Capitalism - Any links?

[Apprentice of Marx]

Where can i find theoretical explainations on why capitalism will collapse

[Pete]

go to my thread on Marxist Theory in this forum.

[redstar2000]

http://www.marxists.org

It's always best to begin at the beginning...and they actually have some of the works of Marx and Engels in Swedish.

:cool:

[von Mises]

Or start at the end, why communism will never work

www.mises.org , check Human Action

[Blibblob]

Yes, i agree, start at the end. Black book of communism...

[MJM]

Quote: from Blibblob on 10:25 am on Feb. 28, 2003
Yes, i agree, start at the end. Black book of communism...

We've already cover this piece of fiction. The numbers are inaccurate, two of the co-authors distanced themselves from this book, when they found out that extra zeros had been added.

Black book of Capitalism would be a better place to start, but of course it's not publish by our "free presses".
Although it is available in French.

Read Capital by Marx.

[Frank Quist]

Quote: from MJM on 5:49 am on Feb. 28, 2003

Quote: from Blibblob on 10:25 am on Feb. 28, 2003
Yes, i agree, start at the end. Black book of communism...

We've already cover this piece of fiction. The numbers are inaccurate, two of the co-authors distanced themselves from this book, when they found out that extra zeros had been added.

Black book of Capitalism would be a better place to start, but of course it's not publish by our "free presses".
Although it is available in French.

Read Capital by Marx.

I'm interested, could you give a source for your first statement?

[Blibblob]

come on, we all know the Black book of Communism is full of bullshit. But it is funny...

[Frank Quist]

I just would like to read something about it, that's all.

[MJM]

To their credit, the authors admitted that their criticisms of Asian communists and therefore most of their criticism of communism is speculative.(p. 459) The reason is that they would like the governments there to fall so that they can see the archives before they pass judgement.

The largest part of the 100 million deaths they are attributing to communism comes from the Great Leap, where they use the upper end of 43 million deaths. MIM recently reviewed this literature again in MIM Notes 203, since Harvard professor Roderick MacFarquhar's book just came out in paperback.

Contrary to MacFarquhar who details all the actions the Communist Party took and how Mao made public self- criticism, Margolin says Mao refused to admit a problem during the Great Leap.(p. 464) He then goes on to list wartime atrocities in World War II by the communists.

Even more than MacFarquhar who misplaced a decimal in his single largest accusation against Mao to make it 10 times worse than it was, Margolin leaves us seriously questioning his basic quantitative skills. We can only hope it was the editors or translators who introduced the errors, but there were numerous basic mathematical errors in his chapter and no matter how one slices it, the chapter does not reflect well on the authors and editors.

"This last province [Anhui], in north-central China, was the worst affected of all. In 1960 the death rate soared to 68 percent from its normal level at around 15 percent, while the birth rate fell to 11 percent from its previous average of 30 percent. As a result the population fell by around 2 million people (6 percent of the total) in a single year."(p. 492)

The above is such a bungle that it is difficult to sort out all the errors and curiously enough, it refers to Margolin's biggest accusation at the provincial level. The first number is actually 68.58 per thousand. 68 percent is 68 per hundred. Once again, we have an error overestimating by a factor of 10. What is worse is the stupidity in saying that the mortality rate was 68 percent but only 6 percent died! In this way Margolin exceeds the stupidity of MacFarquhar's mistake. Of course, the birth rates are similarly exaggerated by a factor of 10. At least MacFarquhar correctly reported these figures in a table in his third volume.(12)

In more obvious moralistic "have your cake and eat it too," Margolin denounces the regime in China for creating a situation where "the birth rate fell to almost zero as women were unable to conceive because of malnutrition."(p. 494) He does not realize that if that is true, his death toll must be very low, much less than the 20 million lower end estimate he uses. It's clear that he has never sat down to think through questions like what goes into creating a life expectancy figure.

Further exceeding MacFarquhar by covering more years with his ignorance, Margolin says "For the entire country, the death rate rose from 11 percent in 1957 to 15 percent in 1959 and 1961, peaking at 29 percent in 1960. Birth rates fell from 33 percent in 1957 to 18 percent in 1961."(p. 495)

Given this sort of record it is not surprising Margolin also botched the imprisonment rate figures where he momentarily got on the right track before falling off (and actually compared the imprisonment figures with the U$A's and found them equal in his own error-prone way). (p. 541) He apparently is OK with reporting 8 digit figures raw and re-reporting percentages, but anything actually involving his own understanding of division is suspect.

At one point saying that the peasants were too weak to harvest grain rotting on the farms, (p. 493) Margolin also says that once capitalist-style organization came into place, the peasants quickly ended the famine. (p. 496) Which was it Margolin? Were the peasants too weak as the Great Leap went on to harvest or just needing capitalist incentives? Nor does Margolin seem to flinch at saying the worst year was actually 1961,(p. 491) after the Great Leap had ended and widescale private farming and systems tantamount to it had come into play.

It is obvious that Margolin likes to study history, but his quantitative skills are so lacking it is no wonder that he came out against communism. His essay along with MacFarquhar's error introduces further doubt into the basic competence of the people doing bourgeois academic research on the Great Leap. Anyone with any experience in mortality figures, life expectancies or statistics and the slightest knowledge of the Great Leap from any perspective should have caught Margolin's mistakes right away and should have known off the top of their heads that what he was saying was impossible. Anyone with a high school education should have caught the mistakes if studying carefully. When talking about China with its large population and the potential for 8 digit famines, it is essential that an author be comfortable with numbers.







With regard to the charge of 100 million dead from communism, 85 million are from the Soviet Union and China, 20 million from the Soviet Union and 65 million from China.(p. 4) As we have just shown the crucial lynchpins to that argument concern a famine reported by Nazi collaborators in the Ukraine and a Great Leap toll where repeated and obvious arithmetic errors were published in the book. Together these two items account for 49 million dead out of 100 million alleged victims.


http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/bookstor...ore/commie.html (http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/bookstore/commie.html)

Stalin apologists, I know, but a good disection of the figures and such.
Decimal points were moved.




The Authors.


Despite the book’s success, some of its contributors openly dissociated themselves from the introduction and conclusion written by Stéphane Courtois. According to Nicolas Werth and Jean–Louis Margolin, Courtois went too far in his estimate of the numbers killed by all Communist regimes—over 100 million, he approximated. More importantly, Courtois crossed the line when he compared the Soviet Gulag with the Nazi Holocaust. Courtois argued that in addition to the sheer numbers of dead—and the death toll of those killed by Communists far exceeds those murdered by the Nazis—a similarity exists between the "class genocide" preached by Lenin and Stalin and the "race genocide" of Hitler. Eschewing the argument that one evil was lesser than the other, Courtois firmly asserted that both totalitarian regimes practiced "crimes against humanity" on a monumental scale.


http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0002...ews/radosh.html (http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0002/reviews/radosh.html)

The second link carries on to endorse the book even after mentioning the above.


I'd say those two links offer a good look at both sides of the argument. Both agree that the figures are incorrect to some degree. Therefore you can't take the conclusions seriously, if the figures aren't factual what are they?

[Blibblob]

Figures cant lie, but liars can figure.

I have no clue where i heard that from, and no idea why i said it...