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Why wouldn't the immediate moral consequences be the main thing to look at?
That's a fantastic question. I am not being sarcastic at all, it's legitimately the main question among leftists. This naturally leads to Dialectical and Historical Materialism.
Note: this is a vast simplification.
Materialism is the belief and natural conclusions that come from the idea that matter and environmental conditions are what create thought. Ie, a painter knows blue because they percieve the sky and thus can envision beyond that. People are more products of their environment than anything else.
Dialectical Materialism is a logical method that looks at matter as a trajectory. Everything is not what it was, the river of yesterday is not the river of today. Everything is changing and nothing is static. Within everything is the element of that which it can change to, ie an apple contains within itself the fuel for it to rot.
Historical Materialism is the combination of those ideas with the central idea that just as the environment shapes human thought, so too in turn do humans reshape their environment, which in turn reshapes human thought again! This is the driving force of change in history.
Circling back to Imperialism, we must analyze the following:
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Why does Imperialism exist, and did it always exist in the manner it does?
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What are the consequences of Imperialism?
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What are the consequences of the consequences of Imperialism?
To answer:
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Imperialism exists because of the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall. This tendency exists as a fundamental for Capitalism. As competition persists, Capitalists seek to gain profit by lowering costs via automation, but as competitors also automate, prices lower. This race to the bottom is held back by worker wages, which must be at subsistence + replacement to persist. After enough time and monopolization, you cannot explpit further, so you must seek new methods to exploit, so Capitalists export Capital and import profits from third world countries, thus super-exploiting for super-profits.
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The consequences of this are that Third World Countries experience a drain in value, entire countries function as Capitalists and entire countries function as Workers. It's a sort of nation-scale Worker-Owner exploitation, if that makes sense. Thus, the Material Conditions within the Third World climb slowly while a sort of Labor Aristocracy appears in the first world, where workers have inflated lifestyles on the backs of third world workers.
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The consequences of the consequences of Imperialism is that this form of international Capitalism creates wretched exploitation of third world workers and prevents workers in the third world from rising against their own exploitation. This opens the door for fascism and prevents the door to progress to Socialism from opening. This works against progress. However, the tendency for the rate of profit to fall still exists, and thus exploitation of the third world rises, and revolutions occur against said imperialism. That's why the US swoops in and stomps this out.
That was a long explanation, and not nearly thorough enough, but should help. Essentially, we must analyze the trajectory of systems and the cause and effect of systems. Expansionism can happen for many reasons, but is often tied to Imperialism, which itself is the natural development of Capitalism to its most brutal and unequal stage.
Dialectical Materialism is a logical method that looks at matter as a trajectory. Everything is not what it was, the river of yesterday is not the river of today. Everything is changing and nothing is static. Within everything is the element of that which it can change to, ie an apple contains within itself the fuel for it to rot.
Building on this cause I like the philosophy, and we're like fifty comments deep so probably nobody will attack me for it. But this is sort of like. The dialectic, here, is the idea that within everything, is the thing which causes it's own undoing, or, it's own opposite. Everything exists in a kind of paradoxical state. If you think about old philosophy, it tries to kind of, conceive of fundamental laws which govern everything, and those laws don't really deal with change. Like those old timey greek philosophies that are like, water composes everything, because water, water can freeze, become solid, water can become liquid, steam, you look upwards into the sky and you see a kind of vast ocean of blue, all life requires water, etc. So it sees water as like this most fundamental of all elements, this kind of, ultimate truth. You get similar stuff with like, the four elements, right, water, earth, air, fire, states of matter. Naturalist philosophy, these philosophies concerned with fundamental truths. Folk philosophy.
The dialectic is concerned with change. You have the thesis, right, the idea, the truth, that the sky is blue, right. But then within that is the antithesis, the sky is black, right, and I hear you say well no that's impossible. But then we have the nighttime, the change imposed by time, imposed by the context, sort of. the sky turns from blue to black because of nighttime, and back again in the day. The sky turns red in the evening, the sky turns purple, turns pink, turns green maybe even, and then through that process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, or, sky blue, sky black, sky black and blue, we arrive at truth more generally. We integrate these new realities with our previous realities, we integrate these contradictions, and we arrive at truth. It's sort of like a basis for the scientific process. You postulate a truth, you go out and attempt to contradict yourself, then you come back in, and change the truth you postulated to fit what it is that you've found out in the world. Hopefully, maybe you just do p-value hacking or whatever, I dunno.
And then at some point the postmodernists come along and fuck everything up for everybody with schizo language games, but nobody has any time for that and I don't really understand it even though I probably do, because it's fucked up eldritch shit, so, I won't get into it unless I'm maybe pressed a little bit. And then there's like wittgenstein rolling in on a holy chariot, and then dying after he gets thrown off when a rock hits the wheel or something, I dunno.
Yeah, all makes sense.
So what I'm getting at, is not like disagreeing with any of that. I'm just saying that, for example, it's relevant that the USSR starved millions of people in the territories it expanded into when their agricultural policies failed. So if we're going to say "We have to fight capitalism!" (which, yes, we do, or at least limit its bad effects) by saying "We need to install communism!", it's a relevant question to ask, okay what are the details, how do you plan to prevent that even-worse-than-capitalism outcome from happening again (which, I'm not saying that's every communist system, just that it's a relevant example to bring up as why "this isn't capitalism" isn't a sufficient or safe reason to switch to any particular other-than-capitalism system as the new answer).
Surely that makes sense? Or no?
The people in the USSR largely starved during the transition from feudalism to Socialism. It's worth noting that famine was common and regular before Socialism, and ended after collectivization was completed. Obviously, collectivization was largely botched, however we must also recognize the results. We can learn from their mistakes to prevent such tragedies from repeating.
I say this, because the USSR skipped past Capitalism to Socialism. It wasn't a "worse than Capitalism" situation, they eliminated the mass starvations that were taken as normal under Feudalism, especially as they were undeveloped.
The US is completely unique in comparison to revolutionary Russia. The modern US produces a mass excess of food, and people still starve. You would have to explain why you think collectivization would lead to starvation in the US, no?
Largely, Marxism has 3 major components.
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English Economic theory - Marx built the Law of Value off Ricardo and Smith. His analysis of Capitalism explains how Capitalism is exploitative and cannot last forever.
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French Socialism - Marx built his visions of Socialism off of French labor movements towards collective ownership, a what to replace Capitalism with.
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German philosophy - Marx distilled Dialectical Materialism from Hegel's Dialectical Idealism, and looked at History through that vision. This is the why of Communism.
All 3 elements are inseperable and united.
Does that answer your question?
Does that answer your question?
Not completely, no. The more fundamental question I am trying to ask is this: It sounds like you're saying Biden is bad because we need to convert to communism and he's capitalist and so you can't support him regardless. Right? Or no?
And so I'm saying, if you're saying capitalism is so bad we need to replace it, then what are you wanting to replace it with, that any leader who doesn't want to replace it with is unworthy of any support? I realize that's a very very broad question which may not even have a single specific-at-the-outset answer, but I tried to narrow it down by asking, like what country would be the model? Or would we be doing something that was never done before?
It sounds like maybe the answer was the second one, right? Or no? I'm just trying to understand what it is that you're saying, in concrete terms, at this point. Like would we still have congress, or the electoral college? Would we be able to own private property? Would the economy be centrally managed by the government as in USSR and China? That kind of thing.
That's not quite what I am saying. "Communism" is not something you can jump to from Capitalism, Socialism is.
Either way, if we understand Capitalism itself to be a constantly declining system, efforts to merely patch it up without replacing it with some form of Worker Ownership will continue that decline and will continue Imperialism. We can support Biden over another, terrible pick, but Biden is still a block towards progress.
As for asking what I want, the answer is Socialism, of some form, as this eliminates both Imperialism and Capitalism's largest issues. Socialism has been tried in different manners with different results.
Fundamentally, the US is entitely different from the USSR and PRC, so even if we copied them 1 to 1 we would have vastly different results. We cannot predict exactly what it would look like, and in the end we need to understand that it must be a democratic, worker-focused change, so whatever is capable of building a unified-front in the US will be what Socialism will look like.
To answer your listed questions:
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Congress and the Electoral College would likely be replaced by worker councils, with democratic representatives.
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Private Property would eventually be removed, personal property would remain.
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Some level of central planning would almost certainly be employed.
- Congress and the Electoral College would likely be replaced by worker councils, with democratic representatives.
- Private Property would eventually be removed, personal property would remain.
- Some level of central planning would almost certainly be employed.
Got it. Do you have examples of places this approach has been employed and worked well during the 150 years or so of socialism/communism being around?
What do you mean by "working well?" What metrics do you want to see?
My entire point is that you cannot simply copy a country that had a different historical development and expect the same results, so I don't know why you're asking me which country I want to copy.
I mean I think you probably see what I'm getting at -- I'm suspicious of how this will work out in practice. In particular, I'm suspicious of the idea of shutting down private property, or centrally managing the economy; it sounds like a solution for the ills of capitalism but I'm aware of a couple of big examples where the way it's been implemented has turned into a living nightmare, and not produced the economic happiness it was supposed to produce.
Surely it's fair to ask how it's worked out in practice? You know, the metric being good standard of living, happy people, press freedom, basic necessities being met, that kind of thing. I'm not saying you have to copy another country exactly but surely it's relevant to look at examples. No?
Not saying you have to copy another country but also, like, if we were going to replace all the cars in a country with some other mode of transportation, it's fair to ask, okay where do they use that and how does it work? If it works well then cool, that's an indication of good things, and if not then maybe some lessons we can learn about how to implement it better here. Doesn't that seem fair?
Care to share the examples, and the metrics by which you call them failures?
"Good standard of living, press freedom, and basic necessities met" hasn't been achieved anywhere IMO, especially if you consider the global context. If you can give specifics, we can look beyond vibes.
Care to share the examples
Sure, USSR and China are the big countries which converted to communism, and then in both cases millions of people starved. You said famines were common even in the feudal system in Russia, I think, but that's not fully accurate -- I mean, they happened, but not with anything like the same frequency, under the same technological-efficiency backdrop, or for simple reasons of management (there was generally some external reason like a drought). And the USSR had trouble providing basic necessities to its people for all its existence, even worse than the failures the US has to provide basic necessities. And they both have much more barbaric prison systems even than the US's fairly barbaric prison system.
China's different because at this point it's working "well" economically, but at the cost of personal individual freedom and working conditions -- I mean, the exploitation that the US is doing of global work force (which is very real) is often happening to workers inside China, so you can't really say that enacting China's system here would be a solution to the problems of the US. All it would do is import the exploitation of Chinese workers to happen to American workers too (i.e. much worse than their already pretty significant level of exploitation.)
(I realize all that is huge oversimplification, and those might not be the models you would choose, which I why I keep asking over and over again for details of the model you would choose.)
Good standard of living, press freedom, and basic necessities met" hasn't been achieved anywhere IMO, especially if you consider the global context
Agreed. I think the closest that's been achieved was probably the New Deal-era American economy (such as it was available to white people) up until around the 1960s. Basically, a strong organized working class backed by unions, exerting control over a democratic government to push back against the control that capital wants to exert over the levers of power.
Basically what I would think is the next step would be to extend that to all races, get back to unions as a unit of political power instead of political parties and a whole specialized class of lobbyists and consultants that work in Washington providing change "from above," reform some of the worst evils of money in politics and barbaric foreign policy, and see where that gets us. Because even that is far far away from where it should be. But that to me seems like a more sensible step than trying to make a more centralized economic structure, and assuming that the issues of who winds up in charge of the central planning will take care of themselves.
(Not that I'm saying that that last is what you're advocating -- just talking about my sort of stereotype view of what "getting rid of capitalism" as a solution might look like.)
You're making the mistake of looking at countries and systems as static snapshots, rather than as developments on what was before. Both the PRC and USSR ended famines as compared to the Nationalist Agrarian KMT and Tsarist Russia. That's why life expectancy doubled under Mao and in the USSR, they managed to industrialize and end their respective regular famines.
Comparing to the US is additionally strange, the US was a superpower and both the USSR and PRC were developing countries, that's like comparing an adult to a child. If one starts off on a much higher foot, why compare at the same point in time, rather than the same point in development?
Either way, with respect to what you're saying, you are ignoring why New Deal America crumbled. Capitalism will erode safety nets over time as Capitalists fight the Tendency for the Rate of Profit to Fall, and this too results in Imperialism. It's unavoidable as long as you allow dictators like Capitalists to exist, rather than democratic production.
Additionay, Capitalism cannot be democratic, nor can the press be free, nor can everyone's needs be met. Capitalists influence the media, thus choosing who can be elected, and requires safety nets be insufficient so the workers have to work.
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