Communism, Marxism, Socialism, Capitalism, What are your thoughts?

[gay_Aleks]

China seems to be reopening, while the U.S is paralyzed and wants to throw in schoolchildren to the dogs.

 

[Gorbles]

LIKE THE ONES THAT STARTED IT?

Sure. That in no way relates to other countries' handlings of a pandemic due to their prioritisation of short-sighted for-profit endeavours.

 

[Crezth]

The nice thing about libertarianism is their holy texts are more arcane and unmoored from reality than anything a Marxist has ever come up with.

Also screeching about ChiComs starting pandemics, gotta love it.

 

[Birdjaguar]

There has been a lot of technological innovation! People have a hard time following the breadcrumbs, but we have a technological development process where early foundational investment by public bodies create discoveries that are followed up by market forces or further public investment

NM has two national Labs: Sandia and Los Alamos. Both are now heavily invested in spinning out non defense tech to the private sector.

For example UbiQD has used Los Alamos research into quantum dots to create QD film for greenhouses to boost productivity and for window glass to generate electricity. NM has lots of this going on. DoD research dollars gets spun out into private companies that find markets to apply that technology and then sell products.

 

[Birdjaguar]

If you want to talk about socialist countries, we cannot do so without also including a historical primer on capitalistic intervention in such countries, and the relevant power dynamics that (continue to) allow this to happen. How many governments has the US interfered with, in the past half a century or so? This is another reason why attempting to demand historical precedent is unfair. Countries run in an arguably capitalist way have spent a lot of time and money ensuring that their way continues to be a popular way with no visible alternatives. A lot of (periodically) dominant political systems have done so throughout history.

Just don't leave off your list the attempts by communist countries to overthrow non communist regimes from 1945-2000. Everyone wants to impose their system on others because it is "better".

 

[gay_Aleks]

If we're talking about Eastern Europe post-WWII, you'd probably have to blame Churchill more than anyone; he looked at the area, and beyond Greece, shrugged his shoulders and went, "Sure, go on, take whatever you want.". Not that there was all that much he could do. And besides, what, the former fascist collaborators should just stay there?

 

[Gorbles]

Just don't leave off your list the attempts by communist countries to overthrow non communist regimes from 1945-2000. Everyone wants to impose their system on others because it is "better".

A lot of them do, but to be specific, we were talking socialist. Not communist (or Communist / more generally autocratic).

Additionally, the context was a hypothetical socialist society, and why one hasn't easily sprang into being in the recent past. The context was not a hypothetical form of other governance interfered with by outside aggressors. The parallel I was attempting to argue (to keep it to a reasonable scope more than anything else) was between capitalism and socialism. Springing "what about communism" into the mix doesn't actually help the argument at all. We have established capitalist countries. Quite a few of them.

 

[AmazonQueen]

LIKE THE ONES THAT STARTED IT?

Are you subscribing to conspiracy theories now?
Theres a difference between the virus started in China and China started the virus.

 

[Estebonrober]

I can't speak to the UK under than under the Attlee ministry with the nationalizations of steel, etc., but even those were rolled back later on and didn't approach anything like an Eastern bloc country. Japan on the other hand had a relatively free market during its postwar boom years with not much government intervention. The influence of MITI, the former Ministry of International Trade and Industry, has been vastly overstated and their mistakes long forgotten. Among other things, they told Sony that transistors weren't worth the capital investment and Honda shouldn't make cars because Japan had too many car companies.

Sorry the graph here is in Japanese, but this is government expense/GDP by country. Japan (日本) is the blue line.

View attachment 562975

Forgive the bad formatting here but I'll list all the countries as they are listed here.

AUSTRALIA --- CANADA --- DENMARK --- FRANCE
GERMANY ----- ITALY ---- JAPAN ----- KOREA
UK ---------- USA ------ OECD AVG -- G7 AVG

so no national healthcare in Japan then?

 

[El_Machinae]

We can even grant that China bungled their early response and international communication. This doesn't change how timelines work, though. They bungled and then they adapted. Other countries were then infected and they bungled. They had a small advantage over China, because they were able to notice China's bungling and then adapt to it. It's not like there was a secret cabal in China lying to the WHO, but properly handling it themselves. They were misinforming the WHO and also dealing with their own lack of knowledge. Beijing was declaring a state of emergency well-before there were significant outbreaks elsewhere. And those outbreaks had the early advantages that Beijing did not. Like ... um ... the actual DNA sequence. Or a set of symptoms

Now, a liberal society is going to have a harder time dealing with a pandemic than an illiberal one. There are just fewer checks on people's liberty to move. Fewer ways to track people. And probably even less infrastructure to trace people. Regardless, however, there is a strong component of socialism required to successfully handle a pandemic. We also cannot truly judge the relative successes yet, since 'successful response' to a pandemic isn't just captured by the number of people who died. We have a global bomb of poverty coming because of the lockdown and there's a good chance that many people have suffered more from the lockdowns than we know.

 

[amadeus]

Are you subscribing to conspiracy theories now?
Theres a difference between the virus started in China and China started the virus.

I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but the subsequent coverups, lying and misinformation most certainly are.

so no national healthcare in Japan then?

There is, but that doesn’t make a country socialist.

I’ll try to keep it brief and explain to the best of my understanding: in principle, all residents of Japan are in one of two plans, a national health insurance plan or a company health insurance plan. Functionally at the clinic/hospital level these are basically the same, the only difference I know of is how the payments into the system are made, where companies pay half of the costs to the system and deduct the other half from salary. Of course this just works out to be less in cash compensation, but neither here nor there in explaining the system.

There are public hospitals but most (80%ish?) are private, and clinics are definitely private. At clinics/hospitals you have a 30% copay and the rest is covered under the insurance. There are price controls on approved treatments and I believe these are adjusted biannually.

Overall, I’ve been happy with the system.

 

[Crezth]

I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but the subsequent coverups, lying and misinformation most certainly are.

And nothing to do with socialism whatsoever.

 

[El_Machinae]

Is there a trendline of blaming capitalism for imperialism? Or do we blame imperialism for ruining some of the social experiments that countries are trying?
Both capitalist systems and communist systems seem to have incentive to interfere with countries outside of their borders. How much of that is packaged in the underlying economic theory?
(I've already discussed how 'debt trap' motivates later police actions, I guess).

 

[Birdjaguar]

Is there a trendline of blaming capitalism for imperialism? Or do we blame imperialism for ruining some of the social experiments that countries are trying?
Both capitalist systems and communist systems seem to have incentive to interfere with countries outside of their borders. How much of that is packaged in the underlying economic theory?
(I've already discussed how 'debt trap' motivates later police actions, I guess).

How do you define imperialism? When do you see it beginning in Europe? 1492? 1600? 1815?

 

[El_Machinae]

I don't see a beginning, but it would be the use of a country's resources to destabilize or 'motivate' the citizens of another nation. Nearly any invasion or set of sanctions would qualify.

 

[REDY]

What is stopping socialists in liberal capitalist country building own companies owned by workers and parallel economy system? Capitalists took power over feudalists, feudalist oppression was perhaps suppressing and delaying it, but was not able to stop it and in the end it just have to participated in it. In communist countries under worst repression there was grey economy, people outside system offering what people needed and not what was state party offering. Nearly everybody was reading Samizdat, listening free Europe to actually get relevant informations. There was parallel education and culture. How actually can communism exist without oppression and how the current liberal capitalist state suppress it?

 

[Birdjaguar]

What is stopping socialists in liberal capitalist country building own companies owned by workers and parallel economy system? Capitalists took power over feudalists, feudalist oppression was perhaps suppressing and delaying it, but was not able to stop it and in the end it just have to participated in it. In communist countries under worst repression there was grey economy, people outside system offering what people needed and not what was state party offering. Nearly everybody was reading Samizdat, listening free Europe to actually get relevant informations. There was parallel education and culture. How actually can communism exist without oppression and how the current liberal capitalist state suppress it?

Implementation and proof of concept projects may not be their forte.

There are many co-op companies, ESOPs or other worker owned businesses in the US. They rarely make any headlines though.

As of 2020, we at the National Center for Employee Ownership (NCEO) estimate there are roughly 6,600 employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) covering more than 14 million participants. Since the beginning of the 21st century there has been a decline in the number of plans but an increase in the number of participants. There also are about 3,800 profit sharing and (to a much lesser extent) stock bonus plans that are substantially invested in company stock and are like ESOPs in other ways. In addition, we estimate that roughly 9 million employees participate in plans that provide stock options or other individual equity to most or all employees. Up to 5 million participate in 401(k) plans that are primarily invested in employer stock. As many as 11 million employees buy shares in their employer through employee stock purchase plans. Eliminating overlap, we estimate that approximately 32 million employees participate in an employee ownership plan. These numbers are estimates, but are probably conservative. Overall, employees now control about 8% of corporate equity.

Although other plans now have substantial assets, most of the estimated 4,000 majority employee-owned companies have ESOPs.

https://www.esop.org

 

[Crezth]

Is there a trendline of blaming capitalism for imperialism? Or do we blame imperialism for ruining some of the social experiments that countries are trying?
Both capitalist systems and communist systems seem to have incentive to interfere with countries outside of their borders. How much of that is packaged in the underlying economic theory?
(I've already discussed how 'debt trap' motivates later police actions, I guess).

Capitalism leads to imperialism. There are a few ways of framing this view, but one of the most enduring especially in the non-First World is Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Form of Capitalism.

Summarizing the argument in broad strokes, the idea is there is nothing fundamentally different about the pathologies of capitalist expansion (and thus exploitation) and what we might call "imperialist" expansion and exploitation. Birdjaguar threw out a couple of dates, honestly we can pick any of those because it's a relative proposition, as some measure of industrialization has accompanied the very earliest efforts of European imperialism. Since Columbus's time, merchants sought access to new markets, sought new goods to trade, sought cheap labor to make goods en masse, and thus in every instance also indulged the appetites of so-called imperialists.

The incentive to imperialize is purely natural under capitalism for these reasons. It's why, despite a bloody de-colonizing struggle in the last half century against the European colonial regimes, there continues to be some degree of economic imperialism, because the basic pathologies have not changed at all. What has changed, say in Africa, is the wherewithal of people to resist imperialism. And we could talk about how imperialism self-cannibalized in every nation it was attempted, to the end of fostering dozens and dozens of anti-colonial revolutions, but we'd be getting into a separate (though interesting) subject.

Back to capitalism then, Lenin wrote specifically in terms of the European imperialism of his time, albeit recognizing these pathologies had persisted since the very beginning of the merchant class's power and, thus, had metastasized into something new with the advent of mechanical industry:

We must now try to sum up, to draw together the threads of what has been said above on the subject of imperialism. Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general. But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves in all spheres. Economically, the main thing in this process is the displacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly. Free competition is the basic feature of capitalism, and of commodity production generally; monopoly is the exact opposite of free competition, but we have seen the latter being transformed into monopoly before our eyes, creating large-scale industry and forcing out small industry, replacing large-scale by still larger-scale industry, and carrying concentration of production and capital to the point where out of it has grown and is growing monopoly: cartels, syndicates and trusts, and merging with them, the capital of a dozen or so banks, which manipulate thousands of millions. At the same time the monopolies, which have grown out of free competition, do not eliminate the latter, but exist above it and alongside it, and thereby give rise to a number of very acute, intense antagonisms, frictions and conflicts. Monopoly is the transition from capitalism to a higher system.

If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism. Such a definition would include what is most important, for, on the one hand, finance capital is the bank capital of a few very big monopolist banks, merged with the capital of the monopolist associations of industrialists; and, on the other hand, the division of the world is the transition from a colonial policy which has extended without hindrance to territories unseized by any capitalist power, to a colonial policy of monopolist possession of the territory of the world, which has been completely divided up.

...

(1) the concentration of production and capital has developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital”, of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.

None of this is to say non-capitalists can't be imperialists, nor that socialist economies can't conquer non-socialist economies, but that capitalism as we have observed it, historically, has created the imperialism as we know it today, and which still persists today.

What is stopping socialists in liberal capitalist country building own companies owned by workers and parallel economy system? Capitalists took power over feudalists, feudalist oppression was perhaps suppressing and delaying it, but was not able to stop it and in the end it just have to participated in it. In communist countries under worst repression there was grey economy, people outside system offering what people needed and not what was state party offering. Nearly everybody was reading Samizdat, listening free Europe to actually get relevant informations. There was parallel education and culture. How actually can communism exist without oppression and how the current liberal capitalist state suppress it?

As a matter of fact, what prevents worker-based parallel economy efforts is... the capitalist state. The late 19th and early 20th centuries were marked by violence against labor and concomitant labor uprisings against intolerant conditions. The entire history of the creation of the welfare state in every country it's been realized has been a history of labor rising up and winning victories for itself. And we can see, objectively, that the workers' creation of the welfare state is a far more sustainable model of "capitalism" than the hard-nosed bootstrap free market havens the capitalists keep trying to push. It's also true that when the capitalists try to roll back the welfare state and erode those privileges - as we can see happen in Britain and France and other parts of the EU - it's again the workers' responsibility to create political power in parallel to capital's and then champion for their own rights.

Right now a similar "grey economy" exists in America, except with a bewildering jungle of contradictory media and absolute shortages in most necessities in the bottom half of the economy. The import of medicine, for example, from where it might be cheaper or more effective, is banned.

 

[Moriarte]

None of this is to say non-capitalists can't be imperialists, nor that socialist economies can't conquer non-socialist economies, but that capitalism as we have observed it, historically, has created the imperialism as we know it today, and which still persists today.

Furthermore, we already observed through history of the 20th century, how the crisis of imperialism, brought about by cyclical nature of capitalist free markets can cause a reaction, whereby monopolised capital in pursuit of increased profitability, international competitiveness and stability formulates a “new solution” and a way forward to unite a nation under the corporate state. The form may differ, but the substance remained the same: minimise costs for the capitalist class, maximise costs for the working class.

 

[Aleksey_aka_al]

Both capitalist systems and communist systems seem to have incentive to interfere with countries outside of their borders.

No. That is how it is in a capitalist dominated world based on nationalism. Communists have to deal with it. And unlike communists the only end goal capitalists always have is to exploit. So this interference is very different.