Stop playing along is a part (!) of the the becoming ungovernable indeed. It involves a lot of flexible asymmetric tactics that can not be found in a 150 year old book.
Any 150 year old book that gives ideas or at least an outline of how to overthrow the ruling class, is more valuable in my opinion than your meme, or your response that you can’t elaborate on how to reach that goal.
I’m very thankful that I grew up in USSR, and it was a stunning success while it was around. The fact that it ultimately fell does not negate all of its achievements while it existed.
Russia went from a backwards agrarian society where people traveled by horse and carriage to being the first in space in the span of 40 years. Russia showed incredible growth after the revolution that surpassed the rest of the world:
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960’s, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 period while having better nutrition:
In 1987, people in the USSR could retire with pension at 55 (female) and 60 (male) while receiving 50% of their wages at a at minimum. Meanwhile, in USA the average retirement age was 62-67 and the average (not median) retiree household in the USA could expect $48k/yr which comes out to 65% of the 74k average (not median) household income in 2016:
The Soviet Union had the highest physician/patient ratio in the world. USSR had 42 doctors per 10,000 population compared to 24 in Denmark and Sweden, and 19 in US:
Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth that made the achievements listed above possilbe:
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
I am no socialist, but I am surprised to agree that the Soviet Union actually did something positive. Literacy did rise to 99% from some low number. That is to their credit.
Nice copypasta… but yeah a lot of hard working people tried their best to make the USSR work, just for the vanguard party to gamble it all away after turning the USSR into a petro-state in the 1970ties and failing to push through the later reforms when it all came tumbling down on them during the 1980ties with falling raw-material prices.
The implication that MLs aren’t learning from mistakes of USSR, of which there were plenty, is just projection on your part given that you cling to a 150 year old dogma that has been clearly demonstrated to be impotent in driving any real change.
If you had even a shred of intellectual honesty then you’d be able to acknowledge that USSR had plenty of amazing achievements while also being imperfect. China, Cuba, and Vietnam have learned from the mistakes of USSR and will do better going forward. Meanwhile, anarchists will continue letting their countries slide into fascism precisely.
Being ungovernable together is just a euphemism for being disorganized. Meanwhile, the state that has the monopoly on violence is highly organized. Anarchists might want to ponder why militaries aren’t federalist efforts, but I guess that takes a level of introspection that would no longer make one an anarchist.
It’s not so much that the state has a monopoly on violence. It’s that for it to not have a monopoly on violence, it would mean that non-state actors would have to choose to do violence.
That’s not an easy choice to make, is it? History is filled with accounts of crazies who chose violence but who chose it because they like the idea of violence more than for any other reason… and they ended up monsters. It’s admirable that people would not want to become that.
When is violence justified? Against whom? How can you safeguard things so that the even initially justifiable violence doesn’t go too far, spin out of control? More importantly, possibly, is what you do after your violence succeeds… you’ve built up this paramilitary force to perform the violence, they’ve won, and now they’re de facto in charge. You end up with goons running the show, because you needed goons to beat the other guy. You might be a goon yourself. That’s nearly always bad. You almost need some separate organization afterward, of civilians, to take over. How do you keep it separate during the struggle?
It might be more accurate to say that the state doesn’t so much have a monopoly on violence as that it’s just the only group out there sociopathic enough to want to use it.
There are never any guarantees in life, however that’s hardly an argument against fighting injustice. What we do see is that socialist states do a far better job meeting the needs of the majority than capitalist ones. Such states can have many problems, but they’re an undeniable improvement over capitalism.
The default state of things in the west is that monopoly on violence is in the hands of capitalists, and it’s currently being used to subjugate the rest of the population to the will of capitalists.
The trouble is that I’m not a “majority” I am a person. More to the point, I am a person who is more used to not being in the majority than I am in it. “Good for the majority” in many cases has often left me out.
It isn’t in my interest to pursue strategies that are good for the majority. There are others like me.
Such states can have many problems, but they’re an undeniable improvement over capitalism.
That’s not clear at all. Let’s go with the “at least communism fed everyone”. In the United States, literally no one starves who isn’t anorexic or similarly mentally ill. Homeless people are fat.
We can talk about other metrics too (spaces races and whatnot), but capitalism seems to at least keep up with communism in those regards without some really absurd double standards.
The default state of things in the west is that monopoly on violence is in the hands of capitalists, and it’s currently being used to subjugate the rest of the population to the will of capitalists.
Which of course never happened in the Soviet Union or Cuba, or any of the the other places?
Look, I’m not even you’re opponent here. There is a profound philosophical question here, one that if anyone actually bothers to attempt to solve it, the sort of violence you think is a solution might actually become possible.
More to the point, not just possible, but justifiable. Like, provably so. Even to people like myself who don’t conform to your ideology.
Wouldn’t it be great if, for instance, we could look at some event somewhere in the world, apply the rules, and say “in situations like this where x and y are occurring, and where z does not occur, that violence was justified”? We have those rules mostly worked out for individual scenarios. We know what self-defense looks like.
We don’t have those rules worked out for group/collective scenarios. And until we do, it will always be anxiety-inducing to contemplate the violence, and politically dangerous to even talk about it (for fear of terrorism conspiracy charges). Better still, with the rules worked out and agreed upon (mostly or wholly), we’d likely see quite alot of behavior changing in a hurry when the government realizes it is inviting justified rebellion if it doesn’t… without having to resort to the violence.
The part you have to get over first is accepting that it may truly be the case that if we figure those rules out honestly, some of your heroes may turn out to have been “not so heroic” and some of your examples of good governments may turn out to have been the tyrants their detractors have claimed all along.
I have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that the USSR had amazing achievements despite being later run down to ruin by a corrupt homegrown elite.
Meanwhile, it’s either ignorant or utterly disingenuous to claim that CPC switched back to capitalism. So, lets’ correct some of your nonsense here.
All the core economy in China is publicly owned, and this accounts for around half of the overall economy. Far from switching to back to capitalism, CPC allows some capitalism in special economic zones. Arguing that this makes China capitalist is akin to arguing that Canada is communist because we have free healthcare here.
And of course we can see that work in China is being directed towards common benefit as clearly evidenced by the fact that China is the only place in the world where any meaningful poverty reduction is happening.
It’s disingenuous to claim that China isn’t capitalist when the majority of its productive population lives in or near the “special economic zones” by now (aka the large cities in the south) and by far the most of it’s GDP comes from capitalist ventures (this includes Huawei).
Yes it retained some pockets of socialism in the rural country side and their capital city to keep up appearances.
I’ll repeat this fact once again since your reading comprehension is evidently lacking: all the core economy in China is publicly owned and state owned enterprises account for half the economy. And you’re now arguing against cooperative ownership as well here?
Yes it retained some pockets of socialism in the rural country side and their capital city to keep up appearances.
Some pockets being half the economy. You show an amazing lack of intellectual honesty bud.
What both you and I know is that China has very different outcomes from actual capitalist states. Of course, you’re unable to acknowledge this basic fact since your whole nonsensical argument would then unravel.
Stop playing along is a part (!) of the the becoming ungovernable indeed. It involves a lot of flexible asymmetric tactics that can not be found in a 150 year old book.
That isn’t very specific.
It can’t be. Context is key.
Any 150 year old book that gives ideas or at least an outline of how to overthrow the ruling class, is more valuable in my opinion than your meme, or your response that you can’t elaborate on how to reach that goal.
Along with 150 years of stunning success based on this approach.
Yeah, tell me about the stunning success of the USSR… or that of the CPC that switched back to Capitalism after starving millions to death.
If you can’t learn from your mistakes and just blame others for your failures you are not a “stunning success”.
I’m very thankful that I grew up in USSR, and it was a stunning success while it was around. The fact that it ultimately fell does not negate all of its achievements while it existed.
Russia went from a backwards agrarian society where people traveled by horse and carriage to being the first in space in the span of 40 years. Russia showed incredible growth after the revolution that surpassed the rest of the world:
USSR provided free education to all citizens resulting in literacy rising from 33% to 99.9%:
USSR doubled life expectancy in just 20 years. A newborn child in 1926-27 had a life expectancy of 44.4 years, up from 32.3 years thirty years before. In 1958-59 the life expectancy for newborns went up to 68.6 years. the Semashko system of the USSR increased lifespan by 50% in 20 years. By the 1960’s, lifespans in the USSR were comparable to those in the USA:
Quality of nutrition improved after the Soviet revolution, and the last time USSR had a famine was in 1940s. CIA data suggests they ate just as much as Americans after WW2 period while having better nutrition:
USSR moved from 58.5-hour work weeks to 41.6 hour work weeks (-0.36 h/yr) between 1913 and 1960:
USSR averaged 22 days of paid leave in 1986 while USA averaged 7.6 in 1996:
In 1987, people in the USSR could retire with pension at 55 (female) and 60 (male) while receiving 50% of their wages at a at minimum. Meanwhile, in USA the average retirement age was 62-67 and the average (not median) retiree household in the USA could expect $48k/yr which comes out to 65% of the 74k average (not median) household income in 2016:
GDP took off after socialism was established and then collapsed with the reintroduction of capitalism:
The Soviet Union had the highest physician/patient ratio in the world. USSR had 42 doctors per 10,000 population compared to 24 in Denmark and Sweden, and 19 in US:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0735675784900482 (sci-hub for access)
USSR defeated a smallpox epidemic in a matter of 19 days https://www.rbth.com/history/331857-how-ussr-defeated-black-smallpox
The Social Consequences of Soviet Immunization Policies https://www.ucis.pitt.edu/nceeer/1997-812-03g-Hoch.pdf
Professor of Economic History, Robert C. Allen, concludes in his study without the 1917 revolution is directly responsible for rapid growth that made the achievements listed above possilbe:
Study demonstrating the steady increase in quality of life during the Soviet period (including under Stalin). Includes the fact that Soviet life expectancy grew faster than any other nation recorded at the time:
A large study using world bank data analyzing the quality of life in Capitalist vs Socialist countries and finds overwhelmingly at similar levels of development with socialism bringing better quality of life:
This study compared capitalist and socialist countries in measures of the physical quality of life (PQL), taking into account the level of economic development.
I am no socialist, but I am surprised to agree that the Soviet Union actually did something positive. Literacy did rise to 99% from some low number. That is to their credit.
Nice copypasta… but yeah a lot of hard working people tried their best to make the USSR work, just for the vanguard party to gamble it all away after turning the USSR into a petro-state in the 1970ties and failing to push through the later reforms when it all came tumbling down on them during the 1980ties with falling raw-material prices.
As I said… failing to learn from mistakes…
The implication that MLs aren’t learning from mistakes of USSR, of which there were plenty, is just projection on your part given that you cling to a 150 year old dogma that has been clearly demonstrated to be impotent in driving any real change.
If you had even a shred of intellectual honesty then you’d be able to acknowledge that USSR had plenty of amazing achievements while also being imperfect. China, Cuba, and Vietnam have learned from the mistakes of USSR and will do better going forward. Meanwhile, anarchists will continue letting their countries slide into fascism precisely.
Being ungovernable together is just a euphemism for being disorganized. Meanwhile, the state that has the monopoly on violence is highly organized. Anarchists might want to ponder why militaries aren’t federalist efforts, but I guess that takes a level of introspection that would no longer make one an anarchist.
It’s not so much that the state has a monopoly on violence. It’s that for it to not have a monopoly on violence, it would mean that non-state actors would have to choose to do violence.
That’s not an easy choice to make, is it? History is filled with accounts of crazies who chose violence but who chose it because they like the idea of violence more than for any other reason… and they ended up monsters. It’s admirable that people would not want to become that.
When is violence justified? Against whom? How can you safeguard things so that the even initially justifiable violence doesn’t go too far, spin out of control? More importantly, possibly, is what you do after your violence succeeds… you’ve built up this paramilitary force to perform the violence, they’ve won, and now they’re de facto in charge. You end up with goons running the show, because you needed goons to beat the other guy. You might be a goon yourself. That’s nearly always bad. You almost need some separate organization afterward, of civilians, to take over. How do you keep it separate during the struggle?
It might be more accurate to say that the state doesn’t so much have a monopoly on violence as that it’s just the only group out there sociopathic enough to want to use it.
There are never any guarantees in life, however that’s hardly an argument against fighting injustice. What we do see is that socialist states do a far better job meeting the needs of the majority than capitalist ones. Such states can have many problems, but they’re an undeniable improvement over capitalism.
The default state of things in the west is that monopoly on violence is in the hands of capitalists, and it’s currently being used to subjugate the rest of the population to the will of capitalists.
The trouble is that I’m not a “majority” I am a person. More to the point, I am a person who is more used to not being in the majority than I am in it. “Good for the majority” in many cases has often left me out.
It isn’t in my interest to pursue strategies that are good for the majority. There are others like me.
That’s not clear at all. Let’s go with the “at least communism fed everyone”. In the United States, literally no one starves who isn’t anorexic or similarly mentally ill. Homeless people are fat.
We can talk about other metrics too (spaces races and whatnot), but capitalism seems to at least keep up with communism in those regards without some really absurd double standards.
Which of course never happened in the Soviet Union or Cuba, or any of the the other places?
Look, I’m not even you’re opponent here. There is a profound philosophical question here, one that if anyone actually bothers to attempt to solve it, the sort of violence you think is a solution might actually become possible.
More to the point, not just possible, but justifiable. Like, provably so. Even to people like myself who don’t conform to your ideology.
Wouldn’t it be great if, for instance, we could look at some event somewhere in the world, apply the rules, and say “in situations like this where x and y are occurring, and where z does not occur, that violence was justified”? We have those rules mostly worked out for individual scenarios. We know what self-defense looks like.
We don’t have those rules worked out for group/collective scenarios. And until we do, it will always be anxiety-inducing to contemplate the violence, and politically dangerous to even talk about it (for fear of terrorism conspiracy charges). Better still, with the rules worked out and agreed upon (mostly or wholly), we’d likely see quite alot of behavior changing in a hurry when the government realizes it is inviting justified rebellion if it doesn’t… without having to resort to the violence.
The part you have to get over first is accepting that it may truly be the case that if we figure those rules out honestly, some of your heroes may turn out to have been “not so heroic” and some of your examples of good governments may turn out to have been the tyrants their detractors have claimed all along.
I have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge that the USSR had amazing achievements despite being later run down to ruin by a corrupt homegrown elite.
Oh do tell, what constitutes this homegrown elite you speak of. This I must know.
Those of the vanguard party that turned the USSR into a petro-state in the 1970ties.
Meanwhile, it’s either ignorant or utterly disingenuous to claim that CPC switched back to capitalism. So, lets’ correct some of your nonsense here.
All the core economy in China is publicly owned, and this accounts for around half of the overall economy. Far from switching to back to capitalism, CPC allows some capitalism in special economic zones. Arguing that this makes China capitalist is akin to arguing that Canada is communist because we have free healthcare here.
On top of this, China has lots of cooperative ownership with huge companies like Huawei being cooperatively owned. Meanwhile, workers enjoy high degree of participation in the decision making process.
And of course we can see that work in China is being directed towards common benefit as clearly evidenced by the fact that China is the only place in the world where any meaningful poverty reduction is happening.
It’s disingenuous to claim that China isn’t capitalist when the majority of its productive population lives in or near the “special economic zones” by now (aka the large cities in the south) and by far the most of it’s GDP comes from capitalist ventures (this includes Huawei).
Yes it retained some pockets of socialism in the rural country side and their capital city to keep up appearances.
I’ll repeat this fact once again since your reading comprehension is evidently lacking: all the core economy in China is publicly owned and state owned enterprises account for half the economy. And you’re now arguing against cooperative ownership as well here?
Some pockets being half the economy. You show an amazing lack of intellectual honesty bud.
You do know that state-monopolist capitalism exists and is practiced in many countries, not only China?
What both you and I know is that China has very different outcomes from actual capitalist states. Of course, you’re unable to acknowledge this basic fact since your whole nonsensical argument would then unravel.
Yes China is (so far) an example of a successful capitalist country. Your point being?