Objections to Socialism

[Toro]

We lost interest.

 

[Agnapostate]

We lost.

Better.

 

[Annie]

I think a million is still a lot of dollars. With that said, I realize how fast it can be depleted. My folks had high school educations, never did either have a salary above $30k. My mom was home with my brother and I until I entered 3rd grade. They bought our house from my aunt, in 1950, for $18k. It was a rather wealthy area, in an area of wealthy areas.

We were always the low man on the totem pole for income. Our vacations were mostly spent at home. My uncle, a priest took my brother and I to the Dells and Canada, but not my folks, they struggled to pay tuition, mortgage, etc.

Yet, by the time they were in their 70's, with my marriage a shambles and my brother having major problems, they had saved more than we could have imagined. The stress of my divorce and child custody problems caused my mom a stroke. Both my brother and I were glad when my dad moved them down to FL to get away from the ongoing problems.

They came to visit often and we them too. In 1999, when my youngest was graduating from middle school, they came for ceremony. My mom broke her hip and suffered another stroke shortly thereafter. Between June then and 2004, when she died, my dad spent over 700k on nursing and other expenditures. 3 years at home and 1 in nursing home. He had it and my brother and I were behind him 100%. Fact is that when she died, he had less than 30k left. He died 2 years ago last August, with $12k left.

 

[Toro]

We lost.

Better.

Maybe Catzmeow was correct.

 

[Agnapostate]

Maybe Catzmeow was correct.

I've never seen it happen. Ordinarily, I would say that anything's possible, but...no, it's not.

 

[Agnapostate]

Here we are, Toro...another day, another rebuttal of scatmeow.

 

[editec]

It IS possible, I think, for workers to create that workers commune, Agna.

I know of ONE right now where my X works.

But it takes a rather remarkable group of people to keep that system working year after year, too.

Now I have created something more along the lines of a centralized social system.

Essantially my volunteers are the selfless workers each striving to help the commonweal, and I am their Stalinist dictator who pays them nothing but lip service to keep the system going.

Of course I pay myself the same amount as my laboring class, so in that sense, I have perfected the Stalinist system somewhat.

Oh yeah, and I haven't, as yet, had to ship any of my volunteers to Siberia for re-education, either.

But I'm AM tempted, sometimes, I'll admit that, too.

You know how it is, man, all animals are created equal, but some animals are slightly more equal than others.

 

[Agnapostate]

You know how it is, man, all animals are created equal, but some animals are slightly more equal than others.

That's amusingly ironic, given this.

George Orwell is the tall figure near the back. He served in the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification during the Spanish Civil War, an anti-Stalinist Marxist organization.

He had this to say of the Spanish Revolution in the anarchist collectives, as written in his Homage to Catalonia:

I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life--snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.--had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master...This was in late December 1936, less than seven months ago as I write, and yet it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance. Later events have obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or 1905, for that matter. I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags and with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Senor' or 'Don' or even 'Ústed'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos días'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.

 

[Agnapostate]

A free marketer doesn't advocate government intervention. Toro does, so I don't consider him to be a free marketer. He views a mixed economy as optimal. In my book, he's a centrist.

Really? So if I mentioned the negative social opportunity costs of market externalities, you wouldn't advocate Pigovian taxation? And you wouldn't consider the infant industries argument as a method in which government intervention can bolster eventual market exchange? What's most ironic about the free marketers' base hatred of government is that the government has traditionally acted as the primary stabilizing agent in a capitalist economy.

Funny you mention utopian talking points, though. Your view of how a society can function without a governing body is pretty funny. Just yet another idea that "looks good on paper".

You'll have to specify what you mean by a "governing body." I believe that a society can function more productively without a state, as was the case in the anarchist regions of Aragon, Catalonia, and parts of the Levant during the Spanish Revolution, in which the "governing" body was horizontal federations of decentralized urban collectives and rural communes, in which libertarian social organization and socialist collectivization generated efficiency gains and beneficial social effects. Hence, there is empirical support for my perspective, in that such a society has existed and functioned in the past, to say nothing of what we might derive from microeconomic analysis into the greater productivity of worker-owned enterprises, which have the tendency of minimizing the principal-agent problems seen in the conventional capitalist firm.

On the other hand, support of free market capitalism has no empirical basis and is entirely derived from the textbook. Capitalism can collapse solely on the basis of the existence of imperfect contracting, which free market utopianists routinely fail to acknowledge. The fact that information asymmetries exist in a capitalist economy will necessarily cause adverse selection and moral hazard problems in the real world separate from the free market utopia.

 

[Oddball]

Ahhh...The old collectivist/authoritarian cry of externalities....The unforeseen consequences......I love it.

The trouble with those thugs is that they completely ignore (no, not ignore, but misdirect attention from) the externalities of their aggressive and overbearing policies.

CAFE standards cause exploding Pintos??....SUE FORD!!!

FDA takes in $1/2 BILLION to approve Vioxx....Which ends up killing people....SUE MERCK!!!

Nice work, if you can get it.

 

[Zoomie1980]

The collective ownership of the means of production.

It runs completely counter to basic human nature. We are not bees or "borg".

 

[Agnapostate]

It runs completely counter to basic human nature. We are not bees or "borg".

That's amusing. Socialists have long held a greater understanding of human nature than their opponents (see Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, for instance), whereas anti-socialists often reduce the labor market to a mere collection of factors of production governed by neoclassical laws alone. It's simply a reality that a desire for self-governance and free association is an element of an intrinsic human desire for freedom, and thus, *felicific* maximization. It's only natural that this be extended into the economic realm.

 

[Zoomie1980]

What are you fools talking about. Anarchy? Anarchy is an oxymoron. Anarchy can not ever really exist.

Why? Simple. Anarchy is the absence of government or authority. However In the absence of any Government or Authority the person with the biggest gun, or the most followers will become the Authority. Anarchy is like trying to defy a law of Physics. You create a power vacuum and someone is going to fill it. Therefore you will never have your true anarchy, you will always have some war lord or another trying to run you.

Duh....

Amazing how so wrapped in the theoretical some get. Fundamental human nature trumps all theoretical academic precepts. We are NOT bees. We are humans. If you have something someone else wants, and you are weak and that person is stronger than you, you WILL lose it.

The fundamental reality of the human condition is:

You are entitled to what you can take and what you can keep.

All other things in human life stem from that axiom of our existence.

 

[KittenKoder]

What are you fools talking about. Anarchy? Anarchy is an oxymoron. Anarchy can not ever really exist.

Why? Simple. Anarchy is the absence of government or authority. However In the absence of any Government or Authority the person with the biggest gun, or the most followers will become the Authority. Anarchy is like trying to defy a law of Physics. You create a power vacuum and someone is going to fill it. Therefore you will never have your true anarchy, you will always have some war lord or another trying to run you.

Duh....

Amazing how so wrapped in the theoretical some get. Fundamental human nature trumps all theoretical academic precepts. We are NOT bees. We are humans. If you have something someone else wants, and you are weak and that person is stronger than you, you WILL lose it.

The fundamental reality of the human condition is:

You are entitled to what you can take and what you can keep.

All other things in human life stem from that axiom of our existence.

All socialism does is give all the power to a few at the top while everyone else is left to their whim.

 

[Zoomie1980]

It runs completely counter to basic human nature. We are not bees or "borg".

That's amusing. Socialists have long held a greater understanding of human nature than their opponents (see Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, for instance), whereas anti-socialists often reduce the labor market to a mere collection of factors of production governed by neoclassical laws alone. It's simply a reality that a desire for self-governance and free association is an element of an intrinsic human desire for freedom, and thus, *felicific* maximization. It's only natural that this be extended into the economic realm.

If you are weaker than I, and you have something I want, I WILL take it from you and there is NOTHING you can do to stop me.

All realistic human socio-economic structures ALWAYS come back to that bedrock of human nature. Anarchy simply cannot exist with our species.

 

[Zoomie1980]

You know how it is, man, all animals are created equal, but some animals are slightly more equal than others.

That's amusingly ironic, given this.

George Orwell is the tall figure near the back. He served in the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification during the Spanish Civil War, an anti-Stalinist Marxist organization.

He had this to say of the Spanish Revolution in the anarchist collectives, as written in his Homage to Catalonia:

I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites. Up here in Aragon one was among tens of thousands of people, mainly though not entirely of working-class origin, all living at the same level and mingling on terms of equality. In theory it was perfect equality, and even in practice it was not far from it. There is a sense in which it would be true to say that one was experiencing a foretaste of Socialism, by which I mean that the prevailing mental atmosphere was that of Socialism. Many of the normal motives of civilized life--snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc.--had simply ceased to exist. The ordinary class-division of society had disappeared to an extent that is almost unthinkable in the money-tainted air of England; there was no one there except the peasants and ourselves, and no one owned anyone else as his master...This was in late December 1936, less than seven months ago as I write, and yet it is a period that has already receded into enormous distance. Later events have obliterated it much more completely than they have obliterated 1935, or 1905, for that matter. I had come to Spain with some notion of writing newspaper articles, but I had joined the militia almost immediately, because at that time and in that atmosphere it seemed the only conceivable thing to do. The Anarchists were still in virtual control of Catalonia and the revolution was still in full swing. To anyone who had been there since the beginning it probably seemed even in December or January that the revolutionary period was ending; but when one came straight from England the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags and with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt. Churches here and there were being systematically demolished by gangs of workmen. Every shop and cafe had an inscription saying that it had been collectivized; even the bootblacks had been collectivized and their boxes painted red and black. Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Senor' or 'Don' or even 'Ústed'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade' or 'Thou', and said 'Salud!' instead of 'Buenos días'. Tipping had been forbidden by law since the time of Primo de Rivera; almost my first experience was receiving a lecture from a hotel manager for trying to tip a lift-boy. There were no private motor-cars, they had all been commandeered, and the trams and taxis and much of the other transport were painted red and black. The revolutionary posters were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisements look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loud-speakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the wealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue overalls or some variant of militia uniform. All this was queer and moving. There was much in this that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.

Spanish-American War....anti-Stalinist/Marxist org....

Hmmmm......

Stalin was an infant in 1898.....

Oooops....

Nevermind, Spanish CIVIL WAR, not American War....1936..... valid post

 

[Zoomie1980]

It IS possible, I think, for workers to create that workers commune, Agna.

I know of ONE right now where my X works.

But it takes a rather remarkable group of people to keep that system working year after year, too.

Same point can be made about the "success" stories of socialism in Western Europe. Where it involves small, ethnically homogeneous, educated, dedicated societies like Denmark, Norway, etc... it kinda works. Scaled to complex societies like unified Germany or France burdened with massive Muslim immigration it breaks down greatly.

 

[Agnapostate]

Duh....

Amazing how so wrapped in the theoretical some get. Fundamental human nature trumps all theoretical academic precepts. We are NOT bees. We are humans. If you have something someone else wants, and you are weak and that person is stronger than you, you WILL lose it.

The fundamental reality of the human condition is:

You are entitled to what you can take and what you can keep.

All other things in human life stem from that axiom of our existence.

You can indulge in these abstractions if you wish. However, it's merely the reality that collectivism empowers individualism. Without the existence of mutual aid, it would be impossible for even the most powerful individuals to dominate, since overwhelming quantity would annihilate relatively significant quality, and the powerful view would be deluged by the greater might of the "weaker" masses and hordes. However, mutual aid facilitates more expansive development and an a means of accessing a wider realm of experiences and opportunities.

All socialism does is give all the power to a few at the top while everyone else is left to their whim.

Without further elaboration from you, I'm already certain that this is merely inaccurate reference to the state capitalism of the Soviet Union and related regimes, not socialism.

If you are weaker than I, and you have something I want, I WILL take it from you and there is NOTHING you can do to stop me.

All realistic human socio-economic structures ALWAYS come back to that bedrock of human nature. Anarchy simply cannot exist with our species.

Certainly. However, humans are not destined for isolation. It's a sociobiological reality that humans in effectively every society form collective associations, whether free or not. This is a reality true of "nomads and city-dwellers, of hunter-gatherers and of industrial civilizations, of Eskimos in Greenland and Bushmen in Africa, of a tribe of twenty Australian aborigines and of the billion people that make up China." Focus on the "competitive" aspects of human nature has served as a justification for the alleged morality of capitalism since the days of Herbert Spencer's formation of social Darwinism. This has undoubtedly been utilized by those who would seek personal wealth rather than a rational understanding of various elements of human nature. That has made study of the role of cooperative tendencies in evolution all the more necessary. As Kropotkin writes:

It was necessary to indicate the overwhelming importance which sociable habits play in Nature and in the progressive evolution of both the animal species and human beings: to prove that they secure to animals a better protection from their enemies, very often facilities for getting food and (winter provisions, migrations, etc.), longevity, therefore a greater facility for the development of intellectual faculties; and that they have given to men, in addition to the same advantages, the possibility of working out those institutions which have enabled mankind to survive in its hard struggle against Nature, and to progress, notwithstanding all the vicissitudes of its history.

Such analysis is merely a necessary component of any comprehensive study of human nature; while certainly not being exclusive any more than study of competition is, it's a critical element.

 

[Agnapostate]

Spanish-American War....anti-Stalinist/Marxist org....

Hmmmm......

Stalin was an infant in 1898.....

Oooops....

Nevermind, Spanish CIVIL WAR, not American War....1936..... valid post

No matter. Your grasp of history's the most impressive quality you've demonstrated yet.

For that matter, I did not describe the POUM as an "anti Stalinist/Marxist" group. They were libertarian Marxists, and thus anti-Stalinist.

Same point can be made about the "success" stories of socialism in Western Europe. Where it involves small, ethnically homogeneous, educated, dedicated societies like Denmark, Norway, etc... it kinda works. Scaled to complex societies like unified Germany or France burdened with massive Muslim immigration it breaks down greatly.

Considering that the establishment of social democratic capitalism is not equivalent to "socialism," and considering that my preferred variety of socialism is decentralized in nature and dependent on grassroots participatory management anyway, this post adds little to the discussion.

 

[JW Frogen]

I have no objections to socialism.

Once you tell me who pays for it.

And as long as I don't have to.

Which makes me a pure socialist, true and true.