[ SECRET POST #3014 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3014 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 06 pages, 130 secrets from Secret Submission Post #431.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[diet_poison]

In all honesty, how else is communism supposed to work? Give a single person or small group of people THAT kind of power over things and it's going to get ugly. The idea of the working class ruling a place as a single entity is wildly impractical, since it ignores the need for administration in any organization larger than about half a dozen people.

[cushlamochree]

This is kind of the problem with talking about leftism a lot of the time: it's really hard because there's this huge background of historical thought (like I said in my other post, 150 years of people arguing with each other). But it's not really something that's actually around in popular culture, especially these days and especially in America (for lots of reasons); the only accounts of these things that are around in the culture and the discourse are unfortunately these really weird, surface-level things. So it's frustrating to talk about, and then because it's politics people are super invested in it, and as a result you get things like the conversations going on in this thread.

All of that, I guess, is a roundabout way of saying that there are answers to those questions. A bunch of them. Like, you can probably have state centralization without it intrinsically being the totalitarian dystopia of Maoism and Stalinism. The idea of state control of the economy doesn't have to be tied to that particular way of organizing things politically. But you can also have a system where you have a democratic government that nationalizes key industries, which isn't all that crazy. You can even do crazy things like syndicalism where industries are controlled by the workers on a local level and organized in a hierarchical, federalized way from the bottom up, where the organization and administration is broadly distributed instead of concentrated with a small group of people. Obviously, there's difficulties with any of those systems, but I don't think there's any prima facie reason why any of them should be impossible. And then, on the other hand, a lot of leftists would argue that free market capitalism is open to equally fundamental criticisms.

It's all a lot of nonsense in the end, probably. But there's a bunch of different ways of answering those questions, is my point.

[diet_poison]

See, I like this comment.

You're thoughtful. :)

It doesn't seem to me like you're taking a particular stance here, which is fine, but I'm going to follow through with my comment that you replied to - having an idea of a place where authority doesn't really exist and major industries and government are organized from the ground up is understandable, but I don't think it would ever actually work because you can't even make that kind of change without someone fighting for it, which requires structure and leadership. Even if you managed to find a person who was willing to totally dissolve their authority after winning the fight and not appoint someone else to take their place, then you have a power vacuum, which is very unstable and will eventually be filled by something. People look for leaders when things get rough, and things will inevitably get rough; also, there will always be opportunists willing to prey on the masses, so to speak. Someone will fill that void.

[cushlamochree]

I think those are fair points. But I also think the concerns you're raising here are kind of fundamental problems of politics. So I don't think that it's unique to any of these hypothetical systems, and I don't think these problems would be more or less unsolvable in any of them: these are kind of just the base-level reasons why politics is hard for human beings. (I would also, in passing, make a slight alteration, which is that the problem is less someone being willing to totally dissolve their authority, and more about turning that authority into something that works in a stable, long-term way). I mean, these are also problems that existing political systems tend to run into, you know?

Also, if you're interested in this kind of thing, I strongly recommend On Revolution by Hannah Arendt, which is essentially all about this kind of thing, and the related question of how do you start a new political body after a revolution. It's mostly political/historical and not economic, and it can be some pretty heavy sledding, but I also think it's fantastic and really insightful. And also I'm a raging Arendt fanboy so I couldn't not recommend it.