Former KGB agent describes how "progressivism" met

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Not all Socialist countries are falling. Not even close. The biggest threat to the Canadian economy at the moment is the economic unrest in much of the rest of the world, especially America.

Since when has there been a stateless and classless society since Communism's conception?

*Crickets chirping*

So how can you judge Communism? No country has reached Communism yet. They're in the stage of Socialism.

Tell me you're joking.

IDK about you kid, but I'm going to enjoy the tax breaks I'll soon be getting now that Marijuana is legal in WA and many other states will follow. How about you hillbillies pay for the drug war with YOUR tax dollars from now on, eh?

I don't care how much you love capitalism, because its future is looking increasingly cloudy and if humanity survives this century, capitalism as it is now will cease to exist. Markets will crash if they are kept under control by a centralized government. Russia herself is already on the road back to communism.

Canada isn't actually very socialist. I mean, it's considered the 6th freest economy by the Heritage Institution, beating out the US in economic freedom. http://www.heritage.org/index/ranking?src=home

If that's the case, then wtf does socialism even mean?? Should the US now call itself the USSA? Should it have called itself the USSA during it's Cold War against socialism?? The absurdities abound!!

The traditional meaning, where socialism referred to nations structurally similar to the USSR in their economies, or similar to the designs of the socialist tradition end up being very easily reasoned about. The definition you're using? It's a load of BS without any conceptual clarity whatsoever.

I'd hold that we should use the traditional definition, because it is conceptually clear. I'm also sure that John Browning was referring to the traditional definition, not this much vaguer one.

Didn't Noam Chomsky destroy William Buckley in a debate?

F*ck I don't know.
Did he?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYlMEVTa-PI[/youtube]

Oh, come on. There was never a clear "traditional definition" of socialism. The closest thing approaching that would be "worker ownership of the means of production", but actually existing regimes called socialist seldom fit that ideal.

As far back as the 19th century socialism was made quite a fuzzy concept given all the "Fabian socialists" in Britain advocating Bismarckian welfare states as at least part of a reform process that would gradually lead up to "socialism". The fact that various "socialist" parties in Europe that have their origins in evolutionary socialist movements of the early 20th century created and now have reduced their objectives to maintaing a social welfare state also adds confusion to the idea of "socialism". As does the fact that various Latin American governments that have instituted social democratic reforms are called "socialist" with impunity.

The Heritage Foundation rating of the "economic freeness" of Canada is probably in part

• Politically motivated to deflate America's relative "freeness" so as to motivate calls for even more deregulation.
• Based on the fact that Canada has a more open economy when it comes to trade, whereas the US is much more protectionist.

Abacacus's "socialist Canada" allegation is probably based on the idea that Canada has single-payer healthcare (which, thanks to various American right-wingers, is now considered "socialism") and a stronger social safety net than America. This deflated notion of socialism comes, at least in part, from the efforts of various right-wingers to label Democratic attempts at tweaking America's safety net around the edges "socialist" as well as the confusion caused by the reforms of evolutionary socialists in Europe.

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0509/22445.html

Given that JohnBrowning is a dyed-in-the-wool American right-winger, I wouldn't hold it past him to consider Obamacare "socialism", btw.

Most "right wingers" these days are dog humpin', snuff munchin' hillbillies. Apparently JB's trailer park finally managed to persuade their ISP to restore service. :/

Hmm..... but wouldn't that definition work, and couldn't many existing socialist regimes be allowed in some sense because they were efforts to construct the ideal, and considered by themselves an outgrowth of it?

I mean, the major problem is that the actual regimes called socialist fail the definition so radically. However, to be honest, couldn't we make the choice to exclude or include them based upon the question or problem we're addressing. So, because they are attempts to implement socialism, it seems valid to talk about them as socialist when evaluating socialist. However, because they are failures, when talking more abstractly about ideology, it would also be fair to talk about


I don't think the efforts of earlier socialists to aid the welfare state really create fuzziness. I mean, it's not just the Fabians, but the issue of welfare state or no also was a dividing point among Marxians.

The fact that this evolved into socialist parties which are really just social democrat creates a problem. But at the same time, it's entirely valid to separate a party from a term, so in the US, we have the democratic party, but nobody makes the mistake that the democratic party's ideas are necessarily especially democratic, or that the republican party's ideas are especially republican.

That being said, even if we want to move the other direction, towards "socialist" as "social democratic", we'll still need to actually fix the term a lot, as we'll need to disentangle it from "socialism" as the worker ownership of the means of production, as the latter meaning is the one that causes the scare quotes to come up. So, the Right-wing has been exploiting the inconsistency towards their end in the use of the terms, as "socialism" is only a scary term if it means something like the USSR, but not if it means social democracy, as if it means the latter, then it just means "left wing", which... is stupid.

I appreciate your counterpoints though, and it's worth considering. How would you consider fixing up the term where it actually makes real sense in this debate, rather than mixing up ideas.


I can definitely see the first motivation, so if you look at the US's evaluation: http://www.heritage.org/index/country/unitedstates

You can notice how much it is driven by largely right-wing fears, which seem likely inflated, so take this passage:
" Corruption is a growing concern as the cronyism and economic rent-seeking associated with the growth of government have undermined institutional integrity."

However, I do think that Canada's high level is probably not as strongly ideological. I could be wrong, and these kinds of evaluations involve a kind of intention evaluation that is very flexible, and so it's easy to create all sorts of guesses. However, I would think that the Heritage Institute would want to knock down nations not the US, unless they want to uphold them as standards for the US to emulate. They don't likely want to do this with Canada.

Canada's major relative strengths(roughly 10 or more points higher than US) according to their chart are the following:
* "Fiscal freedom"
* Freedom from corruption
* Financial freedom

They did give Canada more points than the US in investment freedom, business freedom, and property rights. The only thing they give credit for relative to Canada is labor market freedom(14 points), and government spending (5 points). http://www.heritage.org/index/country/canada Maybe you can see their ideological motivations in those categories, but my feeling is that while bias undermines the integrity of this, it's not outright propaganda, as the motivations for how they handled this are hard to make clear.


Freaking right-wingers. I know, it's a ploy to conflate the anti-socialist history of the US with social democracy. It's rather stupid and annoying, and I hate these efforts at conflation, especially given that most of our allies in the Cold War had these "socialist" policies, as the US is an outlier in how it handles it's healthcare system.


That's fair enough.

The Soviet Union did create gender equality.

Women even had their own holiday in the Soviet Union.

But was not purely Communist.

Anarchism trumps Communism.

The Austrian school of economics is losing credibility with each year. As for Canada, their economy is doing extremely well even though they are hardly a truly socialist country. I've always favored authoritarian socialism over democratic socialism and ESPECIALLY capitalist dumbocracy. The belief in liberty requires an enormous faith in people that I no longer have and never will(again). I'm devotee of Thomas Hobbes. An English philosopher despised by most American schools of thought.

That's a really interesting statement, because you have to realize that the Austrian school for a very long time was mostly off of the radar. So, the fact it is on the radar now enough to lose credibility is a real accomplishment in terms of credibility. Honestly... it's actually had a real uptick in credibility in recent history. Not VERY recent history mind you, but there are scholars who consider themselves Austrian who do good work that can be published by mainstream researchers, and Austrian ideas are actually being examined which for awhile they simply weren't. Maybe you're right in the sense that Austrians gained credibility with the economic crash, and then now they're losing that, but that's probably expected. Post-Keynesians gained credibility, but I don't see them leaving the permanent mark they hoped to have.

I do see your point. Part of this has to do with Austrian populism and how that's been taken up by libertarian and conservative populists. The Mises Institute, while popularizing Austrian ideas, is also shooting it in the foot in terms of it's credibility to intellectuals by presenting a very dumb vision of Austrian economics, one easily taken in by the masses and semi-intellectuals who want a realm of specialness, but not one that can hold up to serious scrutiny. So, the form of Austrian we see on the internet is simply a result of the Mises Institute, and they're often poorly educated and holding to odious ideas.


Interesting. But wouldn't the belief in non-liberty involve a trust in people as well? I mean, it seems to me that the reason to favor liberty is really a distrust of any power-group to have dominance over the other. By denying dominance, we avoid the tyranny of power-groups by making them have to compete over power, and this can work so long as the institutional framework we've built is stable enough to allow for this competition for power without breaking down. (After all, if Microsoft tries to take over America, they could try, but they'd be smacked down pretty quickly, and they don't have much reason to think it's worth it)


Isn't the biggest problem with Hobbes largely that his Leviathan idea is a poor model of how human social interaction works? I mean, it was a good start to recognize that game theoretical interactions are important, and to introduce a model that takes seriously human distrust and the role of power-structures to maintain order, even though these power-structures are not inherently good.(which was an idea earlier theories would have tended to have) It's just that while fear is a part of human interactions, a lot of bonding that human beings go through isn't just fear based, but rather human beings are fundamentally social creatures, enough so that the lens of individualism is partially distorting. So, people WANT to get along with their fellows, and even if the government were even abolished, a war of all against all wouldn't happen, because the fear of the government isn't the biggest reason why we want to get along with our neighbors and be good citizens.

Rather, I think a more fruitful direction for you to approach human interactions would be through norms, and the evolution of social structures, not through governments. Governments of the sort with the power to enforce their rules very well are pretty much a later development anyway, as humans started off with tribes, and we only got governments when we started getting bigger and more complicated structures of society. Norms pre-existed governments though, and earlier governments likely simply enforced pre-existing norms(which had been enforced before without a government, they were just taken over by government as society grew and the bonds became harder to handle through traditional social means), and these norms were very likely tied to traditionalist religious notions and other things of that nature. ... but I'm rambling. A book I really liked was actually by an Austrian economist author though: Rules and Order by Friedrich Hayek. It also has a bit of a defense of common law, which may be interesting as well.

If it was a single payer system it would be fully socialist. I see it as authoritarian capitalist, which isn't mutually exclusive from socialism. More than anything, Obamacare is a monstrosity created by socialists gone full ret*d. It was conceived as a cornerstone for socialism, but the final product was a turd.

I could pm the mods about that but I tend not to do that.

I don't know anyone that ever tried to hump a dog, in all my life I've only met one person that uses snuff, I've never lived anywhere that didn't have a concrete foundation and a permanent structure on it, and I've been on wp all this time I've been gone from this forum.

There are lots of conservatives of all different income levels, lifestyles, and education- just like liberals, and liberals are just as easily bashed by conservatives.\

Conservatives have their reasons for being conservative, and it's not out of love of billionaires. Some live a simple rural lifestyle, but that is not the same as being less evolved. Socialists tend to be seen by conservatives as either mentally incompetent or morally bankrupt. Neocons tend to be rare outside of the corporate ladders, and poor conservatives tend to tolerate them rather than like them if it's useful for their own priorities.