"No one's ever shown us a long-term working alternative to capitalism"

On a discussion group GA just wrote:

"nobody has hitherto managed to show in practice an alternative to a society harnessing the forces of capitalism that works, works in the long run, and works without serious side effects like dictatorship or other disproportionate limitations in the freedom of people to lead their lives"

I replied:

Well, it's not surprising, really, cos the history of human society doesn't work this way. The place of experiment has to be taken by real life commitment, on a huge scale. Comparing results needs an appropriately huge perspective both as regards time and place. 

We have seen perfectly clearly however that capitalism - as a long-term mode of production - does not work smoothly or beneficially for the mass of humanity. It proceeds from crisis to crisis, and the trade-offs in terms of health and well-being versus riches and technical advances are not worth making - from the point of view of the massive majority of people who merely produce the wealth rather than get to own and enjoy it. If today, after all these centuries, capitalism can do no better for the less well-placed than it's doing in Greece and Spain, let alone Haiti or Honduras, or South Africa or Rwanda, then it's an obvious failure. It is also totally incapable of systematically making use of the benefits of planned cooperation to apply available knowledge and techniques for the betterment of the majority of humanity. It can't even do this in the US (South Bronx, East LA), or the EU, let alone West Sahara or Eritrea. 

We have seen that certain important aspects of social progress - infrastructure, literacy, education, general (if basic) provision of health and education are much better managed in non-capitalist states, like the USSR, Yugoslavia, or China. This is quite amazing, historically speaking, given that the advantages became apparent so very rapidly. And given that the disadvantages inherent in the genesis and life of these states (non-hegemonic economic status, undemocratic governance removing the vast mass of the working people from planning and decision-making) are so very destructive and make them so vulnerable to aggressively hostile policies from more powerful capitalist rivals.

The road to social and  economic change and improvement will be created not by a small group of technocrats in an editorial office or library but by ordinary people getting together to run their own affairs free of exploitation and slave-driving, using free open cooperation with anyone they want using any ideas and techniques they want regardless of profits or patents. To do this, people will need ideas regarding political and economic and social organization, and they will have to fight to get their hands on these, since one of the major preoccupations of capitalism today is the stifling and extermination of these ideas and the organizations bearing them.

So, if you want a pre-validated successful non-capitalist society, you can forget it. Which means you either sigh, sit back and drink a resigned toast to really existing capitalism - Here's to Bhopal, Marikana, the Vietnam War, Iraq and Afghanistan! - or you get stuck in to making better alternatives than the ones that have half-worked in really existing (but far from optimal) non-capitalist societies. Or get swirled about in the wind with the sands on the bank of the Styx - a fate Dante wished upon the congenitally indecisive trimmers who never made a choice and never took sides. These poor sods never even got let into Hell - Charon felt too much contempt for them. Blowing through cold, dark, empty streets for all eternity. 

Communism - good on paper but doesn't work

Here's a short Facebook exchange about "communism" not working. Naz had been discussing things at home with her dad.


Naz: 
Hello chops I was having a talk with my dad about communism and he was telling me that it looks good on paper, but it doesn't work. If you nationalize land there's less production, he said south africa was more successful under apartheid because they had more production. He also included that Poland had a lot more progress in 3 years of Capitalism than in 40 years of communism! Explain!! 

Thanks 

Me: 

Hi! Depends how you measure being "successful", doesn't it.

Ask him that first. Success is what? And for who? Would he be among those enjoying the "success"? Why?

Poland. "Progress" is like success - depends what you mean, how you measure it and for who.

And Russia is more appropriate to look at when it comes to what happened under the Stalinist version of "communism". Poland and the other eastern European countries did make progress under the Soviet regime, but they were also badly hit by being treated as occupied semi-colonies and forced to be run for foreign interests by agents of the foreigners.

Despite this Polish women have suffered very badly since 1990, and education and culture have been under the thumb of a very primitive Catholicism since then, too. And the jury's still out on the effects on the peasantry (the mass of small independent farmers) of the return of capitalism. So far the governments haven't dared to attack them in the interests of agribusiness the way they do in most other EU countries.

As for Russia, I don't think anyone living there thought life between 1990 and 2000 marked an improvement over Soviet days, except in relation to certain limited areas of civic rights (there was greater formal freedom of speech, but you could get shot if you exercised it) and the availability of some foreign goods. In the USSR people had money but little to buy. In post-Soviet Russia people had no money (their Soviet savings were DELIBERATELY wiped out by Yeltsin and his pro-western friends) but lots of things they could (NOT) buy with it.

Also the majority of Russians resented being governed by a drunken clown and his robber baron oligarch cronies - and the MOB, which was a genuine product of reborn capitalism. People died younger, were sicker, committed suicide more, drank more, were worse housed, got worse education and health care, had to put up with the horrors of racism, terrorism and war, and watched US-style crime grow unchecked.

Progress and success for some...

Now that was between 1990 and 2000. After Putin became president in 2000 most ordinary Russians felt an improvement came. A lot of the most important resources were brought back in to national ownership (oil, gas). A lot of the least "patriotic" oligarchs were driven abroad, jailed or bankrupted. The mob was tamed. Russia started winning international sports competitions again (like ice-hockey). Russians were very proud of Soviet achievements, and felt humiliated by Yeltsin turning them into a mockery and selling their arses to anyone with a fistful of dollars.

I'm inclined to think that Yeltsin himself was sick of being the laughing stock of the world. From super-power to mange backstreet mutt in ten years flat....k

Yeltsin chose Putin to be his successor. I'm pretty sure one of the reasons was to get his revenge on all the people who had been laughing at him to his face.

You should ask your dad what he thinks about Putin's Russia. By all the criteria of success he seems to use Russia is doing pretty well. But it's doing so by laughing in the face of the US and going back to greater state control. It's looking after its own interests, thank you very much. And of course it's tightened a lot of the civic freedoms that were relaxed after 1990.

Does that make the new Russia "communist" again?

It certainly looks like "our" (ie the West's) enemy again.

But of course the real question behind all this is what is "communism"?

Ask your dad what he thinks capitalism is, and when it started.

Ask him if he thinks capitalism in the US after independence was such a great success.

If he does, ask him if he really thinks the slavery of its first 90 years were such a great thing...

The thing is, new social systems grow, and even though they can be fundamentally stronger than previous ones (capitalism was fundamentally stronger than feudalism) their early years can be very ugly indeed.

Especially if they are surrounded by very hostile and powerful representatives of the old system doing their damndest to exterminate them, which was the case in the USSR.

And one last thing, if capitalism is so good and free and successful and progressive, how come it didn't just cheerlead the whole world to celebrate a capitalist white christmas after world war 2?

The poor people of China threw it out and laughed. Same thing in Cuba and Vietnam.

And all those millions of East Europeans just let themselves be corralled into slavery???

Stalin wanted to hand Yugoslavia to the West on a plate (like John the Baptist's head), but the Yugoslav's didn't want to be a head on someone else's plate and made their own revolution.

He did manage to hand Greece to the West, but not until the Greek people had fought and lost a revolution of their own.

Ask him to look at the world today. And ask him how attractive the rest of the world finds the US. Ask him how often he sees poor people in some war-torn part of the world running on the streets waving We Love America placards. Ask him why US soldiers don't dare walk around in jeans smoking Marlboros chatting and smiling to the locals.

Ask him what kind of success and progress a bunch of armoured SWAT goons smashing through a poor family's wall represents to the ordinary people of the world. US life on TV soaps is one thing. Murderous thugs in your back yard, pissing on your relatives' dead bodies and burning your sacred books, is another.

US forces don't even walk around smiling in places like Iceland any more.

Maybe Bob Hope and Bing Crosby looked like success and progress once. And John Wayne. But they're dead and no one wants them back. Their success has turned out to be a huge historic failure. US history is on fast rewind. Right now we're back in the Great Depression.

Have a great day, Naz! I

I'm taking the dog out for a walk now...

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Sharing ideas - and strangling them...

Here's a short article from Scientific American on sharing scientific ideas and work:
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http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=when-should-a-scientists-data-be-li-2010-07-22&sc=DD_20100723&posted=1#comments

Jul 22, 2010 02:01 PM in Basic Science | 15 comments

When should a scientist's data be liberated for all to see?

By Katherine Harmon

 

When researchers make an exciting discovery, the data behind it are often closely guarded until they can be examined, developed and then revealed—at least in part—in a peer-reviewed journal with all of the proverbial fanfare. 

But that custom often leaves the public and most of the research world in the dark—sometimes for years, as some lamented in the case of the formal description of the hominid Ardipithecus ramidus, which came some 15 years after the original discovery. Publication usually involves sharing some data because the scientific method encourages others to review one's work so they can attempt to replicate it. But in a Web-driven era of rapidly moving and easily stored data, however, many researchers now argue forcefully for an open exchange of data and the wider use of so-called scientific commons. 

Climate change, molecular chemistry and microbiology are just a few of the fields currently entertaining the idea of a better-connected repository to which data can (or must) be uploaded soon after discovery. And in the medical world, many researchers are looking hopefully toward a digital future in which masses of patient data can be examined for patterns of disease soon after they are gathered. 

"It would be preferable, from a pure scientific advancement standpoint, to have every piece of data released immediately to the public," Jorge Contreras, deputy director of the Intellectual Property Program at Washington University's School of Law in St. Louis, Mo. and author of a new policy essay on the topic published online July 22 in Science, said in a prepared statement. 

That idealistic approach, however, "doesn't give data-generating scientists the opportunity to publish and advance their careers through publication," he noted. Thus new findings and data sets are still usually held close to the vest in the harsh publish-or-perish world. 

And the data dearth doesn't necessarily stop with publication. "Because of busy schedules, competitive pressures and other interpersonal vagaries, the sharing of scientific data can be inconsistent even after publication," Contreras observes in his essay. 

Not every field has been so tight-fisted with its data. As an encouraging example, he points to the Human Genome Project's stipulation that all new data be made public within 24 hours of being generated. But, he concedes, not every discipline is primed to fall in line with such immediate free access. The genome "represented the common heritage of the human species and should not be encumbered by patents," he writes. But patents are precisely the point of many scientific endeavors, and showing your cards to the competition early on is a patently dim decision. 

Thus Contreras proposes a balance of data access and data rights. "I think you must have a compromise," he said in a prepared statement. "Commons weighted too heavily in favor of data users are not likely to attract sufficient contributions from data generators, whereas commons weighted too heavily in favor of data generators" would be less helpful to other scientists and the public.  

But that doesn't mean data should be held back. Instead, he argues, widely accepted lead times—after data are publicly released but before others can publish results on them—would allow "data generators a 'head start' on preparing publications based on their data, yet data are still broadly available for the general advancement of science." 

Image courtesy of iStockphoto/AlexRaths

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I commented:

Humanity needs to own its own thoughts - we think, create,  work and develop together. Everything around us is created collectively - but it's not owned collectively. Once products have been created they're legally in the hands of the profit-motivated people owning the system of production. They act as proxies for humanity.
And as we are seeing (Bhopal, BP, active non-prevention of starvation and disease -Big Pharma and HIV in Africa - and war) they're doing a really lousy job for the rest of us. 
So all that crap about how capitalism (private ownership of ideas, culture and production) stands for progress and prosperity is just that - crap.
Ideas, sharing them and using them is for all of us, now. When this happens we'll be blown away by the force and rapidity of the development of human society. The prosperity created (and the safety and reason of the creative process) will soon make it possible to reward the most active creators well enough, while making life for the rest of us comfortable enough, to both encourage this approach and dispel envy and hatred towards those growing fat off the present system while others die because of it.
This is simple - but *not* easy!

Central planning, socialization...

This is my response to a tech magazine piece on Google's plans for developing ultra-fast broadband access in the US.

http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Search-Engines/Google-Broadband-Play-Pushes-Network-Neutrality-in-Googles-Favor-681320/?kc=EWKNLGOV02172010STR1


Well, if ordinary capitalism (Verizon etc) is unable and unwilling to unleash the full potential of high speed broadband access for a nation and its citizens, then socializing, centrally planned, innovational and let's do it ubercapitalism will. Google is showing not just the potential of high-speed universal access broadband provision, but also the huge and incontrovertible superiority of blatantly creative and socially oriented large-scale operations.

Their recipe for satisfying humanity's thirst for knowledge, ideas and culture is to make these things instantly available to everyone. Revolutionary, ANTI- monopolistic, and absolutely necessary.

When it comes to collective social progress and responsiblity, Google puts even the cutting-edge innovative excellence of Apple into the shade. Apple is a one-man show, and giving society what it needs is not where it's at. It releases its products in tightly controlled pellets, so to speak. Compared to Google Apple is constipated and Steve Jobs screams when he shits.

So Google isn't perfect. Who is? But it's decades ahead of the zombie capitalism suffocating the US and the rest of the world today.