What would a "better" society look like?

[Cheezy the Wiz]

I'm sorry, but if I cast a Burnout, you should NOT be able to use your Merfolk Looter to draw a Hydroblast. That's just nonsense.

But you should be able to prevent damage in response to it being dealt, which is now the case.

 

[Chimera Kitty]

It was always the case! It just required special timing windows!

 

[Traitorfish]

Ahh... I know that impulse to find similarities between what you dislike - I do it myself. But in this case you are wrong, the economic systems of the "west" and the "soviet block" were not just the same thing dressed up with different speech.

There were similarities, and indeed there were comparable classes in each block. The "managerial class" in the capitalist block had its counterpart in the "bureaucratic class" in the soviet block. Galbraith made a persuasive argument for such institutional similarities still when the Cold War was in full swing and to do it was heretical in either side - but he was always one to write those simple but inconvenient truths that you just don't admit when you are a member of respectable circles!

But what about the capitalist class proper, the "rentier class"? Did the rentiers of the capitalist block had their counterpart in the nomenklatura? Djilas complained that they did, but the way I see it, it really wasn't the same thing. The nomenklatura were politicians on the active, akin to western politicians on the active and/or administrators. It was part of that "bureaucratic class" which was a counterpart to the western "managerial class". The "rentier class" typical of capitalism had been successfully eliminated (or, more correctly, diluted - one of the goals of socialism) in the soviet block. That was why it was so hated and feared by the members of that class in the capitalism block. It wasn't just posturing.

The difference between having a rentier class which is allowed to gradually concentrate wealth (wealth begets more wealth, and rents from wealth accumulate with a compound effect), or having what has become fashionable to call "state capitalism" (I really would like to know who coined the term) where the proceeds from any "rents" (profits) are either generally redistributed through state services or reinvested, has big institutional consequences! Big social consequences too. If it didn't then the crassest of capitalism of the most benign of social-democracies would be similar, something which the people forced to live under one or the other have very often (and sometimes violently) rejected by demanding changes from one to the other.

It would be worth, it seems to me, do discuss what "state capitalism" is. Not only because that has by far been the most often used alternative to "capitalism" but also because the term itself is, I suspect, politically loaded towards pretending that it is no different from capitalism. Which is a rather... bold claim.

Yes, the "socialist" organisation of social labour of the Soviet and Chinese blocs were qualitatively different from those of the West. But so what? The West also displayed qualitative differences between states and sections of the economy. So did the USSR from China, or Yugoslavia from Poland, or Romania from Albania. Capitalism does not preclude heterogeneity, and in fact on a large scale demands it- "uneven and combined development" and all that. What identifies a particular social formation as "capitalist" isn't the presence of a rentier class or the absence of a welfare state (or, at least, not in a Marxian conception of capitalism), but the organisation of labour as value. That was present in the "socialist" regimes just as surely it was present in the West, and is not altered by their peculiarity within those terms.

My position is still further. I think up until 1953, the USSR was following a possible tract towards socialism (albeit a certainly undesirable one for us Westerners), a tract which his successors rendered meaningless by failing to understand the role that Stalin's State Capitalist* enterprise from 1928 onwards was meant to play. It's quite possible that Stalin himself forgot this purpose. Either way, his successors were so afraid to think for themselves or deviate in any meaningful way from Radnoy Stalin's economic practices, that the trend towards Socialism in One Country, in the only possible way it could have been created, was destroyed, and under Brezhnev it became the caricature of "socialism" that so many Third World nations more obviously were. Khrushchev, for all his faults, was their last chance.

Now, it's quite possible to argue, I suppose, that the plan was doomed to fail from the start, and was not the fault of Stalin's successors, but of Stalin himself for undertaking the venture in the first place. Perhaps the only path for them was one which yielded those unthinking bureaucratic successors, and it was never actually possible to progress beyond the OMG STEEL AND HEAVY INDUSTRY stage. Perhaps Stakhanovism is inherent to the Five Year Plan For Economic Development mindset. I'm not educated enough to say. All I can do is observe that, if the USSR was trying to mirror the economic development of the capitalist period, without the worst that capitalism has to offer the working class, then it failed to reproduce the surplus of consumer goods which is supposed to characterize not only more mature capitalism, but also the beginnings of socialism. And without that, they had no chance of overtaking the West.

*By "state capitalism" I mean a very specific thing. I refer to the Trotskyist concept of Permanent Revolution, by which a socialist revolution in an infant-capitalist society might seize control and use the state to guide society through a mirror of capitalist economic development under its own hand, in an attempt to reproduce the necessary prerequisites for socialism. State Capitalism, to me, refers to this process. Thus, I agree that the USSR was State Capitalist, but I contend the point with TF that this constitutes the exact same thing as "Real Capitalist."

If we follow Marx, capitalism is the organisation of labour as value, and that's really an either/or proposition, there's no hedging your bets. You might argue that a particular such mode of organisation is more democratic or benign or even "progressive", but it remains none the less capitalism, and that isn't negated by the (real or espoused) ambitions of the political leadership towards its transcendence.

I think the organization of a "tribal council" constitutes something structural, and if it resembles the vast majority of organizations sharing that name from our history it probably has some other very nasty structural problems with it to.

Well, again, "tribal council" doesn't refer to any specific form of political organisation, just a vague suggestion of uncivilisedness. Unless we actually specify what the practical content of this "tribal council" is, we can't really say anything about it. (It's like saying "I eat food" and expecting somebody to evaluate your diet.)