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Workable Socialism


Martell Spy

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Imagine if a large tech corporation in the United States were forcibly broken up, nationalized, or partly nationalized like a utility. The best example tech corporations would be Amazon and Facebook. And this isn't done through violence, but through the political system. Now I don't think that's actually going to happen I should note. Probably what is coming for Facebook is regulation. There has been growing chatter about those 2 particular companies though in the U.S. and the chatter is coming from both the left and the right. So, it is at least possible that something like that could happen. 

We are in 2024 and this event has already happened to one of these example corporations. Would this change anything as far as rethinking what is possible to achieve with out violence? What if a share of the profits are already being automatically sent to the bank accounts of regular Americans?

 

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1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

I know this doesn't warrant a serious answer but here's one : pretty much any American (or Western) media, official report, or fiction until the mid-1970s at the very least.

That was the official story at the time but it was inaccurate.  Although the huge, tragic famine in the 1920s during forced collectivization is very well known, Soviet Russia faced other periods of famine long before the final decline accelerated in the 1980s. 

It was kept classified, and only declassified in recent years, but US administrations in the 1960s and 1970s secretly exported grain to Russia to prevent a political collapse from famine.  Once the Russians had a huge nuclear arsenal, the Americans felt they had to feed the failing Russian state rather than have them descend into chaos.

There was even a scandal in 1972 when the Nixon administration made a huge loan to Russia to buy US grain to avert famine.  The understanding was that the Russians would buy corn, of which the US had a large surplus.  But the Russians did a switcheroo and bought up a large % of the wheat crop instead.

There has never been a way to tally the human cost of Russia’s efforts to keep pace in the arms war and space race, but it was undoubtedly much worse than guessed at the time.

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Just to be clear. The questions of what to produce and how much to produce is a difficult question to decide. And likely is the reason Soviet style systems failed.

As a first approximations, a decentralized price system works fairly well.

That said a number things can go wrong with the price system, which hopefully should be the end of anyone's libertarian wet dreams.

The price system may not account for the full cost of production - think pollution. Various informational problems can arise. Adverse selection problems in insurance markets for example. Information can be hard to gather about the price and quality of a commodity offered or supplied - think labor markets.

People can form incorrect expectations about prices in the future, which if bad enough can lead to recessions or depressions. They can can misprice assets because they don't know risk precisely. Or they may just misprice assets because they are being "irrational". Or they may not have been able to participate in financial markets because they were not alive, which can send the economic system into different equilibrium.

In short, there are good reasons to be skeptical of Soviet style economies. That said, nobody in their right mind thinks we should aim to become "libertarian paradise" like Somalia, or whatever, and just watch the magic of the markets work by themselves, in all cases at least.

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8 hours ago, Toth said:

Throughout Eastern German history, its economy was always slowly building up, but continuously strangled by the central planning economics. If you listen to the people living and working there, you always hear the same stories about factories standing still because of constant resource shortages of the most basic resources. There was constant scarcity and then the diversion of these scarce resources to... well, on paper more important things, but this scarcity also birthed rampant corruption that further screwed over the central plans. The whole economic system was simply unfeasible.

It sounds to me like the problem was the crippling lack of resources, not the economic system. How would East Germany have fared better under any other system, given the same initial shortages? What would have happened to the more important things if resources hadn't been diverted to them? I'm pretty sure the USSR was in no position to afford a Marshall Plan equivalent.

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23 minutes ago, Martell Spy said:

We are in 2024 and this event has already happened to one of these example corporations. Would this change anything as far as rethinking what is possible to achieve with out violence? What if a share of the profits are already being automatically sent to the bank accounts of regular Americans?

Facebook and Google shouldn't be making any profits; they should be public services that cost money to run, instead of selling their users as a product to advertisers. In fact, replace Facebook with a decentralised service that functions more like email behind the scenes, so there is no central repository of all our data.

Amazon should be given to the Post Office to run. Profits from that could be sent out to all Americans if necessary to help get the public onside, though just putting it towards funding public services would be more efficient.

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10 minutes ago, felice said:

It sounds to me like the problem was the crippling lack of resources, not the economic system. How would East Germany have fared better under any other system, given the same initial shortages? What would have happened to the more important things if resources hadn't been diverted to them? I'm pretty sure the USSR was in no position to afford a Marshall Plan equivalent.

WHAT!?! The economic system was to blame for the lack of resources! What the fuck is even the point of this post??? You do understand that the Soviets had to build barbed wire and concrete structures and SHOOT people to keep them in their system, right? Like, you didn't miss that part of history class? The U.S.S.R was never, ever, at any point, intent on developing the economies of its subject satellites. They existed to be supplemental to the Soviet machine, acting otherwise is wildly revisionist.

I mean, I don't even... Like, do you understand that the Soviets refused to allow places like Poland, Ukraine, and Hungary to get assistance from actual functioning societies right? That it was counter-productive to their interests for subjugated peoples to see that there was a way to live that wasn't under brutal authoritarian oppression?

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18 minutes ago, felice said:

Facebook and Google shouldn't be making any profits; they should be public services that cost money to run, instead of selling their users as a product to advertisers. In fact, replace Facebook with a decentralised service that functions more like email behind the scenes, so there is no central repository of all our data.

Amazon should be given to the Post Office to run. Profits from that could be sent out to all Americans if necessary to help get the public onside, though just putting it towards funding public services would be more efficient.

Well, I'm not currently making a political argument for this. I'm not necessarily opposed either. I'm just using it as an example. If this political battle was already fought and over with, it might inspire people to think other similar things might be possible and create other action.

It sounds like the EU is the one that is really moving on the Facebook front though.

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9 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

This thread is fucking bizarre. There are people in here downplaying the atrocities of the Soviet goddamn Union, Scott. I don't think you're dealing with rational actors. Or at least not informed ones. 

"The Soviet Union was an economic success" gimmie a fucking break. What Bolshevik bathroom stall wall did you silly gooses read that off, I wonder?

Like lost causers, tankies always manage to come spread their apologia when their topic is discussed.

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17 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Sure. If you ignore decades of post-WW II growth and policies that were extremely successful at keeping inequalities to a minimum throughout the West while improving the standards of living for almost everyone.

Why did things work so well at the time, uh? If only there were people who'd spent years studying all that and had written books about it...

A large part of the reason were the effects of WWII itself (and pretty much every one of those books mentions this). Unfortunately, there is no way to replicate them without another world war and the latter would wipe out humanity.

11 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Is that a function of capitalism per se?

Yes, concentration of capital is an intrinsic property of capitalism. This goes all the way back to Marx and it's not seriously contested. Of course, knowing that capitalism has this property, democracies can (and sometimes did) act to limit it by breaking up monopolies, instituting high taxes, etc. etc. Of course, knowing this, the capitalists can (and do) try to subvert democracy in a variety of ways and, at the moment, the capitalists appear to be winning.

Also, the focus on the Soviet Union is rather strange. Yes, it fell apart, but it was only one iteration of the experiment. Why not look at, say, China, which is a communist country that is currently second in the world in GDP (or even first if you look at purchasing power parity).

 

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52 minutes ago, Altherion said:

Also, the focus on the Soviet Union is rather strange. Yes, it fell apart, but it was only one iteration of the experiment. Why not look at, say, China, which is a communist country that is currently second in the world in GDP (or even first if you look at purchasing power parity).

 

China is not remotely communist.  It was impoverished and routinely had localized famines until it switched to a capitalist* system under Deng Xiaoping and directly generated the largest ever reduction in global poverty in just a few decades.  The only communist thing about China is the legacy name of the single ruling party with autocratic power.  Even the many state-owned enterprises, including the many companies owned by the People’s Liberation Army (a type of sinecure, compensation and bribe combined), are operated for the profit of their direct political owners/sponsors.

China is the single greatest evidence point of why and how capitalism outperforms socialism as an economic system.  It also shows that you don’t need democracy for capitalism.

*Euphemistically introduced as “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.  Deng is famous for saying “what does it matter if it is a black cat or a white cat, so long as it catches mice?” to gloss over a complete reversal in ideology, despite the incredible loss of life under Mao’s cultural revolution within living memory.

Most Chinese people don’t even have state pensions or national healthcare.  For the average citizen it has less social safety net than America.  The only thing that looks communist about it is that political cronies own vast amounts of wealth by operating politically-favored companies in the name of national interest, and the autocratic control of the citizenry through censorship, residency permits, etc.

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5 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

That was the official story at the time but it was inaccurate.  Although the huge, tragic famine in the 1920s during forced collectivization is very well known, Soviet Russia faced other periods of famine long before the final decline accelerated in the 1980s.

It took some time for the failures of the Soviet agricultural system to be tied to an overall failure of its economy. Or, to put it differently, that the failure of one sector was symptomatic of the failure of the whole.

However, I do agree that it's important to underline that the Soviet economy started failing long before any real dose of democracy was injected in the Soviet Union. Though I agree with Altherion that this focus on the Soviet Union is a bit ridiculous.

1 hour ago, Altherion said:

A large part of the reason were the effects of WWII itself (and pretty much every one of those books mentions this).

Absolutely.

Quote

Unfortunately, there is no way to replicate them without another world war

There are many ways to do that. A good good death tax might even be enough.

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4 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

WHAT!?! The economic system was to blame for the lack of resources!

You don't think Germany losing WWII, and the USSR suffering massive losses itself after starting from the position of impoverished third world backwater just a couple of decades earlier, might have contributed just a teeny little bit?

4 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

What the fuck is even the point of this post??? You do understand that the Soviets had to build barbed wire and concrete structures and SHOOT people to keep them in their system, right?

Oh yes, I'm not saying it wasn't an awful totalitarian hellscape, just that their problems shouldn't be blamed entirely on the economic system.

4 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

The U.S.S.R was never, ever, at any point, intent on developing the economies of its subject satellites. They existed to be supplemental to the Soviet machine, acting otherwise is wildly revisionist.

True enough, though presumably they wanted the satellite economies to be strong enough to be able to make a good contribution to the machine! And having to constantly compete with the US in order to look strong enough to discourage them invading to "liberate" the country obviously didn't help with sparing resources for civilian purposes.

4 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

I mean, I don't even... Like, do you understand that the Soviets refused to allow places like Poland, Ukraine, and Hungary to get assistance from actual functioning societies right?

Not familiar with that, no. On the surface, that sounds like an awful decision, but on the other hand, what strings were attached to the offers of aid? It seems unlikely that it was a purely charitable endeavour on the part of the capitalist nations and not some kind of poisoned chalice for the USSR.

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I never thought I'd see the fucking day... I hope, I genuinely hope, that you're a 17 year old wanna be rebel or slightly slow young twenties-something who thinks "communism is rad!" And wears Che Guevara shirts you bought at the GAP. I really hope that. Because the thought of a functional adult defending the economic model of the Soviet Union is enough to make me want to fucking puke. 

I mean at least Nazi sympathizers have racism, cool uniforms, and anti-Semitism to justify their fandom. But I don't think I've ever in my life seen someone defend the Soviets who wasn't 15 years old with a hammer and sickle pin next to their yin/yang symbol or a gibbering idiot.

I don't even know why I'm going to state this in response to your last explosion of ignorance because I genuinely don't care about how you respond. But the Soviets invaded Poland with the Nazis. The Poles asked the West for help, not for the Soviets to conquer their entire state and subjugate it to a client status. The Soviets murdered 22 goddamn thousand Polish military officers, police, and intelligence operators in a single 2 month span. That was in 1940 and isn't even the highest body count of the atrocities committed against the Poles by the Soviets. And after 6 years of occupation by Nazis and 20 percent of the entire population being murdered the survivors got to trade one slave master for another that you seem so eager to redeem. You fucking disgust me. Read a book once in a while before you start spouting ignorant bullshit that minimizes an entire nation's worth of horror.

 

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2 hours ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

But I don't think I've ever in my life seen someone defend the Soviets who wasn't 15 years old with a hammer and sickle pin next to their yin/yang symbol or a gibbering idiot.

What part of "awful totalitarian hellscape" do you think is a defence?

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9 hours ago, felice said:

It sounds to me like the problem was the crippling lack of resources, not the economic system. How would East Germany have fared better under any other system, given the same initial shortages? What would have happened to the more important things if resources hadn't been diverted to them? I'm pretty sure the USSR was in no position to afford a Marshall Plan equivalent.

Okay, let's unwrap this. First, the GDR existed for 40 years and at the end had an economic power 5 times the size of what its provinces had before the outbreak of WW2. The rebuilding effort was essentially done at that point, though arguably in its last year it was crippled by debts, couldn't import anything anymore and was on the brink of bankruptcy.

The problem with planned economy is that you don't magically know who needs what in which quantities at any given point. You need a ton of bureaucratic overhead and tons of communication with it. It is also not just done with one plan. Communist countries of the Soviet style highly advertised their 5-years plans, but those were mostly just ambitious growth targets. In day to day business, a ridiculously convoluted web of short-term plans (usually for a year) were covering every single economic sector imaginable. These plans were responsible for connecting suppliers and companies, often without really being aware of the focus other plans had... and they were the core source of trouble because in these negotiations those companies received preferred treatment that had the best connections to the central planning ministry, not the ones that were most sensible choice. This system invited cronyism and misapplication for useless pet projects, with these causing cascading effects down the line where the scarcity of one thing inevitably created the scarcity of another. Not to mention the moral damage of the workers who were essentially just sitting around waiting for things to start while being angry about their voice in the numerous participation systems (everyone could theoretically make suggestions to the central planning bureau) being ignored in favor of the institutional top-down hierarchy.

Given how even under these problematic circumstances Eastern Germany was the most economically successful member of the Eastern Bloc, it is easy suggest that a Chinese style state capitalism would have been the most sensible course of action for the communist party to fix the economy while still preserving their power, but the high ranks of the party were staffed by a bunch of old men notorious for their aversion to change, so they preferred to refuse to acknowledge that anything was wrong with how things were.

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11 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

China is not remotely communist.  It was impoverished and routinely had localized famines until it switched to a capitalist* system under Deng Xiaoping and directly generated the largest ever reduction in global poverty in just a few decades.  The only communist thing about China is the legacy name of the single ruling party with autocratic power.  Even the many state-owned enterprises, including the many companies owned by the People’s Liberation Army (a type of sinecure, compensation and bribe combined), are operated for the profit of their direct political owners/sponsors.

Yes and no. It has undoubtedly adopted most of the elements of capitalism combined with local practices which look a lot like corruption, but there is a difference in that the Party is ultimately in control. The Chinese capitalists are on relatively short leashes; if one steps out of line, the Party has no qualms about arrest, confiscation or possibly even execution -- even the offender is a billionaire.

11 hours ago, Iskaral Pust said:

Most Chinese people don’t even have state pensions or national healthcare.  For the average citizen it has less social safety net than America.

This is true, but they never had the kind of safety net that Western countries have even before Deng Xiaoping's reforms. The safety net is not a core feature of communism (or even socialism -- except under the bizarre definition promulgated by some American liberals). Some elements of it exist(ed) in some communist countries, but I can't think of one that is up to Western standards (e.g. when they did provide healthcare, it was pretty rudimentary).

11 hours ago, Rippounet said:

There are many ways to do that. A good good death tax might even be enough.

This is basically the argument currently being made by parts of the American left. Yes, there exist policies that would replicate some post-war conditions without a war. However, without a major war or credible threat of revolution or some other massive, nation-wide crisis, there is no way to implement these policies. Remember, the capitalists are running the show. It doesn't matter whether the people elect right-wing populists (e.g. Trump in the US), neoliberals (e.g. Macron in France) or even left-wing populists (e.g. Syriza in Greece back in 2015), policy will always be amenable to the capitalists.

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2 hours ago, Altherion said:

This is basically the argument currently being made by parts of the American left. Yes, there exist policies that would replicate some post-war conditions without a war. However, without a major war or credible threat of revolution or some other massive, nation-wide crisis, there is no way to implement these policies. Remember, the capitalists are running the show. It doesn't matter whether the people elect right-wing populists (e.g. Trump in the US), neoliberals (e.g. Macron in France) or even left-wing populists (e.g. Syriza in Greece back in 2015), policy will always be amenable to the capitalists.

That's... negative, even by my standards.
Yes, I agree that it feels like whatever we (the people) do, the neoliberals end up controling things. And tbh it's not like I see any possibility of radical change in the near future. Nonetheless, I think there are also some reasons for cautious optimism...

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