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Pentecoastal Elites posted:I think this is important because if humans some have innate drive towards greed (again, as defined as wealth-hoarding at the expense of others), I think communism is impossible in the long term because humans will inevitably reproduce societies where they can satisfy the need to express greed, in the same way that humans will inevitably reproduce societies with clothing and indoor living spaces so they can satisfy the need to protect themselves from the elements. I think that it is still in our collective interests to went to build a society that attempts to mitigate against greed, even if we grant that "innate greed" will make communism long-term unfeasible, as opposed to maintaining a society that... does NOT fight against greed. SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:This society, capitalism in general, rewards selfishness and punishes selflessness This is, very loosely, what materialism attempts to convey: we learn to behave in the way we do because of our material conditions, and in a system that requires that we constantly act in our own self-interest and at the expense of others, it "feels natural" for some to always behave in that fashion, because they have understood that attempting to act contrary to what capitalist society expects, is unsustainable and will bring about ruin. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 04:12 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 04:09
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BoldFrankensteinMir posted:Yeah, this is where you lost me friend. Trying to paint Mao as a champion for the interests of others is just flat-out ignorant. He starved his own people and rewrote the history books to cover it up. None of that is admirable or worth emulating. quote:That tragic history behind the revolution vanishes in the historiography and propaganda that encompasses the negative cult of heroes. While in their reading of Russian history they pursue the repression of the Second Time of Troubles, for the great Asian country they skip over the Century of Humiliation (the period that stretches from the First Opium War to the seizure of power by the communists). Just as in Russia, in China it’s ultimately the revolution led by the communist party that saves the nation and even the state. In the biography of Mao Zedong earlier cited, not only do they ignore the historical background briefly restated here, but they blame the Chinese communist leader for most of the horrors caused by the starvation and famines that affected China. A rigorous silence is maintained with regard to the embargo imposed on that great Asia country after the communists came to power. quote:Finally, there is controversy over the contribution of [the El Niño Southern Oscillation] to the agricultural catastrophe of Mao’s Great Leap Forward. The drought-famine of 1959–61, which killed 20 million peasants (the death toll officially admitted in 1980 by Hu Yaobang) was the most deadly of the twentieth century, perhaps of all time. Given the PRC’s impressive commitments to food security and disaster mitigation in the early 1950s, as well as its dramatic success in raising average life expectancy the scale of this holocaust is stupefying and, for many sympathizers with the Chinese Revolution, almost inexplicable. Certainly, the “strong” El Niño of 1957–59, which also produced a famous famine and nearly a million refugees in the Brazilian sertão, was the likely culprit responsible for the onset of drought in 1958–59, but recent interpretations radically disagree over the relative importance of climatic and political determinants. In Hungry Ghosts, a Robert Conquest–like exposé of Mao’s orchestration of “the darkest moment in the long history of China,” Jasper Becker fails to mention any natural context for the famine whatsoever, although Chinese meteorologists have characterized the drought, which affected one-third of the nation’s cultivated acreage, as the most extreme of the twentieth century. For the first time in human memory, people could actually wade across the Yellow River. ___ OwlFancier posted:Is there not some sort of link between revolutionary centralized communism and famines though? The link between centralized communism and famines is that the USSR stopped having them after the 40s, and then Russia started running into food shortages again after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. An examination of famines in the modern period indicates that it's almost never about an inability to physically produce or deliver sufficient food to meet the subsistence needs of the population, but rather an inability of the population to procure the food for lack of ability to pay, combined with state and private forces that collude to enforce the "rules" on the acquisition of food. It's an ideological phenomenon. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 09:36 on Nov 6, 2020 |
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Nov 6, 2020 09:31
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dex_sda posted:Hell, stepping away from communism for a second, the irish potato famine was chiefly the complete failure of capitalism. The irish had enough to feed themselves as a nation even with the potato blight, but they were compelled to sell it away and the laissez-faire whig gov halted even the paltry food relief tories organised before. The other example of this is the British parliament extolling the virtues of railroad construction in India as thereby making it impossible for the region to ever experience famines... only to have these railroads be used in practice to shuttle foodstuffs across the subcontinent where they could fetch the highest prices, even as the grain and millet had to be placed under armed guard to prevent starving people from simply taking the harvest by force, out of desperation. Sharks Eat Bear posted:- free trade [I feel too uninformed to have a good take. I find a lot of anti-free trade rhetoric to be xenophobic/racist, but also not sure how free trade exists outside the context of imperialism and neoliberalism] "Free trade" is, in general, a bad idea, because what it essentially means is that countries are not allowed to engage in protectionist behavior. This means that countries that are not-yet-industrialized, are never going to be able to industrialize, since any domestic production/manufacture will be cannibalized by cheaper imports from already-developed countries, and then the not-yet-industrialized country cannot impose tariffs on those imports, since tariffication is in violation of free trade principles. The Global South becomes trapped as merely being a consumer of the advanced finished goods produced by the Global North, as well as being a source of raw material, but are never allowed to become producers themselves.
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Nov 6, 2020 11:16
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OwlFancier posted:To be sure I absolutely would not suggest that capitalism doesn't cause famines, more just that in the current time I do worry about the effects of things like embargos and major industrial rejiggering on a society that relies on global trade for food security (which is a lot of societies) I think it's realistic to suggest that any country that undertakes a socialist project is under a very real threat of suffering disruptions to its food-production and food-logistics chains (and not just food, but many other basic goods), even simply as a function of trying to reconfigure to a collectivized form of production, not yet counting the rest of the capitalist world deliberately trying to gently caress with them. Having said that, it means that a socialist movement needs to approach the project carefully. To paraphrase Malatesta, you cannot attain the moral emancipation of being able to avoid all the bad things as long as the current conditions of political and economic subjection apply, and so we should not use the possibility of these bad things happening, as a prohibition against attempting to break the vicious cycle.
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Nov 6, 2020 11:28
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DrSunshine posted:Wait, I am interested in this. Which ones? Unless I'm mistaken the most obvious example would be the Bolsheviks participating in the Provisional Government. As Lenin explained in "An Infantile Disease", even if you don't set out to actually win any legalistic victories via your participation in bourgeois democracy, at the very minimum, their sandbagging of the efforts of the communists will serve as an example to the people that the bourgeois democracy needs to be overthrown, because LOOK AT WHAT THEY'RE DOING, THIS ISN'T GOING TO WORK.
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Nov 6, 2020 17:24
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Why does the Provisional Government count as bourgeois democracy rather than just democracy? Because the state of the Russian Revolution after the abdication of Nicholas II was up in the air as to whether they would "stop" at a bourgeois liberal democracy, ostensibly to develop their productive forces via the (full/complete) adoption of capitalism, or if they'd "continue on" to socialism directly. The Provisional Government generally represented the interests of those who favored the former, which is why it also had to be overthrown in turn. Cpt_Obvious posted:Are all forms of democracy bourgeois in nature? I wouldn't say so. Communism desires democracy, and in turn it desires the abolition of capitalism because capitalism is incompatible with democracy. CYBEReris posted:IIRC Lenin was adamant though that it should be with their own party and their own platforms oh, I agree. If, as a communist, one decides to participate in parliamentarianism at all, one should at the minimum vote for the communist candidate and the communist party.
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Nov 6, 2020 17:52
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Falstaff posted:Also, hey Grandenko... the first excerpt was from Domenico Losurdo's "Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend" the second excerpt was from Mike Davis's "Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World"
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Nov 7, 2020 04:04
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The Oldest Man posted:Meanwhile, a neoliberal will support the exact same mechanisms of control (naked force being used against perceived threats and dissenters, for example) but will talk circles around the issue of why. Their conception of natural rights from the liberal heritage includes some ideas about personal liberty, but the reality of implementing a market-first philosophy in the real world is that a lot of people don't want to turn their ground water or whatever over to the control of Nestle and will resist that so they must be suppressed to enable market actors to invade. Reconciling self-determination with a religious belief in the superiority of the market as the ultimate hammer for all nails requires a lot of mental gymnastics. one of the clever ways I've heard it put is that neoliberals will chalk everything up to "market forces", and then will claim that that's non-violent, even when the phrase has the word "force" right there in the latter half!
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Nov 10, 2020 17:43
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OwlFancier posted:As I said, why should the central planners or ultra rich care about either? Why should they care about even the people they could save the lives of if doing that diminishes their own immediate wealth or power? Are they just expected to have a more prominent sense of noblesse oblige than the factory commune? I'm trying to engage with this discussion but I'm kind of lost as to why there seems to be this impression that "top-down socialism" is not also democratized? Like, if the worry is about whether central planners are going to be willing to sacrifice large swaths of population, why wouldn't a socialist polity vote them out? It's a central tenet to socialist democracy, even Soviet democracy and not just anarchist principles, that representatives to the government should be subject to recall.
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Nov 12, 2020 05:14
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"Human error" also means that it wasn't deliberate. Ultimately, the reason why there's pushback on this sort of topic is because "there were famines under (if not specifically committed by) communism" is used as a rhetorical cudgel against never ever ever wanting to try socialism / communism ever again. For people to then point out that there were also famines under (again, if not specifically committed by) capitalism is not "whataboutism", or an attempt to excuse communism's failures by accusing capitalism of having done the same, but rather as an attempt to apply a level of consistency to the argument: if communism is never to be tried because of all the failures that have occurred under it, why are we not saying the same of capitalism? if we believe that capitalism can be regulated, can be reformed, can have its sharpest edges ground down to prevent the disasters and calamities that it was unable to successfully address, should not communism be granted the same benefit of the doubt? To suggest otherwise would be ideological dogmatism.
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Nov 12, 2020 06:34
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Acerbatus posted:I mean, isn't the government doing gently caress all to actually enforce it - or in other words, anarchy - basically what's happening right now and not working? The dictionary definition of anarchy is different from anarchism as an ideological tendency within the left. Further, even though the Federal (and for the most part, state) government is not doing anything to alleviate the pandemic, they are still enforcing status quo behavior... which then leads to people having to go to work regardless of the pandemic, because the banks, the landlords, etc. are still requiring that you pay them, and the police are still going to beat you up if you do not. And insofar as people are trying to engage in mutual aid, it's not enough, because the amount of surplus value and labor that people can afford to recirculate within mutual aid networks, is often not enough to meet the demands of the people who need it. Acerbatus posted:I don't understand this idea of anarchy that has SOME central leadership. Anarchism does not abhor centralized leadership - rather, it demands that leadership be democratized and be free of coercion. Crumbskull posted:Personally, and you'll all eventually put me on ignore for constantly banging on about this, but I view co-operative association as an extremely potent strategy for altering productive relationships (i dont know if thats whay its called i havent read any marx i jusy use context clues) AND they give people an actual material opportunity to practice worker democratic management, develop class solidarity, improve their life materially through anticapitalist action etc. I get a lot of push back from ostensibky.more radical anarchists and 'communists' in town about how co-ops don't go far enough or at risk of succumbing to identity crisis and isomorphism with capitalist enterprise and I guess my answer is: well, no poo poo but until you can figure out another way to pay your bills and get socialism practice at the same time why don't you come to my office and I'll show you how to draft a pro forma. My view is that co-operatives are (among other things) a way to develop bonds of solidarity between workers, which can eventually be weaponized towards advancing socialism, in the same way that a socialist political party can serve as a nexus for organizing even if you don't expect to be able to legislate socialism into existence. The danger in both of these cases, and why some farther to the left may tend to scoff at co-operatives (or in the latter case, at electoralism), is when people invest more in the preservation of the organization itself, rather than the long-term goal of building socialism, up to and including merely wielding the co-operative as a tool (meaning it can also be discarded) once the time is right. This is somewhat exacerbated by co-operatives, as a cog in the larger wheel of capitalism and a free market system, will still have to make decisions relative to contradictions in capitalism, so there is a problem there of workers consenting to exploit themselves, so to speak. Of course, one might say that this is still a non-trivial improvement over a fully-private capitalist firm, but it's something that will have to be reckoned with eventually.
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Nov 13, 2020 07:06
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A loose distinction that one can make between feudalism and capitalism is that feudalism appropriates surplus value via force/fiat, with the feudal lord essentially being a fusion of the military and economic spheres, while capitalism appropriates surplus value via contracts and legalism - the establishment of the concept of private property and the enclosure of the commons denies most people the ability to provide their own subsistence, which means they need to sell their labor, and the price of labor is controlled by capitalists, etc. Of course, capitalism still and also relies on brute force to enforce such contracts, such as the police, the general bureaucracy of the state, private security, etc., which I why I said it was merely a "loose" distinction, but I think it should be clear that a proletarian who goes through life "living by the rules" and never runs afoul of the law is still having their surplus value appropriated all of the time merely as a function of capitalist society, without the kind of direct, violent coercion at the point of a feudal lord's sword. Anyway, capitalism's need to appropriate more and more of the proletariat's surplus value in order to keep propping up the constantly falling rate of profit forms a contradiction with preventing the proletariat from being able to participate in the economy as they're able to afford fewer and fewer goods and services as their wages keep getting progressively smaller. This contradiction will manifest itself in crises and spasms of resistance and even revolutions... but if we get to a state where the capitalists are appropriating so much surplus value from the proletariat that even individual, edge-case proletarians are unable to accumulate capital anymore, and it is only the bayonets pointed at their necks that are keeping the workers in line, then I would argue that we've entered some form of neo-feudalism - the contractual, legalistic obligations of capitalism have failed, and the capitalists enter again into a fusion of the military and economic spheres in order to continue this (by then illusionary) cycle of workers ostensibly working for "wages".
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Nov 13, 2020 09:20
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Acerbatus posted:To my knowledge, no communist government in history has had an actual more than single party system, because doing so goes against the idea of everyone being equal within the community by drawing explicit lines. We can see the end result of that with China, North Korea, etc being dictatorships. Communist nations are one-party states not out of an egalitarian ideal, but rather because conflicting parties are only ever going to be representative of the interests of certain classes. Given that the Communist party represents the class of the workers and of peasants, and since the goal of a socialist revolution is to establish a proletarian state, there would be no need nor reason to allow for other parties, since that would only ever allow for the seizure of political power by... the bourgeoisie, since they'd be the only class whose interests wouldn't be represented by the worker's party. Acerbatus posted:How, then, does communism improve on the current system where a cult of personality can dictate everything? By democratization within the party. To make a very clumsy analogy, an America that was only ever ruled by a president who is a Democrat, and a Congress composed of Democrats, would not necessarily be a dictatorship, nor would it be a cult of personality, nor would it be undemocratic, in the sense that you'd still have various underlying trends and forces within the party that we see today. Obviously there are problems with this analogy as far as the Democrats being so ideologically varied as a "big tent", but the incompatibility of the politics of Joe Manchin versus that of Bernie Sanders would mean that even under as a "one-party" state, a Democrat-controlled USA would still indeed have diversity of opinion. And given that the Democrats would presumably run primaries in this hypothetical scenario, there would still be democratic input by the people, there would still be elections, and people could still choose whether they'd like to be represented by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Pete Buttigeig (again, allowing for the stretch in ideological spectrum of a democratic socialist versus a liberal, vis-a-vis the example of Stalin and Trotsky being on the Right-Opposition and Left-Opposition of the SOVNARKOM). ___ One further thing I'd like to touch on here is that the economic context under which a communist state would operate would also necessarily inform its democratic traditions, i.e., you wouldn't have a Joe Biden-esque candidacy happen because you presumably also wouldn't have the kind of oligarchical media that blows up his image and sabotages those of his opponents, or direct oligarchical investments into electioneering to accomplish the same. CelestialScribe posted:Why, when speaking to communists and socialists, so many of them use factories as the examples of potential democratic workforces when most people today don't work in factories? Part of it is because of the context in which most socialist texts were written, as in Marx analyzing the conditions of factory work in 19th century Europe. Besides that, it's a rather direct and simple/physical way to express the point: a worker applies their labor to assemble a chair (or a part of a chair), and the combination of raw materials + labor creates value in the form of a fully-assembled chair, but the capitalist appropriates the surplus value of that interaction. I suppose in a modern context you could just as easily put this in the form of a call center: the capitalist invests in the capital of renting office space, workstations, internet connectivity, etc. They hire a call center agent. The agent's labor in the form of answering calls, when combined with the capital invested in the phone and the computer used to perform that service, creates value. Except the call center has a contract with the capitalist for 9 dollars per hour per agent, but the agent is only getting paid 2 dollars per hour. The other 7 dollars goes into the capitalist's pocket.
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Nov 14, 2020 13:08
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enki42 posted:I have a hard time getting behind this. It seems plainly evident to me that different sorts of workers might have different workplace conditions, concerns, and different political outlooks on how things could be solved (for an example, see the approximately 8 bajillion different flavours of socialism that people support, all of which are wholly concerned with workers first and foremost). VictualSquid posted:Assuming all the peasants have died out, there is no long term unemployment, there are no career soldiers or politicians, there are no local experiments further along in abolishing the worker/employer distinction. And your country is an ethnostate without any regions considering increased independence. I want to be clear that what I was pointing out was that the reason for one-party statehood was, as I said, not out of egalitarianism, but rather... what I'd posted is the general gist of the rationale. This is not to say that this reasoning is to be taken on its face as an absolute, or an established consensus among communists. What the both of you have pointed out, that there is heterogeneity of views even within the single class of proletarians, and that such heterogeneity should be sufficient justification for a diversity of parties, was identified by other communist thinkers as well Trotsky, in The Revolution Betrayed posted:In reality classes are heterogeneous; they are torn by inner antagonisms, and arrive at the solution of common problems no otherwise than through an inner struggle of tendencies, groups, and parties. It is possible, with certain qualifications, to concede that “a party is a part of a class.” But since a class has many “parts”—some look forward and some back—one and the same class may create several parties. For the same reason one party may rest upon parts of different classes. An example of only one party corresponding to one class is not to be found on the whole course of political history—provided, of course, you do not take the police appearance for the reality.
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Nov 14, 2020 14:22
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Timeless Appeal posted:2) I've been struggling, especially in terms of Covid, how people in such fields respond to emergency situations. Let me put it this way, if someone in this thread worked in a ladder factory, "My boss says that we're behind quotas and I need to work all this weekend with no promise of pay to get there" we would all tell that person they were being screwed over. But for COVID, I am finding myself sacrificing a lot of my personal time to work not out of a sense of compliance to my manager, but out of responsibility to vulnerable kids in precarious situation. It is a fundamentally unjust situation for you to be rendering additional work, out of a sense of responsibility and obligation (or even personal pride in one's work), and then not be adequately compensated for it. In a capitalist context, we tend to say that we shouldn't work beyond what we're paid to do, because we recognize that you're only exploiting yourself further. When it comes to public service / emergency situations, it's difficult to reconcile this impulse with the fact that lives are on the line. For a lot of people, this does just mean rendering more unpaid work and chalking it up to karma. Under socialism, the intent would be that not only would such additional work be compensated appropriately*, but that additional capacity would be built** so that you wouldn't need to do the extra work. * capitalism does not do this because your salary is already planned out ahead of time with respect to its cost as a part of the budget. Paying you more would lead to less profits, so capitalism will not do that, and especially since you have no leverage as an individual, and in fact will rationalize the extra work to yourself even without capitalist propaganda, just because your work saves lives. ** as VictualSquid said, capitalism does not do this because it doesn't believe in having slack capacity over the long term, since anything not needed right now is simply a cost waiting to be cut.
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Nov 14, 2020 14:41
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VictualSquid posted:The Russian revolution lead to the masses gaining power at the expense of the feudal ruling class. But they did not gain enough power to start marx's proposeded mechanism of transition from mass rule to full communism. I'm trying very hard not to be glib as I write this, and certainly this isn't the only reason that the USSR did not transition to full communism, but I think the failure of a global socialist revolution to catch on, and the capitalist encirclement that followed the failure of such a world-spanning movement, are huge factors in why the USSR developed in the way that it did, potentially even if you never changed anything else about Marxist-Leninist theory.
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Nov 16, 2020 13:23
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as The Oldest Man said, the pessimistic outlook on a breakthrough in personal 3D printing is that it's going to be used to cut out a lot of common items that you currently buy from retail stores and instead you'll have to print them out yourself, except the 3D printer is only going to work with proprietary raw material and you have to pay for a subscription to the blueprint service.
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Nov 23, 2020 01:55
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Gaunab posted:I guess this is the best place to put this but if it's not I apologize. I was looking up some stuff about wages and I ended up in a few reddit threads pre covid talking about hourly vs salary and people bragging about working 60 hour weeks because they get overtime. A lot of the bragging came from salaried workers and they wished they were hourly just for the overtime. It confused me that some people would rather work that much just for overtime rather than being paid more for the work they do and/or having extended deadlines so they wouldn't have to work that long. Maybe it's a way to rationalize that changes aren't likely to happen, maybe covid might have changed their outlook or maybe they're just lying but it's so weird to me to be that defined by a job. I just had to get that off my chest. Yeah I'm kind of the opposite opinion: with a salary I can stop working when I'm done working and not feel like I'm not monetizing enough of my time by working overtime. I guess it's different when you're living in economic precarity and you want the option to do an extra shift to get some extra cash for that unforeseen expense that needs to be taken care of immediately... but that's really a symptom of people living in economic precarity in the first place, and letting people destroy their bodies just a little bit faster is fundamentally unjust.
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Nov 27, 2020 11:40
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:Did Marx acknowledge the history of religion pre-dating capitalism? I assume he would say that religion has the same ultimate control/placating effect across a spectrum of exploitative socieconomic arrangements, and isn’t unique to capitalism? Yes. The use of religion as a means of societal control was acknowledged as something that isn't unique to capitalism. Sharks Eat Bear posted:Where I’m going is that I do believe having some sort of shared faith and rituals is hugely important to solidifying communities, in a way that to me seems integral to the socialist and/or communist project. I suspect there have been tomes written on this by people much smarter than me, so all I’ll say is that in a better society, hard science would be more important as the medium for shared faith and rituals than it would be as the engine of industrial progress. It was Bakunin that had an especially atheistic bent in his socialism, while Marx's "opiate of the people" remark can be taken to mean less that it needs to be abolished outright, and more that people clinging to religion is a natural outgrowth of them seeking reprieve from their feelings of oppression. That most socialists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries had some atheistic leanings to one degree or another comes from how the Church was a much more powerful influence than it used to be, and "progressive" movements within the Church were not nearly as prevalent. Of course, nowadays, we do tend to recognize the "utility" of religiosity within socialist projects.
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Nov 28, 2020 08:03
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Neoliberals don't like "the state" because they want everything left up to the free market. Taken a step further towards libertarianism, they don't like "the state" because they don't want corporations to be regulated, whether you believe that's because they think an unregulated free market is how it's supposed to work, or because they just want to run their companies more haphazardly and greedily. When a government ultimately gets taken over by neoliberal interests, it results in bad governance. When people experience bad governance, they tend to blame the government. This is not wrong, per se, but there is of course a difference between saying that "we should stop the government from being able to do things, because it keeps doing bad things", versus recognizing that the reason why the government is doing bad things and running things badly, is because it's being run by neoliberals. Some people are shifting towards mutual aid and anarchist forms of organization because they want to do something outside of getting the government to do it, whether it's because they think that the government cannot ever be made to do good, or because they think that it's too difficult right now to win electoral victories or immediate executive concessions, or because people need help Right Now and you can't wait around that long even if you could protest hard enough to win a second stimulus check. Or we might say that this is a line of thinking that isn't even particularly unique to the circumstances of 2020, because the American government has been bad for long enough that you could come out with an anarchist view of things just from everything that's happened in the last decade up to 2019, never mind the specific further radicalizing moments of how the US has handled COVID, or how the Democrats rigged the primaries against Bernie a second time. Having said all that, my read is that this person is worried about the tension between anarchism and the sort of social democrat programme that Sanders's movement wanted, because the latter is contingent upon placing a lot of power into the hands of the state, and people might be suspicious of that.
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Dec 2, 2020 06:38
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Sharks Eat Bear posted:I suppose it’s a possible thing to worry about, although I imagine the number of anarchists who are so deeply anti-state that it creates meaningful tension with the Sanders movement is vanishingly small. Seems like a very marginal worry, in the scheme of the rest of the perils & crises of neoliberalism that the interview discusses. Yeah, I broadly agree. I think anyone who's meaningfully on the left is capable of recognizing that "make healthcare be government-run? what if the Republicans get ahold of it?" is a disingenuous argument, and especially when "government-run healthcare" is something that all Americans across the political spectrum approve of when polled about it.
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Dec 2, 2020 07:55
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Sucrose posted:I guess my point is, in Marxism, how do you make sure you don't end up living in just another Communist dictatorship? Where did those societies go wrong? To be able to properly address this question we would have to get into a discussion of why you'd consider I'm assuming the USSR to be a "dictatorship".
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Dec 8, 2020 16:35
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Cpt_Obvious posted:2. The Chinese Firewall is surprisingly easy to bypass. All it takes is a VPN (at least that's all it took as of 4 years ago, I haven't been there since). This is somewhat tangential to the current topic but I do want to point out that the "Great Firewall of China" is not primarily an instrument of social control, as China watchers would have you believe. Indeed, it's very easy as a private individual to circumvent the firewall - but it's NOT easy to do this if you are a business, which points us towards the firewall as a form of digital protectionism. They successfully managed to isolate their domestic internet space from the likes of Google, Facebook, eBay, and Amazon as business entities, which has allowed them to develop their own home-grown social media sites and e-Commerce industries.
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Dec 9, 2020 09:23
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CelestialScribe posted:Then why is political speech so heavily regulated online in China? I'm not suggesting that online political speech in China isn't heavily regulated, or isn't regulated at all, or that the firewall itself isn't used for that among other things. I'm saying that the economic rationale for the firewall's existence is far too often unmentioned or understated.
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Dec 10, 2020 06:32
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CYBEReris posted:I've heard that the "firewall" is mostly in place so that the local environment is the default and chinese apps have room to breathe there without being squashed by the western monopolies, how accurate is that? That's what I previously wrote, yes - it's very easy to bypass as a private individual, but not as a business, and it acts as what we might call internet protectionism for the PRC.
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Dec 10, 2020 14:04
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would the heterogeneity of the CPC support the idea that a "one-party state" is still capable of presenting a diversity of tendencies, groups, and policies? I'm specifically referring to this quote from Trotsky: quote:In reality classes are heterogeneous; they are torn by inner antagonisms, and arrive at the solution of common problems no otherwise than through an inner struggle of tendencies, groups, and parties. It is possible, with certain qualifications, to concede that “a party is a part of a class.” But since a class has many “parts”—some look forward and some back—one and the same class may create several parties. For the same reason one party may rest upon parts of different classes. An example of only one party corresponding to one class is not to be found on the whole course of political history—provided, of course, you do not take the police appearance for the reality. In here, he's arguing against the Soviet Union only allowing for one party, because that party represents the workers and the peasants, and any other party would only be used to represent other classes, which would be unnecessary because you want the workers and the peasants to be the ruling class.
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Dec 18, 2020 08:43
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As I understand it, police abolition, at bottom, has to do deal with the problem that cops are the institution that are going to enforce private property and enclosure under capitalism. Broadly speaking, if you don't have enough money to buy food, the cops are the ones who are supposed to make sure you starve rather than be able to just take food that you didn't pay for. If you can't afford rent, the cops are the ones who are supposed to make sure you remain homeless rather than be able to just squat in an unoccupied house. Even if they guard the food and disperse the homeless tent communes non-racistly and without "excessive force", for however that's defined, that they're enforcing the built-in cruelties of capitalism means that they're a problem even if they're "only" inflicting the "soft" violence of denying people food and shelter from lack of ability to pay. This is why the police need to be abolished even if the police were merely only doing their jobs as politely as possible (again, as hypothetical and as unlikely as that sounds), because their job itself is the issue, but more broadly that's why capitalism needs to be abolished, because the problem isn't just that the police are enforcing private property and enclosure, but also that private property and enclosure are themselves an unjust concept that shouldn't be enforced by anyone to begin with, and even if you went as far as abolishing the police, the next Thing that's tasked with that enforcement is still going to be problematic.
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Dec 23, 2020 01:37
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Would the thread appreciate an explanation of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall? This excerpt was taken from "The City: London and the Global Power of Finance", by Tony Norfield quote:Marx argues that there is a ‘progressive tendency of the general rate of profit to fall’ and this is ‘just an expression peculiar to the capitalist mode of production of the progressive development of the social productivity of labour’.²⁸ Elsewhere, Marx states that this is ‘in every respect the most important law of modern political economy, and the most essential for understanding the most difficult relations’.²⁹ As such, it is worth spending a little time on this subject.
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Feb 26, 2021 03:44
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My take on this is what we generally understand to mean as being what's good for the company/its stakeholders is no longer true. An excerpt from Cedric Durand's "Fictitious Capital":    
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Jul 20, 2021 05:34
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Tweezer Reprise posted:I hope this doesn't count as a necropost, but I've recently had a particular fire lit under me after learning a lot more than I used to know about Yeltsin's coup in 1993, and my attention has shifted backwards to Gorbachev. Does anyone have any good books about him and the late era of Soviet history? My (perhaps flawed) impression of Gorbachev at present is basically FDR though the looking glass, so to speak: a singular figure trying to keep the house from coming down by putting his ear to the ground and attempting to harness the adversarial forces bubbling up, to reform by folding the corners all back into a cooperating unit. This worked for FDR: the American state in the 30s and 40s more fully became the master of capitalism instead of merely its interlocutor and conduit. This however, did not work for Gorbachev, and I'd love to learn more about why, and if there was any conceivable way for the Soviet Union not to fall apart post-Brezhnev. I would recommend "Armageddon Averted" by Stephen Kotkin as a look into the final days of the Soviet Union
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Sep 5, 2021 05:10
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DrSunshine posted:I'm interested in learning about the necessary material preconditions for capitalism's existence. Have any writers identified what environmental states must exist in order for capitalism to exist, or written extensively about the relationship between capitalism and the underlying physical world? digging up this post I made in another thread from a long time ago: gradenko_2000 posted:I just finished "The Origin of Capitalism", by Ellen Meiksins Wood.
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Sep 13, 2021 01:21
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:which wealthy? putin is a super billionaire but the president of ukraine seems to be "owner of a used car lot" upper middle class. It seems like an invasion, not two equally matched foes being used as pawns under capitalism. I think the "other wealthy" here juxtaposed against Russia is the West
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Feb 25, 2022 14:37
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