danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
Fridge politics is very important in my house.
Are you an anarchist but not a member of an anarchist organisation?
- Thread starter danny la rouge
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danny la rouge
More like *fanny* la rouge!
You want a 'grass roots socialist state'?
Supine
Newt Member
Rob Ray
Weight is meaningless
I would strongly query the idea that State structures inherently reduce rip-offs. Most of the arguments I have with people from former Soviet Bloc countries involve them being incredulous that we'd be so naive as to think enlarging the State is a route to anything but rampant corruption and me being incredulous that they think extending privatisation will protect against same.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Not all problems can be dealt with at a grass roots level. How we tackle climate change, and resource management in general, would be one example of a problem that requires large scale organisation, decision-making and also decision-enforcement. Accountability should always feed right down, but some kind of nested structure is needed. And that for me looks very much like a structure with state-like entities in it, whether you call them states or not.
There is also, always, the question 'how do we get from here to there?' We're not building ideal worlds from scratch. We're attempting to get from where we are now to somewhere better.
I really don't see why it would be impossible for the commune structure to deal with that or to work on a big scale.
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littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Point I would make about that is that they were living in totalitarian states with zero accountability, hence the corruption. And also hence the corruption continues within a capitalist framework in places like Bulgaria. It's not very sexy to say this, but the enlarged state exemplified by post-war Britain, achieved through democratic socialism, was able to happen with very little corruption. Boring things like institutional robustness come into play.
Very amusing that you think the Atlee govt was socialist I must say. Thanks for that.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
Not to mention cognitive dissonance
Rob Ray
Weight is meaningless
(seriously though, wtf are you talking about, Britain's been corrupt af and has almost no institutional oversight over swathes of how society runs, most infamously its financial sector)
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
Yeah, corruption in the UK has increased. But it's still nothing like the scale of somewhere like Bulgaria, say, or Romania. Or Cuba. You don't have to pay a bribe to get a hospital bed.
Sasaferrato
Super Refuser!
Firstly, I wouldn't say I was interested if I wasn't. You should know by now that with me WYSIWYG.
Secondly, I'm not dismissing the idea, I'm expressing a view that in the small, it could work, but in the big?
Thirdly, I would rather hear about the concept from those invested in it, which is my preferred learning method. We all learn differently.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
I see you edited. It's a different scale. In our everyday lives, we don't have to go around bribing officials just to get our everyday stuff done.
Pickman's model
Starry Wisdom
No indeed. The corruption is of a different sort and wholly different order - no £50 to get a hospital bed but if you know someone in the govt you can get millions for unusable protective equipment
'socialism' with a state and a ruling class. Oh dear.
Rob Ray
Weight is meaningless
So you're happy as long as the corruption is at a more grandiose institutional level that you don't personally have a frame of reference for. Cool beans.
(Also it's not true to suggest this stuff doesn't happen at lower levels in the NHS, comparatively speaking the media just likes to focus on the most outrageous cases from foreign climes).
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So do the worker's own and control the means of production and distribution in this 'state socialist' society of yours? And is there a decommodified economy?
Because neither of those things have ever happened with 'state socialism' or with a Labour government in power.
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In my view, no :
Rojava: The Myths and the Reality
Let us be clear from the outset: Rojava is not a product of a revolution, but simply of one “special armed body” stepping in for another “special armed body”.
www.leftcom.org
A380
How do I change this 'custom title' thing then?
You don't really understand what socialism actually means, do you?
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
This is a bizarre response to what I posted. I posted that state structures could and did enlarge here in the UK post-1945 without a correlated increase in corruption. I posted that this happened through 'democratic socialism', ie a socialist program enacted by a government that was elected through the existing system.
There was loads wrong with the Attlee govt, particularly its handling of foreign policy, but that doesn't change my point. I'm not claiming that this was the greatest govt ever that only did great things. I am claiming that things like an NHS, a comprehensive welfare state, council housing programmes and the nationalisation of large industries and utilities are examples of socialist policies, and I'm also claiming that those policies made a positive difference to the lives of millions of people. I also think there is an important difference between a nationalised industry and a privately owned one. The latter answers to its shareholders for whom it is duty-bound to extract a profit. The former does not.
Regarding 'decommodifying' the economy, we've lost loads in this regard in recent decades. Council housing was an example of decommodified housing. The university grant system was an example of decommodified university education. As we all know, we've been subjected to more than 40 years of commodification of the economy, by both tory and labour. The NHS is still an example of decommodified healthcare.
They're not.
I don't think thats true, but even if it is I think your point about corruption has already been dealt with.
I don't think I regard your example there as decommodification. It seems we have different meanings for that term. I am referring to things genuinely being produced for need and an economy based on human needs and equality, not profit and the rule of a minority.
And no Labour government has ever been socialist, they have only ever been capitalist. The workers' never owned and controlled the means of production, the state and therefore the ruling class did and whenever you have a state you have a parasitical ruling class who run things primarily for their own gain.
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teuchter
je suis teuchter
Capitalism by itself isn't interested in providing a vital service unless it happens to be one that can generate a profit, of course.
State intervention is perfectly capable of providing a vital service and in many places it does. Obviously it depends on whether it's a state that wants to do that, but for something like transport (other than perhaps very local transport) state intervention, I would say, has a much greater potential to provide a good transport system than a conglomeration of semi-co-ordinated self-organised community services.
Of course self organised services often fill in the gaps that a poor state service leaves, but that doesn't mean that a state system is intrinsically inable to provide a good transport service. On the other hand, there are things intrinsic to self-organised systems that mean they don't provide a great service beyond a very local one, because that's critically dependant on complex co-ordination and oversight.
If I'm looking at whether somewhere has a good public transport system that's accessible to all, there are usually two things that determine what's on offer: the proportion of the population who rely on it, and the amount of investment the state wants to put into it.
There are places in the world where a lot of people rely on public transport (because few can afford their own vehicles) and where the state doesn't invest much. In these places you often see something that is a kind of conglomerate of locally self-organised systems, although they are essentially run commercially. These are places where you might for example see a lot of minibuses running to a lot of places but without a fixed timetable or even fixed routes. You can get around these places, without your own transport, perhaps better than you can in many rural parts of the UK, but that doesn't mean it's a good transport system; they are usually chaotic and slow, involve a lot of waiting around and don't offer reliable or predictable journey times. That's what you get without any co-ordinating oversight and the co-ordination needs to be at the scale of the transport network so if you want a national network you need co-ordination at that scale.
Every place I've been where I've seen a truly excellent transport system it's co-ordinated by some form of state oversight. The individual operators might be private companies or they might be state owned; that's a separate issue as I see it, but in any case in the UK we've watched transport systems go from partially co-ordinated conglomerates of private companies to increasingly regulated groupings to conglomerates of locally state owned operators to fully nationalised single entities to privatised franchises under greater or lesser state regulation and currently moving towards increasing state regulation and even part nationalisation. In any case there's one thing that never really seems to work which is a bunch of independent entities with no incentive to co-ordinate with each other in a way that isn't focussed on what's most convenient or attractive to each entity.
I very much recommend The Anarchist Collectives by Sam Dolgoff as a starting point, but its too much for me to convey what is written in that book here.
Unlike more statist and top-down experiments, its the more horizontal ones (despite their limitations) that have gone further in achieving proper socialism or communism. That is to say that they achieved some degree of genuine worker's ownership and running of the means of production and distribution, and also real decommodification of the economy.
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Rob Ray
Weight is meaningless
You have no idea what is and isn't "intrinsic to self-organised systems". Kropotkin used to use the lifeboat service as an example of a self-organised system that was run neither for profit nor under State control, and while it's not specifically non-hierarchical it is a nationwide volunteer service covering the entire coastline and is merely one of an entire Third Sector which fills in such grey areas within capitalism and State constructs because neither one does the job it sells us. There is no comprehensive State system for most human needs, and in fact never has been even prior to the collapse of the post-war compromise. The State and Capital have always relied on self-organised solidarity to make up for their inability to provide for the working class, particularly during crisis.
As has been pointed out above, complex systems with oversight using flat hierarchies have been created in eras with far less communications infrastructure than today and even in the midst of extreme hostility from vested interests that do their level best to destroy such projects, it's really only lack of imagination and research which would lead to this bizarre idea of "inherent" incapability.
littlebabyjesus
one of Maxwell's demons
A volunteer service wasn't going to build Crossrail, though, was it? Big infrastructure projects of that kind require huge investment up front and massive organisation, not to mention systems to allow people to make reasonable objections. Again, it's unfashionable to say such things on here, but Crossrail is a decent example of how big infrastructure projects should happen. There was extensive democratic accountability as the route was planned, so much so that it took years longer to do than it would have done somewhere like, say, China. But the Chinese authorities just push such things through from the top down and tough shit basically on anyone in the way. We are actually better than that, and one of the reasons we're better than that is the state institutions that legally require consultation.
The idea that 'the state' is all bad just doesn't stand up. It's something we need to be in constant negotiation with and that can be a fucksite better than it is right now, but how do you reasonably coordinate something like the building of a rail network without something like state structures? It would just be the strong fucking over the weak.
The idea that 'the state' is all bad just doesn't stand up. It's something we need to be in constant negotiation with and that can be a fucksite better than it is right now, but how do you reasonably coordinate something like the building of a rail network without something like state structures? It would just be the strong fucking over the weak.
teuchter
je suis teuchter
The lifeboat service isn't a transport system.
Certain things I agree work well on a self-organised basis. Other things I don't.
Give me an example of a transport system that operates at anything beyond a local level, on a "self organised"basis. Not something that existed for a few years in a small area a hundred years ago, something that actually exists in the modern world.
Supine
Newt Member
Do you really think there is no organisation and heirarchies in the lifeboat service? There totally is. Maybe no capital interests, because they are volunteers, but there is a system with levels.
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