Julian658 wrote:
It is somewhat astounding that the same mistake regarding the nationalization of farms leading to food shortages was replicated in China, Zimbawee, Cuba, Venezuela, etc.
I have to point out that these were *political* transitions, and that they had their (economic) costs.
I'm not a Stalinist, but I support any *nationalization* efforts to collectivize the economy within any given country.
I don't know these histories that well off the top of my head -- I'd have to do some research to get fully caught-up, but I think I can safely say that the problem in all of these cases was with the *bureaucratic elite* and its management of each nationalization process, etc., within the larger capitalist world political economy. In other words *corruption* is often the biggest problem because there's *no accountability* of those at the top. They're eschewing the globally dominant 'international community', and rightly so, but then there's no *oversight*, as a result.
At most it's *incrementalism*, and really it's the *workers* who need to be fully in charge, and also co-administrating, on collectivized *production goods* (factories), which is *beyond* nationalization / Stalinization.
Julian658 wrote:
[img]https://image.slidesharecdn.com/adamsmith-131222091116-phpapp01/95/a-summary-of-adam-smith-ideas-life-legacy-9-638.jpg?cb=1387715875[img]
Sorry for being repetitive. By the way Adam Smith also understood the evil side of capitalism. But, farms are best run by people that have a vested interest in the farm.
What about present-day technologies, and the capacity for *full automation*?
Could we get to the point where a water-fountain-type kiosk could be installed *anywhere and everywhere*, and would instantly 3D-print any metal or plastic part, or parts, for the consumer, at negligible cost to public funds?
It would be 'materials on tap', and people could even quickly build shelters and homes from the parts printed -- at that point would your capitalism-based 'personal ownership' argument really hold up? All that would be needed would be enough *volunteers* to simply install these public 3D printers, which would probably be solar-powered, and the filament material would be cheaply produced in bulk and mass-available, like plastic sheets are today.
Even if there was rampant vandalism, all that would mean is that more volunteers would be needed, and more machines installed and carted away, like those bike-rental thingees in major cities.
I think your 'private responsibility' argument becomes a *cliche* very quickly, especially in our times of mass industrial production where *any* material process could just be reiterated some more, to provide *abundance* to easily cover all the bases. It's not even like anyone has to 'hold their finger on a button' for an extended time period, because everything's *computerized* now, so it's just a matter of *programming* a schedule for any given industrial workflow.
Farms can now be *indoors* and hydroponic and fully automated / robotic.
Julian658 wrote:
If I appeared triumphant it was not my intention to do so.
Okay. I hope this point is well-taken.
Yes, capitalism has enabled *tremendous* productive forces, but it's also commodified *people*, and turned *us* into cogs in its 'machine', both economically and politically. Here's from Wilde again:
Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends. And when scientific men are no longer called upon to go down to a depressing East End and distribute bad cocoa and worse blankets to starving people, they will have delightful leisure in which to devise wonderful and marvellous things for their own joy and the joy of everyone else. There will be great storages of force for every city, and for every house if required, and this force man will convert into heat, light, or motion, according to his needs. Is this Utopian? A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... /soul-man/
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Julian658 wrote:
The left has a definitive legitimate role in acting on behalf of the poor. As i said before, if the problems are solved there is no role for the left. And hence they benefit from the turmoil. This latest brutal attack and killing on an innocent man in Minneapolis is like music for the activists, but they do have a legitimate role. My daughter is married to a detective in Baltimore and he is a but burned out. However, he has enormous compassion for the poor in Baltimore and does his best. He has never fired a shot in 10 years. However, there are a lot of bad cops out there. He tells me about it all the time. But, I encourage to watch the videos of cops executing white people. American cops are truly out of control.
Yes, we could call *any* political reformist efforts a 'cottage industry', because those soft-left efforts will never have any lasting effect against the behemoth of the capitalist status quo.
Wilde speaks to this dynamic as well:
The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism – are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.
They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.
But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life – educated men who live in the East End – coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.
There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.
Under Socialism all this will, of course, be altered. There will be no people living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up unhealthy, hunger-pinched children in the midst of impossible and absolutely repulsive surroundings. The security of society will not depend, as it does now, on the state of the weather. If a frost comes we shall not have a hundred thousand men out of work, tramping about the streets in a state of disgusting misery, or whining to their neighbours for alms, or crowding round the doors of loathsome shelters to try and secure a hunch of bread and a night’s unclean lodging. Each member of the society will share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society, and if a frost comes no one will practically be anything the worse.
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Julian658 wrote:
Sure, there is super tiny minority where gender does not match biological sex. But, PLEASE well of over 99.7% of of babies with XY chromosomes grow up as males. The social constructionists say the bay grows up to be a boy because he was raised as a boy. That is total BS because the transgenders are raised as boys and all along they feel female. So it seems social constructionism is not the case of transgenderism.
Hmmmm! Good point. I'll have to ask for a *mix* here, of nature and nurture -- previously you've said 50/50 -- and I'm not that interested in gender-identity politics anyway, beyond basic civil rights.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
See, this is your *biological determinism* speaking again -- empire isn't a 'desire', it's a *byproduct* of the material world of class society. Recall its *origin*:
Julian658 wrote:
Sure, the tendency to create empires is likely a social construction. However, it developed in all world cultures that never had contact with each other. So there must be an innate impulse as well. Like everything it is a combination of both. It is a bit like the hegemony of men over women over the centuries.
No, allow me to clarify -- empire is *not* a 'social construction', in the sense of a 'subjective social reality', or 'groupthink', as with religion. It's a *material byproduct* of social *objective* reality -- empire *emerged* from empirical / objective factors, namely the societal production of a material *surplus*.
[In] other conditions survival came to depend on adopting new techniques. Ruling classes arose out of the organisation of such activities and, with them, towns, states and what we usually call civilisation. From this point onwards the history of society certainly was the history of class struggle. Humanity increased its degree of control over nature, but at the price of most people becoming subject to control and exploitation by privileged minority groups.
Such groups could only keep the surplus in their own hands at times when the whole of society was suffering great hardship if they found ways of imposing their will on the rest of society by establishing coercive structures—states. Control over the surplus provided them with the means to do so, by hiring armed men and investing in expensive techniques such as metal working which could give them a monopoly of the most efficient means of killing. Armed force is most effective when backed by legal codes and ideologies which sanctify ruling class power by making it seem like the source of people’s livelihoods. In Mesopotamia, for example, ‘Early kings boast of their economic activities, of cutting canals, of building temples, of importing timber from Syria, and copper and granite from Oman. They are sometimes depicted on monuments in the garb of bricklayers or masons and of architects receiving the plan of the temple from the gods’.68
Not only could rulers think of themselves as the embodiment of society’s highest values—so too, in certain circumstances, could those they exploited. By the very fact of absorbing society’s surplus, of having control of its means of reproducing itself, the rulers could come to symbolise society’s power for those below them—to be seen as gods, or at least as the necessary intermediaries between the mass of society and its gods. Hence the god-like attributes of the pharaohs of Egypt or the priestly attributes of the first ruling classes of Mesopotamia and Meso-America.
Harman, _People's History of the World_, p. 26
And:
Chapter 4
Women’s oppression
Women everywhere lost out with the polarisation of society into classes and the rise of the state. There was a shift in their status, described by Frederick Engels more than a century ago as ‘the world historic defeat of the female sex’. From being co-decision-makers with men, they were thrust into a position of dependence and subordination. The exact nature of the subordination varied enormously from one class society to another, and from class to class in each society. But it existed everywhere that class existed. So universal did it become that even today it is usually treated as an invariant product of human nature.
The change was rooted in the new relations that grew up between people with the production of a surplus. The new intensive production techniques tended to prioritise men’s labour over women’s for the first time. Gathering, the main source of nutrition for hunter-gatherer societies, had been fully compatible with childbearing and breast-feeding. So had early forms of agriculture based on the hoe. But heavy ploughing and herding of cattle and horses were not. Societies in which women did these things would have low birthrates and stagnating populations, and lose out to societies which excluded most women from these roles. Gordon Childe pointed out long ago that among ‘barbarians’, purely agricultural peoples, ‘whereas women normally hoe plots it is men who plough. And even in the oldest Sumerian and Egyptian documents the ploughmen really are males’.73 He suggested, ‘The plough…relieved women of the most exacting drudgery, but deprived them of the monopoly over the cereal crops and the social status which it conferred’.70 Key decisions about the future of the household or lineage became male decisions, since it was males who would implement them.
Harman, _People's History of the World_, p. 29
Worldview Diagram
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Julian658 wrote:
The white people are not going to save anyone. One simply has to change the stereotype and show ONE is better. There is no other choice or avenue.
But you're still using *demographic* categories, and you *do* recognize racism.
These are *mass* dynamics that have nothing to do with the *individual*, and so must be addressed at *mass* scales, as with police brutality, or any other kind of social oppression.
Julian658 wrote:
This has a solution. Black areas should be policed by cops that are mostly black. IN other words many blacks are not applying to the police academy. That is one way of solving the problem. Asking racists cops not to be racosts is not working. What was the cop thinking? Where has he been living during the last 10 years?
The WSWS just addressed this argument:
No doubt racism plays a role in incidents of police violence. While the greatest number of police killings is of whites, African Americans and Hispanics are disproportionately targeted for harassment, abuse, arrest and incarceration. The Trump administration has deliberately cultivated the most backward and reactionary layers, including among police officers. Trump has proclaimed that he likes watching footage of “rough” treatment of “thugs,” and has urged police not to be “too nice.”
The source of police violence, however, is not racial antagonism, but class oppression. The unifying characteristic among victims of police violence—black, white, Hispanic or Native American—is that they are poor and among the most vulnerable segments of the population.
The role of Black Lives Matter and other proponents of racial politics, in claiming that racism is the cause of police violence, is to promote the idea that hiring more black police officers or electing more black politicians will resolve the problem. Inevitably, this means channeling opposition behind the Democratic Party, one of the twin parties of Wall Street and the military. And the epidemic of police violence continues unabated.
This reign of terror raged under the watch of Democratic President Barack Obama and continues under the fascistic Republican Donald Trump. Regardless of whether a state has a Democratic or Republican governor, if the mayor or police chief is black, white, male, female, straight or gay, police killings continue unabated.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/0 ... s-m28.html
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Julian658 wrote:
It is not perfect, I can acknowledge that all day. But, the alternative is to change the system by another group of people that claim they will be perfect and not corrupt. I don't buy that! The human tendency for corruption is universal.
Yeah, and my politics don't call for a mere change of 'management'.
There *has* to be a revolution by the working class, so as to eliminate the class system once and for all. 'Corruption' is endemic to the class division and will never go away as long as some people are more socially *elite* than others.