Were there other kinds of socialist revolutions that just weren't successful? The only one I can think of is Spain.
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I'm actually going to spin this point off, because I think its definitely relevant and would like to get more people to weigh in: how do we resolve what I call "the proximity problem"?
I don't like making arguments from "human nature" but I think its a relatively safe takeaway from human history across the globe that people's social camaraderie and formation of mutual interests is positively correlated with their physical proximity to each other. This isn't even so much about "we hate the nation next door and will go to war" so much as the fairly inescapable tendency of people to prioritize the interests of those they live with over those they don't.
This has always created...barriers to harmonious mutual interest that unified communities across great distances, but the post-industrial explosion in the relative density of urban areas has put a new spin on it that we absolutely still feel today, and is still going to be a problem in the future.
Cities need food. A lot of food. Cities cannot grow their own food. Rooftop planters and community gardens are nice, but the scale isn't even close. The amount of food that a metropolitan area requires is far and away greater than it could ever be converted to produce. What you really need is a lot of farmland. And so you have a proximity problem. People in the increasingly growing urban areas need food. The food has to come from places that aren't near to them. People in the city begin to align their interests with people in the city, people in the rural areas align with those in the rural areas
Note that I'm not making an argument for why this explains the progressive/conservative split or anything quite like that. I'm saying that, big picture, if large cities continue to exist in the form that they do, there will be friction between them and the areas that support their existence by sheer virtue of the fact that they exist in different places
How do you address this? Higher institutions tasked with mediating the relationship between the different areas? A large scale deconstruction of cities to convert the landscape into more homogenous (as opposed to the highly heterogenous current urban/rural distribution) mid to low density communities that function as largely self-sustaining ecosystems?
This is an honest and open question, I think how people answer it speaks to their fundamental perspective a lot
I don't like making arguments from "human nature" but I think its a relatively safe takeaway from human history across the globe that people's social camaraderie and formation of mutual interests is positively correlated with their physical proximity to each other. This isn't even so much about "we hate the nation next door and will go to war" so much as the fairly inescapable tendency of people to prioritize the interests of those they live with over those they don't.
This has always created...barriers to harmonious mutual interest that unified communities across great distances, but the post-industrial explosion in the relative density of urban areas has put a new spin on it that we absolutely still feel today, and is still going to be a problem in the future.
Cities need food. A lot of food. Cities cannot grow their own food. Rooftop planters and community gardens are nice, but the scale isn't even close. The amount of food that a metropolitan area requires is far and away greater than it could ever be converted to produce. What you really need is a lot of farmland. And so you have a proximity problem. People in the increasingly growing urban areas need food. The food has to come from places that aren't near to them. People in the city begin to align their interests with people in the city, people in the rural areas align with those in the rural areas
Note that I'm not making an argument for why this explains the progressive/conservative split or anything quite like that. I'm saying that, big picture, if large cities continue to exist in the form that they do, there will be friction between them and the areas that support their existence by sheer virtue of the fact that they exist in different places
How do you address this? Higher institutions tasked with mediating the relationship between the different areas? A large scale deconstruction of cities to convert the landscape into more homogenous (as opposed to the highly heterogenous current urban/rural distribution) mid to low density communities that function as largely self-sustaining ecosystems?
This is an honest and open question, I think how people answer it speaks to their fundamental perspective a lot
I've had a whole vicodin and am close to hallucinating. Time to write. (Hunter S. Thompson method.)
At the turn of the twentieth century modernism had taken hold of Europe and Western society as a whole. The central belief was that through ingenious design and enough effort, one could engineer every facet of life until it was perfect. Science would lead the way to utopia. Among the affected disciplines was urban planning. Many an architect would stake their claim in creating perfect designs because to engineer a city was tantamout to engineering an entire society (for more on the idea that the buildings we live in shape the way we live, see Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language"). One such city to be designed was Sao Paulo. The planner, whose name I cannot remember, went to work and designed the entire city before it was even built. All the people lived here, the markets would be there, etc. Well, this is Sao Paulo, one of the ugliest cities on Earth:
People who live in this part of Sao Paulo are actually extremely miserable. Also, it wasn't smart to put everyone in the same place, because now it's rather inconvenient to go grocery shopping, etc.
Now consider Paris. Paris grew organically after centuries and is a disorganized mess. Parisian street corners, if you have not seen them before, are bustling hubs of absolute chaos. There are a million bakeries spread out everywhere. Bookstores, shops, whatever. Somehow, though, everyone could find exactly what they need (yes, before the internet). Paris is many times more efficent than Sao Paulo.
I also have a second story. This is a story of two attempts to organize the world wide web. The first was a startup that decided they'd make a portal to the web based on heirarchical categories. They would keep adding sub categories until everything on the internet would be categorizable and discoverable. The second was a startup that decided they'd go from the bottom up. There would be no heirarchy. They would index things based on the way it was connected to each other naturally, and they'd determine simpler relationships from that information whereever possible. The first company was Yahoo. The second company was Google. Yahoo abandoned its web portal centric view a long time ago. Search engines are now a part of the internet that's taken for granted.
It's the opposite. Small teams are most efficient when there is a centralized authority and they can move swiftly to accomplish goals. At ever increasing scales it becomes more and more impossible to centralize and disperse information, so the only reasonable method of organization is to keep decision making as local as possible. This is why command economies don't work and market economies do.
On the contrary. Our society is so complicated that it could only ever hope to be managed by cooperating local entities. It surprises me you'd make an argument like "It's so big, how will it ever be managed!" Ask Earth how it gets along on a day to day basis.
No, you'd be wrong.
You seem to misunderstand what urbanization is. Let me tell you a story. I wish I could remember where I found this, but my googling is failing me at the moment.
At the turn of the twentieth century modernism had taken hold of Europe and Western society as a whole. The central belief was that through ingenious design and enough effort, one could engineer every facet of life until it was perfect. Science would lead the way to utopia. Among the affected disciplines was urban planning. Many an architect would stake their claim in creating perfect designs because to engineer a city was tantamout to engineering an entire society (for more on the idea that the buildings we live in shape the way we live, see Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language"). One such city to be designed was Sao Paulo. The planner, whose name I cannot remember, went to work and designed the entire city before it was even built. All the people lived here, the markets would be there, etc. Well, this is Sao Paulo, one of the ugliest cities on Earth:
People who live in this part of Sao Paulo are actually extremely miserable. Also, it wasn't smart to put everyone in the same place, because now it's rather inconvenient to go grocery shopping, etc.
Now consider Paris. Paris grew organically after centuries and is a disorganized mess. Parisian street corners, if you have not seen them before, are bustling hubs of absolute chaos. There are a million bakeries spread out everywhere. Bookstores, shops, whatever. Somehow, though, everyone could find exactly what they need (yes, before the internet). Paris is many times more efficent than Sao Paulo.
I also have a second story. This is a story of two attempts to organize the world wide web. The first was a startup that decided they'd make a portal to the web based on heirarchical categories. They would keep adding sub categories until everything on the internet would be categorizable and discoverable. The second was a startup that decided they'd go from the bottom up. There would be no heirarchy. They would index things based on the way it was connected to each other naturally, and they'd determine simpler relationships from that information whereever possible. The first company was Yahoo. The second company was Google. Yahoo abandoned its web portal centric view a long time ago. Search engines are now a part of the internet that's taken for granted.
You don't seem to understand that almost every facet of life is already like this. Society is already like this.
Besides "everything".. it should be self evident that things which are not related to each other are better left independent. I stand by my thought experiment of direct democracy wherein different policy boundaries have nothing to do with each other and therefore representatives do not have to compromise your beliefs just to be effectual.
uhuh, the efficiency of government... :P
*eyeroll*
I mean, the answer is pretty self evident that different cities interact with each other all the time without having a common government. As for urban vs. rural interests, you're being way too abstract. Farms provide farmstuff and cities provide.. whatever it is that cities provide, industrial equipment, clothes, whatever. Do you think they're going to go to war with each other or something?
Do you think urban cities are these highly homogeneous, cohesive social structures and everyone gets along with each other already? You don't need to organize the deconstruction of anything. People will figure out what kinds of relationships they need and want.
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Most socialist oriented revolutions attempted to follow a vanguardist method due to the influence of the USSR, though a lot of them (a majority of them?) were really nationalist/anti-imperialist movements that slapped Marxism-Leninism on the top to get international communist support. That's part of the reason why such states were relatively easily able to drop the Marxism-Leninism when the time came.
But in terms of revolutions following a more "classical" line there's the Paris Commune, the German Revolution at the end of WWI, the Hungarian Revolution etc. Plus other anarchist attempts like Makhno. The Zapatistas are hanging in there doing their thing in Mexico. The Maoists in Nepal were successful in establishing a republic and haven't turned it into a a dictatorship since they actually demobilized for elections.
I agree with sphagnum though I wouldn't characterize the Nepalese movement as anything other than similar bourgeois nationalist, they're the worst parts of Maoism and none of the Socialism. Makhno and the Zapatistas are the vanguard of their own revolutions.
Paris Commune, Germany, and Russia were all more or less the idea of "organic" and proletarian, but also petered out/derailed into bonapartism or opportunism, etc.
Nationalist/Right Wing Maoism/Khrushchevism (aka Stalinism)'s nationalist bourgeois tendencies are still 100% in full effect today, sadly. The Catalonian election and the vast Leftwing betrayal of internationalism and Socialist "values" in favor of capitalist "right of determination". Etc etc. I feel like I'm rambling, I'm not in my time zone and haven't had my coffee.
Paris Commune, Germany, and Russia were all more or less the idea of "organic" and proletarian, but also petered out/derailed into bonapartism or opportunism, etc.
Nationalist/Right Wing Maoism/Khrushchevism (aka Stalinism)'s nationalist bourgeois tendencies are still 100% in full effect today, sadly. The Catalonian election and the vast Leftwing betrayal of internationalism and Socialist "values" in favor of capitalist "right of determination". Etc etc. I feel like I'm rambling, I'm not in my time zone and haven't had my coffee.
If we keep going I'll come back to this, its a slightly deeper question and I want to touch on some other stuff first
I'm not making an argument for central planning, this isn't about central planning. This is about the existence of a higher infrastructure within which different parties are operating that is capable, when necessary, of making decisions that account for context. Its not soviet style "and here's where we put the car factory" but it is about, say, formalizing restrictions on pollution even when 30% of the population finds pollution in their interests and would keep on polluting away.
I mean this is a continued argument against the unmoderation of Twitter and YouTube as they become radicalizing platforms for white nationalists.
Not to be dismissive of everything else you said above but...yes, yes absolutely government efficiency. Do you have any idea how much more effective and extensive the US Postal Service is compared to any other parcel and mail service operating in the US? FedEx and UPS frankly aren't even close, they're jokes, they exist for a set of very specific circumstances. And there's a reason why the current cause du jure of progressivism in the US is the move towards the public institutionalization and away from the negotiative marketplace of healthcare.
Not...really? Within a nation they interact using the government of the nation they are part of. Across nations they interact on the basis of formal agreements established by their national governments and upheld by national law.
I think that without a higher structure of mediation you'll find very rapidly that pretenses of mutual aid give way to "well we need to look out for us" and the relations will begin to resemble anarchocapitalism between nice syndicalist or socialist cells
I live in one of the biggest cities in the US so lol, no, I don't ."Organize" is probably perhaps too active of a word there, what I mean is "what arrangement do you see this working under?" People are marvelous at ignoring externalities when figuring out what kind of relationships they need and want, often due to, again, proximity.
I don't trust that a lack of higher structure means that as people are determining the relationships they need and want they will be considerate of reciprocal consent and they won't just start dumping waste in the river to let the folks downstream deal with it
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A follow up on Mik Pappas, the DSA-endorsed candidate who won his judge race and has been putting in work.
http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2018/02/02/mik-pappas-no-cash-bail-policy-criticism/
However, he also tried to hold a defense attorney in contempt of court even though he doesn't have that power. Wonder what that was all about - the article doesn't go into detail.
http://pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2018/02/02/mik-pappas-no-cash-bail-policy-criticism/
However, he also tried to hold a defense attorney in contempt of court even though he doesn't have that power. Wonder what that was all about - the article doesn't go into detail.
I really wish that judge placements would move beyond being priority at very local levels, and that there was more of a national conversation among activist movements. Its incredibly potent seizure of power
Nepal's a surprising success story in terms of keeping it democratic. Not that it's really helped them make significant changes but Nepal simply doesn't have much capacity to help itself under any kind of regime. Landlocked, few commodity resources, weak agricultural capacity.
So here's another chance for me to admit tremendous ignorance about the material conditions in other parts of the world but...people have been living in Nepal for a long time. Few commodities and weak agricultural capacity have always been an issue for anyone living there, and people made it work for thousands of years. What barriers are there to sustainable living that aren't political? Is it just that the acceptable standards of living have risen so dramatically that what can be sustained is no longer "okay"?
Correct. People will aspire to more than just the peasant existence that they've had for time immemorial. They had that peasant existence under the monarchy. Just because that royal class is gone doesn't mean that things have become fair.
Which isn't to say Nepal should go super-capitalist at all, just that they do need economic growth to fuel higher living standards, and they have a large challenge in front of them to achieve that under pretty much any economic system.
That makes sense and is largely what I was expected, I just genuinely didn't know if I was missing something else
There are larger questions about what that implies for the global management and distribution of resources that I really don't feel able to even poke at at the moment though. Like, even I avoid questions like "should nations get to exist" because of how contentious it is even among radical movements
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Oh yes, there's definitely a problem of inegalitarianism between nations, even if each nation had achieved ideal situation of economic egalitarianism domestically. Some countries drew the short straw economically, and that question will be at the forefront of how we as a species deal with the 21st century.
Not sure which take I've found better, life is better now because of cheap microwaves or that climate change is an issue but we'll all eventually be swallowed by the sun anyways.
Sharing this argentinian mini-serie "Marx is back", it's in spanish, but there's english subtitles:
Episode 1: Bourgeoise and the proletariat
https://youtu.be/eckwjxa0-w4
Episode 2: The market and the crisis of capitalism
https://youtu.be/0VDOkgYpLWI
Episode 3: The state and the revolution
https://youtu.be/FbjKyQZxtu0
Episode 4: The fight for the power of the workers
https://youtu.be/rVnvr-NhDjI
Episode 0: Communism, the encounter with Trotsky
https://youtu.be/lD5QLwcSDJ8
The last one is Trotskyism, House will not like the last one.
I have not seen all of them yet. but its cool
Episode 1: Bourgeoise and the proletariat
https://youtu.be/eckwjxa0-w4
Episode 2: The market and the crisis of capitalism
https://youtu.be/0VDOkgYpLWI
Episode 3: The state and the revolution
https://youtu.be/FbjKyQZxtu0
Episode 4: The fight for the power of the workers
https://youtu.be/rVnvr-NhDjI
Episode 0: Communism, the encounter with Trotsky
https://youtu.be/lD5QLwcSDJ8
The last one is Trotskyism, House will not like the last one.
I have not seen all of them yet. but its cool
Viewpoint's new issue on imperialism is out with tons of great articles: https://www.viewpointmag.com/2018/02/01/issue-6-imperialism/
Pretty great article and people are welcome to join the thread to explain the basics https://www.resetera.com/threads/ar...e-video-game-industry’s-biggest-titles.21524/
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The mods merged a new one apparently: https://www.resetera.com/threads/the-outline-made-in-china-every-new-video-game-you-love.21553/
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Some nice graphs showing how bad the economic situation is for Americans under 35. Take a look at that college debt one in particular.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/02/young-families-median-worth-economic-recession
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/02/young-families-median-worth-economic-recession
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Bro it's like 90% libertarians. I go to a school that's known to be pretty conservative and I'm still shocked at how conservative it is.
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I'm gonna take a guess that it's also predominantly white guys.
We have a few Chinese students, but it's mostly white males. Lol
I think I'm the only black guy in the program
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It's an academic subculture with an intrinsic appeal to people with privilege, so it's not very surprising for fit to be dominated by exactly who you'd expect. Also academic Marxists ruined their cred in a lot of ways when the USSR came crashing down since they got so tied to command economics - it's going to take some time to rebuild a "respectable" heterodoxy.
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I actually tried to screenshot them on my phone but they're just slightly large enough that I can't get a whole graph on one screen without scrolling lol
Here you go: https://imgur.com/a/NvVVo
EDIT: To the article's thesis statement, we need to be careful about assuming dissatisfaction with capitalism equates to favoring socialism, or what we think socialism means (yes obviously even among us there's lots of disagreement). I'm not sure that when people poll highly for socialism they actually mean a transformation of the control of capital, the word just is too loaded with baggage in the US
We're at what could be a pivotal moment but right now education is maybe the most important task. I mean, obviously I've made arguments for reformism in the past, things like "expanding medicare" and "establishing universal income" have important material effects I support, but if we really want to make a leap I think we need to go a bit further and give people a vision of a truly public society
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Thanks, will get on it.
Regarding young peoples' preference for "socialism" I think it's clear that, despite what socialists might want, they usually mean social democracy when they say it.
Look, asking a young person to give up TV, videogames, music festivals, and general consumerism is just a step too far. The next generation of Capitalists will simply spend their free time now attempting to spin consumerism in an ethical embodiment, even so far as to call it Socialism, to assuage their own guilt and bourgeois tendencies.
Lifestylism, performance and identity are counter revolutionary.
Which brings me to:
https://acvoice.com/2012/12/02/global-capitalism-with-a-human-face/
I don't really disagree with that critique so much as I think that its too narrow in ascribing that compartmentalization to capitalism. Capitalism is more then happy to take advantage of it, but the same mechanism shows up in political relationships across all of history and, again, I really do think that physical proximity plays a role that we shouldn't ignore. It is very very easy to ignore or downplay things happening "over there", and to believe someone who says "I'm fixing the problem, trust me". They just don't affect people who affect people who affect us.
Probably similar to my first reaction to reading Society of the Spectacle
As soon as i started Reading the reply that zizek video appeared in My mind. Hahaha Zizek IS haunting me.
What do you mean by history? Consumerism is a relatively new phenomena and unique to Capitalism.
Sorry I didn't word that super well, it overlaps with a topic I was discussing with someone on Twitter last night, which is how much obfuscation and blurry information screws up any models we have of "how people treat each other".
Consumerism is a very recent phenomena, but willingness to believe that a problem happening to someone else is being dealt with because you're informationally (and often physically) distant from it is not. People don't "know" enough about if Starbucks really is behaving ethically in the sourcing of its coffee in the same way that they know if their local school board is corrupt
The obvious extrapolation here is that this is also what allows populations to go to war and justify killing each other, but that's a bit easy and I'm not entirely sure its that clean of a relationship...if this sounds inconsistent its because this is a thing I'm thinking about and working through right now
Sure, out of sight, out of mind. Though the article addresses that to a degree.
Thought the same thing while listening to NPR while running some errands. An interview with an extremist bomb mule survivor, talking about how the Taliban were animals, willing to kill civilians for political ends, had no problem going to villages not their own and taking them over...
I was just sitting there thinking "Yeah, sure, that's true but is this some type of comparison you have going on here?"
Thought the same thing while listening to NPR while running some errands. An interview with an extremist bomb mule survivor, talking about how the Taliban were animals, willing to kill civilians for political ends, had no problem going to villages not their own and taking them over...
I was just sitting there thinking "Yeah, sure, that's true but is this some type of comparison you have going on here?"
Lol that's a much faster way to put it. But I do think that anyone thinking about transformation of the current social order needs to reckon with "out of sight, out of mind". Do we shrink the scale of things so that people don't have relations with other people who are "out of sight", and what does that look like?
If we as a people are unable or unwilling (and I've got a few reasons to be unwilling) to do that, then how do we guard against exploitation?
In the context of Socialism or in the context of "Cultural Capitalism"? The latter will always require exploitation and isn't able to be reformed otherwise. The former, if there is no privatization then I don't see how there could be exploitation.
Specifically in the context of any system which forgoes a state (or states) in favor of mutual aid and negotiation in good faith. Exploitation will take the form of communities that negotiate not with the goal of meeting the needs of all parties but with leveraging disparities to gain more for "us" at the expense of "them".
As soon as side A figures out that side B needs A more than A needs B, A has power in the relationship. Either A forgoes this power or A recognizes this power to extract a more favorable result for themselves.
Its easy to forgo this power and just help your neighbor out. Its harder when you're dealing with people you have never met and have no strong personal context for. And, as we discussed slightly upthread, people like those in Nepal are going to need things from people who don't live in Nepal. In a hypothetical between socialist Nepal and socialist India (even if they aren't states, just communities of people living in different places) socialist India still has to decide that it won't take advantage of Nepal's needs to gain more for their community. Obviously they should as a socialist community that provides to each according to their needs, but will they?
(obviously states as they exist now largely do a flawed to nonexistent job of solving this problem, but at the very least the ability to institutionalize norms around negotiation is, to me, important)
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If "Group A" controls "Thing A", and has expectations of "Group B" before "Group B" can acquire "Thing A", then "Group A" has privatized "Thing A" and has assigned an exchange value to it. Meaning "Thing A" is a commodity.
If there is privatization, and there is exchange value and commodities as well as an authority that both protects the commodity and establishes its value, then there is a State.
This is a Capitalist relationship.
If there is privatization, and there is exchange value and commodities as well as an authority that both protects the commodity and establishes its value, then there is a State.
This is a Capitalist relationship.