Election 2020

[pbrower2a]

(11-17-2020, 03:18 PM)Einzige Wrote:

(11-17-2020, 02:55 PM)pbrower2a Wrote:

(11-17-2020, 02:15 PM)Einzige Wrote: As an actual Marxist, I see very little difference between the platforms of the Democratic Party and the Republicans. Both are ultra-capitalist, ultranationalist parties of the bourgeois and their bootlickers among the privileged sectors of the working class (the"middle-class", whose own relationship to the means of production is identical to the lowliest Third World laborer). Bill Clinton created the Imigration And Customs Enforcement agency weaponized by Trump with the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996; Barack Obama was the Deporter-in-Chief. These parties are structurally and functionally identical.

As a practical matter, I reject the concept of proletarian revolution because it has never worked well. The dictatorial regimes that replace the predecessors (exclusion: Nazi Germany) prove just as dictatorial and despotic as the nasty regimes that they replaces.

Yes, Communism will be totalitarian - just as capitalism is today. You cannot exist outside of capitalist relations today; there is no way to achieve independence from money relations, no matter how skilled the individual may be (even survivalists must buy their land, pay property taxes, buy tools, etc, all to encourage them to remain in the system.). Capitalism as a mode of production is all-encompassing now. So Communism will be also.

Only if you confuse "totalitarian" with "inhuman" or "anti-human". A capitalist system with a leader at all dictatorial (as in Pinochet or Trump) will be inhuman to the extent that it holds that that those who own and administer the assets have no responsibility to the common man, but instead that the common man knows no restraints on the responsibility to the economic elites.  Pinochet is often suggested as an exemplar of market forces but he was the head of an order of extreme concentration of wealth and economic power. He destroyed democracy and stifled freedom of expression to protect the elites from all challenge. Trump is more neurotic and less organized, and the American economy has a larger small-business sector.
 

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Quote:Marxist socialism is simply the imposition of state ownership of the productive capital, and that proves simply a newfangled form of feudalism.

Wrong. Read Engels' Socialism: Utopian & Scientific Chapter III:

Quote:If the crises demonstrate the incapacity of the bourgeoisie for managing any longer modern productive forces, the transformation of the great establishments for production and distribution into joint-stock companies, trusts, and State property, show how unnecessary the bourgeoisie are for that purpose. All the social functions of the capitalist has no further social function than that of pocketing dividends, tearing off coupons, and gambling on the Stock Exchange, where the different capitalists despoil one another of their capital. At first, the capitalistic mode of production forces out the workers. Now, it forces out the capitalists, and reduces them, just as it reduced the workers, to the ranks of the surplus-population, although not immediately into those of the industrial reserve army.

But, the transformation — either into joint-stock companies and trusts, or into State-ownership — does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies and trusts, this is obvious. And the modern State, again, is only the organization that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine — the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is, rather, brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State-ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.

So what happened in the Soviet Union? It simply passed from feudalism into State capitalism, as even Lenin recognized.  Per The Tax In Kind.

Quote:While the revolution in Germany is still slow in “coming forth”, our task is to study the state capitalism of the Germans, to spare no effort in copying it and not shrink from adopting dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of Western culture by barbarian Russia, without hesitating to use barbarous methods in fighting barbarism. If there are anarchists and Left Soeialist-Revolutionaries (I recall offhand the speeches of Karelin and Ghe at the meeting of the Central Executive Committee) who indulge in Karelin-like reflections and say that it is unbecoming for us revolutionaries to “take lessons” from German imperialism, there is only one thing we can say in reply: the revolution that took these people seriously would perish irrevocably (and deservedly).

At present petty-bourgeois capitalism prevails in Russia, and it is one and the same road that leads from it to both large-scale state capitalism and to socialism, through one and the same intermediary station called “national accounting and control of production and distribution”.

Marxism-Leninism is already obsolete. The capitalists do not have a death wish, and they will do what they can to make a proletarian revolution impossible and even intellectually absurd. Capitalists do not need to be particularly humane to decide that hunger and homelessness are calls for revolution: better a welfare state. Capitalists generally have found that a consumer society is a better idea than a command society that serves only the interests of the owners and administrators. Engels as an authority? Contemporary mathematicians remain in awe of Euler and Gauss, but they don't look to the writings of those great geniuses for the mathematical questions of the day.    

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Quote:Markets are much more rational than is central planning because markets take the human part out of decision-making of what gets made and what gets offered. The human part in central planning is often simply foolishness, making a surfeit of what is obsolete or substandard because such is easier than responding to consumer demand.

There is no central planning under socialism. There is social planning, in which the whole of society directs production for the whole of society, unmediated by bureaucracies or markets.

Markets decide that obsolete technologies such as mainframe computers, pre-recorded VHS tapes, Windows 7 and earlier PC's, and CRT televisions are no longer made for mass consumption. We are beginning to see this even with dead-tree editions of books. Just go to Goodwill or Salvation Army stores to see what people used to cherish but don't now. (OK, one qualification: the thrift shops don't want obsolete TV's and computers). 

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Quote:"Socialist" economies have proved backward in technological innovation (think of the old East German version of 'high tech') except in military equipment (the Drug Enforcement Agency bought some MIGs for surveillance aircraft, and after overthrowing Saddam Hussein the US bought plenty of AK-47's of Soviet design for the new Iraq).

There has never been a socialist economy.

More later.

Definitional dodge.