Far from being a No True Communist, I think a good argument can be made that Stalin is really the only successful communist history has produced. Obviously he was terrible, but you really can't argue with his results. After Lenin basically destroyed the Soviet economy,* Stalin transformed it into an industrial powerhouse, and by the middle of WWII built the greatest war machine the world had seen up to that point, then used it to impose communism throughout Eastern Europe. Compared to Stalin, all the other notable communists--Mao, Lenin, Trotsky--were basically aimless murderers who shot people by the magazine for no particular reason other than to instill terror and hope it would magically bring about communism. Stalin had a clear plan, seized political power, killed anyone he thought might be a threat, then set about starving or killing anyone who was surplus to requirements and forced the rest to work on his grand national plan.

I'm not saying Stalin was good obviously. He was extremely bad. The reason, though, is that communism is bad. To implement it, you need to destroy a lot of people's way of life, and to force them to acquiesce to that you need to kill a bunch of them or send them to the gulag, and to keep political power while you're doing that you need to kill all your rivals. That's the path. In light of that, you can pretty much divide real world communists into three categories:

-Real Communists: Stalin only

-Aimless murderers: Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Pol Pot. Happy to kill lots of people, but lack the ability to accomplish anything through their murderers.

-Social democrats who don't like democracy: People like Castro. Laudably choose not to impose a real communist transformation on their countries, and instead aim for social democracy, except instead of the democracy part you have a king and no one has any rights.

EDIT: Forgot my footnote!:

*It is technically true that Lenin revived the Soviet economy with the NEP, but that basically meant abandoning communism so as to allow the economy to recuperate after the depredations of war communism. It's not a communist success story.

Again, not a coach, but like lots of game theory strategies, populations threatening the elites with communism is a good strategy to extract concessions and probably easier and better on the working class than executing a communist revolution.

But like any strategy, the threat has to be realistic to succeed.

It's a tough act to pull off but people with genuine working class sympathies shouldn't denigrate communism too much nor should they disinherit the implicit violence of the revolution. The threats are meaningless if they are ultimately pacifist and only seek incremental changes.

tl;dr summary: the left should absolutely embrace the violence of communism as righteous and legitimate and regrettable outcome if capitalists don't bargain with them. Like a lot of problems in modern liberal democracies, by disinheriting the actual debate, disavowing the revolutionary spirit of it, and embracing too much of the liberal aesthetic, so to speak, they've given away their best threat to use in the meta debate: we'll collude to violently just seize your ****, now what? Let's talk about how we structure things and keep that in the back of your mind as we do it. The right is increasingly laid bare that they come to the table with "well you can go starve to death and die in the street from preventable illnesses, we DGAF, do everything on our terms" so we shouldn't feel too guilty about this, it's sort of implicit in all human bargaining.

If you think that Stalin was a successful communist then it kind of was given that it provided the economic stimulus that allowed Stalin to go full communist? The NEP was specifically designed to address the missing out of capitalist industrialisation, Marxists believed at the time that transformation ran from feudalism > capitalism > socialism and Lenin understanding this tried to insert the capitalism under state control. This was the reason many on the left argued for decades as to whether it was better to interpret the USSR as a deformed / degenerated workers state or state capitalist.

In any case the workers in the USSR neither owned nor managed the industries in which they worked so a communist critique is clearly available to anyone that wants to make it.

Yeah that's incredible.

It is counterintuitive. The short answer is interest rates and the trend in interest rates have nothing to do with whether policy is loose or tight.

The Fed Funds rate was 5% in 1976. The Fed Funds rate was 10% in 1977 even before Volcker. Does that mean Volcker's predecessor was super aggressive in tightening during that time?

Your chart also shows inflation was rising during that time. You stop inflation through tight monetary policy. How could inflation be going up with tight monetary policy? It can't. Interest rates are a bad measure of Fed policy.

In the Great Recession, interest rates went to zero. Everybody howled about how insanely loose monetary policy was. The reality is policy was far too tight. Inflation was very low. Rates should have been negative.

Here is a monetary economist explaining.

http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/...money_lea.html

https://www.cnbc.com/id/101000307?view=story&$DEVICE$=native-android-tablet

Here is a quote from Friedman

I thought "what's better for capitalists and capital, capitalism or not-capitalism, chessmate commies" was bad but ****.

Define comparable. Even poor Cubans have access to water, electricity, health care, school. They do sometimes deal with food shortages but most Cubans aren't starving. So I'd probably rather be a poor Cuban than a poor person in a Third World country or a Brazilian favela or a Chinese peasant farmer or something like that.

Would you rather be a poor Cuban or a poor American? Kinda depends; do I have cancer? Am I physically able to handle the rigors of a full time job? A physically able, mentally stable poor American on the younger side probably has more upward boundaries than a poor Cuban but obviously there's a lot of variance. Since the US is just so much more wealth and we're not a bottom barrel oligarchy yet, it's probably still in almost all cases better to be a poor American than a poor Cuban. I'd rather be a poor Canadian or a poor Swede than a poor American, though.

I just thought it worth hammering home that communist countries will never crush rich capitalist ones on a lot of metrics, and shrewd communist types should obviously just concede those arguments straightaway since it's not even a contradiction of the theory.

When you look at a lot of country comparison data there's none available for Cuba, so either it's not available at all or we're going to need a real expert here to address that. I know it's not an economic sampling, but some of the Europeans here, like jalfrezi, have traveled in Cuba and could at least give their perspective.

Again, I'm not a communist and it would be a bad idea for a first world country as we can produce enough wealth and have enough social programs to be better off without it. What I would ask of the United States is that if a country like Bangladesh had a communist party and seized some of the property that imperialists hold and redistributed it*, that we not bomb them to oblivion or even isolate them. But, even that is hoping too much. A lot of foreign owned factories would be affected. The leaders would be called Pol Pot, there would be war and atrocities always happen in war and the anti-communists would have all the evidence they need.

*I don't know anything about land ownership in Bangladesh, but United Fruit (now Chiquita) still holds huge amounts of land in Central America.

You're treating Communist as just the label for a party. FDR was the most successful Democrat, but ordered internment, presided over Jim Crow and tried to take over the Supreme Court - not the most democratic president.

While I get your point, and it's a good one, people don't frequently go to Cuba afaik for a different type of life, and I can only think it's because its worse (and inb4 "but cappy propaganda").

add: I'd wager a small amount that einbert for example does not move to Cuba after these college campus revelations.

Ya, prove it.

Also DV's comparison to ACism or private property doesn't work, because the institution of private property is can be credited for prosperity at least partially if not entirely. There's a reason to believe South Koreans would expect to fare better than North Koreans.

Comparing the morals of private property to the morals of class warfare don't work, because it's comparing right to wrong, apples and oranges. Yet, it is frequently repeated by clowns.

And yes, US is better than Cuba despite DV's clownish strawman that it's Alabama football.

The comparison to ACists is that within the Austrian economists and ACist and ACist curious types is this notion that since Bretton Woods or the end of the gold standard, whatever, statists and central bankers have been hoodwinking everyone with games that delays the inevitable public debt-fueled hyper inflationary monetary crisis for...decades. Literally as long as like 70+ years now. The crisis is coming but for the central banker tricks keeping it bay, perhaps as long as the average human lifespan and into the unknowable future.

My point is even assuming the assumptions, the conclusion is a non-sequitur. If a human can live and die and literally never be exposed to the crisis because central banking hijinks can forestall hyper inflationary debt crisis forever, why would be opposed to that? That's a *defense* of central banking! I don't agree with the assumptions but by granting central bankers and statists can team up to foist financial fictions on everyone for generations to delay bad stuff from happening, that actually sounds kinda OK?

So it goes with the communist who puts aside the demands for a bloody proletarian revolution because they acknowledge the capitalists have so gamed public perceptions and satisfied essential needs that there is not really any popular appetite for a working class revolution over capital owners and management. Everyone is too distracted and zoned out on Netflix and satisfied with scraps and the NFL to bother.

If you think that, you should rethink whether the foundations of your theory make sense. There's no meaningful communism without a violent proletarian revolution and it's not sensible to describe the revolution as happening incrementally on a cosmic timescale or to really admit there's no working class demand for it. Might as well not call yourself a communist if you think the forces of global capitalism can erode a working class consciousness and revolutionary spirit with reality TV and iPhones. To be clear, I don't think that's an accurate empirical description of reality and I'm sure dereds is arguing quite this, BUT he sort of is. And if you argue that capitalists can either buy off the long term support of large amounts of the working class or buffer its revolutionary spirit then you're essentially arguing capitalism has a lot going for it; it's quite adaptable, quite successful, quite orderly and its worst characteristics can be managed effectively through bargaining with capitalists.

That's essentially where I am at, and therefore I am not a communist. I acknowledge capitalism is just too adaptable and successful to be toppled anytime soon, and so the leftist is to drive a very hard bargain with capitalists moreso than predict their inevitable destruction generations from now once we change enough hearts and minds.

So how do you explain this flock to bitcoin and other decentralized cryptocurrencies? I mean, dollar's the nuts people never get wise, and this is, if true, a feature not a bug. Why would anyone compete with the central banks in the real world if they are in either case efficient?

I dunno, how does imjosh feel about flocking to bitcoin? Isn't that thread in BFI filled RIGHT NOW with a guy who has to get a second job because he just lost his shirt with a bunch of speculative investments in bitcoins?

Not on me to explain what might be bad gambles on some recent speculative bubble investments in cryptocurrencies but why generations of ACist and Austrian type predictions about hyperinflation induced global financial crisis hasn't arrived. ACists were right all along because of some super volatility priced assets are HOT HOT HOT on reddit while basically all of the world's trades are done in worthless fiat currency is a pretty lol burden of proof shift.

This also illustrates another key difference. ACists don't need the proletariat to uniformly rise-up because they learned that they might get concessions in game theory class. They can simply produce solutions such as crypto currency.

It should be obvious that the crypto currency is actively competing with currencies, and you can look at developments and nations where there is hyper inflation risk, such as Venezuala, coincidence! They buy BitCoin! DUH

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...ezuela/534177/

Granted, it does take some extrapolation to see what's happening, and Mises could not see the invention of new currency, but it's kind've obvious. If the banks should inflate like Venezuala, then the market responds w/ more BitCoin.

Uhm no. They couldn't match what the US output was. Not only were we fighting and supplying our own troops but we were supplying the Soviets, UK and many other countries at the same time.

This gives a pretty good breakdown and you can see that they couldn't match the USA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milita...g_World_War_II

Dvaut,

Marx wasn't the only or even the first communist and there's a lot there besides the trajectory to communism. It seems like you're being unnecessarily absolutist. Could not a the New Deal full employment economic policies be called modified communism just as aptly as modified capitalism?

And I think it's lost that capitalism is ruthlessly enforced just as much as communism is, it's just that we are so indoctrinated in it that we see the specific property rights we recognize as obvious. We have a million people in prison for property crimes. The places I'm allowed to exist in this world without another person's permission are limited to the 4000sf on the lot I live on and some strips of communist roads and sidewalks that connect to property I'm not allowed to set foot on. That's freedom?

Anyway, there's the taming of capitalism by restricting it from destroying the world and taxing and redistributing profits to keep the poorest from revolting, but there's also more radical compromises of mixing systems with government employment, ownership of industries, and even limits on the amount and kind of private property that it will protect. And the last one there keeps going in the opposite direction as intellectual property rights keep expanding. The courts rolled this back recently, but legislators and regulators had naturally occurring DNA sequences as something ownable. Property rights have never been absolute in applying to everything or nothing except in the minds of fanatic ACers or I guess some communists in theory, but not in real life.

I'm not sure what I'm being asked to respond to here. I agree:

- there's more to communism than Marx but I mean the further you move away from Marxism the more the term communism is probably being abused. Not necessarily, but usually. I don't acknowledge that there's a meaningful communism without a violent proletarian revolution and redistribution of both wealth and the means of production to the working class and that will happen on a shorter time horizon than decades. If you start migrating away from those assumptions, claim they are unnecessary or a vestige of 19th century thinking and True 21st Century communism is progressive taxation, work relief programs won at the ballot box, I say that's a pretty inaccurate characterization of communism even if we agree it's a good outcome or that it's a good bit closer to communism than the status quo.
- I agree, I guess, that the New Deal could be called modified communism just as aptly as modified capitalism
- I agree capitalism is enforced with extreme ruthlessness and inhumanity

This is true, but do you know what Russia was like in 1918 compared to the US? We didn't have a huge military, but we were much much further along in industrialization generally.

Also, WW1 had an impact. Russia had 1.8 million deaths. The US had 116k. And the Russian literacy rate at the turn of the century was about 25% and in the US it was about 90%.

The Russian industrialization in that period was pretty huge.

Dvaut,

Yeah, the 2nd paragraph wasn't really arguing with you. I put a "----" to separate paragraphs, but then the 3rd paragraph I kind of came back to something similar to the first paragraph so I took it away.

Some of us ain't so good at writing.

They lost almost 2x that. The number you cite only accounts for military and not civilian. I don't dispute that they made great strides, greater than what the US made I was just correcting the record for US output.

It's pretty sad that close to 100 million people died during the 2 conflicts.

I'm really excited about where the BFI Bitcoin thread is going. I missed most of the excitement in the silver thread during the silver bubble, now is the perfect time to get in on the ground floor for some quality lolz. People are already posting yootoobes about hyperinflation and sound money and how Bitcoin will reach at least $35,000.

I guess it depends on what your criteria for being a communist are. Stalin certainly did a lot of things that seem distinctively communist to me (collectivized agriculture, fostering/imposing worldwide communist revolutions, development of a non-capitalist industrial economy).

Obviously the US had much greater industrial capacity than the USSR. I stand by the claims that: 1) the USSR was an industrial powerhouse, and 2) the Red Army was an unmatched war machine prior to atomic weapons.