|
Now that we have a new thread, in order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a complete and thorough read before posting! NOTE: When providing a source, please provide a very brief summary on what it's about and what purpose it adds to the discussion. The supporting statement should clearly explain why the subject is relevant and needs to be discussed. Please follow this rule especially for tweets.
Your supporting statement should always come BEFORE you provide the source.If you have any questions, comments, concern, or feedback regarding the USPMT, then please use this thread: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/website-feedback/510156-us-politics-thread |
United States43538 Posts
On January 31 2026 06:34 LightSpectra wrote:
The private owners of steel, railways, coal, and hospitals seemed to give up their ownership without a fight to the Labour government of the UK c. 1945-1951.
You’re missing a bit of context here. They weren’t fully independent of the government in 1945. Labour weren’t proposing a revolution, they were proposing a continuation of what had been the accepted default for six years.
WW2 was devastating to colonial, merchant, and investment interests but for many Brits the experience of national jobs programs, government built and supplied housing, full employment, equitable rations etc. had positives. Many people ate better on rations than they had before the war. Attlee’s argument was that if it could be done in wartime, why not peace? Of course the wartime government ran up ruinous deficits as a necessity to win the war but it’s wrong to imagine 1945 as a revolution. The groundwork was already there, it was the Conservatives who were proposing going back.
|
Whether or not it was "revolutionary" is not so important as was the fact that 20% of the economy being collectivized didn't cause society to collapse or stagnate, but resulted in widespread and dramatic increases in standards of living. So if that much can be done democratically, why not 30%? 70%? Why should I believe there's some inherent relationship between abolishing private property and authoritarianism when there's more examples than just Attlee's government?
|
United States43538 Posts
On January 31 2026 09:25 LightSpectra wrote:
Whether or not it was "revolutionary" is not so important as was the fact that 20% of the economy being collectivized didn't cause society to collapse or stagnate, but resulted in widespread and dramatic increases in standards of living. So if that much can be done democratically, why not 30%? 70%? Why should I believe there's some inherent relationship between abolishing private property and authoritarianism when there's more examples than just Attlee's government?
It wasn’t collectivized under Attlee’s government. That’s the point. Your entire premise of the election of a Labour government resulting in all these parts of the economy coming under government control is incorrect. A national coalition governed through WW2 in which Labour played a very significant role. WW2 was still ongoing when they held the 1945 election. The Churchill government wasn’t defeated by a new socialist agenda, Churchill and Attlee presented rival concepts of what should replace the wartime national coalition and Attlee’s vision of continuity and expansion won.
There was tremendous economic shock when large parts of the economy fell under government control but in the broader context of u-boats and the blitz it wasn’t the biggest headline of the week. Additionally the national coalition government doing this had suspended elections etc. so your point about no relationship between government takeovers of the economy and authoritarianism isn’t well made here. Nor about living standards, lots of people became homeless around the time the government took over the provision of housing. In context the Luftwaffe had something to do with that but without context you can’t simply declare nationalization was done democratically, smoothly, and without setbacks.
Basically pick another example. Attlee ain’t the one, there’s an awful lot of context that has to come with Attlee.
|
"At the end of the War, 94% of industrial raw materials in the UK were controlled by the state.10 However, though the government had taken control of many industries during the War, ownership remained largely in private hands. The only firms taken into national ownership during the War were Short Brothers (aircraft manufacturers), Brown Ltd (precision machine manufacturers) and Power Jets Ltd (manufacturers of propulsion jets)." Source: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-8325/CBP-8325.pdf
The critical difference between private and collective ownership is whether the profits go to the owners/shareholders or all of society. The state managing and regulating production doesn't change that. So yes, the nationalizations did happen after the election of 1945.
|
On January 31 2026 07:20 Falling wrote:
Anything is possible in theory, but in practice? How many kicks at the can does Marxism get? Infinite tries for the Marxist, but for me not one more if I care about the well being of the people of that country. Not only has it only produced tyranny, it is also a demonstrably less productive system that equally spreads the poverty but doesn't produce wealth for the average citizen.
You can even look at the early colonies (Jamestown is the one I recall) which predated Marxism but early on the colony held the product of their labour in common... and was on the brink of starvation with governors writing about the constant complaints of how people were not doing their fair share so what was the point of working hard for another to lazily receive the benefits. Once they stopped the common storehouses the colony had surplus enough to trade and the women saying they couldn't work because of their children were out in the fields. (I've lost the pdf of the journals so I can't pull the direct quotes right now but the paraphrase is close enough.)
The individual profit motive is far more powerful then the more abstract working together for the common storehouse. (Even if due to job specialization, the individual profit motive does create a form of cooperation for the benefit of many.) With the common storehouse, some of the people will work really hard but a great many will not which will build resentment or apathy in the hard workers. At which point do you introduce coercion if the internal motivation is insufficient to work for the common good?
You’re taking two different angles here, and both are common, but worth distinguishing. The first (which I’ll focus on for brevity; we can revisit the second later if you want) is a sort of empirical, “black box” approach – let’s ignore any of the theory about why Marxism or capitalism would/would not work, and just look at the historical record of societies pre-communism and post-communism. How’d it turn out?
And really, we’re probably talking about Russia and China, right? Those are certainly the most well-known, and in a lot of other cases they’re small and/or peripheral nations whose fates are mostly decided by the ways great powers intervened there. Afghanistan went communist in 1978, and it certainly didn’t go very well for them, but I think it’s pretty hard to look at that story and say the outcomes are a result of fundamental merits or defects in Marxism.
But Russia, sure, it went pretty bad ultimately. The February Revolution looked promising (certainly an improvement over the tsar) but it basically leads to a Kerensky dictatorship until the October Revolution puts the Bolsheviks in power. There’s asterisks – all that is set against the backdrop of WW1, a trying time for everybody, and maybe Bolshevik rule doesn’t turn out so badly if not for the nightmarish civil war they’re immediately embroiled in for many years after WW1 ends. There’s certainly atrocities you can blame on Lenin, but the really hideous stuff comes when Stalin takes over, which doesn’t really seem like a guaranteed outcome from the start. As for China, I’m just not as familiar with the history – maybe someone else could recount the ins and outs there and answer whether the bad outcomes are directly traceable to the ideology.
But like, the French Revolution got pretty ugly, too, and that was a revolution based on the principles of liberal democracy, no? That also ended with a strongman dictator invading everybody, but I don’t think anybody here would say that’s an inevitable outcome of democracy or egalitarianism or constitutional government. There *were* plenty of guys in the 19th century who were pretty sure that was the inevitable outcome of those sorts of principles, and worked hard to make sure everybody stuck with the traditional monarchies instead, but that just meant by 1914 you had a bunch of ancient, ailing dynasties in charge – holdovers from the previous century, totally unequipped for the challenges of the new era, with millions dying as a result. (Nothing like today, of course.)
Don’t get me wrong, I think modern socialists are pretty eager to take Lenin’s ideology as gospel, without acknowledging that he pretty clearly wants a one-party state, and that’s pretty directly responsible for a lot of what comes next. And there’s certainly some No True Scotsman to the often-mocked “true socialism has never been tried” line. But I also think the black box approach – “Marxism always ends in dictatorship, therefore anything from that branch of political thinking is automatically poisonous and evil” – is a bit lazy, no?
|
Canada11408 Posts
Russia and China are the most prominent examples and if there were only two examples, that would be a bit lazy, yes.
Members of the Warsaw Pact could be mini-examples although to what extent their policy was dominated by Moscow making them all the one and the same-- better additional examples would be Albania and Yugoslavia. But we could include Laos, Cambodia, etc.
Certainly the French Revolution was an aborted attempt to become democratic, but we actually do have quite a few successes that we can point to whether it's a slow transition into a constitutional monarchy like the UK and Canada or a sudden break with war fought into a republic like America or lost war into occupation into democracy like Japan. There turns out to be quite a few paths to form successful liberal democracies. Not all succeed. Some retreat into authoritarianism like Putin's Russia or will bounce back and forth whenever the military decides to step in like in Thailand.
But any causal link that movements founded on liberal democratic principles leads to failed democracy and an authoritarian regime would be incredibly weak with so many counter examples.
Whereas the push to create a system founded on Marxist principles doesn't create some successes and some fails or it doesn't create some successes but after a hundred or two hundred years it slides into authoritarianism. It becomes authoritarian within a couple years of the movement gaining power if not immediately.
|
Let's try this from a different lens, what government/economic models have been the most widely regarded successful and how are they different from humanity's failed attempts at capitalism and communism?
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
