i think the best thing to do is to analyze economic systems without relying too much on ideas of "socialist" or "capitalist" economies. for example, let's take the united states. what have you got? large conglomerations of people spend most of their time taking orders from unelected officials - or rather, those officials HAVE been elected, but by stockholders, which doesn't necessarily mean employees. that is, as far as i'm concerned, not a great state of affairs, but with only mild twisting it would describe both the modern united states and most soviet state enterprises, despite that the american enterprises are "not part of the state".
a lot of people take issue with stockbrokers and bankers and such being so personally rich because "they're just moving money around", which, well, i sympathize. but we do have banks for a reason, they move money around. if you want to start a company you can get a loan from a bank, and where do they get that money? other people. and they make interest on you if you succeed. a system like this seems to me to be a good idea. it could, in the above vein, also to some extent describe state organizations like gosplan. so we can apply the same sort of criticisms.
The thing is I feel it should be possible to have that first thing without it resulting in a massive abuse of the worker (as it did in the USSR and does in the USA. Albeit in quite different ways and usually not as badly in the latter). How exactly that would be possible is not something I know, I can vaguely guess that it would revolve around removing a lot of the influence those kinds of groups have on the government, but that, specifically, is a problem in of itself.
Accountability is not profitable, and it does not get people elected. That's a problem no matter how you look at it.
^^ Adorno believed that classical music (which was his area) should represent the state of the world as it was in post-war Europe and discard the trappings of the old Europe, particularly the sort of kitsch Romantic gestures associated with more conservative styles and the tonal bombast of Stalin's "Soviet realist" state composers. He viewed more traditional composition as retrogressive and happy music as unrealistic.
True Art is angsty and socially conscious, in other words.
sounds like someone who needed to eat more candies in his lifetime.
i think the best thing to do is to analyze economic systems without relying too much on ideas of "socialist" or "capitalist" economies. for example, let's take the united states. what have you got? large conglomerations of people spend most of their time taking orders from unelected officials - or rather, those officials HAVE been elected, but by stockholders, which doesn't necessarily mean employees. that is, as far as i'm concerned, not a great state of affairs, but with only mild twisting it would describe both the modern united states and most soviet state enterprises, despite that the american enterprises are "not part of the state".
a lot of people take issue with stockbrokers and bankers and such being so personally rich because "they're just moving money around", which, well, i sympathize. but we do have banks for a reason, they move money around. if you want to start a company you can get a loan from a bank, and where do they get that money? other people. and they make interest on you if you succeed. a system like this seems to me to be a good idea. it could, in the above vein, also to some extent describe state organizations like gosplan. so we can apply the same sort of criticisms.
I don't disagree, except to say that from my perspective the sort of top-down organisation of Soviet enterprises is about as far from real socialism in its placement of the means of production in such a small number of hands as the American banking system is. That form of unchecked, undemocratic "state socialism" is basically just a form of fascism or mutated plutocracy: Businesses in cahoots with the state, providing certain services for free to the people but only at the behest of the oligarchy or dictatorship in charge. In this case, the businesses are the state, but nothing else is much different. Look at China right now, for instance.
I think it is more apt to say that it is socialism implemented poorly and/or with bad intent than not true socialism.
It's a broad word, after all.
Eh, I could agree with that with respect to Lenin or even Stalin and Mao, who really believed that what they were doing was "for the good of the country," but by the end of the Soviet Union, and by this point in China for sure, even the parameters of fascism were superseded in terms of state/business collusion.
yeah in case i wasn't clear i'm not big on "top-down" either. that's the sort of thing that i'd rather talk about than "socialism" which is just all over the place. and invites dumb arguments about what it Really means.
(does anyone outside of some republicans honestly consider the PRC nowadays "socialist" tho)
How exactly that would be possible is not something I know, I can vaguely guess that it would revolve around removing a lot of the influence those kinds of groups have on the government, but that, specifically, is a problem in of itself.
see this is what i mean. gotta think about what "the government" is going to be. a lot of people's lives are governed by regulations and rules from their places of "employment" and such that are under different mechanisms than those of "the government"
yeah in case i wasn't clear i'm not big on "top-down" either. that's the sort of thing that i'd rather talk about than "socialism" which is just all over the place. and invites dumb arguments about what it Really means.
(does anyone outside of some republicans honestly consider the PRC nowadays "socialist")
How exactly that would be possible is not something I know, I can vaguely guess that it would revolve around removing a lot of the influence those kinds of groups have on the government, but that, specifically, is a problem in of itself.
see this is what i mean. gotta think about what "the government" is going to be. a lot of people's lives are governed by regulations and rules from their places of "employment" and such that are under different mechanisms than those of "the government"
god i'm using so many stupid scare quotes sorry
I'm kind of not sure what you're getting at? Not that I'm accusing you of being misdirectory (is this a word?), I'm just tired.
I'm advocating for government control over (like I said earlier) healthcare, the education system, etc. as opposed to what we have now which is, well, a mess.
The rights of workers in other fields are sort of a stickier matter for me just because I don't know a lot about how businesses actually work beyond "shadily, most of the time".
but like I don't think it's controversial to say that, eg. the minimum wage is entirely too low, and at some point when you get to the heart of these issues I feel like you can't just keep promising to add more regulations,
it's like, since my babby anthro 101 class i've been interested in broader ideas of what a government or a state is. for an example mostly unrelated to socialism you can abandon the concept of "border" and so end up with something like mandalas.
so when people say "government control over" or "state/business collusion" that's where i get weird. by thinking of businesses as naturally independent entities of states you're like, that's almost libertarian. they've never really been independent in any meaningful way and it's hard to talk about "control" of one over the other?
what's another example. i don't know. while back i did a report on the "food system" in the US. it was in the context of poverty, so there was a lot about EBT and all. but what interested me in the first place was when i volunteered at a food pantry. food pantries are, for a start, non-governmental non-profit organizations, that directly carry out welfare, so they're part of the "welfare state" without being "part of the state". i mean i was literally handing food to people. but you also have business connections - the majority of the food we passed out was actually surplus stock from local supermarkets. they get several advantages: a bit of good publicity (though nobody seems to be aware of how common this is), almost free disposal (allowing them to get extra stock without having to worry about that so as to respond easily to rapid demand changes), probably a tax break (government interference!). and then another portion of the food was from a federal program, the CSFP, which is the government shipping around food, but where do they get that food? they buy it from contractors. but there's a public bidding and bla bla bla bla
so i'm also tired but what i mean is that thinking of "corporations" being one thing, selfish profit-takers or whatever, kind of understates what they actually do (e.g. distribute food) and similarly bla bla with the government bla bla THE ADORNO IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE
I think the biggest issue with all this is that the US is a lot more like pre-20th-century Europe than anyone would like to admit. States have enough power that we're essentially Balkanized, aside from a few token things that most people take for granted.
On top of that, there's a strong streak of resentment (if not outright abuse) of the poor, especially if they're not white and Protestant (read: English). Hell, people in the South are still smarting over a war that ended nearly 150 years ago.
Schoenberg himself had some very nasty things to say about him IIRC
Schoenberg's retorts to Adorno's rhetoric were fantastic.
To be fair, Adorno came to regret his youthful militancy, but still, his elders and betters gave him the best kind of what for.
I don't suppose you happened to have Schoenberg's retorts on hand or know where I could find them do you? I would love to read that.
It's hard to find full direct quotes, but he apparently liked to refer to Adorno as "the informer" and referred to his contributions to Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus as "Twelve-Tone Goulash." He also was quite vehement in stating that where he treated dodecaphony as a flexible method, Adorno imagined his works as operating under a rigid system, thus entirely misinterpreting them and basically acting like a massive fun-sucker.
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Schoenberg himself had some very nasty things to say about him IIRC
Accountability is not profitable, and it does not get people elected. That's a problem no matter how you look at it.
It's a broad word, after all.
(does anyone outside of some republicans honestly consider the PRC nowadays "socialist" tho) see this is what i mean. gotta think about what "the government" is going to be. a lot of people's lives are governed by regulations and rules from their places of "employment" and such that are under different mechanisms than those of "the government"
god i'm using so many stupid scare quotes sorry
I'm advocating for government control over (like I said earlier) healthcare, the education system, etc. as opposed to what we have now which is, well, a mess.
The rights of workers in other fields are sort of a stickier matter for me just because I don't know a lot about how businesses actually work beyond "shadily, most of the time".
I'm not making sense. Sorry, again, tired.
so when people say "government control over" or "state/business collusion" that's where i get weird. by thinking of businesses as naturally independent entities of states you're like, that's almost libertarian. they've never really been independent in any meaningful way and it's hard to talk about "control" of one over the other?
what's another example. i don't know. while back i did a report on the "food system" in the US. it was in the context of poverty, so there was a lot about EBT and all. but what interested me in the first place was when i volunteered at a food pantry. food pantries are, for a start, non-governmental non-profit organizations, that directly carry out welfare, so they're part of the "welfare state" without being "part of the state". i mean i was literally handing food to people. but you also have business connections - the majority of the food we passed out was actually surplus stock from local supermarkets. they get several advantages: a bit of good publicity (though nobody seems to be aware of how common this is), almost free disposal (allowing them to get extra stock without having to worry about that so as to respond easily to rapid demand changes), probably a tax break (government interference!). and then another portion of the food was from a federal program, the CSFP, which is the government shipping around food, but where do they get that food? they buy it from contractors. but there's a public bidding and bla bla bla bla
so i'm also tired but what i mean is that thinking of "corporations" being one thing, selfish profit-takers or whatever, kind of understates what they actually do (e.g. distribute food) and similarly bla bla with the government bla bla THE ADORNO IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE
I will read this tomorrow.