maintain it's economy. The problem with going a China/Taiwan route is that DC and the American political establishment still saw the Soviet Union as its prime foe and really didn't care how much the Soviets tried to reform. Krushchev and Gorbachev never got that the US one way or another would come for them. Also, the Soviet Union's geopolitical position was always necessary because the Soviets' only real way to have an normalized trading relationship with the outside world was to have allies and the less allies it had, the more it would be pushed into a corner. Despite nationalist sentiment, the some form of the Union could have probably have been saved until early summer 1991 but between the incompetence of Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and the August coup there wasn't much hope. That said, what occurred did inform how PRC long-term strategy by tying itself to the American economy so deeply that not even the Beltway could disentangle it (and they are trying).
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Sep 12, 2020 00:03
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Ardennes posted:A vastly larger group of economies outspent them why didn’t that problem happen in like Cuba or China as well
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Sep 12, 2020 01:47
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indigi posted:why didn’t that problem happen in like Cuba or China as well It clearly was and still is an issue for Cuba which is still in a poor trade position and has to import the vast majority of finished goods. They may have survived the collapsed largely because of Castro himself who wasn't just going to go down without a fight like Gorbachev. Chinese investment into nickel smelting more recently has given them some breathing room. China was at least from an American perspective "allied" with us during the 1980s and that allowed it to start to accrue capital from the West and that relationship only grew until the present-day. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Chinese were in fairly rough shape.
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Sep 12, 2020 03:08
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Ardennes posted:It clearly was and still is an issue for Cuba which is still in a poor trade position and has to import the vast majority of finished goods. They may have survived the collapsed largely because of Castro himself who wasn't just going to go down without a fight like Gorbachev. Chinese investment into nickel smelting more recently has given them some breathing room. everything seems so hopeless lol
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Sep 12, 2020 03:16
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Atrocious Joe posted:that anti-trans account is lovely, but also only has 500 followers compared to the think tankers 34000 Why does this matter?
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Sep 12, 2020 11:04
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indigi posted:everything seems so hopeless lol Always has been. The odds have always sucked and the game has always been rigged. But we don't fight for what's right because we think the odds are good, we do it because it's right.
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Sep 12, 2020 11:15
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We only have to be lucky once.
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Sep 12, 2020 11:21
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indigi posted:everything seems so hopeless lol The long arc of history has bent towards class conflict being resolved in favor of the lower classes. The mere fact we live in a capitalist economy as opposed to feudalism or a slave society is proof of that. Assuming climate change doesn't wipe us out the working class will eventually win again. That may not happen in our lifetimes but it's only a matter of time. I'd also argue socialism is extremely influential in the global south and once again gaining steam due to america's decline. Things look a lot less hopeless one you decenter your worldview from the reactionary north
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Sep 12, 2020 15:45
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