…immediately transition to communism because that would be impossible, or at least strategically impractical. The plan of Marxist-Leninist revolutions was always to create a transitional state that would eventually transition into a stateless classless society once the state was no longer needed.
@Radical_EgoCom@NoiseColor@yogthos immediate transition is not only possible in theory but actually has some precedent (although so far it’s only happened in the wrong place and time to last at scale for more than a few years). On the other hand expecting a transitional state to actually continue the transition is even less rational than expecting Jesus to show up and start helping.
The actual reason anarchist experiments always fail is because they lack organization and structure necessary to keep them going. Maybe if spent some time to learn what a state is, then you wouldn’t feel the need to make inane statements like this.
These things go hand in hand. Military power requires organization, ability to create industry, build factories, have a trained workforce, and so on. Creating these things requires having some form of central planning and authority. This is an excellent read on the subject incidentally https://dashthered.medium.com/where-do-tanks-come-from-8723ff77d83b
On the other other hand, choosing to stay in a capitalist system and expecting to be treated like a human being is less rational than expecting God even cared enough to want to help in the first place.
Capitalism is a system where people who own capital exploit the working class to create more wealth for themselves. A system where the means of production are publicly owned and are used for the benefit of the workers is demonstrably not that. The fact that you don’t even understand such basic things shows how woefully clueless you are.
@yogthos China is a place where people who own capital exploit the working class to create more wealth for themselves. The fact you’re pretending otherwise makes you an anti-communist, an anti-materialist, or more likely both.
Yup, that makes sense. That’s why China is pretty much the only place in the world where large amount of people are being lifted out of poverty, while the wealth of the rich is diminishing. You are very intelligent. You wouldn’t recognize materialism if it hit you in the face kid.
@yogthos China is a place where some people are being lifted out of poverty BY CAPITALISM BECAUSE CAPITALISM IS THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM IN PLACE THERE. Also while it is a lot of people it’s not as many as the official number because the poverty line itself is affected by factors other than people’s living conditions.
The $1.90/day (2011 PPP) line is not an adequate or in any way satisfactory level of consumption; it is explicitly an extreme measure. Some analysts suggest that around $7.40/day is the minimum necessary to achieve good nutrition and normal life expectancy, while others propose we use the US poverty line, which is $15. https://www.cgdev.org/blog/12-things-we-can-agree-about-global-poverty
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
@Radical_EgoCom@NoiseColor@yogthos Rosa Luxemburg explained all this better than I could and she wasn’t even an anarchist (but really take your pick of almost any non-ML communist theorist).
But in summary: implementing communism inherently deprives counterrevolution of the capital it needs to function, so any delay in implementing communism is at best a strategic error and at worst an indication that the org has already become counterrevolutionary.
I agree that revolutions can always be bloody, but when people say authoritarian, they mean a state where dissent is surpressed by violent means. At least in modern times, most western states (and, in fact, most states) don’t suppress discourse as much as the USSR often did.
1/3 [most western states (and, in fact, most states) don’t suppress discourse as much as the USSR often did.]
I have to partially disagree. While it is likely true that the USSR was more outward with its suppression methods than most western states today, countries, like America for example, do suppress dissent on a regular scale (Campus protest, George Floyd protest are just two notable examples, but there are plenty of more).
2/3 Also, speaking of America again, one of America’s suppression methods is suppression through delusion, tricking people into thinking that they’re actually free with constant propaganda in media and schools when the reality is that America is just as much (and maybe even more, since it’s hard to compare the exact numbers to the Soviet Union) police presence and civilian surveillance as the Soviet Union did (but probably more surveillance given the advancements…
3/3 …in technology) and all while having the largest prison population in the entire world, possibly being larger than the amount of prisoners in labor camps under Stalin (again, it’s hard to compare since records from that era from the Soviet Union are lacking).
There’s currently less than 1.4 million prisoners in the US, while official Soviet records show 0.79 million in executions alone under Stalin. Average that by year, and you still have 0.02 million per year.
According to official Soviet estimates, more than 14 million people passed through the Gulag from 1929 to 1953, which averages to 0.58 million per year.
Edit: That’s a little bit more than two times the current US prison influx amount, and I didn’t account for per capita-ing (modern US has more population in total than USSR ever did).
Robertson drew attention to one of the great scandals of American life. “Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today,” writes the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik. “Over all, there are now more people under ‘correctional supervision’ in America–more than 6 million–than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.”
I only counted those incarcerated. You’re counting community service, probation, parole, etc. And my sources are The Guardian and this academic journal.
That’s just splitting hairs, but even going with your numbers, it’s clearly comparable to the time of peak incarcerations in USSR. So, if we look at how the systems evolve over time, USSR incarceration rate dropped, while US incarceration rate continues to climb.
Having poorly made police officers is way worse than have state policies of persecuting ideas and even forms of art. Unlike what would happen in the USSR, Snowden’s leaks were not blocked and promoters of the leak weren’t hunted down (except for Snowden himself, which would happen in most countries), and you are free to discuss here without being banned.
Oops, yeah, I forgot about that. But you actually see livestreamed debate about whether suppressing these protests was good (oftentimes it’s highly criticized), and you don’t just get prosecuted if you just express opinions online. Also, the campus protests were suppressed because the owners of the private property being protested on didn’t like it. They get substantial funding from the state, but there’s still a difference from the state itself doing it. Like socialists and flat-earthers don’t get straight-up stamped out by police, whereas Stalin actively prosecuted people who didn’t support pseudobiology.
I’m not at all trying to suggest that Stalinist Russia was more free than modern-day America, just that many people think of America as a free country when it’s actually closer to Stalinist Russia than they’d care to recognize.
My point is that the United States is indeed much less authoritarian. Saying that there’s no such thing as a state that’s more authoritarian or less authoritarian is denying reality.
US incarceration rate is higher than what USSR had during Stalin’s purges. It’s hard to think of a better measure of how authoritarian a state is than the percentage of the population it keeps behind bars.
most western states (and, in fact, most states) don’t suppress discourse as much as the USSR often did
This is hard to say outright just because of variation between and even within western states (I’ve seen very petty arrests over discourse in my state), but overall I agree, yes.
I also think it’s important to understand why it was the case. Western countries all have a similar media landscape so I propose the propaganda model described in the book Manufacturing Consent applies generally to them. The result of those filters being, the loudest voices are those of state (relevant former-CIA interview!) and commercial interests (in the US, mass media it’s almost all subsidiaries of Comcast, TimeWarner, Disney, News Corp, NA and Sony at this point), which may clash, but rarely ever enough to threaten the state or the status quo - the state treats the biggest companies well. Major news broadcasters aren’t promoting major change even when they criticize a government or leader, they usually just say ‘vote for the other liberal politician!’. The discourse is generally so tame, within the bounds of simple policy and culture changes, rather than threatening the state, so it doesn’t really need to be suppressed by the state. But when it does (see Jan 6, or laws about threatening the president at all), we start seeing the limits of where discourse is allowed.
In my understanding, USSR didn’t have as much luxury there. The people with the most money, rather than those with the least, have an interest in fighting the state and allowing them to have the freedom to use their money freely to gain power. So discourse which threatens the state will probably be a bit more scary to the leadership. I don’t think it’s a good thing (for example, it reminds me of news I saw of China’s state suppression of Maoist protesters, which comes off to me as fragile and repressive) but I understand why they don’t give as much liberty as the well-established propaganda model of the USA.
There’s also something to be said about the suppression of discourse that our economic system implies, rather than the state suppressing it. See this clip of filmmaker George Lucas talking about freedoms in film art wrt USSR and USA. Obviously I’m not suggesting the inability to publish art is the same as being arrested by a state, obviously not! Rather, I want to highlight that one can’t just point to state policy to compare the freedom of discourse.___
@NoiseColor @yogthos
…immediately transition to communism because that would be impossible, or at least strategically impractical. The plan of Marxist-Leninist revolutions was always to create a transitional state that would eventually transition into a stateless classless society once the state was no longer needed.
@Radical_EgoCom @NoiseColor @yogthos immediate transition is not only possible in theory but actually has some precedent (although so far it’s only happened in the wrong place and time to last at scale for more than a few years). On the other hand expecting a transitional state to actually continue the transition is even less rational than expecting Jesus to show up and start helping.
The actual reason anarchist experiments always fail is because they lack organization and structure necessary to keep them going. Maybe if spent some time to learn what a state is, then you wouldn’t feel the need to make inane statements like this.
The actual reason most anarchist places fail is because they lack military power. Places that are actually recognized like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freetown_Christiania still run today.
These things go hand in hand. Military power requires organization, ability to create industry, build factories, have a trained workforce, and so on. Creating these things requires having some form of central planning and authority. This is an excellent read on the subject incidentally https://dashthered.medium.com/where-do-tanks-come-from-8723ff77d83b
@yogthos @Aatube “creating these things requires having some form of central planning and authority” is literal superstition.
👆 How to say you’re historically illiterate without saying you’re historically illiterate.
@yogthos no, your superstitions are not “history”, they’re just superstitions.
Repeating nonsense over and over isn’t going to make it true buddy. Feel free to provide examples of anarchism working in practice though.
@yogthos oh look, the anti-communist is back proclaiming knowledge of another subject he clearly hasn’t bothered to research.
When you definitely understand what communism is. 😂
On the other other hand, choosing to stay in a capitalist system and expecting to be treated like a human being is less rational than expecting God even cared enough to want to help in the first place.
@Sarcasmo220 choosing a “transitional state” is literally choosing to stay in the capitalist system, so yes thank you for making my point for me.
Capitalism is a system where people who own capital exploit the working class to create more wealth for themselves. A system where the means of production are publicly owned and are used for the benefit of the workers is demonstrably not that. The fact that you don’t even understand such basic things shows how woefully clueless you are.
@yogthos China is a place where people who own capital exploit the working class to create more wealth for themselves. The fact you’re pretending otherwise makes you an anti-communist, an anti-materialist, or more likely both.
Yup, that makes sense. That’s why China is pretty much the only place in the world where large amount of people are being lifted out of poverty, while the wealth of the rich is diminishing. You are very intelligent. You wouldn’t recognize materialism if it hit you in the face kid.
@yogthos China is a place where some people are being lifted out of poverty BY CAPITALISM BECAUSE CAPITALISM IS THE ECONOMIC SYSTEM IN PLACE THERE. Also while it is a lot of people it’s not as many as the official number because the poverty line itself is affected by factors other than people’s living conditions.
Interesting theory. Let’s see how it stands up in face of actual facts of the situation…
Household savings hit major highs across China https://www.chinadailyhk.com/hk/article/315229
90% of families in the country own their home, giving China one of the highest home ownership rates in the world. What’s more is that 80% of these homes are owned outright, without mortgages or any other leans. https://www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepard/2016/03/30/how-people-in-china-afford-their-outrageously-expensive-homes/
The real (inflation-adjusted) incomes of the poorest half of the Chinese population increased by more than four hundred percent from 1978 to 2015, while real incomes of the poorest half of the US population actually declined during the same time period. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w23119/w23119.pdf
From 1978 to 2000, the number of people in China living on under $1/day fell by 300 million, reversing a global trend of rising poverty that had lasted half a century (i.e. if China were excluded, the world’s total poverty population would have risen) https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/China’s-Economic-Growth-and-Poverty-Reduction-Angang-Linlin/c883fc7496aa1b920b05dc2546b880f54b9c77a4
From 2010 to 2019 (the most recent period for which uninterrupted data is available), the income of the poorest 20% in China increased even as a share of total income. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.DST.FRST.20?end=2019&locations=CN&start=2008
By the end of 2020, extreme poverty, defined as living on under a threshold of around $2 per day, had been eliminated in China. According to the World Bank, the Chinese government had spent $700 billion on poverty alleviation since 2014. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/31/world/asia/china-poverty-xi-jinping.html
Real wage (i.e. the wage adjusted for the prices you pay) has gone up 4x in the past 25 years, more than any other country. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cw8SvK0E5dI
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2022/04/01/lifting-800-million-people-out-of-poverty-new-report-looks-at-lessons-from-china-s-experience
@jeremy_list @NoiseColor @yogthos
[immediate transition is not only possible in theory but actually has some precedent]
– How is it possible in theory, and what precedent does it have?
[expecting a transitional state to actually continue the transition is even less rational than expecting Jesus to show up and start helping]
Why?
@Radical_EgoCom @NoiseColor @yogthos Rosa Luxemburg explained all this better than I could and she wasn’t even an anarchist (but really take your pick of almost any non-ML communist theorist).
But in summary: implementing communism inherently deprives counterrevolution of the capital it needs to function, so any delay in implementing communism is at best a strategic error and at worst an indication that the org has already become counterrevolutionary.
How do you want to achieve this? Globally at once? Or bit by bit? Can you please Rosas work?
I agree that revolutions can always be bloody, but when people say authoritarian, they mean a state where dissent is surpressed by violent means. At least in modern times, most western states (and, in fact, most states) don’t suppress discourse as much as the USSR often did.
@Aatube @yogthos @NoiseColor
1/3 [most western states (and, in fact, most states) don’t suppress discourse as much as the USSR often did.]
I have to partially disagree. While it is likely true that the USSR was more outward with its suppression methods than most western states today, countries, like America for example, do suppress dissent on a regular scale (Campus protest, George Floyd protest are just two notable examples, but there are plenty of more).
@Aatube @yogthos @NoiseColor
2/3 Also, speaking of America again, one of America’s suppression methods is suppression through delusion, tricking people into thinking that they’re actually free with constant propaganda in media and schools when the reality is that America is just as much (and maybe even more, since it’s hard to compare the exact numbers to the Soviet Union) police presence and civilian surveillance as the Soviet Union did (but probably more surveillance given the advancements…
@Aatube @yogthos @NoiseColor
3/3 …in technology) and all while having the largest prison population in the entire world, possibly being larger than the amount of prisoners in labor camps under Stalin (again, it’s hard to compare since records from that era from the Soviet Union are lacking).
There’s currently less than 1.4 million prisoners in the US, while official Soviet records show 0.79 million in executions alone under Stalin. Average that by year, and you still have 0.02 million per year.
According to official Soviet estimates, more than 14 million people passed through the Gulag from 1929 to 1953, which averages to 0.58 million per year.
Edit: That’s a little bit more than two times the current US prison influx amount, and I didn’t account for per capita-ing (modern US has more population in total than USSR ever did).
actual sources seem to disagree with you
https://web.archive.org/web/20121104001152/https://time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2109777,00.html
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/01/30/the-caging-of-america
I only counted those incarcerated. You’re counting community service, probation, parole, etc. And my sources are The Guardian and this academic journal.
That’s just splitting hairs, but even going with your numbers, it’s clearly comparable to the time of peak incarcerations in USSR. So, if we look at how the systems evolve over time, USSR incarceration rate dropped, while US incarceration rate continues to climb.
Having poorly made police officers is way worse than have state policies of persecuting ideas and even forms of art. Unlike what would happen in the USSR, Snowden’s leaks were not blocked and promoters of the leak weren’t hunted down (except for Snowden himself, which would happen in most countries), and you are free to discuss here without being banned.
Oops, yeah, I forgot about that. But you actually see livestreamed debate about whether suppressing these protests was good (oftentimes it’s highly criticized), and you don’t just get prosecuted if you just express opinions online. Also, the campus protests were suppressed because the owners of the private property being protested on didn’t like it. They get substantial funding from the state, but there’s still a difference from the state itself doing it. Like socialists and flat-earthers don’t get straight-up stamped out by police, whereas Stalin actively prosecuted people who didn’t support pseudobiology.
@Aatube @yogthos @NoiseColor
I’m not at all trying to suggest that Stalinist Russia was more free than modern-day America, just that many people think of America as a free country when it’s actually closer to Stalinist Russia than they’d care to recognize.
My point is that the United States is indeed much less authoritarian. Saying that there’s no such thing as a state that’s more authoritarian or less authoritarian is denying reality.
US incarceration rate is higher than what USSR had during Stalin’s purges. It’s hard to think of a better measure of how authoritarian a state is than the percentage of the population it keeps behind bars.
https://lemmy.ml/post/17103219/11784747
This is hard to say outright just because of variation between and even within western states (I’ve seen very petty arrests over discourse in my state), but overall I agree, yes.
I also think it’s important to understand why it was the case. Western countries all have a similar media landscape so I propose the propaganda model described in the book Manufacturing Consent applies generally to them. The result of those filters being, the loudest voices are those of state (relevant former-CIA interview!) and commercial interests (in the US, mass media it’s almost all subsidiaries of Comcast, TimeWarner, Disney, News Corp, NA and Sony at this point), which may clash, but rarely ever enough to threaten the state or the status quo - the state treats the biggest companies well. Major news broadcasters aren’t promoting major change even when they criticize a government or leader, they usually just say ‘vote for the other liberal politician!’. The discourse is generally so tame, within the bounds of simple policy and culture changes, rather than threatening the state, so it doesn’t really need to be suppressed by the state. But when it does (see Jan 6, or laws about threatening the president at all), we start seeing the limits of where discourse is allowed.
In my understanding, USSR didn’t have as much luxury there. The people with the most money, rather than those with the least, have an interest in fighting the state and allowing them to have the freedom to use their money freely to gain power. So discourse which threatens the state will probably be a bit more scary to the leadership. I don’t think it’s a good thing (for example, it reminds me of news I saw of China’s state suppression of Maoist protesters, which comes off to me as fragile and repressive) but I understand why they don’t give as much liberty as the well-established propaganda model of the USA.
There’s also something to be said about the suppression of discourse that our economic system implies, rather than the state suppressing it. See this clip of filmmaker George Lucas talking about freedoms in film art wrt USSR and USA. Obviously I’m not suggesting the inability to publish art is the same as being arrested by a state, obviously not! Rather, I want to highlight that one can’t just point to state policy to compare the freedom of discourse.___
Peoples are lying, not history