Was Lenin a Сволочь?

and why am I asking the question?

I am asking the question because I’d like the Behind the 𝔅𝔞𝔰𝔱𝔞𝔯𝔡𝔰 crew to do this episode. I guess this one could risk 𝔭𝔦𝔰𝔰𝔦𝔫𝔤 off Grumbine and Eshalegal, but I’ve got something to ward off that slap. I try to inject some feeble geek comedy into Ōhanga Pai, because it keeps me sane, and so anything I write that you disagree with you should take as comedic. If you cannot find the punchline read harder!

The sort of cartoon that gets you slapped by Grumbine. So you GIMP it from the safety of your New Zealand desktop.

Frankly I do not care much for the man Lenin. It is not for one man to determine the course of history. He had some nice ideals.

Immeasurable damage was done has been done and continues to be done throughout history to the brand “Socialism” by a few 𖦪𖥣ꛪ𖦙𖢧 𖧳𖧥𖨚𖢧𖧥𖦪𖦧𖨚 who claimed to be socialists but who were not socialists.

Fwiw, to me, Socialism is many possibilities, but among all of them is non-violence and ‘diplomacy first’, and (for nominal [elected] “leaders”) if you cannot appease the hoi polloi by dispensation of kindness then resign. Give someone else a go at policy stuff. You never know, those who like doing the job least can sometimes be best at it.¹

If you cannot have a Soviet unless by force, then you should not have a Soviet. This is to me as elementary as mathematics teaching & learning. If you cannot put in gazillions of hours of hard work feeling stupid to your bones then you cannot be good at mathematics, so you cannot want to be a mathematician. (Ah yes, I was reading Zubok’s book Collapse, that’s why this essay. You read,… then… ideas strangely seem to form out of thin air.)

I am against all ideologies despite what Žižek might argue, my half-baked ideology is flaky-pastry anti-ideology. If it were fully-baked anti-ideology it would be an ideology hence a logical contradiction. But I am totally in favour of full employment and price stability of spiritual transcendentals. One can be a true advocate for love, compassion and justice without claiming to know what these words mean exactly nor how to practice them perfectly nor even know the theory for that, but nevertheless catching some of the spirit of it all. If that’s an ideology to Slavoj well then I am guilty of being ideological by his definition, but not mine. Half-baked is sometimes tastier.

TODO
Get to the point.
I totally forgot what I was going to say about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin 
Ahhh. Proly was silly.

What I am half-dead against is purity testing and such-like. If someone is pro-worker then I am half-pro-them, at least when it comes to our community half-politics. Everyone is a politician who is involved in any social policy, by the way. Writing “letters to the editor-bot” or writing Select Committee submissions — you lovely political animals you!

The paid professional politicians are just the filth at the end of an exhaust pipe we need to sign off on the emission into The Law. Hey, no disrespect to any of you self-respecting professional politicians. It’s a dirty job and someone² has to get half-filthy rich doing it half-heartedly. At least I know that no damn “tax payer” is paying for you. So unlike libertarians and right-wing nut-jobs I do not begrudge your existence.

On purity fetishes: for example, it was deeply weird to me when I read some online leftists saying nasty things about the Fabian Society, as if they were some sort of CIA Op or controlled opposition. That sort of conspiracy stuff (comes too from the otherwise nice guy 1Dime and his ill relatives on the Lacanian Left, so that’s depressing). If AOC³ is controlled opposition then you are denying her free will agency. I’d simply say AOC is not quite fully mature is all. She began as a science geek, and probably has not read much working class history, but her instincts are good. We can work with that. No one and no system is controlling her and The Squad. It’s more like what Chomsky said, prominent positions in society are often suffering from self-selection bias.

You are not in AOC’s position since you are too cynical, too up-yourself, and far too lazy. (Boy, was that 🄿🅁🄾🄹🄴🄲🅃🄸🄽🄶! 🤣)

You do not have to decapitate allies with full blown Marxist Grim-Reaping for a warped sense of purity all the damn time. Vampire Castles and Purity tests are killers of Solidarity. Same can be said for some in New Zealand, but since it is too close to home I won’t name names.

We’ve got some Fabians in NZ who put out decent content and town hall meetings. Seems to me a superior way for workers to organize than joining a partisan political party. I like the Workers Education Association too, but they seem to have less of a public footprint where I live.

Oh yeah, by the way, MMT extremism is not a purity test. If you want to say “MMT Wrong!” and instead believe in a fantasy monetary system you’re not being pure nor anti-pure. You are being 🅔🅐🅣🅡🅔🅓🅓🅡 — Anagram that!

Testing Some Systems with MMT Probes

Getting to the bare bones essence of things polecon, how about these definitions from a dirtbag MMT lens:

• Social democracy — has a lot of private ownership of the means of production, but a robust Welfare State.

• Democratic socialism — has a lot of public and worker ownership of the means of production and almost no Welfare State except for pensions.

Since I am supreme dictator today but my currency of ASCII tokens is budgeted, these are your only options. I ran out of keystrokes for the rest.

You can’t guess which nation I prefer to live in.

Before going further, let’s just note that “public ownership of the means of production” means the State owns the means of production. But the State is always hiring private citizens to do the work. The State can also allow the workers to manage the whole show, the “ownership” is nominal, and should not really be anything of interest. Although oversight Ombudsman type systems will be needed in a large enough nation. No one has time these days, not has anyone ever in a village large than a few thousand, to be the watchdog on the State while raising a family or treating themselves for the unfortunate condition of “being alive and wanting to stay alive”.

If a fully private firm is owned by the workers in the firm, that’s good too. This dissolves the tension between Social democracy and Democratic socialism. Who really cares about the nominal ownership? No one should care. What matters is that in the workplace the workers have control of the means of production, not the bosses. This means workers have a measure of control over their lives. The bosses are elected managers or nominal owners.⁴ Any entrepreneur who wants to start-up a private business can do so. But under a democracy (of any variety) they must grant who they hire to do the work an equal say in the business. Work is not like sports. Bosses are not like captains of a sports team. Peoples lives are at stake. This worker control is a moral imperative, and so should be enshrine in the Law of the Land. Failure to have such Laws and enforce them is a moral abomination.

The guess I posed above has the answer that I do not prefer to live in either type of nation. It all depends on how things are run. I personally do not want any State Welfare for myself. But we must have a Welfare State. I guess I should rephrase that and say I do not want to have to have any state welfare. What I desire is state support for workers, all of them, and that’ll probably take care of myself, but my selfish interests are not important in the grand scheme of things.

The whole point of wise political economy is to shrink the Welfare State to as small as possible not because it is inefficient and evil, but because no one should need it, or very few should need the programs. We should have all the programs in place anyway. A young child does not need state welfare. Her parents or guardians need a decent wage and benefits. How does the State afford better worker benefits? By hiring yet other workers to work a bit. Not by handing out their I.O.U. for nothing.

Public healthcare, public schools, public housing, public Internet, &c., is not state welfare by my definition. (I would even say Pensions are not really state Welfare, but that’s maybe a linguistic bridge too far. For me, Pensions are just a continuation of wage compensation. You were not fully compensated in your working years, believe me!)

These are simply public utilities or programs (building the houses) that workers provide whom the state compensates, rather than you and yours truly paying the bill. A direct government I.O.U is certainly more efficient than my I.O.U for such wages, but also a damn sight more efficient than the government finding a way to get me their I.O.U so I can pay the private firm delivering the Internet provider the governments I.O.U.

As for smartphones and fashion accessories, we don’t need the government supplying them. But is it?🤣

The government could always directly pay the wages for the private firms making veggie burgers and French fries and whatnot. Why not? Yeah, but that does move a few more administrators out of the private sector into the public sector. Is that going to still remain efficient? (I think not. People’s Republic of Walmart notwithstanding.)

I would have room in my democratic socialist dictatorship for some PRoW computer automation of supply. But you’d need an extra layer of preference voting or discovery. The private market simply does do this more efficiently, (at least I think so, but if not, great, let’s do it the other way) and that means something in our age where rate of energy use per minute is a serious ecological concern. I do not know how much of a concern, it’d probably be a darn sight less bad than cryptocurrency and Ai chatbot server farms and whatnot. So I am not anti a huge whopping great lot of public ownership of the means of production.

The way to decentralize it to avoid a potentially sclerotic People’s Republic of Walmart is with a lot of Worker Cooperatives.

Don’t listen to the leftie eggheads claiming Worker Coops are “propping up capitalism”. Did anyone in the USA look around today outside the window? We’ve long gone past anything recognizable as “Capitalism”.

What Neoliberalism does is create a massive need for a Welfare State pointlessly and at the same time infects us with politicians and mainstream media who constantly whine about “dole bludgers” and the Nanny State. You 𖧥𖨚𖨚𖦙𖥕ꛚ𖠢s are creating it you 𝖕𝖊𝖗𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖙𝖊𝖉 ℭ𝔘𝔑𝔗𝔰.

Ahhh, nothing like a good bit of fontmouthing language to round out a loving spiritual message to all our comrades.

1. Not a joke. The barista who expressed espresso for 60 years might enjoy a break from that to hang out more at the disco club. But if we ever encounter espresso fascists we might want to hire her back at all costs. Bernie the Barista.

2. My dear old Dad did for a bit. It was too dirty for him. He was a kind man.

3. That is to say, the concept of the “AOC” platonic form that the woman known as AOC represents. The AOC in any parliament.

4. In any case, under State supported LLC laws, the owners of LLC firms are not incurring risk, so what does “ownership” (as in responsibility) even mean in this case? It just means “gets to exploit the workers for profit share”.