Curious about how this goes but not masochistic enough to enable comment notifications...
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And how is capitalism working? We never want to talk about the needless wars, deaths, dictators, and literal slavery sanctioned by capitalism. Capitalism has been the dominant system for some time now: it has had every opportunity to reform itself into a fair and equitable system. Instead it exploits the global south, prioritizes profits over people, and puts a paywall on necessities that we now mass produce-- forcing the working class to generate more profits for the wealthy. It is a barbaric, corrupt, hypocritical system that forces us to sell ourselves, by the year or by the hour.
This feels like a post hoc fallacy. Capitalism is not the cause of those things, societies that organize into dominance hierarchies, regardless of economic organization, cause those things. Slavery, wars, dictators, barbarism, deaths, corruption, and hypocritical systems were present before and in absence of capitalism. The Soviet Union formed into a dominance hierarchy (bureaucrat class instead of capitalist class), and inevitably displayed the same attributes.
No, it is not a post hoc fallacy. The claim is not simply that death and dictators occurred after capitalism rose to dominance. The claim is that the economic incentive of infinite profit explains why these events happened. Specific wars were fought in to protect the interests of multinational corporations; the CIA installed dictators (e.g., South America, Africa), in order to stop the spread of socialism; there are slave laborers mining minerals in the Congo so that Tim Cook can make another billion.
If you want to get philosophical, perhaps we could agree that it is a category error to say that an economic system of commodity production caused death and dictators in the technical sense of causation. It would be better to say that these events find their ground or explanation in the incentives of capitalism. But I doubt most people care about this distinction.
The incentive is that resources are lootable, that doesn’t change by swapping out one ideology for another. We can point to the post-WWII eastern bloc, Cuba, and Afghanistan as examples of USSR installing dictators. Ideologies tend to be too myopic in their understanding of reality, all systems have a tendency to form into dominance hierarchies, that’s the core issue. Fortunately, all systems decay over time and after collapse there is a period of time where a decentralized, democratic system can exist for a period of time.
I won't brush away the missteps and abuses of certain leaders. We must, however, place these injustices in their proper context.
Socialist countries faced opposition from the most economically and politically powerful nation in the history of the Earth. Given the successes that socialist economies did achieve -- in providing healthcare, housing, transportation, food, jobs, etc. -- can you imagine how much more successful they could have been had the United States helped instead of destabilized them at every turn? But the US could not peacefully allow us to develop socialist production of goods for direct consumption. This economic model is a direct threat to the capitalist's appropriation of profits.
I hope you're right, but time will tell.
I think Castro was incredibly popular in Cuba from the beginning. They were not forced into communism.
So if we argue against hierarchies, we're still arguing against capitalism and still arguing for communism, just more of an anarchocommunism. Communism isn't just the countries that tried, just like capitalism isn't just the usa
No, because it would form into a dominance hierarchy. It’s the iron law of oligarchy, and communism does not have any mechanisms to prevent its formation. Unless humans evolve beyond their own nature, “anarchocommunism” is not in the realm of possibility.
Oh you're right, I have total faith in the "iron law" created by someone who went on to join Italy's National Fascist Party
That would be a genetic fallacy if you are basing validity on origin instead of content. Would you prefer the social dominance theory? It’s broader in scale but still explains the inevitability of hierarchy and concentration of power.
Yes you know all your vocab words. These are just philosophical theories that have plenty of detractors. They aren't true just by virtue of their existence. And I think the political party of the source is relevant when it's a political theory. It says a lot about the conclusions that theory leads to, and when it leads to fascist Italy then clearly something went wrong
We aren’t talking normative philosophy or metaphysics. The iron law and SDT are based on observable phenomena supported by empirical evidence. I’m not going to accept an Agrippa trilemma argument where nothing can be proven absolutely true. I understand these concepts about hierarchy may be uncomfortable to one’s ideological fantasy, but it’s not productive to minimize these things because they are uncomfortable.
Just because I don't think those theories are true doesn't mean I think they couldn't be proven true. Anarchism is also a political theory based on observable phenomena supported by empirical evidence. It is very contradictory to the theories you bring up which means they can't all be true, even though they're all published theories. We could do a big experiment to figure it out though. We'd just need to first get to a communist society, then we can see if it can sustain itself or if hierarchies naturally dominate without outside influence. I'm willing to be proven wrong, are you?
Anarchism is not feasible on a large scale, most places in the world will tend towards hierarchy. There are certain necessary conditions for Anarchism to be sustainable long-term, such as the Zomia region in SE Asia due to geography. That’s assuming these tribes are non-hierarchical, I haven’t looked that far into it.
stateless societies like "Zomia" have successfully repelled states using location, specific production methods, and cultural resistance to states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asian_Massif#Zomia
So it's working, because of that area's natural resistance to outside influence. Sounds like our experiment is going to be very enlightening
C’est quoi cette niaiserie? The exception does not make the rule. If you can’t accept human tendency to form hierarchies, it leads to fatal errors if attempting to create an egalitarian society. Can the majority of people live in isolated, mountainous regions living under pre-agrarian civilization conditions? No. It’s only possible small-scale under specific conditions, and even that region is slowly transforming into hierarchical structures on the fringes because of cultural transmission with the outside world.
Zomia is the biggest remaining area of earth whose inhabitants have not been completely absorbed by nation-states, although that time is coming to an end.
https://www.zomiacollective.com/zomia
This feels like circular logic. There's an innate tendency that humans can't possibly avoid because stateless society is impossible on a large scale, and communism is impossible because of humanities fundamental need for hierarchies.
That's the first time I've ever seen a "law" called an "iron law", which is kind of wild for a law of political science. Kinda like they had insufficient evidence and had to resort to PR instead, like "look, it's an iron law, you have to believe it".
The USSR had plenty of issues, but they most certainly did not display the same attributes as capitalism.