281–290 of 372 posts
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> Where are all the creative products the Soviets made? Didn't they make Sputnik
Back in the heyday(!) of the USSR, tourists would routinely fill their luggage with blue jeans to sell on the black market there.
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On the other hand, countries with more regulated markets such as European nations, the U.K. and Commonwealth nations, and Japan and some of the East Asian Tigers might have less pollution than the United States. You get Americans importing EU baby formula because they are more restrictive about what chemical additives can go into them. Couldn't it just be argued that free market extremism is as much folly as a pro-ce…
> Couldn't it just be argued that free market extremism is as much folly as a pro-central planning position? The trouble with calling free markets folly is they are enormously successful, in every place and time where they have been tried. The trouble with central economic planning is it always does badly. BTW, one of the functions of government in a free market is to regulate the externalities - costs of doing busin…
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> nothing like socialism That happens every time. Socialism gets implemented with high hopes, falls flat on its face, and gets declared to be not really socialism at all. How many times does it need to fail before one realizes it is never going to work?
If you read the literature around the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin's coup was highly criticized as un-socialist: Luxemburg, Goldman, etc. Simple litmus test for socialism: do workers manage production completely, through direct democratic processes?
You also conflation democracy with freedom. 49% gets subjugated by the other 51%.
Freedom means not being dictated to by the mob.
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I haven’t read Marx, nor do I particularly care to, but this seems like an endorsement for intellectual incuriosity.
There are so many interesting things to learn that are reality (like reading history books), why waste the precious remaining few years of my life reading books promoting nonsense? I read historical accounts about the Kennedy assassination, but don't waste my time on the conspiracy theory books. Nor do I bother with treatises on ancient aliens or UFOs. Or books on astrology, kirlian photography, ESP, flat earth, reli…
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Did you know there used to be people who lived on that land
I missed the railroads, steel industries, chip manufacturers, iphones, etc. that were looted from those people? BTW, studies of the bones of pre-Columbian Indians shows they worked hard and suffered from periodic famines, as well as a lot of violence.
Industries tend to require raw materials, which many times are located in or around land.
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> Where are all the creative products the Soviets made? Didn't they make Sputnik
Yes, they did. Anything else? Is your car a Soviet made car? How about your clothes? Computers? Furniture? Books? Anything in your dwelling? Back in the heyday(!) of the USSR, tourists would routinely fill their luggage with blue jeans to sell on the black market there.
Anyway, you asked for Soviet creative products and I’ve named one. For what it’s worth, I’ve also heard good things about Soviet watches, I had a coworker who collected them and they’ve been discussed before on HN.
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If you read the literature around the Bolshevik revolution, Lenin's coup was highly criticized as un-socialist: Luxemburg, Goldman, etc. Simple litmus test for socialism: do workers manage production completely, through direct democratic processes?
The trouble with your definition is the violence necessary to steal the means of production so you can set it up for your workers. A totalitarian government is required to do that. The workers will be severely constrained in what they can do - like set up their own businesses. You also conflation democracy with freedom. 49% gets subjugated by the other 51%. Freedom means not being dictated to by the mob.
You could argue that private property is theft, necessarily enforced by a repressive state, and reappropriation is justice. The general strike is non-violent (until the police arrive).
> You also conflation democracy with freedom. 49% gets subjugated by the other 51%.
The interesting part about decentralization is that it somewhat relieves this problem. Federation allows for complex arrangements that coordinate towards consensus. So it might not be necessary to subject populations to laws they don't agree with with such broad strokes.
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> There is no value without labor. While this is generally true, it's also not the entire equation. For example, there's no gain without risk. - When I work for someone else, I am offloading some of the risk to that person/owner. When someone starts a company and hires other people... if the company goes belly up, the founder loses their investment; the workers find another job. - When I rent from someone else, I am…
The nuance in this argument is that everybody shares risk. Workers take risk not only of the financial kind (choosing to take a job at company A instead of B is a bet), as well as physical risk most times. If we believe shareholder of a oil company is taking more risk than the worker in a platform, we value capital more than labour.
If we want to play the "risk grants ownership" game, then we have to be honest: at some point, the risk of the initial investment is paid off, and the risk the employees take on collectively matches or exceeds the risk of the investors. If we're being logically consistent, ownership would transfer as these risk pools shift. But we're not consistent, and our system doesn't value risk, it values capital.
If: 1 - Cooperatives excite you and 2 - You use social media you might want to look at the social.coop Mastodon instance (or cosocial.ca if you're Canadian). Not only has the community on both those sites been a breath of total fresh air for me, I am not worried about the server I'm on having decide between disappearing and selling ads, and I feel like I'm partaking in a social enterprise. Just recently social.coop h…
Beware of social washing to justify higher costs. cosocial.ca charges CA$50 for its annual membership. Omg.lol charges $20/year for Mastodon and a bunch of services and for $29/year, I can offer Mastodon, Lemmy, Matrix and Funkwhale, with 250GB of storage.
We all collectively own the funds, and if we ever want to lower yearly rates or pay our members dividends from surpluses, members are free to put it to a vote.
Part of the reason we run a surplus is to deal with any unexpected costs (they don't just scale with users, but also the popularity of users on our server), but FWIW I think we should open up a pay-what-you-can tier much like social.coop has. Thanks for reminding me, I'll send it to the coop for consideration.
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Nice try, but getting 10,000 people to dig holes (e.g. gigantic infrastructure projects) ends up costing much more than what it takes for "one guy" to "design a microchip"
Sure, it costs more, and everyone agrees on that. Where we disagree is whether it provides more VALUE. The LTV says that it does by definition, because labor = value, and therefore more labor = more value. You may choose to disagree. Just as modern economists disagree with the LTV.
Modern economists haven't refuted this, and in fact many parrot it, and anyone saying they have rejected the idea is misinformed. See for instance https://bnarchives.yorku.ca/308/2/20101200_cockshott_nitzan_...
The LTV absolutely accounts for demand (what capitalists call "value") and in fact requires it for its description of how capitalism operates. It's really just saying there are two forms of value: aggregate demand and aggregate production costs, with competition driving prices down to production costs. If you don't agree with that, I don't really know how else to help because it's kind of a universal truth in a mass production market economy.