The “working class” (or whatever) holds political power over capital.
The Great Crusade (Reds! Part 3)
- Thread starter Aelita
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The “working class” (or whatever) holds political power over capital.
Basically, untill your tech is good enough for FULLY AUTOMATED LUXURY (space gay?) COMMUNISM, worker control of the means of production is the best you can really hope for.
I recognize that is true in the UASR, but the very existence of capital means capitalism exists in the UASR.
The UASR is in a transitional phase between capitalism and socialism/communism. Socialism and communism means the same for ITTL communist ideology, which adhere more to the classical and orthodox Marxist positions before the Bolshevik Revolution.
The entire "state socialism" for an ITTL American Marxist means the "commune-state promoting socialist/communist property relations within the context of the world communist revolution" which honestly, is quite limited. State ownership is nothing socialist. It falls within the capitalist mode of production itself. So the presence of state ownership and nationalized industries is nothing indicative of any big presence of socialism. It tells you how limited socialism is within American society and it tells you of the severe limitations of construction of socialism in the context of material conditions of the 1930s worldwide.
I think most of the constant people present here on this thread understand that.
Now the triumphalism of the Comintern ITTL after its defeat of fascism allowed a certain faction of the American Communist Party to go bold and as Jello noted, a prominent leader within the ranks of most likely, the Liberation Communist Party, will declare to the world that "communism is within 20 years", ala Khrushchev IOTL. Of course, it's quite wishful thinking as the Cold War drags on and it became generally agreed in the Comintern that communism is achievable only after the extinguishing of the world capitalist market; which means a Cold War victory in favor of the Comintern. The establishment thinks that part of making that accomplishment is through military conflict; which is why you got the ITTL neocons and "tankies".
In quite an unrelated topic... For the most part; I imagine UASR today having the lines of Japanese and South Korean infrastructure with more ecological components. Public transportation very extensive and private roads less present but still a society with a lot of cars. UASR cooperative firms congregating around keiretsu-like federations of cooperatives with a core cooperative bank at its center along with Solidarity. UASR poverty virtually non-existent. Not even invisible. It's just doesn't there. World War II mobilization may have destroyed American poverty altogether. I am not going to be surprised.
And yet this is not a paradise. And definitely not socialist or communist.
The entire "state socialism" for an ITTL American Marxist means the "commune-state promoting socialist/communist property relations within the context of the world communist revolution" which honestly, is quite limited. State ownership is nothing socialist. It falls within the capitalist mode of production itself. So the presence of state ownership and nationalized industries is nothing indicative of any big presence of socialism. It tells you how limited socialism is within American society and it tells you of the severe limitations of construction of socialism in the context of material conditions of the 1930s worldwide.
I think most of the constant people present here on this thread understand that.
Now the triumphalism of the Comintern ITTL after its defeat of fascism allowed a certain faction of the American Communist Party to go bold and as Jello noted, a prominent leader within the ranks of most likely, the Liberation Communist Party, will declare to the world that "communism is within 20 years", ala Khrushchev IOTL. Of course, it's quite wishful thinking as the Cold War drags on and it became generally agreed in the Comintern that communism is achievable only after the extinguishing of the world capitalist market; which means a Cold War victory in favor of the Comintern. The establishment thinks that part of making that accomplishment is through military conflict; which is why you got the ITTL neocons and "tankies".
In quite an unrelated topic... For the most part; I imagine UASR today having the lines of Japanese and South Korean infrastructure with more ecological components. Public transportation very extensive and private roads less present but still a society with a lot of cars. UASR cooperative firms congregating around keiretsu-like federations of cooperatives with a core cooperative bank at its center along with Solidarity. UASR poverty virtually non-existent. Not even invisible. It's just doesn't there. World War II mobilization may have destroyed American poverty altogether. I am not going to be surprised.
And yet this is not a paradise. And definitely not socialist or communist.
It is really quite hard to bite my tongue and stop myself from rampantly jossing speculation.
This timeline is written by a Leftcom in Jello and a Syndicalist in me.
This timeline is written by a Leftcom in Jello and a Syndicalist in me.
Bookmark1995
Banned
I think we're all aware of this point.
The previous discussion was how many ITTL Americans THINK they live in paradise, to the point of exasperating every non-American person with smug superiority.
I really don't care for the "fully automated luxury communism" meme, to be quite honest, and the more adjectives I see tacked on the tackier it gets. I'm not so pessimistic as to think that total automation is a necessary condition for communism, nor is it a sufficient condition.
Which is not to say I'm opposed to automation, but I think the we're making it harder for ourselves if we ignore the fundamentals. Production is pathological in capitalism, occurring for its own sake as part of the need for capital to circulate and accumulate. We produce too much of all the wrong things already, and people get hung up on the capitalist compulsion to work, believing it to be the necessary condition to accomplish anything, and so invite the devil back in the form of "market socialism", cooperatives, etc.
Simply put, if such compulsion were necessary, than the massive creative commons projects like Linux, GNU, and numerous other open-source projects that play fundamental yet hidden parts of modern life wouldn't be possible. And yet they managed to occur within the oppressive confines of capitalism.
I don't wear my tendency like a badge, but you're literally describing me.
Pretty much this, but we shouldn't downplay the immense influence that Lenin and some Bolsheviks have in American communism ITTL. But it's the influence of Lenin, Bukharin et al in 1917-8, the theorists of revolution, agitation and action, not their role as practical politicians in the nascent Soviet state.
Without revealing too much of the future trajectory, but one of the defining features of the DotP is political consensus to remove market allocation wherever and whenever possible. In the UASR, housing is public, and there's no such thing as private property in dwellings. It can, of course, be at times bureaucratic and stupid, and the exact nature of the involvement of local, state and federal administrations is complicated and evolving, but one of the iron-clad guarantees of the revolution is that no one is going to go without a roof over their head, and no one is going to starve.
In Comintern historiography, WW2 is more commonly referred to as "The World Revolutionary War," a partial success but ultimate failure. And there's only one reason why it ultimately failed: the atomic bomb.
The development of atomic weapons enabled the FBU the means to resist the economic and military pressure of a relatively united bloc that utterly outmatched them economically and militarily. Nukes are the ultimate weapon of reaction, because they give the "Samson option" of pulling the temple down around you. And in the struggle to survive the present, they push the future further away.
No, I was critiquing the notion that compulsion to work, implicit or explicit, is absolutely necessary. Copyleft and opensource projects are interesting in how they've been deliberately structured to defy commodification. And yet even though they have defied the capitalist impulse to commerciality, these enormously large and complicated projects have been successful even in a social environment where its contributors had to give up precious free-time, on top of the work required to sustain themselves, in order to contribute. In other words, I don't think that the threat of destitution or starvation is required for work to happen, which is what the "Fully Automated Luxury Communism" meme implies.
Everyone is in public housing. It's a voting issue, at the very least, and the common planning paradigm involves public input in the disposition of public resources. And since this is not a closed society, failing to be responsive is going to cost you. Not to say that 'eyesores' or questionable building projects don't end up being built. But there's a simple reason why public housing was bad IOTL, and that's because the intended users were politically powerless people on the margins of society, and had no input in these projects.
Everyone is in public housing. It's a voting issue, at the very least, and the common planning paradigm involves public input in the disposition of public resources. And since this is not a closed society, failing to be responsive is going to cost you. Not to say that 'eyesores' or questionable building projects don't end up being built. But there's a simple reason why public housing was bad IOTL, and that's because the intended users were politically powerless people on the margins of society, and had no input in these projects.
It's suggested that a good number of people in the UASR (mainly the Marxists) are well aware of the point that they're still at least somewhat capitalist, in fact just how not-capitalist things are is a point of conflict:
Maybe a lot of them are smug because they're always constantly sure communism is just around the next corner, but a lot of Americans are surely not smug about how not-capitalist they are. They're aware of the faults and ways things have come up short.
Redshank Galloglass
Banned
Pick which one you are then:
I'm only joking, so don't take it to heart. Pls.
OK, let's not start up the meme war again.
Anyway @Jello_Biafra you bring up the example of Linux and such things, and I get your point. There are many examples of things people have made even though it doesn't make them money. But I wonder, just how many MORE of such things would we have if most of the population wasn't stressed making ends meet by working 8 hours a day +traffic jams?
Anyway @Jello_Biafra you bring up the example of Linux and such things, and I get your point. There are many examples of things people have made even though it doesn't make them money. But I wonder, just how many MORE of such things would we have if most of the population wasn't stressed making ends meet by working 8 hours a day +traffic jams?
Well, collectively, the UASR population is still trying to "make ends meet" collectively speaking as a society, with the threat of international capitalism just as there, but without the almost daily threat of starvation and deprivation in some form of social provision or another by losing a day's wages. I believe that's what you are talking about.
Personal property which includes "items intended for personal use" like vehicles, clothing, is very different from private property like factories, mines, dams, power plants, etc. You are making the differentiation that everything not public is by definition, private, which is not correct, at least in Marxist understanding of property rights. Also; socially or collectively-owned is publicly owned, correct, but it doesn't mean that it is state-owned.
Clothing and toys definitely fall under personal property and communists even IOTL definitely has very good respect for personal property at the least.
Me as well. I am quite on that part of the spectrum too, but I consider myself... less sectarian.
I've actually thought that WW2 is going to be referred like that. I've seen that name in another alternate history timeline called Reality Rosa. And the Comintern is definitely going to refer to World War II as a world revolutionary war.
I'm not downplaying the role of Lenin and some of those other Bolsheviks of 1917-1918 like Bukharin as well. Sorry if I've made the impression.
I like the fact that despite the pragmatic establishment of a semi-market socialist system that there is a political understanding that markets are mere transitional instruments even within a DotP and a fully mature DotP may have socialized markets in the means of production but it's not necessarily a market-based "socialist" economy itself. And that both major parties plus the Social Ecology Union are fully committed to market abolitionism, however carefully and gradually performed it is. It tells you how much advancements could have been made to form an international planned economy ITTL especially once developments in information technology kicked off by the 1970s ITTL. Remember Project Cybersyn in Chile? That's a mere prototype and it didn't even fully functioned at 100% capacity and as intended. Just imagine what if a North American equivalent was created, which is going to be the case ITTL.
Seems like the experience of creating an international planned economy for World War II ITTL is going to pay dividends for ITTL Comintern economists. So a version of parecon is still very much intended to be implemented en masse ITTL for the current version. There may be limited forms of it at the grassroots as early as the 1933 revolution itself.
Definitely this is all going to look very bureaucratic and messy at times but the democratic component of the political-economic system is going to help a lot in providing accurate public inputs for state and participatory planning projects and instruments that American StatePlan and the Council for the National Economy shall introduce gradually by time.
I've been mulling over a few ideas for some artistic movements that are committed to market abolitionism in terms of cultural production that I was going to post on the fanfic thread. In part as a thought experiment to see how the sort of creative commons that the internet, even within the confines of capitalist productive relations and active attempts to enclose them, could have been achieved with 60s and 70s levels of technology.
I think Jello speaks very well for herself on the subjects of balance of work-compulsion versus technical necessity (IMHO a communist world economy was possible already in 1900, with shorter work hours than workers worked OTL--not a lot shorter really, but in much less dangerous conditions) and the specific question of housing quality.
We should never forget that the Revolution in America was not made by a single centrally controlled party, but by a great variety separate but more or less cooperating movements. IIRC the Debs-DeLeonists took leadership as a more centralized set of parties, but they had to rely on a large penumbra of fellow travelers, and respected democracy within their own more militantly organized parties enough that there could never be any question of mass purges of anyone who accepted socialism on any terms, with or without reservations. Only the hard core propertarians had to run or be executed and even they might be able to negotiate terms if they credibly abjured violent opposition to socialism.
There are two keys here--
1) the widespread versus OTL sentiment that as Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked in dissent on SCOTUS--"The Constitution does not enact Marshall's Economics!" (Apparently Marshall was a leading orthodox marginalist economist of the day, who wrote the standard American text). It would not be necessary for everyone to be a Marxist in economics to accept that the sort of Catch-22 laissez-faire unregulated market "freedom" touted by the minority of social betters was not serving the common people remarkably well, and that there were indeed pragmatic fixes not in the elite interest-but in the interest of the majority. This underscores the widespread political view that Constitutional government had been captured by these same elites--a harder radical such as a Debs-DeLeonist would argue that actually it wasn't so much captured as always a tool of the bourgeoisie from conception (that is, with whatever degree of respect or its opposite Holmes was due, the 1787 Constitution did in fact enact Adam Smith functionally speaking) --but either way a broad consensus, at least as broad as the one prevailing against British rule in 1776 (so, 1/4 to 2/5 the total population) was in agreement the state and economy as it existed was dysfunctional compared to something attainable, and there was enough common ground among the whole range of more or less radicalized Americans that they could agree on a state and economic structure good for now that could evolve from there according to how popular consensus indicated. The moderates "lose" later in that the radicals redeem their promises of a superior and scientific guideline to a better society, but they win along with everyone else in pragmatic terms and are not excluded for their conservatism.
The breadth and depth of this radical tendency are greater than OTL--but we tend to disregard, looking backward, how strong they were even OTL, and this is why Reds! is plausible to me.
2) the USA, as OTL, is a rich country. All that was wrong OTL in the 1930s was a breakdown of the capitalist system--properly speaking, it did continue to function as it does normally, it just went through a more severe swing to paralysis than usual. With the incubus of capitalist control surgically removed alternative mechanisms could muddle along with some inefficiency and still leave Americans better off than most people on the globe--let's say that's what happened in the mid-30s. Then scientific coordinated use-value production organization proved its worth and began to deliver improved results versus capitalism--production guided to items of use, the system brought into proportion, no further economic cycles. Controlled by open democratic oversight, with a strong syndicalist element favoring grass-roots worker control where possible, tapping into both a rich resource base and a very tech-savvy workforce becoming more educated every day, there was plenty margin for error and yet less error than the systematic ones capitalism builds in (and capitalist scholars overlook as being natural, inevitable, necessary and therefore not to speak of).
In this context we can see how the system may have avoided fiascoes in things like public housing--or perhaps did not, making some serious mistakes but was able to face simply writing those off, repurposing the buildings or demolishing them and trying again with better wisdom.
We should never forget that the Revolution in America was not made by a single centrally controlled party, but by a great variety separate but more or less cooperating movements. IIRC the Debs-DeLeonists took leadership as a more centralized set of parties, but they had to rely on a large penumbra of fellow travelers, and respected democracy within their own more militantly organized parties enough that there could never be any question of mass purges of anyone who accepted socialism on any terms, with or without reservations. Only the hard core propertarians had to run or be executed and even they might be able to negotiate terms if they credibly abjured violent opposition to socialism.
There are two keys here--
1) the widespread versus OTL sentiment that as Oliver Wendell Holmes remarked in dissent on SCOTUS--"The Constitution does not enact Marshall's Economics!" (Apparently Marshall was a leading orthodox marginalist economist of the day, who wrote the standard American text). It would not be necessary for everyone to be a Marxist in economics to accept that the sort of Catch-22 laissez-faire unregulated market "freedom" touted by the minority of social betters was not serving the common people remarkably well, and that there were indeed pragmatic fixes not in the elite interest-but in the interest of the majority. This underscores the widespread political view that Constitutional government had been captured by these same elites--a harder radical such as a Debs-DeLeonist would argue that actually it wasn't so much captured as always a tool of the bourgeoisie from conception (that is, with whatever degree of respect or its opposite Holmes was due, the 1787 Constitution did in fact enact Adam Smith functionally speaking) --but either way a broad consensus, at least as broad as the one prevailing against British rule in 1776 (so, 1/4 to 2/5 the total population) was in agreement the state and economy as it existed was dysfunctional compared to something attainable, and there was enough common ground among the whole range of more or less radicalized Americans that they could agree on a state and economic structure good for now that could evolve from there according to how popular consensus indicated. The moderates "lose" later in that the radicals redeem their promises of a superior and scientific guideline to a better society, but they win along with everyone else in pragmatic terms and are not excluded for their conservatism.
The breadth and depth of this radical tendency are greater than OTL--but we tend to disregard, looking backward, how strong they were even OTL, and this is why Reds! is plausible to me.
2) the USA, as OTL, is a rich country. All that was wrong OTL in the 1930s was a breakdown of the capitalist system--properly speaking, it did continue to function as it does normally, it just went through a more severe swing to paralysis than usual. With the incubus of capitalist control surgically removed alternative mechanisms could muddle along with some inefficiency and still leave Americans better off than most people on the globe--let's say that's what happened in the mid-30s. Then scientific coordinated use-value production organization proved its worth and began to deliver improved results versus capitalism--production guided to items of use, the system brought into proportion, no further economic cycles. Controlled by open democratic oversight, with a strong syndicalist element favoring grass-roots worker control where possible, tapping into both a rich resource base and a very tech-savvy workforce becoming more educated every day, there was plenty margin for error and yet less error than the systematic ones capitalism builds in (and capitalist scholars overlook as being natural, inevitable, necessary and therefore not to speak of).
In this context we can see how the system may have avoided fiascoes in things like public housing--or perhaps did not, making some serious mistakes but was able to face simply writing those off, repurposing the buildings or demolishing them and trying again with better wisdom.
This is important to note, I agree. Capitalist crisis aren't usually caused by lacking production, as earlier crisis were (and future crisis may be). Instead, they come from excess. Capitalist economy crashes when the buyers are no longer interested, and the actors who overproduced run out of funds. There is nothing really lacking in the economy when it crashes.
The problem comes from the fact that everything is tied together, and one domain crashing because of overproduction will in turn cause people to have less money to buy other things, propagating the crisis.
This in turn means no capitalist crisis is truly localized. And attempts to minimize them without changing the system just means pouring money down the drain. And usually not in the right direction.
Bookmark1995
Banned
I wonder if ITTL historiography will portray the Second World War as the true battle between capitalism and socialism, describing the atrocities of Nazi Germany as just the most extreme form of exploitation.