My scenario is actually against your point because you're not considering the full capitalist lifecycle in your argument. Capitalist competition necessarily leads to capital consolidation and monopolies by its very nature. Meanwhile, capital owning class is very much in charge in every capitalist state. Capitalists own the media, pay for political campaigns, lobbying, and so on. Working class has no real representation in politics, and no holds no actual power. All people get to do is to once every few years decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class are to represent and repress them.
I'm not changing any topic here, I'm simply explaining why you're making a false equivalence. Meanwhile, there aren't many people following me around, there's literally three of you.
And the reason I call you out on following me around isn't because you disagree with my views, but because you make personal attacks and don't actually make any arguments of your own. You keep doing this psychoanalysis of me, telling me that I'm not confident, calling me a troll and so on. Nowhere do you say anything of substance.
If you want people to take you seriously then maybe consider making a reasoned argument instead of personal attacks. Just a thought.
haha plausible and same
I did, your link doesn't account for the fact that much of the emissions in places such as China are a consequence of production of commodities that are consumed in the west. What matters is where the products are consumed as opposed to where they're produced.
The reality is that US raising rates creates problems for countries like Argentina which makes repaying their foreign debt more expensive. In the end it, the drive for dedollarization is that it provides countries with a way out of the exploitative credit system US created via IMF and the dollar hegemony.
It's really on the nose when you think about it.
Clearly having too much money doesn't buy happiness, but having enough money to live comfortably does. It's also important to account for inflation and other cost of living increases when considering household income.
That roach is going to outlive us all.
Capitalism is not only the exploitation of the working class by individual capitalists. As Marx and Engels explained, as as Engels argued, ‘capitalist’ is a social role, not an individual one. You’re engaging in circular reasoning if you’re trying to say “it wasn’t capital accumulation because the state was not capitalist by definition”.
I'm not engaging in any circular thinking here. I'm simply stating that capital accumulation is the core aspect of capitalism, that's why it's called capitalism. Once again, the state does not accumulate capital. That's just something you made up and keep using as a straw man. The state directs the productive power towards producing material things people of the country use.
The drive towards industrialization in the USSR represented a state-led capital accumulation. Wages were quite low during this time. The fact that wages were set by state planners and not the market does not make them “not wages”, and the fact that their labor value was appropriated by the state instead of privately does not make them “not wages” either.
It did not, it produced infrastructure, housing, food, energy, and weapons that the people of USSR needed to live and defend themselves from the capitalist threat. Meanwhile, your argument regarding the wages is intellectually dishonest because it ignores all the things people got they didn't need to pay money for, and the fact that prices for things like food were fixed.
I’m aware that the USSR set prices and produced things according to production targets rather than market demand. This does not make it “not commodity production”. Even if we concede that people are happy with the wages they are paid or are okay with their exploitation at the moment does not make it “not wage labor”, “not exploitation” and thus "not capital accumulation - it’s the fact that wage labor exists at all.
People working to produce things that they all use collectively is not exploitation. Your whole argument here is fallacious. Nobody in USSR was exploiting the labour of the workers for personal benefit the way actual capitalism works. Labour was done in the collective interest.
You could make a coherent argument that organization of labour could have been better, or that there was lack of genuine workplace democracy. These could be sound and credible arguments drawing parallels between capitalist company structure and state owned enterprise in USSR. However, that's not the argument you're making.
More circular reasoning. You’re saying that there’s a dictatorship of the proletariat because there’s a dictatorship of the proletariat. Moreover, you keep conflating terms- you realize that the DoTP and socialism/ communism are not the same right?
I'm beginning to think that you don't understand what the term circular reasoning means. There was a dictatorship of the proletariat because the proletariat ran a communist revolution that was led by the communist party and took power. That's why there was a dictatorship of the proletariat.
The way this is framed is entirely wrong. The goal of socialism is not to build a worker’s nation-state. The proletarian state’s role, led by the vanguard party, is to directly suppress the bourgeoisie during the transition to communism globally. The dictatorship of the proletarian is not equivalent to communism/ socialism and the proletarian state does not take over the role of “managing” the state capital, as capital cannot be “tamed” like Stalinists think it can.
Once somebody demonstrates a better way to do thing we'll talk. The reality is that the approach that USSR followed actually created a better state of things than a capitalist society as imperfect as it was. This was a socialist state that was moving in the direction of communism. The goal of socialism is to create a transitional state that moves society from capitalist relations towards communist ones. This does not happen overnight.
This does not take place within the context of a nation-state. It happens internationally as the proletariat are at global war with the bourgeoisie.
This argument would make sense if there was a global socialist movement which does not actually exist. In absence of such a movement, creating a socialist state is obviously the next best option. If Europeans didn't shit the bed at the start of the 20th century and joined the communist movement, then what you're talking about may have been possible.
My argument is that Stalin’s theories are a gross departure from Marx’s theory and Lenin’s application it.
Unfortunately, your argument is not dialectical because it ignores the material realities that drove these departures. If USSR failed to rapidly industrialize under Stalin, the most likely outcome would've been that nazis Germany would've taken it apart and ushered in global fascism before US finally managed to do it.
You're presenting a position that ignores the material realities in favor of idealism. Lenin directly addresses this style of argument in “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder
What we see in China today is not fundamentally different from NEP which Lenin realized was necessary for largely the same reasons. It's very easy to argue and criticize things in the abstract, it's much harder to actually implement these things while under duress from global capitalism.
Lots of reasons, starting with the fact that US uses far more energy per capita than most countries. US also imposes its economic system upon the world that necessitates constant growth an consumption. US arguably being the wealthiest country in the word is also in a better position than most countries to actually do something about the problem.
Compare this with China which has an actual plan to transition off fossil fuels that it's actively implementing. China now leads the world in both nuclear and renewables by a huge margin, and continues to implement clean energy solutions at scale. If China is able to do this, then why is US isn't puling its weight?
Yeah, it's always the same handful of tropes that have been debunked to death. It's honestly exhausting. If only these people spent even a fraction of time actually educating themselves on the subjects they attempt to debate.
You're either missing or intentionally ignoring my point which is the purpose of labour. The purpose of labour under capitalism is to create wealth for the capital owning class. The purpose of labour in a socialist system such as USSR is to create value for society. What you're talking about is the organization of labour, which I completely agree can be done better than what USSR did. However, that's an entirely separate point of discussion.
It's kind of amusing that you can't even acknowledge that Marxist theory continues to evolve over time and new terminology is added. Workplace democracy typically refers to cooperative ownership of the enterprise where the workers have a democratic say over administrative functions of the business, get to elect leaders in the workplace, and have power of recall. USSR practised aspects of this, but still suffered from worker alienation.
That's a rather superficial and frankly ahistorical interpretation of events. USSR certainly was not destined to collapse, and many alternative paths were clearly possible. Claiming that USSR was not a dictatorship of the proletariat is also demonstrably absurd.
That's a completely baseless assertion I'm afraid. A state such as USSR can absolutely transition past capitalist relations, and it was very much happening in USSR until the counterrevolution was allowed to happen under Gorbachev.
Again, I fundamentally disagree with your assertion that USSR wasn't socialist, or that there was no path towards communism in USSR. While other interpretations of Marx, Engels, and Lenin are certainly valid, the interpretation USSR had was sound given the conditions USSR existed under.
I mean Lenin literally created the NEP, and he was clearly pragmatic enough to realize what compromises needed to be made. So far, the only tangible critique of USSR I can discern in your argument is that your disagree with the use of state owned enterprise as the mode of organizing labour. Perhaps you can articulate your critique more clearly.
This is the point I made earlier, since the conditions for a world revolution did not exist, the next best thing that could be done was to build a socialist state in form of USSR. This is what Parenti referred to as Siege Socialism. The fact of the matter is that Lenin and Marx turned out to be overly optimistic. It turns out that capitalism is much more resilient than people expected, and overthrowing it globally is a very difficult task. Creating bulwarks against capitalism is an important step towards that.