8 ms·

It's a shame things ended up this way. Were it not for the May 1947 crises, we might have avoided the Cold War entirely (though perhaps not, as the Spanish Civi

• gruturo 5y ago
  > France and Italy could have had moderate communist governments As an Italian born in the 70's, thanks but no thanks?
  • eecc 5y ago
    Why? Has the “partitocrazia” first and the ‘80s cleptocracy, Berlusconi’s downward spiral, and the last attempts an installing neoliberal proxy governments done any good to the country? I guess there’s no point discussing impossible alternative scenarios - especially given the extremely conservative attitude of Italian society - but an Italy with a more Scandinavian-like compromise would have been an interesting country to live in.
    • fsloth 5y ago
      "Italy with a more Scandinavian-like compromise" Not OP but as a Finnish (so not True Scandinavian but close enough)- Scandinavian wellfare state is as far from Communism as anything. Please don't confuse our social democratic parties with actual communists. The Scandinavian liberal and egalitarian political outlook predates Marx (and Adam Smith in fact) - see for example Anders Chydenius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Chydenius https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anders_Chydenius . While set in familiar enlightenment milieu Scandinavian concept of wellfare-state cannot be understood by labeling it as "socialism" which is a later construct. Wellfare state itself of course was born after second world-war but the philosophical basis is more or less set in an earlier egalitarian view of man.
      • TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
        Yet strangely, if anyone suggests similar goals for the US they're invariably attacked as socialist or communist. It's more accurate to say that socialism is a later expression of the same ideals - which actually date back to the late 18th century, when they appeared around Europe during a period of revolutions and enlightenment-inspired liberalism.
        • kragen 5y ago
          Socialism by that name predates Marx, but (unlike, I think, liberalism) you can find recognizable socialist thinking in the classics. The impulse toward egalitarianism is omnipresent throughout history, because equality is such an appealing Schelling point. Marx's genius was finding a justification for extremist Digger-style egalitarian ideology in the face of such dramatic manifestations of the positive-sum potential of voluntary exchange; in an earlier era where the gain of one feudal lord was inevitably the loss of another, the Digger approach is almost inevitable, but in the face of the explosive prosperity of the Industrial Revolution, Marx had to do quite a bit of work to explain how voluntary trade worsened the situation of the working class. To a great extent he was correct in his analysis of existing conditions, but, as it turned out, not about their inevitability or about how to improve them.
          • sudosysgen 5y ago
            This is not at all what Marx believed. I understand where the misconception comes from though. Marx was quite particular amongst socialism because he did not believe humans were equal in ability. Indeed, he argued with other socialists and believed that different people had superior and inferior abilities, and even that the more productive people logically deserved a higher wage, and so did the people with greater need. This is why unlike other socialists of the era, Marx did not advocate for equal wages - he thought that people that were more productive should have a greater income (as well as people who needed it, ie, people with families, handicapped, etc...) He also did not believe that conditions would not improve - he was a radical proponent of economic growth, and thought that things would improve for a significant amount of time until a plateau was hit, at which point a transition to communism would be the only alternative to decay. Instead, Marx's argument was not that capitalism created inequality - he thought that inequality was inherent to the human condition - but that capitalism fundamentally engendered inequality on the basis not of personal ability, but on the basis of artificial social relations that rewarded the ownership of capital far more than the inherent inequality of humans ability and human need. He also would vehemently disagree that voluntary trade worsened the situation of the working class - he wrote extensively about how capitalism was an immense improvement over feudalism, and how it would and was improving the situation of the working class materially. The issue he had is that the thought that this material improvement would eventually stop contributing to well-being, and that eventually the social harm caused by the capitalist social relations would lead to a plateau then decay of overall wellbeing. If you look at his immediate suggestion in how to improve them, you would find them much more inline with modern welfare states than anything else, and indeed that was why Lenin basically instated a welfare state when he took power. Here are the actual policies that Marx wanted to see implemented: 1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes. 2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax. 3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance. 4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels. 5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly. 6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State. 7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan. 8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture. 9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country. 10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c. These are certainly quite radical. But all of these are suggestions that are either already implemented today in capitalist countries, or that liberal capitalists have advocated for. Except for 1., 3. and 2., he was actually correct about how to improve the conditions of the working class - the abolition of private property of capital was his eventual goal, yes, but he was incredibly precient about the policies that would be used to improve capitalist society.
    • simonh 5y ago
      Scandinavia is in no way communist, not even "moderate' communist. For the nearest equivalent to that, Yugoslavia would be a better comparison. If you look at the rapid industrialisation and growth of Italy through to the 60s starting from a similarly dire start, they leaped ahead of Yugoslavia. Yes Italy suffered recession through the 80s and 90s, but the Yugoslav economy completely collapsed. 150% inflation in Italy spread over a decade? Try 9,000% inflation in Yugoslavia over just 6 years in the same era. They were even a net importer agricultural produce despite 29% of their work force being in agriculture. More recently since you brought him up yes Berlusconi was an idiot that hurt Italy, no question, but to really wipe out an economy right down to the roots there's no substitute for Marxism.
      • eecc 5y ago
        Italy also benefited from access to the European market, while Yugoslavia was stuck - and even there not quite well integrated either - with the flailing economies of the Eastern Block. About your last statement, you seem to forget some of the attempts at Neoliberal Edens in South America of the '90s. They didn't go that well, haven't they?
        • Ginden 5y ago
          I'm not sure if any liberal thinker would label policies such as fixed exchange rates, constant deficit funded by foreign borrowing, military dictatorships, as "liberal".
        • simonh 5y ago
          Yugoslavia did trade with Europe, it was independent and not a member of the Warsaw Pact. Only 25% of its trade was with the eastern block.
          • eecc 5y ago
            Hey, went to double check that claim and learned on Wikipedia that Yugoslavia did IMF backed austerity policies in the ‘80s.
    • thereddaikon 5y ago
      Social Democracies are not Communist States. Communism requires certain extreme actions, not least of which is dissolving private property and seizing it for the state. Last I heard, Norway isn't taking everyone's land away and forcing everyone to live in communes.
      • eecc 5y ago
        Sure, but the OP said "moderate communism" and I wrote that a Scandinavian-like compromise would have been an interesting scenario for Italy. I didn't quite say the two were the same thing, although some - n.b. some - ethical assumptions are cut from the same cloth.
        • thereddaikon 5y ago
          I'm in agreement with another user's opinion that there is no such thing as moderate communism given that several of its core concepts are radically distinct from other forms of government/economic systems. Rejecting private property as a concept is a big threshold to cross. So is a full collectivization of labor. There is only one nation I know of that operated with a similar view but wasn't Marxist and that's the Inca.
• rsj_hn 5y ago
  > France and Italy could have had moderate communist governments, The only way any industrialized nation adopts a communist regime is with Red Army tanks. There is a reason why no communist government has succeeded in any industrialized nation -- and it's not for lack of trying. But you just can't convert a liberal advanced economy into an authoritarian command economy without massive repression. There are too many people who own property and land who won't agree to be dispossessed. There has never been any moderate or mild communist regime that didn't start out as a repressive regime and just mellowed out as successive generations stopped believing in it. But to make that initial mass confiscation of property you need true believers and mass democide as class enemies are liquidated.
  • Yoric 5y ago
    > There has never been any moderate or mild communist regime that didn't start out as a repressive regime and just mellowed out as successive generations stopped believing in it. As a side-note, on the other hand, there have been plenty of mild communist municipalities that worked pretty well (and some of them still do) in Western Europe, or in Israël, for instance.
    • rsj_hn 5y ago
      > As a side-note, on the other hand, there have been plenty of mild communist municipalities that worked pretty well (and some of them still do) in Western Europe, or in Israël, for instance. I don't think so. So what makes this work for, say, a Kibbutz, is that it's a voluntary association of people donating some wealth, and they can also leave the Kibbutz when they want and new people can come in whenever they want. Thus the individual Kibbutzniks are almost all capitalists, as they continue to have bank accounts, brokerage accounts, pension funds, land holdings, etc on areas outside the Kibbutz. Rather the Kibbutz is like a big coop. It's one business run cooperatively for the staff, and it's like a summer camp for the visitors. But each individual person still has their own bank account, and that bank account consists of private ownership claims on productive capital outside the Kibbutz. But in a communist economy, you would not be able to privately own capital. The "true" communist Kibbutz would have its own currency, its own bank, and you would need to sell all your assets and donate them to the Kibbutz, holding accounts only in the Kibbutz bank that were backed only by the business in the Kibbutz. Then you couldn't spend the day picking oranges but receive dividends from Walmart at the same time. BTW, in many countries there are coops of all sorts. Housing coops, business coops, agricultural coops. Capitalism, as a system, is not about banning corporate (e.g. group) ownership according to some agreed-upon bylaws. But communism is about banning private ownership. So capitalist societies have wide varieties of ownership structures.
• Kafkish 5y ago
  > as the Spanish Civil War shows the USSR wasn't great at letting allies stay independent Same is true for the US. Allied countries whose leaders take decisions that run contra to what we want tend(ed) to be regime-changed and those leaders killed.
  • nivenkos 5y ago
    > that run _contra_ to what we want I CIA what you did there.
• kapuasuite 5y ago
  The Soviet intelligence apparatus spent a good deal of time and effort post-1945 ensuring that pretty much every state in Eastern and Central Europe would be dominated by the local communist party, parties which largely took direction from Moscow itself. In some places, like Poland, the process began even earlier when the war was still ongoing. The idea that they wouldn't have done so if Communist governments reigned in France and Italy is laughable. Read Postwar, by Tony Judt. It's a pretty good roundup of what happened in Europe during the post-war era, including the start of the Cold War.