Were there other kinds of socialist revolutions that just weren't successful? The only one I can think of is Spain.The USSR pursued a capture-the-state approach which subsequently subsumed it to the logic of state maintenance.
Were there other kinds of socialist revolutions that just weren't successful? The only one I can think of is Spain.The USSR pursued a capture-the-state approach which subsequently subsumed it to the logic of state maintenance.
Not ignoring, will respond when I'm high.
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.Diffuse and organic organization seems to work well when everyone is close neighbors.
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.What we think of as contemporary life requires the organization of people and resources on a massive scale that I do not trust to flat structures, frankly.
No, you'd be wrong.You can say that that's precisely the problem with contemporary life and maybe you'd be right
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.we should at least recognize that this then requires, basically, the complete reversal of every trend towards urbanization going on around the globe and that seems challenging
You don't seem to understand that almost every facet of life is already like this. Society is already like this.That's not just a shift in who controls labor, but a complete rearchitecting of every spatial and social configuration
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.What would you cite as examples of facets of life benefiting from independent compartmentalization and free association?
uhuh, the efficiency of government... :PMy obvious counters would be the relative efficiency of public vs private run services such as postal services and healthcare
*eyeroll*more generally how the internet is proving firsthand how pure free association fosters fascism and bigotry
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?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"?
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.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?
Were there other kinds of socialist revolutions that just weren't successful? The only one I can think of is Spain.
Were there other kinds of socialist revolutions that just weren't successful? The only one I can think of is Spain.
If we keep going I'll come back to this, its a slightly deeper question and I want to touch on some other stuff firstIt'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.
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.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 mean this is a continued argument against the unmoderation of Twitter and YouTube as they become radicalizing platforms for white nationalists.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.
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 mean, the answer is pretty self evident that different cities interact with each other all the time without having a common government.
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 cellsAs 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?
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.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.
...
"As District Justice, I will work to end mass incarceration, to disrupt the school to prison pipeline, and to prevent evictions," he said in a campaign ad.
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Refusing to grant evictions, balking at signing arrest and search warrants, and steadfastly refusing to set cash bail for crime suspects — he doesn't believe in it.
He even tweeted, "In the past two weeks, I've set bail in over a dozen cases. Not once have I imposed cash bail. Not once has this resulted in chaos, collision or calamity #endcashbail"
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Pappas believes cash bail unfairly penalizes the poor because they can't post it, but rich people can.
"To require someone who is, at that point, innocent to give the one thing we know they don't have, which is money, as a condition of their release pending the outcome of their trial is going to come across as unfair to the defendant," Pappas said.
He takes a similar stance on refusing to sign some arrest and search warrants, even though police privately grouse that he's hindering their investigations. Pappas counters that he's not a rubber stamp, but a "bulwark" in protecting the rights of suspects.
"Being that bulwark is the most essential function of a magistrate sitting there reviewing those warrants, and you're reviewing warrants, you're not just approving them. That's not the role. You review them to determine if probable cause is met," Pappas said.
...
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 powerA 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.
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.
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"?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"?
That makes sense and is largely what I was expected, I just genuinely didn't know if I was missing something elseCorrect. 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
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.
Pretty great article and people are welcome to join the thread to explain the basics https://www.resetera.com/threads/article-outsourcing-the-unseen-labor-behind-the-video-game-industry's-biggest-titles.21524/
I'm in a PhD program for economics fellas and it's super conservative. It's literally the worst.
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.
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.
We have a few Chinese students, but it's mostly white males. LolI'm gonna take a guess that it's also predominantly white guys.
Agreed.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.
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
Here you go: https://imgur.com/a/NvVVoI 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
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.
Zizek characterizes today's form of capitalism as "global capitalism with a human face", or more generally, cultural capitalism. Cultural capitalism sells an attitude, or lifestyle, as the direct result of its products.For example, think of Nike, which advertises a culture of physical achievement ("Just do it"), or the clothing line Northface, which sells clothing under the slogan "never stop exploring". Starbucks was a leader in this field, promoting "fair-trade" coffee as more than just coffee: "You are buying into something bigger than yourself. You are buying into coffee ethics….It's good coffee karma," says one of their campaigns. This is cultural capitalism at its purest, where consumers buy their own "redemption" from being only consumers. They become environmentalists, social activists, and philanthropists, a whole "culture", all expressed in one consumerist act.
Learning of inequality or injustice in the world causes an emotional response. Whether its sadness or anger, the emotional response prompts us to donate money and/or effort to ending those injustices. If you remove the emotional response, however, you remove people's desire to act. This is what Zizek believes cultural capitalism does; it "short-circuits" the emotional process by including the charitable act in the price of the consumerist act.
this short-circuit would not be a problem if the charitable act that companies include within their products were real, effective programs. In fact, it could even be an effective and efficient way to aid people. However, the current manifestation of cultural capitalism is actually detrimental to the people they claim to support. It only holds the symptoms of poverty at bay, and does not seek to address the original cause of poverty. No real, viable solutions are ever offered, but are, in fact, discouraged by the belief that one is already in place. In this way, the first-world countries can feel morally satisfied and continue to exploit the cheap labor and products of undeveloped third-world countries; "The worst slave owners were the ones who were kind to their slaves", Zizek says.
So, how do we address this problem? The proper action begins with thinking. And it is important to realize that thinking is, in itself, an action. Too often, when confronted with inequality and injustice, blind, immediate action is applauded, while thinking is condemned as cold, calculating or unfeeling.
When you buy that Northface jacket, are you also trying to buy into the outdoorsy, independent explorer persona?
Probably similar to my first reaction to reading Society of the SpectacleThat criticism by Zizek was pretty eye opening for me back when I first read it, even though I'd already swung toward socialism years prior.
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".What do you mean by history? Consumerism is a relatively new phenomena and unique to Capitalism.
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?Sure, out of sight, out of mind. Though the article addresses that to a degree.
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".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.