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by kortilla 1999 days ago
> He's a marxist, so statements like that are grounded in a historical materialist analysis -- very basically, that the material result of policies is their reality, not whatever ideals they might aspire to.

Not a very sound way of thinking if you care about confounding variables. Presumably there are always special exemptions when not analyzing capitalism? I.e. The material result of communist policies in the USSR (total collapse) don’t apply to communism because it wasn’t true communism? If so, then we don’t really have true capitalism either so you can’t really make any assertions about capitalism.
2 comments
allworknoplay 1999 days ago
You're somehow conflating a method of analysis with communism, which doesn't make any sense. Why are you bringing communism into this?
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allworknoplay 1999 days ago
Totally separately and having literally nothing to do with anything else here, but since you brought it up, the USSR lost an economic war to capitalism, it didn't collapse because communism doesn't work. They spent their money lifting people out of poverty while american empire was busy extracting resources from other countries and keeping them in poverty.

Note also that I'm not defending individual policies of the soviet union.

EDIT: wanted to tack on: if in 1989 the US and western europe had collapsed and become communist, I wouldn't take that as proof -- or a particular reason at all -- that capitalism didn't work. That would be idiotic -- we were engaged in a decades-long cold war with another giant power, and lost. I may have separate arguments about capitalism, as I do now, but the collapse has nothing to do with it.

Similarly, the collapse of the soviet union has everything to do with trying to eliminate poverty WHILE staring down the barrel of the largest and most powerful empire that's ever existed.

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google234123 1998 days ago
This is historical revisionism. The soviet leaders tried to copy the success story of Deng Xiaoping's transitions from socialism to capitalism in China. The planned economy system just didn't work. The "US Empire" can't explain why by the late 1980s, the Soviet Union had 4x tractors as the United States which was totally wasteful.

Here is a good article on why it's computationally challenging to completely plan an entire economy. https://chris-said.io/2016/05/11/optimizing-things-in-the-us...

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wussboy 1998 days ago
Prices are information. That information turns out to be very useful when planning an economy.
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