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> Another way to look at it: stock market is up, which is basically owned by the top-X; while "labor" struggles to get by - and will struggle for the foreseeabl

> Another way to look at it: stock market is up, which is basically owned by the top-X; while "labor" struggles to get by - and will struggle for the foreseeable future. Anyone who thinks about "changing the world" could use a situation like this crisis as a test case; if a situation like this does not punish the poor, that you may live in a "(super-)human" society. Keep going! You've already made it about 90% of the way to Marxism. The interests of capital and labor are at odds, because capital has no way to extract value from the world without labor. This means capital has strong incentives to keep labor in its place, which leads to situations where billionaires can massively increase their wealth as a result of a global pandemic that shuts down much of the economy, but workers suffer as a result.

cscurmudgeon 6y ago
I never understood why people promote Marxism. Leaving aside the fact that Marx was racist, any society that went in this direction has suffered horribly. Scientifically and even theoretically, there is no evidence that Marxism has worked or will work in the future. There is a reason people from more socialist countries flee to less socialist countries like the US despite any problems in the US. Nowadays, we can’t even fully split up labor and capital as though they are two different sets of people as it was in the days of Marx. Everything is a spectrum. Going to any of the ends (pure capitalism or pure communism) will be a disaster.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > I never understood why people promote Marxism. Leaving aside the fact that Marx was racist, any society that went in this direction has suffered horribly. Since Marx’s time, basically every country in the developed West has gone in the direction of Marx’s prescriptions, driven largely by Marxists and other socialists (often through the labor movements as vehicles). You're probably confused by confusing Leninism and it's descendants with Marxism, a piece of Leninist propaganda that capitalists have been prone to adopt as their own. But Leninism abandons central features of Marxism to avoid Marxists dependendencies on the existence of advanced capitalism and broad working-class consciousness, in favor of an centralized authoritarian system designed to be implemented in pre-capitalist societies under a narrow elite. But even if Leninism can be seen as a form of Marxism rather than a massive deviation from it, itself a debatable point, it clearly would even then be a subset of, and not coextensive with Marxism, so it would be still improper to limit “went in that [Marxist] direction” to adopting Leninism or one of it's descendants. The states non-Leninist socialists, including Marxist Communists, described as “state capitalism” aren't “more socialist” (and certainly not more Marxist) than the states which adopted a subset of the Marxist program in the conditions for which Marx prescribed them.
  - cscurmudgeon 6y ago
    As I said, everything is a spectrum, even Adam Smith wanted capitalism with regulation. What would you say defines Marxism and Leninism? I have spent countless hours and have arrived at the conclusion that most definitions of these are inconsistent and informal. I will be happy to engage with you if you have a formal and concise definition and I will be ready to change my stance based on that.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Have you considered that "more socialist" countries might have done better had other countries not felt the need to "bring democracy to," or "liberate" them? Or lured them into massive arms races that ultimately neither side could afford?
  - cscurmudgeon 6y ago
    A lot of people from India and China move to the US. How did the US interfere in India? Shouldn’t socialist countries be more robust to interference from capitalist countries if they are inherently better? Otherwise, they seem weak geopolitically and won’t survive long.
    - pmiller2 6y ago
      Both India and China are market economies. Market economies have the property that certain people can succeed wildly, but also that certain people are left behind. This explains why people leave. How exactly would you build a country that was politically resistant to outside interference from countries that are much wealthier than it? This is a genuine question.
      - cscurmudgeon 6y ago
        That is false. India was a socialist nightmare. Only recently has it switched to a market economy. It is still recovering and will take decades to recover. This is all well-known. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_Ind... China recently lost its legal status as a market economy. https://www.businessinsider.in/international/news/china-loses-wto-dispute-against-eu-for-market-economy-status/articleshow/76494302.cms https://www.businessinsider.in/international/news/china-lose... I thought these were well known. If you are willing to rectify this, I am willing to engage more, but respectfully decline to continue further otherwise. > How exactly would you build a country that was politically resistant to outside interference from countries that are much wealthier than it? This is a genuine question You can’t that’s why pure communism/socialism is a disaster almost always. A better question is why other countries with US interference like Japan and South Korea have ended up being much more richer than before. North Korea without any US interference is much much poorer. (It is almost like a controlled experiment) Why is that?
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Do you think no one in the US suffers horribly? Consider the bankruptcies, the imprisonment-for-profit, the financial corruption, the racist police violence, the homelessness, the opiate scandals, the gun violence, the fact that most of the population has no safety net of any kind - and that's nowhere close to being a complete list. There were privileged people in the Soviet Union who were doing just fine, and they had no interest in how well the system was working for everyone else. We know how that ended. It's very, very unwise to assume that the US can't possibly make the same mistake.

cscurmudgeon 6y ago

I never understood why people promote Marxism. Leaving aside the fact that Marx was racist, any society that went in this direction has suffered horribly. Scientifically and even theoretically, there is no evidence that Marxism has worked or will work in the future. There is a reason people from more socialist countries flee to less socialist countries like the US despite any problems in the US. Nowadays, we can’t even fully split up labor and capital as though they are two different sets of people as it was in the days of Marx. Everything is a spectrum. Going to any of the ends (pure capitalism or pure communism) will be a disaster.

dragonwriter 6y ago
> I never understood why people promote Marxism. Leaving aside the fact that Marx was racist, any society that went in this direction has suffered horribly. Since Marx’s time, basically every country in the developed West has gone in the direction of Marx’s prescriptions, driven largely by Marxists and other socialists (often through the labor movements as vehicles). You're probably confused by confusing Leninism and it's descendants with Marxism, a piece of Leninist propaganda that capitalists have been prone to adopt as their own. But Leninism abandons central features of Marxism to avoid Marxists dependendencies on the existence of advanced capitalism and broad working-class consciousness, in favor of an centralized authoritarian system designed to be implemented in pre-capitalist societies under a narrow elite. But even if Leninism can be seen as a form of Marxism rather than a massive deviation from it, itself a debatable point, it clearly would even then be a subset of, and not coextensive with Marxism, so it would be still improper to limit “went in that [Marxist] direction” to adopting Leninism or one of it's descendants. The states non-Leninist socialists, including Marxist Communists, described as “state capitalism” aren't “more socialist” (and certainly not more Marxist) than the states which adopted a subset of the Marxist program in the conditions for which Marx prescribed them.
- cscurmudgeon 6y ago
  As I said, everything is a spectrum, even Adam Smith wanted capitalism with regulation. What would you say defines Marxism and Leninism? I have spent countless hours and have arrived at the conclusion that most definitions of these are inconsistent and informal. I will be happy to engage with you if you have a formal and concise definition and I will be ready to change my stance based on that.
pmiller2 6y ago
Have you considered that "more socialist" countries might have done better had other countries not felt the need to "bring democracy to," or "liberate" them? Or lured them into massive arms races that ultimately neither side could afford?
- cscurmudgeon 6y ago
  A lot of people from India and China move to the US. How did the US interfere in India? Shouldn’t socialist countries be more robust to interference from capitalist countries if they are inherently better? Otherwise, they seem weak geopolitically and won’t survive long.
  - pmiller2 6y ago
    Both India and China are market economies. Market economies have the property that certain people can succeed wildly, but also that certain people are left behind. This explains why people leave. How exactly would you build a country that was politically resistant to outside interference from countries that are much wealthier than it? This is a genuine question.
    - cscurmudgeon 6y ago
      That is false. India was a socialist nightmare. Only recently has it switched to a market economy. It is still recovering and will take decades to recover. This is all well-known. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_liberalisation_in_Ind... China recently lost its legal status as a market economy. https://www.businessinsider.in/international/news/china-loses-wto-dispute-against-eu-for-market-economy-status/articleshow/76494302.cms https://www.businessinsider.in/international/news/china-lose... I thought these were well known. If you are willing to rectify this, I am willing to engage more, but respectfully decline to continue further otherwise. > How exactly would you build a country that was politically resistant to outside interference from countries that are much wealthier than it? This is a genuine question You can’t that’s why pure communism/socialism is a disaster almost always. A better question is why other countries with US interference like Japan and South Korea have ended up being much more richer than before. North Korea without any US interference is much much poorer. (It is almost like a controlled experiment) Why is that?
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Do you think no one in the US suffers horribly? Consider the bankruptcies, the imprisonment-for-profit, the financial corruption, the racist police violence, the homelessness, the opiate scandals, the gun violence, the fact that most of the population has no safety net of any kind - and that's nowhere close to being a complete list. There were privileged people in the Soviet Union who were doing just fine, and they had no interest in how well the system was working for everyone else. We know how that ended. It's very, very unwise to assume that the US can't possibly make the same mistake.