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OwlFancier posted:I don't know if I would describe the transition from feudalism to capitalism as being non-incremental and non-reformist. Violent and eventually total, sure, but it took a while and was quite distributed across geography and time and also lacked central oversight. Fair enough. But there's some wiggle room between "limited or incremental" and immediate, and that wiggle room is where I'm working from. But large scale in that, even geographically specific, it wasn't a matter of "first we'll Capitalize the basket weavers".
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Jan 28, 2019 21:42
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Certainly I would see it as a result of technological advancement producing a change in how society worked that proliferated because the adopters gained power over those who didn't. Once started it would have been extremely difficult to stop and would still have resulted in massive societal changes because you can't put the cat back in the bag. So it doesn't quite compare to attempts to "build socialism" in that they're always fighting uphill rather than being a force that is self perpetuating and proliferating.
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Jan 28, 2019 21:45
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It's always been a case of a class realizing their political power. In the transition of Feudalism the bourgeoisie and guilds realized that not only did they outnumber the aristocracy but they generate the most wealth, hold actual political influence and since they stopped believing in God the "Divine Mandate" ace up the Aristocracy's sleeve was null in void. They rise up and new methods of generating wealth were created in the form of commodity with new methods of managing and exploiting labor to get there. So once one nation made that realization and started chopping heads the bourgeoisie next door thought, "Wait a minute. They're onto something." The issue with previous attempts to "build socialism" have been the working class in certain pockets realizing that they outnumbered the bourgeoisie, they generated the wealth, and they hold actual political influence. But since these movements to "build socialism" never got past the commodity form and still needed a section of society to manage and exploit labor for commodity production and the realization of various plans of construction, they never actually accomplished a social transformation. This section of society ceased being working class when their day to day was no longer laboring but instead managing Capital for accumulation and investment. They became the new Capitalist class. Zuhzuhzombie!! fucked around with this message at 21:57 on Jan 28, 2019 |
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Jan 28, 2019 21:53
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I agree that you're not gonna get rid of capitalism without changing people's understandings of why we produce things and to what end. Though I also think that under the current system it's not quite as simple a matter of people "realizing" that they outnumber the booj. Cos it's important to consider why people don't think that now, why the booj still hold power. A lot of things happened to spark the first revolutions and build the power of the bourgeoisie over the aristocracy, to break those ideas of divine right and the old order, it didn't just happen spontaneously, you had plagues and wars and weak monarchs and overextended empires and technological changes materially increasing the power of the bourgeoisie to get to that point. Which I guess is my main contention really, I'm skeptical that you can just grit your teeth and force your way into postcapitalism as long as the system, poo poo as it is, can still keep enough people and enough influence on side to control the popular consciousness. You can, though, I think see some interesting cracks forming in that with the degeneration of the press due to advances in technology and the advent of "post facts" reality. It's gonna require big changes for the establishment to get that back under control, and obviously you've got the visible incompetence of the right to react to leftism other than by screaming that we need to do capitalism harder than ever or just devolving into fascism. Not that it's necessarily a good thing for people because there's no guarantee the left would win out, but I think I like Marx's general suggestion that capitalism's gonna collapse when it can't do otherwise, when everything just piles up against it and it eventually keels over under its own weight of poo poo. It pays to be ready for then and things like cooperative ownership and even old school state ownership of stuff might be useful ideas to have built before then, but I guess I also think you're not going to reform your way peacefully to socialism or communism, it's gonna be violent and poo poo regardless because it's going to involve the collapse of the old order and people scrambling to find something to replace it.
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Jan 28, 2019 22:10
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> Cos it's important to consider why people don't think that now, why the booj still hold power. > but I think I like Marx's general suggestion that capitalism's gonna collapse when it can't do otherwise, That's ultimately it, right? The bourgeoisie probably spent untold amount of time stewing about how they should run things. There were plenty of minor or smaller or isolated revolutions that were killed by the aristocracy until the kings and queens could no longer justify their power to their base. There's an interesting bit of literature out there speculating that one of the things that the bourgeoisie used to finally grip power was to begin associating the masses of people with "the nation" instead of "the king".
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Jan 28, 2019 22:15
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Zuhzuhzombie!! posted:There's an interesting bit of literature out there speculating that one of the things that the bourgeoisie used to finally grip power was to begin associating the masses of people with "the nation" instead of "the king". I'd believe that.
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Jan 28, 2019 22:19
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OP, it's 2019, you're a functioning adult with a day job, you already know somewhere in the back of your mind that a stateless society is totally unworkable, and yet you're still wasting mental energy fantasizing about back to the land libertarian homesteading bullshit when the entire planet has maybe a decade left to pull out of its climate change death spiral.
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Jan 28, 2019 23:57
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Helsing posted:OP, it's 2019, you're a functioning adult with a day job, you already know somewhere in the back of your mind that a stateless society is totally unworkable, and yet you're still wasting mental energy fantasizing about back to the land libertarian homesteading bullshit when the entire planet has maybe a decade left to pull out of its climate change death spiral. The whole point of this thread is to ascertain the permissible powers of the state, as there have been hundreds or more failed states in history. I'm simply identifying reasons why people might be afraid of Socialism (or capitalism with redistributionist tendencies). The American 'Right' is pulling hard away from 'Socialism' but with no clear direction. If you're a politically-aware American who doesn't think the earth is 6000 years old, I'm sure you could come up with a better system than anything being implemented now. If your system involves pulling right-wingers out of their comfort zone and forcing them to provide for the better good, you'll have riots on your hand and they'll try their hardest to force something in a completely opposite, and likely backward, direction.
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Jan 29, 2019 21:38
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Jolly Jumbuck posted:If your system involves pulling right-wingers out of their comfort zone and forcing them to provide for the better good, you'll have riots on your hand and they'll try their hardest to force something in a completely opposite, and likely backward, direction. Most of the red states in the USA are taking in quite a bit more federal money than they put out in taxes, and vice versa for the blue states. IE the conservative right wingers are already being provided for, for the greater good. Poor as gently caress people in Kansas don't have anything to lose already. The fundamental problem isn't left vs right wingers, it is a mass of people who think they'll suddenly be a peasant so that everyone can be a peasant alongside them when in reality it is the top 1% hoarding over half the wealth that exists.  And that graph is a little old iirc, meaning things have become even more skewed. The question is how to set up economic systems such that they come out with a result that the society finds desirable. Right now our economics aren't geared to help society as a whole, they are geared to the benefit of a very small handful of people. And some people I guess just have been sipping the Cold War Koolaide for too long and they probably are unreachable yeah but you don't need 100% of the vote in a democracy. quote:hardest to force something in a completely opposite, and likely backward, direction. And ya know maybe if their response to all this really is just "idc I'm not paying taxes to support some black welfare queen I guess I'll be a nazi now then" maybe that's a failing on their part somewhere. Tired of treating these people with kiddie gloves to be honest. COMRADES fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Jan 29, 2019 |
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Jan 29, 2019 21:47
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Cicero posted:It would be cool if this debate got solved once and for all, because I've noticed that even socialists don't agree on what socialism is (e.g. just try asking whether the USSR counts as socialist or not), which can make it a difficult topic to discuss. In comparison, it seems like there's much less confusion and argumentation over what counts as capitalism, even when involving people with radically different political views. At any given time in history there are multiple competing schools of thought on socialism within socialist groups, evolving over time into different groups. Lots of reading to do from various important figures on this exact topic throughout those time frames. There is disagreement on the true meaning of political philosophy for much narrower political groups, so attempting to define True Socialism is generally not possible in a non-political context.
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Jan 29, 2019 21:58
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Sodomy Hussein posted:At any given time in history there are multiple competing schools of thought on socialism within socialist groups, evolving over time into different groups. Lots of reading to do from various important figures on this exact topic throughout those time frames. There is disagreement on the true meaning of political philosophy for much narrower political groups, so attempting to define True Socialism is generally not possible in a non-political context. That's been my thought too. Bernie Sanders, while I agreed with a lot of his ideas and disagreed with a few, made a very clear picture of what he wanted, something no other politician in recent memory has done. If this is socialism, cool. His opponents tried to pass it off that his policies would have brought us close to a Venezuela-like situation, while his supporters pointed out it was in line with high standard-of-living Scandinavian countries. I picked Ben Shapiro as my criticizing punching bag since he is often viewed as being logical and well-spoken. He may be able to make good points that resonate with a lot of Americans, but these points are all in isolated soundbites. He can make an intelligent soundbite about how Obama's $500M Solyndra investment was an example of failed redistribution of wealth, or how Clinton's attack on coal was an assault on the free market. Great. But if he ignores the tariffs placed on solar panels or the $12B on agricultural bailouts pushed by Republicans for soybean trade deficits, then he's merely showing selective outrage at certain government spending items and not others. It almost seems that any of his criticisms can be countered by his laughable admission that Scandinavia is "Capitalist but has selective redistributionist tendencies" and the accusations of "socialism" from the right can be waved away on almost any idea of Bernie Sanders or the left in general and just relabeled.
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Jan 30, 2019 16:50
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Edit: Economic criticisms of his. Many of his social or religious arguments are completely stupid, but those are beside the point in regards to this.
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Jan 30, 2019 16:52
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My initial reaction to the question: Socialism has always been a broad to the point almost useless term. It emerged out of the French Revolution as a counter to it's counterpart Liberalism. The liberals may have wanted to give you political liberty and representation, but the socialists wanted social equality too. It didn't matter if you had a republic if society was still stratified and you were living on the streets. What social equality looked like and how it was achieved was ill defined and differed from thinker to thinker. These early socialists were the "utopian" socialists that Marx sought to refute in the Communist Manifesto - his whole goal was developing "scientific socialism" - something with concrete definitions based on materialist ideology instead of idealism. It's here where he first espoused on his theory of class conflict based around the means of production. Anyways, without going into a long digression on Marx and how his theories developed over the decades, the main thing to note is that he didn't really differentiate between the terms Socialism and Communism. His predictions about Capitalism spreading to every corner of human civilization and revolutionizing all human society came true - this is what we call globalism today. He probably imagined the proletarian revolution would spread like the liberal revolutions of 1848, creating initial states similar to the Paris Commune (what he called "low socialism") that gave way to Communism. This obviously didn't happen and when the revolutions DID occur, they happened in less developed nations like Russia and China, the exact opposite of what Marx predicted. So you get even more confusion as modern Socialists basically try to figure out the proper strategy for the working class to seize power and build Communism (and, fwiw, I don't think "true" Communism will be technologically feasible for at least a century or more). In addition to that, there are Goddamn Liberals who call themselves Socialist and define it as "the government does things" or whatever, as well as legacy Socialist parties in Europe that turned Liberal following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Marxist-Leninists think a vanguard party must seize control of society and develop the dictatorship of the proletariat - basically identifying the USSR as, at best, the "low socialist" phase of the development. LeftComs think there is no such thing as low socialism and Communism will arise organically and most Socialists are just opportunists. Syndicalists/De Leonists think labor unions will seize control through general strikes and transform Capitalist firms into Mondragon style cooperatives, etc etc. It's possible that, as Bourgeois society comes in many different flavors and forms, Proletarian society will too. In general, a True Socialist should meet these basic criteria: 1. Believe in a class based view of society. Specifically that the different classes have conflicting interests and you side with the working class, who are the people who sell their labor power for a living. If you don't believe in class conflict, you're a liberal and should stop calling yourself a Socialist. Period. 2. Be an internationalist. Some struggle with this because of patriotic mindworms, but the working class does not end at the border. Capitalism is a global system and it will only be destroyed on a global level. 3. This is a small one, but while it doesn't matter what tendency you are, you should be a materialist, not an idealist. What does this mean? Philosophically materialists believe society, culture, government, etc are derived from material conditions, while idealists think the world is shaped into being by having the right ideas or whatever. You know how Conservatives are obsessed with the idea that "politics are downstream from culture" and try to counterprogram Hollywood liberals and create their own social media sites, etc etc? Well this is exactly backwards. What should Socialists try to achieve? (This is written in a specifically American context): 1. In the short term, we should team up with progressive liberals to protect and expand the welfare state. Welfarism isn't really Socialism but it is to the working class's benefit and winning concessions like universal healthcare helps build political confidence. Social democratic reforms are always one election away from being destroyed and the falling rate of profit means that sooner or later the Capitalists will be coming after your Social Security, so this isn't a permanent solution but it is one that brings the class conflict to fore. 2. Building worker power outside of electoral politics - this means labor unions at the minimum. Remember, the broader the union the better. American Socialism has its roots in the De Leonism I mentioned above and everyone from Richard Wolff to uh, Ronald Reagan??? has latched on to worker's coops as A Good Thing. A market economy based around worker's coops still has a lot of the hallmarks of Capitalist commodity production and thus a lot of the same problems, but it would dramatically increase working class power so it sounds good to me. 3. Fight for environmental justice. Climate Change is the biggest threat to the global working class right now and to the continued existence of industrial society, a prereq for the development of Socialism. The burden of fighting CC should fall on the wealthy (no regressive consumption taxes paid by the already overburdened working class) and should not involve any scam fixes like "Cap and Trade" that encourage Bourgeois speculation on the future of the loving planet. 4. I know goons hate the 2nd Amendment but really we should be arming the working class so when the Bourgeois automate the need for most labor out of existence and hide in their armed fortresses protected from climate catastrophe they can't just liquidate us, because that's what they will do. 5. Formulate a version of "identity politics" that is critical of, and surpasses, the liberal version. You can't be a Socialist and a bigot - most of your fellow working class people are PoC and a majority are female. LGBTQ+ are overrepresented compared to the upperclass, as well. Their issues aren't always economic ones, but the class system is intertwined with other forms of oppression and you can't eliminate one without destroying the other. The Liberal version (often mocked as "More. Women. Drone. Pilots") envisions a more cosmopolitan Bourgeois dictatorship, but not a more horizontal society in general. A PoC president like Obama might be a victory for a more diverse representation within the US but if he goes on to murder third worlders and protect American imperial hegemony, is that really a victory of PoC Proletariat globally? (No, it isn't) Same poo poo with Kamala Harris and her school-to-prison pipeline. 6. More generally, the role of Socialists in every country are to organize the working class into a conscious political force and to "not anticipate the world with our dogmas but instead attempt to discover the new world through the critique of the old". While knowing your Marx and theory is important, the man wasn't a prophet and he was writing about the most dynamic economic force in human history. Capitalism is always refining itself and co-opting it's challengers and we must respond to this dynamism with our own, based on material critique. Engaging in electoral politics at all might be a mistake - you're playing with your enemy's ruleset from the outset, after all. It might be better for Socialism to take the route the Civil Rights Movement did - always making demands, always exercising it's power in the streets with strikes and boycotts, and never letting a concession settle.
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Feb 3, 2019 02:31
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Helsing posted:As far as what socialism is, I think its pointless to try and define an ideology without historicizing it. This is especially true in the case of socialism, which is often linked to a specific historical project deriving from a series of revolutions in countries around the Atlantic Ocean and later Asia. I think socialism will be hard to talk about coherently outside of that context. Any post that doesn't contend with this is just pointless navel gazing, honestly. These things don't sit apart from history and need to be understood as such.
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Feb 3, 2019 02:37
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I have no idea about socialism, I always think of it as a collective owning the means of productions. But again, not a precise answer. I do have some idea about the challenges organizations face in the economic/sociological sense, and it always strikes me that I see no socialist thinkers in the vicinity of these "concrete issues". For example: - How do you make decisions and in what hierarchies? We know that voting, for example, doesn't really work nor produce a stable and efficient outcome if the preferences of the workers are not homogeneous. Even if workers are stable and transitive in their opinion, they need not produce transitive outcomes. Any voting system itself with enough complexity to make it useful is either dictatorial, inefficient or can be manipulated. There's some believers in quadratic voting and all that, but this seems to be a very practical issue. Any socialist should be keenly aware, and expert, in these issues. - We also know that command economies / centralized systems can not solve allocation for two reasons. Practically, its computationally infeasible right now. Our attempts (algorithmic mechanism design, reverse reinforcement learning...) are in the "fingers on your hand" dimensions, not in the millions they needed to be. Furthermore, the efficiency loss (the information rent you give up in these systems, which in real life comes down to manipulation, losses and wrong decisions) is also a theoretical outcome we can not ignore. As such, I strongly believe that non-centralized systems will remain efficient, even necessary, in the near future. - Given that, how should the "market" be set up, and how is allocation and distribution organized? A conception of welfare under the restriction of a "fair distribution" leads invariable to a social market economy. Indeed, socialism + market seems to lead to a straightfoward, textbook capitalist economy with restrictions on distribution and, in particular, a uniform ownership structure. Since this fits so neatly in all the theory, one would ask why this economy would not have to solve exactly the same issues we have now, and why this economy would not sort into the same "efficiency/fairness" spectrum we now observe. - A lot of work being done on non-monetary / generalized exchange and numenaire-less mechanism design, say in sociology or in economics. The issues are of course numerous, but at the very least we know that they become more complex. Socialism needs to get rid of capital / and money as primary incentive - I think it is clear why. But, in the end, this probably implies the need to fight ANY other aggregate measure of worth (a sociologist would use status and social capital, an economist something like power), because then "class" just pivots to another sort of capital - social capital. And that's also not really fair in terms of who starts where, who can get what, and it is arguably more difficult to distribute. On the economist side of things, it turns out money (or status/power or any other numenaire measure) is useful for incentive design because preferences are relatively well-behaved around it. This gives the mechanisms, such as auctions, a certain robustness feature that we lose without these sort of rewards. Again, it's not just the efficiency loss you'd have to take into account. In designing a socialist system, you need to ensure it can not be "gamed", while it is also not totally worthless as a system. As it turns out, this is actually pretty hard to do, if you are unwilling to introduce some sort of uniform reward measure. And you would be, because that would just mean "class" in the end. We (as in, the scientific community), do not really know of a general solution to this. There are probably many more issues. And these are not things specific to socialism, you know, just organizations in general. Capitalists struggle with those issues in the same way (go to any management school). I find it striking that all "socialist" real life experiences have in common, that they start without a concrete plan to solve the above (and other issues). It seemed the "yes or no" of socialism simply trumps the "how". But then, all of those real life cases fell flat on their face, in every case a major reason was the inability to solve one or more of the theoretical issues. I therefore think that socialism is more in its infancy stage. Instead of tackling concrete issues, socialists are chasing their own tail, trying to define what they want. One the one hand, we do see very few socialists actually engaging with practical issues. On the other hand, it is not clear from what perspective these issues should be engaged, if there is no consensus on what socialism should do or be. Socialism will always be "attractive", because such a non-concrete, ideal based theory is attractive. The ethics of socialism seem well developed to me, and I find it hard to fault the "grand theory" on that basis (ie. I would also like these utopistic visions laid out by socialists). That's also its curse, because if you get "down and dirty" with practical matters, you lose your utopia. Socialism is a thought so grand and general and beautiful, it is almost irrelevant in practice. In its current form, socialist thought and the "go with the flow" approach does not solve the critical sociological, psychological and economical problems posed by human organization, and it is unlikely to produce such solutions going in circles.
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Feb 3, 2019 04:00
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Very broadly, socialism is about seeking a replacement for socialism, arguably in the framework of a state, at least initially. Left-liberalism is fundamentally about reforming capitalism, but ultimately replacing it. This divide is what fundamentally separates socialists and liberals. As for the Soviet Union, it is best seen as state socialism applied to essentially a barely developed siege state. It is why there can only be so much "pulled" from the Soviets as an example, but nevertheless may provide an illustration of what may be necessary in the future if we continue to screw up. Also, as the Soviets as "lovely socialism", it is arguably what happens to socialism when it meets a very hard reality. Honestly, I don't think there was another way for the Soviets to develop the way they until arguably the late 1930s. Worker control over the means of production could have been conducted...but probably also would have lead to the collapse of the country considering its state during the 1920s (the issue was wages). Also. the NEP was completely unsustainable. The chief issue was trade. Also, arguably Scandinavia isn't "socialist" itself but that fundamental improvements have occurred through policies of social democratic parties within a mixed market model.
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Feb 3, 2019 04:04
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COMRADES posted:Most of the red states in the USA are taking in quite a bit more federal money than they put out in taxes, and vice versa for the blue states. IE the conservative right wingers are already being provided for, for the greater good. Poor as gently caress people in Kansas don't have anything to lose already. Um you posted a graph that says 20% of people in america wn a majority of the wealth right after you spit a canned THE 1% line out.
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Feb 3, 2019 07:59
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That graph would look the same way if only the top 1% owned all that wealth. Do you know how graphs work?
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Feb 3, 2019 08:23
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Jolly Jumbuck posted:I'm simply identifying reasons why people might be afraid of Socialism (or capitalism with redistributionist tendencies). The American 'Right' is pulling hard away from 'Socialism' but with no clear direction. The American 'Right' have been denouncing "socialism" for more than 100 years (with only a few years where denouncing communism was louder). Due to "patriotic mindworms", it has become a knee-jerk reaction to denounce anything/everything labeled as "socialism" without knowing what socialism is, or why it might be bad at all: it is the duty of all tribal members to denounce the enemy. Mantis42 has a good start for you.
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Feb 3, 2019 21:58
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Well, socialism has unfortunately become welded in the minds of many to the idea of a one party police state, where dissent from the party line is punished. It doesn't help that russia imposed that government on the countries that neighbored it after ww2, and the whole berlin wall issue. Scandinavian socialism at least can show people that socialism doesn't have to be associated with giving up the ability to protest against the government.
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Feb 4, 2019 00:59
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Capitalism is essentially property and markets. It's a system that almost works by itself as a force of nature (not that it's a good idea to let it work that way). Social democracy is capitalism with a welfare state attached. In practice, all western democracies are social democracies, or "mixed economies" to some extent. Some more than others, with Sweden being more social democratic than the USA. Some people think Sweden is socialist (you hear American politicians defend socialism with that line occasionally), but they aren't socialist because they have private ownership and markets just like the USA. Even the USA is a mixed economy social democracy to some extent, something you'll occasionally see hardcore libertarians pointing out to their chagrin (because they want to go full Mad Max). Wanting to have more welfare in the USA is not what socialism is, because giving the poor more benefits while retaining markets and property would still essentially be a capitalist system. And if you're going to define socialism as a subset of capitalism then the term is useless (the term social democracy is right there for you to use!). In practice, what socialism has meant in an economic sense so far is command economies. Command economies have never worked and probably never will, barring some as-yet nonexistent technological solution. If command economies don't work, and socialist intellectuals have not come up with a better idea than command economies, then why are there still socialists? I think Socialism is more of a posture than a serious idea as it stands, so it can mean whatever you want to it to mean. It's very emotionally motivated, a seething hatred of capitalism being a good rule of thumb for who a socialist is even if it doesn't provide a definition of socialism. With that in mind I'd say socialism is whatever capitalism isn't. If capitalism is markets and property, then socialism is no markets and no property. If capitalism is the USA, then anything that's not the USA is socialism (go dictators!). This leads to a certain amount of contrarianism and oikophobia among western leftists.
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Feb 4, 2019 03:51
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Define "never worked" in the concept of planned economies as opposed to "worked" in the sense of unplanned ones? Cos like there are plenty of ways that centrally planned economies have historically worked better than unplanned ones and also plenty of ways that unplanned ones repeatedly gently caress up, i.e the constant recessions that keep happening all the time for the past couple centuries. Also there are plenty of ways that even the US does not allow its economy to just do what it wants as well as plenty of examples of government constructed "free market" alternatives to state owned areas of the economy that are spectacularly dumb and in no way benefit anybody except the companies that participate in them. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Feb 4, 2019 |
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Feb 4, 2019 03:59
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Mukip posted:Capitalism is essentially property and markets. It's a system that almost works by itself as a force of nature (not that it's a good idea to let it work that way). This is absolutely false, the rise of the market society closely tracks with the rise of the nation state. Markets before capitalism were self limiting in nature.
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Feb 4, 2019 04:13
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I'll grant that point, OwlFancier. Whether something works or not depends on what you consider "working" to be so that was rhetorically lazy of me. Market economies work in the sense that they have provided our societies with unrivaled prosperity compared to historical and contemporary alternatives. It is less worse than all the alternatives that have been tried at creating wealth for the majority of people in the aggregate. This doesn't mean that the poor don't have legitimate grievances. Command economies don't work because of a currently unsolvable flaw where they cannot figure out how to centrally plan the distribution of resources if an efficient manner.
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Feb 4, 2019 04:14
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CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:This is absolutely false, the rise of the market society closely tracks with the rise of the nation state. Markets before capitalism were self limiting in nature. I'm not quite sure what you mean by that. I'll add the prefix of 'free' (or at least semi-free) markets and private ownership if that helps. Mukip fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Feb 4, 2019 |
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Feb 4, 2019 04:22
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Mukip posted:I'll grant that point, OwlFancier. Whether something works or not depends on what you consider "working" to be so that was rhetorically lazy of me. I mean, if you want "generates shitloads of money" to be the end goal then the Soviet and now Chinese models both outperform the US model in terms of ability to construct a productive economy in the shortest amount of time. Free markets don't distribute resources efficiently either, and I would suggest that wealth disparity is perhaps the best indicator of that. If you have shitloads of money just being stored then it's not being employed productively. It represents wasted labour. Again I really don't see a metric whereby central planning produces an economy that "doesn't work" more than lack of planning does? If anything it would seem like on the whole it generally works slightly better even if it has major room for improvement? OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:30 on Feb 4, 2019 |
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Feb 4, 2019 04:25
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I said 'creating wealth for the majority of people in the aggregate', not 'generating shitloads of money'. I consider that to be putting words in my mouth. Can we have a thread for once where people read others posts in good faith? The Soviet economy was very dysfunctional and that isn't a controversial statement. The average US or European citizen was much more materially wealthy. As for China, well, it's a capitalist economy now isn't it?
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Feb 4, 2019 04:32
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State capitalist. The state directs a large amount of control over the economy and businesses so it's still rather more commanded than the US is. Also what's "creating wealth for the majority of people in the aggregate"? Does that mean wealth equality? Cos the US is real bad at that. If you have an economic system that produces a livable standard for people but only by being the wealthiest country on the planet and being massively inefficient at distributing its wealth then, uh, that doesn't seem like a very good recommendation of the system?
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Feb 4, 2019 04:38
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Most countries involved in WW2 were state capitalist if you need an example. Look at how the US, UK, Canada etc commanded their economy, established industries wholesale, built up a bureaucracy and executives to manage them, and directed them to one end, including in some cases the establishment of labour unions and fair wage guarantee programs.
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Feb 4, 2019 04:42
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Yeah during wartime the state directs a lot more control over the economy, to varying degrees depending on necessity, either the government just issues lots of contracts or they employ the implicit threat of shooting the directors if they get any funny ideas, or they just straight up control the factories in the case of the soviet union. The second world war is a pretty good example of the sort of spectrum you can have as far as command/laissez faire goes within different kinds of societies, especially if you compare it to the following decades.
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Feb 4, 2019 04:47
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A command economy is one where instead of free markets determining the production of goods, government planners do. But even in free market economies, there's a certain amount of economic planning. There isn't really any such such thing in the modern world as a totally unplanned economy. But "more central planning than that other capitalist economy" is not the definition of a command economy. China is a capitalist mixed economy, it is by no means a command economy in the sense that people use that term. The sentence "creating wealth for the majority of people in the aggregate" is just normal English words, man. Wealth inequality is certainly an issue, but its not something any sane person is going to ditch free markets for command economies over.
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Feb 4, 2019 04:53
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The problem I'm having is that you're looking at the US and other countries which began industrialization very early on, and then you're looking at places like the former USSR and China which were not industrialized at the beginning of the 20th century, and you're then looking at the place they're both in now and saying that it's because they had/have command economies, rather than literally anything else, when command economies have primarily served to put them on competitive footing with the US despite their previous positions... Like you're looking at places that a hundred years ago were barely out of subsistence agriculture. Maybe that and some of the other political considerations of the past century might have something to do with why they are the way they are? OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Feb 4, 2019 |
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Feb 4, 2019 04:56
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Neither the Soviet Union or pre-Xiaoping China were ever on a competitive economic footing with the US.
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Feb 4, 2019 04:58
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Mukip posted:Neither the Soviet Union or pre-Xiaoping China were ever on a competitive economic footing with the US. Do you think that the US starting the 20th century with an economy orders of magintude larger than either of them might have been a contributing factor to that? Both countries experienced meteoric industrial growth throughout their lifetimes under central planning. It's really weird to look at that and say "nope doesn't work" OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 05:03 on Feb 4, 2019 |
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Feb 4, 2019 05:01
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But they absolutely did not work well at creating wealth for the average citizen in either China or the USSR. Both nations experienced famines and while industrialization occurred, the factories were not used efficiently to improve the living standards of their citizens compared to capitalist economies. And there's no way they could have been used efficiently, either. The problem with command economies is not that they are literally incapable of producing goods. The Soviets industrialized and then produced plenty of tanks because the state directed resources to that end. The problem they have no logical means of efficiently allocating resources to the production of goods, leading to overproduction or underproduction and then shortages of all sorts of things. This is a problem with command economies that remains unsolved in the modern day, it's got nothing to do with starting from an unfavourable position as an agrarian economy. Dude just go and actually read about it instead of dreaming up hot takes.
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Feb 4, 2019 05:13
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But why is that different from laissez faire economies? They also experienced famines during industrialization and wars and exploited their workers and all sorts of atrocious things? Today the free market produces all sorts of things that we don't need, arguably don't really improve our lives or if they do, they do so because of problems that our economic system itself causes? Is planned obsolescence an efficient use of resources for human betterment? Is throwing out 30% of all food production while people go hungry an efficient distribution of resources because it's the method that maximizes profits? Is marketing an efficient use of resources? The manufacturing of desires so that they can be fulfilled in exchange for money? None of this is without consequence because consumption is the prime driver of climate change. A big part of why China's economy is the way it is is because it functions as the world's factory, it's the free market in places like the US and Europe that drives the production at those prices and under those conditions, it's global, after all. And why do you think the soviet union produced shitloads of tanks? Was there anyone else at the time producing shitloads of tanks that might have been a motivating factor? Is there anyone around today still spending shitloads of money on the military only now failing to produce very much at all? Again you're positing "inefficiency" or exploitation as a problem unique to command economies which is where I'm taking issue. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Feb 4, 2019 |
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Feb 4, 2019 05:30
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There weren't any Laissez-faire economies by the time the USSR and communist China were founded. The rest of your post is just a Gish gallop of sophistry so I'm done with this, you can have the last post if you like.
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Feb 4, 2019 05:46
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Mukip posted:Market economies work in the sense that they have provided our societies with unrivaled prosperity compared to historical and contemporary alternatives. Marx and most Marxists will tell you that Capitalism is an improvement over Feudalism and earlier economic models. It's by far the most dynamic and revolutionary socioeconomic force in human history. Our contention is that it is historically finite process, that it's own internal contradictions will inevitably destroy it even if it is not overthrown by revolutionary leftists. If the falling rate of profit doesn't destroy it, then the automation of most labor (physical and, someday, mental) will. If that doesn't destroy it, we are rapidly seeing that there are limits to growth simply from an ecological perspective. The economy can't not grow, that would be a recession or even a depression. A crisis. Yet it mustn't grow or we will face environmental collapse. Even if we somehow mitigate Climate Change (fat chance) there will always be another crisis over the horizon as the Bourgeois plunder the planet looking for value to extract. This is untenable. quote:Command economies don't work because of a currently unsolvable flaw where they cannot figure out how to centrally plan the distribution of resources if an efficient manner. Large Capitalist firms like Amazon pretty much already do this in miniature. There's no reason why you couldn't have the same commodity production and distribution system except instead of Jeff Bezo sitting at the top collecting the surplus labor value you had, well, no one. Basically the same people who already handle the logistics of our economy except they get paid in labor vouchers and maybe they elect some of their own to a worker's council to oversee the everyday running of the organization. Paul Cockshott's work is a pretty good starting place to look into how a planned economy would work. Of course, this is all assuming that the proletariat need central planners when there are many theoretical forms of decentralized socialism. Perhaps you could have a mix - a state that controls things like energy production, natural resources, and the essentials of life while there is a market socialist economy for luxury items.
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Feb 4, 2019 05:57
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I mean yeah I personally prefer something more decentralized wherever practical just on the basis that I think it implies a limited degree of production more than anything, so it's absolutely not just a matter of how much command you want in your economy as far as socialist-not socialist goes, but having a huge hardon for free market stuff and raging hateboner for anything that resembles a command economy is real weird. It makes little sense to point at high availability and say it's a product of efficiency and staunchly ignore any suggestion that maybe it might represent inequality instead? OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Feb 4, 2019 |
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Feb 4, 2019 06:01
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Doesn't that seem like a mixed market economy though? Decentralized socialism where the government controls energy, healthcare, basic food, and everything else is done by businesses .
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Feb 4, 2019 06:05
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