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Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

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Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#51

Post by sudosysgen »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #21
s_kilk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's certainly true of the Soviet case (the fear instilled by the Stalin years left everyone lying constantly just to avoid the bullet), but Chile was very different. The whole project was to build a genuinely inclusive and worker-led democracy. And they got pretty far with it too, considering they were under economic blockade. We don't get to find out how the story would have ended because the Yanks decided to do…

Well, not everyone . Some people were allowed to live so that an unprecedented era of prosperity unmatched by any other country in Latin America could be ushered in.

So prosperous that raising the price of public transit by a few dollars has led to widespread protests.

Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#52

Post by eirini1 »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #21
s_kilk wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's certainly true of the Soviet case (the fear instilled by the Stalin years left everyone lying constantly just to avoid the bullet), but Chile was very different. The whole project was to build a genuinely inclusive and worker-led democracy. And they got pretty far with it too, considering they were under economic blockade. We don't get to find out how the story would have ended because the Yanks decided to do…

Well, not everyone . Some people were allowed to live so that an unprecedented era of prosperity unmatched by any other country in Latin America could be ushered in.

unprecedented prosperity for like, 20 people. The millions of other people definitely haven't enjoyed anything but immense poverty and misery since the Pinochet coup the implementation of the neoliberal wet dream.

Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#53

Post by chr1 »

tsimionescu wrote: post #45
helpPeople wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The literal definition of socialism is an impossibility, power always gets concentrated among the few. "This time will be different" crowd hadn't been compelling. Human nature hadn't changed.

Socialism is essentially only an extension of democracy to the economic system. Since democracy seems to work relatively decently (warts and all) for most prosperous societies, I don't see why human nature is a good argument for saying it's impossible.

Capitalism is also an extension of democracy, the difference is that with capitalism you get to choose how to vote, by giving part of your vote to someone who have created a better product, and get someone elses vote by doing something useful. With socialism you get the same amount of votes whether you do something useful or not, and can spend that vote on the only type of product whether you like it or not.

This is actually rather similar to the form of democracy we have in our governing system, where you get to choose between two bundles of policies you do not like, and i'd say we need to make our governing democracy more similar to our economic democracy instead!

Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#54

Post by eirini1 »

NaggingGranpa wrote: post #30
monocasa wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nixon was extremely concerned about Chile, had constant updates from, and made it a high level goal of his presidency to overthrow Allende. The trashman strike was for sure CIA organized for instance. And it's a lot easier for your propaganda to take when your troops aren't committing massacres in the country like in Vietnam.

Nixon also made Vietnamization a high level goal of his presidency. How did that work out? Propaganda? Latin America is based on caste. If your "revolution" is based on stealing from the Spanish-blooded landowners to feed Amerindian losers who breed like rabbits, you will get opposition. Not much propaganda needed. And when the landowners send their sons to the army officer corps, you will have opposition with actual…

> If your "revolution" is based on stealing from the Spanish-blooded landowners to feed Amerindian losers who breed like rabbits, you will get opposition.

this is some real mask-off shit.

Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#55

Post by nullstyle »

iudqnolq wrote: post #42
nullstyle wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't seem to be fully accurate. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691166032/th...

That book appears (based on the publicly available abstract) to argue that the Central Bank of Sweden funded the Nobel Prize because of ulterior motives. I don't have the knowledge necessary to take a stance on that claim. However, my comment merely argued that the implementation of the Nobel Prize in Economics is such that the prize is awarded in the exact same way as all the other Nobel Prizes; in other words, it's…

>> my comment merely argued that the implementation of the Nobel Prize in Economics is such that the prize is awarded in the exact same way as all the other Nobel Prizes; in other words, it's no less reputable than the originals.

Naw, IMO the reputability of a prize owes to whole lot more than just shared selection principles. I was just linking to some work in which others question the reputation of the prize as well.

Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#56

Post by randallsquared »

tsimionescu wrote: post #45
helpPeople wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The literal definition of socialism is an impossibility, power always gets concentrated among the few. "This time will be different" crowd hadn't been compelling. Human nature hadn't changed.

Socialism is essentially only an extension of democracy to the economic system. Since democracy seems to work relatively decently (warts and all) for most prosperous societies, I don't see why human nature is a good argument for saying it's impossible.

To the extent that we can agree that democracy works better than autocratic systems, it may be due in part to basing decisions on more input from more people. If we consider a line from consolidated, low-information (CL) decisions to distributed, high-information (DH) decisions, dictatorships' decisions mostly would fall to the CL end, and democracies would be DH-ward of them. Free interactions between individuals in a market, however, are even more DH-ward, and arguing for grocery stores or other price-driven systems to be converted to democratic systems seems like a step backward.

Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#57

Post by iudqnolq »

nullstyle wrote: post #55
iudqnolq wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That book appears (based on the publicly available abstract) to argue that the Central Bank of Sweden funded the Nobel Prize because of ulterior motives. I don't have the knowledge necessary to take a stance on that claim. However, my comment merely argued that the implementation of the Nobel Prize in Economics is such that the prize is awarded in the exact same way as all the other Nobel Prizes; in other words, it's…

>> my comment merely argued that the implementation of the Nobel Prize in Economics is such that the prize is awarded in the exact same way as all the other Nobel Prizes; in other words, it's no less reputable than the originals. Naw, IMO the reputability of a prize owes to whole lot more than just shared selection principles. I was just linking to some work in which others question the reputation of the prize as wel…

Care to provide anything beyond "naw" to support your claim that the same people deciding doesn't means decisions are equally reputable?

Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#58

Post by carapace »

coldtea wrote: post #19

It's funny in a way, that a modern person believes that through technology we can very well reach consciousness with computers, go to Mars, design our genes, achieve immortality, colonize the universe, find the "god's particle", and so on, but successfully modelling an economy is impossible...

It's not impossible (I would like to believe) but it involves self-referential models: In order to work, economic models must include models of the models (both yours and other peoples'.)

This means that cybernetics (the study of "circular loops in causation") is the minimum formalism for economics.

Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#59

Post by monocasa »

eirini1 wrote: post #54
NaggingGranpa wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nixon also made Vietnamization a high level goal of his presidency. How did that work out? Propaganda? Latin America is based on caste. If your "revolution" is based on stealing from the Spanish-blooded landowners to feed Amerindian losers who breed like rabbits, you will get opposition. Not much propaganda needed. And when the landowners send their sons to the army officer corps, you will have opposition with actual…

> If your "revolution" is based on stealing from the Spanish-blooded landowners to feed Amerindian losers who breed like rabbits, you will get opposition. this is some real mask-off shit.

For real. Keep this kind of stuff in mind when watching what's going on in Chile and Bolivia today. Or anytime someone from Miami says that every Cuban they know hates Castro (or now Diez-Canel) and we should help get rid of him.

Re: Cybersyn and Allende’s Semi-Automated Luxury Socialism

#60

Post by tsimionescu »

randallsquared wrote: post #56
tsimionescu wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Socialism is essentially only an extension of democracy to the economic system. Since democracy seems to work relatively decently (warts and all) for most prosperous societies, I don't see why human nature is a good argument for saying it's impossible.

To the extent that we can agree that democracy works better than autocratic systems, it may be due in part to basing decisions on more input from more people. If we consider a line from consolidated, low-information (CL) decisions to distributed, high-information (DH) decisions, dictatorships' decisions mostly would fall to the CL end, and democracies would be DH-ward of them. Free interactions between individuals in…

Socialism and the free market (at least the free market of goods, capital markets are a different discussion) are perfectly compatible.

The democracy I'm talking about is inside corporations. Corporations in capitalism are extremely autocratic entities, while in socialism they would be democratically organized. Worker-owned enterprises would still compete on the free market.

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