The problem (according to Das Kapital ) is that the owning class will fight back. Not all of them. Some realize that long-term capitalism requires keeping the working class happy (more or less) but well more than not. And as we learned with feudalism in the middle ages, it takes only one bad king to bring the ruin the works of ten of his predecessors. (It’s a running theme in A Song of Ice and Fire )
So these recommendations are on the assumption that our governments are not already captured. The point of government is to serve the public good and the US has been trying to go back to that for over a century (since the Great depression, which escalated the desire to try something else, all the while the Soviet Union was doing just that.)
Our plutocrats have more resources by which to keep hold of our current governments, even as industry pollutes the air and drives us toward extinction.
Please don’t perceive the Soviet Union as serving the public good. It was a well played (albeit it was 1950s 1960s, easy to write your own narrative) fascism that only benefitted Stalin and Moscow, while keeping the usual fireworks expense needed to sate the masses (just as in capitalist America) at a minimum. They murdered good people left and right, because they weren’t obedient. They murdered good and bad people because they had money they wanted.
Some “visionaries” were allowed to build some architectural projects or other, for the people, as long as they adhered to the party’s rule. This was an easy way for a person without honor to have his name written in stone. Repeat for all subcultures.
Firstly Marx and Das Kapital are not the Soviet Union. The USSR was an attempt to make communism work, much the way that the United States wasis was (is no longer) an attempt to make democracy work.
US constitutional framers made a lot of mistakes and concessions: failing to end slavery and the chattel status of women, using first-past-the-post elections and embracing a two party system, using the electoral college as an intentional sabotage of popular democracy by which the ownership class could undermine a popular vote creating early precedence the US is only a democracy as far as oligarchs can control it.
So when railroad barons in the 19th century were able to assure they got to choose who got to run in the primaries, even then, the people got to vote for elite-picked officials, and public-serving governance was already sabotaged.
At the time of the Great Depression (1929-1939), communism was looking pretty good to the people because we were living in cardboard boxes and eating flour paste and shoe leather and Hoover and the industrialists thought this was fine. (🐶🔥) So if you notice a lot of things going on today seem familiar and rhyme with history, yeah, you’re totally right. This isn’t our first rodeo.
In fact, our industrialists balked when FDR pushed the New Deal, which was a stopgap to give capitalism another chance. Some of our oligarchs were already looking to overturn democracy for fascism. Even then, a PragerU-style an anti-communism campaign (delayed a bit by WWII) was created and pushed onto kids. The stuff on YouTube isn’t new. It’s the same stuff put on reels and shown to me when I was in school in the late 70s / early 80s, just updated and available faster.
Let’s also remember the Red Scare started with Wilson, who sought to isolate and sabotage communism in the Soviet Union weeks after the October Revolution much the way the monarchist coalition of Europe turned on France after its revolution in 1789. So communism never really had a chance but to establish ad hoc hierarchies which leads to corruption.
I’m not a political scientist. I can’t say how well the Marxist model can work, but that it hasn’t really ever had a chance what with industrialists hating on it the way monarchists hated on democracy. But then, here in the States, democracy never had a chance because it was sabotaged from the beginning. But we do know from both stories that plutocrats and aristocrats will always try to reinstall itself and sabotage efforts to partition and dissipate political power, as it has done continuously for the last few centuries. And whenever they seize power, public serving governance is the first casualty of corruption
(I talk about some of the easy fixes our framers could have made in the US to make democracy here more robust. Brains smarter than mine have come up with robust election reform packages that have been made and updated for decades now, with a snowflake’s chance in Hell of actually getting pushed through state and federal legislatures. Short of change by force, the US is already fucked.)
Yes, awful things happened in the USSR. But we actually talk about those while we’re still refusing the discuss the awful things still happening in the USA. We don’t like to talk about the people we don’t like to regard as people, and what we continue to do with them. And I think it’s just as tankie to disregard the wrongdoing done by the US as it is by the USSR, by post-Soviet Russia or by China. Or by anyone, really. We’re all the baddies.
And that said I’m not going to throw out Marx because of Russia any more than I’m going to throw out Hume because of America.
Good post. One thing I will say about Marx is that his analysis of Capital is really insightful. Especially if you consider it alongside what Smith says in The Wealth of Nations regarding the problems of rent seeking behaviour. Between those two works is a solid analysis of much of what ails modern Capitalism.
The biggest problem with Marx isn’t his analysis of the problem, it’s his proposed solution . I’m sympathetic to socialist ideas, but while the idea that a small group of people can seize power is plausable, the idea that they will then voluntarily disseminate it to the populace, is fanciful. Human nature doesn’t work that way.
Yeah, so far we don’t have any good solutions for the propensity of power to consolidate. Similarly Madison presumed people in office would be rational and naturally inclined towards serving the common good, but also that the voters would know their own personal best interests and vote accordingly. History would quickly demonstrate otherwise.
As I said, I’m not a political scientist, and right now, if we could revise our elections there’s a handful of basic changes we could make to improve things and give the public more power. But we’re going to need sociological tricks we don’t yet have to erect a society that doesn’t succumb to corruption over centuries (if not decades). We naked apes aren’t really meant for huge societies, and knew we were treading on dangerous ground when we first started seeing the fruits of agriculture.
That said, CIA experts and Christian Sociologists (desperate to see their faith not get shredded in the next few eras) warn that if power is not disseminated back to the public, we are likely headed towards civil war within the next five to ten years. These will be interesting times, and if history serves it might be decades before we see a stable normal again.
I highly doubt USSR 1930s onwards was ever an attempt to make socialism work. Especially after Lenin’s death.
The remark about USSR being only an attempt at communism is verbose, and questionably required. I never attacked socialism’s ideas.
Just by numbers, a lot more innocents’ murdering happened in Soviet Union. Double digit millions if not more over its existence. There is just no whataboutism that can save that piece of fascist wreck of a state.
I merely wanted the idea by @[email protected] that the Soviet Union “Had good ideas” to die in a fire.
In my top-of-thread comment, I didn’t mention the USSR at all other than to say it was trying something other than capitalism, and that trying something else was inspiring Americans in the early 20th century. Now I suspect you’re not engaged in this dialogue in good faith.
But make no mistake, Lebensraum for ethnic russians was executed without much pondering. Killing, burning, destroying anything that was in the way.
Hey now. That’s not quite accurate. A great deal of thought went into it when the leadership realized that the Greens (peasant militias primarily organized for mutual defense against pillaging aka “requisitions” by the Red and White armies), the presence of anarchist societies allowing voluntary association (like the Makhnovists in Ukraine, and ethnic groups with strong identities or cultural individuality would interfere with the Central Commitee’s absolute power over the populace.
The problem (according to Das Kapital ) is that the owning class will fight back. Not all of them. Some realize that long-term capitalism requires keeping the working class happy (more or less) but well more than not. And as we learned with feudalism in the middle ages, it takes only one bad king to bring the ruin the works of ten of his predecessors. (It’s a running theme in A Song of Ice and Fire )
So these recommendations are on the assumption that our governments are not already captured. The point of government is to serve the public good and the US has been trying to go back to that for over a century (since the Great depression, which escalated the desire to try something else, all the while the Soviet Union was doing just that.)
Our plutocrats have more resources by which to keep hold of our current governments, even as industry pollutes the air and drives us toward extinction.
Please don’t perceive the Soviet Union as serving the public good. It was a well played (albeit it was 1950s 1960s, easy to write your own narrative) fascism that only benefitted Stalin and Moscow, while keeping the usual fireworks expense needed to sate the masses (just as in capitalist America) at a minimum. They murdered good people left and right, because they weren’t obedient. They murdered good and bad people because they had money they wanted.
Some “visionaries” were allowed to build some architectural projects or other, for the people, as long as they adhered to the party’s rule. This was an easy way for a person without honor to have his name written in stone. Repeat for all subcultures.
Firstly Marx and Das Kapital are not the Soviet Union. The USSR was an attempt to make communism work, much the way that the United States
wasiswas (is no longer) an attempt to make democracy work.US constitutional framers made a lot of mistakes and concessions: failing to end slavery and the chattel status of women, using first-past-the-post elections and embracing a two party system, using the electoral college as an intentional sabotage of popular democracy by which the ownership class could undermine a popular vote creating early precedence the US is only a democracy as far as oligarchs can control it.
So when railroad barons in the 19th century were able to assure they got to choose who got to run in the primaries, even then, the people got to vote for elite-picked officials, and public-serving governance was already sabotaged.
At the time of the Great Depression (1929-1939), communism was looking pretty good to the people because we were living in cardboard boxes and eating flour paste and shoe leather and Hoover and the industrialists thought this was fine. (🐶🔥) So if you notice a lot of things going on today seem familiar and rhyme with history, yeah, you’re totally right. This isn’t our first rodeo.
In fact, our industrialists balked when FDR pushed the New Deal, which was a stopgap to give capitalism another chance. Some of our oligarchs were already looking to overturn democracy for fascism. Even then, a PragerU-style an anti-communism campaign (delayed a bit by WWII) was created and pushed onto kids. The stuff on YouTube isn’t new. It’s the same stuff put on reels and shown to me when I was in school in the late 70s / early 80s, just updated and available faster.
Let’s also remember the Red Scare started with Wilson, who sought to isolate and sabotage communism in the Soviet Union weeks after the October Revolution much the way the monarchist coalition of Europe turned on France after its revolution in 1789. So communism never really had a chance but to establish ad hoc hierarchies which leads to corruption.
I’m not a political scientist. I can’t say how well the Marxist model can work, but that it hasn’t really ever had a chance what with industrialists hating on it the way monarchists hated on democracy. But then, here in the States, democracy never had a chance because it was sabotaged from the beginning. But we do know from both stories that plutocrats and aristocrats will always try to reinstall itself and sabotage efforts to partition and dissipate political power, as it has done continuously for the last few centuries. And whenever they seize power, public serving governance is the first casualty of corruption
(I talk about some of the easy fixes our framers could have made in the US to make democracy here more robust. Brains smarter than mine have come up with robust election reform packages that have been made and updated for decades now, with a snowflake’s chance in Hell of actually getting pushed through state and federal legislatures. Short of change by force, the US is already fucked.)
Yes, awful things happened in the USSR. But we actually talk about those while we’re still refusing the discuss the awful things still happening in the USA. We don’t like to talk about the people we don’t like to regard as people, and what we continue to do with them. And I think it’s just as tankie to disregard the wrongdoing done by the US as it is by the USSR, by post-Soviet Russia or by China. Or by anyone, really. We’re all the baddies.
And that said I’m not going to throw out Marx because of Russia any more than I’m going to throw out Hume because of America.
Good post. One thing I will say about Marx is that his analysis of Capital is really insightful. Especially if you consider it alongside what Smith says in The Wealth of Nations regarding the problems of rent seeking behaviour. Between those two works is a solid analysis of much of what ails modern Capitalism. The biggest problem with Marx isn’t his analysis of the problem, it’s his proposed solution . I’m sympathetic to socialist ideas, but while the idea that a small group of people can seize power is plausable, the idea that they will then voluntarily disseminate it to the populace, is fanciful. Human nature doesn’t work that way.
Yeah, so far we don’t have any good solutions for the propensity of power to consolidate. Similarly Madison presumed people in office would be rational and naturally inclined towards serving the common good, but also that the voters would know their own personal best interests and vote accordingly. History would quickly demonstrate otherwise.
As I said, I’m not a political scientist, and right now, if we could revise our elections there’s a handful of basic changes we could make to improve things and give the public more power. But we’re going to need sociological tricks we don’t yet have to erect a society that doesn’t succumb to corruption over centuries (if not decades). We naked apes aren’t really meant for huge societies, and knew we were treading on dangerous ground when we first started seeing the fruits of agriculture.
That said, CIA experts and Christian Sociologists (desperate to see their faith not get shredded in the next few eras) warn that if power is not disseminated back to the public, we are likely headed towards civil war within the next five to ten years. These will be interesting times, and if history serves it might be decades before we see a stable normal again.
I highly doubt USSR 1930s onwards was ever an attempt to make socialism work. Especially after Lenin’s death.
The remark about USSR being only an attempt at communism is verbose, and questionably required. I never attacked socialism’s ideas.
Just by numbers, a lot more innocents’ murdering happened in Soviet Union. Double digit millions if not more over its existence. There is just no whataboutism that can save that piece of fascist wreck of a state.
I merely wanted the idea by @[email protected] that the Soviet Union “Had good ideas” to die in a fire.
Otherwise, good points.
In my top-of-thread comment, I didn’t mention the USSR at all other than to say it was trying something other than capitalism, and that trying something else was inspiring Americans in the early 20th century. Now I suspect you’re not engaged in this dialogue in good faith.
Soviet Union === USSR
I didnt read his posts as “USSR had some good ideas”
Hey now. That’s not quite accurate. A great deal of thought went into it when the leadership realized that the Greens (peasant militias primarily organized for mutual defense against pillaging aka “requisitions” by the Red and White armies), the presence of anarchist societies allowing voluntary association (like the Makhnovists in Ukraine, and ethnic groups with strong identities or cultural individuality would interfere with the Central Commitee’s absolute power over the populace.