The U.S. Olympic team is one of a handful that will supply air conditioners for their athletes at the Paris Games in a move that undercuts organizersāĀ plans to cut carbon emissions.
U.S. Olympic and Paralympic CEO Sarah Hirshland said Friday that while the U.S. team appreciates efforts aimed at sustainability, the federation would be supplying AC units for what is typically the largest contingent of athletes at the Summer Games.
āAs you can imagine, this is a period of time in which consistency and predictability is critical for Team USAās performance,ā Hirshland said. āIn our conversations with athletes, this was a very high priority and something that the athletes felt was a critical component in their performance capability.ā
TheĀ Washington Post reported earlier this monthĀ that Germany, Australia, Italy, Canada and Britain were among the other countries with plans to bring air conditioners to France.
No, you just donāt understand that āmeans of productionā doesnāt exclusively apply to industrial production, it talks about all capital, including financial. Lenin talks about this extensively as far back as the early 1900s, and it applies extremely well.
Lenin does sound awfully like socialism propaganda. Or more in essence, the desire for egalitarian utopia written by pseudo-philosophers (neither economists, nor engineers, nor mathematicians, nor any based-in-logic scientific field) without having any such social system in place and only dreaming. USSR did not go well, in any way, as an aside.
I can understand the desire for a push for more socialistic government reforms, but what needs to just happen is European semi-capitalism semi-socialism to just be more controlled, especially with regards to tax avoidance, and anti-monopolisation, and then to government mandated climate-change-fighting policies such as heavy (and unavoidable) taxing on pollution.
Looking back into old books and spouting the same-old propagandist battlecries does not do much to the conversation, and actually tries to derail it, instead of simply pointing āyeah thatās bad, maybe they should have done this, I did the math [or maybe this other person <link> did the math]ā.
Again, youāre not bringing any remotely new pseudocriticism to the table. Friedrich Engels outlines this in his essay āSocialism: utopian and scientificā from 1880, in which he explains the difference between utopian socialism, and scientific socialism. Your criticism is outdated by 144 years.
Again, showing us how you havenāt read a single essay or book on Marxism, and all youāre doing is regurgitating anti-communist propaganda. If you think Marxist writers arenāt well-versed in economics, youāre absolutely delirious. Marx is best known for his āCapitalā, a 3-volume treaty on economics which is still used to this day in economics faculties. There ARE things wrong within the book such as the understanding of money which Modern Monetary Theory has extensively criticised and improved upon (if youāre interested in the field of economics), but itās a key work in explaining many of the functionings of economics, being the first work (to my knowledge) to properly describe the process of revalorization of capital and doing a great job at analyzing economics under the light of the industrial revolution. Iām currently reading Leninās āImperialism: the higher stage of capitalismā, and like half the book are references to economists or geographers, most of them non-marxists, showing economic trends in the concentration of capital, in the specifics of the distribution of colonial land among some industrial powers of the worldā¦ Even if youāre not a Marxist I suggest you have a look at it, it may change your mind about which degree of science Marxists are using in their analysis, and itās quite short.
The Russian Empire in 1917 was a backwards, feudal, unindustrialized state incapable of winning a war against a recently industrializing Japan and requiring massive French loans to even attempt to fight it, where the vast majority of the population were quite literally serfs working the land for an aristocracy. If youāre interested in Russian history up until the 1917 revolutions I recommend āThe Empire Must Dieā by Zygar, a non-marxist writer (in fact very critical of bolshevism) in which he examined an immense amount of documents starting from 1900 and describes the period that led to these revolutions in extremely good detail.
The USSR managed to come out victorious of a 4-year-long civil war in 1921 against the Tsarist loyalists which were aided economically and militarily to the point of Russia being invaded on their behalf by 14 countries including European powers such as England, France, and Italy. By the early 1940s, only 20 years after beginning to industrialize, the Soviets were capable of defeating the industrial powerhouse of Nazi Germany (a country that had begun industrializing around 150 years prior to that). By the 1970s, the USSR had gone from being the feudal state I describe, to being the second power in the world. This is not a defense of everything the USSR did as there was massive oppression during Stalinism, but saying that āthe USSR did not go well in any wayā is again delirious.
I disagree. Capitalism inevitably leads to the concentration of capital and the establishing of monopolies. Itās literally the tendency of markets, since itās a āwinner-takes-it-allā system, in which once a big share of the market is consolidated by the āmost competitiveā company, economy of scale makes it quite literally impossible for other companies to outcompete it in a free market. The best alternative to a free market isnāt a āregulated free marketā, itās a democratically planned economy which actually goes where the population wants it to, and not where the invisible hand guides it.
āRegulatingā companies into stopping their polluting and monopolistic behaviour usually amounts to allowing the companies of other countries to outcompete them (as you can see with the current cries of the EU and the USA against Chinese electric vehicles or solar panels), and that is if the capital-controlled media and elected officials even dare to attempt this in the first place. For a very recent historical example on how capital wonāt allow a progressive government, you can read the case of the Spanish political party āPodemosā (Iām bringing it up because Iām well-versed in everything that happened because i happen to be Spanish). Wanting to apply this exact type of regulation to improve workersā rights and social rights and legislating progressively towards a clean economy, there was a collaboration between private media and the state apparatus, in which a false report of corrupted money from Venezuela to Podemos and its leader Pablo Iglesias was fabricated by a rogue corps inside the National Police, and was leaked to private media. All of this is already confirmed to be true by judges, and again, you can look all of this up. The result was a multi-year campaign of smearing in private media which led to the practically total disappearance of the party, in one of the most flagrant cases of lawfare in a European country in the recent times.
Another Spanish example of capitalism refusing to be regulated is the Second Spanish Republic, in which a democratically elected leftist government in the 30s wanted to regulate for a redistribution of land to peasants to improve on the massive inequality at the time, together with labour protections and workers rights. The result was a fascist coup that sunk the country in a half-decade of civil war, and ultimately placed Francisco Franco as the fascist dictator of the country for the following 35-ish years until his death in the 70s.
The anti-scientific and ahistorical thing isnāt saying that communism can be obtained, but to say that regulations arenāt only possible, but even better. Youāre just showing us that you donāt understand the history of class struggle and workers rights movements, which achieved the concessions they achieved in the western world not by electing progressive reformist representatives, but by organizing labor and striking and disrupting until their demands were met.
From my coarse perspective, given your input, what Engels wrote (which would be even more dated) maybe takes in more perspectives. But then, we werenāt entirely talking about Engels before. Scope broadens.
My very first comment was about your (not entirely hidden) socialistic propaganda style of writing. The points you tried to make in your very first post would likely be valid, but instead they were railing the discussion in a direction of socialistic revolution, because of ACs.
In no way was my response anti-communism propaganda. I just disliked the phrasing which clearly shows your desire to drop the old-school battlecries without a directed objective. (Unless you desire to just include all objectives without second guess, from books, but then be sure to include all).
The general problem I have (which is empirical and not substantiated here) is that Lenin himself, while likely incredibly intelligent, was not, by trade and thus biggest chunk of his time, a mathematician, or an economist, so while he can read the papers, having a fully informed opinion on the matter is a dubious idea.
Reasons why I am so jaded and critical is that many fields these days (especially lacking rigorous peer review) fall victim to innability to discern fact from fiction. Specifically for philosophy, feels like the field has diverged from mathematics and physics in an ununderstandable way, where philosophy tries to be a voice of reason in humanityās subjective reality of society while ignoring mathematics and pure formal logic. To me this is insane. Especially for a field that was once exactly that: mathematics, physics and trying to understand the natural world. In general, the field has been critiqued for empirically arguing that its education is actually formative for logical thinking 1 2.
The reasons I am jaded at dated books, is because the way of thinking can be so different, even in physics, many papers from early 20th century have god in the picture or see the human as some kind of special consciousness in the picture of the universe.
The first paragraph I completely agree.
Nazi Germany was indeed defeated by allied forces. And Russia definitely played a large part in it. However, the way it did, was not due to industrialization. It was due to an insane amount of conscription that is well-known as a meat-grinder. 9 million military dead (versus 4.3 million military from Nazis. Note: Nazis werenāt only fighting USSR.) was not a mark of an industrialized nation cranking out well-prepared, well-rationed, well-equipped soldiers, it was a feudal state throwing meat at the problem (or rather opportunity). Among other atrocities such as forced famine Holodomor.
The time of the cold war, Russia was barely scraping by to keep the narrative of āGreat superpowerā alive, it was only until Chernobyl, Gorbachev that USSR finally imploded and all was slowly unraveled. If 1970s USSR was this great superpower, then somehow 10 years later it fell to stagnation and then collapse? What? With people coming out from the iron curtain amazed at how simple people in foreign countries had lived, the variety of food, the quality of engineering, of clothes they had.
All the while illegal speculators were a huge problem, and simple food items were āalways out of stockā throughout the whole USSRās life. You just had to know the right people and pay the right money to live normally. That is, after you waited for 3 hours to get bread.
Personally, USSR achieved limited industrialization, while funneling unfathomable amounts of money into shiny things such as space exploration, while people had a hard time getting bread. To me, this is still close to feudalism.
Europe has achieved the highest quality of life in the world not by a planned economy, but by mediating the inherent problems of capitalism (monopolism, elitism, class warfare) and complete socialism (government overreach, lack of freedom, lack of democracy). This is what I said is most prudent to continue, but it requires maintenance from strong-willed people.
That is indeed a central problem, slightly reduced by import taxes. Obviously a full solution should include some international cooperation, and if it isnāt possible (and seems it isnāt) sanctions and heavier import taxes should follow. Or some taxes on import that take into account pollution at the importing source.
I donāt see how your example of corruption is novel. Corruption is indeed something that must be fought, and it wouldnāt disappear in a socialist society, as it didnāt USSR (where you could get anything for favors if you knew the right people).
The 20th century period across Europe was indeed a rough one, many countries went fascist (Spain, Portugal, Russia, briefly: Austria, Greece, Germany, Italy). Still, I donāt think itās a novel example. And itās also not an example against the current state of Europe, itās an example of the inequality and volatility of European countries at the time.
The idea behind representative democracy is that I cannot do the work of a law-maker, deal with tax policy details while also living a life, so I elect someone whom I think I can trust.
If I have no trust in the system, I will go to the streets, as it was always the case. And yes, in this sense, we hold a lot of thankfulness for those that went to the streets before us to bring us to where we are now.
Iām not trying to hide anything here. My username is a reference to Lenin, whom I referenced in the comment, doesnāt get much more explicit than that :)
Firstly, Iām not the one who brought up the dispossessed masses, that was another commenter. Secondly, itās not without a directed objective. The argument is clear: āthe fault of climate change is not of the individuals who use AC, but of the system as a whole, and since the system is controlled by the ruling class, the ruling class is to blameā. It explicits this victim-blaming mindset where the general populace is blamed for climate change and pollution, when theyāre not the ones choosing in which system they live. And I say this as someone who doensāt own a car out of principle, so criticism to the system is compatible with individual action and compatible with understanding that the blame is not of the individual workers.
I donāt accept this criticism. First of all he was a lawyer, so he definitely had education in economics. Secondly, I donāt believe that formal education in an institution is the only possible way to attain knowledge in a field. I say this as someone doing a PhD in a STEM field, knowing many people around me who have formally attained the same education level as I have and know jackshit, and others who with the same formal degrees as I do, are insanely more knowledgeable. Hell, Marx himself, who wrote one of the most influential and important works on economics of history, formally studied law and philosophy, not economics. How is this not proof enough?
All of this criticism of philosophy is valid, but again, socialism and Marxism arenāt philosophical ideas. Theyāre philosophical when it comes to the morality, sure, in the sense that I do believe that theyāre morally superior to other systems, and that much is subjective. But the historical, economical, and political study of socialism and Marxism can be scientific. That doesnāt mean that every single book or article or essay on socialism is scientific, but that it can be approached as a science. Economic planning, the analysis of media, the economic analysis of capitalism and imperialism, all of those are very scientific, and the fact that you havenāt encountered scientific literature on them has more to do with your surrounding conditions or ideas than with the nature of the study debate of socialism. Especially nowadays, when there have been socialist attempts such as China, Vietnam, the USSR and the whole soviet block, Cubaā¦ Itās very possible to do material, economical, historical and political analysis of socialism, and itās routinely done, both from a subjective point of view and a scientific one.
Being critical is good. Criticising them without making an attempt to read them based on preconceived notions isnāt. You talk about the scientific method which is great for me, since I work in that field. To me, the most important part of the scientific method are predictive capabilities. Without proving predictive capabilities, there can be no science. And when you read Leninās work āImperialism: the highest stage of capitalismā, and it can successfully make predictions about the economy that are valid more than 100 years ago, such as the tendency towards monopoly of capitalism (as we can see with NestlĆØ, Amazon or Google), or later stages of capitalism shifting from the export of manufactured goods to other countries to the export of capital to other countries (look at how much capital entered China since the 80s from capitalist countries), Iām as amazed as I am when Einsteinās theory of general relativity is yet again confirmed 100 years after its writing when SUPERLIGO is capable of detecting the gravitational waves of a collision of black holes. Especially because he was running against many economists of back in the day who were already claiming that the best way to solve monopoly was through progressive regulationsā¦ and look where thatās led us.
Regarding your discussion of how the USSR managed to defeat nazism, yes, lots of people died, but what can be expected? The USSR had 20 years to industrialize against the 150 years of Germany, of course their army wasnāt as capable or developed as the German one. This whole āmeat grinderā vision of USSR in WW2 stems from Nazi propaganda, in which the Nazis were justifying losing against the āSlavic Untermenschenā because of the infinite āhordes of Asiansā that they were throwing at them, and talking of the brave fight of the Soviets against Nazism as a āmeat grinderā is very insulting towards the population of those countries. Belarus lost 25% of its population during WW2, and reducing their contribution to the war to āa meat grinderā is horrendous IMO.
You donāt understand what āfeudalā means. Feudal isnāt a synonym of agricultural or poor, feudal refers to a particular system of social relations, where serfs are bound to work the land of their lords without a wage on exchange, but instead receiving military protection on exchange for a compulsory requisition of the goods produced by the land, paid in kind. Again, when you use those terms in this fashion, youāre proving that you havenāt studied the true meaning of what youāre talking about.
Regarding Holodomor, it happened during the collectivization of agriculture, and it happened because of a combination of bad planning in collectivization (doing it too fast), unfair and poorly-planned requisitions of grain in certain regions such as Ukraine or Central Asia in general (which people often forget about because then they canāt make baseless claims of genocide against Ukrainians), sabotage by Kulaks, and bad crops. But this is the first and last famine that the USSR saw, and it happened prior to the industrialization of the country. Almost as if famines are commonplace in preindustrial societies, huh? Almost as if Russia was a region which has suffered historically about 5 famines per century. Thatās not to say it wasnāt intensified by poor planning by the government, but again, first and last famine in the USSR. And itās not like capitalism doesnāt create famines. Just some years later, during WW2, the British provoked a famine in India (Benghal Famine if youāre interested) which killed 3+mn people, and that one was actually done with explicitly racist undertones, with Churchill famously justifying the famine by telling Indians that āthey reproduced like rabbitsā.
Because, again, youāre not being faithful to reality. The USSR never impoded, and it never collapsed. The USSR did suffer a period of stagnation, but how exactly does stagnation lead to collapse? Spoiler alert: it doesnāt. The USSR was dissolved illegally and antidemocratically against a referendum carried out in 1991, from the top down, by the Gorbachev administration. This is indeed a consequence of one of the biggest problems of the USSR: the immense concentration of power at the top spheres of government. But you canāt accuse the USSR of collapsing. In fact your reasoning is backwards. If the USSR survived to a civil war in which 14 foreign countries invaded it, if it survived to a WW2 where 25+ million inhabitants perished, and if it survived to the Cuban Missiles crisis, how on Earth is it supposed to crumble under stagnation? As I said Iām Spanish, Spain hasnāt grown AT ALL in per-capita terms since 2007, so itās been stagnant for almost two decades at this point. Would you say itās a failed state and that itās collapsed and the government should be dismantled, or is economical stagnation really not that big a thing? The USSR was burdened with problems with economic planning (very hard to do properly before modern computers, if youāre interested in this I suggest that you read āPeopleās Republic of Walmartā, a book that outlines arguments for economic planning and criticises planning within the USSR as antidemocratic and inefficient), with overspending in military (triggered and forced by the USA despite the constant attempts of the USSR to try and reduce tensions and reach deals about disarmament and deescalation), and several other problems. But the moment it all started going down (and not just stagnating) is after the mid-80s, when Perestroika was applied and huge swaths of the economy were suddenly liberalized and subjected to markets.[1/2]
[2/2] What really made the former USSR actually collapse, was the neoliberal shock therapy applied after its illegal dissolution, supervised and directed by āprestigious expertsā from MIT and by the IMF. There, the GDP fell as dramatically as it does in war times, and the situation was so dire that the population loss due to alcoholism, suicide, lowering standards of life and healthcare, missing births, depression, unemployment, etc. are numbered in millions of lives lost, and many millions more ruined. Thatās the moment when goodāol capitalism auctioned the entire country to a few corrupt oligarchs because the priority was to privatize everything as quickly as possible, and which led to the modern fascist oligarchic kleptocratic government in Russia. But these millions of lives lost and ruined by capitalism donāt count, do they? These were somehow a necessity, unlike Holodomor, a famine in a preindustrial society.
Europe has achieved the highest quality of life through a combination of imperialism and resource, wealth and labour extraction from underdeveloped countries (look up the concept of unequal exchange if youāre interested), and last centuryās worker movements which achieved significant improvements in the quality of life of people, and obviously due to technical and scientific progress. But these worker victories were achieved DESPITE capitalism, not because of it.
And the technical and scientific improvements that happen under capitalism, funnily enough, are funded mostly by public research, in which universities and pulic institutions will do the brunt of the research, and then a few companies will cherrypick whatever they deem profitable, study a bit further, patent it, and then sell it to the rest of the world at exorbitant prices, as we see blatantly and glaringly with medicine and pharma. Iāll remind you which country in the world was the first to double-vaccinate 95%+ of its population against COVID: Cuba. With state-funded research, and state-funded vaccine production, with the goal of vaccinating as many as possible as soon as possible, instead of the objective of maximizing profit. Or just look on how much governmetns spent funding big pharma to develop the vaccines. This progress isnāt BECAUSE of the private sector and capitalism, itās DESPITE it.
This was already obvious to Lenin in his 1917 work āImperialism: the highest stage of Capitalismā, where he extensively criticises the idea of āultraimperialismā or long-term collaboration between different capitalist world powers as impossible (again a successful prediction more than 100 years ago, how lucky is that?).
Obviously corruption happens everywhere, but itās a very different problem systemically when the means of production are owned collectively. Because, suddenly there are no private companies with the private interest of maximizing profit at all costs. So you donāt have the car factory paying the goverment official to be able to dump waste in the river, or the construction firm paying the local town hall to requalify their lands and allow for a construction plan. Embezzling and favors still exist within socialism, but without a profit motive, many other types of corruptions disappear. If thereās no wealthy ruling class whose existence and profit depends on the exploitation of the working class, suddenly thereās no wealthy powerful people doing everything legally and illegally possible to maximize their profits.
Russia went fascist? Excuse me? The USSR is the ONLY country in Europe which supported the Republicans in Spain in their fight against ACTUAL fascism, while Britain and France looked at the Nazis and the Italian Fascists supplying weapons to the reactionaries and literally bombing republican Spain, and claimed ābest we can do is non-intervention and a volunteer corpsā (brigadas internacionales, my utmost respect to all who participated in them)
Again, youāre failing to have a proper understanding of the reasons for fascism to exist. Fascism is a reactionary movement which takes place when the wealthy elites of a country see themselves threatened by the mobilization of the working class. It happened like this in Spain, it happened like this in Germany, it happened like this in Italy, and it attempted to happen in Russia as well (look up what the Black Hundreds were, and how Bolsheviks eliminated them). One of the most explicit purposes of fascism is to eliminate socialism and anarchism from society, for the most part through violent means. Fascism isnāt a consequence of āinstabilityā, itās a response to socialist movements and worker coordination.
Elected representatives arenāt a bad idea in itself, theyāre just proven not to be democratic in western capitalist systems, in the sense that they donāt make decisions that represent the majority, but instead make decisions which represent a wealthy minority. Again, how many people in the EU wanted to apply austerity policy after the 2008 crisis, whose consequences we suffer to this very day? If you want an example of what real democracy looks like to me, I recommend you have a look at Pedro Rossā book āHow the workers parliaments saved the Cuban Revolutionā, which details how after the dismantling of the USSR, Cuba was immersed in a deep economic crisis after losing its main trade partner, and how democratic participation by millions of people in the island was capable of saving people from the worst of the crisis.
You hold them in high esteem, but then proceed to basically insult their legacy when you say that living conditions in western Europe are due to capitalism, instead of honoring the worker movements of the past century.
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A society canāt be run on smartphones, this was patently obvious during the COVID pandemic, when governments had to decide which were the āessential jobsā that society literally wouldnāt keep running without. Were these the smartphone jobs? Or was it agriculture, education, transport of goods, supermarket cashiers, infrastructure, and trash collection among many others?
Iām fully aware that SOME people can get rich using a smartphone. Hell, Iām a lucky individual who had access to high level studies, and who fortunately enjoyed STEM, and my life is pretty dope, I consider myself very successful. Iām just not stupid enough to think thatās a sustainable, or even desirable model of society, where SOME people can be āsuccessfulā (assuming that your metric of success is income) by moving around numbers in investment funds or programming databases so that banks can surveil us and squeeze a few dollars more out of our pockets.
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