DPUGT

No, you’re not free to do this under capitalism unless you happen to be born into at least some moderate wealth.

Define moderate wealth in a way that excludes a significant portion of the population. There are counter-examples all the way down.

I can only assume that you’re not aware of the second world war that devastated USSR.

Devastated all of Europe, or so I'm told. And yet things weren't even a tenth as bad elsewhere. And that only obviates the housing issue... the coffin problems issue was completely about keeping some out of universities where they simply were not welcome. Education for some, factory work for others... like everywhere else. (Hell, even in the US you wouldn't be kept out of university if simply by being jewish alone, the way that it was in the Soviet Union).

That’s pretty big news to me given that homelessness is rampant in capitalist states.

It's pretty big news to you that the homeless aren't starving? Or do you often run around confusing food with housing?

Just thinking about what kind of human garbage one has to be to write that sentence.

Compared to the sort of human garbage that implemented it as policy for decades? Or do you mean that I'm politically inconvenient because I recognize it as such?

This was demonstrably not the case in USSR. Anyone was free to join the party and move up through the ranks.

You're free to do this in capitalism too. And you'll do comparable amounts of backstabbing and conspiring and other shady shit to get to the top. The occasional relatively-uncorrupt person will luck their way to the top, and their personal biases will enable them to believe that it's meritocratic too!

Sure, it's not always been that way. We can go back to pre-1865 and say "but black people couldn't do it!" but that'd be disingenuous.

It also makes no sense to say that party members owned industries since the productive output of these industries did not benefit them directly.

Bezos doesn't benefit directly either. His salary is what, $80,000/year? The billions people like to talk about isn't even real cash. He couldn't use that to pay for anything. It's equity. It's illusory money. If he tried to sell the shares, the price would tank and they'd be worthless and not the billions claimed. Amazon's revenues are not his revenues. He can't spend that money directly.

His billions aren't non-existent, but they aren't money. They are power. The power to decide how Amazon acts as a business entity. He has alot of that.

Just like the communists did over their own industries. The "elite few" communists.

The only difference is that we can quantify Bezos' wealth, where as the numbers were hidden for the elite Soviet leaders and party members.

The substantive difference is that the means of production in USSR were publicly owned

"Public ownership" is a nonsense phrase. When I own a thing, it is mine. I can decide that no one can possess it, or that one person or another can possess it temporarily. I can give it as a gift permanently. I can charge money for it, or not. I can charge for it on a recurring basis, or not.

That's what ownership is. But there is no ghostly "public" which has a gigantic 100ft tall translucent human face that owns something with "public ownership". Instead, someone almost certainly not me ends up owning it, even if he or she can't use the word "own" without getting into trouble. That man or women gets to decide who possesses it temporarily or on what basis. They get to decide to dispatch it to another man or woman, who then owns it (but can't use the word "own). I can't even sell my supposed "share" in this, and be excluded from the public ownership of the thing (for indeed, who would want to buy it when they have their own public share of it, and having two shares gets them no more consideration?).

This man may have made promises that I can use it or can't on some schedule. But they can rescind those promises. In all cases, if they renege on the promises, they incur no significant penalty.

This "public ownership" seems to me to be nearly identical to "some other person not me owns it, and fuck me".

This allowed USSR to provide everyone with food, housing, healthcare, and education.

Tell that to the people excluded from the universities with coffin problems. Or the five families hot-bunking in shitty brutalist apartment buildings how they were lucky to have housing.

Lots of things allow all different sorts of non-communist systems to provide everyone with food. It's not that impressive in the 21st century to say "but they fed everyone".

and a retirement guarantee by 60.

With enough vodka rations to make sure only 1 in 50 collected on it.

The trouble is that I'm not a "majority" I am a person. More to the point, I am a person who is more used to not being in the majority than I am in it. "Good for the majority" in many cases has often left me out.

It isn't in my interest to pursue strategies that are good for the majority. There are others like me.

Such states can have many problems, but they’re an undeniable improvement over capitalism.

That's not clear at all. Let's go with the "at least communism fed everyone". In the United States, literally no one starves who isn't anorexic or similarly mentally ill. Homeless people are fat.

We can talk about other metrics too (spaces races and whatnot), but capitalism seems to at least keep up with communism in those regards without some really absurd double standards.

The default state of things in the west is that monopoly on violence is in the hands of capitalists, and it’s currently being used to subjugate the rest of the population to the will of capitalists.

Which of course never happened in the Soviet Union or Cuba, or any of the the other places?

Look, I'm not even you're opponent here. There is a profound philosophical question here, one that if anyone actually bothers to attempt to solve it, the sort of violence you think is a solution might actually become possible.

More to the point, not just possible, but justifiable. Like, provably so. Even to people like myself who don't conform to your ideology.

Wouldn't it be great if, for instance, we could look at some event somewhere in the world, apply the rules, and say "in situations like this where x and y are occurring, and where z does not occur, that violence was justified"? We have those rules mostly worked out for individual scenarios. We know what self-defense looks like.

We don't have those rules worked out for group/collective scenarios. And until we do, it will always be anxiety-inducing to contemplate the violence, and politically dangerous to even talk about it (for fear of terrorism conspiracy charges). Better still, with the rules worked out and agreed upon (mostly or wholly), we'd likely see quite alot of behavior changing in a hurry when the government realizes it is inviting justified rebellion if it doesn't... without having to resort to the violence.

The part you have to get over first is accepting that it may truly be the case that if we figure those rules out honestly, some of your heroes may turn out to have been "not so heroic" and some of your examples of good governments may turn out to have been the tyrants their detractors have claimed all along.

and max pay was capped at 9x lowest pay.

Even in the US, there are limits on the difference in monetary compensation. Because of that, for the most prestigious/lucrative positions, non-monetary compensation is offered. At the lowest rungs, it was health insurance. When you start talking higher, then there are company cars and so forth. And for CEOs, you get equity in the form of stock options, personal assistants, etc.

The Soviets had all of these for the highest positions, just like everywhere else. The only thing different is that they made the pay difference limitation explicit and lower.

They rose to their positions through their work.

No. I think higher in the thread you mentioned how Brezhnev came from a family of metalworkers. When he became General Secretary, it wasn't because he was the best metalworker at the foundry. It wasn't because he was the best manager of metalworkers at the foundry. That wasn't how anyone rose to high positions in the Soviet Union.

Like elsewhere, there is a social game. And people who play it well rise high, those who play it perfectly rise higher still. Those who can't or won't play it, those who are bad at it, or who are visibly bitter about it, don't rise at all.

None of it has to do with anything resembling actual work.

but it’s certainly not because the party was some sort of an oligarchy that you seem to be insinuating here.

What is an oligarchy? Sure, we all know the dictionary definition, but those aren't very nuanced.

The "rule by the rich". Even in places that are clearly oligarchies, occasionally one rich person loses it all, no longer rules, or another becomes rich and starts ruling. And "rich" is relative too, no one would claim that a millionaire can't ever be an oligarch simply because elsewhere in the world there exist billionaires.

The Party was a group of oligarchs. They did not measure their wealth the way that wealth was measured in other countries, socially it was sort of taboo to even think in those terms. But they had more luxuries, nicer homes, more real estate than anyone else in the Soviet Union. To a level that, were they in any other countries, they would have been (single digit) millionaires.

And that's without even considering the industries that they owned. Sure, they wouldn't use that word, because again it was taboo. But "ownership" is something that can't ever be collective. To own something isn't to be able to use that word to refer to it, but to control it and to be able to decide who control passes to and in what circumstances. Are you claiming that Brezhnev had no power to go to some iron mill and say "you aren't allowed to work here anymore" to some flunky he didn't like? Just as a western capitalist could fire someone he didn't like? That he couldn't put someone else in charge of that factory? That he couldn't decide to change the floorplan and expand it? Or shut it down?

Sure, he couldn't do it by decree like some feudal king. But the western capitalist rarely does that either (and rarer still does it without it causing him headaches). He builds consensus, gets others on the board of directors on his side. Let's the right managers know that good things will happen if they help, and bad things will happen if they don't. Etc.

The only real substantive differences are that some words (ownership, rich) weren't allowed to be used. But the same qualities and circumstances permeated that nation.

It's not so much that the state has a monopoly on violence. It's that for it to not have a monopoly on violence, it would mean that non-state actors would have to choose to do violence.

That's not an easy choice to make, is it? History is filled with accounts of crazies who chose violence but who chose it because they like the idea of violence more than for any other reason... and they ended up monsters. It's admirable that people would not want to become that.

When is violence justified? Against whom? How can you safeguard things so that the even initially justifiable violence doesn't go too far, spin out of control? More importantly, possibly, is what you do after your violence succeeds... you've built up this paramilitary force to perform the violence, they've won, and now they're de facto in charge. You end up with goons running the show, because you needed goons to beat the other guy. You might be a goon yourself. That's nearly always bad. You almost need some separate organization afterward, of civilians, to take over. How do you keep it separate during the struggle?

It might be more accurate to say that the state doesn't so much have a monopoly on violence as that it's just the only group out there sociopathic enough to want to use it.

I have never heard of a company of any sort that thinks in a mindset which reasonable people would consider "long term". I have read numerous articles about this over the years, all whining and lamentations about how company X or corporation Y fail to think in the short term... their corporate structures tend to discourage that, as they are run by CEOs who only wish to cash out on the stock options they get as the larger part of their compensation.

If this translates to your scenario at all, then they might well ignore the long-term implications of layoffs.