In a conversation with AfD leader Alice Weidel on X, Musk concurred with her assertion that Adolf Hitler was a communist and pushed disinformation about migrants coming into the US.
You’re doing exactly what Engels points out, though. You are trying to change the nature of a thing by changing its name.
OSHA has authority, power, whatever you want to call it to compel unsafe or toxic production to cease. This is necessary, and cannot simply be a request to be denied, as people will work in their own interests and may want to cut corners. You don’t need to threaten people not to put their genitals in vices, correct, but you do need to have power over people who are deliberately skirting safety protocol for their own benefit.
This is why this entire conversation has been relatively pointless, it’s clear that you certainly have firm beliefs about what you want, you just fundamentally lack the understanding of the Marxist position to its entirety and can only disagree with it by shifting and distorting things or by changing the names of things we agree on. You double down when proven wrong and try to pretend Marxism isn’t Socialist.
I think you need to take a step back and read at list a bit of Marx and Engels and read up more on the various AES states if you want to actually come up with sensible critique.
“to compel”. That’s power. Authority is more like “to convince”.
This is necessary,
No.
as people will work in their own interests and may want to cut corners
It is not in the interest of workers to cut corners. That interest is coming from somewhere else. That is why OSHA needs power. Without those external interests, all that OSHA needs to do is convince that certain practices are beneficial to the worker’s own self-interest. If they are any good at their job, they will be very convincing, they will have much authority.
This is the fundamental stuff that Marx, and by extension many Marxists, miss in their analysis. That’s why the revolution failed: Because it was not, systemically, beneficial to the worker, because it was the exchange of one boot for another boot. Advances such as healthcare? Goddammit SocDems caused Germany to introduce universal public healthcare under Monarchism. “We need the dictatorship of the vanguard to introduce these advances” is not an argument, it never has been necessary and with the likes of OSHA: The USSR was not great, not terrible. Bosses could override safety concerns because higher-ups want production quota, and they did. The reason it wasn’t terrible is because the people engineering factories cared about that stuff, and worked it into the design.
The same misappreciation btw also extends to histography: “The peasant has no class consciousness”. Peasant revolt after constant peasant revolt attested in history would beg to differ.
Okay, so OSHA needs power. If a factory is producing in unsafe conditions or produce toxic or unsafe goods for the public. Not every situation can be solved via “convincing.” Depending on OSHA to be “convincing” is silly, all such Utopian formations of societies like the Owenites and Saint-Simon’s commune failed for similar reasons.
I think you need to revisit Marxist theory and history, and you honestly should revisit Anarchist theory which today understands the necessity of just hierarchy. The USSR was great, not perfect but absolutely massive for Workers around the world.
Not every situation can be solved via “convincing.”
Well, you need to convince the KGB to stop enforcing the bosses’ commands, taking away the bosses’ power, as that is where the necessity for OSHA to have power even arises. Of course, enforcement of power is all the KGB is there for so you have to convince power-hungry authoritarians to stop doing what they do and retire. It’d be in their own interest, but their neuroses doesn’t let them see it.
We can talk about the need to coerce to get rid of the KGB to bring about a system that is free from the KGB, we can talk about the need of defences against the resurgence of a KGB while the very notion of ordering people about is not relegated to the history books, but we do not need to even entertain the idea of power being necessary in actually realised socialism as it would be a contradiction in terms.
The necessity for OSHA to have power is that people act in their own self-interest as a rule. Humanity can collectively plan and produce, and eventually as production is improved these measures will not need to be as strict, but they remain a necessity for administration and planning.
Again, it is awfully dishonest to attempt to redefine Socialism as Anarchism.
You’re doing exactly what Engels points out, though. You are trying to change the nature of a thing by changing its name.
OSHA has authority, power, whatever you want to call it to compel unsafe or toxic production to cease. This is necessary, and cannot simply be a request to be denied, as people will work in their own interests and may want to cut corners. You don’t need to threaten people not to put their genitals in vices, correct, but you do need to have power over people who are deliberately skirting safety protocol for their own benefit.
This is why this entire conversation has been relatively pointless, it’s clear that you certainly have firm beliefs about what you want, you just fundamentally lack the understanding of the Marxist position to its entirety and can only disagree with it by shifting and distorting things or by changing the names of things we agree on. You double down when proven wrong and try to pretend Marxism isn’t Socialist.
I think you need to take a step back and read at list a bit of Marx and Engels and read up more on the various AES states if you want to actually come up with sensible critique.
“to compel”. That’s power. Authority is more like “to convince”.
No.
It is not in the interest of workers to cut corners. That interest is coming from somewhere else. That is why OSHA needs power. Without those external interests, all that OSHA needs to do is convince that certain practices are beneficial to the worker’s own self-interest. If they are any good at their job, they will be very convincing, they will have much authority.
This is the fundamental stuff that Marx, and by extension many Marxists, miss in their analysis. That’s why the revolution failed: Because it was not, systemically, beneficial to the worker, because it was the exchange of one boot for another boot. Advances such as healthcare? Goddammit SocDems caused Germany to introduce universal public healthcare under Monarchism. “We need the dictatorship of the vanguard to introduce these advances” is not an argument, it never has been necessary and with the likes of OSHA: The USSR was not great, not terrible. Bosses could override safety concerns because higher-ups want production quota, and they did. The reason it wasn’t terrible is because the people engineering factories cared about that stuff, and worked it into the design.
The same misappreciation btw also extends to histography: “The peasant has no class consciousness”. Peasant revolt after constant peasant revolt attested in history would beg to differ.
Okay, so OSHA needs power. If a factory is producing in unsafe conditions or produce toxic or unsafe goods for the public. Not every situation can be solved via “convincing.” Depending on OSHA to be “convincing” is silly, all such Utopian formations of societies like the Owenites and Saint-Simon’s commune failed for similar reasons.
I think you need to revisit Marxist theory and history, and you honestly should revisit Anarchist theory which today understands the necessity of just hierarchy. The USSR was great, not perfect but absolutely massive for Workers around the world.
Well, you need to convince the KGB to stop enforcing the bosses’ commands, taking away the bosses’ power, as that is where the necessity for OSHA to have power even arises. Of course, enforcement of power is all the KGB is there for so you have to convince power-hungry authoritarians to stop doing what they do and retire. It’d be in their own interest, but their neuroses doesn’t let them see it.
We can talk about the need to coerce to get rid of the KGB to bring about a system that is free from the KGB, we can talk about the need of defences against the resurgence of a KGB while the very notion of ordering people about is not relegated to the history books, but we do not need to even entertain the idea of power being necessary in actually realised socialism as it would be a contradiction in terms.
The necessity for OSHA to have power is that people act in their own self-interest as a rule. Humanity can collectively plan and produce, and eventually as production is improved these measures will not need to be as strict, but they remain a necessity for administration and planning.
Again, it is awfully dishonest to attempt to redefine Socialism as Anarchism.