Of the socialists here, who would also identify as a Lysenkoist and why? Do you really believe that the inequitable distribution of capital is entirely the function of society, chance, and arbitrary historical processes?
Assuming it is not (i.e., some people innately possess traits that facilitate the accumulation of capital), is Marxist ideology and analysis dead in the water?
Lysenko is right in that people are not robots shaped 100% by their genes, but can be influenced heavily by environment.
That's who I reject the argument of 'socialism is against human nature because we are inherently greedy'. People can be- for want of a better word- brainwashed from birth to be model citizens.
The Soviets failed to achieve this because they kept many facets of the capitalist reward system; had currency, cars and apartments for high-achievers, etc; as well as general Slavic incompetence and slovenliness
>Lysenko is right
I knew marxists were braindead retards but seriously at least pretend not to be.
Name one single thing that Lysenko got wrong
Right, but the extent of genetic effects on traits such as industriousness or "financial smarts" can be quantified as long as we have good measures of these constructs, which we do in many cases.
If we accept even a little that people might be where they are in our capitalist society because of inborn predispositions facilitating their ability to be good capitalists, it almost lessens the "exploitative" process of capitalism.
In this sense, class is only oppressive to the extent that it prevents people who would otherwise be very good at accumulating capital (due to their inherent predispositions) from actually doing so. But how many people would this actually apply to? How many truly smart, industrious people are left without opportunity in a society that offers no shortage of hiring/enrollment initiatives and scholarships for minorities/poor people? In contrast, what proportion of the proletariate is oppressed more by their own bad genes than class structure?
A true socialist society would aspire to engineer away genetic diversity and make everybody the same. Only in this circumstance would environment and society be the pure determinate of human differences.
>Mendel was wrong
>High humidity and low temperature conditions can increase wheat yields fourfold
Very interesting point.
In a truly socialist egalitarian society where everybody has equality of opportunity, the population would find themselves rigidly stacked in a genetic hierarchy from the most able at the top to the least able at the bottom.
That scenario is almost more harrowing than the worst nightmare-capitalism, since there's nothing you can conceivably do to escape your lowly position in society.
Exactly. Paradoxically, communism, in attempting to obfuscate inborn differences, ends up creating a society driven by them.
Consider the concept of seizing the means of production. Given how capital non-intensive things like programming and app development are, even if one is dirt poor, as long as they are motivated, they can access the internet, read a book, and otherwise accumulate intellectual capital, which is theoretically infinite and difficult for the bourgeoisie to dispossess the proletariate of.
Why then in an information age does their remain an oppressed proletariate even in advanced societies with no shortage of ways to access information, learn skills, and digitally access many forms of education? If we insist on thinking that a failure to do so is only a result of arbitrary historical processes and class conflict, we can't explain this fact.
What remains is to suggest that there are factors beyond simply class that will attenuate the ability of some to reap the benefits of even the most ideal socialist society. Some individuals are simply less intelligent and capable than others. It's really sad actually.
It's a bit like being given a boat without oars and being told that, across some river, there is a fortune waiting. You might drift to the other side by accident, but, in all likelihood, it doesn't matter if the fortune is real or not because you haven't the means to reach it.
For this reason, in both capitalism and socialism, the majority will always suffer because they will tend to lack oars.
In fairness, this can still be explained within the Marxist economic model. Poorer people spent a majority of their time busting ass just trying to put bread on the table.
They don't neccessarily have the free time to learn a programming language, plus they have less margin of failure, since gambling your precious time on a risky venture could easily leave you homeless.
True, but modernity has certainly produced labor-saving benefits that Marx could only have dreamed of. Whether these are truly emancipating remains contentious, but that is beyond the scope of what must be demonstrated. That is to say, people have more opportunities to access information on demand and at their leisure than ever before.
Working minimum wage jobs in HS and college, I saw no shortage of people on Facebook and Twitter in their downtime. Other than aircraft controllers or factory workers, I struggle to think of a job that requires constant attention or leaves you truly exhausted at the end of a shift. People could do more if they were motivated or found it interesting. The potential personal and financial rewards are certainly there, as I've argued.
But they don't. They prefer entertainment and pastimes that are minimally cognitively demanding and immediately gratifying. To assume that this is arbitrary and does not speak to individual differences in intellectual ability is absurd.
I don't disagree that poor people spend most of their time busting ass. The question is why. Is it because they are equally capable as anybody else, but unfairly constrained in opportunity by class membership? Or is it because membership in the lower class correlates with possessing unfavorable genetics for things like intelligence, addiction, poor impulse control, psychiatric issues, economic decision making, etc. In an increasingly free and fair society, we would expect the latter to be increasingly true.
In this circumstance, even a perfectly fair society would look like an oppressive, bigoted hellhole to the extent that genetically disadvantaged people made up a significant proportion of the society. In fact, the more such people became a larger fraction of society, the more unfair it would appear.
That the roots of oppression and inequity could be this easily misattributed is deeply disturbing to me.
>A true socialist society would aspire to engineer away genetic diversity and make everybody the same.
That's not necessarily a desirable thing, even without socialist thought. The distribution of TYPES of labor cannot be uniform within a developed society, even an "equitable" one. You can't have a society composed entirely of just farmers, or just factory workers, or just fishermen. Multiple types of work need to be done for a society to function, and people are generally more efficient when they specialize. And engineered uniformity on a genetic level would leave a population vulnerable to environmental changes.
*even WITHIN socialist thought
Yes, bust socialist/ lysenkoist dogma would hold that training and education are the ways in which people become specialized laborers, not by virtue of inborn predispositions. A lawyer becomes a lawyer because he is put in a position to become a lawyer. A janitor becomes a janitor because he is put in a position to be a janitor.
This was always a paradox of the Soviet university system, which,like any university system, had a vested interest in training those most capable of learning and advancing science and technology. Deep down, I don't believe any Soviet academic really believed you could randomly select 100 sons of illiterate turnip farmers and, with the right education, turn very one into engineers and doctors.
Lysenkoism, which the Party admittedly distanced itself from starting in the 60s, would argue that the only forces that apportion the number of men who become doctors versus janitors are arbitrary classist oppression under capitalism and necessity within a communist planned economy. There are clearly other constraints at work, namely motivation and intelligence. Both of these are nontrivially heritable.
State-subsidized genetic enhancement is an option if it is safe, freely available, and without stigma. But, yeah, you're right. If that too costs money (probably a lot of it), you'd be fucked if you were poor. As they say, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
>State-subsidized genetic enhancement
Why? You had the same starting point as everyone else.
We're not disagreeing. I'm not a socialist precisely because of my misgivings regarding its Lysenkoist assumptions. I firmly believe that, for most complex traits, a significant portion of individual differences are the result of genetics.
The only way to address such inequality would be to biomedically intervene and place everybody on the same playing field. I'm on the fence regarding whether this is an ethical thing to do, though.
If equality and particularly equality of outcome is of such overwhelming importance as most contemporary social critics would suggest, it follows that no price for achieving it is too high. If that cost is changing who we are at a fundamental molecular level, I am not sure.
To clarify, I am a capitalist who leans in the direction of seeing state-sponsored genetic enhancement as a good investment towards future economic growth and reduced dependence on social services such as welfare, mental health, and law enforcement.
Since we don't know the genome well enough to understand which traits correlate with which genes (and we probably never will), if you wanted to produce a true level playing field you would have to make everyone genetically identical. Society would be made up of clones.
What part of Marxism would be dead in the water?
I believe there you are almost completely right in thinking the roots of oppression and inequity stem from essentially being less optimal humans. However, there are sizeable number of people in the lower classes who are more intelligent than their peers, but have no opportunity to get ahead. Admittedly it's getting smaller and smaller, especially in developed countries, it's still there. Even if 99% of the lower class possess unfavourable genetics that keep them in their spot, there is still that 1% who don't make it. However, this is not an argument for socialism, its just 4 A.M. and I wanted to post something
Soviets failed to achieve it because Russia was a backwards agricultural shithole that had just lost a war, went through a civil war, and then nearly lost yet another war.
It was just the worst possible place for this experiment. Would've fared much better in the UK as the empire disappeared.
They tried socialism in postwar UK
It was alright but nothing to write home about
By the mid-30s Stalin very much achieved socialism. Only butthurt Trotskyites think otherwise
>currency
>inheritance
>marriage
>autocratic rule
>trade
>paid healthcare
>paid education
Stalin's "socialism" looked an awful lot like the Tsar's serf economy
>currency
Socialism never claims that wages and currency would disappear, it's a transition phase.
>marriage
Oh noes!
>autocratic rule
Stalin did not decide everything. Stalin went away for three months every year, cut off from politics with no telephone. In September 1933, he wrote from his holiday location to Kaganovich and the Politburo in Moscow: ‘I cannot and should not have to decide any and all questions that animate the Politburo ... you yourselves can consider things and work them out.’
>trade
"It had to trade with capitalist states, ergo capitalist!!" you sound like that idiot Bordiga
>paid healthcare
>paid education
False, there were "socialised wages" which were not disbursed but put into a reserve fund and paid out in the form of education, health and pensions.
>Stalin's "socialism" looked an awful lot like the Tsar's serf economy
How so?
not just "Mendel was wrong" but "Mendel was wrong because his theory conflicts with Marxism"
So capitalism is more equitable than socialism since in a capitalist society genetic losers can transcend their physical or mental shortcomings by acquiring wealth and thus the ability to buy happiness and status that would otherwise be unattainable? I guess that makes sense 2bh, in a socialist society where everyone was of equal wealth and status, ugly beta males would never even have the possibility of sex and reproduction, in a capitalist society they can at least buy these things.
>Soviets failed to achieve it because Russia was a backwards agricultural shithole
Industrializing shithole, which is why the Germans wanted the war sooner rather than later.
>that had just lost a war, went through a civil war, and then nearly lost yet another war.
The socialist insurrection is heavily tied into the reasons for Russia unexpectedly folding as they did.
Violent revolution is endemic to Communists anyways so that isn't an excuse.
In every way, except your owner wears a red star in his hat
>is Lysenko necessary to justify socialism?
Loaded question, but no.
>Is Lysenkoism Necessary to Justify Socialism?
No. I just want people to realize property is a spook and property rights are a social contract. That means it's up to society to determine the nature of property, as long as they collectively have the ability to defend it, and property isn't a right, it's simply a social contract backed up by the threat of collective force.
>it's a transition phase
Then you admit socialism was not yet achieved?
Doesn't look like his statement suggests that at any level.
>Violent revolution is endemic to Communists anyways so that isn't an excuse.
Purges, mass murder, starvation and violent revolutions are endemic to Asia.
It is a Russian thing, a Chinese thing, a Vietnamese thing, a Cambodian thing. Not a communist thing.
It just so happens that the worst people most prone to casual large scale murder that tried Communism first, ruining it for the rest of the world by association.