An Alabama woman was imprisoned for ‘endangering’ her fetus. She gave birth in a jail shower
An Alabama woman was imprisoned for ‘endangering’ her fetus. She gave birth in a jail shower
Please show me where I said to do nothing. Why don’t you try imagining new ways of improving things rather than repeating the mistakes of the past? Of the revolutions in the 18th-20th centuries, I think only the American revolution accomplished anything close to what it was intending. And that’s because it didn’t destroy all the existing institutions while in the process of implementing new ones.
(Not that I agree with what the American revolution was intending, but we did get mostly what they set out to do without thousands of poor civilians starving to death in the process.)
Our institutions are not the problem, our policies are the problem. I want to see a transition to UBI, but an overhaul that dismantled WIC and SNAP before we got UBI in place would be an unmitigated disaster for the very people we were intending to help.
It’s not the reform that I’m skeptical of. It’s the lust for revolutionary destruction as a path to reform that I’m skeptical of. It’s emotionally satisfying without regard to its actual efficacy in accomplishing the proposed reforms. Because history does not show us evidence that this works out well in the long run.
Couple things for you to look up:
These two things would likely do it.
Do what? Just saying “we’ll have farming and transport” is not a plan.
I’m not saying there isn’t any other way to accomplish food production and distribution. I’m saying that just overthrowing our current systems without an explicit plan to keep food on the shelves is going to result in regular working class people starving. That has happened in every revolution except the American, and that’s because the American revolutionaries already had the Continental Congress in place making plans about how to administrate the country, if they managed to win the war.
But most revolutions were just pure chaos with no plan that resulted in regular people starving to death. I 100% agree we need new systems. But I’m not terribly interested in living through a violent revolution.
That fallacy only holds when it’s a retroactive and also incorrect claim of category error. This is neither retroactive nor incorrect. The USSR is not communist by any definition, not now, or before it existed, either. Marx himself wouldn’t have been a fan.
To oversimplify, there are three criteria for communism:
The state must be abolished. That means no government, no class of rulers, no individual or group with a monopoly claim on force to achieve their ends. People self-manage and organise their affairs and business by common agreement and consent based on mutual aid and co-operation.
Classes must be abolished. There can be no class distinctions remaining; specifically, no owners who can exploit workers. All are workers, and all commonly own all materially productive components of society. Nothing is privately owned by individuals (meaning nothing is gatekept for the purposes of seeking rent), but is democratically organised on the basis of need.
Money itself must be abolished. Once democracy has prevailed over the economy, the common ownership of the means of production has bee achieved, and thus everyone has reached the stage where they can freely consume what they need and want without worry of whether they can “afford” it, money will be seen as the arbitrary constraint that it is, and cease to be useful, and disappear completely.
None of these things happened under the USSR. If Marx were a teacher and the USSR his student, they would get a failing grade.
No true “no true Scotsman fallacy” fallacy?
We have to go deeper!