Lets talk socialism for a change

[nietzreznor]

[ QUOTE ]
All this labelling is a bit nitpicky but I think that usuing Communist Russia as an example of why socialism doesn't work is like using the Enron scandal or the Abramoff affair to say that capitalism doesn't work. Pure socialism has never been tried and it is distinctly possible that (similar to AC) it is simply a utopian outlook that is not real world possible.

I'm quite happy to agree that the state owning the all of the means of production is usually if not always an unmitigated disaster, but that isn't socialism.

[/ QUOTE ]

tom,

I agree with this for the most part. My initial statement wasn't intended to mean that socialism was unfeasible/murderous, period, only that those who were vehemently denying that Nazis were socialists ought not to forget just how ugly 'state socialism' can be.

[tomdemaine]

For the record I'm not advocating socialism but I think that 50 years of ridiculous "reds under the bed" propaganda has tarnished true stateless socialism in America to the point where the ideology itself is often dismissed as inherently evil when if anything it is impractically good and utopian.

[tomdemaine]

Ironically socialism and AC probably have more in common with each other than either do with statist versions of themselves.

[hmkpoker]

[ QUOTE ]
For the record I'm not advocating socialism but I think that 50 years of ridiculous "reds under the bed" propaganda has tarnished true stateless socialism in America to the point where the ideology itself is often dismissed as inherently evil when if anything it is impractically good and utopian.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'd like to ask a sincere question about stateless socialism/anarchism (I'm assuming this is what you're talking about, like infoshop.org kind of stuff; if not I apologize)

If the individual freely utilizes the collective products of the society's labor, and his labor becomes freely usable to the society, where is his incentive to work? If what I consume is not directly proportional to my production, why would I produce?

[jcx]

[ QUOTE ]
Nope. As the other's said, Nazi's were anti-socialist. I've already gone through the trouble of showing Hitler's hatred of socialists in another thread where a poster was trying to make the equally ignorant claim that Hitler was an atheist. Quit being a lazy troll and do some goddamn research.

[/ QUOTE ]

You are a typical leftist. The fact that the Nazis are on your side of the proverbial political aisle is something your ilk hate so vehemently you will do anything you can to distance yourself from them. The successful painting of Hitler and the Nazis as right wing is possibly the most successful big lie of the 20th century. The fact that the Nazis were to the right of the Communists does not prove they are not leftists, it merely means they have something in common with every other idealogy. The fact that Nazis hated Communists also proves nothing. My dalmation hates my neighbors' chow, but they are both dogs.

The proof normally given to support the notion that Nazis are not Socialists is that private businesses were allowed and that the Nazis did not directly own the means of production. This is clever smoke and mirrors. I will quote Leonard Peikoff:

"Contrary to the Marxists, the Nazis did not advocate public ownership of the means of production. They did demand that the government oversee and run the nation's economy. The issue of legal ownership, they explained, is secondary; what counts is the issue of CONTROL. Private citizens, therefore, may continue to hold titles to property -- so long as the state reserves to itself the unqualified right to regulate the use of their property"

This sounds just like the Socialism practiced today.

Ludwig Von Mises also wrote extensively on the Nazi Economy. Let's see what he had to say:

"The Nazis did not, as their foreign admirers contend, enforce price control within a market economy. With them price control was only one device within the frame of an all-around system of central planning. In the Nazi economy there was no question of private initiative and free enterprise. All production activities were directed by the Reichswirtschaftsministerium. No enterprise was free to deviate in the conduct of its operations from the orders issued by the government. Price control was only a device in the complex of innumerable decrees and orders regulating the minutest details of every business activity and precisely fixing every individual's tasks on the one hand and his income and standard of living on the other.

What made it difficult for many people to grasp the very nature of the Nazi economic system was the fact that the Nazis did not expropriate the entrepreneurs and capitalists openly and that they did not adopt the principle of income equality which the Bolshevists espoused in the first years of Soviet rule and discarded only later. Yet the Nazis removed the bourgeois completely from control. Those entrepreneurs who were neither Jewish nor suspect of liberal and pacifist leanings retained their positions in the economic structure. But they were virtually merely salaried civil servants bound to comply unconditionally with the orders of their superiors, the bureaucrats of the Reich and the Nazi party."

So many people are fooled just because there were a few wealthy industrialists in Nazi Germany. This means nothing. They served at the pleasure of the state, made exactly the products the state demanded and charged the prices they were told to charge. They had absolutely no influence in government affairs. If this isn't a Socialists wet dream I want to know what is.

The Nazis were Socialists. Deal with it.

[tomdemaine]

[ QUOTE ]
[ QUOTE ]
For the record I'm not advocating socialism but I think that 50 years of ridiculous "reds under the bed" propaganda has tarnished true stateless socialism in America to the point where the ideology itself is often dismissed as inherently evil when if anything it is impractically good and utopian.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'd like to ask a sincere question about stateless socialism/anarchism (I'm assuming this is what you're talking about, like infoshop.org kind of stuff; if not I apologize)

If the individual freely utilizes the collective products of the society's labor, and his labor becomes freely usable to the society, where is his incentive to work? If what I consume is not directly proportional to my production, why would I produce?

[/ QUOTE ]

This is the part that is utopian and fall into the same traps as the "whey won't my neighbour come and murder me" AC threads, and, like those threads the answer is "we don't know for sure but here are some possibilities".

Will a doctor stop treating sick people just because he isn't getting paid? (assuming his and his families needs are being taken care of) Will a musician stop writing songs?

Then there is the AC social norms shunning from society argument. A lazy person won't be looked on well by others and few people want to be a social pariah.

There are probably a lot more and I imagine that many of them in some way mirror AC answers to similar questions.

[tomdemaine]

[ QUOTE ]

The Nazis were Socialists. Deal with it.

[/ QUOTE ]

See my other posts in this thread.

[DVaut1]

[ QUOTE ]
The fact that the Nazis are on your side of the proverbial political aisle is something your ilk hate so vehemently you will do anything you can to distance yourself from them.

[/ QUOTE ]

Strange, I feel like I know what you're getting at here.

[Cyrus]

[ QUOTE ]
Socialists killed the Jews because...

[/ QUOTE ] FALSE. Whatever "reasons" you might come up with.

[ QUOTE ]
Socialist policies have eliminated all sense of nationality and heritage.

[/ QUOTE ]FALSE.

I will not just invoke the example of the Bolsheviks who made it official policy to preserve all historical monuments, buildings, sites, etc (Stalin tore down a serious number of Orthodox churches, though). But nationalism was a prominent undercurrent in most "socialist camp" countries -- which is why it exploded after the communist regimes fell.

[ QUOTE ]
A Socialist government cannot fix its own problems because it cannot possibly allow itself to shrink, and hence solve its own problems.

[/ QUOTE ]Your phrasing is somewhat unfortunate. [img]/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img] It presupposes that only the absence of government solves a government's problems!

[ QUOTE ]
Europe died in Auschwitz. We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims.

[/ QUOTE ]

Oh, come on! Seriously. This is, at best, poetic licence.

Europe did not "die" in the death camps; European Jewry did, along with the Slavs (in equally horrible numbers), gypsies, and other unfortunate members of the "weaker" tribes of Europe.

What died in the death camps was Man's supposed higher calling. What died was the belief that Art and Education will necessarily elevate Man. (The Nazi officer was listening to opera and sending off Jews to be shot.)

The Jews are, fortunately, still extant in Europe, and their contribution to arts and sciences continues. As to the "Muslim threat", it's nothing novel. Europe has been facing down such "dangers" for centuries. (Spain was occupied by Muslims for centuries, someone should inform that ignoramus. And Spanish arts and sciences advanced greatly because of that occupation!)

Personally, I have no problem if all of the United States is populated mostly by blacks and latinos after a century, or if Europeans get to be mostly dark-skinned. I could not care less, actually. I leave that kind of worrying to the fanatics of "blood purity".

[hmkpoker]

[ QUOTE ]
This is the part that is utopian and fall into the same traps as the "whey won't my neighbour come and murder me" AC threads, and, like those threads the answer is "we don't know for sure but here are some possibilities".

[/ QUOTE ]

Here's the difference. AC assumes that human beings act toward their perception of self-benefit. Killing your neighbor is, very seldom, self-benefitting, particularly in regions with lots of resources. Unless you are so powerful that the people cannot fight back, as is the case of warlords in poor african countries (who use resources that can only exist in wealthier areas, making them effectively gods), there's really no reason to kill one's neighbor.

A lot of the assumptions of AC are empirically disproved because they could happen in society today, but do not. Chomsky in <u>Understanding Power</u> described AC as a nightmare where people will be taking other people to court for tresspassing on their property. But that's absurd; a kid walking by your house may be tresspassing if he steps on your lawn. If he's of a rich family, you could sue the crap out of him. But you don't, because 1) god that's horrible, and 2) no reasonable jury would convict him. It's just a waste of effort. It's not profitable.

Anarchism, however, makes assumptions about human motivation that are just flat-out wrong. To be considered successful (that is, better than what we have), the anarchist system has to promote more productivity than the existing capitalist structure. To gain an understanding of whether it would or not, we need a basic understanding of human (or just animalian) motivation:

Humans and animals are incentivized to do things by either the desire for reward or the avoidance of punishment, and reward almost always works better. If you want to get someone to do more of something (specifically something he doesn't find inherent reward in), you have to reward him more. Rewards are most effective when they are large, direct, immediate, predictable, and proportional to the operative (in this case, productive) work. Self-serving rewards are the most effective. (btw, I have a BA in psychology; this isn't stuff I'm pulling out of my ass, these are axioms that have been derived from lab and field observations of countless experiments)

In capitalism, the incentive is maximized. You do something that other people value, BAM, money. That was cool, so you do it again. But a socialist in a large society will not see the fruits of his labor manifest as a direct personal reward. The incentive, which we know scientifically to be necessary to promote the desired behavior, is not present. At our current level of wealth, motivations that don't behave in accordance with science are, for lack of a better term, fictional.

[ QUOTE ]
Will a doctor stop treating sick people just because he isn't getting paid? (assuming his and his families needs are being taken care of) Will a musician stop writing songs?

[/ QUOTE ]

Doctors and artists; prestigious, recognizable, fulfilling careers. Every anarchist uses these archetypes as examples. Maybe they would pursue those things simply because they derive pleasure from them, but what about the garbagemen, the factory workers, the busboys, the janitors, the burger flippers and the cashiers? No one likes these jobs. They do them because they get paid. Why would anyone want a job screwing nuts onto bolts when he could just be an artist instead?

And btw, I somehow doubt as many people will want to undergo the rigorous amount of training necessary to become a physician when they're not going to live any better than a burger flipper.

[ QUOTE ]
Then there is the AC social norms shunning from society argument. A lazy person won't be looked on well by others and few people want to be a social pariah.

[/ QUOTE ]

Motivation by punishment. This is the Office Space problem; lack of reward and possibility of punishment will make someone only productive enough not to get fired. And secondly, these people do exist in society today. They're called hippies and they don't do a goddamn thing except [censored] off and smoke weed. Capitalism doesn't reward this kind of behavior, though. Anarchism does.