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>But then all of a sudden, around 1980, that progress slowed, stopped, and in many ways reversed. Conveniently the moment, large scale spyplanes confirmed the
by qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
>But then all of a sudden, around 1980, that progress slowed, stopped, and in many ways reversed.
Conveniently the moment, large scale spyplanes confirmed the sovjet union was a messy paper tiger, not the industrial science powerhouse it propaganda made it out to be. Ever after that, it was crisis management and containement towards collapse. Before that it was panic and better-this-then-that-negotations with unions. It was a watershed moment back to the gilded age.
- hnbad 4y agoCare to elaborate for those unable to read between the lines?
- zjp 4y agoWhen we realized the Soviet Union was about to collapse in on itself there was no more political (or moral, or whatever lens you want to look at it through) incentive to try to make our system any better than it was.
- vagrantJin 4y ago"We realized" Haha. That's hilarious. The negligent hand waving of an enemy states collapse as a banal "realization" is the stuff of pure comedy.
- zjp 4y agoI await your treatise on the subject.
- theironhammer 4y ago
- simple-thoughts 4y agoRemember from the perspective of someone in the 1950s, a managed scientific communist system could be more efficient in the same way scientifically managed assembly lines replaced craftsmen. So in a lot of capitalist countries there was a constant fear that the communist system might actually be better and thus should be compromised with. Once the info about actual state of affairs in communist systems was revealed, it was no longer seen as a threat.
- hnfong 4y agobtw, Yuval Noah Harari repeatedly warned that advances in informatics and AI might actually solve the problem of central planning. The Soviets tried to do central planning without the means to transfer and process information cheaply. They didn't even have Excel (or Lotus 1-2-3 for that matter). If they failed only because the tools weren't good enough, it might be due for a comeback especially when AI systems could now plausibly take over those roles...
- meheleventyone 4y agoWhy is it a warning, wouldn’t it be a good thing if we could more efficiently allocate resources than the current system? And aren’t most corporations centrally planned economies on the inside?
- Ieghaehia9 4y agoIt's a warning if it isn't accompanied by great democratization, because the planned economy concentrates a lot of power in the hands of the planners. Some proponents of planned economy (e.g. Cottrell) suggest that elected democracy should be replaced by sortition for just that reason. Or perhaps there are technical ways to make planning less centralized, say some kind of federated system with freely available real-time production data, where a new producer can decide what group of existing producers to join.
- hnbad 4y agoIncidentally, Cybersyn[0] promised to achieve that goal of automating central planning. Of course we never found out if it would have worked out as the system was destroyed during as part of the heavily US-backed coup replacing socialist Allende with the fascist Pinochet[1]. There are legitimate concerns surrounding the level of surveillance and automation necessary for such a system but they seem hollow from the present sociopolitical context where surveillance and automated decision making is normalized as part of the capitalist system rather than an aspirationally socialist one. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...
- rob74 4y agoYeah, that's my theory as well: as long as there was a "socialist block", the capitalist countries felt some kind of obligation to demonstrate that capitalism could also care for the not-so-well-off. After that, it was back to capitalism's essence of the rich (the exploiters, if you want to use socialist jargon) getting richer and the poor (the exploited) getting poorer.
- ndsipa_pomu 4y agoHaving a strong "socialist block" could easily have the reverse effect whereby political discourse is scared away from socialist ideas as they are considered to be evil communism (c.f. McCarthyism). I would consider that a lot of mainstream media (owned by rich and powerful people) has attempted to keep alive the idea that socialism is the enemy and needs to be fought against.
- hnfong 4y agoYet slightly left-leaning policies wouldn't look as "communist" when there's actually a communist state in existence.
- db48x 4y agoThis is so dumb. The entire history of “capitalism” is of the rich getting richer and the poor getting richer too.
- jk20 4y ago[dead]
- marketerinland 4y agoThey’ve been saying that the poor are getting poorer my entire life. Yet in my country, we’re healthier; longer living; and yes the average person is wealthier than ever before. It’s physically impossible for the poor to get poorer every year without a complete societal collapse. Yet people keep repeating this line.
- s3000 4y agoWith the growth of China, will the pre-1980 times come back?
- GrumpySloth 4y agoChina is a capitalist country.
- dontreact 4y agoChina is run by the Chinese communist party. You can’t own a house there (only a 99 year lease) and their notion of private property is very different. It’s not that simple.
- GrumpySloth 4y agoNone of that screams workers rights, nor welfare of the common people. Quite the contrary. If Marx was living in the XXI-st century, he’d be writing about Chinese instead of English factories. In fact the lack of workers rights makes it more reminiscent of theoretical capitalism than anything in the West.
- dontreact 4y agoAll I am saying is that it's a vast oversimplification of an economic and political system composed of over 1 billion people to simply say "it's capitalist". The overarching point here is that as China rises hopefully we in the US can learn something from their system and integrate it into ours. The idea that we can't do so because "they are a capitalist country and so are we" is reductionist and I was trying to point out ways in which that was the case.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoYou want to integrate "the individual is nothing" and the birthplace caste system? You are aware of the reality behind the shiny propaganda videos of skyscrapers? The anti-meritocracy, were beeing born into party aristocracy gives you undeserved jobs, whose lack-of-skills underpaid underlings have to compensate for if you screw up? The reactionary politic changes, that always trigger if things are to late? The absence of any plan beyond keeping the status quo? Look at the zero covid, were literally a revolution has to happen, for a unfeasable plan and the corresponding corruption to be undone? Literally all initiatives and plans result in this, a surface level placation, corruption cancer growth beneath and suffering by the citizens who made the economic miracle of china really happening - against the ccp resistance. This is what you want to integrate into western societies? Why? I understand the utopian, shangri-la projections of the failed western left, but please not on some labor camp..
- VulgarExigency 4y ago[flagged]
- oblio 4y agoStalin is your go-to ideologue for this, really?
- VulgarExigency 4y agoWas he wrong? Regardless, yes, he is. I am a marxist-leninist.
- oblio 4y agoWell, he is, depending on your perspective. For the developed countries, yes, there's a regression for the lower and middle classes. For developing countries, which are very much developing due to capitalism, there is a <<huge>> improvement in quality of life right now. I'd argue that life is improving for more people (in developing countries) than it's regressing (in developed countries).
- hulitu 4y ago>For developing countries, which are very much developing due to capitalism, there is a <<huge>> improvement in quality of life right now. And which are the coutries "which are very much developing due to capitalism" ?
- oblio 4y agoRephrasing that. Many developing countries are growing quickly due to capitalism. So, which developing countries are growing thank to capitalism? All of them. All the rising developing countries are rising thanks to capitalism. China, Vietnam, South Korea/Taiwan (already developed by now), Romania, Poland, Czechia, Botswana, etc.
- bjornsing 4y ago
- TheOtherHobbes 4y agoThe neoliberal counter-reformation was planned long before then. The Chicago School and Hayek had already been planted and nurtured. The shift started in the late 70s with organised attacks on the concept of unionisation, socialised welfare, and government investment, combined with aggressive promotion of the private sector as a glorious, efficient, and generous engine of progress. All of this was carefully seeded and very deliberately promoted and funded immediately after WWII. The most obvious example was the Mont Pelerin Society, which was given to Hayek to organise and wasn't just ideologically anti-Marxist, but aggressively anti-Keynesian. The fall of the Soviet Union accelerated this process by finally removing much of the organised opposition to it. But it was already up and running long before Gorbachev became President.
- dontreact 4y agoThere were many movements planned in the 1970s, but the failure of the Soviet system seems like the key driving force in the rise of this one to me.