This is the problem with people promoting socialism. They tend to compare idealized version of socialism with real version of capitalism. And such comparison inevitably leads to unrealistic conclusions.
The problem is that real version of socialism is what you see in China or Cuba or former USSR. The argument with "we haven't done socialism right" is the same as "we haven't done capitalism right".
I have been born in socialist country and to this day I can see negative consequences of that era. And the obvious reason why ideal socialism can't exist - people. Same reason why capitalism sucks.
Edit: To people downvoting me: Your fake internet points have no meaning, but I love the irony of it. You can't even keep the illusion of classlessness and equality in an internet thread, yet you are somehow convinced you could run a country like that. You'd be locking people for life in your communist paradise just for having different opinion and you know it.
Definition of Socialism: the workers own the means of production.
Which country were you born in where you owned the means of production?
I was born in country where intellectuals were in jail and uneducated workers were put to management positions, because they should own the means of production or some bullshit like that. You can imagine the end result of that.
And again, this is the same "that wasn't true socialism" argument. Obviously it wasn't. The socialism as per your definition can't exist on a country level. You can see it being implemented on a small company level (think family owned businesses) but the bigger it gets the more the cracks show and it just does not scale.
You don't need money going to shareholders in order to scale. You need management structure. Even anarchists would say they're against unnecessary hierarchy, and at least a little structure is generally necessary. Top management does not need to be paid 300-to-1 over the average worker. Nor do they need to specifically represent shareholders, which is what a CEO is.
No we'd say we're against hierarchy because hierarchy is evil and organisation doesn't imply it. It's an important corner stone to look out for as hierarchical realism (the notion that organisation just doesn't work between equals) is the fundamental opponent. On the contrary, if you look at systems, complexity and chaos theory it becomes clear that it's hierarchical systems which are fundamentally flawed, can, by their very structure, not process information nearly as well. SNAFU.
Right but as soon as you have hierarchy, you have classes. You can have hierarchy in family owned business and it can work with everyone doing their best for the good of the business/family. But these social structures fall apart as the hierarchy grows bigger. And very soon what's good for your family is not necessary good for the business - including non-monetary stuff like how much time you spend working or how hard your job is. Notice how there's not a single CEO or shareholder in the picture and the system is already falling apart.
There is this famous saying from communist times: "If you're not stealing, you're stealing from your family" That pretty much sums it up.
You can't have working socialism with humans, because the system is inhuman by its very nature. (and I don't mean it in bad way even if the consequences end up being really nasty for many human beings)
Lenin himself called the system he instituted state capitalism, it was supposed to be a transitory state as Marx said (and the Bolsheviks were very big on historical materialism) that first you have capitalism, develop productivity, then communism would follow naturally as a consequence of resolving capitalism's inherent contradictions.
The gaslighting started with Stalin, who invented the term "really existing socialism" to make it doubly clear that it was neither real, existed, or was socialism.
The closest any society ever got to communism isn't via the Bolshevik "dictatorship of the proletariat" (aka dictatorship of the state bureaucracy), but via Anarchism. Horizontal organisation, abolish hierarchies. Very early revolutionary Russia qualifies until the Bolsheviks abolished councils in practice, Rojava qualifies, Chiapas qualifies, revolutionary Spain (until Bolsheviks teamed up with fascists to kill it off), revolutionary Ukraine (until the Bolsheviks -- I think you see the pattern).
Interesting tidbit I picked up on an Andrewisim video recently: organizations from the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist branch of the left are particularly vulnerable to falling into cult behavior. It's a reason to consider the whole branch to be bad and cut it right off. If not that far, then at least view organizations from that branch with a lot of criticism.
Yes, exactly it always fails, because it just does not scale. It's an idea, that can't exist in reality on a country level. You can point to Freetown Christiania as an example - a small anarchist commune, that already shows some major cracks in its structure. I mean, just grow family business a bit and you can already see structures and hierarchy emerging.
Rojava is about 4.6 million people, about as many as Kuwait. About 11 Icelands worth of population.
Yeah that one is probably closest. Still pretty far from socialism and held together by military with child soldiers.
Still pretty far from socialism
Plenty of worker control and ownership. If you want to get technical I'd say it's a mixture of state socialism (only other example: Yugoslavia) and anarchism.
held together by military with child soldiers.
You mean the less than 200 16-18yolds which were demobilised like ten years ago.
The thing is that the YPG is organised horizontally, tons of independent militias and in some locales 16yold bearing arms was understood as being completely kosher, so it happened, and then the larger structure and the world got wind of it, and not doing it was added to the memorandum of understanding between all the sub militias.
There might be some technical gripes as the YPG is not officially a state actor and according to the letter of international law only states are allowed to recruit 15yolds into the military (for non-combat roles), and you can join the YPG with 16, but frankly speaking that's not really an argument, it can be countered by saying "de facto" a lot.
You, OTOH, make it sound as if it were some African warlord with boot camps for 10yolds they raided as slaves. The situation is quite different, it was teens saying "ISIS killed my family I want a rifle to fuck them up". And TBF there's practically nothing more lethal than a 17yold gal with a sniper rifle and a grudge.
Thanks for detailed reply. I didn't mean it in a bad way. It certainly wasn't well written comment. Apologies.
What I failed to convey is that IMO this is not best example as It's a community stuck between rock and a hard place. A lot of what it is right now seems to exist out of necessity. Which makes me wonder how well would it work if there were other realistic options that aren't absolutely horrible.
Like if you lifted the entire land and dropped it in the middle of the EU with free market and mobility, would it still exist? I don't think it would. For the same reasons I mentioned earlier.
Rojava could exist here, that's for sure, if you somehow teleported it over it wouldn't regress politically -- what would be the reason for people to allow that?
Heck they probably could even join the union: You need to be a democracy, and a market economy. Democracy goes without saying, and distributing food and decommodify what they can doesn't mean that they aren't also a market economy. They're just taking the "social" in "social market economy" more seriously than our socdems over here. OTOH they probably wouldn't want to but join EFTA instead.
As to "not a good example": It's true that liberal democracies limit revolutionary zeal that's why being an Anarchist in the west is kinda... erm. I don't want to swear or jinx the nice stop-gap we have going on here. OTOH you should acknowledge that if they manage to do it between a rock and a hard place, the system itself is plenty stable enough to work under better conditions.
if they manage to do it between a rock and a hard place, the system itself is plenty stable enough to work under better conditions
That's like saying that if fusion manages to happen in the middle of the sun, surely it can happen in my living room.
if you somehow teleported it over it wouldn't regress politically -- what would be the reason for people to allow that?
Why wouldn't they? If my family is about to starve and most import and export is blocked, sure I will work on a farm to sustain our community, because ultimately that also feeds my family and I don't have the option to seek better job somewhere in EU.
If there is no ISIS on the border trying to murder me, why should I accept that the farm that belonged to my family for generations was collectivized and I'm working on it for a tiny share rather than benefiting from all it can produce?
That’s like saying that if fusion manages to happen in the middle of the sun, surely it can happen in my living room.
It can. You'll need a pressure vessel to get to the necessary combination of temperature and pressure, sure, but it's perfectly possible.
The question is not whether an Anarchist revolution could start here, which is an open question Anarchists in liberal democracies are banging their head against, but whether it could sustain itself if it is, as it is now, suddenly teleported to let's say the middle of the North Sea. Ignoring impacts of sudden climate change on crops and whatnot because that'd be silly. It's a proper magical teleportation.
If my family is about to starve and most import and export is blocked, sure I will work on a farm to sustain our community, because ultimately that also feeds my family and I don’t have the option to seek better job somewhere in EU.
Working abroad, maybe studying, and then coming back to develop your country supports your family even more.
If there is no ISIS on the border trying to murder me, why should I accept that the farm that belonged to my family for generations was collectivized and I’m working on it for a tiny share rather than benefiting from all it can produce?
There was no force-collectivisation. In fact there's no collectives, there's cooperatives. There's also plenty of agricultural cooperatives in the EU, some of them ludicrously large, though granted Arla is capitalist AF. Models that right-out mirror what you have in Rojava also exist. If your farm was in a EU country you'd be paying taxes on income, in Rojava you're sending out your surplus harvest for distribution and are getting all kinds of services from the wider community. And that decommodified community solidarity is a benefit in itself.
Or do you think farmers will look at the EU, how farmers are protesting largely because they're getting squeezed by middle-men (traders, supermarkets) and think "yeah we want that, that's better"?
sending out your surplus harvest for distribution
I fail to understand what surplus harvest is in this context. I have a friend farmer and he never mentioned that, because you know they generally sell stuff. The closest thing he mentioned was hay of which he might have more than he'll need to feed the animals over winter, but even that is same product as any other and is sold to other farms. It's not surplus, it's par of the production.
all kinds of services from the wider community
What kind of services are we talking about? Farmers (and other citizens in EU) also get all kind of services. Also once they sell their produce, they can get all kind of services even beyond what local community provides. I don't see any benefit outside of situation where the export/import is impractical. Hence my metaphor with fission. (even if not technically 100% accurate as metaphors are)
I fail to understand what surplus harvest is in this context.
What you don't need for yourself, or for whole communities, what the communities don't need. If you're currently a subsistence farmer ways will be found to make you more productive than that, e.g. by making sure that each village has a tractor at least.
I don’t see any benefit outside of situation where the export/import is impractical.
Why are you exporting food to some place while the local restaurant is importing it? Even if it's practical because you have roads and open borders and whatnot doesn't mean that it's sensible.
And, of course, there's plenty of restaurants around in the EU which source very locally. Make that the norm, instead of the exception.
Rojava, also the Zapatista, still do plenty of commodified trade -- goods against money. The base requirements that people have, though, food, shelter, education, healthcare, are decommodified. Part of the food you produce in excess goes into doctor's stomachs, the rest onto the market so that things like medical supplies can be bought, stuff Rojava doesn't produce itself.
What gets distributed, what gets sold and what gets bought is all council decisions.
That honestly sounds like taxation with extra steps.
Why are you exporting food to some place while the local restaurant is importing it?
The obvious answer is that they both do what is most reasonable for them. If it's cheaper to source locally the restaurant can (and if they care will) source locally. But why limit yourself to local only?
In practice the "let's do all local" is very naive. My friend is a farmer. He told me about hay to give you some example. He's able to sell and deliver truckload of bales for a good price. It's extra money for him. But the thing is you need to buy truck load. Some local horse owner wanted just one bale. And he explained that if he paid the driver to go over to his farm, load it, unload it, paid the fuel, etc.. he'd be actually losing money. So you might be wondering why is that horse owner buying more expensive hay when there's farm with literal tons of hay not that far away. Well that's why - it's actually cheaper for everyone involved.
There's another company that has cars and equipment to do small deliveries. They buy bulk hay, make smaller packages and sell it, but it's obviously not local anymore, they need to be able reach across the country as they wouldn't even cover equipment cost if they only served few local horse owners. It sounds ineffective, but it really isn't.
I'm not saying that it's always absolute 100℅ effective system, but everyone involved has motivation to be as effective as possible.
To stretch this into extremes, why aren't you using locally built computer? It is technically possible to build one in your city. But the investment would be astronomical. And once you produce said computers, producing just enough for local community would never be economical. And if you produced quantities that are economically viable and sold them globally, it would be cheaper to buy them from the local global market than to build logistics for local delivery.
This is the problem with people promoting socialism. They tend to compare idealized version of socialism with real version of capitalism. And such comparison inevitably leads to unrealistic conclusions.
The problem is that real version of socialism is what you see in China or Cuba or former USSR. The argument with "we haven't done socialism right" is the same as "we haven't done capitalism right".
I have been born in socialist country and to this day I can see negative consequences of that era. And the obvious reason why ideal socialism can't exist - people. Same reason why capitalism sucks.
Edit: To people downvoting me: Your fake internet points have no meaning, but I love the irony of it. You can't even keep the illusion of classlessness and equality in an internet thread, yet you are somehow convinced you could run a country like that. You'd be locking people for life in your communist paradise just for having different opinion and you know it.
Definition of Socialism: the workers own the means of production.
Which country were you born in where you owned the means of production?
I was born in country where intellectuals were in jail and uneducated workers were put to management positions, because they should own the means of production or some bullshit like that. You can imagine the end result of that.
And again, this is the same "that wasn't true socialism" argument. Obviously it wasn't. The socialism as per your definition can't exist on a country level. You can see it being implemented on a small company level (think family owned businesses) but the bigger it gets the more the cracks show and it just does not scale.
You don't need money going to shareholders in order to scale. You need management structure. Even anarchists would say they're against unnecessary hierarchy, and at least a little structure is generally necessary. Top management does not need to be paid 300-to-1 over the average worker. Nor do they need to specifically represent shareholders, which is what a CEO is.
No we'd say we're against hierarchy because hierarchy is evil and organisation doesn't imply it. It's an important corner stone to look out for as hierarchical realism (the notion that organisation just doesn't work between equals) is the fundamental opponent. On the contrary, if you look at systems, complexity and chaos theory it becomes clear that it's hierarchical systems which are fundamentally flawed, can, by their very structure, not process information nearly as well. SNAFU.
Right but as soon as you have hierarchy, you have classes. You can have hierarchy in family owned business and it can work with everyone doing their best for the good of the business/family. But these social structures fall apart as the hierarchy grows bigger. And very soon what's good for your family is not necessary good for the business - including non-monetary stuff like how much time you spend working or how hard your job is. Notice how there's not a single CEO or shareholder in the picture and the system is already falling apart.
There is this famous saying from communist times: "If you're not stealing, you're stealing from your family" That pretty much sums it up.
You can't have working socialism with humans, because the system is inhuman by its very nature. (and I don't mean it in bad way even if the consequences end up being really nasty for many human beings)
Lenin himself called the system he instituted state capitalism, it was supposed to be a transitory state as Marx said (and the Bolsheviks were very big on historical materialism) that first you have capitalism, develop productivity, then communism would follow naturally as a consequence of resolving capitalism's inherent contradictions.
The gaslighting started with Stalin, who invented the term "really existing socialism" to make it doubly clear that it was neither real, existed, or was socialism.
The closest any society ever got to communism isn't via the Bolshevik "dictatorship of the proletariat" (aka dictatorship of the state bureaucracy), but via Anarchism. Horizontal organisation, abolish hierarchies. Very early revolutionary Russia qualifies until the Bolsheviks abolished councils in practice, Rojava qualifies, Chiapas qualifies, revolutionary Spain (until Bolsheviks teamed up with fascists to kill it off), revolutionary Ukraine (until the Bolsheviks -- I think you see the pattern).
Interesting tidbit I picked up on an Andrewisim video recently: organizations from the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist branch of the left are particularly vulnerable to falling into cult behavior. It's a reason to consider the whole branch to be bad and cut it right off. If not that far, then at least view organizations from that branch with a lot of criticism.
Yes, exactly it always fails, because it just does not scale. It's an idea, that can't exist in reality on a country level. You can point to Freetown Christiania as an example - a small anarchist commune, that already shows some major cracks in its structure. I mean, just grow family business a bit and you can already see structures and hierarchy emerging.
Rojava is about 4.6 million people, about as many as Kuwait. About 11 Icelands worth of population.
Yeah that one is probably closest. Still pretty far from socialism and held together by military with child soldiers.
Plenty of worker control and ownership. If you want to get technical I'd say it's a mixture of state socialism (only other example: Yugoslavia) and anarchism.
You mean the less than 200 16-18yolds which were demobilised like ten years ago.
The thing is that the YPG is organised horizontally, tons of independent militias and in some locales 16yold bearing arms was understood as being completely kosher, so it happened, and then the larger structure and the world got wind of it, and not doing it was added to the memorandum of understanding between all the sub militias.
There might be some technical gripes as the YPG is not officially a state actor and according to the letter of international law only states are allowed to recruit 15yolds into the military (for non-combat roles), and you can join the YPG with 16, but frankly speaking that's not really an argument, it can be countered by saying "de facto" a lot.
You, OTOH, make it sound as if it were some African warlord with boot camps for 10yolds they raided as slaves. The situation is quite different, it was teens saying "ISIS killed my family I want a rifle to fuck them up". And TBF there's practically nothing more lethal than a 17yold gal with a sniper rifle and a grudge.
Thanks for detailed reply. I didn't mean it in a bad way. It certainly wasn't well written comment. Apologies.
What I failed to convey is that IMO this is not best example as It's a community stuck between rock and a hard place. A lot of what it is right now seems to exist out of necessity. Which makes me wonder how well would it work if there were other realistic options that aren't absolutely horrible.
Like if you lifted the entire land and dropped it in the middle of the EU with free market and mobility, would it still exist? I don't think it would. For the same reasons I mentioned earlier.
Rojava could exist here, that's for sure, if you somehow teleported it over it wouldn't regress politically -- what would be the reason for people to allow that?
Heck they probably could even join the union: You need to be a democracy, and a market economy. Democracy goes without saying, and distributing food and decommodify what they can doesn't mean that they aren't also a market economy. They're just taking the "social" in "social market economy" more seriously than our socdems over here. OTOH they probably wouldn't want to but join EFTA instead.
As to "not a good example": It's true that liberal democracies limit revolutionary zeal that's why being an Anarchist in the west is kinda... erm. I don't want to swear or jinx the nice stop-gap we have going on here. OTOH you should acknowledge that if they manage to do it between a rock and a hard place, the system itself is plenty stable enough to work under better conditions.
That's like saying that if fusion manages to happen in the middle of the sun, surely it can happen in my living room.
Why wouldn't they? If my family is about to starve and most import and export is blocked, sure I will work on a farm to sustain our community, because ultimately that also feeds my family and I don't have the option to seek better job somewhere in EU.
If there is no ISIS on the border trying to murder me, why should I accept that the farm that belonged to my family for generations was collectivized and I'm working on it for a tiny share rather than benefiting from all it can produce?
It can. You'll need a pressure vessel to get to the necessary combination of temperature and pressure, sure, but it's perfectly possible.
The question is not whether an Anarchist revolution could start here, which is an open question Anarchists in liberal democracies are banging their head against, but whether it could sustain itself if it is, as it is now, suddenly teleported to let's say the middle of the North Sea. Ignoring impacts of sudden climate change on crops and whatnot because that'd be silly. It's a proper magical teleportation.
Working abroad, maybe studying, and then coming back to develop your country supports your family even more.
There was no force-collectivisation. In fact there's no collectives, there's cooperatives. There's also plenty of agricultural cooperatives in the EU, some of them ludicrously large, though granted Arla is capitalist AF. Models that right-out mirror what you have in Rojava also exist. If your farm was in a EU country you'd be paying taxes on income, in Rojava you're sending out your surplus harvest for distribution and are getting all kinds of services from the wider community. And that decommodified community solidarity is a benefit in itself.
Or do you think farmers will look at the EU, how farmers are protesting largely because they're getting squeezed by middle-men (traders, supermarkets) and think "yeah we want that, that's better"?
I fail to understand what surplus harvest is in this context. I have a friend farmer and he never mentioned that, because you know they generally sell stuff. The closest thing he mentioned was hay of which he might have more than he'll need to feed the animals over winter, but even that is same product as any other and is sold to other farms. It's not surplus, it's par of the production.
What kind of services are we talking about? Farmers (and other citizens in EU) also get all kind of services. Also once they sell their produce, they can get all kind of services even beyond what local community provides. I don't see any benefit outside of situation where the export/import is impractical. Hence my metaphor with fission. (even if not technically 100% accurate as metaphors are)
What you don't need for yourself, or for whole communities, what the communities don't need. If you're currently a subsistence farmer ways will be found to make you more productive than that, e.g. by making sure that each village has a tractor at least.
Why are you exporting food to some place while the local restaurant is importing it? Even if it's practical because you have roads and open borders and whatnot doesn't mean that it's sensible.
And, of course, there's plenty of restaurants around in the EU which source very locally. Make that the norm, instead of the exception.
Rojava, also the Zapatista, still do plenty of commodified trade -- goods against money. The base requirements that people have, though, food, shelter, education, healthcare, are decommodified. Part of the food you produce in excess goes into doctor's stomachs, the rest onto the market so that things like medical supplies can be bought, stuff Rojava doesn't produce itself.
What gets distributed, what gets sold and what gets bought is all council decisions.
That honestly sounds like taxation with extra steps.
The obvious answer is that they both do what is most reasonable for them. If it's cheaper to source locally the restaurant can (and if they care will) source locally. But why limit yourself to local only?
In practice the "let's do all local" is very naive. My friend is a farmer. He told me about hay to give you some example. He's able to sell and deliver truckload of bales for a good price. It's extra money for him. But the thing is you need to buy truck load. Some local horse owner wanted just one bale. And he explained that if he paid the driver to go over to his farm, load it, unload it, paid the fuel, etc.. he'd be actually losing money. So you might be wondering why is that horse owner buying more expensive hay when there's farm with literal tons of hay not that far away. Well that's why - it's actually cheaper for everyone involved.
There's another company that has cars and equipment to do small deliveries. They buy bulk hay, make smaller packages and sell it, but it's obviously not local anymore, they need to be able reach across the country as they wouldn't even cover equipment cost if they only served few local horse owners. It sounds ineffective, but it really isn't.
I'm not saying that it's always absolute 100℅ effective system, but everyone involved has motivation to be as effective as possible.
To stretch this into extremes, why aren't you using locally built computer? It is technically possible to build one in your city. But the investment would be astronomical. And once you produce said computers, producing just enough for local community would never be economical. And if you produced quantities that are economically viable and sold them globally, it would be cheaper to buy them from the local global market than to build logistics for local delivery.