NoFreeWill posted:

the god-awful aesthetics of Socialist Realism

wtf...

Lessons posted:

shriekingviolet posted:

NoFreeWill posted:

Crow posted:

Is your entire life like a shopping catalog? But everything is broken? Do you know where you bought these thoughts? That Encounter magazine looks so cute on you


yeah it turns out the soviet union is alive and well, i forgot that facts is propoganda

the soviet union survived 70 years of continuous siege by the ruthless mass of western imperialist forces. do your criteria for a true/successful ethical system and/or state ultimately just boil down to crude might makes right? how does the survival of a state figure in the slightest into the objective morality horseshit you've been peddling. what are you even arguing for at this point. don't you only meat.

If you look at it from a normal persons perspective, the Soviet Union collapsed of its own accord after 50 years of peace with the West. Same for Maoist China. Maybe you don't agree with that but it's the broad perception and you aren't going to change it.

are you talking about the "normal people" who work with you at the Pedo Security Systems International Corp.? who gives a shit about what "normal" petite bourgeoisie think about the savage muslim hordes or whatever, er I mean UFOs, uh I mean the USSR

Crow posted:

Lessons posted:

Crow posted:

A twitter man with an anime avatar stands before a crowd of normies ready to convince them, of anything,

Here are the facts. This is me:



But at least I dont have to convince anyone that Marxism-Leninism is a science.

youre just some weird hobbyist?

I don't know, what does it matter?

drwhat posted:

I'm beginning to think he sincerely holds his ridiculous joke beliefs

I think to a lot of people (communists) the idea of communism is itself a moral system, it is a set of values that says the minimization of collective suffering is an inherent good. Which is basically utilitarian, but communism implies a humanist calculus in which the lack of opportunity, community support, human social interaction, safety, security, leisure time, family time, etc is the ultimate cause of avoidable manmade suffering. Therefore any political structure which deprives potential capitalists from the opportunity to amass surplus will necessarily be good in the long run.

The counterargument that capitalism can do it better actually is not historically true, which is clear if you include in your view all the exploited and killed workers globally.

If economics included the "externalities" of human happiness (i.e. the effects of the things listed above), and all the various psychological studies that show the effects of the constant underlying severe anxiety that is caused by being economically insecure, communism would consistently be the obvious right answer to how best to organize ourselves to maximize our long term happiness, intelligence and even productivity. Expropriating surplus has a clear long term cost, it's just ignored.

I don't think you can say communism is essentially utilitarian (even with a richer notion of well-being than vulgar utilitarianism), since so many communists explicitly reject all forms of utilitarianism.

However, an interesting (or really boring? idk) bit of economic history is that the dramatic advance of utilitarianism as the ethical basis for political economy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (as promoted by economists such as JS Mill, Edgeworth, and Pigou) lead to many economists to support greater redistribution of wealth and more regulation. A basic concept in economics is diminishing marginal returns to wealth--1,000 additional dollars provides much more benefit to an individual if they are poor than if they are rich. A very simple utilitarian calculus then suggests that egalitarianism is socially optimal.

However, starting in the interwar period there was a huge push back against normative utilitarianism in economics spearheaded by LSE chair and Hayek patron Lionel Robbins, who said that it's not scientific to make interpersonal comparisons of utility--that you can't say that a pauper benefits more from 1,000 dollars than Bill Gates does, since we have no way to measure directly measure the magnitude of a person's utility. This critique led to the discrediting of traditional welfare economics by the mid 20th century, despite economics retaining the language and formalism of utilitarianism.

In economics, the conventional wisdom is that this methodological critique led to the rejection of radically redistributive policy prescriptions, but I think this is backwards--utilitarian ethics was leading western economists to dangerous conclusions, and with the ascendancy of communism and the left, any anti-capitalist ideas pervading economics needed to be squelched.

Tellingly, while the Robbins critique has been and continues to be used to discredit arguments for wealth redistribution, implicit interpersonal comparisons of utility remain common in many other fields of economics, such as industrial organization. Consumer surplus and producer surplus, for example, are the aggregate utilities of consumers and producers in a market, which obviously requires that utilities be comparable between people. These concepts remain in wide use, both in undergraduate teaching and in modern economic research, despite their clear inconsistency the current doctrine on interpersonal comparisons of utility. Generally, the only time economists are bothered by utilitarianism is when it suggests resources should be transferred from the rich to the poor.

So even the neoclassical paradigm can support radical egalitarianism, and certain forms of analysis had to be declared verboten to prevent this.

Edited by Aspie_Muslim_Economist_ (March 11, 2015 05:12:18)