Hey,
New to socialism here. I support socialism and I see that my surplus is being extracted and I'm being exploited as a worker. To end this exploitation, we need to stop capitalism.
But why did almost all the countries that tried this turn into authoritarian regimes? Why is it that after the revolution mostly authoritarian governments get power instead of the people? How do we prevent this?
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By arming the proletariat and keeping them armed.
this.
Also by ensuring the bureaucratic class can't consolidate power, by lots of methods.
The adversity of the Russian Revolution gave birth to the authoritarianism of the USSR and the rise of Stalin. The USSR then had a big role to play in the revolution in China, and both the USSR and China had big hands in leftist uprising in the rest of the world, most left-wing rebellions aligning with one or the other.
As for bourgeois states that have socialist ruling parties, like Venezuela, they're no more "authoritarian" than any other bourgeois state, it's just a smear by the Western media.
Standing against the powers that are in economic position to impose their will upon smaller nations will, inevitably, lead to a type of political arrangement that is closed, anti-democratic and somewhat authoritarian.
This is true not only to Marxist governments but also pretty much any government that didn't allow itself to be pushed around by the developed world. The influence that countries like the US now or Great Britain-France back then could exert over their affairs is enormous, and had to be legislated away through the undoing of democratic institutions. You need to think of authoritarianism not as disease of Marxist governments, but as disease of the
… and then we can have a lot of Ukraines and Syrias whenever the powers that be desire.
If you feel that you are exploited, why don't you become self employed? What are your skills? What can you do to benefit others and also earn money by doing so?
Leftists have this incredible pathology going on: they know that a combination of media manipulation, ideological categories and orchestrated crises can, has and is leading the masses towards reactionary stances and reactionary militancy, but they believe arming them will help.
If the population in Venezuela today was armed we'd have a right-wing coup and possibly a civil war going on.
Can we please just come up with a label for this fallacy already?
Being an idiot and not knowing about bariers to entry, market forces favouring large corporations and corruption.
You are right, I guess we need a free market capitalism after all.
"free market capitalism" still has barier to entry and favouring of large corporations by the market.
And the existance of large corporations will lead to corruption, unless you have anclapism, in which corruption is impossible because everything is allowed, even stealing.
What would that barrier be?
Because Lenin's concept of a vanguard party was never compatible with socialism to begin with. Socialism is fundamentally about taking the democratic principle of having power over decisions that affect oneself and applying it to production. It has to come from the bottom up. If all you do is replace the bourgeois with state officials you solve nothing.
Funds. To buy the capital to produce, to market and gain a market share capable of sustaining the business, to sustain the living expenses of the startup employees until profit can be made.
You know? Basic shit.
You can always borrow money or get some investors to sponsor you, if you can convince the them that your idea will be profitable. If you actually developed a new and more efficient way of producing a capital good, then you will earn a lot of market share. Even so, I know people that earn a good sum just by doing web development or design for random clients, you know freelancers. They sell their services in exchange for a sum of money that both parties agreed upon.
And as such you sell your company in advance, giving investors the fruits of your labour, and thus you do not own the means of production.
See?
As for freelancers, that is certainly partially true, but a you cant freelance producing coffee or freelance make toasters.
cont.
I would also hesitate to classify information goods the same as physical goods. A design, a website, code or the words for a book are produced once and can be infinitely copied for almost no labour cost. They do not behave at all like classical commodities like shoes, bread or something like that, which is made once, and consumed once.
Information goods do not perform well in a capitalist free market, which is why all states have implemented some form of patents or copyrights, which make information goods behave as if they were normal commodities, with a finite source, which access is controlled by someone.
Because "education" and attempts to convert unwilling and hostile people to leftist thought are what will really help, right? University speeches and online articles are definitely the best responses to the "media manipulation, ideological categories and orchestrated crises" that you mentioned.
Good. A coup or civil war are exactly what's needed; not just in Venezuela, but across the entire world. Conflict breeds change. "Peace" breeds stagnation.
So your argument against arming the proletariat is fascists are good sweet talkers?
wew lad
You could always mortgage your house to get a loan from a bank and after your business becomes a success then you can pay them back the money they gave you initially. Sure it's a risk, but many businesses stated like this. If you don't want to take any risks then you can continue to work for a boss and have a guaranteed income.
You could invent new recipes of coffee sell them to cafes if you can't make your own cafe.
Don't worry I am not in favor of copyright laws. However they didn't always exist and yet people still created great pieces of opera and music. Yes anyone could go to your concert and listen to you and make a copy, but people preferred to listen to the original than to go to listen to an imitation. Even today industries such as jokes, fashion and cooking have little to no copyright laws. I disagree that information goods don't perform well in a free market capitalism. If someone wants a service and there is someone who can perform that service then they will both prosper(one gets a good/service, the other gets money/goods/favors.
And if I don't have a house to mortgage, or funds to buy the necessary components in order to develop coffee recipes?
That just confirms why point. Barrier to entry. Rich people have less barrier to entry and just because it has been this way for a while, doesnt mean its the right way.
You know goddamn well i did not mean invent new hipstery coffee formulas.
That is because in the past you could not record music. The performer produces a service, which is the music, and a service is consumed on the spot, thus its a classic commodity. The sheet music is not the product, just like how a recipe is not the product of a 5 star chef, but the food he makes with his skill is.
Comedy is in the same situation as music was before, and is now, because people will still download the video from pirate bay than pay the comedian. As for fashion, there are shittons of copyright and patent laws in fashion. There is a reason knock-off brands are such a popular item on the black market.
I should have explained better I guess. A sevice is not an information good. Making someone a cake with their equipment and ingredients is a service, but the content of a book, or the code of a software product are information goods.
The largest companies that deal with information goods only exist because they have copyright. Entire branches of the economy, which is not silly non-important stuff like comedy or fashion, would not exist without copyright laws.
Because revolutions don't come about as a rational educated response, but rather as an outlet for the unrest caused by material conditions.
It's not the proletariat rising against the capitalist with a fundamental understanding of their exploitation and the system they despise.
It's the proletariat being angry at the grievances caused by their material conditions, and then some people channeling that anger into definite goals, acting as leaders.
With such a glaring failure point, it only takes some infighting/external aggression/malicious intent at the "vanguard" to turn it
into yet another political class,with the usual employment of violence to further their goals.
We don't need class revolutions , we need individuals.The first point is not " enlisting" a group, changing the tit from which they drink but sever their connection to porky(ideologically).
Well you could always start working for two years at a company to save enough money to start the business for yourself. While working you could also learn how people act in the field or what they think about this and that. You might even convince some co-workers to quit their jobs and start a co-op with you. But say that you don't want to be exploited. You could start writing books, or going into web design/development. There are boundless free tutorials on this subject. You could always learn a craft like metal works, carpenting, fashion designing. If you know where and how to look you will surely find someone who will be willing to teach you a craft. Even with the automation today, there are things that are still hand made or partly hand made with the help of machinery and tools. You could learn photoshop(again free tutorials) and take commissions(I heard the furry audience has a lot of income and willing to give you cash for a painting of their fursona).
Not everybody started out as rich, many took a risk and became rich and successful. Sure their offsprings have fewer barriers of entry, but that's because of the sacrifice of their parents and grandparents. If you don't want to take such a risk yourself, then you could always write books about how unfair it is. Who knows, a lot of people might buy your books and ideas.
If you don't have an innovative ideas or don't want to innovate then why enter the market in the first place?
No, but after seeing a play or listening to a song, some people were able to recreate them. Even so, people still go to concerts and cinemas, even if they can watch it for free of youtube or piratebay. Just because you can get it for free, doesn't mean that people don't go to see the original.
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You can copyright a name or quote on a T-shirt but you can't copyright cut jeans or skinny jeans for instance.
I agree and even some libertarians are against current copyright laws, so you are not the only one thinking about it. If I could, I would instantly abolish copyright laws. Pic related is what someone on /liberty/ said about copyright laws(or maybe it was a libertarian from Holla Forums, I can't remember).
Oh and about jokes, even if you can find a lot of free sites with hundreds of jokes, and you can also watch on youtube a lot of comedy shows, people still go to comedy shows.
Also, a right wing coup would not possibly result in a bloody civil war, it certainly would and the world police would have their bongles bangled by the thought of not having more smiling puppets on their doorstep.
No, no hierarchy. If you're so certain the relations within the workplace are fair and just, then you have nothing to fear from workplace democracy.
The tyranny of authoritarian regimes can almost always be separated from their socialist policies, which were only "socialist" from their extremely warped perspective because tyrants see themselves as saviors of humanity. Hardly different from religious figures that condone and even perpetuate mass murder for the sake of "love and peace".
The USSR and PRC were destined to be authoritarian if you take a look at their history.
Great, so you take all the risk and do all the work while the bank makes all of the profit risk-free. Brilliant.
Two years? You can not be serious. Unless you make a quarter of a million a year and have no expenses, you are not going to be able to start a real business.
Of course, we have to assume that there is also a viable market for these independently-produced products and that there is no established company that is already feeding it.
Here we see the naked myth of social mobility. Nobody ever got rich by working hard and taking risks. They got rich by making some other poor bastards work hard for them and take the risks with their money, and even then they were only able to do so when there was land to be stolen and slaves to be exploited. There is no more free land.
Boutiques serve a niche market that just does not exist beyond certain communities and only when consumers have the purchasing power to buy expensive luxuries.
One thing to note is that Marx didn't actually think that in socialism workers would receive the full value of the products they provided the labor to produce…it was surplus value used for the personal enrichment of capitalists he was objecting to, not surplus value used for things like re-investing in expanded production. In "Critique of the Gotha Program", he criticized another socialist named Lasalle who thought that workers should receive the "undiminished" proceeds of labor:
I'm not sure if "additional production" here just refers to building more units of existing goods using the same techniques as before, or if he's also taking into account investment in new types of products, technological innovations and such. I would say that in the current capitalist system, the one socially useful contribution of capitalists is that they make decisions about how to re-invest surplus value in new innovations, and tend to be better at this than an average member of the public would be (Elon Musk putting his money from PayPal into developing Tesla Motors and SpaceX, for example); in some way or another it seems like there would have to be skilled people performing the same function in a socialist society, if we want it to continue to be innovative rather than being a static economy that produces the same types of products with the same type of technology indefinitely. Historically this was always a big weakness of planned socialist economies, but market socialism might be more promising.
Which ones exactly?
I was just talking about all the ones that had planned economies and identified themselves as "socialist", like the USSR, East Germany, Cuba, China prior to 1978, etc.
like Venezuela, they're no more "authoritarian" than any other bourgeois state
[citation needed]
i've never set foot outside venezuela so i don't really know what other countries are like