Lenin does sound awfully like socialism propaganda. Or more in essence, the desire for egalitarian utopia written by pseudo-philosophers (neither economists, nor engineers, nor mathematicians, nor any based-in-logic scientific field) without having any such social system in place and only dreaming. USSR did not go well, in any way, as an aside.
I can understand the desire for a push for more socialistic government reforms, but what needs to just happen is European semi-capitalism semi-socialism to just be more controlled, especially with regards to tax avoidance, and anti-monopolisation, and then to government mandated climate-change-fighting policies such as heavy (and unavoidable) taxing on pollution.
Looking back into old books and spouting the same-old propagandist battlecries does not do much to the conversation, and actually tries to derail it, instead of simply pointing “yeah that’s bad, maybe they should have done this, I did the math [or maybe this other person <link> did the math]”.
From my coarse perspective, given your input, what Engels wrote (which would be even more dated) maybe takes in more perspectives. But then, we weren’t entirely talking about Engels before. Scope broadens.
My very first comment was about your (not entirely hidden) socialistic propaganda style of writing. The points you tried to make in your very first post would likely be valid, but instead they were railing the discussion in a direction of socialistic revolution, because of ACs.
In no way was my response anti-communism propaganda. I just disliked the phrasing which clearly shows your desire to drop the old-school battlecries without a directed objective. (Unless you desire to just include all objectives without second guess, from books, but then be sure to include all).
The general problem I have (which is empirical and not substantiated here) is that Lenin himself, while likely incredibly intelligent, was not, by trade and thus biggest chunk of his time, a mathematician, or an economist, so while he can read the papers, having a fully informed opinion on the matter is a dubious idea.
Reasons why I am so jaded and critical is that many fields these days (especially lacking rigorous peer review) fall victim to innability to discern fact from fiction. Specifically for philosophy, feels like the field has diverged from mathematics and physics in an ununderstandable way, where philosophy tries to be a voice of reason in humanity’s subjective reality of society while ignoring mathematics and pure formal logic. To me this is insane. Especially for a field that was once exactly that: mathematics, physics and trying to understand the natural world. In general, the field has been critiqued for empirically arguing that its education is actually formative for logical thinking 1 2.
The reasons I am jaded at dated books, is because the way of thinking can be so different, even in physics, many papers from early 20th century have god in the picture or see the human as some kind of special consciousness in the picture of the universe.
The first paragraph I completely agree.
Nazi Germany was indeed defeated by allied forces. And Russia definitely played a large part in it. However, the way it did, was not due to industrialization. It was due to an insane amount of conscription that is well-known as a meat-grinder. 9 million military dead (versus 4.3 million military from Nazis. Note: Nazis weren’t only fighting USSR.) was not a mark of an industrialized nation cranking out well-prepared, well-rationed, well-equipped soldiers, it was a feudal state throwing meat at the problem (or rather opportunity). Among other atrocities such as forced famine Holodomor.
The time of the cold war, Russia was barely scraping by to keep the narrative of “Great superpower” alive, it was only until Chernobyl, Gorbachev that USSR finally imploded and all was slowly unraveled. If 1970s USSR was this great superpower, then somehow 10 years later it fell to stagnation and then collapse? What? With people coming out from the iron curtain amazed at how simple people in foreign countries had lived, the variety of food, the quality of engineering, of clothes they had.
All the while illegal speculators were a huge problem, and simple food items were “always out of stock” throughout the whole USSR’s life. You just had to know the right people and pay the right money to live normally. That is, after you waited for 3 hours to get bread.
Personally, USSR achieved limited industrialization, while funneling unfathomable amounts of money into shiny things such as space exploration, while people had a hard time getting bread. To me, this is still close to feudalism.
Europe has achieved the highest quality of life in the world not by a planned economy, but by mediating the inherent problems of capitalism (monopolism, elitism, class warfare) and complete socialism (government overreach, lack of freedom, lack of democracy). This is what I said is most prudent to continue, but it requires maintenance from strong-willed people.
That is indeed a central problem, slightly reduced by import taxes. Obviously a full solution should include some international cooperation, and if it isn’t possible (and seems it isn’t) sanctions and heavier import taxes should follow. Or some taxes on import that take into account pollution at the importing source.
I don’t see how your example of corruption is novel. Corruption is indeed something that must be fought, and it wouldn’t disappear in a socialist society, as it didn’t USSR (where you could get anything for favors if you knew the right people).
The 20th century period across Europe was indeed a rough one, many countries went fascist (Spain, Portugal, Russia, briefly: Austria, Greece, Germany, Italy). Still, I don’t think it’s a novel example. And it’s also not an example against the current state of Europe, it’s an example of the inequality and volatility of European countries at the time.
The idea behind representative democracy is that I cannot do the work of a law-maker, deal with tax policy details while also living a life, so I elect someone whom I think I can trust.
If I have no trust in the system, I will go to the streets, as it was always the case. And yes, in this sense, we hold a lot of thankfulness for those that went to the streets before us to bring us to where we are now.