None of those things should be illegal. It is really annoying to see how a leader class kills people of hunger and make everything illegal so that now everyone is a criminal for trying to survive.
That system you define there just exists in your head. It is not possible. It is like pretending the existence of unicorns. The real one every time ends up in an authoritarian regime.
How does someone dream of things that are better? How can you have faith in anything at all? Is not the love you feel towards your friends and family kind of like the unicorn you are describing? Do you even really feel love, if its just in your "head"?
It's unfortunate that such a sensible idea only becomes justification for kleptocratic oligarchies which is what the other poster was going on about.
And people keep saying that communism hasn't been tried. But it has. It starts with the state trying to be socialist and then "withering away" to full on communism (according to the ideology's author). Only we never get past that part. We usually go straight to concentration camps, murdering those who disagree with the revolution, relative poverty, and a extremely uncompetitive economy.
(Dig further with Hayek, I am sure you will find much worse things in his naive Darwinism than anything in your scary communist countries.)
First, you did not build a valid criticism about Hayek, just labeled him as Darwinist. Second, your reasonings are as if you see 1000 people jumping from a 5th floor and smashing themselves against the ground every time and still saying: there must be another possibility. No, man, it is in front of you, do some analysis, please!
> [...] Argentina [...]
No.
Source: I live in Argentina and it's neither socialist nor communist. It's currently center-left capitalist. Our immediately preceding government was center-right capitalist. In the 70s we had far-right capitalist military dictatorship (Chicago boys influenced economy wise, School of the Americas trained).
1: Why isn't france or china on the former or currently socialist list? There are many others.
2: Consider the volatility and violent turmoil, war, genocide, atrocities from those former and present countries from the timeperiod of german unification under bismarck (somewhat arbitrarily chosen date) to the present day.
3: There have been many non-communist and non-socialst nations which where bad and there are still such regimes in existence today.
Eliminating "communism" or "socialism" was not a cure for anything. Many of these countries share different traits which would have a much greater effect on their stability.
Do you think that all those books people have written about it, both for and critically against, are just filled nonsense, and the writers and thinkers just had to count on the fact that nobody would actually read them? And that I, who have read a small portion, am somehow hypnotized into delusion by them, thinking I have gained knowledge, when in fact there was no knowledge to be gained at all?
I can't of course argue against this, as I am implicitly deluded in general, but I would still question your overall rhetorical strategy here.
We have evidence in America that the right/democratic quadrant kind of works -- it can produce great prosperity, but there can be a lot of sadness still (Jim Crow). At least there are mechanisms to fix it internally. It can get better (Civil Rights Act) but it can also get worse; we are finding now that if the Overton window moves too far to the right, there seems to be a tendency for America to become more authoritarian. We don't really know what going too far left looks like in America (probably the same IMO) because it's never even come close to happening; despite all the hysteric labeling of Democrats as Communists, they are really more liberal than left. There is no mainstream leftist representation in the US Federal Government, not even Bernie or AOC (the Green New Deal is written squarely within the framework of capitalism).
There are a lot of people out there saying that the left/democratic quadrant looks attractive, but they are shouted down by people who say that we can't ever try that, because look at what the left/authoritarian quadrant did in the past. People who are here in this thread right now. They are very vigorous about this claim, possibly because they lived under such left/authoritarian regimes. But I think that's a big mistake to conflate left/authoritarian with left/democratic, and it leaves us at a suboptimal local maxima as a society.
People often argue that it's a short trip from left/democratic to left/authoritarian, and that may be true. But it's also a short trip from right/democratic to right/authoritarian, and that's where we are right now as a nation. On this day, January 6, we as Americans should be more aware of that than ever. But that doesn't mean we can't try new things, and we shouldn't be held back from improving the future by the failures of the past.
This is too simplified to mean anything. The USSR had many socialist branches, where the bolsheviks ultimately won out in a power struggle. The bolsheviks wanted state control, the citizen working for the state, while others were into having actual soviets where the citizens would've taken control of their means of production. Having a parliament and democracy was important to many of these groups (and the liberals who were also politically active). I wouldn't recommend a dictatorship, regardless if it has "of the proletariat" as a suffix.
The downvoting around here is just weird. I thought downvotes were supposed to indicate comments that were against forum rules or just unhelpful; _maybe_ offtopic? But people seem to downvote stuff they just don't like, regardless of how intelligent it might be.
It's sad, and it's deteriorating HN.
You don't need an all-powerful totalitarian government to enforce that kind of ownership; the people can do it on their own. Owners of steel mills need workers to work the steel mills. Without workers, their steel mill is worthless. Without private ownership of a steel mill, the still mill is still valuable as long as it has workers. Under communist philosophy, the government doesn't need to use authoritarian powers to enforce communal ownership of steel mills, because no one wants to own a steel mill that has no steel workers. Therefore, workers have the ultimate power under this philosophy.
That seems to be the major problem with communism - it works on a small scale communities but for anything larger you get the relationships and conflicts of interest between the many actual (small-scale) communities and/or between communities and de-facto outsiders, and there this fundamental basis stops working well; the effectiveness of trust-based relationships are different for different sizes of communities and persistence of identity/reputation/etc.
This also has a theoretical basis in decision theory, e.g. even simplified models like the iterated prisoner's dilemma clearly have different optimal cooperate/defect strategies depending on whether you're dealing with someone with whom you expect many more interactions (i.e. someone you know from your mini-community) or someone who's either anonymous with no persistent reputation, or known to be of a transitory nature.
A community of a hundred humans will have emotional ties that allow them to cooperate in a way that a community of a hundred sub-communities and their delegates simply does not.
If your delegates emotionally treat the other delegates as "their community" then you get essentially a bureaucrat/administrator class that exploits the communities for their own gain and results in the usual scenario a reality where your local rep doesn't mean anything. The observed dynamics in the early Soviet structure is relevant, where smaller soviets/worker councils were sending their delegates to larger soviets of soviets and so on in multiple levels, which had your exact plans and expectations, but quickly started to get poor results as these representatives (the process of which continued pretty much forever) become less relevant, and got effectively turned into an 'apparatchik' class for the opposite top-down control - which quite well matched the incentives of these individual representatives, who formed a "community" with their fellow representatives and generally benefited from the structure.
And if your delegates are actually faithful to their communities and properly represent for their interests, then (in the absence of some authority forcing communities to do things) the relationships between the communities become effectively a market economy, based on objective trade instead of altruistic cooperation (they agree to win-win cooperation, but disagree on any extensive resource transfers from richer communities to poorer ones, caring about their community and ensuring their advantage) and the large scale economy of the country effectively becomes equivalent to free market only with the basic participants in the economy being slightly larger, not households but these communities - this is also a historical observation of how the relations between kibbutz communities turned out.
There is no "maybe" that you suggest, these things have been tried out, we know the results, and (sadly!) your expectations do not match what happens. I fully agree with your "should", in a perfect world it really should work, but in the one we live in it does not. Perhaps it would work with some post-homo-sapiens which are better than us, but that would be a substantial change in fundamental behavior and response to incentives which IMHO can't happen with purely cultural or social change, it would require change in us as a species.
Free markets allow people to organize the way they like. Other systems don't.
Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business.
> I don't engage in negotiations with my wife or my friends, we cooperate
Me neither but trust isn't scalable. On a large ethnically and culturally diverse population it's impossible to have trust.
It's good to have choice. Engaging in negotiations can be boring but it's preferred over the tragedy of the commons or attempts social control that always end up being an euphemism for privileges for friends or authoritarian policy.
Even if a delegate system does devolve into essentially communal trading, that would still be an improvement to capitalism because atomisation at the level of a functional community is less destructive to the human spirit, and more mutually sustainable than atomisation at the individual level.
I'm just talking about ideas I've read about here, and things that seem worth trying - it's not like I've personally experienced an anarchist commune, especially one that has scaled beyond a single personal community. My main point of orientation is that the problems inherent to capitalism are pretty glaring (including, importantly, climate collapse through over-extraction, which will eventually cost us our biosphere) and alternatives need to be investigated. I'm well aware that self-organising systems are hard to build, systems theory and cybernetics are one of my main interests and they're all about self-organisation in nature and technology. But doing nothing is not an option. If I had a magic wand to implement any system I wanted I certainly wouldn't be so clumsy as to assume that something that "sounds reasonable" would work as I assume; experiments would have to be tried with many, many different models. Some experiments have and continue to be undertaken in communes and revolutionary communities around the globe, but nothing on the scale of a whole country outside of state socialism, which was just a red dictatorship. But at the end of the day, we really need to make the switch from competitive, exploitation-based coordination to cooperative coordination that can be more firmly rooted in human values.
3. True. I do not think a non-socialist system makes countries automatically successful. But I think that a great degree of economic freedom favors much development. There can be other problems, though.
It is difficult to identify those traits, but I always remember something someone important to me taught me since I was young: first fix it, complain later. It is not about it is your fault or not (extend this to any enemy in any society). If you choose crying and not fixing, you will face a bad fate. If you choose fixing, you can complain or not, but if it is fixed, your fate has way more chances to be a good one.
Of course, if there is no private property directly, uh, that is going to be a bad one. The welfare is expensive and it is what is basically destroying my own country in my opinion: we cannot indefinitely hold a 120% debt. Besides that, I really think that it is the welfare of the politicians and many sectors of the public workers, not from the normal people that do not fall in one of those areas.
Let's investigate this claim a little bit. First of all, when I think about heavy handed government intervention, I think about the use of lethal force. Labor history in the United States is replete with instances of the US government using lethal force to quash labor movements. For example:
[0] The Battle of Blair Mountain was the first aerial attack on US soil, when the US Airforce attacked striking workers with leftover bombs from WWI.
[1] The Homestead Strike, where the PA State Militia was brought in to put down a steel worker uprising.
[2] The Great Railroad Strike, where national guard troops and police killed over 100 workers in Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Michigan, and Illinois.
[3] The Lattimer massacre, where almost 20 unarmed striking workers were slaughtered by county police.
[4] The Memorial Day massacre when police opened fire into an unsuspecting crowd of assembled striking mill workers and their families, killing 10, maiming 9, wounding dozens more.
I could go on but I think I've made my point. I could literally list at least 10 more incidents of state-sanctioned violence being used to quell worker uprising, and if you haven't heard of the above events, I encourage you to do a deep dive into the history of labor movements in the US. (It's worth noting that it's not surprising that you may not have heard about these events, because they are not taught in schools. I wonder why?)
My charge to you: can you find a single instance of the state using this kind of violence against the owners of corporations? Of the police shooting plant owners and their families in the back? Of the US air force raining explosives down upon mine owners? Of the national guard being deployed to stop worker exploitation and wage theft? It seems to me that the exact opposite of what you claimed is true: heavy handed government intervention is done at the behest of owners against workers movements.
"[O]nce emotions had died down, [PA Governor] Pattison felt the need to act. He had been elected with the backing of a Carnegie-supported political machine, and he could no longer refuse to protect Carnegie interests. [1]"
This is why you see today that Amazon is even using the same firm [5] that Andrew Carnegie and Henry Frick used against their workers last century! That's not an accident!
Just as a final point, private property does not ever "spring up and thrive" on its own. Private property as a concept only exists as long as that property is defended by the state using its monopoly on violence. When someone trespasses upon your property, you call the state to forcibly remove, arrest, and imprison that person. If the state doesn't show up, you can only own as much property as you can personally defend.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike#Arrival_of_th...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Railroad_Strike_of_1877
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lattimer_massacre
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1937_Memorial_Day_massacre
I think one of the worst contributions of marxism (as in incorrect) is the theory of objective value (translating from spanish, I hope I am doing it right), which basically says how much you are being stolen. In fact, there is no such thing as objective value and this is very easy to demonstrate in the experience of any of us. It is just absurd.
Yet there are people that still seem to believe it but I do not think they really think it is correct. This theory is the foundation of how much the employer steals to the worker. And that sets up a very conflictive mindset instead of a cooperative one. I believe more in cooperation. I do not deny an employer and an employee, both parts always want more. But both win together.
That's where the name comes from, in fact.
Why it takes a significant deviation from that base to permit alternative forms to operate on a level playing field should be obvious.
The current system has many drawbacks, but it can easily be much worse, and most (all?) attempts of "tear everything down and rebuild" will be much worse at least for a non-trivial time - and there needs to be a very good, reliable argument the expected long-term result is really going to work in order to justify that certain harm in the face of uncertainty that there's going to be any improvement and quite some evidence that the long-term result often is not only not better, but clearly worse. "Doing nothing is not an option" is not an ethical justification if your "doing" harms someone, and making random radical changes to status quo without properly evaluating the realistically expected consequences (without wishful thinking and unrealistically optimistic assumptions) is simply irresponsible and unethical even if the current system has severe flaws.
Free markets are not absolute freedom, and private property still restricts the action of people without money. Poor people can barely do anything because they're too busy trying not to become homeless. The wealthy, on the other hand, can do what they want. That's not a very free system. More free than some Soviet dictatorship, 100%, but I like to think that we can do better. Plenty of coercion occurs under the banner of free market trade - just look at rare metal extraction in Africa, that powers our electronic devices.
> Cooperatives are cool and I have nothing against them but there's a reason for them being so few. They go bankrupt more often than other business.
They actually don't, they have greater staying power than corporations [1]. There's not many because investors don't want to invest in them due to the nature of their structure, and workers don't typically have the resources to fund their own business. Plus, they're a pretty niche concept, many people haven't heard of them. So once again, people can't organise the way they like because the way people can organise in the market is controlled by capital.
> Me neither but trust isn't scalable. On a large ethnically and culturally diverse population it's impossible to have trust.
That's a pretty weird thing to say. I hadn't even brought up race. I grew up going to a racially diverse school, had friends of various backgrounds, many of my neighbours and people I've worked with have been of different backgrounds, no issue. Maybe that's just you that doesn't trust people of other backgrounds.
> It's good to have choice. Engaging in negotiations can be boring but it's preferred over the tragedy of the commons or attempts social control that always end up being an euphemism for privileges for friends or authoritarian policy.
Do you not think that the ultra-wealthy are engaging in privileges for friends or authoritarian policy? They write the laws you must obey!
Any system where the primary incentive is in opposition to moral value is less than ideal. If I am incentivised by the profit motive to withhold resources to the needy (see for example: US medical industry, the military-industrial complex withholding "being alive" to foreign citizens) then that's not a particularly moral system because the people least affected by morality will rise to the top.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative#Longevity_a...
It's true that democracies are hard to set up and maintain. We are learning that here in America right now. It seems like authoritarianism is the natural order of governments, so maybe left/authoritarianism is like a local minima: it's easy to fall into that well, hard to get out of it, but there are much better things out there if you can avoid it.
Capitalism is basically free market, no price controls, prviate property respect and low regulation. Argentina is number 148 in the index of economic freedom. Would you call that capitalist? Not me: https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
When that happens, click the timestamp of the comment you wish to reply to to go to that comment’s page, which has a reply box in my experience.
Really, consider how you're shifting the goalposts: you only consider far right libertarians as capitalists. The rest of the world disagrees with you.
Anyway, I live in Argentina and you don't. You are wrong.
> That is not capitalism. Call it something else.
No. You must use definitions of capitalism compatible with the current consensus. Otherwise you're playing the same game you keep accusing leftists of, "that's not true capitalism, I mean something else!".
The best thing to pick at, if you are arguing with Marxists, is the general "labor theory of value" and whether that ultimately is correct. The labor theory of value has to do with how we assign economic value to things on the market, and that it ultimately is from the labor of those who produce the product.
[5] https://www.npr.org/2020/11/30/940196997/amazon-reportedly-h...
By that measure, how capitalist is Argentina? As much as this in the economic freedom index, which could be considered an index of "how capitalist" a country is (position 148): https://www.heritage.org/index/ranking
If this is capitalism...
I do not know what consensus you talk about. Capitalism is low or no regulation and free market. Also, should favor low taxing. Otherwise you have social democracy.
> Anyway, I live in Argentina and you don't. You are wrong.
This is a fallacy of authority, as you can see by the economic freedom index I shared with you. Position 148 next to countries like Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Ecuador... even the communist Laos has a better score in economic freedom!!! I live in Vietnam, Laos is next to where I used to live in Hanoi. If that has more economic freedom than Argentina, Argentina cannot in any way be considered capitalist as such.
Even according to the communists, that's not true. Socialism is the common ownership of the means of production. Communism is the hypothetical post-scarcity classless society into which socialism is supposed to evolve eventually.
No "communist" country that ever existed actually claimed to be communist; they claimed to be building communism. Which, as the popular Soviet joke went, is always on the horizon - which is an imaginary line that recedes as you try to advance to it.
So the only conclusion that can be derived from this is that "Marxism-Leninism" inevitably leads to totalitarianism and poverty. Which is fair enough, but it doesn't really say anything about other varieties of socialism, especially the non-Marxist ones. Are you familiar with the Zapatistas, for example?
When Marx came up with his "modes of production", one of those was what he called the "Asiatic mode of production" (because it was ostensibly widespread in Asia). The idea is that it's basically a society where all property is collectively owned by the ruling class, which uses violence or threat thereof to directly extract surplus from the rest of the population. Whether this accurately describes any historical society in Asia or elsewhere is debatable, but it does seem to very accurately describe the USSR. Which is probably why Stalin personally cracked down on that definition, and had it purged from the Soviet interpretation of Marxism.
Regulation is an assertion of authority over the property of others - I'd never tell you what colour to paint your roof, but if I could do it, it would be a dilution of your ownership.
Not saying we need 0% taxes and 0 regulations, but less is more here.
For example, a person with ten titles to ten houses can only live in one of them at a time; their control of the other nine comes from the ability to call the police who'd evict any squatters - which then makes it possible to rent them out. But suppose the police wouldn't show up?
It's why delegations and councils make sense on paper but are, even at the best of times, not perfect in practice. I understand that we may not strive for perfection in our social systems, but this does go against the distribution of power intent behind communal living in the first place. I actually like the idea of communal ownership of means of production, but I don't think it's possible to implement successfully with humans as a species (or likely any species, even ants have hierarchical importance). It might be possible with "sentient" machines at some point in the distant future, but the rest is biologically encoded in our nature.
Well, he did work with a criminal from our past military dictatorship...
> . Apart from this comment: capitalism is free market and low regulations. By that measure, how capitalist is Argentina?
By that token there are no capitalist countries at all!
A capitalist country with more regulations than you'd like is exactly that: a capitalist country.
Argentina is not communist. You're embarrassing yourself.
> I live in Vietnam
I've seen you claim you live in all sorts of countries, but whatever.
You are wrong. The only people who agree with your strict definition of "capitalism" are libertarians, a tiny minority. I guess all countries in the world -- the US included -- are communist to you.
Good luck with that.
I have not claimed to have lived in a ton of countries. I have lived in Vietnam, in Singapore, in Spain and in places you do not need or I want to tell you. But I just claimed to have lived in those and to know, through people, other countries.
Go travel a bit and talk to foreigners and read a bit if you want to know more. But do not claim your country is not de facto socialist in many terms. It is. You do not like it? Ok, cool. But it is.
I showed you evidence. I never claimed Argentina is communist by the way. I claimed what they do is socialist-style stuff. Every day stronger and stronger, limiting freedom.
Calm down a bit and start trying to not insult everyone you do not like. You do not like me I am cool with it. But attack the argumentation, not the people.
Milei is the only person in your country honest enough to put his payroll and privileges on a lottery to not keep it for him because he is against taxes.
See you!
Pray tell me, does this line of debate tactics usually work for you?
> Milei is the only person in your country honest enough to put his privileges on a lottery to not keep it for him becaise he is against taxes.
"Honest" is one way of putting it. "Far right libertarian" is another. In any case, like I said, he also has an authoritarian streak.
In Portugal a socialist-communist government is governing right now. It is not like they do what their supposed ideology says, but it is a fact that the government is that. Mexico is now managed by Lopez Obrador, a socialist. Argentina by Alberto Fernández. Another socialist. I agree those countries are nothing near Russia before, but it is the governments they have now.
History is also replete with unions beating 'scabs' to death, like Caesar Chavez's union members beating immigrants in the desert as they tried to cross the border.
In many ways, giving a public service without taking the wealth of others and giving up you assigned salary for the task could be seen as more socialist than what mamy socialists claim. That is why, as of today, I have respect for Milei: he tries to promote what he believes starting on not making the rest pay the bill.
Things can change, sure. And politics can change people. I can change my mind. I talk about now and today. Respect for Mr. Milei. If there was a person like Milei in Spain, and not necessarily a libertarian, I would probably vote again. Now I simply cannot.
You do realize that's a publicity stunt on Milei's part, and that it's completely unrelated to socialism, right?
> If there was a person like Milei in Spain
Aren't you living in Vietnam?
The RLA was passed in response to the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, which I mentioned in my previous post. This was an uprising that spanned multiple states, and resulted in over 100 deaths.
These laws which you regard as heavy handed were paid for with literal blood at the hands of the federal government and corporations. I think it's important to point out the scope and scale of these things. On one hand you have the federal government mobilizing the machines of war at the behest of, and in coordination with corporations, to slaughter workers and their families for having the audacity to ask for better working conditions. That's heavy handed.
On the other side you have laws passed in response to this bloodshed that were intended to help tilt the scales in the other direction just a bit. That's not heavy handed. Maybe you feel that these kinds of restrictions are heavy and onerous, but really I don't think it's fair to draw an equivalency.
As for Caesar Chavez, I don't think that's an example of heavy handed government intervention. It seems more like interclass violence, and it's sad. I will be the first to say that no one really comes out of the labor rights movement squeaky clean. But I think it's the government and corporations who have the highest body count and deserve most of the blame, because they had most of the money and power at the time. They could have chosen and afforded to not resort to violence, others in more precarious situations felt that violence was the only choice.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Act_o...
The person waiting and flooded the comments days after to rank their posts higher, increases the likelihood that this is the tirade of someone accused of domestic violence by two sources.
The thread's topic is completely changed by the flood of comments and I insist that it be removed entirely if you are not going to remove enough comments to reduce the thread hijack.
> And 21 million of people are subsidized. I do not see a capitalist system subsidizing 21 million people. That is not capitalism. Call it something else.
So by your logic, USA is a socialist country? Democratic socialist? Communist? That’s… not what most Americans would say.
> The numbers could not be fully explained by part-time schedules; about 70 percent of the 21 million people receiving Medicaid or SNAP benefits work full time, in general, the GAO said.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/11/18/food-stam...
[1] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
I join you in pointing out that there is not a rigidly adhered to performative standard of government classification. By that I mean for example, that while the USA is generally considered as the quintessential modern, successful democracy, it is not that, but a representative republic with deomcratic elections.
So sure, France hasn't been purely "communist" or "socialist", but the reality of the world is that there is much more going on than could be captured by a check box.
>3. It is difficult to identify those traits, but I always remember something someone important to me taught me since I was young: first fix it, complain later.
Well, we have Iran as just one example of those kind of outcomes. That course is only tolerable from one end of the bayonet. If you stab enough people if might fix every problem we have, but there will be nobody to complain later.
I guess it really is as you say: intervention just causes more intervention...
With that in mind, consider what would happen today if you were to claim some random empty house as your own, posted a sign to that effect outside, and started to shoot any "trespassers". That would be murder - and the law would come down on you. Same thing would happen in this hypothetical society if someone tried to do what you describe.
(The issue of how a fully anarchist society would deal with murder in the first place is a separate and complicated one. I can't really speak for them; my own take is that anarchism is a kind of political asymptote - an unachievable utopia that the realistically-possible ideal society would trend towards as its cultural underpinnings evolve to make it more viable. In this day and age, something like Bookchin's libertarian municipalism appears to be empirically viable.)
More explanation here in case it's helpful:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23959679
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...