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Homework Explainer posted:i don't agree with this, comrade. individual actors making unilateral choices is great man propaganda that the west pushes in opposition to actually existing socialisms. the way those governments operated, and the way power was diffused among committees, soviets, etc., shows the "dictator theories" of those countries to be a pretty appalling misrepresentation of the way they functioned. gensecs were heads of state for most countries, yes, but there's absolutely no chance they made every political and economic decision for those countries, or even most of them. i'd argue more that because the government takes a larger role in economic planning that the "individual" you refer to is the government itself and not necessarily the head of state or specific central planners. everything else is 100 percent correct. I don't think you're getting his point. It's the fact that there are identifiable moustache twirling villains on the Soviet side. Millions died in the holodomor? It's Stalin's fault. millions more in the Chinese famines? It's that crazy Mao. The millions that die each year from a golbal capitalist system that doesn't deliver food and healthcare to those most in need? There's no one main identifiable culprit. The point is about narrative, not objectivity or morality. quote:while i agree that socialism now doesn't have to take the form of past socialisms, the way firms worked in the soviet union is very much like a cooperative, even more aggressively so since such a large percentage of workers were in the union and had a government guaranteeing their rights, and their participation both in the direction of the firm and the greater political process. I feel this is a very lopsided view where you're not considering what makes the socialist ideal of co-operatives good and what made the workplaces of the USSR bad. You mention Trade Unions and government guaranteed rights, but not their toothlessness, the illegality of them performing core actions like strikes and the ability of the government to inflict astounding atrocities against its civilians for little cause. Not to mention that trade unions are a good thing because they protect and empower workers so when there is a varietyof disempowerment and abuse aimed at workers which happens regardless of trade unions then that doesn't really cut it as an acceptable rationale. If a worker is killed for trying to follow a non-party line, then his wife is sent to a labour camp for being a member of the family of a traitor to the Motherland while his and his child is impoverished and find it hard to work because he is officially labelled a "child of an enemy of the people" then that is not a good place for labour rights regardless of the number of people in sidelined trade unions. You need to take an overall holistic look at labour rights. Your focus on a few details reminds me of the way pharmaceutical companies will justify drugs on the basis of some change in a correlatorary effect even when it shows no signs of actually curing the disease. quote:stalinism isn't a real historical category of marxism, imo. stalin himself refused the term and continuously asserted himself a marxist-leninist. "stalinism" is a trotskyist construction that has been used as anti-soviet propaganda to great effect. Seeing as Lenin's dying wishes involved removing Stalin (which Stalin kept hidden) and Stalin lacked the theoretical underpinnings of contemporaries I don't really agree with or care for what he said or thought. Stalin was about the self-perpetuation of the Bolsheviks and lacked the ideological underpinnings and convictions of others. Stalinism is a recognised political trend that differs from the Leninism that preceded it. If you want to call it "Marxism-Leninism with less respect for human rights as Practiced by the USSR during approximately the 1930's to 1950's (possibly longer)" then you can but we all know you just mean Stalinism. quote:i'll joke about "the lion assad" on occasion. there are criticisms to be had against him, ones i'll gladly discuss with other anti-imperialists. but man, i gotta tell you, american imperialism is far worse than assad or putin. the us government really does preside over a perpetual death machine and the consequences of this are remote to those of us living here but all too real for the people under attack by imperial power. You seem to be skipping past the point. The issue is defending Assad as "not a butcher". I detest imperialism plenty but that doesn't make the domestic butchery of a middle-eastern dictator somehow acceptable.
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Jan 23, 2016 23:58
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team overhead smash posted:I don't think you're getting his point. It's the fact that there are identifiable moustache twirling villains on the Soviet side. Millions died in the holodomor? It's Stalin's fault. millions more in the Chinese famines? It's that crazy Mao. The millions that die each year from a golbal capitalist system that doesn't deliver food and healthcare to those most in need? There's no one main identifiable culprit. Another difference is that people starving today usually aren't doing so because of capitalism. Homework Explainer posted:that kind of limited social mobility is, in reality, rare. which is my point. capitalism tells us all things are possible when in all likelihood only a very few are. "Rare" is not the same thing as "impossible." Homework Explainer posted:in addition to what the above poster said in response to this, if you're referring to bernie sanders he's basically an eisenhower republican or, at best, a new deal democrat. that's not a left turn, that's gaining back ground won in the middle of the 20th century, the very time i mentioned when the country was at its most socially democratic. this is what frustrates me about bernie. the window of political possibility has narrowed so much that dwight eisenhower with a d next to his name is the great "left" hope. that's not heartening to real leftists, or at least it shouldn't be. that's how effective the ruling class is at shaping the narrative, though! Eisenhower was cool, but Bernie is still to the left of him. And regardless of whether we've been where we're going before in the past, it's still a left turn from where we are (and were under Bush). So again, it goes against the idea that we can only move left when threatened with revolution. Also I consider myself a real leftist and it would be heartening to me if Bernie Sanders won, because he's exactly as far left as I want to go. Homework Explainer posted:another thing worth mentioning, if the anticoms itt want to have a real discussion about actually existing socialism (they don't, when spouting ad hoc received wisdom is so much more satisfying, with so little effort expended) it's important to keep in mind we haven't seen a socialism not under unflinching attack and encirclement by imperialism. russia is, as always, an excellent example, but cuba works really well for this too. the country was under heavy blockade and sanction from the moment of its marxist turn, yet still managed to keep people housed, educated and healthy. even during the special period social services weren't dismantled or diluted. It just sounds like a flimsy excuse to me. America also faced the same "threat of subversion or outright invasion" as Russia did during the cold war and it did just fine. Socialist countries will always fail, and there'll always be something you can point to besides the ideology to explain it. team overhead smash posted:2) The Capitalist deathcount from starvation and similar is easily 100+ million which far exceeds all deaths caused by Communism. Source? team overhead smash posted:3) You also seem to be missing the point that even in hosed up Soviet Russia these were aberrations which were fixed and not repeated and don't represent the norm. Under the Capitalist framework millions of people dying of starvation and preventable medical conditions is the status quo. I mean is your argument really "Well occasionally the worst kind of Communism that we don't want to have and will be trying specifically to avoid can be fractionally as bad as Capitalism"? This doesn't even make sense. First off millions of people dying of starvation and preventable medical conditions is not the capitalist status quo. In capitalist Canada for example, last year there were zero deaths from starvation and less than a hundred deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases. Second, if more people have died for economic reasons in capitalist countries, it's because there have been way, way more capitalist countries historically, because it's a system that works much better. team overhead smash posted:As Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen explained in Hunger and Public Action China showed that many of these deaths were unnecessary and could easily be prevented with an egalitarian health policy. To quote him: An egalitarian health policy is not mutually exclusive with capitalism.
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Jan 24, 2016 23:28
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Anyway these posts are getting too long for me to read but I wanted to say this. I live in a food desert. And I would rather wait 20 minutes for a bus so I can go to a grocery store to choose from a wide variety of delicious food, or go to a cheaper grocery store nearby if I want to save, or go to the Korean one a block away for some bean curd and durian juice, than wait in line for an hour for a suicidal guy to give me a jar of cat food.
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Jan 24, 2016 23:30
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Jewel Repetition posted:Another difference is that people starving today usually aren't doing so because of capitalism. Yeah, they clearly are. Each year several million people will needlessly die from a combination of starvation, malnutrition and preventable disease. We have the resources to stop these deaths, but the global system of commodity distribution does not give them what they need and prioritises making people fat in Western countries and producing medicine at a profit for investors. This global system of commodity distribution is called 'Capitalism'. quote:Source? Explained further below in my previous post in a bit of detail, the work of Amartya Sen and specifically Hunger and Public Action quote:This doesn't even make sense. First off millions of people dying of starvation and preventable medical conditions is not the capitalist status quo. In capitalist Canada for example, last year there were zero deaths from starvation and less than a hundred deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases. Millions of people dying of starvation and preventable medical conditions every single year is very much the capitalist status quo, it just happens in poor African countries as opposed to the richest countries on earth. It's a global market and the poor in the poor countries are the ones who suffer the most for it. It's an exploitative connected system where the people of Canada benefit at the expense of others. If you want to know more, I'd recommend checking out my homeboy Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism quote:Second, if more people have died for economic reasons in capitalist countries, it's because there have been way, way more capitalist countries historically, because it's a system that works much better. Source? I've already backed up the contrary point of view, that Capitalism causes far more deaths even when the populations are taken into account. Also I'm guessing that even putting that aside your claim would still rely on the idea that things like the Chinese 59-61 famine are repeatable and at some point soon China is going to go bug-gently caress crazy and starve 50 million people to death. quote:An egalitarian health policy is not mutually exclusive with capitalism. An egalitarian health policy for everyone that doesn't result in millions of needless deaths each year is mutually exclusive though, or is at least so incompatible that it has never been achieved or been close to having been achieved at any point in the history of Capitalism - even though it's something that the hosed up authoritarian socialist countries managed to achieve pretty quickly. quote:Anyway these posts are getting too long for me to read but I wanted to say this. I live in a food desert. And I would rather wait 20 minutes for a bus so I can go to a grocery store to choose from a wide variety of delicious food, or go to a cheaper grocery store nearby if I want to save, or go to the Korean one a block away for some bean curd and durian juice, than wait in line for an hour for a suicidal guy to give me a jar of cat food. This guy disagrees but I supposed your needs take precedence over his  
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Jan 25, 2016 00:54
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Jewel Repetition posted:In capitalist Canada for example, last year there were zero deaths from starvation and less than a hundred deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases. And as we all know, capitalism stops at the border.
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Jan 25, 2016 04:04
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Could you explain to me, in detail and specifics, how people starving in Africa at the moment is the fault of capitalism and how socialism would prevent it?
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Jan 25, 2016 04:11
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Jewel Repetition posted:Could you explain to me, in detail and specifics, how people starving in Africa at the moment is the fault of capitalism and how socialism would prevent it? starvation is a failure of the distribution of resources, ie the economy, and the economies of Africa are overwhelmingly capitalist.
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Jan 25, 2016 04:18
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Sheng-ji Yang posted:starvation is a failure of the distribution of resources, ie the economy, and the economies of Africa are overwhelmingly capitalist. Okay, but most capitalist economies don't have any starving people, so how is it a necessary feature of capitalism? They're arguing that my ability to buy a frozen pizza is causing African children to starve, and I want to know all the steps of the Rube Goldberg machine that goes from my grocer's freezer to their stomachs.
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Jan 25, 2016 04:30
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lol @ Bernie Panders, will this guy ever stop pandering? I wanna say Hey guy, enough with the constant pandering already!
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Jan 25, 2016 04:42
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some links not associated with current discussion the horrors of actually existing socialism i'm sure we know better than russians what they want for themselves man, the people of the former soviet republics just don't know how good neoliberalism is, huh as far as what's being talked about goes, Jewel Repetition posted:Eisenhower was cool, but Bernie is still to the left of him. And regardless of whether we've been where we're going before in the past, it's still a left turn from where we are (and were under Bush). So again, it goes against the idea that we can only move left when threatened with revolution. Also I consider myself a real leftist and it would be heartening to me if Bernie Sanders won, because he's exactly as far left as I want to go. well yes, we're seeing this turn because we're in a period of crisis. the american working class knows something's up but class consciousness is at a minimum so it's getting channeled in campaigns like sanders' or worse, trump's. and trump's got the better chance of winning at this point. crisis is built into the capitalist system and it's at these most vulnerable moments countries teeter on the brink of fascism. the only reason we haven't gone full fascist at home yet is because we're extracting superprofits from the global south. Jewel Repetition posted:It just sounds like a flimsy excuse to me. America also faced the same "threat of subversion or outright invasion" as Russia did during the cold war and it did just fine. Socialist countries will always fail, and there'll always be something you can point to besides the ideology to explain it. they really really didn't face the same threat. the united states remains the only nation to use nuclear weapons on sovereign territory, the us military made incursions into countries daring to self-determine and bombed the gently caress out of most everyone else when the cia wasn't organizing and funding coups. "killing hope" by william blum is probably the most comprehensive text on this. compared to the united states' imperial entanglements in the 20th century the soviets were practically pacifists. afghanistan and that's about it, and that was in defense of a secular egalitarian government being uprooted by the imperial bourgeoisie. the us got involved and cultivated al qaeda and the taliban. these groups plague the region to this day along with the islamic state, which the united states has seen as a strategic asset in ousting unfriendly governments. who are the good guys in this scenario? Jewel Repetition posted:Okay, but most capitalist economies don't have any starving people, so how is it a necessary feature of capitalism? They're arguing that my ability to buy a frozen pizza is causing African children to starve, and I want to know all the steps of the Rube Goldberg machine that goes from my grocer's freezer to their stomachs. it's not your ability to buy per se, it's the misallocation of food resources that leads to a global surplus and millions starving to death every year. you're kind of atomizing this, which isn't unusual R. Guyovich fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Jan 25, 2016 |
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Jan 25, 2016 05:14
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Apropos of Sander's shameful nonanswer to the question of reparations I thought maybe I'd share some of the relevant items from the PSL platform to help clue folks in on some better answers to that question in case they ever end up as a standard bearer for the so-called radical left:quote:There shall be primary government institutions created guaranteeing representation of all nationalities inside the United States. In recognition of centuries of national oppression and systematic exclusion, and to protect the interests of all, the new government structures would be constructed to assure equal representation from all nationalities in the United States. quote:The new government shall recognize the inviolable right of all oppressed nations to self-determination with regard to their means of gaining and maintaining their liberation. In the United States, this includes the right of self-determination for African American, Native, Puerto Rican and other Latino national minorities, the Hawai’ian nation, Asian, Pacific Islander, Arab and other oppressed peoples who have experienced oppression as a whole people under capitalism. When Coates, rightly, despairs of the imagination of "progressives" to articulate real solutions - however impractical - to the ongoing horror of racism in America, these are the sort of ideas that should be under discussion. DOCTOR ZIMBARDO fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Jan 25, 2016 |
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Jan 25, 2016 05:33
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re: trade unions competing with communist party trade unions in the socialist republics, it's important to remember that non-aligned unions were almost entirely front organizations for imperialist destabilization. most famously the solidarity movement in poland was literally funded and supported by the cia. midway through the 20th century the west figured out trade unions were the perfect vehicle to topple communism, as soviet citizens and american leftists alike would be sympathetic to a union wanting more power. this operation was obviously a smashing success in poland and the rise of trade unionism in china is a continuation of that policy edit: this doesn't deal with unions specifically, but check this poo poo out. the cia was all over the place and that is a badass platform that will never be seen on a democratic party candidate's website or wherever R. Guyovich fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Jan 25, 2016 |
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Jan 25, 2016 06:05
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People working for the AFL-CIO literally use the term "AFL-CIA" to refer to their Solidarity Center, which is actually quite accurate since 95% of its funding comes from USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy, two of the biggest organs of what people in international relations call "soft power". And hell yeah it's a badass platform, guarantee representation in government, national self-determination, and freedom to all American colonies. That's a pretty good start for some anti-racist policy ideas. Oh yeah and they know the answer to "what are your thoughts on reparations?" DOCTOR ZIMBARDO fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Jan 25, 2016 |
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Jan 25, 2016 06:10
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woah maybe the anticoms are right, look at how desperate things are in the socialist republ — oh wait
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Jan 25, 2016 06:19
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Jewel Repetition posted:Okay, but most capitalist economies don't have any starving people hmm
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Jan 25, 2016 07:35
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Homework Explainer posted:they really really didn't face the same threat. the united states remains the only nation to use nuclear weapons on sovereign territory, the us military made incursions into countries daring to self-determine and bombed the gently caress out of most everyone else when the cia wasn't organizing and funding coups. "killing hope" by william blum is probably the most comprehensive text on this. compared to the united states' imperial entanglements in the 20th century the soviets were practically pacifists. afghanistan and that's about it, and that was in defense of a secular egalitarian government being uprooted by the imperial bourgeoisie. the us got involved and cultivated al qaeda and the taliban. these groups plague the region to this day along with the islamic state, which the united states has seen as a strategic asset in ousting unfriendly governments. who are the good guys in this scenario? When it comes to banana republics, funding rebels, all that dirty and harmful poo poo during the Cold War, one point I might be willing to give to you is that that stuff was bad. Homework Explainer posted:it's not your ability to buy per se, it's the misallocation of food resources that leads to a global surplus and millions starving to death every year. you're kind of atomizing this, which isn't unusual What I'm saying about that is socialism isn't the only solution and capitalism isn't the only cause.
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Jan 25, 2016 07:44
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Jewel Repetition posted:What I'm saying about that is socialism isn't the only solution and capitalism isn't the only cause. nah, it is socialism or barbarism
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Jan 25, 2016 07:52
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Sheng-ji Yang posted:nah, it is socialism or barbarism  Jewel Repetition posted:What I'm saying about that is socialism isn't the only solution and capitalism isn't the only cause. Almost every single country in the world is a capitalist nation, directly tied in to international markets and financial flows. Countries which attempted to protect themselves from foreign trade found their markets forcefully opened, either through naked force or through the accumulation of international debts - the forgiveness of which was contingent upon them opening themselves to international capital and markets. Capitalism isn't just "the way things are done," it's the basis upon which the very fabric of global society is developed - and the ultimate shape of that society is defined by its laws. Which country and peoples do or do not acquire a certain amount of goods & resources, depends wholly upon their Capital power. Countries with a high accumulation of capital, like Canada, generate the highest demand and draw resources from the Global South in order to enable their ambitions. To understand why this is a bad thing, you have to understand what happens when and where Capital is realized. The amount of trade received by the Global South in exchange for its resources, is never going to equal the value of Realized Capital in the Global North. If trade were truly fair or equitable, then countries like Canada could not profit from the system. This is what Homework Explainer means when he talks about Superprofits. Countries in Africa, Latin America, and South Asia are kept in a permanent state of poverty with respect to North American, European, and East Asian countries. If Capital were truly realized in the Global South, and those countries were allowed to develop to parity with the North, then the system would collapse. Without being able to extract Superprofits from the South, Northern countries would have to accelerate the rate of exploitation of their domestic labor force, and ultimately invite Revolution. If capitalism is not the only cause of this arrangement, then just what do you believe is causing it, and for what motive? What alternative is there to this system that you believe is acceptable if not socialism?
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Jan 25, 2016 12:09
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Jewel Repetition posted:Okay, but most capitalist economies don't have any starving people, so how is it a necessary feature of capitalism? They're arguing that my ability to buy a frozen pizza is causing African children to starve, and I want to know all the steps of the Rube Goldberg machine that goes from my grocer's freezer to their stomachs. Capitalism is a global system that does not just take place within a country but also between countries, happening in a global market with countries with very uneven levels of development and power forced to compete and interact. Since the development of Capitalism alongside the industrial revolution, there has not been a single day where powerful nations have not exploited under-developed nations and left masses of people dying needlessly. The market is what decides how much your pizza costs, yes? And it's also what decides how much is earned by children in Malawi for a days work harvesting tobacco to sell to major international companies, yeah? And the market that decides the need for people to be employed at all, leaving 200 million people worldwide out of work - many in countries with awful social safety nets due to the country's extreme poverty (again due to the market), right? This is all so basic and widely accepted by any economic ideology I don't see what the problem is here where you think international trade is a "Rube Goldberg machine". Then again perhaps that's actually very prescient insight from you that accurately describes the arbitrary, crazy and impractical ways that the Capitalist system leaves millions to die each year. quote:What I'm saying about that is socialism isn't the only solution and capitalism isn't the only cause. Nah, when starvation happens under a Capitalist system, it is going to be down to Capitalism. Famine isn't a case of "there's a drought, people die". They die because of the system they're in and the position in it do not allow them to eat and live, which happens frequently under Capitalism even when there are no droughts. Let me quote from "Late Victorian Holocausts" a book which looks into tens of millions of people killed even beyond the norm in the late 19th century/early 20th century by the Capitalist system's misallocation of food. At the beginning it explains a basic modern definition of famine that I'll type out below. Emphasis in bold is mine.: 'Famine (causality)' 'Whether or not crop failure leads to starvation, and who in the event of famine, starves, depends on a host of non-linear social factors. Simple FAD (food availability decline), as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen calls it, may directly lead to famine in isolated hunter-gatherer ecologies, but it is unlikely to do so in any large-scale society. Although distant observers of the famines described in this book, including government ministers and great metropolitan papers, regularly described millions killed off by drought or crop failure, those on the scene always knew differently. From the 1860's, or even earlier, it was generally recognised in India, both by British administrators and Indian nationalists, that the famines were not food shortages per se, but complex economic crises induced by the market impacts of drought and crop failure.' 'The celebrated famine commissions were particularly emphatic in rejecting FAD as an explanation of mass mortality. Thus in the aftermath of the 1988-1902 catastrophe, the official Report on famine in the Bombay presidency underlined that "supplies of food were at all times sufficient, and it cannot be too frequently repeated that severe privation was chiefly due to the dearth of employment in agriculture [arising from the drought]." Commissioners in neighbouring Berar likewise concluded that "the famine was one of high prices rather than scarcity of food." Chinese official discourse also treated famine as primarily a market perturbation, although giving considerable attention as well to the corruption of local granary officials and the dilapidation of the transport infrastructure.' 'In recent years, Anartya Sen and Meghnad Desai have meticulously formalised this Victorian common sense in the language of welfare economics. Famine in their view is a crisis of "exchange entitlements" (defined as "legal, economically operative rights of access to resources that give control of food.") that may or may not have anything to do with crop yields. "Famine," emphases Sen, "is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of their not being enough good to eat". In theoretical jargon, the "endowments" of different groups (ownership of land, labour, power and so on.) "map" to alternative "entitlement sets" of goods and services. People starve in a Senyan world when their endowments, for whatever reason, cannot command or be exchanged for minimal calories to subsist, or, alternatively, when their entitlement mappings shift disastrously against them. Famine is thus a catostrophic social relation between unequally endowed groups that may be activated by war, depression or even something called "Development" as well as by extreme climate events. Most likely it is a conjuncture of different factors.' There may be various things that cause deprivation, but the only reason they cause needless death is due to the system they operate in. It is the Capitalist system which results in the deaths because in modern society it is not about there not being enough food, but rather how it is allocated. The system which results in millions of deaths each year, far outstripping Communism, is a Capitalist one.
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Jan 25, 2016 12:28
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Here's a softball: what's your take on the mid-80s famines in the communist countries of Mozambique and Ethiopia? The latter of which, notoriously, involved the central government intentionally starving recalcitrant provinces. Would you argue that those countries would be better off if they were still under communist rule?
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Jan 25, 2016 18:37
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PleasingFungus posted:Here's a softball: what's your take on the mid-80s famines in the communist countries of Mozambique and Ethiopia? The latter of which, notoriously, involved the central government intentionally starving recalcitrant provinces. Would you argue that those countries would be better off if they were still under communist rule? Putting aside the difference between communism, socialism, actually existing socialism and capitalism as practised by Marxists and just going ahead on the basis of these being so-called Communist countries, three key things spring to mind: 1) I don't really care in the context of this topic because we're talking about alternatives for Western nations. No-one is advocating an Ethiopian style communism as an alternative for the US and other Western nations in the same way no-one is advocating Burundi style Capitalism, which is to say none of us are loving stupid. If your only point is that Ethiopia and a proposed communist alternative can be described in the same word while ignoring all the qualitative differences, you don't really have a point. 2) Due the lack of an international socialist revolution in industrialised countries, Capitalism has always been the dominant global force and the 'communist' states existed within a Capitalist system. Both were snowed under by debt and stripped of their ability to generate income at the same time as the famines hit (because they're of course primarily agrarian countries). 3) Yup it was awful and just goes to show that the times when Communism doesn't work are on par with Capitalism when it is working.
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Jan 25, 2016 20:03
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team overhead smash posted:2) Due the lack of an international socialist revolution in industrialised countries, Capitalism has always been the dominant global force and the 'communist' states existed within a Capitalist system. Both were snowed under by debt and stripped of their ability to generate income at the same time as the famines hit (because they're of course primarily agrarian countries). It seems like the endpoint of this argument is that any and all of communist states' failings can be blamed on capitalism. A hypothetical global communist regime would be so different from recorded history as to be incomparable, so really, we can't say anything about communism at all.
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Jan 25, 2016 20:38
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PleasingFungus posted:It seems like the endpoint of this argument is that any and all of communist states' failings can be blamed on capitalism. A hypothetical global communist regime would be so different from recorded history as to be incomparable, so really, we can't say anything about communism at all. No, you can't blame all of Communism's failings on Capitalism. Like it wasn't inevitable that the USSR would go Stalinist and kill millions of people. There were factors pushing it that way (The strong authoritarian tendencies from the Tsarist regime, the weakness and perceived weakness of the Bolsheviks, entrenched class interests, etc) but there were powerful actors who had agency to choose how to respond and could have stopped it from happening. In fact if Lenin had been healthy for another few years, it might have ended very differently as it seemed he'd just cottoned on to Stalin and power of the General Secretary position when he got struck down with his illness. Also as I mentioned in point number 3 the governments of Ethiopia and the like still have to hold their hand up. Despite being in a Capitalist system which encourages starvation, their actions encouraged it too. About the second part though, yeah, it would obviously be radically different. Hell, even communism in a single Western country would be different seeing as it wouldn't be in an underdeveloped country with little to no history of democracy. Also the conception of how to reach communism has drastically changed over the years in response to Marxists seeing what happened in places like Russia and going "Yeah, let's not do that when we get the chance because that's messed up". We can still make logical and educated guesses about a communist state though, just like we can about any social or economic policy change that hasn't been tried before, and can make even more accurate ones about a socialist state that would be an intermediary stage as it's closer to our own current set-up. What we can't do though is say "Well two radically different systems and approaches can both inaccurately be described as communism, so therefore they're the same" which is the approach you were going for in your previous post. team overhead smash fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Jan 25, 2016 |
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Jan 25, 2016 21:11
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im only voting psl if they agree to change the flag to the bitchin victoria 2 communist one
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Jan 25, 2016 22:21
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Bro Dad posted:im only voting psl if they agree to change the flag to the bitchin victoria 2 communist one dude vicky 2 had bitchin communist flags
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Jan 26, 2016 00:18
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why vote for a socialist/communist party when it'd be just as effective if not more to make your own local one and try to change the minds of the voters in your area so later they'll vote third party right alongside you?
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Jan 26, 2016 03:35
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Well to a degree the PSL does things like that. For example, Eugene Puryear, their VP nominee, runs for DC city council on the DC Statehood-Green Party ticket. That said, why go to the enormous effort and expense of starting a political party for, scratch if there is one out there already with an ideology you agree with? At the end of the day, any political party with more than one member has to make concessions. I guess if you want to be the next Bob Akavian and build your own cult of personality (shots fired!) you could just start something from scratch or whatever. But I guess that's not a political tradition I would agree with. So I guess what I'm saying is: hell yea go organize your neighborhood man.
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Jan 26, 2016 04:57
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:That said, why go to the enormous effort and expense of starting a political party for, scratch if there is one out there already with an ideology you agree with? mostly to avoid things like having to deal with any stupid poo poo the leaders of said party say that make it impossible to sell your fellow voters on their brand of socialism/communism or even just convince yourself that was isolated stupidity you can ignore instead of a more mainstream candidate with more personally palatable idiot poo poo on their boots (the Assad thing is what I'm thinking of here), since presumably you or i with enough money and time to do stuff like that might be a little smarter about the messaging not being quite as tone-deaf. unless you only care about voting your conscience or write off anyone who isn't willing to withhold judgement until you fully explain about how they really meant something else/there's a good reason they said as much i guess. quote:At the end of the day, any political party with more than one member has to make concessions. I guess if you want to be the next Bob Akavian and build your own cult of personality (shots fired!) you could just start something from scratch or whatever. But I guess that's not a political tradition I would agree with. i'm inclined to agree that it's a hell of a task to set something up from scratch and certainly not realistic to expect out of everyone, i guess i just think that there are way better things to do with the time i'd spend talking about and doing a third party completely futile vote that would go further in making one eventually successful - like going out and actually convincing as many people as i could that full socialism is actually really good and/or finding someone who can sell themselves really well politically that's amenable to pushing for as much socialism as possible. i'd love actual socialism in the mainstream but it isn't going to just magically show up even if everyone on this board voted for PSL this year, my point is that anyone who feels bernie isn't good enough right as they may be will as far as i can tell achieve less than nothing by just voting for a third party alone. i mean, sure, do both if you want, but just voting is a sucker's game even if you pick the ultimate best party of them all with perfectly electable and decent human beings for candidates if most everyone else who votes still responds readily to socialism/commie bashing. quote:So I guess what I'm saying is: hell yea go organize your neighborhood man. i would genuinely like to, right now i want to set myself up for a job in cs though by doing a cs50x course well enough to get an internship and maybe not become homeless in january if cruz wins and kills social security or something equally insane. plus more people might actually think i know what i'm talking about if i can claim that line of work and certainly they'll take me more seriously than they will as of now where i've never had a 'real' job (i.e. blockbuster csr and seasonal call center tech rep). if money and time became no object i'd opt to build or work in an org based around stuff that anyone can see capitalism is utter poo poo at and then talk with people i helped beat the system designed to screw them about the alternatives to that system, then send messages about local/state/federal elections when they're close by and maybe if i can get a pony with my wishes services to help people get to the voting booth or whatever along with a genuinely decent socialist person running right then to vote in for different positions. probably in reality i'd settle for a local organization that wasn't off-putting and try to push it in more socialist directions but hell if i know what the future holds. at the very least i'd like to assuming global warming doesn't completely eradicate snow during winter for my state talk a bunch of people who don't have cars or otherwise don't drive in my county into collectively walking down the road after a snowfall to protest the fact that businesses have more legal incentive to leave sidewalks untouched after the snowplows throw street snow on them and hence treacherously unusable than they do to actually try to clear the sidewalks of snow (because if someone falls on a sidewalk that the business actually tried to clear, the business can be held responsible, but if they fall because the sidewalk wasn't cleared at all, it's just bad luck apparently!)
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Jan 26, 2016 06:31
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It actually makes more sense to take over the Democratic party and turn it socialist, because the entire system is set up to suppress Third Party participation. Even with a widespread base of support.
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Jan 26, 2016 07:02
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:It actually makes more sense to take over the Democratic party and turn it socialist, because the entire system is set up to suppress Third Party participation. Even with a widespread base of support. that's absolutely one way to go for 'going out and convincing people near you socialism is good'  really though that's probably the best way to do it in the end. i think though if you don't first have an army ready to take over the party wholesale and have to broker with the establishment at all, you'll end up having to compromise heavily at first to prove to them that they actually can win an election with a politician that embraces the socialist label despite not really fitting that label enough to seriously rustle anybody's jimmies in the end. it might even be good to do that to rally people who would absolutely join up for taking power away from the establishment but don't really know there's enough people around that feel the same way to work towards that goal. the tea party did not find trump overnight, it took decades, and a socialist version will probably take about as long if not longer.
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Jan 26, 2016 08:14
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IMO developing countries should just get themselves some protectionist pro-agriculture policies. Like, get their countries to stop letting the global market exploit them so bad. Not by glorious revolution, just sensible trade and subsidies. I'm just not going to accept any ideology that says I can't eat what I want, no matter how much good it does for people I'll never meet (probably none tbh but I'm humoring you here). And I think most Americans are the same way. Ignatius M. Meen posted:why vote for a socialist/communist party when it'd be just as effective if not more to make your own local one and try to change the minds of the voters in your area so later they'll vote third party right alongside you? You're right, it will be exactly the same amount of effective. *Extremely smug smirk.*
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Jan 26, 2016 08:25
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lots of people in this thread will be wrong when the muslim genocide occurs
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Jan 26, 2016 08:32
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Jewel Repetition posted:You're right, it will be exactly the same amount of effective. *Extremely smug smirk.* there is the extra bonus of being made to see firsthand exactly how much work it's going to take to convince a good proportion of people that socialism is better than capitalism, which does not exist with just voting and then later grumbling about how the system is rigged and the next election a socialist third party will totally landslide it without any need for more effort. on the other hand if they're actually good at proselytizing for socialism the overton window might get skewed a few places and actually make the dems in those areas have to tilt a lot further left for the votes which would be pretty cool. seems pretty win-win to me! e: i just looked again and noticed a bit of a fallacy i can't not address quote:IMO developing countries should just get themselves some protectionist pro-agriculture policies. Like, get their countries to stop letting the global market exploit them so bad. Not by glorious revolution, just sensible trade and subsidies. you mean like protectionist pro-agriculture policies that would drive prices for those goods in the US way up, potentially past the point where you or a lot of other non-wealthy people can afford to eat them? isn't that in effect going to dictate your eating habits despite your desires anyway? Ignatius M. Meen fucked around with this message at 09:04 on Jan 26, 2016 |
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Jan 26, 2016 08:59
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Jewel Repetition posted:IMO developing countries should just get themselves some protectionist pro-agriculture policies. Like, get their countries to stop letting the global market exploit them so bad. Not by glorious revolution, just sensible trade and subsidies. What the gently caress is a protectionist pro-agriculture policy? Like if you'd said protectionist industrial policy that would make sense, but I'm not sure of your meaning here. The developing countries already have agriculture out the rear end, there's nothing to protect and develop. What they need is to use the money made from agriculture to generate a surplus of capital that they can invest in industry and then it's that infant industry that they need to be protectionist about. Being protectionist about agriculture doesn't make any sense. Of course that doesn't happen because trade is bi-lateral and the problem is that the developed countries like the USA are protectionist about the poo poo the developing countries actually produce while stopping the developing countries from being protectionist about the things that would actually help them. In the EU for instance we give farmers $2 per cow per day, which is the World Bank measure of poverty. Roughly half the people in sub-saharan Africa earn below this in terms of their entire daily wage. On what possible basis can they compete? It's better to be a European cow than an African human in terms of the money you earn. The reason it's done is because if a European farmer had to compete fairly with an African farmer, they'd be massively undercut and unable to make a living. Free trade agreements are unfairly stacked and will be made to exclude the areas that developing countries may actually be able to compete in due to its competitive advantages in unskilled labour. In the WTO talks in 2005 for instance the USA generously opened up it's market to some of the worst off developing nations to 97% of all types of goods. That 3% though was carefully calibrated to exclude all the goods these developing countries actually produced, like Bangladesh textiles and apparel. The USA is completely fine with Bangladesh exporting jet engines and other items like that, not that Bangladesh does so or is able to, but stops them from competing on a level playing field with the poo poo they actually do. Honestly I wish that the developing countries were able to be more protectionist with the things that matter. It's help them develop through Capitalist to a stage where they're ready for socialism in the future, while getting rid of the Imperialist advantage the developed nations have had - causing more pressure on the working class to work against the system as they're no longer subsidised by the exploitation of under-developed countries. Jewel Repetition posted:I'm just not going to accept any ideology that says I can't eat what I want, no matter how much good it does for people I'll never meet (probably none tbh but I'm humoring you here). And I think most Americans are the same way. Why do you support Capitalism then? Even excluding the selfish piece of poo poo factor of you putting you having a nice selection of food over people dying, under Capitalism you can only eat what you can afford based on market decided factors of the value of your labour (minus the surplus value) versus the cost of the food based on the demand for the product and the desire for bourgeois to make money. You very much can't eat what you want. If you're just trying to come up with some wording that fits "Argh, I just want what capitalism offers, stop making me try to define it because I keep on getting it wrong and making no sense" without explicitly saying so, then socialism can offer the same variety of food as Capitalism as there are various types of socialism that different socialist pursue and see as preferable. Market socialism would keep the market based system of capitalism but with ownership of firms by labourers rather than capitalists. All the pizza companies would still be there, just owned by the workers who would then benefit from their labour without the parasitism of capitalists. From socialism we'd eventually be able to move to communism which is the closest to "eat what I want" that you'll actually get.
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Jan 26, 2016 09:30
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Ignatius M. Meen posted:you mean like protectionist pro-agriculture policies that would drive prices for those goods in the US way up, potentially past the point where you or a lot of other non-wealthy people can afford to eat them? isn't that in effect going to dictate your eating habits despite your desires anyway? I'm talking about just in countries that need it.
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Jan 26, 2016 09:33
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team overhead smash posted:What the gently caress is a protectionist pro-agriculture policy? Like if you'd said protectionist industrial policy that would make sense, but I'm not sure of your meaning here. Yeah I just made that up to see if anybody would notice and/or demonstrate that it was actually real. team overhead smash posted:Why do you support Capitalism then? Even excluding the selfish piece of poo poo factor of you putting you having a nice selection of food over people dying, under Capitalism you can only eat what you can afford based on market decided factors of the value of your labour (minus the surplus value) versus the cost of the food based on the demand for the product and the desire for bourgeois to make money. You very much can't eat what you want. Well I can eat most of the things I want. It's still way more options than socialism, as defined by people in this thread, is my point. team overhead smash posted:If you're just trying to come up with some wording that fits "Argh, I just want what capitalism offers, stop making me try to define it because I keep on getting it wrong and making no sense" without explicitly saying so, then socialism can offer the same variety of food as Capitalism as there are various types of socialism that different socialist pursue and see as preferable. Market socialism would keep the market based system of capitalism but with ownership of firms by labourers rather than capitalists. All the pizza companies would still be there, just owned by the workers who would then benefit from their labour without the parasitism of capitalists. From socialism we'd eventually be able to move to communism which is the closest to "eat what I want" that you'll actually get. What, no it isn't.
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Jan 26, 2016 09:37
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Jewel Repetition posted:Well I can eat most of the things I want. It's still way more options than socialism, as defined by people in this thread, is my point. Covered how you're wrong in the paragraph below the one you responded to, but you ignored it. quote:What, no it isn't. Yeah, it is.
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Jan 26, 2016 09:49
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The impression I'm getting here is that Jewel Repetition believes socialism is incompatible with pizza.
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Jan 26, 2016 15:12
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let's not forget that any government acting against the interests of the united states, i.e. nationalizing its resources or daring — gasp — to elect a socialist leader, is gonna get hardcore imperial intervention, whether that's straight military invasion or the manufacture of a coup or uprising
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Jan 26, 2016 16:42
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:The impression I'm getting here is that Jewel Repetition believes socialism is incompatible with pizza. Someone said something to the effect of, "The food industry loads food up with sugar, fat, and salt at way unhealthy levels because that poo poo is literally addictive to our monkey brains when calibrated correctly and sells like crazy, so without a profit motive in food distribution there'd be more healthy food because this would not happen," and somehow this got interpreted as, "when we have banned the sale of Hot Pockets and anything that tastes like licorice, we will have achieved 60% of socialism, comrades!"
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Jan 27, 2016 00:07
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