Hong Wu wrote:
OK weird formatting, welcome to the forum. You're basically suggesting that an entire country or, since we're in a global economy, the entire world has to be socialist before socialism can work?
Yeah, my writing style is to write in a way that sounds like speaking -- hope it's not too packed-together. I also try to keep things concise.
Correct -- the capitalist mode of production is mutually exclusive to a potential *socialist* mode of production since each material basis (exchange values vs. use values, respectively) are incompatible.
People commonly cite this-or-that *country* to try to get an 'example' of socialism, but such efforts are ill-founded since, yes, socialism *would* have to be worldwide, by definition. (Why should any area of the world have to continue to be mired in capitalist labor exploitation while other areas *transcend* it -- ?) Stalin did a great disservice to socialism by forcing his abomination of 'socialism-in-one-country', which people now think is how socialism *is*, when in fact it's better-termed as 'Stalinism':
Political Spectrum, Simplified
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Victoribus Spolia wrote:
FYI @ckaihatsu, you need to have a black and white avatar per the rules. Just thought someone should let you know.
Otherwise, welcome to the forum.
Thanks -- I just fixed my avatar.
Victoribus Spolia wrote:
This is not an unheard of view, but it does seem somewhat at odds with many of the board's Stalinists if I read them correctly.
Well, I *agree* with the Stalinist formulation / strategy of 'national liberation' (as for Syria), but I'm not a Stalinist because they tend to get wrapped-up in the bourgeois nation-state, and make deals with the existing bourgeois power structure as a logical result, as in Nepal or China.
Victoribus Spolia wrote:
This was sort of Rei's view, but she argued that global socialism comes only after global democracy and capitalism has completely saturated everything first as she feels that international socialism is the natural evolutionary result of a technocratic global market economy (hence, as a dialectical materialist, she is an accelerationist par excellence).
This, unfortunately, is a woefully outdated kind of politics -- it was valid 101 years ago, when many countries, like Russia, still had backward material development (minimal industry), but today Trotsky's 'Permanent Revolution' is more applicable, and apt:
Trotsky put forward his conception of "permanent revolution" as an explanation of how socialist revolutions could occur in societies that had not achieved advanced capitalism. Trotsky's theory also argues, first, that the bourgeoisie in late-developing capitalist countries are incapable of developing the productive forces in such a manner as to achieve the sort of advanced capitalism which will fully develop an industrial proletariat. Second, that the proletariat can and must, therefore, seize social, economic, and political power, leading an alliance with the peasantry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_revolution
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Victoribus Spolia wrote:
It seems to me that Ckaihatsu is a more of a theoretical idealist as far his variety of international socialism. Metal masturbation without due consideration of rights, ethics, or even practical possibility.
Hmmmm, it's not good to be so dismissive of *theory* -- there's a lot that can go *wrong* in even the best-intentioned attempts at socialism, as we can see from 20th-Century history (Mao's 'Cultural Revolution' springs to mind).
Your concern is more with the 'superstructure', while the *mode of production* (socially-necessary social production), or 'base', is really what's at-stake. In other words, the aspects of 'rights', 'ethics', and even practical social possibility, are all contingent / dependent on how a society disposes of its surplus labor value -- that which exceeds the material reproduction of the working-class, going forward in time. (I'll add that 'rights' and 'ethics' are of the past age of *bourgeois* revolutions in the 18th century, since they superseded feudalism's 'divine right of kings'. But now that the world has the capacity for global-scale humane production on *industrial* implements, *that's* what concerns a socialist-minded politics.)
Consciousness, A Material Definition
History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle