I’ve seen this episode, at first after the revolution there’s three full plates of food. The party is doing well in power, then they consolidate power, the food portions get smaller as party elites get richer and more powerful.
Eventually it’s just three plastic replicas of food, as they acknowledge everyone eats differently. Eventually it’s just a badge or picture of the plates of food. By that time class based Capitalism has been restarted by the new party oligarchs, they even have more control and oversight than the current Capitalists.
What I mean is, you can’t “should” us to a new and better system. You have to fully understand the current one, its weaknesses and strengths and the minds/views/motivations of every class and type in it before you can come up with something that is entirely and peacefully transition motivated, and has a better option to transition to… What’s more the whole journey has to appeal to human nature and satisfy some if not all those needs… Even if you don’t personally share all those needs… And you have to be realistic about such.
Rules for Rulers comes as close as I’ve seen on this:
Or, you know, we could spend slightly more on existing food programs and relax eligibility requirements…
We don’t have to put Stalin in charge to better fund SNAP or free school lunches
Cool, glad it got resolved so simply and neatly, good job everyone! 👍
P.S remember when the Black Panthers had to enforce the right to have a free breakfast program, by patrolling the streets with guns? They we’re Maoist by the way (Maoism dictates using the community to set up community services). Glad things are so much simpler now. Operating on kind comments, thoughts and prayers 🙏
I don’t understand why, when confronted with the idea that we should eliminate hunger, you equated that with communist revolution
Cooking Mama has an ideal outcome - Great
Cooking Mama’s idea of getting there was whatever the fuck the USSR was doing… - Not Great
Just Tax the rich while maintaining a strong democracy, it’s not hard.
you don’t get to communism through “social democracy” XD
any concessions given by the rich in bourgeois “democracies” are funded by outsourcing some of the exploitation to the imperial periphery/global south
You definitely don’t get to a public owned means of production and redistribution of goods through Autocracy for vwry obvious reasons.
The rich need not make concessions when the poor can help write the laws.
1st of all, great whataboutism 👍
but I will indulge you:
Autocracy?! That’s not what that word means. Tsarism was autocracy, Chiang Kai-shek was basically an autocrat.
What you are talking about is a revisionist degenerated workers state (or bourgeois state of a new type in the case of contemporary China) in which the bureaucracy grew too strong to a quasi caste-like status above the rest of the population. There were attempts to correct this in both the USSR (workers/left/united opposition) and in the PRC (Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution) but both were crushed
So it’s definitely smth we should learn from, to not repeat those mistakes. But that does not mean turning to the snake oil that is social democracy/democratic socialism which believe that somehow we can magically convince the ruling classes of systemic change and that they will give up power voluntarily. (And even if you manage somehow to wrestle significant concessions, they will either be rolled back after 30yrs or you’ll get the bullet in a fascist coup)
EDIT: Even under bureaucratic state socialism, there still was collective rule. Yes cults of personality were established around key figures (e.g. Stalin and Mao) but you can look up CIA documents where they dismiss that Stalin had abolished collective leadership (though ofc he still was the figurehead of the bureaucracy and the dominant force). Mao had an even stronger cult of personality, but a far “weaker” position than Stalin and the leadership was far more collective (just an fyi: this is why Mao called for a cultural revolution, which was a grassroots movement btw. The capitalist roaders (party bureaucrats who wanted to get back to capitalism but keep their privileged party posts) where gaining more and more power and he was not in a dictatorial position to stop them at will. So he had to organize a mass students and youth movement. Ofc there were excesses and errors there as well)
And despite the corrupt character AES brought forth massive progress in all fields of society. Free education up to university for everyone who didn’t slack at school. Millions of emancipated people learned to read for the first time ever. Massive scientific progress. Access to culture for millions. Making things like theatre, operas, ballet, cinema and chess accessible (and affordable !) for the masses. Making sure everyone had a place to work, sleep, smth to eat and clean water. Giving women the right to work, vote, choose whom or even if to marry, to go through life unveiled and just generally choose their own lives.(but this is one of the errors again. Patriarchal social structures were still kept and social conservatism took hold, which is why women rarely if ever had the rly high positions and were barred from the military f.e.) Making sure every child had a place at a crib or kindergarten. Making good quality healthcare accessible to all free of charge. Including vaccinating even the furthest regions, that had never even seen a doctor before.
This might not seem all that impressive to the priviliged liberal, but you have to look at the state the regions where in before: semi-feudalism at best (and/or bombed into the 3rd world after WW2)
Ofc there were excesses and mistakes, as already stated. But that does not negate their achievements.
TL;DR: dismissing state socialism as “something that didn’t work for the people” is disingenuous and disregards the fact that it did work and that, despite its flaws, it worked for hundreds of millions of people. We should not demonize previous socialist experiments, neither should we glorify them, but constructively learn from their mistakes when striving for a class-, state-, and moneyless society (aka communism, which is materially possible in todays world and not an idealist utopia, but a historic necessity if humanity is to progress as a species and not devolve into barbarism/fascism)
good short clips of Parenti talking if anyone’s interested (he put it rly well imo)
https://youtu.be/JSpVB_XXXBQ?si=NdbBBRJfhglQo1ez
https://youtu.be/npkeecCErQc?si=oAh8jj_WYCAtoUKB
https://youtu.be/BeVs6t3vdjQ?si=1obub_-e-vLi9ubG
and also a rly good Parentiwave edit https://youtu.be/3-PHYj1vb-w?si=0WTNxg43xIAdnFck
The core issue is that it actually is impossible to maintain full democracy under capitalism. Even under perfect direct democracy with no lobbies and full representation those with the means to promote their voice louder will do so.
And if you have big money (which some will, because the more money you already have, the easier it becomes to hoard even more), you can fund projects that will have to promote you in return, skewing the voting process.
In reality though, political lobbying, corruption, etc. are omnipresent, and extremely hard to combat, because it’s in the logic of capitalism to accumulate wealth at all costs, legal or otherwise.
Now, I’m not saying socialist societies are totally devoid of corruption and self-interest, but they at least have mechanisms in place to curb it.
Capitalism is not aimed at increasing people’s wellbeing, it’s aimed at pursuing profit, and people’s wellbeing is fundamentally secondary. If putting people in worse conditions increases profits, this will eventually be done. Socialism, on the other hand, declares people’s equality and wellbeing as the core priorities. Resources should be spent in a way that benefits most people.
The system which produces mega yachts also has the best record for feeding people.
The hammer and sickle on the chalkboard there is a flag under which tens of millions of people starved in the last century.
CIA document
considering most of the world is capitalist and a lot of the world live with food scarcity i don’t think capitalism is doing very well.
Well then explain to me why the biggest capitalist system in the world, the USA, can feed the vast majority of people in their borders. No one here lives with food scarcity… right? Surely they don’t throw a ton of food away either. And homelessness shouldn’t be an issue either with this incredible system. Right?
Does this also apply to say, smartphones?
Weird gotcha. What is this the early 2000s when smartphones were rich people toys?
Globally, they still are. Almost half the world doesn’t have one. And children still lose their limbs mining the cobalt etc.
I guess the question could be better phrased as “and what are you personally giving up to ensure that as many people as possible are fed?”
Yea I assumed that your main point was some kind of sacrifice, not the smartphones themselves. If it weren’t for the smartphones you’d be phrasing your gotcha around TVs, or washing machines, or fridges, or indoor plumbing. I’ve seen this very conservative argument before.
Progressivism and leftism aren’t some kind of ascetic christianity and nobody needs a morality preacher. Social progress is not about individual morality. And it’s not a zero sum game either.
There is enough food production and wealth in the world to eliminate hunger and extreme poverty already. I could be a selfish asshole not willing to part with my sneaker collection and that would still be the case.
Maybe there is a future where carrying around a smartphone isn’t necessary because we’ve rebuilt human connection in communities. The damn things are addictive misery machines under capitalism anyway. But that’s very different from going around wagging the finger at people that say “we could feed the hungry”.
However also, for many many people smartphones are their only way to access the internet, and it’s the primary device for computing in poorer nations I believe
If there’s one “essential” electronic device these days, it’s the smartphone.
Somehow, all these pleas on behalf of the downtrodden never include us actually making any sacrifices or change, just the rich.
Weird how it’s easy to agitate for change when it involves zero sacrifice on your part.
That’s bullshit. Same argument corporations try to push on us about climate change. Fish rots from the head down. Obviously there will be sacrifices we have to make. But to preach “what will YOU be giving up, huh??” when megacorps and gazillionaires hoard literal mountains of wealth to the detriment of the planet and all others while they purposely stand in the way of any progress or change that might affect their bottom line? Bootlicking at worst, misguided liberal soapbox bullshit at best.
Ok… if i give up my phone, i feed a family for a week. If bezo gives up a yacht, he feeds 1,000 familes for life. See the problem here?
This probably does apply to smart phones, TV, consumer computers. Its hard to look at socialism and answer the question of what would it look like but at a guess: planned obsolescence would be out the window. No one is upgrading to an ai powered refrigerator because their old one is broke. No one is buying the newest smart phone because they’re older model died(Hyperbole), Yet we live in a system of yearly releases of similar tech that we mindlessly consume. This consumption is a by product of the capitalist system. Purely manufactured to make money.
So in my imagined full communist world. We have phone. Phones that last longer, they are geared to be easily upgraded, dissembleable and actually future proofed unlike what we have now.
You think that there aren’t people who might need a Smartphone for work or medical emergencies? That is a non-zero number, so no. However should we have everyone’s base needs met before others get past a certain point before luxury goods? Yes. Should we be able to do that now AND have luxury goods? Also Yes. Is it alright for people to have a Billion Dollars before that? Definitely No.
People can have mega yachts precisely because others don’t get 3 meals a day. That’s how the system is designed to work.
Not because the capital spared from denied meals (or production thereof) are going directly towards yachts, but because the capitalist mode of production requires the threat of starvation to force us into unfavourable compensation for our labour.
Really, we could easily do both at this point (and more), but since greed knows no limits, there is also no limit to what pain the capitalist class will impose on us in order to extract surplus value.
We already produce enough food for a billion more people than what exists, but still around a billion live in starvation to deter the rest of us.
