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On February 22 2023 05:57 ChristianS wrote: @GH: My biggest question about what a post-revolution socialist society: to what degree is it democratic? I think you’d say, for instance, that our current government is nominally democratic, but the levers of power are sufficiently removed that it’s impossible to enact a version socialism you’d accept by democratic means. Even if it’s popular, even if it stays popular for a long period, even if it’s a high priority issue for lots of voters, the machinery of government is (maybe intentionally) incapable of making the change.
But like, we’re talking about making less car-dependent cities. I don’t doubt socialists love bikes, but to actually get there we’re talking about a lot of local government issues (zoning laws! public works funding! housing!), and on that scale, democratic government fails on these issues often because of things like NIMBYism rather than some nefarious corporate lobbyist. If we’re still democratic, how will we address those issues in the new system?
Alternatively, a place like the USSR generally addressed these issues with some form of central planning. I’m not well-studied in the history here, but my impression is that central planning combined with unelected public officials was a recipe for a lot of petty tyrants, who had a lot of power on the local level and basically no accountability. If we’re not democratic in the post-revolution, how would we avoid these petty tyrants?
First I'd ask where we're at? As in, do you see socialism as "the lesser evil" to capitalism?
I usually don’t know what it means. I think most of the things I’d like to see in the world are policies that, say, my grandparents would call “socialist.” I’m not sure what it would look like to seize the means of production, but I certainly think the current owners are poor stewards. On the other hand most people I see calling themselves socialist on Twitter seem mostly interested in yelling about problems. They might tell me NIMBYism is problematic but I don’t think they actually have ideas about how to structure local government to avoid it.
I mean I think the short answer might be “yes” but I’m asking partly to find out more about what this “lesser evil to capitalism” might look like.
Would you say you're also like DPB in that you also don't know capitalism that well (or that potentially a lifetime of capitalist propaganda has mislead you to think the answer to the lesser evil question isn't obvious)?
At the root is that capitalism is profit driven, while socialism is people driven. That alone is enough to understand it plainly imo. Capitalists already know homo economicus is a lie and basically the entire developed world recognizes it completely breaks down without democracy (which isn't an intrinsic value of capitalism, they are usually in conflict) and a heavy dose of anti-capitalism, whereas socialism clearly articulates democracy as a core value and the anti-capitalist social policy (like Universal public healthcare) is practically a given rather than a functionally impossible task (given the current state of US politics).
To me you can take most issues and easily apply the "profit motive" vs "people motive" lens to understand why socialism's prescriptions are inherently "less evil" than capitalist prescriptions (we can look back to the electric car issue for reference).
Capitalists unabashed first priority is profit. Making sure whatever the prescription for the deplorable state of US infrastructure, city planning, etc. is profitable for them and leads to increased growth of profits in the future (depending on the structure of executive compensation), externalities be damned. That means they fundamentally oppose prescriptions that interfere with their stated intentions of profiting off the efforts to mitigate climate catastrophe, even at the expense of humanity. Combine that with the outsized influence money buys you in US politics (regulatory capture is a known issue of capitalism) and it's clear capitalism/US democracy just isn't going to be capable of producing realistic solutions to the issues its causing.
Socialism (at least the interpretation I resonate with) intrinsically approaches the problem from a different perspective. It prioritizes sustainability and critical consciousness or "being more fully human". This is reflected in the prioritization of sustainability and practicality over profit. Hence talking about things like redesigning cities, changing roads, public transport, etc which are more helpful and less profitable than making sure automakers sell tens of millions of electric vehicles built with batteries that are mined by children's bare hands/stolen out of destitute countries so that people like Elon musk can get even richer.
My position isn't that socialism is a magical utopia wand that solves everything, it's just that it's a more fitting approach to solve the problems (not saying that it can't produce its own) we're facing.
Yeah, I mean, I’ve said a lot of times that trying to understand the financial system makes my head go fuzzy, so in that sense I’m probably in the same boat as DPB that I don’t understand capitalism all that well.
But I know some economics. I’m fully on-board with the idea that homo economicus is an extremely poor approximation of human behavior; that “greed is good” ignores the more-often-than-not situation where there are unscrupulous ways to make money with huge negative externalities; in short, that the idealized libertarian model of capitalism we learn in high school and undergraduate Economics courses is simplistic and wrong.
What to do next, though, is non-obvious. You’ve got a model that makes sense, but you know is wrong in all sorts of ways. “Abolish capitalism” or “revolutionary socialism” aren’t magic evocations that eliminate the problems; if your signature is to be believed, markets still exist under socialism. If we still have markets, we still have to decide how to handle them, and if our simplistic homo economicus models don’t work we still have to decide when to interfere with markets and when not.
Liberal democracies usually do some form of regulated markets; you let people pursue profit, but there’s a government looking out for any major negative externalities, ready to step in and stop any bad actors. That works better in some cases than others; sometimes you get “institutional capture” and related problems, but in theory, a government agency with the public’s interests at heart can avoid a lot of the collateral damage of free markets.
I think my own industry is a great example of the successes and failures of this approach. The FDA has historically been a robust regulatory presence that (at least since the 70s) pretty successfully sets standards based on reasonable scientific understanding of what pharma companies can and can’t do. I don’t think “institutional capture” has generally been a fair criticism; the FDA really does have pretty stringent standards for drug approval, and it really does block stuff from coming to market if the science isn’t there to back it up. There’s been lots of controversial cases, to be sure, but I don’t think anybody who follows it would say “the FDA just does whatever industry tells them to do” or anything.
But the result is the pharmaceutical industry, which is one of the most obviously fucked industries in the US. Don’t get me wrong, the drugs generally work; the FDA’s mostly done their job there. But the profit motive has completely fucked the whole industry. Basic life-saving drugs have absurd, exorbitant prices, and FDA compliance is frequently one of the barriers they actually use to prevent competition from driving prices down in the way a free market supposedly would. Meanwhile on the development side, we’re hindered by the fact that a) lots of horrible health problems are had primarily by people without much money, and b) you can only make money on something you can parent. a) is why nobody develops for, say, malaria or tuberculosis; b) is why modalities like ADCs are hindered by needing to have some proprietary approach to the problem. Otherwise you’ll do all the work to show something works, and somebody else will piggyback on that, undercut you, and take all your sales.
In other words, I’m not so ignorant about capitalism as to not recognize a lot of really atrocious problems happening. But I know how a “free market” handles these problems; I know how a regulated market handles these problems; and I know how a centrally planned system handles them. None of them do it well. What I don’t know is what a “people-centered” alternative looks like.
Yeah, I mean, I’ve said a lot of times that trying to understand the financial system makes my head go fuzzy, so in that sense I’m probably in the same boat as DPB that I don’t understand capitalism all that well.
But I know some economics. I’m fully on-board with the idea that homo economicus is an extremely poor approximation of human behavior; that “greed is good” ignores the more-often-than-not situation where there are unscrupulous ways to make money with huge negative externalities; in short, that the idealized libertarian model of capitalism we learn in high school and undergraduate Economics courses is simplistic and wrong.
What to do next, though, is non-obvious. You’ve got a model that makes sense, but you know is wrong in all sorts of ways. “Abolish capitalism” or “revolutionary socialism” aren’t magic evocations that eliminate the problems; if your signature is to be believed, markets still exist under socialism. If we still have markets, we still have to decide how to handle them, and if our simplistic homo economicus models don’t work we still have to decide when to interfere with markets and when not.
Liberal democracies usually do some form of regulated markets; you let people pursue profit, but there’s a government looking out for any major negative externalities, ready to step in and stop any bad actors. That works better in some cases than others; sometimes you get “institutional capture” and related problems, but in theory, a government agency with the public’s interests at heart can avoid a lot of the collateral damage of free markets.
I think my own industry is a great example of the successes and failures of this approach. The FDA has historically been a robust regulatory presence that (at least since the 70s) pretty successfully sets standards based on reasonable scientific understanding of what pharma companies can and can’t do. I don’t think “institutional capture” has generally been a fair criticism; the FDA really does have pretty stringent standards for drug approval, and it really does block stuff from coming to market if the science isn’t there to back it up. There’s been lots of controversial cases, to be sure, but I don’t think anybody who follows it would say “the FDA just does whatever industry tells them to do” or anything.
But the result is the pharmaceutical industry, which is one of the most obviously fucked industries in the US. Don’t get me wrong, the drugs generally work; the FDA’s mostly done their job there. But the profit motive has completely fucked the whole industry. Basic life-saving drugs have absurd, exorbitant prices, and FDA compliance is frequently one of the barriers they actually use to prevent competition from driving prices down in the way a free market supposedly would. Meanwhile on the development side, we’re hindered by the fact that a) lots of horrible health problems are had primarily by people without much money, and b) you can only make money on something you can parent. a) is why nobody develops for, say, malaria or tuberculosis; b) is why modalities like ADCs are hindered by needing to have some proprietary approach to the problem. Otherwise you’ll do all the work to show something works, and somebody else will piggyback on that, undercut you, and take all your sales.
In other words, I’m not so ignorant about capitalism as to not recognize a lot of really atrocious problems happening. But I know how a “free market” handles these problems; I know how a regulated market handles these problems; and I know how a centrally planned system handles them. None of them do it well. What I don’t know is what a “people-centered” alternative looks like.
I appreciate the elaboration.
Before we explore further into what "people-centered" alternatives look like beyond the electric car vs people-centered or "walkable" cities and neighborhoods, universal public healthcare, free education, etc examples (that I trust you're relatively familiar with) I also want to ask, Do you want to continue to be complicit in the atrocities you recognize and the countless ones either of us may be oblivious to?+ Show Spoiler +
I am constantly stumbling on horrific stuff in my studies, I don't know if you saw the backlash from Israel about the movie Farha but it caused me to watch the movie and read up on what it was depicting and imo the reality was way worse than what I understood from what was depicted in the movie, given it was heartbreaking on it's own. They could have made Israel look wayyyyy worse and still be well short of the brutal reality. A similar thing happened with the movie RRR and the UK.
I don't ask to be flippant, but sincerely in an effort to build a mutual understanding and carry the discussion forward.
EDIT: I just want to use a bit of my own experience with this so that it's less likely to be misconstrued as an attack.
I've mentioned it before, but a big part of what sent me down the path of socialism was when I found out that the US government's own assessment said almost 9 out of 10 of the people being blown to bits were not the target and far too many were innocent women and children (ignoring the treatment of basically any male that can feed and cloth themselves as an enemy combatant). I immediately thought "fuck, I voted for the guy that signed off on doing that." If the roles were reversed I would not be very receptive of the idea that people that voted for the guy that signed off on murdering my child/mother weren't complicit in it. Right then I knew I had to figure out something better than doing that again with Hillary (who was by most accounts more openly hawkish than Obama) and I knew it* would continue under Biden (*this is just one "it" example of the atrocities and complicity).
That's where the question comes from, if that makes sense?
Oh don’t worry, I wasn’t gonna construe it as an attack. And I mean, of course I don’t want to be complicit in atrocities! And yes, I know at least some of the extent that they’re happening, I assume there’s much worse stuff happening I *don’t* know about, and I know I’m at least somewhat complicit in all of it. I’m not familiar with the Farha movie specifically but I mean, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and such were in my lifetime, too. Or more recently, drone striking a wedding in Yemen. It’s fucked and there’s a lot of it, I’m not gonna plead total ignorance here.
But I don’t know how to stop it from happening. Maybe I’m still complicit, but I’m not choosing it either, I’m just trying to live my life because I don’t know what another option is.
On February 22 2023 10:46 ChristianS wrote: Oh don’t worry, I wasn’t gonna construe it as an attack. And I mean, of course I don’t want to be complicit in atrocities! And yes, I know at least some of the extent that they’re happening, I assume there’s much worse stuff happening I *don’t* know about, and I know I’m at least somewhat complicit in all of it. I’m not familiar with the Farha movie specifically but I mean, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and such were in my lifetime, too. Or more recently, drone striking a wedding in Yemen. It’s fucked and there’s a lot of it, I’m not gonna plead total ignorance here.
But I don’t know how to stop it from happening. Maybe I’m still complicit, but I’m not choosing it either, I’m just trying to live my life because I don’t know what another option is.
I'm glad, though I was less worried about you than others *
In as much as you see capitalism as the "lesser evil", you are choosing (admittedly built on a foundation of ignorance). You do know of another option, at least vaguely, socialism.
Basically capitalism has you (and most of us really) on a treadmill of labor and distractions that has prevented you from being able to take a step back and fully evaluate your options (namely socialism) or even the frequency and magnitude of the atrocities committed at your ostensible behest (it's your democracy) for capitalism.
While I appreciate working together on learning/exploring this stuff, let's continue to be honest about the situation.
*EDIT: I was looking back and the stuff I said in your blog is still relevant.
On February 22 2023 10:46 ChristianS wrote: Oh don’t worry, I wasn’t gonna construe it as an attack. And I mean, of course I don’t want to be complicit in atrocities! And yes, I know at least some of the extent that they’re happening, I assume there’s much worse stuff happening I *don’t* know about, and I know I’m at least somewhat complicit in all of it. I’m not familiar with the Farha movie specifically but I mean, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and such were in my lifetime, too. Or more recently, drone striking a wedding in Yemen. It’s fucked and there’s a lot of it, I’m not gonna plead total ignorance here.
But I don’t know how to stop it from happening. Maybe I’m still complicit, but I’m not choosing it either, I’m just trying to live my life because I don’t know what another option is.
In as much as you see capitalism as the "lesser evil", you are choosing (admittedly built on a foundation of ignorance). You do know of another option, at least vaguely, socialism.
Basically capitalism has you (and most of us really) on a treadmill of labor and distractions that has prevented you from being able to take a step back and fully evaluate your options (namely socialism) or even the frequency and magnitude of the atrocities committed at your ostensible behest (it's your democracy) for capitalism.
While I appreciate working together on learning/exploring this stuff, let's continue to be honest about the situation.
Yeah, but what good does it do to discuss my culpability in it? I mean *I* care, for how well I sleep at night, but the people getting bombed or drone striked or w/e don’t really care if I feel bad about it or not. I think you’re bringing it up to persuade me that I’m obligated to support any alternative to capitalism, but I’m still asking basic questions like “do we still vote in this new system” and I still don’t think I know the answer. So if someone asked me “why are atrocities a necessary consequence of capitalism and why would this alternative system not lead to similar atrocities?” I would say “uh, I don’t know, something something profit motive, something something resource extraction. And to the second question, I dunno, I guess we’ll care about people more?” Let alone if other alternative ideologies start making the same argument (i.e. “if you don’t support atrocities you’re obligated to support anarchism” but same for communism, libertarianism, whatever else you wanna name). What would I say to them?
I think anarchists would often say that most people don’t want to be complicit in atrocities, they just wanna be left alone and be able to live their lives. That means an absence of people trying to kill or enslave you, but it also means having access to the resources you need to survive. The inherent violence of the current world order comes from people on top believing that maintaining this violent system is the only way to keep that (not being killed or enslaved, access to the resources they need). The only way to stop the violence would be to create a system in which people can have those guarantees without it. So… what does that system look like?
On February 22 2023 10:46 ChristianS wrote: Oh don’t worry, I wasn’t gonna construe it as an attack. And I mean, of course I don’t want to be complicit in atrocities! And yes, I know at least some of the extent that they’re happening, I assume there’s much worse stuff happening I *don’t* know about, and I know I’m at least somewhat complicit in all of it. I’m not familiar with the Farha movie specifically but I mean, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and such were in my lifetime, too. Or more recently, drone striking a wedding in Yemen. It’s fucked and there’s a lot of it, I’m not gonna plead total ignorance here.
But I don’t know how to stop it from happening. Maybe I’m still complicit, but I’m not choosing it either, I’m just trying to live my life because I don’t know what another option is.
In as much as you see capitalism as the "lesser evil", you are choosing (admittedly built on a foundation of ignorance). You do know of another option, at least vaguely, socialism.
Basically capitalism has you (and most of us really) on a treadmill of labor and distractions that has prevented you from being able to take a step back and fully evaluate your options (namely socialism) or even the frequency and magnitude of the atrocities committed at your ostensible behest (it's your democracy) for capitalism.
While I appreciate working together on learning/exploring this stuff, let's continue to be honest about the situation.
Yeah, but what good does it do to discuss my culpability in it? I mean *I* care, for how well I sleep at night, but the people getting bombed or drone striked or w/e don’t really care if I feel bad about it or not. I think you’re bringing it up to persuade me that I’m obligated to support any alternative to capitalism, but I’m still asking basic questions like “do we still vote in this new system” and I still don’t think I know the answer. So if someone asked me “why are atrocities a necessary consequence of capitalism and why would this alternative system not lead to similar atrocities?” I would say “uh, I don’t know, something something profit motive, something something resource extraction. And to the second question, I dunno, I guess we’ll care about people more?” Let alone if other alternative ideologies start making the same argument (i.e. “if you don’t support atrocities you’re obligated to support anarchism” but same for communism, libertarianism, whatever else you wanna name). What would I say to them?
I think anarchists would often say that most people don’t want to be complicit in atrocities, they just wanna be left alone and be able to live their lives. That means an absence of people trying to kill or enslave you, but it also means having access to the resources you need to survive. The inherent violence of the current world order comes from people on top believing that maintaining this violent system is the only way to keep that (not being killed or enslaved, access to the resources they need). The only way to stop the violence would be to create a system in which people can have those guarantees without it. So… what does that system look like?
When you say "I think you’re bringing it [capitalist culpability in horrific atrocities] up to persuade me that I’m obligated to support any alternative to capitalism", you're not far off in at least one way. It certainly persuaded me that I had to find an alternative to capitalism as soon as humanly possible with consideration for my circumstances and I hope anyone acting in good conscience would do the same.
Like I would get it if Marx didn't exist or even was just half as prolific and the 100+ years of scholarship, activism, etc was all systematically wiped entirely from the record and such, but that's not the case (Not that people like DeSantis aren't trying, while Democrats do their own revisionism or "whitewashing" of stuff like labor movements, civil rights movements, etc.).
I know surviving capitalist oppression is a struggle and a half, but in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (more specifically an introduction by Donaldo Macedo) there's something relevant, and as it's all I readily know you've at least tried to engage with to answer your questions, it seems appropriate. Basically it touches on the perceived complexity of Freire and how it's accessibility is probably less about language than it is ideology/identity (for lack of a better word).
I am often amazed to hear academics complain about the complexity of a particular discourse because of its alleged lack of clarity. It is as if they have assumed that there is a mono-discourse that is characterized by its clarity and is also equally available to all. If one begins to probe the issue of clarity, we soon realize that it is class specific, thus favoring those of that class in the meaningmaking process.
The following two examples will bring the point home: Henry Giroux and I gave a speech at Massasoit Community College in Massachusetts to approximately three hundred unwed mothers who were part of a GED (graduate-equivalency diploma) program. The director of the program later informed us that most of the students were considered functionally illiterate. After Giroux's speech, during the question-and-answer period, a woman got up and eloquently said, "Professor Giroux, all my life I felt the things you talked about. I just didn't have a language to express what I have felt. Today I have come to realize that I do have a language. Thank you."
Paulo Freire told me the story of what happened to him at the time he was preparing the English translation of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He gave an African American student at Harvard a chapter of the book to read to see how she would receive it. A few days later when he asked the woman if she had read it, she enthusiastically responded, "Yes. Not only did I read it, but I gave it to my sixteen-year-old son to read. He read the whole chapter that night and in the morning said, 'I want to meet the man who wrote this. He is talking about me "
One question that I have for all those "highly literate" academics who find Giroux's and Freire's discourse so difficult to understand is, Why is it that a sixteen-year-old boy and a poor, "semiliterate" woman could so easily understand and connect with the complexity of both Freire and Girouxs language and ideas, and the academics, who should be the most literate, find the language incomprehensible?
I believe that the answer has little to do with language and everything to do with ideology. That is, people often identify with representations that they are either comfortable with or that help deepen their understanding of themselves. The call for language clarity is an ideological issue, not merely a linguistic one. The sixteen-year-old and the semiliterate poor woman could readily connect with Freire's ideology, whereas the highly literate academics are put off by some dimensions of the same ideology. It is, perhaps, for this reason that a university professor I know failed to include Freire's work in a graduate course that she taught on literacy. When I raised the issue with her, she explained that students often find Freire's writing too difficult and cumbersome. It could also be the reason that the Divinity School at Harvard University offers a course entitled "Education for Liberation," in which students study Freire and James Cone extensively, whereas no such opportunities are available at Harvard's School of Education. For me, the mundane call for a language of "simplicity and clarity" represents yet another mechanism to dismiss the complexity of theoretical issues, particularly if these theoretical constructs interrogate the prevailing dominant ideology
I promise it was at least as hard (in many ways harder if you look into what it took for various communities that have embraced Freire to even have access to Freire's work). As daunting as it might seem, you can dig into this stuff and find various answers to your questions from various socialists to develop your own perspective and understanding if you genuinely want to.
Maybe Freire isn't where you personally should start, maybe for you Lenin's "What is to be Done" is better, maybe it's some sort of modern "socialism for dummies" book, hard for me to say much until you start reading/watching/listening/engaging with more socialist perspectives and develop an understanding of at least what's initially resonating with you and where you think there's a problem you need to dig into deeper. I do think we owe the most horrifically oppressed people around the world, and the people that sacrificed before us at least this much. The older the material the more socialists you'll likely find that noticed the same problems and had their own prescriptions for them. Then when you ask "how do we address X concern of mine" you're bringing your own perspective rooted in at least a perfunctory understanding of the framework you and your comrades are attempting to use to address your concerns. Then they can say "I tend to agree with Y when they say Z about X" and you can have some idea what that means in a larger socialist context and eventually some of the common critiques of "Y and/or his Z" as well as other popular ways socialists address your concerns.
Like many things in life, if you want the results you have to put in the work. If folks went back to their professors or even k-12 teachers and told them something to the effect of "I think there might be something important I need to learn about" and proceed to describe their efforts to learn about socialism (particularly their reliance on someone like myself) their professor/teacher would probably be some blend of concerned and confused, don't ya think?
That's not to say I'm not trying or willing to keep working together on this stuff (or don't think it's valuable for all of us), but people have to remember I'm busy surviving capitalist oppression too and they know better when it comes to learning about something they think is important. It's also not like I'm talking to people that haven't been hearing about socialism as an alternative to capitalism for years and this is their first time encountering the idea or me presenting it to them.
EDIT: I didn't mean to leave you hanging DPB but it sort of works out because I think perhaps Second Thought may be something like what you're/ChristianS looking for in a good entry point for yourself and a lot of people. The presentation style is much more familiar to how a lot of people ingest things nowadays too.
There's probably plenty of useful vids there but this one on the insufficiency of social democracy seems most applicable to the discussion.
I remember liking that introduction by Macedo a lot. I should reread that.
Sure, I certainly know your time is limited and don’t want to demand an education because I’m too lazy to do my in homework. I guess I hoped “is it still democratic” would be relatively simple/straightforward to at least partially answer, but I guess I hoped wrong.
I’ll try to find time to read some of what you’re suggesting. Maybe I’ll write a blog about it.
On February 22 2023 14:23 ChristianS wrote: I remember liking that introduction by Macedo a lot. I should reread that.
Sure, I certainly know your time is limited and don’t want to demand an education because I’m too lazy to do my in homework. I guess I hoped “is it still democratic” would be relatively simple/straightforward to at least partially answer, but I guess I hoped wrong.
I’ll try to find time to read some of what you’re suggesting. Maybe I’ll write a blog about it.
I thought I answered that, but yes it's democratic.
Maybe even easier and more productive than that would be to watch the Second Thought video and share some of your thoughts on his assessment of social democracy vs socialism.
I watched the video. I think the key questions are: 1. How do you maintain the political will to continue socialist policies when you allow people to choose as in a democracy? 2. Currently there is no coalition of socialist countries who are large enough to force the capitalists to submit to their rules instead of running away to another country. Absent this, how can a socialist revolution succeed?
On February 22 2023 10:46 ChristianS wrote: Oh don’t worry, I wasn’t gonna construe it as an attack. And I mean, of course I don’t want to be complicit in atrocities! And yes, I know at least some of the extent that they’re happening, I assume there’s much worse stuff happening I *don’t* know about, and I know I’m at least somewhat complicit in all of it. I’m not familiar with the Farha movie specifically but I mean, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and such were in my lifetime, too. Or more recently, drone striking a wedding in Yemen. It’s fucked and there’s a lot of it, I’m not gonna plead total ignorance here.
But I don’t know how to stop it from happening. Maybe I’m still complicit, but I’m not choosing it either, I’m just trying to live my life because I don’t know what another option is.
In as much as you see capitalism as the "lesser evil", you are choosing (admittedly built on a foundation of ignorance). You do know of another option, at least vaguely, socialism.
Basically capitalism has you (and most of us really) on a treadmill of labor and distractions that has prevented you from being able to take a step back and fully evaluate your options (namely socialism) or even the frequency and magnitude of the atrocities committed at your ostensible behest (it's your democracy) for capitalism.
While I appreciate working together on learning/exploring this stuff, let's continue to be honest about the situation.
Yeah, but what good does it do to discuss my culpability in it? I mean *I* care, for how well I sleep at night, but the people getting bombed or drone striked or w/e don’t really care if I feel bad about it or not. I think you’re bringing it up to persuade me that I’m obligated to support any alternative to capitalism, but I’m still asking basic questions like “do we still vote in this new system” and I still don’t think I know the answer. So if someone asked me “why are atrocities a necessary consequence of capitalism and why would this alternative system not lead to similar atrocities?” I would say “uh, I don’t know, something something profit motive, something something resource extraction. And to the second question, I dunno, I guess we’ll care about people more?” Let alone if other alternative ideologies start making the same argument (i.e. “if you don’t support atrocities you’re obligated to support anarchism” but same for communism, libertarianism, whatever else you wanna name). What would I say to them?
I think anarchists would often say that most people don’t want to be complicit in atrocities, they just wanna be left alone and be able to live their lives. That means an absence of people trying to kill or enslave you, but it also means having access to the resources you need to survive. The inherent violence of the current world order comes from people on top believing that maintaining this violent system is the only way to keep that (not being killed or enslaved, access to the resources they need). The only way to stop the violence would be to create a system in which people can have those guarantees without it. So… what does that system look like?
When you say "I think you’re bringing it [capitalist culpability in horrific atrocities] up to persuade me that I’m obligated to support any alternative to capitalism", you're not far off in at least one way. It certainly persuaded me that I had to find an alternative to capitalism as soon as humanly possible with consideration for my circumstances and I hope anyone acting in good conscience would do the same.
Like I would get it if Marx didn't exist or even was just half as prolific and the 100+ years of scholarship, activism, etc was all systematically wiped entirely from the record and such, but that's not the case (Not that people like DeSantis aren't trying, while Democrats do their own revisionism or "whitewashing" of stuff like labor movements, civil rights movements, etc.).
I know surviving capitalist oppression is a struggle and a half, but in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (more specifically an introduction by Donaldo Macedo) there's something relevant, and as it's all I readily know you've at least tried to engage with to answer your questions, it seems appropriate. Basically it touches on the perceived complexity of Freire and how it's accessibility is probably less about language than it is ideology/identity (for lack of a better word).
I am often amazed to hear academics complain about the complexity of a particular discourse because of its alleged lack of clarity. It is as if they have assumed that there is a mono-discourse that is characterized by its clarity and is also equally available to all. If one begins to probe the issue of clarity, we soon realize that it is class specific, thus favoring those of that class in the meaningmaking process.
The following two examples will bring the point home: Henry Giroux and I gave a speech at Massasoit Community College in Massachusetts to approximately three hundred unwed mothers who were part of a GED (graduate-equivalency diploma) program. The director of the program later informed us that most of the students were considered functionally illiterate. After Giroux's speech, during the question-and-answer period, a woman got up and eloquently said, "Professor Giroux, all my life I felt the things you talked about. I just didn't have a language to express what I have felt. Today I have come to realize that I do have a language. Thank you."
Paulo Freire told me the story of what happened to him at the time he was preparing the English translation of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. He gave an African American student at Harvard a chapter of the book to read to see how she would receive it. A few days later when he asked the woman if she had read it, she enthusiastically responded, "Yes. Not only did I read it, but I gave it to my sixteen-year-old son to read. He read the whole chapter that night and in the morning said, 'I want to meet the man who wrote this. He is talking about me "
One question that I have for all those "highly literate" academics who find Giroux's and Freire's discourse so difficult to understand is, Why is it that a sixteen-year-old boy and a poor, "semiliterate" woman could so easily understand and connect with the complexity of both Freire and Girouxs language and ideas, and the academics, who should be the most literate, find the language incomprehensible?
I believe that the answer has little to do with language and everything to do with ideology. That is, people often identify with representations that they are either comfortable with or that help deepen their understanding of themselves. The call for language clarity is an ideological issue, not merely a linguistic one. The sixteen-year-old and the semiliterate poor woman could readily connect with Freire's ideology, whereas the highly literate academics are put off by some dimensions of the same ideology. It is, perhaps, for this reason that a university professor I know failed to include Freire's work in a graduate course that she taught on literacy. When I raised the issue with her, she explained that students often find Freire's writing too difficult and cumbersome. It could also be the reason that the Divinity School at Harvard University offers a course entitled "Education for Liberation," in which students study Freire and James Cone extensively, whereas no such opportunities are available at Harvard's School of Education. For me, the mundane call for a language of "simplicity and clarity" represents yet another mechanism to dismiss the complexity of theoretical issues, particularly if these theoretical constructs interrogate the prevailing dominant ideology
I promise it was at least as hard (in many ways harder if you look into what it took for various communities that have embraced Freire to even have access to Freire's work). As daunting as it might seem, you can dig into this stuff and find various answers to your questions from various socialists to develop your own perspective and understanding if you genuinely want to.
Maybe Freire isn't where you personally should start, maybe for you Lenin's "What is to be Done" is better, maybe it's some sort of modern "socialism for dummies" book, hard for me to say much until you start reading/watching/listening/engaging with more socialist perspectives and develop an understanding of at least what's initially resonating with you and where you think there's a problem you need to dig into deeper. I do think we owe the most horrifically oppressed people around the world, and the people that sacrificed before us at least this much. The older the material the more socialists you'll likely find that noticed the same problems and had their own prescriptions for them. Then when you ask "how do we address X concern of mine" you're bringing your own perspective rooted in at least a perfunctory understanding of the framework you and your comrades are attempting to use to address your concerns. Then they can say "I tend to agree with Y when they say Z about X" and you can have some idea what that means in a larger socialist context and eventually some of the common critiques of "Y and/or his Z" as well as other popular ways socialists address your concerns.
Like many things in life, if you want the results you have to put in the work. If folks went back to their professors or even k-12 teachers and told them something to the effect of "I think there might be something important I need to learn about" and proceed to describe their efforts to learn about socialism (particularly their reliance on someone like myself) their professor/teacher would probably be some blend of concerned and confused, don't ya think?
That's not to say I'm not trying or willing to keep working together on this stuff (or don't think it's valuable for all of us), but people have to remember I'm busy surviving capitalist oppression too and they know better when it comes to learning about something they think is important. It's also not like I'm talking to people that haven't been hearing about socialism as an alternative to capitalism for years and this is their first time encountering the idea or me presenting it to them.
EDIT: I didn't mean to leave you hanging DPB but it sort of works out because I think perhaps Second Thought may be something like what you're/ChristianS looking for in a good entry point for yourself and a lot of people. The presentation style is much more familiar to how a lot of people ingest things nowadays too.
There's probably plenty of useful vids there but this one on the insufficiency of social democracy seems most applicable to the discussion.
On February 22 2023 14:23 ChristianS wrote: I remember liking that introduction by Macedo a lot. I should reread that.
Sure, I certainly know your time is limited and don’t want to demand an education because I’m too lazy to do my in homework. I guess I hoped “is it still democratic” would be relatively simple/straightforward to at least partially answer, but I guess I hoped wrong.
I’ll try to find time to read some of what you’re suggesting. Maybe I’ll write a blog about it.
I thought I answered that, but yes it's democratic.
Maybe even easier and more productive than that would be to watch the Second Thought video and share some of your thoughts on his assessment of social democracy vs socialism.
I watched it.
The video is explicitly not set up to clarify what socialism specifically would do (it’s mostly about why social democracy is insufficient; I’d have to watch his other videos I guess) but maybe its most core argument is something like “We should have a say in what our industries and corporations do the same way we should have a say in what our government does.”
That’s an interesting concept. I think a lot of people from a lot of different political backgrounds have an intuition something like that; one of Blackjack’s big issues, for instance, is that tech companies have too much power over what is and isn’t acceptable speech. Who cares if it’s a private company, why should they get to decide what we can and can’t say online?
More generally, the reason we think democracy is just and monarchy is unjust is because power ought to be divided among the people it affects, not concentrated in one or a few individuals without any real accountability to force them to act in the public interest. But if we really believe that, why should we restrict the logic to government power? Corporations have power over all sorts of things, ultimately a lot more power than the government does over our lives. Why should we not get a say in how that power is used, too?
I seem to recall Facebook talking about setting up a global “Facebook Supreme Court” to adjudicate issues like “should Trump stay banned, and for how long?” It’s a funny concept. I imagine several of Zuckerburg’s lords cornering him in a field at sword point and forcing him to sign a Facebook Magna Carta, then eventually we get a Facebook Constitution and a Facebook Bill of Rights and a Facebook Miranda warning mods have to say when they go to ban you. But at its heart that stuff comes from the same intuition: Facebook has power over us similar to how a government has power over us, so why don’t we have legal protections and due process the same way? Not that Facebook’s “Supreme Court” will actually give us any of that (it’s mostly PR I assume), but the fact the PR is moving in that direction suggests they’re trying to head off exactly this type of concern.
I have some reservations about this, however (which might be answered by the guy’s other videos, I can’t say). First, I’m not sure to what extent we can really say “socialism has markets” by this logic. If we erase the private/public distinction for businesses, aren’t we essentially nationalizing the whole economy? At which point businesses will be run by elected officials looking for votes, rather than executives looking for profits? In that case we might get our goods and services for free, or maybe the government gives everyone an allowance of credits and sets prices on the various goods and services available. But is that really a “market”? It seems to me we’re still basically looking at a centrally planned economy, with everything that entails.
Suppose I have an idea of how I might help the world by some good or service I can provide. Can I do it? Who do I talk to? The thing people like about markets is that I don’t have to persuade any central authority to *let* me do it. If it’s expensive I might need to find investors, but anybody with the means to pursue an idea can just go do it. Ultimately I’ll have to find a way to charge someone money for it to keep the economic activity viable, but I’m free to figure that out myself; I don’t have to submit paperwork to the government making an economic case for my idea.
Maybe I *should* have to, if my idea is actually harmful in some way. But the argument of people who like markets (see “I, Pencil” for instance) is that a truly efficient global economy is always going to be far too complex for any one person or organization to comprehend. You need something agent-based, where each individual or organization only needs to understand their little corner of the whole, or else you’ll wind up with a swamped central authority that is constantly denying people’s innovative ideas because they complicate the overall picture too much.
Again, maybe there are responses to that kind of concern, but it’s what stood out to me anyway.
On February 22 2023 14:23 ChristianS wrote: I remember liking that introduction by Macedo a lot. I should reread that.
Sure, I certainly know your time is limited and don’t want to demand an education because I’m too lazy to do my in homework. I guess I hoped “is it still democratic” would be relatively simple/straightforward to at least partially answer, but I guess I hoped wrong.
I’ll try to find time to read some of what you’re suggesting. Maybe I’ll write a blog about it.
I thought I answered that, but yes it's democratic.
Maybe even easier and more productive than that would be to watch the Second Thought video and share some of your thoughts on his assessment of social democracy vs socialism.
The video is explicitly not set up to clarify what socialism specifically would do (it’s mostly about why social democracy is insufficient; I’d have to watch his other videos I guess) but maybe its most core argument is something like “We should have a say in what our industries and corporations do the same way we should have a say in what our government does.”
That’s an interesting concept. I think a lot of people from a lot of different political backgrounds have an intuition something like that; one of Blackjack’s big issues, for instance, is that tech companies have too much power over what is and isn’t acceptable speech. Who cares if it’s a private company, why should they get to decide what we can and can’t say online?
More generally, the reason we think democracy is just and monarchy is unjust is because power ought to be divided among the people it affects, not concentrated in one or a few individuals without any real accountability to force them to act in the public interest. But if we really believe that, why should we restrict the logic to government power? Corporations have power over all sorts of things, ultimately a lot more power than the government does over our lives. Why should we not get a say in how that power is used, too?
I seem to recall Facebook talking about setting up a global “Facebook Supreme Court” to adjudicate issues like “should Trump stay banned, and for how long?” It’s a funny concept. I imagine several of Zuckerburg’s lords cornering him in a field at sword point and forcing him to sign a Facebook Magna Carta, then eventually we get a Facebook Constitution and a Facebook Bill of Rights and a Facebook Miranda warning mods have to say when they go to ban you. But at its heart that stuff comes from the same intuition: Facebook has power over us similar to how a government has power over us, so why don’t we have legal protections and due process the same way? Not that Facebook’s “Supreme Court” will actually give us any of that (it’s mostly PR I assume), but the fact the PR is moving in that direction suggests they’re trying to head off exactly this type of concern.
I have some reservations about this, however (which might be answered by the guy’s other videos, I can’t say). First, I’m not sure to what extent we can really say “socialism has markets” by this logic. If we erase the private/public distinction for businesses, aren’t we essentially nationalizing the whole economy? At which point businesses will be run by elected officials looking for votes, rather than executives looking for profits? In that case we might get our goods and services for free, or maybe the government gives everyone an allowance of credits and sets prices on the various goods and services available. But is that really a “market”? It seems to me we’re still basically looking at a centrally planned economy, with everything that entails.
Suppose I have an idea of how I might help the world by some good or service I can provide. Can I do it? Who do I talk to? The thing people like about markets is that I don’t have to persuade any central authority to *let* me do it. If it’s expensive I might need to find investors, but anybody with the means to pursue an idea can just go do it. Ultimately I’ll have to find a way to charge someone money for it to keep the economic activity viable, but I’m free to figure that out myself; I don’t have to submit paperwork to the government making an economic case for my idea.
Maybe I *should* have to, if my idea is actually harmful in some way. But the argument of people who like markets (see “I, Pencil” for instance) is that a truly efficient global economy is always going to be far too complex for any one person or organization to comprehend. You need something agent-based, where each individual or organization only needs to understand their little corner of the whole, or else you’ll wind up with a swamped central authority that is constantly denying people’s innovative ideas because they complicate the overall picture too much.
Again, maybe there are responses to that kind of concern, but it’s what stood out to me anyway.
The first thing I want to address is this thing about answers. Different peoples do democracy and capitalism differently and they tend to change (to one degree or another) over the years. Socialism is also interpreted differently and changes over time. So when you say "which might be answered by the guy's other videos" you're missing the point. It's like an alien looking for all the answers to what democracy is from Introvert neglecting that a Democrat or a Libertarian might have a different perspective and are all still speaking about the same concept, democracy. Basically speaking, whatever your question, it's unlikely that none of the scholars, activists, etc. that have been immersed in this stuff for over a century (notwithstanding cultural threads that go back further) noticed your concern prior to your engagement with this stuff.
It's also unlikely in most cases that every socialist immediately agrees on how socialism reconciles an issue (this is pretty central to differences between DSA and revolutionary socialism for instance). What I've been trying to impart is that you have to look for yourself at the various answers socialists have come up with to your concerns to determine which tendencies you vibe with like you do with Democrats.
I know you understand this conceptually when applied to party factions within the Democrats that offer varying solutions to a problem. Try to maintain this understanding when thinking about socialism if you can please (this isn't unique to you).
To respond to your scenario a bit, for starters your survival isn't dependent on producing profits for someone that couldn't care less about your life, so you probably have more free time (unless compared to someone like a wealthy failson under capitalism) and community resources to pursue your ideas to help the world. You talk to your (socialist) friends, family, and community to begin with. To get and integrate feedback into your idea (that we'll presume for sake of this scenario is actually world helping). From there, unlike a capitalist society where basically if it isn't profitable it isn't happening (regardless of whether it helps the world), it becomes a matter of dialectically engaging your fellow socialists at appropriate levels/industries based on the scale/scope of the endeavor.
I don't know if this is an issue for you but I also want to make clear "profits" aren't necessary for sustainable production of stuff, if they were essential, they'd be considered an expense. That's not to be confused with disregarding the expended resources of a project in juxtaposition with its utility.
I know you probably aren't an educator, but you have a willing and engaged audience here, asking honest questions. They seem like fairly basic questions that almost anybody living in today's society would ask. I understand you don't want to "pollute" their perfectly clean minds with your own (perhaps too radical) interpretation. Shall I give it a go?
I personally haven't heard of any socialist theorists that adequately addresses the problem of entrepreneurialism. But that's mainly because in a socialist system, entrepreneurialism just isn't important. To a certain extent I very much agree with that. The way the question is often formulated is "I have an idea that will do X better. Right now, I can start a business, and if I indeed do X better, I will be rewarded by the market. What incentives are there in a socialist system to ever bother?"
This firstly misses the point that whether the market rewards you or not is most often not dependent on how well you do X, but a whole bunch of extraneous issues that you only have a very partial control over (ranging from your social status to market conditions to whether the venture capitalists you talk to to get your starting capital had their morning coffee to... you get the point). There are no doubt sources on this, but it's clear that this system perpetuates and worsens inequalities among people that socialism explicitly combats.
Second, this raises this question of how to progress economically ahead of other forms of progress. Questions of entrepreneurialism may be important but they are LESS important to society than addressing societal inequality, which capitalism is inherently unable to address. You could probably add environmental sustainability to the list of problems modern socialists say capitalism is inherently incapable of addressing.
And I probably explained this all really badly, because I'm not a socialist and find it hard to actually argue their points convincingly, which is why it would be much better if GH would actually answer such questions. And then in the footnotes give a "read more on this here!" or a "watch this video if you want more food for thought".
And now for me, the reason why I struggle with this argument is because entrepreneurialism is kind of a shit way of doing progress, but it's a lot less shit than the alternatives I've seen proposed (granted, I haven't read a lot). And while inequality is important, to me it's a lot less important than the conditions improving at the bottom. I'd rather have some Bezos-esque assholes around but the lowest class has affordable healthcare, a living wage, a retirement plan that works, etc. than full equality... in squalor. And without decent progress you end up with the latter.
Environmental problems can be solved in a social democracy. The main thing lacking is the political will to accept internalizing the environmental cost.
Oh, and to address a point in the video, cooperative corporations are fully compatible with capitalism. Nobody says the owners of the company can't be its employees. Not even in a libertarian hellscape.
I know a lot of people are prone to extremely reductive “THIS is the fundamental problem with socialism” type arguments that tend to focus on some specific interpretation of socialism (probably one no actual socialist believes), “refute” it, and call it a day. I promise that’s not my intention or goal, and I understand that there’s a lot of ideological variability under the heading of “socialism.” I suppose I should have said “I’d have to watch his other videos to find out this guy’s version of socialism” or something similar.
That said, I do think public control of economic activity (and I do hope “public control of economic activity” is broad enough to capture most definitions of socialism) poses some pretty fundamental difficulties for “entrepreneurship”. Acro chose the term; I don’t object to it, although I’d note it doesn’t need to be particularly innovative or novel. What if I just want to plant a crop? Or change which crop I plant on my farm? If economic activity is decided democratically, that presumably means the public (probably through some elected official) gets to decide that kind of thing. Or maybe we’d restrict government control to only certain types of economic activity, but that sounds like (at least by the video’s definitions) we’d be drifting back toward “social democracy.”
I’m not too worried about the inventive part of it specifically. Incentives are real and they absolutely motivate people, but I’m not that persuaded by the “socialism doesn’t work because without incentives people don’t work” argument. I think most people want to help other people if they can, and you’d still get plenty of entrepreneurship in a society where, for instance, tax rates were really high and everybody had a generous UBI. But will you even be allowed to do what you want to do? Or would you need to seek approval from the planning authority first?
For reference, I think a lot of anarchists would like a lot of economic activity to happen under the heading of “mutual aid,” i.e. people just do cool stuff for each other. Not for profit, and also not a government program, just people providing for each other because they can (and being provided for in turn). There are issues with that model, too, IMO, among them that it’s still a private, unaccountable organization that’s responsible for giving you stuff you need. But on the upside, it lets people pursue their ambitions without part of the plan needing to be “convince the central authority to let me do it.”
On February 23 2023 10:04 ChristianS wrote: I know a lot of people are prone to extremely reductive “THIS is the fundamental problem with socialism” type arguments that tend to focus on some specific interpretation of socialism (probably one no actual socialist believes), “refute” it, and call it a day. I promise that’s not my intention or goal, and I understand that there’s a lot of ideological variability under the heading of “socialism.” I suppose I should have said “I’d have to watch his other videos to find out this guy’s version of socialism” or something similar.
That said, I do think public control of economic activity (and I do hope “public control of economic activity” is broad enough to capture most definitions of socialism) poses some pretty fundamental difficulties for “entrepreneurship”. Acro chose the term; I don’t object to it, although I’d note it doesn’t need to be particularly innovative or novel. What if I just want to plant a crop? Or change which crop I plant on my farm? If economic activity is decided democratically, that presumably means the public (probably through some elected official) gets to decide that kind of thing. Or maybe we’d restrict government control to only certain types of economic activity, but that sounds like (at least by the video’s definitions) we’d be drifting back toward “social democracy.”
I’m not too worried about the inventive part of it specifically. Incentives are real and they absolutely motivate people, but I’m not that persuaded by the “socialism doesn’t work because without incentives people don’t work” argument. I think most people want to help other people if they can, and you’d still get plenty of entrepreneurship in a society where, for instance, tax rates were really high and everybody had a generous UBI. But will you even be allowed to do what you want to do? Or would you need to seek approval from the planning authority first?
For reference, I think a lot of anarchists would like a lot of economic activity to happen under the heading of “mutual aid,” i.e. people just do cool stuff for each other. Not for profit, and also not a government program, just people providing for each other because they can (and being provided for in turn). There are issues with that model, too, IMO, among them that it’s still a private, unaccountable organization that’s responsible for giving you stuff you need. But on the upside, it lets people pursue their ambitions without part of the plan needing to be “convince the central authority to let me do it.”
Yeah, what you describe in the first paragraph happens a lot, and everyone says it's not what they're doing (and some of them genuinely believe it). Regardless I find this approach is more practical for myself when it comes to understanding peoples objections/concerns.
I don't think this "what if" stuff is the best way to go about this, but I can entertain a bit since you engaged with something.
The short answer is it's not "your" farm. I don't exactly know where to go from there because I can't be sure what the source of such a fundamental error is (besides your limited familiarity with the subject). Like did you mean a personal garden, or that you're concerned about the community/ies eating the crops having input on what is grown on community land, or something else?
EPT
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