immediately dismantled the socialist power structures that were in place

That’s insanely ahistorical. The socialist power structures that were in place, existed precisely BECAUSE of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. And soviets had a very high degree of government control all the way up until the death of Lenin. You’re seriously mistaken about this

Hitler had famous writings detailing his ragingly racist and antisemitic views, and committed holocaust against specific ethnicities and nationalities out of Aryan-supremacism.

Napoleon was a militarist nationalist whose life was purely a militarist endeavour. He pursued violent expansionism out of patriotic fervor.

Comparing Lenin, a lawyer who escaped the autocratic regime of his homeland and spent a life in exile examining Marxist texts on how to improve the life conditions of people, to either Napoleon or Hitler, shows you have absolutely no idea of the values Lenin valued and promoted, you haven’t read one single of his texts, and you’re speaking purely out of anti-communist sentiment that’s been ingrained in your brain.

What are you? A Trotskyist? A Liberal?

I agree that automatization would greatly help.planned economies and that was one of the issues with Soviet economy in particular. Just too many variables to control manually. Nowadays, corporations do exactly that.

I wonder how can market be regulated in a way that doesn’t create capital accumulation. Isn’t that the very point of starting an enterprise?

Your comment comes from a very flawed and limited understanding of what democratic planning of the economy could be. “51% of the population decided to wear a blue shirt so only blue shirts are made” isn’t at all a good representation of the possibilities of democratic planning of the economy.

Look at Amazon. Amazon is already an insanely big centrally planned economy. They have at their disposal the best engineers and computer scientists that enable such central planning that makes them an indestructible behemoth of efficiency. As soon as one client so much as clicks on a product, computer algorithms calculate the likelihood of them buying the product, and send signals to their warehouses to prepare their products for delivery, and in turn they send signals to their distributor or the manufacturer to supply or produce some more, all in the blink of an eye. The power that we, as workers, could harness if we made that ours, is unimaginably strong. Imagine a planned economy where direct input from consumers modifies the manufacturing quantities of the goods produced, without Amazon selling your data and appropriating all the surplus value of all workers in the process.

Imagine wanting to open a small business, and instead of having to be rich from the start, going to the local council to see if the community is interested in having such a business, let’s say a cafe. You make a pitch, they like they idea, and they fund your project because, after all, it will be good for the neighborhood, with a part of the money they’re allocated by the state for such purposes. You run your business in a risk-free fashion, since the community is already interested and has funded the project, and the better it works, the more money you can earn since you have productivity bonuses.

Imagine facing climate change, and making collectively as a society a 20-year plan subdivided in 5-year intervals to decarbonise the main sectors of the economy responsible for greenhouse gas emissions, all with the collaboration of experts in the science of climate change, experts in said sectors working not to maximise the profit of shareholders but for the betterment of humanity, and computer programmers managing absurd amounts of data that allow for very precise estimations of the state of the economy in 5 years time.

That’s the future I want, and it’s doable. We have the technology, we have the knowledge, we have the people. The only thing left is to eliminate the cancerous property structures of productive property.

I’m sad that when you use the word “democracy”, the best future people can imagine is the modern American system of “democracy”…

I’m not a theorist obviously, but it seems like it’s inherently going to be a limited number of decision makers who can’t possibly know everything, and they become a bottleneck to business creation at best, a corruption machine at worst. I know I wouldn’t trust the government of half (or more but my point is, Republicans) the current US states to decide what business are allowed to exist.

Advocates of Central Planning advocate for rungs, not just 5 dudes and some excel spreadsheets. There would be factory level planners, local planners, regional planners, state planners, country planners, and international planners. Nobody will no everything, but they will know their own areas inputs and outputs.

I know the retort is of course that we have corruption now, but I’d think if we’re theorizing, there’s a better way to reduce extant corruption than introducing a new vector for even more corruption. And there’s a way to harness the power of people starting small businesses freely without letting those businesses become unregulated behemoths.

Why would it be more corrupt? Why do you believe Small Businesses are fine? Markets themselves inevitably result in those unregulated behemoths, it’s better to have a cohesive whole that is thoroughly regulated and democratically controlled.

Like just set the criteria you would be telling the Central Planning Authority to prioritize, and do that with regulation. Set an ownership tax so that as a business gets bigger the ownership moves away from the founder and into the public trust.

I recommend reading Wage Labor and Capital for more information on why the Profit Motive and Capitalist Production itself to be bad.

Amazing.

You do know starvation rates lowered over time every time central planning has been put in place, right? You do know Capitalist countries also plan, correct?

It already exists. See for example Mondragon

The major issue is that it has to compete on a global market that’s exploitative.

Are you familiar with the bartering system? Rather than money, you would judge the value of the object by how much you needed it. If you really wanted the avocados, you would ask the person who had avocados what they would trade. If you didn’t have what they wanted, you can bargain or try someone else who has avocados who wants what you currently have.

Basically, a money less society goes back to a very simplified society. You won’t be able to get everything you want and will have to, sometimes, settle for what you currently have. It also gives you the ability to trade your skills.

So, you go back to the avocado trader and tell them that you’ll build an avocado shed for them in exchange for a crate of avocados. You both negotiate, exchange and then move on.

It’s more work because you have seized the means of production by making things yourself in order to trade, rather than off shoring to someone else who is likely not getting paid at all. This is why the wealthy absolutely don’t want this system because it’s more work for them, while in the lower class it’ll give more control back. When balancing, there will always be people who lose and people who gain.

You provided a bit of information about money but you didn’t provide any insight into what a moneyless society might look like and you didn’t provide any information to convince someone that this is a feasible concept

That’s simply because I’m not particularly well-versed into the advantages or disadvantages of moneyless societies, and I’m not particularly for or against them, if anything I’m im favour of the existence of a centralized currency as we have now. My point was only that discussion is l best done when nuanced and interested, and not “but avocado”. My point was also that Marxist terms are to be discussed and revised at all times, and maybe you’re right and moneyless societies aren’t the best alternative given our modern knowledge of money.

Regarding the second half of your paragraph, my problems with IOUs are a bit different. The problem with non-centralized, promise-based forms of money, is that they’re very prone to being violated, and that barter is a very inefficient form of exchange of goods and services. I’m not well-versed in the concept of a moneyless economy, but I’m a bit more well-versed in the nature of money. For example, money’s worth doesn’t come from “everyone agreeing that it’s worth something for some reason”. It comes from taxation. A central authority, in this case the state, imposes compulsory taxes using the monopoly of violence, in a given currency. The fact that people will have to pay their taxes in that particular currency, means that they need to obtain that currency in the first place to pay said taxes. This makes people more likely to engage in economic activity with that currency, since it’s suddenly very useful for everyone in order to pay their compulsory taxes. Taxes are also very useful as a redistribution mechanism. All in all, a central currency whose monetary policy is decided collectively by the workers in a democratic fashion, can be argued to be a useful thing for a democratic communist society. I’m sure there are arguments against this but I’m not very well versed in the critique as I said.

Conclusion: question everything, but let’s do it in a serious way to improve our knowledge and to possibly envision better societies.

(Said the dude from .ml)

I really don’t mean to be rude, but both you and the other user seem to have no concept of anarchism. I mean, what you said straight up makes no sense. Marxists and AnComms both have the same end goal, so what do you think the difference between them is?

Anarchist societies and groups exists and have existed throughout history; they didn’t have to be “build towards” by taking control of the government first.

And please don’t be telling me why you like or don’t like anarchism; I’m arguing about what it is. Whether you like or think is viable is an entire different conversation.

This is the conclusion I’ve come to since reading the State and Revolution. The people who are capable of overthrowing the current system aren’t likely to be the same people capable of keeping true to an approach that’s legitimately socialist. There are problems with reformism as well, as it can result in an endless series of small concessions to distract from an equally endless series of measured power grabs.

If I take what I read of Marx and Engels as likely to be accurately predictive, my conclusion has to be that the circumstances they’re discussing haven’t occurred yet. Basically, Lenin jumped the gun with his support of imposing a revolution and a dictatorship of the proletariat. The power structure it creates is too centralized to achieve its goals.

This would suggest to me that if Marx and Engels are correct, a spontaneous and universal proletariat uprising is probably still down the road somewhere. Basically, we see hints at this state reflected in the microcosm of revolution, but have yet to see the circumstances that cause an actual change of prioritization and autonomy rather than simply a changing of the guard.

AnComms are under the socialist umbrella, but the comic isn’t delving into every single thing that’s under that umbrella, because it’s not 600 pages long.

Thanks for being open to discussion, I appreciate it. I’ll start talking about the reality of multi-party systems and liberal democracy.

Generally, multi-party systems aren’t democratic if we adhere to the definition that “the power of legislation is in the hands of the people”, which I think would be a good premise for a parliamentary multi-party system. Ideally, you’d choose a platform in elections, which has a given program, or even create your own platform if you don’t feel represented enough. Then, this platform supports its program in a Congress, and votes through representatives to pass legislation according to its program. Sounds good, but let’s examine whether the policy that people want to enact is actually passed, and whether policy that people don’t want to enact is passed.

We can start with the case of the US. The vast majority of Americans support an extended universal healthcare system of some sort. The technical details are a bit hazy, but the reality is that most people would support such a system as poll after poll shows. Yet, the years pass, and there’s basically no progress in this direction, how is this democratic? How come if a majority of people support this, it’s not pushed forwards and legislated? It’s the same with abortion rights, a vast majority of Americans believe in legal abortion rights for women, yet no legislation is passed in that regard and many states actually go backwards. A majority would support increased taxes on the extra-wealthy and on big companies. Study after study show that public opinion is one of the worst predictors for policy, i.e., there’s barely any correlation at all between polls on policy, and actual passing of policy. Can we say that there’s an actual democracy in the US, when the interests of the people don’t correlate with legislation?

I’ll talk about Europe now, since I’m Spanish and it’s a closer example to me. Recently we assisted to the outrageous example of Macron unilaterally skipping Congress to increase the retirement age against the desires of basically the entirety of France. Huge protests broke out, he was vilified in social media, and all polls showed that this was an extremely unpopular decision. Yet it passed. The same happened all over the EU during the 2010 Euro crisis. Austerity policy was enforced by the authorities everywhere: lowering expenditure on healthcare, education and public retirement pensions, reducing investment in infrastructure, increasing taxes such as VAT… Again, this was extremely unpopular and against the desires of most people. It’s been a decade and a half since then, and these austerity policies are still in place. VAT is still higher than it was, expenditure in healthcare and education hasn’t increased to the levels prior to the crisis… Yet another example of blatant anti-democracy. If the policy isn’t carried out with the will of the people, the system isn’t democratic.

I could go on giving examples of failed cases of policy in multi-party systems, but now I’ll do the opposite and bring examples of multi-party systems that actually applied popular policy.

Salvador Allende was a Chilean leftist politician in the previous century, who was elected by a majority of citizens to carry out nationalizations of the mining industry (the heart of the economy of the country at the time), and to improve the welfare state. His term didn’t last very long at all, because when popular policy started being actually enacted in a democratic fashion, a fascist coup murdered him and replaced him with a fascist dictator.

In the Spanish Second Republic, a similar thing happened. In the 30s, a very progressive leftist government was elected, and promised to carry out land reform, i.e. expropriation from big landowners and redistribution of land to the farmers in a country which was primarily agrarian. It suffered the same fate: a fascist coup, a bloody civil war, and almost 40 years of fascism.

In Iran, under the administration of Mosaddegh, a leftist secular politician who wanted to make sure that the Iranian oil was profiting the majority of Iranians instead of the Shah and a few British companies, nationalised the oil industry. This was met with economical blockade, with paid actors pretending to be communists destroying private property to agitate people, and fake protests organized by the mafia funded by the MI6 and the CIA ousting him from the government.

Now let’s go to a period in which actually progressive policy was passed in Europe in a popular and democratic fashion: the post-WW2 period. Under the looming threat of a socialist revolution, and the high level of labour organization through unions, the governments of Europe were successfully pressured into passing meaningful legislation on the limit of working hours per week, on progressive tax systems, on welfare state (healthcare, education and pensions)…

So it seems to me, that the only way to make governments pass actually progressive and democratic policy that most people agree with, is through the organization of workers and the threat of a communist revolution. That, if people just vote socialists into power without organizing labor, they suffer coups, that if they vote social-democrats they get austerity and antidemocratic policy. What percentage of Europe agreed to increase the military budget after the start of the war in Ukraine? I’m not trying to argue whether that’s a good or a bad policy, I’m just saying all polls showed it was an originally unpopular decision, yet it was carried out.

If the only way to enforce governments to enact popular, progressive and democratic policy, is through the organization of labor, then why would I want multi-party systems instead of a system of representation of workers in a single, unified, democratic structure?

I know it’s a long answer, but I appreciate it if you made it to the end.

I’m not the person you asked and they surely have a better answer, but I thought I’d throw some things out there:

A lot of what are understandably called “one party states” are not technically one party. The DPRK has like three other parties and I’m pretty sure there are countless parties all over the PRC. It’s still reasonable to refer to these countries as one party states because they have some kind of constitutional provision preventing any other party from taking power at the highest levels, but they still use multiple parties as a means of representing diverse interests.

Our comrade VI evidently knows way more about Cuba than I, but something I happen to know is that, when you run for office in Cuba, you are not the candidate of any party, you are effectively independent. I think that they conceptualize what a party is in a very different way. In America, the political parties are literally private entities, with all the legal ramifications that entails, and are effectively companies pushing brands in order to get money from donors via held seats (that’s a crude generalization, but I think it works well enough). In the “one party states” I know of, the “one party” is considered to be part of the governing apparatus itself, rather than something that exists outside it seeking to influence it. It’s all a conjoined project that way.

I personally think that, assuming there is actual democracy in terms of the government needing to enact the popular will, a one party state is probably a more coherent way of having society united in its various projects, even if the proverbial ship needs to change course now and then for whatever reason. That’s just my feeling though, and it’s mainly informed by the overwhelming sense one gets if they follow American elections that they are engineered at every level to be anti-democratic.

What’s your point?

Rather than a dry, aseptic description of the Cuban institutions and form of government, the book reads as a historical account of the process that took place in the years of the Periodo Especial.

The second half of the book, for some reason, is a recount of the Cuban revolution and its historical causes, which you may or may not skip reading depending on what your purpose is with the book.

Thanks for providing a link!

Thanks for posting the link!

wtf you talking about the world is bigger than republican and democrats and you have countries where religion is not that big with signs of the problems of late stage capitalism.

You can’t have all people smart in capitalism without free good education, if education is a commodity the poor people become ignorant and easier to manipulate by the people who own the capital and they will manipulate them to vote for what is best for the capital. You can remove religion and the same problem will continue, you only solve people voting with the ass with education and that is really difficult within capitalism, like I said before billionaires will not let that happens.

Why are you saying that?

a totally planned economy is set to fail because it’s impossible to plan for everything.

What do you mean? Can you provide an example, and how Capitalism can better account for it?

You could dispute the genocidal bit but you cannot in good faith argue that the communist party wasn’t dictatorial.

In what manner was the Communist Party “dictatorial?” It held immense power, yes, but it wasn’t 1 dude deciding everything, there was worker participation in how it ran and the party itself was democratically run. There was corruption, yes, but it wasn’t a dictatorship either.

And I believe the OPs point is that that’s a bad thing.

We shouldn’t be basing our politics and imagery today off the guy who fucked socialism for a century.

How, exactly, did Lenin “fuck socialism for a century?”

Lenin was the man who presided over the creation and support of new worker power and socialist modes of production.

All he did was create a centralised state capitalism and perpetuated existing class conflict, with his party taking the role of the bourgeoisie.

What sepparates any form of Marxism from “state capitalism,” in your eyes? Marx was an advocate for central planning.

Secondly, please describe how the CPSU competed against each other in Markets for the purpose of Capital accumulation into their own pockets, and explain why wealth disparity greatly decreased during the USSR and increased after it’s dissolution.

The USSR had numerous struggles and issues, both external and internal, but it was Socialist.

Even Paul Averich, an anarchist who wrote the definitive history of the 1921 Kronstadt uprising and critic of the Bolsheviks, didn’t call Lenin genocidal. Ever heard about the White terror? After the civil war Lenin was sick and by Feb 1924 he would be dead, but go ahead and keep believing in myths. Calling Lenin a genocidal dictator, and hand wringing about the red terror after the Russia fought off civil war and invasions for years after the October revolution, is akin to taking the side of the confederates after the American civil war. Complete ignorance of history, complete acceptance of bourgeois myth.

I’m not uncritical of the USSR or the Bolsheviks and I’m a little skeptical of campists who are; but at least they have usually read reliable history books on the topic and come to a conclusion based on some factual information. You are not dealing with the historical context in which these tragedies occurred.

I’ve very much heard of the red terror, i.e. the internal response of the Bolsheviks in the RSFSR to the civil war against Tsarism and their allies. It was very restrained in numbers (nothing like the Stalinist terror), can be very well compared to the oppression within republican Spain in the Spanish civil war against fascism, both in scope and in numbers. I wonder why people never criticise the latter… Oh right, because they lost against fascists, and the only acceptable leftist movements in the west, are those that fail, like Spanish Second Republic, Mosaddegh, Salvador Allende…

What you anticommunists can’t stand isn’t the red terror, but the fact that for once, the leftists used the means they needed to use in order to secure a victory against fascism

Trotsky was in charge of the red army wrt the suppression of the Makhnovists, so your ire directed at Lenin is misplaced. Even the idea that Lenin had total dictatorial control is a slanderous myth. He was a sheer intellectual force of history, committed to revolution. The Bolsheviks were flawed and contained many bellicose elements such as Stalin; and Lenin was content if not often forced to leave many matters in the hands of Trotsky, Kamanev, Zinoviev and others. If anything, Lenin didn’t have enough control over the Bolsheviks

Generations of socialists have been critical of social democracy. Generations of capitalists have been saying that social democracy is the closest we will ever get to socialism. So who should I believe, the western consensus of capitalist academia, beholden to big money donors for research grants, or the most brilliant, brave and capable intellectuals of the past 200 years, such as Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, DuBois, Lenin and (for a bit of Nordic flair) Pannekoek?

Because what is the Nordic model really? A huge part of the Nordic economy is defense contractors, which means your social democracy is paid for with mass death, imperialism and immiseration. Also, as a member of the western hegemon, Nordic countries enjoy the fruits of neocolonial exploitation of Africa, Asia, South America, etc., not very socialistic to prop up a class of war mongering rich, even if they pay marginally higher taxes than elsewhere.

This debate has existed for a long time, but to socialists it is settled. The Wikipedia entry for the Gotha program of 1875 calls it “explicitly socialist.” And even by today’s standards, it was and would be fairly progressive; calling for workers rights, universal sufferage, etc., but to many of the members of the first socialist international it was controversial because it relied on an upper class of politicians and business men to administer the social reforms. Karl Marx wrote his “Critique of the Gotha Program” tearing apart every point of the short document as another form of class rule, and even created some problems for his socially a connected partner Friedrich Engels by calling Ferdinand Lasalle, a popular reformer, politician and architect of the Gotha program, “a petty dictator in waiting.” He could not have known that Lasalle was in fact conspiring with von Bismarck to enact a plan of social democracy that would serve as a cover for a new regime of class domination that would undercut the socialist movement with moderate reforms, while making the working class beholden to the political/economic upper class.

These reforms can be taken away over time, which we are seeing in European social democracies over the last 40 years; leaving only the naked coercive competitive drive of capitalism to govern all social relations.

And like, I’m an American, my country is the imperial epicenter for neocolonialism imperialist expansion, bourgeois decadence, exploitation and immiseration (for now.) My experiences with people from Nordic countries who I have met have been overwhelmingly positive. Your social democracies are superior to our laissez faire capitalism, they make more sense, are more stable and less subject to natural instability cycles inherent to the system. Nothing is cut-and-dry, there are blended forms of political and economic organization, just like there are blended classes, and new forms are always emerging as history marches. If you want to believe that your social democracies are an island within capitalism, that’s mostly true! But to a socialist, it is not socialism. Quoting a Wikipedia article at us when most of us are acutely aware of how it is used by businesses and governments to shape our remembrance of history and the ideas with which we use to shape the world, comes off as incredibly weak and unconvincing, especially when so many of us spend years studying independently, having discussions and organizing our communities. You can quote wikipedia but it will never convince a socialist. I hope you become more mindful of where you are getting your information and whom that particular interpretation of facts serves. Spoiler alert! Its the owners of private property, the means of production, which have always shaped history and defined the classes and antagonisms inherent to them.

You seem to cite Wikipedia. How about opening articles on capitalism and socialism before you go any further?

This should help you get up to speed before you accuse me of making stuff up.