Comment originally posted by Sam474 on Reddit This comment makes such a good point that It would be a disservice not to post it here, but I wanted to make sure the original commenter got credit....
Exemplary
Comment originally posted by Sam474 on Reddit
This comment makes such a good point that It would be a disservice not to post it here, but I wanted to make sure the original commenter got credit.
Quoted sections below.
I think people aren't giving the internet enough credit.
You grow up being told how great capitalism is and then you get online and find out that people in other countries have the same standard of living we do but without the constant fear of bankruptcy.
You grow up thinking "going to the doctor is expensive, don't get sick and if you do don't go until you're sure you HAVE to" and then you find out most of the developed world can go to the doctor for free, or at least for a very affordable rate.
You grow up thinking "Work hard and be successful and you can retire at 65 and travel a little." and then you get online and find out pretty much all of Europe gets weeks and weeks of vacation time a year and is doing their travelling in their 20s and 30s and loving it.
When you hear that someone else had a kid and it didn't cost them any money, got a year off to raise it, gets free daycare, and goes to spain twice a year for vacation it's pretty hard to still feel content with your 60 hour work week, 2 weeks off a year that you're discouraged from actually using, and health insurance as your second biggest monthly bill.
The connectedness of the internet is such a wonderful and beautiful thing. The level of communication is unprecedented in the world, and I think it's actually a force for (generally) good... in that people can compare ideas, and challenge the dogma that they hear in everyday life. That anyone can access lots of information that they'd have no other way to access from well outside their own fields in which they receive formal education.
It's also changing societies, and especially the minds and ideas of younger people, very quickly. What do you think are some changes we'll see in the next 30 years as those people obtain positions of power in the government and private sector?
just to be clear: the comment is still describing capitalism, just a form of it that's not as shitty and exploitative as american capitalism is. people seem to conflate the government doing things...
Exemplary
just to be clear: the comment is still describing capitalism, just a form of it that's not as shitty and exploitative as american capitalism is. people seem to conflate the government doing things with socialism--they are not explicitly the same thing. a government can do fucking everything, but if the workers don't own the means of production, that's still capitalism, just with a nanny state that does everything for you.
most young people who have come to like "socialism" like socialism in that model of government doing things (which is really social democracy), not necessarily socialism in calling for the democratic control of the means of production, or the eventual "end" of the state itself that the theory suggests happens inevitably in a hypothetical socialist system (this being the theory behind marxism-leninism, for example). and liking the government doing things is okay, and a good step since it'd be a step to the left for almost every government except the actually marxist-leninist ones still existing in the world from where they currently are, but it's also not genuinely socialism and people shouldn't necessarily treat it as if it is.
This is such an important point that people gloss over. The thing is, capitalism is extremely good at what it does right, and that's encouraging sufficiently diversified competition to continually...
This is such an important point that people gloss over.
The thing is, capitalism is extremely good at what it does right, and that's encouraging sufficiently diversified competition to continually innovate and try to stay on top of each other, and this is because there's the element of choice and consumer pressure constantly working against businesses.
The problem is that certain goods and services don't yield to that same pressure. When you become dismembered and you're about to die from blood loss, you're not going to sit there and worry about selecting the hospital with the best rates--no, you're going to get your ass to the nearest hospital as fast as possible and worry about the cost after the fact. When you're forced to choose between having internet and not having internet--and, as a result, effectively choosing to either have access to job applications and not having access to job applications--you're going to choose to have internet, even if there's only one provider who bleeds you dry for every last cent they can, and they would have absolutely zero incentive to improve the quality of their service.
Sometimes market forces fail us, so we need the government to intervene in a way that the effect of market forces is produced in the expected manner. For example, single payer health care would force hospital prices down, and municipal broadband would force ISPs to provide a better service for a competitive price in order to remain relevant.
This is even true of the labor market. A living wage is only incentivized when there's a labor deficit and businesses are forced to compete for the limited labor pool. When there's a labor surplus, the laborer who is willing to work for the lowest pay will be employed and everyone else will remain jobless. The laborer is forced to choose between no pay and low pay. Ethical and moral considerations aside, low pay only perpetuates market under-performance by ensuring that wages are only spent on basic living expenses, not on spurring additional economic activity. In order to avoid the damage all of this causes (see: the great depression without minimum wage), the government intervened by requiring a minimum wage so that laborers cannot be taken advantage of and so that the market doesn't end up stalled by stagnated economic activity.
When the free market fails to produce the necessary market forces, the government should become that market force until such time that a sufficient free market alternative can take over, and even then it's sometimes better to leave the government involved to discourage consolidation and the resulting loss of that all-important market force.
In short: We want capitalism. It's such a powerful economic system with so many benefits. But we need the government to dip its hand in every now and then to keep things running smoothly. History has shown what happens when the free market is left to its own devices without someone to supervise it.
speak for yourself. maybe in another situation, i would agree with this. but in the present, i would much, much rather have a socialist system than a capitalist one given the massive crises that...
In short: We want capitalism. It's such a powerful economic system with so many benefits. But we need the government to dip its hand in every now and then to keep things running smoothly. History has shown what happens when the free market is left to its own devices without someone to supervise it.
speak for yourself. maybe in another situation, i would agree with this. but in the present, i would much, much rather have a socialist system than a capitalist one given the massive crises that are bearing down on humanity that capitalism has thus far been almost totally unresponsive to and the fact that many industries under a capitalist system stand to explicitly benefit from these crises taking place even though they will have massive consequences for huge swathes of the human population, particularly the global poor.
i don't think capitalism is able to--nor do i think the overwhelming majority of capitalists desire to--answer the sort of massive restructuring of the global economy that will likely need to take place to avert things like major climate change, because even if it might benefit the system or people in the long-term, capitalism almost disincentivizes thinking in the long-term because the motivation behind it is profit, not necessarily people. and that's cool if you're like, a global one-percenter or if you happen to live in a rich country or a country that can basically buy its way out of the worst of something like climate change--but most people and places just can't do that, and they're going to massively suffer as a result of that profit-over-people part.
The bolded section is the important part and addresses the kinds of problems you're mentioning. Again, there are parts of capitalism that fail spectacularly, and that's where the government should...
In short: We want capitalism. It's such a powerful economic system with so many benefits. But we need the government to dip its hand in every now and then to keep things running smoothly. History has shown what happens when the free market is left to its own devices without someone to supervise it.
The bolded section is the important part and addresses the kinds of problems you're mentioning.
Again, there are parts of capitalism that fail spectacularly, and that's where the government should be stepping in. Businesses should not have unfettered access to the world's resources, e.g. fresh drinking water should belong to the people and only a portion of it allocated for private bottling and sales (there is a benefit to being able to ship bottled water to places that desperately need it during natural disasters, after all). They also shouldn't be able to engage in the widespread destruction of the planet just because they don't want to spend the extra money to do things in a way that leaves it intact.
The free market is currently failing at its job by allowing these freeloading sociopaths who care for nothing else but ever higher profits to continue along their path of destruction, and the government needs to get off its ass (and the people need to wake the hell up and demand them to do so) and force them to fall in line.
I will grant you, however, that there's one fundamental problem: no matter what, we can't predict all of the problems that will arise with capitalism, so we'll always be playing a game of whack-a-mole. In that respect, maybe capitalism isn't a salvageable solution and socialism the preferred alternative. Maybe there's a hybrid solution, where the resources and means of production are owned by the people and businesses are given lease to them under approved conditions, i.e. their behavior is whitelisted rather than blacklisted, and then they're allowed to operate freely within the accepted scope. Maybe there's an entirely different system that will arise that will prove to be the ideal instead.
I don't know. I don't have the answer to that. But I think we can both agree on this one point in particular: capitalism or not, the government needs to bring the proverbial hammer down yesterday.
Bit of a tangent, but what even are the means of production for most of us in our current economy? I used to say that I tried to seize the means of production once but all that happened was I...
Maybe there's a hybrid solution, where the resources and means of production are owned by the people...
Bit of a tangent, but what even are the means of production for most of us in our current economy? I used to say that I tried to seize the means of production once but all that happened was I brought my laptop home and worked over the weekend. It's a joke, but I think there's a kernel of truth in it that I was the means of production; or rather, the time I spent working for someone else was. In that context me owning the means of production would mean having control over how I spend my time so that the time I spend on "work" is time spent enriching myself or making my own vision come true. I don't know what the socialist answer to that is.
i think the socialist answer would probably reject your set-up here, since the means of production are explicitly non-human inputs (more specifically they're physical and non financial inputs)...
It's a joke, but I think there's a kernel of truth in it that I was the means of production; or rather, the time I spent working for someone else was. In that context me owning the means of production would mean having control over how I spend my time so that the time I spend on "work" is time spent enriching myself or making my own vision come true. I don't know what the socialist answer to that is.
i think the socialist answer would probably reject your set-up here, since the means of production are explicitly non-human inputs (more specifically they're physical and non financial inputs) that help to create economic value. but if you play it out in spite of that, your laptop in this example would most likely be what a socialist considers the means of production, since that's most likely what you'd be using to produce economic value.
No it’s the structures around how you produce your work. Your laptop may be the most immediate tool you have at hand, kind of like how a carpenter has their hammer, nails, etc. but the carpenter...
No it’s the structures around how you produce your work. Your laptop may be the most immediate tool you have at hand, kind of like how a carpenter has their hammer, nails, etc. but the carpenter also needs to get wood from somewhere, get a space to work out of, get other supplies, and so on. Those are all the means of production. Specific, large scale industries, like timber, metals and mining, or energy, would be considered the “commanding heights” of the economy since they’re critical to everything else downstream of them.
The same way, there are vast networks of unseen factors in knowledge work as well like who manages the internet connection, who maintains, updates, and hosts the web based services you use to do the work, your communication channels like email, slack, etc.
Additionally, just like steel is a mean of production for steelworking, knowledge is a mean of production in knowledge work. When you write code while working at a company, or design logos, or do...
Additionally, just like steel is a mean of production for steelworking, knowledge is a mean of production in knowledge work. When you write code while working at a company, or design logos, or do any other form of knowledge work, you don't end up owning that code/logo/etc. The company owns the intellectual monopoly on that work, and you, the laborer, do not. Thus, if your boss decides to throw out your work or do something with it that you disagree with, you have no say over the matter. You have no ownership rights over such work.
Additionally, like the grandparent comment alluded to, time might be a nonphysical mean of production. As a laborer under capitalism, you must do what your boss says when on company time. There is no collectivist mechanism to decide how time and effort is spent to produce value.
Most of the things you said that capitalism did well were things that markets do well, and you can very much have a free market economy without capitalism. For instance, if you reorganized all...
In short: We want capitalism. It's such a powerful economic system with so many benefits. But we need the government to dip its hand in every now and then to keep things running smoothly. History has shown what happens when the free market is left to its own devices without someone to supervise it.
Most of the things you said that capitalism did well were things that markets do well, and you can very much have a free market economy without capitalism. For instance, if you reorganized all private companies into workers' cooperatives, you would clearly be operating under a socialist framework, as the workers would then own the means of production, but without further changes your economy would still be market based.
You know what? That's fair. I'll concede on that point. I do believe that there's a benefit in allowing private ownership of industry because it does allow for a certain incentive structure, e.g....
You know what? That's fair. I'll concede on that point. I do believe that there's a benefit in allowing private ownership of industry because it does allow for a certain incentive structure, e.g. encouraging people with good ideas to bring them forward and allowing them to profit well from them, but I would imagine that it would be possible to make something similar work in a different system.
just as an incidental point to this, one of the larger and more successful spanish corporations in the world, Mondragon is in fact a worker co-op in this vein and is a pretty good model of how...
For instance, if you reorganized all private companies into workers' cooperatives, you would clearly be operating under a socialist framework, as the workers would then own the means of production, but without further changes your economy would still be market based.
just as an incidental point to this, one of the larger and more successful spanish corporations in the world, Mondragon is in fact a worker co-op in this vein and is a pretty good model of how this might work in well executed practice (although since Mondragon is ultimately embedded in a capitalist system it is inhibited in some ways it might not be in a socialist system)
Cooperatives work in America too, as anti-Socialist as plenty of people here seem to be. The NCB Co-op 100 Reports Top Producing Cooperatives with Revenues of $214.4 Billion. Starring familiar...
That’s not capitalism, that’s market economics. Capitalism is a specific structure for organizing society and making decisions about who gets what based on the formal ownership of property. In...
The thing is, capitalism is extremely good at what it does right, and that's encouraging sufficiently diversified competition to continually innovate and try to stay on top of each other, and this is because there's the element of choice and consumer pressure constantly working against businesses.
That’s not capitalism, that’s market economics. Capitalism is a specific structure for organizing society and making decisions about who gets what based on the formal ownership of property. In other words, it’s “capitalism” because Capital gets to make the decisions about what to produce, how much, and for whom. Socialism, in contrast, argues that these decisions should be made to focus on what’s best for society rather than for capital.
There have been many strains of socialist thought that go into how best to bring socially conscious economic decisions into play, including market centric ones like the mutualist ideals espoused by Proudhon or Georgism.
Blame the right for using the word "socialism" to describe any individual or policy they view as left of center, for decades.
people seem to conflate the government doing things with socialism--they are not explicitly the same thing. a government can do fucking everything, but if the workers don't own the means of production, that's still capitalism, just with a nanny state that does everything for you.
Blame the right for using the word "socialism" to describe any individual or policy they view as left of center, for decades.
Some of us quite like the idea of Democratic Socialism, and see Social Democracy as a good milestone to aim for in getting there. Even if the Nordic Model is as far as we can get, hell, that would...
Some of us quite like the idea of Democratic Socialism, and see Social Democracy as a good milestone to aim for in getting there. Even if the Nordic Model is as far as we can get, hell, that would still beat the hell out of whatever Cronenbergian Plutocracy we have going for us at the moment, and would be quite the success.
The political movement that created those welfare structures is called “Social Democracy.” Where do you think the “social” in “social democrats” comes from? There is also such a thing as Market...
The political movement that created those welfare structures is called “Social Democracy.” Where do you think the “social” in “social democrats” comes from?
There is also such a thing as Market Socialism, and Georgian socialism, and others. The only common thread between them is the idea that there should be social (societal) control over the economy rather than leaving it up to artificially constructed ideas around property ownership to make all the decisions.
Socialism used to be a wide ranging term for a broad family of leftist philosophies. It only got conflated with Marxist Leninism because the USSR liked it that way, and the USA did too. The first thing Lenin did when he had uncontested power was to kill all the actual workers councils (the actual soviets, weirdly enough) and gulag all the anarchists because other socialists were threats to the state-centric, command orientation of the Leninist regime. And of course US interests loved the opportunity to cast this debate in manichean terms, the better to justify military adventurism with.
I totally agree. I know its quite trendy now to shit on social media like its inherently a bad thing because of mass social engineering. But, the world wide web is combination weapon/tool just...
The connectedness of the internet is such a wonderful and beautiful thing.
I totally agree. I know its quite trendy now to shit on social media like its inherently a bad thing because of mass social engineering. But, the world wide web is combination weapon/tool just like a brick or a pen is. And the thing it does is something brand new.
I think in the next 30 years the most important development is how people's whose world views are just forming now develop and grow. We can already see this in the ways the concepts in popular discourse have become more sophisticated - even if it doesn't seem that way. For instance, consider how rapidly the terms ableist and transphobic have come into common lexicon since the damn of the internet. (Here are the ngrams for ableist and transphobia
While the outrage mobs who use the terms might not always do so admirably, there is something to the simple fact that their prevalence should expand so rapidly. I'm struggling to put my finger on a good analog. But considering the duration of the struggle for recognition of homosexuals or even women, I can only surmise that the existence of the internet has advanced the standing of these groups far more than it would if we were still relying on print or television.
These are really good points. I think there is another factor at play as well; the moving of the goalposts by the right. Socialism used to be the domain of the Soviet Union, whose control over its...
These are really good points. I think there is another factor at play as well; the moving of the goalposts by the right. Socialism used to be the domain of the Soviet Union, whose control over its citizens lives and lack of liberal freedoms was extreme and undesirable for western peoples. Constant use of the word "socialist" by the right to describe anyone even moderately left of center in the United States has desensitized people to its original meaning. People are more willing to identify as socialist now that it no longer implies a desire for everyone to live under a totalitarian Marxist regime.
Even this kind of stuff is heavily exaggerated or outright lies, at the same time we downplay Jim crow laws and for profit prison slave labor, freak out about imaginary white children in the...
the Soviet Union, whose control over its citizens lives and lack of liberal freedoms was extreme and undesirable for western peoples.
Even this kind of stuff is heavily exaggerated or outright lies, at the same time we downplay Jim crow laws and for profit prison slave labor, freak out about imaginary white children in the basement of a pizza shop while not giving a rat's ass about actual state sponsored kidnapping and human trafficking.
Anyways, I have to go, it's my turn for the toothbrush.
I don't think The Great Purge was a lie. The Soviet Union was a pretty awful place. Just look at the difference in quality of life between East and West Berlin before the wall fell.
I don't think The Great Purge was a lie. The Soviet Union was a pretty awful place. Just look at the difference in quality of life between East and West Berlin before the wall fell.
it's funny that you mention this, because there's a pretty compelling case to be made for most marxist-leninist states such as east germany that the gap in pure quality of life was generally the...
it's funny that you mention this, because there's a pretty compelling case to be made for most marxist-leninist states such as east germany that the gap in pure quality of life was generally the result of (1) the pre-existing gap in wealth, education, industrialization, and other factors of that nature between such countries and the west; and (2) the fact that many of these nations were also then unable to participate in the greater global economy, which greatly hamstrung their ability to leverage what little wealth and material goods they did have to offer to the global community since many of their trade partners thus had to be marxist-leninist states as well, and therefore had similar issues as they did.
and of course, it would be disingenuous to neglect the political repression in many marxist-leninist countries, which was very real--but while marxist-leninist repression tended to be larger in scale, political repression absolutely wasn't exclusive to marxist-leninist countries. seeing as many south american capitalist dictatorships engaged in political repression and mass murder of leftists, america notoriously witch hunted suspected communists twice in the 1900s, and many marxist-leninist countries were actively fucked with or overthrown by western countries even if their socialist politicians were democratically elected, i think the most you can say is that the charge of "political repression" toward either side in the cold war is something of a wash. both of them extensively engaged in it around the world; the marxist-leninist side just came out of it with a larger body count than capitalist side.
As a Chicago resident, I can assure you that there are plenty of crooks and cronies in the blue side as well. I don't know who originally said It, but there is a quote which is paraphrased as...
As a Chicago resident, I can assure you that there are plenty of crooks and cronies in the blue side as well.
I don't know who originally said It, but there is a quote which is paraphrased as those who seek power are often the very ones who should not have it. I find that to be the case, however, there certainly is a lot more overt corruption on the right side in recent decades.
I'm sure it's been said many times by many people, but the phrasing makes me think of Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy.
I don't know who originally said It, but there is a quote which is paraphrased as those who seek power are often the very ones who should not have it.
I'm sure it's been said many times by many people, but the phrasing makes me think of Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy.
The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
It's been building for a long time and it's impossible not to see it. All it's going to take is some sort of spark to set it all off. We just haven't hit the right one yet, but it's only a matter...
It's been building for a long time and it's impossible not to see it. All it's going to take is some sort of spark to set it all off. We just haven't hit the right one yet, but it's only a matter of time.
It takes getting the money out of politics. Give every viable candidate (by some measure of the primaries) a publicly-funded minimum amount of money to run their campaigns. No one can have more;...
It takes getting the money out of politics. Give every viable candidate (by some measure of the primaries) a publicly-funded minimum amount of money to run their campaigns. No one can have more; not through PACs or private donations. Then real candidates can emerge, candidates who may be excellently qualified for the job, but can't raise the money and don't have the money themselves to reach the people who need to hear their voices.
Thanks to the internet, we're no longer isolated to small towns, our parent's bubbles, the bubble of our nation. Decades old lies and propaganda are being shattered, because we now can just look...
Thanks to the internet, we're no longer isolated to small towns, our parent's bubbles, the bubble of our nation. Decades old lies and propaganda are being shattered, because we now can just look up facts.
But it's not just the lies. It's the broken promises.
It's a double-edged sword. Accurate information is easier than ever to find, but so is inaccurate information. Hence the rise of the anti-vaccination movement and popularity of other conspiracies.
It's a double-edged sword. Accurate information is easier than ever to find, but so is inaccurate information. Hence the rise of the anti-vaccination movement and popularity of other conspiracies.
And it's not just inaccurate information that's the problem, its the sheer volume. It's become very easy to obfuscate relevant and pertinent information in the deluge.
And it's not just inaccurate information that's the problem, its the sheer volume. It's become very easy to obfuscate relevant and pertinent information in the deluge.
I posit that the vast majority of people are socialists (whether they realize it or not), at least once you can peel back the decades upon decades of propaganda blasted into their minds. At it's...
I posit that the vast majority of people are socialists (whether they realize it or not), at least once you can peel back the decades upon decades of propaganda blasted into their minds.
At it's core, what is the ultimate goal of Socialism? It is to improve the lives of everyone in society. Who in their right mind would object to that goal? Only the people with the absolute highest standards of living would object, because their standard would slowly erode while ~95% of the population's lives improved. So that 5% does everything in their power to keep re-enforcing how "terrible" Socialism is, to keep the masses from realizing that if they worked together (and started implementing socialist policies), their lives would improve tremendously.
if people want to read something critical of socialist practice or of socialist countries, the gulag archipelago is definitely not the book for that seeing as the wife of the author of that book...
if people want to read something critical of socialist practice or of socialist countries, the gulag archipelago is definitely not the book for that seeing as the wife of the author of that book is literally on the record as questioning its accuracy and basically saying that it's a bunch of unrefined hearsay-type material and not objective fact of any sort. there are many criticisms that can be levied at places like the soviet union--but you're not going to find particularly valid ones in the gulag archipelago.
which is cool, but at the very basis of the work are massive mischaracterizations in the size and brutality of the gulag system (by several orders of magnitude, such that even the largest...
I'm halfway through Volume 1, and I think this is a gross mischaracterization of the work so far. There are all kinds of things in the book that can easily be verified: he names names, has many citations, draws links, for example, between a law that is passed and a subsequent increase in a type of torture that is used, has many expositions on specific court trials which happened, including between 1918 and 1922 when the Bolscheviks threw out the entire legal system and badly rebuilt it from the ground up --naming specific judges and key prosecutors in the process-- and of course, gives his own personal experiences as he himself was a prisoner in the Gulag.
which is cool, but at the very basis of the work are massive mischaracterizations in the size and brutality of the gulag system (by several orders of magnitude, such that even the largest estimates of its size on a year-by-year basis come nowhere close to his) and its very function as a system of punishment (it is now reasonably well established by people have gone through soviet archives that most people who were sent to gulags were in and out of the system relatively quickly, and the number of discharges within the gulag system greatly outnumber the number of deaths that occurred, which are estimated now as somewhere around 1.5 million or so), so... perhaps as a narrative work of his personal experiences it stands up, but as an authoritative source on the gulag? not really, no.
So I'm not sure what meets the standard you are seeking. And if this book is so bad, then why did he win the Nobel Prize for it in 1970, why was he invited to give the 1978 commencement address at Harvard*, and why did Putin personally honor him for his achievements?
i mean, winning the nobel prize does not inherently make a book good or somehow validate its contents. that's a silly argument to make on a lot of levels. nor did i claim the book was bad--rather, my point is that it just does not stand up if your thing is objective, historical fact that can be used to criticize the soviet union and socialism in general given its glaring accuracy issues on the gulag itself and looming issue of his ex-wife's characterizations of many of the details he gives. there are plenty of books which do not have those problems that are also much better sources on the flaws and issues of the soviet union.
i cannot off the top of my head, but somewhere in the book solzhenitsyn puts forward a figure of 50 million (which wikipedia includes in their table on gulag population estimates) for the entire...
Are you referring to Chapter 2? If not, can you cite the specific area where estimates are made?
i cannot off the top of my head, but somewhere in the book solzhenitsyn puts forward a figure of 50 million (which wikipedia includes in their table on gulag population estimates) for the entire period, which is over double and close to triple what the current historiography suggests was actually the case (more modern, contemporary estimates place total gulag numbers more toward the 18-20 million range)
But this begs the question of why anyone should trust these records. In Gulag, for example, there are numerous accounts of records being falsified to reach quotas, and using false accusations to effectively populate slave labor camps to reach goals of the 5/10 year plans
you can beg the same question of nazi statistics which were notorious for similar falsification, but we don't really accept that as a valid reasoning for why nazi concentration camp numbers might not be valid or are otherwise overinflated or underinflated, so i don't think this is a valid argument you can make against the records of the gulag system or estimations derived from them, especially not when the other estimates really do not have any more firm of a leg to stand on than the actual archives themselves do.
And maybe I misunderstand you, but are you saying that a total of 1.5 million were killed in the years between 1918 and the early 1950s?
this is around the likely mid-point of figures for that time period (and is generally accepted based on record-keeping) and since they draw from actual records and not like... literally guessing based on fragments of evidence or pure speculation, i don't think it's unreasonable to say that these numbers are almost certainly the most accurate ones we have on how many deaths occurred within the gulag system.
Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union, estimates of Gulag victims ranged from 2.3 to 17.6 million (see a History of Gulag population estimates section). Post-1991 research by historians utilizing archival materials brought this range down considerably.[75][76] According to a 1993 study of archival Soviet data, a total of 1,053,829 people died in the Gulag from 1934 to 1953.[12]:1024 However, taking into account the fact that it was common practice to release prisoners who were either suffering from incurable diseases or near death,[77][78] a combined statistics on mortality in the camps and mortality caused by the camps gives a probable figure around 1.6 million.[8][9]
...
The tentative historical consensus among archival researchers and historians who utilize such data is that of the 18 million people who passed through the gulag from 1930 to 1953, between 1.5 and 1.7 million perished as a result of their detention.[7]
Can you name them? Preferably books not written by Marxists, to ensure the bias issue is not present.
almost literally anything that is not fucking the gulag archipelago, lmao. even the black book of communism is unironically probably a better source of information of the issues of the soviet union, seeing as outside of its quixotic quest to arrive at the oft-touted 100 million deaths under communism figure it does detail genuine examples of the political and social repression in places like the soviet union.
Putin hates communism, but loves the idea of a powerful imperialist Russia without communism. I'm also not aware of Putin being a scholarly individual or someone we should hold as a reliable...
why did Putin personally honor him for his achievements?
Putin hates communism, but loves the idea of a powerful imperialist Russia without communism. I'm also not aware of Putin being a scholarly individual or someone we should hold as a reliable source, considering the current geopolitical landscape and current ongoing cyberespionage. His career as a KGB agent should also have us double down on not relying on him as a source.
Of course Putin wants you to think communist gulags bad, the more we obsess and grandstand with those gulags, the less we're criticizing his gulags or the gulags in the United States.
Obama, the drone war president, continuing the wars by Bush, the wars not ended or reduced by Trump, recieved the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. Basically for nothing when you get down to it.
I'm not sure what is suppose to be compelling about the fact that a university in one country invited someone who wrote a book claiming another country was bad at the height of those countries cold war. That's just good politics. This is the schoolyard equivalent of "my best friend agrees with me, see im right!"
It's not about whether or not somebody was mistreated in the gulag, it's about making sure we keep talking about those gulags instead of today's gulags and it's important to make sure we keep...
It's not about whether or not somebody was mistreated in the gulag, it's about making sure we keep talking about those gulags instead of today's gulags and it's important to make sure we keep stretching and decontextualizing those gulags into reasons we can't have Medicare for all or other basic forms of improved economic democracy.
It's not diverting the topic. That's the entire topic! That's the reason people keep bringing up gulags. Otherwise no one would give a shit how many people Stalin shoved into a meat grinder with...
It's not diverting the topic. That's the entire topic! That's the reason people keep bringing up gulags. Otherwise no one would give a shit how many people Stalin shoved into a meat grinder with his bare hands if it couldn't be used as a political football to defend rising income inequality. YOU derailed THIS thread by bringing up gulags.
We're not at an impasse. You are derailing discussions and grandstanding about irrelevant out of context last century prisons. You'll notice ending private prisons and mass incarceration of black...
We're not at an impasse. You are derailing discussions and grandstanding about irrelevant out of context last century prisons.
You'll notice ending private prisons and mass incarceration of black people is a leftist position.
I like the ideas of democratic socialism, but the people/execution is why modern leftism is a hard bite to swallow for the lower classes. Culturally, poor blacks, latinos and whites are very...
I like the ideas of democratic socialism, but the people/execution is why modern leftism is a hard bite to swallow for the lower classes. Culturally, poor blacks, latinos and whites are very similar (grew up poor and white in a latino-heavy neighborhood). If you can't get the poor white guy, you probably won't get the black guy either, but you can't build a loudspeaker to blast this notion into these left-wing echo chambers. This would be a reason, I think, many poor people of all races voted for Trump (yes, working-class minorities voted for Trump).
The article felt like a propaganda piece, trying to tell me about the "hip new wave of socialism."
If Sanders can run properly, I'll vote for him, unless I see a socialist Democrat running who has a better campaign (part of the reason Bernie lost the DNC is he was only a Democrat for the campaign, but is an independent senator). It takes extreme ideas to get a minor change in a democracy, but they have to hit close enough to home (like the old DSA motto in the article) to work. The DSA, as represented by the article, at leasr, sounds too much like the American left that gave Trump the presidency
color me skeptical on this one, although i don't have data on it. socialism has always been an ideology of the lower classes and there's no reason to think this has changed at all in the 21st...
I like the ideas of democratic socialism, but the people/execution is why modern leftism is a hard bite to swallow for the lower classes.
color me skeptical on this one, although i don't have data on it. socialism has always been an ideology of the lower classes and there's no reason to think this has changed at all in the 21st century.
Culturally, poor blacks, latinos and whites are very similar (grew up poor and white in a latino-heavy neighborhood). If you can't get the poor white guy, you probably won't get the black guy either, but you can't build a loudspeaker to blast this notion into these left-wing echo chambers.
absolutely not, lol. the long-standing political stratification between white poor/working class voters and minority poor/working class voters alone should be enough to completely dispel this notion or the notion that their experiences or the beliefs that have come of those experiences are even remotely similar, to say nothing of the fact that black americans in particular are actually much more likely to accept socialist ideology than white americans (which isn't new--many black liberation movements in america have historically been genuinely socialist in a marxist-leninist or maoist way or taken on socialist doctrine).
This would be a reason, I think, many poor people of all races voted for Trump (yes, working-class minorities voted for Trump).
if by "many" you mean pretty much the same number as have always voted republican, then sure. donald trump did really no better in 2016 with blacks, hispanics, or asians than a normal republican candidate would. he lost every minority group quite handily, and in the 2018 midterms all of these groups and white americans shifted significantly more democratic. he also lost voters with an income under 30k 53-41 and voters with an income of 30k to 40k 51-42, neither of which are particularly large shifts to the right from obama's numbers (plus, there is the confounding variable of exit polling in 2016 underestimating clinton's numbers on some things significantly so those numbers might be off)
The DSA, as represented by the article, at leasr, sounds too much like the American left that gave Trump the presidency
clinton lost for a lot of reasons, but being too far to the left is absolutely not one of them, and the DSA's continued electoral successes since their first major foray into electoral politics as their own thing in 2016 suggest there is a significant niche to be filled in the american left, politically speaking.
I was at the party described at the beginning of this article. Admission was free and open to everybody, the drinks were cheap, the crowd was alright. The Dating Game program started a little late...
I was at the party described at the beginning of this article. Admission was free and open to everybody, the drinks were cheap, the crowd was alright. The Dating Game program started a little late but a full third of the party sat on the floor and clapped and supported the kids who had been put on the spot. We smoked in the back offices and spilled out into the halls. The DJ took requests and there was some dancing. It was a nice night.
Before the US collapses into a Socialist utopia, I hope young people learn what Capitalism is and what moral standard it rests on. Neither party represents Capitalism today and, if not clear to...
Before the US collapses into a Socialist utopia, I hope young people learn what Capitalism is and what moral standard it rests on. Neither party represents Capitalism today and, if not clear to you, the left is just as fascist as the right. For those interested I recommend the following books by Ayn Rand;
I mean the following in the best way possible, and I'm sorry for not succeeding at wording it better: In what way can you convince me to read these with a receptive mind and accept them on their...
Ayn Rand
I mean the following in the best way possible, and I'm sorry for not succeeding at wording it better:
In what way can you convince me to read these with a receptive mind and accept them on their own merit if I'm currently operating under the opinion that Rand is derivative, with a shaky and incomplete ethical philosophy, logical shortcomings, hyperbolic language, and have a moral adverse reaction to her rejection of altruism?
No offense taken. To convince you I can only appeal to your reason and honesty. You sound philosophically educated so you understand that your moral ideal (altruism) is what determines your...
No offense taken. To convince you I can only appeal to your reason and honesty.
You sound philosophically educated so you understand that your moral ideal (altruism) is what determines your political ideal (socialism). Rand's argument is that her moral ideal (egoism) implies her political ideal (capitalism). (Side note, the Right holds altruism as a moral ideal too which is why they do not represent nor can they morally defend capitalism, common belief that the Right is capitalist notwithstanding).
Historically in every country where socialism has been accepted it leads to economic and social disaster at best and genocide at worst. As a socialist I would want to know why and how this happens so that the problem can be fixed. The intellectual apologists for socialism either ignore, minimize or evade the question or rationalize it with non-sense like historical accidents (e.g. war, famine, etc.) or a bad man (e.g. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc) that corrupted a "good" system. Perhaps you don't support the "hard" socialism that leads to all the disasters but a hybrid with the material benefits of capitalism and the benevolence of socialism. But Rand explains why this mixture is impossible to sustain and the logic of events (and the moral ideals) will always drive the society to one pole or the other. Rand answers all these questions (and much more) and as a socialist you should want to know the implication of your beliefs.
Of course, you didn't say it but reading between the lines of your comment you probably think "why should I read this crackpot, it is a waste of my time" and given your context it is, so how about a more practical reason to read Rand?
After Trump won I knew what was next, the left would press the moral not the political issues to regain power. I have seen it all my life and it is their ace in the hole. Since both the Left and Right share the same morality of altruism this is the winning argument (political views are dependent ones moral ideals). We see this already with the run up to the election when AOC proclaimed that "Being Morally Right Is More Important Than Being Factually Correct". The Right is terrified of AOC because they lose this attack every time and have no answers, no rebuttal.
Trump is a pragmatist and doesn't hold any clear moral or political principles which makes him and the Right vulnerable. The Left is morally consistent on altruism and all the bickering and debate is on what form of socialism is practical or politically feasible at this time. The Right is a mixed bag of altruists, some of whom are lamely trying to defend capitalism but are learning that it can't done on the moral ideal of altruism. In past elections cycles the Right has never had any moral arguments to push back against the Left so they always lose in the long run. They share altruism as the moral ideal which is why the Right has slowly adopted ALL the Left's political goals and policies, albeit in watered down form.
So what has changed? Rand's ideas have been seeping into the culture for over 50 years now and I think you will start to be challenged by moral and political questions that you can't answer coming from her influence. After decades of ignoring her, smearing her, misrepresenting and misunderstanding her -- she is still around and still very popular. The one thing the Left or Right can't do is answer her arguments and they are just hoping that she goes away and that people will dismiss her on their say-so without ever reading firsthand what she actually wrote. But her popularity is not an accident and there are huge numbers of citizens that don't want socialism but don't know how to defend capitalism but will find and use her moral arguments to defend their position. As a socialist you should be ready for this, and if she is an ignoramus as claimed it should be easy work for you to demolish her arguments and win the debates of the day. In other words know your enemy.
How is it "nonsense" rather than literal historic facts and straight-up debunking occurrences of non-sequitors, hasty generalizations, double standards, and red herrings? This doesn't explain why...
The intellectual apologists for socialism either ignore, minimize or evade the question or rationalize it with non-sense like historical accidents (e.g. war, famine, etc.) or a bad man (e.g. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc) that corrupted a "good" system.
How is it "nonsense" rather than literal historic facts and straight-up debunking occurrences of non-sequitors, hasty generalizations, double standards, and red herrings?
Historically in every country where socialism has been accepted it leads to economic and social disaster at best and genocide at worst.
This doesn't explain why Cuba has such high literacy and quality of doctors relative to their pre-socialist origins and Latin American peers.
This doesn't explain why the USSR were back water farmers at the beginning of the century then industrialized and invented space travel in less than 50 years.
There is no such thing as a moral ideal. Every judgement that people make is influenced by a variety of factors and under no circumstances would I definitively say that an altruistic act is always...
Moral ideal
There is no such thing as a moral ideal. Every judgement that people make is influenced by a variety of factors and under no circumstances would I definitively say that an altruistic act is always better than an egoist one.
Historically in every country where socialism has been accepted it leads to economic and social disaster at best and genocide at worst.
Funny I was unaware that many European countries were in economic and social disaster and experiencing genocide.
The intellectual apologists for socialism either ignore, minimize or evade the question or rationalize it with non-sense like historical accidents (e.g. war, famine, etc.) or a bad man (e.g. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc) that corrupted a "good" system.
This is a straw man argument and adds nothing.
a hybrid with the material benefits of capitalism and the benevolence of socialism
Like modern institutions of socialism that are flourishing in Europe and other places?
the logic of events (and the moral ideals) will always drive the society to one pole or the other
In most political societies, an increasing polarization is only seen when situations get worse for the constituency. If you look at countries which have instituted some form of socialism, such as many countries in Europe, you'll see that their unrest and their political polarization has actually gone down.
Meanwhile, in America, where the majority of the constituency has had conditions degrade over the last 30 years, the polarization has gone up.
It's wrong to attribute political polarization to a "natural state of ideas" because the reality is that poor conditions are what cause people to act in extreme ways. People who are content or well off in life tend to vote to continue the status quo, whereas those who are poor vote for change - this naturally leads to a divisive state where the more inequality there is the more polarization there is.
the left would press the moral not the political issues to regain power
What does this even mean? Is climate change now a "moral" issue and not a political one? Is income inequality "moral" and not political? Where are you drawing the line? A political issue is a political issue, period.
Since both the Left and Right share the same morality of altruism this is the winning argument
If your argument is that animals believe in being treated fairly, then you are absolutely correct.
But if all animals feel this way, then why is anyone arguing for a set of policies which promotes inequality?
Trump is a pragmatist and doesn't hold any clear moral or political principles
No, Trump is a narcissist who does everything for himself in spite of consequences. If he were a pragmatist he would be taking actions to keep himself in power.
In past elections cycles the Right has never had any moral arguments to push back against the Left so they always lose in the long run
I disagree with the premise that it's a "moral" argument that you need to push back. Many of the arguments on important issues have been pushed by the left accompanied by science which shows that these policies are socially equitable and promote the best outcomes for a society.
It's not an issue of the right having a poor "moral argument", it's an issue of the right having an argument that does not reflect reality.
I think you will start to be challenged by moral and political questions that you can't answer coming from her influence
BE WARNED. THE WIZARD OF OZ IS ALL POWERFUL AND MIGHTY. DO NOT QUESTION THE WIZARD OF OZ. 🙄
How about you pose some of those questions here so that they can be addressed? I don't think I (or others) will have many issues picking apart Ayn's arguments (as they have historically already been countless times).
this comment has a number of bizarre aspects. firstly, how do you "collapse" into a utopia when utopia is inherently a good state of being? secondly, by what standard can it be claimed that all of...
this comment has a number of bizarre aspects. firstly, how do you "collapse" into a utopia when utopia is inherently a good state of being? secondly, by what standard can it be claimed that all of the modern, major american parties do not represent capitalism? even the green party isn't about to overthrow the capitalist system, and their rhetoric makes them far and away the closest thing to a viable non-capitalist party. thirdly, how can leftists be "fascists" when fascism is an inherently right wing ideology with inherently right wing traits?
also, judging by your links to ayn rand, i assume you are a right-libertarian--am i correct in that assessment? i don't know many people who aren't libertarians who are particularly fond of randian writing, perhaps with exception to some ultraconservatives.
It was a rhetorical jab at all the advocates who want an "ideal" socialist society but every time it is tried it ends in disaster. Read my response to @CALICO or even better read Rand's book on...
this comment has a number of bizarre aspects. firstly, how do you "collapse" into a utopia when utopia is inherently a good state of being?
It was a rhetorical jab at all the advocates who want an "ideal" socialist society but every time it is tried it ends in disaster.
secondly, by what standard can it be claimed that all of the modern, major american parties do not represent capitalism?
Read my response to @CALICO or even better read Rand's book on Capitalism.
tldr: Political systems derive from morality, everyone is an altruist (Left or Right) which leads to socialism. Capitalism rests on egoism which the Left has completely abandoned and the Right is too cowardly to defend.
thirdly, how can leftists be "fascists" when fascism is an inherently right wing ideology with inherently right wing traits?
This is what the left wants you to believe. Fascism does not mean bad people on the Right.
Fascism, communism and capitalism are essentially economic terms (related to the production of wealth). The key concept to understand is individual rights, particularly your right to property. Without getting too deep into a political discussion, the right to property means the right to keep and power to control the use and disposal of your own property. Under communism all property is owned and controlled by the state. Under capitalism all property is privately owned and controlled. Fascism is the tricky case. Under fascism property is still "privately" owned but its use is controlled by the state. In other words, under fascism one's title to property is a meaningless piece of paper since ownership without control destroys the concept of property rights.
Both communism and fascism are variants of socialism so it can be applied to the Left or the Right. More importantly, due to the historical importance of private property rights in the US, we are moving toward fascism since that gives the facade of respecting property rights while destroying the right to property. Americans will never vote in communism but they may fall for fascism, Left or Right doesn't really matter.
sorry but, this is basically fucking gibberish and it's exceedingly obvious that you're veering into beliefs that categorically do not have basis in the consensus of even the general public, much...
sorry but, this is basically fucking gibberish and it's exceedingly obvious that you're veering into beliefs that categorically do not have basis in the consensus of even the general public, much less political scientists. "Both communism and fascism are variants of socialism so it can be applied to the Left or the Right. " for example is fundamentally wrong to the point of being a literal fucking meme, and literally basic research on what socialism, communism, and fascism mean can dispel the idea that they're even remotely similar ideologies.
Comment originally posted by Sam474 on Reddit
This comment makes such a good point that It would be a disservice not to post it here, but I wanted to make sure the original commenter got credit.
Quoted sections below.
The connectedness of the internet is such a wonderful and beautiful thing. The level of communication is unprecedented in the world, and I think it's actually a force for (generally) good... in that people can compare ideas, and challenge the dogma that they hear in everyday life. That anyone can access lots of information that they'd have no other way to access from well outside their own fields in which they receive formal education.
It's also changing societies, and especially the minds and ideas of younger people, very quickly. What do you think are some changes we'll see in the next 30 years as those people obtain positions of power in the government and private sector?
just to be clear: the comment is still describing capitalism, just a form of it that's not as shitty and exploitative as american capitalism is. people seem to conflate the government doing things with socialism--they are not explicitly the same thing. a government can do fucking everything, but if the workers don't own the means of production, that's still capitalism, just with a nanny state that does everything for you.
most young people who have come to like "socialism" like socialism in that model of government doing things (which is really social democracy), not necessarily socialism in calling for the democratic control of the means of production, or the eventual "end" of the state itself that the theory suggests happens inevitably in a hypothetical socialist system (this being the theory behind marxism-leninism, for example). and liking the government doing things is okay, and a good step since it'd be a step to the left for almost every government except the actually marxist-leninist ones still existing in the world from where they currently are, but it's also not genuinely socialism and people shouldn't necessarily treat it as if it is.
This is such an important point that people gloss over.
The thing is, capitalism is extremely good at what it does right, and that's encouraging sufficiently diversified competition to continually innovate and try to stay on top of each other, and this is because there's the element of choice and consumer pressure constantly working against businesses.
The problem is that certain goods and services don't yield to that same pressure. When you become dismembered and you're about to die from blood loss, you're not going to sit there and worry about selecting the hospital with the best rates--no, you're going to get your ass to the nearest hospital as fast as possible and worry about the cost after the fact. When you're forced to choose between having internet and not having internet--and, as a result, effectively choosing to either have access to job applications and not having access to job applications--you're going to choose to have internet, even if there's only one provider who bleeds you dry for every last cent they can, and they would have absolutely zero incentive to improve the quality of their service.
Sometimes market forces fail us, so we need the government to intervene in a way that the effect of market forces is produced in the expected manner. For example, single payer health care would force hospital prices down, and municipal broadband would force ISPs to provide a better service for a competitive price in order to remain relevant.
This is even true of the labor market. A living wage is only incentivized when there's a labor deficit and businesses are forced to compete for the limited labor pool. When there's a labor surplus, the laborer who is willing to work for the lowest pay will be employed and everyone else will remain jobless. The laborer is forced to choose between no pay and low pay. Ethical and moral considerations aside, low pay only perpetuates market under-performance by ensuring that wages are only spent on basic living expenses, not on spurring additional economic activity. In order to avoid the damage all of this causes (see: the great depression without minimum wage), the government intervened by requiring a minimum wage so that laborers cannot be taken advantage of and so that the market doesn't end up stalled by stagnated economic activity.
When the free market fails to produce the necessary market forces, the government should become that market force until such time that a sufficient free market alternative can take over, and even then it's sometimes better to leave the government involved to discourage consolidation and the resulting loss of that all-important market force.
In short: We want capitalism. It's such a powerful economic system with so many benefits. But we need the government to dip its hand in every now and then to keep things running smoothly. History has shown what happens when the free market is left to its own devices without someone to supervise it.
speak for yourself. maybe in another situation, i would agree with this. but in the present, i would much, much rather have a socialist system than a capitalist one given the massive crises that are bearing down on humanity that capitalism has thus far been almost totally unresponsive to and the fact that many industries under a capitalist system stand to explicitly benefit from these crises taking place even though they will have massive consequences for huge swathes of the human population, particularly the global poor.
i don't think capitalism is able to--nor do i think the overwhelming majority of capitalists desire to--answer the sort of massive restructuring of the global economy that will likely need to take place to avert things like major climate change, because even if it might benefit the system or people in the long-term, capitalism almost disincentivizes thinking in the long-term because the motivation behind it is profit, not necessarily people. and that's cool if you're like, a global one-percenter or if you happen to live in a rich country or a country that can basically buy its way out of the worst of something like climate change--but most people and places just can't do that, and they're going to massively suffer as a result of that profit-over-people part.
The bolded section is the important part and addresses the kinds of problems you're mentioning.
Again, there are parts of capitalism that fail spectacularly, and that's where the government should be stepping in. Businesses should not have unfettered access to the world's resources, e.g. fresh drinking water should belong to the people and only a portion of it allocated for private bottling and sales (there is a benefit to being able to ship bottled water to places that desperately need it during natural disasters, after all). They also shouldn't be able to engage in the widespread destruction of the planet just because they don't want to spend the extra money to do things in a way that leaves it intact.
The free market is currently failing at its job by allowing these freeloading sociopaths who care for nothing else but ever higher profits to continue along their path of destruction, and the government needs to get off its ass (and the people need to wake the hell up and demand them to do so) and force them to fall in line.
I will grant you, however, that there's one fundamental problem: no matter what, we can't predict all of the problems that will arise with capitalism, so we'll always be playing a game of whack-a-mole. In that respect, maybe capitalism isn't a salvageable solution and socialism the preferred alternative. Maybe there's a hybrid solution, where the resources and means of production are owned by the people and businesses are given lease to them under approved conditions, i.e. their behavior is whitelisted rather than blacklisted, and then they're allowed to operate freely within the accepted scope. Maybe there's an entirely different system that will arise that will prove to be the ideal instead.
I don't know. I don't have the answer to that. But I think we can both agree on this one point in particular: capitalism or not, the government needs to bring the proverbial hammer down yesterday.
Bit of a tangent, but what even are the means of production for most of us in our current economy? I used to say that I tried to seize the means of production once but all that happened was I brought my laptop home and worked over the weekend. It's a joke, but I think there's a kernel of truth in it that I was the means of production; or rather, the time I spent working for someone else was. In that context me owning the means of production would mean having control over how I spend my time so that the time I spend on "work" is time spent enriching myself or making my own vision come true. I don't know what the socialist answer to that is.
i think the socialist answer would probably reject your set-up here, since the means of production are explicitly non-human inputs (more specifically they're physical and non financial inputs) that help to create economic value. but if you play it out in spite of that, your laptop in this example would most likely be what a socialist considers the means of production, since that's most likely what you'd be using to produce economic value.
No it’s the structures around how you produce your work. Your laptop may be the most immediate tool you have at hand, kind of like how a carpenter has their hammer, nails, etc. but the carpenter also needs to get wood from somewhere, get a space to work out of, get other supplies, and so on. Those are all the means of production. Specific, large scale industries, like timber, metals and mining, or energy, would be considered the “commanding heights” of the economy since they’re critical to everything else downstream of them.
The same way, there are vast networks of unseen factors in knowledge work as well like who manages the internet connection, who maintains, updates, and hosts the web based services you use to do the work, your communication channels like email, slack, etc.
Additionally, just like steel is a mean of production for steelworking, knowledge is a mean of production in knowledge work. When you write code while working at a company, or design logos, or do any other form of knowledge work, you don't end up owning that code/logo/etc. The company owns the intellectual monopoly on that work, and you, the laborer, do not. Thus, if your boss decides to throw out your work or do something with it that you disagree with, you have no say over the matter. You have no ownership rights over such work.
Additionally, like the grandparent comment alluded to, time might be a nonphysical mean of production. As a laborer under capitalism, you must do what your boss says when on company time. There is no collectivist mechanism to decide how time and effort is spent to produce value.
Most of the things you said that capitalism did well were things that markets do well, and you can very much have a free market economy without capitalism. For instance, if you reorganized all private companies into workers' cooperatives, you would clearly be operating under a socialist framework, as the workers would then own the means of production, but without further changes your economy would still be market based.
You know what? That's fair. I'll concede on that point. I do believe that there's a benefit in allowing private ownership of industry because it does allow for a certain incentive structure, e.g. encouraging people with good ideas to bring them forward and allowing them to profit well from them, but I would imagine that it would be possible to make something similar work in a different system.
just as an incidental point to this, one of the larger and more successful spanish corporations in the world, Mondragon is in fact a worker co-op in this vein and is a pretty good model of how this might work in well executed practice (although since Mondragon is ultimately embedded in a capitalist system it is inhibited in some ways it might not be in a socialist system)
Cooperatives work in America too, as anti-Socialist as plenty of people here seem to be.
The NCB Co-op 100 Reports Top Producing Cooperatives with Revenues of $214.4 Billion. Starring familiar names such as ACE Hardware, Land O'Lakes, Ocean Spray, Blue Diamond, Piggly Wiggly, Crystal Sugar, and more.
That’s not capitalism, that’s market economics. Capitalism is a specific structure for organizing society and making decisions about who gets what based on the formal ownership of property. In other words, it’s “capitalism” because Capital gets to make the decisions about what to produce, how much, and for whom. Socialism, in contrast, argues that these decisions should be made to focus on what’s best for society rather than for capital.
There have been many strains of socialist thought that go into how best to bring socially conscious economic decisions into play, including market centric ones like the mutualist ideals espoused by Proudhon or Georgism.
Blame the right for using the word "socialism" to describe any individual or policy they view as left of center, for decades.
Some of us quite like the idea of Democratic Socialism, and see Social Democracy as a good milestone to aim for in getting there. Even if the Nordic Model is as far as we can get, hell, that would still beat the hell out of whatever Cronenbergian Plutocracy we have going for us at the moment, and would be quite the success.
The political movement that created those welfare structures is called “Social Democracy.” Where do you think the “social” in “social democrats” comes from?
There is also such a thing as Market Socialism, and Georgian socialism, and others. The only common thread between them is the idea that there should be social (societal) control over the economy rather than leaving it up to artificially constructed ideas around property ownership to make all the decisions.
Socialism used to be a wide ranging term for a broad family of leftist philosophies. It only got conflated with Marxist Leninism because the USSR liked it that way, and the USA did too. The first thing Lenin did when he had uncontested power was to kill all the actual workers councils (the actual soviets, weirdly enough) and gulag all the anarchists because other socialists were threats to the state-centric, command orientation of the Leninist regime. And of course US interests loved the opportunity to cast this debate in manichean terms, the better to justify military adventurism with.
i'm not entirely sure what you're contesting here or if you're contesting anything at all about what i said, to be honest.
I totally agree. I know its quite trendy now to shit on social media like its inherently a bad thing because of mass social engineering. But, the world wide web is combination weapon/tool just like a brick or a pen is. And the thing it does is something brand new.
I think in the next 30 years the most important development is how people's whose world views are just forming now develop and grow. We can already see this in the ways the concepts in popular discourse have become more sophisticated - even if it doesn't seem that way. For instance, consider how rapidly the terms ableist and transphobic have come into common lexicon since the damn of the internet. (Here are the ngrams for ableist and transphobia
While the outrage mobs who use the terms might not always do so admirably, there is something to the simple fact that their prevalence should expand so rapidly. I'm struggling to put my finger on a good analog. But considering the duration of the struggle for recognition of homosexuals or even women, I can only surmise that the existence of the internet has advanced the standing of these groups far more than it would if we were still relying on print or television.
These are really good points. I think there is another factor at play as well; the moving of the goalposts by the right. Socialism used to be the domain of the Soviet Union, whose control over its citizens lives and lack of liberal freedoms was extreme and undesirable for western peoples. Constant use of the word "socialist" by the right to describe anyone even moderately left of center in the United States has desensitized people to its original meaning. People are more willing to identify as socialist now that it no longer implies a desire for everyone to live under a totalitarian Marxist regime.
Even this kind of stuff is heavily exaggerated or outright lies, at the same time we downplay Jim crow laws and for profit prison slave labor, freak out about imaginary white children in the basement of a pizza shop while not giving a rat's ass about actual state sponsored kidnapping and human trafficking.
Anyways, I have to go, it's my turn for the toothbrush.
I don't think The Great Purge was a lie. The Soviet Union was a pretty awful place. Just look at the difference in quality of life between East and West Berlin before the wall fell.
it's funny that you mention this, because there's a pretty compelling case to be made for most marxist-leninist states such as east germany that the gap in pure quality of life was generally the result of (1) the pre-existing gap in wealth, education, industrialization, and other factors of that nature between such countries and the west; and (2) the fact that many of these nations were also then unable to participate in the greater global economy, which greatly hamstrung their ability to leverage what little wealth and material goods they did have to offer to the global community since many of their trade partners thus had to be marxist-leninist states as well, and therefore had similar issues as they did.
and of course, it would be disingenuous to neglect the political repression in many marxist-leninist countries, which was very real--but while marxist-leninist repression tended to be larger in scale, political repression absolutely wasn't exclusive to marxist-leninist countries. seeing as many south american capitalist dictatorships engaged in political repression and mass murder of leftists, america notoriously witch hunted suspected communists twice in the 1900s, and many marxist-leninist countries were actively fucked with or overthrown by western countries even if their socialist politicians were democratically elected, i think the most you can say is that the charge of "political repression" toward either side in the cold war is something of a wash. both of them extensively engaged in it around the world; the marxist-leninist side just came out of it with a larger body count than capitalist side.
I never implied otherwise. It's a defining trait of far right fascist states as well. Extreme ideologies beget extreme solutions.
As a Chicago resident, I can assure you that there are plenty of crooks and cronies in the blue side as well.
I don't know who originally said It, but there is a quote which is paraphrased as those who seek power are often the very ones who should not have it. I find that to be the case, however, there certainly is a lot more overt corruption on the right side in recent decades.
I'm sure it's been said many times by many people, but the phrasing makes me think of Douglas Adams, author of Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy.
I was hoping that someone pointed this out. We are welcoming socialist ideas because the current system has failed so many.
It's been building for a long time and it's impossible not to see it. All it's going to take is some sort of spark to set it all off. We just haven't hit the right one yet, but it's only a matter of time.
It takes getting the money out of politics. Give every viable candidate (by some measure of the primaries) a publicly-funded minimum amount of money to run their campaigns. No one can have more; not through PACs or private donations. Then real candidates can emerge, candidates who may be excellently qualified for the job, but can't raise the money and don't have the money themselves to reach the people who need to hear their voices.
Thanks to the internet, we're no longer isolated to small towns, our parent's bubbles, the bubble of our nation. Decades old lies and propaganda are being shattered, because we now can just look up facts.
But it's not just the lies. It's the broken promises.
It's a double-edged sword. Accurate information is easier than ever to find, but so is inaccurate information. Hence the rise of the anti-vaccination movement and popularity of other conspiracies.
And it's not just inaccurate information that's the problem, its the sheer volume. It's become very easy to obfuscate relevant and pertinent information in the deluge.
I posit that the vast majority of people are socialists (whether they realize it or not), at least once you can peel back the decades upon decades of propaganda blasted into their minds.
At it's core, what is the ultimate goal of Socialism? It is to improve the lives of everyone in society. Who in their right mind would object to that goal? Only the people with the absolute highest standards of living would object, because their standard would slowly erode while ~95% of the population's lives improved. So that 5% does everything in their power to keep re-enforcing how "terrible" Socialism is, to keep the masses from realizing that if they worked together (and started implementing socialist policies), their lives would improve tremendously.
if people want to read something critical of socialist practice or of socialist countries, the gulag archipelago is definitely not the book for that seeing as the wife of the author of that book is literally on the record as questioning its accuracy and basically saying that it's a bunch of unrefined hearsay-type material and not objective fact of any sort. there are many criticisms that can be levied at places like the soviet union--but you're not going to find particularly valid ones in the gulag archipelago.
which is cool, but at the very basis of the work are massive mischaracterizations in the size and brutality of the gulag system (by several orders of magnitude, such that even the largest estimates of its size on a year-by-year basis come nowhere close to his) and its very function as a system of punishment (it is now reasonably well established by people have gone through soviet archives that most people who were sent to gulags were in and out of the system relatively quickly, and the number of discharges within the gulag system greatly outnumber the number of deaths that occurred, which are estimated now as somewhere around 1.5 million or so), so... perhaps as a narrative work of his personal experiences it stands up, but as an authoritative source on the gulag? not really, no.
i mean, winning the nobel prize does not inherently make a book good or somehow validate its contents. that's a silly argument to make on a lot of levels. nor did i claim the book was bad--rather, my point is that it just does not stand up if your thing is objective, historical fact that can be used to criticize the soviet union and socialism in general given its glaring accuracy issues on the gulag itself and looming issue of his ex-wife's characterizations of many of the details he gives. there are plenty of books which do not have those problems that are also much better sources on the flaws and issues of the soviet union.
i cannot off the top of my head, but somewhere in the book solzhenitsyn puts forward a figure of 50 million (which wikipedia includes in their table on gulag population estimates) for the entire period, which is over double and close to triple what the current historiography suggests was actually the case (more modern, contemporary estimates place total gulag numbers more toward the 18-20 million range)
you can beg the same question of nazi statistics which were notorious for similar falsification, but we don't really accept that as a valid reasoning for why nazi concentration camp numbers might not be valid or are otherwise overinflated or underinflated, so i don't think this is a valid argument you can make against the records of the gulag system or estimations derived from them, especially not when the other estimates really do not have any more firm of a leg to stand on than the actual archives themselves do.
this is around the likely mid-point of figures for that time period (and is generally accepted based on record-keeping) and since they draw from actual records and not like... literally guessing based on fragments of evidence or pure speculation, i don't think it's unreasonable to say that these numbers are almost certainly the most accurate ones we have on how many deaths occurred within the gulag system.
almost literally anything that is not fucking the gulag archipelago, lmao. even the black book of communism is unironically probably a better source of information of the issues of the soviet union, seeing as outside of its quixotic quest to arrive at the oft-touted 100 million deaths under communism figure it does detail genuine examples of the political and social repression in places like the soviet union.
Putin hates communism, but loves the idea of a powerful imperialist Russia without communism. I'm also not aware of Putin being a scholarly individual or someone we should hold as a reliable source, considering the current geopolitical landscape and current ongoing cyberespionage. His career as a KGB agent should also have us double down on not relying on him as a source.
Of course Putin wants you to think communist gulags bad, the more we obsess and grandstand with those gulags, the less we're criticizing his gulags or the gulags in the United States.
Obama, the drone war president, continuing the wars by Bush, the wars not ended or reduced by Trump, recieved the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. Basically for nothing when you get down to it.
I'm not sure what is suppose to be compelling about the fact that a university in one country invited someone who wrote a book claiming another country was bad at the height of those countries cold war. That's just good politics. This is the schoolyard equivalent of "my best friend agrees with me, see im right!"
It's not about whether or not somebody was mistreated in the gulag, it's about making sure we keep talking about those gulags instead of today's gulags and it's important to make sure we keep stretching and decontextualizing those gulags into reasons we can't have Medicare for all or other basic forms of improved economic democracy.
It's not diverting the topic. That's the entire topic! That's the reason people keep bringing up gulags. Otherwise no one would give a shit how many people Stalin shoved into a meat grinder with his bare hands if it couldn't be used as a political football to defend rising income inequality. YOU derailed THIS thread by bringing up gulags.
We're not at an impasse. You are derailing discussions and grandstanding about irrelevant out of context last century prisons.
You'll notice ending private prisons and mass incarceration of black people is a leftist position.
And the trail of tears, the kidnapping and enslavement of Africans, Jim crow laws, Bengal famines, Irish potato famine, contras, etc..
I like the ideas of democratic socialism, but the people/execution is why modern leftism is a hard bite to swallow for the lower classes. Culturally, poor blacks, latinos and whites are very similar (grew up poor and white in a latino-heavy neighborhood). If you can't get the poor white guy, you probably won't get the black guy either, but you can't build a loudspeaker to blast this notion into these left-wing echo chambers. This would be a reason, I think, many poor people of all races voted for Trump (yes, working-class minorities voted for Trump).
The article felt like a propaganda piece, trying to tell me about the "hip new wave of socialism."
If Sanders can run properly, I'll vote for him, unless I see a socialist Democrat running who has a better campaign (part of the reason Bernie lost the DNC is he was only a Democrat for the campaign, but is an independent senator). It takes extreme ideas to get a minor change in a democracy, but they have to hit close enough to home (like the old DSA motto in the article) to work. The DSA, as represented by the article, at leasr, sounds too much like the American left that gave Trump the presidency
color me skeptical on this one, although i don't have data on it. socialism has always been an ideology of the lower classes and there's no reason to think this has changed at all in the 21st century.
absolutely not, lol. the long-standing political stratification between white poor/working class voters and minority poor/working class voters alone should be enough to completely dispel this notion or the notion that their experiences or the beliefs that have come of those experiences are even remotely similar, to say nothing of the fact that black americans in particular are actually much more likely to accept socialist ideology than white americans (which isn't new--many black liberation movements in america have historically been genuinely socialist in a marxist-leninist or maoist way or taken on socialist doctrine).
if by "many" you mean pretty much the same number as have always voted republican, then sure. donald trump did really no better in 2016 with blacks, hispanics, or asians than a normal republican candidate would. he lost every minority group quite handily, and in the 2018 midterms all of these groups and white americans shifted significantly more democratic. he also lost voters with an income under 30k 53-41 and voters with an income of 30k to 40k 51-42, neither of which are particularly large shifts to the right from obama's numbers (plus, there is the confounding variable of exit polling in 2016 underestimating clinton's numbers on some things significantly so those numbers might be off)
clinton lost for a lot of reasons, but being too far to the left is absolutely not one of them, and the DSA's continued electoral successes since their first major foray into electoral politics as their own thing in 2016 suggest there is a significant niche to be filled in the american left, politically speaking.
I was at the party described at the beginning of this article. Admission was free and open to everybody, the drinks were cheap, the crowd was alright. The Dating Game program started a little late but a full third of the party sat on the floor and clapped and supported the kids who had been put on the spot. We smoked in the back offices and spilled out into the halls. The DJ took requests and there was some dancing. It was a nice night.
I can't answer this question for everyone, but for me it was around the age of 17 in high school American Politics class.
Before the US collapses into a Socialist utopia, I hope young people learn what Capitalism is and what moral standard it rests on. Neither party represents Capitalism today and, if not clear to you, the left is just as fascist as the right. For those interested I recommend the following books by Ayn Rand;
Philosophy:Who Needs It
The Virtue of Selfishness
Capitalism:The Unknown Ideal
I mean the following in the best way possible, and I'm sorry for not succeeding at wording it better:
In what way can you convince me to read these with a receptive mind and accept them on their own merit if I'm currently operating under the opinion that Rand is derivative, with a shaky and incomplete ethical philosophy, logical shortcomings, hyperbolic language, and have a moral adverse reaction to her rejection of altruism?
No offense taken. To convince you I can only appeal to your reason and honesty.
You sound philosophically educated so you understand that your moral ideal (altruism) is what determines your political ideal (socialism). Rand's argument is that her moral ideal (egoism) implies her political ideal (capitalism). (Side note, the Right holds altruism as a moral ideal too which is why they do not represent nor can they morally defend capitalism, common belief that the Right is capitalist notwithstanding).
Historically in every country where socialism has been accepted it leads to economic and social disaster at best and genocide at worst. As a socialist I would want to know why and how this happens so that the problem can be fixed. The intellectual apologists for socialism either ignore, minimize or evade the question or rationalize it with non-sense like historical accidents (e.g. war, famine, etc.) or a bad man (e.g. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, etc) that corrupted a "good" system. Perhaps you don't support the "hard" socialism that leads to all the disasters but a hybrid with the material benefits of capitalism and the benevolence of socialism. But Rand explains why this mixture is impossible to sustain and the logic of events (and the moral ideals) will always drive the society to one pole or the other. Rand answers all these questions (and much more) and as a socialist you should want to know the implication of your beliefs.
Of course, you didn't say it but reading between the lines of your comment you probably think "why should I read this crackpot, it is a waste of my time" and given your context it is, so how about a more practical reason to read Rand?
After Trump won I knew what was next, the left would press the moral not the political issues to regain power. I have seen it all my life and it is their ace in the hole. Since both the Left and Right share the same morality of altruism this is the winning argument (political views are dependent ones moral ideals). We see this already with the run up to the election when AOC proclaimed that "Being Morally Right Is More Important Than Being Factually Correct". The Right is terrified of AOC because they lose this attack every time and have no answers, no rebuttal.
Trump is a pragmatist and doesn't hold any clear moral or political principles which makes him and the Right vulnerable. The Left is morally consistent on altruism and all the bickering and debate is on what form of socialism is practical or politically feasible at this time. The Right is a mixed bag of altruists, some of whom are lamely trying to defend capitalism but are learning that it can't done on the moral ideal of altruism. In past elections cycles the Right has never had any moral arguments to push back against the Left so they always lose in the long run. They share altruism as the moral ideal which is why the Right has slowly adopted ALL the Left's political goals and policies, albeit in watered down form.
So what has changed? Rand's ideas have been seeping into the culture for over 50 years now and I think you will start to be challenged by moral and political questions that you can't answer coming from her influence. After decades of ignoring her, smearing her, misrepresenting and misunderstanding her -- she is still around and still very popular. The one thing the Left or Right can't do is answer her arguments and they are just hoping that she goes away and that people will dismiss her on their say-so without ever reading firsthand what she actually wrote. But her popularity is not an accident and there are huge numbers of citizens that don't want socialism but don't know how to defend capitalism but will find and use her moral arguments to defend their position. As a socialist you should be ready for this, and if she is an ignoramus as claimed it should be easy work for you to demolish her arguments and win the debates of the day. In other words know your enemy.
How is it "nonsense" rather than literal historic facts and straight-up debunking occurrences of non-sequitors, hasty generalizations, double standards, and red herrings?
This doesn't explain why Cuba has such high literacy and quality of doctors relative to their pre-socialist origins and Latin American peers.
This doesn't explain why the USSR were back water farmers at the beginning of the century then industrialized and invented space travel in less than 50 years.
There is no such thing as a moral ideal. Every judgement that people make is influenced by a variety of factors and under no circumstances would I definitively say that an altruistic act is always better than an egoist one.
Funny I was unaware that many European countries were in economic and social disaster and experiencing genocide.
This is a straw man argument and adds nothing.
Like modern institutions of socialism that are flourishing in Europe and other places?
In most political societies, an increasing polarization is only seen when situations get worse for the constituency. If you look at countries which have instituted some form of socialism, such as many countries in Europe, you'll see that their unrest and their political polarization has actually gone down.
Meanwhile, in America, where the majority of the constituency has had conditions degrade over the last 30 years, the polarization has gone up.
It's wrong to attribute political polarization to a "natural state of ideas" because the reality is that poor conditions are what cause people to act in extreme ways. People who are content or well off in life tend to vote to continue the status quo, whereas those who are poor vote for change - this naturally leads to a divisive state where the more inequality there is the more polarization there is.
What does this even mean? Is climate change now a "moral" issue and not a political one? Is income inequality "moral" and not political? Where are you drawing the line? A political issue is a political issue, period.
If your argument is that animals believe in being treated fairly, then you are absolutely correct.
But if all animals feel this way, then why is anyone arguing for a set of policies which promotes inequality?
No, Trump is a narcissist who does everything for himself in spite of consequences. If he were a pragmatist he would be taking actions to keep himself in power.
I disagree with the premise that it's a "moral" argument that you need to push back. Many of the arguments on important issues have been pushed by the left accompanied by science which shows that these policies are socially equitable and promote the best outcomes for a society.
It's not an issue of the right having a poor "moral argument", it's an issue of the right having an argument that does not reflect reality.
BE WARNED. THE WIZARD OF OZ IS ALL POWERFUL AND MIGHTY. DO NOT QUESTION THE WIZARD OF OZ. 🙄
How about you pose some of those questions here so that they can be addressed? I don't think I (or others) will have many issues picking apart Ayn's arguments (as they have historically already been countless times).
this comment has a number of bizarre aspects. firstly, how do you "collapse" into a utopia when utopia is inherently a good state of being? secondly, by what standard can it be claimed that all of the modern, major american parties do not represent capitalism? even the green party isn't about to overthrow the capitalist system, and their rhetoric makes them far and away the closest thing to a viable non-capitalist party. thirdly, how can leftists be "fascists" when fascism is an inherently right wing ideology with inherently right wing traits?
also, judging by your links to ayn rand, i assume you are a right-libertarian--am i correct in that assessment? i don't know many people who aren't libertarians who are particularly fond of randian writing, perhaps with exception to some ultraconservatives.
It was a rhetorical jab at all the advocates who want an "ideal" socialist society but every time it is tried it ends in disaster.
Read my response to @CALICO or even better read Rand's book on Capitalism.
tldr: Political systems derive from morality, everyone is an altruist (Left or Right) which leads to socialism. Capitalism rests on egoism which the Left has completely abandoned and the Right is too cowardly to defend.
This is what the left wants you to believe. Fascism does not mean bad people on the Right.
Fascism, communism and capitalism are essentially economic terms (related to the production of wealth). The key concept to understand is individual rights, particularly your right to property. Without getting too deep into a political discussion, the right to property means the right to keep and power to control the use and disposal of your own property. Under communism all property is owned and controlled by the state. Under capitalism all property is privately owned and controlled. Fascism is the tricky case. Under fascism property is still "privately" owned but its use is controlled by the state. In other words, under fascism one's title to property is a meaningless piece of paper since ownership without control destroys the concept of property rights.
Both communism and fascism are variants of socialism so it can be applied to the Left or the Right. More importantly, due to the historical importance of private property rights in the US, we are moving toward fascism since that gives the facade of respecting property rights while destroying the right to property. Americans will never vote in communism but they may fall for fascism, Left or Right doesn't really matter.
sorry but, this is basically fucking gibberish and it's exceedingly obvious that you're veering into beliefs that categorically do not have basis in the consensus of even the general public, much less political scientists. "Both communism and fascism are variants of socialism so it can be applied to the Left or the Right. " for example is fundamentally wrong to the point of being a literal fucking meme, and literally basic research on what socialism, communism, and fascism mean can dispel the idea that they're even remotely similar ideologies.
This is a lie and you should be ashamed of yourself for trying to spread misinformation.
This seems obviously wrong or semantically meaningless.
See my reply to @alyaza.
You're right, there's absolutely no difference between fascists and antifascists. You are very intelligent.