I try to be a very loud champion of nuance when it comes to history. Saying that Stalin or Trump weren’t responsible for every stupid or evil decision made while they were in power is technically true and must often be placed in context. In this case, the context is that the vast majority of the stupid and evil decisions made by underlings were made to please their superiors and up and up ultimately to the man who set the course for those decisions. Stalinism and Trumpism could not exist in an environment in which their followers operated on the basis of what they thought was “best” rather than on the definition of “best” that radiated downward from those in charge.
Stalin eventually eliminated virtually all those who balked at his vision whereas Trump is facing continual blowback from his opponents, a reflection of the fundamental differences in the two forms of government. (Trump, who has shrewdness rather than intelligence, tried to remove all internal balkers from his government in his second term, only to find, as Stalin did, that incompetent loyal toadies promulgating his vision lead to a mounting pile of disasters. One system could bury them, in several senses, the other, as Trump is realizing, cannot. You don’t need to know Marx to see those parallels.)
How do you think people make money from owning a company in the current world? Generally by having a job at the company (unchanged under the OP’s proposal, although presumably they couldn’t pay themselves an “unfair” amount) or by selling stock that they own (unchanged under the OP’s proposal) or by taking a loan against stock that they own (unchanged under the OP’s proposal). Am I missing something?
I think this is important to note that our American system of government makes us the Best Country in the World because it was designed with a series of controls that provide a stable mechanism for failure and recovery in the event of corrupt or incompetent leadership.
Most ideologies seem take an approach of "as long as we select perfect, competent leaders who perfectly follow or religious, economic, and political dogma, everything will run perfectly! Then inevitably they collapse or the system is stuck with them until they die and some new leaders appears who fools everyone into thinking THEIR religious, economic, and political dogma is really the correct one and if everyone just follows THEM, everything will run perfectly.
Our system has worked for 250 not because we picked perfect leaders but because the Founding Fathers knew that at some point, some asshole would be in charge and they designed the system to be so convoluted that even the shittiest ruler could only fuck it up so much for a limited time.
Well, you currently have the most ruthlessly corrupt, self-serving, and utterly incompetent president the US has ever seen. Where are these controls and why aren’t they working? Congress is supposed to be a check on presidential power, and Congress is AWOL, having literally done nothing – they may as well not exist. The Supreme Court has done very little, and Trump is working around the very few rulings that have been against him. Meanwhile important national institutions are being seriously damaged and international relations with the US are at a historic low point. So what’s being done?
ETA: I’m not sure why your post here links back to my post in the other thread. It’s not in any way responsive to anything I said there.
It’s actually the opposite. Parliamentary systems, for example, particularly those in the Westminster tradition, make it far easier to get rid of an incompetent or corrupt leader than the US presidential system. A good example is that the UK has had five different prime ministers in just the last four years.
As long as ~47% of the voting public prefers even Donald Trump to the Democrats, and the Republicans can leverage this into just enough of a bare majority to block any congressional action against Trump, we’ll have the president we deserve. That is, in a terrible sense, democracy.
Well the simplest answer is that all three branches of the federal government are currently being held by a particular strain of political ideology. I can’t even call it a “party” at this point because it’s been hollowed out and replaced by a cult of personality devoted to the whims of a single person. And it is correct that this is not how it was intended to work. The idea originally was that the different branches of the federal government would protect their own power based on simple human jealousy. Members of Congress would want to protect their own power via a vis the presidency. Same goes for the supreme court. But what we have right now are a bunch of politically aligned people in different positions of power covering for one another and marching in lockstep every bit as much as a line of Nazis wearing jackboots. They’ve been convinced, or were always ideologically inclined to, value power and loyalty over the law or the good of the country in general. The system, to me at the very least, seems fundamentally broken at this point.
Right now this very second, nothing can be done at least not legally. The mechanisms, (impeachment, removal, the 25th amendment, etc…) that were intended to be used in situations like this are being controlled by the very people who have that overwhelming loyalty to that one individual. That loyalty is short circuiting the way the law was intended to work.
That’s why all eyes are on the midterms in November. It’s the first chance we’re going to get to be able to correct some of this mess as small and ineffective as those efforts may seem right now. And it’s all going to come down to how people vote.
And in a few years someone else will be in charge and the political landscape will look different. The United States isn’t going to scatter into its component states like the Soviet Union.
But I’m not sure what any of this has to do with “Stalin’s version of communism”. I don’t think that statement, about benefits being tied to work, says anything about the underlying political structure that is supposed to execute it. I suppose political structure is loosely tied to economic structure, but only loosely. I don’t see any reason why our democracy is more or less likely to execute “to each according to their work” than a parliamentary democracy, for instance.
As Brian Aldiss (I think) put it, they all focus on solving the small problems of how to deliver each person his or her fair share, while passing over the big problem of how to get make each person be content with his/her fair share and no more.
Did they believe in the hyper-idealistic version of communism? Probably not; but I would say that they believed in Marxism (as adapted to their circumstances by Lenin). That is, they were absolutely enchanted by the idea that societies could be engineered, and that they could leapfrog the doomed-to-eventually-die capitalist system by jumping directly to socialism without a “bourgeois” phase first. That a rationally planned economy and society could outperform a system that merely produced millionaires. Their failing was that capitalism really did produce advancement and improved living standards (if only as a byproduct), while in the USSR political interests soon dispensed with the “rational” part.
That this wasn’t a mere one-off aberration, a corruption of “true” communism, seems to be backed up by the subsequent history of virtually every major communist movement. Somehow, irrespective of Marxism as an economic theory, it seems politics always takes over.
Lenin wrote a very detailed and involved study of how in fact tsarist Russia, which had abolished serfdom a few years before the US abolished slavery, was in fact becoming a capitalist economy. That was not just factories and industries but included agriculture, where former serfs were now more like wage labourers and sharecroppers. It is true that Marx suggested Russia could build on the communal structures and traditions of the peasant mir, and so bypass capitalism, but that had nothing to do with Lenin’s ideas. Quite the contrary.
To argue that only “socialists” thought about “engineering society” is a little naive. Capitalists too engineer society, and those who think “the market” somehow gives everyone an equal say in this engineering might ask, who voted with their money to put billions of dollars into the machinery of empire, slavery, war, AI, data centres, and Labubus.
Capital and capitalism and capitalists do a lot more than just create millionaires. That the crimes of slavery and enclosures and imperialism and genocide and the Industrial Revolution happened a while ago should not mislead us. Any system that works on the Soprano principle of “This thing’s a pyramid, since time immemorial. Shit runs down hill, money goes up” cannot be said to be free, democratic, or just.
Yes, you’re missing dividends. You’re also missing the fact the these businesses wouldn’t exist in the first place under the OPs plan. Who is going to start these companies and with what capital? Where is the incentive to start a business? Do we expect the government to create all the companies that will connect the customers and the laborers? Part of investing is assuming risk. If investing becomes all risk and no reward, then the only way to start a business and hire more laborers is for the government to do it. Good luck with that. There is no incentive to innovate. No competition, no progress, no new ideas.
