f***ing low wages low hours... f*ck capitalism

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09 Nov 2013, 6:07 pm

Thelibrarian wrote:
auntblabby wrote:
capitalism only works properly for capitalists.

I could add that at its best, capitalism provides a standard of living unrivaled by any other system or time period, including things like the Internet.
The internet was brought to us by state funded research.

Blabby, Rushking is right, at least with some qualifications. The Internet actually began life as ARPANET, a computer network developed about fifty years ago now. It was originally a DOD project, and hence completely government-funded, although now the Internet is structured as a nonprofit corporation

I should add that is hardly socialism. Nor am I against it any more than I am against government funding roads and prisons. If you will recall from an earlier conversation, a truly socialist country, like the Soviet empire, was still using tubes when they broke up.

It is also the case that the Internet was developed by government taking money from private enterprises and individuals in the form of taxes, and giving it in many cases to other private businesses that actually made things work, though most of the researchers themselves were on the government payroll.

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09 Nov 2013, 6:42 pm

Thelibrarian wrote:

If you will recall from an earlier conversation, a truly socialist country, like the Soviet empire, was still using tubes when they broke up.

Leninism and the multiple ideologies it formed, are very far removed from the socialist philosophy developed by thinkers like Charles Fourier and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

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09 Nov 2013, 7:10 pm

^^^ I really think it is high time for the modern thinkers to invent a new kind of -ism. People are needlessly getting tangled up in semantics instead of seeing what is in front of them and deciding what they want to see instead.

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09 Nov 2013, 8:09 pm

leafplant wrote:

People are needlessly getting tangled up in semantics instead of seeing what is in front of them and deciding what they want to see instead.

I agree that this is a big problem. Words aren't very useful after their meaning gets lost, but the problem is that you can't undo the all the history behind them. I'm basically a libertarian communist, but the word libertarian doesn't mean what It used to mean anymore in the anglosphere, since the American libertarian party formed. So many in this country today will believe the two words are a contradiction. My libertarianism has a longer history, and discarding my definition would cause a lot of confusion for people reading a lot of things out of the large catalog of anarchist literature.

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10 Nov 2013, 3:43 am

RushKing wrote:

Thelibrarian wrote:

If you will recall from an earlier conversation, a truly socialist country, like the Soviet empire, was still using tubes when they broke up.

Leninism and the multiple ideologies it formed, are very far removed from the socialist philosophy developed by thinkers like Charles Fourier and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

No, Fourier's ideas weren't as lethal as Lenin's by any means. But he was still a utopian, responsible for utopian communes all over the US, and none of them worked. Nor were Proudhon's ideas any better, at least when applied to the real world.

One thing both Fourier and Proudhon share in common with Lenin's utopian schemes is that they all belong on history's proverbial ash heap. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. It's time we got back to what works. And those are ideas and procedures with a time-tested track record.

Finally, Fourier's ideas were very limited in their application compared to those of Lenin. And Proudhon's ideas had even less effect. It's hard not to suspect that had these systems been required to perform as fully independent systems that they would not have been just as awful as Leninism.

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10 Nov 2013, 4:10 pm

Thelibrarian wrote:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. It's time we got back to what works. And those are ideas and procedures with a time-tested track record.

What is this thing you are talking about?

There is a large variety of socialisms and you appear to be lumping them all together. How do we make a clear definition of what doable is? If doability depends on what we attempt to do, how we do it, when we do it, where we do it and who we are. Why should we make a false dichotomy between utopia and realism?

I don't let my wishes determine what I believe to be the case, but I can still have wishes without undermining reality. So utopia and realism are not incompatible.

If wishful thinking means believing something to be the case without evidence, simply because its desirable to; utopia =/= wishful thinking. I believe it is wishful thinking to believe private property directly benefits me rather than the owner.

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10 Nov 2013, 5:27 pm

RushKing wrote:

Thelibrarian wrote:

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results. It's time we got back to what works. And those are ideas and procedures with a time-tested track record.

Properly defined, all socialisms have in common government ownership of the means of production. I believe government is necessary to handle some functions (e.g. roads, defense), but it is always terribly inefficient. While capitalism certainly has its problems, all socialisms have worse problems. It's the reason most of the world has abandoned it.

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10 Nov 2013, 5:41 pm

Thelibrarian wrote:

Properly defined, all socialisms have in common government ownership of the means of production.

That is a branch of marxist socialism. All the other types of socialism tend to believe in common ownership, rather than state ownership of the means of production.

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10 Nov 2013, 5:43 pm

RushKing wrote:

Thelibrarian wrote:

Properly defined, all socialisms have in common government ownership of the means of production.

That is a branch of marxist socialism. All the other types of socialism tend to believe in common ownership, rather than state ownership of the means of production.

Please tell me about what you term common ownership. What is it, and where has it actually been tried?

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10 Nov 2013, 5:56 pm

Thelibrarian wrote:

RushKing wrote:

Thelibrarian wrote:

Properly defined, all socialisms have in common government ownership of the means of production.

That is a branch of marxist socialism. All the other types of socialism tend to believe in common ownership, rather than state ownership of the means of production.

Please tell me about what you term common ownership. What is it, and where has it actually been tried?

Common ownership is pretty much the self management of commons; as in the people who occupy and use a resource making the rules. This was tried during the Spanish revolution and it worked.

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10 Nov 2013, 6:02 pm

RushKing wrote:

Thelibrarian wrote:

RushKing wrote:

Thelibrarian wrote:

Properly defined, all socialisms have in common government ownership of the means of production.

That is a branch of marxist socialism. All the other types of socialism tend to believe in common ownership, rather than state ownership of the means of production.

Please tell me about what you term common ownership. What is it, and where has it actually been tried?

Common ownership is pretty much the self management of commons; as in the people who occupy and use a resource making the rules.

Actually, that sounds just like Marxist communism. Marx believed that the purpose of The Revolution was to overthrow and do away with the non-working classes, with the working classes taking over the means of production, and making their own rules. It was Marx's belief that only the workers could initiate and carry out The Revolution, though the intelligentsia could play a role by getting the workers ready by dispelling what Marx called false consciousness. But since the workers had no real inclination to do such a thing, actual communism had to cease the means of production, allegedly on behalf of the workers--what these communists called a dictatorship of the proletariat.

With this in mind, where and when has common ownership been successfully tried?

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10 Nov 2013, 6:10 pm

RushKing wrote:

This was tried during the Spanish revolution and it worked.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9X8vgdHw10[/youtube]

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10 Nov 2013, 6:33 pm

RushKing wrote:

This was tried during the Spanish revolution and it worked.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9X8vgdHw10[/youtube]

Yes, I'm aware of the anarcho-syndicalists during the Spanish Revolution. I used to be a Chomsky fan, and he was very sentimental about these anarcho-syndicalists. Are there any common ownership governments that lasted longer?

Actually, Fourier started Brook Farm and some others. Most of these movements tend to be very short-lived.

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10 Nov 2013, 7:29 pm

Thelibrarian wrote:

A lot of communes around the globe like Black Bear Ranch.

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10 Nov 2013, 7:34 pm

RushKing wrote:

Thelibrarian wrote:

A lot of communes around the globe like Black Bear Ranch.

That's what I thought. Thank you.

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