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> If peacetime USA 2018 is not an industrialized command and control society, I don't know what is. I don't know if you're developing some difference between c
by uxp100 8y ago
> If peacetime USA 2018 is not an industrialized command and control society, I don't know what is.
I don't know if you're developing some difference between command economy and command society, but since you're talking about surplus labor I don't think so. The term command economy was developed to refer to soviet style socialist economy in the early days. Public ownership plus government allocation and production quotas.
It seems like a weird self own for a presumed leftist to say, "Oh yeah, capitalism is so bad we basically already have communism."
- icebraining 8y agoSome on the left consider both the US and the USSR to be capitalist (the term used for the latter is often "state capitalism"), not communist.
- uxp100 8y agoThat's true, though I think mainly because of things that changed as the decades went along, but people were calling the USSR economy a "command" economy since nearly the beginning.
- icebraining 8y agoNo, critics of the Bolsheviks, such as anarchists and left-wing communists, were warning against that since the revolution, and just a little time after people from other countries were doing the same, such as Emma Goldman in her article titled "There Is No Communism in Russia" from 1935.
- uxp100 8y agoI see. I was thinking of Goldman's earlier writings that more about the NEP, but I see that "There Is No Communism in Russia" has the distinction between nationalization and a true "public" ownership. (And it is true that most anarchist writing I've really just skimmed or read many years ago)