There's a problem here in that if we give socialism a broad meaning to the point where it can be applied to any political program involving state planned/owned/regulated economy, we end up with "socialism with Chinese characteristics". On the other hand, when I try to give specific, concrete examples of what I want socialism to look like or what I think it would grow into given sufficient organic development and trial-and-error experimentation, my definitions are so narrow I quickly end up looking like just another special snowflake whose own personal definition of socialism has never been tried, etc.
It's great that we discuss and debate our terms but I fear that leaving them too vague means we get bogged down in semantic infighting and our political results follow suit.
I would try to design enough formal feedback channels (besides voting) so that public opinion could be inferred without a doubt. We already live in a time where people can yell at BART officials on Twitter directly about poor service; I don't think any official who ignored or willfully misinterpreted those demands would last very long in office. And again, the public would ultimately need to approve an economic plan, and could freely reject any that doesn't reflect their interests. This doesn't solve the tyranny of the majority, but it should prevent tyranny by the planners.
Exactly, what if people could propose what they want on the ballot via referendum, then the planners could crunch the numbers and come back with costs for the most popular choices? They could try to pull a fast one and say "actually bars and strip clubs will cost 10 million labor hours each; pick either booze or hospitals but not both" but I think the public would push back against that estimate. If the government's estimates are compromised, people could recall planners (or perhaps a new group of planners could be chosen randomly by sortition) and ultimately vote for any plan that seemed desirable and attainable, regardless of the source of the plan. If Jim Bob from Duluth has had better success in predicting costs than the professionals, there would be nothing stopping people from voting for his proposal instead.
On your point about labor discipline, this is kind of one of socialism's basic arguments: when capitalist states (or historical socialist states) suppress labor movements and protests, not only is it immoral, but it also denies the government the opportunity to solve the public's problems or inefficiencies. If the public is unhappy with working conditions, then their rights to free speech, protest, and even to prevent production via striking must be protected- not only because it is morally right, but because their dissent is the only means of epxressing their real preferences to the planners and society at large. Ultimately, control of production (and of enforcement, to whatever degree necessary and practical) must belong to the workers, because otherwise they are at the mercy of whoever really calls the shots and can set the narrative (whether that is a capitalist state or state socialist planners.)
Finally, about the market: the market primarily allocates goods depending on peoples' ability to pay, not their willingness. The working class is kept in a state of debt (and in some places, literal) slavery and fear of absolute poverty. Those with vast wealth can artifically and disproportionately skew demand towards their own interests. Thus markets often fail to capture accurate demand, and we end up with outcomes that are bad for the majority but benefit the owning class (privatized health insurance, private cable monopolies, etc.) On the supply side, goods and services are overproduced and wasted (food, unsold vehicles) or are underproduced/overpriced due to regulatory capture (such as laws forbidding direct sale of vehicles by manufacturers), poor policy (either the result of upper class interests, or of government attempts to compromise between opposing classes, such as rent control). Even when production of goods adjusts to market signals, it is slow and imperfect. What if we could just decide to produce however much we would likely need to satisfy a certain goal or demand, plus a bit extra?
Overall, I feel like we're talking past each other somewhat, and I also think I could give you any number of policies, whether practical ("planners could be recalled at any time by the public") or ridiculous ("people could humiliate planners in the street to discourage them from acting too arrogant") and your response would either be (understandably) skepticism, or some variant of "the Serious People will always be around, and will find a way to exploit any system or rule to their own ends and/or to enable bullying". I don't expect to change your mind, especially with nothing but hypotheticals, but I don't think it would be productive to continue the dialogue. But nevertheless, I have appreciated the opportunity to clarify my thoughts and beliefs via answering your questions, and I am sincerely appreciative that you have asked your questions with civility, given how bad other leftists seem to have treated you. I hope I have extended you the same courtesy.
mutual here wanted some specifics to hang on anticapitalism, something more concrete than vibes, nicer than AES, more feasible than fully automated gay luxury space communism. this is a sketch of that; parts can be expanded as desired. this is meant to be messy rather than elegant; if you hate one part, other parts could often do it’s purpose, and the exact implementation would be a matter of dispute between political parties, on the boards of firms, and so on, just like today
(this was the effortpost that I wrote earlier, rewritten with less art because rewriting is less fun than fwriting the first time.)
short version
nationalize big firms; small ones become cooperatives. tax income to create an investment pool and subsidize prediction markets to guide investment. crappy jobs to anybody who wants them, better-paying jobs if you can convince an SOE or employer to take you on
new pareto inefficiencies this creates
reduced ability to pass on your wealth, reduced ability to hand over control of an institution in a way that can’t be taken back, weaker labor discipline, less ability to choose your own marginal propensity to save. I think these are all analogous to the pareto inefficiency of not being able to sell yourself into slavery or to sell your vote - a good trade-off for long-run freedom even if they introduce some friction, and probably good for growth through institutional integrity in the long run
I’m mentioning these at the beginning because I know there’s going to be a tendency to say this is just capitalism with more steps, and because it’s worth noting possible costs
normal consumer markets
you get money from your job/disability check/Christmas cards and go to online or in-person stores, where you spend it at mutually agreed prices on magic cards or funyuns or whatever, just like today
prediction markets to replace financial markets
financial markets do two useful things: first, they pool people’s best estimates of future prices and risk profiles, and they direct investment towards more profitable (and, hopefully, more broadly successful) endeavors.
the core socialist critique of financial markets is that they require private ownership of capital. but you can place bets directly!
in order to marshal more collective knowledge, everyone could get some “casino chips” each time period and cash them in at the end for some amount of cash, which they could then use in consumption markets. public leaderboards of good predictions could both improve learning and incentivize good predictions, although at the possible risk of correlating errors more. the same could apply to allowing financial vet specialist cooperatives that place bets for you for a fee. these tradeoffs, and the ways to abuse this system, are broadly analogous to tradeoffs that exist within capitalism, just without a separate owner-investor class.
almost any measurable outcome can be made the subject of a prediction market in this way, including questions not traditionally served by financial markets
lending/investment decisions
cooperatives and SOEs looking to expand production would be able to receive capital investments from the state. like loans under capitalism these would be a mix of automatic and discretionary, including:
investment proportional to prediction markets’ guesses about room for funding, or about the succcess likelihood of new cooperatives
discretionary investment by central planning boards, especially into public goods
loans at fixed interest rates
“sure, take a shot” no-questions-asked funding for people starting a cooperative for the first time
the broader principle would be to keep the amount of resources under different people’s control broadly proportional, while investing in promising rather than less promising things and not putting all your eggs in one way of making decisions
because no individual has the incentive or opportunity to personally invest their income in a business, an income tax would raise revenue for the investment fund. for the typical worker this would be slightly less than than the “virtual tax” of profit at a capitalist workplace (which funds both investment and capitalist class consumption). the exact investment/taxation rate and how progressive it would be would be a matter of political dispute
bigger firms as SOEs
big firms relying on economies of scale and having multiple layers of bureaucracy would be owned by the state. like a publicly traded corporation, these corporations would have a board of directors at the top, which could be set by some combination of:
rotating appointment by the elected government, similar to the supreme court or fed
appointment by a permanent planning agency
sortition by proxy (choose a random citizen and they appoint the board member)
prediction market guesses about who would perform best in terms of revenues - expenses or some other testable metric
election by the employees’ union or consumer groups
direct recall elections on any of the above by citizens
and indeed you could have some combination of these, with the goal of having a governing body that is broadly accountable to the public without being easily captured by any one clique
smaller firms as cooperatives
if you want to start a firm you can go into business with your friends. you would get money from the general investment fund and govern the business together.
cooperatives would have a “virtual market capitalization” determined by prediction markets concerning how much they would be worth under state ownership, and as the ratio of this to your member base grows over and above the general investment:citizen ratio, the state (who’s your sleeping investor) would buy you out, similar to how wildly successful startups are purchased by megacorps. (most cooperatives most likely would be happy to be small.) there could be additional arrangements where you rent capital from the state rather than owning it, if you want to keep local control.
to preserve the cooperative nature of the enterprise it wouldn’t be necessary to start arresting anyone for hiring non-employees; people could simply have the right to sue in civil courts if their goverance/profit rights as presumptive cooperants werent honored. there might still be some manner of hush-hush hiring under the table but the wage premia for keeping quiet seems like an adequate recompense for this
universal jobs
if you want a job, the state will give you one at a rate that is a little below the market rate but enough to live on, whichever is higher. people would have a right to at least x hours of work in whatever they’re most immediately productive at (in many cases menial labor) and at least y hours of whatever they insist they is their god-given calling (poet, accordionist, data scientist, whatever.) x and y would be a matter of political dispute, but with steady economic growth and automation, x could fall over time. much y time would be “fake work” but (1) of the sort that people would find meaningful (after all, if you feel it’s not, switch into something that would be) and (2) present a lot of opportunities for skill development, discovering what you’re good at, and networking
cooperatives and SOEs would have access to people working basic jobs, maybe according to some sort of bidding or lottery scheme. movement between the two is meant to be fluid, with basic jobs workers having the opportunity to show their worth on the job and direct state employees/cooperants being able to safely quit their job at any time
state ownership of land
blah blah blah georgism blah blah blah you can fill out how this could work in a market socialist context. maybe carve in an exception for making it harder to kick people out of their personal residences
I'm certainly not a Hamas supporter, but the idea that Israel has ever been interested in working towards a peaceful 2-state solution (and that their relation-building with Saudi Arabia has anything to do with that) is laughable.
Israelis may disapprove of Netanyahu, but from the polling data I've seen, it has more to do with his attempted subversion of democracy than his treatment of Palestine. So the idea that popular opinion in Israel was about to result in a sudden relaxation of the political and economic repression of the Palestinians (if only those no-goodniks in Hamas hadn't ruined it for the rest of them! Ah well, maybe we can try again in 50 years) is bullshit.
Israel (it's voters, state, and institutions) has had decades to do something to end the cycle, and they are indeed the ONLY party that can end this cycle. If the Palestinians' only choices are: 1. Give up and accept total defeat on Israel's terms or 2. Rage impotently and drag a bunch of innocents down into hell with you out of spite, maybe Israel should consider offering them a better set of choices?
Obviously Hamas actions are abhorrent and the rise in antisemitism is uncalled for. What is the proper the response to 75yrs of apartheid though? Something has to be done about that or his cycle will never cease.
So you came from the post in which I explicitly named three organizations working for a two-state solution. And didn’t think… to look into… their proposals for a two-state solution…
As a reminder, before Hamas’s attack, Israel was working on normalizing peaceful relations with Saudi Arabia. That’s dead in the water because Hamas broke a ceasefire and killed a thousand Jewish civilians.
Before Hamas’s attack, there were massive, frequent, and often daily protests among the Israeli public, speaking out against an administration comprised of anti-Palestinians. Those are on hold now, because a thousand Jewish civilians were killed, and the country is at war. But Netanyahu’s coalition of asswipes is built like a house of cards, and they’ll suffer in the next election. That much is clear.
Hamas wasn’t looking to gain territory, win, or free Palestine on October 7th. Israel has never lost a war in its modern history, and it has overcome far worse odds than a couple thousand terrorists. There’s no feasible way for Hamas to have won. They broke the ceasefire and killed civilians anyway. Why? Why waste those lives and those resources, knowing that Israel would retaliate against Gazans?
Because Hamas looked around and saw something that horrified them. They saw Arab nations, once their allies, walking away from the idea of killing millions of Jews in favor of normalization and peace with Israel. They saw the citizens of Israel, rallying in unprecedented numbers for peace and democracy. They saw Fatah, their Palestinian enemies since 2007, ready to come back to the bargaining table for a peaceful two-state resolution.
Hamas broke a ceasefire for a media ploy. They did it, knowing that it would stop the normalization process between the Saudis and Israelis. They did it, knowing that it would bring an abrupt halt to Israeli protests. They did it, knowing that Israel would retaliate, and that the world would be watching as Hamas put Palestinian civilians in the line of fire and blamed it on Israel. They were looking to propagandize a dying movement, and friend, it seems like you bought into it.
Something does have to be done about Israeli’s treatment of Palestinians. Something does have to happen to end this cycle of violence. And plenty of things were being done about it, in the Knesset, on the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. But Hamas considers peace without genocide to be a failure. Peace without genocide leaves Hamas out of a job. So they put a stop to it, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian lives.
And you don’t gotta take that from me. Ask them. They aren’t trying to hide it, they’ve been saying it all month. It’s in their founding charter.
Very strongly endorsed. I see lots of predictions/imaginings of socialism that envision 90% of people living in (dependent) luxury while a small number of enginners and planners actually "run the economy." I don't consider this an ideal system!
I think it also explains why so many people have these purely destructive/venegful understandings of revolution - the prospect of fighting and dying just to win the right to discuss/debate production statistics every month isn't very appealing. Yet I think most people feel powerless because they have no way to provide input or control over the society/economy as a whole. The only antidote to powerlessness is power, which goes hand in hand with responsibility.
Got this phrase stuck in my head: "socialism is the fight for the right to take responsibility". Haven't quite worked out what i mean by this, but something to do with it being a move from a mass of atomised and so helpless individuals who have no ability to effect change and so can flee from any sense of responsibility for the state of the world to the formation of a working class collectivity which can take decisive control of society and so the members of which must face up to the responsibility this control entails. This is why revenge fantasies or apocalypse fantasies are ultimately antithetical to socialism -- they're a flinching from responsibility, a retreat to that irresponsible atomised view of the world.
Property ownership itself is a system of authority. If you own all the farmland in an area, I have to work on it in order to survive, or I will starve. What gives you the right to control a resource and demand that I subordinate myself to you for my daily bread?
When we abandon cooperation and democracy as a means of conducting economic activity, solving ethical questions, and relating to each other, life becomes nothing more than a nightmarish struggle to death as you have described. Without a system of authority to protect your property rights, who will stop your stronger, smarter neighbor with more friends from taking your property at gunpoint and enslaving your family?
By your own logic, there will always be someone capable of dominating you and willing to do so. You will not survive the world you wish to create.
What's interesting to me is that for all the fervor surrounding Muslims, I've never seen anyone do any deep investigative journalism on how religion is maintained across generations, and how deeply the parents actually believe in it. Kids are dumb and have short attention spans; do they have a parent at home constantly making serious comments about jihad, or is this a case of edgy lower-class humor? If the parents were genuine Islamists, you'd think they'd be sticking their kids into a private school, or not sending them to school at all, and the fact that they found it funny implies a lack of deep conviction. Or maybe it does and
A recently started initiative “Network Islam-experts” records issues of radicalized students. Since 2016 there have been 481 cases of schools who encountered ‘problems’. Today for the first time a case-file was made public involving toddlers.
An East-Flemishs school network made an internal report named “indoctrination among toddlers”, it details problematic behavior:
“Citing Arabic verses during playtime, refusing to come to class because it doesn’t fit their beliefs, not coming to school on Friday for ‘religious reasons’. A girl refuses to give a boy a hand or to stand in line near boys.”
Sadly these are the least frightening cases:
A preschooler already has a ‘friend’ in Morocco she will be married to later. A child threatens to murder ‘infidels’. Calling non-Muslim students ‘pigs’. Making the motion of slicing someones neck.”
After conversation with parents it was concluded they support these actions and found them funny.
1, 2, 3
Even as a jaded adult, every so often I see a gore picture/video that deeply disturbs me. I perfectly understand the urge to protect people (and kids in particular) from beheading videos and cartel members skinning each other alive.
But I have no idea what people mean when they say they find porn traumatizing. I would definitely be disturbed by seeing a video of sexual assault, but that's because of the violence and violation of someone's consent, not the sex itself. I don't think people are consciously lying when they say they're "traumatized" by porn, but I think a better word would be "scandalized". Most Americans have incredibly repressive attitudes towards sex and nudity, and I imagine that stumbling upon large amounts of it unprompted online causes many people to experience narcissistic injury.
im pro children having privacy but if you think parents should give kids unrestricted internet access…its not 1999. in 2022 thats legitimately neglectful. do you know how many kids are out here like. watching gore and porn. its not normal or healthy. its traumatic.
The last paragraph is the worst part. It's chilling that anyone would be impressed by-and offer a job to-someone so manipulative and deceptive.
Welcome to the tech industry, where cruelty, dishonesty, and callousness are rewarded as long as they're innovative enough.
tl:dr: Guy writes a script to connect two men together on a dating app, both of whom think they are talking to a beautiful women. Many seem to like a woman as sexually forward as they are, some are confused, more still are thrown off by the not-so-great pronoun-switching part of the script.
He turns it off before things go too far. We learn some things about men (maybe), and about online dating.
Thoughts?
Costs can't easily be predicted for every decision, true, but arguably a lot of costs can be estimated with a fair amount of accuracy for straightforward production decisions. I feel confident in our ability to predict how many more cows, farmers, and milking machines it would take to double milk production. But yes, the cost of innovation is hard to estimate. I guess the cost of uncertainty/confidence could be factored into calculations- "we can (with 100% certainty) achieve a 2x increase by simply working twice as hard for cost x, or we can double output by funding a bunch of new research which could cost anywhere between .5x and 5x, with probabilities/confidence values for each scenario."
You're right that this would be an inherently political process, even in a post-class society I would expect the different parties involved (SOEs, coops, scientists, laborers, etc) to have differences of opinion, and to support the budgets that favor them. As naive as it sounds, I would hope that any disputes about costs and tradeoffs could be resolved through boring old debate and compromise. I don't envision the planners' role as binding; their only job is to present accurate information so that the public can make an informed decision. They can't dictate to the public, and I wouldn't want to prevent the public from trusting someone else's calculations, if they had lost faith in the government's ability (although hopefully the professional planners would be a reliable institution.)
So I think we agree about revealed preferences: whatever the system, let people buy/vote for what they want, and let the firm/state provide a quote. If people agree to the cost but balk at the price afterwards, maybe the planners could factor that into their calculations ("plenty of you talked a big game about reducing transit times by working double overtime shifts at the railyard, but from the timecard data you seem to value your free time more. That will be our assumption on future similar projects.")
I think this vision of socialism is actually quite conservative, in a way- by shifting the important allocation decisions from an elite few to the public at large, it forces them to take responsibility for their own decisions, inputs, and outputs.
mutual here wanted some specifics to hang on anticapitalism, something more concrete than vibes, nicer than AES, more feasible than fully automated gay luxury space communism. this is a sketch of that; parts can be expanded as desired. this is meant to be messy rather than elegant; if you hate one part, other parts could often do it’s purpose, and the exact implementation would be a matter of dispute between political parties, on the boards of firms, and so on, just like today
(this was the effortpost that I wrote earlier, rewritten with less art because rewriting is less fun than fwriting the first time.)
short version
nationalize big firms; small ones become cooperatives. tax income to create an investment pool and subsidize prediction markets to guide investment. crappy jobs to anybody who wants them, better-paying jobs if you can convince an SOE or employer to take you on
new pareto inefficiencies this creates
reduced ability to pass on your wealth, reduced ability to hand over control of an institution in a way that can’t be taken back, weaker labor discipline, less ability to choose your own marginal propensity to save. I think these are all analogous to the pareto inefficiency of not being able to sell yourself into slavery or to sell your vote - a good trade-off for long-run freedom even if they introduce some friction, and probably good for growth through institutional integrity in the long run
I’m mentioning these at the beginning because I know there’s going to be a tendency to say this is just capitalism with more steps, and because it’s worth noting possible costs
normal consumer markets
you get money from your job/disability check/Christmas cards and go to online or in-person stores, where you spend it at mutually agreed prices on magic cards or funyuns or whatever, just like today
prediction markets to replace financial markets
financial markets do two useful things: first, they pool people’s best estimates of future prices and risk profiles, and they direct investment towards more profitable (and, hopefully, more broadly successful) endeavors.
the core socialist critique of financial markets is that they require private ownership of capital. but you can place bets directly!
in order to marshal more collective knowledge, everyone could get some “casino chips” each time period and cash them in at the end for some amount of cash, which they could then use in consumption markets. public leaderboards of good predictions could both improve learning and incentivize good predictions, although at the possible risk of correlating errors more. the same could apply to allowing financial vet specialist cooperatives that place bets for you for a fee. these tradeoffs, and the ways to abuse this system, are broadly analogous to tradeoffs that exist within capitalism, just without a separate owner-investor class.
almost any measurable outcome can be made the subject of a prediction market in this way, including questions not traditionally served by financial markets
lending/investment decisions
cooperatives and SOEs looking to expand production would be able to receive capital investments from the state. like loans under capitalism these would be a mix of automatic and discretionary, including:
investment proportional to prediction markets’ guesses about room for funding, or about the succcess likelihood of new cooperatives
discretionary investment by central planning boards, especially into public goods
loans at fixed interest rates
“sure, take a shot” no-questions-asked funding for people starting a cooperative for the first time
the broader principle would be to keep the amount of resources under different people’s control broadly proportional, while investing in promising rather than less promising things and not putting all your eggs in one way of making decisions
because no individual has the incentive or opportunity to personally invest their income in a business, an income tax would raise revenue for the investment fund. for the typical worker this would be slightly less than than the “virtual tax” of profit at a capitalist workplace (which funds both investment and capitalist class consumption). the exact investment/taxation rate and how progressive it would be would be a matter of political dispute
bigger firms as SOEs
big firms relying on economies of scale and having multiple layers of bureaucracy would be owned by the state. like a publicly traded corporation, these corporations would have a board of directors at the top, which could be set by some combination of:
rotating appointment by the elected government, similar to the supreme court or fed
appointment by a permanent planning agency
sortition by proxy (choose a random citizen and they appoint the board member)
prediction market guesses about who would perform best in terms of revenues - expenses or some other testable metric
election by the employees’ union or consumer groups
direct recall elections on any of the above by citizens
and indeed you could have some combination of these, with the goal of having a governing body that is broadly accountable to the public without being easily captured by any one clique
smaller firms as cooperatives
if you want to start a firm you can go into business with your friends. you would get money from the general investment fund and govern the business together.
cooperatives would have a “virtual market capitalization” determined by prediction markets concerning how much they would be worth under state ownership, and as the ratio of this to your member base grows over and above the general investment:citizen ratio, the state (who’s your sleeping investor) would buy you out, similar to how wildly successful startups are purchased by megacorps. (most cooperatives most likely would be happy to be small.) there could be additional arrangements where you rent capital from the state rather than owning it, if you want to keep local control.
to preserve the cooperative nature of the enterprise it wouldn’t be necessary to start arresting anyone for hiring non-employees; people could simply have the right to sue in civil courts if their goverance/profit rights as presumptive cooperants werent honored. there might still be some manner of hush-hush hiring under the table but the wage premia for keeping quiet seems like an adequate recompense for this
universal jobs
if you want a job, the state will give you one at a rate that is a little below the market rate but enough to live on, whichever is higher. people would have a right to at least x hours of work in whatever they’re most immediately productive at (in many cases menial labor) and at least y hours of whatever they insist they is their god-given calling (poet, accordionist, data scientist, whatever.) x and y would be a matter of political dispute, but with steady economic growth and automation, x could fall over time. much y time would be “fake work” but (1) of the sort that people would find meaningful (after all, if you feel it’s not, switch into something that would be) and (2) present a lot of opportunities for skill development, discovering what you’re good at, and networking
cooperatives and SOEs would have access to people working basic jobs, maybe according to some sort of bidding or lottery scheme. movement between the two is meant to be fluid, with basic jobs workers having the opportunity to show their worth on the job and direct state employees/cooperants being able to safely quit their job at any time
state ownership of land
blah blah blah georgism blah blah blah you can fill out how this could work in a market socialist context. maybe carve in an exception for making it harder to kick people out of their personal residences
This feels the same as saying "why would a revolutionary oppose cutting welfare, this will just anger the proles and leave them with nothing left to lose!" People would probably react to mandatory service/conscription the same way they react to most hardship; with passivity and obedience rather than full revolt.
Many countries have mandatory service and it doesn't seem to have made them any more rebellious. Arguably the mandatory service of, for example, Israel and South Korea only serve to entrench their nationalist cultures (and in South Korea, it seems to play no small part in fueling a bitter and resentful mens' movement/backlash to feminism).
I think expecting a soldiers' revolt in today's world is to ignore that the best example we have (revolutionary Russia) only happened in the context of many millions of peasant soldiers being thrown into a horribly unpopular war for a government that many of them had never even heard of before. Many peasants did not even consider themselves Russians, and it still took tremendous slaughter before they began to seriously revolt in large numbers.
Finally, as an American I'm very loath to support any policy that would encourage anyone to join and support the military. Growing up in the War on Terror, a lot of people spoke positively about mandatory military service and I don't think that that program, if enacted, would have resulted in anything other than further suffering for the people of Iraq and Afghanistan.
i’ve made this post and argued about this before but i don’t get if you’re a revolutionary (of basically any stripe) why you would oppose mandatory military service—what could possibly be better than the state paying for training your future cadres and the people being just one seized armoury away from resembling an actual force—the point of all revolutionary movements is to start and win a civil war and somehow the volunteer service model is going to make that easier
also obviously conscripts are going to be easier to radicalise into defection than volunteers
Who else could wade through the sea of garbage you people produce
97 posts