ue_ (u/ue_) - Readit News

ue_ commented on Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’ nytimes.com/2017/09/29/wo... · Posted by u/mudil

adventured · 8 years ago

> the American (capitalist) system in which you need to pay huge amounts for education in order to have the mere chance to get a job that's above sustenace wage

You do realize that wasn't true until about 15 years ago, right? You should be asking what happened (hint: it wasn't Capitalism, it was the US Government's inflationary student loan program). Until the mid 1970s when the US Government nearly destroyed the dollar, you could pay for a Harvard education with a part time job. As recently as the late 1990s, the US had very little in the way outstanding student loans compared to the size of its median income (thus the epic student loans increase that everybody can't stop talking about, ie that's why it's a headline now, because it wasn't expensive before).

It should take you about 15 minutes to do some research and compare the price of a college education prior to the year 2000, versus incomes at the time. Pick any decade prior to 2000 and do the comparison. What happened after 2000? The Bush years wars & spending hammered the dollar, which also sparked the big commodity bubble.

College tuition & fees costs climbed 500% from ~1990 to ~2010. I wonder if that was spontaneously caused by Capitalism; you know, just out of the blue prices suddenly skyrocketed because of Capitalism; or if it was something the US Government did to cause it.

Another hint: how were college costs able to completely disregard income growth and all other restraints for two decades?

ue_ · 8 years ago

The very fact that we are talking about student loans, inflation, destroying the dollar and income (wage-labour) means that we are talking about capitalism; though other actors within a capitalist economy by virtue of having more military or property power may influence a capitalist economy, it does not change the fact that it is a capitalist system nevertheless.

Nowhere did I claim that "free market" policies led up to this point, nor did I claim that government intervention didn't lead up to this point. However I did claim it was due to the capitalist mode of production and so far I haven't been refuted on that point.

ue_ commented on Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’ nytimes.com/2017/09/29/wo... · Posted by u/mudil

AutomationTool · 8 years ago

You don't have to pay large amounts of money for education and you don't have to pay large amounts of money to get a decent job.

You need to get out of your echo chamber.

ue_ · 8 years ago

I'm posting right now on what is by and large a forum hostile to anti-capitalist thinking; this is the very opposite of me being in an echo chamber.

Many "decent" jobs require at least a university degree, which almost always entails taking out a loan. So while you don't have to "pay" large amounts of money, you may need to loan it and then pay it back later.

ue_ commented on Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’ nytimes.com/2017/09/29/wo... · Posted by u/mudil

pdpgxpgxydx · 8 years ago

If the Cuban government is making those decisions it's not communism, it's state capitalism. In socialism, workers own the means of production collectively, and have voting power and representation in their workplace.

ue_ · 8 years ago

I agree, this is what I was trying to get at.

ue_ commented on Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’ nytimes.com/2017/09/29/wo... · Posted by u/mudil

briandear · 8 years ago

Plumbers and electricians make great money and they aren’t incurring debt to do so. Plumbers, especially self employed ones, make more than your average “marketing assistant” or some other job that requires a degree.

Plenty of people go to school and don’t rack up tens of thousands in debt.

The question we should be asking is why does education cost keep expanding so quickly: cost inflation is much higher than even healthcare. It isn’t “capitalism” it’s actually the he fact that student loan availability distorts the market. Eliminate student loans and costs will drop like a rock to a level the actual market supports. Don’t blame capitalism because capitalism would never support the artificial cost inflation caused by government intervention.

If Big Macs were subsidized as much as universities, they’d cost $100 because McDonald’s knows that if you can’t afford it, the government will be there to help.

ue_ · 8 years ago

>Don’t blame capitalism because capitalism would never support the artificial cost inflation caused by government intervention.

What is capitalism other than the system of predominant wage-labour, private ownership of socially productive property (supported by the state), capital accumulation and class society? The idea that capitalism cannot be blamed for the fact that people are required to obey the whims of speculators in the market, to tailor their ambitions such as to maximise wage rather than to pursue enjoyment and the replacement of relations between people with relations between commodities is absurd.

Capitalism "supports" whatever will make a profit; in this case, student loans turn profits. Why would this system of student loans not occur under government intervention? There clearly exist private loan agencies.

To be clear I'm not speaking in favour of the Cuban system, so please don't assume that I am.

ue_ commented on Cuban Doctors Revolt: ‘You Get Tired of Being a Slave’ nytimes.com/2017/09/29/wo... · Posted by u/mudil

mratzloff · 8 years ago

I'm sure American doctors would pay down their debt quite quickly if they lived like a Cuban doctor and nearly their entire paycheck went to school loans.

Ultimately, if you think it's such a good deal, I'm sure Cuba would let you defect and go to medical school for the opportunity to earn $30/month like she does in Cuba.

ue_ · 8 years ago

I think it's possible to critique both systems; the American (capitalist) system in which you need to pay huge amounts for education in order to have the mere chance to get a job that's above sustenace wage, the system screwing over especially those who can't afford to pay back debt; the Cuban system in which your training is free of charge but you cannot apply your skills such that you receive above sustenance wage. Considering the doctors who are able to get into well-paying jobs alone, the American system seems to work better.

Another commenter remarked that the Cuban system is set up to keep the people at the top in power, the American capitalist system less obviously so. I wonder what other methods of Socialist organisation may be explored other than the capitalist wage-labour system we see in both Cuba and the US. The idea of labour vouchers has always been interesting to me.

ue_ commented on How Big Banks Became Our Masters nytimes.com/2017/09/27/op... · Posted by u/eevilspock

DataWorker · 8 years ago

Thanks for clarifying what seems to be a pernicious confusion about the meaning of these terms. Sadly I think many people would have to abandon their pet prejudices in order to speak of these terms with the appropriate precision and historical nuance you've provided.

ue_ · 8 years ago

I think your analysis is correct; regardless of one's personal sympathies it's important to get the terms correct when discussing these issues. I think the image of what Socialism is has been corrupted based on misinterpretations of its meaning, especially in my judgement in the US. The fact that some people are downvoting my comment perhaps shows how ingrained biases are, and I am very far from perfect having only read the major Socialist authors, so it would be nice to be corrected if anyone has such a correction - though I doubt I will be; HN and Reddit are similar in that "drive-by" downvotes are common.

I remarked elsewhere that the art of dialectic was at some point lost; in Plato's dialogues the method was used to free the other person's soul from contradictions by advancing questioning of their assumptions and models. On mass platforms this cannot arise, as one's reputability (which should be irrelevant) comes into question via the usage of downvotes, and further the downvotes do not advance the dialectic, they aim to put a halt to it. It were as if there were, in the time of Socrates, a man sitting at the table during a diologue who did not engage but merely remarked "That's wrong!" or "I disapprove!".

ue_ commented on How Big Banks Became Our Masters nytimes.com/2017/09/27/op... · Posted by u/eevilspock

chewz · 8 years ago

Socialism is about class solidarity and more equal redistribution of capital gains mostly via democratic process. Communism (or bolshevism and maoism) on the other hand is about exclusive small cadre party pretending to represent entire working class and seeking total control over society using all means including terror.

Free market is about leveling play field and equal access to marketplace for all actors big or small. Capitalism on the other hand is about maximizing control over markets and maximizing rent seeking.

ue_ · 8 years ago

Your definitions of Socialism and Communism are almost entirely false and lacking in any reference to the founders of the movement, their usage in the disciplines of philosophy, political philosophy and sociology, and historical meaning.

Socialism since its inception was never about redistribution of capital gains, it was about the ownership of society's means of production by the working class, i.e those who survive mostly or entirely from the sale of their labour-power. This definition stretches back to even before Marx, as does Communism. Your definition of "Socialism" is what it is thought of in the US, i.e Socialism is where the government spends money on social programs which it acquires via heavy taxation. This, as many point out, is actually social democracy, a form of economic management practiced most notably in Scandinavian countries.

So if what I have said is true, you may ask: What is the purpose of the word "Communism"? The truth is that 19th century authors used the term "Socialism" and "Communism" interchangably; this can be seen in Marx and Engels, Bakunin and Oscar Wilde's works. Although they were separated into higher and lower stages, the practice of calling the lower stage as "Socialism" is an invention of Vladimir Lenin who sought to describe his country as "state Socialist" in an effort to convince people of the idea that the means of production were communally owned by the working class.

Communism is further not about party control; the idea of the vanguard party again originates from Lenin; but here we must make a distinction - Lenin did not seek to modify what his theoretical predecessors meant by "Communism", he sought to create a model of praxis, that is, to ask and answer the question of: How is Communism achieved? Lenin's own idea to this was the usage of the vanguard party, which is a group of highly educated Communist intellectuals which guides the masses of the working class toward revolution and Communism.

You are conflating Communism with praxis (thus making a category error) and further conflating that specific Leninist praxis with Communism in general. The evidence that this is a conflation rests in two facts: there exist and have existed through history democratic Socialists who not only used the terms "Socialism" and "Communism" interchangably as I have already mentioned but who sought to establish Communism not via representation of the working class themselves but via the normal methods of parliamentary democracy. An example of this praxis in use is various Socialist parties which compete in local and national elections in Europe and elsewhere. Further, there exist today several varieties of Communism, within academia the meaning of Communism can be stretched much father than you may have anticipated; Badiou writes, "where there is a State, there is Communism to oppose it". This is known as the Communist hypothesis.

On to the definiton of capitalism, the main factor is the private ownership of social means of production. By this I mean that the majority apparatus used to produce goods which society exchanges and uses are owned by individuals who seek to make a profit. This is echod by Smith, Ricardo, Marx and Keynes. Other factors which contribute to the definition include the predominant usage of wage labour and the goal of capital accumulation.

ue_ commented on Reducing isolation at work is good for business hbr.org/cover-story/2017/... · Posted by u/nether

lookACamel · 8 years ago

My gut feeling is that "work" (as it we know it now) is pathological. The fact that it's considered best practice to separate work and friendships, says a lot about the nature of work. Our modern age conception of work is literally 'soulless'.

ue_ · 8 years ago

This leaves me to think why it is considered best practice to separate work and friendships. It's certainly not frowned upon in most places to make friends with your coworkers, to go for drinks after work or to meet up on weekends.

ue_ commented on The Dying Art of Disagreement nytimes.com/2017/09/24/op... · Posted by u/w-m

Chiba-City · 8 years ago

There are no debates. There are dialogs. Any contest is staged. I avoid all contests. Our education system, media messaging and fictional narratives are all conflict based. Nothing in real life is like that. Anyone SHOUTING-AT someone at Harvard (or around me) gets kicked out. You just call the police.

Young folks (some older ones) here never realize the is nothing to win and there are no prizes. Go on YouTube and hear great dialogues between Buddhists, Catholics, Anglicans, Suffis and so on. There are no cage fights. That is 100% propaganda. None of us will "Win the Matrix." The Matrix is a silly fiction.

It can take modern people raised on propaganda hero/villain narratives months, years or lifetimes to readjust. Disagreement is not conflict. Positional goods (first, fastest, best) worth having are very rare. Life is pretty good 24/7/365 depending upon distributions of our mutual attentions. I am autistic and had to read the finer manuals to liberate myself. I try to help others (including some DC vets).

Just to repeat: there are no debates and all contests are staged. [Edits: typos, paras]

ue_ · 8 years ago

Interesting, the concept of dialectic stretches all the way back to Plato, even though Hegel (and later Marx) are most known for it. The Socratic dialectic operates by the principle of questioning, and through questioning internal inconsistency is shown. The most important part here however is that this dialectic wasn't a debate, it was conducted for the purpose of improving the "opponent"'s soul by freeing them of contradictions.

Whether this is possible now, I don't know, but I think it should be fostered. In the same way, I think attachment to views is the cause of many arguments, which I am guilty of engaging in.

The concept of dialectic is so powerful it was applied to many processes, usually as thought experiment. For example, Engels wrote:

>Species of grain change extremely slowly, and so the barley of today is almost the same as it was a century ago. But if we take a plastic ornamental plant, for example a dahlia or an orchid, and treat the seed and the plant which grows from it according to the gardener’s art, we get as a result of this negation of the negation not only more seeds, but also qualitatively improved seeds, which produce more beautiful flowers, and each repetition of this process, each fresh negation of the negation, enhances this process of perfection.

ue_ commented on Saudi Arabia Agrees to Let Women Drive nytimes.com/2017/09/26/wo... · Posted by u/fmihaila

averagewall · 8 years ago

It can and does function. It's just that buying off a politician means they use the money to buy off or fool voters. Voters still make the ultimate decision about who's in power. American voters have a tradition of refusing to vote for any candidate that isn't enormously wealthy. They somehow equate advertising spending with "will do what I want". That's their own mistake though, and they experience the consequences themselves. That's the attractiveness of democracy, people get what they ask for so they won't be angry when it doesn't go their way.

ue_ · 8 years ago

Quite often people don't get what they ask for; if they did then my point about politicians taking money would be completely moot; this is why direct democracy is gaining traction; having a direct democracy with rotating or random delegates seems to be a much better plan for democracy as it helps to rid ourselves of this problem.

Voters rarely make decisions as to who is in power; they are forced to select from a small group of candidates which have come so far already, and then a committee choses which candidate is best and makes them compete for election. I do not think that a system based on the agency of people rather than the agency of ideas is a good system.

Sometimes the voters don't actually get their say; a national organisation overrides their will. Sometimes the democratic pathways are blocked by media misinformation. These are problems of the situation in which democracy is placed, and they have been recognised at least as far back as Marcuse wrote in the 1960s. The problem is less to do with whether people get candidates in power, it's more to do with how well people are informed as to the true nature of their reality. It may sound as though I'm saying "people don't know what they want", but my intention is to advance to the super-democratic status of "people must obtain the information they need".

Marcuse puts it better than I ever could:

>The liberating force of democracy was the chance it gave to effective dissent, on the individual as well as social scale, its openness to qualitatively different forms of government, of culture, education, work--of the human existence in general. The toleration of free discussion and the equal right of opposites was to define and clarify the different forms of dissent: their direction, content, prospect. But with the concentration of economic and political power and the integration of opposites in a society which uses technology as an instrument of domination, effective dissent is blocked where it could freely emerge; in the formation of opinion, in information and communication, in speech and assembly. Under the rule of monopolistic media--themselves the mere instruments of economic and political power--a mentality is created for which right and wrong, true and false are predefined wherever they affect the vital interests of the society.