I don't think we've yet to see literal socialism exist, just an ideological and political shift of certain countries and societies that attempted to transition from capitalism to a socialist mode of production, which can be considered "formal" socialism, I suppose. But, the drive being political and cultural means the state can regress backwards into conserving capitalist modes of production if the culture or leadership changes—like that Peace of Crap MegaF*ckér Khrushchev. Largely it's a difficult proposition because if a country goes socialist and attempts to transition into socialism proper, it's faced with massive external violence by fascists kamikazing into socialism to destroy both societies. There is a very real necessity to shift surplus value away from productive capital and into defending national capital/resources, which, imo, would subject the socialist country to the LTRPF and capital/power accumulation potentially reverting policy towards market reformism to get much needed resources in the short run. But, that's just one guys thoughts ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
AmericanNazbro posted:I refuse to emptyquote because I am the 1% of GBS who gets the joke but I love the shift-key too much. You can get f*cked, "Kylé"
:cawg:
postposting posted:if only we could have some kind of... permanent revolution
That's a ban.
AmericanNazbro posted:Donald: Assuming Alende's Chilé existed in a vacuum, you don't think it would have been possible for it to transition into full socialism? It would have sputtered out once reaching peak liberalism, or w/e, and revolutionary fervor would have subsided? Or are we only talking about social democracies like the Scandinavian kind (i.e. those existing within empire)?
well i don't want to sound flippant but it didn't exist in a vacuum. i mean if the capitalist totality was entirely chile then its political economy would be completely different, like, not relying on copper exports or whatever, not having a vast reserve of bourgeois power in the united states and its allies, etc. i think chile could have sustained the basics of socialism in one country but they would have had to suppress the organizing of the right and smash the bourgeois state to prevent counterrevolution.
getfiscal posted:AmericanNazbro posted:Donald: Assuming Alende's Chilé existed in a vacuum, you don't think it would have been possible for it to transition into full socialism? It would have sputtered out once reaching peak liberalism, or w/e, and revolutionary fervor would have subsided? Or are we only talking about social democracies like the Scandinavian kind (i.e. those existing within empire)?
well i don't want to sound flippant but it didn't exist in a vacuum. i mean if the capitalist totality was entirely chile then its political economy would be completely different, like, not relying on copper exports or whatever, not having a vast reserve of bourgeois power in the united states and its allies, etc. i think chile could have sustained the basics of socialism in one country but they would have had to suppress the organizing of the right and smash the bourgeois state to prevent counterrevolution.
Right. I think we agree, I was just asking for clarification really with the absurd hypothetical so no worry about being flippant.
getfiscal posted:roseweird posted:getfiscal posted:i try not to debate people on-line anymore but i hope you have a nice day.
i support this idea but it might get very quiet around here
a spooky posting ghost town wouldn't be all bad, especially with hallowe'en coming up.
*floor creaks*
*you feel the air stir around you, and a voice speaks into your left ear as if someone is standing behind you*
"....Stalin..."
NoFreeWill posted:who that New Man would be.
AmericanNazbro posted:But, the drive being political and cultural means the state can regress backwards into conserving capitalist modes of production if the culture or leadership changes—like that Peace of Crap MegaF*ckér Khrushchev.
in material analysis Khrushchev or any name doesn't really explain anything, as for culture we need to understand what's behind it, again in the material sense
if you seize political power you can't just start full socialist planning right away. the economy is already in motion. but you can do things like consolidating businesses in particular industries, building supply chains, ensuring the state has firm control over things like communications and transportation, etc. and at the same time you're taking those businesses out of the hands of the capitalist class, and ensuring they are being inspected and guided by revolutionaries, etc.
kliman actually clearly doesn't know what the intermediate stage would look like because he's not even sure what would happen. like in his book he says that he doesn't know how you get from current society to communism exactly because there's no feasible intermediary. he thinks the ideas just need to spread so deeply that people just start organizing things directly from production to use and abandon money. i think all the reformist and state-capitalist sort of things can and do produce positive changes, because they strip the bourgeoisie of some of their power and give workers more breathing space to organize (and, like, live their lives), and build real capacities that can be exploited for further change. like, if some left party nationalizes the banks, that doesn't create socialism in itself, but it can be a powerful weapon as part of a broader class war.
daddyholes posted:AmericanNazbro posted:But, the drive being political and cultural means the state can regress backwards into conserving capitalist modes of production if the culture or leadership changes—like that Peace of Crap MegaF*ckér Khrushchev.
in material analysis Khrushchev or any name doesn't really explain anything, as for culture we need to understand what's behind it, again in the material sense
I know but A.) I'm lazy; B.) I think it's understood here that Khruschev instituted a bunch of reforms to reaffirm a bourgeious state apparatus, and also made a bunch of indictments against oppressing of bourgeoisie (via slandering stalin)—which did have an impact on the culture.
note the transition in the 1980s (observed by fukuyama, lol) from actual material support for third world movements to mere "sympathy" from the ussr. i think this was idiotic mostly because their success actually depended on continual and increased independent development in the third world. they couldn't just burp out stuff about Our Common European Home and hope for the best.
i think a lot of the arguments over economic transition and restoration, as above, are sort of occulted versions of this argument regarding international position.
fleights posted:that is why models such as venezuela or bolivia are more pertinent to 21st century communism than cuba or north korea
this really only makes any sense if you are viewing it from the typical anticommunist line of 'outdated states' (an impossible thing, really, if they exist than they are not outdated). i mean cuba is absolutely a central issue to these latin american movements, provides alot of close political guidance, come on.
jools posted:i'm coming around to thinking that the USSR was basically far too weak internationally throughout its existence to take any particularly deep economic lessons from it. the transition from stalin to khruschev seems more the beginning of a path to first worldism that really comes into full blossom with gorbachev.
so, uh, what's the definition of first worldism in this case? because the USSR was a middle-income country:
GNI per capita in USSR in 1990 was equal to 2691 US dollars., ranked 86th in the world and was on par with GNI per capita in Lithuania (2802 US dollars), GNI per capita in Brazil (2719.5 US dollars), GNI per capita in Cuba (2644.4 US dollars). GNI per capita in USSR was less, than GNI per capita in the World (4214.9 US dollars) by 1523.9 US dollars.
http://kushnirs.org/macroeconomics/gni/gni_ussr.html
and then it "collapsed" (how passive. "Mistakes were made") spectacularly and was partitioned off, while entering very deep and violent political and economic crises. so i'm not exactly sure that the USSR was approaching first-world conditions, certainly not in terms of exploitation of the third world, etc.
i think a lot of these debates here are missing key statistical and historical facts and figures. like, the position of political leadership is not the same thing as the mode of production. party leadership is not the same thing as various organs of the soviet state and attendant institutions. 'state capitalism' isnt really a mode of production (unless you just mean capitalism), and
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.
the USSR doesn't fit this description of capitalism. so, what is capitalism? what is socialism? What's for launch
and you kind of hit on that anyway with
like, the position of political leadership is not the same thing as the mode of production. party leadership is not the same thing as various organs of the soviet state and attendant institutions.
because those two things more than anything else influence this question of international alignment.
plus imo measures like GNI are crap for measuring actual welfare in socialist states just because a lot of stuff is distributed much more effectively (take ukraine - their GNI PPP/capita is higher than it ever was in the USSR, but lmao at the idea that welfare is anything near what it was).
Edited by jools ()
Superabound posted:i think that, if you were in control of the economy/government, all youd really have to do is use that control to make everyone else in power stop continually stomping out the kindling fires of Socialism before they become a raging inferno. American Capitalism is not a naturally emergent system, it is not a default state of affairs, but rather the direct, eternally-in-collapse result of massive amounts of global theft and state violence
I agree with this. Socialism has sprung up in almost every country on Earth but there has been both overt and covert suppression of it by local and foreign governments as part of a specific plan to combat and eliminate socialism and communism. The fall of the USSR and the failure of world socialism isn't just due to some philosophical defect or lack of navel gazing, it's because there is and has been an active campaign against it for almost a hundred years if you want to use the birth of Communist Russia as a yardstick.
Crow posted:fleights posted:that is why models such as venezuela or bolivia are more pertinent to 21st century communism than cuba or north korea
this really only makes any sense if you are viewing it from the typical anticommunist line of 'outdated states' (an impossible thing, really, if they exist than they are not outdated). i mean cuba is absolutely a central issue to these latin american movements, provides alot of close political guidance, come on.
reactionary states do exist, but you raise a good point, hasta siempre, comandante
roseweird posted:
i played this video and my Cat frreak'd the sh'd out
stegosaurus posted:battlezone was so sick
AmericanNazbro posted:Dinald or whoever else wants to sit through 2 hours of this sexy little fat man drone on about proudhon's peyronie's disease, how to abolish the oppressive matriarchy and stigma surrounding fordyce spots
oh wow this is a body blow to communists worldwide, seriously there's no recovering from a devastating analysis like that; if you want to be a communist in good faith after 9/18/2014, you have to watch that whole video and respond in detail to every point.
Barbarossa posted:.custom249957{}Superabound posted:i think that, if you were in control of the economy/government, all youd really have to do is use that control to make everyone else in power stop continually stomping out the kindling fires of Socialism before they become a raging inferno. American Capitalism is not a naturally emergent system, it is not a default state of affairs, but rather the direct, eternally-in-collapse result of massive amounts of global theft and state violence
I agree with this. Socialism has sprung up in almost every country on Earth but there has been both overt and covert suppression of it by local and foreign governments as part of a specific plan to combat and eliminate socialism and communism. The fall of the USSR and the failure of world socialism isn't just due to some philosophical defect or lack of navel gazing, it's because there is and has been an active campaign against it for almost a hundred years if you want to use the birth of Communist Russia as a yardstick.
well perhaps the fact that it was successfully suppressed implies a philosophical, economic, or cultural defect in it's program. if it was superior it would win...