Zompist Bboard Again

While capitalist democracies are not ideal by any means, in practice they are better than many other ways of organizing societies, Communist states included, from looking at their relative track records. (Both may very well have awful foreign policies, but that is another story.) Of course, in my view, socialist democracies (and not mere "social democracy", i.e. kinder-and-gentler capitalist democracies, either) would certainly be better than capitalist ones. And as mentioned, having much in the way of natural resources does not necessary doom a country to be a horrible, exploited client state (even if this has been true in many cases).

Ares Land wrote: ↑Mon Feb 14, 2022 8:42 amGetting back to Chile, it's worth keeping in mind that democracy wasn't the US end goal at the time at all... They were helping a military dictatorship;

may I remind that the US's end goal has never been democracy? rather, it has always and forever been a) geopolitical supremacy and b) the profits of its corporations. they invest in pinochet, the saudis, bin laden, the muyahadeen, the fascists in spain, former nazis, israel, the contras, and so on and so on. only children and other innocents buy the line that 'we're spreading democracy and freedum across the world: US ARMY, A GLOBAL FORCE FOR GOOD'.

What I'm saying is that a) We don't depend on Third World countries that much b) the West has the capacity to adjust just fine.

Hah! I wish I live long enough to see the West standing on its own, unsubsidized by theft and exploitation on a global scale. okay, no, actually I don't, the resulting refugee crisis would be a huge humanitarian crisis. but then again, I do, the hunger and misery the rest of the world are kept in to prop up a relatively few white people's lavish lifestyles is an even bigger humanitarian crisis. either way, If neo-colonial unequal trade ceased (for whatever reason), I'm pretty sure standards of living in western europe and the US would drop to the level of, I don't know, greece?

also, most of the third world is already 'a democracy' by those standards by which people in this thread keep insisting that the us is a better boot on one's neck because 'it's a democracy'. and yet, it governs itself with the interest of global capital at heart, and fuck their own people. this is because 'a democracy' is not meaningfully democratic, i.e. what it does is independent of the will of the demos.

zompist wrote: ↑Mon Feb 14, 2022 10:20 am("Selling it to the highest bidder" is basically capitalism and it's what happens today, so I'm not sure why you think prices would skyrocket. More realistic is the idea that the locals could run production themselves, and thus take a greater cut. This happened in Arabia starting in 1950, when the Saudis forced 50% profitsharing. Since the 1970s the Saudis have owned Aramco outright.)

false: for example in Chile we have no royalty, you can just come in and take the copper and we'll let you (if you're a billionaire, of course). that's not 'selling it to the highest bidder', that's more like 'giving it away to rich guys from the West'. and we did it not out of some democratic impulse to largesse, we did it cause you put us under a fascist dictatorship that decided this, and afterwards under a false democracy that kept doing it. the same basically happens to about every other country that's not 'the West' with its respective resources. "openness to world trade" just means "lets the West take natural resources and also take away the profit and also pollute as much as it wants and also kill your people if they make trouble". Back in the seventies, when the government of Chile tried to nationalize the copper (i.e. to sell it to the highest bidder), well, we know what happens.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Feb 15, 2022 8:33 am While capitalist democracies are not ideal by any means, in practice they are better than many other ways of organizing societies, Communist states included, from looking at their relative track records. (Both may very well have awful foreign policies, but that is another story.) Of course, in my view, socialist democracies (and not mere "social democracy", i.e. kinder-and-gentler capitalist democracies, either) would certainly be better than capitalist ones.

I see no evidence for this, other than it being the liberal orthodoxy. real socialisms -for all of their failings- operated under extreme duress: unlike the early experiments in capitalism, they were under siege from the get-go, by economic sanctions, outright war, covert war, and in general a coordinated ploy to destroy them by basically the rest of the planet (under control of capitalism). under those circumstances, it's a real testament to the system's effectiveness that it managed to, for a while anyway, a) increase the standards of living of its populations immensely (russia, china, vietnam, laos, cuba), and b) hold on as long as it did. sure, by the eighties people in socialist countries weren't living as affluently as rich americans or wealthy brits, but then again they were never going to: still, to this day, cuba has less child malnutrition, and malnutrition in general than the US. that's the thing I find most funny about libertards going 'hahaha communism only creates hunger hahah holomodor checkmate commie'.

having much in the way of natural resources does not necessary doom a country to be a horrible, exploited client state (even if this has been true in many cases).

it dooms you to the fact that they will try to make you such a client state: only those who successfully fight (china, russia, japan, vietnam) get away with not being one.

Torco wrote: ↑Fri Feb 18, 2022 10:42 am

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Feb 15, 2022 8:33 am While capitalist democracies are not ideal by any means, in practice they are better than many other ways of organizing societies, Communist states included, from looking at their relative track records. (Both may very well have awful foreign policies, but that is another story.) Of course, in my view, socialist democracies (and not mere "social democracy", i.e. kinder-and-gentler capitalist democracies, either) would certainly be better than capitalist ones.

I see no evidence for this, other than it being the liberal orthodoxy. real socialisms -for all of their failings- operated under extreme duress: unlike the early experiments in capitalism, they were under siege from the get-go, by economic sanctions, outright war, covert war, and in general a coordinated ploy to destroy them by basically the rest of the planet (under control of capitalism). under those circumstances, it's a real testament to the system's effectiveness that it managed to, for a while anyway, a) increase the standards of living of its populations immensely (russia, china, vietnam, laos, cuba), and b) hold on as long as it did. sure, by the eighties people in socialist countries weren't living as affluently as rich americans or wealthy brits, but then again they were never going to: still, to this day, cuba has less child malnutrition, and malnutrition in general than the US. that's the thing I find most funny about libertards going 'hahaha communism only creates hunger hahah holomodor checkmate commie'.

Even when we completely ignore foreign policy, Stalinism resulted in the murder of countless people in its purges and, as you mention it, the Holomodor and like, and Maoism resulted in the Great Leap Forward, in which millions starved to death. These clearly were not the results of outside pressure at all but rather had solely internal causes (e.g. the purges and the Holomodor were the result of the totalitarian Stalinist state needing a constant supply of enemies to justify its existence).

Travis B. wrote: ↑Tue Feb 15, 2022 8:33 am

having much in the way of natural resources does not necessary doom a country to be a horrible, exploited client state (even if this has been true in many cases).

it dooms you to the fact that they will try to make you such a client state: only those who successfully fight (china, russia, japan, vietnam) get away with not being one.

Examples of countries with considerable natural resources that are not hellholes include Canada, Norway, Australia, and the US itself...

Torco wrote: ↑Fri Feb 18, 2022 10:42 am

zompist wrote: ↑Mon Feb 14, 2022 10:20 am("Selling it to the highest bidder" is basically capitalism and it's what happens today, so I'm not sure why you think prices would skyrocket. More realistic is the idea that the locals could run production themselves, and thus take a greater cut. This happened in Arabia starting in 1950, when the Saudis forced 50% profitsharing. Since the 1970s the Saudis have owned Aramco outright.)

false: for example in Chile we have no royalty, you can just come in and take the copper and we'll let you (if you're a billionaire, of course). that's not 'selling it to the highest bidder', that's more like 'giving it away to rich guys from the West'.

False? OPEC didn't happen because Chile? Did you see the word "could" in my sentence? But you get a far better rant if you ignore what was actually said. "You didn't make an absurd false claim, so I'll make it for you and then claim you said it!" No one here is defending US interventionism or neocolonialism.

You have nationalization right in your region— Argentina renationalized YPF in 2012. Brazil's Petrobras has, I believe, had a local monopoly since 1953. Evo Morales nationalized natural gas in Bolivia in 2006— ironically, the biggest fight was with Petrobras. Ecuador's Petroecuador is state-owned (I have conflicting sources on whether Texaco still has a stake); it also seems to have a reputation for toxic environmental management.

oh, no, sorry if I was unclear, what's false is that what you have is selling natural resources to the highest bidder under capitalism (which I take it you did claim). sure, that's the idea in the books, but what very often happens in the third world is that you have US interventions pushing to just give away the resources to particular bidders. of course there's resistence to this, and also corruption and inoperancy in those countries that resist (not entirely autogenous, tho). OPEC did, of course, happen, but so does US intervention to secure better trading conditions for Western corps, does it not? and 'the government just gives me the resources for the low low price of making a few local elites rich' is a good trading condition.

Torco wrote: ↑Fri Feb 18, 2022 10:42 am I see no evidence for this, other than it being the liberal orthodoxy. real socialisms -for all of their failings- operated under extreme duress: unlike the early experiments in capitalism, they were under siege from the get-go, by economic sanctions, outright war, covert war, and in general a coordinated ploy to destroy them by basically the rest of the planet (under control of capitalism). under those circumstances, it's a real testament to the system's effectiveness that it managed to, for a while anyway, a) increase the standards of living of its populations immensely (russia, china, vietnam, laos, cuba), and b) hold on as long as it did. sure, by the eighties people in socialist countries weren't living as affluently as rich americans or wealthy brits, but then again they were never going to: still, to this day, cuba has less child malnutrition, and malnutrition in general than the US.

Ah yes, poor Russia, unfairly maligned just because it murdered or imprisoned tens of millions of citizens, colonized all the nearby countries, caused endless foreign wars, couldn't feed its people, and polluted the environment. Oh, and allied with Hitler to start WWII, something that communists tend to forget when lecturing the less enlightened about fascism.

On China I actually agree with you... mostly. No one really knew how to develop China, and the Nationalists did about the worst possible job, failing to enact land reform, failing to rein in the landlords and warlords, failing to develop industry, and above all failing to resist foreign intervention (the West) and conquest (Japan). Mao got things done: kicked the foreigners out, suppressed the landlords and warlords, started developing the country. Only he could not stand to see slow but sure development; twice he sabotaged his own government for pointless and bloody exercises in revolutionary extremism. If his type had stayed in power China would probably look today much more like North than South Korea.

When you put the two of them together, I find it pretty absurd to complain that "the rest of the planet" was able to put two or three billion people under "extreme duress." The PRC was never seriously under attack by the West. Neither was Russia after the 1920s; in fact during WWII it was helped by supplies from the evil, moustache-twirling US. Both countries were able to indulge in decades of foreign wars and propping up Third World dictatorships. Did you know that communist Cuba, and CIA-trained exiles, engaged in a proxy war in the Congo? What a glorious thing for the Congolese, to get their own local reenactment of the Cuban revolution in their own territory.

No one really knows how to develop a country, though by this time we have quite a lot of knowledge on how not to. Some of the rudiments can be done by almost anyone: land reform, expand the workforce, some automation and industrialization, better agriculture. Neither capitalists nor communists have a monopoly on these techniques, and neither can tout the benefits as a consequence of their ideology. The PRC did reasonably well when Mao was distracted; so did capitalist South Korea and Taiwan; so did socialist India.

The problem with a lot of these discussions is that we don't ask "which communism" or "which capitalism". You yourself made a good case earlier in this thread for more capitalism in Chile— not more US interventionism of course, but more local entrepreneurship and competition. What makes the US a swear word in much of the world is that the US, like Britain before it, has mistaken "promoting our exports and imports" with "promoting capitalism." These are basically opposed goals! Actually promoting capitalism would mean encouraging things the US itself did, such as enacting high tariffs, fostering local companies and education, import substitution, unionizing.

On the left-wing side... almost everyone here is open to some sort of socialism. I've always been against plutocracy and against watering down Rooseveltian liberalism, but I've also moved to the left as plutocracy keeps getting worse. But I'm only interested in democratic socialism. If you come along touting authoritarian communism— well, I'm with Orwell, that shit is just capitalism with new faces.

Torco wrote: ↑Fri Feb 18, 2022 11:46 am oh, no, sorry if I was unclear, what's false is that what you have is selling natural resources to the highest bidder under capitalism (which I take it you did claim). sure, that's the idea in the books, but what very often happens in the third world is that you have US interventions pushing to just give away the resources to particular bidders. of course there's resistence to this, and also corruption and inoperancy in those countries that resist (not entirely autogenous, tho). OPEC did, of course, happen, but so does US intervention to secure better trading conditions for Western corps, does it not? and 'the government just gives me the resources for the low low price of making a few local elites rich' is a good trading condition.

OK, I don't contest this. I was specifically talking about resource cartels, which rotting bones was advancing as something poor countries should do. I'm not sure what rotting bones expected to happen with a cartel; what OPEC did was just raise prices, which produced a shock to rich countries but a much bigger shock to poor countries.

zompist wrote: ↑Fri Feb 18, 2022 12:41 pm

Torco wrote: ↑Fri Feb 18, 2022 10:42 am I see no evidence for this, other than it being the liberal orthodoxy. real socialisms -for all of their failings- operated under extreme duress: unlike the early experiments in capitalism, they were under siege from the get-go, by economic sanctions, outright war, covert war, and in general a coordinated ploy to destroy them by basically the rest of the planet (under control of capitalism). under those circumstances, it's a real testament to the system's effectiveness that it managed to, for a while anyway, a) increase the standards of living of its populations immensely (russia, china, vietnam, laos, cuba), and b) hold on as long as it did. sure, by the eighties people in socialist countries weren't living as affluently as rich americans or wealthy brits, but then again they were never going to: still, to this day, cuba has less child malnutrition, and malnutrition in general than the US.

Ah yes, poor Russia, unfairly maligned just because it murdered or imprisoned tens of millions of citizens, colonized all the nearby countries, caused endless foreign wars, couldn't feed its people, and polluted the environment. Oh, and allied with Hitler to start WWII, something that communists tend to forget when lecturing the less enlightened about fascism.

On China I actually agree with you... mostly. No one really knew how to develop China, and the Nationalists did about the worst possible job, failing to enact land reform, failing to rein in the landlords and warlords, failing to develop industry, and above all failing to resist foreign intervention (the West) and conquest (Japan). Mao got things done: kicked the foreigners out, suppressed the landlords and warlords, started developing the country. Only he could not stand to see slow but sure development; twice he sabotaged his own government for pointless and bloody exercises in revolutionary extremism. If his type had stayed in power China would probably look today much more like North than South Korea.

[snip]

On the left-wing side... almost everyone here is open to some sort of socialism. I've always been against plutocracy and against watering down Rooseveltian liberalism, but I've also moved to the left as plutocracy keeps getting worse. But I'm only interested in democratic socialism. If you come along touting authoritarian communism— well, I'm with Orwell, that shit is just capitalism with new faces.

I could not agree more, including with the stuff I snipped just to keep this post from being excessively long.

Torco, I think maybe emotions and tragic history are making this thread a little tense and encouraging you to use more hyperbole than you otherwise would. If it helps, I doubt anyone here (sit down, Travis, you haven't been called) would argue that the US has done Chile dirty. But that doesn't mean that the US is some mustache-twirling villain, or that the Soviet Union wasn't so bad. Case in point, you mention politically coerced deals where Elon Musk gets your copper, but in a fair market Elon Musk gets your copper anyway. Who else is this mysterious "highest bidder?" Poor people in Talca? Capitalism is a system, and dependency theory is correct. But calling it "theft" is to search for evil faces in what is essentially Matrix code. We all want to change that system, even here in the bad old USA.

The thing is that the foreign policies of both the US and the Soviet Union have both been awful, and it is not a fair assessment of them to focus on one's flaws while overlooking the other's. However, domestically in each case there is a very distinguishable difference between the two. Sure, American democracy has been flawed, especially in earlier years, with slavery and after it Jim Crow and like in the past and gerrymandering and police killings of unarmed minorities and like in the present, but its flaws in more recent times have not been comparable whatsoever in degree to those of the Soviet Union.

Torco wrote: ↑Fri Feb 18, 2022 10:42 am [I see no evidence for this, other than it being the liberal orthodoxy. real socialisms -for all of their failings- operated under extreme duress: unlike the early experiments in capitalism, they were under siege from the get-go, by economic sanctions, outright war, covert war, and in general a coordinated ploy to destroy them by basically the rest of the planet (under control of capitalism). under those circumstances, it's a real testament to the system's effectiveness that it managed to, for a while anyway, a) increase the standards of living of its populations immensely (russia, china, vietnam, laos, cuba), and b) hold on as long as it did. sure, by the eighties people in socialist countries weren't living as affluently as rich americans or wealthy brits, but then again they were never going to: still, to this day, cuba has less child malnutrition, and malnutrition in general than the US. that's the thing I find most funny about libertards going 'hahaha communism only creates hunger hahah holomodor checkmate commie'.

I don't know enough about Cuba, Laos, or Vietnam, but in Russia and China general living standards did not improve when the Leninists took over; what they mostly did is reducing inequality by killing or driving out the wealthy, and impoverishing the countryside by redistributing ressources to their core constituency, industrial workers (whose living standards did improve due to that redistribution). China's living standards only began to rise after the introduction of elements market economics and private decision making in agriculture, and by now China is basically a Capitalist country that calls itself Communist (which is also true about Vietnam). Yes, both countries achieved industrialisation, but Russia had started to industrialise already under the Czars (that's where the revolutionary workers came from) and would doubtlessly have continued to do so without Leninism, and perhaps without killing and impoverishing millions in the bargain.
I mean, there is lots that is wrong with the current world order and that needs correction in how our current economic system works, but that really doesn't make it necessary to defend the failed, inhumane system that was Leninist(-Maoist) one-party dictatorship and command economics.

hwhatting wrote: ↑Sun Feb 20, 2022 7:53 am I don't know enough about Cuba, Laos, or Vietnam, but in Russia and China general living standards did not improve when the Leninists took over; what they mostly did is reducing inequality by killing or driving out the wealthy, and impoverishing the countryside by redistributing ressources to their core constituency, industrial workers (whose living standards did improve due to that redistribution). China's living standards only began to rise after the introduction of elements market economics and private decision making in agriculture, and by now China is basically a Capitalist country that calls itself Communist (which is also true about Vietnam). Yes, both countries achieved industrialisation, but Russia had started to industrialise already under the Czars (that's where the revolutionary workers came from) and would doubtlessly have continued to do so without Leninism, and perhaps without killing and impoverishing millions in the bargain.
I mean, there is lots that is wrong with the current world order and that needs correction in how our current economic system works, but that really doesn't make it necessary to defend the failed, inhumane system that was Leninist(-Maoist) one-party dictatorship and command economics.

Agreed completely.

Torco wrote: ↑Sat Feb 12, 2022 10:53 pmChina says it wants to just be economically and politically hegemonic without messing too much with the rest of the world's internal affairs

And Russia says it’s withdrawing from the Ukrainian border. Are either of these to be trusted?

Torco wrote: ↑Sat Feb 12, 2022 10:53 pmAnd like, I get it, this is a very subjective thing: the US has been a decent ally to english-speaking countries

So that would be the Auld Enemy then? c.f. This is oor land

Torco wrote: ↑Sat Feb 12, 2022 10:53 pmit's understandable you think it's a preferrable overlord,

Obviously, my actual preference is for no overlord /superpower, but, if I really have to choose, the US as superpower is the lesser evil.

Torco wrote: ↑Sat Feb 12, 2022 10:53 pmliberals tend to speak of whether things 'are a democracy or not', and the only way of being a democracy is being a multi-party, freedom of enterpreneurship, parties funded by private individuals and companies, liberal parliamentary-presidential representative democracy with universal suffrage, direct national elections and the rest of it... but if we see that this system is not perfect, and that it's in some ways anti-democratic, then the question's about being democratic, not about being 'a democracy': regarding the rule of law, this notion somewhat falls down under class analysis: I know how things are like in my own country which is called 'a democracy', and I don't expect these things are very different in yours

Multi-party democracy with universal suffrage I am in favour of but I don’t like “freedom of enterpreneurship”; I think companies have too important a role in society nowadays. And I don’t think companies should be organised as they are or that should be able to fund anything.

Look, I’ve criticised American imperialism several times on this board. I used to have signature saying something along the lines of ‘America, land of the free, home of the braves” and I used to have an alt account called George Bush to mock him. It’s not like I don’t know the many faults of the US. It’s just that these flaws do not come close to those of Xi Jinping’s regime.

Torco wrote: ↑Sat Feb 12, 2022 10:53 pm wage theft, for example, is much more money stolen -and much more important money, too- than muggings and bank robberies, and yet it's very weakly enforced, commonly criminals get away with it, and generally does not involve jail time: from this we gleam that it is the private property of rich people that the court and police system protect, and fuck the poors (so, a flawed democracy, just like a single-party one is flawed: or, perhaps not harshly, false democracy in both cases). this has a long corollary I expect I don't need to elaborate too much: the crimes rich people engage in are in general weakly investigated and punished, rich people get away with great evil simply cause they're rich, and the crimes poor people do are harshly punished, and all -to put it in Zizekian terms, so on and so on. from this we gleam that rule of law applies mostly ti rich people, the rest of us be damned. btw this is also true regarding non economics crimes: if you're a rich 30yo and run over a random guy you're likely to not see jail, but if you're black and get caught with 10 grams of weed we know what happens. the rich friends of epstein got away scott free, blablabla.

While certainly the application of rule of law could be improved, Sarkozy and Fillon are getting jail time for example.

Torco wrote: ↑Sat Feb 12, 2022 10:53 pmThe free and fair election thing is also weak: sure, there's no state intervention in elections in decent 'democracies', but there is intervention by other, equally undemocratic powers, and I see no reason to regarding one as a greater violation of democracy than the other.

What are you referring to?

Torco wrote: ↑Sat Feb 12, 2022 10:53 pm The constitutional rights, weeeell.... I meean... you know, surveilance state, military industrial complex, the CIA, political opponents and opponents of corporations getting suicided -happens routinely in my under-the-sphere-of-the-us 'democracy', and in all latam for that matter: they both seem weak in this sense: where the chinese have social credit points the yanks have, you know, credit credit points. freedom of speech is nice, but kind of token if you can get fired for discussing, for example, unions. freedom of association is nice, but when you can be fired for getting into a union it's also kind of token. same with right to property: it's mostly an excuse for rich people to fuck poor people, and the property of the little guy is much less protected. political and legal equality would be nice, but when rich people can buy politicians and I can't it's the same. and we already know we're not equal under the law with wealthier people than us in our 'democracies', so...

Are you referring to things happening in Chile or the US or what? In any case, getting disappeared for announcing you got raped, arrested for singing the national anthem badly etc

Torco wrote: ↑Sat Feb 12, 2022 10:53 pmI mean, but the chinese also have elections! sure, they're somewhat limited in their options, though so are the yanks, corrupted by state interference, though so are the yanks, gerrymandering and lobbying and corporate donors and the rest of it. the relevant elections in China are all inside the CPP, but the CPP is not six rich guys in a room, it's got a hundred million members, and presumably they get to elect their local party committees, and then those elect the higher up party committees and so on: it's not a perfect system, but then again, neither is the US one: They just both look like imperfect and corrupt democracies from where I sit.

Sure, elections would be better without gerrymandering but the worst examples are blown out by the courts or governers, the Democrats are proposing to get rid of it and even at its worst still affords a significantly closer relationship between demos and representatives than anything in China at the moment.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 1:20 pm I would actually prefer a global hegemon to locally be a dictatorship than a non-socialist democracy, if only because a dictatorship would be weakened internally. Nevertheless, I slightly prefer America as a hegemon over China because America is less capitalist these days than China is.

How would a dictatorship be more likely to be weakened internally?

Torco wrote: ↑Fri Feb 18, 2022 10:42 am may I remind that the US's end goal has never been democracy? rather, it has always and forever been a) geopolitical supremacy and b) the profits of its corporations. they invest in pinochet, the saudis, bin laden, the muyahadeen, the fascists in spain, former nazis, israel, the contras, and so on and so on. only children and other innocents buy the line that 'we're spreading democracy and freedum across the world: US ARMY, A GLOBAL FORCE FOR GOOD'.

Now that’s an exaggeration. The US was more or less isolationist for a while, and thankfully put anti-trust laws for example into place. And, despite the colonies in Palestine, Israel is really not as bad as some of their opponents make out. For example, you can see Arabic on Israeli official documents well before the current regime in China would put any Uighur anywhere even in Turkestan.

Torco wrote: ↑Fri Feb 18, 2022 10:42 am the hunger and misery the rest of the world are kept in to prop up a relatively few white people's lavish lifestyles is an even bigger humanitarian crisis.

Sure, the world should certainly be more equal, and less focussed on luxury waste (and providing to and aspiring to it), but the luxury wasters are not all white: they’re also Qatari, Singaporean etc

Torco wrote: ↑Fri Feb 18, 2022 10:42 am still, to this day, cuba has less child malnutrition, and malnutrition in general than the US.

But how does that compare to Cuba pre-Revolution?

Generally, sure, you want to combat American imperialism, but watch out that worse won't come up while you're focussed on that.

Things I agree with:

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 11:12 am Just because American democracy is not perfect by any means and because the US does have very strong hegemonic tendencies does not mean one can establish an equivalence with the PRC or somehow claim that the PRC is better than the US. Remember that the PRC is well on it's way towards being a personal dictatorship right now and it has imprisoned countless Uyghurs in concentration camps just for being Uyghurs (and while the US does have it's own concentration camps they are not on nearly the same scale).

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 12:20 pm For all those that think that China isn't hegemonic, they forget that they are not as hegemonic as the US only because they do not have as much power globally as the US and that they very much desire such power, and once they have such power they will be just as hegemonic if not more so. I would much rather have an imperfect democracy as global hegemon than a personal dictatorship, and I fear the day when China displaces the US in this role.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 1:08 pm One has to consider though that much of how the PRC is "better" than the US is simply a function of it having less power - had it the power, it would probably be no better than the US.

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 1:21 pm Definitely. At the same time, the US hasn't always created dictatorships. After WWI it insisted on autonomy for the new Eastern European countries, though this can be called a geopolitical mistake as they were easy prey for Russia and Germany. The US was extremely uncomfortable with the British Empire, and basically forced Britain and France to give up the Suez war in 1956. Jimmy Carter's turn toward human rights resulted in a wave of democratization in Latin America.

zompist wrote: ↑Sun Feb 13, 2022 1:21 pm Sure you can. That's what Roosevelt did. It helps when those corporations have just destroyed the economy and their own credibility.

rotting bones wrote: ↑Mon Feb 14, 2022 5:29 amThey are, but their colonial empire is much smaller: Tibet, Xinjiang, Yunnan, etc. Possibly North Korea.

zompist wrote: ↑Mon Feb 14, 2022 3:55 pm I'll try to illustrate with a hopefully less inflammatory example. I've said a few times that AKAB-- all kings are bastards. Monarchy is a terrible system, which was mostly devised to solve one problem (the succession) and often fails at that. Kings are socialized to be sociopaths, and it works-- they are out-of-touch narcissists who do much evil and little good, even if (unusually) they are personally benign or hard-working. I expect you don't disagree much.

So, getting rid of monarchy is a good thing. But does it solve all our problems? Do we get good leadership, a more equitable society, a society that does good rather than evil? Not even close. Getting rid of kings is good, but we get new problems, or we discover that a lot of what we blamed on kings is really due to hierarchy itself, or corruption, or human cussedness, or whatever.

Well, same thing with capitalism. Your dogmas about capitalism are more or less true, only they ignore all nuance (some capitalist societies are better than non-capitalist ones, just as some kings are not entirely horrible) and ignore the fact that many evils are not due to capitalism at all.

"Leftist intellectuals" are mostly in the business of reinforcing leftism and attacking capitalism. Which for the most part is a good thing! But by their nature they're not necessarily going to be good at identifying the good parts of capitalism, or what evils are not due to capitalism, or recognizing what problems leftism is prone to.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Fri Feb 18, 2022 10:55 am Even when we completely ignore foreign policy, Stalinism resulted in the murder of countless people in its purges and, as you mention it, the Holomodor and like, and Maoism resulted in the Great Leap Forward, in which millions starved to death. These clearly were not the results of outside pressure at all but rather had solely internal causes (e.g. the purges and the Holomodor were the result of the totalitarian Stalinist state needing a constant supply of enemies to justify its existence).

zompist wrote: ↑Fri Feb 18, 2022 12:41 pmOn the left-wing side... almost everyone here is open to some sort of socialism. I've always been against plutocracy and against watering down Rooseveltian liberalism, but I've also moved to the left as plutocracy keeps getting worse. But I'm only interested in democratic socialism. If you come along touting authoritarian communism— well, I'm with Orwell, that shit is just capitalism with new faces.

On more related news, I used to have a mohawk like Gabriel Boric. I still listen to Rammstein though.

hwhatting wrote: ↑Sun Feb 20, 2022 7:53 am I don't know enough about Cuba, Laos, or Vietnam, but in Russia and China general living standards did not improve when the Leninists took over; what they mostly did is reducing inequality by killing or driving out the wealthy, and impoverishing the countryside by redistributing ressources to their core constituency, industrial workers (whose living standards did improve due to that redistribution). China's living standards only began to rise after the introduction of elements market economics and private decision making in agriculture

From what I know, this isn't correct about China. The CCP's core was not industrial workers but peasants-- in fact this was a big dispute in the 1920s, as the Soviets wanted to concentrate on the cities and Mao wanted to focus on peasants. The Soviet policy went nowhere-- there were not enough industrial workers. Mao basically took over the countryside before taking any cities at all-- the first major city the CCP controlled was Harbin, handed to them by the Russians.

Getting rid of the landowners and warlords was not a minor thing: they had been taking well over half the peasants' crops, as well as forcing them to labor on various projects. Even Americans who visited the CCP sector during WWII were impressed by the level of popular support for the party. By contrast the Nationalists never confronted the landlords and never implemented land reform. From 1953 to 1957 rural income rose by a fifth, primary school enrollment doubled, and life expectancy rose from 36 to 57.

The emphasis on peasants was Mao's, but the prosperity of the 1950s was largely due to Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping.

As I said earlier, these stage of development-- if you avoid certain mistakes-- can be handled by all sorts of regimes. Dictators in Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea did just as well; democratic India almost as well.

The real problem was that Mao couldn't hold himself back-- slow progress wasn't enough for him, especially if it was under other people's direction. Twice he intervened disastrously, killing millions of people. So it's certainly true that absolutist one-party rule ended up being terrible for China. It had a real stroke of luck when Deng was in charge, though.

The big problem with pinning all of the problems of the world on capitalism is that many of the problems of the world are not due to capitalism itself but rather due to other associated matters such as hierarchy, issues which many of the purported replacements do not address. Communism in particular just replaces the hierarchy of private capitalism with the hierarchy of state capitalism and the party. Of course some people realized this from early on, such as the anarchists in particular—which is much of what attracted me to anarchism as a teenager, as it opposed both capitalism and Communism, whose many failings and crimes I was well aware of as a teenager. Of course these people oftentimes instead of opposing capitalism alone opposed authority instead. Problem is, their own proposed solutions in practice end up reinventing the state but calling it and its structures by different names, because what they are for in theory is unworkable otherwise, but without many of the advantages of representative democracy combined with rule of law. Realizing this led me to democratic socialism, as it seems like the best alternative to capitalism, Communism, and anarchism together.

Of course that raises the question of why did I not support democratic socialism from the outset—which was that it seemed too liable, given the political circumstances, to revert to capitalism on one hand, or to become Communism on the other hand. This is why I specifically believe that democratic socialism must involve true, direct worker ownership and self-management of capital—so the state cannot privatize the means of production and thus deliver it into the hands of private capitalists or, conversely, replace democratic control of capital with party control of capital. This is also why I oppose social democracy, because a kinder-and-gentler capitalism can easily become a less kind-or-gentle capitalism with the vagaries of democratic politics.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Feb 20, 2022 4:55 pm This is why I specifically believe that democratic socialism must involve true, direct worker ownership and self-management of capital—so the state cannot privatize the means of production and thus deliver it into the hands of private capitalists

I hate to tell you, friend, but worker ownership is privatization. Unless your workers are somehow not private individuals (robot ownership, maybe? Could be worse). You can't say that only workers can be owners and all owners must own an equal share, unless you're willing to outlaw things like private investment or bank loans. If by "preventing privatization" you mean preventing ownership by a small number of individuals, then you'll need someone to enforce that for you...

or, conversely, replace democratic control of capital with party control of capital.

Aaaand, this is the other end of the squozen balloon. democratic control is party control. There is no organization that can act on behalf of the interest of the entire population that does not have the power wielded by Le Fancy People's Party. A cacophanous riot of separate political parties wield that same power, just as weapons against each other. Taking power away from the plutocrats means giving it to some other body that can enforce things like worker ownership, etc. Who dat, u think?

Bottom line, there is a large burlap bag marked "SACK OF ALL EARTHLY POWER (tremble ye mortals)" and it's not going away. The only thing you can do is come up with a plan for who is going to hold the sack and when. You can let whoever has the biggest gun hold the sack, or you can take turns, or you can elect a committee of sack-handlers, but you're never eliminating the fact that somebody has to hold the damn sack and be trusted by everyone else not be an utter bastard. All economic systems have to confront this problem.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Sun Feb 20, 2022 8:41 pm

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Feb 20, 2022 4:55 pm This is why I specifically believe that democratic socialism must involve true, direct worker ownership and self-management of capital—so the state cannot privatize the means of production and thus deliver it into the hands of private capitalists

I hate to tell you, friend, but worker ownership is privatization. Unless, your workers are somehow not private indiciduals (robot ownership, maybe? Could be worse). You can't say that only workers can be owners and all owners must own an equal share, unless you're willing to outlaw things like private investment or bank loans.

Umm that is precisely what I am for—making it so that only workers have a direct say in the operation of businesses, with businesses acting democratically within. Note that not all workers necessarily must have an equal share, e.g. how much weight one's vote has may vary upon, say, how many hours one works or how long one has been with the business. While there would be outside funding—e.g. funding by the state, as without such how would new businesses practically get off the ground—such would not entail taking a share of control over said businesses.

Also note that "privatization" as I used it refers to delivering publicly held capital into the hands of private capitalists, which is the typical usage I am familiar with. Workers either building new businesses that are worker-owned-and-self-managed or seizing control of the businesses at which they themselves already work and bringing about worker self-management hardly counts as privatization.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Sun Feb 20, 2022 8:41 pm

or, conversely, replace democratic control of capital with party control of capital.

Aaaand, this is the other end of the squozen balloon. democratic control is party control. There is no organization that can act on behalf of the interest of the entire population that does not have the power wielded by Le Fancy People's Party. A cacophanous riot of separate political parties wield that same power, just as weapons against each other. Taking power away from the plutocrats means giving it to some other body that can enforce things like worker ownership, etc. Who dat, u think?

I like your usage of past participles here. That said, by party control I meant control of capital by a party dictatorship as opposed to a democratic state. This is the difference between state capitalism as exercised by a Communist state, e.g. the Soviet Union, as opposed to, say, a social democratic state, e.g. Norway.

Travis B. wrote: ↑Sun Feb 20, 2022 9:08 pm Umm that is precisely what I am for—making it so that only workers have a direct say in the operation of businesses, with businesses acting democratically within. Note that not all workers necessarily must have an equal share, e.g. how much weight one's vote has may vary upon, say, how many hours one works or how long one has been with the business. While there would be outside funding—e.g. funding by the state, as without such how would new businesses practically get off the ground—such would not entail taking a share of control over said businesses.

Well, I hate to quibble over nomenclature, but you, my friend, are not a "Democratic Socialist" in any recognizable sense. At all the DSA parties, you'd be known as "that hard-core Stalinist guy." This isn't Communism with a capital C, it's got three Cs and a P! I'm fine with State Capitalism (I mean, who isn't? Oh, right, Democratic Socialists), but you have to accept what this entails. Whatever underpaid party aparatchik is in charge of deciding which new businesses get access to the only source of capital investment, and enforcing bans on private loans, and identifying which factory worker has violated the rule against building spare parts (i.e. generating new capital) in their garage, will quickly become the most bribable human being that has ever lived. The giant sack of power is still there, only now, due to our own clever attempts to hand it to a disintrested party, it's not directly benefitting the person holding it, meaning someone else can easily persuade them to move the sack this way or that. And so goes the oversight committee. And the committee to oversee the oversight committee. All Hail the Sack of Power.

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Sun Feb 20, 2022 8:41 pm I hate to tell you, friend, but worker ownership is privatization.

This is a some sort of semantic game, but I admit it'd be amusing if some country nationalized businesses from the rich, handed them over to their workers, and called it "Privatization."

Bottom line, there is a large burlap bag marked "SACK OF ALL EARTHLY POWER (tremble ye mortals)" and it's not going away.

Is there? Who owns the sack in (say) a hunter-gatherer society? Who owns the sack in (say) an early empire where the king's orders become meaningless 100 km from the capital, unless he's personally there with an army? Who owns the sack in the USA?

I think this sack of yours is a fantasy-- admittedly, a fantasy that can hit the unwary hard in the head. The utopian or dystopian impulse is to imagine that there is one sack, and one entity can control it for benign of malign purposes. This is pretty much never a description of any actual country, not even the really nasty ones. The person who thinks they own the sack always has people they'd better not piss off and events they cannot control.

Or to put away the metaphor, power is always divided, sometimes by design, more often by ordinary human muddle, historical accidents, and limited information. Sometimes this is even lauded as a good thing: our government is basically designed to have multiple veto points, to have limits on its power, to not be very good at many things. It has to share power explicitly with the states, and de facto with other bodies, like parties or Facebook or talk radio.

Utopians, I wager, usually dislike this-- it's messy and gets in the way of a thematic unity. But there's no reason a socialist-minded country couldn't embrace it instead.

You have a point, of course, that worker ownership might depend on state power, or be threatened by banks, or whatever. Of course, which is why if Travis was in control, he'd have to have detailed policies in those areas. Obviously it's more than saying "businesses are co-ops now lol." Laws and customs and expectations today are all in favor of corporations and plutocrat ownership; a society based on co-ops would rethink all of that.