So when the communist party came into power after the Bolshevik revolution, Wilson went to the League of Nations to negotiate a common embargo of the Soviet project, essentially sanctioning Russia the way we might sanction a nation for humanitarian wrongdoing.
This is to say Wilson was afraid of it actually working, which would jeopardize the industrial moguls who were already running the US.
This is also to say, the Soviet Union was doing a communism in hostile circumstances, much the way European monarchs pressured France to raise a new king after the revolution (leading to Napoleon’s rise to power, the Levée en masse (general conscription) and the War of the First Coalition (or as is modernly known, Napoleon Kicks European Butt For A While ).
Historians can’t really say, but the fact the red scare started with Wilson (and not after WWII) might have influenced events, including the corruption of the party and the rise of Stalin as an autocrat.
Also according to Prof. Larry Lessig, Boss Tweed in the 1850s worked to make sure the ownership class called all the shots in the United States, eventually driving us to Hoover and the Great Depression. FDR’s New Deal (very much resented by the industrialists) was a last chance for Capitalism, which then got a boost because WWII commanded high levels of production and distracted us with a foreign enemy. Then the cold war.
So communism was really unlucky and didn’t get a fair shake in the Soviet Union, and US free market capitalism got especially lucky in the 20th century, and we don’t really know if either one can be held together for more than a century or two. EU capitalism is wavering, thanks to pressure from the far right, and neoliberalism failing to serve the public.
In the meantime, check out what’s going on in Cuba, which isn’t perfect, but is interesting.
FYI, in the fifties the CIA wrote a memo where they stated that claims that Stalin was autocratic were largely exaggerated and the USSR largely had collective leadership.
CIA is a big institution, and gathered a lot of very useful data, which it shares in the World Factbook. (At least those things that can be attained by open research, which is a lot) CIA also engages in espionage not only to gain hidden and secret information but to serve state interests, typically how the state department (under the executive) defines interests of the state.
And as with most espionage organizations, CIA is not above engaging in cruel, sometimes violent shenanigans. During the cold war, CIA secured the Americas from influence of the Soviet Union (containment) but also arranged exploitation rights to US centered companies, and were often messy about it. To be fair KGB was also about trying to influence countries to sell to USSR, so there was incentive to act aggressively and escalate towards brutality.
( Incidentally, all those American interest companies are now multi-national corporations, which means they have no real allegiance to the US, and evade paying taxes anyway. )
Also during the cold war, CIA was big on SIGINT (intercepting communications and listening in) where KGB was big on HUMINT (infiltrating offices and coercing officials to report to KGB). This is not to say these are the only methods they respectively used (CIA liked finding officials in need and bribing them, often arranging for goods and services they’d otherwise not have access to), so when KGB captured (and brutally killed) a spy, it was usually the informant, not the CIA employed handler that turned them.
Also of note, the Most Brutal Spy Agency award (probably a dagger-shaped trophy) would go to… Deuxième Bureau of the French Republic, who liked exotic James-Bond-style cinematic deaths, like throwing people out of a helicopter over a body of water. KGB did feed Oleg Penkovsky into a blast furnace, but he was a mole in KGB feeding information to the US. Moles are embarrassing when uncovered and no one likes them.
Anyhow, CIA = incompetent is a mostly 21st century trope, when George W. Bush and his administration replaced all the top management with cronies at a time post-USSR Russia (and the entire Baltic region) was undergoing a lot of political upheaval. The US needed a robust intelligence sector managing foreign affairs at the time. But that was just not meant to be.
The whole Valerie Plame incident (in which the administration burned a CIA employee for political revenge – she escaped and made it home) demonstrated the meager level of respect Bush and crew had for the intelligence sector. After that, CIA, now a subdivision of DHS became reputed for torture and drone strike campaigns (which massacred fifty civilians for every killed POI), and worked with NSA to spy on Americans, under the color of looking for Terrorists.
Shit only gets worse from there. CIA would use the NSA mass surveillance program intel to create dossiers on Americans. Despite its conflicts with fourth-amendment protections, these files are used by secret courts – FISA – for secret trials, violating fifth- and sixth-amendment protections. These trials putting convicts on the Disposition Matrix (id est, Obama’s kill list ) for abduction and rendition or straight execution.
And all these resources were available for Trump when he came into office. Fortunately he got in a spat with the CIA directorate in 2017, so they weren’t as chummy with the White House early on as they were during the Obama administration. But now he has all those resources (though the upper echelons are MAGA loyalists and consequently double-plus-inept)
In the 1980s I wanted to be a spy… CIA researcher at Langley, actually, but I couldn’t handle the language requirements. Also being a field operative is really, really hard on the soul, and it’s no wonder James Bond drinks like Ian Flemming.
Lol no. They woukd drug each other with lsd while on assignment through the whole later half of the cold war. Which, based, very cool, but not the best for winning cold wars.
most brutal
Do we include their proxies and ‘school of the americas’ grads as theirs? Because some of them also liked the helicopter trick. And worse things.
secured americans against
Sure thing sen. Mcarthy.
Really though. They said that’s what they were doing. But they’re kind of professional liars.
often messy about it
Fire is often thought of as warm
wanted to be a spy as a kid
Sure, before you learn what it really is. Try being a labor organizer; all the danger and intrigue, less language requirement and pay, plus it’s easy on the conscience.
They were always streaked with incompetent shit heads. There’s huge swathes of culture they just cant get people into, because they can’t hire anyone from those cultures, and to work there your ability to understand shit has to wear serious horse blinders.
I suggest we also collectively recall CIA can be both, given it’s a pretty big institution. It’s also been an evil fucker, presuming commercial interests based in the US count as US interests, even when those companies have become large multi-national corporations who actively avoid paying taxes.
I agree that it’s gauche that surveillance companies will pass sufficiently saucy private pictures to their colleagues for a gander (a tradition since WWII that is still carried on in NSA deep-packet scans of internet communications. (That includes sext exchanges between teenage lovers.) Playing around with LSD (on each other, as a practical joke) sounds like it falls more into this category, which, I’ll concede, is unprofessional especially for a department that has to sometimes engage in unethical action for sake of US national security, but that’s different than incompetent
If I was going to be critical of them, it would be their propensity for assassinations (botched ones on occasion) when there were alternatives, abandoning liberation forces they had sworn to support and supply and putting down developing democratic regimes in favor of US-allied dictators. Or even that they fueled their budget by supporting and participating in major drug trafficking syndicates, but these things are not incompetent, they’re immoral.
CIA’s strength (in the 20th century, at least, was SIGINT, including codebreaking, and analysis (that is, developing accurate dossiers based on limited or scattered data), and CIA did a whole lot more of that than they did killing VIPs and supporting revolutionary force.
As a young adult, I realized being a field operative was dangerous, and besides I was better at research and analysis, which I wasn’t imagining at all as a kid. Then by the time I understood the more gruesome parts of CIA history, George W. Bush was in office and they were torturing folks.
I agree, but very large corporations (like WalMart and Amazon with high levels of vertical integration and revenue greater than the GDP of many countries) are kind of like a command-economies and “work” (for the shareholders). So, I think command-economies can work, but the question is for whom.
It really depends. China is winning the race on sustainable energy because it’s treating it the way the US treated the Space Race after Sputnik.
And we are seeing how market economies go, the the outcome is dire.
I don’t know what works, but obviously neither do you. Neither do our elected representatives who are captured by interests to return to monarchy (which can command the economy).
“USSR was communist!” everyone says, when there was nothing communist about how the country was governed. But, somehow, these same people don’t consider North Korea a democratic country, even though they even have that in their name.
And every time I mention that “we don’t know if communism works, nobody has tried it yet”, I’m getting downvoted to oblivion…
it’s almost like there’s a concept of political communism and then there’s the Communist Party and they’re different things but they’re purposely conflated at least here in Statesia
I think it’s funny that the same people who will mock us with “no true socialism/communism” are the same people who will blame all our problems on “crony capitalism”…
The reason is simple: we KNOW that the issues we currently suffered are enabled by capitalism. Because capitalism’s core is “money equals power” and “more money equals more power”. This incentivises behaviour like Shell’s/BP’s/Exxon’s to do climate change research, learn that they’re fucking the planet over, and then proceed to bury that research under a sleuth of fake, corporate-sponsored “research” stating otherwise.
People like me say “no true socialism/capitalism” because it’s true. It’s also true that we don’t know what issues that system would cause. Maybe Universal Basic Income does collapse a society because laziness ultimately wins over all other values? We don’t know!
What we do know is that every time a country/society tried implementing socialist/communist solutions to capitalism-induced problems, the results were exceptional. Look at Finland’s homelessness statistics. Look at Baltimore and it’s crime rates. Every single time a 4-day work week was tested anywhere on the planet, it was touted a massive success that boosted productivity and happiness of employees. Etc., etc., etc.
It’s easy to get good results with capital from capitalist system and throw it into welfare. But you are taking about communism as a core system.
We don’t see good examples of it because it fails incredibly fast, and then leaders who tried to build communism understand it, but aren’t willing to acknowledge mistake because they will lose power. Thus, they continue to build autocracy.
If communism as economic system works, we first need to prove it as successful PLC of a smaller scale, such as a company that produces something being fully community led from the inside using communist principles, and for such company to be able to compete on the market.
We don’t see good examples of it because it fails incredibly fast, and then leaders who tried to build communism
I’ll link to my other reply somewhere in here so as to not repeat myself: CLICK.
TL;DR: nobody has yet tried to actually build communism. Every single major instance (USSR, China, NK) where - regardless of beginnings - ultimately turned into totalitarianisms/authoritarianisms before any communist principles could take root.
Oh but they did try. You just prefer to ignore it, but soviet union did attempt different tricks from the communist rulebook - moneyless society was tried and failed, so they had to fall back to working practices from capitalist rulebook and promise the people “communism in the brighter future”.
Same way communism was tried in Makhnovschina, Gulyay Pole (south-eastern Ukraine). Stateless, anarchy driven flavour of such. USSR killed all of them and then killed everyone who visited the funeral, btw, so they were afraid of them A LOT. What can we learn from anarchy? That Ukrainian farmers who were not forced into communist state preferred to have monetary relationships :-)
What are you talking about? They always had money. The reform you mention was the return to basing the value of their currency on gold to stabilise it against inflation.
(something, btw, most capitalist states have moved away from nowadays)
Putting aside it is a baseless speculation, how is a system that falls into authoritarianism under a little bit of pressure a good system? If it wasn’t capitalists, wouldn’t it be something else? Drought? Covid?
It devolved because people take democracy for granted. And unlike USSR, it can heal without falling apart if people start acting like citizen (I don’t have high hopes btw).
It devolved into authoritarianism because Stalin - an authoritarian brute - took over. Lenin even stated in his diaries that Stalin taking over “would be a catastrophe”.
It devolved into autherianism as soon as bolsheviks took over, and that was right at the beginning. Stalin was a catastrophe because he was more wicked than the rest of them, but it doesn’t mean that whatever Lenin was doing wasn’t authoritarian project.
There is still a difference between does not always prevent authoritarianism and causes authoritarianism almost immediately.
Sure, but… This is the part I always get downvoted for:
Communism probably doesn’t cause authoritarianism. I say “probably” because we don’t know - nobody has ever tried communism yet. Sure, USSR, China, NK all had “communism” on their banners, but they never actually implemented communist values (other than nationalising property). The fact that they all devolved to authoritarian systems is not proof that “communism causes authoritarianism”, it only proves that the people in charge of the parties leading the revolutions where autocrats. Lenin was extremely critical of Stalin, for example, and noted in his diaries that him getting into power would be catastrophic. Also, those who are good at leading a violent revolution are not necessarily good at leading a country in peace-time.
As I note above, there are success stories with NGOs. The Zapatistas are still active and going strong. Also the Black Panthers in the US before they were massacred in an FBI operation.
When a society is annexed or wiped out, it can’t really be said to be fault of the governing system that it failed.
I say “probably” because we don’t know - nobody has ever tried communism yet.
Well, that depend on your definition of try. The common soviet revolutionaries were not fighting and dying to put Stallin in charge, or to enact purges and gulags. But revolutions are always tricky. We can’t tell if the problem is communism or just a revolution going wrong.
But we have a branch of mathematics called Game Theory that is designed to model these situations in theory and it’s very difficult to design stable communism even just in theory. Partially just because eliminating the owning class puts all that power into the hands of the political class. Partially because state is not pushed to run the economy properly when there is no competition to compare to. And partially just because there is no practical data, unlike for capitalism.
Regardless, between the risks and costs of a revolution, the uncertainties of entirely untested system and theoretical issue with communism, I find it very much preferable to work on improving social democracies, that we see working in Europe instead of risking it all on communism.
Though I don’t know if USA is salvageable without a revolution anyway :/
Communism is as much of a utopia as capitalism (“trickle-down” just does not exist, unless humans stop being humans), but since most large countries are already running a version of capitalism, there’s just too much risk involved in a revolution.
I think a socialist-capitalist entity would have the most success. Capitalist market (heavily regulated) + Universal Basic Income, housing & healthcare, all taken care of by the government. That takes care of those on the “lower rungs” while giving incentive to educate/work/get rich for those who are into these kinds of things.
The Constitution of the United States has baked-in ownership class superiority coming right out of the gate, thanks to pressure from slave-owning interests.
Capitalism can be done so that it’s way more fair than Obama era capitalism¹ but it requires a bulwark of oversight and uncaptured regulatory agencies to preserve a narrow wealth distribution.
Even in Europe wealth disparity is corrosive to the institutions.
I’m not interested in a specific model of not-capitalism. I’m interested in systems that support the public. And capitalism is demonstrably antithetic neoliberal capitalism is antithetical to that.
What we’ve seen in China and USSR is party-centric communism (soviet — lower case — communism). We haven’t seen public-participatory communism.
1 Im not looking at Trump ere because we’re already mired deep into an autocratic takeover and policies that work to dismantle institutions and engage in humanitarian wrongdoing.
We haven’t seen it because it is inherently unstable. You either get people reintroducing capitalism or create an authoritarian party/leader to prevent that.
I should clarify, we haven’t seen public-participatory communism in state governments, but we have seen it in NGOs, such as the Black Panthers and Zapitista Army, the former of which was massacred by FBI hits, and the latter which is still active in the Chiapas territory of Mexico. And they’ve been around since 1994. < does a websearch, > It appears the ZA controls a not-insignificant amount of territory.
But then we’ve so far seen all forms of government are unstable, with the current standard being a 1000 year peace. (Maybe the ancient Egyptian empire, but I don’t know its history). Many regimes have risen and shown hubris that their rule should last so long, and have fallen to corruption or annexation by other states. Capitalism and authoritarianism facilitate the return of autocracy which, when it exists for long enough, becomes monarchy. The Kim family ruling DPRK (North Korea) serves as a modern example, and Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of Jong Un, has been deified to continue the culture of personality.
The US began destabilizing almost immediately. Remember the Constitution of the United States was the second draft, after the Articles of Confederation led to violent disagreement between the colonies. And still, after that the plantation barons introduced backdoors into the Constitution that figure specifically into the current crisis of tyranny, today.
Capitalism gets introduced because the rest of the world uses capitalism. We’ve seen plenty of communal efforts who provide socialized services within the commune, but will export product to trade with the outside. Middle Ages historians believe villages and hamlets shared openly without concern for parity, and would take their surplus (and cash crops) to towns to be traded or sold at market. But we didn’t call this communism we called it subsistence agriculture They’d also reserve a portion for tribute to their liege lord, who kept order, protected against foreign enemies and maintained stores of goods for crisis (specifically, runs of bad winters and short crops).
It’d be nice if Kings governed fairly and compassionately, and corporation upper management could run their companies truly to facilitate long term company growth, but eventually you get a Joffrey Baratheon or IRL, a John of England, a Nero Caesar, or a Vlad Țepeș that brings ruin to the legacy their ancestors have built.
If you’re going to denounce government models because they’ve never worked before, you have to apply the same standard to all other models you contrast it to.
We don’t know what works, on account that none of them we’ve tried so far have succeeded for very long. This is why we need to see them as skeletal models and not as immutable ideologies nor as devices by which to manipulate the public into tolerating autocracy.
Having an absolute ruler kind of has everything to do with authoritarianism. The UK is flawed to a frightening degree, always has been, that’s why it’s so out of place and left behind by the rest of Europe.
Same with Norway, Denmark, Sweden, or the Netherlands - all of which are monarchies, but also 100% democracies, without the “let’s ID check everyone trying to access the Internet and block their VPNs” vibe that UK recently acquired.
Lol OK, sorry, it’s a constitutional democracy whose parliament is given authority by an absolute ruler. Still pretty shit and I strongly support any movement to do away with monarchs permanently.
It’s not baseless speculation, and it’s not a little bit of pressure. I’m saying it was a lot of pressure. And I’m saying we don’t know what could have happened if the early Soviet Union was left alone to flourish or fail on its own merits.
I’m not sure if we can leave an experimental state to do its own thing, since it is really popular among commercial interests and aristocrats to meddle with establishment systems in order to procure more power, lather, rinse, repeat. All for freedom and for pleasure; nothing ever lasts forever
Regardless, it appears that we’re just too tempted when creating our state constitutions to lend favor, at least, to the petite bourgeoisie, who take advantage of that power to secure more power until the state collapses into an autocratic regime or factions into warlord states.
If left alone, it would do the “world revolution” aka military expansion. And that is exactly what it did all the way up to ww2, including the start of ww2 - occupation of Poland together with nazies.
By then, Stalin had seized power. Again, as with democracy, there’s a difference between the model of government and the
And it’s not like containment was passive. In fact, the US notoriously put down democratic states to erect autocratic regimes that were aligned with US based companies American interests, sparking the development of NGOs who resort to terrorism to fight oppression by NATO-aligned interests. Again, if we’re going to compare actual nation states, let’s compare actual nation states. Wilson supported the White Army (the monarchists) so there were ill feelings between the Bolsheviks and the US, but Wilson didn’t even try to negotiate with the nascent Soviet Union. He just decided (in line with his corporate buddies) that the notion of Marxist communism was evil, and USSR was by fiat.
When we get to strategic nexus regions like Poland or Korea, yes, all the major powers that surround them end up fighting over control of the territory, which sucks when you’re indigenous to that borderland. We’ve yet to establish and enforce the right of sovereignty of weaker nations.
If you want to compare command economics, you contrast it to capitalism. If you want to compare USSR, you do so to USA. The point isn’t that they suck, the point is that we need to work out how to get them to suck less
In Das Kapital Marx gets into the weaknesses of capitalism, in which those with power will exploit it to consolidate more power, which is what we’ve seen.
If you want a capitalist system, figure out how to preserve a public-serving (not commerce-serving) government, that regulates products so that they are safe to use, are offered in good faith (counter-example: AAA games that are really just micro-transaction market fronts), are made without abuse of labor, resources, or environment, and are priced based on their value rather than their scarcity.
If you want a capitalist system, figure out how to get upper management to regard its laborers as human beings rather than props or parts of a machine. (Not just because it’s moral, but because well-treated workers are productive beyond the additional cost).
If you want a capitalist system, figure out how to assure a minimum standard of living for everyone in the state, whether they allegedly work or don’t work. (The US relies on a lot of labor that is not compensated for, and fails to recognize skills and services that are essential, as we discovered at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown and after it was lifted.
If you want a capitalist system, solve the problems that are consistently endemic to markets. Likewise, if you want a communist or socialist system, you have to solve the problems that come with those models.
Or we can wait until the fascist autocrats of the US purge everyone else (likely into mass graves or ash dumps) and starts cutting into itself. Or until they go to war, and ultimately Chinese bombers blot out the sun over Washington.
If a system ultimately leads to negative outcomes, either you fix it, or you turn to other systems. But saying that we’ve tried something in the past and it didn’t work is not a cause to rule it out.
So when the communist party came into power after the Bolshevik revolution, Wilson went to the League of Nations to negotiate a common embargo of the Soviet project, essentially sanctioning Russia the way we might sanction a nation for humanitarian wrongdoing.
This is to say Wilson was afraid of it actually working, which would jeopardize the industrial moguls who were already running the US.
This is also to say, the Soviet Union was doing a communism in hostile circumstances, much the way European monarchs pressured France to raise a new king after the revolution (leading to Napoleon’s rise to power, the Levée en masse (general conscription) and the War of the First Coalition (or as is modernly known, Napoleon Kicks European Butt For A While ).
Historians can’t really say, but the fact the red scare started with Wilson (and not after WWII) might have influenced events, including the corruption of the party and the rise of Stalin as an autocrat.
Also according to Prof. Larry Lessig, Boss Tweed in the 1850s worked to make sure the ownership class called all the shots in the United States, eventually driving us to Hoover and the Great Depression. FDR’s New Deal (very much resented by the industrialists) was a last chance for Capitalism, which then got a boost because WWII commanded high levels of production and distracted us with a foreign enemy. Then the cold war.
So communism was really unlucky and didn’t get a fair shake in the Soviet Union, and US free market capitalism got especially lucky in the 20th century, and we don’t really know if either one can be held together for more than a century or two. EU capitalism is wavering, thanks to pressure from the far right, and neoliberalism failing to serve the public.
In the meantime, check out what’s going on in Cuba, which isn’t perfect, but is interesting.
FYI, in the fifties the CIA wrote a memo where they stated that claims that Stalin was autocratic were largely exaggerated and the USSR largely had collective leadership.
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf
On one hand, i don’t trust the cia on anything. I dont even trust them to know what those words mean.
On the other; this us hilarious.
< nerd-moment rant >
CIA is a big institution, and gathered a lot of very useful data, which it shares in the World Factbook. (At least those things that can be attained by open research, which is a lot) CIA also engages in espionage not only to gain hidden and secret information but to serve state interests, typically how the state department (under the executive) defines interests of the state.
And as with most espionage organizations, CIA is not above engaging in cruel, sometimes violent shenanigans. During the cold war, CIA secured the Americas from influence of the Soviet Union (containment) but also arranged exploitation rights to US centered companies, and were often messy about it. To be fair KGB was also about trying to influence countries to sell to USSR, so there was incentive to act aggressively and escalate towards brutality.
( Incidentally, all those American interest companies are now multi-national corporations, which means they have no real allegiance to the US, and evade paying taxes anyway. )
Also during the cold war, CIA was big on SIGINT (intercepting communications and listening in) where KGB was big on HUMINT (infiltrating offices and coercing officials to report to KGB). This is not to say these are the only methods they respectively used (CIA liked finding officials in need and bribing them, often arranging for goods and services they’d otherwise not have access to), so when KGB captured (and brutally killed) a spy, it was usually the informant, not the CIA employed handler that turned them.
Also of note, the Most Brutal Spy Agency award (probably a dagger-shaped trophy) would go to… Deuxième Bureau of the French Republic, who liked exotic James-Bond-style cinematic deaths, like throwing people out of a helicopter over a body of water. KGB did feed Oleg Penkovsky into a blast furnace, but he was a mole in KGB feeding information to the US. Moles are embarrassing when uncovered and no one likes them.
Anyhow, CIA = incompetent is a mostly 21st century trope, when George W. Bush and his administration replaced all the top management with cronies at a time post-USSR Russia (and the entire Baltic region) was undergoing a lot of political upheaval. The US needed a robust intelligence sector managing foreign affairs at the time. But that was just not meant to be.
The whole Valerie Plame incident (in which the administration burned a CIA employee for political revenge – she escaped and made it home) demonstrated the meager level of respect Bush and crew had for the intelligence sector. After that, CIA, now a subdivision of DHS became reputed for torture and drone strike campaigns (which massacred fifty civilians for every killed POI), and worked with NSA to spy on Americans, under the color of looking for Terrorists.
Shit only gets worse from there. CIA would use the NSA mass surveillance program intel to create dossiers on Americans. Despite its conflicts with fourth-amendment protections, these files are used by secret courts – FISA – for secret trials, violating fifth- and sixth-amendment protections. These trials putting convicts on the Disposition Matrix (id est, Obama’s kill list ) for abduction and rendition or straight execution.
And all these resources were available for Trump when he came into office. Fortunately he got in a spat with the CIA directorate in 2017, so they weren’t as chummy with the White House early on as they were during the Obama administration. But now he has all those resources (though the upper echelons are MAGA loyalists and consequently double-plus-inept)
In the 1980s I wanted to be a spy… CIA researcher at Langley, actually, but I couldn’t handle the language requirements. Also being a field operative is really, really hard on the soul, and it’s no wonder James Bond drinks like Ian Flemming.
< /nmr >
Lol no. They woukd drug each other with lsd while on assignment through the whole later half of the cold war. Which, based, very cool, but not the best for winning cold wars.
Do we include their proxies and ‘school of the americas’ grads as theirs? Because some of them also liked the helicopter trick. And worse things.
Sure thing sen. Mcarthy.
Really though. They said that’s what they were doing. But they’re kind of professional liars.
Fire is often thought of as warm
Sure, before you learn what it really is. Try being a labor organizer; all the danger and intrigue, less language requirement and pay, plus it’s easy on the conscience.
They were always streaked with incompetent shit heads. There’s huge swathes of culture they just cant get people into, because they can’t hire anyone from those cultures, and to work there your ability to understand shit has to wear serious horse blinders.
I suggest we also collectively recall CIA can be both, given it’s a pretty big institution. It’s also been an evil fucker, presuming commercial interests based in the US count as US interests, even when those companies have become large multi-national corporations who actively avoid paying taxes.
I agree that it’s gauche that surveillance companies will pass sufficiently saucy private pictures to their colleagues for a gander (a tradition since WWII that is still carried on in NSA deep-packet scans of internet communications. (That includes sext exchanges between teenage lovers.) Playing around with LSD (on each other, as a practical joke) sounds like it falls more into this category, which, I’ll concede, is unprofessional especially for a department that has to sometimes engage in unethical action for sake of US national security, but that’s different than incompetent
If I was going to be critical of them, it would be their propensity for assassinations (botched ones on occasion) when there were alternatives, abandoning liberation forces they had sworn to support and supply and putting down developing democratic regimes in favor of US-allied dictators. Or even that they fueled their budget by supporting and participating in major drug trafficking syndicates, but these things are not incompetent, they’re immoral.
CIA’s strength (in the 20th century, at least, was SIGINT, including codebreaking, and analysis (that is, developing accurate dossiers based on limited or scattered data), and CIA did a whole lot more of that than they did killing VIPs and supporting revolutionary force.
As a young adult, I realized being a field operative was dangerous, and besides I was better at research and analysis, which I wasn’t imagining at all as a kid. Then by the time I understood the more gruesome parts of CIA history, George W. Bush was in office and they were torturing folks.
I guarantee, unless you’re a mavhinery operator, your job is not effected as much by lsd as a professional liar/abuser.
Do you mean bush2? Because, like… What do you call what they did to gary webb?
Hey, you know who doesnt have to do any torture? Labor organizers!
This was an internal memo not meant for the public eye, so it probably contains accurate information.
My trust is not greatly increased, and they could be manipulating released documents to form a narrative.
If, again, they know what any of those words mean.
Command-economy communism is an absolute joke and a terrible idea.
I agree, but very large corporations (like WalMart and Amazon with high levels of vertical integration and revenue greater than the GDP of many countries) are kind of like a command-economies and “work” (for the shareholders). So, I think command-economies can work, but the question is for whom.
It really depends. China is winning the race on sustainable energy because it’s treating it the way the US treated the Space Race after Sputnik.
And we are seeing how market economies go, the the outcome is dire.
I don’t know what works, but obviously neither do you. Neither do our elected representatives who are captured by interests to return to monarchy (which can command the economy).
So that’s, just, like, your opinion, man.
China has also been leading in increased demand for coal and petrol, and recently reversed their stance on population limiting policy.
You lost me at “the Soviet Union was doing a communism”. Hard to see a dictatorship as the workers owning the means of production.
“The Western idea of a dictator within the Communist setup is exaggerated.”
— The CIA
(https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf)
And you think that describes the Soviets and isnt just a statement about the red scare?
The document linked specifically is talking about the Soviet system and Stalin.
Yeah, after the death of Stalin.
“Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership.”
It’s like the first sentence of the document dude.
Congrats you made the argument that it was an Oligarchy.
This is such a weird thing people believe in, no?
“USSR was communist!” everyone says, when there was nothing communist about how the country was governed. But, somehow, these same people don’t consider North Korea a democratic country, even though they even have that in their name.
And every time I mention that “we don’t know if communism works, nobody has tried it yet”, I’m getting downvoted to oblivion…
it’s almost like there’s a concept of political communism and then there’s the Communist Party and they’re different things but they’re purposely conflated at least here in Statesia
I think it’s funny that the same people who will mock us with “no true socialism/communism” are the same people who will blame all our problems on “crony capitalism”…
The reason is simple: we KNOW that the issues we currently suffered are enabled by capitalism. Because capitalism’s core is “money equals power” and “more money equals more power”. This incentivises behaviour like Shell’s/BP’s/Exxon’s to do climate change research, learn that they’re fucking the planet over, and then proceed to bury that research under a sleuth of fake, corporate-sponsored “research” stating otherwise.
People like me say “no true socialism/capitalism” because it’s true. It’s also true that we don’t know what issues that system would cause. Maybe Universal Basic Income does collapse a society because laziness ultimately wins over all other values? We don’t know!
What we do know is that every time a country/society tried implementing socialist/communist solutions to capitalism-induced problems, the results were exceptional. Look at Finland’s homelessness statistics. Look at Baltimore and it’s crime rates. Every single time a 4-day work week was tested anywhere on the planet, it was touted a massive success that boosted productivity and happiness of employees. Etc., etc., etc.
It’s easy to get good results with capital from capitalist system and throw it into welfare. But you are taking about communism as a core system.
We don’t see good examples of it because it fails incredibly fast, and then leaders who tried to build communism understand it, but aren’t willing to acknowledge mistake because they will lose power. Thus, they continue to build autocracy.
If communism as economic system works, we first need to prove it as successful PLC of a smaller scale, such as a company that produces something being fully community led from the inside using communist principles, and for such company to be able to compete on the market.
Check out Mondragon and similar companies.
Yes, but how they compare to the rest of the market competitively?
I’ll link to my other reply somewhere in here so as to not repeat myself: CLICK.
TL;DR: nobody has yet tried to actually build communism. Every single major instance (USSR, China, NK) where - regardless of beginnings - ultimately turned into totalitarianisms/authoritarianisms before any communist principles could take root.
Oh but they did try. You just prefer to ignore it, but soviet union did attempt different tricks from the communist rulebook - moneyless society was tried and failed, so they had to fall back to working practices from capitalist rulebook and promise the people “communism in the brighter future”.
Same way communism was tried in Makhnovschina, Gulyay Pole (south-eastern Ukraine). Stateless, anarchy driven flavour of such. USSR killed all of them and then killed everyone who visited the funeral, btw, so they were afraid of them A LOT. What can we learn from anarchy? That Ukrainian farmers who were not forced into communist state preferred to have monetary relationships :-)
What are you talking about? They always had money. The reform you mention was the return to basing the value of their currency on gold to stabilise it against inflation.
(something, btw, most capitalist states have moved away from nowadays)
Putting aside it is a baseless speculation, how is a system that falls into authoritarianism under a little bit of pressure a good system? If it wasn’t capitalists, wouldn’t it be something else? Drought? Covid?
I’m currently watching capitalism in America bow to authoritarianism. I fail to see what you’re trying to say
America has always been authoritarian. You and I obey the authority of capital — who controls the state. US democracy has always been an illusion.
That no system is perfect but one of them lasted centuries in multiple countries and one always failed within years, if not immediately.
Also, US failing so hard is mostly the result of the two party system. That shit never really worked properly.
Throw in gerrymandering, a first past the post primary system and the electoral college and you get we’re we are today.
Sprinkle in a dose of Citizens United and the oligarchs get all the power the need/want.
exactly
Looks at present day US and UK
Still multitudes better than soviet union at any time and period.
One authoritarian-devolved state being better than another is not the flex you think it is…
It devolved because people take democracy for granted. And unlike USSR, it can heal without falling apart if people start acting like citizen (I don’t have high hopes btw).
My goodness, what nonsense…
It devolved into authoritarianism because Stalin - an authoritarian brute - took over. Lenin even stated in his diaries that Stalin taking over “would be a catastrophe”.
It devolved into autherianism as soon as bolsheviks took over, and that was right at the beginning. Stalin was a catastrophe because he was more wicked than the rest of them, but it doesn’t mean that whatever Lenin was doing wasn’t authoritarian project.
So, now you’re saying that they never actually tried communism, because it was authoritarianism from the get go?
I mean, I appreciate the correction, but it only strengthens my point.
There is still a difference between does not always prevent authoritarianism and causes authoritarianism almost immediately.
Sure, but… This is the part I always get downvoted for:
Communism probably doesn’t cause authoritarianism. I say “probably” because we don’t know - nobody has ever tried communism yet. Sure, USSR, China, NK all had “communism” on their banners, but they never actually implemented communist values (other than nationalising property). The fact that they all devolved to authoritarian systems is not proof that “communism causes authoritarianism”, it only proves that the people in charge of the parties leading the revolutions where autocrats. Lenin was extremely critical of Stalin, for example, and noted in his diaries that him getting into power would be catastrophic. Also, those who are good at leading a violent revolution are not necessarily good at leading a country in peace-time.
As I note above, there are success stories with NGOs. The Zapatistas are still active and going strong. Also the Black Panthers in the US before they were massacred in an FBI operation.
When a society is annexed or wiped out, it can’t really be said to be fault of the governing system that it failed.
Well, that depend on your definition of try. The common soviet revolutionaries were not fighting and dying to put Stallin in charge, or to enact purges and gulags. But revolutions are always tricky. We can’t tell if the problem is communism or just a revolution going wrong.
But we have a branch of mathematics called Game Theory that is designed to model these situations in theory and it’s very difficult to design stable communism even just in theory. Partially just because eliminating the owning class puts all that power into the hands of the political class. Partially because state is not pushed to run the economy properly when there is no competition to compare to. And partially just because there is no practical data, unlike for capitalism.
Regardless, between the risks and costs of a revolution, the uncertainties of entirely untested system and theoretical issue with communism, I find it very much preferable to work on improving social democracies, that we see working in Europe instead of risking it all on communism.
Though I don’t know if USA is salvageable without a revolution anyway :/
100% agree on all points.
Communism is as much of a utopia as capitalism (“trickle-down” just does not exist, unless humans stop being humans), but since most large countries are already running a version of capitalism, there’s just too much risk involved in a revolution.
I think a socialist-capitalist entity would have the most success. Capitalist market (heavily regulated) + Universal Basic Income, housing & healthcare, all taken care of by the government. That takes care of those on the “lower rungs” while giving incentive to educate/work/get rich for those who are into these kinds of things.
The Constitution of the United States has baked-in ownership class superiority coming right out of the gate, thanks to pressure from slave-owning interests.
Capitalism can be done so that it’s way more fair than Obama era capitalism¹ but it requires a bulwark of oversight and uncaptured regulatory agencies to preserve a narrow wealth distribution.
Even in Europe wealth disparity is corrosive to the institutions.
I’m not interested in a specific model of not-capitalism. I’m interested in systems that support the public. And capitalism is demonstrably antithetic neoliberal capitalism is antithetical to that.
What we’ve seen in China and USSR is party-centric communism (soviet — lower case — communism). We haven’t seen public-participatory communism.
1 Im not looking at Trump ere because we’re already mired deep into an autocratic takeover and policies that work to dismantle institutions and engage in humanitarian wrongdoing.
We haven’t seen it because it is inherently unstable. You either get people reintroducing capitalism or create an authoritarian party/leader to prevent that.
I should clarify, we haven’t seen public-participatory communism in state governments, but we have seen it in NGOs, such as the Black Panthers and Zapitista Army, the former of which was massacred by FBI hits, and the latter which is still active in the Chiapas territory of Mexico. And they’ve been around since 1994. < does a websearch, > It appears the ZA controls a not-insignificant amount of territory.
But then we’ve so far seen all forms of government are unstable, with the current standard being a 1000 year peace. (Maybe the ancient Egyptian empire, but I don’t know its history). Many regimes have risen and shown hubris that their rule should last so long, and have fallen to corruption or annexation by other states. Capitalism and authoritarianism facilitate the return of autocracy which, when it exists for long enough, becomes monarchy. The Kim family ruling DPRK (North Korea) serves as a modern example, and Kim Il Sung, the grandfather of Jong Un, has been deified to continue the culture of personality.
The US began destabilizing almost immediately. Remember the Constitution of the United States was the second draft, after the Articles of Confederation led to violent disagreement between the colonies. And still, after that the plantation barons introduced backdoors into the Constitution that figure specifically into the current crisis of tyranny, today.
Capitalism gets introduced because the rest of the world uses capitalism. We’ve seen plenty of communal efforts who provide socialized services within the commune, but will export product to trade with the outside. Middle Ages historians believe villages and hamlets shared openly without concern for parity, and would take their surplus (and cash crops) to towns to be traded or sold at market. But we didn’t call this communism we called it subsistence agriculture They’d also reserve a portion for tribute to their liege lord, who kept order, protected against foreign enemies and maintained stores of goods for crisis (specifically, runs of bad winters and short crops).
It’d be nice if Kings governed fairly and compassionately, and corporation upper management could run their companies truly to facilitate long term company growth, but eventually you get a Joffrey Baratheon or IRL, a John of England, a Nero Caesar, or a Vlad Țepeș that brings ruin to the legacy their ancestors have built.
If you’re going to denounce government models because they’ve never worked before, you have to apply the same standard to all other models you contrast it to.
We don’t know what works, on account that none of them we’ve tried so far have succeeded for very long. This is why we need to see them as skeletal models and not as immutable ideologies nor as devices by which to manipulate the public into tolerating autocracy.
Yeah they had pretty good runs, democratic constitution held strong in the US for 250 years. UK is a monarchy, same as ever.
China and NK democracy failed on basically Day 1, USSR only did a little better.
Nothing to do with authoritarianism.
They were never democracies to begin with.
Having an absolute ruler kind of has everything to do with authoritarianism. The UK is flawed to a frightening degree, always has been, that’s why it’s so out of place and left behind by the rest of Europe.
The UK’s king is not an absolute ruler.
Same with Norway, Denmark, Sweden, or the Netherlands - all of which are monarchies, but also 100% democracies, without the “let’s ID check everyone trying to access the Internet and block their VPNs” vibe that UK recently acquired.
Lol OK, sorry, it’s a constitutional democracy whose parliament is given authority by an absolute ruler. Still pretty shit and I strongly support any movement to do away with monarchs permanently.
It’s not baseless speculation, and it’s not a little bit of pressure. I’m saying it was a lot of pressure. And I’m saying we don’t know what could have happened if the early Soviet Union was left alone to flourish or fail on its own merits.
I’m not sure if we can leave an experimental state to do its own thing, since it is really popular among commercial interests and aristocrats to meddle with establishment systems in order to procure more power, lather, rinse, repeat. All for freedom and for pleasure; nothing ever lasts forever
Regardless, it appears that we’re just too tempted when creating our state constitutions to lend favor, at least, to the petite bourgeoisie, who take advantage of that power to secure more power until the state collapses into an autocratic regime or factions into warlord states.
If left alone, it would do the “world revolution” aka military expansion. And that is exactly what it did all the way up to ww2, including the start of ww2 - occupation of Poland together with nazies.
By then, Stalin had seized power. Again, as with democracy, there’s a difference between the model of government and the
And it’s not like containment was passive. In fact, the US notoriously put down democratic states to erect autocratic regimes that were aligned with
US based companiesAmerican interests, sparking the development of NGOs who resort to terrorism to fight oppression by NATO-aligned interests. Again, if we’re going to compare actual nation states, let’s compare actual nation states. Wilson supported the White Army (the monarchists) so there were ill feelings between the Bolsheviks and the US, but Wilson didn’t even try to negotiate with the nascent Soviet Union. He just decided (in line with his corporate buddies) that the notion of Marxist communism was evil, and USSR was by fiat.When we get to strategic nexus regions like Poland or Korea, yes, all the major powers that surround them end up fighting over control of the territory, which sucks when you’re indigenous to that borderland. We’ve yet to establish and enforce the right of sovereignty of weaker nations.
If you want to compare command economics, you contrast it to capitalism. If you want to compare USSR, you do so to USA. The point isn’t that they suck, the point is that we need to work out how to get them to suck less
In Das Kapital Marx gets into the weaknesses of capitalism, in which those with power will exploit it to consolidate more power, which is what we’ve seen.
If you want a capitalist system, figure out how to preserve a public-serving (not commerce-serving) government, that regulates products so that they are safe to use, are offered in good faith (counter-example: AAA games that are really just micro-transaction market fronts), are made without abuse of labor, resources, or environment, and are priced based on their value rather than their scarcity.
If you want a capitalist system, figure out how to get upper management to regard its laborers as human beings rather than props or parts of a machine. (Not just because it’s moral, but because well-treated workers are productive beyond the additional cost).
If you want a capitalist system, figure out how to assure a minimum standard of living for everyone in the state, whether they allegedly work or don’t work. (The US relies on a lot of labor that is not compensated for, and fails to recognize skills and services that are essential, as we discovered at the beginning of the COVID-19 lockdown and after it was lifted.
If you want a capitalist system, solve the problems that are consistently endemic to markets. Likewise, if you want a communist or socialist system, you have to solve the problems that come with those models.
Or we can wait until the fascist autocrats of the US purge everyone else (likely into mass graves or ash dumps) and starts cutting into itself. Or until they go to war, and ultimately Chinese bombers blot out the sun over Washington.
If a system ultimately leads to negative outcomes, either you fix it, or you turn to other systems. But saying that we’ve tried something in the past and it didn’t work is not a cause to rule it out.