ＲＥＶＯＬＵＴＩＯＮ ＩＳ ＯＶＥＲＲＡＴＥＤ
Crypto-Centrist Transhumanist Nationalist.
Type-19 Paramilitary Cyborg. Wanted time criminal. Class A-3 citizen of the North American Union. Opposed to the Chinese Hyper Mind-Union, the Ultra-Caliphate, Google Defense Network, and the People's Republic of Cascadia. National Separatist, enemy of the World Federation government and its unificationist allies.
Blogs Topics: Cyberpunk Nationalism. Futurist Shtposting. Timeline Vandalism. Harassing owls over the Internet.
Use whichever typical gender pronouns you like.
Not all content will have sufficient warning tags.
In past ages, communists, socialists, and anarchists were usually reacting to a world in which resources were scarce in general as well as in specific and in which the situation of the poor in general was one of miserable deprivation. Meanwhile, the future potential of automation and robotics – machines which might not merely reduce the amount of work that needed to be done, but largely eliminate it – was not really visible.
Today things are… different.
It’s pretty common that I see far leftists more-or-less promising the following after a Revolution:
1. That it will no longer be neccessary for everybody to work, and moreover that people will be permitted not to work, and yet to have enough to live on, without needing to justify not working to anybody.
2. That industry will change to vastly decrease damage to the enviroment
3. That material quality of life and industrial capacity will not catastrophically plummet, especially not in things like medical technology
I think that this is… very optimistic. The kind of optimistic that no wise person would ever bet on.
Some far leftists claim that communism is more efficient and will do better than capitalism. This is unlikely. The Soviet Union did great things – industrializing rapidly after everyone else had a head start and after having the Nazis burn half their country – but they were just catching up to others, and they were oppressive, enviromentally destructive, and didn’t let people not work by any means. It didn’t last.
(However, in the post-Stalin soviet union, there were some labor rights that would make Americans drool.)
If you combine this with confiscationism and the intersectionality thing where anybody’s position in the grand hierarchy of justified people can be questioned, you have a nightmare: a society that continually eats itself, finding new classes of “bourgeoise” and kulaks and “counter-revolutionaries” to force into slave labor or just murder and loot, so that the Beautiful People can have their gleaming solarpunk utopia and their communism of leisure.
I do not wish to suggest that I intend to be the enemy of hope; our current system is unjust and needs to be reformed. We can reform it in a way that will turn automation from a curse into a blessing, and which will improve peoples’ lives now and in the future. But this will not be revolution but counter-revolution, and will have no place for bloodstained red flags.
Concept: Guerrilla anti-marketing campaign by Socialists consisting of advertising things people already own to them using Big Data, with the goal of increasing life satisfaction, but more importantly undermining corporate power, the Capitalist life script, and Consumerism.
Even HPMOR points out that people who obsess over avoiding death are typically considered evil, and Peter blood-of-the-youth Thiel isn’t really doing anything to counter that impression, is he.
I kinda hope someone shoots Thiel, not just because he deserves it, but also because it would be so great for all his research into human longevity to go to waste. You might be able to outrun telomere decay or whatever, but you can’t outrun hot lead.
unless I’m woefully misinformed about the level of his crimes against humanity, I’d be extremely hesitant to endorse murdering the man as I think any grounds on which to do so would apply to way too many people.
Being a billionaire in and of itself constitutes an extremely serious crime. One cannot possess that level of power and influence over other people’s lives without, not even intending to, carelessly harming and killing people.
There’s a reason people use the word “obscene” to describe extreme wealth. Because that’s what it is, disgusting, brutal, bloody, destructive.
does it make a difference if his billions are invested in shares of publicly traded companies, US government bonds, or cash stashed in a storage locker?
if you divided the ownership of his wealth between ten people, but they kept it in the exact same form as he has it now, would that make them each 1/10 as evil as he is, even though the net effect of the wealth on society hasn’t changed?
…why do I suddenly find myself rooting for Peter Thiel to become immortal, and not just discover life extension technologies that can eventually be extended to most of humanity?
Anyhow, what difference does it make if it’s a person that has that power, versus vast, impersonal forces? Vast, impersonal forces carelessly harm and kill lots of people as well, but their perceived liability is spread so wide that it’s hard to see - and composed of the same personal failings but spread out over a lot of smaller and imperfect humans.
….vast, impersonal forces that could easily exist, or have equivalents, under other economic modes.
For instance, if we executed all the billionaires, how many people would die due to subsequent lack of technological progress and making that technology cheap enough to be widely accessible?
It seems to me like the pro-guillotine camp here would deny any moral liability for these after-effects.
Social Democracy With American Characteristics probably ends up looking a lot like Cali does now, and by all accounts that's not a very pretty sight. Americans are just too bad at governing (and budget management especially) for it to go any way but slow death. Still better than full communism though I guess.
Thus why Full Communism was described implicitly as having a (much) high(er) risk of “exploding and killing everyone.”
The Communists, Socialists, and Social Democrats lack the necessary organizational science and political will to successfully implement the hypothetical post-capitalist society they want, and the necessary cluefulness to overcome ideological blinding and make the necessary ideological sacrifices to achieve and maintain it.
Most of them don’t even seem to have the concept of organizational structuring/mechanisms as a form of technology which must be researched and developed (including with competing experimentation), despite all the rhetoric about how the mechanics of Capitalism drive human action.
It’s being pointed out to me that the Soviet Union did do some experimentation of this kind, and that Socialism has had the built-in idea of “we don’t know what Socialism will look like”.
This didn’t occur to me largely because I have only ever seen “we don’t know what Socialism will look like” used as an excuse not to do any planning against well-known failure modes of Socialism/Communism. (I wouldn’t apply the same level of scrutiny to Social Democracy, as Europe exists and has problems but those problems generally don’t involve massive purges and so on. I just think those attempting it in America will screw it up.)
There was further criticism about “how do you actually do this? because politics,” which is of course reasonable, because politics. But I’m one person, rather than an organization. I do have some ideas on this, however.
Honestly if the Indian government buying the bullet train off of the Japanese in the hopes it repeats its zero-accident track record in Delhi isn’t the most ingenious experiment in human biodiversity theory, please find me a better one.
Wait until Dinesh decides the bolts don’t really need to be screwed on as tight as Takashi told him and we’ll see if they match that record.
We don’t have a non-corrupt India with which to separate out biological factors, including environmental ones (such as poor nutrition), so “does India fuck up the bullet train” does not work as an experiment for your hypothesis.
You’re not dealing any more in the scientific method than I am. You hazard to bet the fact that bullet trains won’t work in India is down to something intangible like “corruption” and I’m suggesting it’s got more to do with human capital.
People who shit in the street and ride on the top of freight trains aren’t doing so because of poor nutrition, fam.
But they might out of cultural factors. (Also, poor nutrition, in the aggregate, could harm national IQ and mental health, among other things.)
Corruption is a norm, it can be removed (Singapore) by sufficiently-determined group of actors passing and enforcing the right laws.
The trick is that it’s based on expectations about others engaging in corruption and expectations of getting caught. It also arises when it’s impossible to function without violating the rules.
When corruption rates are high, there is not only a social expectation that one will get away with it, but there’s also the effect of “but everyone else is doing it - why do they get to benefit, but not me?” Additionally, there are networks of corruption that can be relied on.
Increasing the odds of getting caught and punished above a certain level eradicates the pro-corruption network effects. (This could be achieved with a series of sting operations all unleashed at once as a form of shock therapy.) At that point, corrupt officials become isolated individuals with far less expectation of getting away with it.
After a while, the next generation of bureaucrats rises in which the default is that corruption is almost unthinkable, and the relative rarity at that point makes it much less costly to police.
Under Communism, because it’s so at odds with reality, arresting the corrupt officials won’t work as well because they may have to lie and be corrupt to survive, normalizing corruption. Similarly, some cultures with a strong external locus of control or other elements may be prone to corruption.
In honor of the brave men and women of Loss Prevention, who work tirelessly and thanklessly as gainfully employed workers of the private sector, and protect the many goods we enjoy from being stolen by looters and parasites, I’m promoting this, the Thin Yellow Line flag.
These men are on the front lines every single day, preventing communists and advocates of alternative lifestyles from stealing makeup and other luxury goods ostensibly in the name of worker liberation, preventing their fellow workers from bearing the costs in the form of shortened hours and layoffs, and keeping prices low for the rest of us in society who actually produce utility for others.
When you see these private security enforcers at your local Wal-Mart, Target, Sears, or Macy’s, salute them, because they are the line between civilization and barbarism, and they do it without extorting the taxpayer or murdering innocent people in the street.
Ah yes, the extremely pro gay Communists. The Communist utopia where LGBTQ people will frolick in fields of wild flowers or whatever. Yup, those Communists. Definitely not the ones who think that homosexuality is bourgeois degeneracy or Facism itself.
No one has the slightest bit of idea what the USSR’s economic system actually was, not even state capitalism, but some kind of weird ideology-driven bureaucratic octopus.
Either of those takes are significantly better than “all socialism is exactly the same, so if you want poor people to not die of starvation, then fuck you, because VENEZUELA VENEZUELA VENEZUELA VENEZUELA”, as @dragonkyng was trying to say.
VENEZEULA VENEZUELA VENEZUELA is not a good argument for not ever helping the poor, but it is a reasonably good argument for not being ideology-huffed, uncautious, and incompetent in attempting to do so. After all, only what is produced can be consumed, and if there is a system with 10% profit then there are some pretty hard limits on just how much you can spend before eating into productive capital.
“USSR was actually an octopus” doesn’t really work that well, since most “seize the means of production” people (rather than welfare and unions people) don’t appear to have solid plans on how to not summon octopi instead of what they say they want. (And some of them openly say there should be no plan.)
You’re showing plots and data from the Great Leap Forward, I believe the point that Chomsky’s making is that it ended. Killing people was not effective in developing the country. Actually doing public health is.
I said “industrialization“ when I probably should have said “development,“ because it’s not industrial capacity they needed but medical infrastructure, but in all this you have to ask the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?“
Like @mitigatedchaos, I don’t think India is the relevant comparison. I think China is better compared to other centralized, authoritarian states in East Asia, like Taiwan and South Korea, rather than a decentralized, democratic state like India. But that comparison does suggest an answer to the question “Why was India unable to accomplish even this?”
Democratic, decentralized states have more trouble coordinating public resources and marshaling public effort. Amartya Sen, comparing India to China, thought that there was “no mystery in explaining these failures” in public health. It wasn’t because India didn’t have egalitarian goals. India’s National Congress was an admirably egalitarian and social democratic party, with a 1955 manifesto commitment to “planning with a view to establish a socialist society in
which the principal means of productions are characterized by social ownership or control.” India didn’t fail because it didn’t have the right goals. India failed because it lacked the means.
Sen writes that India failed “because of the extraordinary neglect of these goals in
choosing the directions of planning and public policy”. Sen describes the failures not as failures of substance – although he concedes that India should have focused on export promotion, agricultural development, and economic incentives rather than import-substitution, industrialization, and state-directed planning – but failures of will.
The picture is, however, quite different when it comes to means
using failures. There is a surprising amount of tolerance of low
performance precisely in those areas, vital to the living standard, that
had grabbed the imagination of the nation at the time of Independence and that, in the ultimate analysis, give significance to planning
efforts in transforming the quality of life of the masses. There is, in
fact, remarkable complacency about India’s moderate record in
removing escapable morbidity, avoidable mortality, and astonishingly low literacy rates.
I think this is just the mirror image of the virtues of a democratic and decentralized government, and the pluralism of Indian society, which Sen praised so fulsomely in the context of famine prevention. “No government in India – whether at the state level or at the center – can get away with ignoring threats of starvation and famine and failing to take counteracting measures,” but China could survive years without any change in policy.
But the pluralism that prevents the central government from ignoring threats of starvation – that supplies the powerful opposition pressure to change its policies – is the same pluralism that discourages it from expropriating private wealth, directing public wealth to national programs, prioritizing public health over the preferences of strong interest groups, or delivering the same public investments for decades without democratic control.
Sen says as much:
In China, where the driving force has come from inside the state
and the party rather than from the opposition or from independent
newspapers, the basic commitment of the political leadership – not
unrelated to Marxist ideology – to eradicate hunger and deprivation
has certainly proved to be a major asset in eliminating systematic
penury, even though it was not able to prevent the big famine, when
a confused and dogmatic political leadership was unable to cope with
a failure they did not expect and could not explain. The advantages
and disadvantages of the different forms of political arrangements
and commitments in China and India provide rich material for social
comparison and contrast.
China was a totalitarian country. Comprehensive planning meant the Communists were able to coerce individuals into professions for much less than it would cost them if they were free – “the relatively low wages paid to highly specialized medical personnel help keep total expenditures down” – allowing the planners to deliver as many personnel as they needed, at nominal cost.
There are only 2,458 people per (fully qualified Western) doctor in
China, as compared with 9,900 in other low-income countries and about 4,310 in
middle-income countries. The ratio of population to other medical personnel
(including nurses and doctors of Chinese medicine) is even more favorable -
892 excluding barefoot doctors and 365 including them, as compared with 8,790
in other low-income countries and 1,860 in middle-income countries.
In part because the pay of most medical personnel is very low by
international standards, this has been achieved at an estimated total annual
cost of under $7 per capita, of which $4 is public expenditure. Almost
two thirds of expenditures are for drugs. By the standards of low-income
developing countries, the level of public expenditure is high - it compares
with $2 in India and $1 in Indonesia.
You could do the same thing in an open society – Korea and Sri Lanka did, and without spending much – but it’s harder.
I think @mitigatedchaos is right to focus on homogeneity. It’s harder to deliver public goods when you’re a democratic, decentralized, and pluralistic society. It doesn’t mean you can’t do it – Sri Lanka and Kerala did – but it makes it harder to coordinate resources, especially when you’re facing strong incumbents.
China did away with all that. It did away with democracy, decentralization, and pluralism. It liquidated its incumbents. That made it easier for the Communists to pursue their plans to “eradicate hunger and deprivation,” but it also made the Communists liable to reproduce hunger and deprivation – both inadvertently and on purpose.
Beijing children born after 1965 were half as malnourished as children raised in other cities, and twenty times less malnourished as children raised in the suburbs. (One wonders what happened in the countryside.) In poorer provinces, life expectancies were 10 to 13 years shorter than they were in Shanghai. Communism reinforced that urban bias.
So long as we’re comparing autocracies with autocracies, it’s pretty clear that Taiwan and South Korea have a better record than China – or Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam – and China has a much better record after 1978 than it did beforehand, notwithstanding Sen’s amusing belief that perhaps Reform and Opening stopped China from achieving first-world living standards.
Taiwan and South Korea had the same insulation from democratic control that was proves such an “asset in eliminating systematic penury” through credible commitments, but they lacked the socialist platform that made China such a basket case. They didn’t liquidate the small farmers. They didn’t nationalize the land. They draft the peasants into work teams. They didn’t centralize food marketing. And they got by without famines. Not because they were democrats – they weren’t – but because they weren’tsocialists.
Taiwan and South Korea also dramatically reduced mortality. They just didn’t kill tens of millions in the process.
