Were Mao and Stalin Actually Socialists? (No True Scotsman)

[polishgenius]

On 15/03/2017 at 6:20 PM, MerenthaClone said:

 Also you talk about logical fallacies too much.  

 

In fairness it would be no true Scot thread if he didn't.

[Altherion]

5 hours ago, Rippounet said:

It may be pretentious of me to say this, but I think the mistake that was made in the 20th century was to believe you could transform economic and political systems almost overnight and that people would then evolve into the ideal socialists. As it turns out, I'd say it's the other way around: you need a population to be prepared to take over the means of production and -logically- government, and only then can you hope to transform the economic and political systems.

You are not wrong, but there is a chicken and egg problem here which is probably why Lenin did what he did: without a transformed economic and political system, you will never have a population prepared to take over the means of production. Keep in mind that the establishment of the old order will naturally resist you to the best of their ability and as long as they are in power, they control educational institutions just as they control everything else. For example, consider the Western nations of today: the past few generations are arguably the most educated that ever lived, but they are at best only a little closer to being prepared to take over the means of production. Furthermore, the tradeoff for theoretical knowledge is division which is overtly and covertly introduced in the process: the college educated vs. the working class, the various identity groups against each other and against the majority, etc.

5 hours ago, Rippounet said:

In a nutshell, socialism may be a utopia for ideal men. My two cents on this would be that the issue is actually not how to build a better society, but how to raise better humans. Enlightened, educated individuals should then be able to transform their society more easily than us, who tend to be too self-centered and violent to achieve a collective system of governement. We can't hope to see an ideal world in our lifetime ; at best we can hope to prepare one for our grandchildren, with great sacrifice.
And the resistance and obstacles to such projects, in our day and age, are quite simply overwhelming.

This is effectively what was tried in the USSR and in China, but it proved difficult to do given that both the teachers and the students were flawed. There's a missing piece before we can go further -- perhaps a corrective mechanism of some sort that takes flawed humans into account.

[The Marquis de Leech]

2 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Ultimately an utopian society is one where taxes are very low, govt is small because the demands on govt are small, i.e. low crime = smaller police force, fewer prisons, fewer courts, judges and lawyers, and most importantly fewer victims. Peaceful relations with other countries = lower military spending. Healthier people, happier people meaning much less demand for healthcare, and so on. The corporate mandate is a balance between increasing shareholder value, social responsibility and profit sharing with employees, which could include, for instance tying executive pay to the pay of the lowest paid employees.

Different people have different ideas on utopia. Not everyone subscribes to a dream of low tax liberalism.

[Jo498]

There are a whole bunch of problems. One is that the first and most notorious attempts were done in countries like Russia and China that were according to the theory very ill-suited for the experiment. (It "should have been" France or Germany or some other somewhat industrialised, less backward country in the early 20th century.) Nevertheless it is quite amazing (adn I think without precedent) how the Soviet Union managed to get from the agrarian backwater Czarist Empire to Sputnik in 40 years (while in between losing more people in the worst war in history than any other country involved). Sure, millions died, not only in the war. But then, how many died and starved (mainly but not only in the colonies) in the far slower rise of the British Empire to a modern industrial state  from the late 18th to the early 20th century? Almost everywhere the transition to modernity and/or the rise of an empire was built on blood (the main difference is that in the US and Britain it was mostly  the blood of Natives, not the "own people"). It only looks far bloodier when it took a shorter time as in Germany or Russia than in Britain or France.

Another problem is that it often does not help a lot to convince even the majority of a nation's population if there are powerful forced either within or without (e.g. the CIA staging a coup for some rightwing generals) who will do almost everything to stop the "socialist experiment"). This is one reason why socialism had to be internationalist.

But I think another main problem is social democracy, as paradox as this sounds. Social democracy has been a comparably peaceful "third way" that also worked quite well economically. But besides the apparently unavoidable development into sprawling bureaucracies, the Social democrats also tended to forget that the other side did not cease their class struggle (as Warren Buffet admitted in that famous quote, that his side was winning). Always ready to compromise, keeping "centrist" and denouncing anyone more to the left as dangerous extremists, they have basically only lost ground in the last decades and seemed utterly powerless against the undue influence of the capitalists. The most striking example is that almost nothing is done against tax havens (and these are not only the Bahamas but the Netherlands and Ireland as well), not much in regulation since the 2008 crisis etc.

From the "old socialist" perspective, the late 20th/early 21st century opium for the people is not religion but technical gadgets and a few social democratic measures (but far more talking points) that hide the immense and rising power of the other side (the economic and political elites) and  and make the development of "class consciousness" (or whatever today's equivalent would be) all but impossible.

[Isalie]

3 hours ago, polishgenius said:

 

In fairness it would be no true Scotsman thread if he didn't.

ftfy

[Isalie]

44 minutes ago, Jo498 said:

From the "old socialist" perspective, the late 20th/early 21st century opium for the people is not religion but technical gadgets and a few social democratic measures (but far more talking points) that hide the immense and rising power of the other side (the economic and political elites) and  and make the development of "class consciousness" (or whatever today's equivalent would be) all but impossible.

True that. The *left* has been watered down as fuck and ought to be ready for a split from liberalism. In Sweden it has kind of happened to an extent, with the former leader of the left leaving to start a feminist party. The next step should be for the left to focus on actual economic class issues. As it stands though, as long as the alt-right is married to the actual right, the left will probably keep focusing on the different minority struggles. 

This is not to say that the different minority movements aren't worthwile or important. Though I honestly think that economical redistribution could do much more for young black men than BLM ever could.

[The Marquis de Leech]

32 minutes ago, Jo498 said:

But I think another main problem is social democracy, as paradox as this sounds. Social democracy has been a comparably peaceful "third way" that also worked quite well economically. But besides the apparently unavoidable development into sprawling bureaucracies, the Social democrats also tended to forget that the other side did not cease their class struggle (as Warren Buffet admitted in that famous quote, that his side was winning). Always ready to compromise, keeping "centrist" and denouncing anyone more to the left as dangerous extremists, they have basically only lost ground in the last decades and seemed utterly powerless against the undue influence of the capitalists. The most striking example is that almost nothing is done against tax havens (and these are not only the Bahamas but the Netherlands and Ireland as well), not much in regulation since the 2008 crisis etc.

Social democracy was to some extent screwed when it shifted from being about creating socialism via incremental means, and became more about managing capitalism as an end unto itself. It was arguably a pragmatic shift (there are limits, more so than ever, on what elected governments can actually do in practical terms), but the question of "how best to run the market economy" is ultimately different from what social democrats are supposed to do (i.e. justice for the workers). Integrating the Left into propping up an Establishment that actually despises it is one of the odder (and sadder) long-term political trends - a trend that, as you note, has only accelerated these past thirty years.

The other issue, I think, is that the collapse of the Eastern bloc removed the limits on what liberals could do in terms of pushing the free-market agenda - they no longer had cause to fear the political consequences of their own policies. Meanwhile, without the Soviets anchoring one end of the political spectrum, the policies that had originally been seen as compromises became the left fringe of the Overton Window - everything drifted rightwards. 

[Jo498]

Although there were many failures of Social democrats (beginning when the Germand Social democrats supported the war 1914 because the Kaiser did not recognize any parties, only Germans) I would not go so far to claim that what they managed to achieve between the 1940s and 80s or so was bad or all in vain. Although one should also recognize that from Bismarck until the cold war most of the conservatives realized that some social democratic measures had to be implemented for reasons of social stability. So while there has been a "roll back" in the last 30 years there was also a time beginning with the late 19th century when some socialist measures were recognized as necessary by almost everyone.

Of course one also has to keep in mind that the situation of the lower classes in the first 100 years of industrialization or so could be horrible. One probably cannot stress this enough to understand that the tremendous appeal of radical socialism, even Stalinism, was not always an intellectual fad (although one should not underestimate this either) but rooted in the conditions that we will find today mostly in third world countries but were "next door" 100 or even 80 years ago.

And when we look at the conditions in third world country sweatshops or mines we also realize how foul the compromise is we reached with the untrammelled forces of capitalism.

[DMC]

Disclaimer:  Unfortunately, I only have time to respond to the OP - which I feel a certain obligation to respond to - and have only skimmed the broader discussion of the thread.

On 3/15/2017 at 11:38 AM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

So, are people going to attempt to define away those of a given political philosophy because they dislike what that person did?

For me this is not an academic debate.  Well, I suppose it is, but more of a high-school-social-studies distinction than me looking up my notes from political theory graduate seminars, if that makes sense.  Mao and Stalin were communists, or (as they preferred) Marxist-Leninists.  Family-feud the five most famous communists, and they'll be there along with Marx, Lenin, and I dunno, maybe Engels.  

Differentiating between socialists and communists is not done in some "Scotsman fallacy" aim, but rather to accurately disentangle a term that was adopted and modified by communist ideology beginning with Marx.  Can you associate socialism with communist in regards to the state controlling means of production?  Sure, but that's where the association ends in any true conceptual definition.

Communists, beginning with Marx, viewed socialist policies as a strategy to achieve their ultimate goal of a one-party, proletarian-dominated state.  Obviously, this ideology precipitated millions of deaths and a half century of proxy wars between two world superpowers.  Part of that process involved communist states utilizing the "socialist" label even when their economic systems could more accurately be described as state-capitalism and their political system is defined as totalitarianism.

The latter is the conflation that really bothers me.  Socialism, or socialist policies, entail a collective as opposed to individualistic control over the means of production.  That's it.  In the modern era, it has been a response to classical liberalism that begat volatile capitalism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.  Totalitarianism is to socialism as apples are to baseball.  They are orthogonal.  Did Stalin and Mao use certain socialism policies in the administration of their respective regimes?  Yep.  Insofar as they did so, they also used capitalist policies when it served their aims.

The logical fallacy is not in in trying to remove Mao and Stalin from socialist canon, it's in equating totalitarian state actions with a theory on the means of production.  

[MerenthaClone]

5 hours ago, polishgenius said:

 

In fairness it would be no true Scot thread if he didn't.

Hah!

[SeanF]

On ‎3‎/‎15‎/‎2017 at 3:38 PM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I think that any political or economic system can be abused or suborned to empower an individual or a group.  Attempting to disclaim those who are horrible, within a given subset of people of a particular ideology, is the "No True Scotsman" fallacy.  

"No True Scotsman would ever litter... therefore you can never fault a 'Scotsman' for littering because littering removes them from the subset of people identified as Scotsman".  

This is done by advocates of particular political philosophies in order to remove the people they dislike, in this case Mao and Stalin, from the subset of people who are adherants to or advocates of that philosophy, in this case socialism.  So... were Stalin and Mao actually socialists?  I think they were they enacted polices that made the State the official owner of the "means of production" for their given States.  They also did nasty stuff and were in no way actual advocates of egalitaranism.  I think their economic policies put them pretty squarely within the socialist definition.  

So, are people going to attempt to define away those of a given political philosophy because they dislike what that person did?

I think that Mao and Stalin were both socialists, but their socialist beliefs mattered far less to them than their own egotism.

[SeanF]

2 hours ago, Jo498 said:

There are a whole bunch of problems. One is that the first and most notorious attempts were done in countries like Russia and China that were according to the theory very ill-suited for the experiment. (It "should have been" France or Germany or some other somewhat industrialised, less backward country in the early 20th century.) Nevertheless it is quite amazing (adn I think without precedent) how the Soviet Union managed to get from the agrarian backwater Czarist Empire to Sputnik in 40 years (while in between losing more people in the worst war in history than any other country involved). Sure, millions died, not only in the war. But then, how many died and starved (mainly but not only in the colonies) in the far slower rise of the British Empire to a modern industrial state  from the late 18th to the early 20th century? Almost everywhere the transition to modernity and/or the rise of an empire was built on blood (the main difference is that in the US and Britain it was mostly  the blood of Natives, not the "own people"). It only looks far bloodier when it took a shorter time as in Germany or Russia than in Britain or France.

Another problem is that it often does not help a lot to convince even the majority of a nation's population if there are powerful forced either within or without (e.g. the CIA staging a coup for some rightwing generals) who will do almost everything to stop the "socialist experiment"). This is one reason why socialism had to be internationalist.

But I think another main problem is social democracy, as paradox as this sounds. Social democracy has been a comparably peaceful "third way" that also worked quite well economically. But besides the apparently unavoidable development into sprawling bureaucracies, the Social democrats also tended to forget that the other side did not cease their class struggle (as Warren Buffet admitted in that famous quote, that his side was winning). Always ready to compromise, keeping "centrist" and denouncing anyone more to the left as dangerous extremists, they have basically only lost ground in the last decades and seemed utterly powerless against the undue influence of the capitalists. The most striking example is that almost nothing is done against tax havens (and these are not only the Bahamas but the Netherlands and Ireland as well), not much in regulation since the 2008 crisis etc.

From the "old socialist" perspective, the late 20th/early 21st century opium for the people is not religion but technical gadgets and a few social democratic measures (but far more talking points) that hide the immense and rising power of the other side (the economic and political elites) and  and make the development of "class consciousness" (or whatever today's equivalent would be) all but impossible.

Social democracy helped the working classes to own property.  Once, large numbers of people became owners of property, the appeal of socialism faded. 

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

8 minutes ago, SeanF said:

Social democracy helped the working classes to own property.  Once, large numbers of people became owners of property, the appeal of socialism faded. 

I think that is a very cogent and important point.  How can "education" overcome the desire of individuals to have their own stuff?  Particularly when they are come to the education from families who grew up without collective owership of property.  Where exclusivity is valued.  How does "education" overcome their reasonable expectations of owning things?  

[SeanF]

2 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I think that is a very cogent and important point.  How can "education" overcome the desire of individuals to have their own stuff?  Particularly when they are come to the education from families who grew up without collective owership of property.  Where exclusivity is valued.  How does "education" overcome their reasonable expectations of owning things?  

I think the desire to own property is innate in human beings, and I don't think either civilisation or prosperity are possible without allowing some private ownership of property.  One can argue about which forms of property should be owned by the State, and which should be owned by companies and individuals, but not even the Soviet Union was able to completely abolish private property. 

[The Marquis de Leech]

2 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

I think that is a very cogent and important point.  How can "education" overcome the desire of individuals to have their own stuff?  Particularly when they are come to the education from families who grew up without collective owership of property.  Where exclusivity is valued.  How does "education" overcome their reasonable expectations of owning things?  

There's an old saying from a New Zealand Labour politician, with reference to our First Labour Government (1935-1949) - "they walked to the polling booth to vote us in; they drove to the polling booth to vote us out". So, yes, social democracy became a victim of its own success.

As for how the Left deals with what happens if you move people from the working class to the middle class is a complicated and unanswered question.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

16 minutes ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

There's an old saying from a New Zealand Labour politician, with reference to our First Labour Government (1935-1949) - "they walked to the polling booth to vote us in; they drove to the polling booth to vote us out". So, yes, social democracy became a victim of its own success.

As for how the Left deals with what happens if you move people from the working class to the middle class is a complicated and unanswered question.

RBPL,

It is an interesting conundrum.  Creating a large, stable, property owning, middle class puts in place the people who will fight against the collectivization that socialism claims is necessary for "true fairness" and yet most socialist theorists said that stage of a property owning middle class is necessary to get to the desired "Utopia".  

Perhaps Fukuyama is correct this stage is the best we can hope for without some incredible catastrophe forcing societies hand at large?

[SeanF]

Socialists and social democrats should surely be pleased that the grinding poverty, bad health, and illiteracy, that was the lot of most human beings throughout history has now been largely eliminated in Western (and some Eastern) countries, in part as a result of their efforts.  Even if it was never possible to create a propertyless Utopia, that's still an enormous achievement.

[DMC]

17 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Creating a large, stable, property owning, middle class puts in place the people who will fight against the collectivization that socialism claims is necessary for "true fairness" and yet most socialist theorists said that stage of a property owning middle class is necessary to get to the desired "Utopia".  

You are still conflating socialism with communist thought, which is rather ironic considering the impetus of this thread was accusing the other side of employing a logical fallacy.  Actual "social utopia" philosophers range from Thomas More to JS Mill, and have little or nothing to do with Marx's depiction.

19 minutes ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Perhaps Fukuyama is correct this stage is the best we can hope for without some incredible catastrophe forcing societies hand at large?

Fukuyama was demonstrably wrong about most everything and his theory is primarily a joke in intellectual circles at this point.  In relation to the context you are referring to, the middle/professional class is still buoyed by the safety net provided by socialist policies, although there is most certainly a political/messaging problem clarifying that in recent times.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

5 minutes ago, dmc515 said:

You are still conflating socialism with communist thought, which is rather ironic considering the impetus of this thread was accusing the other side of employing a logical fallacy.  Actual "social utopia" philosophers range from Thomas More to JS Mill, and have little or nothing to do with Marx's depiction.

Fukuyama was demonstrably wrong about most everything and his theory is primarily a joke in intellectual circles at this point.  In relation to the context you are referring to, the middle/professional class is still buoyed by the safety net provided by socialist policies, although there is most certainly a political/messaging problem clarifying that in recent times.

You are missing my point.  If "most" people are satisfied by the existing equilibrium how can further change be prompted in a movement that claims to rely upon the consent of the governed before it will take action?  If the majority remains satisfied, based upon Rippounet's assertion that one of the defining characteristics of socialism is "Democratic Control", no further change should be implemented.  

I don't care for Fukuyama either and I certainly don't think history will ever "end".  But... if we take Democratic limitations on Government power to be a truism and an actual constraint upon government action how can further Socialist development, beyond the social safety net, ever be created?  

[The Anti-Targ]

6 hours ago, Roose Boltons Pet Leech said:

Different people have different ideas on utopia. Not everyone subscribes to a dream of low tax liberalism.

The point is, the need for tax is because govt has fundamental things that need to be paid for because society is in a particular state of moral decay. In an utopian society there is no moral decay, therefore the need for the govt to waste pots of cash minimising the harm caused by moral decay is gone, so the tax burden is much smaller. Taxes also need to be levied in order to redistribute a seriously uneven distribution of wealth. But if the wealth distribution through primary economic activity is more even, because the economic system is governed by sound principles of justice, compassion and the like then, the need for redistribution is largely eliminated. Thus decreasing significantly the need for redistributive taxation. But while the economic system is governed, quite literally, by the 7 deadly sins, there is a pressing need for govt to tax in order to try to mitigate the worst of the effects of the economic system.