United States Politics Thread 47

[Raphael]

CIA talking point or no CIA talking point, it's a basic fact that Soviet Communism had to build walls and fences to keep its own people from running away.

The people who ran away were rich and middle class people who thought they could get a better life in the West.

Nope. After a few years of capital-c Communist rule, there are no rich people in a place any more. So the people who run away after that point can't be rich people.

The West welcomed defectors + a brain drain.

Oh no, it's so unfair that the other side is taking in the people running away from you! And it's, of course, completely impossible to prevent people from running away by, you know, making life in the places under your rule more attractive.

[Travis B.]

About anti-Communism (emphasis on the big C), we must promote libertarian and democratic leftist positions and not defend Communism, because if we do not defeat the view that leftism is necessarily Communism, people will always find out how bad Communism really was, if not from us then from rightists, and because they have no awareness of leftist alternatives to Communism, they will reflexively adopt right-wing positions in reaction.

As a result we must make people aware of left-wing critiques of Communism, and we must make people aware that these critiques indeed are left-wing ones, so people know that being a leftist is not synonymous with being a supporter of Communism, and to also as a side-effect promote awareness of non-Communist leftist positions.

[rotting bones]

I'm aware of the right-wing argument that anything vaguely left-wing is literally Stalinism. But the correct answer to that is to point out the ridiculousness of the argument, not to argue that Stalin had his good moments.

This. This. This.

You still need to show me my pro-Stalinist argument. If there's a Marxist figure I've been defending, it's Jyoti Basu.

[rotting bones]

Nope. After a few years of capital-c Communist rule, there are no rich people in a place any more. So the people who run away after that point can't be rich people.

Not by Western standards, but Communist societies still had a middle class. The Soviet system was actually quite unfair.

Oh no, it's so unfair that the other side is taking in the people running away from you! And it's, of course, completely impossible to prevent people from running away by, you know, making life in the places under your rule more attractive.

There is no judgment. Everyone is doing what benefits them. I'm just pointing out that the US is now closing down opportunities for scholars like me.

[Travis B.]

About walls and fences, the matter is that if a society guided by left-wing positions truly sincerely embodied freedom and equality for all, they would not be needed as no one would want to leave except for rightists who do not appreciate freedom and equality, whose running away should be welcomed as then they no longer have to be dealt with at home.

[Raphael]

About anti-Communism (emphasis on the big C), we must promote libertarian and democratic leftist positions and not defend Communism, because if we do not defeat the view that leftism is necessarily Communism, people will always find out how bad Communism really was, if not from us then from rightists, and because they have no awareness of leftist alternatives to Communism, they will reflexively adopt right-wing positions in reaction.

Yeah, I've sometimes got the impression that people farther to the Left are more likely to eventually turn around completely to the right-wing than people with more moderately left-wing views.

[rotting bones]

About walls and fences, the matter is that if a society guided by left-wing positions truly sincerely embodied freedom and equality for all, they would not be needed as no one would want to leave except for rightists who do not appreciate freedom and equality, whose running away should be welcomed as then they no longer have to be dealt with at home.

I agree that non-authoritarian leftist societies shouldn't have walls and fences. But I think people will still run away if they get better offers from foreign countries.

[Travis B.]

About anti-Communism (emphasis on the big C), we must promote libertarian and democratic leftist positions and not defend Communism, because if we do not defeat the view that leftism is necessarily Communism, people will always find out how bad Communism really was, if not from us then from rightists, and because they have no awareness of leftist alternatives to Communism, they will reflexively adopt right-wing positions in reaction.

Yeah, I've sometimes got the impression that people farther to the Left are more likely to eventually turn around completely to the right-wing than people with more moderately left-wing views.

I've heard about this tendency as well, where something will say that so-and-so was a Communist (with a big C) until X happened, and they then turned into a complete rightist.

[Travis B.]

Conversely, you don't hear about anarchists turning straight into rightists. When anarchists (e.g. myself) move away from anarchism, they generally adopt a different sort of leftist position (e.g. democratic socialism) rather than making a complete about-face and becoming rightists.

[Raphael]

where something will say that so-and-so was a Communist (with a big C) until X happened, and they then turned into a complete rightist.

Which means that they never had decent or reasonable political positions in their life, but might still think that the fact that they changed sides once gives them a better and more rounded understanding than the rest of us have.

That said, I don't think anyone should get too smug about this. Another impression of mine is that you can never reliably tell from someone's political past what their political future will be.

Centrists might triangulate themselves to a de facto fascist position and then eventually stop bothering with the de facto part. Far leftists might take part in red-brown alliances, bond with their new allies over their shared hatred of "the libs", and then eventually end up entirely on the brown side of such an alliance. And of course in the other direction, people starting out as relatively well-meaning right-wingers might eventually figure out how much "well-meaning" and "right-winger" contradict each other, and decide to stick with the "well-meaning" part.

Somewhat related, something where I've been waiting for an excuse opportunity to post it:

Both Stalinists and right-wingers have an interest in pretending that you have to be a Stalinist in order to be a left-winger, because both Stalinism and right-wing politics look somewhat better when they are presented as the only alternatives to each other.

Both pacifists and right-wingers have an interest in pretending that you have to be a pacifist in order to be a left-winger, because both pacifism and right-wing politics look better when they are presented as the only alternatives to each other.

Both postmodernists and right-wingers have an interest in pretending that you have to be a postmodernist in order to be a left-winger, because both postmodernism and right-wing politics look better when they are presented as the only alternatives to each other.

[Travis B.]

hatred of "the libs"

Mind you, in private many libertarian leftists strongly dislike "the libs" as well, for the reason that they are often seen as prioritizing bourgeois identity politics over the class war.

[Torco]

But why go to the length of defending the USSR, which is almost entirely undefensible?

I guess I didn't notice the place where everyone else is seeing a defense of the USSR.

Whenever I defend aspects of "Marxism", I'm defending the democratic Marxism of my childhood. Every subsequent government has been increasingly worse.

I'll say again what I said before: The CIA has framed its propaganda in such a way that if you don't argue against Communism the way you argue against Islam, most people in my experience with associate your criticism of Communism with a criticism of leftism in general.

I know you might not want my endorsement here, me being the resident tankie, but this is entirely correct. In my experience, especially in the anglosphere, people act as if you either think that literally everything Stalin and the USSR did was 100% bad or you're literally Adolf except painted red.... so I guess Strasser?

aside from philosophical inquiries as to what even "communism doesn't work" even means, I don't think its very realistic to say that marxism-leninism (what most anglophones mean when they say Communism uppercase) can't work. the USSR worked for a long time, until it didn't, but its collapse was not correlated with it becoming more marxist-leninist but, rather, if anything, with it becoming less marxist-leninist (perestroika etcetera... there was even a coup by "old guard" generals, old guard here meaning opposed to the de-ML-ization of the soviet union). If MLism didn't work, then the country should have either collapsed directly as a result of adoption the system (which it didn't, rather the opposite is true) or it should have collapsed once it had crossed some sort of threshold, when it became too ML to work (which it didn't, rather the opposite is true). Plus, China is literally these days looking more and more like the country that's gonna dethrone the US; hardly looks like a country with a system that "doesn't work".

and the PRC is a marxist-leninist country. of a different sort than the USSR but the genetic relationship is rather clear: both stalinism and maoism are offshoots of marxism-leninism, they're sister ideologies, and they both "work"

or perhaps we here mean by "working" something more normative? something like "communism it can't result in a country that is morally acceptable", so "communism bad". We of course, if so, face one of two probems: circularity or ponderation:

so we either have a substantive position such that only liberal democracies are morally acceptable regimes, or we don't. if we do, then all we're saying is "communism bad cause it isn't liberalism", or ultimately "communism is bad because it is communism", since you can't very well have a communist-liberal regime anymore than you can have a spider that is also a mammal. not false necessarily, but also tautological.

if we do not have such a substantive position, then how do we measure the evils of communism against the evils of capitalism? cause if we don't, we're not doing the whole job: if we give the status quo a moral pass, and only measure the sins of alternative systems, we're not rationally considering reality but, rather, just cheering for the system because it is the system, blind conformity: so how do we weight the obvious, unequivocal evils of countries that are communist against the obvious, unequivocal evils of countries that aren't communist? because we don't say that "liberalism can't work" right?

About anti-Communism (emphasis on the big C), we must promote libertarian and democratic leftist positions and not defend Communism, because if we do not defeat the view that leftism is necessarily Communism, people will always find out how bad Communism really was, if not from us then from rightists, and because they have no awareness of leftist alternatives to Communism, they will reflexively adopt right-wing positions in reaction.

As a result we must make people aware of left-wing critiques of Communism, and we must make people aware that these critiques indeed are left-wing ones, so people know that being a leftist is not synonymous with being a supporter of Communism, and to also as a side-effect promote awareness of non-Communist leftist positions.

two problems with this

a) this cedes infinite ground. if everything Communism did was bad, then we can't defend post-natal for women, or vacations. these are things communists and Communists fought and died for, and implemented. same with a lot of other, to say it idiosyncratically, victories of the working class.
b) are you sure you can have completely libertarian leftists regimes under conditions of class struggle? very concretely, there are people with as much power as a country, and there's a class of people (call them what you like) that collectively have both an interest in leftist regimes failing, and more money than god. there's the CIA, but also Soros, who claims he was instrumental in the collapse of the USSR, and all the other billionaires. without strong territorial control of some sort, authoritarianism, you're just going to get bought and black-opped and bribed and infiltrated to kingdom come. revolutionaries that succeed aren't libertarian anything, the more libertarian versions of political systems appear when things stabilize and when they're not fighting the elites that rule rest of the world.

[malloc]

There are also "leftists" supporting indigenous identities against Westernization, and Muslims are a flagship minority behind this cause.

Do you feel that indigenous people should give up their culture and Westernize or am I misunderstanding your post?

[Travis B.]

The thing though is everything good one claims about single-party or dominant-party Marxist-Leninist states can also be claimed just as well if not better about social democracy, without the vast majority of the bad (I won't say all the bad though, because social-democratic Scandinavia has historically mistreated their Sámi and Greenlandic minorities). While I do think that social democracy is a 'kinder, gentler' capitalism, I would take it over big-C Communism any day.

And note that what I speak of here does not apply to the democratic Marxism rotting bones speaks of -- those Marxists were not sending supposed 'class enemies' to the gulag or to the wall.

[zompist]

aside from philosophical inquiries as to what even "communism doesn't work" even means, I don't think its very realistic to say that marxism-leninism (what most anglophones mean when they say Communism uppercase) can't work. the USSR worked for a long time, until it didn't, but its collapse was not correlated with it becoming more marxist-leninist but, rather, if anything, with it becoming less marxist-leninist (perestroika etcetera... there was even a coup by "old guard" generals, old guard here meaning opposed to the de-ML-ization of the soviet union). If MLism didn't work, then the country should have either collapsed directly as a result of adoption the system (which it didn't, rather the opposite is true) or it should have collapsed once it had crossed some sort of threshold, when it became too ML to work (which it didn't, rather the opposite is true).

As this is addressed to straw men or people who aren't here, it doesn't prove anything. I know you dearly want to argue with, I dunno, Milton Friedman, but he's not here, he's dead. I don't think a single person here is a rah-rah capitalism-rocks neoliberal.

I think you're forgetting your Marx here... indeed, forgetting what you correctly said about Chile some time back, that it needed more capitalism, not less. Russia, according to the Marxists, was not a capitalist country; it was feudal. The Soviets gave it extreme industrialization-- that worked in the sense that getting away from feudal agriculturalism generally works. Feudalism is so bad that Chinese communism was an improvement too, and that despite Mao almost ruining the country twice.

"If MLism didn't work, then the country should have either collapsed"... why? Is there a magic law that bad systems immediately fail? Pray please, can you make this magic work on Trump?

In Latin America, of all places, it should be clear that a bad, inefficient, miserable, hierarchical system can last for centuries.

and the PRC is a marxist-leninist country.

Bahahahha. It absolutely is not.

Going by official names, are we? So the Nazis were socialist, because it's in their name?

[WeepingElf]

Social democracy is indeed a well-working (though not perfect - but perfection in human societies is unattainable, and most attempts at attaining it resulted in totalitarian nightmares) "middle way" between US-style capitalism and Soviet-style communism. The Scandinavian countries, where social democrats have been in government much of the time, fare better than the rest of Western Europe, where social democrats have been in government less often than in Scandinavia, but usually the main opposition party when they were not, which fares better than the United States, where there is no social democratic party to speak of (of course, there are social democrats within the Democratic Party, but they are a minority within it). We need not discuss how bad Soviet-style communism was; it failed epically.

[Ares Land]

b) are you sure you can have completely libertarian leftists regimes under conditions of class struggle? very concretely, there are people with as much power as a country, and there's a class of people (call them what you like) that collectively have both an interest in leftist regimes failing, and more money than god. there's the CIA, but also Soros, who claims he was instrumental in the collapse of the USSR, and all the other billionaires. without strong territorial control of some sort, authoritarianism, you're just going to get bought and black-opped and bribed and infiltrated to kingdom come. revolutionaries that succeed aren't libertarian anything, the more libertarian versions of political systems appear when things stabilize and when they're not fighting the elites that rule rest of the world.

That's the part I really disagree with.
I think it's tempting for leftist regimes to turn to autocracy, using the arguments you outlined (and they may even be sincere).
Then what have you won? The USSR may have "worked", that's true. Was it in any way a good place to live?
China ultimately gave up everything, and while supposedly marxist-leninist it's as tough a capitalist regime as any, even tougher.

Autocracy is antithetical and even lethal to socialism, at least the way I see it. There's simply no way to report problems or condemn abuse.
The end result is China, an horrid caricatural version of capitalism. Is the 996 system of working hours anything but exploitation of the worst kind?

[Travis B.]

b) are you sure you can have completely libertarian leftists regimes under conditions of class struggle? very concretely, there are people with as much power as a country, and there's a class of people (call them what you like) that collectively have both an interest in leftist regimes failing, and more money than god. there's the CIA, but also Soros, who claims he was instrumental in the collapse of the USSR, and all the other billionaires. without strong territorial control of some sort, authoritarianism, you're just going to get bought and black-opped and bribed and infiltrated to kingdom come. revolutionaries that succeed aren't libertarian anything, the more libertarian versions of political systems appear when things stabilize and when they're not fighting the elites that rule rest of the world.

That's the part I really disagree with.
I think it's tempting for leftist regimes to turn to autocracy, using the arguments you outlined (and they may even be sincere).
Then what have you won? The USSR may have "worked", that's true. Was it in any way a good place to live?
China ultimately gave up everything, and while supposedly marxist-leninist it's as tough a capitalist regime as any, even tougher.

Autocracy is antithetical and even lethal to socialism, at least the way I see it. There's simply no way to report problems or condemn abuse.
The end result is China, an horrid caricatural version of capitalism. Is the 996 system of working hours anything but exploitation of the worst kind?

Exactly. China is a good example of what we don't want, and if it is the inevitable result of one's system if it survives in the long term, I don't want to be part of your revolution.

[Travis B.]

For socialism to really embody freedom and equality for all, it must be libertarian or at least democratic, as concentrating power in the hands of a Party inevitably results in oppression for the vast majority, something that is entirely contrary to such goals. Sure, it may seem 'easier' to be able to suppress the capitalists with absolute power, but absolute power is absolutely corrupting, with those whom it has been granted quickly taking the place of the private capitalists who previously held power.

[Torco]

and the PRC is a marxist-leninist country.

Bahahahha. It absolutely is not.

Going by official names, are we? So the Nazis were socialist, because it's in their name?

not name, no. besides, it's not the marxist-leninist republic of china. i think the five year plans, the public ownership of land, the party control over corporations, banking, politics and over the billionaire class [as opposed to capitalism, where it is capitalists that control those things], are better indicators of china being socialist than its name.

I think it's tempting for leftist regimes to turn to autocracy, using the arguments you outlined (and they may even be sincere).
Then what have you won? The USSR may have "worked", that's true. Was it in any way a good place to live?
China ultimately gave up everything, and while supposedly marxist-leninist it's as tough a capitalist regime as any, even tougher.

Autocracy is antithetical and even lethal to socialism, at least the way I see it. There's simply no way to report problems or condemn abuse.
The end result is China, an horrid caricatural version of capitalism. Is the 996 system of working hours anything but exploitation of the worst kind?

i know you said it rhetorically, but the ussr probably wasn't the hell-on-earth people often portray it as. russians polled on this don't 90% say it was worse than what they have, it's more like 50 to 25% that say capitalism is better. the standard of living in the union went up after the revolution, not down. plus China didn't 'give up everything'... though, granted, it did give up a lot. the chinese have even less vacation days than we do in chile.... though still more than freedom loving americans.

I get the idea that autocracy isn't a good thing, but i mean... realistically, i don't think there's a choice. zero libertarian socialist revolutions have "worked" in the more basic sense of not collapsing immediately. doesn't mean they can't, but it doesn't look good. and you observe the same with liberal regimes: the first liberal states that emerged from feudalism weren't very libertarian either.