Sorry, I'm not paternalistic, I'm not an elitist.
Jesus Christ. Post labor, post scarcity, individualism....
You're describing Communism.
You'd know that if you had any idea that you weren't talking out of your rear end.
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I didn't realize that the LateStageCapitalism subreddit loves communism
- Thread starter Trojita
- Start date
Sorry, I'm not paternalistic, I'm not an elitist.
Jesus Christ. Post labor, post scarcity, individualism....
You're describing Communism.
You'd know that if you had any idea that you weren't talking out of your rear end.
I don't know about exceptionally evil paranoid tyrant, but at least one genocide took place under his watch off the top of my head. And like the deliberate starvation that took place at some gulags, it seems like it was pretty intentional.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor#Genocide_question
There's honestly so much incorrect here that I struggle to understand how you came to the conclusion that tankies are bad when you're agreeing with half their points. Was Katyn also carried out by the Nazis and did Hungary and Czechoslovakia deserve their beat downs?
I'll focus on Stalin. I believe House is more knowledgeable about the Mao era than I am.
I don't think Stalin was a mustache twirling cartoon villain who wanted to take over the world. I think a sober analysis of his life shows him to be a paranoid and ruthless pragmatist, as well as an egotist and a brutal man. He genuinely believed in communism but he came to hate people in general and believed that it was necessary for the dumb Russian commoners to have a replacement for the tsar. He didn't actually like the cult of personality but he used it because he felt it was necessary. There were times he stopped it - like that one children's book that exaggerated his life - and he made fun of it in private but he still enlarged his own person because he thought only he was sure about the correct path to communism. He could flip on a dime, which is why he was the "gray blur". First he could buddy up with Bukharin, then he could kill him.
He wasn't godlike or all powerful. He didn't always get what he wanted. He respected when some people would talk back to him (Zhukov) unless they got too popular (Zhukov). He tried to institute democracy until he decided it would work against him. He didn't have de jure dictatorial powers but he did have de facto dictatorial powers. Sure he got elected to be the leader every time and he put up some mild protest, but everyone still voted for him because they were scared out of their minds. Sure he hated having that buzzer to tell people to stop clapping. But they still clapped because they were scared out of their minds!
Did Stalin personally sign off on everyone who got purged and executed? No. Did he still unleash the chaos of the purges, the show trials, and so forth? Yes. He still signed off on executions and population transfers and killed people for disagreeing with him even if they weren't actually a threat (Trotsky, Bukharin). He still enforced the one party state, gutted the army out of paranoia, cracked down on art that didn't fit the propaganda he wanted (or others did it because they wanted to suck up to him and he didn't stop it - see The Great Friendship), reversed much of the Lenin era social progress, supported Lysenkoism, and so on. And this is all just scratching the surface.
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They are of course hard questions to answer. Having a population that is all highly educated is key. The people in those nations mustn't become complacent when the quality of their way of life becomes threatened by greed or poisonous ideologies. Iceland did something we couldn't (didn't) when they went after the banks.
Things that are good about Capitalism:
It allows people ownership over property and their individual labor. These are things people like and that people actively value.
It allows for people to create new enterprises and try to make them work as a business. Some will work. Some will fail. If someone thinks they have a good idea, they're free to try and pursue that idea. (within reason of course, all things have some amount of regulation)
Businesses take inputs (labor, materials, etc.) and leverage them to produce outputs, with the desire to make a profit in the process. This process adds value to the raw inputs when making them into a product or service, which is why in Europe you have the "Value Added Tax". Capitalism encourages people to keep trying to find new ways of providing things to people that they desire. Businesses are ultimately service industries. They exist to serve their customers. If no customers exist, they cease to exist, which is why many businesses will try and pressure regulators to give them a captive market and force them to use it. (And again, this doesn't mean all regulation is bad, we force people to get all sorts of insurance because we know that if we don't force them to, they won't do it because they don't think they'll need it because people are generally very bad judges of many things that they don't understand!)
The reason the alliance exists is because without it, there is not a majority in favor of Right-Wing economic policies. Therefore in order to enact said policies, they have to draw the battle lines on social issues instead of economic ones, because it's the only way to get a coalition large enough to win. Using the US as an example. https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publications/2016-elections/political-divisions-in-2016-and-beyond
If you govern primarily on right wing economics as a Republican, you will lose. You can't capture enough of the voters to win. This is why Trump, during the campaign, governed as a Le Pen-type, promising to "drain the swamp", feigning support of liberal economic social policies, and other blatant BS. This falsehood, alongside the racism, allowed him to win "populist" votes. Which are predominantly white and rural, and overrepresented in value in the US political system. (A reason Obama hammered Clinton on NAFTA during the primaries despite not actually being against free trade.) And it's thus this specific flip-flop in office, governing as a standard republican, which is most likely to hurt him.
The thing is- this tactic of using social conservatism to accrue power and leverage it? It's hardly unique to "capitalism." Many people are just assholes.
It allows people ownership over property and their individual labor. These are things people like and that people actively value.
It allows for people to create new enterprises and try to make them work as a business. Some will work. Some will fail. If someone thinks they have a good idea, they're free to try and pursue that idea. (within reason of course, all things have some amount of regulation)
Businesses take inputs (labor, materials, etc.) and leverage them to produce outputs, with the desire to make a profit in the process. This process adds value to the raw inputs when making them into a product or service, which is why in Europe you have the "Value Added Tax". Capitalism encourages people to keep trying to find new ways of providing things to people that they desire. Businesses are ultimately service industries. They exist to serve their customers. If no customers exist, they cease to exist, which is why many businesses will try and pressure regulators to give them a captive market and force them to use it. (And again, this doesn't mean all regulation is bad, we force people to get all sorts of insurance because we know that if we don't force them to, they won't do it because they don't think they'll need it because people are generally very bad judges of many things that they don't understand!)
The unholy alliance of Big Business and Social Conservatism is very much a thing, but you misunderstand why this occurs. This is not about class solidarity- that's already impossible because many of the working class won't ally with minorities because they're just straight up racist and actively want to have some form of dominance over others. White Union labor was never a source of enlightened tolerance, but they voted Dem due to the support they got from their elected officials. The combination of Civil Rights passing, globalization weakening their negotiating positions and Reagan further weakening those positions led to the slow exodus of the White Working Class from the Democratic party. Not the working class as a whole though- the Black/Hispanic/etc. working classes stayed put!
The reason the alliance exists is because without it, there is not a majority in favor of Right-Wing economic policies. Therefore in order to enact said policies, they have to draw the battle lines on social issues instead of economic ones, because it's the only way to get a coalition large enough to win. Using the US as an example. https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publications/2016-elections/political-divisions-in-2016-and-beyond
If you govern primarily on right wing economics as a Republican, you will lose. You can't capture enough of the voters to win. This is why Trump, during the campaign, governed as a Le Pen-type, promising to "drain the swamp", feigning support of liberal economic social policies, and other blatant BS. This falsehood, alongside the racism, allowed him to win "populist" votes. Which are predominantly white and rural, and overrepresented in value in the US political system. (A reason Obama hammered Clinton on NAFTA during the primaries despite not actually being against free trade.) And it's thus this specific flip-flop in office, governing as a standard republican, which is most likely to hurt him.
The thing is- this tactic of using social conservatism to accrue power and leverage it? It's hardly unique to "capitalism." Many people are just assholes.
You specifically quote half my post and leave out the part where I specifically say I dropped the link pretty much for the PICTURES. Jesus.
Again, I'm not interesting in spending half an hour drawing up and argument and citing references, sorry. Your opinions about Stalin put you very much in the minority.
You have not justified this any more than anyone on the opposite side has justified that communism inevitably leads to horribly repressive socieites. I think abolition of slavery and the death penalty, environmental protections, greater political power for the working class, stronger democratic representation, etc. are all possible under a capitalist framework (I'm not very confident at all in abolishing nuclear weapons).
The relevant further context is that they are historians of these times and places, and I'm letting you know that people that have literally dedicated their entire lives to studying these times and places, and just as importantly have been trained specifically in historical methods and thinking, do indeed claim that even if the West has exaggerated some traits of these places there were very serious problems that shouldn't be overlooked.
That bad isn't not bad.
This is true for essentially every historical topic of note. You're getting your BA in history so you should be aware at this point that ultimately questions like this don't lead to choice paralysis, but instead reading the historiography and understanding what are the dominant and reasonable takes.
I don't study either place, so I can't really point you in that direction. What I do know is that the best take for something like this is understanding what historians as an expert community think and say. Very few, outside of China, are actually apologists as opposed to people simply arguing that some things have been exaggerated.
That said I think numbers, and I say that as a very quantitatively focused person, aren't the best way to get at questions like this anyway.
People read bad history all the time. I've never heard of that book, but it looks like it was published by Random House. People should be very wary of anything not published by an academic press.
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Of course socialism will appeal to the young, in socialist countries, our neighboring country Syria is extremely socialist, you get free education, healthcare and public transport. My friends there manage to live a decent life, get married and own a house with a 100/150$ a month wage. While here in Lebanon you can't do any of that on a wage that's seven times higher.
European countries that manage to regulate their free market and introduce good socialist, pro labor laws are what I see as the answer, a balance.
European countries that manage to regulate their free market and introduce good socialist, pro labor laws are what I see as the answer, a balance.
It was so successful that Mao lost out in a power struggle against the Stalinist.
People don't starve and society doesn't collapse from having too much food.
All famines are man made.
People who aren't dictators don't have any semblance of obstruction completely liquidated.
I very specifically didn't ask you to spend half an hour doing that. Did you read what I said in that quote? I said it's better to use no sources than bad ones.
Also you should know that it's impossible to remove a source from its context. It doesn't matter what you're using the source for, the context remains. That's exactly what I was talking about with reading the archives.
I'm assuming you haven't read what I said if you're calling me a Stalin apologist. Where did I ever say anything like that in this thread?
Maybe don't go right for the personal attacks.
I'm stepping back from the Stalin debate, as i have bitten off more than I can chew. Sources corroborate the fact that there were Trotskyist attempts made against his rule, and, in a historical discussion, focusing on one man is less appealing to me over focusing on the historical processes that were occurring at every level that led to the policy decisions of the USSR. Like every other historical actor, Stalin and the USSR were flawed.
On Mao I'm still holding my point, but whoever made the point that this is in the realm of historians, not the laymen, you're right. As an aspiring historian, setting the record straight is kinda what I like to do.
The problem with saying communism doesn't require authoritarianism rule is that it flies in the face of history. The early American settlers were, for all intents and purposes, communists. However, the problems that inexorably plague any implementation of communism reared its ugly head, and the settlers moved over to what you can consider capitalism, in order to survive.
Using this example, even on a small scale communism collapses, and without a regime to enforce those principles, it collapsed at a much more rapid pace.
Ultimately, communism isn't compatible with the human condition. Without authority, it's ripe for exploitation at the cost of society. Without USSR or Mao Zedong's strong arm policies, communism would have been a footnote in history instead of what we consider it now. Communism simply can't exist long term without a government imposing it.
Again, communism isn't monolithic and doesn't explicitly require a post-labor and post-scarcity society if you want to go stateless.
For a communist society to exist within a more traditional and structured society you need the technology to enable post-labor and post-scarcity.
Post-labor, in case you are confused again, is the completely removal of the need for human labor to produce the means of comfortable living. Complete automation of all construction, food production, energy production, sanitation, transportation, etc.
I don't think this means too much. I'd say this is more or less par and parcel to what Capitalism is. The fact that under the logic of Capitalism that Capitalism is a good thing isn't a great argument for Capitalism in itself. This is why people need to read Weber. Regardless of if you agree with his mechanism, the subjectivity of Capitalism is an obviously important part of what it is. Understanding this subjectivity as a phenomenon instead of assuming Capitalism is somehow some natural thing is important, just like it's important to think of all historical developments in terms of their social and intellectual contexts.
In feudalism people actively liked and valued the great chain of being. That's why peasant revolts were always couched in the language of the lord betraying his position in that chain.
China was vastly underdeveloped and relied on the USSR economically, yeah.
Sure, but which man? Mao? Or the thousand year's of lineages that had left China in a slump? Mao's collectivist policies, at least in the short term of the 50's and 60's produced more food than peasants had ever eaten before, when nature allowed it.
that's good haha!
The problem is you, and I'm honestly not trying to be mean about this, as a lay person are attacking the legitimacy of historians as an intellectual community through "setting the record straight," and there's a lot of theoretical problems with understanding your take as doing this in some platonically correct way, in a way that involves dismissing actual historians. And I'm not even talking about myself here, I'm talking about demeaning "otherwise reliable historians" because they don't agree with your opinion.
It's great you want to be a historian, it really is. But you need to recognize that if you're in the process of getting your BA you aren't there yet. On that note, it's not exactly the easiest journey...
Hey kirblar, remember last time we had an argument with graphs and stuff? Anyway,
Actually capitalism is entirely built on the idea that you don't own your individual labour unless you are a capitalist yourself. Also, socialism doesn't preclude personal property. It precludes privately-owned capital. People can still have a house and car and boat and jetski and whatever else. They just can't own other people's labour. Seems like a good deal honestly.
I appreciate the macroecon refresher, but nothing about innovation or progress is incompatible with socialism.
I think we are essentially saying the same thing, but your understanding of it is ideological and mine is materialist. I mean, you agree that owners of capital use racism and other discrimination to leverage the working class against its own interests. But you somehow think that those same owners of capital dump billions of dollars into racist propaganda... for fun?
Because if you think that poor people are just automatically inherently irredeemably racist, then why does capital seem to have such a vested interest in promoting racism? Seems like wasted money to me.
Who benefits from right wing economic policy? The rich. That means that (like I said) the rich are incentivized to promote non-class-based antagonisms like racism, homophobia, misogyny and so on, in order - like you just said - to convince part of the working class to vote for pro-capital economic policy.
As I also said I appreciate that these forms of discrimination have existed throughout history. But you'll also notice that all widely read socialist theory is antiracist and feminist. Because under capitalism, those bigotries become effective tools with which the very rich can manipulate the masses.
Actually capitalism is entirely built on the idea that you don't own your individual labour unless you are a capitalist yourself. Also, socialism doesn't preclude personal property. It precludes privately-owned capital. People can still have a house and car and boat and jetski and whatever else. They just can't own other people's labour. Seems like a good deal honestly.
I appreciate the macroecon refresher, but nothing about innovation or progress is incompatible with socialism.
I think we are essentially saying the same thing, but your understanding of it is ideological and mine is materialist. I mean, you agree that owners of capital use racism and other discrimination to leverage the working class against its own interests. But you somehow think that those same owners of capital dump billions of dollars into racist propaganda... for fun?
Because if you think that poor people are just automatically inherently irredeemably racist, then why does capital seem to have such a vested interest in promoting racism? Seems like wasted money to me.
Who benefits from right wing economic policy? The rich. That means that (like I said) the rich are incentivized to promote non-class-based antagonisms like racism, homophobia, misogyny and so on, in order - like you just said - to convince part of the working class to vote for pro-capital economic policy.
As I also said I appreciate that these forms of discrimination have existed throughout history. But you'll also notice that all widely read socialist theory is antiracist and feminist. Because under capitalism, those bigotries become effective tools with which the very rich can manipulate the masses.
This is revisionist history. Yes, more food was produce then ever before in Mao's China, but it wasn't being fed to the peasants. They were working on the fields for all their work to be exported to somewhere else. In the end, peasants had to form illegal marketplaces in order to be able to feed themselves.
Its a good thing that is a LONG way away from now because todays population is absolutely not yet ready for such things. We would tear ourselves apart screaming about 'evil communism' and 'lazy minorities' and 'welfare' and the like instead of all living comfortable lives of luxury.
This is disingenuous. All of them had prior experience in politics and/or the military before becoming President. Trump has neither.
Communism is monolithic. It is an entire way of life on a global scale and is a completely separate mode of production from the current/"traditional" society.
You're trying to spin garbage Liberal techno-utopianism babble as Socialism.
It's not.
Stop.
I know a lot of young people who genuinely think communism is the way to go after Trump. It's just frustrated gesturing from a group of people who feel put down and disrespected by society. I wouldn't worry too much about it. They know that voting blue is the best way to a brighter future, and a lot of them have started attending Democratic Socialists of America meetings. They'll grow up.
Look, dude, I just posted a link with some pictures and specifically stated that. I honestly don't know shit about the dailymall and I'm not writing a paper on it, so I didn't research that much. If you want to argue the pictures are invalid, go ahead and make the argument and I'll apologize for posting a link with fake photographs. Insisting "I think your source sucks so it is invalid" doesn't cut it. It's like people that say "CNN is fake news, give me a real source".
I think since you were replying to my posts back to Torres and arguing against me, I confused a few of your posts together. My bad. That said you still seem to be arguing on the "Stalin not that bad" side. Saying that is a minority opinion isn't a personal attack.
Correct me if you're arguing something else.
Not the USSR, but the Stalinist wing of the Chinese Party. There were sectors of the Party that wanted to organize China similarly to how the USSR was organized economically. Mao had broke with them considerably.
They were also the target of the Cultural Revolution and, eventually, won that political clash as well with Deng ascending to power.
No it doesn't. History can't be easily used to make statements like this. This is the problem with lay people "using" history in their arguments. Making inferences about the essential nature of things using historical thinking is very difficult stuff that requires a strong theoretical underpinning.
Besides the fact that this is nonsense, I'd highly recommend you don't just act like articles from random Forbes contributors, or even actual journalists, are good history.
This isn't a good example. Besides the fact that the history and interpretation are totally off in your one example, you can't just generalize all willy nilly.
This is an incredibly strong claim to be making based on one random guy's assertions.
Communism by its very nature is variable and adaptive. One such variation is techno-communism, another is anarcho-communism (as wrong as it is).
What you call "liberal techno-utopianism" is techno-communism. It is socialist by its nature. It is post-labor, post-scarcity, post-capital, and truly egalitarian. And it all works within the structure of a state.
A lot of First Nations people lived in communitarian societies too, until those 17th century "communist" settlers showed up and started killing them all
My guy, I didn't mean that as a personal attack. I assumed since you used the daily mail you were British and aware that it's main use is as toilet paper. That said you need to not take stuff like this personally. Someone pointed out that you used a bad source. Maybe think about why that is instead of getting overly defensive in support of something you acknowledge that you "don't know shit about."
It's not just that I think this, it's that the daily mail is very widely regarded as absolute trash. That's just in popular discourse of course. Actual historians would hardly even give it that much legitimacy.
Again, you've admitted you don't know the source, why go to bat for it? Sources aren't good until proven otherwise. They are always to be interrogated. That's the core of the historian's job.
Based on what specifically? The part where I agreed with your sentiment?
Let's not beat around the bush, most people understand calling someone, or implying that they are, an apologist for Stalin or Mao is an insult. This isn't just a minority opinion, but one that's commonly understood to be morally wrong.
I've specifically called him a bad person in this thread. So yes I am. Good argumentation is important, one doesn't get a pass for having a thesis I agree with.
But you do own your labor! You are free to sell your labor to employers on the market! Or not! It's up to you! My employer does not own my labor. I can quit at any time. I'm not in a military contract. This is a problem with Communism/Socialism, as collective ownership of the means of production inevitably means everyone's labor is considered to be under state control. This is why the authoritarianism is necessary.
There will be less innovation and progress when people have less incentive to innovate. Profit is a great motivator for many people, they like making money! We've seen in the UBI experiments being run in Africa that many of the people receiving funds have used that money to invest and expand in business operations- hiring a helper, buying new materials, etc.
No, they absolutely dump billions into propaganda to gain more power. But people's susceptibility to that has nothing to do with the structure of an economic system.
I feel the same way - I'm not a fan of great man theory, and I try to understand how the USSR worked outside of just the dictatorship, how material conditions led to the warped formation of its government and so forth.
But if you're serious about becoming a historian, I would implore you to ignore Grover Furr.
I don't think this issue is settled history. There is a real battle occurring to control the narrative on Mao's legacy, I don't think this assertion is misplaced. I apologize for demeaning them, but I have to be honest, you see the methodology behind the way people achieve the numbers they do, and it's hard not to do so.
I feel like you can't really use this as an example of anything? Yeah, the entrenched bureaucracy won, this isn't super surprising.
But the famines were going to occur regardless, the policies put into place were meant to curb as much of the damage as possible.
Again, my brand socialism is leagues apart from the socialism we saw in the 1900's. I don't have a stake in defending this other than trying to derive truth. But, to pretend these issues are settled is disingenuous. Big picture-wise, these regimes tended towards failure for a lot of reasons, I'm in agreement there.
"I have spent many years researching this and similar questions and I have yet to find one crime that Stalin committed." yikes, point noted.
Yes, they do, and they pay you some fraction of the value of your labour in exchange for giving it to him.
Uh
Sounds like what you're saying is even when they don't have to work to survive, people innovate and build things. I'm not sure that's proof that capitalism drives innovation.
Maybe, when people's basic needs for security and dignity are decommodified, people will be more able to pursue what they're passionate about or interested in. Maybe a socialist society would actually lead to more innovation because people aren't locked into doing shit that will make them money.
Oh, that's another thing. Some tiny sliver of the world's population owns half of everything. If we distributed work in a way that didn't ultimately serve that tiny group of people, we could (presumably, assuming perfect efficiency) work half as much for the same standard if living. That sounds like a recipe for more innovation, not less.
The point isn't that people aren't susceptible, it's that the system we live in inherently incentivizes the rich to exploit that susceptibility as hard as they possibly can for material gain.
Meanwhile, you live in a global capitalist society with injustice, poverty, war, mass destruction of nature, global warming, trade wars, government/corporation collusion etc...
Everyday you wake up and exist in horribly unjust society but seem totally fine about it. Yet get riled up about people writing stuff on an Internet forum.
I personally like how these threads inevitably progress from "No True Communist" to "But Stalin wasn't really all that bad."
It's almost like different people say different things, and it's probably unfair to act like this is a contradiction for the people who've never stated the latter.
Frankly you can hate communism all you want, but it's dishonest to act like saying communism hasn't happened is a no true Scotsman. Communism is a prescriptive label, it has a specific meaning. The terms set about in that definition have never been achieved.
Which ones? I'm not too familiar with older Native American societies, but they were largely hunter-gatherer societies with no economies. On top of that, their cultures were incredibly diverse where the gamut ran from tribes warring, stealing property, taking slaves to having no concept of personal property.
I voluntarily provide my time and effort to them in exchange for money. I am free to stop doing this at any time. When you work for an employer, you are voluntarily renting yourself out, they do not own you any more than I own the McDonalds I grab a midnight snack from when I buy a hamburger.
People are going to drive innovation when they believe they can profit from it. We'll never be able to have everyone pursue their passions because we will still need people to grow crops, make food, design airplanes, etc. And sure, some people love agriculture, some love making food, and some love designing airplanes, but a whole heck of a lot of other people are doing those things to make money!
There's a lot of problems with essentializing about native peoples. Most obviously we don't want to drudge a conception of the noble savage back up.
That said acting like native peoples had no economies is ridiculous, of course they had economies all human societies have economies.
You are quite right to be cautious of saying "native people were" and universalizing traits to them based on a conception of specific groups though.
Since what I actually want to say will probably get me banned or warned, I just want to say, as someone whose grandparents fled China during Mao's reign, that you are completely wrong.
The numbers on food production don't support that though.
I apologize if I minimize the real suffering during those turbulent times man, that's not my intention.
Late Stage Capitalism is pretty interesting because the mods seem to be fairly hardcore tankie types but the anti-capitalist subject matter appeals to the more moderate liberal DemSocs in the Reddit userbase. So you get relatively common criticisms of US domestic policies combined with some really edgy dictator apologia and bad economics sprinkled in. Most of the other leftist subs either come down hard on one side or the other.
