@yogthos Again you post something that actually disproves your point.

At the end of real socialism in 1990 there were 24% people living below the poverty line. This 24% is the socialist Poland's closing balance (not to mention collapsed pension system and 48 billion dollars of foreign debt).

Even your graph shows that it never returned to the "socialist" levels of poverty.

If you more detailed data you can see it's falling down all the time (green=changes in law)

@kravietz USSR collapsed in 1991, and the period after was total hell. I lived through it personally. The 1993 levels of poverty are not the socialist levels of poverty.

@yogthos If you lived in Moscow or St Petersburg, you might have only experienced this in 90's. Most of Soviet province and satellite states (like Poland) were living in this hell at least since 70's.

@kravietz I think part of the issue here is that Poland was an a vassal state of USSR. And that would be comparable to places like South America that US currently subjugates. And quality of life there is a lot worse right now.

If we're going to compare the two systems fairly, then we have to compare them in that context. We have to recognize that Western lifestyle is dependent on exploitation of the third world.

@yogthos You could just as well say that Astrakhan was a vassal state of Moscow and St Petersburg. There are huuuge income gaps between these two and the rest of the country even today (or maybe especially today), just as there were in Soviet times.

@kravietz this is a more detailed analysis that's more meanignful btw http://www.roiw.org/2006/2006-21.pdf

@yogthos Now, this is really good and in-depth article. Just remember that communism in Poland ended in 1989 so the "closing balance" is 1990. Now, if you go to page 8:

"income poverty and expenditure poverty incidence startedto decrease after 1994 and 1995, respectively, reaching levels much below the1990 values by the end of the decade"

Page 9 gives absolute values - the closing balance of socialism is indeed 23.8% below social minimum line.

@yogthos It briefly rises to 28% in 1995 but quickly falls to 17% in 1999 and then continues to decrease.

Also note that people losing income from collapsing enterprises in 90's is not the "fault" of market economy. It was direct consequence of their often absurd ineficiency resulting from applying Marxian economy. They were only able to function as long as the party was receiving Western loans.

@kravietz I don't think what Poland or USSR had was anything even remotely like Marxist economy though.

Marxist economy would be running worker owned coops as opposed to state level planning which is clearly Leninist.

@kravietz failure to embrace Marxism was the real problem with USSR in my opinion. What they created was a state run capitalist system.

@yogthos You don't know much about Marxian economy then. Marx and Engels had a few very outright directives: first violent revolution, then dictatorship of the proletariat and nationalisation of means of production, central planning, prices based on (rather bizarre) labour-value theory. USSR did everything correctly from the theory point of view.

These elements like the cult of the Plan or regulated prices survived to the very end of USSR.

@kravietz I don't understand the term "dictatorship of the proletariat", it seems self contradictory to me. Proletariat is the majority of the population, and a "dictatorship" of the majority is commonly referred to as a democracy.

Meanwhile, there is absolutely nothing wrong with having central planning, and it's necessary to do any large scale projects efficiently.

Incidentally, this is similar to the system China currently has where the state governs a capitalist market.

@kravietz and once again the core of the discussion is how socialism stacks up against capitalism.

My claim is that far more exploitation and inequality happens under capitalism when you look at the system as a whole.

My second claim is that inequality is inherent in capitalism by design because it requires a gradient to function.

We can agree USSR had tons of problems, but it's absurd to discount socialism based on that. You clearly don't think we should discard capitalism based on US.

@yogthos There's a fundamental problem with central planning: it assumes planners have perfect knowledge of consumer needs and their changes. If you apply planning to *everything* from production of toilet paper, food and steel, it will never work.

All countries in the world apply *some* economic planning to strategic sectors, like energy. This works, but nobody applies it to all sectors like Marxists did.

@kravietz how do you reconcile that claim with the fact that pretty much every megacorp like Amazon and Walmart is centrally planned?

@yogthos "Contradictory"? Oh, welcome to the world of Marxism! It's full of contradictions.

Here's what Bertrand Russell (a British philosopher and socialist) said after visiting Soviet Russia in 1920:

@kravietz once again that has nothing to do with Marxism, and describes the problem with abandoning Marxism in favor of creating a ruling party which is state capitalism.

@yogthos Bolsheviks did everything correct:

"A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists." (riedrich Engels, On Authority)

@kravietz you have to remember the context of the time here. We're talking about peak capitalism following the industrial revolution.

However, I don't see any fundamental problem the idea of the people's party that represents the workers.

The first thing bolsheviks did was dissolve the local soviets if you recall. That goes completely against Marxism.

@yogthos Do you mean dissolution of the Constituent Assembly in 1918 and arrests of SR and Menshevik?

Oh, that was easy from ideological point of view. They just said that only Bolsheviks properly represent the interests of proletariat and the Revolution, and the others don't and are actually reactionary and counterrevolutionary. And throw a few citations from Marx & Engels.

They did it all the time.

@kravietz sure, but that's why I say that USSR perverted a lot of ideas of Marx & Engles. The blame should go where it belongs in this case.

@yogthos "When society, by taking possession of all means of production and using them on a planned basis, has freed itself and all its members from the bondage in which they are now held by these means of production which they themselves have produced but which confront them as an irresistible alien force." — Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring

There was a lot more details on LTV and planning in the "Capital"

@kravietz I'm not seeing a problem there. Are you seriously suggesting that the idea of planning is bad?

When you build a city, would you not plan things like public transit, schools, hospitals, and so on?

Workers owning their workplaces and working together to plan a common future seems like a good way to run a society to me.

The alternative is having an oligarchy that the rest of the society serves.

@yogthos I'm not saying "planning is bad". I actually said every enterprise and state *does* planning. What you mentioned - the spatial planning - is very important.

But no country except for USSR planned the production of toilet paper or wheat for the next five-year cycle with fixed prices.

It just doesn't work.

@yogthos You seem to attribute many reasonable things to Marx, who never proposed them.

Public schools and "moral economy" was proposed by Adam Smith half century before Marx. Trade unions, labour laws etc - by Liebknecht and other social-democrats, whom Marx called "renegades"

Regulation of free market in order to prevent oligarchy and monopolies - that's Friderich von Hayek.

Marx's plan was in essence to first destroy everything and then rule with the iron hand of the Party.

@kravietz I feel like you're doing the same though since you're attributing a lot of Leninism to Marx. And sure, a lot of these ideas are fairly obvious and they're not unique to Marx. However, they are present in Marxist view.

I recommend reading this essay contrasting Smith and Marx incidentally. I happen to very much agree with the conclusions it draws https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/Anderson%20manuscript.pdf

@kravietz I'd still like to discuss the original problem I outlined with capitalism that started this whole thread though. :)

I don't see how you prevent accumulation of resources at the top in a capitalist economy. Even in systems such as Scandinavia this is an ever present problem.

A system that's asymmetric in nature seems to be fundamentally unfair to me. It ends up being a birth lottery where you have to be born into the upper crust to have a good life.

@kravietz ultimately, I don't really care what the system is called or whether it's Marxism or something else entirely.

However, I don't see capitalism working for majority of the people on the planet, and I am very concerned with what it's doing to our biospehere right now. I don't see how these problems can be addressed within the framework of capitalism.

@yogthos It's a multivariate equation. You can prevent excessive accumulation by progressive taxation, property tax and inheritance tax. To prevent capital flow and informal sector economy however you need to create a system that is attractive to investors at the same time. This requires good infrastructure, citizen-friendly regulation, science-based decision making and effective administration.

@kravietz but these are all mitigation strategies, they don't solve the root problem of wealth being accumulated in the hands of a small number of individuals. All this does is slow down the process.

And people who are at the top will always push for policy that benefits them. The bigger the gap between the rich and the poor the worse the problem becomes.

@yogthos What "process" do you mean? Are you talking about Marx's "inevitability of revolution" here? But Marx predicted - and called for - "inevitable global revolution" for over 50 years and it never happened. It's because Marx's historical and economic determinism always was a pseudo-science and it failed.

When SPD called for evolutionary change (rather than violent revolution), Marx called them traitors and reactionaries. But it was SPD who was right and Marx was wrong.

@kravietz he never predicted a specific date that it would happen. However, surely you can see things unraveling. US is on a brink of a civil war, UK is in a meltdown, France has had ongoing riots for months with no end in sight.

All of that is a direct result of increasing gap between the rich and the poor. More and more people are getting left behind as the super rich continue to accumulate wealth. Surely you can see that this is not a sustainable situation. This is what Marx predicted.

@kravietz on top of that we have an environmental catastrophe on our hands. As the effects of global warming continue to become more extreme we'll see billions of people displaced. This will cause a huge immigration crisis as people start feeling the affected areas.

It's impossible to solve this problem in the framework of capitalism because growth and consumerism are inherent properties of the system. Capitalism provides no path towards sustainability.

@yogthos It's like saying you can't make round gingerbreads just because in USA they make them square by tradition. Capitalism is just a tiny part of society. You absolutely can make a capitalist economy that has low inequality and is sustainable. Plenty of laws were introduced against simplistic "capitalist" interest, such as labour laws, anti-tobacco laws, environmental laws etc. So it's possible - we just need more of that.

@kravietz capitalism is the dominant part of society. Majority of people work, and that's a huge part of their lives. Majority of work is done for the sole purpose of making a capitalist more money.

Explain to me how a capitalist economy would have low inequality. What is the incentive for capitalists to extract less value from their workers?

And plenty of laws have been eroded by capitalist interests, such as huge environmental protection rollbacks in US.

@kravietz again, the root problem is that people with wealth have far more influence on the government than anybody else.

Wealthy people want to continue accumulating more wealth. They influence the government in a way favorable to their interests.

How do you think we ended up with the one percent situation?

@kravietz also the gingerbreads argument equally applies to USSR. Just because that was implemented poorly there doesn't invalidate the idea itself.

That's how we get better at the end of the day. Try things, see what worked well and what didn't, and iterate. That's how all progress is made.

I think the idea of pooling effort together to solve common problems through cooperation is worth pursuing.

@yogthos You're talking about "increasing gap" all the time, even after I have shown graphs that clearly show Gini indexes decreasing in some countries?

@kravietz 1% of the people own over 50% of all the wealth globally. The graphs you're so fond of are comparing poor to other slightly less poor people.

Your wealth is like that of an ant compared to somebody like Gates or Bezos.

@kravietz right, you want to do high level planning at state level, and handle the implementation at the local level.

It sounds like we're mostly agreeing on what's desirable. And I'm not proposing recreating USSR. Clearly it was a failed experiment. I just think that discarding socialism as an idea because USSR implemented it poorly is throwing the baby out with the bath water.

@yogthos Yes, I too believe we're pretty close. I'm however quite strict about semantics this is why we went through the whole exercise of "what do you mean by socialism". And this is why I don't like politicial design based on labels (like "socialist", "liberal" etc) because they oversimplify something that needs to be flexible and pragmatic rather than tribal divisions.

@kravietz I agree semantics are important. For me it's fundamentally about how the society decided to allocate work and resources.

I think that workplaces should be democratic where each employee has a vote on what the company works on, and how the work is done. I think that profits should be divided equally as well.

And I think that the nature of the work should be such that it benefits majority of the population and work is something that should be minimized in general.

@kravietz and I think that resource allocation should be democratic. One of my core issues with capitalism is that resources are predominantly allocated towards personal whims of the capitalist class.

This results in huge amounts of waste and meaningless work. And I think that's what's ultimately responsible for the climate catastrophe.

We need to be aiming for sustainability instead of growth, and we should aim to minimize work in general.

@kravietz to me it's absolutely surreal that we've had exponentially growing automation since the industrial revolution, yet majority of people work harder and longer than ever today while 1% of the population reap all the benefits from this work. I think this is incredibly perverse.

@yogthos What do you mean by "democratic workplace" precisely?

@kravietz exactly what it sounds like. In a capitalist model the company is owned by a small number of people who decide everything.

The rest of the employees effectively live in a totalitarian state. The company decides when they work, what they wear, what they say, when they eat, and so on.

I want the workplace to be owned by the workers. Where every worker has a say in how the work is done, what the direction of the company is, and so on. Democracy in the workplace.

@yogthos If "the nature of the work should be such that it benefits majority" then what about minorities? What about, say, Mastodon? Does it "benefit majority"?

@kravietz clearly it does. Perhaps we need to establish more definitions here.

By benefiting the majority I mean investing time and effort into things that benefit everybody. Things like education, healthcare, food production, social services and so on.

Mastodon falls squarely into that category, it's non-profit effort to create an online community. Open source in general is socialist by its very nature in my opinion.