Eric Weinstein on the crisis of late capitalism | Hacker News Reader

Eric Weinstein on the crisis of late capitalism

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68 pointslgregg93 comments

I think it's interesting, but limiting, how he focuses on the creative arts as a solution: "to remind ourselves that the hotel maid who makes up our bed may in fact be an amateur painter? The accountant who does our taxes may well have a screenplay that he works on after the midnight hour?"

I'll submit that many, maybe even most, folks do not have these levels of creative aptitude. Moreover, the majority of creative output is crap to the majority of its consumers. I agree that the educational system is primarily ill-equipped to get people out of the current mentalities of employment, but I also think that there will be a certain, possibly large, subpopulation that doesn't have the aptitude or interest to do these sorts of things, even if there were such "magical training" to generate creative output that was valuable and desirable to most other people.

Even for the other fields he cited, like engineers, hedge-fund managers, etc., these currently require a high level of education and experience. No amount of training will reach the non-academically-inclined.

I think the future of people in the jobs that technology replaces is either to move to the direct service industry, which is much more difficult to automate and becomes more difficult to automate as the service level becomes higher, or abjectly falling out of the economy. Not everyone can paint or write a screenplay, and not everyone wants to.

In the days of old, they would scrub the decks of ships while under sail for no reason than to keep the crew busy to prevent boredom which was considered a cause of mutiny. Perhaps, not having a system where people are working all the time is dangerous for no other reason.

I'm a workaholic as it is the only way to maintain my sanity.

You can't have a revolution if everyone is living paycheck to paycheck and missing even one day could jeopardize their housing.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/08/24/most-americans-live-paycheck...

You definitely can have armed revolution. Some form of "imbalanced economic conditions" is the most common STATED reason for violent revolution, which the starving poor inevitably participate in.

You are mentioning retraining people who have already been through the education system. Weinstein is advocating restructuring the education system from one that creates docile workers who perform repetitive tasks for a wage to one that encourages creativity and initiative. I also think you underestimate how many people have given up their passion to the reality that they need to plug themselves into capitalism to survive. If given an opportunity to pursue that passion instead of living paycheck to paycheck I think we might see a intellectual and cultural golden age.

I couldn't agree more!

I'm really disheartened at the pessimism that some HN members show towards people working low paying/status jobs.

No, I think you overestimate it. There's this belief that circulates that people's occupations or pursuits are determined by their circumstances; they're bricklayers or plumbers or whatever due to a combination of factors beyond their control, and given the right magical combination of UBI/education/retraining/pixie dust, they'll move to some other job.

Meanwhile, my father-in-law was a tradie since he was a kid and even in retirement, supposedly freed of any occupational needs or financial necessity, he still does it because he likes to. I don't see him writing a screenplay or orchestrating a symphony. It's not his bag.

I agree that re-education and first education are certainly two different things, and I even agree that we would get more people interested in the creative pursuits if they were inculcated in them at an early age, but I disagree that this is the entire solution or even a substantial part of it because not everyone has that inclination.

Working all your life in physical labour, to provide ungrateful offspring with the chances you never had will do that to you.

I think you're conflating trades, which often provide solid incomes, and lots of room for creativity, learning, and skill-development, with mind-numbing service jobs like being a cashier, delivery drivers, or call-center employees.

There is also some conflation between 'creativity', and 'artistic inclinations'. Lots of things require creativity, artistic practices only being one of them.

I second this. I wasn’t saying everyone should be painters or musicians or novel writers.

My brother-in-law prefers a mind-numbing job. He was a cashier for many years, until they promoted him to management and he had to have his mind "in the job" even outside of work hours, then switched to being a delivery driver, which is working out as his dream job - he can listen to sports broadcasts while driving, and when the deliveries are done, so is the job. No part of it comes home.

He has a degree in sports journalism, so he can be creative, and learn, and develop skills, it's that he doesn't want to do that for a job.

I suspect the reason he doesn't want that job is that he doesn't want the stress and responsibilities associated with that job, not that he doesn't like being creative.

> Well, I think here you point out to one, really, of the basic defects of our system: that the individual citizen has very little possibility of having any influence - of making his opinion felt in the decision-making. And I think that, in itself, leads to a good deal of political lethargy and stupidity. It is true that one has to think first and then to act -but it's also true that if one has no possibility of acting, one's thinking kind of becomes empty and stupid.

-- The Mike Wallace Interview: Erich Fromm (1958-05-25) [ http://www.hrc.utexas.edu/multimedia/video/2008/wallace/from... / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTu0qJG0NfU ]

If you bind two fingers together, nerves and muscles that can make no difference anymore (because of external constraints) become numb or even die off. This is trivially true, it's not surprising in the least. Few people deny it because they lack the inherent capacity to understand it, but because they themselves are bound in some way, too.

Compare the fact that your comment is greyed out, even though it's perfectly polite and coherent, with the discussion in the video above. It's gotten much worse, much more uptight and cowardly.

Thank you for linking to the Erich Fromm interview! I have never heard of him before, but I find myself agreeing with most of his statements in this interview. What strikes me, and are relevant to this discussion, are his thoughts on alienation in the workplace and how production and consumption have become ends upon themselves, not means to increase the dignity of humankind.

The solution is to use technology to replace high skilled professions with average Joes. These high skilled professionals can just go do research, and there is always more research to be done. The average Joes will be aided by a combination of technology and human supervision to do a job that is effectively as good as a professional would have done it.

For example, a nurse might be retrained to do diagnosis. Instead of learning the corpus of medical literature they will have Internet access to a database and supervision from an MD. So that way we might be able to replace many MDs who will instead go into research.

I think that is the sane way forward. And it won't be a solution for everyone, of course. But I think it should be doable.

That sounds like a recipe for “idoacracy”.

What happens when there is an emergency and the system is unavailable?

You are literally training people to be button pushers that’s a horrible horrible idea especially when so many innovations come out from the work place when people are faced with challenges.

Would you make the same claim about how we require groups of people for everything we do ? What if we run out of architects ? What if we run out of neurosurgeons (given that we're always saving, saving saving on training such people resulting in their numbers not increasing despite the obvious incentive, combined with idiotic ideas about outsourcing it's becoming a real possibility, certainly for particular geographies)

Until the advent of Hard AI it is possible that many people could be put to work constructing the digital realities and experiences for video games. (even playing actor roles in video games) However I think even for this to be a reality one would still require a UBI.

> Not everyone can paint or write a screenplay, and not everyone wants to.

Not everyone can, but I'll bet a lot more people could than are currently doing it.

It is not a coincidence that upon the reduction of taxes on the rich in the us we get a widening gap between the rich and the poor.

There is a straight forward way to address this (estate taxes and high taxes on the wealthy) but for some reason this is never the solution.

Instead many go out of their way to say that this gap may persist (and of course many ultra rich would like this) and that we need to come up with a way that the non-rich will not rise up.

I have to say that seems self-interested.

Its not like the poor is going down, they're also going up but not nearly as fast. Almost all of our poor people are rich by global standards is an argument I hear often. Most poor also end up middle class as they grow up, take responsibility and contribute to society is another I hear.

I lived in poverty for years after dropping out of college, sometimes with roommates that were way beyond toxic, worked multiple jobs 70 hours a week just to pay rent and food and still ended up middle class with a job I love; I've been through hell to find heaven. What I learned on the way I now use every day, its made me a stronger and better person and I can now help others do the same.

If someone had given me what I have today, just for the sake of equality, I would not have learned responsibility, discipline, I would hardly have developed most of the skills I now have and probably would've lost all of it by now. I would basically still be an angsty teen in an adult's body, which is what kept me poor in the first place.

Notice I didn't argue for basic income or any other specific redistribution scheme (I like cost effective schools and low cost health care though) rather i argued for things that end rich dynasties that purpetuate inequality across generations.

I think each generation should earn their riches rather than rich dynasties persisting across generations. I favor capitalism and inequality of outcome but earned capitalism from at least a relative equal start.

I see your point, thanks for the precision. I can agree perpetuated inequality does give kids a huge head start.

Taxation is already high for the rich, but the top bracket is usually quite low. I don't think the solution is more taxes, but more tax brackets; they should scale to accommodate the extra rich.

The very rich also tend to hide their money offshore or play games with multiple residencies to find the best tax rates.

Even if the poor were not going down (they are in the west https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1oHJezqBYU ) that wouldnt matter much as we all compete for any goods that are pseudo finite. If inequality grows faster than the "growing pie" certain people will be worse off.

In my humble opinion, wealth inequality is the root of the issue -- to the point where a hedge fund MD can write, not ironically, and I actually thought the article was good, about how much richer people above them are.

That and an increasing lack of socioeconomic mobility. I remember as an adolescent, thinking that professional careers (generally) were a meritocracy, and then slowly realizing they were, for the most part, far from that, although cleverly disguised as such to outsiders.

I think the right and the left recognize that wealth inequality is the issue. The problem seems to be the degree to which we correct that inequality.

In the general sense, some want an extreme (do nothing) or another (full economic equality). I think that really frames the discussion difficulty.

What it seems like is starting to arise is a sort of moral justification for a change in society. Rand's objectivism was a staunch endorsement of a brutal form of capitalism that saw a large divide between the wealthy and the common man. You might argue that objectivism is the philosophical opposite of Marxism. Weinstein and his peers are seemly exploring the moral territory between the two and focusing on what is right, rather than what is pragmatic.

This might be a useful progression from what's being called late capitalism to another system which has most or all of the benefits of capitalism, without the difficult cyclical problems.

i think (it's always hard to know for certain, because this is a pretty deep subject) that I agree with everything you said.

on difficulty in framing discussion: I agree that there can be two extremes, and discussions always seem to get bogged down in labeling due to these ingrained notion of what is good and bad. Is communism bad? most americans would probably say yes because that's what we learned in school. but i would argue (and I think based on what you said you'd agree) that there's no system inherently good or bad (within reason), it's just execution, implementation, situation etc that causes certain systems to be good or bad. I would argue the scandinavians, from what little I know, have done quite well, whereas most wealthy americans would take up pitchforks at that level of taxation.

and to be honest, i never was a big fan of ayn rand. it seemed to take too strong of a stance, as if there was no room to even consider if, in fact, greed (I guess they would call it something like individualism or great men or something like that) might actually be bad in some cases, or if the invisible hand might be leaving a large portion of the population in generational poverty (and simultaneously ensuring the top stay on top). my 2c is that nothing is 100% good or bad, it's situational, and there's a lot of gray areas.

lastly, at the risk of babbling on, it would be great if you are right, that there is some aspect of morality (along with, to weinstein's point, self-preservation) to the discussion. is it wrong for bezos to be worth $X billion, while a large portion of his workers live paycheck to paycheck? is it wrong that larry, sergei and the other tech elite live in an area that also suffers from rampant homelessness? at the least, I absolutely think it's a valid moral question to ask.

To your last point, I agree. I think capitalism worked pretty well for a long time when a rising tide lifted all boats, but that it's time to evolve with the times.

I think the critics of Rand ignore the speculative nature of her works and focus too much on the ad hominem.

Anthem was a really good work about the dangers to an individual of a collectivist utilitarian society. I think it should be regarded up there with 1984 and Brave New World. Atlas Shrugged was a bad work of art with a keen idea. In a lot of ways, I don't think Rand had any idea what she was writing about and fetishized her own works into this strange hypercapitalist ideal. The idea that society could be abandoned by "the one percent" and left to languish has become a common theme of modern science fiction, especially in young adult fiction and anime.

Capitalism will still work from the perspective of human progress, but the progress is becoming less and less shared. Spreading out the wealth curve will logically increase human development as those with potential receive more opportunity.

One "problem" with western liberal democracies is that the billionaires are not tied to the land. This means that they are less concerned about the future of any one particular country. They can just relocate with ease. It also makes them less likely to invest considerable time and effort in trying to shape any one particular country because some other faction might take over power in a few years and all their work will be lost.

This is in contrast with countries like China where the CCP oligarchs are more or less tied to their country. That is the so called technocracy. It is not that they are any better than western billionaires. They just have no choice but to ensure the future stability of the only country in which the can retain their high status.

Now, I say "problem" because do we really want to recreate a new aristocracy?

What's wrong with aristocracy? It seems like we have not rid ourselves of a single problem that old aristocratic societies had, we only got rid of the benefits and then kept all the bad parts.

Today's rich are not bound by any noblesse oblige, their money can more than ever exclusively benefit far-off places. Instead of building Rome or adding more beauty to Paris, they build gated communities. In patronizing art they tend to only flatter each other, it seems, (though maybe the art world of early Florence or Amsterdam were just as much "insider" art scenes, I don't know.) Beautiful things, especially beautiful cities, are not built anymore. Anything built that might benefit the middle class or lower is totally stripped, economized away. Most beautiful things (buildings, plazas) in cities were built long before high tax rates existed.

Politics is still run by rich families (Bush, Kennedy, Clinton in the US) or rich businessmen (Trump, Bloomberg). Power is still held by the nobility, its just that the nobility is not held to any standards and barely cares for the country they reside in, beyond their gates.

We got rid of a lot of "bad parts". For example we got rid of institutionalized classism whereby certain stations in society were reserved for nobles and royals.

And one other thing facet to think about is that "avoiding collapse" is not necessarily the same as progress. These new aristocrats may decide to give everyone just the very minimum to get by, leaving the masses in a sort of limbo. And then that defeats the whole point of capitalism; the individual is not longer in control of their destiny.

If they aren't creating jobs or otherwise stimulating prosperity, would it be a great loss if they relocated to somewhere else? Due to their political influence, their net impact on society may be negative.

What I am saying is that because they do not care, they stop society from dealing with these problems until it is too late. Climate change is the obvious example.

Climate change is a global problem, so you cannot move countries to escape it. The best you can plan for is to move to minimise its impact on you personally for as long as possible, which is fine if you only expect to live another 30-50 years and don't give a crap about the next generations.

This is an important subject, but a marginal article. Now I have to read more of Weinstein's writings.

There are some key points there. A crucial one is "why did capitalism work"? Some preconditions were required. One seems to be growth. Piketty makes that point at length of course, as have others. Capitalism did not create growth; technology did. Before the Industrial Revolution, GDP in Europe increased by a few percent per century.

Weinstein makes a less common point: the capitalist working and middle class depended on "the ability to train briefly in one's youth so as to acquire a reliable skill that can be repeated consistently with small variance throughout a lifetime, leading to what we've typically called a career or profession". That's broken down. Few people now have the same job for a lifetime. Or even a few years, now. For most people, the return on investment for higher education has gone negative. And, as he points out, any repetitive job is likely to be automated.

Weinstein makes the usual mistake of jumping from trying to identify the problem to proposing solutions. One of Piketty's strengths is that he admits he doesn't have a solution. Proposing solutions too soon turns the problem political too soon.

Weinstein has an incredible resume.[1]

[1] https://www.ineteconomics.org/research/experts/eweinstein

Now I have to read more of Weinstein's writings

Start with the one on how currencies and stocks behave like elementary particles in gauge fields. I stopped there, it was not just bad thinking, but torturous and clumsy twisting of physics bordering on crackpottery, just to jump on the bandwagon while the mainstream economics suffered acute physics envy. Now that mainstream narrative has changed he suddenly discovers philosophical issues and himself an inner philosopher.

I find it disgraceful that as per the linked bio "He delivered the Special Simonyi Lectures at Oxford University in 2013 putting forth a theory he termed “Geometric Unity” to unify the twin geometries (Riemannian and Ehresmannian) thought to ground the two most fundamental physical theories". These are outreach lecutres to lay public. To my knowledge "twin geometries" aren't "thought to ground" anything by anyone else than Eric Weinstein so that's misleading at best. Especially that he apparently didn't bother to write up what he means, even clumsily, much less to publish.

In fact he didn't publish anything in a physics venue ever at all. MathSciNet indexing math journals also returns zilch.

Ouch. Thanks.

It has been said before in many ways but I think it's still true that it's really hard for any human (or system) to change their actions without feedback (sometimes even painful feedback). The richer your are the further you are away from that. Some people of course, will change, but on average it just won't happen.

> Certain fields will need to undergo a process of radical deregulation in order to give the minority of minds that are capable of our greatest feats of creation the leeway to experiment and to play, as they deliver us the wonders on which our future economy will be based

Wow, that's some top-shelf Ayn Randian bullshit. Our only salvation is to let the super-entrepreneurs do whatever they want! No mention of which regulations are so inhibitory, environmental maybe? If only we could dump toxic waste into rivers, then we could turn profits and be happy. /s

It would works amazingly when the goals of self-interest and greed are aligned with what's in the best interest of everyone... And we all know how often that turns out to be true

As an educator, I'm always quite puzzled by comments such as Weinstein's. He states that "we have an educational system that's based on taking our natural penchant for exploration and fashioning it into a willingness to take on mind-numbing routine." But there's a problem: to really learn something deeply, you have to do hard work; it's not all just fun + creativity to grok the inner-workings of a microprocessor (or whatever you're into). So you get forced to go down these paths, with lots of work along the way, so you can finally understand something deep. Only then can you innovate, because you have a solid understanding of the state of the art.

Imagine if he wrote this line instead: "to remind ourselves that the hotel maid who makes up our bed may in fact be a microprocessor designer? The accountant who does our taxes may well have a new surgical procedure that he works on after the midnight hour?" It would just sound ridiculous.

The reality is that study and hard work, all part of the current educational system (esp. at the high end), all are needed to move society forward, not people writing screenplays.

I can’t wait for the current educational system to die. It’s funny, quite a bit of current educational system is based on ideas of Comenius, however he himself would be appalled by the current state.

here is one project which is trying to solve the welth distribution inequality: https://merit.world/

they claim that root cause of inequality comes from the fact that signalling and exchange value of money is nowadays coupled together (i.e. dollar is used for exchange of goods as well as to signal to the public that you a rich person).

they try to separate this two ingredients, so that there will be sort of two currencies, one for exchange, and the other for signalling (kind of likes in facebook world).

Certainly a must read by anyone concerned about our society, politics, and the future. Eric is deep thinker with traditional intellectual roots and a mathematician's disciplined mind.

The problems of late stage capitalism can be attributed in roughly equal portions to ZIRP, cronyism and unfettered globalization. None of the above are endemic to capitalism.

e.g. I saw a brand name 55" TV in Best Buy for $279. That's roughly two day's wages at the new proposed $15/hr minimum wage. Something is deeply busted here. Tariffs are not gonna make dent in consumer demand for a product that is already way too cheap.

ZIRP, it's been shown greatly benefits the 0.1% and has marginal benefits for others. This is basically was Piketty has been decrying, but he seems to miss the dependence on the level of interest rates to the outsized return on capital over the last 40 years.

Cronyism basically explains why Obama put no bankers in jail and AIG was bailed out so they could pay off their end of the world puts to Goldman. And now Trump has his own cronies. However, it's hard to easily prove cronyism has been increasing over the long term, pretty easy to prove over the short term.

Why are cheap TVs a problem? I don't understand that part of what you're saying.

FWIW, I think the biggest missing piece in this discussion is to directly address the lower productivity growth. I think technologically there's plenty of runway still for higher productivity, if we weren't collectively sabotaging ourselves in poorly-understood ways. (Not that I claim to understand just how we're doing it. Only that we're nowhere near the limits of the possible with technology.)

Infuriating interview for almost any socialist today, by which I mean the majority of people who identify with the marxist or (real, actually non-hierarchical and anti-statist) anarchist conception of the word.

Not to mention an embarrassingly bad and mystical account of the beliefs of the "enlightened billionaire class" and an astoundingly ahistorical account of how any rights for the marginalized were won in the 20th century. This is the same "englightened billionaire class" whose extractivist industries are pushing the planet ever closer ecological collapse, massive numbers of climate refugees, increasing militarization over resource control, etc.

To be fair to Weinstein, he is saying that the enlightened self interest of the billionaire class to find a solution to capitalism arises from the threat of insurrection and the collapse their power. He describes Occupy as a peaceful warning shot to the ruling class. Next time they might not get off so easy.

It superficially resembles the Marxist account of the bourgeoisie as responsible for their own downfall ("what the Bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers"), but he ascribes it more to a philanthropic change of heart or concern about their legacy.

> I think it's a combination of both embarrassment and enlightened self-interest that this class — several rungs above my own — is trying to make sure it does not sow the seeds of a highly destructive societal collapse, and I believe I have seen an actual personal transformation in many of the leading thinkers among the technologists, where they have come to care deeply about the effects of their work. Few of them want to be remembered as job killers who destroyed the gains that have accumulated since the Industrial Revolution.

> So I think that in terms of wanting to leave a socially positive legacy, many of them are motivated to innovate through concepts like universal basic income, finding that Washington is as bereft of new ideas in social terms as it is of new technological ones.

I mean the entire idea is bullshit to me. UBI is not socialist and Elon Musk talking about UBI is poor evidence of any sensitivity to the plight of workers or even recognition that things will end badly for them if we stay on course by the bourgeoisie at large.

Fighting the UAW yet talking about UBI isn't being a "woke billionaire" or something, that's absurd.

It plays better than saying that at least some portion of the rich recognize that the current course is unsustainable and will result in violent revolution or asset seizure, and so they are willing to work towards finding some sort of solution out of self interest.

Throughout history the main problem of the ruling class was to find the balance between keeping in power and enriching themselves without the pushing the mob too far and revolting and killing them. This is no different.

It sounds like the current billionaires still think they are entitled to be super rich and should control the world but they also want to feel good about themselves.

It was a frustrating read, but for what it's worth, he does raise the point that capitalism is powered by growth and that the growth began to go haywire in the 70s. He is correct that what comes after capitalism will be very different, he just appears to be completely unaware of the centuries of thinking that has gone into this.

He doesn't even mention the nearest socialist idea next to private capitalism, market socialism powered by worker cooperatives. That of course has its own problems, but come on, even a mention of that would have made me feel like he or the interviewer had done some homework. Instead I feel like they've noticed a few of the problems Marx did in the 1800s and are bantering about context free.

The media class and their billionaire friends consistently discuss technological change as having completely changed the economy such that Marxist analysis doesn't hold. I'm not convinced. Some of Marx's ideas ware that capitalism would routinely automate and disrupt routinized activity while leaving no safety net for the workers. It would scatter workers, break up every social structure, leave workers alienated from their work and social relations, and leave workers without salable labor with nothing.

This is in contrast to pre-capitalist modes of production that tied peasants to the land or to other feudal relations. Today's peasants have nothing securely, not even housing, and are entirely precarious save for the liberal welfare state that is being torn asunder by the capitalist counterattack on labor since at least the '70s.

I would posit that we are merely encountering extreme conditions in this analysis, but that our abilities as technologists blind us to this reality as our labor is still salable, and the VCs will help us start companies by lending us their money.

Sure, but a concern about growth and technological revolutions is just as easily found in Keynesian economists works. The conception of socialism here is just regurgitating Hayek's understanding of socialism in "The Road To Serfdom" as fundamentally being about "big government", which is woefully disconnected from the writings of almost every socialist (government centralization is theorized method of implementing the socialist mode of production by some socialists, but it's not fundamentally the point nor is there an understanding of welfare reforms as being "more socialist" by any Marxist I know). Or it's confusing what some socialists agitate for against neoliberal revanchism as their ultimate aims. Either way I wish these people would read a single work by a socialist or have some understanding of the schools of thought within socialism before making these hilariously misinformed pronouncements. It might even challenge their understanding of the "enlightened billionaire class".

Definitely agreed that the eagerness to write off Marx is related to a misunderstanding of what Marx actually said though.

I added the part about the Welfare State because that's what we have today that favors workers, not because that's socialism. It's a manifestation of social democracy, I'm in agreement with you.

> Why capitalism won’t survive without socialism.

This is nothing new. In the last century there was a movement for a "third way" which meant some kind of compromise between Capitalism and Socialism. The goal was to combine Capitalism and Socialism to somehow create a hybrid with all the advantages and wealth creation of Capitalism combined with the socialist goals of the welfare state and other boondoggles. This is an impossible goal and the two systems cannot be combined, mixed or grafted together. They really are opposites and any hybrid is unstable.

You (you, specifically) either have the right to live your life as you see fit or you are fodder for the state's goals and plans, regardless of the rationalization or your agreement with such plans. The end point and most consistent form of Socialism is Communism which is an evil system of sacrifice of all to all. Fascism is also a type of Socialism and also based on sacrificing the individual to state, nation or race and equally deadly. Explain to me; what does Capitalism, historically the freest and most productive and pro-life political/economic system have to gain by combining with any variant of Socialism, systems that have a track record of mass death and destruction?

What makes these debates impossible to resolve is that the current system is not Capitalism but a mixed system of freedoms and controls which, by the logic of events, is driven toward some variant of Socialism as the dominant ethics demands.

Saving Capitalism requires a new ethical system that holds individual rights as an absolute and that a major evil is the sacrifice of the individual to the state, regardless of its form. Weinstein needs to get out of politics or economics or technology and start thinking very hard about ethics.

> The end point and most consistent form of Socialism is Communism which is an evil system of sacrifice of all to all.

Almost every "communist" state perceived themselves as a state in the socialist mode of production for which communism had not been reached yet. There were "communist parties" in these states that were seen as overseers of the task of transitioning to communism and "communist" became a convenient shorthand in the west for the governments of second world nations. "USSR" means "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics".

Furthermore, the organization of society under ML(M) countries was not perceived to be socialist by theorists from the left communist, trotskyist, syndicalist, and anarchist traditions of socialism who developed ideas like state capitalism, the degenerated workers state, and bureaucratic collectivism to characterize the USSR and their satellites. For many of these theorists, the fact that the USSR had commodity production and waged labor made them non-socialist (libertarian communists go further and suggest that the punitive state apparatus is incompatible with socialism as well).

> Fascism is also a type of Socialism and also based on sacrificing the individual to state, nation or race and equally deadly. Explain to me; what does Capitalism, historically the freest and most productive and pro-life political/economic system have to gain by combining with any variant of Socialism, systems that have a track record of mass death and destruction?

This is Hayek's characterization in "The Road To Serfdom", which has been strongly rebuked by almost every socialist and expert historian on fascism I'm aware of including Robert Paxton, Ernesto Laclau, and Umberto Eco.

It can't account for the fact that fascisms "anti-capitalist" threats were almost always tied to a kind of national chauvinism that attacked "rootless cosmopolitans" and other anti-semitic and nationalist imagined boogiemen (Nazism for instance went to great lengths to distinguish between "Jewish capital" and "productive capital"). To the extent that industries were expropriated, it was to consolidate a national identity and dispossess perceived national enemies, however the fascists also pumped millions into the national bourgeoisie and arms manufacturers with no interest in collectivizing them. Oskar Schindler is only comprehensible with this understanding, as a German national who was well integrated into the nazi party and saw fascist Germany as an opportunity to extract greater profits with the fascist laws setting wages for Jewish people.

Fascists greatly deemphasized class conflict, killed socialists in the earliest days of their rule, purged or killed the Strasserist third-positionist members from their ranks (don't mistake that for sympathy with Strasserists, they were just as bad, even if they're sometimes characterized as "the left wing of the Nazis"), outlawed unions, lowered the wages of workers, and waged battles in pursuit of imperialist conquest. A large part of fascism's success must be traced to collaboration with the national bourgeoisie and urban petty bourgeoisie as a reaction to the enormous growth of socialist parties in Germany, Italy, Spain, and Russia. A socialism that allied with the bourgeoisie and preserved private property rights and their accumulation of capital is an absolutely baffling idea.

In almost no sense are they legible as "socialist" and it's telling that Hayak was quick to characterize them as such yet worked for his mentor von Mises while he was an economic advisor to Austrian fascists (von Mises also went on to characterize fascism as a movement which "for the moment, saved European Culture").

That's not even getting into the attitudes of every socialist of the time, which you can read about in almost every work published by a socialist after 1922 (and especially in the works of socialists under fascist regimes such as Antonio Gramsci).

Socialism is not "government centralization" and to say this is to basically ignore the entire body of works of socialists informed by the Marxist tradition (which is to say, basically every socialist of the past 150 years even if they don't call themselves a "Marxist"). Socialism and capitalism are completely irreconcilable modes of production, and the only people who claim otherwise are generally social democrats and third-positionist fascists (for both of whom, socialism means partial nationalization of industries).

Socialism and capitalism as opposite poles on a gradient of "anti-statism" is a convenient characterization for right libertarians who are happy to use the former USSR as a boogieman and completely brush over the coercive state apparatuses in every capitalist state (what are Angola, San Quentin, Rikers, etc. if not gulags?) that has ever existed and the fact that property rights and commercial exchange are features of a society that requires a state to enforce them. The "freest and most pro-life economic system" which was built on the transatlantic slave trade and genocide and dispossession of indigenous people from their lands (and which has been at continuous war with countries from the global south since after WW2).

One thing I meant to add before the edit window closed - this is the most baffling part of your argument to me:

> Explain to me; what does Capitalism, historically the freest and most productive and pro-life political/economic system have to gain by combining with any variant of Socialism, systems that have a track record of mass death and destruction?

> What makes these debates impossible to resolve is that the current system is not Capitalism but a mixed system of freedoms and controls which, by the logic of events, is driven toward some variant of Socialism as the dominant ethics demands.

In this incoherent account of history, you believe capitalism to have the most historical successes of any economic system, yet current systems to be unrepresentative of capitalism? No doubt there's a delta, capitalist economies are not transhistorically invariant, but (entertaining your understanding of what it means to be capitalist) do you really think post-feudal nations (for instance, 17th-18th century England or 19th century Germany) had small or weakly coercive states? When did "capitalism" begin and end in your opinion?

The irony is heightened because the delta between now and post-feudal societies is largely a result of workers agitating for additional rights and welfare reforms, something you'd think a supporter of "individual liberties" would support.

I don't consider the soviet bloc states to be socialist so I don't find this to be a good argument in any case, but I always find it interesting that proponents of capitalism have a slippery account of what is capitalist that rejects or embraces societies as capitalist to fit a narrative of the system's success when its convenient (while often accusing libertarian socialists of advocating something "impossible" or without historical precedent).

I identified the basic principle by which to judge societies, i.e. individual rights, regardless of what the social/political/economic system is called by their advocates or detractors nor the details of their legal manifestation. Does the society sacrifice individuals to the collective? That is the essential and though there are many variants I don't think it is complicated to understand, though you may disagree.

I think your whole approach is flawed because you are viewing these questions from a political or economic angle whereas I claim the Capitalism versus Socialism debate is really about ethics. I think it is telling that you ignored my last paragraph where I made that important point. Nobody has consistently defended or implemented Capitalism because it rests on the ethic of selfishness which is in conflict with the predominant ethic of today. In earlier times one was taught to sacrifice to the King or God and the only modern contribution to ethics has been to substitute Society for God or King. Capitalism was born of that past era and its moral foundation of selfishness was implicit from the beginning. The advocates of Socialism, in all its variants, have attempted to either destroy Capitalism outright or to somehow leash it to serve so-called "social good". There is nothing incoherent about that argument unless you fail to see that these two political/economic systems derive from fundamentally different and incompatible ethical systems.

Finally, I have read almost all of what von Mises wrote and I think your are misrepresenting or misunderstanding him when you claim he advocated fascism. This is factually wrong and an insult to a consistent advocate of individual rights and freedom and staunch opponent of socialism. Moreover, if you know the works of Mises you must know that he proved that Socialism cannot work economically. Without free markets to develop a meaningful price system Socialism cannot solve the problem of economic calculation. This fact is demonstrated historically where the socialists countries had to use prices determined out side their system in freer countries so that bureaucrats could make some semblance of rational plans. Without those prices socialist countries would have collapse much sooner than they did, and it demonstrates that Socialism is in fact a parasite on free societies and not a viable social system.

> I identified the basic principle by which to judge societies, i.e. individual rights, regardless of what the social/political/economic system is called by their advocates or detractors nor the details of their legal manifestation. Does the society sacrifice individuals to the collective? That is the essential and though there are many variants I don't think it is complicated to understand, though you may disagree.

Advocates of capitalism argue that it's lead to the greatest increase in prosperity and decrease in poverty in the history of the world, yet also argue that extreme poverty faced by some is an acceptable cost for these benefits. Is this an argument in service of the collective against the individual? Furthermore, which individuals does capitalism preserve the rights of? Enslaved peoples? Those who have been dispossessed of their lands? Those who have been strong-armed into the expropriation of their natural resources and had their governments deposed by capitalist states?

It's not even clear what "individual" and "collective" mean as these are not necessarily opposite poles or even coherently separable things. Individual health and wellbeing have social effects and vice versa. Except for nomadic and extremely rare instances of people isolated from society, the wellbeing of a society has extremely tangible and obvious effects on individuals and their rights. If the USSR was socialist, what do the NKVD and work camps have to do with benefitting the collective?

If capitalists are great advocates of the rights of individuals, do they venerate the right to steal? The right to squat in vacant homes? This entire framing is incoherent without an agreement on what the rights of individuals are, which will _necessarily_ privilege the rights of certain individuals over others, as the valid expression of individuals in a system of ethics are demarcations of where society says their agency as individuals begins and ends.

> I think your whole approach is flawed because you are viewing these questions from a political or economic angle whereas I claim the Capitalism versus Socialism debate is really about ethics. I think it is telling that you ignored my last paragraph where I made that important point. Nobody has consistently defended or implemented Capitalism because it rests on the ethic of selfishness which is in conflict with the predominant ethic of today. In earlier times one was taught to sacrifice to the King or God and the only modern contribution to ethics has been to substitute Society for God or King. Capitalism was born of that past era and its moral foundation of selfishness was implicit from the beginning. The advocates of Socialism, in all its variants, have attempted to either destroy Capitalism outright or to somehow leash it to serve so-called "social good". There is nothing incoherent about that argument unless you fail to see that these two political/economic systems derive from fundamentally different and incompatible ethical systems.

Again, what does this even mean? There is no definition of an individual's rights in a system of ethics that does not simultaneously circumscribe the agency of other individuals. "Selfishness" is a hand-wavy term used to heighten the sense that individuals will enjoy great autonomy and agency under your system of ethics (if also requiring them to orient their thinking towards their immediate prosperity and enrichment), yet that autonomy can only be guaranteed by its protection from interference by other individuals.

Socialism and capitalism are modes of production, they're not ethical systems. Socialism was developed as an idea in response to the relations of power in a classed, capitalist society, and while various socialists have denounced things like greed, egotism, etc. Marx also emphasized the possibilities for individuals to pursue a fulfilling life under socialism. Even if I were to buy into your notion of the individual and collective as coherently separable entities, your account of this as essential to the difference between socialism and capitalism has to be tied to the ways in which people use these words. Fascism has always declared itself to be an enemy of socialism (and vice versa) so clearly there's problems with your understanding of the socially constructed meaning of these words (and therefore the weird conception of their ethical foundations you borrow from von Mises).

The ethical dichotomy you're referencing is from von Mises where he's basically trying to copy Max Weber's sociological investigation into protestant work ethic as informing capitalism, but his argument is so clumsy and incoherent (especially conceptually) and he doesn't have a convincing historical account like Weber to bolster his argument.

> Finally, I have read almost all of what von Mises wrote and I think your are misrepresenting or misunderstanding him when you claim he advocated fascism. This is factually wrong and an insult to a consistent advocate of individual rights and freedom and staunch opponent of socialism.

Look up Engelbert Dollfuss, the guy who von Mises literally provided economic guidance to. Von Mises preferred liberal capitalism, no doubt, but he was more than happy to make an alliance with fascists when labor militancy was high and socialists were gaining broad public support in Europe. This was mirrored by capitalist countries supporting authoritarian semi-fascist regimes like Pinochet, Marcos, Batista, the Brazilian military government of 1964, etc.

Yet another example of the ethics of capitalism that ostensibly prioritizes "the rights of individuals".

> Moreover, if you know the works of Mises you must know that he proved that Socialism cannot work economically. Without free markets to develop a meaningful price system Socialism cannot solve the problem of economic calculation.

von Mises did not "prove" anything. He makes a lazy argument that money as a unit of accounts is necessary to make informed decisions about the production of goods in an economy because he can't conceive of any other way an economy might incorporate value judgements. Then he basically underplays how woefully inadequate and irrational price signaling is in practice under capitalist economies. You would basically get laughed at by any economist today for making this argument because of it's hand-wavy account of money being "flawed but good enough" and a failure to engage with any of the ideas about production planning under socialism.

It doesn't even say socialism is flawed or inefficient, it says it's _impossible_ because an economy without money would involve judgements about production that would essentially be blind leaps, which is basically closing his imagination to any of the myriad ways that have been proposed for valuation and planning under socialism.

I assume he thinks that because Marx doesn't go into this (because Marx is mostly concerned with the relations of production, the alienation of the worker from their labor, and class antagonisms in society, not a specific method of economic calculation) that there are no socialists with answers to this question.

He doesn't even understand Marx's understanding of private property (aka ownership of means of production by which the owner or owners retain exclusive rights of the profits generated via labor by others) and thinks it has something to do with unitary control by a single body of economic planning. Ironically many industries in capitalist states meet the criteria for his definition of socialist firms.

> This fact is demonstrated historically where the socialists countries had to use prices determined out side their system in freer countries so that bureaucrats could make some semblance of rational plans. Without those prices socialist countries would have collapse much sooner than they did, and it demonstrates that Socialism is in fact a parasite on free societies and not a viable social system.

I don't agree that the USSR was socialist nor do I think their method of economic planning was worth copying, but Russia transformed from a backwoods feudal and partially capitalist society to an industrialized developed nation and the second largest economy in the world under their system. If that's socialist to you, it certainly debunks von Mises notion of it being "impossible".

> Socialism and capitalism are modes of production, they're not ethical systems.

I never said they were ethical systems. I said they rest on incompatible ethical systems or theories. This is where the debate lies, not in politics nor economics (i.e., production) where the question cannot be answered.

Politics and economics presuppose an answer to what is the good. Socialism, in all its variants, holds that sacrificing individuals for the benefit of "society" is the good. Since "society" is just a collection of individuals it has to mean in practice the sacrificing of some individuals for the benefit of others. This is its present and historical track record and an unavoidable consequence of that premise which can't be dismissed as an accident of history, errors, personalities or bad men but by design.

On the other hand, Capitalism rests on the opposite view that the individual is paramount and the purpose of the government (i.e. legal and political system) is to protect the individual from others violating his rights. The individual's right essentially amounts to the freedom to take action and the right to property. The govt's role is to protect the rights and property of its citizens from predation of others, including the govt itself. 51% of the people voting to expropriate the property of the other 49% does not make it moral, i.e., democratic socialism is an oxymoron. If the individual is paramount and his rights are protected by law, police and social norms, i.e. he is free, then capitalism is the economic system of production that develops.

Finally, every single one of your replies on this thread are long, overly-complicated, convoluted rationalizations for socialism that are not meant to illuminate the discussion but obfuscate it. Perhaps you don't even know it but you use the exact same arguments that were used last century to spread socialism across the globe and the death of millions. These arguments won't work in this century and last century, for various reasons, people fell for socialism and accepted it voluntarily. That won't happen this time around so you are wasting your time with intellectual arguments, socialism will have to be imposed by force. Do you have the stomach for that battle?

> Politics and economics presuppose an answer to what is the good. Socialism, in all its variants, holds that sacrificing individuals for the benefit of "society" is the good. Since "society" is just a collection of individuals it has to mean in practice the sacrificing of some individuals for the benefit of others.

Again, re-read what I said. Capitalism is also based on judgements that prioritize the benefit of some versus others. "Individual" vs "society" is an incoherent framing of rights because people exist as both individuals and members of a society. "Individual rights" are rights conferred to the collective, and are also rights that necessarily circumscribe what other people are allowed to do. Pretending like this isn't the case is just letting your ideology cloud your perception of what rights are "natural" or whatever.

> This is its present and historical track record and an unavoidable consequence of that premise which can't be dismissed as an accident of history, errors, personalities or bad men but by design.

Your knowledge of history is absolutely garbage and you've just ignored every reference to history I've brought up WRT capitalism and fascism, so why should anyone care what you think about this?

> On the other hand, Capitalism rests on the opposite view that the individual is paramount and the purpose of the government (i.e. legal and political system) is to protect the individual from others violating his rights. The individual's right essentially amounts to the freedom to take action and the right to property. The govt's role is to protect the rights and property of its citizens from predation of others, including the govt itself.

Even the framing of "positive" vs "negative" rights admits that all rights confer duties on people and circumscribe their agency, and any philosopher worth listening to will admit that _all_ rights have both positive and negative duties. "Individual" vs "collective" rights are absolutely meaningless. This is the slight of hand in the liberal tradition that ultimately reduces to rights that are perceived to be axiomatic and "natural" in some way and therefore "individual" because it fits your weak ass ideology's account of what it represents.

> 51% of the people voting to expropriate the property of the other 49% does not make it moral, i.e., democratic socialism is an oxymoron. If the individual is paramount and his rights are protected by law, police and social norms, i.e. he is free, then capitalism is the economic system of production that develops.

You even admit here that the police and law have to enforce your "individual rights", which is an implicit acknowledgement that they circumscribe the agency of others. But I'll take the acknowledgement (finally) that capitalism requires a statist carceral system. That's a start.

> Finally, every single one of your replies on this thread are long, overly-complicated, convoluted rationalizations for socialism that are not meant to illuminate the discussion but obfuscate it.

Learn to read pal, this is pretty minuscule in comparison to the political pamphlets and treatises that defined the ideas we're discussing. And stop using this cop out to ignore what I've said.

> Perhaps you don't even know it but you use the exact same arguments that were used last century to spread socialism across the globe and the death of millions. These arguments won't work in this century and last century, for various reasons, people fell for socialism and accepted it voluntarily. That won't happen this time around so you are wasting your time with intellectual arguments, socialism will have to be imposed by force. Do you have the stomach for that battle?

lol if the only socialist movements you're willing to acknowledge are ML(M) ones that almost uniformly happened in feudalist states under immense social upheaval, you're going to have this incredibly dumb and skewed perception of what socialism means. Expropriation doesn't require violence, and there's historical examples of socialists who have expropriated without violence beyond self-defense. Furthermore it's ironic that you internalize the same bullshit "dialectical materialism" ideas about the deterministic nature of history that some of the socialists you use as a boogieman also liked quite a bit.

Hell even capitalist revolutions had expropriation and violence. What do you think happened in the American Revolution? Whose property rights were protected and which individual rights were preserved against "the collective"? You're just going to ignore this like every other reference to history I've brought up, so I dunno why I bother.

If you're going to actually respond to my points, I'm happy to continue the conversation, but otherwise stop wasting my time.

> so why should anyone care what you think about this?

> because it fits your weak ass ideology's account of what it represents.

> Learn to read pal

> And stop using this cop out to ignore what I've said.

Looks like I hit a nerve. Set aside all the BS and answer the question. On what moral grounds does Socialism justify confiscating property and sacrificing lives? We can certainly disagree about what is or is not Capitalism but this is what Socialism does and you know it. BTW, this is my original point; the Capitalism -vs- Socialism debate cannot be answered in politics or economics, your efforts notwithstanding. It is an ethical question that you are evading and ultimately will lose.

> Expropriation doesn't require violence, and there's historical examples of socialists who have expropriated without violence beyond self-defense.

I selected this out of all of what you wrote because it perfectly illustrates the (poor) level of your thinking. This claim is a clear self-contradiction. The opposite of expropriation is a voluntary trade or donation. To say that property or lives can be expropriated without violence is complete non-sense. The fact that socialism disarms the victims and controls the legal system so as to threaten violence if the expropriation is opposed is a massive evasion of the facts. Moreover, the rest of your thoughts on this are a mish-mash of equivocations, false analogies, contradictions, irrelevancies, misrepresentation and other errors.

No, I have no interest in identifying all these errors in your essay because that (should be) your responsibility. I will only give one example regarding rights. You equivocate on its meaning by claiming that societies or collective have "rights". Only individuals have rights because only individuals need them to live in society free of interference from others. In modern parlance it is called freedom. Moreover, joining a collective does not grant you extra power to expropriate other people's property, i.e, the power to violate THEIR rights. That is mob rule even if you vote on it or do it under the cover of the law.

>If you're going to actually respond to my points, I'm happy to continue the conversation, but otherwise stop wasting my time.

I am not going to respond to your points because I refuse to get sucked into a pointless discussion of politics or economics. It is pointless to discuss these topics until you explicitly state your ethics and justification for expropriation under Socialism. Moreover, as is typical of a socialist, you put the blame on me for wasting your time but that is entirely your choice, not mine.

> Looks like I hit a nerve. Set aside all the BS and answer the question. On what moral grounds does Socialism justify confiscating property and sacrificing lives? We can certainly disagree about what is or is not Capitalism but this is what Socialism does and you know it. BTW, this is my original point; the Capitalism -vs- Socialism debate cannot be answered in politics or economics, your efforts notwithstanding. It is an ethical question that you are evading and ultimately will lose.

This is weak ass "u mad" stuff because you can't respond to anything I've said. Rapidly alternating between referencing history and refusing to respond to points in return that also reference history makes your argument look weak and makes you sound like an ass.

> I selected this out of all of what you wrote because it perfectly illustrates the (poor) level of your thinking. This claim is a clear self-contradiction. The opposite of expropriation is a voluntary trade or donation. To say that property or lives can be expropriated without violence is complete non-sense.

lol most people would not consider taxation or squatting or repossessing capital assets "violence". Ask I dunno, anyone if they'd think that

> The fact that socialism disarms the victims and controls the legal system so as to threaten violence if the expropriation is opposed is a massive evasion of the facts. Moreover, the rest of your thoughts on this are a mish-mash of equivocations, false analogies, contradictions, irrelevancies, misrepresentation and other errors.

This is not what socialism is. Please stop referencing history if you flatly refuse to engage with any of my references to history, and especially if you don't even understand what you're talking about. lol the "this is flim flam fiddle faddle" remark at the end is convincing to nobody if you don't actually engage w/ the arguments in a concrete way.

> Ask I dunno, anyone if they'd think that

LOL, talk about weak. So now your argument is "everyone agrees with ME". That is not an argument and is a logical fallacy.

>This is not what socialism is. Please stop referencing history if you flatly refuse to engage with any of my references to history

I think you know this is exactly what socialism is but you refuse to admit it. It is impossible to have a discussion in a vacuum without any reference to history, that is a strawman representation of my position. My position, and my original post comment, was that the Capitalism -vs- Socialism debate can't be resolved with discussions about politics, economics or technology and that it is essentially an ethical debate not that history in these fields is irrelevant. Moreover, the fact is (and you are proof of this) that one cannot even comprehend historical facts or even economic systems without first identifying the ethical system that underlie them. Your ignorance on these issues is a direct result of your ignorance of the ethical issues.

Like Weinstein, you need to get out of politics and economics and study ethics if you are sincere about understanding Capitalism -vs- Socialism debate. If you disagree with me on that point then feel free to move on.

lol buddy you've patently ignored every reference to history I've made, you're not entitled to a captive audience. Engage in the discourse or don't. If you want to go back and actually address all the points I've made thus far instead of disregarding it as nonsense that's below you, I'll wait and I'll address the history you're bringing up after you're done. Otherwise fuck off.

>Otherwise fuck off.

Where does the hostility come from? Let us not forget the context -- you posted on MY sub-thread comment where I claimed that the Socialism -vs- Capitalism debate is an ethical question not about economics nor political. If the tables were turned and you posted your long drivel on the economics and politics of Socialism and Capitalism (according to you) and I tried to hijack the thread and demand that you argue ethics, well, I think you would be bit perplexed and perhaps a little angry for the unfair imposition.

I have been clear from the beginning on my view (you are free to disagree) and that I am not interested in getting sucked into the details and minutia of politics and economics nor pointless discussions on what is or is not Socialism without defining the ethical premises. Both Socialism and Capitalism rest on different ethical systems and if you are a serious advocate of Socialism I highly recommend that you study ethics. If you want to spout non-sense unopposed with many "upvotes" perhaps you should take this discussion to reddit.com/r/latestagecapitalism, you will be at home there or on reddit in general because everyone agrees with you.

Yeah I gave you a lot of criticism about your framing of the "ethical systems" underlying these two modes of production from a philosophical perspective and you refused to discuss those as well. And this isn't "your thread" like its your living room or some shit, that's not how discussion has ever worked online. Engage in the discourse or don't.

I will give you a hint in your foray into ethics; Men are not ants or bees.

> On what moral grounds does Socialism justify confiscating property and sacrificing lives? We can certainly disagree about what is or is not Capitalism but this is what Socialism does and you know it.

With regard to “confiscating property”, I disagree that socialism does this simply because it had a different model of what are property rights than capitalism, anymore than capitalism does simply because it fails to recognize as property rights some things that were considered property rights under feudalism.

As for “killing people”, while I see how that's true of, say, Leninism, I don't see how it's true of any of the socialist models that build on rather than bypass capitalist development (abandoning that was where Leninism diverged from Marxism.)

It is a very old rationalization that the killing under socialist systems is only due to a bad man and not the system. You need to think, not about the politics, legal structure or the economics of the social system but the underlying ethical assumptions on which it depends. If society is superior to the individual then sacrificing individuals to social goals is inherent in the system, not an accident of history.

It wasn't "one bad man", but it was a product of history. It's not a fucking coincidence that the Gulag system strongly resembled the Tsar's Siberian prison camps. There are pretty obvious reasons for what happened that have nothing to do with "the underlying ethical system", which you still can't elaborate on in a philosophically coherent way.

Also the USSR had waged labor, commodity production, bosses, and prison camps so it fails to meet several (basically all?) criteria of socialism that many people would claim except for Marxist Leninists (and even Maoists have a lot of disagreement about this).

You're fixated on this goofy "ethical system" explanation, but whenever you're challenged with history or to account for the violence inherent in capitalist systems you balk.

And the convictions of revolutionaries, their interpretation of what was required for a transition to socialism, etc. is extremely salient to a discussion of how socialism plays out in practice (despite the fact that you shrug this off as "politics" and "economics", yet another form of argument that must be beneath your pious bullshit), and there were in fact examples in history to demonstrate this.

I was replying to dragonwriter, not you.

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