Are you serious right now? The Democrats are fully onboard. They supported the creation of DHS. The supported the expansion of border patrol. The supported the expansion of ice. They supported the expansion of local police. They supported the transfer of military surplus to the police.
The Democrats are not going to save you. They’re not Marvel heroes. They’re not even basic protestors. They haven’t done shit on decades.
I was wrong, potentially. I am seeing conflicting reports. This document from the CIA shows Soviet citizens closed the calorie gap to withing 300 calorie, putting them at the #2 best fed country in the world.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000498133.pdf
But this blogger did some deeper analysis and shows some very interesting numbers
https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-food/
I’m not finding numbers yet for the poorest in the USSR but between housing costs at less than 10% monthly wage, food guarantees, low food cost, universal jobs guarantees, and universal social benefits like health and education.
Again, that same blogger has an article on it
https://nintil.com/the-soviet-union-poverty-and-inequality/
And notes
inequality (Measured by the decile ratio) decreased by around 40% in the 1956-65 period, achieved by a faster increase of the earnings of the poor (144%) compared to those of the richer citizens (38%)
By 1967-68, the decile ratio was around 3, meaning that the richest citizens, on average, were earning three times as much as the poorest ones, which seems quite equal. In comparison, the UK had a ratio of 3.4.
Now, that’s not to say that the USSR was rich by any means, especially not compared to the West. They had been an agrarian society 50 years prior, whereas the West had industrialized in the late 1800s. Additionally the Soviets lost a massive percentage of their population in the war.
But, only 20 years after that war and 50 years after the revolution, they were truly an economic marvel.
Well… 80% of the weight humans lose is lost through the breath as CO2… Does that count?
was any of it communism?
It would be better to say that all of it was the movement for communism but none of it was a communist economy. In that way I think it becomes clear. It’s like training for football. Is any of the physical training “football”? No. But all of it is towards football and the actions are specific to the movement for football.
Similarly, all of what we call communism in our day to day discourse is the actual communist movement working on the process of bringing about a communist economy (or just “communism”) but, since communism hasn’t been achieved yet, it’s still very experimental and unknown. Every step produces new empirical learning which gets studied by communists all over the world to analyze what works and what doesn’t.
They all pretended to have it all figured out
Have you read the writings of communist leaders? They are very clear that the victory is of the revolution over the former ruling class and that from this point forward the country is building a new future.
effectively lying to the people, instead of being honest and trying to make everybody come together to work through the problems.
But they did create a collaborative society where everyone came together and solved problems. From collective farming to citizens commisions to workplace and local councils to national initiatives. They’ve all achieved so much incredible stuff. Cuba developed a COVID vaccine on the same timeline as the US and the USA spent billions incentivizing a competition between privately held companies.
You’d have to be very open about this process from the very start and trust that everybody is willing to endure that uncertainty of not knowing where the journey is going exactly.
Yup. That’s what it is. And that’s what they do.
That’s probably a big ask, both of the people leading such a, well, for lack of a better word, revolution as well as the people following.
It is. And that’s part of the experimental process. What systems are needed? What roles do people play? How do you defend against outside corruption and internal corruption at the same time? How do you deal with the people who disagree and want to turn back the revolution to the way things used to be?
All very hard problems. All part of the movement, the literature, the debates, the speeches, the education, the philosophy, the critique.
It’s all there. It’s been going on for over a century. You can read all about it.
Yes. It was me. All communist revolutions Mark the beginning of a transitionary period. Not a single one has achieved a “final form” of communism. The ones that still exist are still building towards communism. The ones that failed failed before they built communism. Some people call it socialism, some people call it the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Talking about these concepts is challenging even for the people who have researched and studied. It’s honestly confusing for people who haven’t spent a lot of time researching it. It was for me.
Just like capitalism, it will be much easier to talk about this stuff when we look back over 400 years of history, but while we’re still in the first half of the process, if not earlier, it’s hard to pin down.
I’m not sure I understand your question. Was any of what capitalism?
Yes allocation of resources is essentially how a large number of human needs are met and that would not be different under connunism. Only the system of resource allocation changes, not the basic science of how humans operate. Need chemicals, need energy, can’t do that without allocation of resources.
I don’t think I mentioned anything resembling pride, but I also don’t know that pride is a sustainable way to run a society. Threats are also sort of universal regardless of system. They exist in all societies. It would be the system of threats that would change
I hate the excuse “we haven’t found the right version of communism” that communists use to explain away why no communist countries have succeeded.
That’s not an accurate representation of the position at all.
A communist society is a theoretical concept. You can’t just become a communist society through a revolution. If you have a feudal society and then have a revolution, you now have a new leadership structure of a feudal society. If you have a capitalist society and you have a revolution, you have new leadership of a capitalist society.
When society says a country is communist, what society means is the country is run by a communist party. A communist party is an organization that aims to build communism from the current state of their society. It’s never been done before.
So communists are not saying that we haven’t found the right kind of communism. We’re saying that communism is arrived at through empirical, iterative experimentation. And the reality is that feudal and capitalist societies also emerge through a process of empirical iterative experimentation, it’s just not described that way and it’s not deliberately theorized about by the leadership. Communists parties are very self conscious and self aware. They know that there is no answer to “what will communism look like?” yet. They know the job is to iteratively build towards the key goals of eliminating class distinction, eliminating the profit incentive, and eliminating privatization of wealth. How that happens is in the realm of the experimental.
One of the core properties of man is wanting more, wanting better, why not exploit that property and let people accumulate more, get better stuff, as long as it is done in a regulated manner?
This is an argument from a mystical concept of human nature. I could easily retort with the statement that one of the core properties of man is having limited capacity for things (limited stomach size, limited time, only 2 hands, only 2 eyes and one area of focus, etc).
But all of human society, including primitive communist societies, used the human drive for progress to solve social problems. It’s just that in class society, wealth is arranged such that only the minority hold the wealth and power and they use that wealth and power to capture the drive for progress and channel it into maintaining their positions of power. This is obvious when you think about war and jingoism. The king is threatened by another king. He needs someone to fight the other king, but he won’t do it personally. So he has to get you to fight. But that would make your life worse. So he has to convince you that the other kingdom’s people are evil barbarians who want to take everything from you. Now you have to balance the risk of becoming a soldier versus the risk of losing everything by not becoming a soldier.
Human drive for progress is ever present. Under communism, the human drive for progress is taped to make society as a whole better. Before we get to communism, that will mean salaries. After communism, we’re not entirely sure what that means. It probably means vouchers for additional privileges, more leisure time, etc. basically everything you want money for, you would just get that thing you want without the need for a market system of rationing.
Tax the shit out of the rich, but let them have their high score board so they can brag to eachother.
This doesn’t solve the problem. The rich, with their high scoreboards, control the governments. That’s how liberal democracy with private property works. The rich started the governments. It was the rich merchants that wanted liberal democracy so they could have power as well as riches. They raised militias and killed kings and then built societies that elevated the merchants to positions of power. That’s done now. They aren’t going to let you use the governments their class made to remove them from power. They’ll allow high taxes if it’ll get you to stop fighting for a generation or two, and then they’ll use their power to accumulate wealth in other ways. At the end of the day, they control the majority of the planet’s resources and they can starve you out if you don’t like it.
My point is this, the world isn’t equal, there are hot areas, there are cold areas, there are wet areas, there are dry areas, there are areas with beautiful views, areas with nothing interesting to look at outside.
Yes, that’s why communism is an experimental process that each country will go through differently.
Say you build thousands of identical apartment, some will be colder than others, some will have more moisture, should an identical apartment with an amazing view be more expensive than an apartment with a view of a brick wall?
Perhaps we’re thinking on different scales here. A single building can hold thousands of apartments. We’re trying to solve the problem of housing for billions of people. It’s impossible to build identical apartments for all of them.
But yes, your point is well taken and not something that people don’t understand. There is an infinite amount of complexity in the world and a doubly infinite combination of personal preferences and aversions associated with that complexity.
People should be able to prioritize what’s important to them and they should have those needs met. There are limited resources and limited resources need a mechanism of rationing.
But with apartments, let’s look deeper. If you want to have a chance at getting an apartment you like, it needs to be available. The more we have of something, the easier it is to get. So what if we overbuilt housing? The problem with overbuilding housing only exists under capitalism. Apartments go unrented and landlords lose out on profits. Worse, abundance lowers prices since supply outpaces demand, so keeping a balance between supply and demand keeps profits high. Capitalist media has been dunking on China for years for over building housing, saying it’s tanking their housing market and prices are falling and so many apartments go unrented.
Which would rather have? An abundance of very cheap choices so that you aren’t competing with a mob for each apartment and driving the prices through the roof. Also, remember that in the USSR, even though salaries were low, housing still only cost 10% or less of monthly earnings. We’re talking about completely different scales here.
My point is that even in a “true” communist system there inequallities that can’t really be quantifiable, yet absolutely matter.
We know. That’s why we say communism can be described as “from each according to their ability, to each according their need”. We don’t distinguish between needs like food and water and needs like variety and sunlight and music and leisure time and self expression. They’re all needs.
Communism is not a program of everyone gets the same thing. This idea comes from one of the easier experiments to run while trying to build communism - mass produce a single thing, get economies of scale, meet the needs of the many. Food insecurity is climbing incredibly in the US, but to take the examples of Russia and China, they were experiencing famines every 4 years and 2 years, respectively, before their communist revolutions. One of the first goals was to feed all the people consistently and reliably. They ran lots of experiments - mass production, pest control, mechanization, etc. They failed a few times before getting it right. But eventually the average Soviet citizen was getting more calories than the average US citizen, and the bottom of Soviet society was significantly better off than the better of capitalist society.
The communist movement is greatly aware of the variety of needs and desires of the human species and far from denying those things, it is attempting to create a society where everyone gets their needs met, no one is homeless or impoverished, no one is driven to crime because they need to feed themselves or their family, etc .
Read closer. It said:
we don’t know the exact forms and processes that communism will take as it is still being built for the first time in modern history
during the transitionary phase, which all communist countries you can name are in and no country has ever yet left, incentives are and have been compensation, meaning money
prior incentives from pre-capitalist societies were violence
prior incentives from primitive societies were the outcomes of doing the work
without monetary incentives, primitive societies didn’t wonder about how to incentivize people to do dangerous work, they wondered about how to make dangerous work less dangerous
as communism is built from capitalism, compensation is the incentive that will be used while society also works on reducing the need for incentives by making dangerous work less dangerous or making it obsolete. A communist society will be one where the incentives are sufficient to get the work done without being so large that they create an upper class of rich people
I also should have said the richest among us under capitalism have never done dangerous work and that people who do dangerous work rarely become capital owners anyway.
There is nothing contradictory about people who do more difficult or dangerous getting special privileges (which is all extra salary really amounts to) under communism.
Sorry, I figured if people were asking questions that maybe they would have done some reading beforehand and gotten some contexts.
A communist society is an academic or theoretical concept, much like a capitalist society is. Every country in the world that has implemented capitalism has done it with different specific characteristics.
No one has yet made a communist country, only communist parties that set building communism as their goal.
It’s not about “trust me” or “have faith”. You can look at every country ever run by a communist party and the incentives for dangerous work have always been more salary. The incentive for more difficult or rarified work have always been more salary.
But that’s not that useful of an answer because obviously there has to be difference between capitalist and communist countries.
So I tried to explain how we think of it theoretically. Difficult and dangerous work has always existed as it has always been socially necessary. Solving for how this work gets done is the job of a society. It has been solved through collectivism (primitive society), physical violence (feudal and slave society), and wage slavery (capitalist society). Communism will solve it through collectivism, because that’s what it definitionally means, and so long as it’s solved through wage slavery or physical violence, it doesn’t meet the definition of communism.
No one knew what capitalism would look like before it emerged either. Capitalism in its current form took centuries to develop in fits and starts all over Europe. And while it tried to emerge, monarchs and feudal lords fought against it, hard and violently.
So when I say no one knows what communism looks like, I am not saying “trust me”. I’m saying it’s a problem to be solved through the process of building society. Just like there were new problems to be solved under capitalism that not only did people not understand but many problems emerged that people could never have predicted.
I mean, would you rather I say that in general communist incentives are specifically this? There’s no way to answer that question. Prior to the abolition of money, the incentive is money. If the society moves to vouchers, the incentive is vouchers. That’s why I said “compensation”.
I also said reduction in work volume and reduction in work risk.
That’s three specific incentives.
Did you want me to say “you can get a super soaker or a stuffie at the ticket counter”?
Which war? You have realtives that were alive and living in the USSR during WW2 and they tell you stories about their time there?
There have been no countries in the modern era that have made it communism. Every communist party in the world is starting from a non-communist starting point in a world where capitalism is the dominant economic form that shapes everything. Name any Communist country and you’ll be naming a country led by a Communist Party.
A communist party is a party that sets building communism as their goal. The process of building communism has never been complicated to date. The first experiment large scale experiment in building communism was the USSR. They lasted 70 years. Many would say they stopped even attempting to build communism around year 50 or 60.
Let me try this in levels.
Under the transitionary phase between capitalism and communism, there is still currency/money, there is still commodity production, there are still bank accounts. So, for things that society needs but people are less willing to do, the answer is compensation. Communist parties have always compensated people for their work, yes even prison laborers, and for the work that fewer people are qualified for or fewer people desire to do, that compensation is increased to create incentives.
When we reduce that to simplest form, the answer is incentives.
Before capitalism, people still did dangerous work and difficult work. They didn’t do it because they were going to get rich (they weren’t), they did it because the consequences of not doing it were dire.
In feudal and slave societies, this is because the consequences, though they might be social, we’re personalized by the oppression of lords and masters. Lords and masters beat, tortured, and killed serfs and slaves to incentivize them to do dangerous and difficult work.
But what about before those societies? In nomadic societies, people did difficult and dangerous work because it needed to be done, and the consequences of not doing it were felt by the whole tribe. People weren’t tortured and murdered to incentivize them to do the dangerous work. In fact, people got together and tried to make the dangerous work less dangerous.
Reducing those things down, we have an understanding of what “difficult and dangerous” work really is - socially necessary work.
We also understand how it can be solved without incentives - socially collaborative problem solving.
So, in the transition between capitalism and communism, we still incentives and we still have socially necessary work.
Why do we call it a transitionary period? What is happening to make a transition?
The transitionary period is the period of socially collaborative problem solving to make socially necessary work both less voluminous and less risky (which includes risk of harm as well as risk of understaffing and risk of knowledge loss). No one knows that communism looks like yet. But we know what contemporary experiments exist in reducing the volume and risk of socially necessary labor - robotics, real-time systems monitoring and feedback, new construction methods, new chemical science, new applications of physics, etc.
As it turns out, sedentary lifestyles are also incredibly dangerous and lead to huge numbers of premature deaths. So it’s unlikely that communism will go the same direction capitalism seems to go, with huge numbers of people sitting in office chairs or couches for decades on end.
Oh wow, that was an awesome clarification. Thank you! I see now that I was greatly confused by the analogy with the European concept of a fetish in foreign cultures, that such a thing was a set of beliefs held by a people. It did not click for me that commodity fetishization is not an analog to what the European’s believed foreign cultures believed about certain objects, but rather an analog to the role Europeans believed it to play in that society, specifically a material role, a causative role.
Thank you for that.
On the content front, I think there’s a debate to be had, but not now. I need to process and reread with this new focus. Thanks for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
Genuine question, have you read any of Capital?
Yes, but I definitely don’t fully understand it. You and I disagree on the meaning of this concept, and I’m keen to learn, but if it’s not too arrogant, I’d like to continue pushing my understanding and having you critique it so I can learn where my error in understanding is.
“Fetish”, in “commodity fetish” refers to the commodity appearing to have mystical properties, when in actuality it’s an inanimate object.
I always thought this was sort of a metaphorical or poetic way of describing the phenomenon. Like, what even is an example of a “mystical property” that would apply in the context of industrial modernity? I don’t think Marx was critiquing the phenomenon of people believing their kitchen knives were sharp because of their connection with the divine or that automobiles were able to heal your epilepsy if you just laid your head against the engine block.
But it appears animate; it appears to be capable of magical things
Again, this seems metaphorical. My understanding is that Marx’s analysis is that when individual commodities are fetishized he meant that people believe that commodities as commodities are capable of meeting the believer’s personal human needs, when in reality it is actually the human relationships that are meeting the needs through the application of labor on nature to produce that which is needed.
To reiterate, I’m presenting my understanding so you can critique it and help expose my incorrect understanding.
it also makes social relations between people appear as relations between things
I understood this not to be an also but rather a restatement of the same thing referred to by the magical/mystical framing.
the relation of domination between capitalist and worker appears as an exchange of commodities, a wage in exchange for labour-power
Yes, this I see and agree with. I believe it’s consistent with my understanding and does not represent a contradiction with my understanding. Although it’s interesting to see it framed this way and think “was Marx saying this as individual human relations or as class relations, or both?”
Clout-chasing is just clout-chasing, The desire to make money is because, well, we live in a capitalist society, and more money means you can get more stuff
Isn’t this mystical thinking? “Money means you can get more stuff” is ascribing a power to commodity (in this case money) that is actually a power inherent in the relationship between humans. Money is a perfect example of “a belief that the exchange values of goods are inherent to them” and an example of a pathway by which “social phenomena such as market value, wages and rent are reified”
Bringing it back to the video thing, content creators see what they produce as a commodity, a commodity collectively call “content”. If you’ve spent any time at all in the world of content, you know that the way people relate to the production and management of content has “absolutely no connection with the physical nature of the commodity and the material relations arising out of this” (to quote Marx).
And the OP’s post is a prime example. Communication is the fundamental reality when it comes to content. Humans communicate with each other. We’ve created ways to communicate across time and space. And instead of using it to communicate things that humans need or desire to communicate, content creators see content as a way to make money. As such, they subvert the original communication goals and produce lies, rage bait, or shallow attractors and then fill that content with “calls to action” to “like and subscribe” or spend their time trying to be part of other content to spread their “brand awareness” etc, etc, etc.
All of these things feel like the magical properties Marx is describing. All of these things reify the social phenomena of rent, intellectual property, advertising revenues, etc. And none of these things bear any resemblance to real human communication, which is the fundamental “what” that content actually is.
That’s my argument. And I feel like it’s pretty solid. But again, it’s easy for me to feel that way if I have a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept. If I thought cheese was anything that contained milk, and I poured milk on spaghetti, it still wouldn’t mac-n-cheese but I would be real confident it was. So, please don’t take my words to be a religious argument or something I hold strongly. I’m happy to abandon my whole argument if you can help me understand what I’m missing or what I’ve assumed that makes my thinking erroneous.
And if you do engage with this, thanks for your time and effort in helping me develop a clearer understanding.
Characteristics which had appeared mysterious because they were not explained on the basis of the relations of producers with each other were assigned to the natural essence of commodities. Just as the fetishist assigns characteristics to his fetish which do not grow out of its nature, so the bourgeois economist grasps the commodity as a sensual thing which possesses pretersensual properties.
So when OP says “fuck why are videos like this. Why can’t videos just be like that” what is happening?
Is it that OP is assigning characteristics to videos that are actually expressions of the relationship between the producers and consumers of those videos, and of the distributors and the advertisers etc?
As far as I can tell, people chasing clout for money is a human relationship, one of deprevation, desperation, and manipulation. And those relationships drive behaviors which result in the characteristics of commodities, like media.
I don’t know. Maybe I’ve misinterpreted Marx all this time. It’s certainly a topic I haven’t deeply wrestled with in concert with others. Happy to be corrected and learn.
And what observable effect does that have on the world that isn’t exactly what OP is describing?
It means turning everything into a commodity - every hobby, every human act, every creative endeavor, every way of life. The commodity form is fetishized and the drive to commodify everything is what OP is railing against.
Same outcome with a change in Congress