Comment on Why do companies always need to grow?
hansolo@lemmy.today 2 weeks agowhat ideas exactly?
Well, let’s take 3 non-standard examples:
Yugoslavia nationalised industry and introduced worker self‑management after it broke away from Stalin and the USSR. Loads of collaboration with post-colonial Non-aligned Movement African nations that wanted to dabble in socialism but didn’t have a popular movement or resources or planning to back it. Taking refugee in capitalism, like China recently started to do as well, is what let thinks work for a time. Tito, however, was the only thing that held the county together, and once he was gone, the whole place collapsed slowly over a decade. There was no evidence that the “best” socialism in the region (best, as in least totally shit) was worth keeping on its own or valuable enough to try and keep.
Albania imposed strict state ownership, collectivised agriculture (the gulags are basically Woofing, yaay!), and a hard‑line Stalinist-style paranoia-fueled regime. It assigned jobs; no one not official given the job of “driver” by the state could operate a vehicle. And it fucking shows still to this day. Hoxha held the county together with fear alone because nothing of socialism was worth keeping on its own, or valuable enough to the average person to keep.
Bulgaria did a decent job replicating Soviet central planning, collectivisation, and political control. It all sucked and the Yugoslavs loved to leverage economic disparity over them because it was so fucking bleak in Bulgaria for theor entire stint as socialists. Which is part of why Bulgaria is shitting on their neighbors now about EU accession, they finally have the advantage and a grudge that survived 40 years because of socialists caused economic disparity. They happily joined the EU a generation after realizing that nothing of socialism was worth keeping on its own, or valuable enough to the average person to keep. But they have decent freeways now.
Despite three very different attempts to try socialism as a means to the end of communism, only Belgrade and it’s immediate suburbs really had a decent quality of life. Everyone else had a well-documented traumatizingly bad time.
And while I’ll happily admit that I haven’t needed a more than cursory remembrance of Marx since 2002, that literally billions of people have proven time and again that Marx’s ideas are pure fantasy, and that 19th century ideals about economies that have just stated industrialization are not needed in the 20th century any more than Adam Smith has been relevant once advertising manipulated simple supply and demand, because humans are not rational actors.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
You said Marx’s ideas have been tested and I asked for those ideas, not about which countries tried to adopt a certain style of socialism.
Yugoslavia paved its own way with Titoism which Leninists would probably go as far as to not even call socialism. If you’re going to call it an example of Marxism failing you need to be more specific on which Marxist idea failed because Tito also rejected quite a lot of Marxists ideas.
As for Albania and Bulgaria both of them followed Leninism, Albania in particular went so deep with Leninism they started calling Krushchev a revisionist. Leninism does takes ideas from Marxism but the vanguard party idea makes it also very different from what Marx had talked about. I personally view Leninism as something not representative of Marx’s vision of the future and instead a derivation of Marxists ideas. So once again, you need to more specific on what Marx’s ideas failed.
If I’m going to make the arguments for you then you could say central planning is a failed idea because the USSR showed how easy it is to misallocate resources and the top-down bureaucracy leads to an inflexible economy. And in case it’s not clear I would 100% agree that a planned economy is not a good idea.
hansolo@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
All I see here is whining about “uh, guys, no one did it perfectly right 100% the first time, so it doesnt count.” Like what a child says when playing a game.
Like how all y’all didn’t vote for the nice Black lady because of not being perfect enough to your peivledged liking on Gaza, then seem to not able to connect your actions to the repercussions which are what that one douche is enabling in Gaza.
Sorry, but it’s just a bunch of tankie apologist BS, and a perfect example of why no one takes full communism or socialism seriously in any country that isn’t already a single party state, corrupt to the maximal extent possible and unable to waiver from the party line. The Communist Manifesto might as well be some conceptual only scifi fictional government document, like the Star Trek reference to the Fundamental Declarations of the Martian Colonies or the United Federation of Planets Constition. Plot devices for the individual, wholly useless to society as a whole.
Which also does a huge disservice to anyone pushing for a blended system that is known to work well in limited circumstances.
Goodeye8@piefed.social 2 weeks ago
You’re playing a disingenuous game from the start. You talked shit about Marx without knowing anything about Marx. Now you’re talking shit about Socialism in the context of it not working once when you have examples of capitalism not working either. The US is currently bailing out Argentina after their capitalist endeavors failed. I don’t see you calling capitalism a failure.
First of all this is going to come to you as a shocker but not everyone is American. And as a non-American I told Americans they should still vote for Kamala and then focus on fixing their political landscape (including telling Israel to fuck off) because if Trump gets re-elected there won’t be anything left to fix.
I’m not a tankie you moron. I’m well aware of the issues socialism has ran into in the past and I’m not going to defend that. Yet I’m still a socialist because you’d need to have your head pretty far up your ass to not see how capitalism has ran its course.
You’re doing a disservice by defending capitalism.
hansolo@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
OK, I will absolutely apologize for assuming you were American. I try not to creep on people’s post history unless necessary, and didn’t double check. That’s on me, and I’m genuinely sorry for that.
Though, I’m not defending capitalism, other then to try and find the minimal threshold necessary to fulfill it in the original comment. I respect you sticking to whatever politicial or economic stance you want, and I was being a dick yesterday and I’ll blame wine and sun for that. Mostly wine.
As a sorta-kinda economist, the point on which I have settled from seeing a lot of people on several continents live their lives, is that communal living and resource allocation is suitable for emergencies and basic survival in small and rudimentary settings. That is well documented in the anthropological record.
Beyond that, humans have a tendency towards transactionalism, often somewhat incorrectly termed capitalism, because transactions don’t require saving money for capital to be used later. There’s a great book called African Friends and Money Matters that is a frustrating look at a Westerner in Senegal trying to explain how the fundamentals of resource application work. It summarizes perfectly how most of African village level communities work, and I hope fascinating to someone who wants to start from a point of communal resource allocation.
But, my personal opinion is that we grow from that point outward to transactions while luxuriated and well-resourced, and capitalism past that in habitual abundance. So Marx proposing such limitation and hemming people in to a command economy seems counterintuitive simply from the perspective of trying to get people to participate willingly.
That’s not a defense of capitalism, but simply pointing to where it naturally crops up. I can’t abide Marx, so if there’s a third option other then radical agrarian anarcho-syndicate communes and basic cooperatives, that has seen success, I would be interested to hear it. But those, much like Yugoslavia, are also very personality dependent and so not likely to last longer than 60-80 years or so.