How effective was the New Deal?

[Gandalf]

So you would be comfortable saying that Naziism didn't kill people, people killed people?

In the same span of time, you had Stalin and the Imperial Japanese getting in on the mass murder game as well and the common denominator between all three groups is that they're all human and thought that a lot of death would get them closer to their current goals.

Your point being?

[Jub]

Your point being?

That people and not 'isms' kill people. Isms are just the groupthink used to convince people to kill for a specific goal or to be applied post hoc by the other side to paint you as inhuman so you can be more easily ignored.

[Gandalf]

Your point being?

That people and not 'isms' kill people. Isms are just the groupthink used to convince people to kill for a specific goal or to be applied post hoc by the other side to paint you as inhuman so you can be more easily ignored.

You never disappoint for comedy. Would you apply this weird rationale to any abstraction?

[K. A. Pital]

Without spending an hour pondering in thought... yeah, probably.

People are their own worst enemy at this point, and part of the problem is that there are just Too Damn Many People for the planet. If the world population was an even 1 billion a lot of our current problems would be smaller and less catastrophic. But there's no morally acceptable way to cut down the world population by that amount in a short time span.

No: the problem is capitalism and some nations consuming like we have 10 Earths to spare.

Namely, the US. China is only the manufacturing house that the West uses to fuel that overconsumption using credit. The Chinese could never build up such a massive industry without the Western market.

Most of the people in the world are poor and have a below-sustainable footprint.

The problem are the rich, and the obfuscation is serving them. Malthus and Thanos are just reactionary manifestations of the ruling classes‘ fear of world‘s end, but sooner the world shall end the ruling classes and their petty servants from the intelligentsia.

Also I am amazed how you have the gall (sic!) to rail about the pollution in industrial socialist nations when most of the pollution happened to provide god damn rich in the West with their comforts. Industrial China is manufacturing shit for the West and is contaminated because of dirty industries of the West, batteries from China, oil from USSR and Russia, everything - it is all the insatiable capitalist monster.

[Patroklos]

Nobody is forcing China to participate. Quite the opposite really, they are fighting constantly for more participation.

[K. A. Pital]

Nobody is forcing China to participate. Quite the opposite really, they are fighting constantly for more participation.

Its own capitalists are forcing them to. In cahoots with the other capitalists from “developed“ nations. If that powerful ruling class is a „nobody“ then I am a French pilot.

The capitalist method of production itself has the potential to doom mankind, because of two inherent characteristics: endless chaotic, anarchic growth being necessary for profit-making (thus inability of acting according to a harmonious plan and inability of accepting zero-growth without profit), and its totality, that is the inability to tolerate any non-market alternatives to itself, unless subjugated inside a greater capitalist production framework (so-called world division of labour).

It is not „the people“ at fault, because there is no such thing as economic democracy, harmonious planning with full awareness of the sustainable economic footprint, and likewise awareness of the possibilities to lower real footprint towards sustainable through reducing consumption by removing wasteful, individualistic approaches to social problems and enabling collective solutions to the benefit of the entire population.

„The people“ are at fault only inasmuch as they have not yet abolished the social order that is literally destroying the planet.

Which again brings us to my first point: an order where we could plan to reduce and rearrange our total consumption for the benefit of the future generations does not exist. It is possible under a plan - not „necessary and inevitable“, but possible; and with sufficient awareness by the planners, it is inevitable, but it ks for all intents impossible under capitalism, and preserving it at the expense of any planned economies is a shot in own foot.

[Broomstick]

Without spending an hour pondering in thought... yeah, probably.

People are their own worst enemy at this point, and part of the problem is that there are just Too Damn Many People for the planet. If the world population was an even 1 billion a lot of our current problems would be smaller and less catastrophic. But there's no morally acceptable way to cut down the world population by that amount in a short time span.

No: the problem is capitalism and some nations consuming like we have 10 Earths to spare.

No, the problem is that 8 billion people is not sustainable long term. You either need destructive levels of technology to keep them all fed and disease under control, or if you don't you'll have mass starvation and disease. And crowding/resource conflicts lead to war, which can also cut down on the number of people, not to mention wars are good for spreading disease and famine as well as killing people outright.

Also I am amazed how you have the gall (sic!) to rail about the pollution in industrial socialist nations when most of the pollution happened to provide god damn rich in the West with their comforts. Industrial China is manufacturing shit for the West and is contaminated because of dirty industries of the West, batteries from China, oil from USSR and Russia, everything - it is all the insatiable capitalist monster.

Please - the contaminated sites in the former USSR had nothing to do with "the West", it was the result of decisions made by a centrally planned communist regime, some of those decisions and actions taken as far back as the 1940's. Take responsibility for your own goddamned messes, just like you expect the "the West" to do.

[FaxModem1]

To try and keep this on-topic, how does the New Deal compare and contrast with the rapid infrastructure projects of the USSR during their rapid industrialization? In effectiveness, lives lost, environmental damage, etc?

[Jub]

You never disappoint for comedy. Would you apply this weird rationale to any abstraction?

How is the rational weird? Humans are the source of much of our own suffering be that at the hands of a dictator slaughtering millions, a petty manager emotionally abusing a vulnerable employee, a school bully asserting control at school that they don't have at home, that bullies parents taking control from them at home, etc. In the end, the systems we create to codify our own suffering are human creations and the people that helm them are as human as you or I.

I could boil it down further and take humanity out of the equation too by citing numerous studies that show our conscious minds and thus free will are just post hoc justifications for bundles of evolved and learned responses to stimuli. In that case, even the people involved in doling out suffering aren't responsible for their actions physics and the laws of the universe are. People don't like that idea though, they want their suffering to mean something but the cold reality is that our suffering is a purely personal hell that exists without reason and nothing we can control will ever change that.

[K. A. Pital]

No, the problem is that 8 billion people is not sustainable long term. You either need destructive levels of technology to keep them all fed and disease under control, or if you don't you'll have mass starvation and disease. And crowding/resource conflicts lead to war, which can also cut down on the number of people, not to mention wars are good for spreading disease and famine as well as killing people outright.

Sustainability of Western, and specifically US standard of overconsumption is not being discussed here at all. Such a standard could never be reached for 8 billion people - it must be dealt with if any honest discussion is to be had. By letting your consumption reach such a comically wasteful standard you have done the world - no huge service, but only sped up its impending doom. Hence the question about whether it is good to have the rule of capitalism maintained in the long term is a very valid one. Under capitalism there is no way out of the dead end.

Sustainability under optimal organization could theoretically ensure survival of this number of people, but certainly with no exuberant consumption excesses like now. Ergo, under capitalism we are heading for disaster. Under a planned system exuberant overconsumption would be put an end to, and quite possibly let us pass through the needle of peak population. Population controls may be implemented by the government based on recognized necessity.

Please - the contaminated sites in the former USSR had nothing to do with "the West", it was the result of decisions made by a centrally planned communist regime, some of those decisions and actions taken as far back as the 1940's. Take responsibility for your own goddamned messes, just like you expect the "the West" to do.

Contaminated sites are inevitable if competition with, or likewise trading with, the capitalist world is the goal. And such a goal is very much related to the existence of capitalism as such. First it was a matter of competition with capitalism, later it was a matter of selling oil & gas to capitalists, to feed their industries.

But eventually, what matters most is this: the poor nations can, theoretically, achieve sustainable development if they put objective survival of the collective with a small footprint as a goal. Rich nations cannot and their footprint exceeds sustainable by factor of 10.

Planning is the only road that is not catastrophic. If you do not constrain yourselves, the world will deal with that through catastrophe anyway.

[Gandalf]

*comedy snipped for size*

On any large scale analysis, it becomes imperative to look at how a human operates as a part of a system. One doesn't look at the twentieth century and wonder about a sharp rise in human movement in Europe in the second and fourth decades. You abstract the events and they become states waging war on another. You look at the actors and the concepts which comprise them. You look at the classes of the people involved, and so on. If you just go "lol people," you'll miss pretty much everything in a vain attempt to look clever.

[Jub]

On any large scale analysis, it becomes imperative to look at how a human operates as a part of a system. One doesn't look at the twentieth century and wonder about a sharp rise in human movement in Europe in the second and fourth decades. You abstract the events and they become states waging war on another. You look at the actors and the concepts which comprise them. You look at the classes of the people involved, and so on. If you just go "lol people," you'll miss pretty much everything in a vain attempt to look clever.

That's only because we have no way to model individual human behavior using any greater a degree of refinement. You're acting as if this abstraction is a good thing and how we should be looking at things when in objective terms it's bad at making actionable predictions with enough specificity to be worth acting on. It's well and good to analyze things after they've happened, but until this system can actually make consistent predictions out far enough in the future, to within a narrow window of time, and correctly predicting the outcome of any attempted intervention it's just post action naval gazing trying to make sense of the human condition.

In the end, we either get good enough to predict/simulate any given human's behavior and thus murder free will or we hit a hard compute limit and admit that trying to predict based on trends and movements is the best we can do an abandon it as a discipline for being too vague and useless to predict anything.

[Broomstick]

Sustainability under optimal organization could theoretically ensure survival of this number of people, but certainly with no exuberant consumption excesses like now.

I disagree. 8 billion people are too many people for the long-term health of the planet and the fact we're currently in the midst of Great Extinction event is proof of that. An event that started several centuries ago at least.

Ergo, under capitalism we are heading for disaster.

We're headed for disaster at this point regardless, the only question is how hard the landing is going to be.

Communism has no success to show off. The USSR collapsed. East Germany had to build a wall and a no man's zone to keep people IN. China might still have a centralized government but has moved towards capitalism in its economy. The capitalistic countries over-consume and the communist ones slaughter their own with famine. Unless we come up with an alternative to both of those we're pretty fucked.

Under a planned system exuberant overconsumption would be put an end to, and quite possibly let us pass through the needle of peak population. Population controls may be implemented by the government based on recognized necessity.

Yep, slaughter and sterilization, the abolishment of free will and self determinations - as I said, there is no moral and ethical way to fix this current problem. Mao's Great Leap Forward certainly helped ease China's overpopulation problem by killing off 45 million people but mass slaughter whether by directly by guns or indirectly by famine is not a morally acceptable solution.

Here's the problem: centrally planned economies, in practice, have a bad habit of NOT being able to provide the necessities of life and killing off their own by the millions, in between episodes of being able to provide a certain consistent low-level subsistence to everyone, with a cadre of elites on top who are always well-fed and warm. Capitalism has a track record of being more resistant to mass-death by famine, but at the cost of a permanent existence of a truly desperate underclass and exportation of the worst jobs and garbage/debris, and the upside that most people do manage to get what they need even if they have to struggle for it and a cadre of elites on top who are always well-fed and warm.

Neither of these are warm and fuzzy civilizations.

Oddly enough - things seem to go better when there is some attempt at a middle road. Central-planning countries that allow for some capitalism seem to do better. Capitalistic systems that incorporate "socialist" things like universal health care and housing for the destitute are a lot nicer place to live than somewhere like the US.

The New Deal scared the living fuck out of the oligarchs at the time because it sounded communist instead of "rugged individualist". At that point, the USSR was a new player on the world scene and China hadn't gone socialist yet, there wasn't the track record to show the flaws in their system and they seemed to be enjoying success at conversion by the sword and the oligarchs were well aware their necks would be first under the sword. Or, more accurately, they'd be first against the wall if the revolution came. And here came Roosevelt feeding the poor instead of insisting they find jobs, making jobs by way of government instead of relying on private industry, and all those other frightening things that, to an oligarch, looked like communism getting a toehold in the US.

In reality, for all its flaws, the New Deal kept the lid on the masses - by instituting even a tattered and threadbare safety net for the bottom of the social hierarchy it forestalled revolution. Some of the oligarchs understood that, and that's why something as repulsive to them as "social security" (what passes for a public pension system in the US) still exists and is not going away. That's why the US still has the "food stamp" program (although renamed now, that's what it's called) - hungry people are dangerous, keep the poor fed and you make them less likely to get stabby. Forget religion being the opiate of the masses, keeping them housed and fed, even in crappy housing with crappy food, is what keeps the revolutionary mob at bay. Ancient Rome with its breads and circuses understood that, it's not really a new concept.

Please - the contaminated sites in the former USSR had nothing to do with "the West", it was the result of decisions made by a centrally planned communist regime, some of those decisions and actions taken as far back as the 1940's. Take responsibility for your own goddamned messes, just like you expect the "the West" to do.

Contaminated sites are inevitable if competition with, or likewise trading with, the capitalist world is the goal. And such a goal is very much related to the existence of capitalism as such. First it was a matter of competition with capitalism, later it was a matter of selling oil & gas to capitalists, to feed their industries.

Yeah yeah - officer, I had to hit my girlfriend, the bitch made me do it to - all the poor communist countries are pitiful victims, helpless against the demonic capitalistic forces. Bullshit. The central planning governments chose to do things the way they did them, to engage in projects that laid waste to the environment, to dump radioactive shit into rivers and lakes, turn the Aral Sea into a desert, contaminate vast swathes of land with heavy metals and chemicals. Your system was supposed to be better, superior - why wasn't it? Don't blame "The West" - The West wasn't making the decisions for you, YOU were. There's no reason there couldn't have been better environmental controls on known risks like lead smelters other than callous indifference to human life and suffering.

Planning is the only road that is not catastrophic. If you do not constrain yourselves, the world will deal with that through catastrophe anyway.

Right. How many dead under Stalin? 20 million? How many under Mao? 45 million? Well, sure that does help the overpopulation problem a tiny bit, but the track record for central planning is nothing to brag about. Again, don't blame The West or The Capitalists for that. Your system doesn't work.

The problem is, again, people are their own worst enemy. We don't need a devil, we ARE the devil.

But back to topic - the New Deal was effective in halting the economic plunge. It got a bunch of people back to work, fed some hungry folks, and forestalled revolution by restoring confidence in the national social and economic structure. It ameliorated the worst excesses of pure capitalism (just as a dose of capitalism can ameliorate the worst excesses of communism). It wasn't perfect, but it didn't have to be, it just had to be good enough. I don't think, by itself, it was going to result in a truly healthy economy long term but the primary goal was not that but to support society long enough for circumstances to change for the better. Instead, we got WWII which, in human terms, was NOT for the better although it sure benefited the economy in the US (it sort of fucked up Europe and Asia because that's where most of the physical destruction occurred). Which is also a point - what's best for the economy is not necessarily the best in human terms. Regardless of how history actually played out, the New Deal was successful, even if far from perfect.

[K. A. Pital]

Look, we have had this discussion before. If you start counting all the excess deaths under capitalism since the XVII century, you would arrive at huge (and also meaningless) numbers. You could lump the Irish Famine, the Bengal Famine and a multitude of other famines together plus the genocides by capitalist settlers & nations (Americas, Asia, Nazis, Japanese, Belgian Congo, etc) to produce a count of hundreds of millions of victims. This is not interesting for me, no longer - events of the past are important, but so is looking at the objective situation at hand today, the concrete historical circumstances.

Which is why I did not do that recounting, and concentrated on the actual realities at hand: the total inability of industrial capitalism to constrain itself, because it is its very nature.

You offered no rebuttal to that and blamed everything on the abstract „people“. Typical. I could also blame every excess death that ever happened on „the people“; that would be just ridiculous, abandoning any pretense at a honest analysis of society‘s socioeconomic structure and its byproducts.

You see yourself that what is best for the US citizens is hardly best for everyone, and yet you then say, it was effective.

My point still stands- capitalism is an ideology of endless expansion of production for the sake of profit. Communist states from the beginning were locked into an unequal competition and so it is akin to blaming one particular company among thousands in a capitalist economy for acting to rapidly expand its production, but ignoring that the rules of the system demanded it.

I never said industrial socialist states were obliged to plan for sustainability: this qould require stopping competition ALLTOGETHER, and transformation of the human way of thinking.

This has not occurred and you are still hostile to the only people still thinking about a solution. Well, you may rest in peace after your chosen „winner“ whose method of production „works“ destroys the world eventually. Hope you get to see that.

[Gandalf]

That's only because we have no way to model individual human behavior using any greater a degree of refinement. You're acting as if this abstraction is a good thing and how we should be looking at things when in objective terms it's bad at making actionable predictions with enough specificity to be worth acting on. It's well and good to analyze things after they've happened, but until this system can actually make consistent predictions out far enough in the future, to within a narrow window of time, and correctly predicting the outcome of any attempted intervention it's just post action naval gazing trying to make sense of the human condition.

In the end, we either get good enough to predict/simulate any given human's behavior and thus murder free will or we hit a hard compute limit and admit that trying to predict based on trends and movements is the best we can do an abandon it as a discipline for being too vague and useless to predict anything.

It's like a first year philosophy student shat out a junkie's ramblings. Way to go I guess.

How is that a refutation to anything I said?

[Jub]

How is that a refutation to anything I said?

You started out pressing Broomstick on the issue of 'isms' being the issue and I've noticed that you never actually replied to what she had to say about that. I guess you prefer to score cheap internet points going after me...

As far as refuting anything you've said, you haven't actually said anything in this thread. The total of your input is a few one-liners, some complete nonsense about analysis, and mockery of what I've had to say on the issue. You haven't made a point worth refuting.

So lay it out, what does Gandalf think is wrong with the world today?

[Broomstick]

Look, we have had this discussion before. If you start counting all the excess deaths under capitalism since the XVII century, you would arrive at huge (and also meaningless) numbers.

A big difference being that communism didn't exist in the 17th Century and was never in the majority of nations even in the 20th, yet ran up huge numbers in less than a century. Communism is no more the answer than capitalism is.

Could be we're just fucked, maybe civilization can't over-ride instinct and greed.

You offered no rebuttal to that and blamed everything on the abstract „people“.

"People" was not an abstract. Humans have a long history of fucking up their environment to the point of dying off, or nearly so. Look at what was once fertile farmland in the Middle East that is now desert. The famed cedars of Lebannon are long gone. Look at the once-lush Mediterranean area that is now scrub lands. Look at Easter Island - they cut down the last tree then spent a generation or two eating eating other until their population leveled out at a much lower level in a blasted environment.

People are really bad at long-term planning, at taking care of what's around them.

This has not occurred and you are still hostile to the only people still thinking about a solution.

The problem is that your "solution" has been no better for the environment than capitalism, and racked up a death toll of around 100 million in less than a century. The theory is great, that's why it attracts young idealists, but actual practice shows it is no better than what it wants to replace.

[K. A. Pital]

OK. Well, other than 50 million being removed from the equation by “normal” fascists within like 10 years in 1935-1945, I must say once again that these excess death counts are meaningless.

Your are just a nihilist. Nihilism is useless.

[Jub]

OK. Well, other than 50 million being removed from the equation by “normal” fascists within like 10 years in 1935-1945, I must say once again that these excess death counts are meaningless.

Your are just a nihilist. Nihilism is useless.

I'm generally on your side, but can you show me an instance of communism outperforming capitalism in the areas of environmental protection, wealth inequality between it's richest and poorest citizens, and meeting it's citizen's basic needs? I won't count China because they are communist in name only at this stage and show no signs of slowing their change to centrally guided capitalism.

[K. A. Pital]

The only minimally sustainable nation on Earth (with high development, but no oligarchs, ultra-rich, overconsumption) was made by communists.

[Jub]

The only minimally sustainable nation on Earth (with high development, but no oligarchs, ultra-rich, overconsumption) was made by communists.

So a nation under heavy embargo but with no real need to build up a military can just barely manage to scrape by, and that's your best example? A nation where you can bring in things like pencils and spare underwear and trade it to the locals as better than cash, a success?

[Gandalf]

You started out pressing Broomstick on the issue of 'isms' being the issue and I've noticed that you never actually replied to what she had to say about that. I guess you prefer to score cheap internet points going after me...

I did reply. I asked if Broomstick would be okay with saying Naziism didn't kill people, but people did. The one to which you replied, but Broomstick didn't. Please pay attention to the content of your posts. Also, if you think that "going after you" generates internet points of any value, I think that says more about you and your own vanity than you may realise.

As far as refuting anything you've said, you haven't actually said anything in this thread. The total of your input is a few one-liners, some complete nonsense about analysis, and mockery of what I've had to say on the issue. You haven't made a point worth refuting.

I was trying to work out Broomstick's odd rationale by finding out what was at the root of it, through asking varied questions to see if the rationale held out. I find this better than the usual internet arguing of people making statements at each other, because a series of specific questions makes it easier to examine something. It's something I enjoyed doing when I was a teacher. When a student offered an answer which sounded odd, it wound up being more productive to question how they got there, so the issue that caused the questionable final answer could be solved on a fundamental level. Sometimes they were approaching things from a fantastic and interesting perspective, and other times they didn't do the readings and made shit up.

So lay it out, what does Gandalf think is wrong with the world today?

Imperialism, capitalism, and entitled shits on the internet. Imperialism wiped out my people (Indigenous Australians) and keeps us as second class citizens in our own lands. Capitalism keeps perpetuating this problem (among others listed by K A Pital in this thread). Entitled shits on the internet are just an irritant, but I like listing things in threes.

[K. A. Pital]

So a nation under heavy embargo but with no real need to build up a military can just barely manage to scrape by, and that's your best example? A nation where you can bring in things like pencils and spare underwear and trade it to the locals as better than cash, a success?

You asked me if we could deal with overconsumption better than capitalists. I have show you that it is possible. A military is necessary for only two things: capitalist, imperialistic conquests - or to prevent from being conquered by other imperialists. The rest of your objection is “I don’t care that the reality of sustainable consumption is that we can have food, shelter, education and literacy, but not obscene exuberant riches, so I want to destroy the world”. Ok, go right ahead.

[FaxModem1]

So much for keeping the thread on-topic.....

So a nation under heavy embargo but with no real need to build up a military can just barely manage to scrape by, and that's your best example? A nation where you can bring in things like pencils and spare underwear and trade it to the locals as better than cash, a success?

You asked me if we could deal with overconsumption better than capitalists. I have show you that it is possible. A military is necessary for only two things: capitalist, imperialistic conquests - or to prevent from being conquered by other imperialists. The rest of your objection is “I don’t care that the reality of sustainable consumption is that we can have food, shelter, education and literacy, but not obscene exuberant riches, so I want to destroy the world”. Ok, go right ahead.

Don't militaries also exist in communist and capitalist countries for a third purpose? To beat down those who don't agree with the system?

[K. A. Pital]

For this, you have the police.