Julian658 wrote:
As I said before. Marx was correct in his analysis of capitalism and the description of the flaws and inequalities is correct. The problem is that we do not have a better system.
ckaihatsu wrote:
You obviously still haven't taken a look at my 'labor credits' system.
Julian658 wrote:
No I haven't. I am skeptical because socialism has never worked. At best, it works in families or very small groups with kinship. Otherwise, people are not altruistic.
You're conflating a 'communist-type gift economy' with 'altruism'.
Altruism has to do with individual-scale *morality*, or 'lifestylism', while a communistic gift economy has to do with a society-wide *providing for human needs*, through collective, post-capitalist social production. The more people devote their waking hours to putting in work efforts for the social good (mass production, particularly), the more advanced the *whole society* will be. Since everyone's necessarily-voluntary work efforts are collectivized and distributed to 'the commons', distribution can be directed to *unmet need*, directly, with no middleman-type administration or exchange values for private appropriations.
*Individual*-type needs, taken collectively by society, would translate at scale to *mass* needs, for whatever -- the most critical life-and-living needs would be *self-prioritized* by individuals (since only individuals themselves know best what they need to consume), yielding aggregations of mass needs-in-common at larger scales, for moneyless mass distribution.
No socialist argues for a new Stalinism, or bureaucratic elitism, because even while bureaucratic centralism would be an incremental 'radical reform' for capitalism ('single-payer' administration over any given industry), it's still a class-like bureaucratic *elitism*, meaning that workers are not actually the ones controlling social production.
What you term 'socialism' was actually the historical result of nascent workers' control -- 'soviets', or workers councils -- *mitigated* by Western imperialist invasions and domestic counter-revolution. It's best termed 'Stalinism', and is abhorred by the revolutionary left.
I've updated that model framework since I last posted at this thread -- take a look at the latest version of my model framework for a post-capitalist political economy:
Emergent Central Planning
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ckaihatsu wrote:
I don't defend North Korea as a fulfillment of the Communist Manifesto, mostly because the workers aren't fully in control of production over there. And I'm definitely *not* for Western capitalism and imperialism. I defend any quasi-collectivized "socialist" state (like Venezuela) in the *geopolitical* context.
Julian658 wrote:
It turns out that socialist countries are often authoritarian fascist like states with massive oppression.
No, this is an inaccurate characterization because fascism *upholds* private property, while the Stalinist countries at least somewhat *collectivized* social production, directing it from a single locus of administration, for better or for worse.
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Julian658 wrote:
You have failed to tell me how you can impose socialism without an authoritarian repressive state. What will you do if someone wants to be a capitalist within a socialist nation?
First off, no individual -- myself or anyone else -- can *impose* socialism, because then it wouldn't be socialism anymore, it would be *Stalinism*. Any proletarian revolution that aims to overthrow bourgeois ruling-class rule has to, by definition, be bottom-up in the way that it transforms social production and the rest of society.
The reason we aren't living in socialism now is basically for this reason -- there has to be a *mass movement* that's sufficient in size and intent to *sweep away* the existing bourgeois hegemony, worldwide. This movement itself *may* be authoritarian, and also repressive against the bourgeoisie / counterrevolutionaries, but it would do so only due to underlying *mass support*. (So it's just a formality, basically.)
This kind of vanguardist centralism tends to unnerve anarchists, since they think that revolution can be *purely* localist, lateralist, and yet worldwide somehow this way, but I'm not an anarchist. I'm a vanguardist, meaning that the revolutionary workers must, for logistical reasons, form an organization of class struggle that's large-enough and coordinated-enough to rival, and defeat, the bourgeois class foe.
If someone was so against-the-tide during a global revolutionary upheaval that they *insisted* on holding onto some kind of private accumulations, they would be considered a *counterrevolutionary* by the revolutionary proletariat.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
Your descriptions sound exaggerated and propagandistic, nonetheless -- biased.
Julian658 wrote:
Sure, I am biased, but one cannot argue with success. Capitalism has given us the most prosperity in world history.
The prosperity is on an *elitist* basis, though -- there were *two world wars* in the 20th century due to capitalism's inherently *competitive* bent, and I don't need to remind of the *income inequality* dynamic and how it's grown to gargantuan proportions here in the 21st century.
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ckaihatsu wrote:
I'm not a Chavista, but I am in the context of geopolitics. Again, it's the *workers themselves* who need to be in collective control of production, worldwide.
Julian658 wrote:
Venezuelans are leaving the country in large numbers. The food stands in grocery stores are empty and most people are now quite thin due to caloric restriction. The state is repressive and violent with dissidents. I would say the workers are not running the system in a very efficient manner.
And BTW, they are a petroleum rich nation. Why are they doing so poorly?
Well, I'm not going to defend Maduro's administration of the country, though I do defend Venezuela, and Syria, etc., against geopolitical imperialist Western predations. There's the elitism of the boliburguesa within Venezuela, so that's Stalinistic and undefendable. The workers are *not* in direct control of either production *or* the Maduro administration, so you can't use Venezuela as an indictment of the aims of socialism.
Venezuela's economy has been / is heavily dependent on its oil exports, and the price of oil has been pushed downward lately due to the machinations of the OPEC cartel, so we're seeing the results of that market manipulation by the West.
ckaihatsu wrote:
More hilarity from you -- as though cars and computers are physically assembled by the brain of a software engineer -- ! Oh, industrialism is still how goods are produced, via workers' labor.
Julian658 wrote:
I agree, but workers on their own cannot produce anything unless they are directed by an organization with talent.
Well, this is the crux of the difference in our respective politics -- the entire *point* of a proletarian revolution, post-vanguard / post-revolution / post-class, would be exactly that, for the world's workers (liberated-laborers) to *collectively* co-administrate over their own respective work roles. (See the 'Emergent Central Planning' diagram.)
Julian658 wrote:
The employee of the bakery is useless if there is no wise man with vision and incredible work ethic that founded a successful bakery (insert any kind of factory).
You're *mythologizing* and *glorifying* the entrepreneur -- keep in mind that capital ownership is in a *ruling class* internal social organization regarding its role as private ownership. Such people are hardly 'rugged individualists' -- they can receive loans from banks, investment capital from investors, tax breaks from government, and, most importantly, stolen labor value from workers on an hourly basis. Yes, there are in-factions and out-factions among the capitalist class, but, combined and coordinated, they have a collective *class* interest in the continuation of the exploitation of labor.
[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends
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ckaihatsu wrote:
Such specializations (software engineer, blue collar work, complex systems engineering) wouldn't even *be* necessary once all workers are collectively in control of social production. They could just use project-based learning (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project-based_learning) and work-backwards from the intended production goal. No more work specializations needed anymore, especially with modern-day Internet-based communications technologies.
Julian658 wrote:
Why would they work that hard? What is the motivation?
It's not-even about 'working hard' -- it's about liberating the combined productive capacities of *millions* and *billions* of liberated laborers, post-capitalism.
For example, consider what we do here at PoFo, but then think of the same within a world where all productive equipment / factories would be collectively available to all, subject to co-coordination. (Or maybe *teleconferencing* would be used, etc.)
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ckaihatsu wrote:
I don't *bemoan* the rich -- as long as capitalism exists they'll exist as well. People with money may use it for socially *progressive* and enlightening purposes (books, films, art, whatever), or they may not. I *know* it's not a zero-sum system because the sum of products of labor is ever-increasing, especially with our world population of billions.
Julian658 wrote:
Your words about the Utopia are naive. The only reason we have plenty in the West is simple:
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
ckaihatsu wrote:
No, it's because of capitalism's inherent dynamic towards *overproduction*, combined with the large workforce in the U.S., *and* U.S. imperialism, that the U.S. economy is so much more stable and supported economically by everyone else in the world. (The U.S. dollar is the world's reserve currency.)
Julian658 wrote:
Overproduction makes everything extremely cheap. Why do you think homeless people have cell phones?
It sounds like you *agree* on this point, that it's due to capitalism's inherent dynamic of overproduction that goods become more cheap, advanced, and readily available.
Btw, I wasn't describing anything that could be conceivably stereotyped as 'utopian' -- you simply inserted that epithet into your post, irrespectively of what I actually wrote.
*Of course* under capitalism we're all conditioned to look after our own individualistic self-interest -- that's the capitalist dynamic / component of private property. But it's incorrect to ascribe this conditioning / behavior to the human being him- or herself, as with the 'human nature' argument. If people happened to be born in a *post-capitalist*, collectivized-production society, then the norms of *that* society would be taken as 'normal', and people would live their lives correspondingly, for the most part. (In my communistic-gift-economy model framework, for example, I *detach* necessarily-voluntary liberated-labor work efforts from the expected economic rewards, since it would be *human need* that would demand and drive consumption, and thus production -- but this conceptualization is human-nature *valid* because as long as people were collectively *provided-for* then the system would be viable, with no private-type incentives being necessary.)
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ckaihatsu wrote:
So since you're acknowledging inherent, objective *interests*, it's within the working class' inherent interests to organize on their own / our own terms, against the economic predations of the elitist ownership class.
Julian658 wrote:
As I said: Anyone that lives in a the gutter or is dirt poor benefits from socialism. But. how about the rest of the people that are doing OK in a capitalist nation?
Well, maybe we could get into this aspect a bit more -- I happen to think that human needs, and wants, extend all the way up to sheerly *luxurious* standards of living, as long as 100% of every last person's basic needs can be collectively fulfilled as a social priority. (See the Bastani 'Fully Automated Luxury Communism' thread.)
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ckaihatsu wrote:
So what's *your* position regarding the role of the capitalist government within capitalist economics?
Julian658 wrote:
The government should be hands off. The only role is to provide a framework of no aggression between the parties that exchange services or goods.
All capitalists need is freedom and a pact of no violence or aggression.
Well, this is *incrementally* enlightened as a social policy, but what we've seen throughout capitalist history is almost-ceaseless *warfare*, both physical and economic.
This political ethos would still allow colonialist-type *land grabs*, like that which is going on right now by Israeli settlers, for the Palestinian lands that remain.
I'm surprised that you libertarian types aren't more vocal, as here at PoFo, about *this* particular present-day incursion onto others' land.
- By B0ycey
- By MadMonk