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[Devastator]

I mean, really, when I ask myself 'why we have Trump', the answer I come up with is, "Because he's a kleptocratic leader who hijacked a populist movement", which is a huge category of many heads of state around the world, in all parts of the political spectrum.

[Devastator]

Government intervention isn't not capitalism. The reasons for the world wars are complex and varied, but overall the preconditions to fight them are those of capitalism. The first due to the colonial adventurism of decades past crashing into the era of the machine gun and the mustard gas canister, the second due to the disintegration of capital's functionality and purpose which gave birth to fascism.

So do the Russian Revolutions and Chinese Civil war, and their follow-up genocides count?

Or are those capitalist too?  Because if so, maybe you're just using that as an excuse.  A 'No True Scotsman' thing, where nothing bad can be applied to anti-capitalist forces, because nothing is anti-capitalist...

[MetalSlimeHunt]

I mean, really, when I ask myself 'why we have Trump', the answer I come up with is, "Because he's a klepocratic leader who hijacked a populist movement", which is a huge category of many heads of state around the world, in all parts of the political spectrum.

Is it hijacking if it's what that movement asked for? For a long time there have been Republican and right-leaning voters who have advocated for crude and rude politics as opposed to the euphemistic right of yesteryear. Trump is the living god of your uncle who uses racial slurs and tells the grandkids explicit jokes at the dinner table, mostly just to see if he'll get away with it, and to guffaw at anyone who objects.

The GOP establishment was terrified of actually doing that, because they thought the general public wouldn't like that, they'd turn against that and you'd waste your shot at the throne. Trump decided to take the chance, and it turned out to be a winner.

So do the Russian Revolutions and Chinese Civil war, and their follow-up genocides count?

Or are those capitalist too?  Because if so, maybe you're just using that as an excuse.  A 'No True Scotsman' thing, where nothing bad can be applied to anti-capitalist forces, because nothing is anti-capitalist...

A. There's no need to doublepost.

B.

There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

C. You live in the era of capital. It's like going back to the feudal period and saying "well, why does everything seem to have something to do with these nobles, huh? maybe you should just try harder." The influence of capitalism is ubiquitous even in countries that fought against it for the same reason that lasting influence outside the nobility was rare in feudalism. Nonetheless, you can't change historical eras without effort, it's not an automatic or necessarily one-way process. Just one that becomes more likely as technology and organization develop.

[Devastator]

I mean, really, when I ask myself 'why we have Trump', the answer I come up with is, "Because he's a klepocratic leader who hijacked a populist movement", which is a huge category of many heads of state around the world, in all parts of the political spectrum.

Is it hijacking if it's what that movement asked for? For a long time there have been Republican and right-leaning voters who have advocate for crude and rude politics as opposed to the euphemistic right of yesteryear. Trump is the living god of your uncle who uses racial slurs and tells the grandkids explicit jokes at the dinner table, mostly just to see if he'll get away with it, and to guffaw at anyone who objects.

The GOP establishment was terrified of actually doing that, because they thought the general public wouldn't like that, they'd turn against that and you'd waste your shot at the throne. Trump decided to take the chance, and it turned out to be a winner.

Yes it's hijacking.  Something to remember is that in the four years of Trump, that proverbial uncle's life has not gotten better.

There is no absolute reason why someone who can be rude must also be intent on nothing more than stealing as much money as possible while doing as little as possible except what is personally enjoyed by the leader.

What he has provided for them were excuses and scapegoats, things to blame for whatever the current problem is, it must be the cause of X!
..which sounds extremely like using labels like 'neoliberalis'.  He just uses labels like 'deep state' and 'fake news' and 'snowflakes.'

As for B,

What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

What metric should we use to judge both terrors?  I can agree with you that there are certainly horrors visited by society.  If you want to compare the two, I'll need some way to measure them.  If there is no way to ever see the other terror, I'm reminded of the parable of the invisible dragon.


As for C, Can you come up with your specific terms of marxism, then?  What do you like, what do you want?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Yes it's hijacking.  Something to remember is that in the four years of Trump, that proverbial uncle's life has not gotten better.

There is no absolute reason why someone who can be rude must also be intent on nothing more than stealing as much money as possible while doing as little as possible except what is personally enjoyed by the leader.

What he has provided for them were excuses and scapegoats, things to blame for whatever the current problem is, it must be the cause of X!
..which sounds extremely like using labels like 'neoliberalis'.  He just uses labels like 'deep state' and 'fake news' and 'snowflakes.'

So? What does that actually matter? People who support Trump aren't supporting him to make their own lives better, at least not in any conventional way. They're supporting him so he will own the libs. Owning the libs is all they care about, it's their number one issue. They can be dying of untreated cancer, stuck in constant filth and misery, cut off from whatever humanity they may have once had...but Trump sure does show those fuckin' libs and illegals what's what, ha hah!

They are receiving what they asked for. They didn't ask for a better life, they've always asked for nothing more than an amusing death, and even right now they're getting it.

As for B,

What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror—that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

What metric should we use to judge both terrors?  I can agree with you that there are certainly horrors visited by society.  If you want to compare the two, I'll need some way to measure them.  If there is no way to ever see the other terror, I'm reminded of the parable of the invisible dragon.

Uh, how about scale of misery and death? If 1% of the population gets a life of power and luxury off the labor of the other 99%, obviously you're dealing with an imbalanced equation. Their happiness isn't transferable or anything. It can never be worth the misery of the 99%, no matter how exalted the 1% is.

Twain says it himself - the true terror that was the ancien regime killed and ruined so many over the centuries that the so-called "Reign of Terror" could barely even register, if you truly took all human lives into account. But because of society's idolization of the high and powerful, the deaths of a small noble class are recoiled from as a horrifying error yet the centuries of dead and tormented peasants receive no attention or woe at all.

Similarly, the October and Chinese revolutions ended thousand-year terrors of constant oppression and deprivation for the very large majorities of those countries, but you condemn them as genocide. It is fitting that it was Mao who said "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" - all politics involves killing, but you limit yourself to horror only at the suffering of particular classes, in spite of the suffering of the great majority both in any particular time and certainly in history as a whole.

As for C, Can you come up with your specific terms of marxism, then?  What do you like, what do you want?

What I want is to prevent the annihilation of life on this planet, which capitalism's ethos of eternal consumption makes inevitable. Belatedly, I'd also like myself and the rest of humanity not to be pawns of capital and/or all murdered by the functions of capitalism eating us for the same reason.

In terms of Marxist theory, this means changing our socioeconomic era from a capitalist one to a socialist one, just as we once changed from an aristocratic era to a capitalist era. A society where power is concentrated in the working class, as opposed to the capital class as it is now.

[WealthyRadish]

'neoliberalis'

"And here we see the reassembled fragments of a late-holocene Homo Neoliberalis, recovered by flotation from a period-typical sediment rich in plastic microfibers and toxic lead dust. Markings on the remains indicate numerous lifelong parasitic afflictions (most likely creditors) with the acute cause of death likely brought on by loss of habitat due to deregulation of mortgage-backed securities markets..."

[Reelya]

What MSH said about the French Revolution. It's worth looking up the official punishments under the pre-French Revolution government, the one nobody has a problem with apparently. It includes boiling people alive in oil as an official mandatory form of execution (how you died depended on your crime). Other forms included "breaking" people on the wheel, disemboweling, drawing and quartering with horses. All the fun stuff. The pre-French Revolution forms of execution were designed to make sure to maximize suffering. It was public torture-porn. That's what pre-Revolution France was all about.

Beheading was reserved for executed nobles. The guillotine was brought in not because they wanted to ramp up the killing but as a more humane form of execution - it standardized beheading for all capital crimes and was much less prone to botched execution than trying to take someone's head off with an axe. Britain standardized executions on hanging, and we don't get outraged about them hanging a whole lot of people. The reason France didn't is that hanging was one of the specified lower-class forms of execution so they wouldn't have wanted to choose that.

What outraged people during the French Revolution wasn't the deaths, it was that the wrong type of people were dying. Remember this was the same era in which Britain was filling rotting ship hulks with petty criminals then exporting them to brutal existences in undeveloped wilderness at the far ends of the Earth (definitely a high death rate), while of course wiping out a lot of natives who were getting in the way. This was an era that most European nations were busy exterminating entire native civilizations all over the place and we're supposed to think that the few months of the Reign of Terror was the really bad thing that was going on.

[bloop_bleep]

The Holodomor was the greatest genocide in all of history, and not exactly a "quick death" at the hands of an axe or rifle either. You really can't claim that the October Revolution really made the situation a lot better. It just gave somebody else the stick.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The Holodomor isn't even in the top 10 in terms of mass death, and in the modern day even conservative pro-US historians like Robert Conquest generally do not consider it a genocide. The Holodomor was the consequence of farming consolidation and mechanization, which caused famines in nearly every society at the time they implemented it, including the US (Dust Bowl). The Soviet government deserves blame for massively mismanaging the crisis, but certainly not "the greatest genocide in all of history".

Regardless, the USSR went from wooden plows to space travel in two generations, and definitely would have been exterminated to the last by the Nazis had they not rapidly mechanized. It is not an achievement that can be so easily dismissed, especially in light of our own modern stagnation.

[dragdeler]

-

[McTraveller]

I'm not sure that "capitalism" is actually the real bogeyman here.  I think it is more the sociopolitical system surrounding it.  That is - what protections are put in place to avoid abuses.  I'm not entirely convinced that the necessary protections are unique to "capitalism" either though: for instance, the arguments that unbridled capitalism concentrates power are not really different from arguments that centralized economies concentrate power; it's just "private individuals" versus "public planners" that get the concentrated power.

I suppose the one thing society hasn't yet seen is a truly distributed-ownership market-based economy.  I think this is what one endpoint of "universal basic income" economy might be.  Something like you can have all these companies, but where there isn't a concept of stock representing ownership - that is, the public really does own everything.  The only thing I haven't been able to figure out or seen discussed is how such a system would decide which companies to create and keep operating once created.  Would it be by lottery? By public vote? Some committee (like we have today with public grants)?

In the current US system, "which companies to create and keep operating" are decided by private organizations (or individuals) investing in the company in exchange for an ownership stake and first right of refusal for the profits of said company.  If you have a new system where "the public" owns everything, what market pressures are there to help pick the best companies*?  If the ownership is diffuse, are the feedback signals associated with non-viable business plans strong enough to close them down?  Are the feedback signals strong enough to encourage and reward "successful" organizations?  How do you provide feedback that encourages robustness rather than rate of growth?  How would a public system decide to let an industry die when it has been replaced by a more modern one? (Voters are really bad at this - we have enough laws in our "capitalist" system already keeping decrepit industries alive "for the sake of jobs" or whatever.)

Put another way - you can't just look at "make the returns of all companies public."  You have to think about how to make investment in the companies public, how to make the management of the companies public, etc.  How do you avoid tragedy of the commons when everything is the commons?  How do you help employees move from one job to another?

*Even in an everything-is-public-owned scenario, companies are always and ever engines of "profit".  Note that profit doesn't have to be limited to "most dollars coming in."  Profit is (on a societal level) a measure of how efficiently an activity uses resources:  The more output per unit input is profit.  So even this "Utopian" system has to be based on a profit motive for the most broad definition of profit.

[MrRoboto75]

74% of federal prisoners tested have been positive for COVID-19

well they can't vote so

So long as the Boston Marathon Bomber doesn't vote. Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes possible.

We have the most prisoners and for a place called land of the free (with unalienable rights) we treat them like literal subhumans.  Because other than a source of income they do not exist to the government, because even if you leave prison as a felon you cannot vote.

[McTraveller]

Well yeah, here in the US you are free to suffer the consequences of your actions!  There is probably some kind of twisted argument how our high prison population proves we are the most free, because we don't nanny people into not doing "bad stuff."

[Frumple]

Because other than a source of income they do not exist to the government, because even if you leave prison as a felon you cannot vote.

Eh, for what little it's worth, franchise for felons or ex-felons is one of those things that vary by state. Iirc there's at least two that allow voting for people still imprisoned, and a majority restore franchise at some point, good handful immediately on release (though that doesn't always involve re-registering as well, apparently). Permanent disenfranchisement isn't the norm for the country as a whole, at this point, and even for those that still have it, tends to be limited to certain crimes.

Mind, that's still pretty fucked up -- there should be precious goddamn few things that warrant removal of the right to vote, and incarceration alone damn sure isn't one of them -- but it's not as fucked up as you're portraying.

[The Ensorceler]

Specific examples get pretty bad tho. Drug War has always arrested minorities at higher rates than whites no matter what the use rates are, crimes of desperation are punished more harshly than even large scale financial abuse, jury pools, judges, etc are often just racist on their own without needing anybody's help. All of this is very intentionally preserved if not provoked specifically for the voting implications. Florida's recent attempts to restore voting rights are pretty clear on that front.