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The USSR represents an idea of socialism which was put into practice in a particular time and place and produced a powerful nation which therefore had a lot of influence over the concept of socialism, both in people reacting to it and in people following it. But I like Richard Wolff's point about it not actually having some pretty key parts of Marx's analysis involved. It didn't sufficiently change the position of the worker in their workplace, a state directed economy is powerful but it doesn't really liberate the worker, it just makes them dependent on different people who might have more of their interest at heart in some ways than their capitalist boss might, but might remain woefully lacking in others. Personally I put a lot more hope in ideas of collective ownership, giving actual material power to people to make decisions that immediately affect their lives. Democracy on a level and in places where you spend most of your day. Sometimes this extends to odd places in that I'm not actually hugely in favour of social housing because if the government owns your house then a hostile government might elect to take it off you, as happened in the UK with a lot of the social housing stock. People shouldn't own each other's houses, but I very much like the idea of people owning their own personal dwellings, it's when that translates into a market and commodification of housing that it becomes a problem. I think the strongest ideas that stem from Marx and his concept of socialism are those that concern giving people real power over their lives, and you can look at his analysis of how power works in society to give you good insights into who presently has it and ways you might get it to people who don't. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Jan 28, 2019 |
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Jan 28, 2019 18:53
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Cicero posted:The part where Medicaid got expanded is arguably socialist in nature, since Medicaid is a government-run health insurance (?) program. The government funnelling money to private healthcare providers by guaranteeing their fees isn't... really socialism... Or like, it's really not socialism by virtually any standard.
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Jan 28, 2019 19:24
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Cicero posted:Replacing private health insurance companies is arguably socialist, even if it doesn't go all the way and replace private healthcare itself. Health insurance is a sizable industry, I don't see why the government owning it wouldn't count as socialist in some sense if the government taking over other industries counts. If the government owned and operated the healthcare services then yes it would be socialist by some definitions but this is far more like the british privatization of the rail services where the government just throws money at private companies to run any service they want and guarantees all their profits, it's literal handouts to rich people. A big government money faucet that anyone who owns a hospital can stick their head under and guzzle at as long as they bring some old people along to watch isn't really compatible with any definition of socialism. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Jan 28, 2019 |
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Jan 28, 2019 19:53
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Cicero posted:I'm not saying it's socialized healthcare, just that it's socialized health insurance. I... guess that's technically accurate in the sense that you are socializing the costs of maintaining a for-profit healthcare industry... But it's pretty far removed from socialism and I would strongly suggest not calling it that because it doesn't really have rhetorical value and nor is it accurate.
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Jan 28, 2019 19:58
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Cicero posted:I still don't see why it wouldn't count, if you accept that the USSR was a form of socialism chiefly because the government owned and controlled various industries, with the government counting as "the workers" in some sense. So far you've just pointed out that the delivery of healthcare itself is still private and for-profit, but that's not the industry I'm talking about. I would suggest that if you're going to call something socialism it should probably be a little bit more distant from the function of propping up incredibly usurious private industrialists? Like if you have an entire economy that runs via state control and has strategic objectives that include large scale social efforts to raise people's material standards of living that's a bit more credibly socialist than throwing bazillions of dollars at private healthcare because old people won't vote for you if you don't. Intent and context do matter a bit, I think. If you took control of all healthcare infrastructure and retooled it towards providing the maximum availability of needed service to everyone, then that's something you can argue is a pretty socialist idea even if it's in a tradition that I wouldn't necessarily agree with on all things. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Jan 28, 2019 |
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Jan 28, 2019 20:12
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If the government establishes a monopoly on healthcare funding then it's going to depend on how it goes from there. Certainly it's likely to see support from socialists as an immediate measure to improve people's quality of life, however it could quite easily turn into the mother of all pork barrel spending initiatives if that's as far as it goes. It should be followed up with attacks on the privately owned infrastructure itself to bring costs down and eliminate the for profit element. If you manage to achieve a good level of control at that level and especially if you went as far as introducing collective ownership of healthcare infrastructure you really would be heading towards socialist as an accurate label there. But yeah, basically, you don't have socialism unless you have fairly comprehensive worker (or state, if we're being historical) control of industry. If you don't even approach that for a fraction of a single industry then it's kinda diluting the term beyond utility, I think.
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Jan 28, 2019 20:21
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I think if you run around saying that limited government funding of private healthcare is socailism you're going to run into some problems when you run into actual socialists who want to guillotine all the landlords and eradicate housing as a commodity. If someone asked me what socialism meant for healthcare I'd say it would mean if you were sick you could see a doctor and get whatever treatment you need and not think about paying for it. You get it because you need it.
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Jan 28, 2019 20:28
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Cicero posted:What's wrong with saying "it's socialism for the health insurance industry, and we need more stuff like that in other industries too"? "socialism for the health insurance industry" is kind of a nonsense phrase. The concept of insurance is one that only exists because of capitalism. Socialism for the health insurance industry would be running the health insurance industry over in a T34 and setting fire to the ruins. That's the problem with applying the term wildly because it does mean quite a lot of important stuff other than just the government throwing money at things. It's like the "everything I dislike is fascism" problem but backwards. Not every improvement in the world is socialism. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Jan 28, 2019 |
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Jan 28, 2019 20:33
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I think basically that if you're going to talk about them, that you can't really just avoid the fundamental conflict between socialism and capitalism for very long and you shouldn't try to because people are gonna call you on it pretty fast. If you just want to make the word socialism into "things I like" then you're gonna have problems when people try to use the term to describe more specific ideas and their relationship to capitalism or other left wing ideas. I don't think socialism is really a difficult or even particularly controversial idea to describe to people from principle so if you want to talk about it it's worth doing that rather than just trying to attach it to things you or they might like while avoiding any trace of theory.
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Jan 28, 2019 20:38
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I would suggest that at least specifically the health insurance industry is such a spectacularly capitalist thing that saying you're going to socialize it rather than destroy it might render the word a bit... nonsensical.
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Jan 28, 2019 20:50
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Socialism in one country is silly enough without going for socialism in one arbitrary sector of one industry. If I grow spuds in my back garden and then eat them that doesn't make it socialism.
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Jan 28, 2019 21:32
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Again I take a bit of issue with ism vs ist, here. I think the former should imply a degree of totality beyond "the government guaranteeing the existence of the private healthcare sector"
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Jan 28, 2019 21:37
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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.
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Jan 28, 2019 21:39
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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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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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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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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: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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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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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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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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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 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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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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Pharohman777 posted: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 . I mean in the sense of commandyness sure, but "market socialist" would be a bit different in that necessarily it would entail all the businesses being cooperatives or something similar. So different from what you nowadays would consider a mixed economy. Especially if you consider other potential political differences if all your businesses are democratically organized. You open up a variety of strategic goals for an economy in that sense that can be distributed in the sense that they are actually democraticaly decided. It would be odd if you had a society full of cooperative workplaces that just didn't ever think about whether they should all get together and think of some long term goals. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Feb 4, 2019 |
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Feb 4, 2019 06:07
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Liberalism is about the freedom of capital holders to do what they want with their capital, nothing more and nothing less. That's what it started as and that's still what it is. It means freedom from the king, or the government, or your workers telling you what to do with your stuff, and it argues that your stuff is whatever you can lay claim to in law.
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Feb 5, 2019 04:32
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Reznor posted:I didn't realize that is was that contravercial. If you're gonna get marxy about it the government owning the means of production should be as part of a "dictatorship of the proletariat" which is to say the workers use the apparatus of the government to take control away from the bourgeoisie, and then transition to communism over time. If it isn't the workers doing it and it isn't very transitional it's debatable whether or not you've done a socialism.
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Feb 5, 2019 21:51
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