12-01-2020, 01:24 PM
(12-01-2020, 05:31 AM)Einzige Wrote:(12-01-2020, 04:29 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(11-26-2020, 02:25 AM)Einzige Wrote: Bureaucracies do not exist under socialism. Socialism is literally nothing more than the proletariat seizing society and operating it in its image. The bureau belongs to the age of abstract capitalist management, including Soviet and Maoist capitalism.
No true Scotsman fallacy. So you make the argument:
No true Scotsman likes jazz. But "Angus MacPherson just bought a large collection of jazz records. Oh. When you look closely into it, his mother is Russian. Oh, that explains it. Angus McPherson isn't really Scots, then".
You can't say that a system isn't socialist because it has oppression, bureaucracy, militarism, or some other objectionable feature.
...I didn't intend to disparage jazz.
It's not not socialist because it has oppression etc. It's not socialist because it has production for exchange, which bureaucracy implies.
Socialism has very little to do directly with moral abstractions like militarism, war, etc., though it ameliorates these. Socialism is the abolition of wage labor and production for exchange.
Then the "Great October Revolution" was simply an overthrow of a shaky democracy (the Russian provisional republic) and the replacement of a still-feudal political system with an economy still having feudal elements with a state serfdom. With this one makes the case for someone so blatantly pro-plutocracy as Friedrich Hayek. Maybe libertarianism and the Austrian school are themselves utopian, and maybe neither of them would work well. But Marxism-Leninism clearly failed for countries just beginning to industrialize that had big trouble feeding their people. I see no reason to believe that such would work any better here.
One can make the case that production for exchange is not so much a political reality that results from some ideology as it does from human nature. Prosperity depends upon the exchange of good for good, which is possible only when people can do good deeds or make good things. People can produce all the schlock possible, but most of us will not like it. The pointless bellowing of some drunk or lunatic doesn't make it to a bookstore, but poetry by Emily Dickinson and Carl Sandburg does. Figure that such a composer as Jean Sibelius left behind a mystery about an Eighth Symphony that has never made the concert hall because he thought it substandard. He destroyed it because he thought that it would detract from his reputation as a composer. Is it as awful as he thought? We will never know, although some interesting sketches survive. Many fine composers started projects that never went far into completion. It may be a catchy tune, but it doesn't fit some grand counterpoint that might work with something else. "Sketch first and paint second" applies to painters when canvas and paint were not cheap... OK, Bob Ross said at one time that when he made a mistake he typically turned it into a bird.
OK... infants up to a certain point are proud of their ability to produce two things: shit and urine. At some point they are toilet trained, and at that point they learn that a toilet is something at which to get rid of things that nobody values and in fact, about everyone over a certain age considers disgusting and even harmful. Somewhat later we find that our doodles and some of our writings are of no value to anyone else... and we cast those off in the knowledge that those are worthless.
We are at a time in which technology makes the production of good stuff as easy as the production of schlock. As an economic order advances technologically, which includes its productive capacities, quality becomes more important than quantity. I do not collect the wish-fulfillment novels (OK, this may be sexism on my part) in which a (usually) female author has as her plot "He bought me this, he bought me that, we went to some expensive lace where he lavished upon me a great time without concern for cost, and we had great sex"... for men it might be adventure novels in which the hero bayonets his way through Vietcong soldiers to rescue his innocent Vietnamese girlfriend for marriage, and she is of course a virgin... or some space drama in which one travels to Tau Ceti II with the aid of something that the late science-fiction author Robert Heinlein calls a double-talk drive to save the planet from an invasion. (OK, Star Trek is allegedly Wagon Train in space, and I am surprised that nobody has come up with Little House on the Prairie in space, which would probably take a woman to do).
One can live in a delusion of material wealth if one is a late-adapter, as one can use castoffs that one bought cheaply at Goodwill, Salvation Army, or the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. Obvious there is stuff not worth keeping because it is too unwieldy, like console 'entertainment packages' or because it is no longer usable, like pianos that can no longer be tuned. You would be surprised at how cheap compact discs and DVD's are now that they have flooded the market. For really unsalable stuff, just look at the vinyl records recorded for the GI generation back in the 1960's... Lawrence Welk, Montovani, Guy Lombardo... one can hardly give that away anymore because those are now pre-modern, and not very good, tastes.
Production of enough isn't adequate in itself.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
