volodya_ilich

joined 2 months ago
[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We're not stupid animals, there are plenty of historical examples of societies allocating resources based on need rather than economic capability. We're just living under the wrong system, and we need to evolve past that system towards something with actual democracy, where the people can decide democratically how the economy works and how the resources are allocated, where the workers aren't under the orders of a dictatorial power structure 8 hours a day 5 days a week, but instead they collectively make the decisions and take the profits from the companies they own collectively.

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Because they can pay 10 million to a consulting firm to develop a customer-profiling model that predicts their income based on the most recent purchases with a 10% margin of error.

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Fully aware, that's why I reject blaming the individuals as opposed to the system

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

He is not taking a Marxist position

Precisely that's why it's taken him 80 years longer than Marxists to reach that conclusion.

Not every criticism of Capitalism is an endorsement of Marxism

Which is why non-marxist anti-capitalist movements such as Salvador Allende's socialism in Chile, or Mosaddegh's Iran, inevitably fail within a few years due to the lack of understanding of class struggle and the history of capitalism.

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 0 points 1 week ago (1 children)

You are assuming that a country cannot improve its growth because of past and its success it determined purely by past events

Nothing like that. I'm saying that industrialization is a gradual and long process, and by pure logic, some countries which started to industrialize 100+ years before others, had the advantage.

By the way, this “theory” completely falls apart when you look at Germany. Before they were one state, then divided and after communism fell, they re-united. After the berlin wall fell, eastern part was in a far worse condition.

Far-worse condition by which metric? Sure, it was less developed industrially and economically (see my point about not participating in colonialism, which you don't seem to care about), but there was no unemployment and there was guaranteed housing for everyone. There were fewer, and worse quality, consumer goods, but is that how you determine the success of a system?

Regarding colonialism and unequal exchange, you don't seem to understand how important an effect it has. Importing cheap raw materials and exporting high added-value manufactured goods, is the most profitable thing you can do, but it implies unequal exchange, which drains the resources and labour of poorer countries and exploits them. If you're interested at all in the development of the economies of countries, you really should look into, and try to understand, the concept of unequal exchange. Otherwise, it's like saying "wow Rome was so powerful in 200BC" while ignoring that like half the workforce were literal slaves.

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 57 points 1 week ago (8 children)

By the nine divines... Why does it take libs 80 years extra to reach the conclusions that Marxists have already described in detail in the last century...

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 1 points 1 week ago

What you're saying is at best debatable, and it's definitely not consensus in academia. Feudalism is substantially and fundamentally different from capitalism. Serfs worked the land not based on free contracts for a wage selling their labour as a commodity, but rather legally bound to their lord's land. Access to consumer goods wasn't through purchase as commodities in a free market, but through self-production and barter/debt within small communities. Peasants worked the land with their own means of production and made their own tools with their own means of production, and generally people weren't hired working other people's means of production.

Class struggle has existed for millennia, but capitalism is just the current predominant system of class struggle because through industrial development it overpowers preexisting systems that weren't capitalist.

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

That's not necessarily true, many supposedly democratic regimes consistently pass unpopular policy and don't pass popular policy. E.g. welfare state cuts to expenditure in education, healthcare and pensions in post-2008 EU, or the lack of progressive policy in USA healthcare.

It's precisely this ignoring of the popular will that turns people to fascism

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago

Fascism was maintained in several European countries way beyond 1940s, such as my homeland Spain. There were also fascist regimes after WW2 outside Europe, such as in Chile or arguably in South Korea and Taiwan.

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 3 points 1 week ago

Nazism is a flavour of fascism. They're not "differences", they're technicalities

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

The theoretical model of the free market relies on perfectly rational actors acting on perfect information. If those are given, then resource allocation indeed is perfect.

That's not even remotely true. Natural monopolies exist because of how natural resources work, and oligopolies or undercutting of prices to destroy weak competition can happen with perfect knowledge by sellers and buyers.

[–] volodya_ilich@lemm.ee 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Replace "Israel" with "Russia" in your comment. Oh, wow, now suddenly neighboring nations have reasons to want them obliterated from the earth?

 

Martin Luther King was a well-known activist for Black peoples' and worker's rights. After many years of fighting racism and oppression from the establishment, he shared insights on some of his findings of the unjust opposition to rightful change, which may surprise a few of us who are still learning about his figure:

"I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

We've recently seen widespread liberal rejection of grassroots progressive movements such as Black Lives Matter, the protests against western collaborationism in the ongoing genocide in Palestine, and many so-called "progressives" dedicating more time to finding the mistakes committed by non-western regimes than those of their own nations, and calling "Tankies" to those who are a bit further to the left than us. Let us consider if we ourselves are the moderates that Dr. Luther King was talking about, and let's push for the change we actually want rather than bickering about who's "too far to the left"

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