Mastodawn

a very weeny construct 💀Sep 20, 2018

i boosted this video a couple times already but want to stress that it's great! in a mere 20 minutes it:

- ELI5's the historical meaning and origins of capitalism, communism, and other jargon

- addresses the "but communist countries killed millions" argument

- uses this language to crystallize an argument about how the internet came about, turned shitty, and how to fix it

https://invidio.us/watch?v=L01iiJz8Thc

tyvm @strypey

peer to peer communism vs the client-server state [SIGINT10]

JC Brand

@pho4cexa @strypey Interesting talk and worth watching. I'm sympathetic to many of his criticisms, but also critical of his framing.

He frames capitalism in the worst possible way, even though it's often used to refer to a market economy with private property and he frames communism in the most favorable way.

A free market economy does not require a star topology and the price mechanism doesn't require it either.

JC Brand Sep 20, 2018

@pho4cexa @strypey

Also, ~40 million died in China, ~7 million in Ukrane and ~2 million (25%) in Cambodia. All states that had Communism as their stated end-goal.

Those deaths were avoidable, were all in the name of Communism and he doesn't address them at all.

JC Brand Sep 20, 2018

@pho4cexa @strypey In those countries, because they were against "free enterprise", and for collectivization, you weren't allowed as farmer to harvest any of your crops to feed your family. The state had to confiscate ALL of your produce and redistribute it (often selling it to capitalist countries to generate foreign currency) thereby causing famine.

Podcast on Mao's great famine: http://www.econtalk.org/frank-dikotter-on-maos-great-famine/

Again, all in the name of a classless communist anti-imperialist society.

Frank Dikotter on Mao’s Great Famine – Econlib

JC Brand Sep 20, 2018

@pho4cexa @strypey That said, I agree that the VC funding model has serious issues, causes extractive star-topologies and prioritizes cancerous, monopolistic growth, thereby negating smaller sustainable business models (simply because they don't provide 1000x returns). I would have loved to hear what his proposed solution entails, but he didn't go into it.

@jcbrand @pho4cexa
> Those deaths were avoidable, were all in the name of Communism and he doesn't address them at all.

Because they're irrelevant to the way he uses the term, as he explains when he gives his definitions. As #DavidGraeber shows in his book 'The Democracy Project', political terms can have (at least) two totally different meanings, one based on a founding ideal, one based on notable historical failures to fulfill that ideal. So it is with the term "communism".

@jcbrand @pho4cexa Many equally terrible things have been done in the name of building and defending capitalism from communism (eg the Vietnam War):
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/jul/26/communists-capitalism-stalinism-economic-model

Does that mean anyone who makes a pro-capitalist argument has to share responsibility for all that? I would say no, because like Dymitri, those people are using the term in a totally different way from its critics.

Condemn communists’ cruelties, but capitalism has its own terrible record | Owen Jones

Rightwingers point out the horrors of Stalinism, yet forget the human misery their favoured economic model was built on, says Guardian columnist Owen Jones

@jcbrand @pho4cexa . As Graeber also points out, if you actually read Adam Smith, the system of free enterprise he proposes in 'The Wealth of Nations' is more like a kind of minarchist communism than most things called "capitalism" today. He would be turning in his grave at the way his ideas are abused by many today to defend corporate feudalism as "capitalism".

I'm definitely not for crony-capitalism or corporate feudalism and am actively looking for alternatives and better solutions.

However, just as Soviet Communism isn't "real" communism, crony-capitalism isn't a real free-market economy.

(Appropriately regulated) free markets (with a solvent welfare state or perhaps UBI) is still the best way I can see to allow people to have free association, free speech and free enterprise and to avoid tyranny.

@jcbrand @pho4cexa
> However, just as Soviet Communism isn't "real" communism, crony-capitalism isn't a real free-market economy.

We are totally in agreement. Dymitri just uses "capitalism" to mean exactly the same thing you mean by "crony-capitalism". To be fair, that is it's original definition, as it was used by the people who coined the term.
1/2

@jcbrand @pho4cexa
That said, I have no interest in getting snotty at people who use it to mean

> (Appropriately regulated) free markets

As long as we're clear on which definition of "capitalism" we're using in any given discussion, there's no problem (unless people insist on being language police ...)

Mark Shane Hayden Sep 21, 2018

@strypey @jcbrand @pho4cexa

I am moving away from describing present day economies as merely "capitalist" or "communist" because reality doesn't match the original ideologies.

China, Cuba, Venezuela etc. didn't move to communism. They operate under "state capitalism" whereby the means of production are centrally managed by totalitarian regimes.

America (and the bulk of "western" nations) are "corporatist" whereby means of production are consolidated within protected corporations.

Strypey Sep 23, 2018

@msh @jcbrand @pho4cexa I get what you're saying, but I'm not sure how useful these generalizations are anymore. China, Cuba, and Venezuela have very different systems, that emerged from very different histories, with very different sets of relations with 18th/19th C colonialism, and 20th C corporate globalization.

Strypey Sep 23, 2018

@msh @jcbrand @pho4cexa For example, China was never colonized by European powers to the extent that Venezuela and particularly Cuba were. Another example, Venezuela's current system began with an elected government and popular constitutional reform, while China's began with an armed revolutionary uprising and seizure of power, and Cuba's began with a guerrilla revolution loosely supported by the population in order to oust an unpopular capitalist dictator.

Concerning your point about Vietnam, communists and leftists never tire to mention Vietnam in the context of the evils of imperialist capitalism.

I believe that it was wrong for the US to get involved there, just like it was wrong for them to get involved in Iraq.

Wars of imperialism don't have much to do with free markets however and most libertarians (i.e staunchest supporters of free markets) are anti-imperialism and anti-interventionism.

Since Dmitry never actually explained his alternative... I'll venture an attempt at a post-capitalist emergent order.

Commons-based peer-to-peer production of goods based on open standards, open designs and free software. Together with a reigning in of the excesses of "intellectual property" (e.g. price gouging) by weakening or removing their state-provided protections.

For venture funding, doing so via state and crowdfunded ventures that contribute to the commons.

@jcbrand @pho4cexa Dymitri has specific proposals which he's written about in detail. A good intro is his chapter in 'Ours to Hack and Own'. Funnily enough, his proposals are in many ways similar to yours.

@jcbrand @pho4cexa sure, this is my point. I don't hold modern pro-capitalists responsible for the Vietnam war, for the same reason I don't hold modern communists responsible for Stalinism or Maoism. Playing the blame game just isn't helpful. We are all in the same frightful mess (global corporatism where the richest 1% control the same wealth as the poorest 50%), whatever our ideological convictions, and we need to work together to figure out ways out of it.

They're not irrelevant because you can't just divorce a term from "historical failures to fulfill that ideal". Especially not if those failures are actually millions of deaths due to forced deprivation and starvation. Doing so risks repeating those same "mistakes".

Additionally, through his definitions he creates IMO a false dichotomy between Capitalism and Communism because he removes free markets and free enterprise from his definition of Capitalism and then doesn't leave any space for them anywhere in his subsequent analysis.

Free markets create an emergent system and are the only way I'm aware of to maximize personal freedom. (pseudo-)communism has only ever been imposed via top-down authoritarianism.

@jcbrand @pho4cexa maybe that's because markets, like labour, are fundamental mechanisms of human activity. Markets don't belong to "capitalism" any more than labour belongs to "communism".

> Free markets create an emergent system and are the only way I'm aware of to maximize personal freedom.

They're good at maximizing some freedoms, for some people. Universal declarations of human rights, enforced by states, maximize others. Amartya Sen's book 'Development as Freedom' covers this well

@jcbrand @pho4cexa
and yet you seen very keen to divorce "capitalism" from the Vietnam war. You can't have it both ways.

JC Brand Sep 22, 2018

I'm not convinced that there's equivalence between Mao's great famine and the role that Communist ideology played in that, and the Vietnam war and the role that Capitalist (free market/free enterprise) ideology plays.

The Vietnam war seems to me to have been more about American imperialism and jockeying for power with the Soviet Union.

I'm all for using it as a cautionary tale of the problems of imperialism. Not convinced it's a cautionary tale against free market economy

JC Brand Sep 22, 2018

In any case, thanks for the reading suggestion and for a civil discussion.

I'll look into his proposals in more detail.