Soviets were able to develop faster without compromising their ethics
This is a fully mythical view of the Soviets
Wouldn’t Marx consider this good in the sense that it creates conditions so unbearable for workers that they’re forced to radicalize?
No, absolutely not. The point is that it socialized production and brings workers together, while obviously ownership of production remained private. It creates the material basis for the socialization of ownership of the MoP.
Marx’s point was not some crude “revolutionary immiseration” thing and he argued that successfully fighting for labor rights even within the bourgeois system was productive for communists (not as a replacement for revolution, but as one of many ways to help facilitate revolution).
True in what sense? McDonald’s is not the greatest example but it definitely is an example of production being centralized and coordinated with many hands being involved in the production and distribution of each commodity.
You would have to consider what public good these corporations and included innovations are providing. McDonald’s in particular is a torment nexus of food production based on manmade horrors beyond your comprehension and generating addictive behaviors to the worst possible food while extracting the highest amounts of money possible from beaten down workers.
This is a developmental dead end and whatever logistics or consistency arguments for McDonald’s runs into the fact that socialists and soviets never struggled with food distribution to begin with and the consumerist chain restaurant model does not encourage the development of the kind of non-alienated communal citizen a leftist project would want to create.
Chasing and emulating western consumerism is tailist and meat production doesn’t have any place in rational socialist development especially in the context of the climate apocalypse that meat is largely responsible for.
Going back to my original point the full sentence would be
Soviets were able to develop faster without compromising their ethics (relative to their capitalist counterparts)
And my larger point being that outside of the arms race with the capitalists there is no shareholder profit motive or capitalist gun pointed at the head of socialist development, being liberated from the shackles of capitalist realism would mean being freed from the dichotomy between ethics and advancement, ethical options that are impossible under capitalism are available.
But yes I think even in my extremely simplified point the Soviets ended up with better food than westerners without the excesses and evil that McDonald’s and other corporations had done to reach the same result. Let’s not forget that after everything McDonald’s serves like a $14 poisonous hamburger that tastes horrible, made of tortured and mutilated flesh, served by hyper-exploited labor, and in a way that does irrevocable harm to local food culture. We would have to get specific to name the worthwhile innovations McDonald’s produced that couldn’t be discovered without the immense moral and ethical costs.
the thousand other reasons I don’t. Marx does not assign a moral virtue to shopping local or ethically, and in fact cites the consolidation of labor into large firms to be a historically progressive trend.
If we’re talking about mythologizing this passage from OP is a huge reach when we’re talking about buying McDonald’s
You are viewing this in too much from the standpoint of whether something is “bad” or not and I think this prevents you from seeing how things can be useful. Obviously private ownership means that McDonald’s, like any such company, fundamentally expresses class antagonisms that harm the proletariat with engineered precision and wantin destruction. My point is not that a USSA should have McDonald’s but with even redder branding material, my point is that it has aspects of technological development and social reorganizing that are useful for, on the one hand, staging revolution and, on the other, for solving some logistical problems. Misappropriating one of Lenin’s favorite Marx quotes, this is not the same as saying we should merely “lay ahold of the ready-made state machinery”, it is still also an antagonistic structure to the proletariat, but you should understand that being antagonistic to the proletariat does not preclude having a role of historical progressivism (that will be outmoded like any historically progressive development eventually is), because that is literally what capitalism as a whole is and that is one of the most fundamental insights of Marxism.
The Soviets obviously did struggle with food, notoriously so, though they got over this hurdle for the most part, though they struggled much more in producing other types of goods and that continued until the USSR’s dissolution. Moreover, I flatly reject this deflection from the absurd claim of them “not compromising their ethics” because, aside from this moral view being unhelpful, it’s just blatantly false from literally any framework, including the account of any head of state in the country’s entire history from Lenin to Gorby. According to the most generous accounts that have any connection to reality, the USSR was constantly in a state of needing to make brutal compromises and sometimes overt concessions due to material conditions not being superceded by mystical virtue, and this on top of negligence and misjudgement spanning from entire villages to entire nations/ethnic groups in terms of the handling of some issues, created sometimes catastrophically backwards situations and then the Soviets responded to the backwardness with, for example, mass executions, which themselves are a “compromise” with their conditions. Sometimes they also just didn’t solve the situation at all, and sometimes refused to even really try (here I mean during the revisionist period).
I think we’re talking past each other here, it’s an interesting conversation but I think the underlying topic is the relationship between ethics and production. I think it’s a mistake further up in the thread for socialists to conflate bad ethics with better production because that line is a tacit admission of capitalism’s superiority to communism.
Of course it’s useful to steal from your enemies but the original topic of justifying eating at McDonald’s because Marx wrote about capitalist monopoly consolidation is an enormous reach and just reads as a retroactive marxist flavored justification of doing what they’re already doing. I would argue that that line for a lot of Western companies and especially McDonald’s hit the line of diminishing returns decades ago and socialists still have to grapple with the consequences of their consumption even if boycotts are just a small part rather than the end goal.
Also this is not directed at you but if someone eats meat they’re still responsible for the torture and killing of whatever living thing they end up consuming, there’s no argument to be had there. This ethical consumption argument comes up in every vegan struggle session and to the onlookers that try to ratio vegans doesn’t prove them wrong lol. There’s no marxist justification for eating at McDonald’s.
This is a fully mythical view of the Soviets
No, absolutely not. The point is that it socialized production and brings workers together, while obviously ownership of production remained private. It creates the material basis for the socialization of ownership of the MoP.
Marx’s point was not some crude “revolutionary immiseration” thing and he argued that successfully fighting for labor rights even within the bourgeois system was productive for communists (not as a replacement for revolution, but as one of many ways to help facilitate revolution).
I don’t think this is strictly true, especially in the context of something like McDonald’s but I’ll have to get back to you on that
True in what sense? McDonald’s is not the greatest example but it definitely is an example of production being centralized and coordinated with many hands being involved in the production and distribution of each commodity.
You would have to consider what public good these corporations and included innovations are providing. McDonald’s in particular is a torment nexus of food production based on manmade horrors beyond your comprehension and generating addictive behaviors to the worst possible food while extracting the highest amounts of money possible from beaten down workers.
This is a developmental dead end and whatever logistics or consistency arguments for McDonald’s runs into the fact that socialists and soviets never struggled with food distribution to begin with and the consumerist chain restaurant model does not encourage the development of the kind of non-alienated communal citizen a leftist project would want to create.
Chasing and emulating western consumerism is tailist and meat production doesn’t have any place in rational socialist development especially in the context of the climate apocalypse that meat is largely responsible for.
Going back to my original point the full sentence would be
And my larger point being that outside of the arms race with the capitalists there is no shareholder profit motive or capitalist gun pointed at the head of socialist development, being liberated from the shackles of capitalist realism would mean being freed from the dichotomy between ethics and advancement, ethical options that are impossible under capitalism are available.
But yes I think even in my extremely simplified point the Soviets ended up with better food than westerners without the excesses and evil that McDonald’s and other corporations had done to reach the same result. Let’s not forget that after everything McDonald’s serves like a $14 poisonous hamburger that tastes horrible, made of tortured and mutilated flesh, served by hyper-exploited labor, and in a way that does irrevocable harm to local food culture. We would have to get specific to name the worthwhile innovations McDonald’s produced that couldn’t be discovered without the immense moral and ethical costs.
If we’re talking about mythologizing this passage from OP is a huge reach when we’re talking about buying McDonald’s
You are viewing this in too much from the standpoint of whether something is “bad” or not and I think this prevents you from seeing how things can be useful. Obviously private ownership means that McDonald’s, like any such company, fundamentally expresses class antagonisms that harm the proletariat with engineered precision and wantin destruction. My point is not that a USSA should have McDonald’s but with even redder branding material, my point is that it has aspects of technological development and social reorganizing that are useful for, on the one hand, staging revolution and, on the other, for solving some logistical problems. Misappropriating one of Lenin’s favorite Marx quotes, this is not the same as saying we should merely “lay ahold of the ready-made state machinery”, it is still also an antagonistic structure to the proletariat, but you should understand that being antagonistic to the proletariat does not preclude having a role of historical progressivism (that will be outmoded like any historically progressive development eventually is), because that is literally what capitalism as a whole is and that is one of the most fundamental insights of Marxism.
The Soviets obviously did struggle with food, notoriously so, though they got over this hurdle for the most part, though they struggled much more in producing other types of goods and that continued until the USSR’s dissolution. Moreover, I flatly reject this deflection from the absurd claim of them “not compromising their ethics” because, aside from this moral view being unhelpful, it’s just blatantly false from literally any framework, including the account of any head of state in the country’s entire history from Lenin to Gorby. According to the most generous accounts that have any connection to reality, the USSR was constantly in a state of needing to make brutal compromises and sometimes overt concessions due to material conditions not being superceded by mystical virtue, and this on top of negligence and misjudgement spanning from entire villages to entire nations/ethnic groups in terms of the handling of some issues, created sometimes catastrophically backwards situations and then the Soviets responded to the backwardness with, for example, mass executions, which themselves are a “compromise” with their conditions. Sometimes they also just didn’t solve the situation at all, and sometimes refused to even really try (here I mean during the revisionist period).
I think we’re talking past each other here, it’s an interesting conversation but I think the underlying topic is the relationship between ethics and production. I think it’s a mistake further up in the thread for socialists to conflate bad ethics with better production because that line is a tacit admission of capitalism’s superiority to communism.
Of course it’s useful to steal from your enemies but the original topic of justifying eating at McDonald’s because Marx wrote about capitalist monopoly consolidation is an enormous reach and just reads as a retroactive marxist flavored justification of doing what they’re already doing. I would argue that that line for a lot of Western companies and especially McDonald’s hit the line of diminishing returns decades ago and socialists still have to grapple with the consequences of their consumption even if boycotts are just a small part rather than the end goal.
Also this is not directed at you but if someone eats meat they’re still responsible for the torture and killing of whatever living thing they end up consuming, there’s no argument to be had there. This ethical consumption argument comes up in every vegan struggle session and to the onlookers that try to ratio vegans doesn’t prove them wrong lol. There’s no marxist justification for eating at McDonald’s.