Refutations of a book I purchased

[CubanFox]

Today, at St Vincent de Paul, a charity shop chain thing here, I purchased, for the princely sum of 50c, an extremely objective analysis of the Warsaw Pact governments entitled Socialism - Con Job of the Century, by John Leard, just to see how idiotic it was.

Four fifths of the book is a very smug 1989 trip from East Berlin, to Prague, to Budapest, and to all the other capitals of the Warsaw Pact countries. Leard makes a point of how empty the shops are, and how powerful the cars are. He wastes an entire paragraph on how inferior Trabants are to Western cars.

But anyway, the back and front are Leard's critique of socialism. Looking past the only-too-predictable "communism has killed more people than war!" (yes, he says exactly that) and the very tired "Hitler was a communist", the book has a vaguely reasonable critique of our ideology within it.

I have managed to refute most of the stupid points Leard makes; here are but a few of the many:
By "You must, therefore, confess that by 'individual' you mean no other person than the bourgeois, than the middle-class owner of property. This person must, indeed, be swept out of the way, and made impossible." Marx meant that we should kill everyone who owns any property. I thought by that Marx meant seizing their property, not sending them off to the closest katorga.

People in socialist countries have a high suicide/alcoholism rate because they cannot get ahead! Leard makes himself sound like an idiot with this one. I don't even need to refute it.
But my main point was on the statements I could not refute, such as the following: It is no accident that the West is more advanced in regards to technology: capitalism and competition encourage advances in science, and better products for all. I'd actually like to see the answer to this put into the High School Commie's Guide, it's a frequently used cappie debate point.

<overt smugness>Marx predicted that capitalism would self destruct into communism, but today, it is the opposite.</overt smugness> Personally, I don&#39;t understand why Marx predicted this. Capitalism seems able to support itself at the expense of others very well.

Free enterprise can absorb criticism and other ideas for the common good, Marxism cannot. Capitalism is also extremely flexible, and can change in dire circumstances.

No incentive blah blah blah

Those are the main ones; I&#39;ll post more later.

The book ends, by the way, with something that makes me want to want to hunt down John Leard and punch him in the face for being such a smug little bastard:

"If Marx were alive today, I would predict that he would look at the international communist movement and say &#39;Stop&#33; Stop&#33; I was only joking&#33;&#39;"


Before anyone goes "omg CF y did u buy a cappie book11111?", I bought Volume I of Das Kapital, too. I suppose I can take solace in the fact that in 100 years, people will be talking about Karl Marx, and not about John Leard.

(and Das Kapital isn&#39;t laced with retarded neocon clichés, either.)

[Misodoctakleidist]

It is no accident that the West is more advanced in regards to technology: capitalism and competition encourage advances in science, and better products for all.
Well firstly, it&#39;s pointless comparing the capitalism to the Leninist nations bacause as we all know they weren&#39;t communist. The Leninist nations advanced very quickly considering how far behind the west they were, Russia even put the first man in space and lets not forget; they invented Tetris.


Marx predicted that capitalism would self destruct into communism, but today, it is the opposite
Is today the end of history? Will the world stop changing from this moment? No&#33; It&#39;s rather arrogant to presume that we&#39;ve reachest somekind of pinacal of human development


Free enterprise can absorb criticism and other ideas for the common good, Marxism cannot.
This is pretty meaningless, Marxism isn&#39;t an economic system.


No incentive blah blah blah
Do you really need to refute that? I would type out the quote in my sig but I can&#39;t remember it.

[Essential Insignificance]

It is no accident that the West is more advanced in regards to technology: capitalism and competition encourage advances in science, and better products for all. I&#39;d actually like to see the answer to this put into the High School Commie&#39;s Guide, it&#39;s a frequently used cappie debate point.

The author has proceeded; perhaps intentionally, without paying satisfactory consideration to the historical progression, namely the cleavage, of the Western and the Eastern nations;and, how the Western nations were able to left themselves above the, now, backward nations.

Most, now capitalistic countries, particularly America, were founded on the production of slavery. The slave (forced) works for the bear essentials to maintain life; and is put to work for much longer hours then modern wage-labours.

The author is right—it was no accident—that over 9 million slaves were shipped across the Atlantic to foreign shores and put to slave-labour—America is built upon the foundations of slavery&#33;

"Capitalism and competition encourage advances in science" is the general notion that Smith put forward—"only through competition can man achieve his destined potentialities", this notion is now redundant, at the time it may have been reasonable and factual.

The division of labour has abridged the worker to a mechanical and automatic labour; it has rendered his specialized capabilities inadequate and useless. The division of labor has enabled through the capacity of the modern day, large scale productive forces to put ten at work to produce what would have taken 500 men to produce equally, with the tools of feudalism.

But the Leninist 20th century revolutions were where? Backward, semi-developed counties with at most--landed aristocracies. They had to catch up to the West; it was an "historical inevitability"—especially in constant fear of imperial envision.

What is meant by "better products"? X-boxes, play stations, huge televisions, fast cars—are these really better products humanity; are they requirements essential for the well-being of humanity?

Are they really "better" then food and medicine?


----------------
I’m sorry for this doltish exposition—I really haven’t answered the question appropriately—for I have had a few too many drinks, and now am feeling the stupidly role of my thought. :blink:

I’ll try and answer this question more thoroughly and the others tomorrow if nobody else does.

[redstar2000]

Today, at St Vincent de Paul, a charity shop chain thing here, I purchased, for the princely sum of 50c...

First mistake...buying from a Catholic charity...it&#39;s the gulag for you, old boy. :lol:


He wastes an entire paragraph on how inferior Trabants are to Western cars.

That&#39;s the East German car, right? It was supposed to be a really polluting vehicle.

But I&#39;ve heard other things: that it was small, rugged, easy to repair with simple tools, got good gas mileage, etc.

Maybe he should have compared it to Henry Ford&#39;s "Model T". And, in any event, I would expect autos in communist society to be efficient and durable...not symbolic expressions of the size of one&#39;s penis.


It is no accident that the West is more advanced in regards to technology: capitalism and competition encourage advances in science, and better products for all.

It&#39;s no accident that if one country leads another by a century or more, that after another century has passed the original leader still has a substantial lead.

Most of Russia still lived in the middle ages in 1917 and many of their technicians (being bourgeois) fled to the west during and after the revolution. Thus, they basically had to start from near-zero. All things considered, they did a fairly creditable job of building a modern civilization. They might have done better but they certainly could have done a good deal worse.

What great scientific advances or "better products" came from Latin America or the Middle East from 1917 to 1992 -- even though those countries were under the "benign tutelage" of the imperialists for all those years?


Marx predicted that capitalism would self destruct into communism, but today, it is the opposite.
Personally, I don&#39;t understand why Marx predicted this. Capitalism seems able to support itself at the expense of others very well.

There are several lines of reasoning behind this "prediction".

One is the proposition that technological innovation compels an eventual change in the relations of production. People didn&#39;t get up one morning and say "slavery is unjust" or "serfdom sucks". Slavery was replaced by serfdom because serfdom was "more efficient"...made better use of the existing technology than slave labor did. Serfdom was replaced by wage-labor for the same reason.

Thus, Marx concluded that capitalism -- the most technologically innovative system in history -- would create technologies that it was unable to implement efficiently...and would therefore run into such difficulties as to cause it to collapse and be abandoned.

The "contest" between Linux and Windows&copy; is illustrative of the difficulties that modern capitalism has with new technology...as is the fact that people with graduate degrees in physics can&#39;t get jobs in their field and end up working on Wall Street doing nothing useful whatsoever.

A second line of Marx&#39;s reasoning has to do with the "business cycle" of "boom" and "bust". Marx thought that these cycles were inevitable under capitalism and would grow more serious with the passing of time...eventually leading to a "mega-crash" and "total melt-down" of the capitalist economic system.

This looked very prophetic in the 1930s...and Argentina is a recent example of the same phenomenon. But the "mega-crisis" has yet to appear and it remains to be seen if it will "prove out". Some have argued that capitalism will enter a prolonged period of stagnation before or instead of a "mega-crash". We shall see.

The third line of reasoning has to do with the consciousness of the working class itself. Marx thought that each generation of workers would be more discontented and rebellious than the previous generation, would keep raising its demands higher and higher while the capitalist system was less and less able to meet those demands...ending in a revolutionary explosion.

This was clearly over-optimistic...at least it appears so thus far. Class consciousness has "ebbed and flowed" in a tidal fashion rather than just increased in a linear fashion...there are complexities and subtleties here that Marx did not acknowledge.

How this will "play out" in a 21st century of imperialist wars and ruthless global "slash-and-burn" capitalism also remains to be seen.


Free enterprise can absorb criticism and other ideas for the common good, Marxism cannot. Capitalism is also extremely flexible, and can change in dire circumstances.

There&#39;s little evidence for that lately. Capitalism over the last 50 years has developed a "Byzantine" bureaucracy fully the equal of anything found in the old USSR...and cannot seem to do anything about its accelerating growth. I&#39;ve read one guy who suggests that this swollen monstrosity will be the main cause of capitalist collapse. (&#33;)

The "lean & mean" modern corporation mostly turns out to be just mean.

:redstar2000:

The Redstar2000 Papers (http://www.redstar2000papers.fightcapitalism.net)
A site about communist ideas

[Don't Change Your Name]

Sounds like the worst book ever.

[Severian]

Originally posted by [email protected] 7 2004, 04:15 AM

It is no accident that the West is more advanced in regards to technology: capitalism and competition encourage advances in science, and better products for all. I&#39;d actually like to see the answer to this put into the High School Commie&#39;s Guide, it&#39;s a frequently used cappie debate point.
I think this is basically an aspect of the economic productivity question. Others have correctly pointed out that the advanced capitalist countries had a head start. And the USSR, etc. were not any kind of unalloyed failure in terms of technology or other aspects of economic productivity.

But I&#39;m not sure we can 100% refute it with words; it remains to be proven in practice that socialism can outproduce, including outresearch capitalism. We can point out that the USSR wasn&#39;t socialist let alone communist, of course, but it remains to be proven in practice that something better is possible.



<overt smugness>Marx predicted that capitalism would self destruct into communism, but today, it is the opposite.</overt smugness> Personally, I don&#39;t understand why Marx predicted this. Capitalism seems able to support itself at the expense of others very well.

He didn&#39;t predict capitalism would self-destruct. He said it was up to us to overthrow it.

He did predict, or better, observe, periodic "collapses" or economic crises and depressions as we&#39;d say nowadays. He wasn&#39;t wrong about that. Or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Or growing relative impoverishment (gap between rich and poor.) The only one of Marx&#39;s economic predictions that&#39;s been disproved by events is growing absolute impoverishment, and if you look at the whole world and not just the advanced capitalist countries he wasn&#39;t so completely wrong about that either.



No incentive blah blah blah


THis one&#39;s been discussed with many times before but I don&#39;t think there&#39;s a simple verbal refutation for it either; material incentives do go against the kind of consciousness we&#39;re trying to build and moral incentives are made less effective by the kind of consciousness we&#39;re trying to get away from.