Seems like awfully political content to me
265 karma · joined February 16, 2017
When I've (accurately and politely) pushed back on ahistorical anticommunist narratives in the past, I've been rate-limited and warned by HN mods. While commenting on the economics of the USSR in a post about... the economics of the USSR versus other countries, for example. And this is as someone highly critical of the USSR.
Note that there are already various ahistorical anticommunist comments above. Unfortunately, due to the way in which this tragedy entered the public consciousness in different countries, it is a very political topic.
Right?
And it being popular doesn't justify it, it's just an invasion of privacy that many people put up with (or are unaware of).
An incorrect perspective. Fascism is sacrificing one set of the ownership class for another, diverting populism directed against a hostile liberal economic system to only part of that class while giving more power to the rest of it. Fascism is characterized by privatization, not central planning, with a subset of the bourgeoisie gaining vast new powers in comparison. You could even ask Mussolini himself about this in his comments about how fascism should more correctly be called corporatism - and see his transition from opportunistic socialist to opportunistic fascist serving key bourgeois individuals and their interests.
> The rest of this argument is not likely to be fruitful unless you can critically examine your notions surrounding property and violence.
I can critically examine them and always have been able to. Should I interpret this to actually mean, "until you change your opinions on them"? I figured there would be an accompanying pushback about them, but I don't see one.
> Theres also a healthy amount of revisionist historical thinking that seeks to whitewash the terrible conditions created by communist countries.
Again, this seems to just be, "I disagree". A fruitful conversation would be one where we can have a discussion and real exchange, not vague dismissiveness.
> I'm not interested in debating matters of fact here so thank you for your replies and your perspective.
Historical and economic analyses are rarely simple matters of fact and this is a subject where dealing with other perspectives is a necessity. None of what we're discussing is at the level of simple facts, they are interpretations depending on a large set of suppositions and historical knowledge.
But I welcome a discussion.
When looking at explanations for failure, only the most proximal analyses are given credence in pop culture (The Schuerer report was days before the fall of the DDR) and no holistic analysis is considered. To be scientific and historical about this, one must consider the alternative hypotheses, the greater picture and burdens. Let's consider one simple one: the extractive nature of western imperial economics - transferring wealth from the global south to itself. To what extent can you reject the hypothesis that a significant explanatory factor in the economic success of West Germany is the disproportionate value received from these exploitative relationships? Is it considered in the analyses and conclusions drawn? If not, why not? It seems like a very relevant question to me - there are countless examples of capitalist countries with far, far, far worse outcomes than communist ones, and they tend to be in the Global South.
I'm not denying that communists have had international ambitions, only that your description was accurate. And the actual internationalists (Trotskyists) have never had power or organized around it. Extant communist countries were/are part of the idea of "socialism in one country" and tended to fight battles of national liberation or build up arms without actually invading distant countries (in contrast to Western countries).
> "the state is always an instrument of class warfare" I'm justifying western imperialism by referring to the nature of the class struggle as characterized by communists. You're not going to convince anyone by denying that communists were interested in spreading their ideology to other countries tries by force
I would challenge anyone to name a communist country that attempted to export their ideology by force subject to the following reasonable conditions:
(1) They can't be really weird dictators supported / propped up by a Western anticommunist power dead-set on killing other communists.
(2) Can't name the Eastern bloc, as it was a product of a defensive countering of a genocidal campaign by Nazis (Lebensraum).
> and you're not going to convince capitalists by pointing out how successful we were at stopping communist aggression.
What aggression?
> how patrician of you
Not really, I'm referring to a literally feudal monarchy that had very limited regional power.
> quality of life was pretty bad leading up to the fall, that's why it fell.
It very much isn't.
> observing that you can conscript a bunch of farmers to invade outlying countries and steal their grain, then feed those of the survivors you haven't tortured to death in gulags is hardly an argument.
Do you believe that's an accurate summary of the USSR becoming a superpower?
> I'd be more impressed by the superpower claim if it wasn't the case that the USSR went bankrupt trying to compete as a superpower.
It didn't. It was eaten from the inside by a political power grab. However, spending on the military vs. everything else did contribute to support for that power grab.
> can you sell your labor or the product thereof for a price of your choosing? Can you buy tools for work and control them as your own property, inclusive of charging rent for their usage? These are QoL issues that are relevant to workers.
Just to be clear, you're listing examples for why communist countries didn't work or significantly improve over their past ways of being? I don't see why this constitutes not working or improving.
> Capital is the means of production and it requires maintenance and planning, if capital is not maintained and replaced it wears out and breaks and is no longer capital. The planners in the USSR knew this well and that's why they had so much trouble keeping the system going when they wielded authoritarian powers. They couldn't keep the capital running because they lacked price signals in order to obtain information about scarcity relative to demand. Those public programs had run out of value to reallocate.
How convenient that the capital ran out at the exact moment that color revolutions occurred and liberal parties took power, years and years apart from one another!
> Yes, ideology is good for justifying terrible things. Thats why we require that people are allowed to criticize ideology.
My point is, of course, that the ideology I'm referring to is consistent, in addition to having a rationale, whereas the alternative being discussed is incoherent.
> Yet liberal democracy still falls victim to the paradox of tolerance. Hence the desire to prohibit ideas and ideologies that would overthrow civil society.
I'm referring to days, weeks, months after deposing communist party rule. Unless you grant that "civil society" existed there already, then there's nothing to overthrow. In reality, it is an illiberal power grab dictated by servicing of capital, a ridiculous farce of the multi-party democracies that protesters had demanded.
> Actually I question your grasp of the foundational ideas of "The West", whatever that is.
I think it's pretty clear what "The West" refers to relative to communist countries.
But thanks for the personal jab!
> I'm not sure your criticism of The West is apt when it is those several countries that fail to heed their respective majorities in returning to authoritarian central planning.
Seems apt to me. Good talk, good talk.
> Perhaps you are falling victim to the authoritarian's paradox here. Perhaps those democracies are simply engaged in the sort of central planning that is necessary to sustain a society, the kind of central planning that the communist republics they replaced were unable to stomach.
Those "democracies" were privatizing, not pushing a different form of central planning.
Unfortunately, there is a very selectively-enforced limit on political content that has resulted in me being rate-limited, so I'm unable to respond to you in a timely manner anymore. I'd point you at some resources but I feel like that's condescending. Hilariously, this is pretty relevant to your civil society comment - online spaces have no public commons, they are all dictated and censored by whoever owns them, with serious networking effects that place them under the control of large (and censorious) corporations that treat liberal (capitalist) views as normative and non-political.
It does. Many socialists want to (and do) use markets as part of their desired transition. Capitalism is not actually pro-market by default, it just uses markets to accumulate capital. Left to its own devices, anticompetitive (i.e., anti-market) behaviors always arise.
Capitalism vs. socialism is not markets vs. a planned economy. It's about who owns the means of production.
> Socialism (absent central planning) doesn't have a means of allocating capital, so no one has ever tried it for long.
China's doing it right now via state capitalism, erring on a side where they allow capitalists to exist in an extremely controlled fashion and they regularly jail or put to death those who violate their rules - or they seize segments of industry. Socialists often create transitional plans where they maintain much of the same system but with significant curtailing of private property.
Other socialist countries / groups have operated largely by collectives, where initial capital is raised jointly with the government but once a venture is going it self-sustains as a collective bringing in new capital and divying it up by and to workers. Vietnam runs a mixed system where this is the dominant mode of production (the other is a China-style "controlled" capitalism).
Socialism is also a pretty wide brush. Rojava is communalist and local councils are the primary vehicle for regulating and controlling production. EZLN is anarchist-ish and nearly everything is a collective or co-op, with workers pooling capital to start a venture but also working within it and sharing alike. There are many ways to do socialism.
> When they do, everything falls to the tragedy of the commons.
I'm not sure what this is referring to.
> Even authoritarian socialists agree to this.
No such thing as "authoritarian socialists". That's not a self-identity or an ideology, but a pejorative produced by liberals and the folks that take that libertarian-made political compass too seriously.
> Socialist anarchists have various opinions but agree that socialist organization is an unsolved problem.
Anarchists tend to think that it isn't even a problem. Once they win, they depend on self-organization.
> No one is prevented from setting up a socialist organization in capitalist countries, its merely the case that when they do, they aren't able to externalize their costs and they don't achieve very much.
I mean, socialists can organize a party or something within a capitalist country, but you can't do socialism within a capitalist country. The entire system's function is dictated by capitalism - a co-op, for example, is still competing with all the other capitalist companies and has to follow the rules set up for them or perish.
Not sure what you mean by externalizing costs. If you're thinking of co-ops, they absolutely can and do externalize costs.
> Then all forms of what you consider to be socialism will fail because of plunder.
I don't see why.
> yeah, its not cool to mess with other people's stuff. that's the problem here.
Depends on what that stuff is. Private property is distinguished from personal property in a socialist view.
> Maybe if "getting a footing" wasn't synonymous with expropriating the capitalists this wouldn't happen.
If socialists weren't socialist this wouldn't happen? This doesn't make any sense and it doesn't address the point.
> This is true. its also the case that rulers over a mixed economy have vastly more wealth at their disposal than rulers over a command economy and a collective that has norms prohibiting the collection of rents. This is because the market generates more wealth and rulers are able to extract more wealth because there is more wealth.
So the story goes. The expropriation of value from the Global South has something to say about that, though.
Unfortunately, there is a very selectively-enforced limit on political content that has resulted in me being rate-limited, so I'm unable to respond to you in a timely manner anymore. I'd point you at some resources but I feel like that's condescending. Best of luck to you, friend.
yes
> and jump to expropriation
yes
> and violence
No. Most individual socialists are reluctant to be involved in any form of violence and anticipate it to be defensive in form. You can kind of get a sense for this when diving into who the foreign aggressors/invaders are in most conflicts and who are fighting anti-colonial revolutions following a general breakdown of society + state violence cracking down on political movements. Not a lot of people eager for violence among socialists. Pretty much the opposite - tons of people who are debilitated by their empathy.
> with no idea how to progress from this state to their desired end state.
I would say it's more that there are many competing ideas on how to do so and there's constant infighting.
> This is why "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" is a terrible idea and likely to fail in any scenario involving human beings.
But it's not relevant to this situation...
> Yes, they were more interested in exporting their ideology to the rest of the world than making it work where they were already in charge
I'm referring to actually defensive capabilities. Not the "defense" euphemism that Westerners use to describe very military investments used in very aggressive ways.
> and frustrating people's natural inclinations was so difficult as to require a massive domestic espionage apparatus.
Those were and are very direct responses to spying and disruption. Western approaches to socialist-run countries create the same conditions every time, creating a form of selection (like natural selection) for organizing around fighting foreign influence. You'll note that those who didn't (like Allende) were and even those who tried to but weren't strong enough (like Sankara) were murdered and had their governments replaced by imperial powers.
This doesn't mean their domestic spying was or is good, just that it was, in fact, a reaction to real and active outside threats. Notice that Western powers are currently engaged in widespread domestic spying over much smaller threats.
> But what is even more interesting is that all those loyal soviet apparatchiks became more bourgeoise as they became responsible for allocating more resources. Perhaps the communists could learn something here too.
The people I'm describing didn't have any responsibility for allocating resources, they were nerds in universities.
> The propaganda was not too far from reality as many defectors learned.
Defectors that weren't already straight-up spies were frequently disappointed. They found the main thing that they sought: popular consumer goods that they envied. But they also discovered higher rates of homelessness, hunger, a lack of safety at night, and more reactionary views towards homosexuality and women.
Defectors in the opposite direction had similar experiences. When they weren't spies (they often were), they were disappointed in their experience, as they tended to get spied on a lot themselves. Both sides tried to poison or otherwise murder the others' defectors as well.
> I think some people do.
I haven't met many people that acknowledge the existence of "bullshit jobs" and definitely not any who thought they existed for dogmatic reasons. But we all have our bubbles. Do you have any examples that you're thinking of?
> > so fundamental to our typical understanding of how the economy should work that we don't even talk about them
> i.e. dogma
Ha, I thought the same thing as I wrote it and then got distracted. I'm thinking of implicit ideas of how the world works, where we don't even think about alternatives. I'm not sure whether I'd call that dogma or not. I'm not finding the right words to describe it, unfortunately.
> Funny, the people on the right say its between center-left and far-left. I think you both need to read more, tbqh.
If we try to place these ideas on a one-dimensional axes for convenience, the far left is clearly taken up by socialists and communists. Socialists reject all capitalists as allies and drive a hard line between them and everyone else. The nearest to them are social democrats, who attempt to create a controlled form of capitalism through democratic means, where strong social programs and safety nets prevent (theoretically) the public from suffering the worst tendencies of capitalism. Then there are liberals who might believe in some social programs that already exist, but shy away from creating new ones and tend to prefer market-based solutions. Then there are liberals who tend more and more towards uncontrolled capitalism. Finally, there are factions within capitalists themselves that create ideologies like fascism who attempt to resolve crises in profit due to labor fights by adopting a highly nationalist and xenophobic position that blames "bad" capitalists for everyones' problems and tries to organize around "good" capitalists that do things right.
Social Democrats and liberals in favor of social programs tend to populate the center-left and center. Other liberals are right wing and it just keeps going farther right.
Folks on the right who call liberals in favor of social programs "far left" do so because they've not actually been exposed to actual socialists or as a bad-faith pejorative.
It doesn't make any sense to jump straight to "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" in a Marxist tradition. That's a state reached with communism, a proposed end state to a socialist transition of undetermined length - and no actual prescription for how, exactly, any of that would happen.
That would more aptly describe some (non-Marxist) anarcho-communist movements, who believe you can jump straight to a communist way of being without a transition.
> Why would this be a bad thing? Who would want to change this aspect of central planning?
If you are actually punished for making production work better you will become alienated from your job and actually want to do a worse job in order to improve your own personal conditions. People care more about their families, their friends, their local well-being than a far-off bureaucrat's.
> So did they fail to solve these problems because they were prevented from doing so because of dogma?
Not really, they were heavily focused on foreign policy and a growing domestic intelligentsia that was increasingly bourgeois, believing Western propaganda about how much better life was elsewhere and lacking real experience with rampant homelessness, hunger, and the state of poorer countries. That group was actively vying for power and eventually won as the public grew weary of defensive wars and focusing industry on defense and also began to buy that propaganda. That led to serious internal struggles and, eventually, what amounted to a bourgeois coup that dissolved the USSR at the barrel of a tank.
All in all, the problems I described were not dealbreakers. Western bourgeois democracies have plenty of "bullshit jobs", yet we don't refer to that as a problem that's failing to be solved due to dogma - it's failing to get solved because there are dominant systemic forces responsible for it being that way in the first place and they are so fundamental to our typical understanding of how the economy should work that we don't even talk about them, instead distracted by fights between center-right bourgeois politics and far-right bourgeois politics.
Capitalism doesn't do that either. This entire comparison is a category error.
In this discussion, capitalism is being conflated with markets and socialism with planned economies. Neither of those conflations are valid.
> the only form of socialism that capitalists oppose is the one where socialists restrict the form in which people own productive capital.
That is all forms of socialism. It's the only thing socialism is consistently about.
> all those alternative forms of socialism you advocate are free to exist in a free market
No they aren't. They're fundamentally incompatible with the theory of a free market. They are all focused on the abolition of private property.
> but they are as rare as hen's teeth (not to say nonexistent). why is that?
Because when they get a footing they're actively attacked by capitalists. Economically attached with sanctions, invaded, coup'd, bombed, etc.
Rojava is doing an experiment in communalism as we speak. Turkey is bombing it once the US got what they wanted from Rojava (fighting ISIS). Chile elected Allende, who was coup'd within two years by CIA-backed Pinochet. EZLN survives through the weakness of the central Mexican government and their relative irrelevance to capitalists.
Most political systems do not actually allow for the election of such parties to power. They have powerful propaganda campaigns baked into their education and mass media systems, with bourgeois infighting characterized as the extent of acceptable debate. Many force a two-party duopoly where only bourgeois parties have any chance of winning. Many outlaw socialist/communist parties or kill and harass their leaders. Many aren't democracies at all and would require an ideological military process to establish it - and have their opposition strategically funded by Western powers.
There are many reasons that ruling powers maintain that power.
That's not the answer, it's the mechanism of that violence.
> unless you somehow deny that communists were equally dedicated to subverting and overthrowing the west.
I will absolutely deny that. Note the number of capitalist governments coup'd by communists. Note the number of invasions and constant wars of The West. Look at Vietnam. Western involvement was long-reaching, direct, violent, and generally within other countries fighting grassroots revolutions / civil wars or throwing off colonial it imperial influence.
When attempting to find similar situations started by communist countries, we find important differences. Dragged into conflicts on their borders. Literally fighting a genocide directed at themselves. Long-standing territorial disputes on their borders.
> I disagree that this is a valid generalization
Feudal backwaters subject to regular famines became superpowers that eliminated homelessness and hunger. And the fall of those systems corresponded to drops in QoL over and over and over again.
What other tests would you want?
> This is because the centrally planned economy depleted vast amounts of capital in their desperate struggle to keep the economy moving and competitive with the west.
Capital is just stuff or money tradeable for stuff. The stuff didn't go away after color revolutions. But public programs were absolutely privatized or abolished by liberal capitalist governments in moves aligned with their ideologies - ideologies you can find throughout this site, in fact.
> Cynically I could offer the same answer a communist would offer when asked why people weren't permitted to own factories in the Soviet Union: because that would put "the wrong people" in charge of the means of production.
Ah, but in that case there's a consistent ideological position: bourgeois democracy and ownership must be curtailed because otherwise it will grow and eat you and those you love. According to liberal democracy, you're supposed to be able to seek and form a representative government in a multi-party setting - yet they restrict those parties to force bourgeois options to be the only ones available.
The supposedly core ideals of The West clearly bow to capital when push comes to shove and one should question the propaganda that it's these ideals that won or were even the actual goal.
> Less cynically, its not clear how a centrally planned economy would know how to correctly allocate resources, so there's no reason to return to the central planning model in the absence of a solution to the problems that caused it to fail in the first place.
But the vast majority of several countries want that return, with support increasing with age - the people who actually lived under communist party rule. They are prevented from doing so by their political systems. It cannot be voted in. Democracy clearly doesn't mean that much to The West, right?
Look at Venezuela. A country that has been dependent on an oil-based extraction economy for decades and subject to brutal imperialism elects a socialist government that nationalizes... just that one industry, and the entirety of Western powers turn against them along with local national business owners, sabotaging their own points of sale as a form of economic warfare, instead selling across the border to support a black market.
As a reminder, despite the socialist label of the party in power, Venezuela has a significantly lower level of nationalization than France. But because France is not a target of both imperial and capital interests, but is instead firmly established as an imperial country itself, we don't see sanctions or (inaccurate) dithering over election integrity.
Venezuela is what you get when you propose to move some of the power and profits away from capital and don't have the footing to withstand their counterattack.
Not that there weren't serious economic problems, just that they were not dramatic and certainly not so compared to those of capitalist countries. For example, the Soviet system did a poor job at incentivizing production. Factories that performed worse would often receive greater benefits, as policymakers frequently followed a "squeaky wheel gets the grease" approach. This also happened internal to factories or other productive activities, where there was no real incentive to work more efficiently and sometimes a disincentive. These are, of course, easily soluble problems with greater information and adding some incentives for workers' performance, but I don't bring them up because of that - I bring them up because it's what workers complained about.
Socialism cannot estimate this any better or worse than capitalism. Contrasting the two is actually a bit absurd, given that socialism has a wide range of forms and does not prescribe the form in which workers own productive capital.
e.g., market socialists exist. So do central planning-pushing communists. So do communalists...
Claims about it failing for theoretical reasons seem... odd.
Instead of, "what's wrong with communism!?", we should be asking, "if communism doesn't work, why was it necessary for capitalist countries to direct the entirety of their foreign policies into violence and sanctions against communists in their own communist countries and anyone who so much as requested aid from them, despite capitalist countries refusing to supply such aid?"
The reality is that communist countries actually did work and worked better than the prior state those countries were in, but were targeted for systematic erasure by the rest of the planet. When communist countries fell, life did not get better for those who lived there. It got worse. Pensions were privatized or canceled. Public programs eliminated. Promises of multi-party democracy were amended to disclude communists or anyone like them, with violence. Quality of Life indicators plunged and with no option to return to the former system (a certainly authoritarian condition imposed by the newly-in-power, Western-supported governments), these countries languished for decades and were and continue to be subjected to new depravities and exploitation even as they claw back some semblance of dignity.
Look at polling in the former Eastern Bloc. In Russia. In China. It's still very popular and it's not because of the chauvinist (and often contextually racist) idea they're all brainwashed goons. They saw the changes and often have a critically supportive view of a return. They say that most things were better, but acknowledge those that were worse, and when they say they'd support a return it's not to an identical state, just a similar one. But their political systems prevent this. One must wonder why.
If you make an honest mistake on, say, WikiData, nobody should jump down your throat. That's not productive and the context is one where some degree of empathy should be expected. It's a commons. And trust me, I know how internet nerds can be on a commons - internet nerds that often get things very wrong in their criticisms but will swear and yell at you while leveling them.
That context is important. The goal that I hope we all want to push for a data commons is a productive shared environment. But when it becomes narrative or editorials, now there are very serious political and scholarly issues at work and popular narratives are frequently self-sustaining via institutional norms. You can cite hundreds of documents and publications for a popular liberal (like lib dem) narrative even if it's no better supported than a position published by an esoteric scholar in Maine and win any arguments about which should be included in the definitive encyclopedia entry on the topic and which should be quietly shoved aside. Even disagreements listed in these pages tend to be relatively popular narratives that are not particularly disagreeable to those in power, or have become popular enough despite that opposition and are the exception.
Turkish nationalists denying the Armenian genocide on Wikipedia will be drowned out by process: the dominant media and scholarly narratives (which are roughly correct). But what would we see on a page about Evo Morales back in October 2019? Would we not see the repeated dishonest narratives and headlines of the New York Times? In fact, we would: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Evo_Morales&oldid.... No contextualization, just the implication that the NYT narratives are a good resource. And here is the closest snapshot in time to that wiki page: https://web.archive.org/web/20191112031842/https://www.nytim...
In short, mistakes should always be contextualized by the roles of those involved, the goals sought (and hopefully shared), and a desire to get at the truth even if it's uncomfortable.
In such a situation, multiple mistakes were made. If that work culture could somehow support honest, open, and humble approaches to understanding the problem, there would be multiple people either apologizing or, better, taking ownership of their contributions and working towards preventing them in the future (the thing you identify that did not happen). Such a culture is, unfortunately, very unlikely due to the incentive structures of company hierarchy.
The role and power of the individual for whom we're setting these expectations is very important and it's very unhelpful that this isn't considered either in that wiki page or in so many comments (not yours, yours is good). Is the person that made a mistake very powerful and do they have a PR team? Their approach will probably be purely cynical. Is it a company? We should stop anthropomorphizing companies. Is it a junior colleague? Was it truly a personal error on their part or higher up or systemic? Was it a manager harming an employee? On a moral and societal level, we have to consider those harms and whether owning a mistake and apologizing is desirable or even sufficient - perhaps they should just be fired or we should consider their actions to be a crime. Or maybe "we" in this scenario is again PR thinking intended to protect the company, in which case the apology is carefully wordsmithed to avoid liability and has no real value.
I have no idea where this idea comes from. People will attempt to avoid consequences even if those consequences are just.
Alas.