Not completely, no. The more fundamental question I am trying to ask is this: It sounds like you’re saying Biden is bad because we need to convert to communism and he’s capitalist and so you can’t support him regardless. Right? Or no?
And so I’m saying, if you’re saying capitalism is so bad we need to replace it, then what are you wanting to replace it with, that any leader who doesn’t want to replace it with is unworthy of any support? I realize that’s a very very broad question which may not even have a single specific-at-the-outset answer, but I tried to narrow it down by asking, like what country would be the model? Or would we be doing something that was never done before?
It sounds like maybe the answer was the second one, right? Or no? I’m just trying to understand what it is that you’re saying, in concrete terms, at this point. Like would we still have congress, or the electoral college? Would we be able to own private property? Would the economy be centrally managed by the government as in USSR and China? That kind of thing.
That’s not quite what I am saying. “Communism” is not something you can jump to from Capitalism, Socialism is.
Either way, if we understand Capitalism itself to be a constantly declining system, efforts to merely patch it up without replacing it with some form of Worker Ownership will continue that decline and will continue Imperialism. We can support Biden over another, terrible pick, but Biden is still a block towards progress.
As for asking what I want, the answer is Socialism, of some form, as this eliminates both Imperialism and Capitalism’s largest issues. Socialism has been tried in different manners with different results.
Fundamentally, the US is entitely different from the USSR and PRC, so even if we copied them 1 to 1 we would have vastly different results. We cannot predict exactly what it would look like, and in the end we need to understand that it must be a democratic, worker-focused change, so whatever is capable of building a unified-front in the US will be what Socialism will look like.
To answer your listed questions:
Congress and the Electoral College would likely be replaced by worker councils, with democratic representatives.
Private Property would eventually be removed, personal property would remain.
Some level of central planning would almost certainly be employed.
What do you mean by “working well?” What metrics do you want to see?
My entire point is that you cannot simply copy a country that had a different historical development and expect the same results, so I don’t know why you’re asking me which country I want to copy.
I mean I think you probably see what I’m getting at – I’m suspicious of how this will work out in practice. In particular, I’m suspicious of the idea of shutting down private property, or centrally managing the economy; it sounds like a solution for the ills of capitalism but I’m aware of a couple of big examples where the way it’s been implemented has turned into a living nightmare, and not produced the economic happiness it was supposed to produce.
Surely it’s fair to ask how it’s worked out in practice? You know, the metric being good standard of living, happy people, press freedom, basic necessities being met, that kind of thing. I’m not saying you have to copy another country exactly but surely it’s relevant to look at examples. No?
Not saying you have to copy another country but also, like, if we were going to replace all the cars in a country with some other mode of transportation, it’s fair to ask, okay where do they use that and how does it work? If it works well then cool, that’s an indication of good things, and if not then maybe some lessons we can learn about how to implement it better here. Doesn’t that seem fair?
Care to share the examples, and the metrics by which you call them failures?
“Good standard of living, press freedom, and basic necessities met” hasn’t been achieved anywhere IMO, especially if you consider the global context. If you can give specifics, we can look beyond vibes.
Sure, USSR and China are the big countries which converted to communism, and then in both cases millions of people starved. You said famines were common even in the feudal system in Russia, I think, but that’s not fully accurate – I mean, they happened, but not with anything like the same frequency, under the same technological-efficiency backdrop, or for simple reasons of management (there was generally some external reason like a drought). And the USSR had trouble providing basic necessities to its people for all its existence, even worse than the failures the US has to provide basic necessities. And they both have much more barbaric prison systems even than the US’s fairly barbaric prison system.
China’s different because at this point it’s working “well” economically, but at the cost of personal individual freedom and working conditions – I mean, the exploitation that the US is doing of global work force (which is very real) is often happening to workers inside China, so you can’t really say that enacting China’s system here would be a solution to the problems of the US. All it would do is import the exploitation of Chinese workers to happen to American workers too (i.e. much worse than their already pretty significant level of exploitation.)
(I realize all that is huge oversimplification, and those might not be the models you would choose, which I why I keep asking over and over again for details of the model you would choose.)
Good standard of living, press freedom, and basic necessities met" hasn’t been achieved anywhere IMO, especially if you consider the global context
Agreed. I think the closest that’s been achieved was probably the New Deal-era American economy (such as it was available to white people) up until around the 1960s. Basically, a strong organized working class backed by unions, exerting control over a democratic government to push back against the control that capital wants to exert over the levers of power.
Basically what I would think is the next step would be to extend that to all races, get back to unions as a unit of political power instead of political parties and a whole specialized class of lobbyists and consultants that work in Washington providing change “from above,” reform some of the worst evils of money in politics and barbaric foreign policy, and see where that gets us. Because even that is far far away from where it should be. But that to me seems like a more sensible step than trying to make a more centralized economic structure, and assuming that the issues of who winds up in charge of the central planning will take care of themselves.
(Not that I’m saying that that last is what you’re advocating – just talking about my sort of stereotype view of what “getting rid of capitalism” as a solution might look like.)
You’re making the mistake of looking at countries and systems as static snapshots, rather than as developments on what was before. Both the PRC and USSR ended famines as compared to the Nationalist Agrarian KMT and Tsarist Russia. That’s why life expectancy doubled under Mao and in the USSR, they managed to industrialize and end their respective regular famines.
Comparing to the US is additionally strange, the US was a superpower and both the USSR and PRC were developing countries, that’s like comparing an adult to a child. If one starts off on a much higher foot, why compare at the same point in time, rather than the same point in development?
Either way, with respect to what you’re saying, you are ignoring why New Deal America crumbled. Capitalism will erode safety nets over time as Capitalists fight the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, and this too results in Imperialism. It’s unavoidable as long as you allow dictators like Capitalists to exist, rather than democratic production.
Additionay, Capitalism cannot be democratic, nor can the press be free, nor can everyone’s needs be met. Capitalists influence the media, thus choosing who can be elected, and requires safety nets be insufficient so the workers have to work.
You’re making the mistake of looking at countries and systems as static snapshots
Like I said, oversimplifying, yes.
Both the PRC and USSR ended famines as compared to the Nationalist Agrarian KMT and Tsarist Russia
The PRC killed somewhere from 15 to 55 million people in a multi-year famine, around 1960. It’s widely regarded, says Wikipedia, as one of the greatest man-made disasters in all of human history. What KMT famine are you talking about? I searched “KMT famine” and found nothing.
The Russian famines I think I already addressed. You’re free to pretend I didn’t, and simply claim that the USSR didn’t cause a massive man-made famine unlike anything that happened under the Tsars, that has a specific name and still is talked about to the present day in the affected areas almost a hundred years later.
That’s why life expectancy doubled under Mao and in the USSR
I’m open to the idea that things would never have happened the same way in China or Russia without the revolutions. On the other hand, I’m also open to the idea that it would have happened in exactly the same way, because of the advances in medicine and public health that ramped it up over pretty much the same time period in the US, even without a centrally managed economy that killed millions of people and enacted a barbaric system without many of the daily freedoms that I consider essential to a decent life, which even the US manages to provide in some reduced form.
Comparing to the US is additionally strange, the US was a superpower and both the USSR and PRC were developing countries, that’s like comparing an adult to a child.
Not true. Outside a handful of notable cities, the US in 1900 was a lawless and unelectrified wilderness with a life expectancy of 46, that none of the mighty established European empires took all that seriously. In the late 1800s, labor began battling for control of the US in a big way, and around 1930 a pro-labor government got powerful enough to tackle some big reforms, and all of a sudden, some things changed between 1900 and 1950 that catapulted the US onto the world stage in a way where it became the dominant power and has remained there into the present day. And, for white people at least, the conditions inside the country transformed into a sort of paradise life.
(The war was a big part of the US becoming a world power, of course, but the course of the US’s/China’s/USSR’s contrasting economic developments leading up to the war are kind of hard to ignore as a factor.)
Also, the USSR crumbled and collapsed from its dominant position on the world stage into now being a backwards little land of tinpot gangsters and alcoholic misery that can’t even effectively invade its direct neighbor which it outnumbers by at least 10 to 1. Surely that’s relevant? If you’re saying (and I’m not saying you are, just saying if) that you want to replicate parts of the Soviet model in the US?
Either way, with respect to what you’re saying, you are ignoring why New Deal America crumbled. Capitalism will erode safety nets over time as Capitalists fight the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, and this too results in Imperialism.
Agreed. I think this natural tendency always exists within capitalism, and we’re living in the dystopian results right now. I think we’re just disagreeing about what counterbalancing factors need to be introduced to more effectively combat the cancer.
Not completely, no. The more fundamental question I am trying to ask is this: It sounds like you’re saying Biden is bad because we need to convert to communism and he’s capitalist and so you can’t support him regardless. Right? Or no?
And so I’m saying, if you’re saying capitalism is so bad we need to replace it, then what are you wanting to replace it with, that any leader who doesn’t want to replace it with is unworthy of any support? I realize that’s a very very broad question which may not even have a single specific-at-the-outset answer, but I tried to narrow it down by asking, like what country would be the model? Or would we be doing something that was never done before?
It sounds like maybe the answer was the second one, right? Or no? I’m just trying to understand what it is that you’re saying, in concrete terms, at this point. Like would we still have congress, or the electoral college? Would we be able to own private property? Would the economy be centrally managed by the government as in USSR and China? That kind of thing.
That’s not quite what I am saying. “Communism” is not something you can jump to from Capitalism, Socialism is.
Either way, if we understand Capitalism itself to be a constantly declining system, efforts to merely patch it up without replacing it with some form of Worker Ownership will continue that decline and will continue Imperialism. We can support Biden over another, terrible pick, but Biden is still a block towards progress.
As for asking what I want, the answer is Socialism, of some form, as this eliminates both Imperialism and Capitalism’s largest issues. Socialism has been tried in different manners with different results.
Fundamentally, the US is entitely different from the USSR and PRC, so even if we copied them 1 to 1 we would have vastly different results. We cannot predict exactly what it would look like, and in the end we need to understand that it must be a democratic, worker-focused change, so whatever is capable of building a unified-front in the US will be what Socialism will look like.
To answer your listed questions:
Congress and the Electoral College would likely be replaced by worker councils, with democratic representatives.
Private Property would eventually be removed, personal property would remain.
Some level of central planning would almost certainly be employed.
Got it. Do you have examples of places this approach has been employed and worked well during the 150 years or so of socialism/communism being around?
What do you mean by “working well?” What metrics do you want to see?
My entire point is that you cannot simply copy a country that had a different historical development and expect the same results, so I don’t know why you’re asking me which country I want to copy.
I mean I think you probably see what I’m getting at – I’m suspicious of how this will work out in practice. In particular, I’m suspicious of the idea of shutting down private property, or centrally managing the economy; it sounds like a solution for the ills of capitalism but I’m aware of a couple of big examples where the way it’s been implemented has turned into a living nightmare, and not produced the economic happiness it was supposed to produce.
Surely it’s fair to ask how it’s worked out in practice? You know, the metric being good standard of living, happy people, press freedom, basic necessities being met, that kind of thing. I’m not saying you have to copy another country exactly but surely it’s relevant to look at examples. No?
Not saying you have to copy another country but also, like, if we were going to replace all the cars in a country with some other mode of transportation, it’s fair to ask, okay where do they use that and how does it work? If it works well then cool, that’s an indication of good things, and if not then maybe some lessons we can learn about how to implement it better here. Doesn’t that seem fair?
Care to share the examples, and the metrics by which you call them failures?
“Good standard of living, press freedom, and basic necessities met” hasn’t been achieved anywhere IMO, especially if you consider the global context. If you can give specifics, we can look beyond vibes.
Sure, USSR and China are the big countries which converted to communism, and then in both cases millions of people starved. You said famines were common even in the feudal system in Russia, I think, but that’s not fully accurate – I mean, they happened, but not with anything like the same frequency, under the same technological-efficiency backdrop, or for simple reasons of management (there was generally some external reason like a drought). And the USSR had trouble providing basic necessities to its people for all its existence, even worse than the failures the US has to provide basic necessities. And they both have much more barbaric prison systems even than the US’s fairly barbaric prison system.
China’s different because at this point it’s working “well” economically, but at the cost of personal individual freedom and working conditions – I mean, the exploitation that the US is doing of global work force (which is very real) is often happening to workers inside China, so you can’t really say that enacting China’s system here would be a solution to the problems of the US. All it would do is import the exploitation of Chinese workers to happen to American workers too (i.e. much worse than their already pretty significant level of exploitation.)
(I realize all that is huge oversimplification, and those might not be the models you would choose, which I why I keep asking over and over again for details of the model you would choose.)
Agreed. I think the closest that’s been achieved was probably the New Deal-era American economy (such as it was available to white people) up until around the 1960s. Basically, a strong organized working class backed by unions, exerting control over a democratic government to push back against the control that capital wants to exert over the levers of power.
Basically what I would think is the next step would be to extend that to all races, get back to unions as a unit of political power instead of political parties and a whole specialized class of lobbyists and consultants that work in Washington providing change “from above,” reform some of the worst evils of money in politics and barbaric foreign policy, and see where that gets us. Because even that is far far away from where it should be. But that to me seems like a more sensible step than trying to make a more centralized economic structure, and assuming that the issues of who winds up in charge of the central planning will take care of themselves.
(Not that I’m saying that that last is what you’re advocating – just talking about my sort of stereotype view of what “getting rid of capitalism” as a solution might look like.)
You’re making the mistake of looking at countries and systems as static snapshots, rather than as developments on what was before. Both the PRC and USSR ended famines as compared to the Nationalist Agrarian KMT and Tsarist Russia. That’s why life expectancy doubled under Mao and in the USSR, they managed to industrialize and end their respective regular famines.
Comparing to the US is additionally strange, the US was a superpower and both the USSR and PRC were developing countries, that’s like comparing an adult to a child. If one starts off on a much higher foot, why compare at the same point in time, rather than the same point in development?
Either way, with respect to what you’re saying, you are ignoring why New Deal America crumbled. Capitalism will erode safety nets over time as Capitalists fight the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, and this too results in Imperialism. It’s unavoidable as long as you allow dictators like Capitalists to exist, rather than democratic production.
Additionay, Capitalism cannot be democratic, nor can the press be free, nor can everyone’s needs be met. Capitalists influence the media, thus choosing who can be elected, and requires safety nets be insufficient so the workers have to work.
Like I said, oversimplifying, yes.
The PRC killed somewhere from 15 to 55 million people in a multi-year famine, around 1960. It’s widely regarded, says Wikipedia, as one of the greatest man-made disasters in all of human history. What KMT famine are you talking about? I searched “KMT famine” and found nothing.
The Russian famines I think I already addressed. You’re free to pretend I didn’t, and simply claim that the USSR didn’t cause a massive man-made famine unlike anything that happened under the Tsars, that has a specific name and still is talked about to the present day in the affected areas almost a hundred years later.
I mean, technically true.
I’m open to the idea that things would never have happened the same way in China or Russia without the revolutions. On the other hand, I’m also open to the idea that it would have happened in exactly the same way, because of the advances in medicine and public health that ramped it up over pretty much the same time period in the US, even without a centrally managed economy that killed millions of people and enacted a barbaric system without many of the daily freedoms that I consider essential to a decent life, which even the US manages to provide in some reduced form.
Not true. Outside a handful of notable cities, the US in 1900 was a lawless and unelectrified wilderness with a life expectancy of 46, that none of the mighty established European empires took all that seriously. In the late 1800s, labor began battling for control of the US in a big way, and around 1930 a pro-labor government got powerful enough to tackle some big reforms, and all of a sudden, some things changed between 1900 and 1950 that catapulted the US onto the world stage in a way where it became the dominant power and has remained there into the present day. And, for white people at least, the conditions inside the country transformed into a sort of paradise life.
(The war was a big part of the US becoming a world power, of course, but the course of the US’s/China’s/USSR’s contrasting economic developments leading up to the war are kind of hard to ignore as a factor.)
Also, the USSR crumbled and collapsed from its dominant position on the world stage into now being a backwards little land of tinpot gangsters and alcoholic misery that can’t even effectively invade its direct neighbor which it outnumbers by at least 10 to 1. Surely that’s relevant? If you’re saying (and I’m not saying you are, just saying if) that you want to replicate parts of the Soviet model in the US?
Agreed. I think this natural tendency always exists within capitalism, and we’re living in the dystopian results right now. I think we’re just disagreeing about what counterbalancing factors need to be introduced to more effectively combat the cancer.