volodya_ilich

volodya_ilich , 18 days ago

At least they're not blowing their budget exploding rockets...

volodya_ilich , 18 days ago

on purpose

lol

volodya_ilich , 18 days ago

Not only right wing, but mostly right wing. The left isn't the side mostly denying the science of climate change, or the medical consensus of vaccines and gender reassignment therapy.

volodya_ilich , 19 days ago

Going back to the cold-war era where the USSR had to manufacture and provide mostly every single consumer good for its own citizens due to economic sanctions and isolation. You can't compare luxury goods made all over the entire world for a wealthy minority, designed by experts from all other industrialized countries, against soviet-made mass-produced items which were meant to be able to be produced in as many units as possible using the least amount of resources possible. It's just different manufacturing paradigms.

The USSR was what is called a "shortage economy" as opposed to western capitalism's "surplus economy". In capitalism, an abundance of competing companies in the same field leads to overproduction of most goods in a way that some products from some brands end up on the shelves of stores and storage houses collecting dust, and companies who manufacture a lot of these non-desired products, disappear. This leads to an inefficient waste of resources and labour, since it leads to unused goods and services.

The USSR, on the other hand, had a state-planned economy in which, using predictions of the planned output of raw materials, decided what to produce with these materials. Producing 10 more drills, meant that you had to produce 10 fewer units of something else. Hence, the economy was optimized so that only as many as strictly necessary of most goods would be manufactured. Additionally, the products were design to require the least amount of labour and resources necessary to be manufactured, taking into account mostly long-life and easy repairability to prevent inefficiencies. It was the only way that the USSR could, as a less industrialized state than for example Germany or the US or Britain (which had started industrialising around one century before the USSR did), could provide goods for everyone, and for the most part it did. The quality of products may not have been as high as high-quality consumer goods in the west, but that's simply a combination of design choice to be available to cover more goods with similar amounts of raw materials and labour, of fewer experts in design and manufacturing than worldwide due to the size of the soviet block and their economical embargos.

volodya_ilich , 19 days ago

Being able to purchase some models of some products here and there doesn't mean you can sustain a segment of the industry through imports

volodya_ilich , 18 days ago

Yeah I'm not denying they cloned them, I'm saying they were cloned due to the inability to access them widely and affordably in the international market. Cloning stuff is good btw, copyright is a scam

volodya_ilich , 18 days ago

Again, you can't expect the USSR, a nation that started industrialising and educating people in 1920s, to be able to outcompete the entire rest of the world in every sector of the economy. It was a poorer nation than the US, Germany or England historically, it developed much later. The fact that it got as far as it did is impressive enough of a feat, especially since it didn't abuse colonialism and imperialism to do so, but instead used only the sheer work of its inhabitants and the natural resources found within its borders. The USSR falling behind in some extremely novel fields such as computing, is only to be expected.

volodya_ilich , 18 days ago

Planned obsolescence is a direct consequence of capitalism, and it gets worse the more capitalism develops. Capitalism, through competition and markets, makes some companies triumph and some companies to be outcompeted by the ones that triumph. This, coupled with ever-increasing capital investment by the companies that get the most profits, leads unequivocally and necessarily to increasing concentration of capital in the hands of a few companies in a given sector: oligopoly and monopoly. And when a sector is dominated by oligopoly and monopoly, it means competition between companies, the whole premise of capitalism, disappears. And it is at that point when malpractice such as planned obsolescence becomes a thing, because consumers literally don't have a choice.

You're absolutely right that it would be great to go back to times before planned obsolescence, but the only possible way to do so is politically, by eliminating the very system that leads to planned obsolescence.

volodya_ilich , 18 days ago

Tell me you don't understand colonialism and imperialism without telling me you don't understand colonialism and imperialism.

You haven't read a single thing about unequal exchange, or colonialism, or imperialism. The western countries (imperial core) RELY on cheap raw materials and cheap labour from third countries (colonial periphery) to be able to attain the levels of wealth and development that they enjoy. The USSR simply didn't participate in this, and you saying otherwise proves you know jackshit about this topics or about history.

volodya_ilich , 18 days ago

Feel free to stay an ignorant

volodya_ilich , 18 days ago

The fact that anyone, let alone LGBTQ+ people, can go to the streets holding a "Lockheed Martin" sign and not get shamed into dropping it, shows we're failing as a society

volodya_ilich , 19 days ago

What's the alternative? Ending up like Allende, or the Spanish second republic, or Rosa Luxembourg? "The only good socialist movements are those who fail"

volodya_ilich , 19 days ago

Anti-communists thinking that by doing blanket condemnations of past mistakes instead of historical and material analysis of why it happened, how much was necessary, and how much was the excess, they can totally avoid them in the future and bring down capitalism with the power of love.

volodya_ilich , 19 days ago

You say that as if communists don't want democracy. I want the highest degree of democracy possible, I just understand that the material conditions that allow revolutions don't always allow for extremely high democracy at the beginning, and how a vanguard party of communist intellectuals can initially serve well to guide an uneducated populace or, worse, educated against communism as we are now.

volodya_ilich , 19 days ago

The only exception was started by rich landowners because they didn't want to pay taxes to the king. (American)

You really think the US is the only American colony that seceded from its colonial authority by means of violence? And are you implying that the current US government isn't tyrannical?

or succeeds only for the winners to establish a new tyrannical system

You're just making that up. You're tautologically defining any successful violent revolution as failed because it didn't eliminate every single hierarchy overnight. Even if I'm a Marxist-Leninist I can conceive why you'd make that argument about the USSR (though I'd disagree with you), but if you make that argument about Cuba too you're just wrong. Cuba is a state much more democratic and much less oppressive by every metric than its predecessor. You're just falling into that mentality that "the only acceptable revolutions are those which failed".

Additionally, you're failing to acknowledge that non-violent revolutions, such as Allende's Chile and the Spanish Second Republic, can end up in bloodshed and a more authoritarian and repressive form of government not as a consequence of violent revolution, but as a consequence of the lack of it. As a Spanish myself, I'd have much rather seen a version of my country where there was an armed socialist repression against fascism (for example by the CNT or some Bolshevik party), than the history we lived, where a democratically elected, non-violent leftist government was nevertheless couped, plunged into civil war, and eventually turned into fascism. An armed revolution could have actually possibly prevented that. (Funny historical note: the only country that really supported the struggle against fascism in Spain was the USSR, despite the Italian and German fascists helping their Spanish counterpart.)

volodya_ilich , 19 days ago

You're insulting all the people who suffered even more oppressive regimes than Stalin or Mao as a consequence of NOT arming themselves. Chileans suffered Pinochet as a consequence of lack of oppression of the fascist opposition during Allende. Spanish suffered Franco as a consequence of lack of oppression of the fascists during the Spanish Second Republic. Oppression is sadly a tool that must be used, as sparingly as possible that's true, to prevent reactionary elements from maintaining or reinstating even more oppressive structures.

People everyday in post-colonial countries suffer immeasurable despair as a consequence of lack of revolution. If you criticise Stalin or Mao and consider them undesirable and illegitimate, you should be even more convinced of the illegitimacy of current western governments that impose imperialism on the global south. Every day that we delay or refuse these armed revolutions, we're perpetuating this system which is even more harmful than the USSR or communist China by any metric possible.

volodya_ilich , 19 days ago

We need, as commies, to establish grassroots movements that will improve things locally, create safety nets, organize labor to get progressively better victories through strike and if necessary through other means, and to have a growing sector of workers that are class-conscious. When the material conditions arrive, we need to have a critical mass of class-conscious workers so that we can organise as best as possible, and help to educate the rest of people, and to discuss the wants and needs of the workers and translate those needs to the vanguard party. But we also need the vanguard party.

You talk about how things can "go wrong and corrupt the entire thing", but by doing so you're forgetting that that's already the case, that we live in a corrupt, bloody and oppressive system, which kills millions every year worldwide through violent and less-violent means. You say it's never happened, but I disagree with you. Ask an anarchist and they'll tell you about Zapatista and Rohinya movements. Ask a Marxist-Leninist like me and we'll tell you about Cuba and the USSR and why we believe they're inherently more democratic and less oppressive than the current system, although admittedly not perfect. Our best tool to prevent the system from being corrupt, is to have as many class-conscious workers as possible. So let's organise labor, let's create communities and activist organizations, and let's improve things on a local level, so that people's material conditions start to improve and as a bonus we can draw more people to the movement that actively improves their lives.

volodya_ilich , 21 days ago

Copyright was never about defending the creators, its origin is the industrial revolution and it was a tool of companies to protect "their" inventions (the ones of their workers actually). It was NEVER about defending the small person who actually creates things.

volodya_ilich , 21 days ago

That already happens. People who research normally do it under a wage and the invention goes to the company paying the wage. If not, a small inventor doesn't have the financial means and the lawyers to fight a big company copying their idea. The small person is never defended.

volodya_ilich , 21 days ago

As they already do, you mean? Like, look at the recent Spotify scandal, with artists complaining that they don't earn enough and a higher up of Spotify saying that "nowadays content creation is very inexpensive", basically implying that Spotify deserves to keep most of the money since the artists' job is super easy. Most musicians already get most of their money through concerts and merchandising. Copyright already de-facto doesn't protect the artists nor the scientists.

volodya_ilich , 21 days ago

You just made two contradicting statements

volodya_ilich , 21 days ago

I know right? The very idea of copyright is so fucking abstract, absurd and far-fetched. For the most part, it amounts to:

"NOOOOO YOU CAN'T PLACE THE ATOMS IN THIS ORDER BECAUSE ANOTHER PERSON DID IT BEFORE YOU!!!11!1!1!" (When it comes to scientific or engineering parents)

"NOOOO YOU CAN'T MAKE A SURFACE REFLECT THE PHOTONS LIKE THAT, OR EMIT THEM IN THAT PATTERN. THE RIGHT TO DO THAT BELONGS TO SOMEONE ELSE!!!1!!1!" (When it comes to pictoric arts)

"NOOO YOU CAN'T MAKE THE AIR VIBRATE AT THOSE FREQUENCIES IN THAT PATTERN, SOMEONE DID IT BEFORE YOU AND THEY'RE PAYING ME SO YOU CAN'T DO IT TOO!!!" (Music)

"NOOO YOU CAN'T PUT LETTERS IN THAT ORDER!! THAT'S ILLEGAL, ANOTHER PERSON DID IT BEFORE!!" (Text and code)

So yeah, fuck that shit

volodya_ilich , 20 days ago

Imagine you write a movie to sell and Amazon steals that exact movie but uses their resources to market it as their own and sell over seas

Imagine this thing actually happens because you're hired for Amazon as a screenwriter and you're paid a salary of 3k a month making shows that make Amazon 3 million a month, and Amazon, not the screenwriter, owns the rights to the show. Tell me in which world that's fair.

Only a moron thinks a free market economy actually works.

Thank you, that's why I'm a communist.

History has shown that not only do corporations NOT care about rules and regulations

"Copyright rules are necessary because corporations don't care about rules and regulations" isn't as solid an argument as you think it is

volodya_ilich , 20 days ago

Oh I understand it alright, but how is "Amazon owns the IP" a protection of the artist?

volodya_ilich , 21 days ago

Man, anticommunist leftists sure love ignoring the political, historial and material context of things, don't they? Yeah, Lenin was evil and he did that all because he was very very bad and the Bolsheviks are so evil!!! The man who consecrated his entire life to a worker's revolution, read and wrote extensively about it, and from the start was adamant on educating the workers through newspapers and other publications, just was so bad and so evil and so bad. Bad Lenin! Bad!!

If by "nothing required the overthrow of the results of a democratic election" you ignore the ever-increasing threat of a reactionary, pro-Tsarist coup under lukewarm administration, then yeah, it wasn't required.

If by "nothing required Lenin to purge other fellow socialists" you mean there weren't counter-revolutionary Mensheviks and other such assets in positions of power during a literal civil war, then yeah, it wasn't required.

If by "crushing syndicalism" in Russia you mean not immediately giving the means of production to uneducated workers, but instead slowly growing unions to unforeseen levels of participation, with tens of millions of union members in the 30s already, but understanding that socialism can't survive against the onslaught of external powers without heavy planning (as proven by the 20+ million soviet deaths in WW2 in the fight against Nazism due to still comparatively low levels of industrialization), planning which initially can be done better by a vanguard party of socialist intellectuals, then yeah, it wasn't required.

If by "crushing the working class" you mean creating unforeseen levels of access to healthcare, education, eliminating unemployment and homelessness. Or maybe you mean going against the interests of Kulaks and understanding that the best for peasants isn't direct ownership of the land, but the elimination of structures of ownership of it altogether. Then yeah, it wasn't required.

Talking of war communism as if the USSR wasn't facing constant struggle against the rest of Europe portrays that you either don't understand the history or you're making a malicious intent. The Bolshevik revolution faced a coalition of the Tsarist loyalists in the civil war, which was militarily and economically supported by a total of 14 other countries, including Britain and its colonies, France, and many other European powers, in the direct aftermath of WW1. It's basically a miracle that the Bolsheviks were able to win the war, and it speaks very highly of their power to mobilize the population and resources in times of extreme difficulty. This was in the immediate inception of the newborn state, before the USSR even existed as such. Then it was subjected to economic sanction and isolation. Afterwards, during several attempts to make agreements of mutual defense against Nazism with France and Britain (and even Poland) for all the decade of the 30s and being systematically ignored, what is the USSR to think about the rest of the world? Again, the victory of barely post-feudal agricultural USSR against the industrial power of Germany which was established for more than a century at that point, is basically another miracle. Saying that the USSR didn't have reasons to see itself in "war socialism" is astonishing. It falls into what Michael Parenti said in his work Blackshirts and reds: for anticommunist leftists, the only worthy revolutions are the ones that failed.

This is not to say that there weren't excesses in repression during the USSR. Of course there were. Stalinism was extremely excessive and brutal during WW2, and the oppression went way overboard. Then again, that's the nature of the history of states up to that point, isn't it? How can we expect the people born in brutal systems of oppression, who directly suffered that oppression, to not fall in excesses of oppression when times are hard? The best we can do is analyse these excesses from a historical, materialist, constructive point of view, and try to minimise the excesses. But let us not deceive ourselves with idealism: revolutions are bloody, and the ruling class doesn't give away its power without fighting. Let's learn from the mistakes of the past and build more fair and resilient systems that won't commit those excesses, or will minimize them. But let's not be ignorant about the historic and material conditions that led up to them, or we will fall in the same mistakes, or even worse, be on the receiving end after the reactionaries take over.

volodya_ilich , 21 days ago

one of the many Russians

Ok, racist. You can blame governments for certain actions, but blaming ethnicities, especially when the form of government has changed 180° two times in the past century, just shows you're a racist nationalist.

Funnily enough, Lenin's ethnicity is contested, but his patronymic "Ilich" doesn't necessarily suggest that he's ethnically Russian. Sorry that your country has been brainwashed for the past 3 decades to hate an entire nationality. You can blame the current Russian government for any oppression they're carrying out in your country if it's the case, and that's very legitimate, but don't be a racist prick and don't blame a nationality.

volodya_ilich , 21 days ago

The abolition of capitalism is kinda the lesser evil, the transition to communism isn't exactly smooth even in theory.

volodya_ilich , 20 days ago

Thanks for at least not refuting the claims of nationalism and racism

volodya_ilich , 20 days ago

Nice propaganda bro

Thanks comrade. A good marxist would know that everything is propaganda.

sources would be nice

Won't be citing Wikipedia here, western Wikipedia sadly has an anti-soviet bias due to the literature available in the west as a consequence of anti-communism.

I know the coup attempt took place before October. But that doesn't point you to other possible coup attempts? You don't see a coup fail and go "oh thank god that's over" and keep doing the same, right?

Oh the good old, "Call them counter revolutionary and now it's okay to shoot them"

It's not me saying that. There were terrorist attempts on Lenin, and even some successful ones against prominent Bolsheviks.

The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries had a far bigger hand in the Febuary Revolution than the Bolsheviks, and later had their legitimacy confirmed with a free election

Yes, this is true, that's the whole point of the October Revolution. Mensheviks weren't just "another good'ol branch of socialists", the key issue here is that Mensheviks believed that for a revolution to happen, a prior capitalist phase (that Russia hadn't been through) must be a prerequisite. I don't see how forfeiting power to capital and letting it grow in private hands is the most intelligent idea for a socialist revolution. And you know what? Bolsheviks were right! You CAN establish socialism without a previous phase of capitalism. In the USSR, class relations disappeared, and the exploitation was no more.

"In this respect, through the Western lens of a dichotomy of independent unions versus company unions, they were more accurately comparable to company unions, as "unlike unions in the West, the Soviet variety do not fight for the economic interests of the workers. They are conveyor belts for Party instructions, carrying punishments and rewards to industrial and collective farm employees. Soviet trade unions work with their employer, the government, and not against it."

Again, great job citing Wikipedia, which cites itself an English/American author from 1985, not at all suspected of having an ideology of themselves right? If you want sources, you can read Pat Sloan's "Soviet Democracy", a 1939 book written by Pat Sloan, an Englishman who went to the USSR to work for some years and retold an account of the functioning of the system, including unions. Spoiler alert: unions did represent the workers and, among other things, they were responsible for such important things as the access to healthcare and housing for many of the workers. Saying that they were conveyors for instructions from the top down is nonsensical, especially seeing how union membership amounted to tens of millions of workers while being totally voluntary.

While the soviets did eventually institute some rather progressive welfare reforms for their time

"Eventually"? Really? Again, you're just spouting anti-communist propaganda. You can complain about repression but saying that the USSR "eventually" instituted progressive welfare is crazy, it's one of the earliest things the USSR did. The fact that healthcare and education are extremely important is absolutely not a matter of discussion for any socialist, and that you would say "had no popular demand from the working class" is insane.

I believe most Leninists would call this a Bourgeoisie Concession had it happened in a capitalist country.

You can be as smug as you want about it, but in a classless state there are no "concessions". There's no exploitation, so there's nothing to concede.

The Bolsheviks only faced an allied invasion after having pulled out of the war and signed a separate peace with the Germans through Brest-Litovsk

Damn Bolsheviks, signing peace treaties and pulling their country out of war... So evil!

The Tsarists had almost zero power

So little power that they could kickstart a 2-year-long civil war in which many Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries joined them, and in which more than a million and a half people died on the Bolshevik side. I'm sure independent unions controlling the industry separately would have fought much better against the White armies.

and it would've stayed that way had the Bolsheviks not fractured the Russian socialist movement.

Blaming the russian civil war on Bolsheviks instead of the actual, literal monarchic fascists that wanted to restore the Russian Empire. God, I don't know how people like you can self-declare as leftists.

I actually have far more of a problem with Stalins actions in the 1920s before the Great Purge and World War 2. Between Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Ryhzkov, and their supporters, Stalin had effectively crushed any opposition even within the party. Not though discrediting them intellectually or by testing their ideas and showing the failures, but instead by killing or imprisoning them.

I also have problems with this repression because, surprise surprise, people can have nuance about the USSR and its past and history beyond "Lenin bad". I'm fully aware of the repression against Trotskyism and the oppressive descent of the USSR in Stalinist times. What you anti-communists refuse to do is to analyze the material conditions of the moment. We're talking of the first Socialist experiment ever. They didn't know what they'd encounter, they only experienced war, initially military but later also economically, against their surrounding countries, for the sake of daring to be socialists. They had lived through tsarist repression and murder, and just come out of a brutal WW1 and an equally brutal civil war. If you think it's possible to have a revolution without excesses and mistakes, you're sorely mistaken. That doesn't discredit the entire revolution, its ideals, and its achievements, at least it doesn't to me, whereas it clearly does for anti-communists like you.

I thoroughly believe these conflicts during the 1920s were what doomed the USSR, Stalin had killed almost all competing ideas for a potentially better Socialism, even among fellow Leninists.

Again, these things don't happen in a vacuum. There is a need for varying degrees of centralization depending on the material conditions. I ultimately agree that there was way too much power in the higher spheres of the USSR, which ironically led to the demise of the country once the higher ups decided it was time to "liberalize" the economy and the politics, aka Glasnost and Perestroika. But refusing to do material analysis of the circumstances, and reducing everything to "Lenin bad", is counterproductive.

Without giving a context to everything that happened in the USSR, it's very easy to judge the mistakes, but believing that "Lenin was bad and we'd do better nowadays" is delusional and shows a poor understanding of the underlying reasons, which when our revolution comes, will come to haunt us in the form of excessive and disorganized repression because of the lack of a plan for it, or as I said, even worse, a failure of the revolution as happened in my home country, Spain. Spain, during the time of the second republic, had a leftist government composed of a coalition of socialdemocrats, communists and anarchists. They were implementing land reforms according to the will of the majority, but because of the resistance of landowners and capitalists, this didn't go smoothly. Instead of applying repression against reactionary elements, and a vanguard party taking control of a revolution, what happened is that the fascists attempted a coup that plunged the country into a bloody civil war that tore the country apart, and ultimately implemented nation-wide fascism for almost four decades. Funnily enough, nobody on the left talks or complains about the excesses of violence carried out by the antifascist side during the civil war, such as burning churches with priests alive inside, or raping nuns, or execution of fascist prisoners, or even infighting among the leftist parties. You know why? Because it failed, and failed leftist movements aren't criticised but idealised by people like you. Only successful attempts of socialism deserve the ruthless public scrutiny that you guys apply. And scrutiny they deserve, but not without material and historical context that again, you guys so often forget about.

That is what I tried to do here, and is why I'm majoring in Soviet history

Can I ask where you're majoring in Soviet history? I'm interested.

imagine how much could've changed had after the civil war the Factions ban been lifted and the working class was allowed to choose between the Workers Opposition, Left Opposition or Right Opposition in free and fair internal Party elections like takes place now in most modern Socialist parties. I'm sure in this scenario Stalin wouldn't of been able to commit the atrocities he later did, and that Soviet politics would rely much more on the will of the working class than behind the curtain political maneuvering.

We can imagine the ideal utopian past where all humans were perfect and excesses weren't committed, and repression was applied just in the right manner and only on fascist elements. We can also imagine an ideal utopian past where the working class got exactly what they wanted after the revolution and nothing else, where land reform was carried out in the Menshevik way, where consumer goods were prioritized instead of the heavy industry, and where, as a consequence of the lack of heavy industry, a socialist peasant country was absolutely demolished by Nazi Germany and subjected to a holocaust. I would also love to imagine a Spain where there had been Bolsheviks and we had had some Bolshevik oppression for some years instead of 36 years of fascism.

volodya_ilich , 20 days ago

You guys are comically well described by Parenti... "I'd like to cite every failed socialist movement as a source of inspiration".

volodya_ilich , 20 days ago

As for the longer comment I'll answer in another moment, I'm out right now. You're definitely one of the most reasonable anticommunists I've discussed with.

volodya_ilich , 20 days ago

I'm sorry but citing England and France, two of the most imperialist countries in the world, as examples of where workers managed to achieve victories against capital, is a bit racist to me. The whole welfare in the Global North (for the lucky ones who enjoy it) is built upon unequal exchange with colonial countries. It's imperative to understand that non-internationalist worker movements that don't care about imperialism are the actual bourgeois concessions that you mentioned earlier.

Zapatistas and Rohinya are some of the few examples of functional, more anarchist and decentralised cases of socialist movements that triumphed, and while all of my support goes to them and I love what they're doing, they're regional and small movements for a reason. As soon as the west seems them powerful or big or influential enough to be a threat, I fear they'll be eliminated.

Currently the democratic socialist movements have more control in the Democratic world, global South and global North, than the Leninists do.

Excuse me, which demsoc movements have control in the so-called "democratic world"?

The very second that China, Vietnam, Cuba, or Laos actually allows for free elections between multiple socialist factions, and not just the control of society by a party elite, that's the second I'll consider those leninists more successful than the Democratic Socialists.

Speaking of Cuba, I bring another source: a book by Pedro Ross called "how the worker's parliaments saved the cuban revolution" on how the cuban unions democratically decided the future of the country in an unprecedentedly democratic manner during the so-called "periodo especial" in the 90s when Cuba's main economic partner, the USSR, dissolved overnight. It's a textbook example of what democracy means to me, much more so than multi-party liberal democracy systems in which 100% of the parties in power represent the oligarchic capital. Anyhow, how's your statement that as soon as they have multi-party systems you'll consider them successful, consistent with your claim that you measure success on the material conditions of the working class?

volodya_ilich , 28 days ago

Ugh... Here we go again with the social credit... It's been debunked so many times that it's not even funny anymore. You can ask any Chinese person about it and they don't even know what it is because it's really not a thing. Financial credit scores on the other hand...

volodya_ilich , 28 days ago

...or, since the federal reserve creates money, they could do quite literally 100 strokes on a keyboard at the FED and repay the debt. A state doesn't fund itself through taxes, taxes serve many purposes but funding a state isn't one of them.

volodya_ilich , 28 days ago

The thing is you're forgetting who are good borrowers and who are bad borrowers. A person with a low income with a precarious job will be a very bad borrower, and imposing a higher interest rate on them on top of that is just the final nail in the coffin. We generally believe universal healthcare is good, and we don't want to discriminate "good health" and "bad health" people and make unhealthy people pay more, do we?

volodya_ilich , 28 days ago

Your comment stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of public institutions and how money works.

It doesn't matter that the debt is higher than the GDP if it's debt in the currency that the state creates. Japan has a debt of 250% of the GDP and it's always going to pay for it. Why? Because it's in Yen, and the Japanese public sector is the ONLY institution in the world capable of creating Yen. If they wanted, the Japanese central bank could quite literally perform 100 keystrokes on a keyboard, and repay all debt early tomorrow, at a cost of exactly 0 yen to the taxpayer.

Taxes aren't the way a state funds itself. Again, the state creates its own currency, why would it need tax collection to get that currency if it can create it at will at a keyboard's stroke? Taxes serve many purposes, such as forcing people to use your currency in the private sector (they will need that currency to pay for the taxes so it's the one they will use), such as disincentivizing certain behaviours (tax on tobacco for example), or such as reducing inequality (progressive income taxes), or also importantly, removing money from the private sector to reduce or prevent inflation. But the one thing taxes don't do is funding the state budget, since the state's budget is unlimited in theory. There are practical limits, but availability of currency really isn't one of them.

The American citizen won't spend a single dollar paying back state debt, in fact it's exactly the opposite. The state creates the currency with which it pays back the debt, and it's private citizens and corporations who the state owes the interest rate to. If you buy a bond for $1000 at an interest rate or 3%, next year you'll have $1030. The state, through debt, literally creates money for the private sector. It makes people and companies wealthier. Taxes make people and companies poorer, but taxes and debt are completely unrelated to one another, since the state really doesn't need taxes to pay the debt.

I fully agree with your analysis of the poor usage of the state budget and people not getting the welfare state they deserve by right, but that's not something that has to do with debt, it has to do with the government representatives not acting for the benefit of the majority but a select elite of capitalist owners. Debt is purely a financial tool that serves purposes such as creating money, or controlling the interest rates of the country so that people and companies will take more or fewer loans, which has an effect in the economy.

volodya_ilich , 28 days ago

It's not even about reputation, it's mostly about taxes. You enforce the private sector using the state's monopoly of violence to pay tributes in a currency that you create. This way, when there are transactions in the private sector, the main currency that people will want to use (provided it's stable enough) is the one that lets them pay their taxes later. You can't pay taxes with dollars in Hungary, which makes Hungarian people use Hungarian currency instead of Chinese Yuan even if the Chinese Yuan is a much stronger currency.

And yes, the state having the monopoly of violence and enforcing taxes is a good thing, before anyone accuses me of being an anarchocapitalist.

volodya_ilich , 28 days ago

Unstable, and mostly used for speculation or illegal activity. Ew.

volodya_ilich , 28 days ago

if you saturate the market with your currency it becomes less valuable and we end up with runaway inflation.

Notice how I didn't say that the state should create infinite currency, I'm just saying that the limit isn't based on taxation. And funnily enough, if you look at basically all inflationary episodes in developed countries over the past century, they've happened as a consequence of problems with the supply of goods, not as a consequence of excess currency creation. 2022 inflation? Energy prices and supply chain bottlenecks as a consequence of Ukraine invasion and post-covid effects on production. 1970s inflation? Fuel prices... Really, I encourage you to look up a graph of inflation for, say, the USA, over the past century, to look at the inflation peaks, and to make a Google search "crisis of 19XX". You'll find that the inflation was in basically all instances prefaced by a big external event, and not by money creation. Moreover, many of these inflation events happen simultaneously in countries such as the US, UK, Japan and Germany, all of which have different central banks, different currencies, and different rates of currency creation.

Also, there's countless examples of vast increases in money supply without inflation. In the decade of 2010-2020, the EU has created VAST amounts of euros with basically no meaningful inflation. You can look up the Euro monetary mass M2 or M3 over the past decade, you'll find a huge boom, without any effect on inflation. Again, all of this isn't to say there isn't a practical limit to how much you should create before destabilizing the economy, just that the limit is absolutely not imposed by how much you're collecting in taxes, and it depends a lot, for example, on which part of the capitalist boom-bust cycle you are. Another argument for this, is that money creation doesn't have to be just that, it can imply an increase in the amount of available goods and services. As a stupid example, the US government could open a state-funded iron mine and a refinery, hiring all the employees with newly minted currency, and that would effectively increase the total amount of goods and services in circulation, which can balance out the supposed inflationary effect of the currency creation.

About taxes not being currently used practically to reduce inequality, I agree, but that's not a point against the nature of taxation, that's a point against the current decision of who we're taxing, what for, and how much. I absolutely agree with ramping up the taxes of huge multinational companies and their directives. It's just, if we see taxes not as a necessity to fund the state's activity, but as a necessary tool to reallocate money in the economy from rich people to poor people and to create a welfare state and a great infrastructure, it's much easier to explain why Amazon should pay 90% taxes and your average low-paid worker only 10%.

As for your last point with inequality between companies' income and that of people, I couldn't agree more, I'm a hardcore leftist and I want to reduce wealth inequality extremely, again, I'm not arguing for lowering taxes "since they're not necessary", I'm arguing for reallocating the taxes in a much more progressive way to disincentivize certain behaviors such as speculation, and to reduce inequality between the richest and the poorest.

Thanks for the civilized discussion, it's good to be able to actually discuss this stuff.

volodya_ilich , 28 days ago

Forever until a powerful state starts to charge taxes in crypto.

volodya_ilich , 28 days ago

Fully agreed, the whole "Debt bad! Deficit evil!" trope is just neoliberal propaganda against public expenditure, which translates into a weakening of the welfare state

volodya_ilich , 27 days ago

Always, my friend <3

volodya_ilich , 27 days ago

To be fair, it's not you lacking knowledge, it's a fundamental problem in the field of economics, which because of political reasons, has been dominated for the past decades by neoliberalism. The problem is that neoliberalism reaches conclusions that have been falsified by experimental data in several occasions, but since it serves the ideology of the elites, it's peddled constantly in media by prominent "economist" propagandists. If you're interested into the topic and this modern, more empirical vision of the economy, the field is called "Modern Monetary Theory" or MMT. There's a documentary released recently about the basics of it, applied to the US, called "Finding The Money", and I can also recommend the YouTube channel called "Unlearning Economics", which isn't MMT per se but it's very keen on treating economics through empyrism.

volodya_ilich , 27 days ago

Interesting, I'll look up the monetary mass of Japan over time, thanks!

volodya_ilich , 27 days ago

I'm not talking about the current way, I'm talking about the possibility of a privacy-focused crypto, issued by the state, where transactions can be made private with the Blockchain. This crypto, as it would be used for normal transactions, wouldn't have more variability or speculation than the variability and speculation in converting US Dollars to UK Pounds. The post talks in hypotheticals, I do too.

I don't think fiat currency isn't used for illegal activity, I think crypto is mostly not used for normal transactions.

volodya_ilich , 27 days ago

Yeah, it might have been funny the first time 10 years ago, but repeating the same joke over and over again, often makes it annoying and unfunny, as is the case with your comment, especially when it's not even accurate.

volodya_ilich , 27 days ago

Plenty of idiots around to upvote your shit, no doubt.

volodya_ilich , 27 days ago

If the lenders operate with the purpose of maximizing profit, then yeah, it makes sense not to loan money to people in precarious situations except at high interest rates, that's my whole point: that's evil, the profit motive leads to evil decisions. Let's have public banks instead, where interest rates for loans are equalised, in the same way that every taxpayer gets identical access to healthcare regardless of how much they contribute through their income.