Neoliberalism's Dark Path to Fascism

[PyramidHead]

If your theory is unfalsifiable, why is criticizing it for being unfalsifiable a non-starter? To me it seems devastating. In any event, quantities of all sorts of things can be shown to exist -- energy, momentum, current, pressure, yada yada -- and if "what is valuable" isn't one of them, then that's a reason to stop trying to do economic reasoning by making claims about what is valuable. We've known how to do economics without value claims for about a hundred and fifty years now. The Marxists are as outdated on this point as creationists.

But abstract ideas can be handy nonetheless. Ethics is one example of empirically vacuous thought.

I was impressed by the labor theory of value because it accounted for why and how things are taken as valuable in a way that seems consistent with scientific reasoning,

That appears to contradict your statement that no theory about what is valuable is empirical.

specifically the idea that entropy always tends to decrease on large enough scales.

Entropy always tends to increase on large enough scales. (And in this case, "large enough scales" means any scale larger than dust particles being randomly buffeted by atoms in a fluid.)

Basically, nothing in the universe is useful to us unless we make it useful by working on it, transforming it from an arbitrary arrangement to one that suits our needs.

That is a wildly counterintuitive claim. Why do you believe it? The universe is filled with all manner of things that are useful to us that we didn't have to work on to make useful. The North Star is useful to us and we haven't transformed it at all. We did nothing to the air to make it breathable. (Unless you count undoing things we'd previously done to the air to make it less breathable. ) Cave men took shelter in caves without first having to dig them. Fruit trees grow wild in nature, and they make fruits we can eat without first working on them.

To do that, we need to surrender bits of ourselves, literally speaking, by expending energy and time, of which our supply is finite on a biological level. Since nobody wants to waste their energy and time, it makes sense to consider labor as the currency of value.

That doesn't follow. In the first place, whose labor defines the currency unit? Some people's labor makes stuff a lot more useful than other people's labor makes it. Ever heard of Gresham's Law? "Bad money drives out good." If a highly useful and a meagerly useful currency are treated as equal, the highly useful will disappear from circulation.

And in the second place, just because labor makes things more useful and we rely on that to obtain useful stuff, that doesn't mean labor is the only thing that makes things more useful. All sorts of inputs are helpful in making bits of the universe more useful to us. If you just declare as if by divine fiat that you're only going to count one of them and you're going to define all the rest as zero contributors, it's no surprise when you're able to "prove" from that premise that somebody's "exploiting" providers of the input you defined in advance as magically special. And if you want to believe in your own deduction, it certainly helps to have an unfalsifiable theory to derive it from.

Everything valuable needs to be created by working on something with no value, and work is a measure of energy and time directed through the temporary, vulnerable bodies of organisms. As far as abstract concepts go, this one appears to be the most grounded in reality to me.

But not everything valuable needs to be created by working on something with no value, if by "valuable" we mean that real live people value it. The caveman valued his cave.

Worse, you're deceiving yourself, by shoehorning a mental zero-sum model into a phenomenon that isn't zero sum. You're treating "value" as if it were an incompressible fluid like water, if you want a cubic foot of which where you're going then you'll have to take a cubic foot with you -- as opposed to a compressible fluid like air, which people routinely take two cubic feet of with them down into the deep and then comfortably breathe two hundred cubic feet out of their scuba tanks. You're motivating your "value" theory with "make it useful" and "suits our needs". Well, usefulness and needs don't follow the accounting rules of incompressible fluids. We constantly get more usefulness and need satisfaction out of our stuff than we put in, because the same thing is more useful to one person than to another. When what I have is more useful to you than to me, and what you have is more useful to me than to you, we can swap, and thereby increase the usefulness of the stuff without transforming it.

The Labor Theory of Value is an objective value theory. But the degree to which people value stuff is subjective. Things aren't valuable full stop; they're trash to this person and treasure to that person. No objective value theory can correctly represent that phenomenon. A theory that ascribes a one-size-fits-all value to everything will inevitably imply that in every trade either somebody got short-changed or else people traded equal for equal and therefore got no more usefulness from what they received than from what they gave up. But that would imply they have no reason to trade in the first place. But actual trading makes both parties better off, which is why people do it. So Marx's Value=Labor theory makes exactly the same fatal error as Ayn Rand's Value=Gold theory.

In capitalist production, one party is giving up something very important (most of their lives) while another party decides how it is used. Under any theory of value except labor, this can be excused; ... But only one theory captures the shared interests of the large majority of humans, who do not like work being imposed on them and resist it every day.

So, based on unfalsifiable metaphysics, a metaphorical analogy to your impressions of science, and an artificial accounting procedure that inherently can't ever correspond to people's actual evaluations of usefulness, you propose to rerun an experiment -- abolition of capitalism -- that has already been run many times, and that experience teaches us always results in a police state and usually results in a famine. And you think this is in the shared interests of the large majority of humans?!?

Meanwhile, the minority tries to impose as much work as possible, on and off the job, for as little pay as they can get away with.

And at the same time, the workers are trying to impose as much pay as possible for as little work as they can get away with. Employees and employers are competitors as well as cooperators. They're competing for larger shares of the overall usefulness increase that comes from trading, while simultaneously cooperating to bring about a usefulness increase that neither could create alone.

How that synergistic product is split depends on negotiation, which means it depends on who's in the stronger negotiating position. So if owners are getting too much and employees are getting too little, the solution is to strengthen the employees' negotiating position, not to do away with the trade that's what creates a usefulness increase worth competing for in the first place. Which is to say, unionize.

There's a reason governments that collectivize the means of production always prohibit independent trade unions. If government power fell into the hands of snake oil salesmen they'd outlaw real doctors. Trade unionists who still think socialists are their friends are delusional. Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

The labor theory of value is about what is functionally valuable under capitalism, as far as I understand it, not what is personally or metaphysically valuable in an absolute sense. It's a conceptual framework that makes sense of how capital operates and has operated. I don't have any particular commitment to it because I haven't read enough about it to have an educated view, but it rings truer to me so far in my exploration of it compared to the other candidates. I also know that any discussion is largely dictated by unspoken terms and assumptions, which are on display in your reply and too discordant with my own to unravel piecemeal. If you want to take this as a concession of defeat, be my guest; for me, it's just an admission that I'm too busy to engage all of your points, given how much groundwork would need to be laid before we can even proceed. I don't think that's a tragedy, and I don't mind if people treat my posts the same way.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The Soviet Union stole nothing from capitalists.

The nation was destroyed by the Germans.

And they advanced very quickly. They were the first in space. They had great medical research and technologies. They had first rate physicists and engineers.

The US was a lot richer than the Soviet Union after WWII because so little US territory was involved. No US cities were destroyed.

The US pumped a lot of wealth into weapons and the Soviets could not keep up since WWII put them so far behind.

I'm not a supporter of the Soviet system which was just a different system of authoritarian control, like capitalism.

But the idea that it needed capitalists to create a modern society is laughable.

And they went Marxist only at the end of WWII????

Just because much of what they stole was later destroyed doesn't mean they didn't steal it.

What did they steal?

A bunch of primitive technology?

That was all destroyed so whatever they built after that they built themselves from scratch.

And from scratch they were the first in space.

They stole a whole bunch of means of production. The fact that it was later destroyed doesn't mean they didn't steal it.

And you actually think they got to space from scratch?!?! Do you not realize that both sides got big help from captured Nazi scientists?

 

[untermensche]

What did they steal?

A bunch of primitive technology?

That was all destroyed so whatever they built after that they built themselves from scratch.

And from scratch they were the first in space.

They stole a whole bunch of means of production. The fact that it was later destroyed doesn't mean they didn't steal it.

And you actually think they got to space from scratch?!?! Do you not realize that both sides got big help from captured Nazi scientists?

They put a satellite and a man into space faster than the US and the US was not completely destroyed by the war. The US was barely touched by the war.

It is ignorance to say they did what they did by stealing.

They built a modern technological society quickly.

And capitalism had nothing to do with it.

 

[Underseer]

Over the past few years, I've done quite a bit of reading on what Neoliberalism is and its consequences. This piece, in which Chris Hedges and David Harvey explore Neoliberalism, is among the better examinations I've come across. It ended up being a nice piece to sit and sip my coffee to in the quiet of my sitting room.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/neoliberalisms-dark-path-to-fascism/


Some snippets:

Neoliberalism as economic theory was always an absurdity. It had as much validity as past ruling ideologies such as the divine right of kings and fascism’s belief in the Übermensch. None of its vaunted promises were even remotely possible. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite—eight families now hold as much wealth as 50 percent of the world’s population—while demolishing government controls and regulations always creates massive income inequality and monopoly power, fuels political extremism and destroys democracy. You do not need to slog through the 577 pages of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” to figure this out. But economic rationality was never the point. The point was the restoration of class power.

[...]

“As a political project, it was very savvy,” he said. “It got a great deal of popular consent because it was talking about individual liberty and freedom, freedom of choice. When they talked about freedom, it was freedom of the market. The neoliberal project said to the ’68 generation, ‘OK, you want liberty and freedom? That’s what the student movement was about. We’re going to give it to you, but it’s going to be freedom of the market. The other thing you’re after is social justice—forget it. So, we’ll give you individual liberty, but you forget the social justice. Don’t organize.’ The attempt was to dismantle those institutions, which were those collective institutions of the working class, particularly the unions and bit by bit those political parties that stood for some sort of concern for the well-being of the masses.”

“The great thing about freedom of the market is it appears to be egalitarian, but there is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals,” Harvey went on. “It promises equality of treatment, but if you’re extremely rich, it means you can get richer. If you’re very poor, you’re more likely to get poorer. What Marx showed brilliantly in volume one of ‘Capital’ is that freedom of the market produces greater and greater levels of social inequality.”

[...[

Neoliberalism transforms freedom for the many into freedom for the few. Its logical result is neofascism. Neofascism abolishes civil liberties in the name of national security and brands whole groups as traitors and enemies of the people. It is the militarized instrument used by the ruling elites to maintain control, divide and tear apart the society and further accelerate pillage and social inequality. The ruling ideology, no longer credible, is replaced with the jackboot.

As a bit of an aside; I've noticed since the midterm elections that in some corporate media articles I've read, that many of the Democrats who are in fact neoliberals are being referred to as "progressives". It's an interesting sleight of hand. Case in point is this piece from Policico where the caption below the top photo of Rep Adam Smith (D-Wash) reads "Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) who is set to become the first progressive in decades to run the House Armed Services Committee." When Smith is not, in the slightest, a progressive in the traditional sense of the word.

Pretty much.

The ancient Greeks argued that this is inevitable: eventually any democracy will produce an economic elite that knows how to game the system and twist the government to serve their needs at the expense of others. The more the government doesn't serve the needs of the majority, the more the majority of voters become vulnerable to any pedagogue who comes along and promises to return their country from "them" (and who goes in the "them" category seems to be ever-expanding).

Liberals: Gosh, this is unfair. How do we return power to the people from the economic elites?

Conservatives, libertarians, and moderate Democrats: Gosh, this is so unfair! How can we give the economic elites even more power?

 

[Harry Bosch]

Over the past few years, I've done quite a bit of reading on what Neoliberalism is and its consequences. This piece, in which Chris Hedges and David Harvey explore Neoliberalism, is among the better examinations I've come across. It ended up being a nice piece to sit and sip my coffee to in the quiet of my sitting room.

https://www.truthdig.com/articles/neoliberalisms-dark-path-to-fascism/


Some snippets:

Neoliberalism as economic theory was always an absurdity. It had as much validity as past ruling ideologies such as the divine right of kings and fascism’s belief in the Übermensch. None of its vaunted promises were even remotely possible. Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite—eight families now hold as much wealth as 50 percent of the world’s population—while demolishing government controls and regulations always creates massive income inequality and monopoly power, fuels political extremism and destroys democracy. You do not need to slog through the 577 pages of Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” to figure this out. But economic rationality was never the point. The point was the restoration of class power.

[...]

“As a political project, it was very savvy,” he said. “It got a great deal of popular consent because it was talking about individual liberty and freedom, freedom of choice. When they talked about freedom, it was freedom of the market. The neoliberal project said to the ’68 generation, ‘OK, you want liberty and freedom? That’s what the student movement was about. We’re going to give it to you, but it’s going to be freedom of the market. The other thing you’re after is social justice—forget it. So, we’ll give you individual liberty, but you forget the social justice. Don’t organize.’ The attempt was to dismantle those institutions, which were those collective institutions of the working class, particularly the unions and bit by bit those political parties that stood for some sort of concern for the well-being of the masses.”

“The great thing about freedom of the market is it appears to be egalitarian, but there is nothing more unequal than the equal treatment of unequals,” Harvey went on. “It promises equality of treatment, but if you’re extremely rich, it means you can get richer. If you’re very poor, you’re more likely to get poorer. What Marx showed brilliantly in volume one of ‘Capital’ is that freedom of the market produces greater and greater levels of social inequality.”

[...[

Neoliberalism transforms freedom for the many into freedom for the few. Its logical result is neofascism. Neofascism abolishes civil liberties in the name of national security and brands whole groups as traitors and enemies of the people. It is the militarized instrument used by the ruling elites to maintain control, divide and tear apart the society and further accelerate pillage and social inequality. The ruling ideology, no longer credible, is replaced with the jackboot.

As a bit of an aside; I've noticed since the midterm elections that in some corporate media articles I've read, that many of the Democrats who are in fact neoliberals are being referred to as "progressives". It's an interesting sleight of hand. Case in point is this piece from Policico where the caption below the top photo of Rep Adam Smith (D-Wash) reads "Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.) who is set to become the first progressive in decades to run the House Armed Services Committee." When Smith is not, in the slightest, a progressive in the traditional sense of the word.

Pretty much.

The ancient Greeks argued that this is inevitable: eventually any democracy will produce an economic elite that knows how to game the system and twist the government to serve their needs at the expense of others. The more the government doesn't serve the needs of the majority, the more the majority of voters become vulnerable to any pedagogue who comes along and promises to return their country from "them" (and who goes in the "them" category seems to be ever-expanding).

Liberals: Gosh, this is unfair. How do we return power to the people from the economic elites?

Conservatives, libertarians, and moderate Democrats: Gosh, this is so unfair! How can we give the economic elites even more power?

As an aside, usually a party doesn't start attacking the moderates in it's party until after they have taken control of the government.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

What did they steal?

A bunch of primitive technology?

That was all destroyed so whatever they built after that they built themselves from scratch.

And from scratch they were the first in space.

They stole a whole bunch of means of production. The fact that it was later destroyed doesn't mean they didn't steal it.

And you actually think they got to space from scratch?!?! Do you not realize that both sides got big help from captured Nazi scientists?

They put a satellite and a man into space faster than the US and the US was not completely destroyed by the war. The US was barely touched by the war.

It is ignorance to say they did what they did by stealing.

They built a modern technological society quickly.

And capitalism had nothing to do with it.

Denying it was stolen tech doesn't change the fact that it was captured Nazis and Nazi rockets.

 

[untermensche]

They put a satellite and a man into space faster than the US and the US was not completely destroyed by the war. The US was barely touched by the war.

It is ignorance to say they did what they did by stealing.

They built a modern technological society quickly.

And capitalism had nothing to do with it.

Denying it was stolen tech doesn't change the fact that it was captured Nazis and Nazi rockets.

The technology is having the tools and factories to build it.

Not getting some advice like the Americans needed and had but couldn't do it as quickly.

The Soviets stole no factories or tools from capitalists. They built every factory themselves and trained every worker.

Thinking they stole something to do what they did is a childish fantasy based on delusions.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

They put a satellite and a man into space faster than the US and the US was not completely destroyed by the war. The US was barely touched by the war.

It is ignorance to say they did what they did by stealing.

They built a modern technological society quickly.

And capitalism had nothing to do with it.

Denying it was stolen tech doesn't change the fact that it was captured Nazis and Nazi rockets.

The technology is having the tools and factories to build it.

Not getting some advice like the Americans needed and had but couldn't do it as quickly.

The Soviets stole no factories or tools from capitalists. They built every factory themselves and trained every worker.

Thinking they stole something to do what they did is a childish fantasy based on delusions.

They stole the technology from the Nazis. Building the factory is a lot easier than knowing what to build to make the rocket work.

 

[untermensche]

The technology is having the tools and factories to build it.

Not getting some advice like the Americans needed and had but couldn't do it as quickly.

The Soviets stole no factories or tools from capitalists. They built every factory themselves and trained every worker.

Thinking they stole something to do what they did is a childish fantasy based on delusions.

They stole the technology from the Nazis. Building the factory is a lot easier than knowing what to build to make the rocket work.

They stole the same thing the US stole. German scientists, not technology.

And they were destroyed by the war.

And beat the US into space.

 

[Harry Bosch]

The technology is having the tools and factories to build it.

Not getting some advice like the Americans needed and had but couldn't do it as quickly.

The Soviets stole no factories or tools from capitalists. They built every factory themselves and trained every worker.

Thinking they stole something to do what they did is a childish fantasy based on delusions.

They stole the technology from the Nazis. Building the factory is a lot easier than knowing what to build to make the rocket work.

They stole the same thing the US stole. German scientists, not technology.

And they were destroyed by the war.

And beat the US into space.

Yes, the Russians were the first into space. I'll give them their due, the USSR was probably the best non-capitalist planned economy in world history. Having said that, when you eliminate incentive and crush creativity and freedom you fall behind.

 

[untermensche]

They stole the same thing the US stole. German scientists, not technology.

And they were destroyed by the war.

And beat the US into space.

Yes, the Russians were the first into space. I'll give them their due, the USSR was probably the best non-capitalist planned economy in world history. Having said that, when you eliminate incentive and crush creativity and freedom you fall behind.

The point is progress has nothing to do with capitalism.

It has to do with the desire to make progress.

The society needs to be large enough and stable enough with good enough education so that several very smart people can emerge.

That is what is needed.

Not capitalism.

Capitalism is a system of power to ensure an unequal distribution of created wealth.

It has nothing to do with causing human progress.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

The technology is having the tools and factories to build it.

Not getting some advice like the Americans needed and had but couldn't do it as quickly.

The Soviets stole no factories or tools from capitalists. They built every factory themselves and trained every worker.

Thinking they stole something to do what they did is a childish fantasy based on delusions.

They stole the technology from the Nazis. Building the factory is a lot easier than knowing what to build to make the rocket work.

They stole the same thing the US stole. German scientists, not technology.

And they were destroyed by the war.

And beat the US into space.

They got actual German rockets as well.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

They stole the same thing the US stole. German scientists, not technology.

And they were destroyed by the war.

And beat the US into space.

Yes, the Russians were the first into space. I'll give them their due, the USSR was probably the best non-capitalist planned economy in world history. Having said that, when you eliminate incentive and crush creativity and freedom you fall behind.

Yup, look at their history in space:

First rocket, yes.
First man--yes, but at a risk we would never have accepted except in dire need.

But look what came later--we are the ones who could keep the R&D going and beat them to the moon (at which point they basically bowed out of the game and never tried.)

And lets look at the track record to Mars. There are enough birds that we can judge the quality: https://www.space.com/16575-mars-exploration-robot-red-planet-missions-infographic.html

Note how most Russian birds fail and even the ones that make it often don't fare too well. Most of our birds make it.

 

[untermensche]

They stole the same thing the US stole. German scientists, not technology.

And they were destroyed by the war.

And beat the US into space.

They got actual German rockets as well.

You have no point.

Their nation was destroyed.

And they beat the US into space.

Capitalism has nothing to do with human progress. It is a system of exploitation and theft.

And capitalism had nothing to do with the US space program. It was a socialist program. The government paid for all the research and development.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite—eight families now hold as much wealth as 50 percent of the world’s population—while demolishing government controls and regulations always creates massive income inequality and monopoly power, fuels political extremism and destroys democracy.

Poster, this is from the article you posted. It is in the set-up paragraph, from which all the rest follows.

I find this part confusing.

"while demolishing government controls and regulations"

Okay, we've had some fiddling at the edges of regulations and controls. For instance, the big disagreement between the "left" and the "right" is if the top rate should be 36% or 39%. Government regulation grew under ever president during my lifetime.

 

[PyramidHead]

Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite—eight families now hold as much wealth as 50 percent of the world’s population—while demolishing government controls and regulations always creates massive income inequality and monopoly power, fuels political extremism and destroys democracy.

Poster, this is from the article you posted. It is in the set-up paragraph, from which all the rest follows.

I find this part confusing.

"while demolishing government controls and regulations"

Okay, we've had some fiddling at the edges of regulations and controls. For instance, the big disagreement between the "left" and the "right" is if the top rate should be 36% or 39%. Government regulation grew under ever president during my lifetime.

That's why both the "left" and the "right" (with quotation marks) are actually the center-right and the far right (no quotation marks). And part of the way they secure power for their rich friends is to convince people like you that the QUANTITY of regulation is a reliable metric for how much it imposes on businesses. That way, whenever somebody complains about lax enforcement, lobbyist influence, subsidies for large corporations, and employee protections being replaced with multiple bills that dismantle them, they can just whine "but there are so many more regulations now than before, therefore it can't be the case that big business has benefited from the regulatory environment!"

 

[PyramidHead]

They stole the same thing the US stole. German scientists, not technology.

And they were destroyed by the war.

And beat the US into space.

Yes, the Russians were the first into space. I'll give them their due, the USSR was probably the best non-capitalist planned economy in world history. Having said that, when you eliminate incentive and crush creativity and freedom you fall behind.

Yup, look at their history in space:

First rocket, yes.
First man--yes, but at a risk we would never have accepted except in dire need.

But look what came later--we are the ones who could keep the R&D going and beat them to the moon (at which point they basically bowed out of the game and never tried.)

And lets look at the track record to Mars. There are enough birds that we can judge the quality: https://www.space.com/16575-mars-exploration-robot-red-planet-missions-infographic.html

Note how most Russian birds fail and even the ones that make it often don't fare too well. Most of our birds make it.

You both have been hoodwinked into believing that the entire difference in the space race comes down to eliminating incentive. Russia transitioned from basically an agricultural peasant society in the 1910's to an industrial powerhouse a decade or so later. They carried the burden of that transition for a long time, and it still hinders them today. It's appropriate to note here that this (as well as China's similar situation prior to the revolution) was exactly the type of scenario that Marx predicted would end in failure. I don't know if he was right about the reasons, but the USSR was not a Marxist society by any stretch; Stalin having Trotsky executed for saying as much should tell you that. But aside from all that, the measure of a society should not be how far their space rockets go, it should be how their poor are treated. Clearly, the USSR's one-party system was no better than our two-party system in that regard.

 

[PyramidHead]

An excellent article on the reality of living in the Soviet Union and why it collapsed:

https://gowans.wordpress.com/2012/12/21/do-publicly-owned-planned-economies-work/

Among the most important accomplishments of the Soviet economy was the abolition of unemployment. Not only did the Soviet Union provide jobs for all, work was considered a social obligation, of such importance that it was enshrined in the constitution. The 1936 constitution stipulated that “citizens of the USSR have the right to work, that is, are guaranteed the right to employment and payment for their work in accordance with quantity and quality.” On the other hand, making a living through means other than work was prohibited. Hence, deriving an income from rent, profits, speculation or the black market – social parasitism – was illegal (Szymanski, 1984). Finding a job was easy, because labour was typically in short supply. Consequently, employees had a high degree of bargaining power on the job, with obvious benefits in job security, and management paying close attention to employee satisfaction (Kotz, 2003).

Article 41 of the 1977 constitution capped the workweek at 41 hours. Workers on night shift worked seven hours but received full (eight-hour) shift pay. Workers employed at dangerous jobs (e.g., mining) or where sustained alertness was critical (e.g. physicians) worked six or seven-hour shifts, but received fulltime pay. Overtime work was prohibited except under special circumstances (Szymanski, 1984).

From the 1960s, employees received an average of one month of vacation (Keeran and Kenny, 2004; Szymanski, 1984) which could be taken at subsidized resorts (Kotz, 2003).

All Soviet citizens were provided a retirement income, men at the age of 60, and women at the age of 55 (Lerouge, 2010). The right to a pension (as well as disability benefits) was guaranteed by the Soviet constitution (Article 43, 1977), rather than being revocable and subject to the momentary whims of politicians, as is the case in capitalist countries.

That US citizens had to pay for their healthcare was considered extremely barbaric in the Soviet Union, and Soviet citizens “often questioned US tourists quite incredulously on this point.”

Women were granted maternity leave from their jobs with full pay as early as 1936 and this, too, along with many other benefits, was guaranteed in the Soviet constitution (Article 122, 1936). At the same time, the 1936 constitution made provision for a wide network of maternity homes, nurseries and kindergartens, while the revised 1977 constitution obligated the state to help “the family by providing and developing a broad system of childcare…by paying grants on the birth of a child, by providing children’s allowances and benefits for large families” (Article 53). The Soviet Union was the first country to develop public childcare (Szymanski, 1984).

Women in the USSR were accorded equal rights with men in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political life (Article 122, 1936), including the equal right with men to employment, rest and leisure, social insurance and education. Among its many firsts, the USSR was the first country to legalize abortions, which were available at no cost (Sherman, 1969). It was also the first country to bring women into top government positions. An intense campaign was undertaken in Soviet Central Asia to liberate women from the misogynist oppression of conservative Islam. This produced a radical transformation of the condition of women’s lives in these areas (Szymanski, 1984).

The right to housing was guaranteed under a 1977 constitutional provision (Article 44). Urban housing space, however, was cramped, about half of what it was per capita in Austria and West Germany. The reasons were inadequate building in Tsarist times, the massive destruction of housing during World War II, and Soviet emphasis on heavy industry. Prior to the October Revolution, inadequate urban housing was built for ordinary people. After the revolution, new housing was built, but the housing stock remained insufficient. Housing draws heavily on capital, which the government needed urgently for the construction of industry. In addition, Nazi invaders destroyed one-third to one-half of Soviet dwellings during the Second World War (Sherman, 1969).

City-dwellers typically lived in apartment buildings owned by the enterprise in which they worked or by the local government. Rents were dirt cheap by law, about two to three percent of the family budget, while utilities were four to five percent (Szymanski, 1984; Keeran and Kenny, 2004). This differed sharply with the United States, where rents consumed a significant share of the average family budget (Szymanski, 1984), and still do.

Food staples and other necessities were subsidized, while luxury items were sold well above their costs.

Public transportation was efficient, extensive, and practically free. Subway fare was about eight cents in the 1970s, unchanged from the 1930s (Szymanski, 1984). Nothing comparable has ever existed in capitalist countries. This is because efficient, affordable and extensive public transportation would severely limit the profit-making opportunities of automobile manufacturers, petroleum companies, and civil engineering firms. In order to safeguard their profits, these firms use their wealth, connections and influence to stymie development of extensive, efficient and inexpensive public alternatives to private transportation. Governments, which need to keep private industry happy so that it continues to provide jobs, are constrained to play along. The only way to alter this is to bring capital under public control, in order to use it to meet public policy goals set out in a consciously constructed plan.

The Soviet Union placed greater stress on healthcare than their capitalist competitors did. No other country had more physicians per capita or more hospital beds per capita than the USSR. In 1977, the Soviet Union had 35 doctors and 212 hospital beds per 10,000 compared to 18 doctors and 63 hospital beds in the United States (Szymanski, 1984). Most important, healthcare was free. That US citizens had to pay for their healthcare was considered extremely barbaric in the Soviet Union, and Soviet citizens “often questioned US tourists quite incredulously on this point” (Sherman, 1969).

Education through university was also free, and stipends were available for post-secondary students, adequate to pay for textbooks, room and board, and other expenses (Sherman, 1969; Szymanski, 1984).

Income inequality in the Soviet Union was mild compared to capitalist countries. The difference between the highest income and the average wage was equivalent to the difference between the income of a physician in the United States and an average worker, about 8 to 10 times higher (Szymanski, 1984). The elite’s higher incomes afforded privileges no greater than being able to acquire a modest house and car (Kotz, 2000). By comparison, in 2010, Canada’s top-paid 100 CEOs received incomes 155 times higher than the average full-time wage. The average full-time wage was $43,000 (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2011). An income 10 times larger would be $430,000—about what members of the capitalist elite make in a single week. A factor that mitigated the modest degree of Soviet income inequality was the access all Soviet citizens had to essential services at no, or virtually, no cost. Accordingly, the degree of material inequality was even smaller than the degree of income inequality (Szymanski, 1984).

Soviet leaders did not live in the opulent mansions that are the commonplace residences of presidents, prime ministers and monarchs in most of the world’s capitals (Parenti, 1997). Gorbachev, for example, lived in a four-family apartment building. Leningrad’s top construction official lived in a one-bedroom apartment, while the top political official in Minsk, his wife, daughter and son-in-law inhabited a two-bedroom apartment (Kotz and Weir, 1997). Critics of the Soviet Union accused the elite of being an exploiting ruling class, but the elite’s modest incomes and humble material circumstances raise serious doubt about this assessment. If it was indeed an exploiting ruling class, it was the oddest one in human history.

Later the article goes into the effects of Russia's late start in the industrial race (having been a tsarist feudal shithole at the turn of the 20th century when America was already industrialized), the hobbling of their productive capacity through supporting their allies (thus diverting their best minds from social industrial roles into the military) and the Reagan Doctrine whose stated goal was to undermine and destroy Soviet power.

By the mid-1980s, it was clear in both Washington and Moscow that the Soviet Union was in trouble. It was not that the system of public ownership and planning was not working. On the contrary, recognizing the advantages of the Soviet system, the United States itself had emulated it to stimulate innovation in its own economy. Moreover, the Soviet economy was still reliably expanding, as it had done every year in peacetime since Stalin had brought it under public control in 1928. However, defending the country in the face of a stepped up Cold War was threatening to choke off economic growth altogether. It was clear that Moscow’s prospects for keeping pace with the United States militarily, while at the same time propping up allies under attack by US-fuelled anti-communist insurgencies and overthrow movements, were far from sanguine. The United States had manoeuvred the Soviet Union into a trap. If Moscow continued to try to match the United States militarily, it would eventually bankrupt itself, in which case its ability to deter US aggression would be lost. If it did not try to keep pace, it could no longer deter US aggression. No matter which way Moscow turned, the outcome would be the same. The only difference was how long it would take the inevitable to play out.

The USSR was not an idealized, controlled experiment in which the sole variable of economic planning was evaluated while keeping all others constant. It was a messy, rapid experiment undertaken in a century of turmoil by a country that achieved spectacular progress despite incredibly humble beginnings relative to the rest of the world. To hold up the USSR, with its draconian single-party rule and cultural police force, as an example of what happens when economies are democratically planned and operated, is not just dishonest, but self-defeating in light of the many accomplishments they nonetheless made. Had they not been stomped out like just about every other threat to imperial interests, they might have flourished in many ways. It should encourage us to pursue alternatives to capitalism, taking stock of the conditions that led to the decline of the Soviet experiment without buying into Cold War propaganda.

 

[Harry Bosch]

An excellent article on the reality of living in the Soviet Union and why it collapsed:

https://gowans.wordpress.com/2012/12/21/do-publicly-owned-planned-economies-work/

Among the most important accomplishments of the Soviet economy was the abolition of unemployment. Not only did the Soviet Union provide jobs for all, work was considered a social obligation, of such importance that it was enshrined in the constitution. The 1936 constitution stipulated that “citizens of the USSR have the right to work, that is, are guaranteed the right to employment and payment for their work in accordance with quantity and quality.” On the other hand, making a living through means other than work was prohibited. Hence, deriving an income from rent, profits, speculation or the black market – social parasitism – was illegal (Szymanski, 1984). Finding a job was easy, because labour was typically in short supply. Consequently, employees had a high degree of bargaining power on the job, with obvious benefits in job security, and management paying close attention to employee satisfaction (Kotz, 2003).

Article 41 of the 1977 constitution capped the workweek at 41 hours. Workers on night shift worked seven hours but received full (eight-hour) shift pay. Workers employed at dangerous jobs (e.g., mining) or where sustained alertness was critical (e.g. physicians) worked six or seven-hour shifts, but received fulltime pay. Overtime work was prohibited except under special circumstances (Szymanski, 1984).

From the 1960s, employees received an average of one month of vacation (Keeran and Kenny, 2004; Szymanski, 1984) which could be taken at subsidized resorts (Kotz, 2003).

All Soviet citizens were provided a retirement income, men at the age of 60, and women at the age of 55 (Lerouge, 2010). The right to a pension (as well as disability benefits) was guaranteed by the Soviet constitution (Article 43, 1977), rather than being revocable and subject to the momentary whims of politicians, as is the case in capitalist countries.

That US citizens had to pay for their healthcare was considered extremely barbaric in the Soviet Union, and Soviet citizens “often questioned US tourists quite incredulously on this point.”

Women were granted maternity leave from their jobs with full pay as early as 1936 and this, too, along with many other benefits, was guaranteed in the Soviet constitution (Article 122, 1936). At the same time, the 1936 constitution made provision for a wide network of maternity homes, nurseries and kindergartens, while the revised 1977 constitution obligated the state to help “the family by providing and developing a broad system of childcare…by paying grants on the birth of a child, by providing children’s allowances and benefits for large families” (Article 53). The Soviet Union was the first country to develop public childcare (Szymanski, 1984).

Women in the USSR were accorded equal rights with men in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political life (Article 122, 1936), including the equal right with men to employment, rest and leisure, social insurance and education. Among its many firsts, the USSR was the first country to legalize abortions, which were available at no cost (Sherman, 1969). It was also the first country to bring women into top government positions. An intense campaign was undertaken in Soviet Central Asia to liberate women from the misogynist oppression of conservative Islam. This produced a radical transformation of the condition of women’s lives in these areas (Szymanski, 1984).

The right to housing was guaranteed under a 1977 constitutional provision (Article 44). Urban housing space, however, was cramped, about half of what it was per capita in Austria and West Germany. The reasons were inadequate building in Tsarist times, the massive destruction of housing during World War II, and Soviet emphasis on heavy industry. Prior to the October Revolution, inadequate urban housing was built for ordinary people. After the revolution, new housing was built, but the housing stock remained insufficient. Housing draws heavily on capital, which the government needed urgently for the construction of industry. In addition, Nazi invaders destroyed one-third to one-half of Soviet dwellings during the Second World War (Sherman, 1969).

City-dwellers typically lived in apartment buildings owned by the enterprise in which they worked or by the local government. Rents were dirt cheap by law, about two to three percent of the family budget, while utilities were four to five percent (Szymanski, 1984; Keeran and Kenny, 2004). This differed sharply with the United States, where rents consumed a significant share of the average family budget (Szymanski, 1984), and still do.

Food staples and other necessities were subsidized, while luxury items were sold well above their costs.

Public transportation was efficient, extensive, and practically free. Subway fare was about eight cents in the 1970s, unchanged from the 1930s (Szymanski, 1984). Nothing comparable has ever existed in capitalist countries. This is because efficient, affordable and extensive public transportation would severely limit the profit-making opportunities of automobile manufacturers, petroleum companies, and civil engineering firms. In order to safeguard their profits, these firms use their wealth, connections and influence to stymie development of extensive, efficient and inexpensive public alternatives to private transportation. Governments, which need to keep private industry happy so that it continues to provide jobs, are constrained to play along. The only way to alter this is to bring capital under public control, in order to use it to meet public policy goals set out in a consciously constructed plan.

The Soviet Union placed greater stress on healthcare than their capitalist competitors did. No other country had more physicians per capita or more hospital beds per capita than the USSR. In 1977, the Soviet Union had 35 doctors and 212 hospital beds per 10,000 compared to 18 doctors and 63 hospital beds in the United States (Szymanski, 1984). Most important, healthcare was free. That US citizens had to pay for their healthcare was considered extremely barbaric in the Soviet Union, and Soviet citizens “often questioned US tourists quite incredulously on this point” (Sherman, 1969).

Education through university was also free, and stipends were available for post-secondary students, adequate to pay for textbooks, room and board, and other expenses (Sherman, 1969; Szymanski, 1984).

Income inequality in the Soviet Union was mild compared to capitalist countries. The difference between the highest income and the average wage was equivalent to the difference between the income of a physician in the United States and an average worker, about 8 to 10 times higher (Szymanski, 1984). The elite’s higher incomes afforded privileges no greater than being able to acquire a modest house and car (Kotz, 2000). By comparison, in 2010, Canada’s top-paid 100 CEOs received incomes 155 times higher than the average full-time wage. The average full-time wage was $43,000 (Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2011). An income 10 times larger would be $430,000—about what members of the capitalist elite make in a single week. A factor that mitigated the modest degree of Soviet income inequality was the access all Soviet citizens had to essential services at no, or virtually, no cost. Accordingly, the degree of material inequality was even smaller than the degree of income inequality (Szymanski, 1984).

Soviet leaders did not live in the opulent mansions that are the commonplace residences of presidents, prime ministers and monarchs in most of the world’s capitals (Parenti, 1997). Gorbachev, for example, lived in a four-family apartment building. Leningrad’s top construction official lived in a one-bedroom apartment, while the top political official in Minsk, his wife, daughter and son-in-law inhabited a two-bedroom apartment (Kotz and Weir, 1997). Critics of the Soviet Union accused the elite of being an exploiting ruling class, but the elite’s modest incomes and humble material circumstances raise serious doubt about this assessment. If it was indeed an exploiting ruling class, it was the oddest one in human history.

Later the article goes into the effects of Russia's late start in the industrial race (having been a tsarist feudal shithole at the turn of the 20th century when America was already industrialized), the hobbling of their productive capacity through supporting their allies (thus diverting their best minds from social industrial roles into the military) and the Reagan Doctrine whose stated goal was to undermine and destroy Soviet power.

By the mid-1980s, it was clear in both Washington and Moscow that the Soviet Union was in trouble. It was not that the system of public ownership and planning was not working. On the contrary, recognizing the advantages of the Soviet system, the United States itself had emulated it to stimulate innovation in its own economy. Moreover, the Soviet economy was still reliably expanding, as it had done every year in peacetime since Stalin had brought it under public control in 1928. However, defending the country in the face of a stepped up Cold War was threatening to choke off economic growth altogether. It was clear that Moscow’s prospects for keeping pace with the United States militarily, while at the same time propping up allies under attack by US-fuelled anti-communist insurgencies and overthrow movements, were far from sanguine. The United States had manoeuvred the Soviet Union into a trap. If Moscow continued to try to match the United States militarily, it would eventually bankrupt itself, in which case its ability to deter US aggression would be lost. If it did not try to keep pace, it could no longer deter US aggression. No matter which way Moscow turned, the outcome would be the same. The only difference was how long it would take the inevitable to play out.

The USSR was not an idealized, controlled experiment in which the sole variable of economic planning was evaluated while keeping all others constant. It was a messy, rapid experiment undertaken in a century of turmoil by a country that achieved spectacular progress despite incredibly humble beginnings relative to the rest of the world. To hold up the USSR, with its draconian single-party rule and cultural police force, as an example of what happens when economies are democratically planned and operated, is not just dishonest, but self-defeating in light of the many accomplishments they nonetheless made. Had they not been stomped out like just about every other threat to imperial interests, they might have flourished in many ways. It should encourage us to pursue alternatives to capitalism, taking stock of the conditions that led to the decline of the Soviet experiment without buying into Cold War propaganda.

Well, it's very convenient to blame USSR problems on the west. Failed systems always do that. Actually I don't think that the USSR failed. It just that it didn't produce as well as western countries. There were always chronic shortages. As an aside, my wife worked at a very successful owner owned company in the US. She did very well there. Company name is Winco. There was no secret government police trying to shut them down due their lack of capitalist owners. Vietnam is a communist country. They aren't terribly different from the USSR. But they don't post a threat to anyone. They aren't expanding. And the US government is trying to contain them. But anyway, I've debated this with socialists many times over the years. We'll never get anywhere.

Would you at least agree with me that countries should allow people to emigrate away if they don't like their system? Again, I'd love to see a true Marxist system make a go of it. Let's see if it works. Start off small, attract people because the system works. I do believe that smaller worker owned companies can succeed under the right circumstances. I've found that as they grow and become complex, that they don't work as well.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

An excellent article on the reality of living in the Soviet Union and why it collapsed:

An observation on this:

I see nothing about what really did in the Soviet Union: The fax machine.

The Soviet Union was to a large degree a Potemkin state. They relied on the control of information to keep order. Copy machines were quite restricted.

The fax machine, however, to be useful had to be widely deployed--and a fax machine is a form of a copy machine. They lost their near monopoly on the "truth".

It's like what China is trying to fight these days with e-mail and social media. Their people are only allowed access to systems that the government can monitor and censor.