People say capitalism is efficient, yet Twitter has around 5,OOO employees while Mastodon was built pretty much single handedly by Eugene Rochko. Today, Mastodon provides a strictly superior user experience with only a handful of contributors.
Majority of effort at Twitter is directed towards things like ads and tracking that are actively harmful from user perspective. Meanwhile, the core functionality of the platform that benefits the users can be implemented with a small fraction of the effort.
Seems to me that capitalism is actually far more inefficient than open source development in practice.
I would argue that the USSR was not truly communist or socialist since it also exploited workers - it was just the government exploiting workers, instead of private corporations. Russia’s rapid industrialization was due to the fact that Stalin was literally willing to mass murder peasants who didn’t give up all their grain to the government so the government could give it to factories and industrial projects - a policy that was incredibly brutal, but worked.
A pattern I’ve noticed in history is that the speed of industrialization is dependent mostly on how much state power is aligned with the bourgeoisie (in “communist” countries they may not call themselves the bourgeoisie but they certainly act like it, pursuing “development” and “progress” over all else). In Britain, the enclosure movement used massive state power to force peasants to give their land to large landowners to be farmed more efficiently and forced peasants into the city to take up miserable factory jobs. In the Soviet Union, Stalin’s forced collectivization and grain confiscation did the same. And today in China, the same is being done.
In many ways Marx was very right. Nobody but the bourgeoisie (or a “communist” party that acts like the bourgeoisie) can successfully pursue industrialization, because a (democratic) socialist government would never have the brutality and coercion required to successfully force a drastic and unprecedented change of lifestyle for the majority of the population.
Touché. Agree on that one.
USSR was always meant to be a transitional state. ML philosophy is that you can’t just flip a switch and go from capitalist society to a fully classless worker owned society. The first step is to transition to a worker owned state, and then wither it away.
I also disagree with the notion that USSR exploited workers, at least in the same sense as capitalism exploits the workers. Nobody was getting rich off the workers in USSR. There was no generational wealth, and top pay was capped at 8x lowest pay. Politicians and administrators also weren’t the highest paid professions in USSR. Labour was predominantly directed towards socially useful work and the benefit of the state.
People like to point out that USSR was brutal and that the state directed resources. Yet, that has to be seen in a broader context where USSR was under the assault of all capitalist nations since the day it was formed. If USSR did not rapidly advance technologically and militarily, then it would’ve simply been destroyed. And we saw softer approaches, like the one in Germany, get sidelined by fascists. China is a in a similar situation today, where all of Western powers are actively working to destroy it. Without central planning it would be doomed.
Lenin specifically talks about this problem, and says that true socialism will only be possible after it becomes the dominant ideology in the world. As long as socialism is under threat of war, socialist countries have to have militant organization to survive.
I also find it interesting that most criticism of USSR tend to fixate on the Stalin era. This ignores the historical context where USSR went through a brutal war and was plunged directly into the Cold War right after.
However, it’s quite clear that quality of life along with personal freedoms continued to improve steadily with each decade. USSR in the late 80s was nothing like USSR in the 50s. To me this clearly shows that the system was working as intended because people’s lives were constantly improving. We simply don’t see a similar trajectory in vast majority of capitalist nations.
I’m open to suggestion as to how a better system could be formed, but I have not seen any working alternatives so far. The reality is that the world is ruled by capitalist empires that will actively work to tear down any socialist nations as soon as they form. Any more liberal alternative to Marxism-Leninism has to be able to defend against that.
Do you have any unbiased, well-researched sources for this (not USSR propaganda)?
The whole idea of “socialist nations” is very antiquated and impractical; instead of building “socialist nations” through violent revolution, we should aim for socialist spaces within the framework of a pluralistic society. If people can experience multiple systems of social organization for themselves, they will be able to decide for themselves which one is superior. For example, we should build free software (like Mastodon), we should build co-operatives and communes, we should establish info-shops and bookstores, etc. Eventually, when people realize that socialist societies can succeed at small scale, they will be more willing to support us, and our spaces will grow in power. Only at the point where the majority agrees with socialism can we begin talking about breaking away from the state, i.e. revolution.
I personally lived in USSR so I have a pretty good idea of what life there was actually like. There is also plenty empirical research comparing USSR to Western countries. Here’s a paper mostly relying on Western sources. Having experienced both communism and capitalism, I strongly prefer the former.
I fundamentally disagree with that. To me socialism means that the resources and labour are primarily focused towards creating social value. Things like cooperatives improve the situation over traditional companies, but they don’t address the fundamental problem of majority of the labour in society being directed towards creating profit and only creating social value incidentally. I reject the idea of capitalism at its core. I think that the only necessary work that exists should be essential work that’s necessary for the society to function, and this kind of work should be minimized. People should be freed to spend their lives in a way that makes sense to them, and that’s not possible to do within the framework of capitalism.