EU is indeed a paper tiger. Europeans do not understand that the biggest threat to their sovereignty always has been America, not Russia nor any other Asian country and they are about to pay the price for it
Europeans have tried to topple the Republic since its inception in October 1917. The young democracy could barely catch its breath that Westerners tried to take over it. Maybe that explains their behaviour, don't you think?
Everyone wants central planning until the appointed central planners do something that disadvantages them specifically. Then they suddenly remember they want national sovereignty to protect their interests from the central planners.
That's how you have massive pro an anti EU splits in the same country. Because central planning tends to produce massive economic gaps between the winners and losers of the planning policies.
That's a problem a much bigger country like China doesn't really face surprisingly, despite having central planners, and despite having plenty of different nationalities! Maybe Euros could learn a bit from them and democratic centralism too
China is only interested in its minorities as a means to promote tourism. Horrible example. Children are put into boarding schools in many places where they are forced to use Mandarin.
It is currently bussing in lots of Mandarin speakers into Hong Kong to undermine Cantonese. It has done a good job of undermining Tibetan as well.
China will destroy or subsume all native culture in every nation/land it gains control of. China is following the Colonial model of divide, conquer/conquest and containment, except this is all happening in the modern era.
What's bad? They're being punished if they speak their native language and are taken away from their home communities. No better than the stupid boarding schools minorities were sent to in the west.
In both cases, they still learn their respective language in parallel to Mandarin, which is the national language. So I don't understand how this is evil or smth.
From what I get from this article, is that the price for not having my activity directly linked to my identity is under 5 quid for a one time payment. Pretty sweet.
Soviet society was communist, don't fall for the real Communism has never been tried ruse. Soviet society was one of the examples of how Communism at a large scale can end up looking, others are e.g. Cambodia under Pol Pot, China under Mao, Cuba under Castro, Venezuela under Maduro, etc. The things these societies have in common is that they were/are repressive, that the Party/ the government claims it was/is working for 'the people' and that there was/is a clear distinction between Party members and the 'common folk' with the former having access to perks not available or allowed to the latter.
Communism at a large scale does not work because it goes against human nature - we're not bees or ants or other similar animals but rather belligerent primates with a cultural predilection for living in families and clans. It is there where Communism can work, at a small enough scale so that leechers and moochers can be put in their place and there is no (need for a) Party. As soon as the size of the Communi(ty) gets so large that any individual can no longer check on all of the others Commun(ism) no longer works since it offers far too many opportunities for less scrupulous individuals to leech of others and for ideologists to rise to power 'in service of the people'.
> Communism at a large scale does not work because it goes against human nature - we're not bees or ants or other similar animals but rather belligerent primates with a cultural predilection for living in families and clans.
And yet, we don't live as such animals and our collective behavior changed throughout history thanks to our reasoning capabilities taking over the inner "animal".
> our collective behavior changed throughout history thanks to our reasoning capabilities taking over the inner "animal".
That 'inner animal' comes out the moment the shelves in the supermarkets are empty and the electronic payment systems are down. Those reasoning capabilities may have put a thin cultural veneer over the beast but it is still there, ready to defend itself and its own if push comes to shove as well it should - cultures have a way of collapsing when times get hard.
Tell that to China, Vietnam! Life's never been this sweet since they applied scientific socialism. It's been so successful there that Westerners are getting angry and they are accusing them of "flooding other markets" or of "overproduction". They caught up in less than 80 years! Imagine what they will be able to do in 50 years :)
"Scientific" is opposed to "idealistic" in the Marxian traditions. It opposes anarchism and social reformists. It is scientific because it seeks to understand the root causes of all major human historical events that passed and those that have yet to happen. And until now, history gave reason to Historical and Dialectical Materialism, which are respectively the scientific and philosophical pillars of Marxism.
Regarding the markets, considering their ever growing export sector, I wouldn't worry too much for now ;)
"Scientific" socialism versus what you label as "idealistic" socialism is the equivalent of Protestantism versus Catholicism: two iterations of a religion (it is not that commonplace yet to see Marxism and the Hegelian dialectics from which it originated as non-theistic religions but replace 'god' with 'man-as-god' and you'll understand the comparison). Both Catholics as well as Protestants consider their religion the true one while the others may have heard the bell but are lost when it comes to locating the clapper. The same goes for all your various strains of Marxism, good for endless philosophising by academics as well as for being regurgitated by Lenin's [1] 'useful idiots'. How many angels can stand on the point of a pin? Does historical materialism show the inevitability of the end of Capitalism? Philosophise away but don't forget that's all it is: philosophising without basis in actual reality.
[1] whether Lenin ever used the phrase I'll leave in the middle but the concept stands
It was founded by Marxists to fulfil Marxist dogma. Either Soviet Marxism was not as predictive of reality as it liked to pretend to be or it compromised itself. Any system which says "my way or the highway", and that it alone is scientific, is inevitably going to lead to lead to oppression in practice whether it's Marxist dogma or the subject of this article.
Yanis Varoufakis himself attended private school and his father in law was one of the biggest industrialists in Greece. I'm sceptical about how much he knows about working class realities.
For the purposes of discussing the article, Yanis's grasp of working class realities is moot; his thesis is that:
From this perspective, just as the Soviet Union was a feudal-like industrial society pretending to be a workers’ state, the United States today is performing a splendid impersonation of a technofeudal state
I don't agree with that interpretation either. The USA is not very feudal at all, yet. I live in a country which is still partly feudal and was even more feudal when I was a child. Ordinary Americans often have a very different attitude to life, less deferent to government than more feudal countries, and more independent minded.
It may well head towards technofeudalism, but I dispute that. With automation, the peasantry become dispensable to the ruling class and that isn't very feudal at all. Feudalism is a system where money and power flows upwards. In feudalism, the lords are dependent on the peasantry for food, goods and troops... Which is not the case when all these are provided by machines.
That's a nice parallel to the article, which points out that the biggest fans of capitalism haven't managed to actually create their predicted free markets.
Bengal's famine occurred because British imperial government (not market forces) shifted food resources away to support the war effort. Ireland's famine occurred within a largely feudal system, and has been followed by massive land reforms within Ireland. It is arguable if either occurred due to "free market forces". For what it's worth, the massive famines in the USSR and PRC didn't take place due to free market forces either.
The problem with the free market vs Marxism argument is that they are both materialist. These systems know the price of things and real value of nothing.
I cannot reply to the link in the Irish famine above. Very debatable if most of Ireland was "capitalist" at the time especially outside the cities. It was mostly feudal, with an anglicised (or effectively English) aristocracy and peasantry, operating in basically the same way that they had done in the Middle Ages.
The free market today (so called) is heavily managed by governments, leading to a kind of centralised control which converges with what Marxism produces in practice. Neither deliver what they promise.
Marxism (and capitalism) sell themselves as ground upwards movements but are in fact top down. They are both based around materialism which leads to a cynical attitude to life and individuals.
The free market does exist, but not where it is supposed to. The black market sometimes acts as a free market... As do car boot/yard sales... Precisely because it is not interfered with by the authorities all the time. Putting everything online is going to increase government interference.
We are heading to a centralised command economy. Marxists want more of that, not less, but sell it as liberating the working classes.
> We are heading to a centralised command economy. Marxists want more of that
Marxists want the working class whose labor is applied to capital in production to direct capital, and thereby production, rather than capital being privately owned and its owners directing labor, and thereby production. While the democratic centralism favored in Leninist theory and its derivatives is (at least in the theory in which it is conceived) a means of achieving that, current Western Marxists are, IME, all over the map with regard to centralism. They are more united about who should wield power over the economy than about the structure of how that power should be wielded.
> Marxists want more of that, not less, but sell it as liberating the working classes.
Well yes, because it does. You dont even need a fully planned economy, some market forces aint bad and some small bourgeois aint bad either. Bird in a cage etc etc.
Communism is no button you just have to push. It can be described as a society so prosperous that its members do not need to work anymore to live, where classes have been abolished and where the State has disappeared.
It needs to be built and engineered. Countries like China and Vietnam are going in this right direction, and they are already more prosperous, more industrious and more democratic than their western adversaries despite starting from basically scratch
The VPN trick doesnt work for YouTube on mobile anymore. I get popups saying I need to log-in or disable my VPN to watch videos. I could probably buy a silly gmail account online and link it to my YouTube app, but am afraid it will log-in my whole phone to this shady Google account.
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