Capitalism: the cause of and solution to all life's problems

[Ares Land]

Sorry about the delay... I've been looking through all the posts I missed and, well, you haven't been slacking off, have you?

It's frustrating that every time someone talks about progressive change, the Soviet Union comes up as some sort of inevitable end point. Imagine if the only examples we had of Capitalism were places like Yeltsin's Russia or Batista's Cuba. Undoubtedly there would be people saying "I don't want Capitalism because I don't want to inevitably end up living in a favela eating borscht."

The capitalist equivalent is, I'm afraid, the United States and where I come from people do say 'I don't want to sell meth for chemo money.'

On state capitalism: we used to have a fair bit of that in France. (A number of companies are still partly state-owned). The results were... anticlimatic: not Stalinism, but no socialist utopia either. State-owned companies did, well, about the same as privately owned ones, I guess.

It was at its best on huge projects, I think. Successes include high speed train, the Concorde, a pretty solid telecommunication network, and a respectable satellite launching capability.

One thing our brand of state capitalism wasn't was accountable to the public. Our nuclear power plant system was built with no public consultation at all, and for good reason: it would never have passed a popular vote. As one minister quipped: 'you don't warn the frogs when you dry out the swamp'.
(There's also the one experimental plant they built, with liquid sodium as a cooler. The thing never really produced much power: it turns out high pressure liquid sodium melts the pipes, so maintenance costs skyrocketed. I probably won't live to see the site cleaned up as decontamination turned out to be insanely difficult.)

Worker ownership and self-management of the means of production makes sure that production is done so as to suit the interests of the workers doing it, rather than those of petit-bourgeois and capitalist classes or an apparatchik class over the workers. (...)

Um, first off, what's a petit-bourgeois, an apparatchik and a capitalist? Are you sure you're including the right people in these categories?
All of this strikes me as a very rosy view. Aren't there no downsides at all? Myself I see ugly office politics, new workers not having the same rights as the older ones, and occasional fraud, just for starters.

In this scenario, I'm on your side, but I feel like it is the market that's telling me to enter COBOL programming instead of pursuing my interests. People vote for the interests of minorities all the time. I don't see why the worker's vote would deny you the opportunity to practice your craft. When I say "workers", I mean everyone who works for a living, not just avid fans of monster truck rallies or whatever.

Let's say I'd rather work in linguistics for a living. The market being what it is, I picked my second choice and started working in IT.
And under socialism? Well, under socialism we'll need just about the same number of linguists and the same number of programmers. My situation would be unchanged.

Now, getting back to my craftsman widgetmaker scenario: under a capitalist system, I can pick up widget making at any time and see if it works. It's entirely my business and my customers'.
With idea of production by work vote, this adds a third party: the voters. Or more likely, their representatives. (You can't hold a referendum over every career choice.) Who may or not know about widget making, and may feel that yes, it's very good, but the kholkhoze needs a lot more COBOL programming than widget amateurs needs widgets.
(How does that get solved under capitalism: easy, the price of widgets and the salary of COBOL programmers adjust until COBOL programmers get paid more than widget-makers. Than it's up to me, personally, to pick up what to do.)

Can you explain why it's inconceivable that the people would seek to diversify their portfolio? Microprocessors took off because they helped manufacture products that were in demand among the people.

Yep: everybody understood the point of a microprocessor. Nobody saw the personal computer coming -- except the hobbyist. Of course people would have voted down that one.

We routinely get told that the market is more efficient than a planned economy, but nobody really bothers to explain why.
I hope the two examples above help a bit. It's all really about information: between them, seller and buyer have all the necessary information to decide what is produced and sold, and in exchange for what. A planned economy adds a third party, with inevitable information loss, who can only make sub-optimal decisions.

The market isn't, unlike what conservatives and/or libertarian think, the solution to all and every problem of course. It's just a problem-solving tool that gives very good results under specific conditions. (For instance, we all know - except for the Republicans - that it can't handle health insurance at all.)
Why get rid of an efficient tool and replace it with a less efficient one?

I'm not really opposed to socialism, or to capitalism for that matter. My own view is that there's no silver bullet. I suspect an ideal society would have capitalist features (such as a free market) as well as socialist ones.
In the short term, some measures would help immensely: discouraging capital accumulation through taxes, encouraging unions (they're a pain in the ass, but like they, you can't live with them, you can't live without them), granting them a seat on the administration council (at least for large companies), and how about universal basic income?

(Oh, on the robots replacing us: the current 'AI revolution' is impressive but nowhere near being able to replace us. Also, don't buy all the marketing bullshit. A surprising number of 'AI' projects turn out to use good old-fashioned linear regression...)

(BTW, sorry about derailing the thread. Do you think the last few pages could be taken to a separate thread?)

[Travis B.]

Worker ownership and self-management of the means of production makes sure that production is done so as to suit the interests of the workers doing it, rather than those of petit-bourgeois and capitalist classes or an apparatchik class over the workers. (...)

Um, first off, what's a petit-bourgeois, an apparatchik and a capitalist? Are you sure you're including the right people in these categories?

Simple; the capitalists are the people at the top who run large private businesses, the petit-bourgeois should really be divided into two things - the managerial class that helps the capitalists run their businesses and the proprietors of smaller private businesses, and the apparatchiks are the bureaucratic class at the top which runs things in state capitalist economies.

All of this strikes me as a very rosy view. Aren't there no downsides at all? Myself I see ugly office politics, new workers not having the same rights as the older ones, and occasional fraud, just for starters.

I am not stating that it would be perfect, just that it would be, all things considered, better than what we have now. We already have ugly office politics and fraud in capitalism (and the real fraud is very often committed by those at the very top). And yes, new workers not always having the same rights as older ones is a concern, but how is that any worse than what we already have?

[Torco]

Hmm, when it comes to environmental issues, I'd say the problem is not simply capitalism, but more generally, modern technological society, which has historically existed in both capitalist and centrally-planned varieties - and, to put it politely, the centrally-planned varieties weren't known for their strict adherence to environmental standards.

An excellent point. And marxists can screw things even without central planning, see China. But I do have the feeling that capitalism makes it much harder to deal with the issue politically, through regulatory capture mostly. But I agree, perhaps I am here even more radical than you, human activity just entails environmental impact: whatever we get our hands on we either domesticate it or kill it, and as we develop we grow bigger and bigger hands. I'm just saying the solutions we know work aren't market ones, afaik.

I don't know, in Western Europe, a great deal was achieved that way. Labor laws did a great deal more towards alleviating the exploitation of man by man than any revolution.

Yes but revolutions also did a lot for labour: a lot of why western capitalist countries enacted the welfare state, strong labour laws and the rest of it was because of pressure from communism. for one they had to compete and, but also the reds outright funded -not to mention trained and equipped- all sorts of communist parties, labour organizers, union leaders and so on. It's not accidental that after the fall of the berlin wall we saw a shift towards laissez-faire and deregulation, with the subsequent explosion in inequality. As others have pointed out, even the "left wing" is neoliberals now.

That being said you're describing social democracy. It's a lot better than laissez faire, but nato won't let anyone else try it. I don't think that's accidental, either: there's a good deal of work pointing to how the high standard of living of the us, western europe, britain and those places runs on keeping the rest of the world down (see Dependency theory). I'm not convinced we can have a social democrat planet. Still, I here disagree with, say, Moose: liberal democracies are, to some degree or other, actually really legitimately democratic: the rich don't run france the way the rich run peru or, i'm told, russia. in bolivia the power of the bougies is more checked than it is in the us. Most of the problems with liberal democracy have to do with regulatory capture: then again, regulatory capture is the harvard term for the bougies control the state.

I'm not saying capitalism is the only cause of environmental deterioration, though: what I'm saying is that while capitalism is the economic system of the world the environmental problems don't have much of a solution: sure, Germany can pass excellent environmental legislation... hell, the US could too, and at times even has: but they'll just move the dirty stuff somewhere else. If we could have a social democrat world then maybe, but it seems to me capitalism needs to keep the global south as its dumpster. That's kind of the clincher. global problems and all that.

(also i vote yes on the capitalism thread)

[Moose-tache]

About state capitalism, the clear argument against state capitalism vis-à-vis private capitalism is that there have been no instances of state capitalism that compare to or surpass the best instances of private capitalism (e.g. social democracy) in quality of life for the people living under it. Regardless of the arguments for state capitalism and against private capitalism, state capitalism in its pure form has always turned out to be authoritarian, while there have been quite a few instances of private capitalism which have been less authoritarian than it. That in itself indicates that it might be ill-advised to repeat pure state capitalism if our goal is something better than private capitalism, not worse.

Respectfully, I think this argument rests on faulty logic. When we compare two cases, it is impossible to isolate all the variables, but we can at least catalog them and see how many variables are at work outside our control. When comparing, say, a hypothetical USA in 2100 AD that uses a public investment fund to the Soviet Union in 1931 sending people to work at Magnitogorsk, I think it's fair to say there may be more variables at work than [+statecapitalism] or [-statecapitalism]. For one thing, "state Capitalism" is not one thing. Like Socialism, you can have a little or a lot, done one way or another, implemented in one way or another. For another, the substrates of the two scenarios are different, i.e. one inherits a mostly functioning democracy and the other didn't, one had to build a social welfare bureaucracy from scratch and the other didn't, etc., etc. Suggesting that a public investment fund in a democratic society will inevitably turn to despotism because that's what happened when Stalin forced Ukrainians onto collective farms is, in my humble opinion, a very poor argument.

Meanwhile, "not repeating the mistakes of the past" can be used equally to advise against Capitalism, especially if we're playing the game of using all examples of Capitalism interchangeably. You like private health insurance? I guess you like the Great Depression! You want lower capital gains tax? I guess you're nostalgic for slavery! Obviously I know you don't think this, but this is the same sort of logic that leads people to say that we can't have public oversight of capital investments because something something Stalin.

[zompist]

Respectfully, I think this argument rests on faulty logic. When we compare two cases, it is impossible to isolate all the variables, but we can at least catalog them and see how many variables are at work outside our control. When comparing, say, a hypothetical USA in 2100 AD that uses a public investment fund to the Soviet Union in 1931 sending people to work at Magnitogorsk, I think it's fair to say there may be more variables at work than [+statecapitalism] or [-statecapitalism]. For one thing, "state Capitalism" is not one thing. Like Socialism, you can have a little or a lot, done one way or another, implemented in one way or another. For another, the substrates of the two scenarios are different, i.e. one inherits a mostly functioning democracy and the other didn't, one had to build a social welfare bureaucracy from scratch and the other didn't, etc., etc.

Er, which country is supposed to have had a social welfare bureaucracy in 1917?

There's several reasons people keep bringing up Soviet style states.

1. Every single attempt at centralized socialism ended up as despotic. Stalin is not the only example. It's on the centralized-planning socialists to explain how a never-before-seen utopia will happen next time.
2. Socialists don't seem to have any interest in understanding why those nations were despotic. Gosh something went wrong who knows what, but for sure it won't happen like it did the last dozen times!
3. When an authoritarian socialist does pop up somewhere, democratic socialists support them without questions.
4. No one really explains how central state planning would work with a democratic system.

Now, I don't think socialism has to be authoritarian-- but I believe in local control, not state planning. One DSA guy I know used to say "the anarchists keep us honest", and he had a point. I'd like to see Wilde's version of socialism, not Marshal Tito's.

All I would really like an answer to is #4. How is democratic central planning supposed to work?

* Does the central planner overrule workshops, co-ops, regions, or any other form of local control?
* Is being overruled by the "democratic" central planner somehow nicer than having a boss?
* Are the voters allowed to vote for non-socialists? What are the political parties in your utopia?
* Do voters just elect leaders/representatives, or are they consulted somehow about production?
* If they're consulted directly... since when do voters know how to run an economy? Can they vote for gas-guzzling cars and beef feedlots, because like most people they like cars and beef?
* What did you do with all the reactionaries, centrists, liberals, social democrats, anarchists, and insufficiently centralist socialists? (Hint: this problem has a lot to do with why the Soviet system went despotic. Once everyone of the wrong beliefs is declared an enemy, they get treated as such.)
* The voters, or the central planner, want nothing but beef. Is everyone forced to be a dairy farmer? Is it "socialism" to be forced into a "useful" profession rather than anything you'd like to do?

Note, I'm not saying "central planning has to be Stalinist!". I think it's a terrible idea, but I want to understand how you think a non-Stalinist implementation will work.

[Raphael]

We routinely get told that the market is more efficient than a planned economy, but nobody really bothers to explain why.
I hope the two examples above help a bit. It's all really about information:

Oh, based on your computer example, I'd say it's more about innovation. Economies that don't innovate well will be left behind by those that do - and it's difficult to innovate if the five year plan tells you in detail what you're supposed to do for the next five years.

(Another question: how do you get a planned system running in the first place without it being undermined, from the start, by informal market traders selling the People's Glorious Manufacturing Plant's widgets from the backs of their trucks and cooking the books to avoid getting caught? Wait, that gave me an idea: A sci-fi reboot of Only Fools and Horses set in a futuristic socialist utopia...)

[bradrn]

I have little wish to get involved in this conversation (mostly because all this is way above my head), but in case anyone finds it interesting, here’s an fascinating article I saw a while ago on why a centralised planned economy failed in the USSR: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/24/b ... ed-plenty/.

[Travis B.]

Respectfully, I think this argument rests on faulty logic. When we compare two cases, it is impossible to isolate all the variables, but we can at least catalog them and see how many variables are at work outside our control. When comparing, say, a hypothetical USA in 2100 AD that uses a public investment fund to the Soviet Union in 1931 sending people to work at Magnitogorsk, I think it's fair to say there may be more variables at work than [+statecapitalism] or [-statecapitalism]. For one thing, "state Capitalism" is not one thing. Like Socialism, you can have a little or a lot, done one way or another, implemented in one way or another. For another, the substrates of the two scenarios are different, i.e. one inherits a mostly functioning democracy and the other didn't, one had to build a social welfare bureaucracy from scratch and the other didn't, etc., etc.

Er, which country is supposed to have had a social welfare bureaucracy in 1917?

There's several reasons people keep bringing up Soviet style states.

1. Every single attempt at centralized socialism ended up as despotic. Stalin is not the only example. It's on the centralized-planning socialists to explain how a never-before-seen utopia will happen next time.
2. Socialists don't seem to have any interest in understanding why those nations were despotic. Gosh something went wrong who knows what, but for sure it won't happen like it did the last dozen times!
3. When an authoritarian socialist does pop up somewhere, democratic socialists support them without questions.
4. No one really explains how central state planning would work with a democratic system.

Socialists often have a blind spot for authoritarian forms of socialism, it should be noted. There are still people who support Maoism even with the Great Leap Forward and everything that entailed.

Now, I don't think socialism has to be authoritarian-- but I believe in local control, not state planning. One DSA guy I know used to say "the anarchists keep us honest", and he had a point. I'd like to see Wilde's version of socialism, not Marshal Tito's.

All I would really like an answer to is #4. How is democratic central planning supposed to work?

* Does the central planner overrule workshops, co-ops, regions, or any other form of local control?
* Is being overruled by the "democratic" central planner somehow nicer than having a boss?
* Are the voters allowed to vote for non-socialists? What are the political parties in your utopia?
* Do voters just elect leaders/representatives, or are they consulted somehow about production?
* If they're consulted directly... since when do voters know how to run an economy? Can they vote for gas-guzzling cars and beef feedlots, because like most people they like cars and beef?
* What did you do with all the reactionaries, centrists, liberals, social democrats, anarchists, and insufficiently centralist socialists? (Hint: this problem has a lot to do with why the Soviet system went despotic. Once everyone of the wrong beliefs is declared an enemy, they get treated as such.)
* The voters, or the central planner, want nothing but beef. Is everyone forced to be a dairy farmer? Is it "socialism" to be forced into a "useful" profession rather than anything you'd like to do?

Note, I'm not saying "central planning has to be Stalinist!". I think it's a terrible idea, but I want to understand how you think a non-Stalinist implementation will work.

The main way I see democratic central planning as happening in an actually democratic fashion is a democratic state, as controlled directly by voters or by something resembling workers' councils, controlling a public investment fund which they use to funnel funds into projects that they would like to encourage, and thus maintaining a degree of indirect control over the economy without rigid five-year plans and whatnot (too much control would hamper innovation).

[Raphael]

[snip]

The main way I see democratic central planning as happening in an actually democratic fashion is a democratic state, as controlled directly by voters or by something resembling workers' councils, controlling a public investment fund which they use to funnel funds into projects that they would like to encourage, and thus maintaining a degree of indirect control over the economy without rigid five-year plans and whatnot (too much control would hamper innovation).

Not to be pedantic, but I've got the impression that you didn't answer a single one of zompist's questions.

[Travis B.]

[snip]

The main way I see democratic central planning as happening in an actually democratic fashion is a democratic state, as controlled directly by voters or by something resembling workers' councils, controlling a public investment fund which they use to funnel funds into projects that they would like to encourage, and thus maintaining a degree of indirect control over the economy without rigid five-year plans and whatnot (too much control would hamper innovation).

Not to be pedantic, but I've got the impression that you didn't answer a single one of zompist's questions.

I was picturing that zompist was envisioning Soviet-style central planning and not seeing how a degree of central planning could exist under democratic socialism without full-on state capitalism.

About the following:

* Does the central planner overrule workshops, co-ops, regions, or any other form of local control?

No, at least as I envision it. They would funnel public funds to projects that are seen as being in the public interest, but they would not be overruling workshops, co-ops, regions, etc., with the exception that they would act in a regulatory role (to control externalities) over them, just like they already do in capitalist democracies.

* Are the voters allowed to vote for non-socialists? What are the political parties in your utopia?

There are always going to be different political groupings, and any system that is democratic needs to be able to function in a pluralistic society, or else it is not democratic. Note that some sorts of political structurings, such as workers' councils, are by their nature not going to lend themselves to, well, voting for candidates who belong to different parties (because one would choosing an individual from one's own group to represent them rather than a representative belonging to a party).

* Do voters just elect leaders/representatives, or are they consulted somehow about production?

In a traditional democratic government individuals just elect people who represent them. However, other democratic models are possible, such as those modeled along the lines of workers' councils. Take, for instance, a model in which each small geographic unit (traditionally a workplace, in the case of workers' councils, but I disfavor this for a number of reasons) elects from amongst themselves a delegate to represent themselves in the next-higher level of organization, which is rotated (e.g. say every half-year they choose someone different), who has a mandate (they do not make decisions for themselves but rather are told by those who select them what decisions to make), and who is instantly recallable (they can be recalled at any time for any reason, e.g. if they break their mandate), and then the same applies at the next higher level of organization, and so on.

* What did you do with all the reactionaries, centrists, liberals, social democrats, anarchists, and insufficiently centralist socialists? (Hint: this problem has a lot to do with why the Soviet system went despotic. Once everyone of the wrong beliefs is declared an enemy, they get treated as such.)

Democratic socialism ought to be stable enough that it does not need to send those who disagree with it to the gulag, just like how liberal capitalist democracies don't send their dissidents to the gulag either. Habitually sending people to the gulag is a symptom of a system that needs to be forced upon people, and thus needs those who disagree to be suppressed.

* The voters, or the central planner, want nothing but beef. Is everyone forced to be a dairy farmer? Is it "socialism" to be forced into a "useful" profession rather than anything you'd like to do?

The cattle farmers would probably end up getting subsidies then, but no one would force one to raise cattle.

[mèþru]

For the sake of clarity, when I refer to capitalism in this thread I am refering to the means of production being privately owned. When not referring to that specific definition, when it comes to European and Israeli politics my first instinct is to support the parties that call themselves socialist - although by Marxist terminology they are mainly parties of capitalism. Also confusingly, capitalist in Marxist thought refers to the people who own the means of production but do not actually labour (ignoring the fact that management actually is skilled labour) rather than a follower of capitalism. A Marxist might for instance see my beliefs as "anti-capitalist capitalism". I keep saying Marxist because democratic socialism's analysis of economic reality is identical to Marxism, and since Marx never actually wrote down how a socialist society will function in detail, democratic socialism basically is one of several solutions to the question of "now what?" once capitalism is dismantled.

identitarian causes that are liable to alienate those who do not belong to the most oppressed that said liberals claim to champion.

Of course, the solution is to champion socialism. The advantage of socialism over identitarian causes is that it favors the actual interests of the very many rather than the supposed interests of the few, and in doing so, is not liable to alienate those who do not belong to those few.

Ignoring identity politics will not actually solve those oppressions. Historically, communists succeeded much better in the Third World, among black people in the US, among gay people specifically because local communists took up causes important to those specific groups. I know among my friends online who are trans anarcho-communists that if the Democratic party ever abandoned LGBTQ+ folk they might very well just stop voting at all. Racial and homophobic prejudice left untreated in socialist societies has always lead to persecution of minorities same as old but under a red banner.

I don't see much point in convincing anyone with a Marxian view point (including democratic socialists) that capitalism makes sense because Marxian politics starts with different priors. If I was convinced that the Labour Theory of Value was accurate, I would probably be a democratic socialist too. I think debate on economics is better used as a way to increase mutual understanding than to actually convince an ideological opponent that your own views are better. I generally have found most supporters of capitalism, myself included, before debate just don't really understand Marxist and related persepectives properly and likewise Marxists, anarchists etc are often unaware of capitalist theories - and if they are they are usually familiar the Austrian school, which is considered by most supporters of capitalism to be rather fringe.

[mèþru]

Note that some sorts of political structurings, such as workers' councils, are by their nature not going to lend themselves to, well, voting for candidates who belong to different parties (because one would choosing an individual from one's own group to represent them rather than a representative belonging to a party).

That is in no way a barrier for political parties forming. The origin of a party system is when people of similar opinion or goals form a unified front to further chances of themselves and other people who share those ideas. What prevents differences of opinion within a council or between councils leading to parties, or even just affiliation with parties that form outside the councils?

I do think that democratic economic planning can exist, but I think economic planning (which already exists in differing degrees in every Western capitalist state) is best left to professional economists because it is a waste of time and effort to educate everyone on macroeconomics, even assuming most people will even retain the knowledge after leaving school.

Also while my beliefs are a form of capitalism, I definitely prefer democratic socialism over a capitalist dictatorship. Up until the point where I am lacking necessities, I support democracy over getting my way in economics (that also applies the other way - if I don't lack basic necessities I prefer a democratic but laissez-faire society over a regulated capitalism under dictatorship)

[mèþru]

All of this strikes me as a very rosy view. Aren't there no downsides at all? Myself I see ugly office politics, new workers not having the same rights as the older ones, and occasional fraud, just for starters.

I am not stating that it would be perfect, just that it would be, all things considered, better than what we have now. We already have ugly office politics and fraud in capitalism (and the real fraud is very often committed by those at the very top). And yes, new workers not always having the same rights as older ones is a concern, but how is that any worse than what we already have?

This is essentially how a lot of co-ops already work. And I see pretty little evidence that co-ops work better than other companies - in fact larger co-ops generally voluntarily give away most of their decision-making ability to an outside expert to manage them - just like a board of directors used to do with a CEO before 80s business culture ruined things.


I do think a system where evry company is a co-op can work, and that democratic socialism can work. I just don't think it will work as well as the alternative to capitalism. Many people say that the regulated capitalism I seek requires an engaged and educated working class- but the alternatives require the same to dismantle capitalism - and if they are educated and engaged anyway they should go with whichever of all the systems posited works the best. Yet that will require first of all determining what goals there are. Growth? Social cohesion? Impowering individuals (sort of works in opposition to social cohesion but ideally a system has some of both)

[Raphael]

Since you're talking co-ops now, here's a possible future scenario that sometimes wanders into my mind:

Capitalist businesspeople are always looking to maximize their profits and ideally get thousands of percentage points of Return on Investment. But more and more, the only way to get the fantastic ROIs more and more businesspeople are dreaming of is through trading increasingly obscure financial instruments. Meanwhile, providing and selling actual tangible goods and services is usually a lot less profitable, often forcing people in those businesses to make do with razor-thin profit margins.

So it's not that difficult to imagine a future in which capitalist businesspeople focus more and more on chasing ever-more-complicated financial instruments, while the trade in tangible goods and services, with its comparatively slim profits, gets increasingly taken over by co-ops. Eventually, more and more of those people who don't have a lot of money lying around to engage in obscure financial transaction get what they need from co-ops. And in the end, people start to wonder why, exactly, they're keeping the remaining capitalist business firms around...

[Travis B.]

identitarian causes that are liable to alienate those who do not belong to the most oppressed that said liberals claim to champion.

Of course, the solution is to champion socialism. The advantage of socialism over identitarian causes is that it favors the actual interests of the very many rather than the supposed interests of the few, and in doing so, is not liable to alienate those who do not belong to those few.

Ignoring identity politics will not actually solve those oppressions. Historically, communists succeeded much better in the Third World, among black people in the US, among gay people specifically because local communists took up causes important to those specific groups. I know among my friends online who are trans anarcho-communists that if the Democratic party ever abandoned LGBTQ+ folk they might very well just stop voting at all. Racial and homophobic prejudice left untreated in socialist societies has always lead to persecution of minorities same as old but under a red banner.

Note that I am not stating that leftists ought to abandon minorities but rather that we should avoid promoting the inverted hierarchy that many liberals today seem to promote, where the more oppressed any individual is based on their identity the better of a person they are - such that, say, differently-abled gay trans black women are seen as inherently better than white men. The reason this alienates people is that people really don't like being told that they're worse than other people for reasons beyond their control no matter what those reasons are. And considering that the left is supposed to champion the interests of the working class, and a majority of the working class in the US is white, does it serve leftist goals to alienate that majority by promoting positions which hold white people as being undesirables?

[Raphael]

I don't really disagree with you, Travis, but I'll restate what Ares Land posted a while ago:

I am likewise annoyed at talk of male or white fragility and I find cancel culture stupud. And yet t I don't vote for white supremacists and it doesn't take any effort.

Plus, if someone turns to white supremacy because people are being stupid on the internet... Yeah. I mean that sort of person should be a little ashamed of themselves...

Couldn't have put it better myself.

[Travis B.]

People who are white supremacists do not serve our goals one way or another. The bigger concern is the kind of people who do not consciously support white supremacy but who are willing to vote for the Trumps of the world or simply don't vote in the first place because they feel the other side has turned against them and their social class. Of course we can write those people off as being white supremacists too, but then you end up writing off a substantial proportion of the very population whose interests you claim to champion. A better approach would be to encourage solidarity amongst all working class people regardless of what identitarian subcategorization they belong to, and encourage them to unite w.r.t. their actual collective interests.

[zompist]

Note that I am not stating that leftists ought to abandon minorities but rather that we should avoid promoting the inverted hierarchy that many liberals today seem to promote, where the more oppressed any individual is based on their identity the better of a person they are - such that, say, differently-abled gay trans black women are seen as inherently better than white men.

We've been over this several times, but no one promotes this nonsense. When people say "White men shouldn't oppress minorities" and you hear "Other people are better than white men", you need to check your hearing.

[Travis B.]

Note that I am not stating that leftists ought to abandon minorities but rather that we should avoid promoting the inverted hierarchy that many liberals today seem to promote, where the more oppressed any individual is based on their identity the better of a person they are - such that, say, differently-abled gay trans black women are seen as inherently better than white men.

We've been over this several times, but no one promotes this nonsense. When people say "White men shouldn't oppress minorities" and you hear "Other people are better than white men", you need to check your hearing.

I know we've been over this, and I have no objection to telling white men that they should not oppress minorities; after all, I believe that all working class people should stand in solidarity with one another, and that of course includes fighting for one another's interests, and this is the opposite of oppressing one another.

What I refer to is something different, where "white man" and even "white woman" have taken on negative connotations despite being accidents of one's birth, where even individuals in less privileged categories are attacked if they are seen as still too privileged (e.g. white feminists being attacked by non-white feminists on the virtue of being white), where we have concepts like "white fragility" being taught (sorry for the exposition but not everyone here may necessarily be familiar with the book) that essentially tell white people that they by virtue of their birth are inherently the oppressor no matter what they do or think (and that the more progressive they are the worse they are, so there is no escaping being a racist oppressor).

When I have complained about identitarianism I really meant stuff like this; I don't think we should abandon fighting for LGBTQ rights or the rights of people of color but rather we should fight together for the interests of all working class people, POC or white, LGBTQ or straight, in solidarity with one another.

[Raphael]

I've got the impression that this has the potential to become a circular debate, with people telling each other the same things with minor modifications over and over again.