Saturday, December 27, 2008

Busheviks, Bolsheviks, what's the difference?

In my previous post, you saw a Bushevik's hand waving about the reason for unemployment, basically saying "people are unemployed because they don't feel like working," i.e., making excuses for the failures of pure market capitalism. The Bolsheviks have the same problem. For example, I started talking about the problem of power on a blog run by a Communist. He started waving his hands in the air about how that wouldn't be a problem in the perfect Communist state because everybody would be equal and thus have equal power.

Except people aren't born equal. Some people are born smarter than others. Some people are born bigger than others. Short of a Harrison Bergeron style Ministry of Equality that goes around chopping extraordinary people down to size, you will have extraordinary people. That is just how genetics works -- it mixes and matches and generates outliers at both top and bottom of the scale all the time.

So there will always be inequality in people from a biological point of view. So what does that have to do with the fundamental problem of anarchism theory, the problem of power? Well: the problem is that human beings are apes. Apes with delusions of grandeur. With millions of years of ape instincts, which are only lightly overlaid with a veneer of civilization. And one of those ape instincts is the instinct to follow an "alpha male" (or maybe we should call it an "alpha adult" nowdays), i.e., those peope who are, by accident of genetics or birth, extraordinary in some way. This instinct gives that person power, more power than those who are biologically followers rather than leaders. And where there is power, there is the potential for abuse of power. For every FDR, there is a Stalin. For every Abraham Lincoln, there is an Adolph Hitler. For every neighborhood watch organizer lady, there is a pimped up thug drug lord. That is just how it works in reality, as vs. hand waving time.

So now we arrive at the central problem with anarchism, libertarianism, Bushevikism, and Communism: The problem of how to deal with the fact of inequality of power. Anarchism points out the problem of power and proposes eliminating all organized structures of power such as government, property, etc. but has no idea how to accomplish this. But at least anarchism realizes the problem of power rather than burying its head under the ground. Libertarianism claims that giving everybody a gun and eliminating governent will make everybody equal. That is of course not true -- everywhere that the people have eliminated government, what ends up happening is that inequality and the problem of power rise their heads again. Those who are violent migrate to following those who are most violent and the end result is that violent thug lords rule at gunpoint over those who are not violent. Bushevikism claims that power is good because, to quote the Bushevik in Chief, "it would be better if this were a dictatorship, as long as I was a dictator." I.e., they claim to have good intentions, and thus accumulating and using power is a good thing. Communism... ah yes. Once again, like the libertarians, they claim that *removing* everybody's guns will make everybody equal. Which any skinny kid who got beat up by muscular bullies at school knows is utter bullshit.

So what's a Communist's reply when you keep asking, "how are you going to deal with this situation in your Communist utopia"? Pretty similar to a Libertarian's reply when you keep asking, "how are you going to deal with this situation in your Libertarian utopia" -- i.e., ban you from their blog.

So it goes. It just proves that ideologues of all stripes are unwilling to deal with pragmatic observable reality, and instead prefer to live in delusional dreamlands where little things like "facts" simply don't exist. As for me, I don't have any solution to the problem of power, but looking around the world, it seems to me that there are some nations which seem to be handling it better than others. For example, in Scandinavia they have what might be called a "democratic capitalist socialism" which seems to be doing quite well for their people, with little of the suffering, injustice and inequality that has characterized most human societies but with high relative affluence for the typical individual compared to peers in most of the world. From a pragmatic point of view you'd then say, "we don't know what the ideal society is, but they seem to be doing things right, so we're going to take what seems to be working from them and apply it to our own society." But that's us pragmatists. We're not ideologues, so we don't care what "-ism" is attached to a concept or idea. For those folks who are ideologues, well. Ideology comes first for them, and people second. So it was in 1917, and so it is today. Sigh.

-- Badtux the Pragmatic Penguin

20 comments:

  1. Was it JFK who said something like "I don't think of the world as it is, but as it should be"? I used to think that was a noble sentiment. But after encountering many people, mostly libertardians, who can only think in terms of their imaginary, "should-be" world, I think "How fucking stupid is that?"

    Pardon me for writing "fuck" a lot. I'm stuck on a month of 10-hour midnight shifts, and it makes me surly. But at least I have a fucking job. Which I'd better get back to doing...

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  2. Omigod, I'm cracking up here. (I glanced at the title of this post acouple of days ago, but I just read it.) I just recommended Jared Diamond
    and Mike Davis to HeatherAnastasia.

    And I'll prove your point by saying I had to read them, you probably didn't.

    Bukko, I'm totally not offended by swearing, but I know some people are. What I don't get is how heather Anastasia thinks she is less offensive telling someone to commit suicide than someone cussing....

    Oh, did I just prove BadTux's point again? :)

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  3. When communist talk about equality they do not mean biological equality but egalitarianism. Egalitarianism can be achieved without "cutting everyone down to size".
    Communism recognises that people are biologically unequal (although not as much as you'd like to suggest) and that is why it proposes "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need".
    It basically tells people, you can be as biologically unequal as you want and as individual as you want, provided you don't have any power over another person.

    As to your comment about how humans are nothing more than apes with illusions, well, I'd say that humanity has proven to have a tool which makes them different enough for communism to work. Reason.

    PS: The reason why TBB banned you, was not of your "pointed questions" as I'm certain you'd like to believe, but because of your attitude. I will agree that he's trigger happy with the banhammer but that is not a communist's characteristic

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  4. I think the question of power is still not answered by "egalitarianism." Preventing individual power requires collective power. I've been reading a lot about the Reformation of late, and am utterly fascinated by the Anabaptists. I think the lesson of the city of Munster is directly on point: even a commitment to egalitarianism requires leaders, and leaders are prone to corruption from without and within.

    And that was on a small scale, about 15,000 people. Theoretically, that's the level where social democracy should work the best.

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  5. Egalitarianism is "equality under the law". The problem is that we then still need someone to make the laws and enforce the laws, criminals don't go away, and those people have power. The question is, how can we prevent those people from abusing said power?

    Note that this is not a problem restricted to any particular form of economic organization, but is a general problem. Democracy has this problem too. Democracy attempts to solve this power by setting up competing power centers, whether as a formal part of the law making and enforcement mechanisms (e.g. Congress vs. Executive Branch) or informally via a method of setting up a Parliament via proportional representation (i.e. there are then multiple power centers within the Parliament, and actions of law require the agreement of multiple centers of power).

    Unfortunately under both capitalism and communism these power centers have proven to be corruptible by unacknowledged power centers such as financial or security interests. The problem of power is not eliminated by a magic panacea such as "Parliamentary democracy" or "egalitarianism" or even "anarchism", which simply creates new power centers. It appears inherent in the human organism, and can only be addressed by admitting that it is the central problem, a problem which changing the method of economic organization cannot fully resolve, and by carefully observing those societies which have been most successful at resolving the problem of power in a way beneficial to the most people and adopting solutions which work regardless of ideology.

    -Badtux the Pragmatic Penguin
    Hmm, code word is 'pricks'. Is Google trying to tell me something? :-).

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  6. Bukko - You have to choose your *destination* based upon what you would like the world to be. But you can't ignore reality while doing that, and specifically, you must be pragmatic about the problems you're going to face and how to solve them. If you aren't even willing to acknowledge the problems you will face, you have no (zero) hope of resolving them.

    -BT

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  7. James, this is why communism and anarchism do not use leader and do not take the road of reformation which has proven to lead to failure.

    BadTux, you cannot argue against communism if you do not even understand what it proposes. It does not have "power centers" and other such nonsense. Nor does it need someone to "make laws". Unfortunately I am not in the mood to educate you other than to say that you have it wrong.

    But certainly there is nothing inherent in humans that requires "power" or "power centers". These are merely vague nonsense to avoid arguing for anything and stay endlessly vaccilating while allowing the status quo to continue.

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  8. James, this is why communism and anarchism do not use leader and do not take the road of reformation which has proven to lead to failure.

    Thus leaving communism and anarchism to the realm of theoretical but never practiced. Human nature is simply not attuned to this perfect harmony that is required in order to make a true cooperative. It falls prey to Monty Python's wit all over again.

    I think BadTux's point -- and I apologize if I'm wrong -- similar to mine, is that communism can aspire to not have power centers all it wants, but it will ultimately fall prey to basic human bio-social instincts of tribal clustering and leader/follower dynamics.

    It'd be fucking awesome to have our Star Trek communist utopia. Ain't gonna happen.

    These are merely vague nonsense to avoid arguing for anything and stay endlessly vaccilating while allowing the status quo to continue.

    That is bullshit on a stick. It's a central goddamn question, one that every attempt at communism has fallen prey to. The most successful communists are the fucking Amish and Mennonites, whose authority is religious in nature. But authority -- and therefore power -- are most definitely at play, even in a mostly benign, or at least harmless, form.

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  9. James, this is why communism and anarchism do not use leader

    I have observed actual anarcho-socialist councils in action. While there is no "official" leader, every single one has at least one person in it who ends up convincing the others to follow his lead due to his charisma, knowledge, and skill at manipulating others. A leader is a leader whether you call him one or not.

    Nor does it (Communism) need someone to "make laws".

    This is a central problem with anarcho-socialism, which appears to be your definition of Communism. Rapists, murderers, and child molesters need to be dealt with in some manner. This requires some definition of what is rape, what is murder, what is child molestation, and some mechanism for dealing with it. This is law, whether you codify it in actual books or not.

    The problem with anarcho-socialist direct democracy is that if you do not codify law ahead of time, if you approach it in a case-by-case manner via popular vote of the commune when one of these cases happen, you end up with issues where, e.g., an unpopular woman is raped by a popular man and the rapist gets away with it because he's popular and she's not. Don't say it doesn't happen. It does. Thus far the only way we have devised to even halfway handle this situation is rule of law, where a law is devised to handle a specific situation -- i.e., some miscreant forcing himself upon your sister -- and then applied to all such similar situations without regard for who the rapist and victim are. It hasn't proven perfect, because the people who apply this system are not perfect, but nobody's yet proposed anything better.

    there is nothing inherent in humans that requires "power" or "power centers".

    Uhm, as I pointed out, you have 3 million years of evolution fighting with 10,000 years of civilization here. Evolution wins every time. Maybe when you manage to evolve a human organism where all people are equally intelligent, equally beautiful, equally strong, etc., you may be able to say that there is no such thing as "power". But if a man is larger and stronger than his peers, he has power. He has the ability to force one of his peers to do something against his will via brute force. Put three of these people together, and you have a "power center". This is a fact of simple biology and physics, not subject to hand waving. And the human organism is wired to respond to power, to respond to an "alpha male". It's part of our great ape heritage. You want to deny basic human nature. That is why your anarcho-socialist "communism" is utopianism like B.F. Skinner's "Walden Two" rather than something that could actually work -- it refuses to acknowledge that any society has the problem of, "who shall watch the watcher?", i.e., what shall limit the ability of those with power to exploit that power for bad ends?

    Note that this is one of my main problems with anarcho-capitalism too. Anarcho-capitalists (libertarians) believe that if everybody is well armed, then you'll have utopia. The problem is, some people are more violent than others. Some people are born sociopaths with no empathy and no feelings towards others. They will have more power in anarcho-capitalist society than those who are perhaps more creative, more productive, but less violent, because they will be more willing to use their weapon. End game: Warlordism as is typical of failed states like Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, where various warlords carve out private empires based upon being more violent, vicious, and venal than other warlords and thus attracting similarly violent, vicious, and venal people to follow them. If you have 1,000 vicious sociopaths who will kill on the least provocation and 100,000 normal people who are reluctant to kill, the sociopaths will rule. That's what reality shows, regardless of what libertards think.

    Anarchists at least recognize the problem of power, even if their proposed solution (eliminate all social structures that allow exerting power upon other people) doesn't work because it runs into the biological problem of some people being inherently more powerful -- stronger, more intelligent, etc. -- than other people. At that point anarchists go into a funk and try to come up with some mechanism for dealing with this situation, but thus far haven't figured one out that is compatible with their overall goal of eliminating all means of exerting power upon other people. It's interesting that their Communist brethren refuse to even address this central problem of anarchist theory, instead preferring to handwave and say it's "not a problem".

    - Badtux the Realist Penguin

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  10. I see that you basic point is the human nature. If so. here: http://dbzer0.com/blog/this-human-nature

    one that every attempt at communism has fallen prey to.

    Have you actually read why attempts at communism have failed? If so how can you say that? If not, then you really should so that you can see that there were a myriad other problems, much more important problems, that caused the attempts to fail.


    While there is no "official" leader, every single one has at least one person in it who ends up convincing the others


    Perhaps that person can lead but it is not a leader in the classic sense of someone who is disconnected from the populace. The problem with rulers now is that we cannot discard them when they do not represent the majority of people anymore.

    This requires some definition of what is rape, what is murder, what is child molestation, and some mechanism for dealing with it. This is law, whether you codify it in actual books or not.

    I didn't say that there are no laws. I said that they are not handed down from someone.

    Uhm, as I pointed out, you have 3 million years of evolution fighting with 10,000 years of civilization here. Evolution wins every time.


    And the hole in your argument is that evolution has not given us a predisposition for rulers.

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  11. And the hole in your argument is that evolution has not given us a predisposition for rulers.

    Or has it? It's a very common pack trait, especially among primates. Even primates that exist in primary pairs, like orangutans, have dominant partners. I don't see how you can say with any kind of finality that evolution hasn't given us a predisposition for rulers when they near entirety of human history says otherwise.

    I didn't say that there are no laws. I said that they are not handed down from someone

    Even that implicitly concedes the point! So what if the laws are agreed to by a majority, codified by committee? They exist because of the application of power by one actor against another(s).

    Have you actually read why attempts at communism have failed? If so how can you say that? If not, then you really should so that you can see that there were a myriad other problems, much more important problems, that caused the attempts to fail.

    I didn't say that power was the only reason why such attempts failed; but you can't say, and be honest, that it wasn't an issue! The single most successful communists -- the Israeli kibbutzim and especially the collectives of the Amish and the Mennonites (theological descendants of the Anabaptists) -- all answer the problem of power with religion; they just simply push the problem out further by making the answering authority a matter of faith and tradition. Indeed, the Anabaptists are directly on point, since they and their theological progeny not only predate Marx but mark the only continuous application of a practiced communism in a modern context.

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  12. And the hole in your argument is that evolution has not given us a predisposition for rulers.

    a) I said *leaders*, not *rulers*.
    b) And if your argument is that evolution has not given us a predisposition to follow leaders... Oh my. My oh my oh my. Since you now are wanting to simply ignore the majority of the sciences of anthropology and sociology, I don't know what to say. You're like the guy who says, "God created the Earth 6,000 years ago." Uhm, okay. But to come to that conclusion, you have to discard major chunks of science, including the totality of the science of sociobiology.

    So please clarify whether you truly intend to discard the entire science of sociobiology. Thank you.

    - Badtux the Scientific Penguin

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  13. James, history points that way because history is about civilization. Human behaviour existed before civilization and for that you need to look at pre-history.

    Do not judge from primates as humans had to evolve a different sociofamiliar structure in order to even evolve as humans.

    I gave you an article that I wrote myself. Perhaps you can read it?

    Badtux: I'm not ignoring anything, merely saying that it does not support what you say.
    But I'm now convinced that TBB was right from the start. You're not worth discussing with.

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  14. Sigh. Like a creationist who denies that geology textbooks say the Earth is more than 6,000 years old. Evolutionary anthropology and sociobiology are pretty interesting fields, you might want to, like, actually do some research. I did for my last novel, even cited a couple of interesting researchers and papers in passing, I'll try to look that research up for you and make a new post citing it.

    I don't know why the far left and the far right hate science so much. Maybe because science tries to say what *is*, instead of what they (left & right) *want* it to say, and thus the denial...

    - Badtux the Scientific Penguin

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  15. Perhaps you can read it?

    I did read it. What I gleaned from it was little more than Rousseauean "noble savage" utopianism. Civilization rose out of agriculture and husbandry [see Diamond, Hoffer, and Jaynes]. In order to eliminate human want, those mechanisms will need to become more efficient and their distribution networks enhanced: you will need more civilization, not less, to make communism feasible. Otherwise, you will have to wait for small, efficient nanotechnology engines that can be self-replicating, easily distributed, and allow for small bands to exist free from want.

    And then you have to prove that being free from want will ameliorate all the other maladaptive psychological and social mechanisms that lead to conflict. This seems to be the fly in the communist ointment.

    Do not judge from primates as humans had to evolve a different sociofamiliar structure in order to even evolve as humans.

    This is too simplistic. Even variances among different species of primates lead to power dynamics. I mentioned orangutans specifically in anticipation of this contention: their basic sociofamiliar unit is almost identical to our own. To counteract this, you need to return to the problem of want that I explicated above.

    Coming or going, communism faces too many combatant factors. While it is a fine ideal, the timeline it would require to allow man's socio-cultural structures to evolve to accept it would require the very power structures it deems anathema in order to defend it from those combatant factors over the time frame. The dialectic is at the mercy of far too many variables.

    BadTux, I'd be very interested in reading your novels. I wrote one myself, but I'm rather afraid it sucks.

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  16. I don't know why the far left and the far right hate science so much.

    Please, you do not even know what the far-left even proposes much less if we hate science. But such vague accusations I can make myself.

    You hate science because you do not recognise how it supports communism. There. As much sense as any of your arguments.

    James, you read but you didn't seem to comprehend. The post was not about making the barbaric and savage tribes look better but rather to point out that Human Nature does not forbit communism.

    I do not suggest less civilization (where the fuck did you read that from?)

    This is too simplistic.


    It's simplistic because it's a simple sentence. Human societies pre-civilization did NOT have the same sociofamiliar structure we have now. They did NOT have the "power problem" of civilization.

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  17. The post was not about making the barbaric and savage tribes look better but rather to point out that Human Nature does not forbit communism

    Have you not read your Rousseau?

    They did NOT have the "power problem" of civilization.

    I seem to have been unclear. The "power problem" is not inherent to civilization but to man. Civilization brings its own complications to the issue. Again, getting down to the most basic clustering -- the dyad -- you see power dynamics emerging! Again, this is why I mentioned fucking orangutans -- who exist in mated pairs for life and, until their adulthood, with their genetic offspring. You don't get much more fucking basic than the mated pair/offspring sociofamiliar unit!

    I know, I know, I'm cursing again.

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  18. Again, this is why I mentioned fucking orangutans -- who exist in mated pairs for life and, until their adulthood, with their genetic offspring. You don't get much more fucking basic than the mated pair/offspring sociofamiliar unit!

    And that's why you are wrong. because humans in pre-civilization societies did NOT pair for life. They had group marriages. It's a completely different fucking sociofamilial system that was required for humans to even live the forests. That is why Humans evolved as humans and orangutans as orangutans

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  19. Group marriages? If true, that makes humans even more similar to the great apes, who most decidedly have the "alpha male" genetic wiring.

    -BT

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  20. Even your sentence betrays how little you know of this. "If true" indeed.

    I suggest that instead of trying to find connections to the primate of choice that defends you position, you actually bother to learn the nature of these group marriages and the role they played in the workings of the gentile communities.

    I'm out.

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