Communicating CommunismFollow

The dems do. The GOP of course doesn't

Not every, but more than enough to be the rule rather than the exception.

Glen Beck. That's like defending Boobhah for it's incisive social commentary. It's like pretending a Gallagher show is your favorite cooking show.

You know what? When I wrote that I thought in my head "Gee. I should probably open a page to the OP to make sure I write down only exactly what she said". Then I thought: "Nah. It's not that big a deal in the context of the point I'm making, surely only a nitpicking semantic idiot would think it matters...".

You sir, are that idiot.

Fine: Apparently, the most important influence on her "political life". Or maybe in forming her political ideas? What wording would you prefer? What does it mean when someone lists someone as her favorite political philosophers? What does it mean when she makes a point of telling a group of students this? The significance doesn't change no matter which words I use to describe it. She's placing the political ideas of Mao into the same category as those of Mother Theresa and presenting that association to a group of students.




You're picking at words in order to miss the point. The bolded section doesn't change the point at hand one bit. It's "cropped" because it wasn't relevant. That was also only one tiny section of the whole speech, in which she apparently spent most of the time gushing about how brave and wonderful Mao was to keep on fighting even when the chips were down. Now, maybe she was just trying to present an example of perseverance, but then you'd think she could have come up with someone less questionable in motive and result than Mao. And the issue of perseverance doesn't really equate to being one of the two favorite political philosophers, does it? I mean, lots of people persevere. Clearly, there was more to it than that, right?


The core point is that she apparently admires the political virtues of communism as manifested by Mao during the Communist Revolution in China. That's all that really matters here, isn't it? Everything else is just window dressing to the main event. And all the crying about this and that word used isn't going to change the outcome. Dunn is almost certainly done.

Compared to the capitalism of 1847 when Marx and Engels were writing, modern capitalism is a hybrid system. You owe Marx more than you think.



The utopian end of communism is the death of the notion of poverty, not "everyone is poor."

And returning to the original comment - you did try very hard to twist it in another direction, though - no, communism is not evil. Sure, it's failed spectacularly almost every time it was put into practice. But that just makes it nonviable, not evil.

Not really. He and Engels worked out their theories based on an infant stage of the industrial age. They failed to realize that industrialism changed the entire equation, just as agrarianism did a few thousand years earlier. Industrialism coupled with capitalism removes the zero sum component of wealth within a system. New wealth is created because new capital is created which is no longer tied strictly to land use.

The oft heard assumption that the rich get rich by taking from the poor is an example of this failure of theirs to grasp the changing reality. Prior to the industrial age, that statement was largely correct. A given geographical region produced a set amount of goods. In that state, if the rich have more today than they did 10 years ago, it means that the poor have less. That is simply not always true with industrialism. Productive output can increase regardless of direct land use, thus wealth can be generated without impoverishing others.

Marx and Engels looked around at a world in which the wealth of the rich was expanding dramatically, saw that the wealth of the poor was not and made an assessment of the situation based on what they knew of economics. But what they knew was incorrect because the rules had changed. They could be forgiven making that mistake. What's staggering to me is the number of people who live in a world surrounded by proof that increasing wealth by a few not only does not equate to reduced condition by the many, but in fact improves their lives dramatically.

I've given examples of this in the past, but all you need to do is look around you. You live a dramatically better life than someone making the exact same adjusted salary did just 50 years ago, or a century ago. Heck, you're better off than someone making the same income just a decade ago. Capitalism and industrialism, when combined, lead to rapid improvements in consumer products, which in turn lead to improvement to overall quality of life. Even if you don't make more money, even as your "share" of the economic pie gets relatively smaller, your quality of life still improves. That's because in order to make those profits, the capitalist has to make the goods he produces affordable to the maximum number of people. There has to be a reason for someone to buy a newer version of a washing machine, refrigerator, television, stereo, or video player. They'll only do that if the new product is a better total value than the old one.


Marx and Engels were horribly mistaken. Again though, what's the excuse of those living today? You know that capitalism results in newer and better products at a lower price. You see it all around you. That isn't the result of unions or government interference, but largely despite them. We don't owe Marx. We should be reviling him. What obstacles still slow down economic growth and technological development are because too many people actually buy into his outdated and incorrect theories.



First off, the entire concept of Utopia is a satire. You're not supposed to take it seriously, much less strive to obtain it.

Secondly, that really depends on how you define "poverty" doesn't it? I define poverty as the state of not being able to provide for yourself and your family purely as a result of your own labors. Communism does not seek to end poverty, but to provide basics for everyone who is poor. It actually relies on as many people living in poverty as possible to work. Only when a large enough percentage of the population cannot provide from themselves on their own can the government convince them to allow it to take over providing for them. This does not remove their state of poverty. It just makes it more comfortable.




I didn't say *it* was "evil". I said that it always results in horrific consequences for those unfortunate enough to end out living under it (or something similar to that for the syntax *****; I'm not going to go back and quote myself directly).

The real question is: Why pursue an ideology which has failed every single time it's been implemented fully? Why even try to implement it "a little bit"? What's the gain here? A half measure just means we lose half our freedoms and are only half as dependent on the government as we would if we implemented it fully.

That's really the core problem here, isn't it? The whole selling point of communism (or socialism for that matter) is that if only you do it all the way, you can magically transform the world into a place where peace and harmony reign, and no one goes hungry, and duckies and unicorns will live together and whatnot. The promise is always in the future, with the problems of today being ignored because of that future goal. Failures are always explained away as not doing enough, or spending enough, or providing enough. But that's the problem. There will never be "enough" to reach that ultimate goal. And you'll end up in an authoritarian state long before you even get close.


Half measures are never sufficient to provide the results we're promised, but full measures are a disaster. Why bother? I honestly don't understand why people want this or think it's a good idea. It makes no sense to me...

Edited, Oct 21st 2009 3:00am by gbaji

Who gets to decide how to allocate resources, where to expand the economy, and how much to pay people? What criteria will be used to do this, and how will that criteria compare to just using the free market? I can't think of a better way to determine the value of something, then by how much people are willing to pay for it. Can you?



I disagree. A democratic process will result in things being done which people want to have done, but not what they need to have done. Everyone would vote themselves a raise if they could, right? There are always more consumers of a good than producers, so things people "need" would be priced too low. Things they "want" would be priced too high. No one would sell food unless the government stepped in and made them (removing choice). And most people would no longer be able to afford the high cost of non-necessary goods.


Despite all the arguments about poor vs rich used by those advocating such systems, those systems ultimately make the real differences between the haves and have nots even more dramatic. The only way to reverse that trend is to gain total control of the economy, which leads us into the "horrific outcome" condition of full communism. It's a mistake.




It doesn't work though. It's a wonderful tool to further control the population though. When voting becomes about fighting to ensure your group gets as big a slice of the economic pie as possible, the people aren't really free anymore. They're just slaves fighting eachother over the scraps from the government table.



That's because Sweden is a country with a small population and largish oil reserves. The government owned oil industry skews those figures. The government also owns something like 80% of all the wealth in the country. While the per-capita GDP is high, the amount controlled by the individuals instead of the government is very very small. That's what I mean by limited choices.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "societal equity", and "smooth out market curvature values". You'll need to explain those a bit more, and explain why those are good things. It's easy to spout of a nice bit of words that sound really good. It's another thing to clarify what those words mean and how they represent a positive outcome.



Progressive movements always push people into poverty. Again. It depends on the definition of poverty. My definition includes a degree of self-determination. I don't view someone living comfortably because the government provides them with food and shelter as being "not-poor". There's another segment of the population who receive food and shelter from the government. We call them prisoners. Just because there aren't bars around you does not mean you are any less a prisoner of the state if you are reliant on it for your day to day survival.

So how do you explain the fact that the richest nations in the world are those with the most progressive means of taxation? There is more poverty in the US than in Scandinavia. And yet, Scandinavia has much more progressive taxation, and much more welfare programs. How do you explain the fact that the overwhleming majority of poor countries are capitalist/industrialist countries with a very small and weak state, and virtually no welfare programmes?

I'd be happy to believe your theories, but they simply do not reflect reality. The most prosperous countries in the world today are those which took the good bits of capitalism and mixed them with progressive taxation and state intervention. The rise of China is just another example of this.

Whereas we've all seen the consequances of applying the "Washington consensus". Argentina suffered amazingly because of it. Russia after the fall of Communism saw it's standards of living decrease. The so-called "shock therapy" they went through made people wish they had remained communist. All you need to do is look at the reality around you...



Of course not. Otherwise, it would've done it. How else do you explain that there isn't a single exemple, in the history of the world, of a country reaching our standards of living purely through capitalism, without progressive taxation, welfare, and state intervention?



The internet came about through government research. DVDs are not a huge improvement compared to VHS. It doesn't make your life "better". It might make it marginally more comfortable because you can, erm, skip a chapter instead of fast forwarding, but really, how is your life improved through DVDs? How does HD actually make thigns better?



I don't agree that life is either loafs of bread or DVDs. You wanna know how you improve people's lives? By enabling them to have peace. Better health. Better education. Safety and security. Equal rights and justice. Safety nets. Better arts. And a more comfortable life.

Probably in that order.



Considering that the biggest polluter in the world is the US...



I wouldn't expect any less from you

This is called a "gbajifact." It has the special quality of bearing no resemblance to truth whatsoever.



The general consensus is that the effects of the Industrial Revolution started to be felt in the 1830s. Marx was relatively young when he wrote the Manifesto in 1848 and was still writing actively by the time of his death in 1883. Engels kept going right up to 1895. To argue that they were pre-industrial thinkers is absurd: they lived through most of the Industrial Revolution.

Furthermore, industrialisation does not negate communism. Industrialisation is necessary for the creation of the urban working class that we can see fueling the revolutions in Russia in 1905 and 1917. Following Witte's rapid industrialisation of Russia in the 1890s, the country's iron and railway industry along with its working class population increased dramatically without any corresponding increase in their standard of living. As working conditions got worse and the government refused to initiate labour reforms or legalise unions, the workers became increasingly politically active and radical.

The reason communist revolution never spread to more developed countries such as England and Germany was because these countries adopted semi-socialist policies and implemented labour laws to prevent the formation of a dissatisfied urban population, mainly by improving their working and living standards so they had less to protest about. Things didn't just get better on their own. European governments at the end of the 19th century pragmatically adopted socialist elements and merged them with the existing capitalist system to defuse the social democratic movement by ripping its platform out from under it. Bismarck introduced worker's health insurance in 1883 while simultaneously passing anti-socialist laws. This progressed directly to the development of such awesome ideas as the eight-hour working day and the minimum wage. I really mean it: without the influence of Marx, Engels and the socialist movement, capitalism would be monumentally ******** than it is today. It only survived the 20th century by reforming itself into a hybrid system.

Edited, Oct 21st 2009 12:26pm by zepoodle

It doesn't appear they have reserves or produce crude oil, but the Swedes do make Petroleum.

Edited, Oct 21st 2009 8:31am by Omegavegeta

Pure lunacy. If the most effective means I have in order to make money is (legal) market manipulation which creates no wealth, than this is utterly false. It's not even producing some kind of social good, but rather a net drain.

Another "tragedy of the commons" type condition, which positively reinforces this behavior. If we have 20 companies, 10 practicing fair hours/wages while the other 10 using abusive techniques, those using abusive techniques will likely outperform the others, and the others will die off. If the end result is less total sales because large swathes of the community are in shambles, that is of no concern to those practicing detrimental behavior, at least until the non-abusive systems fail. At which point none of the companies can improve the status of the consumers because of the others would sink them, unless non-market forces push them collectively to do otherwise.

Show me a list of progressive totalitarian regimes. Better yet, show me a list of progressive authoritarian regimes. Then let me know if the proportion of those is greater than non-progressive totalitarian/authoritarian states.

Henry Ford. Back in the dark ages, you know when unions didn't exist, his company thrived paying fair wages for the day. Why didn't he sink? Not that unions are all bad, they have their place. They just shouldn't have nearly as much power as they do.