Orwell was certainly not a fan of Soviet communism. In fact, an especially astute reader of "Animal Farm" may notice subtle hints concerning Orwell's opinion of communism.
The best thing about animal farm is that it tells you that it doesn't matter what someone tells you they want to do, once they have power, they are likely be corrupted by it.
Therefore one should trust no system that depends on a few people being trustworthy, the system itself should have self defense mechanisms and limits both in scope and in time, for wielding power.
Communism or at least the soviet flavor failed completely on this last count, and I'm generally not aware of how to make it work without significant centralized power. Social democracies seem to have a nice balance but in online discussion it's like people are either Milton Friedman or Marx apologists and nobody in the middle.
That's true, but it's easy to misrepresent if you don't include another important insight:
"I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are the good people and the bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides." -- Lord Vetinari (by way of Terry Pratchett)
Really? I call. There has to at least be a shade even though I think he was incorrect.
Because otherwise all bosses would be equally shitty and you would not be able to foresee with uttermost certainty how bad people will become shitty bosses when promoted to power.
It is equally obvious in the military how you know who will turn out to be really bad people once promoted to sergeants.
The upshot is that "Okay, we just need to find someone who power will reveal is not shitty." does not and cannot work in the general case (of amounts of power sufficently large to be worth abusing - your 'good' sergeants are still sergeants, not generals or absolute autocrats).
> The best thing about animal farm is that it tells you that it doesn't matter what someone tells you they want to do, once they have power, they are likely be corrupted by it.
I think it was more that a system will abused by the extent to which abuse is possible. Someone benevolent (in the book snowball who was a stand in for Trotsky) will get out maneuvered by someone willing to weaponize all available power (Napolean in the book, Stalin). It’s possible to have someone good for a time (there are occasionally successful monarchs), but the system is not resilient to bad actors.
Norms or good intentions are not enough, you have to look at incentives and what abuse is possible within the system.
The US is a more resilient system (trump failed to hold onto power despite best efforts), but even so it has weaknesses in places governed primarily by norms. A political system needs to be evaluated by its outcomes in practice, not hypothetical “best case” implementations that ignore incentives.
I think you might be getting too caught up in people, rather than interests.
Even if no individual retains power, you could still have a particular interest (a corporation, a guild, an industry body, an ethnicity) corrupting the legislative, executive or judicial functions of government in their favour.
But that's just replacing one system in the consideration for another. An organization isn't a person, much like a government is. While it might have persistence, it's a gestalt of the individuals fulfilling different functions within it.
The idea that an organization can corrupt a government is just expressing the same issue: the system gets exploited to the extent that exploitation is possible.
The US is not particularly resilient. FDR got 3 terms and would have probably got a 4th, GWB pre-Katrina had enough political capital to abolish the 2-terms limit had he dared to do so... GWB also widely abused his presidential powers, and never faced any consequences. Trump had to resort to violence simply because he was too weak.
FDR did not have to do any maneuvering whatsoever to get his 4 terms - Grant had already run for a 3rd before him, as had Teddy Roosevelt. There was no rule against it an the people wanted him in power, so he stayed in power. Similarly, GWB didn't run for a third term, regardless of what he "could have" done. Neither of your examples are very strong here.
The point is that the US system, by itself, has no really-strong guarantees against tyrannical rule. The overall political culture of US voters is what produced the results they got, not the system by itself.
This is true in reverse too: for example, Italians have been tinkering with their electoral system for 30 years now, but one way or the other they continue to change their rulers almost every year. Systems can make some mechanisms more or less awkward, but in the end it's the shared political norms that make the real difference.
You can read a lot of the old discussions between the founders Madison, Hamilton, etc. and the type of abuse they were worried about and how they thought the structures they put in place would reduce risk.
There is also an element of culture required among the population too that’s necessary.
> “I have already intimated to you the danger of parties in the state, with particular reference to the founding of them on geographical discriminations. Let me now take a more comprehensive view, and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally.
“This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but, in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries, which result, gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of Public Liberty.”
My take away is that how societies function is deeply deeply ingrained. Now were going to do things different runs head long in people expectation on whats legitimate. In particular effecting change by wholesale murdering people tends to just make things worse not better.
YouTube video comments, Reddit subs, Twitt…er I mean X. Probably Facebook. Occasionally Hacker News. In my experience mostly ad hoc rather than one big town hall on politics, though those may exist.
"Industrialism" (I lack a better term) is the real bane here. But it's sort of more than that, right?
At the macroscopic level I think it's fair to analogize humanity as a system searching for equilibrium. But we can also do work on ourselves through technical and cultural revolutions. My foray into the past, watching the present, and my projections of the future all paint the classic "monkeypaw" trope. We cure childhood disease and population booms, increases the breadth of the economy, consumes masses of fuel and component elements while jointly polluting everything... We destabilize the system, creating novel problems of various sclae, and it just repeats ad nauseum. It doesn't matter what system you use, as long as we're complicating things as such none of them will ever "succeed" because they require some ideal state approximation that we will never let arise. In engineering everything is a compromise, you can't have your cake and eat it too, etc...
Neither Marx nor Friedman are really wrong, per se, but they can't be right, either. From there it's just a matter of moral convictions, at least in my opinion, which paints everything with an even less discernible gray.
Quoting: "We cure childhood disease and population booms, increases the breadth of the economy, consumes masses of fuel and component elements while jointly polluting everything... We destabilize the system, creating novel problems of various sclae, and it just repeats ad nauseum. It doesn't matter what system you use, as long as we're complicating things as such none of them will ever "succeed" because they require some ideal state"
Yesterday, i saw people disputing at the internet. I'd not read nor join their conflict, but made my jokes about. For today i intended to read, how and what they said.
Quoting (another Topic on HN) some Posts more: "Further: progress will occur on real-world problems that can be solved by those methods, making those applications dominant throughout society." (especialy everything looks like its natural to someone)
Jesssus! They need a pulling-horse, that dies... (-;
"Taste was bitter at the time, but it was never going to be forever. In 2018 models had 100e6 parameters, and in 2013 GPT4 has (wild guess) 2e12 parameters [0]. Conservatively that's 500% per year. At it's peak, hardware never improved at that rate and has since slowed down dramatically. So it was always going to end, and further advancement was always going to revert being driven by a neural net of some sort." The interesting question when neural net will end up driving it.
"Posits that making a huge model won't be a competitive strategy for long because it gets to expensive in terms of heavy quantization."
# ...you may also like to read about: "KYBERNETIK", "Prozessablaufmaschinen", Bottleneck... (calms)
> I'm generally not aware of how to make it work without significant centralized power.
You get rid of the need for power entirely. Communism, by definition, is free of state. That hinges on achieving post-scarcity.
The Communist Party’s primary tenant is achieving post-scarcity to one day usher in communism. The Soviet model failed, really, because they never got there. Probably not because of a poor power dynamic, but because post-scarcity was, and still is, beyond our grasp. It may not even be possible.
When you think about it, the Soviet model is fundamentally designed to fail! If everything went according to plan, it would have fallen to communism. It was never meant to be sustainable.
> Communism, by definition, is free of state. That hinges on achieving post-scarcity.
While Communists sometimes proclaimed that as a utopian future, it is hard to see how it could have come to pass. Firstly because communism would need some kind of perpetual enforcement apparatus for its ancillary goals like ensuring an end to religion and belief in the supernatural.
Secondly, that political philosophy put so much emphasis on the working masses as the class to support and identify with, that one doubts it would permit a future where there were no longer any working masses. I’m reminded of some Maoist literature I once found in a Chinatown bookshop: in discussing the Peking Man fossil, the book claimed that what separated Man from the apes was his ability to labor, and if a person did not work hard, he was not a true human being.
Leninist-derived forms of communists argue for a transitional period, but many other forms of socialism and communism argues it needs to come to pass by destroying the state, and Marx himself shifted towards that, e.g. when after the Paris Commune criticised them not for not replacing the state but for not going further in tearing down the old state (a shift that gave the basis for e.g. libertarian Marxism)
That was also the principal criticism against both Marx and later the Bolsheviks from the left: That rather than "need some kind of perpetual enforcement apparatus", given Marx own criticism of the state as a tool for class oppression you could not hope to reform or take over the state without risking a recreation of the same problems as the state tries to maintain its authority, but need to destroy the state immediately. A criticism that precipitated the anarchists leaving the First International, but also many later splits.
With respect to religion, the notion tend to be that ancillary goals like an end to religion would come simply from removing poverty and providing education, from the thinking that people flock to religion to seek comfort when their lives are hard, and so it's not necessary to do anything about it per se.
> that one doubts it would permit a future where there were no longer any working masses.
The very basis for the rise of socialist thought was the notion that the rise of capitalism made a level of productivity possible where the amount of labour necessary to sustain society would drop.
Marx spends the first half of the first chapter of the Communist Manifesto fanboying over the productivity increases made possible by capitalism and describes its downfall as coming from crises of simultaneous over-production and under-employment - in other words a sharp reduction in the need for labour, but without the social structure to allow the labour and its proceeds to be shared.
So in that sense, maybe still "working masses" but masses no longer limited by a need to maximise hours of work to earn a living.
For me as an anarcho-communist, the problem with religion isn't believing in something supernatural per se, it's the fact that organised religion is just another hierarchical apparatus (like the state) which gives some people power over others. Christian anarchism is quite an influential strain for example, and I'm sure the other major religions probably have groups with similar ideas.
So I don't think ending religion would be a specific goal, not for me anyway. Of course, if someone starts some cult somewhere or starts telling people some god said they should be in charge well then that's a problem, but I think that goes beyond the specifics of religion.
It always comes back to hierarchies in my opinion. Whether it's racism, sexism, organised religion, capitalism, or whatever–the root of the problem is one group of people having power over others.
In such a future, what do you do, then, with people who actually want hierarchies? The most important virtue for a monastic, for example, is obedience, and myriads of people deliberately seek out that lifestyle.
Well as Marx stated, whoever doesn't have the proletariat mentality should be exterminated.
The practical problem (of course apart from the moral for the rest of us who are not Marxists) is, how do you exterminate a group of people without a state?
That's why anarcho-Communism/Marxism is an oxymoron, collectivism needs someone to dictate and organize the collective action, it cannot be stateless.
> how do you exterminate a group of people without a state?
Communism, and thus the state being left behind, cannot happen until post-scarcity is achieved. Once post-scarcity is realized, why would you care if some still hold that mentality? They are only considered to be a hinderance in the days leading up to post-scarcity becoming a reality and during that time there is still a state.
> Well as Marx stated, whoever doesn't have the proletariat mentality should be exterminated.
Citation? Multiple searches turned up nothing like this for me.
> That's why anarcho-Communism/Marxism is an oxymoron, collectivism needs someone to dictate and organize the collective action, it cannot be stateless.
This presumes "collectivism", but many forms of socialism sees enabling extreme individualism as the goal. E.g libertarianism was founded by the anarcho-communist Joseph Dejacque
"Far from opposing the so-called excesses – instances of popular vengeance against hated individuals or against public buildings with which hateful memories are associated – the workers’ party must not only tolerate these actions but must even give them direction."
What I never understood about communism is what's the point of adding it if you already have post-scarcity? Say you got there, just keep using what got you there. And if to get there you need an oppressive "temporary" state, then I don't want it.
The idea is that if that the capability to be post scarcity does not equal being actually post scarcity, and so bringing about actual post-scarcity means ensuring that what is produced actually gets into the hands of everyone one way or the other. One might imagine many different ways of achieving that, but it wouldn't magically happen.
What are you adding, exactly? Communism is just a thought experiment that imagines what the world will be like when post-scarcity is achieved. Star Trek is a more modern adaptation of the same thought experiment.
Perhaps you are referring to actionable ideas we have come up with over the years to try and push us towards post-scarcity?
I'm an anarchist, but you can read on for example council communism, which too is a libertarian socialism, it's Marxist and it is against Marxism-Leninism.
> Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.
If you think I missed the sarcasm, look in the mirror.
Cold War era middle schoolers in the US had that book as required reading in some parts of the country. At least it got us out of reading Shakespeare for a few months.
You don’t assign complex reading to middle schoolers.
Ha. You’re right.
Sarcasm via text is, indeed, easy to miss (and probably more befitting Reddit than HN.)
I try to avoid snark on this site as it’s greatest value, to me anyway, is precisely it’s absence of same.
Mea culpa.
There is nothing subtle about Animal Farm's critique of Soviet Communism. From Wikipedia:
>The Guardian on 24 August 1945 called Animal Farm "a delightfully humorous and caustic satire on the rule of the many by the few". Tosco Fyvel, writing in Tribune on the same day, called the book "a gentle satire on a certain State and on the illusions of an age which may already be behind us". Julian Symons responded, on 7 September, "Should we not expect, in Tribune at least, acknowledgement of the fact that it is a satire not at all gentle upon a particular State – Soviet Russia? It seems to me that a reviewer should have the courage to identify Napoleon with Stalin, and Snowball with Trotsky, and express an opinion favourable or unfavourable to the author, upon a political ground. In a hundred years perhaps, Animal Farm may be simply a fairy story; today it is a political satire with a good deal of point".
Symons's point is that The Guardian and Fyvel called Animal Farm "delightfully humorous" and "gentle satire" because that was the only way they could blunt the sharp attack aimed directly at the USSR, by insinuating that it was not actually serious.
