In a conversation with AfD leader Alice Weidel on X, Musk concurred with her assertion that Adolf Hitler was a communist and pushed disinformation about migrants coming into the US.
See, you go on to prove my exact point, that QA workers and safety workers need the authority to stop production. You recognize this necessary authority, but then undermine it by saying it’s the “will of the workers.” If you don’t recognize it as authority, then it can be gone against, meaning you have to recognize it as authority. Managers don’t just do reports, otherwise they wouldn’t exist. Managers are coordinators of production, if you ever step foot in a factory you’ll see assembly line leaders and area leaders that help coordinate between each other and solve problems as they arise.
You describe fantastic examples like OSHA, which are necessary authorities, essentially explaining why not all hierarchy and not all authority is necessarilly a bad thing. However, you change the names and bring up non-sequitors like GULAGs and whatnot as though you could have an OSHA that only politely asks a factory producing toxic products to stop. OSHA has power because it is punishable to not do what they say, they have authority.
Finally, saying that Marxism isn’t Socialist is very silly, but does indeed go along with you pretending Anarchism is the only form of Socialism, and flip-flopping back and forth on whether or not authority is necessary by trying to change the names of structures we both seem to support materially.
The rest of your comment is anticommunist nonsense that you repeat without any sources, so I’ll leave you with some great ones:
Blackshirts and Reds: a fantastic critique of the USSR, analysis of Communism’s antagonistic relationship with fascism, and tears down “left” anticommunism.
Russian Justice is a great book on how the law, court, and prison system worked in the early USSR
Soviet Democracy is an explanation and exploration of the Soviet system of democracy, which democratized the economy dramatically, especially in comparison with the Tsarist system and the current Capitalist system
See, you go on to prove my exact point, that QA workers and safety workers need the authority to stop production. You recognize this necessary authority, but then undermine it by saying it’s the “will of the workers.” If you don’t recognize it as authority, then it can be gone against, meaning you have to recognize it as authority. Managers don’t just do reports, otherwise they wouldn’t exist.
You’re doing the Engels thing. “See, subordinate, you give authority to Bob from safety. Thus, you accept authority, thus, I get to tell you what to do, and I’m telling you to increase production by 200%, skirting safety protocols if need be”. It doesn’t work like that. Authority, like respect, is earned. A king is not an authority on bootmaking no matter how much power he wields. (Well he could actually be a hobby bootmaker but you get my point).
Proper managers just do reports. Not always the written kind. They’re not saying “do this, do that”, they’re saying “X needs Y, can you supply it, please contact them”, they’re saying “have a look at this procedure what do you think of it”. They’re keeping an eye on everything, produce a larger picture and communicate their insights to anyone who should know, or is asking. Their authority comes from good analysis.
OSHA has power because it is punishable to not do what they say, they have authority.
You’re still equating power and authority. And not just in the “eh those terms have some overlap and speech can get fuzzy”, but in your thinking itself, you’re not making crucial distinctions: OSHA would not need any power if bosses did not have power over workers, its authority as people knowledgable in matters of work safety is plenty to make the workers listen to them. You do not need to threaten a machinist for them to not put their dick in a vice. You do need to threaten bosses who threaten machinists so that they put their dick in a vice. The necessity to threaten the boss with gulag does only arise because the boss is given the power to threaten the worker with gulag.
You’re doing exactly what Engels points out, though. You are trying to change the nature of a thing by changing its name.
OSHA has authority, power, whatever you want to call it to compel unsafe or toxic production to cease. This is necessary, and cannot simply be a request to be denied, as people will work in their own interests and may want to cut corners. You don’t need to threaten people not to put their genitals in vices, correct, but you do need to have power over people who are deliberately skirting safety protocol for their own benefit.
This is why this entire conversation has been relatively pointless, it’s clear that you certainly have firm beliefs about what you want, you just fundamentally lack the understanding of the Marxist position to its entirety and can only disagree with it by shifting and distorting things or by changing the names of things we agree on. You double down when proven wrong and try to pretend Marxism isn’t Socialist.
I think you need to take a step back and read at list a bit of Marx and Engels and read up more on the various AES states if you want to actually come up with sensible critique.
“to compel”. That’s power. Authority is more like “to convince”.
This is necessary,
No.
as people will work in their own interests and may want to cut corners
It is not in the interest of workers to cut corners. That interest is coming from somewhere else. That is why OSHA needs power. Without those external interests, all that OSHA needs to do is convince that certain practices are beneficial to the worker’s own self-interest. If they are any good at their job, they will be very convincing, they will have much authority.
This is the fundamental stuff that Marx, and by extension many Marxists, miss in their analysis. That’s why the revolution failed: Because it was not, systemically, beneficial to the worker, because it was the exchange of one boot for another boot. Advances such as healthcare? Goddammit SocDems caused Germany to introduce universal public healthcare under Monarchism. “We need the dictatorship of the vanguard to introduce these advances” is not an argument, it never has been necessary and with the likes of OSHA: The USSR was not great, not terrible. Bosses could override safety concerns because higher-ups want production quota, and they did. The reason it wasn’t terrible is because the people engineering factories cared about that stuff, and worked it into the design.
The same misappreciation btw also extends to histography: “The peasant has no class consciousness”. Peasant revolt after constant peasant revolt attested in history would beg to differ.
“The whole working gang is interested in production. The program for next month is discussed with all of us. The foreman calls a meeting and tells us that the administration wants us to put out 3,000 milling tools next month. How shall we do it? We discuss in detail; each of us says what he can do. It all adds up to 4,000. So the foreman goes to the administration and raises the plan to 4,000. […]
That’s not how quotas were set in the USSR. An analysis of how implementation came to differ from those kinds of ideal descriptions might be in order. Right-out mandatory if you want to call yourself a materialist.
See, you go on to prove my exact point, that QA workers and safety workers need the authority to stop production. You recognize this necessary authority, but then undermine it by saying it’s the “will of the workers.” If you don’t recognize it as authority, then it can be gone against, meaning you have to recognize it as authority. Managers don’t just do reports, otherwise they wouldn’t exist. Managers are coordinators of production, if you ever step foot in a factory you’ll see assembly line leaders and area leaders that help coordinate between each other and solve problems as they arise.
You describe fantastic examples like OSHA, which are necessary authorities, essentially explaining why not all hierarchy and not all authority is necessarilly a bad thing. However, you change the names and bring up non-sequitors like GULAGs and whatnot as though you could have an OSHA that only politely asks a factory producing toxic products to stop. OSHA has power because it is punishable to not do what they say, they have authority.
Finally, saying that Marxism isn’t Socialist is very silly, but does indeed go along with you pretending Anarchism is the only form of Socialism, and flip-flopping back and forth on whether or not authority is necessary by trying to change the names of structures we both seem to support materially.
The rest of your comment is anticommunist nonsense that you repeat without any sources, so I’ll leave you with some great ones:
Blackshirts and Reds: a fantastic critique of the USSR, analysis of Communism’s antagonistic relationship with fascism, and tears down “left” anticommunism.
Is The Red Flag Flying? The Political Economy of the Soviet Union is a great analysis of how the economy of the Soviet Union functioned.
Russian Justice is a great book on how the law, court, and prison system worked in the early USSR
Soviet Democracy is an explanation and exploration of the Soviet system of democracy, which democratized the economy dramatically, especially in comparison with the Tsarist system and the current Capitalist system
This Soviet World great history book on the early Soviet period.
You’re doing the Engels thing. “See, subordinate, you give authority to Bob from safety. Thus, you accept authority, thus, I get to tell you what to do, and I’m telling you to increase production by 200%, skirting safety protocols if need be”. It doesn’t work like that. Authority, like respect, is earned. A king is not an authority on bootmaking no matter how much power he wields. (Well he could actually be a hobby bootmaker but you get my point).
Proper managers just do reports. Not always the written kind. They’re not saying “do this, do that”, they’re saying “X needs Y, can you supply it, please contact them”, they’re saying “have a look at this procedure what do you think of it”. They’re keeping an eye on everything, produce a larger picture and communicate their insights to anyone who should know, or is asking. Their authority comes from good analysis.
You’re still equating power and authority. And not just in the “eh those terms have some overlap and speech can get fuzzy”, but in your thinking itself, you’re not making crucial distinctions: OSHA would not need any power if bosses did not have power over workers, its authority as people knowledgable in matters of work safety is plenty to make the workers listen to them. You do not need to threaten a machinist for them to not put their dick in a vice. You do need to threaten bosses who threaten machinists so that they put their dick in a vice. The necessity to threaten the boss with gulag does only arise because the boss is given the power to threaten the worker with gulag.
You’re doing exactly what Engels points out, though. You are trying to change the nature of a thing by changing its name.
OSHA has authority, power, whatever you want to call it to compel unsafe or toxic production to cease. This is necessary, and cannot simply be a request to be denied, as people will work in their own interests and may want to cut corners. You don’t need to threaten people not to put their genitals in vices, correct, but you do need to have power over people who are deliberately skirting safety protocol for their own benefit.
This is why this entire conversation has been relatively pointless, it’s clear that you certainly have firm beliefs about what you want, you just fundamentally lack the understanding of the Marxist position to its entirety and can only disagree with it by shifting and distorting things or by changing the names of things we agree on. You double down when proven wrong and try to pretend Marxism isn’t Socialist.
I think you need to take a step back and read at list a bit of Marx and Engels and read up more on the various AES states if you want to actually come up with sensible critique.
“to compel”. That’s power. Authority is more like “to convince”.
No.
It is not in the interest of workers to cut corners. That interest is coming from somewhere else. That is why OSHA needs power. Without those external interests, all that OSHA needs to do is convince that certain practices are beneficial to the worker’s own self-interest. If they are any good at their job, they will be very convincing, they will have much authority.
This is the fundamental stuff that Marx, and by extension many Marxists, miss in their analysis. That’s why the revolution failed: Because it was not, systemically, beneficial to the worker, because it was the exchange of one boot for another boot. Advances such as healthcare? Goddammit SocDems caused Germany to introduce universal public healthcare under Monarchism. “We need the dictatorship of the vanguard to introduce these advances” is not an argument, it never has been necessary and with the likes of OSHA: The USSR was not great, not terrible. Bosses could override safety concerns because higher-ups want production quota, and they did. The reason it wasn’t terrible is because the people engineering factories cared about that stuff, and worked it into the design.
The same misappreciation btw also extends to histography: “The peasant has no class consciousness”. Peasant revolt after constant peasant revolt attested in history would beg to differ.
https://comlib.encryptionin.space/epubs/this-soviet-world/
That’s not how quotas were set in the USSR. An analysis of how implementation came to differ from those kinds of ideal descriptions might be in order. Right-out mandatory if you want to call yourself a materialist.