Discussion prior to this
Imperializt Russia wrote:Hoo boy. Lizzie, Questers, look away now.The Wolfiad wrote:Depends on the kind. Hugo Chavez-style socialism has been discredited and mass nationalisation of the means of the production stifles innovation and competition. If we're including social democracy and perhaps some forms of democratic socialism, we're getting somewhere.
In light of my changed perspective on capitalism and becoming a much harder flavour of socialist, I view social democracy/democratic socialism as a sticking plaster over the problem of capitalism. I'm not versed in "democratic socialism" at all, but social democracy is still fundamentally a capitalist society, just inefficiently spending resources to try and account for the inherent problems that capitalism will always generate. Sounds like ending capitalism would be better - as Questers point out before, I see it as hugely favourable to neoliberalism and always sought in lieu of actual socialism.
Venezuela isn't really a socialist society, and nor would any "mass nationalisation" state as the means of production would be owned by the state, not the workers. The functions of capital have been undertaken by the state. This is why the Soviet Union was fundamentally "not socialist". State-capitalist or state-socialist would be more accurate, specific terms.
This criticism isn't a new one. In fact, it's arguably a fair one; social democracy does not result in radical systemic change. I wouldn't say it's inefficiently spending resources, else by definition so would any redistributive system. It redistributes wealth and targets inequality and it works; whereas the United States went down the path of liberal capitalism, the 10 countries with the lowest poverty rates in the world are European and the ones higher up on the list are the Nordic countries, Germany etc.
A more equal society isn't bad economics. In fact, coupled with a correlation with the size of the welfare state, social mobility is found to be higher in countries with less inequality. Social mobility is a good thing and in fact what left-wingers need to be aiming to enable - the fact is people are aspirational, they want to be able to provide better for themselves and their families. That is why you get working class swing voters Essex Man who voted for Thatcher, Mondeo Man/Worcester Woman who voted for Blair, Motorway Man who voted for Cameron (twice). What they all had in common is that all thought Labour was out to limit their aspiration (except with Blair, who proved that wasn't the case), even though naturally they should have been Labour voters.
The thing is how you get there matters. Saying something 'isn't really a socialist society' is all a bit 'no true scotsman' - these different societies have aimed to apply a radically socialist program because of the context they existed in. Venezuela is a socialist country as oppose to a communist country; mass-nationalisation has long been an aspect of a socialist society and Venezuela has a mass-nationalised industry. The outcome of what they've implemented, which is socialist, is a socialist society.
Venezuela failed because it put all their eggs in one basket with oil and when that went, they failed because they uprooted the economy through failed state planning that turned profitable companies into unprofitable ones, something that it was done in the name of equality - after all, taking companies out of the hands of the few and into the many is a good thing. They face hyperinflation, major goods shortages and is in recession. The thing is this is a consistent theme in every socialist or communist country - name me one that hasn't tried to implement market reforms in some form. Most end up better off overall as a result, though with mixed benefits to the wider population (Russia I acknowledge failed due to shock therapy for instance, China had a generally positive experience). The only exception is North Korea, but I'll admit that arguing North Korea is communist in any other aspect other than economic is fallacious, so we'll forget that.
A socialist society isn't something that's just implemented. It's an outcome. But the fact is various attempts have been made to create that outcome. No one comes into power promising a socialist revolution aiming to make it like any other country that tried to get to that socialist society - they do sincerely try. Chavez thought he sincerely succeeded. He didn't, like all others. And the outcome after is almost always bad - shock therapy or market reforms, which means we end up with countries with economic models too liberal that then destroys it once again, followed by a fall into crony capitalism (China, Russia, the former Eastern Bloc, several Latin American countries etc; some, like China, benefit from this, others like Russia suffer). European social democracies don't face this issue - they are vulnerable to trends of the global market, but overall still remain better off than socialist countries who also are often vulnerable to global market trends too. Objectively, a socialised market economy seems to work. It's understandable, because no socialist economy has provided a profit motive for companies and enabled the principle of diminishability, the principle of rivalry, principle of excludability and the principle of rejectability under a sustained period of time.
Of course, you can say that they were all wrong and you have the great ideal solution. In which case I put it to anyone who does: prove you do. It's also big to say you have the thing that all those who preceded you - I think Jordan Peterson (who I don't like because he's a bit of a transphobe tbh
) described it as 'arrogant' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrIQF2sK3cc) and it's fair to see why. Imperializt Russia wrote:The Wolfiad wrote:Doesn't work.
Based on what, exactly? There is a wealth of anarchist literature (anarcho-capitalism doesn't count) dating over centuries and with some prominent writers and thinkers still working in the field today - Noam Chomsky being the most famous, I imagine.
Anarchism is, I admit, a very loaded term. Partly generally, partly manufactured by capitalists to dissuade people from the idea maliciously.
"Libertarian socialism" would be a "PC" way of putting anarchism. The abolition of hierarchies and capitalist hierarchies and systems. In their place are a series of self-managing communities. They still have rules, and laws, and even courts and security services, but the latter two are not entrenched institutions as they are in our modern societies - they form when needed and dissolve when concluded. There is no societal class, no inherent hierarchy. No "monopoly on the use of force", not because no-one may use force, but because there is no special group who has the sole right of force.
Force is that which the society uses to police itself.
The best example of an anarchist society would be revolutionary Catalonia. Orwell wrote very fondly of this time when he was in Catalonia for the revolution, and it coloured much of his political ideology. As many as two million Catalan, and fighters and thinkers from Europe and America formed non-hierarchical self-managing societies with healthcare provision, education, agriculture, industry and defence forces. Of course, they were eventually defeated militarily by the Nazi-backed fascists.
If we had a capitalist economy where the workers bought out the industry, is it still a capitalist society? Yes. Private property is in the means of production, it just has a different owner. Workers still try to enrich themselves, there's still luck-based inequality and there is still competition within the economy. To avert that, you need a state: that's a fundamental truth. Factories in Anarchist Catalonia were still run on capitalist lines as a result of this/ The exception was in agriculture, where the CNT imposed collectivization, which failed. Inequality between collectives was also an issue; one collective could not impose equal wages to another, or ensure that those living in one collective are equal to another. Again, you need a state to be able to impose regulations on a large scale.
We also then get to the problem that, inevitably, there are people who will want a state (like the socialists and communists noting the limitations of anarchy) and the weaknesses of anarchist ideology (constant deliberation, lack of central authority, a fundamental opposition to hierarchy etc) means that any statist ideology, fascism or not, will triumph over the anarchists. Additionally, anarchism needs to be established when there exists an appetite for revolutionary change and time after time (i.e. Ukraine after the Russian Revolution) that anarchism is always defeated by another force.Anarchism is simply incompatible with human nature, certainly more so communism - hierarchies inevitably form and are needed to maintain an organisation or a society. Rojava is perhaps the best example of a, at least for now (though more libertarian socialist than anarchist), successful anarchist country. Water scarcity and lack of electricity will need to be addressed and they also lack the infrastructure to export their oil reserves, plus they're surrounded by enemies who want to kill them. They do have the benefit of American support and do make up 55% of Syria's entire GDP, which admittedly reflects more on Syria more than anything.
Still, we are yet to know as to whether a state (if I can call it that) that, in the long-run, wishes to abolish the police, has 1/3 of all enterprise controlled by workers (which, as the Soviets found out, is not necessarily a good thing if you want to mobilise the economy to increase output and productivity) and does not have taxes, will be sustainable. My view is that you'll be as disappointed as the Trotskyists were when the USSR became a 'degenerated worker's state'; when they do not have an enemy to unify against (assuming they survive), factionalism will emerge and I can guarantee you the faction that wins will be a statist one, as has always happened. It will then open up and integrate with the world the best it can, thus accepting some aspects of the market economy to enable investment and growth in the economy, in order to ensures its survival.
Imperializt Russia wrote:The Wolfiad wrote:Problem with Leninism was that planned economies weren't good at innovating or utilising resources to as good an extent as the market. Marxists were also wrong in the fact that they believe their system would triumph after some 'final crisis of capitalism', which never materialised and if it does then Leninism is already dead.
Marx supposedly wrote that the western, industrialised states should undergo revolutions to abolish the capitalist class and form socialist societies. This is because, fundamentally, there are means of production to seize in the first place. The functions of society are there to be changed.
In countries that have had "socialist revolution", this was not the case. Universally poorly-industrialised, if at all, formerly feudal peasant societies. Hence why I said that Leninism (and by extension, Stalinism) is very specific to the nature of early 1900s Russia, and also eastern Europe. And specifications further were developed, such as "Hoxhaism" and "Marxist-Leninist-Moaism" in China.
They were not Marxist societies, they were inspired by Marxist literature, and modified it to an authoritarian state centrally planning how to get the means of production for the workers to control, and never transitioned to the "worker control" bit, through corruption or whatever else.
The "centrally-planned economies aren't good innovators or resource users" varies from being a peculiar claim to at times, downright hilarious.
The corporations that produce products for the market, are all centrally-planned, very hierarchical affairs. They are themselves microcosms of the popular convention of "socialist economy".
The further issue with "innovation" is, innovation in what? The internet, computing, satellite communications, and the smartphone were all government research programmes with military aspirations that were later adapted for commercial purposes, and commodified.
What did Apple innovate when it produced the iPod? The iPhone? The iMac?
Packaged products and aesthetic design.
What is the "value" in this?
(above point was merely intended as a thought game)
The value in it was that it was more advanced than Nokia bricks, which were more advanced than banana phones, which were more advanced than the big multi-thousand pound phones, which were more advanced than your landline. A competitor has an incentive to make an innovation as if they don't they will not make a profit and their workers won't get paid. Whereas a government bureau only has an incentive to carry on operating, fulfill it's government-dictated duties and ensure their workers get paid. If the world was organised into a series of socialist countries, we'd probably all have top of the line landlines, but no mobile phones. Here's the thing: how can bureaucracy or a central planner know as much about market conditions as a participant in the market? The Soviet Union for instance produced many goods that weren't used, like Ladas for people with one leg.
The Soviet Union also did have workers control early within their history, but the reason why worker self-management was abolished for one-man management was that there was a lack of infrastructure, a disruption to production and communication, the fact that it was insufficient to provide the needs of the Soviet economy, the existence of anti-communists in Soviet societies and thus the people and the need to produce military goods to defend themselves against capitalist power. To put it simply, it didn't work and there was a need to introduce that along side labor discipline, higher pay for specialists and managers. I guess this leads into companies apparently being ran like a central planning committee is ridiculous - a central planning committee has a monopoly on the entirety of an economy, they do not have to worry about competition whatsoever. The existence of hierarchy in both corporations and the Soviet Union is meaningless, it exists/existed because it is the most efficient means of ensuring productivity.
The development of the internet, computing, satellite communications and the smartphone weren't exclusively government programmes - in the case of all of them the private sector became involved (the inter and they pretty much dominate the development of all of them today. Eight companies manufacture satellites, several companies across the world manufacture parts for computers, smartphone development is driven by competition between Android and Apple and the continuous development of internet such as the surpassing of flash are motivated by competition. Really you've highlighted the strength of a mixed economy as opposed to a planned one - government contracts can be put up to ensure products can be created for the public good and the private sector can develop the best product. There are exceptions where this doesn't happen; there are market failures. It's why we have the NHS. But those exceptions are few, for the most part it is essential to have a private sector.
Also, why did Russia have the Russian Revolution but France and the UK didn't? It's because there were alternatives that could present themselves that were more efficient within their contexts. Thus arguing 'well it wasn't fair because communism emerged in a feudal society' isn't an argument, it reflects how that were a lack of options and how communism is only somewhat viable if things are terribly bad. Britain would turn out to be a better run country in the 60s under Wilson then the Soviet Union under Brezhnev.
Imperializt Russia wrote:The Wolfiad wrote:The Soviet collapsed due to inefficiencies within planned economies and China evolved into the economic system it did for the same reason. Revolutionary Catalonia was also pretty internationalist all things considered, I don't think much could had been down to avert their downfall.
The Soviet Union and China collapsed, in large part, because of the economic pressure imposed on them by the capitalist western world. I promise my tinfoil hat is not on.
The western support of Islamist Mujahideen groups in Afghanistan in the 1980s, was partly because "muh socialist Afghanistan", but more significantly, an effort to deny Russia the "use" of Afghanistan as a gateway to the Middle East, where the capitalist west had a significant foothold; Israel, Iraq (at times), Iran (at times), Saudi Arabia etc.
It's one of the dominant ideological reasons behind the Vietnam War - to isolate China and the Soviet Union together, and in an effort to provoke a conflict between the two, by propping up a series of hard-economic right, capitalist states around them as buffers.
Communism ideologically wants to overthrow all opposing systems in the world and result in tyranny. Of course the West and other countries were going to band against the Soviet Union. But the US didn't collapse because it went into Vietnam. Perhaps things would have been different is the Menshevik Defencists were dominant in Revolutionary Russia or if Korensky wasn't overthrown, but the reality was that the Soviet Union sought to impose their ideology on several countries regardless of whether it was desired or not. If that fault results in economic weakness, then where's the argument? Besides, this isn't fully the case: the Soviet Union faced a continuous period of stagnation from 1964–1982. Perestroika was introduced and that failed because it was half-hearted. If they did introduce any meaningful liberalisations, then in the short-term there would have been unemployment as inefficient state enterprises would have closed, so politically it was inconvenient.
Imperializt Russia wrote:The Wolfiad wrote:It's a problem within the system. Markets seem to be the best for wealth generation, but there is a problem with the actors within it. It doesn't mean tear down the system.
Markets are good for wealth generation. Wealth generation for who? The capitalist class. The 67(?) richest people have the same wealth as the 3.5 billion poorest. The 100(?) richest could end global poverty with their wealth, four times over.
What is the point of wealth generation? Well, the generation of more wealth. What is done with this wealth? Well, a little goes into taxes, which sometimes funds social programmes, and most of it goes... nowhere, just floats around the capitalist class, not even doing anything for them.
What is the point?
Because living in the UK, France, Belgium, the US, Australia in 1987 and any other Western country is far better than living in Cuba, the Soviet Union or the Eastern Bloc in the year. Capitalism has many immoral and unethical aspects about it, but some of those are necessary. The wealthy will always have political power and will always have the upper hand, thus compromises have to be made in making society fairer. That's politics. What's even more immoral than that is a system that is based around the utilisation of violence and fear to rework a country to a different society that has always failed. The alternative is that we all end up poor in a society that is supposedly meant to be an utopia, like every country that has ever tried radical leftism.
I haven't addressed any of your points concerning literature or intellectual figures because Marxism is only of use to historiography and being very intelligent does not = being right. Literature also doesn't necessarily translate into feasibility, whether economically or societally. I can argue that a libertarian society will only be one if we're all free and we can all act as empowered actors in society, but you know that will not be the case. Still, their literature says it will be the case. Ergo, that is true. Marxism was discredited for several reasons, but foremost because there wasn't a final crisis of capitalism to bring about a revolution. Marx was wrong. And his ideology should be discredited with all that done. Kondratiev was killed because his analysis contradicted Marxist theory that capitalism will face a final crisis; what happens instead is that it goes into decline and then rebuilds. When it went into decline in the 70s, it rebuilt itself in the 90s and arguably resulted in greater inequality and a larger concentration of power in the hands of global corporations, plus a reversal of worker's rights (and thus after the Great Recession wage growth) due to the weakening of trade unions (which are redundant today anyway).
Two things to end on:
First, I find it painfully ironic that it always seems to be socialism and communism that faces a final crisis where they end up transitioning into crony capitalist states, a process that emerges likely due to the existence of a large state bureaucracy that ensures cronyism will exist when capitalism comes in, especially when according to Marxist ideology capitalism is meant to be collapsing.
Second, if an engineer produces car called, say, 'Bestcar', that works great in theory in terms of fuel efficiency and in all the promotional material says the car can go at 300 MPH, but sadly blows up when you put petrol in it, am I going to take other engineers seriously who then say that wasn't really how 'Bestcar' was meant to work and that we should try it again but just a bit differently (whilst basically keeping the car the same in terms of the overall build)? Because that's what it feels like when radical leftists tell me to try their brand new form of racial leftism. No matter what you say I'll always say putting petrol inside that car is a bad, bad idea.
