Defending Marxism

[PeacefulRevolution]

As a Marxist, I often engage in debates with supporters of the Capitalist system, and there are four "flaws" within Marxism that I cannot refute. I was wondering if someone slightly more educated in the theories of Communism could help me with these:

(1) Human's are selfish by nature.
(2) There is no incentive for the workers to produce.
(3) Every Communist society in history has had a poor human rights record.
(4) Central economic planning leads to a failed economy.

I have read the Communist Manifesto, a few articles by Lenin, and parts of The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State. If someone who has confronted the above problems and can refute them will help me, it would be greatly appreciated.

[DaComm]

As a Marxist, I often engage in debates with supporters of the Capitalist system, and there are four "flaws" within Marxism that I cannot refute. I was wondering if someone slightly more educated in the theories of Communism could help me with these:

(1) Human's are selfish by nature.
(2) There is no incentive for the workers to produce.
(3) Every Communist society in history has had a poor human rights record.
(4) Central economic planning leads to a failed economy.

I have read the Communist Manifesto, a few articles by Lenin, and parts of The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State. If someone who has confronted the above problems and can refute them will help me, it would be greatly appreciated.


To
respond to the first, this idea is espoused because we live in a society where you can only exploit or be exploited, where in order for survival you deprive others of a right to a livelihood, where your only option is to be antagonistic. When in society where there is classes, and hence no class struggles, human "selfishness" and antagonistic outlooks will evaporate.

To respond to the second, what is the incentive to produce in a Capitalist society? To obtain money. What do you do with money? Buy subsistence’s and luxuries. In a Communist society, you have a guarantee of survival because you receive necessities according to your needs. "What about luxuries, though?" they may repute. Marx stated that in a Communist society the people would have access to wants that exceed what Capitalists at the time had. I conjecture that this system would work with all people being able to get a determined number of luxuries a month that can manifest themselves as anything, and once this quantity is reached, it will restart at the beginning of the next month.

To respond to number three, first kick this person in the balls, secondly re-assure them of the definition of a Communism, and compare it to the system of N. Korea, Vietnam, China, (post-Lenin) Soviet Union, etc. Communism has never been implemented on a noteworthy scale, and thus to say that every single "Communist Society" has failed is an argument, in name only. There is no logic behind saying that Communism cannot work, because all hitherto communist countries failed. COMMUNISM has never been implemented correctly.

The fourth argument is illogical. Tell them to provide support, then it should not be hard to counter everything they say from there.

Hoped this helped!

[Broletariat]

1. I'm quoting from the Anarchist FAQ


Anarchists, far from ignoring "human nature," have the only political theory that gives this concept deep thought and reflection. Too often, "human nature" is flung up as the last line of defence in an argument against anarchism, because it is thought to be beyond reply. This is not the case, however. First of all, human nature is a complex thing. If, by human nature, it is meant "what humans do," it is obvious that human nature is contradictory -- love and hate, compassion and heartlessness, peace and violence, and so on, have all been expressed by people and so are all products of "human nature." Of course, what is considered "human nature" can change with changing social circumstances. For example, slavery was considered part of "human nature" and "normal" for thousands of years. Homosexuality was considered perfectly normal by the ancient Greeks yet thousands of years later the Christian church denounced it as unnatural. War only become part of "human nature" once states developed. Individuals are certainly capable of evil. But individuals are capable of all sorts of things. Human nature has lots of ways of realising itself, humans have lots of capacities and options. Which ones reveal themselves depends to a large extent on the institutional structures. If we had institutions which permitted pathological killers free rein, they'd be running the place. The only way to survive would be to let those elements of your nature manifest themselves. If we have institutions which make greed the sole property of human beings and encourage pure greed at the expense of other human emotions and commitments, we're going to have a society based on greed, with all that follows. A different society might be organised in such a way that human feelings and emotions of other sorts, say, solidarity, support, sympathy become dominant. Then you'll have different aspects of human nature and personality revealing themselves. Indeed, one of the greatest myths about anarchism is the idea that we think human nature is inherently good (rather, we think it is inherently sociable). How it develops and expresses itself is dependent on the kind of society we live in and create. A hierarchical society will shape people in certain (negative) ways and produce a "human nature" radically different from a libertarian one. So when we hear men and women saying that Anarchists imagine men and women much better than they really are, we merely wonder how intelligent people can repeat that nonsense. Do we not say continually that the only means of rendering men and women less rapacious and egotistic, less ambitious and less slavish at the same time, is to eliminate those conditions which favour the growth of egotism and rapacity, of slavishness and ambition? Every fool, from king to policemen, from the flatheaded parson to the visionless dabbler in science, presumes to speak authoritatively of human nature. The greater the mental charlatan, the more definite his insistence on the wickedness and weakness of human nature. Yet how can any one speak of it to-day, with every soul in prison, with every heart fettered, wounded, and maimed? We do not wish to enter the debate about what human characteristics are and are not "innate." All we will say is that human beings have an innate ability to think and learn, that much is obvious, we feel, and that humans are sociable creatures, needing the company of others to feel complete and to prosper. Moreover, they have the ability to recognise and oppose injustice and oppression. These three features, we think, suggest the viability of an anarchist society. The innate ability to think for oneself automatically makes all forms of hierarchy illegitimate, and our need for social relationships implies that we can organise without the state. The deep unhappiness and alienation afflicting modern society reveals that the centralisation and authoritarianism of capitalism and the state are denying some innate needs within us. In fact, as mentioned earlier, for the great majority of its existence the human race has lived in anarchic communities, with little or no hierarchy.

2. I'm quoting Kropotkin


The objection is known. "If the existence of each is guaranteed, and if the necessity of earning wages does not compel men to work, nobody will work. Every man will lay the burden of his work on another if he is not forced to do it himself." Let us first remark the incredible levity with which this objection is raised, without taking into consideration that the question is in reality merely to know, on the one hand, whether you effectively obtain by wage-work the results you aim at; and, on the other hand, whether voluntary work is not already more productive to-day than work stimulated by wages....

What is most striking in this levity is that even in capitalist Political Economy you already find a few writers compelled by facts to doubt the axiom put forth by the founders of their science, that the threat of hunger is man's best stimulant for productive work. ....

They fear that without compulsion the masses will not work.

But during our own lifetime have we not heard the same fears expressed twice? By the anti-abolitionists in America before Negro emancipation, and by the Russian nobility before the liberation of the serfs? "Without the whip the Negro will not work," said the anti-abolitionist. "Free from their master's supervision the serfs will leave the fields uncultivated," said the Russian serf-owners. It was the refrain of the French noblemen in 1789, the refrain of the Middle Ages, a refrain as old as the world, and we shall hear it every time there is a question of sweeping away an injustice. And each time actual facts give it the lie. The liberated peasant of 1792 ploughed with a wild energy unknown to his ancestors, the emancipated Negro works more than his fathers, and the Russian peasant, after having honoured the honeymoon of his emancipation by celebrating Fridays as well as Sundays, has taken up work with as much eagerness as his liberation was the more complete. There, where the soil is his, he works desperately; that is the exact word for it. The anti-abolitionist refrain can be of value to slave-owners; as to the slaves themselves, they know what it is worth, as they know its motive.

Moreover, Who but economists taught us that if a wage-earner's work is but indifferent, an intense and productive work is only obtained from a man who sees his wealth increase in proportion to his efforts? All hymns sung in honour of private property can be reduced to this axiom.

For it is remarkable that when economists, wishing to celebrate the blessings of property, show us how an unproductive, marshy, or stony soil is clothed with rich harvests when cultivated by the peasant proprietor, they in nowise prove their thesis in favour of private property. By admitting: that the only guarantee not to be robbed of the fruits of your labour is to possess the instruments of labour--which is true--the economists only prove that man really produces most when he works in freedom, when he has a certain choice in his occupations, when he has no overseer to impede him, and lastly, when he sees his work bringing in a profit to him and to others who work like him, but bringing in nothing to idlers. This is all we can deduct from their argumentation, and we maintain the same ourselves.3. There has never been an established Communist society.

4. The USSR had a planned economy and never experienced pains from the Great Depression. I believe Egypt had a planned economy for 3000 years. If you fail to plan you plan to fail and all that.

[it_ain't_me]

(1) Human's are selfish by nature.

ok, well, anyone who says this will be happy to learn that scientific socialism is based on self-interest, however self-interest of a specific kind--collective self-interest


(2) There is no incentive for the workers to produce.

socialism is in no way, shape or form incompatible with individual incentives. full-blown communism, perhaps; but that's another argument about something in the distant future, in my opinion


(4) Central economic planning leads to a failed economy.

a person could argue this point either from history or from ideology. if the person starts to argue by making references to milton friedman's ''free to choose'' or some hayek book, i suggest walking away and not wasting your time. any system, free market, planned, or mixed, can be made to look rational on paper. reality is a bit more complicated.

if, on the other hand, they are interested in statistics and actual economic history, then you are in a good position because planned economies have at times done quite well (outperforming market economies in terms of growth by a good margin, bypassing periods of deep economic crisis which affected every capitalist country, achieving near full employment, etc.):


After 1989, the Soviet Union and the other European countries with ''planned'' economies (that is, the Soviet-Type Economies) experienced a period of troubles of various kinds, and largely abandoned both the planned economy and the aims that define socialism and communism. It seems to be widely believed that this proves that a planned economy cannot succeed. However, a careful look at the evidence suggests that this view is oversimple.

Figure 7 below shows the economic performance of four groups of countries for 1960-1989, the generation just before the collapse of the Soviet-type countries. Each curve shows gross domestic product per person (GDP per capita), adjusted for inflation and international differences in purchasing power, as a proportion of the country's gross domestic product per capita in 1960. Thus, they all begin at one in 1960 and rise as the country's GDP per capita increases relative to the starting point. These data are taken from the Penn World Tables and represent the best estimates of production from the neoclassical economic point of view. The red line shows the average for four countries with Communist governments : the USSR, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia.[5] These are the only four for which the Penn World Tables have data for the full period. The blue line shows the average for four very successful industrialized capitalist countries: the U.S.A, West Germany, Japan and Britain. We see that, by the standard of economic growth, the Soviet-type countries did better than the capitalist ones. On the whole, the Soviet-type countries increased their GDP per person by 3.3 times, while the capitalist countries increased their performance by 2.74 times. If the cause of the collapse of the Soviet-type countries was their economic performance, we might suppose that the capitalist countries would have collapsed too; but they did not.

The green line shows the performance of the ''four tigers'' South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. Their performance is clearly a good deal better than the others -- they doubled the growth of the Soviet-type countries (actually growing 2.08 times as much in the period) and much more than doubled the performance of the four large capitalist countries (growing 2.61 times as much in the period). This group of countries, however, was very unusual. Two (Hong Kong and Singapore) were city-states. Had they included the surrounding agricultural regions, they would not have done as well. The other two were the beneficiaries of very large amounts of American economic and political assistance. This is not to detract from their performance. They were among the most successful countries in the world -- thus not representative of either capitalist or Soviet-type countries.http://faculty.lebow.drexel.edu/mccainr/top/prin/txt/comsysf/compsys7.gif

http://faculty.lebow.drexel.edu/mccainr/top/prin/txt/comsysf/cs20.html


(3) Every Communist society in history has had a poor human rights record.

this is sort of a separate issue from the economic ones. on this point i consider it sufficient to say that capitalism's track record is every bit as bad or worse. if the person wants to dismiss the ugliness and brutality of slavery and colonialism and capitalist primitive accumulation as ''things of the past'' and therefore irrelevant to a moral evaluation of present day liberal capitalism, then one can simply say the exact same thing about stalinist industrialization and the purges and the cheka and so on. furthermore, unless one is using inflated robert conquest-like numbers, the ''excess deaths'' of stalinist and maoist industrialization campaigns cannot possibly compare with capitalist industrialization and colonialism in terms of pure numbers.

[AK]

1. I'm quoting from the Anarchist FAQ
That specific section's actually going to be quite useful to me in future. A google search turned up nothing. Where exactly is it the in AFAQ?

[Jimmie Higgins]

These questions are probably the most common arguments people have against radicals, specifically communists and socialists. Many come straight from High School history and Social Studies teachers - at least that's where I heard many of them.

Many have been taken up in various earlier threads (because these arguments are so common) and so many you can find here:

Revleft.com Consolidated Learning FAQ (http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft-com-consolidated-t131001/index.html)

Incentive to work? (http://www.revleft.com/vb/incentive-worki-t75850/index.html)

The answers from radicals to the questions will vary depending on their political views and tradition. To breifly give you the answers as I see them:

1. Humans are selfish by nature: "Greed" in capitalism is the result of 2 things A) artificial scarcity which makes people not want to give up the little money or resources or goods they have if they are not sure if they will need it later. This argument is used to argue in FAVOR of (or at least to say there is no alternative to) the artificial scarcity created by capitalism. If people could have as much as they want, goes this logic, then they would horde - so it is better to manage things through the market to keep personal greed in check. Well, in the US, water is "socialized" and provided through our taps for free and yet you don't see people filling drums of water out the taps and storing them - or going out to the street corner and selling tap water on the black market.

B) "Greedy corporations" - although many liberals and people on the left rightly denounce corporate greed - this "greed" doesn't necessarily come out of the selfishness of corporations and business people themselves. The need to out-accumulate and destroy competitors is build into the nature of the capitalist system - if one corporation was not greedy and did not do everything it could to make more profits, then they would be driven out of business by other firms. So capitalist greed is not a personality flaw, it is a part of the system and so, getting rid of that system will also eliminate this type of greed.

2. There is no incentive for workers to produce in CAPITALISM. Workers are alienated from what they produce and are ultimately coerced to produce, that is their incentive: not to be fired, not to have wage decreases, not to end up in prison. Workers work for a wage and this is what causes "laziness" in capitalism - to a worker, since your wage is not connected to the value you produce for the bosses, your interest is in preserving your wages, not in increasing profits. If there was a worker's revolution and socialism in the sense of working class collective control over their own workplaces, then workers would have an incentive to produce and do quality work - there would also be an incentive not to waste labor (as happens a lot in capitalism) so work would not be done for profit, but for production and use. So workers would want to make their labor efficient - if they made electronics, they would want to make sure it lasts a long time and didn't break easily - they would want to make sure technology is adaptable to new advances so that it doesn't need to be replaced every 2 years.

3. This is where you will begin to get disagreements among radicals. I'd say that every so-called "socialist" or "communist" country never achieved socialism (worker's control over society and production) and certainty not communism (a stateless, classless society). Many people agree with that position, but I also think that the cold war "communist" countries were not even on the same path as socialism - these societies are what some radicals call "state-capitalist". The rulers in these societies were competing with capitalism and trying to build up national industry and economic production to match capitalism (but condensing it into a few short decades). So many of the horrors of exploitation and repression in capitalism (like the enclosing of common lands and slavery) were recreated in these countries as they tried to build up their economic power on the backs of their workers. because this was done rapidly in many cases, repressive governments were used to ensure there was little popular resistance to huge changes.

Socialism and a worker's revolution as I see it have to be the act of a large number of workers themselves (like the Russian Revolution as opposed to USSR tanks "liberating" countries in Eastern Europe and setting up socialism) who would organize together, take over their workplaces and set up new institutions for collective and democratic control of society. Repression as we know it would not be needed and would hurt such a society.

4. Market economy leads to a failed economy. If anyone says that economic failure is the reason that communism is impossible, laugh in their face and make them read some economic figures about the world-wide recession. Then point out that as much as capitalist newspapers and economists and politicians repeatedly declare that capitalism is "fixed" there have been regular busts and failures of the economy (aside from the post-war 1950s-1970s) because it is the nature of capitalism to do so. What's more, even a up-cycle or a boom-period for capitalism results in much misery for many workers. The capitalist economy has seen record profits over the last generation, but this has not translated into higher living standards for workers in the industrial countries. In the US, wages have stagnated during this time and workers have less social safety nets, less union power, less job stability.

[Barry Lyndon]

As a Marxist, I often engage in debates with supporters of the Capitalist system, and there are four "flaws" within Marxism that I cannot refute. I was wondering if someone slightly more educated in the theories of Communism could help me with these:

(1) Human's are selfish by nature.
(2) There is no incentive for the workers to produce.
(3) Every Communist society in history has had a poor human rights record.
(4) Central economic planning leads to a failed economy.

I have read the Communist Manifesto, a few articles by Lenin, and parts of The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State. If someone who has confronted the above problems and can refute them will help me, it would be greatly appreciated.

Good responses so far. Here's my two cents:

1) This is something that is asserted all the time, but there is no evidence presented for it. If humans are just selfish by nature, ask whoever is making this assertion how they explain the existence of humanitarian aid workers all over the world, people like Doctors without Borders, who expose themselves to great danger and discomfort on a daily basis for little or no material reward?
You can point out that slave owners in ancient Greece and 19th-century America considered slavery to be a 'natural' feature of human existence at their time. Or that kings and barons considered feudalism and monarchy to be a 'natural' as well. So what basis does this person have to assert that human society will always be governed by greed, exploitation, and inequality, just because it often has been in the past?

2) This has already been spoken to in this thread.

3) What are 'human rights'? We often consider human rights to be confined to the right to free speech, assembly, freedom of the press, to have elections, etc etc. But isn't the freedom not to starve also a human right? The right to have a roof over your head? The right to receive health care? To have an education? To be employed? For women to not be treated like chattel? To be free from the yoke of imperialism?
If you put 'human rights' in those terms, then the Communist regimes in Russia, Eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, and Cuba made tremendous strides in human rights. For all their faults, the Communist countries, which were never as rich as the capitalist ones, transformed desperately impoverished societies into places where everyone was protected by a social safety net, where human need was prioritized over profit.
Throw that assertion back in his face. If he's concerned about 'human rights', why does he support a system that puts tens of millions of people in sweatshops, that condemns millions of children to death from starvation and preventable diseases every year(about 20,000 deaths per day)? Why does he support a system that reduces human labor, and thus life itself, to nothing more then a commodity to be bought and sold?
Leon Trotsky once said 'In order to make the individual sacred we must destroy the system that crucifies him[note:or her]'.

4) Has already been spoken to on this thread.

[el_chavista]

(1) Human's are selfish by nature.
(2) There is no incentive for the workers to produce.
(3) Every Communist society in history has had a poor human rights record.
(4) Central economic planning leads to a failed economy.
(1) Humans are what society internalizes in their mind.
(2) How then real magnates manage to hire an entire army of actual workers for making profits?
(3) The institutions who record human rights are biased, paid by the capitalists themselves.
(4) Computing science has achieved a degree of development that permits a world central economic planning.

[Broletariat]

That specific section's actually going to be quite useful to me in future. A google search turned up nothing. Where exactly is it the in AFAQ?
http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/secA2.html#seca215

[redSHARP]

1) your friend is a pessimist, ever hear of volunteer fire depts? they are one huge group of selfish pricks! let me tell you!:rolleyes: (sarcasm). Humans are willing to help one another, they just need a common goal.

2) like there is one now? our motivation is to get good crap we can never afford, we basically work in order to eat and have shelter. How about you point out that if the workers ran the factory for their own ends, then they would enjoy their jobs (or something like that).

3)England, France, Germany, US...great human rights records as well

4) i tell you what, china is not an economic juggernaut right now

these questions are bull crap, and a little humor can work in your favor. also try to answer the question and push the question right back at them.





As a Marxist, I often engage in debates with supporters of the Capitalist system, and there are four "flaws" within Marxism that I cannot refute. I was wondering if someone slightly more educated in the theories of Communism could help me with these:

(1) Human's are selfish by nature.
(2) There is no incentive for the workers to produce.
(3) Every Communist society in history has had a poor human rights record.
(4) Central economic planning leads to a failed economy.

I have read the Communist Manifesto, a few articles by Lenin, and parts of The Origin of Family, Private Property, and the State. If someone who has confronted the above problems and can refute them will help me, it would be greatly appreciated.

[mikelepore]

(2) There is no incentive for the workers to produce.

This one is the easiest to dispose of in one minute. Under capitalism, the workers perform all of the work, but receive flat wages that are not linked to changes in productivity that may occur if they feel more motivated. The stockholders receive dividends that are directly linked to productivity, but they don't perform any of the work. Therefore it can't be the case that the system of paying dividends is of any help motivating the workers. That claim assumes a connection between two disconnected things.

[Die Rote Fahne]

(1) Human's are selfish by nature.
(2) There is no incentive for the workers to produce.
(3) Every Communist society in history has had a poor human rights record.
(4) Central economic planning leads to a failed economy.

1) Human's are not selfish by nature. I've said it before, the idea of greed is propagated by the capitalists. In reality you have an instinct for survival, and survival in a capitalist system leads to greediness.

2) Incentive: society progresses and is maintained.

3) There has never been a "communist society". What you are referring to are failed communist revolutions which led to state capitalism.

4) Cannot be answered in short, other than you're wrong. It's been covered.

[mikelepore]

(1) Human's are selfish by nature.

If that's true, it's an argument FOR establishing a cooperative and classless society, not an argument against it. We set up institutions to encourage the behaviors that we want to encourage, and discourage the behaviors that we want to discourage. For example, suppose that some people are naturally violent, because their brains work that way. Does that mean we should give them an environment to make it easier for them to be violent, say, by legalizing violence? No, we set up a system that goes opposite to their impulse, to inhibit it, by making a rule against violence. It's the same with an economic system. Suppose that some people are selfish. In that case, we need to establish a system with a lot of cooperative features built into it, to deprive the selfish people of opportunities to act according to their tendency. For example, don't establish a stock market for them to go to. Don't have a position called "the boss" for them to get into.

[Sir Comradical]

Threaten to kill people who draw cartoons of Karl Marx. That'll show 'em.

[graymouser]

(1) Human's are selfish by nature.
The Marxist response to this is twofold. One: no they aren't. Two: human nature is determined by the society that humans grow up in. That's why there is a transitional stage, to make the transition from those who have never known anything but the war of all against all under capitalism to a society where greed is an aberration.


(2) There is no incentive for the workers to produce.
This is why development of productive forces is important. Think about the factories that exist now, where goods that a hundred years ago required hundreds of workers, can now be produced by a mere handful. Socialism will increase this tendency, except instead of things being produced for the profit of a handful of rich layabouts at the top, they'll be made as social goods. So when a plant goes from needing five hundred workers to needing only fifty, instead of laying off 450 people we'll use it to decrease the aggregate number of hours worked for those who want to stick around, and find other things for the remainder to do.


(3) Every Communist society in history has had a poor human rights record.
Two parts to this response. One: I know you are but what am I? Every Capitalist society in history has had a poor human rights record. There are slavery, genocide and colonial violence on the conscience of most of them; the United States has the additional dishonor of being the only country ever to use an atomic weapon in war. Two: those states are Stalinist and don't represent socialism much less communism.


(4) Central economic planning leads to a failed economy.
The USSR had several problems other than central economic planning per se.

First, efficient planning without serious inputs is impossible - this is one of the things that Trotsky recognized during the 1930s. It was a problem of Stalinist misrule in that the Stalinists couldn't rely on input from the workers or the Soviets that had been politically expropriated to actually have a sound basis for planning, and as such their plans were at best bureaucratically misled and at worst disconnected from the realities. Sound economic planning is only possible based on the fullest democratic inputs from every level so that actual forecasts can be made.

Second, because of the corruption of the ruling bureaucratic caste and the hold they had on society, there was actually growth of an illegal "shadow economy" in the USSR, which was a combination of a black market and a system of corruption that would be familiar to anyone in a third world country today. This second economy was a corrosive factor in Soviet society, rooted in the bureaucratic corruption and its misrule, and created the class basis for a restoration of capitalism.

Third, a lot of the problems actually arose from the USSR's place in world production - because it was trying to "go it alone" with essentially low levels of input from the capitalist world, and because it was engaged in a long military standoff with the USA, it had to focus most of its resources on heavy industry. This meant that consumer goods in the USSR and Warsaw Pact countries were relatively sparse, a fact that was driven by the lack of real inputs for planning (point one) and spurred further growth in the shadow economy (point two), and the citizens thought they were poor relative to the people in western Europe and the USA, even though their basic needs were actually met. The economy wasn't actually failing to the point where it seemed to be, it's just that when the planning was disconnected from reality and combined with military spending to force a crisis, the pro-capitalist measures taken by Gorbachev ("perestroika") actually destabilized the whole system and caused it to crash.

Even if you removed Stalinism and had a collectivized economy that tried to remove itself from capitalism without a world revolution, you'd still have the problem of diverting production from need to military usage that would eventually undermine the economy. But objectively the reasons that the USSR couldn't hold out were much more strongly linked to the problems of Stalinism than to central planning as a concept. (And of course central planning is the only way to remove periodic crises from the economy, so I wouldn't yield the point that capitalism actually "works".)

[Thirsty Crow]

If that's true, it's an argument FOR establishing a cooperative and classless society, not an argument against it.
I don't think anyone should even consider the possibility of an empirically verifiable truth in relation to this statement. In fact, it is neither true nor false, as it essentially functions as a (heavily) compressed ideological statement.
The truth is that human nature is driven by an instinct for survival. Survival means that human beings work, e.g. hunting, raising livestock or planting and reaping crops. But the form of this collective action (it is collective and social since humans have ever since lived in communities), its organization and goals, are furhtest from the "natural" - it is a historical social phenomenon. In other words, people themselves - i.e. communities/societies - decide on these matters. That is not to say that in every society all of its members had a right to voice their opinion/idea/wish. But, it is nevertheless a matter of social organization, and it doesn't depend on wether, let's say, a king alongside the royalty takes the primary role of the "organizer", or the market/capitalist class. There is absolutely nothing natural in the prganization of production and distribution of wealth.

[RED VICTORY]

From the Youth for International Socialism Site:
Q. What About "Human Nature"?
A. The question of so-called "human nature" is one of the most commonly raised arguments against socialism - but it is also one of the easiest to debunk. Many people believe that the way people think has always been the same, and that we will always think the way we do now. But a few examples will show that nothing could be further from the truth. The fact of the matter is, like all things in nature, human consciousness and society are always in a state of change. Marx explained that "conditions determine consciousness". In other words, our environment determines to a large degree how we think. We know what rap music, Hollywood movies, and a Boeing 747 are because they exist in our world. For example, if we were born 5,000 years ago as peasants in China, our world-view would be very different! If we were born as royalty in China 5,000 years ago, we would also have a very different view of things than if we were peasants.
Human beings rose to the top of the food chain not by competing against each other and crushing one another in the struggle to "get ahead", but through cooperation. Only by cooperating were humans able to combine their resources to hunt, build shelters, and eventually domesticate plants, animals, develop pottery, build the pyramids, etc., etc. Just look at a human baby! Compared to a deer, which can stand up and run within minutes of birth, human young are totally helpless for years. Baby humans could not survive even a few days without the help of others! So you see, primitive humans needed to cooperate if they were to survive the elements, wild animals, find enough to eat, etc. For the vast majority of human existence, there were no classes, and we lived communally in small bands, dividing up the work and dividing up the wealth in the interests of everyone.
And although on the surface is appears that nowadays we are all "individuals", the truth is we are even more dependant on literally thousands and even millions of other humans around the world. Can any one person design a car, mine and process the metals and other materials needed, build the factory, and the put together a car themselves? To even pose the question shows how absurd the idea is. And what about the gasoline to fuel it? Or the roads to drive it on?What about the food we eat? The list goes on and on - and we have only scratched the surface.Think about it carefully, and you will see that under capitalism, almost everyone is indirectly linked to everyone else through the world market and the exchange of commodities.
We work together, live together, hang out together, go to the movies together, go to the park together, etc. Do we have police around 24 / 7 to make sure we don't all kill each other? Do we run around murdering each other "to get ahead"? If that were the case, then nothing would ever get done and we would all starve to death in a matter of days! So why do people have this strange idea that we are all "individuals"? Well, getting back to the first point we made, which is that conditions determine consciousness - the ruling class (the capitalists) do everything in their power to affect the way we think. Through our education, through the media, religion, etc., we are raised to have the values of the capitalist system.And what values are these? Precisely the "dog eat dog" attitude which states that the only way to get ahead is to stomp on your opponents. We are raised to look away and think nothing of the homeless, the starving, those killed in war, etc. - or at most to say a prayer for them and give a little "charity" to ease our conscience.
But if we look a little harder, we will see that these "values" benefit only a tiny handful of people - the ultra-rich capitalists! The rest of us, in our daily lives, gain nothing from this. What we want above all is peace, stability, a decent job, no worries about healthcare or education, time off for family and loved ones, etc. It is only the capitalist class which thrives off the individual competition between one company and another. One of the main contradictions of capitalist society is that we have social production (meaning we produce the things we use socially - like the example of the car), but private appropriation of the surplus wealth produced. In other words, we produce the wealth socially, but the profit goes into private hands!The thousands of workers who actually know how to produce the cars in a factory do not get to decide what to produce or how, or what to do with the extra wealth - the capitalist class does. Socialists want to end this contradiction by having social control over the socially produced wealth. The surplus wealth produced by working people would be used to provide better wages, benefits, healthcare, education, safety conditions, new technology that could reduce the working day, etc. - instead of for the private gain of a handful of people while millions starve, are homeless, and unemployed.This is not a utopian idea - the material pre-requisites for this exist now!The only barrier to this is the grip the capitalist class has on political and economic power. Only unity of the world working class can put an end to this situation, and end the horror, degradation, poverty, and instability of the capitalist system once and for all. Then a whole new world will open up!
So just imagine a baby born into a world with no hunger, no want, no poverty, no lack of jobs, etc.Since conditions determine consciousness, they would see the world in an entirely different way than we do today. Even babies born today do not notice differences in race, language, etc. until these are pointed out to them as they get older. Under socialism, people will relate to each other as people, and not as mere commodities to be bought and sold.
The reason for the vast bulk of the problems we suffer under capitalism is scarcity – there is simply not enough to go around. To take an example form nature, if you take 100 rats and put them in a cage with enough food for 100 rats and then a little bit more, you will have docile, friendly, and gregarious animals before you. But if you put those same 100 rats in a cage with only enough food for only 50 of them, you will quickly see the situation deteriorate into a murderous, greedy, self-interested orgy of violence and bloodshed. Of course, humans and their society are much more complex and on a different level than 100 rats in a laboratory cage, but the example illustrates an important point.
As we all know, much of the scarcity we find is artificially produced. We have all heard the stories of farmers being paid not to plant or to destroy crops, even though there are millions of hungry and malnourished children right here in the United States, let alone around the world; of shoe or clothing stores which punch or tear holes in their old stock, to make them unusable, even though millions of people could use those products; of restaurants firing employees for taking food home, insisting instead that this perfectly good food be thrown in the dumpster; or of perfectly healthy, capable, and willing people being paid not to work, or forced into unemployment when they are willing to work, instead of creating meaningful jobs for them.
"Human nature", like all things, in a constant state of change. To accept that it is set in stone for all time does not stand up to even the most simple analysis. Humans have created wonderful tragedies, comedies, songs, poems, paintings, sculptures and countless other expressions of artistic creativity which are a reflection of our changing world view at any given time. Just take a walk through an art, science, or historical museum and you will see the changing consciousness of humanity graphically portrayed. As Marx explained, "the philosophers have interpreted the world in various ways - the point however, is to change it!" Our way of thinking will change with it!


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3. Says the Capitalist. HAH! Human rights are at pretty despicable levels in capitalist
countries ,just the workers have no voice...Imagine NBC or FOX taking on working
Class issues. Laughable but not funny.

4. I'd say Trade Embargo's and Economic Sanctions strangle more economies. The
Capitalist nations blame socialism and communism and Castro and Lenin....as they
starve workers from nations across the globe with their Economic Sanctions.

[Chambered Word]

(3) Every Communist society in history has had a poor human rights record.

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Ask them if they know what the US is doing with Iraqi oil, what Coca-Cola and Nike do to workers who ask for more pay or what the Bhopal disaster is. Then tell them and ask why they apply double standards to the Stalinist countries that have existed.