Lessons posted:

ilmdge posted:

Lessons posted:

Lots of kool anti-communism in this thread. Really makes you think. Personally it makes me think that maybe instead of wasting our time on all this Lenin and Stalin crap we could do something that really makes a difference, like volunteering a community garden and donating to kiva.org. But wait!

thx faulty

stegosaurus posted:

socialism is like free jazz. think about it that way.

this analogy really works. black & african revolutionary nationalists are among its most powerful exponents, the dutch not-really-marxist autonoomen is mirrored by the dutch national style of "wacky jazz" free improv, and it got superseded by people from western europe with expensive glasses (academic electronic improv and eai/ neoliberal technocrats).

getfiscal posted:

also i have no idea what you support. mao thought cuba was revisionist and state capitalist

It’s no fun being a running dog. Nehru is in bad shape, imperialism and revisionism have robbed him blind. Revisionism is being rebuffed everywhere. It was rebuffed in Romania, it is not listened to in Poland. In Cuba they listen to half and reject half; they listen to half because they can’t do otherwise, since they don’t produce oil or weapons.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-9/mswv9_14.htm

???

doesn't seem like much when in context, unless he said something about them again at a later date?

getfiscal posted:

babyhueypnewton posted:

You have yet to actually provide any evidence that planning is inefficient compared to markets

i'm not sure it's even an intelligible question. there's not some transhistorical economic model which we can adapt ourselves to. it's not like 'planning' always trumps 'markets' and the only economic and political problem in history is just convincing everyone to accept as much planning as possible. you make it sound like the evidence is that economic performance is just a function of how much planning was done from the centre. i think it's probably much more complex than that. i think some important evidence though is that every country that committed itself to socialism eventually turned back from trying to plan in a specific way that was originally considered orthodoxy by marxists. you attributing this to greed by a tiny section of the population and the tacit support of the working class despite the fact they knew socialism worked great seems like it raises important questions about how dysfunctional the system must have been to allow a reactionary coup in every socialist country.

Dysfunctional as opposed to what?? You can't ignore the environment in which an experiment happens when evaluating it!

my explanation would be much simpler: most managers and experts in socialist countries were probably smart people who saw the need for pragmatic reforms, which started virtually the moment they became politically possible due to the death of someone like stalin or mao, and most people went along with them because they agreed their system had serious problems.

"Pragmatic" reforms were being made during Mao and Stalin's reign too, and "pragmatic" =/= "capitalist"... It's nonsense to try to depoliticize the market reforms by calling them "pragmatic", they were just as ideological as the economic reforms based on the primacy of central planning and they brought their own set of problems.

this doesn't mean that planning is somehow "bad", just that making some extreme version of planning your core political goal seems like it's more based on bad philosophy more than actual economic problems.

But this wasn't the core political goal. The core political goal was ending the actual economic, social, political, etc problems of capitalist production. It was this goal that led them to adopting different systems!! It wasn't "bad philosophy" but decades of experience and analyses of the failure of market systems which led them toward systems of planning! With their own problems, yes, of course. No-one can seriously believe that radical experiments like these wouldn't have serious problems, especially given the incredibly hostile environment in which they took place. Doesn't change the fact that the supposedly "pragmatic" reforms (formulated under the imperative to win a competitive race with the imperialist nations that was impossible to win in the first place) taken to "correct" these problems came with other serious problems. Problems which were more politically acceptable, problems which apparently did not require "pragmatic reforms" to get rid of, problems which really aren't problems at all but just something to be accepted.

getfiscal posted:

Uhh dude Baby Huey already convinced everyone including myself that I was wrong. I'm sorry I caused you grief. Socialism obviously works really great. Have a great weekend.

Time moves differently in my world and the only reason I signed up was because I disagreed with you so goddamnit I'm gonna tell you so even if everybody has long since forgotten this "debate" even happened!!!

But thank you, I'm having a great weekend, Ghana just played 2-2 against Germany!!! Belgium might lose against Russia which I guess is okay in the sense that the more European groups kicked out the better, but I will be unashamedly nationalistic on this point and root (lol, "root", english is funny) for them anyway

Great weekend to you too, even though your opinion on the soviet union is wrong I still like your posts

gyrofry posted:

what do you like pink ninja dude

boring shit like postrock, postmetal, heavy psych, math rock basically heavy and without human vocals which trigger my aspergers.

ludomartens posted:

Dysfunctional as opposed to what?? You can't ignore the environment in which an experiment happens when evaluating it!

socialism didn't work in hostile capitalist environment, environment is now even more capitalist, ergo socialism even more won't work, therefore we need new isms.