How did you become a socialist? - Page 3 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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As either the transitional stage to communism or legitimate socio-economic ends in its own right.
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#14972167
ckaihatsu wrote:Perhaps you haven't noticed, but this statement of yours is internally contradictory -- 'liberating the masses' is *equivalent* to 'saving the future from the elites'. And there's no mass-empowering of those elites -- they use militarism and violence to stay on their perch.


Not really, most socialists want to collectivize the masses into a dictatorship of the proletariat(or some stupid shit like that), my kind of socialism is just free market anti-capitalism which limits property rights through the voluntary rational solidarity of stakeholders but doesn't abolish private property or markets. It doesn't liberate the masses, it liberates the individual from both the masses and the elites.


You're hedging, to only criticize the *expansion* of the money supply


No I'm not, I don't want deflationary wingnut commodity money any more than I want bankster controlled fiat money.

Anyone who dismisses government control of the money supply, as for deficit spending, is implicitly backing feudal-like / slavery-like social relations


Bullshit. There are plenty of alternatives to government control. We could have democratic control or even competing currencies, those don't "back feudal-like / slavery-like social relations". Anyway, in the US we don't even have government control, we have bankster technocrat control of the money supply.


And, money itself wasn't an 'invention' as much as it was a logical progression


Bankster money is pure invention, there's no logic in it other than power, greed, and predation.


There's no alternative to 'civilization', except a revolutionary overhaul of it, so there's no point in *denouncing* 'civilization' when no better alternative to it can be suggested -- your line is a dead-end.


Of course there are alternatives to the existing system. This system wasn't inevitable, people made choices. Your fatalism is a dead end.


*Or* -- if you give people the benefit of the doubt, that they can potentially see-through the power structure of class rule,


I am giving people the benefit of the doubt by participating in the discourse, if I thought they couldn't potentially see-through the power structures I wouldn't waste my time.
#14972211
You can be against the globalists without embracing excessive nationalism @Sivad.
Excessive nationalism leads to a big problem. If all nations only have people who don't develop ties outside of their own local communities? You got isolationism and all advanced human societies benefit greatly from international relationships. The issue Sivad is that the ones exclusively benefiting from them now are the members of the international plutocracies and not the international working class. Which are far more powerful in terms of numbers.
#14972220
SSDR wrote:
@ckaihatsu, Open borders has nothing to do with socialism, unless if you believe that socialism cannot exist unless the whole world is one, united socialist society. There is also nationalists who are socialists, and it's great that I can use them as references to back myself up against ultra internationalists who think that all socialists are only internationalists. Nationalism has nothing to do with socialism.



'Ultra-internationalists' -- ??

You're turning the essence of socialism into a contrived ersatz pejorative.

I'll remind you that the bourgeoisie has *already* globalized the world -- the point now is how can the *working class* seize these corporate organizations of production and distribution, for their / our own good -- since workers are physically / in-reality the human motive force behind every and all kinds of social production.

Here's from The Communist Manifesto:



The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the entire surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.

The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilised nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the production of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.



https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/w ... 01.htm#007



---


Also, you're being self-contradictory again, in first saying that not all socialists are internationalists, then saying that 'Nationalism has nothing to do with socialism.'

If some self-proclaimed "socialists" constrain themselves to just one-or-another nation-state, then they're, by-definition, either Stalinists or fascists, because socialism (by definition) *has* to be international, based in the working class, so as to diverge from *ruling-class-based* internationalism, meaning corporations and the state. Corporations are international, and bourgeois states have international relations, so the next step on the path to genuine socialism is for the world's working class to *control* these inherited relations of production, for its own best interests.


Sivad wrote:
That's somewhat confused, a lot of what these nationalists are opposing is ant-democratic elitist internationalism(New World Order globalism), and I'm in full solidarity with them as far as that goes. Nationalism can become toxic but local sovereignty is nonnegotiable, I wouldn't give that up for anything and certainly not to be ruled by corporate free trade arbitration committees and unelected international governance soviets.



The 'New World Order' formulation is a red herring -- capitalist nation-states, at the international level, can *never* resolve their own nationalistic differences because at that level they're forever in *competition* with each other. Geopolitical 'stability', ironically and perversely, is only achieved with a single nation-state imperialist hegemon that prevails over its rivals, like that of Britain in the past, and of the U.S. today.

'Local sovereignty' is *meaningless* because it ignores that modern-day production -- *industrial* production, specifically -- is *already* globally coordinated, as within corporations / conglomerations.

It's positive and historically-progressive if you're against monopolies and oligopolies, but you're erroneously conflating two different modes of material-production together -- that of 'free trade' (capitalism), and that of 'soviets' (workers control), when these are *not* the same. (Note the 'mode of production' magnitude in the following framework.)


‭History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show
Image



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Sivad wrote:
Not really, most socialists want to collectivize the masses into a dictatorship of the proletariat(or some stupid shit like that),



The theoretical 'dictatorship of the proletariat' international self-organization of workers is for a *reason* -- it can be thought-of as a revolutionary *strategy*, one of matching the existing bourgeois state(s) in its scale and scope of social organization. A workers state, consistent all over the world, would be a formidable social structure that *could* take on the magnitude of the existing bourgeois-state formulation, to seize societal control away from it, anywhere and everywhere, in favor of establishing collectivist workers control over all social production.


Sivad wrote:
my kind of socialism is just free market anti-capitalism which limits property rights through the voluntary rational solidarity of stakeholders but doesn't abolish private property or markets. It doesn't liberate the masses, it liberates the individual from both the masses and the elites.



On this point you're assuming that all 'stakeholders' (workers, consumers, state-like administration, etc.) would have the same material *interests* in common, when they *don't*.

Heck, I even devised a model of post-capitalist *communism*, and I don't think even such a post-class society would have identical material-factional interests -- again, the fluctuating social roles of [1] workers, [2] consumers, and a [3] social administration would have somewhat different social-*operational* factional material interests, as I note in my intro and that I detail in my 'Labor credits FAQ':



What's called-for is a system that can match liberated-labor organizing ability, over mass-collectivized assets and resources, to the mass demand from below for collective production. If *liberated-labor* is too empowered it would probably lead to materialistic factionalism -- like a bad syndicalism -- and back into separatist claims of private property.

If *mass demand* is too empowered it would probably lead back to a clever system of exploitation, wherein labor would cease to retain control over the implements of mass production.

And, if the *administration* of it all is too specialized and detached we would have the phenomenon of Stalinism, or bureaucratic elitism and party favoritism.



https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... ost2889317



Spoiler: show
...Some of the readily apparent *checks-and-balances* dynamics enabled with the labor-credits system are:

- (Already mentioned) One could work for personal material-economic gains -- the amassing of labor credits -- instead of having to 'like' *both* the socio-political aspect *and* the personal-material-economic aspect of one's work within a strictly-voluntaristic, non-labor-credit, communistic-type political economy. (Individual vs. socio-political realms)

- The contribution of one's potential liberated labor to societal objectives would always be fully optional, since the premise of a communist-type social order is that no one could ever be *actually* coerced for their labor since the ubiquitous norm would be that no productive machinery or natural resources in the world could be used on a *proprietary* / private-accumulation basis, while all the material necessities for life and living would always be in readily-available, sufficient quantities for all. Collective social productivity would be *very good* using post-capitalist, communist-type liberated-labor self-organizing, leveraged with full automation of all productive processes, for *huge* ratios of industrial mass-production output, per hour of liberated labor input. (Individual vs. socio-political and material realms)

- Mass demand, as displayed publicly, per-locality, by the daily mass-aggregated tallied rank positions (#1, #2, #3, etc.), will always be an existing social-pressure, specifically regarding liberated labor contributions to the general social good for varying qualities of public consumption. Such active liberated labor may or may not receive labor credits for their valid efforts, depending on such general *implementation* of circulating labor credits, or not, and the specifics of any active policy package. (Socio-political and material realms vs. individuals)

- Active liberated-labor would control all *ultimate* ('point-of-production') productivity for society, but *not-necessarily-working* people of any intra-voluntary collective 'locality' (or localities) could make and agree-on proposals and final policy packages that contain great *specificity*, as over *exactly* who (which persons) are to be included as active liberated-labor, and also their respective rates of labor credits per hour per discrete work role, and each worker's particular work schedule, as a part of the overall project scheduling. (Consumers vs. liberated-labor)

- Any intra-voluntary 'locality' could collectively develop and agree-on any particular proposal or final policy package, with specifics over staffing, rates of labor credits per included work role, and work schedules for all work roles / liberated-laborers, but if the liberated-labor-internal social process *did not approve* of the terms for any given proposal or policy package they would not *forfeit* their collective control over the implements of mass industrial production as a result -- realistically the result would most-likely be a *devolving* of larger-scale work organizing, since no agreement was reached between mass-demand and self-organized liberated-labor. Production could still take place on any ad-hoc basis, with liberated labor always getting 'first dibs' on anything they themselves produce, but it would be far more small-scale, localized, and balkanized than if larger-scale, multi-locality proposals and policy packages could be realized, for material economies of scale. (Liberated-labor vs. consumers)

- Any given finalized policy package will include a formal announcement of key proponents, politically responsible for that project's implementation, if satisfactory participation to cover all the necessary components of it is present. There is never any *standing*, *institutional* administration over everything, as we're used to seeing historically at the nationalist level. If a project *isn't* performing up to formal expectations (as detailed in its policy package), the proponents can be replaced with a mass-approved (exceeding in ranking over the initial policy package) proposal that 'tweaks' those details that need changing, such as which personnel, exactly, are deemed to be the formal 'proponents' of that project. (Consumers vs. administration)

- Proponents of any given active finalized policy package would have considerable logistical social latitude for administrating over its implementation, depending-on / limited-by its finalized detailed terms. In some instances, for example, proponents over *several* localities, of several *similar* policy packages -- say, over agriculture -- or even at regional, continental, and *global* scales -- may cross-coordinate to *generalize* production across many similar policy packages, for the sake of greater efficiencies of scale. (Administration vs. consumers)

- Proponents are meant to represent the exact terms of an active finalized policy package, and by extension, to also represent popular demand for certain material production and/or socio-political initiatives. Proponents may bring attention to certain aspects of the active finalized policy package in the course of its implementation, as with any possible differences on the part of active liberated-labor on the project. (Administration vs. liberated-labor)

- Liberated-labor will always be able to physically organize internally, without external interference. Depending on each active finalized policy package's provisions, liberated laborers may decide on their own the details of *how* they collectively supply their labor, to meet the objectives of that policy package -- as with specific personnel of their own, which work roles are absolutely necessary, the scheduling of work shifts and personnel, what geographical location(s) are to be used, how machinery is to be used, what the supply chains with other factories are, how the bulk-pooled labor credits funding is to be divided-up, if any additional funding of labor credits is needed, or even if locality debt issuances for additional labor credits are to be called-for, what maintenance may be needed on infrastructure / machinery, what education or training may be required for certain workers, etc. (Liberated-labor vs. administration)

[url]tinyurl.com/labor-credits-faq[/url]



---


Sivad wrote:
No I'm not, I don't want deflationary wingnut commodity money any more than I want bankster controlled fiat money.



But don't you see that money will inevitably become a commodity itself under material conditions of *capitalism* -- ? The functions of *finance* require it (loans, investments, etc.). Your only argument here is that you don't trust the public sector (government), nor do you trust the *private* sector (The Federal Reserve) to centralize and administrate such money-supply operations. You *want* fully atomized / individual participation in the money economy without realizing that such a service *has* to be centralized in some way, for the inherent purpose of *consistency* and authoritativeness / 'legitimacy'.


Sivad wrote:
Bullshit. There are plenty of alternatives to government control. We could have democratic control or even competing currencies, those don't "back feudal-like / slavery-like social relations". Anyway, in the US we don't even have government control, we have bankster technocrat control of the money supply.



The anti-elitist portion of your politics is valid, but even a configuration of 'competing currencies' / cryptocurrencies is a non-starter because such economic mechanics will still inevitably be subsumed under the political organization of the *state*, with its quasi-collectivized tax revenues and spending, as on warfare, in the international geopolitical arena.

In other words you're consciously or unconsciously reaching for a wishful vehicle of fully-neutral 'de-politicized money', when such a thing is in-reality *impossible*. Larger political developments will *always* impact the landscape of the economy, and money-supply, because such inherent dynamics -- like that of class-conflict -- will shape government spending and thus what internal industries are favored, and which are not.


Sivad wrote:
Bankster money is pure invention, there's no logic in it other than power, greed, and predation.



(Yawn.) It's a *succinct* rant, but it's still a wishful-thinking rant.

You can't just blame the currency for the larger mode-of-production itself, capitalism.


Sivad wrote:
Of course there are alternatives to the existing system. This system wasn't inevitable, people made choices. Your fatalism is a dead end.



You're misunderstanding -- I'm not citing 'civilization' in a *fatalistic* way. Rather, I'm saying that human societal civilization is the expression of the most-progressive social-cohesive developments that we have, historically. It's at the leading-edge and bleeding-edge of what we do as human society, going forward. The "alternative" to civilization would be to *regress*, which is an *undesirable* option -- barbarism, basically.

If you can think of a concrete 'alternative' to civilization, please let the rest of us in on it...(!)

Here's from the linked entry that you referenced:



Typically in wars and revolutions, when people exert themselves to the maximum and have to improvise, it is discovered that people can accomplish far more than they previously thought they could do (also captured in the saying "necessity is the mother of invention"). The whole way people think is suddenly changed. But in times of cultural pessimism, general exhaustion prevails and people are generally skeptical or cynical about their ability to achieve or change very much at all.



Taken on-its-own, at face-value, this is an erroneous line of *cultural determinism* -- yes, I'll agree that the *subjective factor* is important, but this line boils it down to something like 'morale', when there are also *larger forces* at-work, like those stacked in the 'History: Macro-Micro' graphic framework of mine, above.


Sivad wrote:
I am giving people the benefit of the doubt by participating in the discourse, if I thought they couldn't potentially see-through the power structures I wouldn't waste my time.
#14972327
@Tainari88, Nationalism and ultranationalism are two different things. A socialist can be a nationalist. But a socialist CANNOT be an ultranationalist. Ultranationalism wants to destroy other nationalities due to historical events, or general excessive pride. For example, in Yugoslavia, Tito was a nationalist, while Draža Mihailović was an ultranationalist. Many Yugoslav Partisans and socialists were nationalists, but they were not ultranationalists. Chetniks were ultranationalists, and they were strongly anti socialist. Another example is Albania, Enver Hoxha was a nationalist, but not an ultranationalist because he wanted to unite ethnic Eastern Orthodox Christians, ethnic Roman Catholics, and ethnic Muslims in Albania. An example of ultranationalists in Albania were anti socialist Catholics who wanted to rebel against Italian imperialism, AND socialist unity of all Albanian people.

Other socialists that were nationalists, but were NOT ultranationalists (because like you said, a socialist CANNOT be an ultranationalist) was Fidel Castro (never glorified Cuba), Kim Jong Un (wants to unite all of Korea, and does not care for religion since there are Buddhist and Christian Koreans), Nelson Mandela (took pride in South Africa, but was friends with many non South Africans), and Nicolae Ceaușescu (who traded a lot with Western nations like how Tito did, but got Romania into a lot of international debt, so in the 1980's, the Romanians had to work a lot in order to extract resources, food, and manufactured products to the nations that Romania was in debt with).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_nationalism
#14972330
@ckaihatsu, You have no scientific proof that a socialist cannot be a nationalist. There are Romanian, Albanian, Serbian, Russian, Polish, Italian, Spanish, and German socialists that are also nationalists. Taking pride in one's blood, nationality, background, etc. what ever you want to call it, has nothing to do with socialism. And if you are going to refer to some of Marx's words, then who would Marx himself refer to? Since there was no Marx before him. Everything has a start. And sometimes, nationalism can liberate one's nation from imperialism, Zionism, or Americanization. If it wasn't for those nationalists in the Balkans, the Balkans would still be under Turkish rule.

And you used the term "Stalinist?" What are you? Some ultra leftist who supports Muslims? And you're had "Revleft" in your post, and Revleft is ANTI communist.
#14972498
SSDR wrote:
@ckaihatsu, You have no scientific proof that a socialist cannot be a nationalist. There are Romanian, Albanian, Serbian, Russian, Polish, Italian, Spanish, and German socialists that are also nationalists. Taking pride in one's blood, nationality, background, etc. what ever you want to call it, has nothing to do with socialism. And if you are going to refer to some of Marx's words, then who would Marx himself refer to? Since there was no Marx before him. Everything has a start. And sometimes, nationalism can liberate one's nation from imperialism, Zionism, or Americanization. If it wasn't for those nationalists in the Balkans, the Balkans would still be under Turkish rule.



I don't disagree with you on the overall *politics* here, SSDR, since I *do* recognize / acknowledge 'national liberation' movements.

But regarding the term 'socialist' it's more of a gray-area, since *any* socialist *should* be for *international* / *global* working class collective self-liberation, ultimately, with national-liberation merely being a stepping-stone to that. If you and your politics are content with socialism-in-one-country then you're not really a socialist since you'd be okay with the class divide continuing to exist outside of the one country that you particularly favor. One would be a Stalinist, then.


SSDR wrote:
And you used the term "Stalinist?" What are you? Some ultra leftist who supports Muslims? And you're had "Revleft" in your post, and Revleft is ANTI communist.



RevLeft is now *frozen*, and I wouldn't assign it an overall political identity, except to say that it was mostly overrun with anarchists, in my experience over the past decade of involvement there.

Of course I support Muslims as a socio-political minority -- particularly for the purposes of their emigration to any chosen First World nation / economy, and for their self-determination / national-liberation anywhere. This position does *not* make me an ultra-leftist, because it's both a realistic and feasible demand.


SSDR wrote:
@Tainari88,


SSDR wrote:
Nationalism and ultranationalism are two different things. A socialist can be a nationalist. But a socialist CANNOT be an ultranationalist. Ultranationalism wants to destroy other nationalities due to historical events, or general excessive pride. For example, in Yugoslavia, Tito was a nationalist, while Draža Mihailović was an ultranationalist. Many Yugoslav Partisans and socialists were nationalists, but they were not ultranationalists. Chetniks were ultranationalists, and they were strongly anti socialist. Another example is Albania, Enver Hoxha was a nationalist, but not an ultranationalist because he wanted to unite ethnic Eastern Orthodox Christians, ethnic Roman Catholics, and ethnic Muslims in Albania. An example of ultranationalists in Albania were anti socialist Catholics who wanted to rebel against Italian imperialism, AND socialist unity of all Albanian people.

Other socialists that were nationalists, but were NOT ultranationalists (because like you said, a socialist CANNOT be an ultranationalist) was Fidel Castro (never glorified Cuba), Kim Jong Un (wants to unite all of Korea, and does not care for religion since there are Buddhist and Christian Koreans), Nelson Mandela (took pride in South Africa, but was friends with many non South Africans), and Nicolae Ceaușescu (who traded a lot with Western nations like how Tito did, but got Romania into a lot of international debt, so in the 1980's, the Romanians had to work a lot in order to extract resources, food, and manufactured products to the nations that Romania was in debt with).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-wing_nationalism



I'm in agreement with your definitions / descriptions here, and will suggest that such 'left-wing nationalism' be *called* that -- 'left-wing nationalism', or national-liberation, and *not* be considered as synonymous with 'socialism' itself, which *must* be world-conscious, by definition.
#14972506
@ckaihatsu, Sometimes staying away from people who are not the same nationality or blood as you is saving you personally. I mean, would a Polish person want to have children with an Ethiopian? I surely wouldn't want to be in a personal relationship with someone who is not my own kind. People need to stay with their own, because a clean person would not want to live with a dirty person who trashes everything up.

And no, I am not okay with classes continuing to exist outside of my people. But, at the same time, if every nationality was classless, then I still would not want to have them mix, because there are so many different kinds of people in terms of nationality. And "Stalinists" (Marxist-Leninists) are socialists. And Stalin was not a nationalist. Nor am I a follower of Stalin.

Exactly, RevLeft is ran by anarchists.

And you support people who support slavery? Muslims support family, slavery, sexism, and kill all atheists. Islam is reactionary. Islam is the enemy of socialism.

Do you have any proof that socialism must be world conscious? Meaning Poles would have to mix with Ethiopians for example.
#14972820
SSDR wrote:
@ckaihatsu, Sometimes staying away from people who are not the same nationality or blood as you is saving you personally. I mean, would a Polish person want to have children with an Ethiopian? I surely wouldn't want to be in a personal relationship with someone who is not my own kind. People need to stay with their own, because a clean person would not want to live with a dirty person who trashes everything up.

And no, I am not okay with classes continuing to exist outside of my people. But, at the same time, if every nationality was classless, then I still would not want to have them mix, because there are so many different kinds of people in terms of nationality.



These are *very* backward ideas and politics, SSDR. If we've found *any* social progress from the bourgeoisie's own brand of class stratification -- the modern world itself -- it's that we can readily set-aside demographic details like nationality, ethnicity, etc., when it comes to matters of the public good (and even the private sector largely conforms to government regulations of non-discrimination).

What you do in your own life is your own business, of course, and no one can tell you who to socialize with, but that's beside the point, anyway, since what's at-stake is how the *public* sphere is to be administrated -- particularly regarding the means of mass industrial production.

If socialism happened tomorrow, with the demographics that presently exist, people's interests would be with *collectivist production*, by the workers themselves / ourselves, without regard to details of demography from person-to-person. In this way all productive processes could be made fully mechanical, and all mechanical processes could be fully automated, eventually, so that all of humanity could reap the rewards of material usage, without having to *labor* for those mechanical benefits, as with the Internet, for example.


SSDR wrote:
And "Stalinists" (Marxist-Leninists) are socialists.



No, not really, they're not, because they're only interested in the constrained, one-country nationalist context -- they're basically nationalist-opportunists. There's no historical example, outside of the Bolsheviks, where some Stalinist-type leader or party took power for the sake of then empowering the world's working class, to spread the revolution internationally.


SSDR wrote:
And Stalin was not a nationalist. Nor am I a follower of Stalin.



Neither am I, and, yes, Stalin *was* a nationalist ('socialism-in-one-country') because he was content to keep the social-relations remnants of the initial Bolshevik / soviet revolution constrained to the nation-state of Russia, ignoring the *internationalist* form of a genuine proletarian revolution.


Political Spectrum, Simplified

Spoiler: show
Image



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SSDR wrote:
Exactly, RevLeft is ran by anarchists.

And you support people who support slavery? Muslims support family, slavery, sexism, and kill all atheists. Islam is reactionary. Islam is the enemy of socialism.



Well, I'm not *for* Islam, or *any* religion, for that matter, but as in *any* demographic population, those *in* Islam run the gamut of political stripes, with some being more 'universal'-minded, and others being dogmatic and controlling in their religious practices, like ISIS.


SSDR wrote:
Do you have any proof that socialism must be world conscious? Meaning Poles would have to mix with Ethiopians for example.



I don't know why you're so fixated on demographic-mixing, since that matter is *tangential* to the *political* goal of collectivist production (socialism), but, yes, of course socialism has to be world-conscious, and world-manifesting, otherwise the reality would be that of *favoritism* for certain geographic parts of the globe, compared to others 'left behind' in class relations.
#14972880
ckaihatsu wrote:
The 'New World Order' formulation is a red herring


:knife:


-- capitalist nation-states, at the international level, can *never* resolve their own nationalistic differences because at that level they're forever in *competition* with each other.


How does that apply to anything I wrote?

'Local sovereignty' is *meaningless* because it ignores that modern-day production -- *industrial* production, specifically -- is *already* globally coordinated, as within corporations / conglomerations.


:knife: Transnational corporations took over the world by eroding local sovereignty and independence.

It's positive and historically-progressive if you're against monopolies and oligopolies, but you're erroneously conflating two different modes of material-production together -- that of 'free trade' (capitalism), and that of 'soviets' (workers control), when these are *not* the same. (Note the 'mode of production' magnitude in the following framework.)


Free trade is capitalism? :knife:

The theoretical 'dictatorship of the proletariat' international self-organization of workers is for a *reason* -- it can be thought-of as a revolutionary *strategy*, one of matching the existing bourgeois state(s) in its scale and scope of social organization. A workers state, consistent all over the world, would be a formidable social structure that *could* take on the magnitude of the existing bourgeois-state formulation, to seize societal control away from it, anywhere and everywhere, in favor of establishing collectivist workers control over all social production.


That's the stupid shit I was talking about.

On this point you're assuming that all 'stakeholders' (workers, consumers, state-like administration, etc.) would have the same material *interests* in common, when they *don't*.


Yeah, I didn't assume anything like that.


If you can think of a concrete 'alternative' to civilization, please let the rest of us in on it...(!)


I did, you ignored it and started raving about stupid shit. :lol:
#14972944
@ckaihatsu, Yes, in pure terms nationality is a construct, and in pure terms, national background could be used as a construct. But many people like differences. The only way that your backwards ideas can work is if everyone is the same, and if everyone is the same, isn't that racist? And, if everyone was the same, wouldn't the "World be boring?" People are different, and it's okay to have difference, it's racist and boring not to. But we need to defend those differences to prevent social chaos and dispute, since those things are the enemies of socialism.

If one nation wants to be socialist, but if another doesn't, like how USA didn't and the Soviet Union did, then socialism can exist in the Soviet Union, since they had no control over the USA. They didn't have the power to liberate the USA for various reasons. Military reasons (WWIII threat), political reasons (Americans love money), and self sufficiency reasons (in some Soviet households well into the 1960's, there were five or six children in one bedroom). A nation needs to focus on its socialist goal before helping other nations. And besides, Russian and American cultures are different. Most Russian people don't like redneck shit, while most Americans don't like some Russian cultural elements. The world would be boring if everyone was the same. So we need to defend those differences.

What you said about Stalin being a nationalist is NOT the definition of nationalism. Nationalism is when one loves their nationality, and wants to keep their own blood. Stalin was Georgian. Most of the people in the Soviet government were Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, or Jews. The Soviet Union did not have a nationality. "Soviet" is not a nationality. The Soviet Union had many nationalities and ethnicities. Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, Jews, Mongols, or Turkic people were some of the nationalities in the USSR. And the 1936 Soviet Constitution went against nationalism and race realism. So that's proof that the USSR did not promote nationalism. Stalin never praised "Mother Russia." Those who praised "Mother Russia" were White Army, nationalist conservatives who went against Marxist-Leninism.

Stalin NEVER glorified any nation. And Stalinism is a form of Marxism. It's Marxist-Leninism, because Stalin called himself a Marxist-Leninist. Only anti Stalinists say that Stalin was not a socialist.

Well you defending Islamic imperialism through "anti racist acceptance" will destroy socialism. Islam is the enemy of socialism.

But just because if the whole world is socialist, doesn't mean that Czechs would HAVE to mix with Ethiopians. Because most people wouldn't like that, even Stalin wouldn't. :lol:
#14973057
ckaihatsu wrote:
The 'New World Order' formulation is a red herring



Sivad wrote:
:knife:



It looks like you're definitely *not* interested in communicating, and especially not about matters of socialism, or politics in general.

If this is the case, please don't waste the time for *both* of us. Just let it go -- I'm sure we both have more-important and more-desirable things to do with our lives.


---


Sivad wrote:
That's somewhat confused, a lot of what these nationalists are opposing is ant-democratic elitist internationalism(New World Order globalism), and I'm in full solidarity with them as far as that goes. Nationalism can become toxic but local sovereignty is nonnegotiable, I wouldn't give that up for anything and certainly not to be ruled by corporate free trade arbitration committees and unelected international governance soviets.



ckaihatsu wrote:
-- capitalist nation-states, at the international level, can *never* resolve their own nationalistic differences because at that level they're forever in *competition* with each other. Geopolitical 'stability', ironically and perversely, is only achieved with a single nation-state imperialist hegemon that prevails over its rivals, like that of Britain in the past, and of the U.S. today.



Sivad wrote:
How does that apply to anything I wrote?



Since you haven't noticed, I'm *refuting* your libertarian-nationalist line about the major capitalist powers wanting to merge into a single pan-global entity, since they're empirically *unable* to do so even if some of them *wanted* to -- and, besides, U.S. militaristic imperialism is bad enough, anyway, and should be the political focus here for anti-imperialist, revolutionary efforts.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
'Local sovereignty' is *meaningless* because it ignores that modern-day production -- *industrial* production, specifically -- is *already* globally coordinated, as within corporations / conglomerations.



Sivad wrote:
:knife: Transnational corporations took over the world by eroding local sovereignty and independence.



And would you *want* to return to a (feudal-type) world of nothing but *localism* -- ?

I'm not *defending* corporate rule under capitalism -- because it's still based on private property -- but the (multi-national) *structure* it's spawned is valuable in operation and should be seized and run by the *workers* of the world.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
It's positive and historically-progressive if you're against monopolies and oligopolies, but you're erroneously conflating two different modes of material-production together -- that of 'free trade' (capitalism), and that of 'soviets' (workers control), when these are *not* the same. (Note the 'mode of production' magnitude in the following framework.)


‭History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show
Image



Sivad wrote:
Free trade is capitalism? :knife:



Yeah -- capitalism uses a system of *exchanges* (and exchange-values) to benefit those merchants and financiers disproportionately who do the social-organizational work, mostly through investments of capital, for any given process of production (of goods and services) and distribution. The *workers* who actually *produce* those commodities are *ripped-off* of their labor value, every hour of every day, for every worker.


[11] Labor & Capital, Wages & Dividends

Spoiler: show
Image



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
The theoretical 'dictatorship of the proletariat' international self-organization of workers is for a *reason* -- it can be thought-of as a revolutionary *strategy*, one of matching the existing bourgeois state(s) in its scale and scope of social organization. A workers state, consistent all over the world, would be a formidable social structure that *could* take on the magnitude of the existing bourgeois-state formulation, to seize societal control away from it, anywhere and everywhere, in favor of establishing collectivist workers control over all social production.



Sivad wrote:
That's the stupid shit I was talking about.



You're not adding anything to the discussion / exchange by just being vaguely disparaging.

If you're just going to be one-sided in your comments without addressing the *substance* of what I've said, then there's no need for you to be here. You could write your knee-jerk comments into a word processor without being connected to the Internet at all, and it would be the same thing as what you're doing here.

You're not realizing that it's all about *social organization* -- that of the workers, versus that of the bourgeoisie. Look at what's happening in France right now with the 'yellow jackets' workers who are *showing* that without work inputs nothing gets done for *anyone*, least of all for the capitalists' profits.


---


Sivad wrote:
my kind of socialism is just free market anti-capitalism which limits property rights through the voluntary rational solidarity of stakeholders but doesn't abolish private property or markets. It doesn't liberate the masses, it liberates the individual from both the masses and the elites.



ckaihatsu wrote:
On this point you're assuming that all 'stakeholders' (workers, consumers, state-like administration, etc.) would have the same material *interests* in common, when they *don't*.



Sivad wrote:
Yeah, I didn't assume anything like that.



See -- you're a *reformist*, at best, since you'd be content with a few left-leaning *reforms* / regulations on the market mechanism, without addressing its inherent income-inequality dynamic, or class favoritism, whatsoever.

Since you don't oppose private property ownership at all you're basically a Democrat who would've allowed Killary to continue bombing Syria, etc.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
If you can think of a concrete 'alternative' to civilization, please let the rest of us in on it...(!)



Sivad wrote:
I did, you ignored it and started raving about stupid shit. :lol:



Your back-to-feudalism / -slavery line is historically *regressive*. Private property, particularly over the means of mass industrial production, needs to be *abolished* by the world's working class, for mass-collectivization of the same, for humanity's benefit.


SSDR wrote:
@ckaihatsu, Yes, in pure terms nationality is a construct, and in pure terms, national background could be used as a construct. But many people like differences. The only way that your backwards ideas



You need to explain this facile characterization here -- how are any of my ideas historically *backward* -- ?


SSDR wrote:
can work is if everyone is the same, and if everyone is the same, isn't that racist?



No, you're using a *caricature* of socialism, to dismiss it. People are people, and would be so regardless of the civilization in-place, with common biological and social needs, but what counts is *how* any given civilization *functions*.

In other words, you need to look to how a society *produces* for those biological and social needs -- as things are now, under capitalism, this can only take place through private ownership, and money-owning market *demand* (paying consumers), even if produced commodities have to be *thrown away* due to inevitable overproduction and lack of market demand -- a 'market failure':

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure


You obviously have a 'tribalist' conception of society, when the human societies of today have been materially *standardized* through bourgeois economics. Here's that quote again from The Communist Manifesto:



The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.

The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation.



The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.



https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/w ... 01.htm#007



---


SSDR wrote:
And, if everyone was the same, wouldn't the "World be boring?" People are different, and it's okay to have difference, it's racist and boring not to. But we need to defend those differences to prevent social chaos and dispute, since those things are the enemies of socialism.



You're sounding very *lifestylist* here -- no, people's *characters* don't all need to be the same, but what *does* need to be the same / consistent, is people's common access to society's *economics*, meaning the way that goods and services are organized, produced, and distributed. Some use the term 'democratic economy' to indicate this meaning / definition.

I developed a *model framework* for this, which is archived at RevLeft:


Labor credits Frequently Asked Questions

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... -Questions


---


SSDR wrote:
If one nation wants to be socialist, but if another doesn't, like how USA didn't and the Soviet Union did, then socialism can exist in the Soviet Union, since they had no control over the USA.



But socialism *never existed* in the Soviet Union -- you're thinking of *Stalinism*, which *didn't* look to workers collective self-determination over social production, for its political motivation. It was *Stalinism* in the USSR because its politics were socialism-in-one-country, which is *not* really socialism, since socialism needs to *overthrow* bourgeois rule and private property relations everywhere in the world.

Many consider Stalinism to be 'state capitalism' since Russia at that time was still within the exchange-value-competitiveness of global capitalism, as a nation. That's why its economics degraded and it finally *imploded*, unable to compete militarily with the West, by the West's prevailing geopolitical standards of hegemonic nuclear-missile militarism.


SSDR wrote:
They didn't have the power to liberate the USA for various reasons.



The USSR had *no* political motivation to 'liberate' the people / workers of the U.S., because its society and social production wasn't based on its own working class to begin with. It had the nation-state interest of *expansionism*, which wasn't all bad, but certainly wasn't a force of *liberation* for Russia's working class, or beyond.


SSDR wrote:
Military reasons (WWIII threat), political reasons (Americans love money), and self sufficiency reasons (in some Soviet households well into the 1960's, there were five or six children in one bedroom). A nation needs to focus on its socialist goal before helping other nations.



But don't you see that, ultimately, the nation-state / country *structure* is itself *bourgeois* in composition -- ? Nations need to be *overthrown* as nation-commodifying political geographic units, by the working class, since the working class as a singular *global* entity has no need for them. (Sure maybe they'd continue to some degree *culturally*, or not, but *materially* the workers would collectively decide what gets produced, which is far more societally important than various cultural groupings.)

Sure, you could argue for nation-state-based *national liberation* / self-determination, but it would *have* to be a stepping-stone to the reorganization of social production by the world's workers, otherwise it just becomes a bid for bourgeois-type *nationalism*, leaving capitalist social relations (private property) untouched, and so then nothing really changes for the better, as is the situation in the world today.


SSDR wrote:
And besides, Russian and American cultures are different. Most Russian people don't like redneck shit, while most Americans don't like some Russian cultural elements. The world would be boring if everyone was the same. So we need to defend those differences.



Cultural homogenization isn't a requirement for a revolution in *material productivity* ('mode of production'), as into *socialism*.


SSDR wrote:
What you said about Stalin being a nationalist is NOT the definition of nationalism. Nationalism is when one loves their nationality, and wants to keep their own blood. Stalin was Georgian. Most of the people in the Soviet government were Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, or Jews. The Soviet Union did not have a nationality. "Soviet" is not a nationality. The Soviet Union had many nationalities and ethnicities. Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, Jews, Mongols, or Turkic people were some of the nationalities in the USSR. And the 1936 Soviet Constitution went against nationalism and race realism. So that's proof that the USSR did not promote nationalism. Stalin never praised "Mother Russia." Those who praised "Mother Russia" were White Army, nationalist conservatives who went against Marxist-Leninism.



Again you're assuming that *culture* is more deterministic than *mode of production*. Here's this diagram again, to show the relative societal determinism of each:


‭History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

Spoiler: show
Image



---


SSDR wrote:
Stalin NEVER glorified any nation. And Stalinism is a form of Marxism.



No, it isn't -- socialism-in-one-country is *not* socialism, because it leaves the majority of the globe to capitalism.


SSDR wrote:
It's Marxist-Leninism, because Stalin called himself a Marxist-Leninist. Only anti Stalinists say that Stalin was not a socialist.



Stalin wasn't a socialist because his politics were a strongman-type, so-called 'socialism-in-one-country'. That's *not* workers power and workers control at all, whatsoever.


SSDR wrote:
Well you defending Islamic imperialism through "anti racist acceptance" will destroy socialism. Islam is the enemy of socialism.



Here's what I *actually* said:


ckaihatsu wrote:
Well, I'm not *for* Islam, or *any* religion, for that matter, but as in *any* demographic population, those *in* Islam run the gamut of political stripes, with some being more 'universal'-minded, and others being dogmatic and controlling in their religious practices, like ISIS.



viewtopic.php?p=14972820&sid=224bbcb324e9b2a8aec3ca09763ea035#p14972820



Here's a real-world example of Islam-based *universalism*:



Malcolm X later said that seeing Muslims of "all colors, from blue-eyed blonds to black-skinned Africans," interacting as equals led him to see Islam as a means by which racial problems could be overcome.[140]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malcolm_X ... e_to_Mecca



---


SSDR wrote:
But just because if the whole world is socialist, doesn't mean that Czechs would HAVE to mix with Ethiopians. Because most people wouldn't like that, even Stalin wouldn't. :lol:



I personally wouldn't care one way or the other -- you seem to think that *culture* is most-deterministic, when it's not. What counts is how *social production* takes place, which needs to be in the hands of the world's *working class*.
#14973063
ckaihatsu wrote:It looks like you're definitely *not* interested in communicating, and especially not about matters of socialism, or politics in general.


I'm not interested in debating the validity of a failed and defunct ideology that's responsible for some of the greatest horrors in human history. It's a system that once implemented immediately collapses into authoritarian state capitalism(red fascism) and has never done one bit of good for anyone but the managerial elites. And I'm especially not interested in debating it with an ideologue who can't recognize any of its faults or failings and thinks it's the one and only master key to understanding and predicting the entirety of human social reality, past, present, and future.

The Marxists took socialism and twisted it into something horribly grotesque and set back the process of emancipation by at least a century. It amazes me that there are still people clinging to that demented political abomination after all the misery and carnage it has produced and continues to inflict on billions of people around the world.
#14973228
@ckaihatsu, Your ideas are backwards because you're claiming that "Socialism in one Country" is not socialism. Even though it is because the socialism in that one country, the economy would be socialist. While the rest of the world's nations can either be capitalist or socialist. If every country is socialist, but wants to keep "divided up" (separated for cultural reasons, different people want different things - again you don't realize that because your ideas are somewhat backwards), then globally it's still socialist, but nations exist to keep different cultures and eugenics. Remember, most Poles don't want to mix with Somalians.

Different people are different, and different people have different standards. Prussian people have higher standards than Russians. This is why the DDR was wealthier than the Soviet Union. This is why Germany is wealthier than Russia. I used both socialist and capitalist examples to prove my eugenic point. Different people, are, different.

Woahh shit man, I never talked about market failure. Where did that come from? I never defended a capitalist mode of production. Who told you that I defended market failures?

I never said that I have a tribalist viewpoint of society. But, everything is determined by economics. Why are wives submissive to their providing husbands? Because they're relying on them. It's common sense.

And that quote supports the family institution. "The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation." You using that quote makes you sound like a Trotskyist - Supporting socialism AND defending the family institution, claiming that capitalists destroy the family, but in reality, capitalists promote the family, but not as much as feudalism.

Yes, people's common access to resources that they want or need should be the same for everyone. I never said otherwise. The reason why everything should be available for everyone is so people don't have to rely on their families!

Socialism did exist in the Soviet Union. Yes there was a currency (in pure socialism there is no currency and I am against currency), yes there were classes (because the people were not ready for pure socialism, and many people didn't fully understand socialism at the time and I am against classes), and there was a medium of exchange (to control the anti socialist slackers and traitors). The Soviet Union was feminist. It liberated many people from the family. People could move out and get jobs that were not family owned. Families were NOT employers. The Soviet Union released movies about domestic abuse to raise family awareness. The Soviet Union was far closer to socialism than the USA. The Soviet Union did NOT have private property. Enterprises were not family owned, and all school was free, so that people didn't have to rely on their families to pay for university. It did have personal property, which is different. Private and personal are NOT the same. The Soviet Union was socialist, but many other nations like the USA or Pakistan were NOT.

Stalinism is a form of state socialism. It used some capitalist tactics to toughen the people up for scientific reasons. And no, the USSR's military was struggling in the 1980's due to the liberal, ANTI STALINIST policies.

The USSR's production was based for the workers. Nothing was for profit truly. And you didn't see annoying advertisements like how you do in NYC. The Soviet Union was liberating.

The Soviet Union was created by the working class. The Red Army was composed of working class people. Stalin was a working class person.

Cultural homogenization? Different people want different things. You cannot have a pure global society without that. Either that, or have different socialist societies that defend their own eugenic differences.

Yes, if the rest of the globe is capitalist, then that socialist state is still socialist! If everyone's hands were pink, and mine was purple, then my hand cannot be purple? That makes no sense.

Stalin was not a weak pacifist. Pacifism is evil because it lets the evil get away from their evil actions. The most evil are not those who commit evil, but rather let those who commit evil get away from it. Without Stalin, the USSR would be destroyed by Nazi Germany.

Malcolm X is not a socialist.

Exactly, socialism is more important than culture, but eugenics comes in place, and different people want different things.
#14973439
Sivad wrote:
I'm not interested in debating the validity of a failed and defunct ideology that's responsible for some of the greatest horrors in human history.



Yeah, this is it -- this statement of yours *cinches* it: You're conflating Stalinism from history with communism as it needs to be.

Things don't always work out in the real world, and you're adopting a 'perfect world' assumption, when the reality was that the nascent soviet revolution was under incredible *external* pressure:



The Allied intervention was a multi-national military expedition launched during the Russian Civil War in 1918. The stated goals were to help the Czechoslovak Legion, to secure supplies of munitions and armaments in Russian ports, and to re-establish the Eastern Front. After the Bolshevik government withdrew from World War I, the Allied Powers militarily backed the anti-communist White forces in Russia.



Assessment by historians

Historical assessment of the intervention has been universally negative. Frederick L. Schuman wrote that the consequences of the expedition "were to poison East-West relations forever after, to contribute significantly to the origins of World War II and the later 'Cold War,' and to fix patterns of suspicion and hatred on both sides which even today threaten worse catastrophes in time to come."[43] Some modern historians summarised, "The immediate effect of the intervention was to prolong a bloody civil war, thereby costing thousands of additional lives and wreaking enormous destruction on an already battered society."[44]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_in ... _Civil_War



---


Sivad wrote:
It's a system that once implemented immediately collapses into authoritarian state capitalism(red fascism)



There's no such term as 'red fascism', because even the Stalin-led degenerated workers state of the USSR was *anti-fascism*:



Siege of Leningrad

The Siege of Leningrad (Блокада Ленинграда) was a prolonged military blockade undertaken from the south by the Army Group North of Nazi Germany against the Russian city of Leningrad (St. Petersburg) on the Eastern Front in World War II. The Finnish army invaded from the north, co-operating with the Germans until they had recaptured territory lost in the recent Winter War, but refused to make further approaches to the city.

The siege started on 8 September 1941, when the last road to the city was severed. Although the Soviet forces managed to open a narrow land corridor to the city on 18 January 1943, the siege was not lifted until 27 January 1944, 872 days after it began. It was one of the longest and most destructive sieges in history, and possibly the costliest in casualties suffered. Some historians classify it as genocide.



Background

Leningrad's capture was one of three strategic goals in the German Operation Barbarossa and the main target of Army Group North. The strategy was motivated by Leningrad's political status as the former capital of Russia and the symbolic capital of the Russian Revolution, its military importance as a main base of the Soviet Baltic Fleet, and its industrial strength, housing numerous arms factories.[10] By 1939, the city was responsible for 11% of all Soviet industrial output.[11]

It has been reported that Adolf Hitler was so confident of capturing Leningrad that he had invitations printed to the victory celebrations to be held in the city's Hotel Astoria.[12]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_ ... evaluation



---


Sivad wrote:
and has never done one bit of good for anyone but the managerial elites.



Yes, the Stalinist state *was* bureaucratic-elitist, and I don't defend Stalinistic rule.


Sivad wrote:
And I'm especially not interested in debating it with an ideologue who can't recognize any of its faults or failings and thinks it's the one and only master key to understanding and predicting the entirety of human social reality, past, present, and future.



Again, you're erroneously conflating historical Stalinism with the ideals of *socialism*, as from the Communist Manifesto, and I also have a model framework of my own that's compatible / congruent with socialism and communism:

Labor credits Frequently Asked Questions

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... -Questions


---


Sivad wrote:
The Marxists took socialism and twisted it into something horribly grotesque



You mean the 'Marxist-Leninists', or Stalinists -- you're not accepting that the problem is *constraining* a revolution to one country (Russia) (it didn't spread, as intended, to Germany and the rest of Europe).

Here's that diagram again, to show you the difference:


Political Spectrum, Simplified

Spoiler: show
Image



---


Sivad wrote:
and set back the process of emancipation by at least a century.



What do *you* mean by 'emancipation' -- ?


Sivad wrote:
It amazes me that there are still people clinging to that demented political abomination after all the misery and carnage it has produced and continues to inflict on billions of people around the world.



Yup, agreed. Socialism can't be constrained to any one country, or a few countries, because it needs to be done by the *working class* itself, without interference from nation-state bureaucracies, like those of Stalinist rule.
#14973466
SSDR wrote:
@ckaihatsu, Your ideas are backwards because you're claiming that "Socialism in one Country" is not socialism. Even though it is because the socialism in that one country, the economy would be socialist.



No, my politics are *not* backward, they're historically-progressive because the workers of the world need to control and direct all social production, as on industrial implements (means of mass production).

Just because I'm not a Stalinist doesn't mean that my politics are backward. If a workers revolution is constrained to just one country then it could only go in one of two directions -- [1] *outward*, to be solidarized-with by the workers of additional countries, or [2] *inwards* (internal to one or more separate nation-states), as happened under Stalin, with no *class* basis existing any more for the revolution to continue, which means it became a system of state capitalism, and was no longer a proletarian revolution.


SSDR wrote:
While the rest of the world's nations can either be capitalist or socialist.



Now you're sounding *exactly* like a Stalinist -- look what happened in history with this set of politics:


The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, also known as the Nazi–Soviet Pact,[1] the Hitler–Stalin Pact,[2] or the German–Soviet Nonaggression Pact[3][4] (officially: Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics),[a] was a neutrality pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed in Moscow on 23 August 1939 by foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, respectively.[6] The pact was followed by the German–Soviet Commercial Agreement in February 1940. Although the Nazi-Soviet relationship started to deteriorate soon after that, the pact remained in force for nearly two years, until the German government of Adolf Hitler broke the pact by invading the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941 (Operation Barbarossa).[3]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov%E ... ntrop_Pact



---


SSDR wrote:
If every country is socialist, but wants to keep "divided up" (separated for cultural reasons, different people want different things - again you don't realize that because your ideas are somewhat backwards),



Your incorrect, facile insults of what my politics are won't deflect from *your own* bad politics -- you're continuing to think that *cultural* matters are what's at-stake, when it's really about how society disposes of its surplus. Under capitalism and the nation-states patchwork there's too much private aggrandizement, and a state apparatus that supports this systematic privatization of society's surplus.

Under the control of the workers the *world* could supply directly to actual human humane needs, like that for the basics of life and living for *everyone*, barring no one. Common needs for food, housing, energy, etc., could be fulfilled *collectively*, with planning and negligible waste, unlike how things are today.


SSDR wrote:
then globally it's still socialist, but nations exist to keep different cultures and eugenics. Remember, most Poles don't want to mix with Somalians.



You're continuing to uphold a culturalist, *racist* line because of your own overriding concern with mere civil-society racist concerns. Nations actually exist to uphold different sections of capital ownership against those of others, and that's why there were two world wars in the previous century, with no guarantees that this frictional dynamic has been resolved for our *current* century.


SSDR wrote:
Different people are different, and different people have different standards. Prussian people have higher standards than Russians. This is why the DDR was wealthier than the Soviet Union. This is why Germany is wealthier than Russia. I used both socialist and capitalist examples to prove my eugenic point. Different people, are, different.



And now you're admitting that you're more concerned with matters of wealth ownership, than anything else -- and on a *socialist* forum, too -- !


SSDR wrote:
Woahh shit man, I never talked about market failure. Where did that come from? I never defended a capitalist mode of production. Who told you that I defended market failures?



Well, what kind of mode of production *do* you advocate-for -- ?


SSDR wrote:
I never said that I have a tribalist viewpoint of society. But, everything is determined by economics. Why are wives submissive to their providing husbands? Because they're relying on them. It's common sense.



The political term for this dynamic is called 'oppression', in this case according to gender, due to private property ownership, as for housing.


SSDR wrote:
And that quote supports the family institution. "The bourgeoisie has torn away from the family its sentimental veil, and has reduced the family relation to a mere money relation." You using that quote makes you sound like a Trotskyist -



You're *misinterpreting* the quotation -- what it's saying is that 'cash is king', because of the support of the bourgeois ruling class for the mode of *commodity* production, above all else ('commodity fetishism').

The quote does *not* support the family institution because the *system* of capitalism does not support the family institution, and a societal implementation of socialism, correctly, would *not* support the nuclear family institution either, instead favoring *collective* organization of work to benefit people *collectively*, without private ownership or commodity production.

Yes, I'm basically a Trotskyist.


SSDR wrote:
Supporting socialism AND defending the family institution, claiming that capitalists destroy the family, but in reality, capitalists promote the family, but not as much as feudalism.



*Individual* capitalists may support the family institution in a *charitable* way, but that doesn't mean that the socio-economic *system* of capitalism inherently supports the family, because it *doesn't*. Whether one is a more-progressive-minded capitalist, or is a parent of one or more children, both kinds of social relations there indicate a kind of *charity* -- a subjective, limited-scope 'struggle', to some degree, against the strict-commodity functioning of the capitalist economic system.


Worldview Diagram

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SSDR wrote:
Yes, people's common access to resources that they want or need should be the same for everyone. I never said otherwise. The reason why everything should be available for everyone is so people don't have to rely on their families!



Okay, well-said -- now what are the political-stance *implications* of this stated politics of yours?

In other words what needs to change in the way society is run for this socio-political goal of yours ('people's common access to resources that they want or need should be the same for everyone') to realistically be realized?


SSDR wrote:
Socialism did exist in the Soviet Union.



No, it didn't, because the workers were not ultimately in control of social production, and of the country itself (there shouldn't even *be* countries existing under workers control because a genuinely proletarian social production would not require them, though the *bourgeoisie* *do* require them).


SSDR wrote:
Yes there was a currency (in pure socialism there is no currency and I am against currency), yes there were classes (because the people were not ready for pure socialism, and many people didn't fully understand socialism at the time and I am against classes),



Okay, you're elucidating your politics more thoroughly here.


SSDR wrote:
and there was a medium of exchange (to control the anti socialist slackers and traitors).



I would argue that the reason money continued to exist in the USSR was because it was state *capitalist* -- it *tried* to remain as insulated and internal as possible, as compared to the West and the global capitalist economy, but that Stalinistic / state-capitalist formulation could only stay insulated for so long, as we saw with the emergence and proliferation of *black markets* within, *inevitable* within an overall global capitalism.


SSDR wrote:
The Soviet Union was feminist. It liberated many people from the family. People could move out and get jobs that were not family owned. Families were NOT employers. The Soviet Union released movies about domestic abuse to raise family awareness. The Soviet Union was far closer to socialism than the USA. The Soviet Union did NOT have private property. Enterprises were not family owned, and all school was free, so that people didn't have to rely on their families to pay for university. It did have personal property, which is different. Private and personal are NOT the same.



Yes, good points -- many call this socio-political structure a 'degenerated workers state', which is fairly accurate.


SSDR wrote:
The Soviet Union was socialist, but many other nations like the USA or Pakistan were NOT.



Okay, I understand your meaning now, though I differ on use of the term 'socialism' for describing the USSR, since *politically* it was not spreading any actual proletarian revolution to other countries.


SSDR wrote:
Stalinism is a form of state socialism. It used some capitalist tactics to toughen the people up for scientific reasons. And no, the USSR's military was struggling in the 1980's due to the liberal, ANTI STALINIST policies.



Okay, also a good point -- it was this 'revisionism' that ultimately prevailed, due to the continuing degeneration of internal workers-state-type structures versus the pressures of external global capitalism.


SSDR wrote:
The USSR's production was based for the workers. Nothing was for profit truly. And you didn't see annoying advertisements like how you do in NYC. The Soviet Union was liberating.



Yes, the Soviet Union was relatively the most *progressive* nation-state in the world at that time.


SSDR wrote:
The Soviet Union was created by the working class. The Red Army was composed of working class people. Stalin was a working class person.



Stalin was *no longer* a working class person once he rose to a position of *political power* within the country -- he derailed Lenin's leadership by turning political efforts almost entirely *internal*, with his 'socialism-in-one-country' line. He was a left-leaning *strongman*, with the bureaucratic elite.


---


SSDR wrote:
And besides, Russian and American cultures are different. Most Russian people don't like redneck shit, while most Americans don't like some Russian cultural elements. The world would be boring if everyone was the same. So we need to defend those differences.



ckaihatsu wrote:
Cultural homogenization isn't a requirement for a revolution in *material productivity* ('mode of production'), as into *socialism*.



SSDR wrote:
Cultural homogenization? Different people want different things. You cannot have a pure global society without that. Either that, or have different socialist societies that defend their own eugenic differences.



I'm implying that, for effective upheaval and proletarian revolution, *politics* and political activity should come to the fore, worldwide, while making *cultural* concerns take a back-seat, for the most part.

I don't agree with Mao's top-down interference in cultural matters, but perhaps the empirical situation would be one of politics-versus-culture, until the bourgeoisie could be decisively uprooted -- then social conditions would be more favorable for laid-back, recreational, cultural activities.


SSDR wrote:
Yes, if the rest of the globe is capitalist, then that socialist state is still socialist! If everyone's hands were pink, and mine was purple, then my hand cannot be purple? That makes no sense.



Again, *politically* there wasn't an *expansion* of workers control beyond the borders of the Soviet Union (and workers control was being *suppressed* within the USSR), so this constraining of a new mode of production to just the Russian nation-state means that genuine socialism wasn't being *spread*, as intended by the Bolsheviks.


SSDR wrote:
Stalin was not a weak pacifist. Pacifism is evil because it lets the evil get away from their evil actions. The most evil are not those who commit evil, but rather let those who commit evil get away from it. Without Stalin, the USSR would be destroyed by Nazi Germany.



Agreed. (But also consider the deal / pact he made with Hitler at the beginning of World War II.)


SSDR wrote:
Malcolm X is not a socialist.



I guess, towards the end of his life, Malcolm X would be better described as a pan-Africanist.

But I included his person as an illustration of how Islam as a religion runs the full political spectrum from left to right.


SSDR wrote:
Exactly, socialism is more important than culture, but eugenics comes in place, and different people want different things.



Since you've brought up the topic of eugenics repeatedly, what are you saying with it politically -- ?

Perhaps that a nascent socialist order would have to exercise political power somehow over civil-society-type issues and dynamics, such as any emergent bids to tribalistic-type 'ethnic cleansing' campaigns -- ?
#14973579
@ckaihatsu, Your politics are progressive, AND seem somewhat backwards in my perspective. Not all progressives have forward politics. Left communists and the Antifa are both very progressive, but at the same time, they're backwards.

I am not a Stalinist either. And not all non-Stalinists are backwards. I am not a Stalinist, and I'm not backwards.

The reason why the USSR had a peace treaty with Nazi Germany was so that the USSR could gain trust of Nazi Germany, while the USSR was secretly building up its military, industry, and housing. Also, the USSR could of potentially gained access to sensitive information about Nazi Germany so that it could know more about them that they could use against them in the future. If a nation is honest with another, it could lose power and international respect. So the USSR had to be confidential with who they disliked so that they could buy as much time as possible. Also, nations need to trade with each other, to gain access to natural resources and technology (German technology was far more advanced than Soviet technology in the 1930's). The USSR could gain access to some German engineering, and that could help their military, but they wouldn't say that because they don't want to look like enemies so they can buy as much time as possible.

But, one nation could be fully controlled by the labour (workers don't exist in socialism, workers labour for capitalists while in socialism, people labour for themselves and for society. The term "worker" is used in capitalism, just like the term "serfdom" was used in feudalism), while other nations could have controlled workers (USA) or controlled serfdoms (Saudi Arabia, parts of Africa, etc.).

In the 1800's, there were capitalist and feudalist societies. Capitalism is the successor of feudalism. In some countries, workers had economic power through wages that were controlled by their employers. Their employers ruled them and fired some people who advocated steps such as feminism, atheism, or socialism. Examples of countries like this in the 1800's were the USA, the British Empire, France, or the German Confederate Empire. Then, there were countries that were family oriented, and that labourers were controlled by their owners and landlords. This is feudalism, or is similar to feudalism. Countries that were feudal like in the 1800's were the Ottoman Empire, parts of Imperial Russia, parts of Africa, or the Kingdom of Serbia. In the 1800's, BOTH capitalist countries and feudalist countries existed, and had different economies. So why can't socialist and capitalist countries co exist? Feudalist and capitalist countries traded, I mean you had Persian rugs in London. The USA traded with the Ottoman Empire. Enver Hoxha's father was a traveling merchant who was from Ottoman controlled feudal Albania, and he traveled to the USA, Britain, and France, which were capitalist countries in the 1900's. He sent money to him and his mother to pay the landlords in the multi family house. If this can co exist, then why couldn't the DDR trade with Federal Germany, or Brazil? Brazil was kind of fascist up until the 1970's. And there was coffee from Brazil in the DDR. And there were Mercedes Benz cars in the DDR, and in other socialist countries such as Yugoslavia, Cuba, or the USSR. They did trade, so they can co exist, just like with capitalism and feudalism of the 1800's.

But in a pure, global socialist world, different societies would still exist because different people want different things. And besides, wouldn't it be boring if everyone was the same?

What does the "matters of wealth" have NOT to do with socialism? Many people are socialists because they want more wealth!!! In capitalism, workers stay poor while the rich stay rich. In capitalism, what determines how much wealth you can get is determined by currency, the concept of debt, and what employment is available. If you are only allowed to work 20 hours a week, then you would stay more poor, then if you wanted to work 50 hours a week. If you want to have your own home, but you're not allowed to build a home even though there are resources, you can't build one because "there's not enough money." But if currency didn't exist, then wages and debt wouldn't limit how much you can work, and how much access of wealth you have because you're allowed to work as much as possible in pure socialism. Socialist countries were more wealthy than their pre capitalist phases. The USSR was wealthier than the Russian Empire. China today is far more wealthier than it was 200 years ago. In pure socialism, you have as much opportunity to work and to extract resources, as the amount of resources there are. There is no debt or wages to limit you. This is one reason why the Russian Empire couldn't industrialize fast enough, "BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO." But with Stalin, he abolished the medium of exchange at the state level, and was like "we have resources, land, and labour, so why can't we industrialize?" So he industrialized Russia from a quasi peasant wasteland full of tree huggers, to one of the most powerful nations to ever exist!

What kind of mode of production do I advocate? I advocate that if there is labour and resources, and if society or people want something, they *or automated technology* should extract it. There should be no currency, nor debt. And that the concept of value should be abolished. Everything should be free from value. In capitalist terms, people work for free, people live for free.

Exactly, many wives have to listen to their husbands because it's the husbands' property. The wives are limited to what the husbands want because he owns their homes, and that limits them from living their destinies and being free.

Money is evil. Anyone who thinks that money is king is my enemy.

CAPITALISM DOES NOT SUPPORT THE FAMILY INSTITUTION? No, Capitalism ENFORCES the family institution. Capitalists want people to be about their families so that the majority of the people are too stressed with their families, and that their families decoy them from realizing that they are being ruled by greedy capitalists. Plus, for some people, if there was a socialist revolution, "they can't run away from their fathers to fight in the revolution because it would be *shameful.* Capitalists inflict shame on rebels to prevent a revolt." Socialism goes against the family institution because family is slavery, and socialism frees people from being ruled by others. In pure socialism, society is extremely individualistic, while economically, by capitalist terms, it is collective. In socialism, society is not one big, egalitarian family. In pure socialist terms, a socialist would realize that people use each other, and that family nurturings are not needed to motivate people to contribute to the survival of humanity, because when one needs nurturing, they could potentially enforce fakeness, stress, and annoying ceremonies and arranged marriages. In a capitalist society, marriages motivate workers to work. While in a socialist context, it is oppression because you have to act a certain way to people who could of potentially abused you (such as strict fathers) but wouldn't view it as abuse, but rather would view those who view it as abuse as "shameless, rebels who promote satanism." Hence, satanism is a symbol of reality. And family somewhat destroys that because they say family is the number one love, yet people get more stress from them, and usually they're the first ones to let you down, child abuse and drama are some unspoken examples and that socialism would liberate people from this.

You sound like a Trotskyist. I bet you think that capitalism destroys family, and that socialism will allow people to love their families again. Stalin only re introduced family only for reproductive matters, to increase the military size of the Soviet Union.

No, in capitalism, one is forced to rely on their families because fathers own their homes, parents own their domestic companies (I bet you're against big corporations and support small family owned companies, because they're "not greedy and more poor" I know how some Trotskyists are against big corporations, even though in capitalism, big corporations are way closer to socialism than small, family owned companies), and people stay with their families for economic security, like if one loses their jobs or company, they have family to help them pay for bills. Capitalism enforces the family, it doesn't promote it in a "charitable" way. Submissive wives are not doing charity to their ruling husbands.

How should my ideas be achieved? If that's what you're asking, then nationalize all property, destroy currency, and make sure everything is industrialized, or post industrialized. If people cannot rule themselves because they're not ready, then have a socialist state run them so they can help them get closer to freedom and liberation.

The USSR did have socialism. It was state socialism. Not all socialists are anarchists. I am strongly against anarchy.

Currency existed in the Soviet Union to control the traitors who needed it to motivate them to work. Black markets were hosted by criminals in the USSR.

Stalin was always a working class person. He only got wealthier due to having lots of leadership in the Soviet state. And the "elites" that he had existed to control the traitors who needed currency and religion to motivate them to contribute to the survival of humanity and work.

I never said that Cultural homogenization was needed for a socialist revolution. It is required for a global, permanent revolution society, since different people are not protected from another. Again, Poles don't want to live in the same apartments as Somalians.

Stalin was not a pacifist to Hitler before Operation Barbarossa. He pretended to be friends with him so he could buy some time and build up the Soviet military as much as he can.

"But I included his person as an illustration of how Islam as a religion runs the full political spectrum from left to right."

- Islam cannot go with the left, UNLESS if they're using left wing politics to go against non Islamic rulers, like the Orthodox Christian Russian Empire, or the conservative parts of the USA today. If Islam rules, politics would be pure right wing. Islam is conservative. Islam is ANTI socialist. Islam is ANTI feminist. (No offense to Muslims on here who are reading this)
#14973726
SSDR wrote:
@ckaihatsu, Your politics are progressive, AND seem somewhat backwards in my perspective. Not all progressives have forward politics. Left communists and the Antifa are both very progressive, but at the same time, they're backwards.



Well, this is quite a sweeping indictment, and so you should be more forthcoming with your underlying *reasoning* for such a (mis-)characterization.

Adding to the mix, and possible confusion, is that there is a political camp called 'progressives', which are only reformist at best. They *don't* draw revolutionary conclusions from the class structure of society as revolutionaries do.


[3] Ideologies & Operations -- Fundamentals [CORRECTED, 170602]

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SSDR wrote:
I am not a Stalinist either. And not all non-Stalinists are backwards. I am not a Stalinist, and I'm not backwards.



Much of what you've been saying, though, *does* sound like a nation-centric focus, even if for purportedly relatively progressive, national-reformist aims:


SSDR wrote:
While the rest of the world's nations can either be capitalist or socialist.



If you're content to let the world be 'mixed' (inevitably objectively impossible), then you're definitely *not* a socialist, because the aims of such are for *transcending* humanity's class division, in favor of workers control of social production, *everywhere*.

By limiting the implementation of socialist-*minded* -- though *not* socialist -- to just one country or another you're effectively being a Stalinist. Here's that diagram again:


Political Spectrum, Simplified

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SSDR wrote:
The reason why the USSR had a peace treaty with Nazi Germany was so that the USSR could gain trust of Nazi Germany, while the USSR was secretly building up its military, industry, and housing.



And with *this* statement you're effectively *defending* the geopolitical diplomatic actions of a Stalinist: Stalin.


SSDR wrote:
Also, the USSR could of potentially gained access to sensitive information about Nazi Germany so that it could know more about them that they could use against them in the future. If a nation is honest with another, it could lose power and international respect. So the USSR had to be confidential with who they disliked so that they could buy as much time as possible. Also, nations need to trade with each other, to gain access to natural resources and technology (German technology was far more advanced than Soviet technology in the 1930's). The USSR could gain access to some German engineering, and that could help their military, but they wouldn't say that because they don't want to look like enemies so they can buy as much time as possible.



You're continuing to dig your hole deeper, SSDR -- you're showing yourself to be more concerned with international *bourgeois* relations, as Stalin did, than with spreading whatever degenerated formulation of the workers' 1917 soviet revolution that may have still continued to exist, despite Stalinistic top-down control afterwards.


SSDR wrote:
But, one nation could be fully controlled by the labour



So could one world, earth, by the same reasoning.


SSDR wrote:
(workers don't exist in socialism,



Workers, and workers control, are the very *basis* of a proletarian revolution into worldwide socialism.


SSDR wrote:
workers labour for capitalists while in socialism,



Socialism would put the collective of all workers, internationally, into control of social production, thus displacing bourgeois-capitalist control of the same. Workers would then be working entirely to benefit *themselves* / ourselves, rather than for the private profits of capitalists.


SSDR wrote:
people labour for themselves and for society. The term "worker" is used in capitalism, just like the term "serfdom" was used in feudalism), while other nations could have controlled workers (USA) or controlled serfdoms (Saudi Arabia, parts of Africa, etc.).



The term 'worker' is more precise than the term 'people', because not all people work for their necessities of life and living. Those who are dependent on a wage are *workers*, and such labor-power is what makes the world go 'round. All workers are 'controlled' -- in the sense of having to work for a wage -- by the ruling class in whatever part of the world. This is the very definition of the 'class divide'.


SSDR wrote:
In the 1800's, there were capitalist and feudalist societies. Capitalism is the successor of feudalism. In some countries, workers had economic power through wages that were controlled by their employers.



Wages don't confer significant economic power to those who work for wages, because wages are *not* wealth, the way capital is -- rather, wages are *spent*, just on the basics of life and living, by / for those who work. The *point*, for laborers, is to create collective labor *organization*, to show society and themselves that they're the motive force behind all social production in society. If workers don't work, nothing gets done, and social production *ceases* -- so it would be better for workers, the ones doing the actual work for social consumption, to be in *control* of their own labor-power, collectively, since society as a whole is *dependent* on their efforts for any given standard-of-living.


SSDR wrote:
Their employers ruled them and fired some people who advocated steps such as feminism, atheism, or socialism.



You're only looking at the *negative* side -- many times there were collective labor *victories*, basically for nationalist reforms of the conditions of labor (8-hour workday, etc.).


SSDR wrote:
Examples of countries like this in the 1800's were the USA, the British Empire, France, or the German Confederate Empire. Then, there were countries that were family oriented, and that labourers were controlled by their owners and landlords.



Laborers are *still* 'controlled' by business owners (the bourgeoisie), and by landlords, because they / we have to get wages just to buy the basics of life and living, and part of that is having housing, which also costs money, from wages. (Hence the term 'wage-slave', or 'wage-slavery', is quite accurate and correct.)


SSDR wrote:
This is feudalism, or is similar to feudalism. Countries that were feudal like in the 1800's were the Ottoman Empire, parts of Imperial Russia, parts of Africa, or the Kingdom of Serbia. In the 1800's, BOTH capitalist countries and feudalist countries existed, and had different economies. So why can't socialist and capitalist countries co exist?



The reason is that the difference between feudalism / slavery, and capitalism is that both those modes of production were still *class*-based societies, so the historic change in the mode of production was basically just a shift in how labor-power was to be expropriated by the ownership class -- directly, from treating workers as *chattel*, or indirectly, from the expropriation of *surplus labor value*, as in wage-slavery / 'free' labor.


[23] A Business Perspective on the Declining Rate of Profit

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Plans for socialism mean that class-based relations (owners vs. laborers) would be *overthrown*, and such would have to be done on a mass-conscious basis by the world's workers themselves / ourselves -- it would be a *first* in world history, because it would be about eliminating the market mechanism altogether. Revolutionary politics, for the collective planning of social production, would be the guiding force, instead of leaving economic organization to the market mechanism. The historic transitions from one type of class society to the next have all basically been changes in worldwide *class ownership*, or 'the global class management' -- just one economic *faction*, or another.

The transition to a *classless* global society requires a *mass conscious* effort, and it would overthrow the class divide once-and-for-all -- see the top 'level' ('class struggle') of this graphic, again:


‭History, Macro-Micro -- politics-logistics-lifestyle

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SSDR wrote:
Feudalist and capitalist countries traded, I mean you had Persian rugs in London. The USA traded with the Ottoman Empire. Enver Hoxha's father was a traveling merchant who was from Ottoman controlled feudal Albania, and he traveled to the USA, Britain, and France, which were capitalist countries in the 1900's. He sent money to him and his mother to pay the landlords in the multi family house. If this can co exist, then why couldn't the DDR trade with Federal Germany, or Brazil? Brazil was kind of fascist up until the 1970's. And there was coffee from Brazil in the DDR. And there were Mercedes Benz cars in the DDR, and in other socialist countries such as Yugoslavia, Cuba, or the USSR. They did trade, so they can co exist, just like with capitalism and feudalism of the 1800's.



See -- you're *continuing* to conflate Stalinism / state-capitalism, with socialism, and then using the state-capitalist nation-state formulation to argue for international 'free trade' policies.

You're showing yourself to be a Stalinist over and over again by arguing for the state-capitalism formulation, which is *not* workers being in collective control of social production.


SSDR wrote:
But in a pure, global socialist world, different societies would still exist because different people want different things. And besides, wouldn't it be boring if everyone was the same?



You're making the cultural-determination argument again, but culture is *not* the most deterministic social force -- *labor* is.


SSDR wrote:
What does the "matters of wealth" have NOT to do with socialism?



Socialism doesn't *depend* on accumulated wealth, because it doesn't *have* to -- wealth is a measurement of commodity-type *exchange value* (money, basically), while socialism uses *workers collective self-organization* as the basis for material economic production, *without* requiring any exchange values / money whatsoever, due to the social implementation of free-access to collective mass industrial production, and direct-distribution.

My 'labor credits' model framework, referenced in previous posts of mine here, shows a possible *structure* for this kind of implementation of workers power over social production.


SSDR wrote:
Many people are socialists because they want more wealth!!!



You're misusing the term 'wealth' here -- sure, people want more of this-or-that, but the real question is how that stuff is to be produced, and how it's to be *distributed*.

As things are now, under capitalism, those who can benefit capitalist organization of *private* production are the ones rewarded with wealth, through profits, but for socialism the watchword would be *egalitarianism* over social production. Social organization over production and distribution could be done *collectively*, by the workers themselves, without having to rely on *capitalist* modes of organization / production / distribution. Instead of *commodifying* labor-power the workers could be collectively socially conscious, and could *intentionally* self-organize to produce for the sake of unmet human / humane *need* (and wants).


SSDR wrote:
In capitalism, workers stay poor while the rich stay rich. In capitalism, what determines how much wealth you can get is determined by currency,



No, currency is just the *formal medium* of exchange values -- what determines relative levels of compensation is *private property ownership*. The rich *have* wealth / private-property, while the workers do *not*, and so must produce labor-power themselves, for a wage, instead of letting *wealth* / capital do the "work" for them as the rich do.


SSDR wrote:
the concept of debt, and what employment is available. If you are only allowed to work 20 hours a week, then you would stay more poor, then if you wanted to work 50 hours a week. If you want to have your own home, but you're not allowed to build a home even though there are resources, you can't build one because "there's not enough money." But if currency didn't exist, then wages and debt wouldn't limit how much you can work, and how much access of wealth you have because you're allowed to work as much as possible in pure socialism.



This is a misnomer / mischaracterization, too, because you're continuing to assume -- in a Stalinistic way -- that labor-power would still be *commodified*.

What's required under socialism is a *detachment* of work-efforts, from the need for consumption. In other words, those who *need* the most would be benefitted by worker-control, liberated-labor social production, regardless of their own work-effort *inputs*. To us today this may sound strange and counterintuitive, but that's only because we've been thoroughly conditioned to regard everything as being *commodified* and valued according to abstract exchange-values, even if it means that people have to die every day from a lack of humane economic distribution of social production.


SSDR wrote:
Socialist countries were more wealthy than their pre capitalist phases. The USSR was wealthier than the Russian Empire. China today is far more wealthier than it was 200 years ago. In pure socialism, you have as much opportunity to work and to extract resources,



You're misrepresenting socialism -- it does *not* mean 'socialism-in-one-country'-type *Stalinism*, with the continuation of commodity-production and state-capitalism-by-country.


SSDR wrote:
as the amount of resources there are. There is no debt or wages to limit you. This is one reason why the Russian Empire couldn't industrialize fast enough, "BECAUSE THEY DIDN'T HAVE ENOUGH MONEY TO." But with Stalin, he abolished the medium of exchange at the state level, and was like "we have resources, land, and labour, so why can't we industrialize?" So he industrialized Russia from a quasi peasant wasteland full of tree huggers, to one of the most powerful nations to ever exist!



Industrialization confers huge advantages of machine- and fuel-leveraged industrial processes, so that's why overall relative wealth increased in those countries (Western First-World, then others) that *did* industrialize.


SSDR wrote:
What kind of mode of production do I advocate? I advocate that if there is labour and resources, and if society or people want something, they *or automated technology* should extract it. There should be no currency, nor debt. And that the concept of value should be abolished. Everything should be free from value. In capitalist terms, people work for free, people live for free.



Well, this is certainly a better expression of politics from you, but I find the sum of your statements to be *inconsistent* -- for example, how do you reconcile this most-recent statement with your previous position of:


SSDR wrote:
While the rest of the world's nations can either be capitalist or socialist.



This is obviously far less enthusiastic, to where you'd be indifferent to some parts of the world that *didn't* transcend capitalist social relations.


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SSDR wrote:
Exactly, many wives have to listen to their husbands because it's the husbands' property. The wives are limited to what the husbands want because he owns their homes, and that limits them from living their destinies and being free.



Agreed.


SSDR wrote:
Money is evil. Anyone who thinks that money is king is my enemy.



So then what are you *recommending* to replace money-type / commodity-type economic relations?


SSDR wrote:
CAPITALISM DOES NOT SUPPORT THE FAMILY INSTITUTION? No, Capitalism ENFORCES the family institution. Capitalists want people to be about their families so that the majority of the people are too stressed with their families, and that their families decoy them from realizing that they are being ruled by greedy capitalists.



Okay, to clarify, I'd rephrase it to say that bourgeois *class society* -- the 'superstructure' -- recognizes, encourages, and even at times *enforces* the institution of the nuclear family. But the 'base' -- capitalism's material economics -- does not *fund* / support the family, so it's like an overall social norm of an 'unfunded [social] mandate'.


SSDR wrote:
Plus, for some people, if there was a socialist revolution, "they can't run away from their fathers to fight in the revolution because it would be *shameful.* Capitalists inflict shame on rebels to prevent a revolt."



It doesn't stop at Western 'shaming', or cultural values. There's *this* history, again:


Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_in ... _Civil_War


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SSDR wrote:
Socialism goes against the family institution because family is slavery, and socialism frees people from being ruled by others. In pure socialism, society is extremely individualistic, while economically, by capitalist terms, it is collective.



Okay, I can agree with this particular formulation.


SSDR wrote:
In socialism, society is not one big, egalitarian family. In pure socialist terms, a socialist would realize that people use each other, and that family nurturings are not needed to motivate people to contribute to the survival of humanity, because when one needs nurturing, they could potentially enforce fakeness, stress, and annoying ceremonies and arranged marriages. In a capitalist society, marriages motivate workers to work. While in a socialist context, it is oppression because you have to act a certain way to people who could of potentially abused you (such as strict fathers) but wouldn't view it as abuse, but rather would view those who view it as abuse as "shameless, rebels who promote satanism." Hence, satanism is a symbol of reality. And family somewhat destroys that because they say family is the number one love, yet people get more stress from them, and usually they're the first ones to let you down, child abuse and drama are some unspoken examples and that socialism would liberate people from this.



Okay, I'll agree here and just note that people can truly be themselves once they're liberated from material concerns.

Here's from my favorite essay on the subject:



Yes; there are suggestive things in Individualism. Socialism annihilates family life, for instance. With the abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear. This is part of the programme. Individualism accepts this and makes it fine. It converts the abolition of legal restraint into a form of freedom that will help the full development of personality, and make the love of man and woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling. Jesus knew this. He rejected the claims of family life, although they existed in his day and community in a very marked form. ‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?’ he said, when he was told that they wished to speak to him. When one of his followers asked leave to go and bury his father, ‘Let the dead bury the dead,’ was his terrible answer. He would allow no claim whatsoever to be made on personality.



https://www.marxists.org/reference/arch ... /soul-man/



---


SSDR wrote:
You sound like a Trotskyist. I bet you think that capitalism destroys family, and that socialism will allow people to love their families again. Stalin only re introduced family only for reproductive matters, to increase the military size of the Soviet Union.



Hmmmmm, I think you're mischaracterizing again -- I'm not familiar with *any* pro-family aspect to Trotskyism. You may want to seek-out supporting evidence for this misconstrued claim of yours.


SSDR wrote:
No, in capitalism, one is forced to rely on their families because fathers own their homes, parents own their domestic companies (I bet you're against big corporations and support small family owned companies, because they're "not greedy and more poor"



Bad guess. Capitalists are capitalists and all exploit labor-value, no matter their size, large or small. I'm not interested in any (fictional) 'better-capitalism', as much as I'm interested in overthrowing the social institution of private property altogether, at all scales.


SSDR wrote:
I know how some Trotskyists are against big corporations, even though in capitalism, big corporations are way closer to socialism than small, family owned companies),



Again this is another mischaracterization on your part -- socialism calls for the working-class *total expropriation* of the business / corporate form of social organization, to produce for human / humane need.

Of course corporations, like any capitalist business, don't require any kind of *political* support within the current socio-political context of capitalism, because they're not on the side of the workers anyway.


SSDR wrote:
and people stay with their families for economic security, like if one loses their jobs or company, they have family to help them pay for bills. Capitalism enforces the family, it doesn't promote it in a "charitable" way. Submissive wives are not doing charity to their ruling husbands.



Yeah, I'll reiterate that the social / material / economic role of the nuclear family is that of *charity* (at-best), because capitalism doesn't inherently *supply* families with any kind of economic support as an integral aspect of its functioning.


SSDR wrote:
How should my ideas be achieved? If that's what you're asking, then nationalize all property, destroy currency, and make sure everything is industrialized, or post industrialized. If people cannot rule themselves because they're not ready, then have a socialist state run them so they can help them get closer to freedom and liberation.



Why stop at *nationalization*, though -- ? This is still-more *Stalinism* on your part, because any nationally-constrained radical reformism, as you're suggesting, would *not* put control into workers' hands, and would continue to require an inherently substitutionist, specialized bureaucratic state-like administration over the workers themselves, which is essentially back to state-capitalism.


SSDR wrote:
The USSR did have socialism.



No, it didn't, because socialism is equivalent to *workers control* over social production, which the USSR didn't have, particularly at the higher levels of state administration -- the elitist Stalinist bureaucracy.


SSDR wrote:
It was state socialism. Not all socialists are anarchists. I am strongly against anarchy.

Currency existed in the Soviet Union to control the traitors who needed it to motivate them to work. Black markets were hosted by criminals in the USSR.

Stalin was always a working class person. He only got wealthier due to having lots of leadership in the Soviet state. And the "elites" that he had existed to control the traitors who needed currency and religion to motivate them to contribute to the survival of humanity and work.



Again, you're basically a Stalinist, advocating his ill-conceived 'socialism-in-one-country'. Here's a rundown of the historical developments that contributed to Stalin's consolidation of power:



The Allied intervention was a multi-national military expedition launched during the Russian Civil War in 1918. The stated goals were to help the Czechoslovak Legion, to secure supplies of munitions and armaments in Russian ports, and to re-establish the Eastern Front. After the Bolshevik government withdrew from World War I, the Allied Powers militarily backed the anti-communist White forces in Russia.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_in ... _Civil_War




Results

Military

War communism was largely successful at its primary purpose of aiding the Red Army in halting the advance of the White Army and in reclaiming most of the territory of the former Russian Empire thereafter.

Social

In the cities and surrounding countryside, the population experienced hardships as a result of the war. Peasants refused to co-operate in producing food. Workers began migrating from the cities to the countryside, where the chances to feed themselves were higher, thus further decreasing the possibility of barter of industrial goods for food and worsening the plight of the remaining urban population. Between 1918 and 1920, Petrograd lost 72% of its population, while Moscow lost 53%.[citation needed]

A series of workers' strikes and peasants' rebellions broke out all over the country, such as the Tambov rebellion (1920-1921). A turning point came with the Kronstadt rebellion at the Kronstadt naval base in early March 1921. The rebellion startled Lenin, because Bolsheviks considered Kronstadt sailors the "reddest of the reds". According to David Christian, the Cheka (the state Communist Party secret police) reported 118 peasant uprisings in February 1921.[citation needed]

Christian, in his book "Imperial and Soviet Russia", summarises the state of Russia in 1921 after years of War communism:

A government claiming to represent the people now found itself on the verge of being overthrown by that same working class. The crisis had undermined the loyalty of the villages, the towns and finally sections of the army. It was fully as serious as the crises faced by the tsarist government in 1905 and February 1917.[8]

Economic

A black market emerged in Russia, despite the threat of martial law against profiteering. The rouble collapsed and barter increasingly replaced money as a medium of exchange[9] and, by 1921, heavy industry output had fallen to 20% of 1913 levels. 90% of wages were paid with goods rather than money. 70% of locomotives were in need of repair, and food requisitioning, combined with the effects of seven years of war and a severe drought, contributed to a famine that caused between 3 and 10 million deaths.[10] Coal production decreased from 27.5 million tons (1913) to 7 million tons (1920), while overall factory production also declined from 10,000 million roubles to 1,000 million roubles. According to the noted historian David Christian, the grain harvest was also slashed from 80.1 million tons (1913) to 46.5 million tons (1920).[11]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_communism




The Left Opposition was a faction within the Bolshevik Party from 1923 to 1927, headed de facto by Leon Trotsky. The Left Opposition formed as part of the power struggle within the party leadership that began with the Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin's illness and intensified with his death in January 1924. Originally, the battle lines were drawn between Trotsky and his supporters who signed The Declaration of 46 in October 1923, on the one hand, and a triumvirate (also known by its Russian name troika) of Comintern chairman Grigory Zinoviev, Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin and Politburo chairman Lev Kamenev on the other hand.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Opposition



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SSDR wrote:
I never said that Cultural homogenization was needed for a socialist revolution. It is required for a global, permanent revolution society, since different people are not protected from another. Again, Poles don't want to live in the same apartments as Somalians.



No, cultural homogenization is *not* required for a global permanent revolution society. Liberated-production would drive such a society, and you're too caught-up with *cultural* (demographic) racist concerns here.


SSDR wrote:
Stalin was not a pacifist to Hitler before Operation Barbarossa. He pretended to be friends with him so he could buy some time and build up the Soviet military as much as he can.



It's arguable. I'm not an expert in Stalinist diplomacy, but you seem to be.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
I guess, towards the end of his life, Malcolm X would be better described as a pan-Africanist.

But I included his person as an illustration of how Islam as a religion runs the full political spectrum from left to right.



SSDR wrote:
- Islam cannot go with the left, UNLESS if they're using left wing politics to go against non Islamic rulers, like the Orthodox Christian Russian Empire, or the conservative parts of the USA today. If Islam rules, politics would be pure right wing. Islam is conservative. Islam is ANTI socialist. Islam is ANTI feminist. (No offense to Muslims on here who are reading this)



I do agree with these generalizations of Islam -- as with any entrenched religion -- though individual participants may vary in their own individual politics, as I've already mentioned.

I don't support any kind of Islamism in the arena of politics.
#14973871
@ckaihatsu,

"If you're content to let the world be 'mixed' (inevitably objectively impossible), then you're definitely *not* a socialist, because the aims of such are for *transcending* humanity's class division, in favor of workers control of social production, *everywhere*."

- I do want workers' control of social production everywhere, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be boarders to defend the different cultures and eugenics of people.

I am not being a Stalinist, Stalin was a socialist, and you made that spectrum. That spectrum is from a Trotsky like mindset, thus being almost useless.

Just because I am somewhat defending Stalin's actions doesn't mean I am a Stalinist.

Stalin couldn't spread socialism around the world because the world was full of traitors, money lovers, monarchies, aging empires, and anti socialist countries such as the USA.

But the term "worker" only has meaning in a capitalist society, and by socialists being under capitalist conditions. In pure socialist conditions, no one works for any individual, no employers, no family providers, because that doesn't exist in pure socialism. The term worker is just as useless as other terms used in non socialist economies, such as "peasant" or "serfdom."

If capitalist enterprises don't exist, then "workers" don't exist because no one owns them. Labour wouldn't be called "workers" nor "slaves." In pure socialism, the term "worker" is not precise at all, it's useless, since wages and employers don't exist. Labourers would only be called people or labourers, or what ever occupation they do, such as doctors or truck drivers.

Wages do mean power for workers in a capitalist economy because workers can choose what to buy. And what they buy determines which companies thrive, and which companies fail. In capitalism, customers, whom are workers with money they got from wages, determine how companies do. Before capitalism, when wages really didn't exist for the most part, the majority of the labourers had NO economic power. Their food, shelter, clothing, and appliances were mostly determined by their owners or landlords. Basically in capitalist, post feudalist terms, "The wages were so low for the workers that they couldn't afford anything, so their employers provided them with everything. The workers had no individual power, they had no power over their destinies." Except that wages didn't exist, I am just trying to say this in more modern capitalist terms to make it easier to understand.

"The *point*, for laborers, is to create collective labor *organization*, to show society and themselves that they're the motive force behind all social production in society. If workers don't work, nothing gets done, and social production *ceases* -- so it would be better for workers, the ones doing the actual work for social consumption, to be in *control* of their own labor-power, collectively, since society as a whole is *dependent* on their efforts for any given standard-of-living."

- No, in pure socialism, nothing motivates people to work. Motivation would be obsolete, and would be for those whose minds are a step(s) behind socialism (those who support state capitalism, early capitalism, or feudalism). Labour "organizations" would exist in capitalism and in early socialism to fight against capitalism to prevent capitalists and conservatives from dividing, and conquering the masses, so they can't use each other to think progressively. Labour organizations are like guns that shoot criminals, once the criminals are dead, the guns are useless, and have no meaning to exist.

Collective labour "victories" are almost useless in pure socialist terms. The "8 hour work day" decreases wealth. The more society works, the more resources are extracted and the wealthier society is in general. Why not harvest 10 acres of crops instead of six? The amount of labour has nothing to do with socialism. Besides, if people don't work as much, society would be weaker and would have a weaker, less extracted industry.

The classless society doesn't have to exist globally. Classless societies can trade with capitalist or feudalist societies, they just have different economic motives and have different modes of production.

Just because I am not against state socialism doesn't mean that I am a Stalinist. There is state socialism (like Stalinism, or Juche) then there is state capitalism (social democracy, Christian democracy, welfare capitalism, Catholic unionists, etc.). A state has nothing to do with socialism, it just depends on what definition of a state you are using.

"You're making the cultural-determination argument again, but culture is *not* the most deterministic social force -- *labor* is."

- What don't you understand? Different people have different standards. Standards have no relations to culture. If one wants to live in a clean, advanced environment (Anglo-Saxons, Nordics), and if another wants to live in nature (indigenous Americans), then they can't live in the same community, both would attack each other using political correctness through "racism." Is it really racist to clean one's home?

The definition of wealth that I was using was having more things, and having a higher standard of living. I guess we were using different definitions of wealth. Many people are socialists because they want better standards of living, and they want to be free from fakeness, religious ignorance, reliance on private employers, economic instability, and family reliance.

In capitalism, the more currency you have, the more power you have. Customers who are workers who rely on wages do have some power, because they're the reason why companies stay in business. In capitalism, wage workers determine which companies go out and which ones thrive. The most of that paragraph has nothing to do with what I said. I was talking about currency and how it can give power, while you just dozzed off explaining why currency exists.

"What's required under socialism is a *detachment* of work-efforts, from the need for consumption. In other words, those who *need* the most would be benefitted by worker-control, liberated-labor social production, regardless of their own work-effort *inputs*. To us today this may sound strange and counterintuitive, but that's only because we've been thoroughly conditioned to regard everything as being *commodified* and valued according to abstract exchange-values, even if it means that people have to die every day from a lack of humane economic distribution of social production."

- I never said that I like gold more than steel. Who told you that I value things? Just because I want more, and just because I want a higher standard of living, doesn't mean I am a capitalist, and it doesn't mean that I value things.

Industrialization is good. It means more wealth and more socialized modes of production, so that nothing is family oriented.

What does having some capitalist and socialist nations have to do with socialist societies not having currency or employers. One society is socialist, another is money capitalist. They trade for natural resources, what is so fuckin complicated about that?

I think that there should be no money, and that everyone should work for free, live for free by capitalist terms.

I said this many times, capitalism enforces the family. It does so because it keeps people distracted with their families. Capitalism is not as family oriented as feudalism, but it promotes and defends the family institution.

"Yes; there are suggestive things in Individualism. Socialism annihilates family life, for instance. With the abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear. This is part of the programme. Individualism accepts this and makes it fine. It converts the abolition of legal restraint into a form of freedom that will help the full development of personality, and make the love of man and woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling. Jesus knew this. He rejected the claims of family life, although they existed in his day and community in a very marked form. ‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?’ he said, when he was told that they wished to speak to him. When one of his followers asked leave to go and bury his father, ‘Let the dead bury the dead,’ was his terrible answer. He would allow no claim whatsoever to be made on personality."

- Yeah for some people, you can't fuck someone because you're afraid that your families will deny you and break you up. If you see someone you want to have sex with, but your families are around, you guys can't love each other fully because of your families. Your families internally split you up, this makes you feel alone, and alienated. But, you don't need to use religious texts, we don't live in a super religious, shaming society anymore, so you don't need to use that.

In scientific terms, corporations are closer to socialism than family owned companies because they have more economic security, and their workplaces are not family oriented. Meaning, if you work for a corporation, managers just can't do what they want, because they are in a big company that has lots of labour rules and regulations. Plus, corporations tend to be in unions. So this is closer to socialism.

Nationalization of economics in a revolutionary mode of production is state socialist. Nationalization of economics in a conservative mode of production is state capitalist. State capitalist countries are non socialist countries that use state capitalist economics to DEFEND capitalism.

Stalinism for the USSR was for the workers. They were oppressive to anti socialists, and traitors of freedom.

I am not an expert on Stalinist diplomacy either. What I said was only common sense. You have to gain the trust of your enemies, and pretend to be friends with them to buy some time. It's common sense.

I don't support Islam at all, since Islam is somewhat political. Islam has lots of politics in it.
#14974077
SSDR wrote:
@ckaihatsu,



ckaihatsu wrote:
If you're content to let the world be 'mixed' (inevitably objectively impossible), then you're definitely *not* a socialist, because the aims of such are for *transcending* humanity's class division, in favor of workers control of social production, *everywhere*.



SSDR wrote:
- I do want workers' control of social production everywhere, but that doesn't mean there shouldn't be boarders to defend the different cultures and eugenics of people.



This *geographic* approach, though, is *incompatible* with a workers' control of social production everywhere, because the workers have *zero* interest in maintaining such borders. Nationalist borders would be *erased* by the ascension of workers control over social production, so as to enclose larger and larger areas under an umbrella of centralized collectivized workers' social production. (Centralization does *not* automatically mean 'top-down' control, though, since the socio-political decision-making would be the terrain of the liberated-laborers collectives at any given scale -- *per-item*, I would argue.)

You're again too concerned with cultural matters -- the 'superstructure' -- instead of focusing on how society reproduces itself, particularly its labor-power, going forward into the future. Nationalistic borders are an *anachronism* in our present day-and-age, and would be a *fetter* to actual workers control of social production, worldwide.

Also, your use of the term 'eugenics' is misplaced, and is also racist and anti-social:



Noun

eugenics (uncountable)

(sociology, biology) A social philosophy which advocates the improvement of human hereditary qualities through selective breeding, either by encouraging people with good genetic qualities to reproduce (positive eugenics), or discouraging people with bad genetic qualities from reproducing (negative eugenics), or by technological means.

(biology) The science of improving stock, whether human or animal.



https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/eugenics



---


SSDR wrote:
I am not being a Stalinist, Stalin was a socialist, and you made that spectrum. That spectrum is from a Trotsky like mindset, thus being almost useless.



No, Stalin was *not* a socialist, and this misconception of yours is what's driving your Stalinist politics.


SSDR wrote:
Just because I am somewhat defending Stalin's actions doesn't mean I am a Stalinist.



No, what makes you a Stalinist is your anti-internationalist stance regarding workers control over social production.


SSDR wrote:
Stalin couldn't spread socialism around the world because the world was full of traitors, money lovers, monarchies, aging empires, and anti socialist countries such as the USA.



Whatever. I'm not interested in your apologias for Stalin.


SSDR wrote:
But the term "worker" only has meaning in a capitalist society, and by socialists being under capitalist conditions. In pure socialist conditions, no one works for any individual, no employers, no family providers, because that doesn't exist in pure socialism. The term worker is just as useless as other terms used in non socialist economies, such as "peasant" or "serfdom."



Well, there's a good argument for this particular definition / distinction to be made, basically that those contributing their labor-power to a post-class, post-capitalist workers society would no longer be exploited, as under conditions of capitalism's private expropriations of labor value, and so would not be 'workers' in the sense of 'workers exploited of their labor value under capitalism'.

However this is a *very* strict definition, and liberated-labor would still require people's time, expertise, and efforts, especially if the work context is one of *industrialized implements*, such as in factories.

The 'employer' would be society's collective best interests, as formally expressed and mass-prioritized -- my 'labor credits' framework model details one particular approach that could be used to implement this populist-type / human-needs aspect:



communist administration -- All assets and resources will be collectivized as communist property in common -- their use must be determined through a regular political process of prioritized demands from a locality or larger population -- any unused assets or resources may be used by individuals in a personal capacity only

labor [supply] -- Only active workers may control communist property -- no private accumulations are allowed and any proceeds from work that cannot be used or consumed by persons themselves will revert to collectivized communist property

consumption [demand] -- Individuals may possess and consume as much material as they want, with the proviso that the material is being actively used in a personal capacity only -- after a certain period of disuse all personal possessions not in active use will revert to collectivized communist property



consumption [demand] -- Every person in a locality has a standard, one-through-infinity ranking system of political demands available to them, updated daily



consumption [demand] -- Basic human needs will be assigned a higher political priority by individuals and will emerge as mass demands at the cumulative scale -- desires will benefit from political organizing efforts and coordination



Labor credits Frequently Asked Questions

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... -Questions



Also:


Some of the readily apparent *checks-and-balances* dynamics enabled with the labor-credits system are:

Spoiler: show
- (Already mentioned) One could work for personal material-economic gains -- the amassing of labor credits -- instead of having to 'like' *both* the socio-political aspect *and* the personal-material-economic aspect of one's work within a strictly-voluntaristic, non-labor-credit, communistic-type political economy. (Individual vs. socio-political realms)

- The contribution of one's potential liberated labor to societal objectives would always be fully optional, since the premise of a communist-type social order is that no one could ever be *actually* coerced for their labor since the ubiquitous norm would be that no productive machinery or natural resources in the world could be used on a *proprietary* / private-accumulation basis, while all the material necessities for life and living would always be in readily-available, sufficient quantities for all. Collective social productivity would be *very good* using post-capitalist, communist-type liberated-labor self-organizing, leveraged with full automation of all productive processes, for *huge* ratios of industrial mass-production output, per hour of liberated labor input. (Individual vs. socio-political and material realms)

- Mass demand, as displayed publicly, per-locality, by the daily mass-aggregated tallied rank positions (#1, #2, #3, etc.), will always be an existing social-pressure, specifically regarding liberated labor contributions to the general social good for varying qualities of public consumption. Such active liberated labor may or may not receive labor credits for their valid efforts, depending on such general *implementation* of circulating labor credits, or not, and the specifics of any active policy package. (Socio-political and material realms vs. individuals)

- Active liberated-labor would control all *ultimate* ('point-of-production') productivity for society, but *not-necessarily-working* people of any intra-voluntary collective 'locality' (or localities) could make and agree-on proposals and final policy packages that contain great *specificity*, as over *exactly* who (which persons) are to be included as active liberated-labor, and also their respective rates of labor credits per hour per discrete work role, and each worker's particular work schedule, as a part of the overall project scheduling. (Consumers vs. liberated-labor)

- Any intra-voluntary 'locality' could collectively develop and agree-on any particular proposal or final policy package, with specifics over staffing, rates of labor credits per included work role, and work schedules for all work roles / liberated-laborers, but if the liberated-labor-internal social process *did not approve* of the terms for any given proposal or policy package they would not *forfeit* their collective control over the implements of mass industrial production as a result -- realistically the result would most-likely be a *devolving* of larger-scale work organizing, since no agreement was reached between mass-demand and self-organized liberated-labor. Production could still take place on any ad-hoc basis, with liberated labor always getting 'first dibs' on anything they themselves produce, but it would be far more small-scale, localized, and balkanized than if larger-scale, multi-locality proposals and policy packages could be realized, for material economies of scale. (Liberated-labor vs. consumers)

- Any given finalized policy package will include a formal announcement of key proponents, politically responsible for that project's implementation, if satisfactory participation to cover all the necessary components of it is present. There is never any *standing*, *institutional* administration over everything, as we're used to seeing historically at the nationalist level. If a project *isn't* performing up to formal expectations (as detailed in its policy package), the proponents can be replaced with a mass-approved (exceeding in ranking over the initial policy package) proposal that 'tweaks' those details that need changing, such as which personnel, exactly, are deemed to be the formal 'proponents' of that project. (Consumers vs. administration)

- Proponents of any given active finalized policy package would have considerable logistical social latitude for administrating over its implementation, depending-on / limited-by its finalized detailed terms. In some instances, for example, proponents over *several* localities, of several *similar* policy packages -- say, over agriculture -- or even at regional, continental, and *global* scales -- may cross-coordinate to *generalize* production across many similar policy packages, for the sake of greater efficiencies of scale. (Administration vs. consumers)

- Proponents are meant to represent the exact terms of an active finalized policy package, and by extension, to also represent popular demand for certain material production and/or socio-political initiatives. Proponents may bring attention to certain aspects of the active finalized policy package in the course of its implementation, as with any possible differences on the part of active liberated-labor on the project. (Administration vs. liberated-labor)

- Liberated-labor will always be able to physically organize internally, without external interference. Depending on each active finalized policy package's provisions, liberated laborers may decide on their own the details of *how* they collectively supply their labor, to meet the objectives of that policy package -- as with specific personnel of their own, which work roles are absolutely necessary, the scheduling of work shifts and personnel, what geographical location(s) are to be used, how machinery is to be used, what the supply chains with other factories are, how the bulk-pooled labor credits funding is to be divided-up, if any additional funding of labor credits is needed, or even if locality debt issuances for additional labor credits are to be called-for, what maintenance may be needed on infrastructure / machinery, what education or training may be required for certain workers, etc. (Liberated-labor vs. administration)



---


SSDR wrote:
If capitalist enterprises don't exist, then "workers" don't exist because no one owns them. Labour wouldn't be called "workers" nor "slaves." In pure socialism, the term "worker" is not precise at all, it's useless, since wages and employers don't exist. Labourers would only be called people or labourers, or what ever occupation they do, such as doctors or truck drivers.



I personally prefer to use the term 'liberated-laborers' since no one could be *forced* to provide their labor-power for the good of society, and not all people would even *be* liberated-laborers. (Some might *forage* for sustenance from de-privatized lands, use hydroponics in building-enclosed 'vertical farms', or only request from collective social production instead of providing to it.) (As long as there was a sufficient 'critical mass' of liberated-labor-supplying social productivity, as from fully-automated, fully-mechanized robotic-type systems, people's needs and wants *could* be met without the inputs of actual human labor.)

Typically 'workers' is *synonymous* with 'laborers', so I don't think that you're suggesting anything substantive here. If human labor *was* required, pre-full-automation, post-capitalism, they would be 'liberated-workers', or 'liberated-laborers', technically-speaking.


SSDR wrote:
Wages do mean power for workers in a capitalist economy because workers can choose what to buy. And what they buy determines which companies thrive, and which companies fail. In capitalism, customers, whom are workers with money they got from wages, determine how companies do.



Sure, but you're skipping over *non*-worker customers in the economy, such as from government spending, and for *luxury*-type goods, for the wealthy.


SSDR wrote:
Before capitalism, when wages really didn't exist for the most part, the majority of the labourers had NO economic power. Their food, shelter, clothing, and appliances were mostly determined by their owners or landlords. Basically in capitalist, post feudalist terms, "The wages were so low for the workers that they couldn't afford anything, so their employers provided them with everything.



You're describing *company towns*:



A company town is a place where practically all stores and housing are owned by the one company that is also the main employer. Company towns are often planned with a suite of amenities such as stores, churches, schools, markets and recreation facilities. They are usually bigger than a model village ("model" in the sense of an ideal to be emulated).

The best examples of company towns have had high ideals; but many have been regarded as controlling or exploitative. Others developed more or less in unplanned fashion, such as Summit Hill, Pennsylvania, United States, one of the oldest, which began as a LC&N Co. mining camp and mine site nine miles (14.5 km) from the nearest outside road.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town



---


SSDR wrote:
The workers had no individual power, they had no power over their destinies." Except that wages didn't exist, I am just trying to say this in more modern capitalist terms to make it easier to understand.



Yes, we could say that monopolistic private control, as in company towns, blurred the line between feudalism and capitalism, regarding social production and consumption.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
The *point*, for laborers, is to create collective labor *organization*, to show society and themselves that they're the motive force behind all social production in society. If workers don't work, nothing gets done, and social production *ceases* -- so it would be better for workers, the ones doing the actual work for social consumption, to be in *control* of their own labor-power, collectively, since society as a whole is *dependent* on their efforts for any given standard-of-living.



SSDR wrote:
- No, in pure socialism, nothing motivates people to work. Motivation would be obsolete, and would be for those whose minds are a step(s) behind socialism (those who support state capitalism, early capitalism, or feudalism).



You're under the conception that people are only motivated to work for *external* rewards -- once sheerly 'economic' motivations are removed, along with the abolition of exchange values, people could certainly still be self-motivated by *intrinsic* rewards, such as the subject matter of any given industry itself (cultural production, etc.), being a 'provider' to others, and so on. The material basis for my oft-cited 'labor credits' framework is actually the 'communist gift economy', which means that people could certainly *gift* their own liberated-labor-power, for *zero* labor credits, for the good of society as a whole, and possibly for themselves in their 'craft', as well.

Supporters of *backwards* modes of production (feudalism, early capitalism, state capitalism) would be the very ones overthrown in social influence by the proletarian revolution.


SSDR wrote:
Labour "organizations" would exist in capitalism and in early socialism to fight against capitalism to prevent capitalists and conservatives from dividing, and conquering the masses, so they can't use each other to think progressively. Labour organizations are like guns that shoot criminals, once the criminals are dead, the guns are useless, and have no meaning to exist.



Labor organizations *do* currently exist within capitalism, such as conventional industrial unions, though increasingly rank-and-file ad hoc organizations to bypass the prevailing *business unionism*, and such rank-and-file organizing *is* potentially able to overcome standard divide-and-conquer strategies from the standpoint of private ownership.

Rank-and-file labor organizing *is* progressive, and historically-progressive, since it contains the potential for the re-establishment of the *soviets*, as seen during the Russian Revolution of 1917:



The Soviets, which were dominated by soldiers and the urban industrial working class, initially permitted the Provisional Government to rule, but insisted on a prerogative to influence the government and control various militias. The February Revolution took place in the context of heavy military setbacks during the First World War (1914–18), which left much of the Russian Army in a state of mutiny.

A period of dual power ensued, during which the Provisional Government held state power while the national network of Soviets, led by socialists, had the allegiance of the lower classes and, increasingly, the left-leaning urban middle class. During this chaotic period there were frequent mutinies, protests and many strikes. Many socialist political organizations were engaged in daily struggle and vied for influence within the Duma and the Soviets, central among which were the Bolsheviks ("Ones of the Majority") led by Vladimir Lenin who campaigned for an immediate end to the war, land to the peasants, and bread to the workers. When the Provisional Government chose to continue fighting the war with Germany, the Bolsheviks and other socialist factions were able to exploit virtually universal disdain towards the war effort as justification to advance the revolution further. The Bolsheviks turned workers' militias under their control into the Red Guards (later the Red Army) over which they exerted substantial control.[1]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Revolution



---


SSDR wrote:
Collective labour "victories" are almost useless in pure socialist terms. The "8 hour work day" decreases wealth.



You can't call yourself a socialist (a Stalinist, actually), and then defend hoards of wealth as you're doing here -- it's antithetical.


SSDR wrote:
The more society works, the more resources are extracted and the wealthier society is in general.



You can't say that society is wealthier 'in general' when the class divide continues to exist, bequeathing the vast amount of increased wealth onto the *ruling class* (owners of capital), while income inequality disproportionately punishes those who *have no* wealth to be rewarded by new influxes of wealth -- profits.


SSDR wrote:
Why not harvest 10 acres of crops instead of six? The amount of labour has nothing to do with socialism. Besides, if people don't work as much, society would be weaker and would have a weaker, less extracted industry.



Well this is an issue that's *internal* to the workers themselves / ourselves, and would have to be decided as such by those involved at any given specific geographical location, and scale.

If those workers, post-capitalism, decide that their society should be one of lessened work-efforts (versus increased productivity), then that's how that society will be.


SSDR wrote:
The classless society doesn't have to exist globally. Classless societies can trade with capitalist or feudalist societies, they just have different economic motives and have different modes of production.



We can't consider a post-class society to be in existence if parts of the world remain under class rule. There has to be *consistency* worldwide for such a definition to have any meaning. Your line here is that of a *Stalinist*, or that of state-capitalism.


SSDR wrote:
Just because I am not against state socialism doesn't mean that I am a Stalinist. There is state socialism (like Stalinism, or Juche) then there is state capitalism (social democracy, Christian democracy, welfare capitalism, Catholic unionists, etc.). A state has nothing to do with socialism, it just depends on what definition of a state you are using.



The terms 'state capitalism' and 'state socialism' are *synonymous*, because both describe a nation-state that's in a larger world socio-economic context of *capitalism*, even if it may be more-left-leaning / 'progressive' *internally*. We've seen from history that such an island of internal "socialism" (the USSR) is unsustainable because that nation-state island of 'non-capitalism' (social welfare of one type or another) decreases that country's *competitiveness* (by pricing measures) within the larger context of competitive capitalist relations, versus other countries.


ckaihatsu wrote:
If you're content to let the world be 'mixed' (inevitably objectively impossible), then you're definitely *not* a socialist, because the aims of such are for *transcending* humanity's class division, in favor of workers control of social production, *everywhere*.

By limiting the implementation of socialist-*minded* -- though *not* socialist -- to just one country or another you're effectively being a Stalinist.



viewtopic.php?p=14973726#p14973726



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
You're making the cultural-determination argument again, but culture is *not* the most deterministic social force -- *labor* is.



SSDR wrote:
- What don't you understand? Different people have different standards. Standards have no relations to culture. If one wants to live in a clean, advanced environment (Anglo-Saxons, Nordics), and if another wants to live in nature (indigenous Americans), then they can't live in the same community, both would attack each other using political correctness through "racism." Is it really racist to clean one's home?



This is a *racist* formulation, because you're persisting in thinking that modern inter-group warfare is based on cultural *tribalism*, and it's not -- the reasons for warfare, under capitalism, are for *economic* (material) reasons, such as how a material surplus is to be produced for any given area / population.

The U.S. Civil War happened because of the incompatibility of two different *modes of production* -- the ownership class within the U.S. had to *resolve* this internal incompatible socio-material friction somehow, between slave ownership and its process of labor value expropropriation, and a 'free-labor' (wage-slavery) system and *its* particular, looser, system of labor value expropriation.


---


ckaihatsu wrote:
Socialism doesn't *depend* on accumulated wealth, because it doesn't *have* to -- wealth is a measurement of commodity-type *exchange value* (money, basically), while socialism uses *workers collective self-organization* as the basis for material economic production, *without* requiring any exchange values / money whatsoever, due to the social implementation of free-access to collective mass industrial production, and direct-distribution.

My 'labor credits' model framework, referenced in previous posts of mine here, shows a possible *structure* for this kind of implementation of workers power over social production.



SSDR wrote:
The definition of wealth that I was using was having more things, and having a higher standard of living. I guess we were using different definitions of wealth. Many people are socialists because they want better standards of living, and they want to be free from fakeness, religious ignorance, reliance on private employers, economic instability, and family reliance.



You're attempting to define 'wealth' as being solely defined by *tangible goods*, or 'merchandise', when wealth is *typically* defined, at the most general meaning, as being that of *capital*, in whatever form -- usually *financial*.

Of course socialists -- usually from the working class -- want better standards of living, which are currently denied by the ruling class through wage-slavery relations and stagnant wage-rates themselves, compared to the always-increasing objective cost of living, but even improved standards of living for workers, from successful class struggle campaigns, cannot be considered 'wealth', since there is zero or negligible *accumulation* of exchange-value / capital. The working class, by definition, cannot access wealth and its reward of *more wealth*, and instead has to sell its own / our own *labor power* for a wage, for the necessities of life and living.


SSDR wrote:
In capitalism, the more currency you have, the more power you have. Customers who are workers who rely on wages do have some power, because they're the reason why companies stay in business. In capitalism, wage workers determine which companies go out and which ones thrive. The most of that paragraph has nothing to do with what I said. I was talking about currency and how it can give power, while you just dozzed off explaining why currency exists.



Again you're erroneously assuming that all consumption in the economy comes from the use of *wages*, when currently *most* of the dollar-value purchases, into private ownership, come from *wealth* and government spending, and not necessarily from wages. This is especially true in a slowing, recession-type economy where the production of *luxury goods* increases since the only people with money to spend are *wealthy* people, while the working class has no need or financial capacity for luxury production.

My position regarding the vehicle of currency remains this:


ckaihatsu wrote:
No, currency is just the *formal medium* of exchange values -- what determines relative levels of compensation is *private property ownership*. The rich *have* wealth / private-property, while the workers do *not*, and so must produce labor-power themselves, for a wage, instead of letting *wealth* / capital do the "work" for them as the rich do.



viewtopic.php?p=14973726#p14973726



---


ckaihatsu wrote:
This is a misnomer / mischaracterization, too, because you're continuing to assume -- in a Stalinistic way -- that labor-power would still be *commodified*.

What's required under socialism is a *detachment* of work-efforts, from the need for consumption. In other words, those who *need* the most would be benefitted by worker-control, liberated-labor social production, regardless of their own work-effort *inputs*. To us today this may sound strange and counterintuitive, but that's only because we've been thoroughly conditioned to regard everything as being *commodified* and valued according to abstract exchange-values, even if it means that people have to die every day from a lack of humane economic distribution of social production.



SSDR wrote:
- I never said that I like gold more than steel. Who told you that I value things? Just because I want more, and just because I want a higher standard of living, doesn't mean I am a capitalist, and it doesn't mean that I value things.



Yes, wanting a higher standard of living is *synonymous* with wanting more commodities / things, because that's what can *provide* more material-quality-of-life for that raised standard of living. No, wanting more does not automatically make one a capitalist.


SSDR wrote:
Industrialization is good. It means more wealth and more socialized modes of production, so that nothing is family oriented.



Yes, I think you mean 'more productivity', on the whole, at greater scales / scopes of productivity, but you're also misrepresenting the *ownership* and *control* of this industrial productivity -- 'more wealth' does *not* distribute evenly to *everyone*. You're again forgetting your previous acknowledgement of *class-divided* society, due to the existence of private property ownership that *exploits* labor-value as a matter of course.

Also, regarding material development, there's this:



Uneven and combined development (or unequal and combined development) is a Marxist concept[1] to describe the overall dynamics of human history. It was originally used by the Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky around the turn of the 20th century, when he was analyzing the developmental possibilities that existed for the economy and civilization in the Russian empire, and the likely future of the Tsarist regime in Russia.[2] It was the basis of his political strategy of permanent revolution,[3] which implied a rejection of the idea that a human society inevitably developed through a uni-linear sequence of necessary "stages". Also before Trotsky, Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Vasily Vorontsov proposed a similar idea.[4] The concept is still used today by Trotskyists and other Marxists concerned with world politics.[5]



Explanation of the concept

Different countries, Trotsky observed,[9] developed and advanced to a large extent independently from each other, in ways which were quantitatively unequal (e.g. the local rate and scope of economic growth and population growth) and qualitatively different (e.g. nationally specific cultures and geographical features). In other words, countries had their own specific national history with national peculiarities.

But at the same time, all the different countries did not exist in complete isolation from each other; they were also interdependent parts of a world society, a larger totality, in which they all co-existed together, in which they shared many characteristics, and in which they influenced each other through processes of cultural diffusion, trade, political relations and various “spill-over effects” from one country to another.[citation needed]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uneven_an ... evelopment



---


SSDR wrote:
What does having some capitalist and socialist nations have to do with socialist societies not having currency or employers. One society is socialist, another is money capitalist. They trade for natural resources, what is so fuckin complicated about that?



We've been over this already.

The global economic context would be one of *state capitalism* in this formulation of yours, meaning that any left-leaning "socialist" countries would not be sustainable in such a trade-competitive and militaristic overall environment.


SSDR wrote:
I think that there should be no money, and that everyone should work for free, live for free by capitalist terms.



The dynamics of capitalism itself do not allow for this societal formulation that you're describing.

Of course money is required for the formalization and flexibility of exchange-values, and workers have material needs of their / our own, requiring provisions, typically from wages -- what you're suggesting here sounds more like *slavery* / feudalism.


SSDR wrote:
I said this many times, capitalism enforces the family. It does so because it keeps people distracted with their families. Capitalism is not as family oriented as feudalism, but it promotes and defends the family institution.



I'm basically in agreement on this point.


---


Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism wrote:
"Yes; there are suggestive things in Individualism. Socialism annihilates family life, for instance. With the abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear. This is part of the programme. Individualism accepts this and makes it fine. It converts the abolition of legal restraint into a form of freedom that will help the full development of personality, and make the love of man and woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling. Jesus knew this. He rejected the claims of family life, although they existed in his day and community in a very marked form. ‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?’ he said, when he was told that they wished to speak to him. When one of his followers asked leave to go and bury his father, ‘Let the dead bury the dead,’ was his terrible answer. He would allow no claim whatsoever to be made on personality."



SSDR wrote:
- Yeah for some people, you can't fuck someone because you're afraid that your families will deny you and break you up. If you see someone you want to have sex with, but your families are around, you guys



'You guys' -- ?? You're assuming that I'm gay or bisexual, and I'm not. I'm straight. I support all civil rights for LGBTQ+ people, though, of course.


SSDR wrote:
can't love each other fully because of your families. Your families internally split you up, this makes you feel alone, and alienated. But, you don't need to use religious texts, we don't live in a super religious, shaming society anymore, so you don't need to use that.



I don't include Wilde's essay for any sexual-orientation reasons, or for any religious reasons -- you're just making facile assumptions. I like that essay because of its *socio-political* content.


SSDR wrote:
In scientific terms, corporations are closer to socialism than family owned companies because they have more economic security, and their workplaces are not family oriented.



No, corporations are *not* closer to socialism, because they're still based on *private-property ownership*.


SSDR wrote:
Meaning, if you work for a corporation, managers just can't do what they want, because they are in a big company that has lots of labour rules and regulations. Plus, corporations tend to be in unions. So this is closer to socialism.



Yes, corporations may be regulated by the capitalist nation-state, but only *nominally* in practice -- you've already acknowledged that the capitalist nation-state trails *behind*, and upholds, the interests of wealth ownership. Here's a real-world factor that supports this argument of mine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood


No, there are *not* 'lots of labor rules and regulations', and corporations don't *need* unions, because they have the backing of the nation-state (the bourgeois ruling class). If they *do* receive the support of some unions then those unions are in reality about *business unionism* and are betraying the interests of their union-affiliated workers, which is a common practice / politics today. (UAW, NEA, etc.)


---


SSDR wrote:
Nationalization of economics in a revolutionary mode of production is state socialist.



No, it's not because the nation-state itself continues to be capitalist, with no input or representation on behalf of *workers'* interests.


SSDR wrote:
Nationalization of economics in a conservative mode of production is state capitalist. State capitalist countries are non socialist countries that use state capitalist economics to DEFEND capitalism.



Yes, I basically agree with this statement.


SSDR wrote:
Stalinism for the USSR was for the workers.



No, the bureaucratic elite in the USSR was *not* for the workers -- it had separate, detached state-administrative interests that were not the same as the interests of the working class itself. That's why the politics were no longer about *spreading* the initial Bolshevik revolution, but was instead about *containing* such a class struggle within the *confines* of the nation-state organization, meaning the Stalinist USSR. You're a Stalinist yourself for defending and apologizing-for this particular formulation.



The Left Opposition was a faction within the Bolshevik Party from 1923 to 1927, headed de facto by Leon Trotsky. The Left Opposition formed as part of the power struggle within the party leadership that began with the Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin's illness and intensified with his death in January 1924. Originally, the battle lines were drawn between Trotsky and his supporters who signed The Declaration of 46 in October 1923, on the one hand, and a triumvirate (also known by its Russian name troika) of Comintern chairman Grigory Zinoviev, Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin and Politburo chairman Lev Kamenev on the other hand.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Opposition



---


SSDR wrote:
They were oppressive to anti socialists, and traitors of freedom.



You're just making shit up here.


SSDR wrote:
I am not an expert on Stalinist diplomacy either. What I said was only common sense. You have to gain the trust of your enemies, and pretend to be friends with them to buy some time. It's common sense.



See -- this is the entire mindset of the patchwork of nation-states under capitalism, one of international *competition*, including nationalist intrigues. This is yet another statement of yours that implies support for state-capitalism, or Stalinism.


SSDR wrote:
I don't support Islam at all, since Islam is somewhat political. Islam has lots of politics in it.



You're sounding very racist, Christian, and Western with this explicitly anti-Islam line of yours.
#14974281
@ckaihatsu, The workers don't necessarily need strict boarders to defend their ways of life, since different people are different, and you wanting everyone to be the same Makes YOU racist. If the world was globally socialist, having boarders wouldn't harm anything since each nation and society has a socialist mode of production. If you're against "being concerned with culture" hence I am not promoting any conservative culture, then you want everyone to be the same. Just because everyone is equal doesn't mean they have to be the exact same, and that's what makes You racist.

Eugenics is the study of genes, such as human genes for instance.

How is this "misconception" driving "My" "Stalinist" politics? I am not a Stalinist, so this doesn't add up, and my politics are not a misconception.

So every socialist who doesn't enforce internationalist policies are Stalinists? What if they don't even know who Stalin is? How can one be a Stalinist if they don't know who Stalin is? You don't know every socialist in the world.

In pure socialism, there is no "employer." Employers own people, and in socialism, no human is owned.

You using Revleft as a source makes you an anti socialist, since Revleft is composed of anarchists.

"Company towns" are slavery, and that's how most infrastructures were kind of like before capitalism. For example, in the Balkans before socialism, when things were kind of post feudalist, jobs were family owned, and people didn't rely on wages, they relied on their family owned companies. This helped enforced forced marriages, and second class treatment to women.

"The *point*, for laborers, is to create collective labor *organization*, to show society and themselves that they're the motive force behind all social production in society. If workers don't work, nothing gets done, and social production *ceases* -- so it would be better for workers, the ones doing the actual work for social consumption, to be in *control* of their own labor-power, collectively, since society as a whole is *dependent* on their efforts for any given standard-of-living."

- No, the point of labourers is to work and to ensure the survival of humanity. In pure socialism, there is no motive force, because in pure socialist terms, that is a form of social slavery, similar to family or religion.

"A period of dual power ensued, during which the Provisional Government held state power while the national network of Soviets, led by socialists, had the allegiance of the lower classes and, increasingly, the left-leaning urban middle class. During this chaotic period there were frequent mutinies, protests and many strikes. Many socialist political organizations were engaged in daily struggle and vied for influence within the Duma and the Soviets, central among which were the Bolsheviks ("Ones of the Majority") led by Vladimir Lenin who campaigned for an immediate end to the war, land to the peasants, and bread to the workers. When the Provisional Government chose to continue fighting the war with Germany, the Bolsheviks and other socialist factions were able to exploit virtually universal disdain towards the war effort as justification to advance the revolution further. The Bolsheviks turned workers' militias under their control into the Red Guards (later the Red Army) over which they exerted substantial control.["

- This has nothing to do with what I was talking about.

"You can't call yourself a socialist (a Stalinist, actually), and then defend hoards of wealth as you're doing here -- it's antithetical."

- I never called myself a Stalinist. When did I say "I am a Stalinist?" What hoards of wealth? What do you mean by that?

"You can't say that society is wealthier 'in general' when the class divide continues to exist, bequeathing the vast amount of increased wealth onto the *ruling class* (owners of capital), while income inequality disproportionately punishes those who *have no* wealth to be rewarded by new influxes of wealth -- profits."

- In socialism, class divide wouldn't exist because there are no social classes. Everything else you said has nothing to do with what I said. The more people work, the wealthier they are. Homes don't build themselves. Crops don't harvest themselves. Unless if we're living off of robots, the more humans (or robots) work, the more wealthier society is. And the more industry, the more extracted wealth through natural resources.

"Well this is an issue that's *internal* to the workers themselves / ourselves, and would have to be decided as such by those involved at any given specific geographical location, and scale."

- And what determines these "internal" issues? Meaning, what determines what the workers want? Their eugenics. Their differences, that's why there needs to be socialist coordinating states, to determine these "internal" issues. And to prevent dispute among the different people. "Geographical location" and "scale" yeah that's why boarders still need to exist, to defend those "scales." And scales means eugenics.

"If those workers, post-capitalism, decide that their society should be one of lessened work-efforts (versus increased productivity), then that's how that society will be."

- Eugenics will determine what they want, that will determine how society will be. Different workers want different things, so pure globalism will result in dispute.

"We can't consider a post-class society to be in existence if parts of the world remain under class rule. There has to be *consistency* worldwide for such a definition to have any meaning. Your line here is that of a *Stalinist*, or that of state-capitalism."

- What does defending different workers' desires have to do with class? If Poles don't want to live with Somalians, how does that relate to class? Both are equal, (me saying they aren't makes me racist), but they're different.

"We've seen from history that such an island of internal "socialism" (the USSR) is unsustainable because that nation-state island of 'non-capitalism' (social welfare of one type or another) decreases that country's *competitiveness* (by pricing measures) within the larger context of competitive capitalist relations, versus other countries."

- How can you call yourself a socialist if you're saying that the lack of competition deteriorates society? Competition alienates society, and alienation is the enemy of socialism.

"If you're content to let the world be 'mixed' (inevitably objectively impossible), then you're definitely *not* a socialist, because the aims of such are for *transcending* humanity's class division, in favor of workers control of social production, *everywhere*."

- Pure internationalism is "mixed." So you're definitely *not* a socialist. Ban class division, but defend the differences and desires of different people. I never supported class division. When did I say that?

The U.S. Civil War has nothing to do with this discussion.

"Of course socialists -- usually from the working class -- want better standards of living, which are currently denied by the ruling class through wage-slavery relations and stagnant wage-rates themselves, compared to the always-increasing objective cost of living, but even improved standards of living for workers, from successful class struggle campaigns, cannot be considered 'wealth', since there is zero or negligible *accumulation* of exchange-value / capital. The working class, by definition, cannot access wealth and its reward of *more wealth*, and instead has to sell its own / our own *labor power* for a wage, for the necessities of life and living."

- I am not talking about financial wealth, since currency doesn't exist in pure socialism. I am talking about MATERIAL wealth.

In pure capitalism, state spending lowers, and private spending increases, since it's more family oriented.

"Yes, wanting a higher standard of living is *synonymous* with wanting more commodities / things, because that's what can *provide* more material-quality-of-life for that raised standard of living. No, wanting more does not automatically make one a capitalist."

- Exactly. Now you understand.

"Yes, I think you mean 'more productivity', on the whole, at greater scales / scopes of productivity, but you're also misrepresenting the *ownership* and *control* of this industrial productivity -- 'more wealth' does *not* distribute evenly to *everyone*. You're again forgetting your previous acknowledgement of *class-divided* society, due to the existence of private property ownership that *exploits* labor-value as a matter of course."

- I don't support privatized, capitalist ownership. When did I say that?

"Different countries, Trotsky observed,[9] developed and advanced to a large extent independently from each other, in ways which were quantitatively unequal (e.g. the local rate and scope of economic growth and population growth) and qualitatively different (e.g. nationally specific cultures and geographical features). In other words, countries had their own specific national history with national peculiarities.

But at the same time, all the different countries did not exist in complete isolation from each other; they were also interdependent parts of a world society, a larger totality, in which they all co-existed together, in which they shared many characteristics, and in which they influenced each other through processes of cultural diffusion, trade, political relations and various “spill-over effects” from one country to another.[citation needed]"

- Exactly, different people wanted different things. Your politics are backwards because you go against that because it's "racist" yet Trotsky himself noticed that different cultures desire different things. You're using references that go against your points. :lol:

"The global economic context would be one of *state capitalism* in this formulation of yours, meaning that any left-leaning "socialist" countries would not be sustainable in such a trade-competitive and militaristic overall environment."

- I don't support trade competition. I am against trade. I am against competition. And what does having a strong military have to do with socialist economics?

"The dynamics of capitalism itself do not allow for this societal formulation that you're describing."

- I'm not a capitalist. I don't support capitalism.

"Of course money is required for the formalization and flexibility of exchange-values, and workers have material needs of their / our own, requiring provisions, typically from wages -- what you're suggesting here sounds more like *slavery* / feudalism."

- What I described was pure socialism. There is no currency, so everyone works for free, lives for free because currency doesn't exist. And that's slavery? How is it slavery if no one is owned and if there is no currency?

"'You guys' -- ?? You're assuming that I'm gay or bisexual, and I'm not. I'm straight. I support all civil rights for LGBTQ+ people, though, of course."

- I am not assuming anything about you nor your personal sexuality. Why didn't you continue that quote? I think you're just trying to make yourself look better. :lol:

"you're just making facile assumptions"

- How?

"No, corporations are *not* closer to socialism, because they're still based on *private-property ownership*."

- They're not socialist. But they are closer to socialism, even though they're not socialist.

"with no input or representation on behalf of *workers'* interests."

- Exactly, Trotsky is not a socialist. He never wanted to input workers' interests.

"The Left Opposition was a faction within the Bolshevik Party from 1923 to 1927, headed de facto by Leon Trotsky. The Left Opposition formed as part of the power struggle within the party leadership that began with the Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin's illness and intensified with his death in January 1924. Originally, the battle lines were drawn between Trotsky and his supporters who signed The Declaration of 46 in October 1923, on the one hand, and a triumvirate (also known by its Russian name troika) of Comintern chairman Grigory Zinoviev, Communist Party General Secretary Joseph Stalin and Politburo chairman Lev Kamenev on the other hand."

- This has nothing to do with the discussion.

"You're just making shit up here."

- No I'm not. You are, for calling me "racist" and you saying that I am judging your personal sexual preferences.

"You're sounding very racist, Christian, and Western with this explicitly anti-Islam line of yours."

- What does race have to do with Islam? And what does Christianity have to do with hating Islam? You're being racist for saying that Christians hate Islam. And I am not a Christian, I am an atheist. You assuming that I am a Christian makes you prejudice. And what does "Western" have to do with Islam. Malcolm X is from the West.
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