A really great book that goes into this is Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti btw. Breaks down a lot of things that simply didn’t work in the USSR. Definitely check it out
Side question — what sort of world would you like? Not presupposing anything, or leading a question. Actually asking—what kind of structure do you think is best based on what you think humans deserve/could do?
We won't have any realistic solutions to international issues like climate change, wage/chattel slavery, and the protection of basic human rights until an international institution has the power to affect those changes.
So the question is: How does humanity enact an international representative government?
Do you think an international body with a variety of ideological perspectives, some capitalist, some centrist, some communist etc, could solve those problems
Well here’s an interesting situation. I think most of the world would agree it’s important to “crush dissent,” to put it crudely and without context, of anyone who denies the Holocaust happened. And by “crush dissent,” that means all the ways to stop that sort of ideology from gainfully reproducing, hopefully short of literally jailing people, even though Germany does do that. Let’s say ideology X causes mass emmiseration, poverty, and climate catastrophe. But let’s say X also allows a minority of people to become very wealthy at the expense of the vast majority of the word’s population and ecology. If we want that to be different (do you want that to be different?), one way to start fixing things is by stopping the ideology of X from gainfully reciprocating, which involves education, raising of material conditions, organizing, and promoting community and healthy/ethical social relations, which is communism. The alternative is not doing that, and causing the extermination of the remaining 1/3 of wildlife and subsequently human life on the planet.
I'm not a communist, and I wouldn't speak for them.
As a Social Democrat I'd like to see international organizations with teeth that can actually enforce climate policies. Currently under WTO rules international corporations can just move shop to avoid rules.
I’d like to see international organizations with teeth
how do you deal with every single school of IR thought besides the Marxists saying this is a violation of national soverginity? How do you feel about the PRC being the biggest actor on the world stage pushing for these kinds of reforms and offering this kind of commitment to International Orgs?
In a speech on Monday to the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the Geneva-based World Health Organization, Xi called for greater international cooperation in fighting the pandemic. He also said China will provide $2 billion over two years to support the fight. Taiwan dropped a request to be included in the gathering after objections from Beijing.
“Covid-19 vaccine development and deployment in China, when available, will be made a global public good, which will be China’s contribution to ensuring vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries,” Xi said via video.
Well I think that situation would define winning for communists, sure. Personally I think if there was an international body where all parties were anti-capitalist, who then could control resource management and development of the world via a system of dispersed democratic committee from the bottom up, that would be the only thing that could save our planet from mass extinction, and also the only thing that could create social structures that don’t allow for worker exploitation. But in my mind there’s a lot of folks who would consider themselves leftists who are not anti-capitalists. Which, clock ticking, what do we do? I’m curious if we have enough time to continue the decades and decades of capitalist-communist argument that’s gotten us to where we are now, if that argument would move us forward through time still without changing economic structures, you know? Cause capitalism is the current mode of production. So that’s gonna continue until it’s stopped. What’s gonna stop it?
I think you need to separate the idea of "having a capitalist economy and liberal-democratic political system" and that of "supporting free market politics." We live under these systems not because they have overwhelming support, but because they have been handed down to us and are very difficult to change. For the most part, around the world people live under capitalism against their will.
Perhaps it comes down to whether or not you believe that, ecologically at the very least, we have time to humor the arguments for a system that has caused 2/3rds of wildlife extinction just within the last 50 years
If anything a more authoritarian power structure and less "political pluralism" could have seen it still going strong to this day and I say this as someone who is generally critical of vanguardism and socialist personality cults. The failure of the August Coup and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Much better examples of the dangers of power concentration and vaguardism are the Sino-Soviet split, which was at least in part driven by Mao and Kruschev's personal dislike of each other, and the terror tactics the Bolsheviks used in the late 1910s to establish dictatorships of the proletariat (from which they excluded peasants) in overwhelmingly peasant dominated areas.
That being said, while there are valid criticisms to be made of the Bolshevik revolution and USSR policies, they were better for the world and the people of Russia than what came before them, what came after them, and 90% of other nation states that existed at the same time as them. While you can point to some things they maybe could have done better, it's hard to argue that they shouldn't have overthrown the Russian Empire, that they should have imitated the rapacious capitalist imperialist looting of the rest of the world the EU & USA wholeheartedly engaged in, or that it was a good thing the USSR capitulated into the neoliberal shock therapied protofash mafia disaster of a state that is modern Russia.
lol how are you gonna be a socdem who's against vanguards when one of the core concepts of social democracy is REPRESENTATIVE parties?
Bruh you can't take a principled stance against vanguardism when your ideology is literally the capitalist liberal version of vanguardism, you got to at least be an anarchist to play that game
You don't know what a vanguard is then, ignorance while understandable in this context, is still not something to be proud of, you should take the time to learn instead of reflexively rejecting something because the capitalist zeitgeist tells you to
Vanguard parties exclude only the supporters of capitalism just like Social democracy by definition excludes socialists and non-capitalists, again you can't have any convincing principled stance against the representative democracy of the working class when you literally stan for the representative democracy of capitalists
No they don't, social democracies would never allow the establishment of socialism and overthrow of the current capitalist mode of production. Social democracy is the attempt by the state to broker, regulate and intermesh the productive capacity of the working class with the capital stock of the investor class for the common benefit of both
By definition those parties cannot be communist, as they legally cannot challenge private ownership of the means of production which underlines that system
Instead of chasing around idealistic "ideas" in your head you should read history and apply a material analysis to it.....sport
Every country in the world is a mixed market economy, even North Korea. Except instead of allowing the people to vote on what kind of free market economy North Korea has access to it is dictated to them. Same top down approach to the economy happened in the USSR and is currently happening in China. Why do you think Communists are better than anyone else at determining the level of a mixed market economy a nation should have?
The idea that anyone, anywhere could ever completely "overthrow the capitalist mode of production" is a dangerous delusion. Free markets, like it or not, are here to stay. Even if that means that must be black markets.
It is fun and all to play idealist about vastly complex socio economic issues, think you have all the answers, and can shape society into a perfect utopia. In reality, people resist change, not everyone will ever want to be wholly under the yoke of either a libertarian or communist regime, and enforcing your idealism on the real world would require massive amounts of violence.
Subjugating the masses to political ideals ain't my bag. Let people vote, have hopefully equitable representation, and maybe muddle towards some sense of progress.
There is no such thing as the "free market" and there never was, in fact peddling that idea is fact a dangerous delusion
Every economy on earth is dominated by command economies internal to firms interconnected by state and privately run logistical command economies all funded and secured by banks run internally as command economies, all interacting thru regulated international bodies and treaties drawn up exclusively by capitalists, this "mixed" nonsense is neoclassical garbage that fundamentally misunderstands what a capitalist market IS, what socialism IS and ignores the fact that class dynamics is the over-determining driver of the distribution of wealth not "democratic processes"
Your whole conception of economics was literally invented in a think tank
and enforcing your idealism on the real world would require massive amounts of violence
Enforcing your social democracy on the world is violence, enforcing capitalism on the world is violence, enforcing private ownership of the means of production is violence, the difference is that those are normalized for you, so either you don't see that violence or you don't consider it morally on the same level as whatever the "violence" you imagine in your head looks like, either way I'm not gonna take lectures on violence from hypocrites
Of course there is no such thing as a free market just like there is no such thing as a planned economy.
Communistic planned economies like a Nozickian or Rothbardian pure free market will forever be impossible. Attempting to implement them would cause untold harm to society.
Why though? Like not even a demsoc?
Edit: go easy on him guys
The idea of a revolutionary vanguard sounds like a bad, bad idea.
Look at what the Bolsheviks did to the Mensheviks.
...yes, and?
The USSR failed because it did not tolerate any political pluralism, and lept from crisis to crisis based on the whims of personality cults.
I guess if you like personality cults...
Well, it is true.
Doctrinaire politics reigned from on high in the USSR which forbade even alternative ideologies of communism.
would you by any chance be american?
A really great book that goes into this is Blackshirts and Reds by Michael Parenti btw. Breaks down a lot of things that simply didn’t work in the USSR. Definitely check it out
nooooo if they read that they'll be able to own me so easily
Side question — what sort of world would you like? Not presupposing anything, or leading a question. Actually asking—what kind of structure do you think is best based on what you think humans deserve/could do?
We won't have any realistic solutions to international issues like climate change, wage/chattel slavery, and the protection of basic human rights until an international institution has the power to affect those changes.
So the question is: How does humanity enact an international representative government?
I wish I knew the answer to that.
Yeah I agree. Are there shortcomings of the Internationale you consider?
Yeah, it excludes non-communists.
Not everyone is a communist.
Do you think an international body with a variety of ideological perspectives, some capitalist, some centrist, some communist etc, could solve those problems
It is better than the alternative.
Do you really think communists will win out if all ideologies except one are excluded?
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I agree, but I don't want to live in a society that only allows either neoliberal or communist solutions.
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You are acting like most people sit down and hash out their ideology instead of adopting it piecemeal as they stumble through life.
Why should folks who aren't ardent and consistent in their beliefs be denied their voice? Also, who is going to determine this purity?
Not a commentary on communism but a genuine question—do you think people “have a voice” under capitalism?
To varying degrees the people always have a voice.
You can't crush dissent completely under any system or we wouldn't be talking right now.
Well here’s an interesting situation. I think most of the world would agree it’s important to “crush dissent,” to put it crudely and without context, of anyone who denies the Holocaust happened. And by “crush dissent,” that means all the ways to stop that sort of ideology from gainfully reproducing, hopefully short of literally jailing people, even though Germany does do that. Let’s say ideology X causes mass emmiseration, poverty, and climate catastrophe. But let’s say X also allows a minority of people to become very wealthy at the expense of the vast majority of the word’s population and ecology. If we want that to be different (do you want that to be different?), one way to start fixing things is by stopping the ideology of X from gainfully reciprocating, which involves education, raising of material conditions, organizing, and promoting community and healthy/ethical social relations, which is communism. The alternative is not doing that, and causing the extermination of the remaining 1/3 of wildlife and subsequently human life on the planet.
That's an odd thing to say in a community that had to relocate because of a ban on a larger platform, owned by a billionaire.
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Perfect description of how the nazis improvised their genocides!
what part of "socialism or barbarism" don't you get?
what do you consider a communist solution to climate change?
I'm not a communist, and I wouldn't speak for them.
As a Social Democrat I'd like to see international organizations with teeth that can actually enforce climate policies. Currently under WTO rules international corporations can just move shop to avoid rules.
how do you deal with every single school of IR thought besides the Marxists saying this is a violation of national soverginity? How do you feel about the PRC being the biggest actor on the world stage pushing for these kinds of reforms and offering this kind of commitment to International Orgs?
In a speech on Monday to the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the Geneva-based World Health Organization, Xi called for greater international cooperation in fighting the pandemic. He also said China will provide $2 billion over two years to support the fight. Taiwan dropped a request to be included in the gathering after objections from Beijing.
“Covid-19 vaccine development and deployment in China, when available, will be made a global public good, which will be China’s contribution to ensuring vaccine accessibility and affordability in developing countries,” Xi said via video.
from: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-18/china-s-virus-vaccine-will-be-global-public-good-xi-says
Okay, so you're against policies you can't even name? LOL bro....
How would the “teeth” work?
well guess what buddy those are your choices and were actually willing to allow liberal thought and expression just not fucking property relations
Well I think that situation would define winning for communists, sure. Personally I think if there was an international body where all parties were anti-capitalist, who then could control resource management and development of the world via a system of dispersed democratic committee from the bottom up, that would be the only thing that could save our planet from mass extinction, and also the only thing that could create social structures that don’t allow for worker exploitation. But in my mind there’s a lot of folks who would consider themselves leftists who are not anti-capitalists. Which, clock ticking, what do we do? I’m curious if we have enough time to continue the decades and decades of capitalist-communist argument that’s gotten us to where we are now, if that argument would move us forward through time still without changing economic structures, you know? Cause capitalism is the current mode of production. So that’s gonna continue until it’s stopped. What’s gonna stop it?
Over half of the world supports free market political parties.
It is utopian to suggest they should be excluded from an international organization.
I think you need to separate the idea of "having a capitalist economy and liberal-democratic political system" and that of "supporting free market politics." We live under these systems not because they have overwhelming support, but because they have been handed down to us and are very difficult to change. For the most part, around the world people live under capitalism against their will.
Perhaps it comes down to whether or not you believe that, ecologically at the very least, we have time to humor the arguments for a system that has caused 2/3rds of wildlife extinction just within the last 50 years
So what is your solution?
Deny billions of people a voice in governance?
I don’t think billions of people are capitalists. I think billions of people are proletarians
No, just capitalists
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class traitors
The USSR failed because the US State department lead by Hillary Fucking Clinton succesfully couped them.
If anything a more authoritarian power structure and less "political pluralism" could have seen it still going strong to this day and I say this as someone who is generally critical of vanguardism and socialist personality cults. The failure of the August Coup and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.
Much better examples of the dangers of power concentration and vaguardism are the Sino-Soviet split, which was at least in part driven by Mao and Kruschev's personal dislike of each other, and the terror tactics the Bolsheviks used in the late 1910s to establish dictatorships of the proletariat (from which they excluded peasants) in overwhelmingly peasant dominated areas.
That being said, while there are valid criticisms to be made of the Bolshevik revolution and USSR policies, they were better for the world and the people of Russia than what came before them, what came after them, and 90% of other nation states that existed at the same time as them. While you can point to some things they maybe could have done better, it's hard to argue that they shouldn't have overthrown the Russian Empire, that they should have imitated the rapacious capitalist imperialist looting of the rest of the world the EU & USA wholeheartedly engaged in, or that it was a good thing the USSR capitulated into the neoliberal shock therapied protofash mafia disaster of a state that is modern Russia.
B A S E D
That isn’t inherent in being a communist, and especially not in being a democratic socialist.
Demsocs are utopian socialists.
I'm not utopian.
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lol MLs need to answerfor a demsoc getting downvoted?
sorry u had a shitty take bruh that doesn't mean were doing a stalinism
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its my cross to bear for actually reading 1 book
lol how are you gonna be a socdem who's against vanguards when one of the core concepts of social democracy is REPRESENTATIVE parties?
Bruh you can't take a principled stance against vanguardism when your ideology is literally the capitalist liberal version of vanguardism, you got to at least be an anarchist to play that game
Vanguardism can never be representative.
I reject it wholly.
You don't know what a vanguard is then, ignorance while understandable in this context, is still not something to be proud of, you should take the time to learn instead of reflexively rejecting something because the capitalist zeitgeist tells you to
Vanguard parties exclude all non-socialists.
They are anti-democratic abortions.
Vanguard parties exclude only the supporters of capitalism just like Social democracy by definition excludes socialists and non-capitalists, again you can't have any convincing principled stance against the representative democracy of the working class when you literally stan for the representative democracy of capitalists
All your doing is revealing your class loyalty
Socialism is not just MLism FFS.
Read a book.
Never claimed it was, but Socialism is definitely NOT social democracy and never will be
Social democracy fully allows communist parties to run in elections.
Try winning the battle of ideas sport.
No they don't, social democracies would never allow the establishment of socialism and overthrow of the current capitalist mode of production. Social democracy is the attempt by the state to broker, regulate and intermesh the productive capacity of the working class with the capital stock of the investor class for the common benefit of both
By definition those parties cannot be communist, as they legally cannot challenge private ownership of the means of production which underlines that system
Instead of chasing around idealistic "ideas" in your head you should read history and apply a material analysis to it.....sport
Every country in the world is a mixed market economy, even North Korea. Except instead of allowing the people to vote on what kind of free market economy North Korea has access to it is dictated to them. Same top down approach to the economy happened in the USSR and is currently happening in China. Why do you think Communists are better than anyone else at determining the level of a mixed market economy a nation should have?
The idea that anyone, anywhere could ever completely "overthrow the capitalist mode of production" is a dangerous delusion. Free markets, like it or not, are here to stay. Even if that means that must be black markets.
It is fun and all to play idealist about vastly complex socio economic issues, think you have all the answers, and can shape society into a perfect utopia. In reality, people resist change, not everyone will ever want to be wholly under the yoke of either a libertarian or communist regime, and enforcing your idealism on the real world would require massive amounts of violence.
Subjugating the masses to political ideals ain't my bag. Let people vote, have hopefully equitable representation, and maybe muddle towards some sense of progress.
There is no such thing as the "free market" and there never was, in fact peddling that idea is fact a dangerous delusion
Every economy on earth is dominated by command economies internal to firms interconnected by state and privately run logistical command economies all funded and secured by banks run internally as command economies, all interacting thru regulated international bodies and treaties drawn up exclusively by capitalists, this "mixed" nonsense is neoclassical garbage that fundamentally misunderstands what a capitalist market IS, what socialism IS and ignores the fact that class dynamics is the over-determining driver of the distribution of wealth not "democratic processes"
Your whole conception of economics was literally invented in a think tank
Enforcing your social democracy on the world is violence, enforcing capitalism on the world is violence, enforcing private ownership of the means of production is violence, the difference is that those are normalized for you, so either you don't see that violence or you don't consider it morally on the same level as whatever the "violence" you imagine in your head looks like, either way I'm not gonna take lectures on violence from hypocrites
Of course there is no such thing as a free market just like there is no such thing as a planned economy.
Communistic planned economies like a Nozickian or Rothbardian pure free market will forever be impossible. Attempting to implement them would cause untold harm to society.