swampman posted:roseweird posted:whats the word for "effete" but when youre talking about a girl
"(of a person) affected, overrefined, and ineffectual."
"no longer capable of effective action."
the word you're looking for is "liberal."
www.google.com.
TZ: You exercised the balance of power for many, many years as Secretary of State and National Security Advisor. So many people are interested in your history and echoes of it come out in your book.
I wanted to ask you about that. One passage in your book says that idealism is a critical part of American policy, but that the most sustainable course will involve a blend of realism and idealism, too often held out in the American debate as incompatible opposites. It made me think of your history in places like Chile. Was it the case that realism trumped democratic idealism there when you engineered the coup against Salvador Allende, was that an example of that?
Henry Kissinger: Ahem. You know one trouble with discussion of this...You’re referring to an event that happened 50 years ago, and so it’s very hard to reconstruct…
TZ: 40, yes.
HK: Or 40 years ago. It’s very hard to reconstruct. The fact is I did not engineer a coup against Allende. Allende was overthrown by his military with whom we had no contact with two years earlier or three years earlier when he came in.
TZ: The head of the Chilean army, General Rene Schneider, was assassinated in his car pursuant to a CIA operation that you did help initiate. You said you turned off but you did help initiate.
HK: That was three years earlier.
TZ: Correct
HK: It was not an operation that we initiated. It was not planned as an assassination, and we turned it off once we became aware. But that happened three years earlier. That was not in connection with this.
TZ: Many other people testified in front of the Church Commission in the Senate later on that in fact you were well informed of that operation even after officially turning it off in a memo –
HK: Let me tell you something here—it’s an issue that your audience cannot possibly know much about. This happened over 40 years ago, it has been exhaustively discussed. It is a reflection of a period in which the divisions in America were so great that opponents seemed to take a perverse pleasure in charging the people with whom they disagreed on other points with sort of criminal activities.
To have a meaningful discussion, you have to begin with the premise that serious people are trying to do the best for their country. We have been trying to overthrow President Assad. We overthrew, in this administration, we supported and took military action in Libya for the purpose that America has an interest in bringing about democratic government. It’s a well-established fact.
What the details were in 1971, with all due respect to you, it’s not an appropriate subject here because it’s easy to fish out individual statements before committees. I think a national debate would be helped if we assumed that serious people were trying to achieve serious objectives and to ask what these objectives were. Not to see whether there is one act taken by some outlying CIA group.
TZ: I understand that, the nature of these questions is not to have a prosecutorial forum. A lot of very smart people have pointed to the way you, as a world leader and Secretary of State, has shaped the world that we see today in places like Cambodia and Chile and other places, and we don’t’ have time to get into all of them...
HK: Cambodia! That’s another one. Here we are at a time when we find terrorist activities going on from foreign countries. What was the issue of Cambodia? Four Vietnamese divisions had occupied a strip of territory in Cambodia. These divisions entered Vietnam at will and were killing Americans. They launched an offensive against the Americans in Vietnam before we even knew the way to the bathroom in the White House. We had four to six hundred casualties in the first eight weeks.
So what would your listeners have done? Would they have bombed these areas or not? We bombed these areas that were largely uninhabited. The current administration is doing it Pakistan, Somalia...
TZ: Excuse me, sir. Uninhabited goes against the facts of history. There were hundreds of thousands of people killed in that campaign.
HK: Wait a minute. Ignorance is no excuse for being insulting. The bombing that people are talking about, that they’re criticizing the White House, was a 10 mile strip in which very few people were killed—if any.
Then there was a military intervention when the North Vietnamese tried to occupy all of Cambodia. And then as a result of the ground operations that were going on, the same sort of casualties occurred as occurred on the ground in Vietnam. Those were not under any individual White House control, and I don’t know whether the numbers are correct, I’m sure they were not hundreds of thousands – there were civilian casualties as a result of the ground operations caused by the North Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.
But to have to go over this again 50 years later, it’s really absurd.
TZ: Well, let me bring it to the present day. The frustration is understandable I suppose. Would students of history have an easier time with some of these questions—I’m not the first to ask these questions, of course—but would students of history have an easier time with these questions, Mr. Secretary, if your papers and your documents that are so important to you U.S. history, and controversial to so many people, weren’t gifted at the Library of Congress in a way that seals them off to the public until after your death—until well after your death?
HK: Absolutely. Your knowledge doesn’t match your malice. So uh…
TZ: Are your records available?
HK: Records in the Library of Congress are copies of records that were in the files. I would say 98 percent of them have been made public, and the ones that are not made public are not kept secret because of my wishes.
I have been spending years and hundred of thousands of dollars to try and get them declassified but they’re hung up on the technicality that the classifying people say they’ve already declassified them as part of another system, and they don’t want to go through the process again.
TZ: So you’re on record here saying it is your wish...
HK: It’s a certain fact that I have tried to make all of these records available. I have nothing to be embarrassed about. I served in a difficult period of various wars in which we did the best we could to bring an end to the wars and begin a structure of peace. And really, for 50 years after, an interview that would spend this much time on this is outrageous.
Ahem. Haw. I dare say sir how dare you bring up my genocidal past. Hmph.
Edited by aerdil ()
NoFreeWill posted:without the "utopian" belief that a better world is possible there's not much reason to agitate for socialism. and the forces of techno-rationalism are now allied with singularity and Nick Land style futures.
communist roleplayer spotted
Edited by fleights ()
So what would your listeners have done? Would they have bombed these areas or not? We bombed these areas that were largely uninhabited. The current administration is doing it Pakistan, Somalia...
TZ: Excuse me, sir. Uninhabited goes against the facts of history. There were hundreds of thousands of people killed in that campaign.
no you excuse ME, sir! Kissinger is right. There were almost no jews living in Cambodia at that time. It was virtually uninhabited.
stegosaurus posted:i want to be one of the Anticapitalist Left Cooperation for the Overthrow's eleven city councilmen. that seems chill
we should hold a unity conference between them and kshama sawant
getfiscal posted:sewer maoists
i mean this is a good joke but what does a communist organization even propose at a city level. i know the pci ran a bunch of different cities in italy and had a lot of subsidized bus service and healthcare and shit... what does someone whose party name is literally a james bond evildoers guild (M.U.T.I.N.Y.) actually do
getfiscal posted:sewer maoists
fuck the ocean
stegosaurus posted:getfiscal posted:sewer maoists
i mean this is a good joke but what does a communist organization even propose at a city level. i know the pci ran a bunch of different cities in italy and had a lot of subsidized bus service and healthcare and shit... what does someone whose party name is literally a james bond evildoers guild (M.U.T.I.N.Y.) actually do
yeah i'm not sure. i guess you could simply deny the division of powers and troll a lot about all sorts of issues. like when city councils started pushing resolutions against the iraq war and such.
stegosaurus posted:is rocky anderson objectively the most mtwist mayor of recent american history?
lol
My understanding of the USSR is that it was state capitalist, but the surplus value was captured by the state and then [inefficiently] redistributed back to the public as a method of abolishing class? Is that more or less correct? Has anyone done an economic analysis of the USSR through the lens of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall?
fleights posted:we cant say that soviet bureacrats were capitalists plundering the soviet economy for their own personal wealth and power because they hardly lived above the level of the russian working class at that time, and if compared to real capitalists its like lower middle class competing with rockefeller..... instead, we should accept that we cant really classify what the soviet state really was except that by attempting to preserve the revolution the bolsheviks ended up destroying it, and that all they managed to accomplish in regards to communism is preparing the semi-feudal russia and her sub states for full capitalism. communists tried to institute communism and failed. none of this anarchist bullshit that they never really cared in the first place.
stegosaurus posted:is rocky anderson objectively the most mtwist mayor of recent american history?
i sure hope so! i voted for him
if you think there is such a thing as non-capitalist development without full socialism and that state-capitalism is not a useful term you may want to change your avatar
fleights posted:the soviet economy was a transitory mode of production that couldn't have lasted forever and its surprising it lasted as long as it did, i fail to see how the brave soviet bureacrats were state capitalists like the fascists. even in so called "soviet imperialism" these were more acts of political hegemony not domination of markets. for example central asian republics were modernized successfully without really having to pay any sort of costs.
i try not to debate people on-line anymore but i hope you have a nice day.
I was just curious about how LTRPF came into play under the USSR. Because Marx claims that TRPF is a law governing capitalism, and since the USSR was capitalistic in it's modes of production, we should be able to see TRPF expressed in some manner, perhaps? I'm genuinely curious if anyone, who wasn't writing an anti-USSR polemic, has written on the subject?
Also, state capitalism isn't Inherently Evil, actually, it's Quite Good Ass Hell when the state is operated by a dictatorship of the proletariat
TRPF may not have manifested itself in the USSR as a number on anyone's balance sheet but i dont think its wrong to point out that the USSR had problems with overaccumulation too
socialism is a lower stage of communism and not just a period of transformation. in semi-feudal countries there is a democratic stage where the state essentially completes the bourgeois revolution by consolidating capital and modernizing agriculture. this revolution passes into the socialist revolution where planning suppresses autonomous capitals and agriculture is collectivized. if the state moves to re-establish competing capitals that are directed by profitability then this restores capitalism. it is possible for this restoration to happen largely within a state framework. the new bourgeoisie in the party, as an autonomous force directing the competing capitals, will strive to overcome worker resistance and either integrate into the capitalist world-market or build a geopolitical bloc capable of independent imperialism.
the soviets encouraged or allowed liberal reforms across eastern europe soon after stalin's death. they cracked down on political reforms but every country introduced market reforms. these ranged from industrial artels in germany to many competing enterprises in a rough market framework in places like hungary. many of the soviets newer allies were simply said to be on a non-capitalist path of development. that is, they obviously weren't socialist, but the soviets simply said they weren't developing in a capitalist way and therefore the communist movements integrated themselves into the capitalist state. they also promoted parliamentary politics more generally, as part of the 'peace' discussion, which western communist parties ran with and essentially liquidated themselves into social-democratic movements loyal to the capitalist state.
the countries that engaged in market reforms didn't just change how profitability indicators worked or something. countries started taking on large debts to finance imports. yugoslavia, which was an extreme example of revisionism, basically became dependent on the IMF. the reforms under gorbachev were initially designed to bring the country closer to somewhere like hungary (which was sometimes referred to as a market socialism). the problems they caused led to an enormous fiscal deficit (unanticipated by the leadership) which almost directly led to shock therapy / austerity. this was just the tail end of similar processes across eastern europe.
maoists called one style of bourgeois thinking as "the production principle". the production principle is the idea that socialism is primarily about maximizing the output of commodities, and that the trick is simply designing an economic mechanism that will do this. as a result, managers and officials will design microeconomic solutions that empower them to tidy up messy political problems. for example, they might say, oh, if it were easier to fire lazy workers, that would tighten up the economic mechanism and we'd get more output. the maoists emphasized that microeconomic reforms happen within a political context of class struggle. a collection of inocuous reforms can converge into something that changes the entire tenor of the system.
getfiscal posted:a collection of inocuous reforms can converge into something that changes the entire tenor of the system.
do you think this could go the other way as well, where a formally capitalist system making seemingly small changes until oops we have full communism? i wouldn't think so and i would imagine that the reason it can happen the other way (formal socialism -> effective capitalism) is that the use values necessary for the reproduction of the society were controlled by a largely capitalist framework, so in order to access them they needed to play ball. does that sound correct?
c_man posted:do you think this could go the other way as well, where a formally capitalist system making seemingly small changes until oops we have full communism?
it can't because capitalism depends on massive global unemployment and poverty in order to maintain its functioning. also the capitalist state is not a mixed entity where the working class has a lot of say, it's a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, so at best it will only buy off selected workers with modest reforms in certain strata and locales. even if it becomes very concentrated in the state, it has huge imperatives to repress labour at the overall level.
also people talk a lot about "capitalism is planned too" but we have to remember it's still fundamentally unplanned in the most important aspects, investment is not determined directly by social use, so it is still anarchic in key respects. capitalists have attempted to smooth these cycles and distortions through policy but it has never been that effective over long periods of time, especially at the level of the global market as a whole.
capitalist economies will often bring sectors into the state in order to reorganize them and redeploy them in new ways, like nationalizing the banking sector or investing in manufacturing and such, but what they can't do is bring these capitals under unified control in order to abolish the global market in labour and move away from production for exchange towards production for use.