Here is a philosophy that defies reason or logic.
Communism.
Can some one explain to me how you attain a classless, stateless society by giving unfettered power to the State? Dont deny that Marx did not proscribe this, either. All I have to do is point to the ten point outline in chapter two of the Communist Manifesto to shoot down any denials of that.
How exactly does that work?
Here is a better question, yet...
Can someone point to one example of where that has EVER worked?
We have had 150 years to see if it does.
Examples, anyone....?
deathtokoalas
you have to get your head around the hegelian concept of history to understand marx' logic. it's not that his ideas didn't make sense, it was that he was basing his ideas on a set of absurd hegelian assumptions. for what it's worth, those assumptions are still with us - they're the same assumptions underlying "invisible hands" and the same assumptions that declared the collapse of the soviet union to be the end of history.
if you take away the idea that history evolves to an end point, it's very hard to make sense of it. however, if you actually believe that then it follows that all you need to do is put the right things in motion and the "invisible hand" of history will guide us to the proper end point.
there are still some marxists out there that thump marx like christians thump the bible, but as a whole the left never really took the idea seriously and modern socialists tend to reject it fairly universally. richard wolff is one example of somebody who explicitly rejects that aspect of marxism in favour of a more anarchist approach of working directly with local councils.
bluewater454
I have no desire to understand why Karl Marx believed what he believed. As an individual, he was an exploitative narcissist who never worked in a factory, on a farm, or any other place that would help him to understand the common man. Likewise, he never ran a business. He was an overeducated idealist who thought he knew how to tell other people how to live, while he himself lived off of the wealth of others. First he lived off of the wealth of his parents, and then off of the generosity of people like Engels, who's family owned a textile factory.
Believe what you wish, but I see little difference in the opinions of marxists today. Men like Richard Wolff and David Harvey may not claim that their socialist ideas will create a stateless, classless society like Marx did, as you say. They are socialists, non-the-less. While Marx's socialism was supposed to lead to some stateless, classless utopia, the socialism of men like Wolff and Harvey is an end in itself.
This, at least, is my opinion of their brand of marxism. I have been following Wolff now for a few years. I know what he will say about a subject now almost before he will say it.
All economic problems begin with the private sector, and all solutions begin and end with the State.
Pure socialism.
Jo Ann C
+deathtokoalas but lady you know little about what the invisable hand means, its the incentives that direct moral agents to appropriate actions
you are clearly poor and unskilled thats your fault for wasting your time, not any one elses please accept your poverty or improve yourself.
deathtokoalas
+bluewater454 well, you asked a question and i gave you the correct answer. i'm not sure why you would ask if you didn't want to know.
marx was actually not a very educated person, and his writings make that fact very clear. one would say today that he got his doctorate out of a cereal box. while serious advances were being made in empirical science in england, he was hopelessly lost in a backwards type of german philosophy. he called his system "scientific socialism", but it's rather clear that he wouldn't be able to properly define the concept if pressed upon it. it wasn't his parents that provided for him, though; rather, it was the family of his wife, which was aristocratic.
you've got the idea that i've presented backwards. the debate over the role of the state has a long history in socialism that goes back to marx' lifetime. marx represented authoritarian state socialism. in his life time, his largest opponent was bakunin, who represented the anarchist strain of socialism. the anarchists rejected the idea of a "dictatorship of the proletariat", which is what you're referring to in this idea that you can somehow use the state to build a communist society. this led to a split in the socialist international in 1872. bakunin actually presented exactly the same argument that you're presenting: if marx succeeded in his revolution, the result would be no better than what already existed. a part of the russian revolution included the bolsheviks massacring anarchist-communists. they also fought against each other in spain.
most modern socialists - including harvey and wolff - agree with bakunin rather than marx on this specific point. they have every intention of building a communist society. however, they do not believe that the way to do that is through state power. rather, they believe the way to do that is through organizing workers at a local level in a way that renders the state obsolete.
when you hear somebody like wolff described or self-identifying as a marxist, that generally has to do with their economic views. marx' ideas about the economy are still taken seriously; his ideas about revolutionary politics are largely not.
that being said, you might hear wolff argue in favour of keynesian spending or something. that's hardly socialism. and it's meant as a short term fix.
deathtokoalas
+Jo Ann C the comparison is apt and has been made academically; hegel's "spirit of history" is very similar to your description of the invisible hand. i'd argue that both concepts are largely nonsense.
i hardly think my economic situation is relevant in explaining marx' viewpoints, but, if you're curious, i'm an artist that is content to live in poverty so long as i have the time and resources to create. i also have multiple university degrees.
bluewater454
You are right.
I am the one that asked.
The problem is that you did not answer the question that I asked. I did not ask why Marx believed what he believed. I asked if his idea of State control has ever produced the communist utopia of a stateless, classless society.
I already know the answer. Of course it did not work. It is impossible. You dont eliminate the State by giving it unlimited power. I dont care who you put in charge of the State. You understand that as well as I do.
You seem to believe that eliminating the State and working from the the local level might work. You may be a little closer to the truth on that one.
I have never heard Wolff or Harvey espouse the local government over the federal government, however. You are correct in that they promote Keynesian style socialism. I have never heard either one say that this is simply a temporary fix. Even if they did, this would only be another version of Marx claiming that giving power to the State would only be a temporary transition to his communist utopia. It just doesnt work that way.
I might refer back to my original question on that one...has it ever worked that way?
If you can't, that is fine. I can give you an example of how you do produce a society that works from the local level.
deathtokoalas
i'll let richard wolff speak for himself. he's pretty explicit in rejecting centralized government, here.
he provides a marxist critique of keynesianism here:
rdwolff.com/content/keynesian-revival-marxian-critique
youtube's spam robots tend to erase links...
but, he still may argue for massive state expenditure in the short run. why? because he understands that it creates jobs, and is a reasonable reaction in an economy that is losing jobs. or at least it did when we had a closed economy. i don't think it's likely to work anymore. there was some logic to it when buddy took his construction pay check and spent it in the local economy. nowadays, buddy spends that construction check at walmart and the profits are used to expand into foreign markets.
but, there's no contradiction between saying "capitalism caused this problem" and then saying "state expenditure won't solve it, but it might make it a little less bad.".
bluewater454
OK.
This does clear things up a bit. He would not, then, call himself a "Keynesian" socialist. He simply sees this type of socialism as an attempt to support a capitalist style economy.
He is correct.
He is also correct that this does not work.
I was quite surprised to even hear him admit that Roosevelts' New Deal socialist policies did not work to revive the economy. Most economists will tell you it did(Friedman, not-withstanding).
He is not, however, disassociating himself with socialism on a federal level(or "macro socialism", as he put it).
He simply wants to add layer of socialism at the local(or "micro") level.
He is, of course, talking about co-operatives.
In reading his description about how this would work, I am left shaking my head. His theory about how this would work would create so many layers of competing bureaucracies in the every day decision making of a business that it would never survive. A business has to make multiple decisions to adjust to the changing needs of the market on a day to day basis. This would simply not work. I have heard Wolff describe his theory of how a "Marxist" business would work before....I did not know whether to laugh or cry.
He is definitely an economist, not a businessman. If his description of a marxist style business is typical, then it goes a long way in explaining why Marxist style economies are mostly basket cases.
deathtokoalas
keynesianism is not socialism. rather, it is a tactic utilized by a section of the capitalist class to avoid the labour problems that come with recessionary cycles. when you've got 20% unemployment, the chances that people are going to revolt increases, so you send them to work through state expenditure. that essay was examining the question of if it worked or not, rather than if it's socialism or not. but you need to realize that richard wolf is rejecting keynesianism because he is a socialist, not despite of it.
nor were roosevelt's policies socialist. again, he's rejecting the new deal as a failed capitalist reform program precisely because he is a socialist, not despite it.
a lot of what you're saying about markets and decision making is incoherent in the context of a system of socially driven production. remember: the goal of socialism is to revolutionize the purpose of production to be for consumption, rather than profit. the idea is that the co-operative would eventually organically abolish the need for markets from the bottom up, rather than restrict them with laws from the top down.
bluewater454
You cant have it both ways.
Either you want a small(or non-existent) State government or you dont. And if you read what he said, this type of expenditure by the State does not work. It didnt work back in the 1930's, and it didnt work in 2009. We wasted almost a TRILLION dollars on nothing back a few years ago. It was supposed to go towards "shovel ready" jobs. If you do a little research on where this money went, it was anything but. It was a trillion dollar pork barrel spending fiasco.
Either you work from the local level or you dont. I would think that a self-described anarchist would understand this.
deathtokoalas
i think you've misunderstood me. as a socialist, i couldn't possibly argue that keynesianism has any structural positive effect - if i were to make that argument, i would be a liberal capitalist. however, i might argue that that's less important than finding a way to stop people from starving to death, or having no other option but criminal activities. the worst part of capitalism is not the appropriation of labour, as bad as wage slavery may be, but the unemployment that it causes.
bluewater454
I dont care whether you call the current style of government control and deficit spending socialism or not. It is still a State-controlled economy.
The State is a neutral entity. It is not partisan. It has no political or philosophical loyalties. The nature of State is pure control. It is the exercise of power. It will always seek to expand its own influence and control for its own benefit. The exercise of power is an addiction. It is like a drug.
Thus, the saying, "power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely" is a universal truth. You can call it capitalist or you can call it socialist.
In the end, it will, like fire, consume everything it controls. That is why the State makes a useful servant, but an evil master.
Let it get too big, and it will control you. Every time.
deathtokoalas
government control of the economy and deficit spending is called capitalism. the government creates these artificial constructs that they call "markets", writes a whole lot of rules about how they operate, enforces those rules with the blunt end of a stick, taxes the fuck out of it and then calls it capitalism.
keynesianism was the 20th century version of what had been previously called mercantilism.
bluewater454
I am sorry. You lost me.
Where did you learn that the "markets" are an "artificial construct of the government"?
The "market", my dear deathtokoalas(did you get bit by one, or something?) is nothing more than We the People.
Every time you go shopping, you create, support, and change the market. Every time you fuel up at an Exxon gas station instead of at a Sunoco, you influence the market. Every time you buy an organic, locally owned brand of milk instead of a national brand, you influence and change the market. When you, and a million others make the same choices, you create what is called a market trend.
In other words...you are the market.
So unless you are now going to claim that the "government" influences your buying habits, I cannot see for the life of me how you can make that statement.
Businesses exist on one principle alone - making money by meeting the needs and wants of "the market". Micro Soft did not get as big as it did by meeting the needs of the government. It was not started by the government, was not supported by the government(just the opposite was true a few years back) and it exists today because it has provided a product that a lot of people want at a price that a lot of people can afford.
The government did not send letters out telling people to go out and buy Micro Soft operating systems. Micro Soft is as big as it is because it has done what it does better(and more ruthlessly) than most other companies. There are better OS than Windows, but MS has done a better job of marketing its product than other companies.
Its called competition.
Do we need to go back to Econ 101 here?
deathtokoalas
the idea that the market is a construction of the state ultimately stems from marx, and it's pretty entrenched on the left.
in order for markets to function, there must be a state to uphold property rights using violence. otherwise, we would never choose to live this way. i would not choose to go to work if i did not have to pay my rent, and i would not pay my rent if the landlord were not able to remove me by complaining to the state and bringing the police in. i have no reason to choose to pay for an apple; i would rather merely take an apple when i see it. in order for me to reach into my pocket and pull out currency to exchange for the apple, there must be a state that upholds that system of exchange by the force of violence. that is, the only thing stopping me from taking the apple is the state's enforcement of property rights by the use of violence.
the abolition of the state consequently means the abolition of the violence that maintains property rights and separates those who own the means of production from those that do not. markets cannot exist without violent state coercion; in their place, we would move towards gift economies, where people contribute what they can in exchange for what they need.
i should take a step back from my initial statement - the idea that property rights are required for capitalism is obviously older than marx. but the idea that markets are artificial constructions of the state is largely a socialist idea.
but, i'll let richard wolff speak again about how debt=capitalism.
Henry Krinkle
+bluewater454 The US, like other technologically advanced societies has a huge state/corporate system. There is a revolving door between corporate and state managers through which they move back and forth. Computers and the Internet were almost entirely developed within the state system for about 30 years, that’s research and development inside university research labs and the military at public expense, before they were handed over to private enterprise for profit-making.The GPS technology in your smartphone was developed by the US Navy NAVSTAR program.
In other words the public take the risks and pay the costs and corporations like Microsoft and Apple privatise the profits. It’s why Google just purchased Boston Dynamics, which was funded by the tax payer through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for 20 years. This is what passes for “market dynamism” in the US and much of the advanced world. The $800 billion a year defence budget has always been a way to compel tax payers to subsidise high technology industry.
deathtokoalas
+Henry Krinkle he's likely to argue that what you're describing is "socialism", rather than acknowledge the necessity of the state's role in defining and regulating markets within any form of existing or previously existing capitalism. in some sense it's a definitional problem - is capitalism this thing that really exists, or is it some utopian, abstract idea about unregulated markets in a stateless society that has never existed in practice and seems lost in contradictions upon a cursory analysis?
i think a lot of it is a function of defining socialism as "the other" in this kind of binary logic. people with these hayekian concepts of market capitalism tend to define anything that doesn't conform to their utopia as "socialist", regardless of it's character.
bluewater454
+deathtokoalas You are correct that you need the State to enforce property rights. The guys who wear uniforms and guns are the only thing out there that protects your from some people who would simply take what they want simply because they can.
Do you see this as a bad thing...?
But saying that the State protects property rights is not the same as saying that the market is an "artificial construct" of the State. I think I already explained why that is not the case.
Perhaps 150 years ago, living under a German monarchy as Marx did, this may have had more truth to it. I cannot see for the life of me how anyone can look at the modern day free market system and say that this is the case now.
This is why I cannot understand the resurgence I am seeing in Marxism. Marxists are using the same accusations toward a prosperous, free market system that Marx was using 150 years ago against a system that was not anything close to what we now have.
Add to that the 150 year track record that Marxist style economies have produced. You want to compare our free market problems with those kinds of problems??
Please.
I will take our problems over what Marxism has produced any cold day of the week.
deathtokoalas
well, i think i've been clear that i'm not a marxist. i'd identify as a post-left anarchist. that means my primary problem is with the idea of wage slavery, and my disagreement with marxists lies in rejecting the idea that collectively owning production resolves that problem. i would argue that industrial society has no possible organization other than socialization in production creating perpetual class war, that changes in ownership are merely glossing over the condition and that the only way out of industrial wage slavery is a change in the mode of production. but i'd also argue that this is in the process of happening with mechanization and computerization, which is replacing socialized production. i'd consequently react to this change in the mode of production by arguing in favour of collectively owned mechanized production - that is, robots running factories that produce goods for the public benefit rather than the profit motive. in some senses, this is jumping right to communism, and i'll acknowledge and openly argue that point. but i really strongly disagree with the marxist idea of needing a socialist stage to get to communism, which is what the content of your initial question was: how does it make sense to abolish the state by empowering it? it doesn't. i'm not trying to justify marxism (i'm opposed to it!), i'm simply trying to answer some of your questions.
comparisons across economic systems are difficult, because all of the communist areas were heavily exploited under imperial domination. you're not dealing with the same initial conditions.
however, i think the idea that america is wealthy due to market capitalism is laughable. america is prosperous because it forms the center of the british empire, which underwent a change in capital from london to washington but still exists in roughly the same form that it did 100 years ago. it built itself on slavery and war - imperial domination. theft of resources. genocide. this has nothing to do with market capitalism. nor are there any "free markets" in the united states, if your idea of a free market is a market...free....from state regulation and taxation. the closest thing to something like that exists in the financial sector, but it's run by computers that trade numbers rather than people that trade goods.
starting in 1917, russia had centuries of catching up to do - and china was even worse off, starting in the 1940s. in actuality, i think the startling growth rate in these areas over the last century is extremely impressive. it took britain several centuries to undergo the changes that china has undergone in fifty. but i don't think that "communism" is the answer for those growth rates, either. the systems in these countries are academically referred to as "state capitalism", and have a lot in common with the protective systems of tariffs that the west used during it's own period of modernization and industrialization, they've simply been tweaked to accommodate local tradition and compensate for obvious errors - that's the benefit of hindsight that comes from following rather than leading. that is, they're using the same economic system we used, and in both cases they were systems defined by powerful state enterprise rather than invisible hands or worker co-ops. call it what you want (mercantilism, state capitalism, crony capitalism, fascism, really existing capitalism), but realize that it has nothing to do with any kind of socialism. bakunin's argument was that if you set up a dictatorship of the proletariat then the capitalists will co-opt the state, and that's precisely what happened virtually everywhere. the dominant ideological driver in china today is neither marx nor mao but confucius, which is not at all dissimilar from the kind of white protestant capitalism that defines the existing republican status quo of chasing material wealth at any cost.
so, when you really look at the first and second world, you see more similarities than differences - there's just a time lag of 150 years. the comparison is consequently deeply flawed, as you are not comparing markets with planned economies, you are comparing two minor variants of mercantilism defined by their cultural rather than their economic differences.
when i say that markets are an artificial construct of the state, what i mean is that they require the laws and regulations that the state places on them in order to even define what they are. in determining this point, you need to ask the following question: could markets function without the state defining the rules in which they operate under? i'm not going to write this essay right here, but i'd emphatically answer that this is not possible - that once you remove the state and it's enforcement of property rights, people will choose to pool their resources together and share. the rules define the market (and once you realize the arbitrary nature of this, the market as a natural entity instantly collapses) whereas the police enforce the rules....
do i think that's a bad thing? well, i think that many things ought to be socialized. i'm ok with somebody protecting their living space. i'm less ok with somebody building fences around growing areas, then demanding that everybody else give them a piece of paper or a hunk of metal before they're allowed to eat the food. property rights are complicated, but they usually have the net effect of upholding exploitative social relations.
...and that's the answer as to why marx is becoming fashionable: your perception that capitalism is working well for the number of people you think it's working for is inaccurate. the mechanization i spoke of previously is a particular crisis point, particularly amongst young people. rather than say "things are good, i don't get this reaction", it might behove you to be more empirical in deducing that if all of these people are reacting then maybe things aren't so good...
i mean, the unemployment rate is pushing 20% in most of the "advanced capitalist" world right now. that's a lot of people that are unable to find employment in a system that's unable to create it.
bluewater454
You asked a good question.
Can the markets survive without the State writing the rules of engagement?
I think that the American experience already proved this. We grew faster economically in the late19th and early 20th century than at any other time in our history. This was a time of minimal federal oversight in our economy.
You also pointed out something that is relevant to the present situation. We now have an unemployment rate of almost 20% here in the US. This number would be arrived at by using the labor participation rate numbers, not the white-washed government U6 numbers.
It would also be relevant to point out that we have a federal government that taxes and regulates our economy more now than at any other time in history.
The Federal Registry contains over 100,000 pages of regulations concerning both civil and statutory laws that govern not only our individual behavior, but also govern our economy. I would hardly call that a free market.
To make matters worse, we have a federal government that is producing debt at a level never before seen in our history. And to make the matter even worse, instead of reigning in its insane levels of spending, its is now pumping BILLIONS of wothless dollars per month into the bond market to keep this debt from burying us. We are literally producing worthless currency to by our own debt. This is insane. It is also unsustainable. This is not a problem produced by the "free" market(such as it is). This problem falls squarely on the shoulders of the State.
We are becoming less free by the year now - both individually and economically. My own industry alone saw a huge increase in federal regulations back in 2010, that before was regulated only on a state and local level. This has had the effect of seeing hundreds of companies go out of business in the past four years.
It is amazing to me that in the freest country on earth, I have to defend freedom. Economic freedom produces economic prosperity. This seems self-evident to me. And yet I talk to people of a younger generation now, like yourself, and you seem to have no concept of this, even though you say you are educated and hold several degrees.
Amazing.
deathtokoalas
the gilded era was a time of high profits and terrible labour conditions. growth is not a very important metric if you're spending your days building railroads, while chained to the tracks. and, that's what a lot of people (young and old) are able to clearly realize - what the term "economic freedom" means is the freedom to exploit the working classes, and that's not what people really want.
fwiw, the gilded era was not a period of free markets, either. it was a period of crony capitalism and weak labour regulation. there is no history of free or open markets in the united states, just a dominant landowning class enslaving the huddled masses.
bluewater454
That, of course, is what Marx would claim.
There is just one problem with this...
It is simply not true.
People did not flock here from Europe to be exploited. They came here for freedom - both politically and economically. You might be able to fool people for a while into thinking that they could come here for a better life. But I am guessing that this could only go on for so long before people finally caught on.
The free market has produced more prosperity for the common man than any other economic system.
Are there those who were(and are) exploited?
Of course. This does not, however, explain the rise of the middle class and the rise in living standards for the common man in general. Exploitation has been a common theme throughout history. And yet, the past 200 years has seen a thousand fold increase in wealth, not only for the rich, but the common man as well.
You are correct in claiming that labor conditions were deplorable, at least by todays' standards. But as we grew economically, we also were able to afford the luxury of addressing those conditions and reforming the system. Economic prosperity did not create the problem of exploitation, it allowed us to solve it.
We were able to, for instance, pass child labor laws because families were no longer dependent upon every able family member to work just for the family to survive.
Freedom and prosperity did not only affect the rich, it also affected the conditions of the common man.
deathtokoalas
something else that marx pointed out is that capital ought to desire high unemployment. it's not clear that capital realized this before marx pointed it out, but it's clear that it does now. that's what our immigration policies exist for.
it's not some arcane marxist leap of circular reasoning, either, it's a simple supply argument. if you have an excess of labour, wages will decrease and profits will increase. it follows that capital should seek to maintain a significant unemployment rate.
marx' insight was realizing that this is unsustainable and will inevitably lead to the collapse of capitalism. keynesian spending is a reaction to this - an attempt to prevent the collapse.
my point is that if you're looking to unregulated markets to eliminate unemployment, you're mistaking the solution for the cause.
there was a lot of dishonesty in the advertising, and people often ended up worse off. here's an interesting fact: they did studies on the bones of italian immigrants in new york versus italians that stayed in italy. now, italy has long been a horrific kleptocracy, with high poverty rates. but the immigrants that came to new york showed very stunted skull development as a result of malnutrition compared to the ones that stayed behind. these studies were used to demonstrate the plasticity of bone structure, but what i'm drawing out of them is the fact that conditions in america were measurably worse for many of the people that arrived.
the flyers they had floating through europe promised a free society, but when people arrived they learned they'd been tricked by a brutal society with a labour shortage that was still grappling with how to rebuild after abolition and was looking, first and foremost, for cheap labour.
i'm not willing to place the rise of living standards that accompanied industrialization on any particular economic system - and, as was mentioned, the system you're thinking of didn't actually exist at the time, anyways. there are changes in technology underlying the increases of wealth.
and, of course, labour activists had something to do with labour laws being passed....
bluewater454
Wow.
That is impressive.
Someone actually did comparison studies between Italian immigrants' bone development and their European counter parts?
Amazing.
What is really amazing is the lengths that some people will go to in trying to discredit the American experience and to explain away the reasons for why people came here. I am quite sure that many immigrants were financially and socially better off in their native countries. Many left behind their wealth, their families, their titles of nobility and everything else that they knew in the Old World. They did not give all that up simply because of some job advertisement. They came here for one thing - freedom.
Sometimes people will give up security, stability, and even wealth for something that they see as more valuable. Sometimes it is opportunity. Sometimes it is a calling. Sometimes it is simply the opportunity to pursue something that they love.
I saw you make a comment to someone that you have chosen a life of relative poverty in order to have the freedom to pursue your art. I am guessing that you could probably make more money doing other things if you chose. But you have chosen freedom over material things, at least at this point in your life.
Why, then, is it so hard for you to understand the idea of people who would risk certain things to pursue opportunity and freedom?
People risked their lives to come here in some cases(they still do). Was there exploitation? Sure there was(and is). There is also the opportunity to succeed where maybe there was not else where.
Freedom is not for the weak or the faint of heart. There are no guarantees.
Zach Martinez
Marx said that the state would "wither away" slowly after socialism was implemented. Communism comes later.
As far as successful communism, what do you mean by "successful?" surely you don't expect a country to be perfect just because it's communist. But if you want a situation where communism does what it's supposed to do, then look up "Twin Oaks community," one of the communes in the States.
deathtokoalas
+bluewater454 yikes. listen, i answered some of your questions, but you've sort of let on their you're elderly and brainwashed and i sort of feel that i'm wasting my time. that rhetoric about "american freedom" would be hilarious in any period.
markets are a system of violent coercion. i would be unable to live the life i choose to life without the help of disability support systems. otherwise, i'd be forced to sell my labour whether i like it or not. that's not freedom. it's slavery.
but, i don't really feel compelled to discuss this further. you have your answer: it's hegelian. and, yes, it's nonsense.
deathtokoalas
+Zach Martinez whatever you think about these sorts of communes, they are not marxism, either. marxism is a centralized, state-organized, planned and overseen economy. these communes are generally not driven by any kind of ideology at all, because they're set up by ignorant hippies that do not have ideologies. marx would have described them as "utopians" rather than marxists, and been right in both meanings of the terms. that's why they almost always fail...
when these communes "succeed" as microcosms in the reality of capitalism, it is in truth because they adapt the characteristics of capitalism. the place you referenced is organized into a hierarchy. it's a business. a cult, more or less.
Zach Martinez
+deathtokoalas There's no hierarchy in Twin Oaks
deathtokoalas
+Zach Martinez you're wrong. they have a currency system, as well.
bluewater454
+deathtokoalas I suppose you are right.
I am just a "brain-washed" old white guy who likes to read and type, and has lived the kind of freedom that I am typing about. This is not a theory for me. It is not some utopian dream. I have seen it. I have lived it.
Freedom is not just a word I have learned in some university or read in a book, but maybe we have different views on what is freedom and what is slavery.
I dont consider earning my living to be slavery. I consider it to be both a right and a privilege. I would consider depending on someone else to be slavery.
Zach Martinez
+bluewater454 The only reason you're able to have your freedom is by depending on other people to protect it. So you're "enslaved" to the people who give you freedom?
Even the most sociopathic robber baron has to rely on consumers as well as employees.
bluewater454
+Zach Martinez Is this the nonsense that is taught in school now?
You dont even have a basic understanding of the freedoms that have been passed down to you, do you?
I am not even sure I want to engage in this discussion. It would be like having to untie a ball of string that is twisted entirely into knots.
I once had a teacher who told me that you need to learn to ask the right questions if you are going to know how to find the right answers. Seemed like a bit of an over simplistic statement to me at the time. I can see now, however, that it was not so simple.
When you ask a question like the one you just asked, then I am not even sure you can be taught. It is not the kind of question someone would ask who even wants to know the right answers.
Maybe I am wrong, but that is my first impression.
deathtokoalas
+bluewater454 the reason we need socialism to replace liberalism in an industrial society is that economic independence is impossible in an industrialized reality, where supply chains rely on specialized labour. socialization in production is a capitalist concept that describes the division of labour.
i'm a studio musician. i play all the instruments myself. but i can't build a car by myself. and i can't grow food by myself, either.
it's a reaction to a technological reality, not a means in itself.
bluewater454
+deathtokoalas Sounds like you would be a good candidate to convert to the Amish. They like being independent from the "industrialized society" that you seem to think is the problem.
You might not look too bad in one of those bonnets. You will have to get used to the aromas of farm life, however.
Zach Martinez
+bluewater454 It doesn't matter what the freedoms are, but how you're able to have them. We enjoy our rights because we defend ourselves from attackers by hiring the police, forming a vigilante group, etc. This is successful because even the strongest criminal can't possibly outpower an organized mass.
So basically since we rely on other people to keep our freedoms from being violated it doesn't make any sense to say that depending on others means you're enslaved.
Of course their are different forms of slavery: One of them implemented by other people and one by the limitations of the natural world. We're all "slaves" to our basic needs because without them we'll die.
"No amount of political freedom will satisfy the hungry masses." -Lenin
deathtokoalas
+bluewater454 i don't mind a witty comeback, but this one isn't following the conversation very well.
bluewater454
+Zach Martinez Sounds like something Lenin would say.
bluewater454
Sorry.
I was off my medications.
I had thought you said you were done with the conversation, anyhow.
If you really want my opinion on "industrialized society",then my thought is that I dont think we have a real choice, do we? The genie is out of the bottle.
You could choose to live on a farm, like some people are doing. I heard the other day that a friend of mine from years ago bought a house out in the middle of nowhere and is living like the family on "Little House on the Prairie".
Technology is simply a tool. It can be used for good or evil. It is not, however, the cause of evil.
There was plenty of exploitation and societal degradation before our modern era. The fact that most people are living longer, healthier lives now as opposed to a couple of hundred years ago tells me that modern technology has been more a benefit than a hindrance to human well-being. It comes with its own set of problems, but I see the modern industrialized era as an improvement overall.
We would agree on one thing, however.
Socialism is the cure to modern industrial prosperity.
deathtokoalas
nobody's trying to demonize technology. it's just a question of understanding that it affects the underlying social organization, and adjusting your social systems in ways that make sense.
i would agree that market theory has quite a bit of logic when applied to agrarian societies. it was never really implemented, but if you live in a society where everybody owns a farm and everybody produces a product then it's easy to see the logic of it. agrarianism was, after all, the assumption that market theory was created around - and remains it's best application.
bluewater454
So you like the technology
You just dont like the industrialized infrastructure surrounding it. You dont like the specialized trades needed to produce it. You believe this industrialized society is exploitive.
deathtokoalas
no. that's not what i said at all. what i've said is that socialism is the most efficient way to maximize individual freedom within an industrial economy.
i think i've already pointed out that we no longer live in an industrial system, and are no longer bound by the restrictions of socialism. we have the potential for even greater use of technology to emancipate workers altogether.
but, we're certainly not going to get to that point by dusting off discredited three hundred year old theories written for societies that rode horses and that have never been tested in real life.
bluewater454
I was being a bit sarcastic, the way I put it. I know what you meant about socialism. I simply disagree.
Socialism is a State-controlled economy. State-controlled economies have never produced prosperity, except to the degree that they allow innovation in the private sector to prosper. Private industry is the work horse of ingenuity and wealth. It is a market-centered entity focused on producing goods and services that the public demands. I know you are already disagreeing and saying that this is not so. You are thinking that its main purpose is to make money.
You are right.
The problem for those in the private sector who wish to be wealthy, however, is that they must figure out a way to meet someone elses' need before this can happen. The ones who are the wealthiest are the ones who figure out a way to serve the wants or needs of the most people.
It is, therefore, focused on service(the "customer is always right", and that sort of thing).
This is in direct contrast to the focus of the State. A State-run economy would not be focused on meeting the needs of the most people in the most economical, efficient way possible. It is focused on the force of law. It is focused on regulation and control. This is the nature of government, no matter how well intentioned those who work in it may be.
heytampon
Marxism is discredited by right wing neoliberalists by being associated with a failed Leninist's Soviet Union and Moaist China. This is all right wing propaganda invented by Capitalist US. Lenin was a fascist, he believed in socialism but it had to be ruled by a "vanguard" aka a group of elites that would guide the common people. this is just communism/capitalism. true socialism does not believe in an authoritarian elite telling the working class what to do.
deathtokoalas
+heytampon i agree with the crux of what you're saying, but in order to make that argument you really need to separate marx' politics from the socialist tradition altogether - which is largely done in practice, but tends to be missed by people outside it because his economics are so important within virtually all socialist thought. you can't really pin this all on lenin. his ideas did come from marx.
bluewater454
+heytampon Marxism has not been discredited by "right wing, neoliberalists", as you suggested. You dont need them to discredit Marxism. It has been discredited by its own practitioners.
All we have to do is point to those who have claimed to practice this ideology and look at the results to see what Marxism produces.
Those of you who hold to this ideology keep telling us to stop looking behind the curtain to see the man pulling the levers.
"Pay no attention to that man behind the Iron Curtain". Sort of a Marxist version of the Wizard of Oz, you could say.
Sorry.
We aren't listening.
yakyakyak69
Since politicians are just cronies of their most powerful, richest campaign contributors...
ALL GOVERNMENT IS OLIGARCHY, ONLY USEFUL IDIOTS VOTE TO GIVE THEM MORE POWER.
bluewater454
+yakyakyak69 Since most people are stupid enough to vote for these cronies, instead of voting for men and women with principles, they get the government that they deserve.
I am guessing that you would call yourself an anarchist, and you believe that all forms of government are evil. We can talk about what kind of government is good, and what types are bad. We have no common ground if you think ALL government is bad.
By-the-way...
setting your key board in caps lock doesn't give you a stronger argument.
yakyakyak69
Of course, you would be guessing wrong. The oligarchy which finances political campaign always puts up their cronies which leaves very few "men of principle" running and most of them lose to those with deeper campaign war chests. Anarchy ALWAYS leads to totalitarianism when the people cry out for a "strong leader" (Stalin, Hitler, Mao etc.) to restore order. Of course, no man rules alone so Anarchy is just the shortest path to Oligarchy... Just ask the Russian Bolsheviks, Chinese Boxers or German National Socialists. No, I am a Minarchist just like Washington & Jefferson. Today we call them Libertarians which is the opposite of a Liberal.
cowpoke02
I could run communism better than a democracy . people vote and the smart ones don't . Hitler had a democracy . lol. communism is bad if you get a bad leader . like having a royal family . if you did a good job you could stop corruption of corporations and outside banks . depends on your leaders . nobody has lived in freedom either yet . lol . best system so far is social capitalism / socialism . maybe democracy would work with a few laws to prevent foreign aid and special interest . ends up a dictatorship by special interests . bad laws a well.
bluewater4541
+yakyakyak69
Then I guessed wrong.
Your statement that "all government is oligarchy" led me to believe that you are an anarchist who thinks that all government is bad, and therefore, would believe that the State needs to be abolished.
I have found myself gravitating more towards the Libertarian side of politics lately. I am new to this, and am not familiar with all the players.
It seems to be a the best alternative to the growing statism that I am seeing today.
yakyakyak69
Anarchy is just the quickest route to authoritarian oligarchy once the people cry out for a "strong leader" and his rich & powerful supporters to restore order. No man rules alone, therefore all government is oligarchy. The founders understood this and gave us a Representative Republican form of government and not a Democracy.
There is little real difference between Corporate-Socialism aka "Fascism", Collective Socialism a.k.a. "Communism" and Democratic-Socialism aka "Mob Rule".
I am a Minarchist a.k.a. libertarian because we need VERY limited government to Protech to our natural rights from the oligarchy, the Socialists, thieves, invaders and bullys. Libertarians believe in personal freedom WITH personal responsibility. Liberals are just rebranded Socialists. The very word "Liberal" is a lie. Progressives are Socialists/Liberals who believe in incrementalism via LIES & DECEIT instead of hot revolution like the Russian Bolsheviks or Chinese Boxers. Of course, all Socialists are Useful Idiots and tools for the Oligarchy who control the money, manufacturing, education & the media as was proven time & again in the 20th Century.
You should read the entire US Constitution including the Declaration of Independence some time. THEY understood history!
Merry Christmas! ;-)
bluewater454
+yakyakyak69
Cant say I disagreed with much of what you said.
I have read the Constitution. I also believe it was the best form of law created in the past thousand years. I think it was genius.
I also think it was a minor miracle that a bunch of cantankerous rebels, who were debating much of the same issues that we are today, could actually have come up with something even close to it.
Their experiences seemed to give them a different mindset than what we have today.
deathtokoalas
Hence, it clearly appears, that the same advantage which a republic has over a democracy, in controlling the effects of faction, is enjoyed by a large over a small republic, -- is enjoyed by the Union over the States composing it. Does the advantage consist in the substitution of representatives whose enlightened views and virtuous sentiments render them superior to local prejudices and schemes of injustice? It will not be denied that the representation of the Union will be most likely to possess these requisite endowments. Does it consist in the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties, against the event of any one party being able to outnumber and oppress the rest? In an equal degree does the increased variety of parties comprised within the Union, increase this security. Does it, in fine, consist in the greater obstacles opposed to the concert and accomplishment of the secret wishes of an unjust and interested majority? Here, again, the extent of the Union gives it the most palpable advantage.
The influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States. A religious sect may degenerate into a political faction in a part of the Confederacy; but the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it must secure the national councils against any danger from that source. A rage for paper money, for an abolition of debts, for an equal division of property, or for any other improper or wicked project, will be less apt to pervade the whole body of the Union than a particular member of it; in the same proportion as such a malady is more likely to taint a particular county or district, than an entire State.
In the extent and proper structure of the Union, therefore, we behold a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government. And according to the degree of pleasure and pride we feel in being republicans, ought to be our zeal in cherishing the spirit and supporting the character of Federalists.
bluewater454
Sounded more like Jefferson than Hamilton.
I'll bite.
Who said this?
deathtokoalas
it's madison.
just a little reality check on who these people really were (plantation owners) and what they really wanted (a slave society).
bluewater454
OK.
Color me confused.
How does the argument for the superiority of a republic over a pure democracy prove that these guys simply wanted a "slave society".
yakyakyak69
Yes the men who wrote the American Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights did not suffer from government education in union collectivism. They were Not " dumbed-down" by TV radio & Marks. They learned by studying history. They were afraid of democracy because mob rule always ends up in a lynch mob and that anarchy always leads to Authoritarian Oligarchy. Remember even monarchy is actually oligarchy because no man rules alone.
deathtokoalas
+yakyakyak69 but, what they wanted was "authoritarian oligarchy".
i think your theory needs some serious revising.
bluewater454
+yakyakyak69
True.
Even King George had to deal with Parliament. He was not an absolute dictator. So I guess you could say we freed ourselves from an "authoritarian oligarchy", as you put it - not an absolute monarchy.
I think that the system of checks and balances that were created was an ingenious way to avoid an oligarchy. It was not fool-proof in itself. Ultimately it is the responsibility of we the People to maintain our freedoms. If we simply leave it up to the government to maintain our freedoms, then we get what we deserve.
yakyakyak69
It's not what the fighters wanted. The fighters wanted "justice & fairness", but these words are subjective and have no real meaning so they are used by the rich & powerful to manipulate the Useful Idiots into giving government more power. Of course, the rich & powerful OWN the politicians and they are worth their price because the Useful Idiots give the crony politicians the power to "redistribute & regulate" so they have the power to give their "friends" huge gov't contracts, bailouts, grants, taxpayer backed loans & Main Street killing regulations that only huge Wall Street businesses can afford to comply with... Like minimum wage laws.
Government is a monopoly which "legally" uses gun violence to create other monopolies for the politically-connect 1% and Useful Idiots vote for MORE government stupidly thinking that will promote "justice & fairness" when all it only provides more money & power to the 1% and their political class cronies.
This is why they are called "the loony left".
bluewater454
+deathtokoalas If they had wanted an "authoritarian oligarchy", then they would not have created the system of checks and balances that were implemented.
If you want to give yourself absolute power, you dont make it hard for yourself to create and change laws, you make it easier. If power was their ultimate goal, then they were the biggest fools in history.
yakyakyak69
Yes, once government took over the "education" of children (by force), unions were allowed to encroach and unions as collectivists HATE the Federalist system of checks & balances and widely distributed power at the State & Federal levels because that is "too slow" for collectivism. Again... Useful Idiots!
Only fools complain about Congressional Gridlock. (1) Act in haste then repent in leisure. (2) Every law passed diminishes OUR freedom!
deathtokoalas
+bluewater454 the point of posting the passage is to demonstrate that they wanted to create a system where only they (they being the upper class, with their wealth tied to land ownership) had any power. and, i think it's been incredibly successful, relative to what their actual aims were. the gridlock you're currently seeing in congress isn't a flaw of the system, it's the way the system was designed to work. it pushes the process of actually governing out to private interests, who can influence each other outside of any sort of process of transparency.
the precise point i'm deconstructing is the idea that the american revolution was put together by a bunch of barely organized rebels. the furthest thing is from the truth. when this is viewed from a distance, people aren't even going to refer to it as a "revolution" anymore, they're just going to talk about a strategic shift in the centre of the british empire from london to washington. the proper historical parallel is to the division of the roman empire into eastern and western spheres, which led to the collapse of the western side and a brief period of eastern hegemony. you can't even talk about it in these orwellian (animal farm, here) terms that you're trying to invoke because there wasn't even a shift of power. it wasn't a new oligarchy recreating the old system. it was an old oligarchy entrenching the existing system.
de tocqueville's warnings of a "tyranny of the majority" are historically removed from the american revolution, and he meant something quite different on top of it. the way this is often applied by conservatives is sort of painful to sort through, because it's legitimately coming from a place of liberal thought. i mean, it's a serious concern to prevent these situations where the majority oppresses a minority - as happened under the nazis, for example. but, ensuring minority rights is a rather different concern than placing an elite above the law is, and trying to draw an equivalency over it is either operating out of ignorance or out of dishonesty. trying to pull that kind of thinking out of the federalist papers is bluntly wrong. they were not concerned with minority rights. they were concerned with maintaining their privileges as an elite governing body.
that passage by madison is useful because it is concise. but, any serious scholar of the political literature of the period will agree that the american system was created to prevent an actual revolution. it's full of discussions about how to prevent rebellions from spreading. this is the nature of how an "authoritarian oligarchy" operates, not an example of people working against it.
in 1765, america was run by a landholding elite. nothing had changed by 1800 - except that that landholding elite was no longer forced to offshore their tax revenue, and a few tariffs came up for their benefit.
bluewater454
+deathtokoalas So you think these men set up a system that ensured a monopoly of land ownership and prevented the underclass from revolting.
Again, the evidence seems to be just the opposite.
First of all. you have a free market system that created a majority "middle class", who were neither rich nor poor, many of whom found themselves in a position that the common man never dreamed of under the previous feudal system. They were in a position to own their own land. And many did(and still do today). The middle class that we created had never existed under previous economic or political systems(at least not as a majority). This seems to contradict your theory of a system that was designed to set up an economic monopoly.
Secondly, if you are trying to prevent a revolution from taking away your monopoly, why the hell would you allow something that other countries did not - gun ownership. this was not only allowed by men like Madison, it was a GUARANTEED RIGHT.
Americans have the right and advantage of being armed - unlike the citizens of other countries whose governments are afraid to trust the people with arms." (James Madison, The Federalist Papers #46 at 243-244)
Once again, if these men were trying to prevent a revolution from taking away their power monopoly, then they were the biggest fools in history.
deathtokoalas
the hobbesian perspective that was dominant at the time would have argued that arming the populace is the best way to keep the opposition fractured.
bluewater454
I have no idea what the "hobbesian perspective" is about. All I can say is that maybe you need to find some different reading material.
Was there a historian named "Hobbes"? If there was, he sounds like someone who was book smart and life stupid. I own guns. It has never had the effect of dividing anyone that I know of politically, except to divide me from those politicians who want to take them from me.
How exactly does that work. You allow responsible, law abiding people to own firearms, and this divides them...how?
deathtokoalas
hobbes was a very important english philosopher that lived a very long time ago. it's ok if you've never heard of him. he lived such a long time ago, that he usually only gets a single line on the first day of classes. despite his importance, you'd have to take a specific interest in him to learn about him. but it's really hard to understand what the american revolution was about without having a rough outline of what hobbes was about. which is perhaps partly why it's so badly understood.
the basic idea is that we're constantly at war with each other to advance our own interests. this is still the fundamental liberal axiom, even if you hear it more from people that call themselves conservatives nowadays. it's "human nature", as they say, for us to be assholes to each other. so, we need this existential threat - like the wrath of the king, or perhaps satan, or communism, or terrorism - to keep us in order.
the people that framed the constitution were not the kind of conservatives that are all about class harmony. rather, they had a strong understanding of what is today called "class war". so, they sought to find the most effective ways to systemically enforce what was then the feudal order of society by using what they perceived to be our "human nature" to keep us in bondage.
it's an oversimplification to suggest that if you give a bunch of angry, illiterate people guns then they will quickly kill each other off. but, it's the basic idea that follows from this hobbesian perspective.
the benefit, of course, is that people that are busy killing each other over religion or race are too busy killing each other to worry about killing the landlord.
......and the fact is that most educated people in the british empire at the time would have agreed with the underlying hobbesian principle and recognized it as a smart tactic.
bluewater454
Philosophers are a dime a dozen.
An educated, moral society is not going to be tearing itself apart simply because it has the freedom to "keep and bear arms". Hobbes theory has never been the case here in the US, because we have in the past been both educated and moral.
It sounds like your Hobbes was exactly the kind of person Madison had in mind when he wrote about governments who dont trust their citizenry with guns. It also sounds like I was right on the money with your Hobbes.
Book smart and life stupid.
As I mentioned before, I have been a gun owner all of my life, as was my father and his father before him. I have heard a lot of ridiculous claims made against gun ownership. That was one I had never heard of.
Just as well.
deathtokoalas
i'm just telling you what they were thinking, that's all. the british used this tactic in several of their colonies - arm the locals and watch them destroy each other, then move in. it usually worked.
the english were masters of psychological warfare. how did a small island conquer the world? through superior tactical warfare, informed by the application of a peculiarly advanced english spin on latin philosophy. they would trick entire countries into doing what they wanted. the americans have picked up on a lot of this..
...but if you want to see some really brilliant tactical planning, you should look into the way the late byzantine generals operated. that's the real source of english colonial policy, and it's rooted in this common belief that the rest of the world is composed of uncivilized idiots that can be easily manipulated through an understanding of english (or greek) philosophy. the byzantines needed to constantly find ways for their enemies to fight each other, as they fully understood they would be destroyed by a coalition of their forces (which eventually happened). so, they would create these elaborate, multi-faceted conflicts amongst the tribes around them, constantly convincing the tribes distant to them to attack the ones closest to them, and cycling the process on over centuries as new tribes moved in to replace the displaced ones. that's something else america has apparently studied, as it is emulating it today.
it's one thing to condemn what the british did, it's another to sort of marvel at how they treated the world with utter contempt and yet more often than not managed to succeed in forcing them to do what they wanted nonetheless.
bluewater454
That is all very fascinating.
It still leaves the question of why our founders would allow guns in the hands of their own people if they were simply trying to manipulate and control them. You dont control your own population by starting civil wars.
Creating civil war may be a great tactic when you are trying to destroy someone elses' country. I would hardly call it a way to control and manipulate your own population.
If divide and conquer was the strategy of our founders for controlling the American populace, then they were the biggest idiots on the planet.
They divided their own power base by separating it into three equal and opposing branches, and then tried to control the people by instigating civil war?
You may be good at music.
As a political strategist, you leave a lot to be desired.
Think about it. Your strategy is to control and manipulate the general populace to ensure your own power and wealth. What you end up with instead, is the freest and most prosperous nation on the planet to date, with a constitution that, 226 years later, is the oldest living constitution on the planet, with one of the freest and most prosperous nations in 5000 years of human history.
You get an A for imagination.
D- for strategy.
deathtokoalas
civil wars are actually an excellent way to control your population - so long as you don't let them get out of hand. it transfers all the class war energy into a safe place. i want you to read what i'm going to type carefully: if you mean to set up a society based on class dominance then you want to ensure that the lower classes are constantly at war with each other, because the systems of dominance are going to necessarily produce violent reactions and you essentially have the choice between fighting an opposition or manipulating the opposition into fighting itself. if you wanted to set up a free and voluntary society, you would take a different approach - but it probably wouldn't involve encouraging people to arm themselves, as that naturally leads to conflict.
so, i don't feel these tactics were foolish. yes: they purposefully created a political system that is essentially useless (but then they tell people it's the path to civilization), then gave people guns to keep them in a state of chaos. not necessarily war, just chaos. family feuds. crime. the eighteenth century equivalent to gangs and mafia groups. things that make organizing a revolt that more difficult. if your aim is to prevent revolt at any cost (including not really caring about the well-being of your citizens), that's far from foolish. it's not very beneficial to the population, but the founders hardly cared about the population....
well, sort of, anyway. that part of the constitution has been subject to restrictions in urban areas (where the state can police directly) from the very beginning.
bluewater454
"As long as you dont let them get out of control"???
Who in the name of common sense thinks that they can control a CIVIL WAR?? If that was their purpose, it backfired on them. Instead of creating a power base where they could enslave the people, our American Civil War finally got rid of the problem of slavery.
Look. If our founders simply wanted a system to control the people, they already had a tried and true system of doing this.
It is called a monarchy.
They could have very easily come up with a way to have made George Washington a monarch, of sorts, without having to go through all the trouble of experimenting with a basically State-free society(under the Articles of the Confederation) and then performing the herculean task of hammering out a new republic at the constitutional convention. If you read through some of the accounts given by Madison and others, I doubt if you can walk away thinking the way you do about their intentions.
You have to have been taught by some really warped people to think the way you do about the founding of the American republic. It is a shame what the American educational system is doing to our country.
It is destroying the morale of our younger generation. If I were a marxist, planning on destroying a political system in the freest country on earth, I could think of no better way than to teach children in school that the founders simply wanted to enslave and control them.
deathtokoalas
i think there are a few points to address, here.
first, monarchy wasn't working. that's why there were all kinds of rebellions in the region that needed to be addressed with different tactics. there was a similar "revolution" in england in 1688 that succeeded in stamping out the rebellions there, and was used as a model by the american plantation owners.
second, you would not expect a group of oligarchical landowners to get together and elect a king in any society, and you would expect a group of british landowners to be particularly hostile to the idea. the british legal tradition is often traced to it's roots in the magna carta, which was an agreement by landowners to reduce the power of the king in favour of themselves. the american revolution itself is in many ways the end point of the magna carta (despite holding to it as a legal basis). the system that came out of the "revolution" is very much a result of a process going back several centuries that slowly shifted power out of the monarchy and into the aristocracy; it just took the ocean to push the final break. for these aristocrats to then elect a king in america would be to act against five hundred years of british legal history that was moving towards the result that occurred.
bluewater454
You are right that the Magna Carta was the beginning of our Anglo Saxon ancestors moving away from absolute monarchy. It placed more power into the hands of the land owners, and less into the hands of the King.
This is what gave rise to the dominance of the Feudal system. You seem to believe that the current political and economic system is simply an extension of that. You would be wrong.
The magna carta was written specifically to give rights to barons, lords, kights, marchants and the like, all of whom were land owners, businessmen, and people of status.
The US Constitution does no such thing.
And for those who think otherwise, you may also want to go back to the Declaration of Independence, which declared all men to be created equal. The meaning of this was obvious - all men are equal under the law, not just land owners. And for anyone who did not quite get this meaning, we also have something called the Bill of Rights. It uses terms such as "all persons born or naturalized in the United States", or "the right of citizens". In no place does it mention the rights of land owners, merchants, or use titles which would indicate a special status of any kind.
You have been making the accusation that the system of law set up by our founders was only created to benefit landowners and the rich. I think it is time for you to be specific. Which law(or laws) accomplish this?
deathtokoalas
do i really need to point out that they wrote a universal constitution, then didn't apply it? "all men" didn't apply to slaves, women, natives, asians, arabs, catholics or eastern or southern europeans - it meant "white protestant germanic". wasp is not quite fair - you were also allowed to be dutch, or swedish.
i mean, it's such a violent history of repression. it's hard to believe that there are people out there that still think that the founders were operating out of some sense of egalitarianism, after watching what they then did.
and, yes, rights in the united states (and the rest of the empire) were often tied to landholding status. the right to vote, for example, was not just a racial or gender-based thing, it was also a class-based thing.
and it's something that's mostly forgotten.
canada is a different country, but the governments come from a common root and have many legal, if not structural, similarities. in canada, we think of 1917 as the date women were allowed to vote. but, this is actually a gloss over history. up until 1917, the only people that could vote were men with property. in 1917, women with property could vote. it was not until 1923 that property was abolished as a vote-determining factor, for both genders at the same time. what that means is that the bulk of people that died in wwI to "save democracy" were, in fact, unable to cast a ballot - and that when they were allowed to vote after the war, they gained the right at the same time as their wives. the 1917 date only applied to a minority of wealthy women, but is widely cited; conversely, the 1923 date would have applied to millions of people of both genders and is entirely forgotten. this is not some kind of accident or oversight.
in the united states, there were actually even religious requirements on voting. you didn't just have to be a white, male property owner - you also had to have a relationship with your church. no atheists; they'd screw everything up. which is arguably not a truly secret ballot.
it was about 1850 that property was abolished as a voting requirement through most of the united states. but, it didn't stop other tactics from developing, like illiteracy tests.
there's a lot of more specific examples, but this demonstrates that they didn't really have any interest in what people thought, which belies their self-evident truth.
it came a little bit later, but probably the best example of investors literally legislating themselves above the law is the idea of "limited liability".
bluewater454
You are absolutely right in pointing out the flaws in the way that many of our founders practiced the kind of universal freedom that they encoded into law. That, however, does not diminish the ideals that they gave to us, and the standard of equality and freedom that they set for themselves and for future generations.
They were men who were trying to form a new kind of republic out of scratch. There had never been a society that had been formed with the kind of ideals that were encoded into our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution. If you read any of the accounts of the constitutional convention, you can see some of the problems they had just carving out the ideas that they wanted to create in balancing states rights with Federal authority: Individual rights with responsibilities, ect,..and that was the easy part. Then they had to put these new ideas into practice, and they had to deal with, among many problems, the fact that not everyone was on board with all of their ideals. Nor did everyone agree on how to put them into practice.
They were men with one foot in the old world, with its prejudices, slavery, monarchies, ect., and the other foot in a new world that no one had ever seen before.
We have had over two hundred years now to work out the foundation of ideals that they gave to us. Have WE reached a state of perfection? I would say no.
These guys didn't shit marbles. They were simply men with some radical ideas about freedom, and the opportunity to actually form these ideas into a new society. I think it is just a little self righteous for us to use our standards today to criticize them with. It shows me just how full of ourselves we are today, criticizing them based on these ideas that we have had over two centuries to work through. .
It is almost like criticizing the Wright brothers for not having developed jet propulsion for their flying machines.
deathtokoalas
i'm just going to pose you a question.
which sounds more like a conspiracy theory: the idea that they secretly meant for the courts to unfold things as they did, or the idea that they legislated and constructed things as they actually existed because that's what they actually wanted?
bluewater454
I dont see that there has to be any conspiracy at all here.
The foundation of law created by our constitution and its statement of intent, the Declaration of Independence, created a society where something occurred that was rare in history. Opportunity was created for the common man to prosper(which became a reality). Women were given the freedom to speak out for equal rights(which also became a reality). Slavery, which had been a human reality for five thousand years, was finally abolished in our borders.
Life was not perfect. Our founders were not perfect men. But for once, the good guys had a fighting chance.
Even a cursory reading of our original documents would tell you that this was not in spite of our laws, it was because our laws that this was possible. This was not an accident.
You dont create what we have by accident(or through conspiracies).
Renato Pereira
+bluewater454
So ...The State is the government and The Markets are We The People ? Oh my ...
Sure... The Markets which are controlled by rich money hoarding capitalists that enforce the payment of public debt at a very small cost to We The People (starvation) .
The State is the personification of the collective aka We The People . The government is a hierarquical tool of organization in societies aka a tool of enforcing the will of big fat ass capitalists over We The People .
Oh my friend , you may one day be free from government (you wont) but you are and will forever be a slave to the markets .
bluewater454
+Renato Pereira
If you believe that the "Markets" are controlled by the "rich, money hoarding capitalists", then you understand nothing about basic economics.
I have never worked for a rich man who controlled the Market. Every rich man I have worked for was a servant to the Market, and was well aware that the Market can be a fickle taskmaster. That is the dilemma that every businessman or woman has to face. It is why more businesses fail than succeed. It is why the rich do not always stay rich. It is the reason that the age of the average millionaire in the US is 58(statistic from TNS Financial Services). It takes a lifetime of success to achieve true wealth. There are no short cuts, and most wealth is earned, not inherited or won through the lottery or get rich quick scams.
The men who built the foundation for the freest and most prosperous nation in history understood the difference between the Government and We the People. You obviously do not. Because of your socialist indoctrination, I doubt that you will ever understand that.
deathtokoalas
you know, sometimes i wonder if you're trolling...
the inheritance/earned debate is something that's changed over time. there were a number of political reforms that happened in the middle part of the last century that tried to even things out, but these have mostly been undone over the last few decades. the data is consequently kind of difficult, as the increase in earned wealth that occurred from about 1950-1980 is still extant in living people, while the return to a "landed economy" hasn't quite caught up yet. so, a baby boomer is going to live through a very different reality than a millennial when it comes to the question of whether we live in what could be called a meritocracy. you can figure this out if you hone in on certain aspects of the data. but you're not going to come to a general conclusion about it. the proper conclusion is that we can decide if wealth is earned or inherited through balancing the playing field with things like student loans, but if we let markets function in an unregulated manner then they will fall to equilibrium in oligopolies and find ways to monetize debt in revenue streams.
bluewater454
What exactly is "trolling"?
deathtokoalas
obviously, there's not some bank shiva sitting around running the world economy.
but, the basis of capitalism is that the more money you have the more power you have, and people with power tend to be corrupted by it rather dramatically. of course, states help in this process. but, it's a circular problem. what the ancaps can't get their head around is that capitalism will always recreate the state it needs to perpetuate itself. it's less clear that the state needs capitalism. so, if you realize that the problem is neither one or the other but the interworkings of the two, then it's capitalism that ought to be the primary target.
bluewater454
You are right that money creates power.
That is not, however, the basis of capitalism.
Every free society that I can think of(maybe you can name me an exception) has been capitalist by default. When political freedom is the catalyst for economic freedom. this creates free market capitalism, which will be based on service oriented wealth. The one who serves the most people in the market will be rewarded accordingly. That, at least, is the theory. It has also been, to a large degree, the reality as well, not just a theory.
Not all capitalism, however, is beneficial. When you have the kind of capitalism that seeks to monopolize the markets through high taxation, regulation and currency manipulation, you no longer have a free market capitalism. You have a bastardized version that distorts the markets and corrupts government power. Many of us would call this socialism.
There really is a simple way to "defang" this monster. You do so by taking away the power of the State. I cannot think of a better way to do this than by adhering to the laws encoded in our US Constitution. The very purpose if this document was to "defang" the State, and allow a free people to stay free. This freedom would include economic freedom, without which any claim to freedom would be a farce.
You and I have been down that road before. We will probably never have any common ground on that issue.
deathtokoalas
again: the crux of the issue lies in property rights, which need a state to enforce with violence and require a state to distribute.
regardless, do you not see why you are describing a system of enslavement? it works fine if you want to engage in commerce on a day-to-day basis; if you desire to "serve people in the market". but, this is just a coincidence: some slaves prefer their condition. it's much less appealing for artists, authors, scholars and countless others who end up forced to engage in economic activity that they have no interest in.
Renato Pereira
+bluewater454 First of all forget that capitalism is a natural state of mankind . It is but a stage of our history . The first way in which people lived was wether you like it or not called Primitive Communism . People gathered food and shared it in their hunter gatherer communities . In the middle ages Feudalism was rampant ... I saw no capitalism at all there hmm strange . Later the borgeosie capitalized on the death of feudalism and imposed yet another tool to enslave the people Capitalism . It is not a natural human behaviour . Its YOUR natural behaviour .
So you refuse to believe that you indeed are a slave of the markets in cspitalism because you are forced to serve them ... Thats because you dont live in Europe and you dont have Troika and IMF up your ass saying : More taxes ! Less wages ! Less public education ! Less healthcare ! Your country needs money to pay the markets !!! .
Let us talk for real here .
Forger the markets .
You talked of Capitalism as a system of voluntary associations based on a few "natural rights" which you refuse to understand that the State enforces over your boss .
How is a choice voluntary when you have to choose beetween your work and unemployment ? Here in Europe in some countries quitting your job is not an option and as such your boss can simply lower your wages and increase working hours because he knows you cant quit your job . So much for voluntary associations huh ?
You mentioned the "men who built the freest nation in the world" . Ill ignore the usual american nationalism and the fact that you think your nation is even close to being free. Lets talk about those men . The men who built your country are not the rich , not the capitalists . The average worker built The USA and every other country for that matter . They built the cities , the railroads , the factories (and worked on them) they built everything . And what did these people get ? A meagre salary meanwhile some fat ass capitalist was hoarding profit . You seem blind before your theories unfairness . The Workers are entitled to ALL the wealth they produce for it comes from their labour. There can be no such thing as private ownership , no feudal lord collecting his profit from the labour of others . Private Property is a means of extracting wealth from workers and as such private property in itself constitutes theft .
bluewater454
+deathtokoalas Well, if you would prefer the way it used to be done, we could go back to the early days of our country when men would simply take matters into their own hands when someone stole their property; such as cattle rustling, horse stealing, or outright war to acquire or keep land. You get a bunch of guys together, go after the thief, and hang him from the nearest tree.
No state required. Just bring your own rope.
You are right that the state is used to protect private property. I prefer that over getting into a gun battle with someone who wants to steal my car. The state, in this case, is a useful tool for law abiding citizens. It brings order to society.
You can call that slavery all you want. I call it law and order. No prosperous, modern society could exist without it. No advanced economy could survive in a chaotic, lawless society.
deathtokoalas
i think you're confusing the problem with it's cause. is private property something that orders society, or is it something that keeps it in chaos?
bluewater454
Private property neither orders society, nor does it create chaos. It is not people who own property that create chaos. It is those who do not recognize others' right to their own property that create chaos.
Do I create chaos by owning my own house to provide a place to raise my family? Do I create chaos by thinking I have a right to get into my car at the beginning of the day to go to work? Maybe I should simply recognize the idea that someone else needs it more than me on a particular day, and just allow them to take it.
Your right to own property is simply an extension of the idea that you own your private thoughts, your body, and by extension you also own the right to the fruits of your own labor. Your property is the manifestation of the product of your labor and the right to choose what you do with your earnings. If you choose to buy a house with the fruit of your labor, then that house is just as much a part of you as your body or your thoughts.
The failure to recognize private property is at the heart of Marxism, as well as other forms of anarchism(which is what Marxism really is). In fact, Marx himself admitted this in his Communist Manifesto.
You may not call yourself a Marxist, but your ideas seem to share some of the same pathways.
deathtokoalas
i probably should have clarified that "private property" - and "property rights" - in a leftist context do not refer to your house or your car. the term we use for that is "personal property". it's a very important distinction, as nobody wants to take away your car or your house or your toothbrush. well, maybe housing ought to be on a needs basis, but that doesn't mean hauling people out at gunpoint.
when leftists talk about "private property" and "property rights", they mean ownership over the various factors of production.
to rephrase the question: do you realize that property rights are in direct contradiction to the bundle of rights we refer to as "human rights"?
bluewater454
Marx also made this distinction.
I knew where you were going with this. The problem with that is that it never seems to work out that way. It is illegal, for instance, to slaughter your cow and sell the meat for money in Cuba. In the Soviet Union this would have been called "profiteering". In Cuba, it will bring jail time if your are caught. This goes to the very heart of private property, and whether you have a right to use your own property to profit from it.
Your right to own a business and contract out with people on a one time(private contractor) or permanent(employee) basis is just as relevant as your right to own your own house, car, or tooth brush.
Private property is not a contradiction to the idea of human rights. It is at the very heart of it. Your right to own property is simply an extension of your right to profit from the fruits of your own labor.
Renato Pereira
+bluewater454 Self ownership ? Wow thats new . I am not a object to be owned by anyone not even by myself .
Private property denies humans the fruits of their labour and their right to own property.
A factory is a prime example . The various workers that work in it are systematicaly denied the fruits of their labour . The private owner hoards money , and gives some to his workers keeping for himself most of it - surplus value aka profit . That wealth is not his to own but of his workers for they produced wealth from where there was none other but their own labour . Saying that private property is an extension of the right to the fruits of your own labour is rather contradictory . Its actualy the opposite . By owning a business in which you employ workers which you pay and at the end of the day collect profit on is simply put : denying those workers the fruits of THEIR labour . Your freedom stops when my freedom begins . You cant have the freedom to take my own .
Furthermore private property denies human their right to own property . A country's wealth belongs to all its people and private property violates that .
And its private property not personal property . Common owner ship with DIRECT control of the means of production by THE WORKERS (not the state) is truly the only fair and just way in which a econommy can be run .
Private property creates a ruling social money-based class and common property owned/controlled by the state creates a ruling political power-based class . As such common property should be owned by the workers of the factory in question .
Until you understand that private property is a means of theft and of enforcing your freedom on others , you will always violate human natural rights.
deathtokoalas
+bluewater454 you don't see the contradiction in the right to gain access to food v. the right to sell it? the right to shelter v. the right to charge rent? the right to freedom of movement v. the right to charge tolls?
bluewater454
+Renato Pereira
Im sorry.
I cant even have a discussion with someone who says that self-ownership is akin to being an "object", as if it that makes you a slave. That is complete nonsense. The idea of self ownership is the basis for all human rights.
The idea that private property denies people the fruits of their labor is also nonsense. The ability to own something does not deny you the fruits of your labor, it prevents others from taking it from you.
Common ownership means that no one will own anything. It basically means that the State will control everything. They, of course, will claim to represent the interests of "the people". It just never quite works out that way.
bluewater454
+deathtokoalas You have the right to use your freedom and your God given talents and provide all of those things for yourself.
Human beings are the smartest and most creative creatures on planet earth. Why do you act like we will all go homeless and starve if there is not someone there to hand everything to us?
That is one of the biggest problems I have with socialism. It makes helpless victims out of people who think they will not survive if the state or society does not feed them like baby birds.
I dont have an automatic right to the food you are selling. I have the right to do a voluntary transaction with you so that we both benefit and we both are the better off for it. You wanted my money more than the excess food you had. I wanted the food more than the excess money that I had.
We both made out, and we both prosper in the end through voluntary trade. There is nothing immoral, divisive, or exploitive about it, and damned if it has not served us well for the past 200 plus years.
You are now going to point out all of the people who are at the bottom of the ladder in this system. Fine.
Now tell me about an economic system that has worked better. I am all for improvement. What I am not willing to do is throw this all away for some unproven system - or even worse...take one more stab at a philosophy that has already proven itself to be disastrous.
Like Marxism.
Renato Pereira
+bluewater454 Completely ignores how workers are deprived of the fruits of their labout through private property . Completely ignores the sentences which refered that common property is to be held directly by the workers .
Proves that he thinks that socialism is a political system to help the poor and homeless .
Proves he has no clue about Primitive Communism , Anarcho-Communist Barcelona or Anarcho-Communist Ukraine which worked fine until fascists/statists crushed them .
Proves that he knows Capitalism has the vast majority of people being exploited and worst off .
Facepalm
No arguments left , I see .
My job is done here .
deathtokoalas
+bluewater454 what i was getting at was private property as the cause of the disorder we see around us. you're not really addressing the question, you're just explaining your preferred order. if you acknowledge that capitalism is a system that pits property owners against everybody else, it follows that it has no end but conflict. the leftist term for it is class war. but it's really some of that hobbes again. it's easy to see that those who own property will always be in conflict with those that do not. telling people to play nice and use the markets, rather than their hatchets, is just enforcing a system of control. the only way to really abolish the conflict is to abolish the property. but you can keep your toothbrush...
i'd like to +1 self-ownership, though. i think it's less that this is a difference between anarchists and marxists and more that people that call themselves marxists seem to have misunderstood marx rather drastically on the point, or perhaps have ejected his views in favour of something more collectivist/corporatist that would have been floating through the guilds at the time. i don't know the history on this. but, i know that marx was an individualist, and he would have argued in favour of the idea of self-ownership at any given opportunity.
however, he would have also argued that socialization of production makes self-ownership difficult to define under modern capitalism, which is the crux of his economic program. marxism is not a rejection of self-ownership, but an argument of it's impossibility in the industrial era and a compromise presented to get around it's impossibility.
i'd further suggest that marx' arguments on this point have reached the point of obsolescence. we're several decades into deindustrialization. probably the single most important question for us to define and answer over the next few decades is whether or not self-ownership is again possible in a post-industrial economy, or if we need to derive some further compromise to deal with it's continuing impossibility.
i think that, with the ongoing replacement of human labour with machines, there is some hope for self-ownership becoming a reasonable goal in the near future. and that is what marx would have hoped for.
bluewater454
+deathtokoalas How do you see us as being post industrial?
bluewater454
+Renato Pereira I didnt ignore anything.
I simply stated that your idea of people being deprived by the concept of private property is nonsense.
Common property is a great idea. It just has never worked the way Marxists claim it will. It will either be co-opted by the state, in which case you get totalitarian Marxism, or it will lead to a break down of the society, like what happened in one of our early British colonies here in North America.
The examples you gave were examples of societies that did not last. The Ukrainian society only lasted a few years. It could not protect its own people. The same with Paris and Spain. They are great examples of what happens when you dont have a state to protect your people. Some things can only be done by the state.
Being more Libertarian than anything, that is something that I dont like saying. I believe in minimal state intervention. There is, however, a need for it.
deathtokoalas
+bluewater454 deindustrialization is a trend that set in in the 80s and refers to a combination of offshoring and mechanization. it doesn't refer to the end of industry, so much as it refers to the end of industrial labour. the service sector is now something like three quarters of the economy; productive workers that could organize a meaningful seizure of meaningful property basically don't exist anymore. and i strongly doubt that renato is one of them.
the long term trend right now seems to be in the reversal of offshoring, but with increased mechanization. what that means is that the leftist idea of seizing production can no longer be assigned to workers, because those workers don't exist and are not going to exist in the future. the shortsightedness of capital is unable to calculate how this produces an unsustainable relationship. given the mass unemployment that is on the brink of becoming revolutionary as a result of increasing mechanization, it's hard to fathom any future other than placing these productive capacities into the common good and expanding them for more general use. i think the most important thing is finding a way to mechanize food production, which would emancipate us from labour in ways that have only previously existed in science fiction.
bluewater454
+deathtokoalas How do you "place these productive capacities into the common good"? Does this mean socialization of industries? This kind of ideology always sounds good when you generalize it. The devil always hides in the details.
Also, your idea that we are "post industrial" is only a reality in the more developed economies like the US. Other economies are coming online with their own industrial revolutions. Countries like China an India are becoming more capitalistic and their economies are growing. When their economies develop like ours has, industry may move to other regions for cheaper labor, as well.
Africa is wide open for this. It has huge potential. If only they could get rid of their tin pot dictatorships and develop stable societies, their potential would be unlimited.
I think you are only looking at this from an American perspective. We have a planetary economy now. Industrialization is hardly at an end. It has simply migrated.
Automation is still in its infancy. It has hardly replaced human labor, except in limited capacities. Despite what I hear from the RBE promoters, we are a loooong way out from seeing machine labor replace humans. This has been a complaint of Marxists and others for the past 150 years, and yet the free market economies continue to develop new job markets. Human creativity and adaptability is the key to survival. Even in the job market.
Renato Pereira
+bluewater454 No . You believe in a society in which the state doesnt intervene in the common enslavement of the masses by the force of capital . The more capital , the more power . That is not a fair society . Of course you cant see this . You have always been in the upper half of this system and as such you support it . You are just another slave like all of us , but oh , you are a good slave . That is really the only difference . A good slave drives a nice car , has a good house , feeds his children . A bad slave might not have a car at all , or even house ... His children might have nothing to eat. Both slaves nonetheless .
If Communism evades all logic ... Then how can Capitalism be logic at all ? Is all the worlds poverty logical ? Do you find it logical that countries have to spend money paying debt while their population loses healthcare and education ? Is this logical ?
Is it logical for a society to judge people on the weight of their wallet ? You said it yourself - money is power . As such power is not equaly divided . Is it not a dictatorship of the rich ? Or is it just fine because they got there through voluntary association/profiting from the work of their employees ? So a dictatorship is fine as long as it is established through voluntary association ? Is this logical ? Is it really ?
Is it logical that thousands apon thousands die of hunger and thirst like flies each year while others have more money that they can spend ? Is it logical that every worker is deprived of the fruits of his labour when his boss colects profit on his work ?
Is any of this that happens everyday logical ?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident: all men are created equal..." . Born into a world that , as its first measure , judges us based on skin , sex and above all , judges us based on money . If indeed We The People decree that all are created equal then why do we forge a society that creates more inequality by the second ?
Is any of this logical ?
bluewater454
+Renato Pereira Political and social equality does not create equal outcomes. Those who have tried to force this kind of equality on their societies have created nothing but equal misery. History has proven this over and over again.
The only thing that you can guarantee is equal standing under the law, and the right to create your own prosperity. Any attempt to force economic equality on people means that you must take from one person to give to another. In that very act alone, you have determined that one person has less of a right to keep what he has earned than another. You have simply created another type of inequality.
There can be no freedom with this kind of forced "equality". Your idea of a dictatorship seems to be that some people make more than others. You look at our system of voluntary association and contract and call it a dictatorship. You say that "thousands upon thousands die of hunger and thirst" under this system, while others become rich.
Im sorry.
That is nonsense.
We do not have thousands and thousands of people dying of hunger while others get rich here in the US, or any other developed free market system. The only ones that have created that kind of disparity are the ones who have gone by the name of Communist, where men like Karl Marx have been held in high esteem.
Renato Pereira
+bluewater454 You failed to understand the analogy . Ill make it clear . More money = more power hence dictatorship of the rich .
The question now is , is this dictatorship valid because "they worked hard to become dictators"?
Oh so Africa is Communism's fault ? You are actualy saying that a continent plagued by Colonialism and Imperialism (a product of capitalism) and dictatorships backed by the huge corporations which profit on their resources (of course this is only voluntary association , ha !) is in fact plagued by communism ?
Or wait ... Is 15% of the USA's (that is what 45.000.000?) population living under the poverty line Communism's fault ? Is the failure of your country to provide adequate healthcare to the poor Communism's fault ? Or the high levels of iliteracy ?
Wait I see now ! We live in a world where 80% of the wealth is hoarded by 20% of the population and its Communism's fault !!!
Hm ... Or is it the fault of a system built by the rich and for the rich ?
You truly suffer from what most Capitalists do . Either the "self made man syndrome" or you simply never knew true hunger or social dispair .
You and your nations founders are hipocrates . "We hold these truths to be self evident: all men are created equal" . And half of the people who signed had slaves and were staunch believers in Capitalism .
Your problem is only one . Human progress is unstopable . You may think that Capitalism will never fall but that is because you live in your US propaganda bubble . Out here in the rest of the world change will be made because we are the majority and we suffer .
You cannot stop freedom (true freedom , not of the markets who enslave entire countries to their greed), we will cry out : Liberty , Equality and Friendship !
Those values will crush your greed for: " We The People hold these truths to be self evident: all are created equal" .
bluewater454
+Renato Pereira
It is curious what you call slavery.
I have never been controlled by anyone who is rich. I have never been oppressed by anyone who is rich. I have, however, been controlled and oppressed by the state. It is the power of the state that gives people real control.
Wall Mart may be the biggest and richest retailer in the world, but Sam Walton cant tell me what to buy or where to shop(or not to shop).
The state can.
The state does.
But you seem to be a little lacking in some facts. By the year 2000, almost 2/3 of the African continent had fallen under communist control; Angola, Benin, Dem republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Somalia, Eritrea, Mozambique, Central African Republic just to name a few. Although many have more recently adopted more democratic forms of government and have more free markets(such as Zambia), communism is still prevalent on the African continent.
Your ignorance of the US economy is no less impressive. The US has maintained a poverty level of about 12% since WW2. You are right. It increased to 15% after the Great Recession. The causes of that are for another discussion.
The reality is that even the poor in the US live better that the middle class in many other countries. There are numerous studies that have taken a look at what it is like to be "poor" in America. Here is a good one:
http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2012/11/poverty-like-weve-never-seen-it
You are right. Human progress is unstoppable.
The problem is that Marxism offers nothing but regression and poverty, which it has proven over and over again. If the world continues down that path, there will be no "progress".
deathtokoalas
+bluewater454 china is actually deindustrializing, in the sense that it is also moving to mechanized labour - which is cheaper than slavery. the ricardian principle is valid, but warped here. asia's comparative advantage is it's larger population density, which produces an oversupply of labour, which keeps wages low. as mechanization develops, that advantage disappears. why ship robotically assembled products from china when you can ship them from ohio?
asians have agency to develop their own systems. that's not my concern. i care about what's in front of me. it seems like fully mechanized, local production is both within our reach and being designed and implemented.
you may have seen automated checkout lines at grocery stores. consider the economic consequences if such a system were applied generally to retail. that's a giant sector. how do these millions of people survive with no income? and who buys the goods if there's no economy? so, it's a big step towards a kropotkin-like "storehouse of goods".
another factor moving in this direction is the future of 3d printing. a large percentage of the things that we buy in stores today will be produced by ourselves in the future. it's like owning our own factories. that's a revolution in the mode of production that somebody like marx couldn't - and didn't - fathom.
africa went through centuries of imperialism (including arab and turkish imperialism), and then became a battleground in the cold war. the "communists" in the region were soviet puppet states - dictatorships that existed to carry out soviet goals. as the "democracies" in the region were western puppet states - dictatorships that existed to carry out washington's goals. generally, the way to figure out if you're dealing with "good guys" in the complex african wars of the last century is to follow the cubans, who did a lot to try and abolish the legacy of colonial slavery in the region and legitimately set up systems of distributive justice. but, the soviets were far less altruistic, and often got in the way of the cuban initiatives. the point is that what africa has dealt with all these years has little to do with economic ideology. it has to do with being the battleground for proxy war after proxy war. today, it's in the middle of a scramble for resources with nato on one side and china on the other.
bluewater454
Glad you brought up China.
I keep hearing from socialists that capitalism was able to create a well-to-do middle class in the US with ever increasing wages only because of a shortage of labor in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The theory is that wages have been stagnating, and the middle class has been shrinking because there is no longer a labor shortage...or so goes the socialists' theory.
So now that China has been liberalizing their economy for some time, and allowing a limited amount of capitalism, I have also been hearing about their growing middle class.
Funny.
I dont recall China having a labor shortage any time in the past, say 100 years. How did they create this prosperous middle class?
deathtokoalas
as an anarcho-communist, i don't assign the "success" or "failure" of any specific system at any given time to the specific phase of capitalism that the economy exists in. china has increased it's living standards for some people through modernization, not through capitalism; this is a function of technology, not of ownership or of capital. in the process, it has also become increasingly draconian. inequality is quite terrible, and the workers that the managers are profiting from are not seeing their quality of living rise at nearly the same rate. to call this a "middle class" is consequently misleading. in north america, our "middle class" was previously composed of workers; liberals now want to use the same term in china and apply it to managers. it's an apples and oranges comparison. the direct answer is that the premise is wrong: there is no rising middle class in china, only an increasing gulf between property owners and their slaves, who are even being increasingly discarded in favour of mechanization. the last time china faced an overpopulation problem, it used a famine as a cover for mass genocide. i'd expect that in the near future.
china is also coming from a much poorer starting point. the country was bombed into the middle ages during world war two. incredible destruction. upwards of 20 million dead. only russia was comparably affected. conversely, america came out of world war two as the most powerful economic power the world had ever known (largely through state management of the wartime economy, i'll add). there's no meaningful comparison in terms of how china could utilize technology to improve it's living standards....
bluewater454
I am not saying that China is a great place to live. Their kind of capitalism comes with no political or social freedom. Its capitalism is also limited to a select few and is not extended to the general population.
I am not sure how you can say "technology" created their middle class, though. No form of technology ever raised my income level. You can create all he technology you want. If there are no good paying jobs, you aren't going to create a middle class. If there is not at least some liberalization of the economy, no businesses will be created to produce those jobs.
As far as the post WW2 economy in the US is concerned, the state had little to do with the growth of our economy. We became rich through selling armaments to the Europeans, whose economies were devastated. We had also acquired 2/3 of the worlds' gold supply and our infrastructure was left undamaged by the war, unlike that of most European countries. We were basically the "last man standing" if you will, economically speaking. This put us in a position to sell a lot of stuff to the Europeans to rebuild their countries, and also put the dollar in the position of being the worlds' default currency, which it still is today.
It is not that the state had nothing to do with this. The post war policies of the US opened trade with other countries, lowered tarriffs(a product of the state) and helped to implement an international monetary system which allowed for better trade between counties(creation of the IMF). This is a legitimate role for government to play. It did nothing to create jobs or businesses, which is what creates real prosperity.
The government also did some things which became more of a detriment to our economy later on(such as increasing taxes to insane levels and create a welfare state), but that is a different topic.
deathtokoalas
world war two put into motion the "war economy" and the "military-industrial complex", which is a system defined by massive state subsidies to industry. the manhatten project is the most well known example of this, but it put in motion a structural state sector that still exists - and has semi-recently brought us innovations like the internet and drones. government develops this stuff through funding research institutions, which eventually privatizes it. this is an example of something where chomsky is actually an empirical source, because he's spent his whole life working in it, and documenting it.
but, you're making the error with china that i was pointing out. the "chinese middle class" is not the result of the creation of good paying jobs. it's the result of a management class siphoning profits through the state, which has created an investor class. for all the talk of opening up markets, there's still really only one employer in china, and it's the state. there's obviously massive amounts of exports coming out of china, and somebody is getting paid. that somebody is a humongous bureaucracy, which is the so-called middle class.
there's still no independent, private businesses. no independent medical industry. no independent legal industry. it's all state run. so, it's not even really a bourgeoisie in the terms that's usually applied. it's more like orwell described in animal farm.
but, i mean, there's not even a labour market in china. so, it's kind of impossible to make this argument you're making.
bluewater454
How can there be no labor market? All you need for a labor "market" is to have people who are willing to work and make money.
You also need a somewhat educated and skilled labor pool to meet the needs of the industries that need labor. I would think that China meets both those criteria. They have a good educational system, and I am quite sure they have plenty of people willing to make a decent living.
What am I missing here?
deathtokoalas
as far as i know, china's labour system is still primarily centrally planned, and driven largely by nepotism. that is, people are mostly assigned to jobs based on what the state determines they are best qualified for. all the unions and staffing agencies that foreign companies use in their factories are run by the government. which means that the foxconn worker that made your laptop is ultimately employed by the state, who assigned them to their job based on their testing scores and data collected via state surveillance.
i understand that there have been "reforms" since the 80s, but i don't think the basic system of the state as the entire economy's human resources department has been modified.
bluewater454
You may have a point there.
I understand that the kind of "capitalism" that they have employed is limited, and not exactly what you would call "free market". If, however, those who have been part of the "chosen few" to participate have prospered, just think what China would be like if they suddenly went free market and allowed all of their citizens to participate.
Holy crap. They would be like Taiwan, only 100 times bigger. Now there is another example of free market capitalist success. Look at the difference between how the Taiwanese economy grew after WW2 as compared to socialist India or Communist China, until recently. No natural resources, no huge immigration influx to supply cheap labor. And yet the Taiwan economy outstripped India during the eighties and nineties, even with all of India's natural resources. India used to be one of the richest countries in the world. After WW2, with their Gandi style socialism, they were at third world status. They have recently accomplished some serious free market reforms, when in 1997 they liberalized their economy and joined the rest of the world as a growing economic power.
There are a dozen stories I could name like these I have just mentioned. Do a google search on Zambia. There is another rags to riches story(ie., socialism to free market).
deathtokoalas
well, your best example is actually japan. taiwan has spent most of the post-war period as a one party military dictatorship, not a free market economy. kind of like south korea. and indonesia. the kuomintang is actually best described as a fascist party in it's union of extreme nationalism with militarism. but japan is legit.
the thing is that the amount of us capital that flowed into these regions was dramatic.
but, obviously there are very different challenges in india - a gigantic place with over a billion people - than there are in an isolated us military base like taiwan.
the neo-liberal reforms in india have been good for investors, but they have also led to an increase in inequality. nobody is going to argue against the idea that capitalism is good at creating a class-based society, where a small number of people prosper while the masses remain impoverished. that much is indeed apparent from the data.
bluewater454
You are right.
I misspoke(er, typed). I was thinking of the former British colony of Hong Kong. You are also right about Japan, although their economy lagged during the nineties when they decided to go with a massive government spending program. The nineties was referred to as the "lost decade" for the Japanese. But I am getting off subject.
Hong Kong has enjoyed one of the highest per capita incomes in the world. You cant simply point to "income disparity" as a measure of success. Communist countries like Cuba have less of an income disparity, but that is only because just about everyone is poor. The state pays the average worker there 20$ per month, whether you are a doctor or street sweeper. If income disparity means every one is poor, then you can have your income equality.
When you have an economy that allows people to create their own wealth, then of course you will have massive inequality. That does not mean that you will have, as you described it, mass impoverishment. I don't care if someone else makes more in a day than I do in a month. As long as we have an economy where the average person has the ability to make a respectable income, and the chance to do better if they have the drive to accomplish it, then that is all that you can ask for.
You dont see mass impoverishment in developed, free market economies. You do see this in economies that try to force income equality, such as the aforementioned Cuba.
I find it ironic that people who claim to care about the poor espouse economic systems that create so much poverty. Gandi claimed to care about the poor. I guess that is why he espoused policies that created so many of them.
deathtokoalas
i'm again ducking out of this conversation and i think my response will explain why.
gandhi was able to secure independence by marching millions of homeless, starving people around as a show of force, and it was granted for the precise reason that the british were concerned about "losing" india to communism. so, first of all, there were clearly some problems there to begin with, huh? i mean, i don't know know if i should be insulted or amazed by your suggestion that there was no poverty in india before gandhi, given that everybody knows the story of the indian independence movement. second, gandhi was not the left-wing option in the indian independence movement. the soviets were very active in the process; the british supported gandhi (and nehru) for the precise reason that there was a very real fear that the leftists may seize the country, and supporting them would prevent that takeover. keep in mind that this is happening about the same time as the maoists are taking over china. the result was an independent india that built a liberal capitalist democracy and remained in the commonwealth, rather than a communist india aligned with russia and china. gandhi never led india, but his economic ideas are some kind of amalgamation of buddhist nationalism with welfare state liberalism - not any further left than the british labour party, just with cultural ties. as it is, nehru was considerably to his right and is best described as a mildly left-leaning liberal.
the communist block actually responded to this with a level of violence. china and india have fought several wars, largely on ideological grounds. to this day, there are armed maoist groups in india that control a substantial amount of territory.
it's an interesting question as to what would have happened had india "fallen" to the communists, but it did not happen and it is amazingly ignorant to suggest that it did, or that india was ever somehow a socialist state.
as for hong kong, it's a city state. but you might be interested to learn that both hong kong and singapore have third world gini coefficients, indicating a tremendous gulf between rich and poor. the rich in these areas can be fabulously rich. but that is not a good thing if it comes at the expense of the bulk of the people on subsistence wages or worse.
i don't have anything else to say on this topic.
bluewater454
You are right about the history if India.
And I am guessing that the Indians aspersion to a totally free market and trade economy was in response the their hatred of their British masters.
You are also right about their history with their communist neighbors to the east. Although Nehru was not a hard core communist, he operated under the socialist slogan "Hindi-Chini bhai bhai" - Indians and Chinese are brothers. Nehru was a bit naive when it came to communist aggression, and was no doubt, caught off guard when the Red Army invaded his country in 1962 and annexed the territory of Aksai Chin.
Make no mistake about it, though. Nehru was a socialist. His Communist style version of the five year plan was a cornerstone of his approach to economic development, although it was a looser and less ideological version that what was being practiced in Moscow or Beijing. His system of nationalizing major industries such as steel and manufacturing, along with a system of state licensing, subsidies and regulation were classic Fabian style socialism.
He was open to a level of private enterprise and entrepreneurship. He simply wanted the state to be the main entrepreneur in his society.
deathtokoalas
fabianism is regulated capitalism. it's not socialism. it's actually aligned closely with classical liberalism, in the sense that it rejects social darwinism. early liberal theorists like adam smith argued for collective ownership of natural resources, under the argument that private ownership of natural resources would lead to mercantilist monopolies and idle rentier classes.
the point is that nationalizing oil and electricity and steel is not only not inconsistent with capitalism but was advocated by the original capitalist philosophers.
bluewater454
Of course it is regulated capitalism.
Socialism, as it is currently being practiced, is nothing more than state control of private industry. It can be seen in the form of "nationalizing" an entire industry, like what we have just done here in the US with health care insurance, or it can simply be in the form of regulating an economy to the point where the private business owner can hardly make a decision without running into a government regulation. It is government ownership of private industry by proxy.
By-the-way.
I thought you were done commenting on this thread...Its kind of like eating "just one more" potato chip, isnt it?
deathtokoalas
that's a definition of socialism that only exists on the populist right, but definitions are malleable things. the problem with it is that you end up deducing that clear conservatives - like bismarck and churchill, to name a few - were left-wingers. unless you want to derive a type of "conservative socialism", it's untenable. socialism needs an aspect of worker autonomy, and that didn't exist in india. nehru was actually rather ruthless in his oppression of labour unions.
i don't want to talk about obama's health care plan, but i think you probably know that it was developed by the heritage institute and is an attempt to permanently keep government out of health care. it's basically a law that forces people to buy health insurance. i live in canada, and that's not remotely to similar to the mixed public/private model we have here, let alone anything remotely resembling "socialism". it's almost like the insurance companies levying a tax; really, it's an outrageous level of corruption.
bluewater454
Socialism has been defined by those who have called themselves socialist. There are no societies in existence where there is complete "worker autonomy"...
OK.
Not completely true.
There are no developed economies where there is complet worker autonomy - ie., co-ops. These exist. They simply dont dominate any developed economy that I am aware of. So when I call someone like Nehru a socialist, I am simply describing the dominant association of what socialism has come to mean - statism.
If you like, I will simply call him a statist. He believed that the state should be the main driving force of the economy. When this is the case, I believe that the economy always suffers.
You called yourself an "anarcho-communist". I know from previous conversations that you basically adhere to the idea of a stateless, classless society where all businesses are "worker owned".
Do you see the current "socialist" movement in politics as moving this goal ahead, or is it more of a hindrance?
deathtokoalas
i don't see an existing socialist movement at all. the left is entirely moribund. about the only thing happening right now are fast food strikes, and i'd consider that a waste of time.
the left has been in a crises point for several decades. there's been lots of commentary on this, but i think the basic idea that the game has been changed is correct. i was getting at this before: productive work in our society is very scarce. almost 75% of jobs in north america are in the service industry. that's a situation which provides socialism with no way forward. it's one thing to talk about co-operative coffee shops or whatever, but it's a syndicalist-capitalist model that in the end doesn't give anybody any real level of freedom.
we can't talk about workers seizing factories. there aren't any factories, and the ones that exist don't have many workers.
so, where is the production, then? well, some of it is in other countries, but most of it has been taken over by robots. the leading economic projections are that we can expect robots to be doing virtually everything within a few decades.
what that means is that the left needs to adjust. socialism is not just moribund, it is obsolete. the answer does not lie in resurrecting old models designed for a different era, but in creating new ideas that are designed for the existing era.
to answer the question directly: this is not being done. the most popular post-leftist reaction seems to in moving to primitivism, which is a non-starter on a social level. i mean, if people want to be hippies and live in forests, whatever. but, they're not going to bring society along with them. and, it would require genocide on such a level that it's not even feasible to consider: 25% of the population simply couldn't kill off 75% of it.
there are a few people pointing out that what that really means is skipping directly to communism. in the marxist framework, communism is the phase that follows socialism. but it comes with the same baggage as marxism and all the same problems...
i think it's something along the right lines, though. i think that, eventually, rising unemployment is going to lead to people overrunning factories. you asked me about this before: did i mean nationalization? no. i mean residents storming the factories and holding them at gun point, then distributing the products locally. like the storming of the bastille. this is something that's going to need to be co-ordinated, and probably be pretty violent. but i don't really see another option.
but, as far as i know, nobody is talking like that.
the one way out of that scenario is if the state sees it coming and retreats back to the idea of the welfare state, as bismarck and churchill and roosevelt did, but all the trends in government right now suggest the exact opposite. it seems to be that they're counting on technology to protect them (bigger guns, drones, surveillance), but i think it's ultimately underestimating the severity of the unemployment problem in the upcoming decades. there's a breaking point of critical mass where there's just no guns big enough to stop it.
it's sort of what marx suggested in his prediction of capitalism destroying itself, but it's actually closer to what the anarchist bakunin suggested. marx put all his hope on the workers. bakunin pointed out that the unemployed are a more likely source of revolutionary potential. bakunin has some problems, too, but i think he got that point right.
again, though, this lies in the balance of the response. if the elite gets a grasp on it, it can reverse it. then, you may indeed see some nationalization and distributive justice, and maybe some "make work", in order to prevent a revolution. and, as an artist, i'd be happy enough with it. but i don't predict this...
bluewater454
You are right.
The economy is changing, and there aren't enough factory jobs here in the US or Canada to make a difference, even if you did take them over.
It strikes me at this point that your old model of taking over factories is a little out-dated. Dont you see this as a little humorous that the capitalist economy of the world has moved so far ahead of you that even if you could "storm" all the factories, it wouldn't really change much? It is sort of like an art thief who FINALLY gets a hold of the Mona Lisa, only to find out that art really isnt that valuable any more. The world has changed, and now it is stolen personal data from hackers that is selling for millions.
You are complaining that our current service economy does not leave any room for any level of "freedom".
I dont know about that.
I know more people today that own their own home businesses than I ever have. I have seen so many ways of making money now that I doubt if the Marxists could ever catch up, except to do what totalitarian Marxists have always done and simply make it illegal to make a profit without state approval. It always seems to come down to force. Even you admitted this.
It seems to me that anarchists are the OCD of the political world. They want the world to fit into this perfect little box where everything is just so. The problem is, of course, that this imperfect world does not seem to want to cooperate, and the only way you can really accomplish your goals is through violence and oppression. In doing so, you compromise the very principles that you claimed to adhere to. Maybe that is why marxism has never accomplished its self-proclaimed goals.
Just a thought.
deathtokoalas
leftists are realistic about violence. we understand that capitalism is a system of violence and must be abolished by violence. it's inconsistent to hold the food down by lock and key, tell me to work or starve and then accuse me of being violent when i kill you to take the key. the initial violence is in the relationship of private property. the discussion keeps cycling back to that because it's the key point.
everything we have around us is still made in factories. what's changed is that the factories are now run by machines. the strategic objectives remain the same; it's the tactics that must be modified.
unfortunately, what's happened is that the left has lost the plot, and held to the tactics.
bluewater454
I think maybe learning to operate in a free market system instead of through violence and state oppression may be the way to go.
There is no reason why co-ops cannot be implemented in a free market society, such as Canada or the US. Maybe we have more in common than you think.
You need to move away from the old model of forcing your ideals through the state, however. That, in itself, is a compromise of stated anarchist goals. It goes to my original question in this thread:
How do you achieve a stateless, classless society through the power of the state?
The answer, to me at least, is obvious.
deathtokoalas
and i answered that it's a hegelian relic of the nineteenth century that nobody thinks is possible anymore - it's a point virtually everybody agrees marx was dead wrong about.
we're going in circles. i keep responding because you keep baiting me, but i'll close off by reiterating that free market systems are systems of state-operated violence; getting beyond state-operated violence requires the abolition of private property, which is how the state enforces it's violence, and which can only be done through individuals working together to seize it. this isn't a process of using the state as a tool of nationalization (that is what liberals do to co-opt socialism), it's rather a process of fighting against the state's enforcement of property rights. not even marx would have argued for nationalization through a bourgeois parliament. that was lasallean, and he was highly critical of it.
all socialist theorists agree that a socialist revolution happens only when the proletariat (and aligned classes) rises up to smash the power of the state (which means abolishing private property), not through these liberal reformist processes you keep mentioning, which are meant to prevent that, and have historically been very successful in that aim.
