There’s something profound behind that funny observation. God is a creation of the human mind, yet humanity forgets that it created God. The idea then appears as something external, becoming an independent power that shapes and controls human consciousness. Humans become alienated from what they themselves produced.
This was Feuerbach’s insight, and Marx extended it: just as humanity creates God and then treats him as an autonomous force, it also creates Capital. But Capital comes to operate as if it were an external, self-moving—almost “demonic”—power. People end up acting not according to human needs, but according to the logic of Capital itself.
From this perspective, the Marxist project is not merely a struggle against the bourgeoisie; it is an effort to overcome humanity’s alienation from its own creations—to reclaim power from the human-made “demon” that has come to dominate social life.
Heh, I think that notion came from watching Nefarious, the 2023 movie by Solomon and Konzelman, where a psychiatrist tries to clarify whether an insane (or possessed?) death row inmate is fit to be executed (they talk about how humanity thinks they've won, while evil is quietly everywhere). The middling review scores don't do it justice.
Or worse, they weren't meant to be portrayed as edgy and misunderstood to lure lonely people into cults of hate.
NB: from what I understand, some cult members joined because they felt part of a community; so, to them, it has a high cost of leaving it because they feel like the other members are friends (kind of like FB/Meta).
“Big oil” is not demonic it is your God as much as it is everyone’s God that uses electricity and all the things you have that are only possible through oil. You are likely not even remotely aware of just how many things you have and do that are only possible because of oil.
Hint: it’s basically 100% of things you have and do. Even your minor deities, Renewable Energy are all a creation and possible due to your God, Big Oil.
How about these companies go from "fuck your democracy lol" to "okay this is bad, this is how we can attempt to fix it". They are among the richest corporations humanity has ever seen.
The dependence on oil is physically plausible, the constant political or public subversion is not.
> Planned economies don’t work great beyond small scopes.
This is a categorically false statement. The Soviets turned the Russian empire from an agricultural backwater with a minority literate populace, into an advanced industrialised state, scientific leader and economic superpower that was on par with the US for decades, a transformation that took place within a span of merely 20~30 years. Planned economies have been demonstrated to have extremely strong potential. Of course, a planned economy is only as good as its planning, and humans are fallible; we have yet to work out a solution to that particular issue.
The USSR was never economically or scientifically on par with the US. They managed to be relatively competitive in some endeavours by concentrated massive percentages of their national people and resources on certain endeavours (industrialization, space, the military), often with brutal violence. The US was militarily competitive, often with more advanced equipment, at a fraction the economic resources - and did it at the same time as having one of the highest living standards in the world (and often had the positive results of military tech bleeding into the civilian sector, like computers).
Magnitogorsk, a massive soviet city built around a steel mill, was essentially built with American expertise (this whole documentary is extremely fascinating on how central planning got to sophisticated and how the USSR ground to a halt): https://youtu.be/h3gwyHNo7MI?t=1023
This is not to say that any planning is bad, but having a central state trying to control everything from how many belt buckles to make down to how far cab drivers should drive each year, and you're going to become a bureaucratic nightmare. Central planning everything becomes a logarithmic planning nightmare, especially when trying to innovate at the same time. You can't plan around output of innovation because the planners are often far removed from everything. A planner would probably try and "plan" on how to breed a faster horse instead of a car, for example.
I'm reminded of an interview I once saw with Gorbachev. He was talking about how he was just promoted into the central committee, essentially the highest ring of the Soviet state. He had just made it to the top and one of his first meetings was having dealing with the issue of persistent shortages of women's panty hose. He was flabbergasted that he was at the top rung of a country that can blast people into space, but can't deal with basic consumer goods availability.
Also, many countries have industrialized just as fast without central planning, particularly several asian ones. True, then did centrally set goals and use various carrot and stick initiatives, but otherwise let the market dictate most of the rest.
> The USSR was never economically or scientifically on par with the US
We can call it solidly #2 if you prefer, but going from a failed empire to #2 in the world is still a real achievement. To be clear, I was not making a statement on whether I think central planning is superior; I was merely contesting the claim that it can not work at scale, which I find to be clearly untrue. Whether it's inferior or not, we have an impressive example indicating that success is at least possible. I would also expect the modern era to offer a better opportunity for central planning than in the past if any nation wanted to give it another go because significantly more well-informed decisions could be made with the degree of data and instant communication we have available today. That said, I certainly wouldn't be keen to advocate for it in my own country, because I don't much like the idea of giving the state absolute control in an era with a level of surveillance the KGB could not have dreamed of.
You can't even measure it cleanly. It was so isolated and its currency wasn't even convertible, but by most measures Japan and West Germany had larger economies with far, far, far better living standards. Go to per-capita level equivalents and you'd be hard pressed to find it higher than any western developed country. Even economic basket-case countries in South America often had better living standards.
North Korea is sending things into space. You can't measure a country on its isolated accomplishments, even if they're impressive.
Many asian countries industrialised with what was essentially central planning. Not in the literal "one government decision maker" sense but via a handful of extraordinarily large mega-corporations operating as central planners themselves.
The big five chaebol in South Korea for example orchestrate more than half the economic activity in the country and that's down from what it was before the turn of the century.
Similarly Japan was heavily industrialised under the zaibatsu and they effectively ran the entire economy of Japan through the entire imperial era. It was only during the american occupation that the zaibatsu were broken up and afterwards the keiretsu would take their place as the dominant drivers and orchestrators of economic activity.
This isn't to say that central planning or extremely heavily integrated planning and operations are a good thing for an economy or remotely healthy in the long term, just that they were pretty prevalent in many major cases of rapid industrialization in asia regardless of whether they came in a socialist or capitalist flavor.
Virtually any country that achieves political stability and effective institutions experiences rapid development in the modern world with open knowledge and trade networks.
There is nothing special about central planning in that manner that a laissez-faire economy would also achieve at that low development.
That's quite a misattribution of success. The Russian empire was politically stable throughout the industrial revolution era, and yet lagged behind other great powers substantially. The Soviet revolution, of course, ushered in a famously politically unstable era with regular, massive purges. Meanwhile, there are many relatively politically stable countries that never managed to become especially industrialised over a period of many decades even up to the modern day, for example Mexico.
There's also a difference between "any country can rapidly develop", and what the USSR did, reaching a superpower status only two countries in the world achieved. For example, the USSR produced 80,000 T-34 medium tanks to the US's 50,000 Sherman tanks and Germany's 8500 PzIV tanks, and it was superior to both. That is a ridiculous feat, and it happened in the middle of a massive invasion that forced the relocation of huge swathes of industry to boot. The USSR was also the first to most space achievements, and it was second to develop nuclear weapons. The USSR did not just catch up to "any industrialised nation", it surpassed them all completely other than the US.
> The Russian empire was politically stable throughout the industrial revolution era, and yet lagged behind other great powers substantially.
The Russian empire was (finally) developing industrially at the outbreak of WW1. It's industrialization was retarded by it's hanging onto serfdom (including in practice after it was technically ended) far longer than the rest Europe (that prevented people moving into cities and work in factories).
> There's also a difference between "any country can rapidly develop", and what the USSR did, reaching a superpower status only two countries in the world achieved. For example, the USSR produced 80,000 T-34 medium tanks to the US's 50,000 Sherman tanks and Germany's 8500 PzIV tanks
The US sent over 400,000 trucks and jeeps to Russia (on top of building many more for itself and other allies), built out a massive navy and merchant marine, built 300,000 planes of various types (almost as much as the rest of the other allies and axis combined), supplied massive amounts of food, energy, etc and researched and built the atomic bomb (and didn't steal it). They did this while fighting a war on two fronts and maintaining a relatively good living standard (it's a fair argument to make that they weren't dealing with a direct invasion threat, though). They also had one of the best military supply chains in the world, that still persists to this day.
The superiority of the T-34 is overplayed. It was a decent tank that was good enough to build at scale, but the Sherman was more survivable and just as reliable.
The Soviet Union went to massive amounts of trouble to gloss over lend-lease aid for propaganda reasons. Russian blood absolutely won the war in Europe, but the USSR had massive amounts of help.
>industrialised over a period of many decades even up to the modern day, for example Mexico.
Pretty sure Mexico's GDP per capita was higher for quite a while, and their stagnation lied precisely in improper government interference that closed off the economy with protectionist policg rather than embracing free trade. Nor did these have inclusive institutions or really stable political situations.
The thing about the USSR, just like with China and India and USA is that once the economic growth sets in, their large populations compared to existing European states would obviously lead to much larger economies of scale and thus GDP growth. But of course, even given that large absolute growth, living standards never did converge with Western Europe. That speaks more to how central planning stagnated things.
This is all false, I guess you've never been to Soviet Union nor russia (that country doesn't deserve capital R). Central planning is dysfunctional at its core, ignoring subtleties of smaller parts. Also, it was historically always done in eastern Europe hand in hand with corruption, nepotism and incompetence where apparatchiks held most power due to going deepest in ass kissing and other rectal speleology hobbies, not because they were competent.
I come from one such country. After WWII, there was Austria and there was eastern bloc to compare. Austria was severely damaged and had much lower GDP than us. It took mere 40 years of open market vs centrally planned economy to see absolutely massive differences when borders reopened and people weren't shot anymore for trying to escape - we didn't have proper food in the shops ffs. Exotic fruits came few times a year, rotten or unripe. Even stuff grown in our country was often lacking completely. Any product ie electric ones, or cars were vastly subpar to western ones while massively more costly (and often design was plain stolen from the western companies).
Society as a whole made it because almost everybody had a big garden to complement everything basic missing in shops. The little meat you could buy was of worst quality, ladden with amount of toxic chemistry that wouldn't be acceptable in Bangladesh.
> The proximate cause of the famine was the infection of potato crops by blight (Phytophthora infestans)[14] throughout Europe during the 1840s.
Vs.
> While most scholars are in consensus that the main cause of the famine was largely man-made, it remains in dispute whether the Holodomor was intentional, whether it was directed at Ukrainians, and whether it constitutes a genocide, the point of contention being the absence of attested documents explicitly ordering the starvation of any area in the Soviet Union. Some historians conclude that the famine was deliberately engineered by Joseph Stalin to eliminate a Ukrainian independence movement. Others suggest that the famine was primarily the consequence of rapid Soviet industrialisation and collectivization of agriculture.
You could've read a bit more of the article. Proximate cause != ultimate cause.
> Initial limited but constructive government actions to alleviate famine distress were ended by a new Whig administration in London, which pursued a laissez-faire economic doctrine, but also because some assumed that the famine was divine judgement or that the Irish lacked moral character,[20
Even under capitalism there is a lot of central planning at huge scales. Walmart is one American example. Woolworths and Coles are another couple in Australia. These companies aren’t rocketing up at the market each morning and taking the latest price… they are managing supply and pricing end to end for most of what they do in advanced.
All great achievements were result of economic planning.
The moon landing (and the necessary R&D and buildup) wasn't based on market-based economic incentives.
There are multiple examples of advanced high-tech economies built up with the help of central planning married to market forces - basically every East Asian country followed this blueprint.
The USSR was a much more powerful economy than it capitalist successor, even though it wasn't run especially effectively.
City supported housing initiatives produce with extensive public planning and infrastructure investments produce much better results than for-profit developers building the least amount of stuff for the most amount of money.
There are 3 main methods of economic control: profit motive, central planning, and intrinsic incentives. Purist approaches that rely on just one or reject the other tend to have bad outcomes.
Money is power. Markets produce wealth inequality. The richest use their money to buy influence and write the rules. Fundamentally a “regulated market” is an unstable system that eats itself, a fiction.
No system consisting of humans is ever stable. We can dampen various events, but building a stable system is impossible. Too many things change constantly around us.
Not even old ossified feudal systems were stable. Either the Mongols came, or Black Death, or some smart-ass with his moveable type, and nothing was like before.
Markets are nothing more than the aggregate expression of what people do, need, desire. It's an expression of a free society. No market means a Stalinist society.
> Markets produce wealth inequality.
That always reminds of Margaret Thatcher's famous words in Parliament: "They'd rather the poor be poorer provided that the rich were less rich."
> They'd rather the poor be poorer provided that the rich were less rich.
That is an absolutely reasonable stance? Wealth isn't absolute, it's relative. If the rich are less rich, more resources are available for everyone else.
Richness is about available resources. The poor being poorer means that they have even less resources, so it precludes that there would be "more resources available for everyone else". What you propose is the rich getting less rich and the poor getting less poor.
Markets are the expression of an unfree society because they concentrate power in the hands of the few. Those with more money benefit by exploiting those with less - exploiting workers on the one hand and consumers on the other (through rent extraction). Stalinism is one form of planned economy but in your view the choices are Stalinism vs unregulated markets as if no other options exist. Absurd.
After decades of neoliberalism (thanks to politicians like Thatcher) we can see what a failure it has been. Wealth inequality is growing, climate change is getting worse, far right movements are spreading, governments are run by oligarchs, industry has declined, the working class is squeezed, labor movements have been crushed, housing shortages.. it’s an ideology of class war by the rich against the working class.
> Markets are the expression of an unfree society because they concentrate power in the hands of the few.
The idea of markets is that both sides are unable to influence the price. What you describe is a problem, but it isn't a healthy/free/working market anymore. I agree that the current economy is suboptimal, but the problem isn't capitalism and and free markets. It's rather a lack of the latter.
I guess see a “free market” as a contradiction, a utopia that even if it existed for a moment would promptly undo itself. As for capitalism - capture of the state by monied interests has always been a central feature.
A totally free market is of course utopia, but a lot of markets actually come close. Think your local butchers, bakeries and mechanics. All business with less than 10 employees and the boss is actually working. There are not that much markets that are actually problematic, but of course we talk about them a lot. Most local markets are actually fine, it's the big multinational corporations that are the problem.
> As for capitalism - capture of the state by monied interests has always been a central feature.
Capitalism is about the concept of private ownership and an economy primarily controlled by the decisions of private business oriented societies. Capture of the state isn't necessary, but common and normal up to a point.
Capitalism is a system where workers create value through their work and are compensated with a portion of that value in the forms of wages. The business owner, the capitalist, is able to extract a portion of that for themselves because they own the business. The state maintains this exploitation of workers’ productivity through so-called property rights - the “rights” of the business owner over the worker. Without the state, this system falls apart.
What separates capitalism from earlier forms, e.g. guilds in the middle ages is that every person can decide to make their own business at any time. Nobody is predestined to a specific profession or estate. That not everyone has its one business is because not everyone wants to do that managing work, some people want to do productive work and a lot of projects are larger than a single person could do.
That work can be exchanged for money predates (the current form of) capitalism and depends fundamentally only on the concept of money alone. I fail to see how that is exploitation per se. You choose to trade something you have for something you want. That's freedom. Taking that away means slavery or starving people.
> The state maintains this exploitation of workers’ productivity through so-called property rights - the “rights” of the business owner over the worker.
What are you talking about? What "rights" of a business owner? The only thing they make are voluntary contracts. You are doing the same when you buy groceries, you are trading money you have for the work of others. What you describe is (wage) slavery, which we claim to have abolished.
Yes they are property rights, but show me the person who doesn't have property. I bet even the homeless person doesn't want it to be legal that the few processions he has can be taken away by anybody, because they just want it.
In civilized countries employees also have more rights than employers e.g. for notice periods, precisely because the working market is often in a state where the employee has less negotiation power. The contract drafter is also the disfavoured party in court.
No you need a state to enforce the property rights of capitalists over workers.
Nor are people all “free” under capitalism - for example the ability to start a business is predicated on assets to fund the business. Capitalist freedoms is freedom for the rich.
And the supposed freedoms of a worker to enter into a contract are a choice between lesser evils - limited choices given their precarious position relative to employers. Jeff Bezos vs an Amazon warehouse worker - it’s not a contract between equals. You seem intent on denying the real power difference between employers and employees as supposedly free arrangements.
As for worker rights they have been fought for by the labor despite the vicious resistance of the capitalist class. Since the 1980s those rights have deteriorated as wealth has continued to consolidate. It’s a trend that’s likely to continue as the richest pollute our globe, promote austerity, extract rent from the working class, undermine democracies, and instigate war.
> No you need a state to enforce the property rights of capitalists over workers.
Can you please define what you mean with "property rights of capitalists"? I don't think we are thinking of the same. When I think of property rights, I think of the concept of exclusive ownership of a thing, which is maintained by declaring theft to be illegal. That is a right, that everyone has including the homeless person living next to the train station.
> Nor are people all “free” under capitalism - for example the ability to start a business is predicated on assets to fund the business. Capitalist freedoms is freedom for the rich.
You can start selling parsley growing in your living room tomorrow, from seeds you found in the local park. However we didn't just started being settled yesterday, so you do need to compete with all the other people already doing things. That you need resources to live, that you don't just have, is not something, that was invented by the "evil capitalists", that is something, that is just human nature (actually not specific to humans). It is true, that some people are born rich, and most don't, but this is unfair not unfree.
> And the supposed freedoms of a worker to enter into a contract are a choice between lesser evils - limited choices given their precarious position relative to employers. Jeff Bezos vs an Amazon warehouse worker - it’s not a contract between equals.
Yes, people like Jeff Bezos are an issue, and Amazon is famous for being a shitty company. However most employers are not Jeff Bezos and most employees don't work for Amazon. You could also start working at the carpenter next door and if you are very good, you will inherit the company. They are looking for people like crazy, prizes for them are high and a lot of craftsmen need to close their business, not because of less demand, but because they are old and their is no one to inherit them to. Working at a carpenter requires you to have finished school, which is payed for by the state and actually mandatory.
> You seem intent on denying the real power difference between employers and employees as supposedly free arrangements.
> In civilized countries employees also have more rights than employers e.g. for notice periods, precisely because the working market is often in a state where the employee has less negotiation power. The contract drafter is also the disfavoured party in court.
Yes, once you are in a contract you need to fulfill them, however you can make any contract you like and are free to terminate them at any time (with a notice period).
> As for worker rights they have been fought for by the labor despite the vicious resistance of the capitalist class.
That highly depends on the country. Often also rulers have seen that peace in their society makes for a stronger society and employers that employees that don't need to think about feeding their children produce better work and providing benefits to their employees improves there competitiveness in the workers market. Traditionally states also didn't liked persons becoming richer than them, as this might pose a threat, people like Jeff Bezos are very much a new phenomena.
> Stalinism is one form of planned economy but in your view the choices are Stalinism vs unregulated markets as if no other options exist.
You've shifted from "market" to "unregulated market". Your point is against markets in general and you haven't explained what's your understanding of "market" is (it seems at the very least unclear to you).
Trying to abolish "the market" can only lead to Stalinism, or whwtever you can to call it, because, again, since a market is the expression of people's actions, needs, and desires abolishing it has to mean abolishing individuals' freedoms. This is not absurd or "ideological propaganda", this is factual (and common sense, really) and proven again and again through the 20th century.
Markets are a place where buyers and sellers come together and exchange money for goods and services.
Markets exploit. Example: the labor market; individuals are forced among unfavorable options to work for the enrichment of business owners otherwise they will end up on the street. Business owners themselves do not face this choice; they have their capital to fall back on. Another example is the housing market where the wealthy have bid up housing as a financial asset, so the working class pays a larger and larger share of income to banks and rentiers, a cash flow from workers to the wealthy. Now people are making ‘choices’ here so supposedly that means markets are expression of free desires. But when one’s choices are constrained due to the power differential between the haves and have nots, the choices are not a free choice. To have actual agency you have to have power, but the power is in the hands of the ownership class.
Maybe you think markets are a necessary evil. But they are not some bastion of freedom like you suppose. That is absurd. We should look at markets for what they are not to candy coat them.
Equality =/= Freedom. It is perfectly possible to have high inequality but individual agency when operating in a positive sum game.
If you want to critique unequal distribution of power, that has always been the case with any society. You cannot coordinate thousands without some form of delegation. But problems borne of the market are always much easier to resolve than problems borne if the political. Therefore it is better to contain an unavoidable problem in a manageable domain that let it establish itself in a more concrete way.
The actual failures of the Western economies lie in naive assumptions about dealing with mercantalist countries and NIMBYism, but given this forum is against the solutions to both it is more politically acceptable to blame everything on "neoliberalism".
Inequality has always existed to some degree, sure, but that’s a shallow platitude. Markets have give us levels not seen since the Pharaohs. No the existence of any inequality doesn’t justify the insane levels we see today.
And blaming NIMBYism not Thatcher’s ideology for UK’s stagnation is pretty funny. Like that has had more influence.
> The actual failures of the Western economies lie in naive assumptions about dealing with mercantalist countries and NIMBYism, but given this forum is against the solutions to both it is more politically acceptable to blame everything on "neoliberalism".
And turning themself more into mercantalist countries, which is meant by 'blame everything on "neoliberalism"'.
Fighting that people can decide what and how they want to sell and buy, results in a society I don't want to live. To enforce it you will eventually free the people from a bunch of other decisions, as they strangely refuse to follow your great ideas.
What the problem is, is the asymmetry in the market, not the market itself.
Citation needed. A healthy market has so many sellers and buyers that no side can force a price above the other. Think your local bakery or butcher. In a healthy market profits are nearly zero.
Any market inherently results in consolidation. My local bakery is a giant chain. My local butcher has been driven out of business by supermarket chains.
That is exactly my point. Local artisan bakers are being priced out by crappier quality baking shops due to their economy of scale. The market optimizes for the cheapest slop made by the biggest conglomerate, the opposite of what I want.
And yet that is a problem of the past twenty years while we had markets for centuries. The concept of markets doesn't seem to be the problem.
If you say we need more regulation and an actual Antitrust Division that does things, then I agree. If you say we need to get rid of free markets and capitalism and return to socialism, then I am strongly against that.
A cancer doesn't kill you as soon as the first cancerous cell division happens. It takes time for the processes of markets to develop into something that threatens our existence.
>My local bakery is a giant chain. My local butcher has been driven out of business by supermarket chains.
Is that an inherent property or is it the result of people in government who believe what you believe putting their thumb on the scale of the market in piecemeal?
If they're not doing evil work, why all the secrecy? It's not like they're going bankrupt either since, like you mentioned, the demand is not going away
Because people are hipocrites - our stated goals (clean environment, fair business) are different from the actual ones (get a lot of stuff and energy cheaply)
But these shouldn't be in contradiction. Oil and gas will end when they will be unprofitable, priced out by much cheaper renewables. Of course this will result in more and cheaper stuff and energy, boost economic growth rates not suppress them.
Well, regardless of what government does, renewables will eventually price out oil and gas. And the government and the megacorps will be on their side because that way they will be making more money. Not before.
No one is trying to limit renewables just for the sake of it. They are trying to do so because so far renewables don't allow to make much money while oil and gas does. There won't be any reason for the powers that be, to resist them once this situation reverses.
Welp, it has worked ok for most of us. It’s below zero outside my house is at 22C and I have strawberries and avocados on the kitchen counter. This weekend I’ll drive with my family to a wedding 500km away and will spend $40 in transportation. With all I hate O&G can’t deny it has made my life easier in many ways.
This is the most "I've got mine" statement that I have seen these past months.
It's not because it was "OK" so far that it is going to be OK moving forward, it's just kicking the can down the road and hope for a miracle, and they have done this since people have wondered about greenhouse gases (and this happened very early on).
Note that most of the issues we will be facing was not because of all the conveniences, but just because doing things in a way that was sustainable and/or more regulated would have hit the bottom line of big oil...
At the end of the day, it will not matter whose pockets were lined when there is no more food to feed people...
"most" of us? Really? Once you add up the people in the countries the West invaded / started wars for the sake of oil, countries where the oil industry gets rich while the population suffers in poverty due to oil induced instability like Venezuela, all the countries where climate change induced national disasters have destroyed lives and livelihoods you'd find that its not really 'most' of us. But hey at least you have your strawberries.
In 200 years time Ken Burns the 6th is going to make a documentary about climate change, and quotes like this will be read out to illustrate just how short-sighted, selfish, and hyper-nihilistic people were.
Actually this was (and still is) commonplace these last decades, for poor and rich people alike. Even the poorest could afford to have a car and put petrol in it. It's becoming untenable for the younger generations because of government intervention and mishandling of the economy.
Petroleum is subsidized so heavily globally. Most oil actually comes from nation companies. That's, like, the maximum amount of government intervention you can get.
The people who think oil are or were a "free market" are beyond delusional. No, that was never the case - all the big players are governments, all of it is centrally planned, and all of it is subsidized by the population. That's why it's so cheap.
The reason it's going up in price is BECAUSE we're doing this less, as renewables become more competitive.
