Ah yes, the building really drives home the message that no expense will be spared on the ruling class once the revolution has happened and the peasants settle in beneath their new oppressors :-)
The concrete and aluminum does not seem like "no expenses will be spared" to me. It looks like sculpted artistic streaks to elevate the otherwise shabbiness to a sci-fi futurism.
Whether the peasants would be oppressed is another can of worms topic, but I think it would be best expressed by growth rates of the USSR and China compared to their peers in similar conditions of industrial development.
You can visit the place next Saturday or Sunday because it's the European Heritage Days where a lot of public places are open to the public in France : https://journeesdupatrimoine.culture.gouv.fr/en/
I worked for 3 months in a building projected by Oscar Niemeyer. It was an horrible experience.
The building is on this foto [1], the Jetsons-like structure in the front didn't exist back then. It was just the long white slab on the back, without windows. Behind there is a preserved rainforest. The place is very humid and, for aesthetic reasons, the building had no windows and horrible ventilation. It was cold and very moldy and respiratory diseases were very common among the staff.
As some people say in Brazil, as an architect, Niemeyer was a very good sculptor.
However, some brazilian disciples of him (e.g: Ruy Ohtake) are actually careful about the comfort and well being within their projects.
Coming from personal experience, his buildings are a mixed bag. In São Paulo, the Copan building is an amazing architectural and social experiment - it has from single bedroom studios to much bigger units, in a building that was intended to bring those different social contexts together.
OTOH, other buildings are woefully impractical. Niemeyer was a brilliant sculptor, but living and working in his sculptures is frequently challenging.
Still, most of the time it's like living in a utopian science-fiction movie. And that's insanely cool by itself.
Oh, "the eye" museum. Totally disconected from the surrounding and famous just because it was projected by Niemeyer. Worst cost/benefit with a questionable esthetic.
That crap also looks like an eyesore. And if anything, that clown bullshitting that it's an abstracted Parana pine makes it even worse.
I wish that it was replaced with something in the old colonial style. A man can dream, right.
(Also, the problems that you're highlighting are easy to explain if you remember that Niemeyer assumes a tropical country, not a temperate and rather wet city. He simply failed to take the environment into account.)
I disagree, the discs in that building looks incredible to me? I love the curved spaces, the variety in shape and light, the canted walls, the colors. It's dated now, for sure, but it has a very retro futurist vibe I dig.
I lived in Brasília three years in my later teens in the early '80s. It was ambitious but fell short. The superblocks were cold and impersonal. There were many strange ideas such as ... all the hotels should be stuffed into two hotel sectors close to the city center. In the almost 40 years since I left I've heard there's more of a local culture and perhaps things have improved. Back then everyone in Brasília was still from elsewhere.
I grew up there in the early 2000s and it was a great city. Lots of kids to play with from your own block, access to local shops within walking distance, safe enough that kids walk around and play by themselves. One of the things I loved the most was going to friends houses and learning what their block was like.
There's parts that suck, over reliance on cars, no public transit, lots of things are just a little bit too far to walk to. But overall, Brasília had more easily accessible green space dedicated to people than most cities in the world imo.
Yeah of course I'm excluding the satellite cities, they weren't planned and this is a thread about the planned city. Brazil has a wealth inequality problem, designing a city well was never going to solve that.
It's not a perfect city, but it's way better than the vast majority of north American cities, which isn't reflected in all the negative comments here.
That building doesn't look appealing, I agree, but I was in Brasília a year ago, and it is a wonderfully designed city, far better than many.
You can walk to many places, apartment buildings don't block your path, there are plenty of parks, and you don't need cars for everything like in American cities.
If that's your criticism, then I wish more cities were designed, and as similar to Brasília as possible.
Walls that slant — isn't that horrible from an engineering perspective?
If it's just a normal vertical wall it's naturally "balanced", but slanting walls would have a tendency to, I don't know, fall down? How does it support the next floor on top?!
Likewise with Frank Gehry's designs. Look at MIT buildings. People might probably consider it works of art, but I — a nobody — consider it cringeworthy.
Slanted walls per se are a bad idea, but arches are self supporting - instead of a vertical load on the slanted wall you get a compressive one along the centerline of the "wall".
The auditorium is not in the building but 'half way' underground [0], so these walls supports the cupola and themselves, but they are not 'load-bearing'. Also did you ever seen how igloo is made?
Not in the school of architecture to which Niemeyer belongs. The internal concrete structure and non-load-bearing walls was key to Le Corbusier's tower blocks. You can see this by the fact that the walls often don't extend to the ground, where the building is supported on open pillars, as in the building in TFA. Modern skyscrapers are just a development of the same principle.
They are definitely a thing, but not all walls need to be load bearing. This is the sort of thing they work out during one of the early stages when they make sure the architect has actually designed something that can be physically built, plenty of (most?) architects even do this themselves as part of initial design work and it’s not something you see as much in the modern era of with computers to help make “sanity check” calculations like this part of the design process, like a pre-commit hook linking your code they can check that they haven’t got major structural elements like load bearing columns or cantilevered spans that can’t be built with concrete and steel. It won’t necessarily ensure the design passes local building codes, but it will definitely help avoid embarrassment for an architect of having to redesign something because it literally could not be built as designed by them.
I love modernist architecture. Not so much the exterior of Niemeyer's buildings but the interior of this one reminds me of a building I commuted along every day, the Czech embassy in Berlin. https://www.sosbrutalism.org/cms/16269951
Niemeyer is a national treasure, but I find his role in helping create a capital in the middle of nowhere in Brazil extremely reprehensible. Brasília was created to keep politicians away from the big population centers and avoid protests.
For two cities that were established with a "master plan" new national capitol idea at roughly the same time and in the same era, it's interesting to see how Islamabad and Brazilia are now two radically different places.
Islamabd has always been right next door to the very old city of Rawalpindi and now the two have essentially grown together into one urban conglomeration.
Hindsight is 20/20. Now we do have empirical knowledge (from Brazil, but also Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria and Myanmar) that moving the capital away doesn't solve any problem. Not protests, and definitely not a population concentration and disparity. We gotta find better solutions to those problems.
And Berlin had been capital of the Germany that came before. Colloquially named after Weimar (until a certain party took power, then colloquially named after that party), but Weimar has never been capital, only the place where the constitution was drafted. By that measure the Bonn republic would have to be called Frankfurt. Traditionally, the state that is usually considered predecessor of Germany (more like a feudalist mini-EU that happened to be mostly German language) never had anything resembling a capital, even after Habsburg effectively made Vienna the permanent seat of what we'd now call executive power. Assembly ("diet") was held in changing locations. At least formally, the last session at Regensburg was ruining for more than a century.
Why do you think that not one of the capitals of any of the 50 states is in the largest city? And why the national capital city is Washington DC rather than New York City? Same reason.
> Why do you think that not one of the capitals of any of the 50 states is in the largest city?
Phoenix, Arizona? That's the first one that came to mind, but I'm sure there's others.
Besides, that's not why DC is where it is. Our early leaders, for better or worse, thought it was best for it to be an independent district. Making NYC (or any other predeveloped city) into an independent entity is much harder than just creating a new one.
I remember learning in grade school that the founders were aware of the fact that in France, the politics of the Paris proletariat totally dominated french politics and the king was always afraid of uprisings, so they decided to put the capital in a backwater city to avoid unrest toppling the government.
Now that I’m looking for it, though, I cannot easily find evidence that that is true- I wonder why I was taught that?
Sounds like you had a teacher with an overactive imagination. That, or mine was hiding The Truth :-)
(I can think of a handful of other factors that contribute to the US's weird capital city distribution, like real estate cost and the fact that many capitals were established after the telegram, making colocation in the largest city of each state less necessary.)
> Why do you think that not one of the capitals of any of the 50 states is in the largest city?
Are we talking about Brazil or the USA?
Here in Brazil, the capital of the state of São Paulo (also called São Paulo, the state and the city have the same name) is the largest city not only of the state, but also of the whole country; according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities), it's one of the largest cities in the world. The same happens for the state of Rio de Janeiro, where I live; its capital, also called Rio de Janeiro (another case where the state and the city have the same name), and which is also the country's former capital, is once again the largest city of the state (and second largest of the country, and also one of the largest cities in the world). Go down the list of "largest cities in Brazil", and you will find several others which are the capital of their state. The capital of the state being the largest city in it is more of a rule than an exception.
That usually happens when the political dynamic is contested between the big commercial city and other state interests.
New York is a great example. The state is large, historically rich but with very different interests. Albany is sort of a middle ground.
Massachusetts is different. The politics are such that Boston was always dominant.
Nationally, the slave states were agricultural dominated by manor like real estate barons. They were afraid of the northeast states and their traders and manufacturers and felt a capital closer to them would be less hostile to their interests.
My understanding is they wanted the interior to get developed and take power/influence away from the coast/near coast & kneecap RdJ/SP rivalry ). Also wanted to "cut from their colonial past". Protests (and protestors) are not a problem for dictators (North Korea, Russia, Iran).
I don't understand the siren call of Communism on early XX - midcentury intellectuals. It's like they didn't go to personally understand the atrocities happening in these so-called worker and peasant paradises -what meatgrinders they were. How did ideology so overcome their ability to see what was happening in those places?
This is really easy to explain: all of the colonial empires were horrifying engines of atrocity, oppression and death. Since imperial apologists hated socialism, that made it a very attractive ideology -- if the worst people alive hate something, it's got to have something to recommend it, right?
The Madras famine of 1877 (in which over 8 million people died) is characteristic. The British Empire didn't just fail to help, it actually made it illegal to offer food relief, on the grounds that it would distort the labour market and violate free-market principles. If you witnessed that, wouldn't you think the market and Moloch were one and the same?
It's worth noting that "concentration camp" is not the English translation of "Konzentrationslager": it's actually the other way around. The German word is the translation of an English phrase used to describe the British Empire's interment camps in the Boer War. IMO, it's impossible to look at, say, a picture of Lizzie van Zyl and not see a premonition of the Holocaust.
You are technically correct about the origin of 'concentration camp'. But this point in relation to the Holocaust is so pedantic as to border on denial.
Most people who died in the Holocaust did not die in 'concentration camps'. About a quarter of them were killed in mass shootings and buried in mass graves. Another quarter were sent to something better described as 'extermination facilities'. There was no camp and no concentration - all victims were gassed to death on arrival. The most famous concentration camp - Auschwitz - also had a facility like this where around a million people died immediately on arrival. While Auschwitz did have the standard features of concentration camps - imprisonment, starvation, forced labor, and brutal punishment and torture, most people who died in Auschwitz never experienced any of this - they were simply executed on arrival.
So, while the 'concentration camps' were of course unimaginably terrible - and not to excuse other crimes against humanity such as the Boer camps, the gulags, etc - to compare other atrocities to the Nazi Holocaust simply because of the presence of concentration camps erases and minimizes the true extent of Nazi crimes against Jews and Roma.
Most of the members of the French Resistance during the Second World War were communists, so the communist party had a certain cache as being freedom fighters in postwar France. Not only that but communists were at the forefront of the early union movements in most countries, as well as the fights for racial justice, womens rights and so on. So communism had a very different reputation.
You make some valid observations about them using social wedges to drive participation. It was a means to an end --it happened in Africa, South America, Asia, etc. but yet, once communist those promises never came to fruition.
In principle many of the constitutions of communist countries afford(ed) citizens more freedoms to the people than say the US constitution, but in practice that was blatantly not the case with a bit of happy time in some parts of eastern Europe for a few years before the Soviets went in to quash the threat and establish harder regimes.
I would counter that by saying that despots have existed all through human history, and have always cloaked themselves in claims of their power coming from god, or them being actual gods, or something like that, so if the batch of despots that cropped up after ww2 used communism as their justification it’s hardly surprising- that was the set ideas floating around at the time that could be used to make them appear virtuous. And of course, by doing so they could get Soviet funding.
Of course, in places like Cambodia, atrocities did take place that were really inspired by some demented but sincere interpretations of communism.
I would say, 20th century communism’s great failure is that it attempts to abolish politics itself by trying to create a utopia where nobody ever disagrees with one another. This is impossible, and totalitarian by definition.
That explains the regimes coming to power via deceptive means and methods -all par for the course... but it doesn't explain the infatuation by intellectuals from the early to late mid XX century. It's like someone seeing Mussolini and being captivated by the act and not digging further.
All of your critiques come with the benefit of historical hindsight, and being completely detached from the dire circumstances that allowed demagogues or populist movements to flourish. You are seeing things through the lens of over a century of world history with which you shape your views; but this is the opposite of myopia, you see the big picture so largely you are unable to consider localized views in context.
To whit, Mussolini, who incidentally was a socialist before he became a fascist, rose to power in a time when Italy was in a state of crisis and discontent. This was a decade full of national revanchist ressentiment compounded by the economic devastation of the Great Depression. In that era, strongmen of not only far left or far right, but liberal center- consider FDR being the only American president to break the two-term precedence and be reelected to four terms- rose to power. Surely that should tell you people in the era had very different worldviews, concerns, and knowledge from yourself?
It's still a fair question to ask around WW2, given that there was already plenty of evidence for atrocities perpetrated by the USSR. Indeed, it was noted at the time: Orwell wrote this in 1944:
"At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. ... The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards would be quite astounding if it were not that they have behaved similarly on several earlier occasions. On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicised with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency. ... In the internal struggles in the various occupied countries, the British press has in almost all cases sided with the faction favoured by the Russians and libelled the opposing faction, sometimes suppressing material evidence in order to do so.
Throughout that time, criticism of the Soviet régime from the left could only obtain a hearing with difficulty. There was a huge output of anti-Russian literature, but nearly all of it was from the Conservative angle and manifestly dishonest, out of date and actuated by sordid motives. On the other side there was an equally huge and almost equally dishonest stream of pro-Russian propaganda, and what amounted to a boycott on anyone who tried to discuss all-important questions in a grown-up manner. You could, indeed, publish anti-Russian books, but to do so was to make sure of being ignored or misrepresented by nearly the whole of the highbrow press. Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was ‘not done’. What you said might possibly be true, but it was ‘inopportune’ and played into the hands of this or that reactionary interest. ... Events in Russia and events elsewhere were to be judged by different standards. The endless executions in the purges of 1936-8 were applauded by life-long opponents of capital punishment, and it was considered equally proper to publicise famines when they happened in India and to conceal them when they happened in the Ukraine."
I'd wager that much of that is because people are susceptible to be lured by the idea of strength. If you identify severe problems with how the world is, even an oppressive government like what the bolsheviks created that claims to solve them might seem like a ray of hope, and you might be willing to look past a lot of horrid things / convince yourself that they're not real so long as you believe those fundamental problems with the organisation of labour and wealth are being solved. It is worth noting that this infatuation was by no means universal - Camus and Sartre famously had a split over Soviet gulags, and Orwell consistently criticised the Soviet Union's authoritarianism despite both being socialists. The fact that only centralised, authoritarian socialist governments managed to take power in the first half of the 20th century has probably done irreparable damage to the idea of communism. If more moderate, decentralised, or liberal (as opposed to authoritarian) governments had managed to take power (such as in Spain) people might not be as quick to dismiss the (in my opinion, very real) structural issues in capitalist systems, and we might live in a better world today because of it - or perhaps that is just my infatuation with the counterfactual!
> Most of the members of the French Resistance during the Second World War were communists
I am an old French (65yo) but what I understand is that statement is only propaganda if only because De Gaule's army was much larger.
Anyway "resistance" was not a well structured organisation even De Gaulle's organisation, it was sparse at the beginning (1941) and a lot of people declared themselve as "résistant" after the D day. Many people who actually did resistance acts did not claim themselve to be "résistants".
See [0] "Before the Liberation day, we were 2,500 in the maquis. Five or six days later, we were around 10,000"
At "liberation", people lived in a state of terror, armed young men roamed the cities. Properties were stolen. Many women were shamed, shaved and raped by those pseudo resistants [2]. Neighbors denounced neighbors for profit.
Again see [0] "“There were people killed, one wonders why. Sometimes out of jealousy or revenge. To take their wives... It's easy when you have a gun in your hand, if you're mentally imbalanced. »"
US forces put the number of "summary executions" following liberation at 80,000. The French Minister of the Interior in March 1945 claimed that the number executed was 105,000 [1].
It was definitely communists who organized the resistance at least in Brittany and in Charente. My grandfather on my mother side was actual bourgeoisie (parents owned a castle and multiple wineyards and shops), and was temporarily hiding Jews or UK pilots at his home from 1941 to 1944 since their castle was between the 'zone libre' and the coast where allied submarines often waited for pilots. He had no love for communists, but he knew most of the passeurs were young communists (one of which he hired, and i think his son still worked for my uncle 15 years ago).
On my father side, in Brittany, even the wermacht garrison in St clette (totalling 5 men on 2 villages, and no road large enough to let any truck send reinforcements, which were hours, even days away if the road was blocked, which happened often), knew who was making the signal and distributing weapons to surrounding group, but couldn't really do anything about it. My grandma had good stories about how poor the area was, as their lack of electricity made them lit bonfire to signal allied planes, bonfire which were very visible for anyone who would look. While they weren't really communists, the ones in Brest sending plans, radio frequencies and taking weapons were.
Most movements were on the left, and it seems that the saboteurs and maquisards were communists led. I'm pretty sure my grandmother told me about the Brest communists though, maybe it was just her impression.
> it was sparse at the beginning (1941) and a lot of people declared themselve as "résistant" after the D day
This isn't the refutation you think it is. Communists and fellow travelers were much more prevalent in the resistance earlier on (but after Operation Barbarossa!). There are a considerable number of French communist martyrs commemorated in French towns and public places. Most of these died during 1942 and 1943, when resistance was against overwhelming odds. Towards the end of the war, there were fewer actions against the Nazi occupation and more towards collaborators. This is however because in many parts of France, the occupation simply was unable to exercise more than a show of control, because of the success of the resistance.
I am very surprised that as an old French person you aren't aware of the significant role played by French communists in the resistance. Have you heard of Vercors? Colonel Fabien? France d'abord?
Whatever you may think of communism in general these are established historical facts. The mainstreaming of the PCF after the war, in contrast to other places in Europe, is specifically related to recognition of their heroism against the occupation. (The same could be said about the mainstream position of freemasonry in French society.) In fact, the strength and popularity of the communist controlled organizations and the risk of a Tito-style regime was a main reason that the UK and US (reluctantly) gave their full backing to de Gaulle towards the end of the war.
> Most of the members of the French Resistance during the Second World War were communists
Though many of the communists followed Moscow's order and only started resisting after 1941 and Germany's attack on the URSS; before that Moscow's message to French communists was more of collaboration with its nazi ally.
I guess they engaged with a critique of capitalism that wasn't (and isn't) available to someone with a more basic education, and communism was seen as an alternative.
A communist back then would point to the capitalist countries committing horrible atrocities of colonialism and slavery.
Another factor would be a rhetoric of liberation. Either you fight against the bourgeoisie, or they will keep sucking your blood as long as you live. That's why conflicts were seen as inevitable.
I doubt anyone condoned violent mass murder. Khmer Rouge and the Cultural Revolution happened in the second half of the XX century.
> A communist back then would point to the capitalist countries committing horrible atrocities
Unlike now, where whenever we point to capitalism, we point to shining beacons of freedom and humanity. ;-)
> I doubt anyone condoned violent mass murder
The fact the Soviet Union and China didn't succeed at implementing an ideal utopian society doesn't prevent others from trying something slightly different (let's say, socdem) in hopes it'll suck less than unregulated capitalism
I think to do that you have to actually look at how corrupt and awful eastern European and colonial powers were. Combine that with a belief that this time it's different Re the strong history of the new boss being far worse than the previous one. And human nature to believe that your tribe is beyond reproach or at least justified (rolls eyes).
While in some places Communism has definitely been responsible for atrocities, in many countries (especially Western Europe, Asia and South America) Communist parties have been on the frontline of liberation movements, indigenous rights, human rights, workers’ conditions, etc.
That’s why for many Communism != atrocities.
100% this. Socialist and communist critiques of our current and historical modes of production identify some systemic issues. It's worth engaging with those critiques more deeply than "communism bad!"
Oh, no doubt they had lots of bright "promise" exemplified by the fists of virile men and fecund women reaching the mountain top having vanquished capitalist evil, triumphantly raising the hammer and sickle and little Ivan joins in the parade...
But it was all illusion and never delivered. They always ended in oppression, regression and failed experiments (social, economic, environmental, etc.)
I think there's a healthy discussion to be had about, for instance Cuba. Yes, poverty is still high but sanctions are still oppressive. They have higher literacy rates than Canada or the US, they have solid medical care, and they've started from a much, much worse position. Similar story with Vietnam. There's a discussion to be had about where they started, where they are now, and what happened in the interim.
To be clear, I'm not saying these countries have done no wrong. They aren't shining beacons, but it is worth examining them in a thoughtful way. It's not like the US (where I live) is a shining beacon either.
Also, I'd argue there are degrees and varieties of both socialism and communism. Is Mondragon socialist? Is Sweden? Is France? What about small council communism and Anarcho communism?
There may be some aspects of life and society where social cooperation helps in certain realms under some circumstances (Kibbutz too?). Exporting medical expertise for Cuba at least then was an "in" for subversion into other countries. That said, two observations. One Cuba was hugely subsidized by the CCCP and still traded with lots of Europe, they were not isolated. Second, all else suffered --it's like time stood still in all other aspects of society, infrastructure, economy, etc.
I think it's totally fair to hold up Cuba against, for instance, Costa Rica or Panama. Both those countries receive substantial subsidies from the US.
I think one could argue that Cuba is not out of line with its peers and might actually be ahead in some ways. It's not perfect, but regionally it's doing pretty alright from what I can tell.
Panama and Costa Rica are pretty protective (usually foreigners get actual seconds, unless they are rich), but if not, if a Cuban had a choice between staying in Cuba or moving to Panama, if I were that Cuban, I would take Panama. On the other hand it's a fair critique, LatAm has a history of being run by strongmen and run poorly, with some exceptions. However, that includes the Castro brothers.
Given the choice between Cuba and anywhere else, most Cubans would without a doubt choose anywhere else. Why else would so many choose to risk death trying to escape their country on overcrowded ramshackle boats? Literally hundreds of Cuban refugees are picked up by border patrol every single month in Miami and the surrounding areas.
Also, it’s not clear whether you meant to say the Castro brothers are included in strongmen or exceptions, but I assume it’s strongmen.
Cuba doesn't have solid medical care. They suppress free speech brutally. Che and Castro were viciously anti-gay. You can't get anything in the stores there, very much like Soviet era shopping. It's a fucking hell hole by Western standards.
The Che was a sadist not all too different from the nazi character in schindlers list who ‘hunts prisoners’ for fun. I don’t know how college students can wear his t-shirt alongside Bob Marley. Or even more ironic a BLM (the movement not the bureau) activist wearing his iconography. Maybe that can be chalked up to capitalism doing its thing…
He saw the poverty and exploitation of LatAm by the US and others and decided to do something about it after the CIA assassinated Arbenz. He was pivotal in overthrowing Batista, an autocratic despot.
He later served in several government programs, and wrote a memoir about motorcycles.
He was eventually executed without trial by Bolivian special forces backed by the CIA.
But college kids probably don't know that much about the flip side of his character. Plenty of stories suggest he enjoyed killing - he certainly had no concerns about executions. He wrote some pretty racist stuff in his early life.
I'm guessing by your username we're on opposite ends of the socialism thing. Don't care! I love your willingness to take evidence as it stands. Believe me, as a stout USA patriot and free market enthusiast, I do not shrink from the weaknesses of my positions either. For example, you're dead right (ahem) about the CIA. Sincere thanks for joining the discourse.
I think blind adherence to a doctrine is a big problem. I love talking about this stuff. And I want it to be approachable, reasoned, and something that someone might go, "well, I don't agree with you, but you aren't just a surface level ideologue".
Hahaha. Well, you see how quickly I'm vilified here! I'm not sure I'd be that excited about exposing myself to the wider internet. :D
I do try to respond to comments here with genuine answers and discourse, but the downvotes here lead me to believe a podcast would likely result in a lot of disinterest or angry mail headed my way.
I mean, he's quoted by a revolutionary publication as saying:
“We don’t need proof to execute a man. We only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him.”
“We executed many people by firing squad without knowing if they were fully guilty. At times, the Revolution cannot stop to conduct much investigation.”
Unfortunately, he appears not to have been assiduous in taking notes as Stalin was, so hard evidence, so far, is spotty.
Cuba severely restricts the ability of its citizens to leave the country. That right there tells you volumes about how good it actually is for the people.
And no, Sweden and France aren't socialist, since they still have private ownership of capital. Capitalism doesn't magically become socialism if you increase the taxes high enough.
Do you know much about France? Almost all large enterprises in France are partly state owned (Total being the notable exception). Although they also have private ownership, it would be extremely hard for say Air France or Orange or Credit Agricole to pursue a course of action in direct opposition to what the government, the civil service, and other large interests wanted.
This may not be text-book socialism but it is quite different from capitalism as practiced in the United States.
Vietnam is actually a very free economy that is all about free enterprise. It's very common there to make a living doing all kinds of street hustles. the government doesn't like to shut them down. Pretty typical for a developing country. Sure they are Communist but that's just a name.
> Yes, poverty is still high but sanctions are still oppressive.
Which sanctions exactly? Surely a communist country doesn't need free trade, that's a capitalist concept and Marx was against it.
> They have higher literacy rates than Canada
This shows you the value of literacy as a metric. North Korea also has high literacy, it's not a reason to prefer living there to Canada.
> It's not like the US (where I live) is a shining beacon either.
The amount of people trying to immigrate to the US vs any other country contradicts this.
> What about small council communism and Anarcho communism?
Masturbatory terms dreamed up by people who don't want to understand economics because it deals with real tradeoffs, whereas politics is about promising the impossible while ignoring economics and history. Anarchism and communism are opposites.
And both council communism and Anarcho communism have long histories of communities actually practicing them. From gift economies in smaller indigenous communities to explicitly anarchocommunist zones in Korea and Spain in the 20s and 30s.
Anarchism is not the opposite of communism. It's the opposite of Stalinist communism, for sure. But anarchism is about the removal of unnecessary and unjust hierarchies. That's not in opposition with "and we should take care of everyone without a profit motive".
One could argue (and in fact, many scholars have) that the open source development model of Linux or other large systems are anarchocommunist in nature.
> I don't understand the siren call of Communism on early XX - midcentury intellectuals
I think it boils down to “enemy of my enemy”. Their main enemy was the establishment, which means capitalism, corporatism and so on. Communism was its declared enemy number one, so to be edgy and radical they picked that.
If the West was trampling over some poor country, whatever that country’s political or cultural preferences, they automatically become appealing to anti-establishment intellectuals in the West as a way to show sympathy.
Perhaps you are making the fallacy of comparing early 20th century communist regimes with today's capitalist society. If you compared them with early 20th century capitalism or colonialism they start to look much more benign.
They really don't, though. You can even look at quality of life in Russia itself - conveniently one of the more oppressive capitalist societies at the time - before and after the Bolshevik revolution.
(There's this myth that's popular with some lefties that Soviets weren't really that oppressive until Stalin. It's not true - mass executions were already in full swing in 1918.)
Mass executions of (certain subsets of) the middle and upper classes, alongside electrification and land reform for the rural poor and trade unions and healthcare for the urban poor, meant an extremely significant improvement in the average quality of life for the Russian population.
Have you ever heard the words "prodrazvyorstka" or "kombed"? Bolsheviks literally robbed the peasants - who, to remind, was the actual majority of the population by a factor of 4x of so - blind at gunpoint to feed their forced industrialization in the cities, triggering more than one famine in the process (Holodomor being the most famous).
If you look at early Soviet history, it's littered with peasant uprisings for this exact reason. In my hometown in Russia, such an uprising was big enough that Soviets decided to use chemical weapons against the rebels; ironically, I used to live on a street that was named after the guy who signed that order.
... or the brutal capitalist South-American dictatorships sponsored by the US so that South America could be saved from "brutal communist dictatorships" (or agrarian reform, or anything that could harm the profits of American companies).
The Vietnamese, who were no angels, when it came to in-country human rights, were so appalled by what the Red Khmer were doing, they decided enough was enough and invaded their ideological kin-spirit to rid it of that vile and disgusting regime.
It's more complex. The Communist Vietnamese originally backed the Khmer Rouge. Then they had a split and the Khmer Rouge attacked Vietnam border towns and committed some pretty horribly atrocities.
The Vietnam brought down the Khmer Rouge, but it all started as an attempt to protect their own population.
As a general rule the people I don't like are highly specialized computer technology professionals who have the hubris to think their level of in-field expertise carries over into issues regarding how to architect society.
What are your thoughts on the commodity -> money -> commodity mode of exchange compared to the money -> commodity > money mode of exchange?
Alternative question, when the English moved to a system of tenant farmers while the French did not, was it necessarily the case that capitalism would need to arise in England and spread across the world?
There's plenty of very interesting economic and social topics that are covered by the likes of Marx, Gramsci, and Melksins Wood. I'd suggest not engaging with the discussion and calling it "perverse" is seeking a position of willful anti intellectualism. You might not agree with all the points, sure, but they are raised in good faith and backed by many many intellectual discussions over decades and decades.
The US began arming the Khmer Rouge in 1979 into the 1980s because the US wanted the Khmer Rouge to take over Cambodia again (well they didn't take over in 1975, the prince who the CIA ousted took over again technically).
You realise that's even worse for Chomsky right? He is an apologist for a genocidal communist regime that also happens to be propped up by the imperialist pig dogs. That's so much worse
On the quote of Georges Pompidou: "[the building] was the only good thing those Commies have ever done".
That translation is a much less neutral than what he actually said. He said "c'est la seule bonne chose que les communistes aient faite", which is quite neutrally: "this is the only good thing that the Communists have done". No "Commies" (I'm not even sure that there's an equivalent in French) or "those Commies".
Very Star Trek, I don’t know much about architecture but I do find curves and circles much more pleasant, if less efficient, than 90 degree angles everywhere.
I get that about Brasilia, but I don't see the discomfort in this one. Those chairs look pretty comfortable to me, and I like the colors.
Edit: Perhaps the more obvious answer is that it's an office/professional building, and you're not supposed to fall asleep in the chairs (although I think I could swing it).
I don’t know, the lounge area in the basement looks horribly uncomfortable. The four chairs around the coffee table have too wide a seat for the back and appear to be uncomfortably low.
Just my opinion, but I see more form over function there. Molded plastic chairs? No thanks, used to work in an office that went that route for conference room chairs…was beyond awful, but good if you never wanted people to use your conference room.
I self identify as a communist, and I would say my views are fairly typical for communist folk.
I don't think your comment is an accurate assessment. I know it's meant to be a joke, but ending a post with "your typical XYZ" is pretty condescending. What if someone posted about, "your typical tech bro, your typical Christian, your typical Republican, etc"?
I'm disappointed to see such strong disinterest in actual substantive discussion here on HN of all places.
"inner party" is a term from the world of Orwell's "1984", but something similar existed in the Nomenklatura of the Soviet Union - an upper class of people in leadership positions who had extensive privileges not available to the average person or even the average party member.
It all looks as if, regardless of the ideology of the people involved, once it actually gets power, as-built communism in a one-party state ends up structured an awful lot like feudalism...
Yeah, there's a reason I'm against one party states and vanguard party communism. (Aka Stalinists or "tankies").
I firmly believe that any communist state needs to be a democratic enterprise, organized locally in the vein of council communism or Anarcho communism.
Nope. I sometimes use rose motifs. I've got some hopeful images of friendly clasped hands surrounded by flowers that say things like "we win through ecosocialism".
No big yellow stars, no big red flags. None of those military/guerilla style hats.
I'm not opposed to hammer and sickle stuff, but I don't own any.
I think you need to distinguish between "communist folk" and the people who inevitably end up being in charge in communist governments.
Show me a communist country where the leaders don't profess to be "for the people" but live lives of luxury while "the people" live lives of struggle and servitude.
For starters, you need to distinguish between authoritarian and libertarian forms of any ideology that permits that distinction. Bolsheviks weren't just communists - they were authoritarian communists, and they exterminated basically every other competing variety in the process of coming to power. Naturally, they backed political factions with similar views in other countries where possible, and otherwise pressured the groups that they did back to adopt the ideology.
Is that a reasonable bar? How does Trump live? Biden? Truss? Trudeau? The UK is starting people for signs that say "not my king", the US incarcerates whole integer percentages of their population, and Canada continues to do terrible things to their indigenous population.
Put more succinctly, I do believe that the US leadership lives like royals while the average worker is scraping by.
I'm happy to chat, but the bar should be set equally.
Except none of those people, to my understanding, are communists and none of the countries they lead are communist countries.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a central tenet of communism the equality of outcome for all citizens? So how does having an elite Inner Party (which there always is) that has special privilege (which they always do) translate into equality of outcomes? Last time I checked, no capitalist/free market country promised such a thing. So Trump having billions of dollars doesn't go against the very principle of the U.S. economic or social structure. To the contrary, it aligns precisely with our economic structure.
Not quite, equality of outcome isn't necessarily the target. The most common axiom is "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs".
Different socialist and communist communities interpret this differently. The fundamental baseline is no one should starve, no one should be homeless, no one should lack basic medical care -- essentially there should be a baseline safety net for everyone.
Some communities focus on workers and profit distribution - the company's profit should be directed by the workers, reinvested or paid out at their discretion (rather than collecting in the pocket of "owners"). Some focus on equality of outcome. Some are built of gift economies similar to the economies of some indigenous tribes.
What most people think of as communist is the Stalinist model of the Soviet Union - an authoritarian, single party, fairly corrupt institution. The Soviets pushed their brand of communism onto other countries, which is why you see so many built on that model. (The Soviets actually attacked other communist states that were more libertarian and democratic.)
I would say yes, authoritarian communism is prone to the outcomes you describe. There's a reason I disparage Stalinists by calling them "Tankies" and do my best not to associate with them.
> "Different socialist and communist communities interpret this differently. The fundamental baseline is no one should starve, no one should be homeless, no one should lack basic medical care -- essentially there should be a baseline safety net for everyone."
Ok, well show me the communist country that lives up to even those ideals and doesn't have an elite ruling class that has privilege and benefits above the working class and poor.
> "I would say yes, authoritarian communism is prone to the outcomes you describe."
Well, yeah. That's pretty much the only type of communism that exists. You can't choose to not live by communism in a communist country. It's by its very nature authoritarian. Because if they were, say, to allow real deviation from that economic and societal system (not the "managed" deviation you see in places like China), their system would quickly fall apart. If today I decided to go and live on a commune in Washington that functions locally under the principles of communism or socialism, I would be able to do so. Nobody could say boo. You can't decide to go and live by the principles of free markets/capitalism (again, real capitalism) in China or any other communist country.
I'd say to take a look at Israeli Kibbutzim, but you'll tell me they aren't technically communist.
I'd tell you to look at indigenous pre industrial economies, but you'd probably say they aren't still around (and again, not self identified as communist).
I'd tell you to look at Mondragon, but that's a large democratic worker co-op making billions of dollars, not a communist country. That's fair.
So let's talk about Portugal post carnation revolution. Portuguese politics is dominated by the socialist party, the social Democratic party, the communist party, and the green party. The State owns many major businesses and many more companies through trust in the public interest. You might say they aren't a communist country, I might say they aren't a Stalinist communist country. But they self identify as socialist country.
I'd encourage you to read up on Ujamaa and the Arusha Declaration, prime minister Julius Nyerere's plan to lift Tanzania out of poverty in the 70s. It unfortunately failed due to world events. But seriously, consider reading up on it. It wasn't perfect, maybe it would have gone autocratic. More broadly I could spend days writing comments about African Socialism.
You can look at the Spanish revolution and the communists who fought against the Stalinists and the Soviet Union. Eventually they were militarily crushed, but they were worker led, libertarian socialist economies with millions of people, eventually stomped out by Stalinists.
I don't think I met the bar of your question, but I hope that I dispelled the idea that there is only one kind of communism.
I also hope I provided at least some interesting things to go dive into on Wikipedia. At the very least I hope I'm providing some novel intellectual stimulation.
There is a hugely rich variety of models, and not all of them require a unitary authority or harsh anti democratic laws. There's a very interesting historical and modern discussion around many, many other models, and not engaging with it (or saying that all these models are the same as the Soviet model) is ignoring a lot of well thought out theory and practice.
I understand what you're saying. There are different ways to implement any social or economic system. Capitalism doesn't always look the same, neither does communism.
But there has to be a core definition, and as long as that core definition is met, then the method of implementation doesn't much matter. But none of the examples you posted are examples of real communism.
For example, you talk about the Portuguese government owning many major businesses. Well, one of the core tenets of communism is the abolishment of private property in favor of communal property. Private property and business exists in Portugal, so it's not an actual communist country.
I'm sorry you feel this way. It might be worth learning about the different types of communist beliefs. I am, for instance, against the idea of state socialism and one party authoritarianism.
I would describe myself as a "council communist", which is to say that workers should elect representatives who meet in councils. It's fundamentally a representative democracy but driven by labor power rather than capital power.
I don't mean to derail discussion of the article, but that quote is just a flatly true statement, no?
It's literally the first line in the English wikipedia article
>"The military dictatorship in Brazil (Portuguese: ditadura militar) was established on 1 April 1964, after a coup d'état by the Brazilian Armed Forces, with support from the United States government"
Ah yes, the building really drives home the message that no expense will be spared on the ruling class once the revolution has happened and the peasants settle in beneath their new oppressors :-)
The concrete and aluminum does not seem like "no expenses will be spared" to me. It looks like sculpted artistic streaks to elevate the otherwise shabbiness to a sci-fi futurism.
Whether the peasants would be oppressed is another can of worms topic, but I think it would be best expressed by growth rates of the USSR and China compared to their peers in similar conditions of industrial development.
Growth rates pumped up by statisticians in nice offices :)
If you shoot the statisticians when they produce politically incorrect numbers, you can skip nice offices, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_Census_(1937)
Nice offices help to find new recruits. Even if they’re usually occupied by those shooting the former.
You can visit the place next Saturday or Sunday because it's the European Heritage Days where a lot of public places are open to the public in France : https://journeesdupatrimoine.culture.gouv.fr/en/
https://espace-niemeyer.fr/evenements/journees-europeennes-d...
I worked for 3 months in a building projected by Oscar Niemeyer. It was an horrible experience.
The building is on this foto [1], the Jetsons-like structure in the front didn't exist back then. It was just the long white slab on the back, without windows. Behind there is a preserved rainforest. The place is very humid and, for aesthetic reasons, the building had no windows and horrible ventilation. It was cold and very moldy and respiratory diseases were very common among the staff.
As some people say in Brazil, as an architect, Niemeyer was a very good sculptor.
However, some brazilian disciples of him (e.g: Ruy Ohtake) are actually careful about the comfort and well being within their projects.
[1] https://curitibaspace.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/Muse...
Coming from personal experience, his buildings are a mixed bag. In São Paulo, the Copan building is an amazing architectural and social experiment - it has from single bedroom studios to much bigger units, in a building that was intended to bring those different social contexts together.
OTOH, other buildings are woefully impractical. Niemeyer was a brilliant sculptor, but living and working in his sculptures is frequently challenging.
Still, most of the time it's like living in a utopian science-fiction movie. And that's insanely cool by itself.
The Pampulha Church in Belo Horizonte is beautiful. The apartment block in the centre much less so.
Theory of mine is that there are things that go into how buildings look, materials and current tradition. But also the actual tools an architect uses.
Oscar Niemeyer like others of his ilk were really really fond of drafting machines. Drafting machines encourage long straight lines and right angles.
CAD is the same except now with splines.
> As some people say in Brazil, as an architect, Niemeyer was a very good sculptor.
We indeed have a lot of those fancy buildings from famous architects, mostly from the 70s.
They all share a common pattern:
- a repressed artist who became an architect
- a beautiful piece of concrete modern art on the outside and that makes fancy design magazine photos
- an oppressive building and a complete failure in term of comfort/ergonomy
Another example is the "Espaces d'Abraxas". But there are even worse examples when you look at brutalist architecture.
Oh, "the eye" museum. Totally disconected from the surrounding and famous just because it was projected by Niemeyer. Worst cost/benefit with a questionable esthetic.
That crap also looks like an eyesore. And if anything, that clown bullshitting that it's an abstracted Parana pine makes it even worse.
I wish that it was replaced with something in the old colonial style. A man can dream, right.
(Also, the problems that you're highlighting are easy to explain if you remember that Niemeyer assumes a tropical country, not a temperate and rather wet city. He simply failed to take the environment into account.)
Brasilia is a terribly designed city, and this is a very ugly building. Classic "high modernism" (https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300078152/seeing-like-a-...)
I disagree, the discs in that building looks incredible to me? I love the curved spaces, the variety in shape and light, the canted walls, the colors. It's dated now, for sure, but it has a very retro futurist vibe I dig.
Eye of the beholder, I suppose.
Looking nice and being a nice place to live are very different things.
I lived in Brasília three years in my later teens in the early '80s. It was ambitious but fell short. The superblocks were cold and impersonal. There were many strange ideas such as ... all the hotels should be stuffed into two hotel sectors close to the city center. In the almost 40 years since I left I've heard there's more of a local culture and perhaps things have improved. Back then everyone in Brasília was still from elsewhere.
I grew up there in the early 2000s and it was a great city. Lots of kids to play with from your own block, access to local shops within walking distance, safe enough that kids walk around and play by themselves. One of the things I loved the most was going to friends houses and learning what their block was like.
There's parts that suck, over reliance on cars, no public transit, lots of things are just a little bit too far to walk to. But overall, Brasília had more easily accessible green space dedicated to people than most cities in the world imo.
> Lots of kids to play with from your own block (...) safe enough
I bet that your part of town was the one that kept the poor plebs away.
> over reliance on cars, no public transit, lots of things are just a little bit too far to walk to.
That by itself already should be an immediate disqualification to consider a city "nice".
> Brasília had more easily accessible green space dedicated to people than most cities in the world imo
I guess if you stick only the planned area and exclude the satellite cities, that could be true. Even then, I'd really like to see some data on that.
Yeah of course I'm excluding the satellite cities, they weren't planned and this is a thread about the planned city. Brazil has a wealth inequality problem, designing a city well was never going to solve that.
It's not a perfect city, but it's way better than the vast majority of north American cities, which isn't reflected in all the negative comments here.
> over reliance on cars, no public transit, lots of things are just a little bit too far to walk to
The city was designed in the 50's. We need to consider the decisions in that context.
OTOH, even Disney's original EPCOT concept had mass transit baked in, and it was imagined in the US, land of the automobile.
Brasília is weird in its lack of sidewalks. Sometimes you can't get to the next building without crossing a street or a parking lot.
Also, public transport is awful. Buses don't have air conditioning and the metro comes within 2km of the airport and turns away!
Still, people I know who grew up there say it was great to be able to roam and play freely around the residential areas.
> Also, public transport is awful. Buses don't have air conditioning and the metro comes within 2km of the airport and turns away
That's an administration issue, not related to Niemeyer's design.
Actually, you can blame Lúcio Costa for the design of the city.
Niemeyer designed the buildings. I hear they are not the best places to work, but I do like the spaces inside the ones I've being to.
That building doesn't look appealing, I agree, but I was in Brasília a year ago, and it is a wonderfully designed city, far better than many.
You can walk to many places, apartment buildings don't block your path, there are plenty of parks, and you don't need cars for everything like in American cities.
If that's your criticism, then I wish more cities were designed, and as similar to Brasília as possible.
If you meant to compare with American suburbs, it is a pretty low bar to clear.
Brasília is wonderfully designed dirty, and the building is beautiful. That's a terrible book.
Do you mean ‘city’? That’s a great typo if so.
Short version (compared to the book): https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/book-review-seeing-lik...
Walls that slant — isn't that horrible from an engineering perspective?
If it's just a normal vertical wall it's naturally "balanced", but slanting walls would have a tendency to, I don't know, fall down? How does it support the next floor on top?!
Likewise with Frank Gehry's designs. Look at MIT buildings. People might probably consider it works of art, but I — a nobody — consider it cringeworthy.
Slanted walls per se are a bad idea, but arches are self supporting - instead of a vertical load on the slanted wall you get a compressive one along the centerline of the "wall".
The auditorium is not in the building but 'half way' underground [0], so these walls supports the cupola and themselves, but they are not 'load-bearing'. Also did you ever seen how igloo is made?
https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/5ad6/3db5/f197/cc73/2...
It’s my understanding that the frame supports the floors, not the walls.
Oh okay. I thought load-bearing walls[1] were a thing.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-bearing_wall
Not in the school of architecture to which Niemeyer belongs. The internal concrete structure and non-load-bearing walls was key to Le Corbusier's tower blocks. You can see this by the fact that the walls often don't extend to the ground, where the building is supported on open pillars, as in the building in TFA. Modern skyscrapers are just a development of the same principle.
They are definitely a thing, but not all walls need to be load bearing. This is the sort of thing they work out during one of the early stages when they make sure the architect has actually designed something that can be physically built, plenty of (most?) architects even do this themselves as part of initial design work and it’s not something you see as much in the modern era of with computers to help make “sanity check” calculations like this part of the design process, like a pre-commit hook linking your code they can check that they haven’t got major structural elements like load bearing columns or cantilevered spans that can’t be built with concrete and steel. It won’t necessarily ensure the design passes local building codes, but it will definitely help avoid embarrassment for an architect of having to redesign something because it literally could not be built as designed by them.
I love modernist architecture. Not so much the exterior of Niemeyer's buildings but the interior of this one reminds me of a building I commuted along every day, the Czech embassy in Berlin. https://www.sosbrutalism.org/cms/16269951
Niemeyer is a national treasure, but I find his role in helping create a capital in the middle of nowhere in Brazil extremely reprehensible. Brasília was created to keep politicians away from the big population centers and avoid protests.
For two cities that were established with a "master plan" new national capitol idea at roughly the same time and in the same era, it's interesting to see how Islamabad and Brazilia are now two radically different places.
Islamabd has always been right next door to the very old city of Rawalpindi and now the two have essentially grown together into one urban conglomeration.
Hindsight is 20/20. Now we do have empirical knowledge (from Brazil, but also Côte d'Ivoire, Nigeria and Myanmar) that moving the capital away doesn't solve any problem. Not protests, and definitely not a population concentration and disparity. We gotta find better solutions to those problems.
Yep. Egypt is trying to do it now. Vox had a great video on that recently.
MBS of KSA has a similar fever dream.
The move from Paris to Versailles by Louis 14 was mostly that, so we’ve had that hindsight for a few centuries now.
See also: Washington, DC
Other examples of capitals moving: Bonn to Berlin (Germany), Bursa to Ankara (Turkey)
Bonn was always a temporary capital, and East Berlin was the capital of East Germany.
And Berlin had been capital of the Germany that came before. Colloquially named after Weimar (until a certain party took power, then colloquially named after that party), but Weimar has never been capital, only the place where the constitution was drafted. By that measure the Bonn republic would have to be called Frankfurt. Traditionally, the state that is usually considered predecessor of Germany (more like a feudalist mini-EU that happened to be mostly German language) never had anything resembling a capital, even after Habsburg effectively made Vienna the permanent seat of what we'd now call executive power. Assembly ("diet") was held in changing locations. At least formally, the last session at Regensburg was ruining for more than a century.
Italy:
from Turin to Florence (temporary, 5 years 1865-1870)
from Florence to Rome (1871)
In theory Rome was the capital of the new Reign of Italy since 1861, but in practice Rome became "available" only 10 years later.
Constantinople to Istanbul. Why did Constantinople get the works? That's nobody's business but the Turk's.
Sorry to nitpick, but that is the same city with a different name.
Even old New York, was once New Amsterdam… ;)
Why do you think that not one of the capitals of any of the 50 states is in the largest city? And why the national capital city is Washington DC rather than New York City? Same reason.
> Why do you think that not one of the capitals of any of the 50 states is in the largest city?
Phoenix, Arizona? That's the first one that came to mind, but I'm sure there's others.
Besides, that's not why DC is where it is. Our early leaders, for better or worse, thought it was best for it to be an independent district. Making NYC (or any other predeveloped city) into an independent entity is much harder than just creating a new one.
I remember learning in grade school that the founders were aware of the fact that in France, the politics of the Paris proletariat totally dominated french politics and the king was always afraid of uprisings, so they decided to put the capital in a backwater city to avoid unrest toppling the government.
Now that I’m looking for it, though, I cannot easily find evidence that that is true- I wonder why I was taught that?
Sounds like you had a teacher with an overactive imagination. That, or mine was hiding The Truth :-)
(I can think of a handful of other factors that contribute to the US's weird capital city distribution, like real estate cost and the fact that many capitals were established after the telegram, making colocation in the largest city of each state less necessary.)
Utah, Georgia, Oklahoma, Colorado as well and then I got bored checking. NC has Charlotte as the biggest city, but Raleigh isn’t small.
> Why do you think that not one of the capitals of any of the 50 states is in the largest city?
Are we talking about Brazil or the USA?
Here in Brazil, the capital of the state of São Paulo (also called São Paulo, the state and the city have the same name) is the largest city not only of the state, but also of the whole country; according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities), it's one of the largest cities in the world. The same happens for the state of Rio de Janeiro, where I live; its capital, also called Rio de Janeiro (another case where the state and the city have the same name), and which is also the country's former capital, is once again the largest city of the state (and second largest of the country, and also one of the largest cities in the world). Go down the list of "largest cities in Brazil", and you will find several others which are the capital of their state. The capital of the state being the largest city in it is more of a rule than an exception.
That usually happens when the political dynamic is contested between the big commercial city and other state interests.
New York is a great example. The state is large, historically rich but with very different interests. Albany is sort of a middle ground.
Massachusetts is different. The politics are such that Boston was always dominant.
Nationally, the slave states were agricultural dominated by manor like real estate barons. They were afraid of the northeast states and their traders and manufacturers and felt a capital closer to them would be less hostile to their interests.
My understanding is they wanted the interior to get developed and take power/influence away from the coast/near coast & kneecap RdJ/SP rivalry ). Also wanted to "cut from their colonial past". Protests (and protestors) are not a problem for dictators (North Korea, Russia, Iran).
I don't understand the siren call of Communism on early XX - midcentury intellectuals. It's like they didn't go to personally understand the atrocities happening in these so-called worker and peasant paradises -what meatgrinders they were. How did ideology so overcome their ability to see what was happening in those places?
This is really easy to explain: all of the colonial empires were horrifying engines of atrocity, oppression and death. Since imperial apologists hated socialism, that made it a very attractive ideology -- if the worst people alive hate something, it's got to have something to recommend it, right?
The Madras famine of 1877 (in which over 8 million people died) is characteristic. The British Empire didn't just fail to help, it actually made it illegal to offer food relief, on the grounds that it would distort the labour market and violate free-market principles. If you witnessed that, wouldn't you think the market and Moloch were one and the same?
It's worth noting that "concentration camp" is not the English translation of "Konzentrationslager": it's actually the other way around. The German word is the translation of an English phrase used to describe the British Empire's interment camps in the Boer War. IMO, it's impossible to look at, say, a picture of Lizzie van Zyl and not see a premonition of the Holocaust.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lizzie_van_Zyl
You are technically correct about the origin of 'concentration camp'. But this point in relation to the Holocaust is so pedantic as to border on denial.
Most people who died in the Holocaust did not die in 'concentration camps'. About a quarter of them were killed in mass shootings and buried in mass graves. Another quarter were sent to something better described as 'extermination facilities'. There was no camp and no concentration - all victims were gassed to death on arrival. The most famous concentration camp - Auschwitz - also had a facility like this where around a million people died immediately on arrival. While Auschwitz did have the standard features of concentration camps - imprisonment, starvation, forced labor, and brutal punishment and torture, most people who died in Auschwitz never experienced any of this - they were simply executed on arrival.
So, while the 'concentration camps' were of course unimaginably terrible - and not to excuse other crimes against humanity such as the Boer camps, the gulags, etc - to compare other atrocities to the Nazi Holocaust simply because of the presence of concentration camps erases and minimizes the true extent of Nazi crimes against Jews and Roma.
Most of the members of the French Resistance during the Second World War were communists, so the communist party had a certain cache as being freedom fighters in postwar France. Not only that but communists were at the forefront of the early union movements in most countries, as well as the fights for racial justice, womens rights and so on. So communism had a very different reputation.
You make some valid observations about them using social wedges to drive participation. It was a means to an end --it happened in Africa, South America, Asia, etc. but yet, once communist those promises never came to fruition.
In principle many of the constitutions of communist countries afford(ed) citizens more freedoms to the people than say the US constitution, but in practice that was blatantly not the case with a bit of happy time in some parts of eastern Europe for a few years before the Soviets went in to quash the threat and establish harder regimes.
I would counter that by saying that despots have existed all through human history, and have always cloaked themselves in claims of their power coming from god, or them being actual gods, or something like that, so if the batch of despots that cropped up after ww2 used communism as their justification it’s hardly surprising- that was the set ideas floating around at the time that could be used to make them appear virtuous. And of course, by doing so they could get Soviet funding.
Of course, in places like Cambodia, atrocities did take place that were really inspired by some demented but sincere interpretations of communism.
I would say, 20th century communism’s great failure is that it attempts to abolish politics itself by trying to create a utopia where nobody ever disagrees with one another. This is impossible, and totalitarian by definition.
That explains the regimes coming to power via deceptive means and methods -all par for the course... but it doesn't explain the infatuation by intellectuals from the early to late mid XX century. It's like someone seeing Mussolini and being captivated by the act and not digging further.
All of your critiques come with the benefit of historical hindsight, and being completely detached from the dire circumstances that allowed demagogues or populist movements to flourish. You are seeing things through the lens of over a century of world history with which you shape your views; but this is the opposite of myopia, you see the big picture so largely you are unable to consider localized views in context.
To whit, Mussolini, who incidentally was a socialist before he became a fascist, rose to power in a time when Italy was in a state of crisis and discontent. This was a decade full of national revanchist ressentiment compounded by the economic devastation of the Great Depression. In that era, strongmen of not only far left or far right, but liberal center- consider FDR being the only American president to break the two-term precedence and be reelected to four terms- rose to power. Surely that should tell you people in the era had very different worldviews, concerns, and knowledge from yourself?
It's still a fair question to ask around WW2, given that there was already plenty of evidence for atrocities perpetrated by the USSR. Indeed, it was noted at the time: Orwell wrote this in 1944:
"At this moment what is demanded by the prevailing orthodoxy is an uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia. Everyone knows this, nearly everyone acts on it. Any serious criticism of the Soviet régime, any disclosure of facts which the Soviet government would prefer to keep hidden, is next door to unprintable. ... The servility with which the greater part of the English intelligentsia have swallowed and repeated Russian propaganda from 1941 onwards would be quite astounding if it were not that they have behaved similarly on several earlier occasions. On one controversial issue after another the Russian viewpoint has been accepted without examination and then publicised with complete disregard to historical truth or intellectual decency. ... In the internal struggles in the various occupied countries, the British press has in almost all cases sided with the faction favoured by the Russians and libelled the opposing faction, sometimes suppressing material evidence in order to do so.
Throughout that time, criticism of the Soviet régime from the left could only obtain a hearing with difficulty. There was a huge output of anti-Russian literature, but nearly all of it was from the Conservative angle and manifestly dishonest, out of date and actuated by sordid motives. On the other side there was an equally huge and almost equally dishonest stream of pro-Russian propaganda, and what amounted to a boycott on anyone who tried to discuss all-important questions in a grown-up manner. You could, indeed, publish anti-Russian books, but to do so was to make sure of being ignored or misrepresented by nearly the whole of the highbrow press. Both publicly and privately you were warned that it was ‘not done’. What you said might possibly be true, but it was ‘inopportune’ and played into the hands of this or that reactionary interest. ... Events in Russia and events elsewhere were to be judged by different standards. The endless executions in the purges of 1936-8 were applauded by life-long opponents of capital punishment, and it was considered equally proper to publicise famines when they happened in India and to conceal them when they happened in the Ukraine."
I'd wager that much of that is because people are susceptible to be lured by the idea of strength. If you identify severe problems with how the world is, even an oppressive government like what the bolsheviks created that claims to solve them might seem like a ray of hope, and you might be willing to look past a lot of horrid things / convince yourself that they're not real so long as you believe those fundamental problems with the organisation of labour and wealth are being solved. It is worth noting that this infatuation was by no means universal - Camus and Sartre famously had a split over Soviet gulags, and Orwell consistently criticised the Soviet Union's authoritarianism despite both being socialists. The fact that only centralised, authoritarian socialist governments managed to take power in the first half of the 20th century has probably done irreparable damage to the idea of communism. If more moderate, decentralised, or liberal (as opposed to authoritarian) governments had managed to take power (such as in Spain) people might not be as quick to dismiss the (in my opinion, very real) structural issues in capitalist systems, and we might live in a better world today because of it - or perhaps that is just my infatuation with the counterfactual!
> Most of the members of the French Resistance during the Second World War were communists
I am an old French (65yo) but what I understand is that statement is only propaganda if only because De Gaule's army was much larger.
Anyway "resistance" was not a well structured organisation even De Gaulle's organisation, it was sparse at the beginning (1941) and a lot of people declared themselve as "résistant" after the D day. Many people who actually did resistance acts did not claim themselve to be "résistants".
See [0] "Before the Liberation day, we were 2,500 in the maquis. Five or six days later, we were around 10,000"
At "liberation", people lived in a state of terror, armed young men roamed the cities. Properties were stolen. Many women were shamed, shaved and raped by those pseudo resistants [2]. Neighbors denounced neighbors for profit.
Again see [0] "“There were people killed, one wonders why. Sometimes out of jealousy or revenge. To take their wives... It's easy when you have a gun in your hand, if you're mentally imbalanced. »"
US forces put the number of "summary executions" following liberation at 80,000. The French Minister of the Interior in March 1945 claimed that the number executed was 105,000 [1].
[0] https://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2001/08/26/215395-la-terrib...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89puration_l%C3%A9gale
[2] https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/french-female-collaborator-...
It was definitely communists who organized the resistance at least in Brittany and in Charente. My grandfather on my mother side was actual bourgeoisie (parents owned a castle and multiple wineyards and shops), and was temporarily hiding Jews or UK pilots at his home from 1941 to 1944 since their castle was between the 'zone libre' and the coast where allied submarines often waited for pilots. He had no love for communists, but he knew most of the passeurs were young communists (one of which he hired, and i think his son still worked for my uncle 15 years ago).
On my father side, in Brittany, even the wermacht garrison in St clette (totalling 5 men on 2 villages, and no road large enough to let any truck send reinforcements, which were hours, even days away if the road was blocked, which happened often), knew who was making the signal and distributing weapons to surrounding group, but couldn't really do anything about it. My grandma had good stories about how poor the area was, as their lack of electricity made them lit bonfire to signal allied planes, bonfire which were very visible for anyone who would look. While they weren't really communists, the ones in Brest sending plans, radio frequencies and taking weapons were.
> "It was definitely communists who organized the resistance at least in Brittany"
Not what I was told (I am born just after the WWII) and not what history seems to tell:
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%A9sistance_en_Bretagne
> "St clette"
You probably mean "Saint Clet"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint-Clet,_Brittany
Yes lighted road were rare on countryside, it only arrived in 1956 in the street were my parents built their home.
Yes! Saint clet, exactly.
I've researched, and you're right about Brittany, it was MI9 led.
But according to this: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_des_r%C3%A9seaux_et_mouv...
Most movements were on the left, and it seems that the saboteurs and maquisards were communists led. I'm pretty sure my grandmother told me about the Brest communists though, maybe it was just her impression.
Thanks for the info about MI9, I didn't know!
A side note, I think the last village electrified in France happened sometime in the ‘70s!?
> it was sparse at the beginning (1941) and a lot of people declared themselve as "résistant" after the D day
This isn't the refutation you think it is. Communists and fellow travelers were much more prevalent in the resistance earlier on (but after Operation Barbarossa!). There are a considerable number of French communist martyrs commemorated in French towns and public places. Most of these died during 1942 and 1943, when resistance was against overwhelming odds. Towards the end of the war, there were fewer actions against the Nazi occupation and more towards collaborators. This is however because in many parts of France, the occupation simply was unable to exercise more than a show of control, because of the success of the resistance.
I am very surprised that as an old French person you aren't aware of the significant role played by French communists in the resistance. Have you heard of Vercors? Colonel Fabien? France d'abord?
Whatever you may think of communism in general these are established historical facts. The mainstreaming of the PCF after the war, in contrast to other places in Europe, is specifically related to recognition of their heroism against the occupation. (The same could be said about the mainstream position of freemasonry in French society.) In fact, the strength and popularity of the communist controlled organizations and the risk of a Tito-style regime was a main reason that the UK and US (reluctantly) gave their full backing to de Gaulle towards the end of the war.
> Most of the members of the French Resistance during the Second World War were communists
Though many of the communists followed Moscow's order and only started resisting after 1941 and Germany's attack on the URSS; before that Moscow's message to French communists was more of collaboration with its nazi ally.
The Molotov/Ribbentrop pact kind of dictated a lot of the pre Barbarossa partitionings of Europe.
I guess they engaged with a critique of capitalism that wasn't (and isn't) available to someone with a more basic education, and communism was seen as an alternative.
A communist back then would point to the capitalist countries committing horrible atrocities of colonialism and slavery.
Another factor would be a rhetoric of liberation. Either you fight against the bourgeoisie, or they will keep sucking your blood as long as you live. That's why conflicts were seen as inevitable.
I doubt anyone condoned violent mass murder. Khmer Rouge and the Cultural Revolution happened in the second half of the XX century.
> A communist back then would point to the capitalist countries committing horrible atrocities
Unlike now, where whenever we point to capitalism, we point to shining beacons of freedom and humanity. ;-)
> I doubt anyone condoned violent mass murder
The fact the Soviet Union and China didn't succeed at implementing an ideal utopian society doesn't prevent others from trying something slightly different (let's say, socdem) in hopes it'll suck less than unregulated capitalism
I think to do that you have to actually look at how corrupt and awful eastern European and colonial powers were. Combine that with a belief that this time it's different Re the strong history of the new boss being far worse than the previous one. And human nature to believe that your tribe is beyond reproach or at least justified (rolls eyes).
While in some places Communism has definitely been responsible for atrocities, in many countries (especially Western Europe, Asia and South America) Communist parties have been on the frontline of liberation movements, indigenous rights, human rights, workers’ conditions, etc. That’s why for many Communism != atrocities.
100% this. Socialist and communist critiques of our current and historical modes of production identify some systemic issues. It's worth engaging with those critiques more deeply than "communism bad!"
Oh, no doubt they had lots of bright "promise" exemplified by the fists of virile men and fecund women reaching the mountain top having vanquished capitalist evil, triumphantly raising the hammer and sickle and little Ivan joins in the parade...
But it was all illusion and never delivered. They always ended in oppression, regression and failed experiments (social, economic, environmental, etc.)
I think there's a healthy discussion to be had about, for instance Cuba. Yes, poverty is still high but sanctions are still oppressive. They have higher literacy rates than Canada or the US, they have solid medical care, and they've started from a much, much worse position. Similar story with Vietnam. There's a discussion to be had about where they started, where they are now, and what happened in the interim.
To be clear, I'm not saying these countries have done no wrong. They aren't shining beacons, but it is worth examining them in a thoughtful way. It's not like the US (where I live) is a shining beacon either.
Also, I'd argue there are degrees and varieties of both socialism and communism. Is Mondragon socialist? Is Sweden? Is France? What about small council communism and Anarcho communism?
There may be some aspects of life and society where social cooperation helps in certain realms under some circumstances (Kibbutz too?). Exporting medical expertise for Cuba at least then was an "in" for subversion into other countries. That said, two observations. One Cuba was hugely subsidized by the CCCP and still traded with lots of Europe, they were not isolated. Second, all else suffered --it's like time stood still in all other aspects of society, infrastructure, economy, etc.
I think it's totally fair to hold up Cuba against, for instance, Costa Rica or Panama. Both those countries receive substantial subsidies from the US.
I think one could argue that Cuba is not out of line with its peers and might actually be ahead in some ways. It's not perfect, but regionally it's doing pretty alright from what I can tell.
Panama and Costa Rica are pretty protective (usually foreigners get actual seconds, unless they are rich), but if not, if a Cuban had a choice between staying in Cuba or moving to Panama, if I were that Cuban, I would take Panama. On the other hand it's a fair critique, LatAm has a history of being run by strongmen and run poorly, with some exceptions. However, that includes the Castro brothers.
Given the choice between Cuba and anywhere else, most Cubans would without a doubt choose anywhere else. Why else would so many choose to risk death trying to escape their country on overcrowded ramshackle boats? Literally hundreds of Cuban refugees are picked up by border patrol every single month in Miami and the surrounding areas.
Also, it’s not clear whether you meant to say the Castro brothers are included in strongmen or exceptions, but I assume it’s strongmen.
Cuba doesn't have solid medical care. They suppress free speech brutally. Che and Castro were viciously anti-gay. You can't get anything in the stores there, very much like Soviet era shopping. It's a fucking hell hole by Western standards.
The Che was a sadist not all too different from the nazi character in schindlers list who ‘hunts prisoners’ for fun. I don’t know how college students can wear his t-shirt alongside Bob Marley. Or even more ironic a BLM (the movement not the bureau) activist wearing his iconography. Maybe that can be chalked up to capitalism doing its thing…
Most college kids know the following about Che:
He saw the poverty and exploitation of LatAm by the US and others and decided to do something about it after the CIA assassinated Arbenz. He was pivotal in overthrowing Batista, an autocratic despot.
He later served in several government programs, and wrote a memoir about motorcycles.
He was eventually executed without trial by Bolivian special forces backed by the CIA.
But college kids probably don't know that much about the flip side of his character. Plenty of stories suggest he enjoyed killing - he certainly had no concerns about executions. He wrote some pretty racist stuff in his early life.
He's a complicated figure, for sure.
I'm guessing by your username we're on opposite ends of the socialism thing. Don't care! I love your willingness to take evidence as it stands. Believe me, as a stout USA patriot and free market enthusiast, I do not shrink from the weaknesses of my positions either. For example, you're dead right (ahem) about the CIA. Sincere thanks for joining the discourse.
I think blind adherence to a doctrine is a big problem. I love talking about this stuff. And I want it to be approachable, reasoned, and something that someone might go, "well, I don't agree with you, but you aren't just a surface level ideologue".
Dammit we need to start a podcast
Hahaha. Well, you see how quickly I'm vilified here! I'm not sure I'd be that excited about exposing myself to the wider internet. :D
I do try to respond to comments here with genuine answers and discourse, but the downvotes here lead me to believe a podcast would likely result in a lot of disinterest or angry mail headed my way.
Also views
I mean, he's quoted by a revolutionary publication as saying:
“We don’t need proof to execute a man. We only need proof that it’s necessary to execute him.”
“We executed many people by firing squad without knowing if they were fully guilty. At times, the Revolution cannot stop to conduct much investigation.”
Unfortunately, he appears not to have been assiduous in taking notes as Stalin was, so hard evidence, so far, is spotty.
Yep, you won't hear me disagree with you that he was very comfortable executing people extrajudicially.
Cuba severely restricts the ability of its citizens to leave the country. That right there tells you volumes about how good it actually is for the people.
And no, Sweden and France aren't socialist, since they still have private ownership of capital. Capitalism doesn't magically become socialism if you increase the taxes high enough.
Do you know much about France? Almost all large enterprises in France are partly state owned (Total being the notable exception). Although they also have private ownership, it would be extremely hard for say Air France or Orange or Credit Agricole to pursue a course of action in direct opposition to what the government, the civil service, and other large interests wanted.
This may not be text-book socialism but it is quite different from capitalism as practiced in the United States.
Vietnam is actually a very free economy that is all about free enterprise. It's very common there to make a living doing all kinds of street hustles. the government doesn't like to shut them down. Pretty typical for a developing country. Sure they are Communist but that's just a name.
> Yes, poverty is still high but sanctions are still oppressive.
Which sanctions exactly? Surely a communist country doesn't need free trade, that's a capitalist concept and Marx was against it.
> They have higher literacy rates than Canada
This shows you the value of literacy as a metric. North Korea also has high literacy, it's not a reason to prefer living there to Canada.
> It's not like the US (where I live) is a shining beacon either.
The amount of people trying to immigrate to the US vs any other country contradicts this.
> What about small council communism and Anarcho communism?
Masturbatory terms dreamed up by people who don't want to understand economics because it deals with real tradeoffs, whereas politics is about promising the impossible while ignoring economics and history. Anarchism and communism are opposites.
The US embargo against Cuba.
And both council communism and Anarcho communism have long histories of communities actually practicing them. From gift economies in smaller indigenous communities to explicitly anarchocommunist zones in Korea and Spain in the 20s and 30s.
Anarchism is not the opposite of communism. It's the opposite of Stalinist communism, for sure. But anarchism is about the removal of unnecessary and unjust hierarchies. That's not in opposition with "and we should take care of everyone without a profit motive".
One could argue (and in fact, many scholars have) that the open source development model of Linux or other large systems are anarchocommunist in nature.
> I don't understand the siren call of Communism on early XX - midcentury intellectuals
I think it boils down to “enemy of my enemy”. Their main enemy was the establishment, which means capitalism, corporatism and so on. Communism was its declared enemy number one, so to be edgy and radical they picked that.
If the West was trampling over some poor country, whatever that country’s political or cultural preferences, they automatically become appealing to anti-establishment intellectuals in the West as a way to show sympathy.
Perhaps you are making the fallacy of comparing early 20th century communist regimes with today's capitalist society. If you compared them with early 20th century capitalism or colonialism they start to look much more benign.
They really don't, though. You can even look at quality of life in Russia itself - conveniently one of the more oppressive capitalist societies at the time - before and after the Bolshevik revolution.
(There's this myth that's popular with some lefties that Soviets weren't really that oppressive until Stalin. It's not true - mass executions were already in full swing in 1918.)
This is simply untrue.
Mass executions of (certain subsets of) the middle and upper classes, alongside electrification and land reform for the rural poor and trade unions and healthcare for the urban poor, meant an extremely significant improvement in the average quality of life for the Russian population.
Have you ever heard the words "prodrazvyorstka" or "kombed"? Bolsheviks literally robbed the peasants - who, to remind, was the actual majority of the population by a factor of 4x of so - blind at gunpoint to feed their forced industrialization in the cities, triggering more than one famine in the process (Holodomor being the most famous).
If you look at early Soviet history, it's littered with peasant uprisings for this exact reason. In my hometown in Russia, such an uprising was big enough that Soviets decided to use chemical weapons against the rebels; ironically, I used to live on a street that was named after the guy who signed that order.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tambov_Rebellion
...or comparing communist regimes with the (capitalist-supported) German Nazi regime.
... or the brutal capitalist South-American dictatorships sponsored by the US so that South America could be saved from "brutal communist dictatorships" (or agrarian reform, or anything that could harm the profits of American companies).
I don't think there was much United Fruit action in SouthAm. They did worry about losing influence to the Soviets though -the old Domino theory.
The Vietnamese, who were no angels, when it came to in-country human rights, were so appalled by what the Red Khmer were doing, they decided enough was enough and invaded their ideological kin-spirit to rid it of that vile and disgusting regime.
It's more complex. The Communist Vietnamese originally backed the Khmer Rouge. Then they had a split and the Khmer Rouge attacked Vietnam border towns and committed some pretty horribly atrocities.
The Vietnam brought down the Khmer Rouge, but it all started as an attempt to protect their own population.
As a general rule, "the people I don't like are just sadists" is usually neither true nor a productive attitude.
As a general rule the people I don't like are highly specialized computer technology professionals who have the hubris to think their level of in-field expertise carries over into issues regarding how to architect society.
What are your thoughts on the commodity -> money -> commodity mode of exchange compared to the money -> commodity > money mode of exchange?
Alternative question, when the English moved to a system of tenant farmers while the French did not, was it necessarily the case that capitalism would need to arise in England and spread across the world?
There's plenty of very interesting economic and social topics that are covered by the likes of Marx, Gramsci, and Melksins Wood. I'd suggest not engaging with the discussion and calling it "perverse" is seeking a position of willful anti intellectualism. You might not agree with all the points, sure, but they are raised in good faith and backed by many many intellectual discussions over decades and decades.
> Chomsky passionately defending the Khmer Rouge
The US began arming the Khmer Rouge in 1979 into the 1980s because the US wanted the Khmer Rouge to take over Cambodia again (well they didn't take over in 1975, the prince who the CIA ousted took over again technically).
You realise that's even worse for Chomsky right? He is an apologist for a genocidal communist regime that also happens to be propped up by the imperialist pig dogs. That's so much worse
I want those chairs [1]. If I can get two of them into my living room :)
[1] https://sdg-migration-id.s3.amazonaws.com/Interior-Design-Os...
Prepare to pay around $20k per (https://www.pamono.es/mod-sillon-alta-de-oscar-niemeyer-para...)
The sad thing about communism is how few can afford it.
We still live in a capitalist society.
On the quote of Georges Pompidou: "[the building] was the only good thing those Commies have ever done".
That translation is a much less neutral than what he actually said. He said "c'est la seule bonne chose que les communistes aient faite", which is quite neutrally: "this is the only good thing that the Communists have done". No "Commies" (I'm not even sure that there's an equivalent in French) or "those Commies".
> I'm not even sure that there's an equivalent in French
Les cocos ;) !
> "this is the only good thing that the Communists have done"
Is still a damnation of that death cult though. No neutrality about it.
I can't tell if I'm looking at renderings from a video game.
To elaborate, it looks like an ugly rendering from a PS2 era videogame.
The discontinuous break in the ceiling here [1] is searing to look at. It looks like a graphics glitch.
[1] - https://sdg-migration-id.s3.amazonaws.com/Interior-Design-Os...
Have you been playing a lot of Control?
Very Star Trek, I don’t know much about architecture but I do find curves and circles much more pleasant, if less efficient, than 90 degree angles everywhere.
It's where he keeps Nie Wieners.
Jean-Louis Gassée got his start as a bartender for PCF cadre at a casino in Deauville.
Why is it that seemingly every space designed by an avowed communist looks completely uncomfortable to spend literally any amount of time in it?
I get that about Brasilia, but I don't see the discomfort in this one. Those chairs look pretty comfortable to me, and I like the colors.
Edit: Perhaps the more obvious answer is that it's an office/professional building, and you're not supposed to fall asleep in the chairs (although I think I could swing it).
I don’t know, the lounge area in the basement looks horribly uncomfortable. The four chairs around the coffee table have too wide a seat for the back and appear to be uncomfortably low.
Project Cybersyn looked pretty ergonomic and Star Trek TOS chic
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/project-cybersyn/
Just my opinion, but I see more form over function there. Molded plastic chairs? No thanks, used to work in an office that went that route for conference room chairs…was beyond awful, but good if you never wanted people to use your conference room.
Our communist party headquarters
I self identify as a communist, and I would say my views are fairly typical for communist folk.
I don't think your comment is an accurate assessment. I know it's meant to be a joke, but ending a post with "your typical XYZ" is pretty condescending. What if someone posted about, "your typical tech bro, your typical Christian, your typical Republican, etc"?
I'm disappointed to see such strong disinterest in actual substantive discussion here on HN of all places.
"inner party" is a term from the world of Orwell's "1984", but something similar existed in the Nomenklatura of the Soviet Union - an upper class of people in leadership positions who had extensive privileges not available to the average person or even the average party member.
It all looks as if, regardless of the ideology of the people involved, once it actually gets power, as-built communism in a one-party state ends up structured an awful lot like feudalism...
Yeah, there's a reason I'm against one party states and vanguard party communism. (Aka Stalinists or "tankies").
I firmly believe that any communist state needs to be a democratic enterprise, organized locally in the vein of council communism or Anarcho communism.
Do you dress in the regalia and carry the symbols of one party states and vanguard party communism?
Nope. I sometimes use rose motifs. I've got some hopeful images of friendly clasped hands surrounded by flowers that say things like "we win through ecosocialism".
No big yellow stars, no big red flags. None of those military/guerilla style hats.
I'm not opposed to hammer and sickle stuff, but I don't own any.
I think you need to distinguish between "communist folk" and the people who inevitably end up being in charge in communist governments.
Show me a communist country where the leaders don't profess to be "for the people" but live lives of luxury while "the people" live lives of struggle and servitude.
For starters, you need to distinguish between authoritarian and libertarian forms of any ideology that permits that distinction. Bolsheviks weren't just communists - they were authoritarian communists, and they exterminated basically every other competing variety in the process of coming to power. Naturally, they backed political factions with similar views in other countries where possible, and otherwise pressured the groups that they did back to adopt the ideology.
Is that a reasonable bar? How does Trump live? Biden? Truss? Trudeau? The UK is starting people for signs that say "not my king", the US incarcerates whole integer percentages of their population, and Canada continues to do terrible things to their indigenous population.
Put more succinctly, I do believe that the US leadership lives like royals while the average worker is scraping by.
I'm happy to chat, but the bar should be set equally.
Except none of those people, to my understanding, are communists and none of the countries they lead are communist countries.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a central tenet of communism the equality of outcome for all citizens? So how does having an elite Inner Party (which there always is) that has special privilege (which they always do) translate into equality of outcomes? Last time I checked, no capitalist/free market country promised such a thing. So Trump having billions of dollars doesn't go against the very principle of the U.S. economic or social structure. To the contrary, it aligns precisely with our economic structure.
Not quite, equality of outcome isn't necessarily the target. The most common axiom is "from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs".
Different socialist and communist communities interpret this differently. The fundamental baseline is no one should starve, no one should be homeless, no one should lack basic medical care -- essentially there should be a baseline safety net for everyone.
Some communities focus on workers and profit distribution - the company's profit should be directed by the workers, reinvested or paid out at their discretion (rather than collecting in the pocket of "owners"). Some focus on equality of outcome. Some are built of gift economies similar to the economies of some indigenous tribes.
What most people think of as communist is the Stalinist model of the Soviet Union - an authoritarian, single party, fairly corrupt institution. The Soviets pushed their brand of communism onto other countries, which is why you see so many built on that model. (The Soviets actually attacked other communist states that were more libertarian and democratic.)
I would say yes, authoritarian communism is prone to the outcomes you describe. There's a reason I disparage Stalinists by calling them "Tankies" and do my best not to associate with them.
> "Different socialist and communist communities interpret this differently. The fundamental baseline is no one should starve, no one should be homeless, no one should lack basic medical care -- essentially there should be a baseline safety net for everyone."
Ok, well show me the communist country that lives up to even those ideals and doesn't have an elite ruling class that has privilege and benefits above the working class and poor.
> "I would say yes, authoritarian communism is prone to the outcomes you describe."
Well, yeah. That's pretty much the only type of communism that exists. You can't choose to not live by communism in a communist country. It's by its very nature authoritarian. Because if they were, say, to allow real deviation from that economic and societal system (not the "managed" deviation you see in places like China), their system would quickly fall apart. If today I decided to go and live on a commune in Washington that functions locally under the principles of communism or socialism, I would be able to do so. Nobody could say boo. You can't decide to go and live by the principles of free markets/capitalism (again, real capitalism) in China or any other communist country.
I'd say to take a look at Israeli Kibbutzim, but you'll tell me they aren't technically communist.
I'd tell you to look at indigenous pre industrial economies, but you'd probably say they aren't still around (and again, not self identified as communist).
I'd tell you to look at Mondragon, but that's a large democratic worker co-op making billions of dollars, not a communist country. That's fair.
So let's talk about Portugal post carnation revolution. Portuguese politics is dominated by the socialist party, the social Democratic party, the communist party, and the green party. The State owns many major businesses and many more companies through trust in the public interest. You might say they aren't a communist country, I might say they aren't a Stalinist communist country. But they self identify as socialist country.
I'd encourage you to read up on Ujamaa and the Arusha Declaration, prime minister Julius Nyerere's plan to lift Tanzania out of poverty in the 70s. It unfortunately failed due to world events. But seriously, consider reading up on it. It wasn't perfect, maybe it would have gone autocratic. More broadly I could spend days writing comments about African Socialism.
You can look at the Spanish revolution and the communists who fought against the Stalinists and the Soviet Union. Eventually they were militarily crushed, but they were worker led, libertarian socialist economies with millions of people, eventually stomped out by Stalinists.
I don't think I met the bar of your question, but I hope that I dispelled the idea that there is only one kind of communism.
I also hope I provided at least some interesting things to go dive into on Wikipedia. At the very least I hope I'm providing some novel intellectual stimulation.
There is a hugely rich variety of models, and not all of them require a unitary authority or harsh anti democratic laws. There's a very interesting historical and modern discussion around many, many other models, and not engaging with it (or saying that all these models are the same as the Soviet model) is ignoring a lot of well thought out theory and practice.
I understand what you're saying. There are different ways to implement any social or economic system. Capitalism doesn't always look the same, neither does communism.
But there has to be a core definition, and as long as that core definition is met, then the method of implementation doesn't much matter. But none of the examples you posted are examples of real communism.
For example, you talk about the Portuguese government owning many major businesses. Well, one of the core tenets of communism is the abolishment of private property in favor of communal property. Private property and business exists in Portugal, so it's not an actual communist country.
> I self identify as a communist,
I view self identified communists as I would self-identified Nazis.
Both are horrendous philosophies that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people.
I'm sorry you feel this way. It might be worth learning about the different types of communist beliefs. I am, for instance, against the idea of state socialism and one party authoritarianism.
I would describe myself as a "council communist", which is to say that workers should elect representatives who meet in councils. It's fundamentally a representative democracy but driven by labor power rather than capital power.
> What if someone posted about, "your typical tech bro, your typical Christian, your typical Republican, etc"?
I don't think any of those groups have proclaimed year zero and made all the schoolteachers into walls of human skulls, but feel free to correct me.
I don't mean to derail discussion of the article, but that quote is just a flatly true statement, no?
It's literally the first line in the English wikipedia article
>"The military dictatorship in Brazil (Portuguese: ditadura militar) was established on 1 April 1964, after a coup d'état by the Brazilian Armed Forces, with support from the United States government"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_dictatorship_in_Brazi...
Yes, seems like the sort of place that dishes our factual statements.
What do you mean?
You can't criticize America.
the villains lair