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Acerbatus posted:I'm not sure if I can agree with that, considering the dust bowl was a natural phenomena (maybe climate change affected it, but I only really know about the effects of climate change within my lifetime I will grant) and the great leap forward's massive famines were the result of poor management. Imagine a scientist is impressed by the "deep ploughing" method of increasing agricultural output. Then imagine that they long ago actually helped spread useful agricultural ideas. That leads to them getting given large scale power over a region's agriculture. Deep ploughing actually is not suitable for the soils in that region. And the agriculture in the region is being totally ruined. Their organisation has a culture where everybody who brings bad news to their bosses gets fired. Based on the fake reports the leaders pat their backs and celebrate and get further promotions. Everybody in the actual region starves or emigrates, depending mostly on the status of the neighbouring regions. Who's fault is it? 1) It is perfectly natural unless it happened in a (different ideology) country, then it was the ideology's fault. 2) It never happened and can never happen unless it happened in a (different ideology) country, then it was the ideology's fault. 3) The local graincounters who would rather risk starving then be fired for accurate reporting are evil saboteurs. 4) The high level leaders are personally moustache twirling villians who personally killed everybody. 5) The organisational structures that favour a high ranking person's pride over the reports from local reality are bad and should be dismantled. This describes many of the famous famines that are often brought up in political contexts. But especially the yuan famine and the dust bowl.
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Nov 7, 2020 12:19
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DrSunshine posted:Seeing the latest rise in COVID cases makes me wonder - how would a decentralized anarchist society solve something like this, an emergency which requires immediate, directed, centralized coordination at the national scale in order to solve? Unless you mean some strange strawman version of anarchism, then they are immune to covid bc they don't exist in the real world. ezln also had a statement on their covid response procedures, you can go look for it.
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Nov 12, 2020 23:21
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mila kunis posted:Again, is this not the case? If anarchists are absolutely fine with using the state and centralized organization as a means of power against class enemies in the transition period towards a classless society then I'm fine with that - but if that's the case, why is there any distinction between socialists and anarchists in the first place? Most anarchists are fine with being called socialists.
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Nov 13, 2020 18:47
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Ferrinus posted:Any discussion of anarchism vs. Marxism is necessarily going to be about means of defeating capitalism, carrying out a revolution, defending a revolution, and generally supporting the transition to a classless society, because it's actually a common point between both ideologies that in a classless society no repressive apparatus is needed and people can be counted on to cooperate in transparent, democratic ways without being forced to. I am an anarchist by most weaker definitions, tho. I do think that the ideal dictatorship of the proletariat as described by marx is a good step. But any apparatus that might be needed must have checks and restrictions to make sure that it doesn't become some kind of new ruling (minority) class. Even a roman style dictator is compatible with my anarchism as long as the recall of their power back to the people is sufficiently reliable. I don't believe that the ML states are worker states in that sense. I do think that vanguard communism is more likely to lead to a dictatorship of the vanguard then a dictatorship of the proletariat. I also do not believe that the current products of ML-revolutions are sufficiently close to being a DoP that they can transition to real communism without any further internal revolutions. Which is sufficient to make me an anarchist by their definition.
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Nov 13, 2020 19:26
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mila kunis posted:Ok, then I'm not arguing against a strawman. Are you talking about some crazy guy arguing on a street corner that the street belongs to him and everybody should pay him for it? I would ignore him. Or are you talking about a political party that wants to privatize streets? I would vote against their ideas.
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Nov 13, 2020 19:57
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mila kunis posted:Isn't that just liberalism then? If some group of people have accumulated wealth, and convince enough people that the means of production should stay concentrated in their hands (wealth can buy you control of media and messaging for example), and people vote in favor of it then how is this anarchism so different from what we have at present? And yes, an anarchist society can theoretically vote to reorient itself along a different paradigm. Even if it is leninism, liberalism or even monarchism.
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Nov 13, 2020 20:24
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Ferrinus posted:Uh, are they? I don't know much military history so feel free to give examples, but the way you write here makes me think first and foremost of Maoist and Viet Cong guerillas, and while those military forces were certainly, like, sneaky and spatially distributed, I'm pretty sure they had centralized command-and-control infrastructure same as the bourgeois forces they were up against. Afaik there were no really measurable improvements in fighting prowess that can be attributed to the de-democratization specifically. The way in which they were "decentralized" was mostly in that officers were elected by their future superiors and the soldiers could recall them as long as it wasn't in the middle of an actual battle.
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Nov 13, 2020 20:30
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Cpt_Obvious posted:Wait, have I been using "centralized" wrong? I feel like I meant it to mean a concentration of power, and you seem to be using it as a "undemocratic" power. If you imply that all (or even most) anarchists oppose "centralized" then it is essentially the same as "undemocratic". Anarchism is primarily about the distribution of power. The ultimate authority is democratically decentralized into the soliders/population or it is undemocratically centralized into the leadership.
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Nov 13, 2020 20:49
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Crumbskull posted:Oh also everyone, irrespective of politics, ahould read Subcommandante Marcos' writing because its genuinely incredible literature and he is extremely funny to boot. Do you have a link to a good collection?
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Nov 14, 2020 00:39
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gradenko_2000 posted: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. And that is without acknowledging the fact that most bourgeois democracies have at least two bourgeois parties. I think formalized parties are the best defence against cults of personalities. I prefer deciding between "green socialist party" and "cyberpunk socialist party" over deciding between president bob and paul.
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Nov 14, 2020 14:07
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Timeless Appeal posted:Can I ask, is there any good literature on public service jobs under socialism? So you would have nurses, doctors and hospital infrastructure going underused (or taking the holidays they earned during the last emergency) in normal times so that during covid there is enough care capacity available without putting all the effort on the workers. Another part is that over-education is the most common anarchist solution to prevent the formation of guilds and other informal hierarchies, so there are extra trained nurses and doctors available from there, too. For example in Germany, the remnants of the socialized healthcare system lead to lots of underutilized clinics and rural doctor's offices which lead to unusual low covid deaths/case. Even while liberal politicans are complaining that we have too much medical capacity and they should be fired in the name of profit.
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Nov 14, 2020 14:23
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We were discussing book recs recently. Here is the anarchist review dog and a Vietnamese communist recommending that the Critique of the Gothaer Program is one of the first things a socialist should read. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lebgIDnaAXk
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Nov 14, 2020 16:24
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Ferrinus posted:So in a liberal republic (what Lenin called the ideal shell for capitalism), individual politicians are ultimately propped up by the system of capitalism and therefore are only able to maintain themselves in their positions by serving capitalism. This is why they all dance to the tune of rich donors and condemn looting in lockstep and keep voting to go to war and so on. There are powerful forces of natural selection at play - it's not even a matter of individual people being corrupted or turned, but just that anyone who won't serve capital doesn't get to become or stay a politician. One way or another, they'll be removed.
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Nov 16, 2020 01:12
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Purple Prince posted:A personal anecdote regarding hierarchy and specialisation. Yeah, lots of practical anarchist theory since the 70s deals with avoiding those problems. Mostly by cleanly delineating those responsibilities, plausibly designating a planner who explicitly isn't dealing with the money. And preventing you from taking over the group by making sure someone else is the accountant next time. And preventing you from using your fresh specialized experience to take over by making you teach the staff you learned to some other group members. There is also the lens of "social capital", which describes moneyless capitalism that might apply here. It was originally meant to describe ivory tower academics who use their fame to get grad students and then gain more fame from the student's results which replicates M-C-M'. I personally consider it a bit overdone but it is sometimes applied to administrators in the SU.
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Nov 16, 2020 01:37
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Ferrinus posted:It did, though. Compare the USSR to the Tsardom. In both cases the country contained government bureaucrats, police officers, priests, propagandists, all sorts of institutions of delegated decision-making. Nevertheless, because the actual material power base of these administrative institutions were different - because the class character of the state was proletarian rather than bourgeois - immense leaps in quality of life and industrial capacity took place that a monarchical or capitalist society would simply never have been able to bring itself to bring about. Also, I do not agree that the leaps in quality of life and industrial capacity in the SU were qualitatively superior to what happened after bourgeois revolutions. Even though they are impressive compared to feudal systems.
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Nov 16, 2020 03:23
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Ferrinus posted:Uh, that doesn't make any sense. Again, we're comparing the Tsardom to the USSR. The USSR objectively did much, much better for the masses, as measured in years of expected lifespan, literacy rates, daily calorie intake, etcetera. Why didn't the Tsar double everyone's lifespan? If you aren't willing to cede that socialist regimes did better than liberal ones, I won't raise the question of China vs. India, but when we compare the monarchy to the Soviet Union we discover that, although both states contain ruling hierarchies, corrupt bureaucrats, prisons, etc, one of them is massively more beneficial to the citizenry than the other. Just massively, massively more resources spent on developing and enhancing the masses. The Tsar didn't double everyone's lifespan because he was a Tsar and not the bourgeois. The bourgeois did double everyone's lifespan because they were not Kings. The SU doubled everyone's lifespan because they were not Kings. Being better at industrializing then the monarchy does not mean that you are better at industrializing then the capitalists. Fast industrialisation is a feature of capitalism to such an extend that Marx early theories recommended that a feudal country should spend some time as a bourgeois state before having an actual socialist revolution. Though Lenin did in fact prove that a socialist revolution can also lead to rapid industrialisation at similar rate as a bourgeois revolution. Also, my main point is: 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. And because that did not happen, any future post-revolutionary society needs to have a theory explaining that failure and a plan for avoiding that failure.
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Nov 16, 2020 13:09
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gradenko_2000 posted: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. But it still means that you need a plan to make sure that doesn't happen again. I don't care if it is a plan to make sure that there is a revolution everywhere approximately simultaneously or a plan to make your attempt at communism succeed despite capitalist encirclement.
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Nov 16, 2020 13:45
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Ferrinus posted:You seem to be shifting the question into a few different arenas, like did socialism do better than liberalism would have, why did socialism ultimately get replaced by capitalism in some socialist countries, did the soviet people lose power over the course of the SU's existence. We can discuss all these if you want, but I'm not willing to simply lose my initial point, which is that it is class dictatorship itself that controls who gets what, not the institutions through which that class dictatorship expresses itself. You said: If the ultimate power lies with the people then the hierarchical structures will rot away. I said: The hierarchical structures didn't rot away in the SU, which shows that the power there didn't lie with the people. Then you started talking about industrial capacity and the Tzar, both of which I consider irrelevant to the discussion.
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Nov 16, 2020 19:44
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Ferrinus posted:(while rubbing my temple and pinching my nose) You did not actually respond to a post of mine in which I discussed or predicted if or how the state would wither away. You responded to a post of mine in which I baldly stated that even if the exact same institutions survive, and if those exact same institutions retain the exact same self-sustaining tendencies that make institutions so dangerous, those institutions will nevertheless act differently and produce different material outcomes because the material basis of their power has changed and therefore the people in those institutions literally, physically, need to do different things in order to maintain their personal power and privilege. I would say that as the structure of power is the most important part explaining the behaviour of the structure, it makes little sense to consider it the same structure after a change. Even if the personal and formal organization stays the same. But I consider this point semantics. My point on the SU is not as a counterexample to your theory. I am saying that while the people had significantly more power then under the Tzar, they did not hold the majority of power which limited the positive results materially.
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Nov 16, 2020 20:07
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Ferrinus posted:If the people did not hold the majority of power, why did they benefit in the majority from the decisions made by Soviet governance? Do you think CPSU's steering committee members were all getting riches and luxuries in even greater proportion than the workers and peasantry were benefiting from the rationalization of agriculture and development of industry? If a capitalist chooses to reinvest all his income, while living like a normal person does he stop being a capitalist?
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Nov 16, 2020 20:32
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Ferrinus posted:No, because his income is being invested in his own private property. Whether the surplus value he reaps goes to his stomach or goes to his factory infrastructure, it's still going to him. There were no private capitalists in the USSR; surplus value could only go to state infrastructure, which is why living standards shot up so quickly and why capitalism was never able to reassert itself until, extremely late in the game, the economy was liberalized, firms were released from the state direction, etc. To me it sounds like the bureaucracy had accumulated all the power they could under the existing formal structures/MoP and then reinvested that power into a switch to a different structure that is even more favourable to them.
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Nov 16, 2020 21:30
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Cpt_Obvious posted:I have a stupid question: There are many appliances that are collectively operated by modern apartment buildings. In my region those are heating, satelite dishes and clothes driers. And I do think that 3D printers could be operated at the same level, and so should paper printers. What is stopping that is capitalist individualization and landlords. On the other hand the soviets tried to collectivise kitchens in the name of efficiency and communality and nobody enjoyed the results.
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Nov 22, 2020 15:28
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thotsky posted:Open source as we know it enabled the tech giants of today. It is a bad thing. If it had any of the leftist potential that people proscribe it it would be illegal. The worst thing you can actually say about the open source movement is that they favours guild-like structures over union-like structures. And even that is better then the status quo in many location.
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Nov 27, 2020 14:00
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Very good video on dogmatism, anarchist analysis, and theory wanks. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DVhuKT7rfyI
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Nov 29, 2020 22:14
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Aruan posted:I don't know of any contemporary scholar who believes that Marxism is a science. Many contemporary non english speaking scholars in regions where the definition of science didn't go through that 1900 shift believe that Marxisms is a science.
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Nov 30, 2020 23:17
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Disnesquick posted:I'm not sure why you think subjugation need be a part of that. Scientists are constantly pushing the boundaries in knowledge without any subjugation. Artists, similarly, are not subjugating anyone. The general definition of such growth would imply exponentiality, otherwise the growth will eventually become unable to be perceived over the statistical wobble of the static society. And then there is a question of how such growth is defined. If it requires an ever increasing demand limited resources that might be bad for the people who favour long term stability. If it requires ever increasing borders it might be bad for outsiders. If it requires ever increasing pollution it might be bad for people who want to keep living on their planet. But if the definition of growth doesn't require any of those things I don't actually see how both ideals of society would be unable to live next to each other, or even interleaved.
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Dec 2, 2020 23:18
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Sucrose posted:Anarchists are against the state and any form of hierarchy though, no? Is there any form of pro-democracy, explicitly anti-authoritarian Marxism that isn't anarchist? An example: Imagine a talented revolutionary leader, he lots of good planning during the revolution an people listen to him; this is compatible with anarchism as long as the people could remove him from his position. After the revolution people keep obeying him even on issues that are unconnected with his successes and talents; this is the danger of bad hierarchies forming. Ultimately he decides that everybody who tells him that his strange ideas on agriculture are wrong should go to prison and people listen; that is authoritarianism. Everbody who is opposed to even any specific authority gets called an anarchist at some point, so there isn't any non-anarchist anti-authoritarianism. The Spartacist lineage was opposed to having a long term vanguard, but their reasoning was that a vanguard that can be shot/arrested/bribed is a weakness to the movement.
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Dec 7, 2020 15:08
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Cpt_Obvious posted:There is an upside and downside to this approach. On the upside, LEO can't target leaders like they normally attempt to do. However, succ libs tend to coopt these movements incredibly easily. Just look at what happened to many of the BLM protests. That is more because a leaderless system actually needs a well thought out structure and organisation to prevent informal leader from taking over. Even if you are lucky you get someone who had specialized talent for a "high-status" task getting treated as a leader, as described in tyranny of structurelessness. I you are unlucky you get grifters and libs. It is the kind of thing that actual anarchist orgs spend a lot of thought on solving.
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Dec 8, 2020 02:17
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A few days ago the southpaw podcast had an interview with Zoe Baker about the history of anarchism and the history of the difference between anarchism, socialism and communism. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgWL2FmtDE0 An interesting point they bring up is that at some points every leftist who as against electoralism was considered an anarchist.
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Dec 8, 2020 17:18
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Ruzihm posted:Is there such a state where the ruled class is not encouraged using fear to behave in ways that are beneficial for the ruling class? No, I would say that this is one of the inherent characteristic of class conflict. The only moments where that fear is less impactful in keeping the populace down is when a revolution is currently happening. And considering how much fear (of outsiders or alternative systems) is an intrinsic part of propaganda everywhere, you probably won't find a non-fear society.
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Dec 8, 2020 18:44
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Aruan posted:It's a characteristic of human conflict, not class conflict. Economic class is the current point of division (one of them), but it is not the only one, and similar divisions existed long before capitalism. Yes, but most of those divisions were also class division. The feudal classes also mainly ruled by making the peasants fear revolting and other radical change. If you go back to before class divisions, to what marx called primitive communism your argument might make sense. But I am not actually up on the current research on those societies so there might be a rule through fear or there might not I do not know.
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Dec 8, 2020 19:00
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Cpt_Obvious posted:The Kingdom of Conscience will be exactly as it is now. Centrists don't really *have* beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child's toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn't change -- not even incremental change. It is *control*. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of American drones hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in centrism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth. Yup. Though I get the feeling that if an anglo had written that he would have tried to find a way to blame liberalism directly. Instead of correctly blaming centrism for their love of changing nothing and noticing that this is only a liberal attitude within our liberal place and times.
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Dec 9, 2020 00:00
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It is part of the contradictions of capitalism. The capitalist system is destroying the organisations that should protect it, in order to make a few more pennies this quarter.
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Dec 9, 2020 04:21
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The Oldest Man posted:Yeah I don't want to spend too much time dunking on liberals because, really, what's the point. But to bring it back to Mao, I would say that while this criticism is technically correct, it is not something intrinsic to liberalism. It is a result of liberalism having won its revolutions and becoming the status quo. While all those attitudes are currently correctly associated with liberalism they were found more often among royalists before the liberal revolutions. And after the next revolutions they will be found among Marxists. Even Mao's complains here are complains about maoists who start behaving as centrists in a maoist society which has lots in common to how liberal centrists act in a liberal society.
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Dec 10, 2020 13:41
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OwlFancier posted:Though given that "it's easy to bypass" doesn't stop the dominant media having a horrific effect on our political ideas, I would still be surprised if it is not a very effective method of social control. Yes, but it is more like a garden fence then like the Berlin wall. You are contained because the cops will arrest you if you are to obvious in jumping the wall, not because it directly stops you.
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Dec 10, 2020 14:35
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The Oldest Man posted:I disagree with this. Think about what an ideologically extremist liberal hardliner would look like, and how they would behave, and the degree to which that person is a totally fictional joke character. That is mao's third type of liberalism and to me it is the definition of centrism. Calling that liberalism makes sense only if you have given up on having the word have enough meaning that liberal hardliners can even theoretically exist.
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Dec 10, 2020 18:00
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The Oldest Man posted:I wasn't talking about hardline "status quo" liberals (as Mao would define them) but rather the idea of a hardline ideological liberal as liberals define their own philosophical values and what that person would look like in real life: irrelevant at best, fictional at worst. He would absolutely be irrelevant in the current world, yes. But the hardline ideological liberals ran the french revolution. And if a post-revolutionary society ever sheds the dominant mindshare of liberalism there will be hardline liberals trying to re-establish it, just like there are monarchists under liberal rule.
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Dec 10, 2020 18:46
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The Oldest Man posted:I think we're agreeing to a point. In my view the potential of liberalism as a revolutionary ideology (or as an ideology for any type of change in the political economy of society) is permanently dead and although there are and probably always will be liberal maximalists, they're as irrelevant as ideological monarchists are. The people espousing that view today with any audience are doing it for pay as a cover for the defense of the status quo or as a stalking horse to clear the way for fascism. Bottom line, when evaluating or addressing liberal critiques of socialism, it's useless to address them as an ideological critique because that's not their origin or intent.
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Dec 10, 2020 19:24
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Ferrinus posted:That is what I say when a cop (or NKVD agent or volunteer militia or whatever) sends a kulak packing to prevent the burning of fields or slaughter of cows, yes. Sometimes internal repression is necessary. This attitude is how the sovjets got all their cows killed. If the police had been abolished, the local peasants could have stopped the kulaks. But no, that is too anarchist. We need to give the kulaks the authority to freely kill the cows, while the peasants are only allowed to watch. A few weeks later the cops will show up to arrest some kulaks that may even be the same kulaks as earlier. Clearly an improvement.
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Dec 22, 2020 20:59
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I would say that cop unions are more like guilds then unions. Not because of any class character, but because of the way they organize and interact with other unions and guilds. Unions are distinct from other organisation of collective bargaining because they act in solidarity, because they support the rights of non-union workers and because they also fight for people with different jobs. Because cop unions would never even consider assisting the station's janitor they are not real unions.
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Dec 22, 2020 22:48
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