This is the problem with people promoting socialism. They tend to compare idealized version of socialism with real version of capitalism. And such comparison inevitably leads to unrealistic conclusions.
The problem is that real version of socialism is what you see in China or Cuba or former USSR. The argument with “we haven’t done socialism right” is the same as “we haven’t done capitalism right”.
I have been born in socialist country and to this day I can see negative consequences of that era. And the obvious reason why ideal socialism can’t exist - people. Same reason why capitalism sucks.
Edit: To people downvoting me: Your fake internet points have no meaning, but I love the irony of it. You can’t even keep the illusion of classlessness and equality in an internet thread, yet you are somehow convinced you could run a country like that. You’d be locking people for life in your communist paradise just for having different opinion and you know it.
I was born in country where intellectuals were in jail and uneducated workers were put to management positions, because they should own the means of production or some bullshit like that. You can imagine the end result of that.
And again, this is the same “that wasn’t true socialism” argument. Obviously it wasn’t. The socialism as per your definition can’t exist on a country level. You can see it being implemented on a small company level (think family owned businesses) but the bigger it gets the more the cracks show and it just does not scale.
You don’t need money going to shareholders in order to scale. You need management structure. Even anarchists would say they’re against unnecessary hierarchy, and at least a little structure is generally necessary. Top management does not need to be paid 300-to-1 over the average worker. Nor do they need to specifically represent shareholders, which is what a CEO is.
No we’d say we’re against hierarchy because hierarchy is evil and organisation doesn’t imply it. It’s an important corner stone to look out for as hierarchical realism (the notion that organisation just doesn’t work between equals) is the fundamental opponent. On the contrary, if you look at systems, complexity and chaos theory it becomes clear that it’s hierarchical systems which are fundamentally flawed, can, by their very structure, not process information nearly as well. SNAFU.
Right but as soon as you have hierarchy, you have classes. You can have hierarchy in family owned business and it can work with everyone doing their best for the good of the business/family. But these social structures fall apart as the hierarchy grows bigger. And very soon what’s good for your family is not necessary good for the business - including non-monetary stuff like how much time you spend working or how hard your job is. Notice how there’s not a single CEO or shareholder in the picture and the system is already falling apart.
There is this famous saying from communist times: “If you’re not stealing, you’re stealing from your family” That pretty much sums it up.
You can’t have working socialism with humans, because the system is inhuman by its very nature. (and I don’t mean it in bad way even if the consequences end up being really nasty for many human beings)
Lenin himself called the system he instituted state capitalism, it was supposed to be a transitory state as Marx said (and the Bolsheviks were very big on historical materialism) that first you have capitalism, develop productivity, then communism would follow naturally as a consequence of resolving capitalism’s inherent contradictions.
The gaslighting started with Stalin, who invented the term “really existing socialism” to make it doubly clear that it was neither real, existed, or was socialism.
The closest any society ever got to communism isn’t via the Bolshevik “dictatorship of the proletariat” (aka dictatorship of the state bureaucracy), but via Anarchism. Horizontal organisation, abolish hierarchies. Very early revolutionary Russia qualifies until the Bolsheviks abolished councils in practice, Rojava qualifies, Chiapas qualifies, revolutionary Spain (until Bolsheviks teamed up with fascists to kill it off), revolutionary Ukraine (until the Bolsheviks – I think you see the pattern).
Interesting tidbit I picked up on an Andrewisim video recently: organizations from the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist branch of the left are particularly vulnerable to falling into cult behavior. It’s a reason to consider the whole branch to be bad and cut it right off. If not that far, then at least view organizations from that branch with a lot of criticism.
Yes, exactly it always fails, because it just does not scale. It’s an idea, that can’t exist in reality on a country level. You can point to Freetown Christiania as an example - a small anarchist commune, that already shows some major cracks in its structure. I mean, just grow family business a bit and you can already see structures and hierarchy emerging.
Plenty of worker control and ownership. If you want to get technical I’d say it’s a mixture of state socialism (only other example: Yugoslavia) and anarchism.
held together by military with child soldiers.
You mean the less than 200 16-18yolds which were demobilised like ten years ago.
The thing is that the YPG is organised horizontally, tons of independent militias and in some locales 16yold bearing arms was understood as being completely kosher, so it happened, and then the larger structure and the world got wind of it, and not doing it was added to the memorandum of understanding between all the sub militias.
There might be some technical gripes as the YPG is not officially a state actor and according to the letter of international law only states are allowed to recruit 15yolds into the military (for non-combat roles), and you can join the YPG with 16, but frankly speaking that’s not really an argument, it can be countered by saying “de facto” a lot.
You, OTOH, make it sound as if it were some African warlord with boot camps for 10yolds they raided as slaves. The situation is quite different, it was teens saying “ISIS killed my family I want a rifle to fuck them up”. And TBF there’s practically nothing more lethal than a 17yold gal with a sniper rifle and a grudge.
Thanks for detailed reply. I didn’t mean it in a bad way. It certainly wasn’t well written comment. Apologies.
What I failed to convey is that IMO this is not best example as It’s a community stuck between rock and a hard place. A lot of what it is right now seems to exist out of necessity. Which makes me wonder how well would it work if there were other realistic options that aren’t absolutely horrible.
Like if you lifted the entire land and dropped it in the middle of the EU with free market and mobility, would it still exist? I don’t think it would. For the same reasons I mentioned earlier.
Rojava could exist here, that’s for sure, if you somehow teleported it over it wouldn’t regress politically – what would be the reason for people to allow that?
Heck they probably could even join the union: You need to be a democracy, and a market economy. Democracy goes without saying, and distributing food and decommodify what they can doesn’t mean that they aren’t also a market economy. They’re just taking the “social” in “social market economy” more seriously than our socdems over here. OTOH they probably wouldn’t want to but join EFTA instead.
As to “not a good example”: It’s true that liberal democracies limit revolutionary zeal that’s why being an Anarchist in the west is kinda… erm. I don’t want to swear or jinx the nice stop-gap we have going on here. OTOH you should acknowledge that if they manage to do it between a rock and a hard place, the system itself is plenty stable enough to work under better conditions.
if they manage to do it between a rock and a hard place, the system itself is plenty stable enough to work under better conditions
That’s like saying that if fusion manages to happen in the middle of the sun, surely it can happen in my living room.
if you somehow teleported it over it wouldn’t regress politically – what would be the reason for people to allow that?
Why wouldn’t they? If my family is about to starve and most import and export is blocked, sure I will work on a farm to sustain our community, because ultimately that also feeds my family and I don’t have the option to seek better job somewhere in EU.
If there is no ISIS on the border trying to murder me, why should I accept that the farm that belonged to my family for generations was collectivized and I’m working on it for a tiny share rather than benefiting from all it can produce?
This is the problem with people promoting socialism. They tend to compare idealized version of socialism with real version of capitalism. And such comparison inevitably leads to unrealistic conclusions.
The problem is that real version of socialism is what you see in China or Cuba or former USSR. The argument with “we haven’t done socialism right” is the same as “we haven’t done capitalism right”.
I have been born in socialist country and to this day I can see negative consequences of that era. And the obvious reason why ideal socialism can’t exist - people. Same reason why capitalism sucks.
Edit: To people downvoting me: Your fake internet points have no meaning, but I love the irony of it. You can’t even keep the illusion of classlessness and equality in an internet thread, yet you are somehow convinced you could run a country like that. You’d be locking people for life in your communist paradise just for having different opinion and you know it.
Definition of Socialism: the workers own the means of production.
Which country were you born in where you owned the means of production?
I was born in country where intellectuals were in jail and uneducated workers were put to management positions, because they should own the means of production or some bullshit like that. You can imagine the end result of that.
And again, this is the same “that wasn’t true socialism” argument. Obviously it wasn’t. The socialism as per your definition can’t exist on a country level. You can see it being implemented on a small company level (think family owned businesses) but the bigger it gets the more the cracks show and it just does not scale.
You don’t need money going to shareholders in order to scale. You need management structure. Even anarchists would say they’re against unnecessary hierarchy, and at least a little structure is generally necessary. Top management does not need to be paid 300-to-1 over the average worker. Nor do they need to specifically represent shareholders, which is what a CEO is.
No we’d say we’re against hierarchy because hierarchy is evil and organisation doesn’t imply it. It’s an important corner stone to look out for as hierarchical realism (the notion that organisation just doesn’t work between equals) is the fundamental opponent. On the contrary, if you look at systems, complexity and chaos theory it becomes clear that it’s hierarchical systems which are fundamentally flawed, can, by their very structure, not process information nearly as well. SNAFU.
Right but as soon as you have hierarchy, you have classes. You can have hierarchy in family owned business and it can work with everyone doing their best for the good of the business/family. But these social structures fall apart as the hierarchy grows bigger. And very soon what’s good for your family is not necessary good for the business - including non-monetary stuff like how much time you spend working or how hard your job is. Notice how there’s not a single CEO or shareholder in the picture and the system is already falling apart.
There is this famous saying from communist times: “If you’re not stealing, you’re stealing from your family” That pretty much sums it up.
You can’t have working socialism with humans, because the system is inhuman by its very nature. (and I don’t mean it in bad way even if the consequences end up being really nasty for many human beings)
Lenin himself called the system he instituted state capitalism, it was supposed to be a transitory state as Marx said (and the Bolsheviks were very big on historical materialism) that first you have capitalism, develop productivity, then communism would follow naturally as a consequence of resolving capitalism’s inherent contradictions.
The gaslighting started with Stalin, who invented the term “really existing socialism” to make it doubly clear that it was neither real, existed, or was socialism.
The closest any society ever got to communism isn’t via the Bolshevik “dictatorship of the proletariat” (aka dictatorship of the state bureaucracy), but via Anarchism. Horizontal organisation, abolish hierarchies. Very early revolutionary Russia qualifies until the Bolsheviks abolished councils in practice, Rojava qualifies, Chiapas qualifies, revolutionary Spain (until Bolsheviks teamed up with fascists to kill it off), revolutionary Ukraine (until the Bolsheviks – I think you see the pattern).
Interesting tidbit I picked up on an Andrewisim video recently: organizations from the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist branch of the left are particularly vulnerable to falling into cult behavior. It’s a reason to consider the whole branch to be bad and cut it right off. If not that far, then at least view organizations from that branch with a lot of criticism.
Yes, exactly it always fails, because it just does not scale. It’s an idea, that can’t exist in reality on a country level. You can point to Freetown Christiania as an example - a small anarchist commune, that already shows some major cracks in its structure. I mean, just grow family business a bit and you can already see structures and hierarchy emerging.
Rojava is about 4.6 million people, about as many as Kuwait. About 11 Icelands worth of population.
Yeah that one is probably closest. Still pretty far from socialism and held together by military with child soldiers.
Plenty of worker control and ownership. If you want to get technical I’d say it’s a mixture of state socialism (only other example: Yugoslavia) and anarchism.
You mean the less than 200 16-18yolds which were demobilised like ten years ago.
The thing is that the YPG is organised horizontally, tons of independent militias and in some locales 16yold bearing arms was understood as being completely kosher, so it happened, and then the larger structure and the world got wind of it, and not doing it was added to the memorandum of understanding between all the sub militias.
There might be some technical gripes as the YPG is not officially a state actor and according to the letter of international law only states are allowed to recruit 15yolds into the military (for non-combat roles), and you can join the YPG with 16, but frankly speaking that’s not really an argument, it can be countered by saying “de facto” a lot.
You, OTOH, make it sound as if it were some African warlord with boot camps for 10yolds they raided as slaves. The situation is quite different, it was teens saying “ISIS killed my family I want a rifle to fuck them up”. And TBF there’s practically nothing more lethal than a 17yold gal with a sniper rifle and a grudge.
Thanks for detailed reply. I didn’t mean it in a bad way. It certainly wasn’t well written comment. Apologies.
What I failed to convey is that IMO this is not best example as It’s a community stuck between rock and a hard place. A lot of what it is right now seems to exist out of necessity. Which makes me wonder how well would it work if there were other realistic options that aren’t absolutely horrible.
Like if you lifted the entire land and dropped it in the middle of the EU with free market and mobility, would it still exist? I don’t think it would. For the same reasons I mentioned earlier.
Rojava could exist here, that’s for sure, if you somehow teleported it over it wouldn’t regress politically – what would be the reason for people to allow that?
Heck they probably could even join the union: You need to be a democracy, and a market economy. Democracy goes without saying, and distributing food and decommodify what they can doesn’t mean that they aren’t also a market economy. They’re just taking the “social” in “social market economy” more seriously than our socdems over here. OTOH they probably wouldn’t want to but join EFTA instead.
As to “not a good example”: It’s true that liberal democracies limit revolutionary zeal that’s why being an Anarchist in the west is kinda… erm. I don’t want to swear or jinx the nice stop-gap we have going on here. OTOH you should acknowledge that if they manage to do it between a rock and a hard place, the system itself is plenty stable enough to work under better conditions.
That’s like saying that if fusion manages to happen in the middle of the sun, surely it can happen in my living room.
Why wouldn’t they? If my family is about to starve and most import and export is blocked, sure I will work on a farm to sustain our community, because ultimately that also feeds my family and I don’t have the option to seek better job somewhere in EU.
If there is no ISIS on the border trying to murder me, why should I accept that the farm that belonged to my family for generations was collectivized and I’m working on it for a tiny share rather than benefiting from all it can produce?
Removed by mod
Well at least they have the right to (down)vote then. That isn’t that common in the socialist paradise last time I’ve checked. 🤣
Ironic