vimothy

yurp
Republicans/right wingers moralising about sex while secretly fapping to porn and paying hookers to shit on them is a given. As often with right wingers, I wonder if they are genuinely (spiritually, you might say) hypocrites or if they just know that being anti-sex sells.

dont be so dismissive of hypocrisy, that's romantic bullshit. hypocritical fidelity to the truth is better than sincere commitment to a bad ideal (c.f. the nazis)
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
they don't get anything right. just like the left. they are in the process of disintegrating, just like the left. losing their social bases.
 

poetix

we murder to dissect
To a first approximation, the left is generally optimistic about how nicely people would behave if only they were given the chance, and how much scope we have to decide how our societies should be so ordered as to give people as much of a chance as possible to be nice. The right is pessimistic about both of these things: people have as much of a predisposition to be nasty as to be nice, and societies develop organically along fairly constrained paths in which such dispositions, along with external resource constraints, are strongly limiting factors. The right tends to overrate how much you can put right through the imposition of top-down authority; the left tends to overrate how much will go right by itself if people are freed from artificial limitations.

There is a kind of diagonal hack through this standoff, the "true knowledge" approach, which is maximally pessimistic about human nature, but reasons from there to the necessity of something like socialism as the only system which adequately disarms and tempers the human propensity to accumulate power, lord it over other people and get endless kicks out of gratuitous cruelty and humiliation. Rational self-interest, pursued with maximum tenacity and foresight (rather than just trying to score easy wins in an endless war of all against all) leads to communism because everything else ends in war and mutual destruction...
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
To a first approximation, the left is generally optimistic about how nicely people would behave if only they were given the chance, and how much scope we have to decide how our societies should be so ordered as to give people as much of a chance as possible to be nice. The right is pessimistic about both of these things: people have as much of a predisposition to be nasty as to be nice, and societies develop organically along fairly constrained paths in which such dispositions, along with external resource constraints, are strongly limiting factors. The right tends to overrate how much you can put right through the imposition of top-down authority; the left tends to overrate how much will go right by itself if people are freed from artificial limitations.

There is a kind of diagonal hack through this standoff, the "true knowledge" approach, which is maximally pessimistic about human nature, but reasons from there to the necessity of something like socialism as the only system which adequately disarms and tempers the human propensity to accumulate power, lord it over other people and get endless kicks out of gratuitous cruelty and humiliation. Rational self-interest, pursued with maximum tenacity and foresight (rather than just trying to score easy wins in an endless war of all against all) leads to communism because everything else ends in war and mutual destruction...

I would suggest that socialism on its own wouldn't achieve these psychological changes, and that it has to be combined with separately instigated change in the psychological realm - i.e. disarming and deconstructing people's psychological defences/adjustments. Absence of this is partly why so often in left wing circles you get 'leaders' who are exactly the kind of megalomaniac, maladjusted figures you do in more straightforwardly capitalist circles, except they're more desperate to hide it.

Without equivalent psychological change you just end up with failed socialism (if you get anywhere near there politically). To me it's not a question of fundamental human nature, but rather a recognition of the damage everyone sustains by growing up in a society/system that is about hiding and obfuscating rather than truth telling and emotional directness. Socialist practices alone won't solve that.

Edit: This may be v similar to what you're saying, tbh. I just think that the political process and the psychological process are separate, and require different approaches, as psychological damage/non-niceness (whether conscious or not) isn't just due to capitalism but also wider structures/modes of organisation within which (most of us) live.
 
Last edited:

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Rational self-interest, pursued with maximum tenacity and foresight (rather than just trying to score easy wins in an endless war of all against all) leads to communism because everything else ends in war and mutual destruction...

This sounds great on paper, but attempts to put it in practice have tended to involve a good deal of war and destruction, and usually extreme authoritarianism/totalitarianism (never mind economic dysfunction) even in the absence of war per se, for reasons baboon has enlarged on above. This is why I still raise an eyebrow when people describe themselves as communists, in 2019, now over 100 years on from the Russian revolution. It just makes me think, OK, and your proposed mechanism for ensuring it doesn't turn out like it has on damn near every other occasion is... what?
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
But Tea, capitalism has turned out terribly on every occasion too, more or less so depending on other circumstances ("tended to involve a good deal of war and destruction, and usually extreme authoritarianism/totalitarianism" refers to every capitalist endeavour, when one takes into account that even in supposedly relatively 'benevolent' cases, that authoritarianism is visited upon OTHER countries in order to benefit the host country, through (neo)colonial power structures - blatant resource and labour theft, mostly).

I don't believe that communism or socialism have ever really been tried in concert with a psychological change approach, so in that they're in the same situation as any other ideology.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
But Tea, capitalism has turned out terribly on every occasion too, more or less so depending on other circumstances ("tended to involve a good deal of war and destruction, and usually extreme authoritarianism/totalitarianism" refers to every capitalist endeavour, when one takes into account that even in supposedly relatively 'benevolent' cases, that authoritarianism is visited upon OTHER countries in order to benefit the host country, through (neo)colonial power structures - blatant resource and labour theft, mostly).

I don't believe that communism or socialism have ever really been tried in concert with a psychological change approach, so in that they're in the same situation as any other ideology.

Right but the point is not to cheerlead for capitalism or to claim that it's either perfect or the best system we could have, which would be manifestly untrue. The point is that communism - as it has been instantiated historically - is not an attractive alternative. The margin of uncertainty in the death toll associated with China's Great Leap Forward is about twice the total casualties of WWI - and for what? China is now thoroughly capitalist in all but name.

And the "real communism hasn't been tried yet" argument just sounds like No True Scotsman to me. Even accepting that it's true, the question remains: what reason is there to think it'll turn out any better next time?
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
But what Mao did is intrinsically connected to communism in what way? I think we could determine that there is no intrinsic link between the ideology and killing millions of people. Mao and Stalin did so because they were psychopaths (choose whatever other word you want), not because they were following a communist ideology. To get me to think differently, you'd have to explain what the causal link is. The problem with those instantiations of communism were multiple, but they didn't include following a communist/socialist ideology too closely.

Whereas inbuilt into capitalism is the expropriation/accumulation of wealth at any cost; colonialism and the millions of death it caused (both in contexts generally considered to be colonial and in others not considered so) were a logical consequence of the capitalist model. And 'our' lifestyles in the West of course are completely dependent upon misery in other countries - not to say that they couldn't be altered in such a way as to make that situation (much) better, but at the moment it's a clear truth of the world.

Reason to think it'll turn out better next time? No reason especially, as I've said upthread - that's my point about the need for psychological change, it needs to happen for any system not to turn awful. But that psychological change is not compatible with capitalism, whereas it is compatible with socialism/communism.

I get as bored/dismayed as others with the idea expressed in certain left wing circles that somehow we can rationalise what happened in China and the USSR through those years and make it 'OK' - but such efforts seem to me to be more about winning arguments/dealing brutally with cognitive dissonance than any actual question of ideology.
 
Last edited:

yyaldrin

in je ogen waait de wind
what would your alternative be then mr. tea? seeing as though capitalism will inevitably lead to the destruction of this planet?
 

droid

Well-known member
There was a suppressed 80's survey that popped up a while back, but I cant find it now. Rigorously peer reviewed and critiqued. Socialist countries came out on top in every metric, life expectancy, education, infant mortality, and surprisingly - happiness. I'll try and dig it out.
 
Last edited:

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
what would your alternative be then mr. tea? seeing as though capitalism will inevitably lead to the destruction of this planet?

I don't have one.

Do you?

Bear in mind also that the historically extant communist regimes have generally had atrocious environmental records.
 
Last edited:

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
There was a suppressed 80's Japanese survey that popped up a while back, but I cant find it now. Rigorously peer reviewed and critiqued. Socialist countries came out on top in every metric, life expectancy, education, infant mortality, and surprisingly - happiness. I'll try and dig it out.

Probably depends heavily on how you define 'socialist'.

Sweden? Sure.

Venezuela? North Korea? Not so much.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Apologies for a drive by:

Saying you don't have an alternative / "there is no alternative" is no longer tenable. We're seeing a huge shift in the mode of production, economic growth, automation, climate change, migration etc which in combination mean that the existing neoliberal order cannot survive. So we may see the emergence of a new way of organising the planet in our lifetimes (or certainly in this century). Clearly, all of these options will have downsides on paper. As there is no perfect way of organising the planet.

Also, whilst we can agree that human nature is not set in stone and is actually a creation of the society that shapes people, it seems likely that a proportion of the population will always be complete cunts.

So where does that leave us? I'll be completely honest here, we are probably fucked. The most likely new way of organising the planet is some technocractic form of fascism. Compounds for the rich elite in an area which is shielded from the eco-catastrophe. A periphery of people like security guards and non-robot employees in other areas. And then everyone else - at best with some kind of minimal universal basic income.

In this situation it doesn't seem too zany to be thinking about alternative models. And of course it is easy to knock alternative models and pretend that everything is going to be fine. But it won't be. So your options are to accept that or try and do something about it.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
Also it is fascinating that defenders of the current social order are now completely obsessed with 1917, Mao, etc. This stuff barely got a mention prior to 2008.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Also, whilst we can agree that human nature is not set in stone and is actually a creation of the society that shapes people, it seems likely that a proportion of the population will always be complete cunts.

Sure, but there's a difference between this, and a world where the most powerful man is subconsciously acting out his own childhood trauma on the entire world (even for Donald, there's a reason he's a cunt). This is not a person who is happy in any regard - a traumatised and traumatising narcissist on an epic scale.

And that difference might well be the difference between the survival of this world and armageddon.
 
Top