RedCondor

No it's not.

Yeah, it's tough out there. But there are really good resources out there, in growing number. I'm kinda optimistic!

Oh, as narrowly as you pose it, not at all! Whoever manages capital best should manage it. If it's a three-way competition between workers, owners, and machines… may the best decision-maker win!

I don't agree with your first paragraph at all.

Capitalist countries were only able to edge out socialist economies by banking on their extant head-start and behaving socialistically (copying socialism in a light way—redistribution, worker advocacy, etc.).

As soon as they were able to claw it all back in the direction of pure capitalism all hell was set loose.

Socialism remains the way forward.

The Hindus invented the "cycle of civilizations" and reincarnation to fatalistically resign themselves to their caste system.

(Some benefit from this more than others.)

The article I took that from discusses the communist answer to that question at length.

https://redsails.org/communist-self-confidence/

1. Humans invented God (and HaShem and the Almighty). God has always been a human creation.

2. Having invented God, humans then assigned to Him their own powers of creation. […]

3. Having projected thought onto a non-human and invented entity, humans then subordinate themselves to it. Endowing their own creation with a specious authority, they take themselves to be lesser than it.

4. People make capital. Everything that counts as capital is a human creation. […]

5. Having created capital, people then assign to it the powers of creation. […]

6. Once the creative powers of work get misassigned to capital, actual workers are made subordinate to it. A created thing that lacks the powers to create is taken to be the all-creative thing and so allowed to lord it over the real creators.

China is wrecking the US, by the way. Good luck with that!

Every anti-socialist's favourite "socialist."

What a surprise! I'm sure it's just a coincidence.

Potshots?

Orwell is already a complete laughingstock anywhere where actually rebellious people hang out. Since his fanboys are always utterly incapable of defending him, the number of people realizing what a POS he was only grows.

To the "Oh, but consider the art, not the artist!" crowd:

Asimov on 1984:

>In his despair (or anger), Orwell forgets the virtues human beings have. All his characters are, in one way or another, weak or sadistic, or sleazy, or stupid, or repellent. This may be how most people are, or how Orwell wants to indicate they will all be under tyranny, but it seems to me that under even the worst tyrannies, so far, there have been brave men and women who have withstood the tyrants to the death and whose personal histories are luminous flames in the surrounding darkness. If only because there is no hint of this in 1984, it does not resemble the real world of the 1980s.

Nor did he foresee any difference in the role of women or any weakening of the feminine stereotype of 1949. There are only two female characters of importance. One is a strong, brainless ‘prole’ woman who is an endless washerwoman, endlessly singing a popular song with words of the type familiar in the 1930s and 1940s (at which Orwell shudders fastidiously as ‘trashy’, in blissful non-anticipation of hard rock).

The other is the heroine, Julia, who is sexually promiscuous (but is at least driven to courage by her interest in sex) and is otherwise brainless. When the hero, Winston, reads to her the book within a book that explains the nature of the Orwellian world, she responds by falling asleep — but then since the treatise Winston reads is stupefyingly soporific, this may be an indication of Julia’s good sense rather than the reverse.

In short, if 1984 must be considered science fiction, then it is very bad science fiction.

https://redsails.org/asimov-on-1984/

Jones Manoel on Animal Farm:

>Orwell spends the entire book describing generations of animals as easily confused, dumb, stupid, illiterate, amnesiac… the entire book! The main target of this book’s critique aren’t the revolutionaries or communism: it’s the working class. George Orwell writes from an aristocratic ethos. “Elite theory” posits the people as incapable of self-governance, without the capacity to constitute themselves as a political subject, and therefore always the object of dispute and manipulation by vying elites. The people lack the capacity for political self-determination, cannot build a political program or engage in autonomous political action. This is George Orwell’s theory, borne out by his choice of metaphors. […] Animal Farm isn’t a critique of revolutionaries; it’s a critique of workers. It’s an aristocratic manifesto against the working class.

https://redsails.org/jones-on-animal-farm/

Dolan on Shooting an Elephant:

>[“Shooting an Elephant”] is a vivid, simple story about how the young Orwell was forced by the pressure of an expectant Burmese crowd to shoot a harmless elephant. Orwell’s surface thesis, laid out in the concluding paragraphs, is that Imperialism turns the Imperialist into a puppet in the hands of the natives. Here’s the first paragraph:

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people — the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans.

I did worry about that description of the Burmese. I mean, it was sort of racist. But reading on, I saw it was just part of a strategy, a double twist where first Orwell zaps you with his anti-Burmese descriptions, then balances them with a paragraph about his loathing for “the Empire [he] served.” It was such a risky, raw strategy I felt proud to have spotted it. Moving up through the ranks, I taught “Shooting an Elephant” for years as a classic of rhetorical structure.

Now I think I read it wrong, rejecting the “obvious” in favor of cooptation by the author. In fact, I was exactly the sort of sucker Orwell had in mind, a half-bright provincial trained to miss the obvious and cleave unto the far-fetched. By teasing this sort of reader with that shock intro, then reassuring him (“Don’t worry, I’m anti-Imperialist”), Orwell got me to ignore the biggest and most important feature of the essay: Orwell’s sheer simple hate for the Burmese. It stuns me to realize that I helped a generation of students overcome their simple, correct instinct (some poor honest kid would always ask, “Isn’t this kinda racist?” and be talked into seeing the Emperor’s glorious wardrobe by me).

http://exiledonline.com/big-brothers-george-orwell-and-chris...

He also stole the plot for both Animal Farm (https://www.radnorshire-fine-arts.co.uk/brand/elias-gertrude...) and 1984 (https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/jun/08/geor...). In the case of Animal Farm he turned it from an anti-Nazi tale to an anti-Soviet one in which there's no Nazis to speak of.

He was a lousy hack of a writer who was elevated to prestige for political purposes.

Perhaps the most blatant case of "political correctness" in literary history.

>Between 1952 and 1957, from three sites in West Germany, a CIA operation codenamed ‘Aedinosaur’ launched millions of ten-foot balloons carrying copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and dropped them over Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia — whose airforces were ordered to shoot the balloons down.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/novel-explosives-of-the-...

>The movie adaptation of Animal Farm was the UK’s first animated feature film, and it was entirely funded by the CIA. This fact was kept secret for 20 years, and only revealed in 1974, to no cultural impact.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/how-cia-brought-an...

If you want to believe this then that's on you.

I provide reporting about how the CIA manipulated the Chilean economy to create the perception that Allende was a bad politician.

In response you simply assert that Allende was a bad politician.

Do you see the problem?

I think the Americanized world will not survive America's decline, and this will soon become indisputable proof that it was America forcing its model onto others rather than anything organic.

Alternatively, palpably growing discontent with material conditions and depleting trust in America's ideological production considers the above account risible Whig history.

The competing account is exactly opposite: the hitherto antiquated idea of a benevolent liberal "end of history" is torn to shreds, as research made widely available even in English variously showcases that the CIA was involved in various genocides (such as Indonesia's) in order to preserve its geopolitical and economic supremacy, to say nothing of exposes about how the FBI tried to goad MLK Jr. into suicide, and other stuff of that sort.

Books such as Vincent Bevins's "The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program that Shaped Our World" (2020) and Vijay Prashad's "Washington Bullets" (2020) are part of this budding understanding, whose foothold is firm both academically and in terms of popularity.

But I think in the end it's always better to hear it from the perpetrators themselves, such as in the words of the so-called "Wise Man" of American Foreign Policy George Kennan, who reported, from the U.S.'s own declassified archives:

>We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1948v01p2/...

As pertains to Chile in particular, far from a hands-off relationship that approved of Pinochet and sent a few economists, the CIA was deeply involved in _causing_ the economic crisis that the Chilean right attributed to Allende, as reported by the New York Times in 1974:

C.I.A. Is Linked to Strikes In Chile That Beset Allende

>The Central Intelligence Agency secretly financed striking labor unions and trade groups in Chile for more than 18 months before President Salvador Allende Gossens was overthrown, intelligence sources revealed today. They said that the majority of more than $8‐million authorized for clandestine C.I.A. activities in Chile was used in 1972 and 1973 to provide strike benefits and other means of support for anti‐Allende strikers and workers.

https://www.nytimes.com/1974/09/20/archives/cia-is-linked-to...

As for the idea that Chileans are broadly grateful for this historical path imposed upon them thus far: we'll see.

>the stock market is exactly the opposite of real estate investing. Land is finite, capital is not.

This is where you go wrong.

Unlike posters defending real estate "investment," I'll criticize you from the opposite end: capital markets are a disguised form of the same old rentierism.

Watch out, lest you become a Clevinger.

>Prison labor has been a part of the U.S. economy since at least the late 19th century. Today it's a multi-billion dollar industry. Incarcerated people do everything from building office furniture and making military equipment, to staffing call centers and doing 3D modeling.

https://www.npr.org/2020/06/29/884989263/the-uncounted-workf...

>13th is a 2016 American documentary film by director Ava DuVernay. The film explores the "intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States";[3] it is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, adopted in 1865, which abolished slavery throughout the United States and ended involuntary servitude except as a punishment for conviction of a crime. DuVernay contends that slavery has been perpetuated since the end of the American Civil War through criminalizing behavior and enabling police to arrest poor freedmen and force them to work for the state under convict leasing; suppression of African Americans by disenfranchisement, lynchings, and Jim Crow; politicians declaring a war on drugs that weighs more heavily on minority communities and, by the late 20th century, mass incarceration affecting communities of color, especially American descendants of slavery, in the United States. She examines the prison-industrial complex and the emerging detention-industrial complex, discussing how much money is being made by corporations from such incarcerations.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_(film)

To whatever extent you want to misuse the term, America has more of a caste system than China.

>[Kennan] envisions all of humanity destined to “melt into a vast polyglot mass,” with only the Chinese, Jews, and blacks remaining apart. “Could this mean that these three minorities are destined to subjugate and dominate all as an uneasy but unavoidable triumvirate the rest of society — the Chinese by their combination of intelligence, ruthlessness, and ant-like industriousness; the Jews by their sheer determination to survive as a culture; the Negroes by their ineradicable bitterness and hatred of the whites?”

https://newrepublic.com/article/117174/george-f-kennans-diar...

Cool joke.

I encourage anyone on the fence between this libertarian and I to read the "Concessions" essay I linked up above.

All so-called "capital returns" are in reality produced by working people, and therefore people get to democratically decide what they do with them, through whatever decision-making forms they politically choose and consent to organize themselves under.

Insofar as there are disagreements, because capitalist "geniuses" don't think their riches should be subject to democracy, we have a struggle between socialism and capitalism.

Marketers take a lot of credit for achievements that don't belong to them.

Take, for example, Hayek's rather more honest commentary on vacations and human rights generally:

>[The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights] is admittedly an attempt to fuse the rights of the Western liberal tradition with the altogether different concept deriving from the Marxist Russian Revolution. It adds to the list of the classical civil rights enumerated in its first twenty-one articles seven further guarantees intended to express the new ‘social and economic rights’. (…) The conception of a ‘universal right’ which assures to the peasant, to the Eskimo, and presumably to the Abominable Snowman, ‘periodic holidays with pay’ shows the absurdity of the whole thing. (…) What are the consequences of the requirement that every one should have the right ‘freely to participate in the cultural life of the community and to share in the scientific advances and its benefits’. (…) It is evident that all these ‘rights’ are based on the interpretation of society as a deliberately made organization by which everybody is employed. They could not be made universal within a system of rules of just conduct based on the conception of individual responsibility, and so require that the whole of society be converted into a single organization, that is, made totalitarian in the fullest sense of the word.

https://redsails.org/concessions/

The decay we witness today is simply the rollback of concessions copied from socialist states and artificially bolted onto capitalism to reduce socialist ferment. The consequences are predictable.

dang presents himself as a good fair arbiter then gimps any ML's ability to respond with sources against a dozen mediocre libertarians spouting the most vanilla ignorance imaginable.

Great posts, though!

>I wouldn't use the words "serfs in some content factory." That choice of language speaks to an ideological bent that is VERY far removed from my own.

Are you very right-wing?

>Only if they lack political education.

Socialists will once again get to explain how the capitalist welfare state was an unsustainable scam paid for by neocolonialism. Demonized socialist projects will come to be seen in a more authentic, positive light, and the fight for worker and human emancipation from capitalism will resume.

This isn't new. Historically, many great teachers of the workers have got around this with a little cleverness.

It'll happen again.

Only if they lack political education.

Yeah the CPC eliminates poverty whereas the USG wages war.

There's no comparison.

I mean, I don't know what to say other than "this is wrong, as is clearly explained by the submitted link."