Debate; Marxists versus LSD, serious replies only

[Led Zeppelin]

This is my reply to LSD's reply to mine in his CC thread:


Did it? It's been a century and a half now, how's the communist movement doing? How many "workers' states" are there? How many societies are on the "road to socialism"?

After more than a hundred years of constant struggle, revolutions in dozens of countries, and something like a quarter of a billion deaths, you know your movement's in trouble if your best success story is a tiny little carribean island with an octogenarian tin pot dictator -- sorry, make that a tin pot dictator's brother.

I already replied to this argument. Bourgeois revolutions also failed, and they had to wait for quite a long time before they were able to successfully take power and establish a system based on bourgeois property relations. Would it have been correct for a bourgeoisie to say, after the utter failure and defeat of his movement, that their cause was lost, and that therefore they would just have to give up? Well, it's sad that they didn't, it would've saved humanity a lot of blood, but that's not what happened, history does indeed sometimes "force the situation with its hand".

It must be remembered that communism was never intended to be implemented in materially backward nations. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky never believed in such nonsense. No serious Marxist would argue that socialism and communism can flourish in backward nations in isolation from the world community at large.

A rationally planned economy does a great job at industrializing nations, sure, but that was not what Marx meant by socialism or communism. The failure of all those experiments should be attributed to the failure of the revolution to spread, and that in and of itself had specific causes. To attribute the failure to the economic system of socialism itself is historically incorrect.


The USSR came out of the Second World War the greatest power in Eurasia; second to the United States, the most powerful nation in the history of the world. And over the next forty years it proceded to crumble and collapse. No foreign power penetrated its borders, no revolt challenged its policies. Russia stood dominant in Europe free to pursue its collectivist command-production agenda, just as China did in asia. And yet all either managed to achieve was misery, poverty, and 15,000 nuclear warheads.

In 1953 Joseph McCarthy famously declared that 800,000,000 people lived under Marxist-Leninist regimes (although I believe the exact term he used was "brutalitarian" ). At the time, that represented almost a third of the planet. Today, that number stands at a little more than a sixth. And if one excludes the PRC, which I believe most members of this board do, it stands at an embarassing fiftieth. That's less than 2%.

Communism had every opporunity in the world to prove that it was more than an appealing idea. It's failure ranks among the most total and humiliating in human history.

The fact that you believe the Soviet Union represented any form of communism is sad in and of itself. The fact that you don't understand the real causes of the bureaucratic states' failure just shows a lack of historical understanding of the issue.

It is funny because I now have to argue against you with points that you yourself argued against others a few weeks ago. The points haven't changed, the arguments are the same, only you have switched side because the other side seems more plausible to you for whatever reason.

The reason is not based in historical fact. Yes, I shall repeat what every Marxist knows to be true, and is based on factual evidence, but I know from experience that the "other side" is incapable of comprehending it, because they are too caught up in their own subjective version of history.

The Soviet Union indeed rose to great prominence as a nation, and for quite some time it seemed as though it would take over the world. Trotsky was utterly defeated it seemed, his argument of "either revolution in the advanced capitalist nations or degeneration until eventual collapse" was proven to be false, at least in the minds of many "Friends of the USSR".

The entire situation became so heated that Trotskyists themselves started splitting over the issue, and we all know where that ended up. However, let's focus on Marxist theory, and its explanation of what the Soviet Union was, and where it would eventually go. Whether you like it or not, it is a historical fact that Trotsky argued that the revolution was doomed to fail if it did not spread to any advanced industrialized nation. Why? Because Marxism always held that socialism requires a higher degree of material conditions than even the most advanced capitalist state possesses, and this level of development could only be reached by the co-operative work of multiple advanced capitalist nations working together under a logical planned economy.

It was for this reason and this reason alone that the "Soviet experiment" failed. Lenin did not support the revolution to "create socialism in Russia", he started it to aid revolution in the west. Leninism does not go against "classical Marxism", it was actually based on it, and argued for it through such individuals as Trotsky.

First you were disregarding the Soviet achievements as abysmal and irrelevant, and now you are raising them to an undeserving level of greatness, bloating its significance to prove your point. Yes, the Soviet Union and the other bureaucratic states had all those achievements....so what? Compare them with the advanced capitalist nations and they pale in comparison. The average individual productivity of labor in the Soviet Union didn't even reach half of that in the United States.

Any person with even a fundamental understanding of Marxism knew that the Soviet Union was destined to crumble. Its economic system of a planned economy was based on insufficient material conditions. Yes, it could achieve great things for such an underdeveloped nation, and it is those gains that we Marxists praise and look to as prove of the superiority of the planned economy, but that developed can only go so far within the limits of a single nation. Eventually the limit will be reached, and growth turns into slump. This has nothing to do with the planned economy itself, it has to do with the fact that such an economy can only rise above its own limitations when it is applied to highly developed material conditions.

Would you even argue that such an economic system, when applied to the world today, would not develop the economies and material conditions of the world to an extent never before seen in history?


I don't want a "spontaneous movement", I don't want any sort of "movement" at all! At least not in terms of overthrowing capitalism and establishing a "workers' state".

There are a great number of causes that could use movements dedicated to them. Communism, however, is not one of them.

If you don't want a movement, then you don't want change.

I don't know if you noticed, but the unions are a movement. You said somewhere that you still support unions and their struggles... so what it is, do you support spontaneous movements which arise "naturally", do you support reformist movements which already exist such as the unions, or do you support no movement at all?

If it is the first, you are arguing for a position which was already debunked by Marxists a century or so ago, see: A Talk With Defenders of Economism (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/dec/06.htm)

And more specifically this:


To say, however, that ideologists (i.e., politically conscious leaders) cannot divert the movement from the path determined by the interaction of environment and elements is to ignore the simple truth that the conscious element participates in this interaction and in the determination of the path. Catholic and monarchist labour unions in Europe are also an inevitable result of the interaction of environment and elements, but it was the consciousness of priests and Zubatovs and not that of socialists that participated in this interaction.

So, even if you support such movements, they are not spontaneous, they are the result of the conscious activity of working-class activists, and of course some top-layer bureaucrats who happen to be in charge of those unions today.

If it is the second and you support reformist movements which already exist, such as the unions, social-democrats etc. then you are choosing to participate in the struggle as a reformist, instead of participating in it as a socialist. It is a conscious decision you made, and you would be playing the part of a reformist activist. If you want to go down this road, then fine, of course the limits of your activity must be known to you. You can struggle all you want for change, but if the bosses say no, it's no.

If it's the third and you support no kind of movement whatsoever, as your quote indicated, then you are useless to the struggles of the working-class as a whole, and you have probably chosen to focus on making money, "working" on your hobby's, and perform other inanities in order to feel better about yourself.

I am not saying that hobby's and those other activities for pleasure are not something I want. Hell, I want to be able to do them as much as possible! But I also understand that I am not the only person in the world. I understand that there are people suffering, and they happen to be the majority. It would be selfish of me to devote my entire life to inanities while they suffer, and not only that, what use would your life had been if you only did that?

If say in 50 years you die, how will people remember you? As the guy who had a lot of hobby's, made a lot of money, like a certain type of music, was a nice guy around his family and friends, had some kids and a wife....but you're dead, your life was limited to those petty niceties. I'm sorry, but you can do both. You can be both active in the movement, arguing and fighting for change to alleviate the suffering of others, and also have your hobby's, your social life, your family etc.

It is those people who choose to be either-or who end up having a shitty life, and don't get me wrong, I know people have chosen to dedicate their entire life to such political activity, and the results aren't pretty, but I am not arguing for that, I am arguing for doing both, and striking a perfect balance between the two.

This is what I, and I hope all other communists, strive to do.

At least when humanity does come to its end, if it does, we can say; "At least we tried". All you can say is; "At least I had some fun going out and getting wasted every night of the week".

On that note, I do know communists who go out and get wasted every night of the week and are also still active in the movement. :p


What you seem to be missing, however, is the labour movement has, overwhelmingly not been communist. The trade-unoinists you speak of, the working class activists, they believed in a better world, but they consistantly rejected the appeals of Marxists of all stripes and colours.

You consider them traitors, enemies of their class who bowed to bourgeois pressure and undermined the revolution. But they're the ones who actually got things done. They're the ones who took an honest hard look at the world around them and never got sidetracked into delusional fantasies of "remaking" humanity.

The welfare state is the result of a long, painful, and ondoging struggle between those with everything and those with nothing. It is the result of a hard-won compromise that, and we must be ever vigilant less it be ripped from under our very feet.

But while that struggle is constant and essential, what it is not is "revolutionary", and it never will be.

Look at the history of all those labor movements, and you'll see that they were all, without exceptions, inspired by Marxism or Marxist thought. The modern labor movement as it exists today originated in the First and Second Internationals, you know, those movements who claimed to be Marxist.

Those gains you speak of, the welfare state, healthcare etc. were all a result of this labor movement. And yes, most of them stopped along the way and decided to settle for the reformed system, but that itself had material causes. The leadership of these movements were first devoted to Marxism, devoted to workers' control of the economy and state. Why did they change their mind about this? Is it because they, like you, realized that capitalism was "a necessity"? Actually, yes, they did, but the reason they did was quite different from yours.

They came to conclusion because they themselves became part of the capitalist machinery of oppression and control. Those labor movements became so powerful and strong that they gained in strength within the capitalist system, and as a result its leaders gained prominent positions within it (in both the state-machinery and unions), and they eventually thought to themselves; "Hey, we are in charge now, why should we argue for the working-class to control everything? If they did, we would lose our positions as well!"

Marx was right: Being determines consciousness. And the being of the top layers of those labor movements determined theirs, eventually. When war came, they voted for it, overwhelmingly. You and I both know that this was a travesty of Marxism. The movement degenerated, just as the later official "communist" movement degenerated.

So your premise was wrong. The people who achieved something were workers who adhered to Marxism, the only reason they were able to achieve those things was because of Marxism. They, however, were betrayed by their degeneration leadership.

The psychology of the masses is a difficult subject to tackle, but let us both agree that when the leadership goes one way, the mass usually follows, unless of course it goes against their wishes entirely...but the welfare state, the healthcare etc. all made sure that it didn't.

Do not discount the importance of Marxism to bourgeois-democracy and workers' rights. It was essential to the rise of both.

Now, either you stand by Marxism as it was and argue for a break with the current system, or you join sides with those who abandoned it. The working-class has been on both sides of the fence on this, and it now happened to be on the other, and that also has an objective cause. The economic conditions obviously play a very important part in this. When that changes, though, they're going to move over to the other side of the fence. Which side will you be on when that does happen, as it inevitably will?


Workers want a lot of things, they want a decent wage, they want to support their families; they do not want to overthrow the state and establish some monstrosity of a bureaucratic command economy.

When you hang around in insular circles, only talking with people who agree with you, it's understandable that you can get the notion into your head that the "class struggle" paradigm is the dominant idea out there. Well, it isn't. Most people believe in "class struggle" about as much as they do the tooth fairy.

No, they do not want to overthrow the state and establish a new state run by themselves because the system is still working for the majority of them. And by "working", I don't necessarily mean that they have a house, a job, healthcare, and are well-off in terms of being middle-class. No, I mean that they are still being fed, clothed, and kept alive as the bare minimum of their existence.

If you find a communist who is fighting for overthrowing the state right now, and believes that it is possible to do it with the current objective material conditions, slap them for me ok? Because they are indeed a joke, they must indeed be ridiculed, and they are done so by the workers, so don't you worry about that.

Marxists do not believe that workers will suddenly "see the light" and overthrow the state. No, the system has to collapse in order for them to do it. It has to collapse so utterly and completely that only a revolutionary change can show them a way out. Every revolution changing one form of social relations to another was preceded by a complete and utter destruction of the old system. Only when the system no longer works for the majority of the working-class, will it rise to change it.

We agree on that.

However, I understand Marxist economics, and you did too, until a few days ago. We know that the anarchy of production which is inherent in capitalism is doomed to fail eventually. Currently the means of production are artificially being kept down in order to prevent "overproduction", a term so ridiculous and absurd that if aliens came to earth and heard of it they would flee and think we were clinically insane.

The entire system as it exists now is so unstable that it could collapse under the slightest weight. Capitalism itself, a total free market ideology, was discarded decades ago. Now we have a intermingling of capitalism with the government, with the bourgeois state desperately trying to keep capitalism alive, like a doctor desperately tries to keep a patient alive who is already half-dead. Don't worry, both the patient and capitalism will eventually die.

As for class-struggle, have you ever spoken to workers on strike? Have you ever spoken to any worker at all? I have, and they sure as hell knew what class-struggle meant. Don't you think that the worker who sees the CEO of his company getting millions in bonuses, while he gets a Christmas package, doesn't know that they are both part of a distinct class who are in constant struggle with each other? Why the hell would they even be in a union if they didn't?

Sorry, but that claim is simply false. The tooth fairy only children believe in. In class struggle anyone who has ever worked a day in his or her life believes in.


Because work sucks and people don't like to do it. And if they have absolutely no motivation to do it, most people simply won't.

There's a reason that the communes failed, there's a reason that the Kibbutzes collapsed. If people can get away with not helping out, if they're presented with the choice of labouring or not labouring with absolutely no consequences either way, 95% of the time they're going to chose the latter.

It's not that they're bad people or that they don't care about the people around them, but human beings have a remarkable capacity for compartmentalization. And knowing that you should help out is a far cry from actually going out and doing it, especially when you're awfully tired and, besides, you just got that new copy of Guitar Hero and haven't had a chance to play it yet and, come on, surely someone else can sweep the street that week...

I see that you have taken over the strategy of ignoring the points of the other side from the capitalists.

I already addressed this issue in my previous post, please either reply to it or ignore it, don't evade it by repeating what you said:

"You have to take into account, LSD, that by the time such a society has been achieved, there is an overabundance of production, so that the time a person has to work would be reduced to a fraction of what it is today. Jobs such as sweeping the streets would still be necessary, yes, and that would be done on a turn-basis, but having to sweep the streets for one hour a week is not something I would refuse to do if I can spend the rest of my time on leisure.

What did you expect, that everyone should be performing their hobby's and that no work should be done at all?

You are saying this based on the psyche of the worker within the context of capitalism. I know workers are alienated, I know workers won't do a good job if they have to do it for free, you know why? Because when they come home they have to feed their kids, pay for rent, buy groceries, and they can't afford all that if they have to work for free.

The entire context of the situation will be different in a communist society, so the perception of people towards work will also be entirely different."

Emphasis added.


If human beings were naturally motivated to work without reward, we really wouldn't need economics. Everything would just take care of itself.

As long as you are implementing some sort of material reward system, you're proving the capitalists rights; but then, you really don't have a choice. 'Cause unless you give people a reason to work, they're not going to. Life is just to short to labour with no possibility of bennefit.

If human beings got that copy of Guitar Hero, and an actual guitar to boot, while not having to worry about where to get their meal, or pay rent, or electricity bills, or paying for college etc. they would be motivated to work because that is their reward.

Also, as I said before, the entire context is different. When I say "work" in the sense of work in a communist society, I mean work for like 10 hours a week, and doing jobs like sweeping the streets, cleaning machinery, making sure the means of production are running smoothly, etc.

I'm sure that at a certain point of development even that kind of work will have ceased given the development of technology.


So you can force people to overcome their basic laziness, threaten them with loss of priviliges or cutting them off from "community resources"; but once you do, you've just got "wage-slavery" with a fresh paint of coat.

If a person refused to work because they are "lazy" (which is an odd concept anyway, at least in such a society, given the fact that children would be brought up in it and the entire concept of "laziness" for 10 hours of work would be deemed ridiculous) then certain actions would be taken by the rest of the community against him or her.

I am sure this person would have some sort of mental problem if they considered 10 hours of work to be "too strenuous" and getting in the way of his playing of Guitar Hero.

There is a phenomena known as social standing. Humans are social beings, they thrive in communities, and they care about what others think about them, therefore they act a certain way in order to keep their position of social respectability in the eyes of other people. This is why people are "polite", this is why people have a certain sense of care for one another, even within the context of the current capitalist system with its numerous hierarchical and class divisions.

In a society lacking those divisions this sense will be heightened tremendously. This is another reason why such a "lazy" person would have to be considered for mental problems.


It's not good intentions don't pave the way to hell, it's the arrogance to impose those intentions on the rest of humanity without giving a damn what it costs them.

Of course such a society could only work if the overwhelming majority of people want it to work.

If such a system would have to be "imposed on them", then the state would not be able to wither away, and so on and so forth, and it would not have developed to such a point in the first place, so you are arguing against a hypothetical which isn't even asserted.

I am surprised to find myself explaining the basics of Marxism to you.


Nonsense, most workers (in the first world, at least) can afford to feed their kids, can pay their rent, can buy groceries, and still have more than enough free time to spend an hour a week sweeping their streets if they really want to.

It's just that they don't want to.


Yes, because they could be getting paid for it and they already have a job, so why on earth would a person be stupid enough to do such a thing?

Again, you are looking at it within the context of capitalism, so your views on this are limited to that context. I'm not really sure what you are arguing against here, because I agree with you that within that context the opinion of people towards work is entirely different than it would be under the communist society proposed.


"Alienation" isn't a product of capitalism, it's a product of labour. Work is generally boring and people don't like doing boring things. Don't you think workers were "alienated" during feudalism? Don't you think they were "alienated" in ancient economies?

Or did you think that farmers farmed out of "love"? That dye makers wore their fingers down because they genuinely enojoyed self-mutilation?

For 5,000 years human beings have worked for one reason and one reason only, they had to. That you think that can be changed by a single act of "revolution" shows what a completely delusional world you're living in.

You forget to mention that during those 5000 years there was also scarcity, and never an abundance of production, therefore also a class-system, and therefore....etc. etc.

You are going around in circles here. Stop arguing within the context of current or past societies, no one is proposing that communism could work on that economic and material basis. By the way, it must be noted that during "primitive communist" societies people actually did work for the benefit of the community, like in some Native American societies, and that class distinctions did not exist.

Though obviously that is not the Marxist definition of communism, it does prove that human beings are psychologically able to function in such a society, instead of all deciding to "be lazy and smoke herbs all the time because work is boring", as you probably expected people in those societies to be doing.


Human ones, as opposed to the no doubt angelic ones you know.

One of the fastest growing businesses in the world right now is private plane production. I don't particularly want a private plane, but I imagine if I had the money I just might buy one.

What we want grows in direct proportion to what we can get. Five thousand years ago, most people were more than happy to get a single room hut; how many people do you know who would be satisfied with anything less than a bedroom, a kitchen, a bathroom, indoor plumbing, electricity, etc...?

Notice I didn't say our needs are infinite, they're not, they're asymtotic: they approach infinity along the boundries of their material means. So if they can't afford a private plane, they don't want one; if they can, there's a more than decent chance that they do.

Thank you for proving my point.

No Marxist would argue that there will be private jets available for everyone in a communist society. If private jets cannot be made for at least one per several families (to be used according to some turn-based system), then people don't want one. Their needs are asymptotic, after all.

However, they do have certain basic and tertiary needs, such as decent housing, different kinds of food, cars, guitars, computers, etc. and those needs can easily be met in a communist society.


Because capitalism isn't some monolithic force, it's an economic system composed of literally billions of individual actors, few of whom actually get together to conspire at anything.

Is it in the interest of capitalism to develop itself out of existance? Of course not, but then capitalism doesn't have interests, only people do. And it's definitely in the interst of individual captialists to develop advanced technologies if they can make a buck off it.

Remember what Lenin said, about the capitalist and the rope? On that point he was spot on; the ultimate flaw of capitalism is that profit is fundamentally disinterested. That's why CEOs will happily dump toxic waste knowing full well that it screws them over just as much as anyone else; and it's why, in the end, the technology to make the whole system irrelevent can't help but be produced.

Technologies which have already been developed are consciously being bought up, patented, and its further development stopped by corporations due to that very reason.

Capitalism at this point is an artificial system of anarchy. Why do you think factories and plants are closed down in the US and rebuilt in China, even though those factories and plants could be producing goods that would be consumed by people?

Because prices would go down, profit would be lost, and the capitalist would be thinking of someone other than himself.


When exaclty did the Russian peasants stop having to work the fields? 'Cause as far as I remember, Stalin collectivized the farms, he didn't shut them down. If anything, most farmers actually had to work harder under the Soviet Union, especially in the early days. Certainly a great many more found themselves shipped off to prison camps or summarily executed for failing to follow orders or daring to actually try and keep some of their own food.

The mechanization of agriculture increased the average individual productivity of farmers greatly, causing them to only have to work for 8 hours a day while having the basic necessities of life, instead of having to work 15 hours a day while being under constant threat of starvation, like most farmers in capitalist nations are today.


I know, I know, that was all Stalin's fault. You people really do love to have it both ways; everything good about the Soviet Union you credit to Lenin, everything bad you blame on Stalin. It's so ridiculous it verges on the theological.

No, "we" don't credit it to Lenin, "we" credit it to the planned economy which is considered to be superior to capitalism by any person with a basic understanding of economic history.

It must be noted that capitalism developed to the point it is today through imperialism, while the USSR developed to the extent it did within the boundaries of its own country, without extracting super-profits from foreign colonies, and it did so in a much faster and humane way.


What the Soviet Union managed economically was not isolated from what it did politically. Russia managed to industrialized in two generations, but it cost an exorbitant price. The same in eastern Europe, the same in China.

Command industrialization works, it just isn't pretty. And if that's really the great success story of the communist movement, I think it's time to get a new movement.

The one you've got reeks of the rotting carcasses of 50 million civilians.

The industrialization of capitalism probably caused ten times as many deaths, not only "at home", but also abroad. The misery and suffering inflicted on humanity by it pales in comparison to the misery and suffering endured by the Soviets.

Capitalism achieved it by a much higher "exorbitant price".

Tell me, I'm curious, when you decided to become a pro-capitalist did you forget everything about history in the process?


Germany in 1933 was an economic disaster, 4 years of bloody war and 14 years of virtual occupation will do that. What the Nazis managed over the next 5 years is unparalled in the history of economic development. Remember, the Soviets had about twenty years to get themselves on the move, the Nazis did it in less than half that, and with far less casualties (at least until they decided to start the war).

Wrong, wrong, and wrong.

The Soviets achieved their level of development in 10 years at the most, after the two five year plans (I say 10 years at the most because the plans were usually reduced by a year or so). After the destruction caused by World War 2 they developed at the same extent in about the same period of time.

Before the 5 year plans were enacted the Soviet Union did not at all utilize its economic system for the benefit of growth, at least not in any significant manner. Instead it used capitalism in the form of the NEP to "stabilize" itself. So the system you are trying to critize here wasn't even used during that period.

The Nazis did not achieve something "unparalled in the history of economic development". Stabilizing an economy by nullifying a treaty and heavily investing in the war industry does not equal a "unparalled economic achievement". If the Nazis didn't start World War 2, they would've gotten bankrupt, any person who is familiar with economics knows this.

It was an artificial stabilization of its economy, nothing to boast about.

As for the "far less casualties" bit, as I said, Germany was already highly industrialized with a high level of technology, the USSR wasn't.

Compare the casualties to the industrialization of the US, with it's millions of slaves, child labor, elimination of native Americans etc. and then you have a fair point. I'm pretty sure most people (if they know anything about history) would agree that the USSR's industrialization was more humane and efficient than the industrialization of the US.


No doubt the Soviet accomplishment was impressive, but it's by no means an isolated example. For all your dislike of Maoism, you can't deny that China's growth from feudal relic of the 1500s to economic powerhouse of Asia is an astonishing feat.

No, it isn't, because I see capitalism in its entirety, not limited to a single nation state, which is where you commit your error.

While China developed to that extent, most of the rest of the capitalist world was starving.

That is not an "astonishing feat" of capitalism, it's a disgrace.


So can command economices result in rapid industrialization in backwards countries? Clearly. There are several examples of it not working, of course, Cambodia's an obvious example. But for the most part, it would appear that brutal socialism can actually produce impressive results; conistantly, however, once the country is developed, command economics can no longer keep up.

Which is why for all the Soviets achieved, once they developed a modern industrial society, the economy stagnated and eventually collapsed. China's managed to avert a political crisis by effectively adopting capitalism, and the other East Asian Communist countries appear prepared to follow suit.

Exactly.

I actually put forward this view above; Marxists don't believe socialism can be achieved in a single nation or a group of underdeveloped nations, they believe that it can only be achieved with the cooperation of several advanced capitalist nations.


So what's the real lesson from all this third world communism? As far as I can tell, it would appear to be that it's good for one thing and one thing alone: industrializing quickly and without care for the human cost.

How truly "revolutionary".

Nice job drawing wrong conclusions from a false premise.


OK, North Kore or Zimbabwe, where would you rather live? Honestly? And if your answer is blinded by ideology, go ask 5 people on the street. I guarantee they'd all chose the latter. There are some shit-hold capitalist countries out there, no doubt, but it really doesn't get much worse than North Korea.

TC already replied to this, I don't know if you saw her post or not, so I'll reply with it because I agree with her view on this:

"Only out of pure ignorance, the standard of living in the DPRK is much higher, the level of crime and violence much lower, and their political repression is directed against people who disagree with me, so I can honestly say I'd rather live in the DPRK."


And, by the way, Zimbabwe is hardly a model capitalist country. I chose South Korea for a reason, it's right next to North Korea; the two countries used to be one and 50 years ago they were basically materially identical.

Your point being? 100 years ago the USSR was basically materially identical to Africa as a whole today, so what?

Once again you are looking at capitalism as an isolated system, limiting it to nation states. I don't know if you realized it or not, but capitalism is a global system, and has been for quite some time. When investments are made in South-Korea, they have to come from somewhere, and it's not Ala Greenspan's ass.

The wealth of South-Korea, Taiwan, Denmark, Sweden etc. are all related to the poverty of South-Africa, Zimbabwe, Sudan etc.

[LSD]

Thanks for posting here, LZ, I appreciate the chance to respond. No doubt you're all still sniping at me in the CC (have I been called a fascist yet?), but it's good of you to put this where I can read it.

Before I respond, I'd just like to address Gunther Glick's comment:


In the defence of those "sectarian trots", I am one of them. When LSD came to our discussion group i had no idea who he was.

Which one were you?


In real life though, hes simply a crackpot. After meeting him for 25 seconds I had already lost respect for him as a person. We tried keeping a speakers list to facilitate the discussion and he did not want to respect it.

:lol:

So I'm a "crackpot", am I? In my defense, I hadn't slept for 3 days prior to that meeting, so I wasn't exactly at my best.

That said, though, how exactly did I "disrespect" your precious list? I don't recall saying a single word durring that meeting, and I certainly didn't interrupt anyone or prevent you from "facilitate discussion".

I understand that you disagree with the conclusions I've come to, but don't mischaracterize my behaviour at that meeting. I was nothing but respectful, despite being so bored I was read to beat myself to death with the copy of Revolution Betrayed sitting by my chair.


***

Ok, back to the serious discussion.

This thread is starting to somewhat long and difficult to follow, so I'm going to attempt to divide my responses into something approaching a coherent flow.


On historical "communism":


I already replied to this argument. Bourgeois revolutions also failed, and they had to wait for quite a long time before they were able to successfully take power and establish a system based on bourgeois property relations.

There's something deliciously ironic about this entire interchange in that I recognize many of your arguments as one's I've made myself. I've never defended the Soviet Union, and I've certainly never invoked Trotsky's name quite so much, but I must have made the above argument about a hundred times since joining the board.

It's not a terrible argument. In fact, I was always rather proud of it myself, since it combines all the best features of political rhetoric. It's just specific enough to be convincing and just vague enough to avoid anything directly refutable.

The problem with it, though, has always been that it is basically a defense for everything. Fascism didn't work? No problem, liberal revolutions also failed. Stalinism collapsed into a big steaming mess of crap? No worries! Look how long it took for "bourgeois capitalism" to get on its feet!

So basically we're left in a sort of optimistic hell, in which any political theory is workable, just so long as you're willing to abide failure after failure. 'Cause failure, it doesn't mean anything, everything fails at first...

Only that's not entirely true, is it? I mean, sure, there were a number of failed liberal revolutions over the years. But the United States has been operating under bascially the same set of principles for about 250 years now. The restoration in France put an end to the more idealistic dreams of the Jacobites and sans-cullotes, but feudalism never really came back to France.

In fact nowhere did feudalism manage to reinsert itself following a capitalist transition. Political regimes came and went, but once the market emerged as the cental economic mover, it never went away.

Largely, of course, that's because so much of capitalism is dependent of development. You need a certain technological and sociological base before you can have a true market exchange. I think pretty much everyone on this board would agree with that. But history shows more than that, not only does sufficient development invariably lead to some form of market economy, but once that transition happens, it can't be reversed.

Once the technology for capitalism exists, feudalism can no longer operate. It's not that the "bourgeois" "overthrew" feudalism, it's that feudalism ceased to be workable in a society that had materially transcended it.

Which is why the entire notion of "bourgeois revolution" is nonsensical to begin with. France had a revolution, but England didn't. Neither did Germany or Japan or a dozen other developed countries around the world. And yet every single one, in remarkably short order, transitioned to capitalism.

There were no "failed bourgeois revolutions" becaue there were no "bourgeois revolutions at all! There were political revolutions, sure, and many of them were instigated by wealthy commoners upset over the lingering influence of the aristocracy. But that's not "class war", it's just good old fashioned social change.

There are no "prime movers" in history. Class has always been an important dynamic, and remains so today, but it is not the end of the story. Human beings just aren't that fucking simplistic. Marx wanted to find an easy answer to the problems of politics and history, and he came up with one -- it's all about class.

The problem is he also came up with a lot of things surrounding that notion, like "iron laws" of history that are demonstrably false and a "labour theory" of value that's ludicrous on face.

Class matters, but it's just one aspect of a very complicated very interwoven tapestry. For a time, the academic world forgot that an Marxianism was a serious philisophical idea. Thankfully, we've moved on as a society.

The days of anyone taking Marxism seriously have long since died, and they're not coming back. Sure, you can find a scattering of true believers if you look hard enough. For instance, there's this message board with something like 7,000 members (although only about 200 are actually active.

But then Stormfront gets that number of visitors every hour.

As I said, there's something very ironic about arguing this side of the fence, on this board, with all you people that I've known for so many years. But there's also something truly tragic about seeing just how deluded so many of you really are.

I was one of you for a long time, but in many ways I really wasn't. 'Cause try as a might, I could never actually convince myself, not in the way you seem to have convinced yourself. I stuck around 'cause I like to debate and it's been real good fun, I say that with all honesty.

But I'm starting to learn that I can have just as much fun arguing this side, and I feel a hell of a lot more honest doing it.

I wish you all good luck with your "revolutions", I really do, but, as you said, you all deserve a good "slap in the face" if you think you matter one iota in the real political world.


It must be remembered that communism was never intended to be implemented in materially backward nations. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky never believed in such nonsense.

Marx and Engles may not have, but Lenin and Trotsky certainly did. Or at leas they thought that "the revolution" could begin such countries.

Well, far be it for me to criticize Lenin's "genius", but that is a monumentally stupid plan. Impose a brutal dictatorship on the Russian people and hope that it will somehow "inspire" the rest of Europe to rise up in response.

How shocking that it didn't work... :rolleyes:

Not only was World War I Russia not a capitalist country, but it was also wholly irrevelevent to the European capitalist system. Russia in 1917 was a primarily feudalistic absolute monarchy, a relic of the middle ages and, relative to its size, one of the economically least important countries in the world.

It was only Lenin's blind Russian nationalism that convinced him that within Russia lay the "weak link" of capitalism. Obviously everyone likes to think that their political scene matters, and the Bolsheviks really wanted to believe that they could be the "vanguard" for a "world revolution"; but the fact is they just weren't that important.

In the end, the masses of Europe didn't give two shits for what was going on in the Urals, and the European bourgeoisie didn't skip a beat when they (temporarily) lost the Russian market. And so, rather predictibly, Lenin was left with his "grand plan" in tatters, running an ostensibly "workers" party in charge of a country with virtually no workers in it!

Is it really any wonder that things turned out as miserably as they did?

And, incidently, there's something rather despicable in the way the Lenin saught to use the Russian people as a part of his large-scale "plan" for Europe. Being a reasonably intelligent person, he had to realize that the chances of a Russian coup d'état precipitating a "world revolution" was pretty fucking slim.

And yet he was willing to subject the Russian populace to year after year after year of brutal top-down "proletarian" rule, clinging to the faintest hope that it might "inspire" people thousands of miles away to imitate his example. To me, it sounds like he was putting his ideological ambition above the practical needs of the people he was ostensibly "representing".

Not, again, that that's anything new. The problem with Lenin, and all other revolutionary "leaders" throughout history, has always been the overwhelming temptation of power: the irresistable urge to use ones position to do "good", regardless of whether anyone below them actually wants said "good" done to them.

It's Stalin and forced industrialization; it's Mao and the Great Leap; perversely, it's even Hitler and the Autobahn.

When people are certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they know what needs to be done, they will got to any lengths nescessary to see their will enacted.

The tragedy of history, of course, is that most of the time they're completely wrong.


The fact that you believe the Soviet Union represented any form of communism is sad in and of itself. The fact that you don't understand the real causes of the bureaucratic states' failure just shows a lack of historical understanding of the issue.

I don't think the Soviet Union represented communism, I think it represented what happens when communism is attempted. I think it represented the kind of bureaucratic nightmare and economic stagnation that happens when you place all power in the hands of the state, "workers'" or otherwise.

Communism, in the sense that Marx intended, has obviously never been achieved. But there's a reason for that, beyond the machinations of Stalin and backwardsness of Russia.

Communism might be achievable some day, as I've said I highly doubt that an amateur Prussian academic correctly sketched out the future course of human events a century and a half ago. But whatever postcapitalism will look like, it will doubtlessly include many of the features commonly associated with "communism".

As long as scarcity exists, however, as long as work is needed and someone is needed to do it, communism will not be possible. You're right, Russia was too backwards to implement communism, but then so are we. So will we be for the next hundred years at least.

I understand the "real causes" of the USSR's miserable failure, they're really not that complicated. But I also understand that those "causes" haven't gone anywhere. We're a long way from Russia 1917, but we're even further away from that day when capitalism will no longer be nescessary.

I don't profess to know when that day will arrive, but I do know that when it does it won't be to fanfare or the waving of red flags. It will be silently, invisibly. Capitalism will not die with the bang of revolutionary insurrection, it will die with a whimper so quiet that no one will notice it's happened until years after the event.

It's not glorious, it's certainly not "revolutionary", bit then neither is the real world.


The mechanization of agriculture increased the average individual productivity of farmers greatly, causing them to only have to work for 8 hours a day while having the basic necessities of life, instead of having to work 15 hours a day while being under constant threat of starvation, like most farmers in capitalist nations are today.

Workers in the Soviet Union weren't under the thread of starvation? What about the ones who refused to colectivize? Or the ones who dared to try and, you know, keep the food they'd grown?

No one starved under Stalin? Really? Tell that to the Ukrainians, tell that to the Georgians, tell that to the millions of peasants who not only starved but died of that starvation.

Industrialization is never pretty, and you're right, it was a pretty miserable affair in the capitalist world too. But compressing that misery onto a single generation is really nothing to be proud of.

Especially since there was no nescessity to move as such a rapid pace! If it was the USSR's intention to reduce the pangs of development, it could have done so over a far more protracted period. The problem, though, was that the Soviets didn't see themselves as industrializing towards capitalism, they saw themselves as "transitioning" to "glorious communism", and were so blinded by that ideological faith that they were prepared to permit any sort of atrocity in order to see it brought about.

The lesson of Marxism-Leninism is that, if pushed hard enough, backwards countries can industrialize very very quckly. I'm still waiting for an explanation of why that's a good thing.


Any person with even a fundamental understanding of Marxism knew that the Soviet Union was destined to crumble. Its economic system of a planned economy was based on insufficient material conditions. Yes, it could achieve great things for such an underdeveloped nation, and it is those gains that we Marxists praise and look to as prove of the superiority of the planned economy, but that developed can only go so far within the limits of a single nation.

So you're proud of the Soviet Union, you "praise it" and "look to it"... but you don't like it. Do you honestly not understand why the rest of us laugh at such absurd hypocrisy?

You can't simultaneously assert that the USSR "proves the superiority" of what you'r advocating and that it had nothing to do with it. If you want the rest of us to look to the Soviet Union as an example of the planned economy in action, then you can't be astonished when we point out what a callosal mess it turned out to be.

And if the Soviet Union in practice had nothing to do with communism, then it had nothing to do with communism and we shouldn't even be discussing it in this thread.

But it's one or the other, LZ, you can't have it both ways.


The Nazis did not achieve something "unparalled in the history of economic development". Stabilizing an economy by nullifying a treaty and heavily investing in the war industry does not equal a "unparalled economic achievement". If the Nazis didn't start World War 2, they would've gotten bankrupt, any person who is familiar with economics knows this.

It was an artificial stabilization of its economy, nothing to boast about.

All economic stabilizations are "artificial", that's the whole point. If the market could stabilize itself without external interference, the Austrians would be right and we'd all still be living under laissez-faire[/b] economics.

You can denegrate the Nazi accomplishment as a minor feat of temporary economic management, but the reality remains that Germany was the only market economy to come out of the Great Depression on top. People like to call Schacht's, and later the MV's, policies just rehashed Keynesianism, but the fact is they presaged Keynes.

In many ways, the United State's New Deal was just an American version of the Four Year Plan, as were the numerous European flirtations with heavy market hampering.

In the mid 1930s, it wasn't the USSR that the world was looking to as a practical example of socialism in action, it was Germany. Germany revolutionized public expenditure models, it revolutionized economic planning, it even revolutionized foreign investment.

Now, a good deal of these policies came out of earlier Socialist Party ideas, and many were actually inspired by early Soviet ideas. But the Nazis were the first ones to implement them in the context of a developed industrial market economy. And in so doing, they would lay the groundwork for the next fifty years of economic policy.

You crow about how the Soviet Union came out of the devastation of the Second World War with still strong economic figures, and you're sort of right. No doubt, Russia managed to pull itself out of some rather abysmal straits. But, on the other hand, it had all the advantages of the military victor to boost its chances.

By the end of the war, the USSR was outproducing Germany something like 7 to 1, but it was also receiving massive investments from the United States. After the war, much of Russia lay in ruins, but her armies were occupying the majority of eastern Europe, and Stalin began literally ripping out East German infastructure to ship it back to Russia.

Meanwhile, [i]West Germany had no armies, no colonies, no real functional industry to speak of; and yet in less than a decade managed to reposition herself as a leading economic power of Europe.

How did she do that? Largely by implementing the same kinds of policies that the Nazis had pioneered 20 years earlier. In 1945, the Soviet Union was outproducing Germany 7 to 1; a generation later, they were dead even; a generation after that, Germany was on top, not 7 to 1, but 20 to 1.

It's been called Germany's "post-war miracle", but it wasn't a miracle, it was a deliberate series of economic plans and fiscal management. That's the ultimate legacy of the Nazis prewar economic policies, and that's why I credit them with accomplishing something unprecedented in economic history.

None of the Nazi leadership lived to see the culmination of their policies, and indeed very few of them probably understood their true ramifications, how could they, their brains were so full of bizarre ideological nonsense that they could barely see straight. But good ideas don't require good people. Certainly your "comrade" Stalin demonstrates that better than anyone.

1930s Soviet Union proved that, if forced hard enough, backwards countries can industrialize very quicky. That's an important lesson, but it's really not a particularly suprising one. 1930s Germany, by contrast, demonstrated that capitalism could be run just as efficiently, if not more so, with a strong degree of government intervention.

It wasn't as flashy as Soviet-style "socialism" -- it wasn't nearly as "revolutionary" -- but in the end it was a far more important economic lesson; and one with a much more lasting influence.


No, "we" don't credit it to Lenin, "we" credit it to the planned economy which is considered to be superior to capitalism by any person with a basic understanding of economic history.

:lol:

That kind of rhetoric always cracks me up, because we both know that you're defining "basic understanding" as Marxist understanding. Meaning that if I pointed out that 99.9% of economists worldwide would disagree with you, you'd just respond that bourgeois economics don't count.

So, yeah, Marxists agree that Marxism is good. That's a truly astonishing bit of news there... :rolleyes:

Meanwhile back here on planet earth, most people with a "basic understanding of economic history" recognize that the planned economy is not only not "superior" to capitalism, it doesn't even compare!

Command-economics aren't even an option as far as most serious economists are concerned. Not because they're right-wing idealogues (although a good number of them are), but because it doesn't really take that deep an historical understanding to recognize that command-economics don't work.

There are a lot of problems with the market, no doubt, and over the past couple hundred years, we've come up with all sorts of inventive solutions to try and soften its harder edges. But every time that some starry-eyed idealist has tried to completely junk the market, it's resulted in absolute disaster.

Being a starry-eyed idealist yourself, I have no doubt that you'll come up with all sorts of reasons for that; chief among them, no doubt, that it's all Stalin's fault and that "material conditions" were never right.

Well, in the real world material conditions are rarely perfect, and when things are shitty, it's all the more important that economic systems actually preform. If your "socialism" can only function in the most ideal of circumstances -- as in, when the country is "developed" enough (whatever that means), when the population is "evolved" enough (talk about Orwellian...), when the leadership is "proletarian" enough, and most fantastically of all, when the rest of the world joins in (!) -- then you're no better than the anarchists, harping on about a vague utopia that can never come to pass.


Compare the casualties to the industrialization of the US, with it's millions of slaves, child labor, elimination of native Americans etc. and then you have a fair point. I'm pretty sure most people (if they know anything about history) would agree that the USSR's industrialization was more humane and efficient than the industrialization of the US.

That's a very clever comparison, the Soviet Union to 19th century America. Obviously no one in their right mind is going to suggest that the latter was not far more brutal.

But that's all it is, clever, 'cause relevent it is not. Your contention is that the Soviet Union was more humane than 19th century America primarily because the former employed a planned economy and the latter did not. I don't suppose it ever occured to you that something else differentiates the two, more than a hundred years.

So how about we compare the 20th century industrialization in Russia with 20th century industrialization somewhere else. How about, for instance, India?

Now, india's still a long way ways from a first world level of development. But then so was the Soviet Union in 1991, so it's not unreasonable to compare Russia's progress from 1917 to 1991 to Indias from about 1947 to present.

Obviously development didn't occur painlessly in either country, but for my part I would much rather have preferred living in the India of 1955 than the Russia of 1932. I imagine, if you were honest with yourself, you'd feel the same way.

And in terms of politics, the two aren't even comparable. Both have been pretty ugly affairs, but there were no "purges" in India and there was no NKVD.

So was 20th century Russia more evolved than 19th century North America? Absolutely. Is that a vindication of the planned economy, however? Absolutely not.


TC already replied to this, I don't know if you saw her post or not, so I'll reply with it because I agree with her view on this:

"Only out of pure ignorance, the standard of living in the DPRK is much higher, the level of crime and violence much lower, and their political repression is directed against people who disagree with me, so I can honestly say I'd rather live in the DPRK."

We honestly don't know what the standard of living is in the DPRK, the government doesn't release figures and no one else can go in and objectively have a look.

Zimbabwe has some abysmal demographic stats, most famously the lowest life expectancy in the world, largely due to the HIV crisis. So it's more than likely that, at present, people are healthier in the DPRK. Living conditions are about more than health statistics, however. And the situation in Zimbabwe, however, is much more fluid, i.e., there's much greater chance of things actually getting better.

The DPRK has been stagnant for about 50 years and will continue as such as long as the present regime remains in power. I don't know what's going to happen in Zimbabwe, but were I living in Harare I would be a great deal more hopeful then if I were living in Pyongyang.

And as for political repression, I've got news for you, the repression in the DPRK is directed against everybody. Or should I say, everybody who isn't on the ins with the regime. That's largely the case in Zimbabwe as well, of course.

So where would I rather live? The obvious answer is neither, of course. But if I was forced to chose I would take the uncertainty of Zimbabwe, over the soul-crushing terror that is the DPRK. Remember, Nazi Germany had some impressive human life indexes too. I still would never have chosen to reside there.

Life is about more than literacy rates, and I susepect that the vast majority of people would agree with me.


Look at the history of all those labor movements, and you'll see that they were all, without exceptions, inspired by Marxism or Marxist thought. The modern labor movement as it exists today originated in the First and Second Internationals, you know, those movements who claimed to be Marxist.

The modern labour movement as it exists today orginated in workers fighting for their rights. The various "internationals" had very little to do with it. The first labour unions were not organized by "internationals" or Marxist political parties, they were organized by workers struggling for decent pay and livable working conditions.

It's so typically Leninist that you would minimize the role of actual workers to one of "following their leaders", but the truth is that the "internationals" and "socialist parties" had virtually nothing to do with the actualy flesh-and-blood accomplishments of working people.

Not that they, like you, weren't more than ready to claim credit for every hard fought victory of the real labour movement; you know, the "reformist" "class-traitorous" unions that weren't fighting for "revolutions", but for "bourgeois" goals like job security and livable pay.

The "leaders" of the labour movement, the bureacrats and career politicians, they might have been inspired by Marx. But the actual workers on the front lines, they were just motivated by what they saw around them, and I highly doubt even 5% of them could quote you any passage from Marx or Lenin.

Good thing too, that way they weren't misguided into thoughts of "revolution". No matter how hard the "labour" politicians tried to pull them that way, they consistantly resisted and confined themselves to fighting for realistic goals and practical solutions.


So your premise was wrong. The people who achieved something were workers who adhered to Marxism, the only reason they were able to achieve those things was because of Marxism. They, however, were betrayed by their degeneration leadership.

And, of course, all of these "marxist workers" were just so damn stupid and ignorant that they couldn't help but follow their "degeratated leadership". After all, it's not like working people are capable of thinking for themselves. absent a glorious "vanguard" to do their thinking for them... :glare:

I guess it really isn't a surprise that the Soviet Union ended up as a brutal autocracy, not when so much of the communist movement is running around arguing that workers are nothing but robotic slaves of their "leadership".

And, incidently, how was it exactly that Marxism was the "only reason" the working class achieved? I'd have thought that the strikes and protests and political campaigns might have played a significant role, but OK, I guess I was wrong. It was actually Marxism, that decripid ideology that offered nothing of any real practical help to workers on the front, that was the "only reason" we have a welfare state today.

I don't know how I could have missed it. I guess I was just under the misimpression that action was more important than academic philosophies. How very foolish of me...:rolleyes:


On "communism" today:


Would you even argue that such an economic system, when applied to the world today, would not develop the economies and material conditions of the world to an extent never before seen in history?

Of course I would. Haven't I just spent 16 fucking pages (between the two threads) arguing exactly that?

"Such an economic system applied to the world today" would result in a bureacratic tyranny the likes of which would put Stalin to shame. Technological development is not just about industry and production, it's also about mass media and information management.

Can you imagine what Stalin could have done if he'd all the tools of the modern world at his disposal? If you thought posters and statues made for a disturbing cult of personality, wait until our "glorious leaders" get themselves 24 hour cable channels and RFID chips.



I don't want a "spontaneous movement", I don't want any sort of "movement" at all! At least not in terms of overthrowing capitalism and establishing a "workers' state".

There are a great number of causes that could use movements dedicated to them. Communism, however, is not one of them.

If you don't want a movement, then you don't want change.

I don't know if you noticed, but the unions are a movement. You said somewhere that you still support unions and their struggles... so what it is, do you support spontaneous movements which arise "naturally", do you support reformist movements which already exist such as the unions, or do you support no movement at all?

I honestly don't know if you have trouble with the english language or if you're just being contentious for the hell of it. But allow me to repeat what I said:

I don't want a "spontaneous movement", I don't want any sort of "movement" at all! At least not in terms of overthrowing capitalism and establishing a "workers' state".

There are a great number of causes that could use movements dedicated to them. Communism, however, is not one of them. -- emphasis added

I want a movement, I want change. I just don't want a communist movement. Why you're having trouble grasping that concept I really can't imagine.


If say in 50 years you die, how will people remember you?

I can honestly say I don't care. I care about how I live while I live, after I'm dead I'm beyond caring about anything, people's opinions of me least of all.

It's an interesting window into your psychological motivations, however. That you're so concerned with how you will be remembered. I can see how such a preoccupation could lead to a more radical political bent.

You want to be a "visionary", to lead a political life that critics a century from now will still write about and admire. I guess that provides a degree of immortality. Che Guevara's face is on a hundred thousand tee-shirts; how many people remember the guy who set up a union and fought for reasonable gains and practical solutions.

The thing is though, in the end, it's the guy who no one remembers who probably did more good. Guevara helped replaced one tyranny with a moderately better one and ran off to fight in some hopeless civil wars.

Makes for a good obituary, but rather lousy politics.

I'd rather lead a good life and be forgotten. Let the future concern itself with itself. I'll happily rest in obscurity. Besides, in the end, we're all forgotten. If it's immortality you're looking for, join a Church. They're the only ones selling.


However, I understand Marxist economics, and you did too, until a few days ago. We know that the anarchy of production which is inherent in capitalism is doomed to fail eventually.

Of course it is. That is, capitalism is doomed to be replaced once its material foundations are no longer standing.

As for the "anarchy of production", it's there for a very good reason. Anarchy may not be pretty, but it beats the alternative. It beats the oppressive nightmare that is all power in the hands of the monolithic state.

Capitalism will fall one day, but not in the sense you're meaning. It won't be "overthrown" or "torn down", nor with the working class "rise up" and implement "socialism" in its place. It will die when the world is no longer capable of supporting it, when the reasons for its existance are no longer present.

Like feudalism before it, and like ancient production before that, when an economic system is no longer current, it doesn't require a "revolution" to end its reign. Nobody "revolted" to implement feudalism, it just came about because the conditions nescessitated it.

So it will be when capitalism is finally made obsolete. But, lest you get too eager, that day is still a long ways away.


The entire system as it exists now is so unstable that it could collapse under the slightest weight. Capitalism itself, a total free market ideology, was discarded decades ago. Now we have a intermingling of capitalism with the government, with the bourgeois state desperately trying to keep capitalism alive, like a doctor desperately tries to keep a patient alive who is already half-dead.

:lol:

How many decades now have you people been saying that? Marx said it, so did Lenin, so did Stalin and Trotsky, so did every Trotskyist newsletter from 1940 to the present. Every year, some article about how capitalism was on its "last legs" and "socialism" was just around the corner.

Every market correction, every recession, every political crisis, and the communist press announced with absolute confidence and boundless glee that the revolution is imminent!

The "total free market" wasn't abandoned, LZ, it never existed. There's never been a true absolute free market, there can't be. Down that road lies anarchy and chaos. What we've seen are various degrees of government intervention, from the protectionist Hamiltonian policies of the 19th century to the social welfare policies of the 1930s and onwards.

But the "bourgeois state" is not struggling to keep capitalism afloat, nor is government intervention in the market at a particularly high point these days. As communists are so keen in pointing out, we're actually seeing a far more free market these days than we did in the 60s and 70s.

If anything, capitalism is uniquely strong today, while the welfare state is taking a bit of a hit. That happens from time to time, of course, and my bet is that this current age of economic liberalism is on its last legs.

As far as the communists are concerned, though, it's just another sign of the end-times. You know, you're a lot like the Christian right; in your warped paradigm, nothing can just happen, it's all a sign of some grande imminent catastrophe.

Two things I'm certain of, fifty years from now, there will still be Christian nuts running around proclaiming that the apocalypse is upon us, and somewhere, some little Trotskyist rag will be proclaiming that the revolution has come.

It's all so damned tragic and hilarious at the same time.


Don't you think that the worker who sees the CEO of his company getting millions in bonuses, while he gets a Christmas package, doesn't know that they are both part of a distinct class who are in constant struggle with each other? Why the hell would they even be in a union if they didn't?

Their in a union because they want a decent wage and don't want to get fired the moment they turn 55.

As for what they think of their CEO, I doubt they like him very much, certainly they're pissed that he gets paid 700 times more than they do. But do they see him as being in a seperate "class"? Do they consider themselves "at war" with him? I doubt it, and I think at some level you do to.

Otherwise, why haven't they "risen up" yet? Why haven't they joined one of the thousands of communist parties running around selling the "class-war" line?

I'll tell you why, 'cause as much as they might not like the fact that their boss makes an obscene salary, they still don't want to see the free market replaced by a planned economy. They still believe that a person should work for a living, and that, in the end, capitalism is a good thing.

Unions aren't about "revolution", they're about what you'd call "reformism", about gaining practical bennefits for their members. That's all they've ever been about.

And that you think that union membership indicates an acceptance of the Marxist political line shows just how detatched you are from actual working people.


On communism itself:


I see that you have taken over the strategy of ignoring the points of the other side from the capitalists.

I already addressed this issue in my previous post, please either reply to it or ignore it, don't evade it by repeating what you said

Not only did I not "ignore" the comments you refer to, I actually quoted them directly and responded line by line! I really don't know what more you could ask for.

Maybe you missed that part? Allow me to repost it then:

Because work sucks and people don't like to do it. And if they have absolutely no motivation to do it, most people simply won't.

There's a reason that the communes failed, there's a reason that the Kibbutzes collapsed. If people can get away with not helping out, if they're presented with the choice of labouring or not labouring with absolutely no consequences either way, 95% of the time they're going to chose the latter.

It's not that they're bad people or that they don't care about the people around them, but human beings have a remarkable capacity for compartmentalization. And knowing that you should help out is a far cry from actually going out and doing it, especially when you're awfully tired and, besides, you just got that new copy of Guitar Hero and haven't had a chance to play it yet and, come on, surely someone else can sweep the street that week...
(...)
"Alienation" isn't a product of capitalism, it's a product of labour. Work is generally boring and people don't like doing boring things. Don't you think workers were "alienated" during feudalism? Don't you think they were "alienated" in ancient economies?

Or did you think that farmers farmed out of "love"? That dye makers wore their fingers down because they genuinely enojoyed self-mutilation?

For 5,000 years human beings have worked for one reason and one reason only, they had to. That you think that can be changed by a single act of "revolution" shows what a completely delusional world you're living in.


If a person refused to work because they are "lazy" (which is an odd concept anyway, at least in such a society, given the fact that children would be brought up in it and the entire concept of "laziness" for 10 hours of work would be deemed ridiculous) then certain actions would be taken by the rest of the community against him or her.

Well that's nice and vague, isn't it. Come on, you can do better than that. What "certain actions" are we talking about here?

Would you be thrown into jail? Maybe have your television set taken away until you "fell into line"? Or will you just be "re-educated", one or two jolts of electicity to your megdula and a fist full of lithium?

Laziness isn't a result of how children are raised, it's just a basic psychological aversion to work. People like to do thinks they enjoy and they don't like doing things they don't. And no amount of "re-education" or childhood propaganda is going to change that.

The problem with "fixing" humanity has always been that most human beings just don't want to be fixed. If you're determined enough and cold-blooded enough, you just might forced the round pegs into the square holes, but you'll shed a river of blood in the process.


There is a phenomena known as social standing. Humans are social beings, they thrive in communities, and they care about what others think about them, therefore they act a certain way in order to keep their position of social respectability in the eyes of other people.

Oh right, the "social standing" argument. The last refuge of the gift economist.

I don't suppose you've noticed the irony in your argument? That you are conceding that people require incentive to work? Funny, isn't it, how you've gone from proposing that people will work just to "give back" to implying that those who don't are "sick" to finally conceding that it will require some sort of pressure to get them into the factory every morning.

Well, you're right, people do a lot of things because social pressure pushes that way. Social pressure, however, isn't nearly as maleable a phenomenon as you seem to be implying. And there's a world of difference between government telling people they should work, and people actually believing it.

Remember, governments and religions have been telling people they "should" work for as long as they've existed. Absent a material incentive, however, most people still aren't motivated to get up each and every morning and trudge off to work.

Social pressure matters, but it's not going to get you to go out in lousy weather down to a job you hate to work for no pay and no hope of reward. And even if by some miracle you find yourself down at the factory, how hard do you really think you're doing to work if you know that it makes absolutely no difference to your life?

Don't you think you might hang out at the coffee bar for a while, maybe chat with you buddies? Remember, they're not particularly motivated to work either, after all, what difference does it make? And in practical terms, that's your "social pressure". Not the Comissar of Efficiency's latest press release, but your friends and aquaintances who are just as lazy and just as averse to working as you are.

You think that paleolithic societies operated on the basis of "social pressure", well you're wrong. They operated on the principle of material pressure. In a hunter gatherer society, if you don't hunt, you die. And communites were small enough that everyone had to participate or everyone would die.

The invention of agriculture changed everything. Once food was in surplus, the thread of starvation seemed a little less, and so society had to shift to a more direct form of material incentive. The pay system was developed and survival became linked with occupations, even occupations that had nothing to do with making the food.

The next great social change will occur when food is not only in surplus, but in absolute surplus; when scarcity itself has been eliminated. Then there will be no more need for materical incentives, because there will be no more need for work.

As long as scarcity remains, however, we're going to need a system for distributing finite goods. And, as appealing as it might be, giving everything to everybody just isn't a realistic option. Not only because, again, people want whatever they can get, but because if material income isn't tied to production, people will just stop producing. And, no, social pressure isn't enough to do the trick, it never has been.

The practical problems alone make a "social pressure"-based system unworkable.

As I posted in the earlier thread:


How hard would it be, really, for an index of productivity vs. consumption to be put on everybody's social networking site, giving due credit to those who work (and work well) and flagging those who shirk?

So, play video games all day long if you want. You'll still get to eat, clothe yourself, get drunk... but when that cutie you want to bang checks you out on facebook and sees that you're a layabout and a drain on common resources, you may come to regret that decision.

Oh that's brilliant, an economic system predicated on "banging" "cuties".

I don't suppose it ever occured to you that that "cutie" might herself be a "layabout", that like most of the human race, she too didn't particularly feel like working for free? Or maybe she just found you cute and didn't much feel like basing her sex life on political considerations.

I'm getting the distinct impression, though, that you didn't put much thought into her life and motivations. She's just supposed to act as the reward, the material incentive if you will for working. Well not only does that just reiterate my point that people need a reason to labour, but it's a disgustingly sexist notion. You don't want to abolish the wage system, you just want to replace pay in money with pay in sexual services from internet "cuties".

Somehow you're under the bizarre impression that lazy people don't have sex, also that people would include their "productivity index" on their facebook account. I guess you could pass a law forcing them; as usual, communist "freedom" comes down to coercion and state oppression.

Mandating what people must include on their web page is an admittedly small intrusion, but I promise you it wouldn't be the end. After all, lots of people don't have facebook accounts, many of us actually meet sexual partners in the real world. In the real world, though, there's no mechanism to stop "layabouts" from "banging" "cuties"! Women will be free to choose partners based on their own criteria! :ohmy:

Wait, I know! We can force people to wear a special tag that identifies their "productivity index"; to make it simple, we can colour code it. Hard workers can wear a red star, moderate workers a green one, and "layabouts" a yellow one.

After all, we do need to make sure that the "parasites" don't consort with our women and pollute our proletarian honour. I think we should hold a mass meeting to announce these new laws. We've got to find a good venue, however. How's Nuremburg for you? :glare:


I am sure this person would have some sort of mental problem if they considered 10 hours of work to be "too strenuous" and getting in the way of his playing of Guitar Hero.

:ohmy:

So it comes out at last. When all else fails, call it a "mental illness". And obviously no one should be forced to "suffer" under a "mental illness", so anyone who refuses to work should be taken to the nearest "clinic" and "fixed".

They might resist, but that's clearly just a symptom of their "illness". And until they concede that the state is right and laziness is wrong, they're obviously still sick and shouldn't be released.

That's a real pretty vision of society you've got there, LZ, a real pretty one. You'll understand if I'm not too eager to skip down the state psychology as social control road with you.

You know how most people still think of communism as oppressive and totalitarian? Well, posts like this kind of explain why. 'Cause when you tell people that if they don't work you're going to lock them up in a mental institution, they're going to universally prefer the system they've got now.

Oh, and in case you didn't notice, fear of being locked up constitutes a material incentive! Under capitalism, if you don't work, you don't eat. Under your system, if you don't work you get shipped off to some government re-education camp.

Explain to me again how yours is so much more "free"? 'Cause, personally, I'd take wage-slavery over re-education camps any day of the fucking week, and I suspect 99.9% of the work would agree with me.


If such a system would have to be "imposed on them", then the state would not be able to wither away, and so on and so forth, and it would not have developed to such a point in the first place, so you are arguing against a hypothetical which isn't even asserted.

The state's not going to "wither away", states don't do that. And, you're right, I'm not arguing your hypothetical utopia, I'm arguing against what would happen were it to be attempted.

At its heart, your arugment comes down to the following: if everybody wants to work for free ...they'll all work for free. Well, yeah. But that's never going to happen.

And so, in practice, you are going to have to impose your utopia, because that's the only way it can ever come about. You're going to need a massive state bureaucracy, and an army of "revolutionary" soldiers and police to ensure that everyone's "doing their part" and no one's going about engaging in "bourgeois" practices like buying and selling and hiring.

And when people refuse to work, as they will when they have no motivation to do otherwise, you're going to need someone empowere to declare them a "layabout" and a "parasite" and to take away their TV or throw them into jail or pump them full of psychoactive drugs.

I don't support capitalism because I like having to work long hours, or having my very survival dependent on accumulating little slips of coloured paper. Of course I'd love to live in the kind of society you describe, in which everybody does their part because they genuinely care about their fellow human and all wants are equally met by a fair and democratic society.

But as beautiful a dream as it is, that's all it is, a dream. Real communism would be wonderful, but life under a Communist party is anything but.


You forget to mention that during those 5000 years there was also scarcity, and never an abundance of production, therefore also a class-system, and therefore....etc. etc.

And when scarcity goes away, we won't need capitalism anymore. We both agree on that. But scarcity isn't going away anytime soon, and so the question is what do we do in the mean time while we still do have scarcity and still do require labour and a distribution of finite resources.

Your plan seems to be to give all power the state and some gargantuum Ministry of Economic Planning, with full faith that despite a hundred years of counterexamples, the "revolutionary" state is incorruptable and humanity "fixable".

You can try to "correct" and "re-educate" the flaws and warts of humanity, God knows many have, but be prepared to kill millions in the process, and I do mean that literally.

I'd wish you good luck, but I'm thankful every day that you're such an irrelevent minority. Because were you to achieve any real power, I shudder to think of the world you would leave in your wake.

[Led Zeppelin]

I split the discussion between me and LSD for the sake of clarity, I hope you don't mind.

I want to request that members only reply seriously, and keep out the one-liners and short commentaries in this discussion, again, for the sake of clarity, given the rather lengthy replies we make.

Thank you.

[RedStarOverChina]

No doubt you're all still sniping at me in the CC (have I been called a fascist yet?),
Why, have you decided to become one all of a sudden?

These days, you'd never know.



France had a revolution, but England didn't. Neither did Germany or Japan or a dozen other developed countries around the world.
Really? You say this despite all your "knowledge" in history? What the hell was the Cromwell Revolution if not a Bourgeois revolution? Did nothing happen in Prussia in 1848? And the Japanese capitalists didn't have to wage war to wipe out the Japanese Feudal lords during the Meiji Reformation?

Without these violent revolutions, many capitalists today would probably end up a lot like you: defeated and demoralized.

There were political revolutions, sure, and many of them were instigated by wealthy commoners upset over the lingering influence of the aristocracy.
And the day will come, when a confident working class with the right material factors, will be "upset" over the control by the Bourgeoisie.



The days of anyone taking Marxism seriously have long since died, and they're not coming back.
Ahhh, the favorite song sang by the reactionaries through out the ages.

That's certainly what they hope would happen. From what I've seen in academia though, things aren't going as expected for them.

The revival of Marxism is a slow process, but this time built on stronger foundations.



But I'm starting to learn that I can have just as much fun arguing this side, and I feel a hell of a lot more honest doing it.
Duh! You've been lying about being a communist all these years, I'm sure you feel quite relieved.

You sure had me fooled though.



Capitalism will not die with the bang of revolutionary insurrection, it will die with a whimper so quiet that no one will notice it's happened until years after the event.
And we'd all be gleefully waiting for the Bourgeoisie to voluntarily give up power like the Feudal lords of Japan did. :rolleyes:

I feel like we refute this kind of reformist arguments every single day, but clearly we haven't done our job.

Then again, the power of "socialization", as sociologists call it, can often overcome reason.

[Schrödinger's Cat]

Well that's nice and vague, isn't it. Come on, you can do better than that. What "certain actions" are we talking about here?

Would you be thrown into jail? Maybe have your television set taken away until you "fell into line"? Or will you just be "re-educated", one or two jolts of electicity to your megdula and a fist full of lithium?

Laziness isn't a result of how children are raised, it's just a basic psychological aversion to work. People like to do thinks they enjoy and they don't like doing things they don't. And no amount of "re-education" or childhood propaganda is going to change that.

The problem with "fixing" humanity has always been that most human beings just don't want to be fixed. If you're determined enough and cold-blooded enough, you just might forced the round pegs into the square holes, but you'll shed a river of blood in the process.You're attacking the purist model of communism. Although many folks here champion absurd notions of abolishing containment centers, to forgive everything else of a spot at the discussion table would be ludicrous. We see capitalists and fascists who are equally in love with their utopian "fatherland" or "anarcho-capitalism."

It's true people avoid and/or neglect work they don't enjoy. I don't recall, however, communism having to abandon all material incentives while such jobs remain semi/non-automated. There will exist natural scarcities like large consumer items. This can be "exploited" (if you will) to fulfill material incentives. Housing, cars, boats, and position in queue lines are all items that (at the moment) can't be produced at the whims of someone's wants. One could theoretically merge anarcho-collectivist and communist theory to form a system where one's efforts correlate to a better plot of land. Recently a theory you're probably aware of called ParEcon was developed where people are reimbursed based on effort. Some aspects of this could be used under communism to invoke something superior to even the capitalist reward system: reward based on effort.

Your responses all appear targeted towards rank-and-file members who insist on touting names in their descriptions. I don't claim to be anything special, but I agree with you on the point of Marx being wrong on more points than most here would want to concede. However, this is nothing separate from anyone with an opinion. Rothbard, Pinochet, Keynes, Friedman, and von Mises are excused of being wrong "because something happened that didn't run according to their strict ideology."

As a matter of a fact I view most of the opinions on this forum poisoned by blind ideology - as I've found on stormfront, and RonPaulforums.com, and democraticunderground.com. It would be a travesty to not think for oneself and simply revert back to the "capitalists=evil," "Stalin=not communist," "Marx=not proven wrong yet" line that many tout, but it's equally displeasing to just deny everything that is evident. Capitalism has waned in some aspects, just like feudalism. The issues of art, intellectual property, food, small commodities, and energy are all being perverted by capitalism. Lords at one time perverted progress by attempting to limit trade on the basis it was "immoral" and that communities should be self-sufficient. It was widely accepted because people didn't know better. Now capitalists pervert progress by attempting to crack down on copyright infringement.

Again, let's not debate purism here.

[RNK]

I don't have much to say, only the urge to snipe a few comments here and there.


In fact nowhere did feudalism manage to reinsert itself following a capitalist transition.


But history shows more than that, not only does sufficient development invariably lead to some form of market economy, but once that transition happens, it can't be reversed.

This arguement would make sense if everyone on this board were arguing for primitivist regression. Thankfully, we're not -- we're merely reflecting upon the historical truth that society is forever changing and that that change is inevitably headed towards one of further social and economic progress.

So you're right. The transition to capitalism can not be undone and fuedalism can not be re-introduced. But like fuedalism before it, capitalism will eventually deteriorate and fall, making way for something new. As Marx said, throughout history mankind has experienced tremendous leaps and bounds; from barbarism to civilization, from pagan tribalism to fuedalism to industrial revolution. This is, quite simply, an objective fact.

What's worrying is your small-mindedness; do you honestly think that capitalism, which has enjoyed widespread existence for less than 200 years, is really "here to stay"? Are you able to comprehend the idiocy in suggesting that human progress has met it's end? Only someone with a complete lack of knowledge about the history of human development would make such an ignorant claim.

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ "Primitive communism" isn't barbarism (just a corrective note). :glare:

We've got at least a few hundred million years. :)

[Led Zeppelin]

There's something deliciously ironic about this entire interchange in that I recognize many of your arguments as one's I've made myself. I've never defended the Soviet Union, and I've certainly never invoked Trotsky's name quite so much, but I must have made the above argument about a hundred times since joining the board.

The only reason I invoke Trotsky and Lenin's name at all is because you lump together all communists into one category, and label it "delusional".

In the process of doing this you commit historical errors that border on the absurd. For example you equate Trotsky and Stalin's line, and actually merge them into one whole "communist line". It's pretty easy to argue like that, because you merge the worst features of Marxism with the rest of it, and then say: "You see! They are all delusional, authoritarian, dictatorial and genocidal maniacs!"

Nevermind the fact that Trotsky and Stalin had opposite views on what Marxism was.

And that is just one example, though the most important, since we are also arguing the Soviet Union in this debate.

So if you want me to stop invoking Trotsky's name, you should stop putting forth absurd versions of history.


The problem with it, though, has always been that it is basically a defense for everything. Fascism didn't work? No problem, liberal revolutions also failed. Stalinism collapsed into a big steaming mess of crap? No worries! Look how long it took for "bourgeois capitalism" to get on its feet!

So basically we're left in a sort of optimistic hell, in which any political theory is workable, just so long as you're willing to abide failure after failure. 'Cause failure, it doesn't mean anything, everything fails at first...


The ABC's of Marxism have totally gotten lost on you, haven't they?

The difference between all those examples you cited and the example I gave are the property relations. I brought up the French revolution because it was the revolution which changed feudal property relations, and enabled bourgeois property relations to come into being.

There were many political changes during this period, all irrelevant to my point. The point is that early attempts at changing the political structure to enable such property relations to come into being failed miserably, though they eventually culminated in the French revolution.

The Russian revolution brought into being some form of property relations which were akin to socialism, yet they failed. Why was it that the USSR, unlike France, reverted back to capitalism? On this point you are correct, the difference was that France already had the material basis for capitalist (or bourgeois) property relations, while Russia did not.

This issue must be kept within the context of economic relations, specifically property relations, in order to be correctly understood.

I'm sure when you invoked this in the past you viewed it in the same context. Too bad that you no longer do.


Which is why the entire notion of "bourgeois revolution" is nonsensical to begin with. France had a revolution, but England didn't. Neither did Germany or Japan or a dozen other developed countries around the world. And yet every single one, in remarkably short order, transitioned to capitalism.

In all these nations the property relations changed, and in accordance the political system changed almost simultaneously. You can find in all of them social upheavals exactly between that period of change of one form of property relations into the other, between social classes contending for power.

There is of course a fundamental difference between the bourgeoisie coming to power and the proletariat coming to power. The former controlled most of the wealth, means of consciousness-forming (printing presses at the time), and could therefore easily manipulate the working-classes to fight for them, only to discard them after the fight was over.

This process of change proceeded differently in various nations, though the example of France is brought up the most often because it is there that the process showed itself most clearly. I would like to keep this discussion therefore within the context of France, not only for the reason already mentioned, but also because it is the process I know most of, having read quite a lot about it from both Marxist and non-Marxist historians.

It is a historical fact that the leaders of the revolution were by a great majority part of the bourgeois class. The members of the Estates-General, National Assembly and National Constituent Assembly were overwhelmingly bourgeoisie. How could they fight for political change without having the manpower to do so? They would need the support of the masses behind them, for without them they were powerless. At this time they decided to appeal to the masses, after the masses took the first steps of course, and to "get them on their side".

The slogan of the revolution; "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" came into being at this time, though obviously you cannot argue that the "equality" part of it was adhered to by the Thermidorian reaction.

It seems as though you are right when you look at the process from a distance, and don't take into the account the events of the period. The system could not function as it did before, therefore the people changed it, end of story.

Yes, they did change, but it didn't change as the masses wanted it to change, now did it? No, it changed as the bourgeois class wanted it to change, after having used the masses for their own political aims.

Class struggle runs through the French revolution like blood runs through your veins, and no matter how much you want to ignore it, you can't.


The problem is he also came up with a lot of things surrounding that notion, like "iron laws" of history that are demonstrably false and a "labour theory" of value that's ludicrous on face.

Oh really, it's ludicrous on face? Then I suppose you would have no problem refuting ComradeRed in this thread: Marxist economics versus bourgeois economics (http://www.revleft.com/vb/marxist-economics-versus-t71937/index.html)

I'm interested to see your arguments against it, since you seem to be so sure of yourself.


The days of anyone taking Marxism seriously have long since died, and they're not coming back. Sure, you can find a scattering of true believers if you look hard enough. For instance, there's this message board with something like 7,000 members (although only about 200 are actually active.

But then Stormfront gets that number of visitors every hour.


Ah, the good old "you are all irrelevant" line. Can't say I haven't seen that before. How many communists are there globally? How many Nazis are there globally? Which one presents a stronger force politically in the world?

Have you watched the news lately?

Despite all the various forms of communism that exist, it is still a factor in the world today, as even heads of state refer to themselves as communist. I haven't seen too many heads of state refer to themselves as Nazi recently, though maybe you can enlighten me on that.

Assessing the strength of Marxism by pointing to a discussion forum....and comparing it to another discussion forum.... how low you have sunk.


As I said, there's something very ironic about arguing this side of the fence, on this board, with all you people that I've known for so many years. But there's also something truly tragic about seeing just how deluded so many of you really are.

I was one of you for a long time, but in many ways I really wasn't. 'Cause try as a might, I could never actually convince myself, not in the way you seem to have convinced yourself. I stuck around 'cause I like to debate and it's been real good fun, I say that with all honesty.

But I'm starting to learn that I can have just as much fun arguing this side, and I feel a hell of a lot more honest doing it.

I wish you all good luck with your "revolutions", I really do, but, as you said, you all deserve a good "slap in the face" if you think you matter one iota in the real political world.

We seem to matter to a lot of people in Venezuela, Nepal, India, Pakistan, Japan, Nigeria, South-Africa, Cuba, Brazil etc. etc.

If you were arguing against a single organization, you may have a fair point. Arguing against communism as a whole not mattering "one iota" just makes you look delusional.


Marx and Engles may not have, but Lenin and Trotsky certainly did. Or at leas they thought that "the revolution" could begin such countries.

Well, far be it for me to criticize Lenin's "genius", but that is a monumentally stupid plan. Impose a brutal dictatorship on the Russian people and hope that it will somehow "inspire" the rest of Europe to rise up in response.

How shocking that it didn't work...

There's a big difference between beginning somewhere and actually implementing it.

You did a great job at simplifying to the ridiculous what actually happened during that period. Lenin's idea actually worked; there was a German revolution, two of them in his lifetime, and both of them failed not because of the "brutal dictatorship imposed on the Russian people" (what did you expect in the conditions of a civil war) but because the German ex-Marxists betrayed the working-class and, like you, decided to go for reform instead of revolution.

Liebknecht and Luxembourg, the two hero's of the German working-class, lost their lives in that ordeal, and for what? For actually representing Marxism, for actually representing the working-class.

Lenin's idea did not fail because of the idea itself, but because spineless liberal traitors like you decided for the class as a whole that "they weren't ready for socialism". Yes, they weren't ready for socialism, and for it they paid with more revolutions and wars, causing the deaths of over 50 million people in just one war alone. I won't even take into account the countless deaths caused by the economic system itself, the mass starvations, the diseases, the poverty, all of which are a result of the illogical capitalist system of production, which instead of basing itself on human need of the community, bases itself on the human need of the individual; the capitalist.


Not only was World War I Russia not a capitalist country, but it was also wholly irrevelevent to the European capitalist system. Russia in 1917 was a primarily feudalistic absolute monarchy, a relic of the middle ages and, relative to its size, one of the economically least important countries in the world.

It was only Lenin's blind Russian nationalism that convinced him that within Russia lay the "weak link" of capitalism. Obviously everyone likes to think that their political scene matters, and the Bolsheviks really wanted to believe that they could be the "vanguard" for a "world revolution"; but the fact is they just weren't that important.

In the end, the masses of Europe didn't give two shits for what was going on in the Urals, and the European bourgeoisie didn't skip a beat when they (temporarily) lost the Russian market. And so, rather predictibly, Lenin was left with his "grand plan" in tatters, running an ostensibly "workers" party in charge of a country with virtually no workers in it!


The European bourgeoisie considered it so unimportant that they didn't even bother sending armies and supplies to the counter-revolution and cause a civil war which ravaged the country even more than it was ravaged by the policies of Tsarism.

The masses didn't give two shits and that is why in the Netherlands alone they were on the verge of toppling the government, before they were betrayed by their "friends" in the parliament, which came in the form of "social-democrats".

Need I even mention Germany?


And, incidently, there's something rather despicable in the way the Lenin saught to use the Russian people as a part of his large-scale "plan" for Europe. Being a reasonably intelligent person, he had to realize that the chances of a Russian coup d'état precipitating a "world revolution" was pretty fucking slim.

And yet he was willing to subject the Russian populace to year after year after year of brutal top-down "proletarian" rule, clinging to the faintest hope that it might "inspire" people thousands of miles away to imitate his example. To me, it sounds like he was putting his ideological ambition above the practical needs of the people he was ostensibly "representing".

Not, again, that that's anything new. The problem with Lenin, and all other revolutionary "leaders" throughout history, has always been the overwhelming temptation of power: the irresistable urge to use ones position to do "good", regardless of whether anyone below them actually wants said "good" done to them.

You would have naturally preferred Russia to stay in the war, slaughtering a few million more people for the honoring of a piece of paper, while the people at home were starving and on the brink of despair.

Yes, yes, Lenin was so selfish, he did not think of the people at all! He should've let them all die, because that's what a person who isn't selfish, like yourself, would have done.

Your "morals" are disgusting and it is no wonder that you cannot relate to anyone else besides yourself.


it's even Hitler and the Autobahn.

The Autobahn was actually planned by the previous government.

Did you go into a coma and lose all your historical knowledge? I could've sworn that you yourself brought forth this point against another member not too long ago.


As long as scarcity exists, however, as long as work is needed and someone is needed to do it, communism will not be possible. You're right, Russia was too backwards to implement communism, but then so are we. So will we be for the next hundred years at least.

The point that I also made in my last post, which you didn't respond to probably because you can't, is that capitalism will never allow itself to be "developed away".

Scarcity exists today only because it is consciously made to. It does not exist today because it has to. If the technology and means of production which are already developed were used to eliminate scarcity, and not to create profits, then it could be done within several decades. This is not only true today, it was true a century ago as well.

Why do you think the World Wars happened? Why do you think any war happens at all? Because the capitalists get bored and decided to "have some fun with their slaves"?

The World Wars happened to save capitalism as an economic system. Means of production already developed had to be destroyed, because it was creating an economic system which was unsustainable. Not enough varying commodities were made to keep the flow of profit going - because technology wasn't developed enough at the time and because people couldn't afford the new "gadgets" - and therefore factories and plants had to close down, workers had to be fired, and the system was on the verge of collapse.

You said that Marxists tend to hue and cry a lot about the system finally collapsing, and keep being proven wrong, and I actually agree with you there (I only used the statement myself in a broad historical context, referring to capitalism as an epoch coming to an end eventually), but you have to admit that during the great depression it certainly had some truth to it.

What saved capitalism at the time, besides Keynesian economics? The war.

Means of production were destroyed en masse, and capitalism was given the job of building it all back up, this time making sure to keep technology up to pace with the development of its means of production, to prevent overproduction from happening, as it had done numerous times before.

Of course this never really worked. Most (if not all) wars that happened after World War two were caused by the same underlying issue; the economic condition.

The point is that capitalism will never allow itself to be "developed away". It will cause wars, famines, and even resort to that horror known as fascism in order to save itself. It is utopian and delusional to think that it won't.

Ironic of you to say we are delusional when your own historical tendency of thought had to deal with utter failure after utter failure, and unlike Marxism, without even achieving anything of significance.


Workers in the Soviet Union weren't under the thread of starvation? What about the ones who refused to colectivize? Or the ones who dared to try and, you know, keep the food they'd grown?

No one starved under Stalin? Really? Tell that to the Ukrainians, tell that to the Georgians, tell that to the millions of peasants who not only starved but died of that starvation.

Industrialization is never pretty, and you're right, it was a pretty miserable affair in the capitalist world too. But compressing that misery onto a single generation is really nothing to be proud of.

Especially since there was no nescessity to move as such a rapid pace! If it was the USSR's intention to reduce the pangs of development, it could have done so over a far more protracted period. The problem, though, was that the Soviets didn't see themselves as industrializing towards capitalism, they saw themselves as "transitioning" to "glorious communism", and were so blinded by that ideological faith that they were prepared to permit any sort of atrocity in order to see it brought about.

When I talked of the mechanization of agriculture and such I was referring to the situation after the initial two five-year plans.

Yes, the USSR did not have to develop at such a pace, and there would not have been as many deaths if they didn't. This is why Trotsky was arguing for practically the same industrialization plan as early as 1925, and why he anticipated many deaths when Stalin decided to takeover his plan and implement within a timeframe of 5 to 10 years.

See, when you merge not only Marxism as a whole but also Bolshevism as a whole into a single policy, a single opinion, and a single theory, then historical fact will eventually catch up with you and disprove you rather easily.

It is a fact that Trotsky argued for this plan as early as 1925, it is a fact that there was an entire tendency within the party who supported his plan, and it is a fact that his position was eventually taken over and implemented by Stalin in a much shorter timeframe causing unnecessary deaths and suffering.


The lesson of Marxism-Leninism is that, if pushed hard enough, backwards countries can industrialize very very quckly. I'm still waiting for an explanation of why that's a good thing.

Go to Russia and ask the average worker when his life was better, under the current capitalist economy or under the previous planned economy, he'll explain it to you.


So you're proud of the Soviet Union, you "praise it" and "look to it"... but you don't like it. Do you honestly not understand why the rest of us laugh at such absurd hypocrisy?

You can't simultaneously assert that the USSR "proves the superiority" of what you'r advocating and that it had nothing to do with it. If you want the rest of us to look to the Soviet Union as an example of the planned economy in action, then you can't be astonished when we point out what a callosal mess it turned out to be.

And if the Soviet Union in practice had nothing to do with communism, then it had nothing to do with communism and we shouldn't even be discussing it in this thread.

But it's one or the other, LZ, you can't have it both ways.


I did say that it proved its superiority, I never said that it had nothing to do with it, at least not in economic terms, which is exactly the context in which I was praising its superiority.

I never praised the political system, and I never praised the economic system as how I wanted it to be or how it should have been. However, it had elements of a socialist economic system, and that should not be discounted. Why not? Because the worker in Russia doesn't discount it, either. He liked the free healthcare. He liked the free education. He liked the job security.

Objectively the planned economy, even in its distorted version, was better for the working-class than capitalism is.

However, it was certainly not the type of economic system which Trotsky envisioned. Ironically you actually agree with Trotsky's position on this matter, even though you don't want to admit it. You said that the planned economy couldn't keep up with the innovations of capitalism, and that at a certain point it hit the surface of its abilities, and started to crumble. The impressive growth rates turned into impressive stagnation, the economy started performing badly, and the system eventually collapsed.

I mentioned earlier that the backward material conditions had a part to play in this, and of course it is the sole reason why socialism was unable to develop in the Soviet Union in the first place. However, the longevity of the planned economy would have been served well if Trotsky's policies were put in practice.

He argued that in order for the planned economy to work correctly, it needed democratic control, for only with such control would innovation be served well. The worker, instead of being criticized and attacked for presenting his views, would be rewarded for his views, and would have a say in the runnings of the economic system. This was an essential for the functioning of a socialist economic system, for without this, the system would become outdated, innovations would be introduced from the top-down instead of the bottom-up, and bureaucratic inefficiency would skyrocket.

The planned economy in the USSR lacked this and also the material conditions required of it, and it was therefore not a fully functioning socialist economic system, despite having elements of this system.

If I were a Stalinist and you were arguing against me, I would be forced to give up, since my positions would be ridiculous, and indefensible. However, luckily, I am not.

I agree that the Soviet system wasn't perfect, I agree that it was not a socialist economic system, I agree that politically it was authoritarian, oppressive and dictatorial.

However, I also agree that capitalism is just as bad, and even worse, though to the worker both are equally bad, and therefore I don't argue in favor of either, except by pointing out the superiority of the Soviet system in its industrialization era in theoretical debates, because the socialist economic system that I do support has elements of that in it.

This is also why Trotsky expressed support for it, and claimed the utter defeat of "classical economists" when it came to that issue.


You can denegrate the Nazi accomplishment as a minor feat of temporary economic management, but the reality remains that Germany was the only market economy to come out of the Great Depression on top. People like to call Schacht's, and later the MV's, policies just rehashed Keynesianism, but the fact is they presaged Keynes.

In many ways, the United State's New Deal was just an American version of the Four Year Plan, as were the numerous European flirtations with heavy market hampering.

In the mid 1930s, it wasn't the USSR that the world was looking to as a practical example of socialism in action, it was Germany. Germany revolutionized public expenditure models, it revolutionized economic planning, it even revolutionized foreign investment.

Now, a good deal of these policies came out of earlier Socialist Party ideas, and many were actually inspired by early Soviet ideas. But the Nazis were the first ones to implement them in the context of a developed industrial market economy. And in so doing, they would lay the groundwork for the next fifty years of economic policy.

You are basically arguing in favor of my position, so I guess I have to thank you?

You say that the policies in question came out of earlier Socialist Party ideas, and many were actually inspired by early Soviet ideas, and that they caused an economic growth "unparalled in the history of economic development".

So, then, you agree that had Germany become socialist it would have had the same growth, and that the command economy is superior to capitalism when applied to an advanced industrial market economy? If not, you just horribly contradicted yourself.

I have to disagree on a certain point though. The German economy primarily stabilized due to the massive investments in the arms industry, forcing them to start the war. Basically the economic stabilization was time bought, and the checks were cashed in when the first shots were fired in Poland.


By the end of the war, the USSR was outproducing Germany something like 7 to 1, but it was also receiving massive investments from the United States. After the war, much of Russia lay in ruins, but her armies were occupying the majority of eastern Europe, and Stalin began literally ripping out East German infastructure to ship it back to Russia.

Meanwhile, West Germany had no armies, no colonies, no real functional industry to speak of; and yet in less than a decade managed to reposition herself as a leading economic power of Europe.

How did she do that? Largely by implementing the same kinds of policies that the Nazis had pioneered 20 years earlier. In 1945, the Soviet Union was outproducing Germany 7 to 1; a generation later, they were dead even; a generation after that, Germany was on top, not 7 to 1, but 20 to 1.

What a mess of contradictions you have made for me! It is hard to find my way through it!

Let's go over this point by point.

You say that the USSR was able to outproduce Germany by the end of the war due to massive investments by the United States. Fair enough, though you overestimate the importance of those investments when you say they were "massive". However, when it comes to Germany getting up to the same level as the USSR in terms of production, and eventually overtaking them, you completely ignore the truly massive investments make by the United States in the form of The Marshall Plan.

Contradiction number one.

You say that Germany was able to do that: "By implementing the same kinds of policies that the Nazis had pioneered 20 years earlier".... but you just said that: "a good deal of these policies came out of earlier Socialist Party ideas, and many were actually inspired by early Soviet ideas."

Contradiction number two.

But it's one or the other, LSD, you can't have it both ways.


1930s Soviet Union proved that, if forced hard enough, backwards countries can industrialize very quicky. That's an important lesson, but it's really not a particularly suprising one. 1930s Germany, by contrast, demonstrated that capitalism could be run just as efficiently, if not more so, with a strong degree of government intervention.

It wasn't as flashy as Soviet-style "socialism" -- it wasn't nearly as "revolutionary" -- but in the end it was a far more important economic lesson; and one with a much more lasting influence.

Ironically Lenin and Trotsky both argued for the same version of capitalism that you are here praising, and the only reason they were unable to introduce this to the Soviet Union was because the material conditions required for it were lacking. So in other words, had there been a revolution in Germany, the Marxists would have implemented pretty much the same plan in terms of economics, while obviously the political system would have been different.

You yourself said this: "a good deal of these policies came out of earlier Socialist Party ideas, and many were actually inspired by early Soviet ideas."

Not just a "good deal", in its entirety.


Well, in the real world material conditions are rarely perfect, and when things are shitty, it's all the more important that economic systems actually preform. If your "socialism" can only function in the most ideal of circumstances -- as in, when the country is "developed" enough (whatever that means), when the population is "evolved" enough (talk about Orwellian...), when the leadership is "proletarian" enough, and most fantastically of all, when the rest of the world joins in (!) -- then you're no better than the anarchists, harping on about a vague utopia that can never come to pass.

I find myself in a truly strange position. I am arguing against two versions of you, and I have the ability to use one of you against the other.

You said earlier that the system implemented in Germany was the type of system you like, and you praised it. You also said at the same time that without a "industrial market" (implying a certain development of material conditions) it would not have worked, and it would not be possible to implement it, at least not the market side of it.

This is basically what happened in the Soviet Union. Lenin and Trotsky wanted to implement this type of system, the material conditions were lacking (no industrial market of any significant proportions), so they were forced to implement one part of it, while not being able to implement the other.

Was this not Lenin and Trotsky's position at all, and I am merely saying it to win in this discussion?

No, a long excerpt, and I apologize for bringing it up, but it is a necessity to prove my point and to disprove yours, or at least that of one version of yours:


State capitalism is a complete material preparation for socialism, the threshold of socialism, a rung on the ladder of history between which and the rung called socialism there are no immediate rungs.

[...]

For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly.

[...]

State capitalism would be our salvation; if we had it in Russia, the transition to full socialism would be easy, would be within our grasp, because state capitalism is something centralised, calculated, controlled and socialised, and that is exactly what we lack.


The American soviet government will take firm possession of the commanding heights of your business system: the banks, the key industries and the transportation and communication systems. It will then give the farmers, the small tradespeople and businessmen a good long time to think things over and see how well the nationalized section of industry is working.

Here is where the American soviets can produce real miracles. "Technocracy" can come true only under communism, when the dead hands of private property rights and private profits are lifted from your industrial system. The most daring proposals of the Hoover commission on standardization and rationalization will seem childish compared to the new possibilities let loose by American communism.

National industry will be organized along the line of the conveyor belt in your modern continuous-production automotive factories. Scientific planning can be lifted out of the individual factory and applied to your entire economic system. The results will be stupendous.

Costs of production will be cut to 20 percent, or less, of their present figure. This, in turn, would rapidly increase your farmers’ purchasing power.

[...]

Without compulsion! The American soviets would not need to resort to the drastic measures that circumstances have often imposed upon the Russians. In the United States, through the science of publicity and advertising, you have means for winning the support of your middle class that were beyond the reach of the soviets of backward Russia with its vast majority of pauperized and illiterate peasants. This, in addition to your technical equipment and your wealth, is the greatest asset of your coming communist revolution. Your revolution will be smoother in character than ours; you will not waste your energies and resources in costly social conflicts after the main issues have been decided; and you will move ahead so much more rapidly in consequence.

[...]

Most Americans have been misled by the fact that in the USSR we had to build whole new basic industries from the ground up. Such a thing could not happen in America, where you are already compelled to cut down on your farm area and to reduce your industrial production. As a matter of fact, your tremendous technological equipment has been paralyzed by the crisis and already clamors to be put to use. You will be able to make a rapid step-up of consumption by your people the starting point of your economic revival.

You are prepared to do this as is no other country. Nowhere else has the study of the internal market reached such intensity as in the United States. It has been done by your banks, trusts, individual businessmen, merchants, traveling salesmen and farmers as part of their stock-in-trade. Your soviet government will simply abolish all trade secrets, will combine all the findings of these researches for individual profit and will transform them into a scientific system of economic planning. In this your government will be helped by the existence of a large class of cultured and critical consumers. By combining the nationalized key industries, your private businesses and democratic consumer cooperation, you will quickly develop a highly flexible system for serving the needs of your population.

This system will be made to work not by bureaucracy and not by policemen but by cold, hard cash.

Your almighty dollar will play a principal part in making your new soviet system work. It is a great mistake to try to mix a “planned economy” with a “managed currency.” Your money must act as regulator with which to measure the success or failure of your planning.

Your “radical” professors are dead wrong in their devotion to “managed money.” It is an academic idea that could easily wreck your entire system of distribution and production. That is the great lesson to be derived from the Soviet Union, where bitter necessity has been converted into official virtue in the monetary realm.

There the lack of a stable gold ruble is one of the main causes of our many economic troubles and catastrophes. It is impossible to regulate wages, prices and quality of goods without a firm monetary system. An unstable ruble in a Soviet system is like having variable molds in a conveyor-belt factory. It won’t work.

Only when socialism succeeds in substituting administrative control for money will it be possible to abandon a stable gold currency. Then money will become ordinary paper slips, like trolley or theater tickets. As socialism advances, these slips will also disappear, and control over individual consumption – whether by money or administration – will no longer be necessary when there is more than enough of everything for everybody!

Such a time has not yet come, though America will certainly reach it before any other country. Until then, the only way to reach such a state of development is to retain an effective regulator and measure for the working of your system. As a matter of fact, during the first few years a planned economy needs sound money even more than did old-fashioned capitalism. The professor who regulates the monetary unit with the aim of regulating the whole business system is like the man who tried to lift both his feet off the ground at the same time.

[...]

In all this, you will not need to imitate our standardized production for our pitiable mass consumers. We have taken over from czarist Russia a pauper’s heritage, a culturally undeveloped peasantry with a low standard of living. We had to build our factories and dams at the expense of our consumers. We have had continual monetary inflation and a monstrous bureaucracy.

Soviet America will not have to imitate our bureaucratic methods. Among us the lack of the bare necessities has caused an intense scramble for an extra loaf of bread, an extra yard of cloth by everyone. In this struggle our bureaucracy steps forward as a conciliator, as an all-powerful court of arbitration. You, on the other hand, are much wealthier and would have little difficulty in supplying all of your people with all of the necessities of life. Moreover, your needs, tastes and habits would never permit your bureaucracy to divide the national income. Instead, when you organize your society to produce for human needs rather than private profits, your entire population will group itself around new trends and groups, which will struggle with one another and prevent an overweening bureaucracy from imposing itself upon them.

You can thus avoid growth of bureaucratism by the practice of soviets, that is to say, democracy – the most flexible form of government yet developed. Soviet organization cannot achieve miracles but must simply reflect the will of the people. With us the soviets have been bureaucratized as a result of the political monopoly of a single party, which has itself become a bureaucracy. This situation resulted from the exceptional difficulties of socialist pioneering in a poor and backward country.

If America Should Go Communist (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1934/08/ame.htm)

By the way, that article is a good read on applying communism to a materially advanced nation, and how different it would be from the Soviet experience. The fears that you express are shared by most people, I (and Trotsky) realize that, but the fact of the matter is that the context of the situation is totally different, and the outcome will be too.


That's a very clever comparison, the Soviet Union to 19th century America. Obviously no one in their right mind is going to suggest that the latter was not far more brutal.

But that's all it is, clever, 'cause relevent it is not. Your contention is that the Soviet Union was more humane than 19th century America primarily because the former employed a planned economy and the latter did not. I don't suppose it ever occured to you that something else differentiates the two, more than a hundred years.

So how about we compare the 20th century industrialization in Russia with 20th century industrialization somewhere else. How about, for instance, India?

It is certainly relevant, though I'll go ahead with your India example.

The difference between India and the Soviet union is not only time, which you already pointed out, but also the economic situation of both nations, and I don't mean initial material development by that, but the property relations.

India's main source of economic growth is foreign investment, due to its cheap labor, it is therefore a part of the global capitalist system, and because of this it is growing at the rate it is today, and has been for quite some time.

The Soviet Union did not have this "luxury". It functioned outside the global capitalist system, in isolated from it, and the reason it did so is because it was forced to do so politically.

So while the Indian economy is growing due to outside sources, the Soviet economy grew due to inside sources, i.e., primarily by the labor and capital of the nation itself. Capitalist India would not be able to do this, as the examples of countless other "poor capitalist nations" prove.

Comparing apples to oranges is something you are doing, not me.


So was 20th century Russia more evolved than 19th century North America? Absolutely. Is that a vindication of the planned economy, however? Absolutely not.

I never said it was a vindication because "it was more evolved", I said it was a vindication because it caused far less brutality and misery on the peoples of the world.

That is a historical fact.


So where would I rather live? The obvious answer is neither, of course. But if I was forced to chose I would take the uncertainty of Zimbabwe, over the soul-crushing terror that is the DPRK.

Your view of the DPRK is rather distorted, and that's coming from someone who opposes the current regime there.

Let's change the context a little however; would you rather live in Cuba or Zimbabwe?

Only a lunatic would prefer Zimbabwe.


The modern labour movement as it exists today orginated in workers fighting for their rights. The various "internationals" had very little to do with it. The first labour unions were not organized by "internationals" or Marxist political parties, they were organized by workers struggling for decent pay and livable working conditions.

It's so typically Leninist that you would minimize the role of actual workers to one of "following their leaders", but the truth is that the "internationals" and "socialist parties" had virtually nothing to do with the actualy flesh-and-blood accomplishments of working people.

Actually no, I merely emphasized the leaders because it was they who eventually turned their back on the original ideas of the movement, and therefore betrayed it. I never said that it wasn't the actual struggle of the workers themselves which caused those gains to be made, that is self-evident, and if you weren't so bent on scoring cheap points you wouldn't have brought that up.

Yes, the struggles of the workers were important, but they were guided by a movement, a theory, an ideology even, and that happened to be Marxism. Before Marxism there were workers' movements, sure, and they fought and struggled, and sometimes they gained something. You are right to point this out, you are however wrong to attach so much importance to this anarchic movement which eventually culminated into a coherent one, in the form of unions in the economic sphere and in the form of Socialist or Social-Democratic parties in the political.

The unions and Social-Democratic parties were theoretically founded on the principles of Marxism. Perhaps you should read up on their early history. The First International was the birthplace of many current-day Social-Democratic parties, the German SPD being one of them. The leaders of those movements referred to themselves as Marxists, before the advent the Third International and "official communism". I can name countless such people, but only a few will suffice: Ferdinand Lassalle, August Bebel, Jean Jaurès and Wilhelm Liebknecht.


The "leaders" of the labour movement, the bureacrats and career politicians, they might have been inspired by Marx. But the actual workers on the front lines, they were just motivated by what they saw around them, and I highly doubt even 5% of them could quote you any passage from Marx or Lenin.

Good thing too, that way they weren't misguided into thoughts of "revolution". No matter how hard the "labour" politicians tried to pull them that way, they consistantly resisted and confined themselves to fighting for realistic goals and practical solutions.

What an absurd view of history. It was actually those leaders who had to pull them in the other direction! See Germany for example, see France for example, see the Netherlands for example...

Also, when I said those leaders were inspired by Marx, I meant the original founders of the movement, not the later leaders who in word were Marxists but in deed were reformists, i.e., capitalists.


Of course I would. Haven't I just spent 16 fucking pages (between the two threads) arguing exactly that?

"Such an economic system applied to the world today" would result in a bureacratic tyranny the likes of which would put Stalin to shame. Technological development is not just about industry and production, it's also about mass media and information management.

Can you imagine what Stalin could have done if he'd all the tools of the modern world at his disposal? If you thought posters and statues made for a disturbing cult of personality, wait until our "glorious leaders" get themselves 24 hour cable channels and RFID chips.

The second version of you is back, and now I have to argue against him!

I'll just refer to the first version of you and point out the contradictions in your statement, again. Didn't you just say that such an economic system was great? Didn't you just praise it? And now you condemn it, though to be fair, perhaps you condemn it because you believe I was arguing for the exact same system as was put in place in the USSR.

If you were, you are wrong.


I honestly don't know if you have trouble with the english language or if you're just being contentious for the hell of it. But allow me to repeat what I said:

I want a movement, I want change. I just don't want a communist movement. Why you're having trouble grasping that concept I really can't imagine.

My comprehension of the English language is fine, it is just so hard to understand the contradictory statements you make. I already replied to your statement, I actually replied to all versions of it (meaning also the hypothetical), and yet you decide to ignore it and repeat your statement as if I didn't.

Allow me to repeat myself:

"If it is the second and you support reformist movements which already exist, such as the unions, social-democrats etc. then you are choosing to participate in the struggle as a reformist, instead of participating in it as a socialist. It is a conscious decision you made, and you would be playing the part of a reformist activist. If you want to go down this road, then fine, of course the limits of your activity must be known to you. You can struggle all you want for change, but if the bosses say no, it's no."


I can honestly say I don't care. I care about how I live while I live, after I'm dead I'm beyond caring about anything, people's opinions of me least of all.

I can honestly say I don't care. I care about how I live while I live, after I'm dead I'm beyond caring about anything, people's opinions of me least of all.

It's an interesting window into your psychological motivations, however. That you're so concerned with how you will be remembered. I can see how such a preoccupation could lead to a more radical political bent.

You want to be a "visionary", to lead a political life that critics a century from now will still write about and admire. I guess that provides a degree of immortality.

Thanks for that psychological analysis of me, mister Freud. Now if you're done playing amateur psychiatrist, let's talk about the matter seriously and leave that nonsense aside.

You say you don't care about how you are remembered after you are dead, which is fine and understandable, given the fact that you are dead. It doesn't take a genius to figure that out, though it does take a petty person to try and score points by ripping my statement out of context and oversimplifying it in such a manner.

It doesn't only matter to how you are remembered when you are dead, but more importantly to how you are perceived while you are still alive. The latter of course directly impacts the former; so if you led a life worthy of positive remembrance, you would be remembered positively. I'm sure you do care about that, unless you are a nihilistic self-centered anti-social douchebag, which I don't believe you are.

You can achieve this by being nice to other people around you. They'll remember you fondly, they'll say "oh, he was such a nice person", and so you shall be perceived, not only after you have died, but also while you are still alive. If this is what you want, that is fine, after all, for most people political activity and consciousness isn't equated to "being nice and caring", you can be "nice and caring" to just the person in question and they'll be fine with it.

I'm sure Hitler's friends considered him a "nice and caring" guy, even though the vast majority of the world now considers him differently. I'm not saying you'll end up like Hitler, obviously you won't because you will be completely irrelevant to humanity as a whole and only individuals close to you will remember you, but it's just an example of how political activity does matter.

It is here that you come into the realm of philosophy, ontology specifically, and where the discussion takes a deeper metaphysical turn, one which I'm not really interested in taking beyond the first stages, because it all comes down on subjective opinions anyway.

What I do want to say though, is that life should have a meaning, and it has different meanings to different people. The devoted Christian preacher considers his going to Church and preaching to be an essential part of his life....how many people does he help by converting other people to Christianity, though? Zero. Even if he does help them, he helps them only by giving them false hope in a fake entity.

Contrast this with the Marxist, who wished to alleviate not only the sufferings of humanity, but also to save it, and does so by presenting scientific arguments in favor of it. One is very simple and probably the most important; why is it that people are starving while we are producing enough food to feed the world 10 times over?

We shouldn't really care about that though, right? We should just get our PS3's, buy Guitar Hero, and waste away our lives focusing on ourselves and our family and friends. Who gives a shit about the rest of humanity, right? Hey, we're lucky to be born here, let's take advantage of it and live our lives to the fullest!

Sorry, but taking such a view is not a possibility for me or for anyone else who is conscious of the misery and suffering of millions upon millions of people, unless they are self-centered egotistical people.

And that is what it comes down to. Not if you are "remember as Che Guevara" or whatever nonsense you try to brandish us with, but if you care about humanity as a human being yourself.


Well that's nice and vague, isn't it. Come on, you can do better than that. What "certain actions" are we talking about here?

Would you be thrown into jail? Maybe have your television set taken away until you "fell into line"? Or will you just be "re-educated", one or two jolts of electicity to your megdula and a fist full of lithium?

As I said, if working 10 hours a week is something you are not willing to do either for taking what you want from the community or for the social standing it gives you, you have a mental disorder or another disease of some sorts and you will be treated for it, while still being fed and still being able to get whatever you need from the community.

A lot better than starving to death or begging for money, isn't it?

All of this is hypothetical though. Even in this discussion I seem to be arguing against two versions of you, one of you which says that communism will come into being after scarcity is eliminated, and the other who says it's utopian to believe it can ever work...

Have you developed a multiple personality disorder or is this just the result of trying to defend capitalism through "logic"?


Laziness isn't a result of how children are raised, it's just a basic psychological aversion to work. People like to do thinks they enjoy and they don't like doing things they don't. And no amount of "re-education" or childhood propaganda is going to change that.

The problem with "fixing" humanity has always been that most human beings just don't want to be fixed. If you're determined enough and cold-blooded enough, you just might forced the round pegs into the square holes, but you'll shed a river of blood in the process.

I love how you ignored the examples I cited and then act as if you were right all along.

I'll repeat what I said, maybe this time you can actually acknowledge it and try to argue against it instead of repeating what you said before I cited the example? I hope so, anyway:

"You are going around in circles here. Stop arguing within the context of current or past societies, no one is proposing that communism could work on that economic and material basis. By the way, it must be noted that during "primitive communist" societies people actually did work for the benefit of the community, like in some Native American societies, and that class distinctions did not exist.

Though obviously that is not the Marxist definition of communism, it does prove that human beings are psychologically able to function in such a society, instead of all deciding to "be lazy and smoke herbs all the time because work is boring", as you probably expected people in those societies to be doing."

Emphasis added.

They worked for the community, and they only did so because of what they received from it in return. Oh, my, sounds like that utopian impossible communism which goes against human nature!

Human nature doesn't exist, and you're not going to invent it. Existence precedes essence. If there is no God to have conceived of our essence or nature, then we must come into existence first, and then create our own essence out of interaction with our surroundings and ourselves. With this comes serious implications of self-responsibility over who we become and who we are. There is, therefore, no universal "human nature".


I don't suppose you've noticed the irony in your argument? That you are conceding that people require incentive to work? Funny, isn't it, how you've gone from proposing that people will work just to "give back" to implying that those who don't are "sick" to finally conceding that it will require some sort of pressure to get them into the factory every morning.

Well, you're right, people do a lot of things because social pressure pushes that way. Social pressure, however, isn't nearly as maleable a phenomenon as you seem to be implying. And there's a world of difference between government telling people they should work, and people actually believing it.

Remember, governments and religions have been telling people they "should" work for as long as they've existed. Absent a material incentive, however, most people still aren't motivated to get up each and every morning and trudge off to work.

There is no irony, if you are able to understand my arguments, instead of trying to nitpick them for contradictions.

I don't know if you've noticed, but taking from society and working because you can take from society whatever you need is also an incentive, so claiming that I never said any form of incentives were necessary is nonsense.

I merely added to it another incentive, that of social standing, and it is one that exists as a fact, since human beings are social beings.

And when I said social standing, I meant social standing within your immediate social relations, such as your friends, your parents, your community etc. I didn't mean any "government" or "state", because no such entity would exist. Merely a "distribution center", and I doubt people will be feeling any pressure from there.

But yes, coupled with the incentives of getting what you need, having to work only a few hours a week, and the social standing issue, you would have to be mentally insane or have a disorder if you would choose not to work.

Would you seriously mind working 10 hours a week if you could spend the rest of your "hobby's"? If so, you are an incredibly lazy person....

You agree with me though, because you said that when scarcity is eliminated, capitalism will "wither away", so what else would the incentives to work be under such a system? It seems to me that you yourself are not quite sure what you are arguing against, and therefore keep making contradictory statements.


The next great social change will occur when food is not only in surplus, but in absolute surplus; when scarcity itself has been eliminated. Then there will be no more need for materical incentives, because there will be no more need for work.

As long as scarcity remains, however, we're going to need a system for distributing finite goods. And, as appealing as it might be, giving everything to everybody just isn't a realistic option. Not only because, again, people want whatever they can get, but because if material income isn't tied to production, people will just stop producing. And, no, social pressure isn't enough to do the trick, it never has been.

What the hell? Are you arguing against a communist society or a socialist society? There are still wages in a society society, so that would be their incentive, the rule "either work or starve" will still be applicable, and it seems as though you were arguing against the latter and not the former.

If so, how on earth could you not have noticed that I was talking within the limits of a communist society, that is, a society in which scarcity was already eliminated?

We were discussing jobs such as sweeping the streets, which has nothing to do with scarcity, and you distorted the entire discussion, mixed communism with socialism, scarcity with non-scarcity, sweeping the streets with actual productive labor etc.

What a tangled web you weave, care to disentangle it?


So it comes out at last. When all else fails, call it a "mental illness". And obviously no one should be forced to "suffer" under a "mental illness", so anyone who refuses to work should be taken to the nearest "clinic" and "fixed".

They might resist, but that's clearly just a symptom of their "illness". And until they concede that the state is right and laziness is wrong, they're obviously still sick and shouldn't be released.

There is no state, there is no scarcity, this is all the result of you misunderstanding the context of our discussion, which was about a communist society free of scarcity, not a socialist society in which scarcity still exists and therefore also wages still exist and the same rule applies as in capitalism of either working or starving.

Stop drawing false consclusions from assumptions.


The state's not going to "wither away", states don't do that. And, you're right, I'm not arguing your hypothetical utopia, I'm arguing against what would happen were it to be attempted.

At its heart, your arugment comes down to the following: if everybody wants to work for free ...they'll all work for free. Well, yeah. But that's never going to happen.

You can have a nice argument with yourself, I wonder who'll come out on top?

"The next great social change will occur when food is not only in surplus, but in absolute surplus; when scarcity itself has been eliminated. Then there will be no more need for materical incentives, because there will be no more need for work.

As long as scarcity remains, however, we're going to need a system for distributing finite goods. And, as appealing as it might be, giving everything to everybody just isn't a realistic option. Not only because, again, people want whatever they can get, but because if material income isn't tied to production, people will just stop producing. And, no, social pressure isn't enough to do the trick, it never has been."

Aha! See if you can reply to that! :rolleyes:


And when scarcity goes away, we won't need capitalism anymore. We both agree on that. But scarcity isn't going away anytime soon, and so the question is what do we do in the mean time while we still do have scarcity and still do require labour and a distribution of finite resources.

Your plan seems to be to give all power the state and some gargantuum Ministry of Economic Planning, with full faith that despite a hundred years of counterexamples, the "revolutionary" state is incorruptable and humanity "fixable".

It isn't going away because it is consciously being kept alive. Only when that conscious bloc is removed and instead of consciously trying to keep scarcity alive we consciously work to eliminate it, such a society can come into existence.

For that to work the means of production have to be run according to logic and reason, not according to profits and for personal gain.

As I said before, capitalism will never "develop itself out of existence".


I'd wish you good luck, but I'm thankful every day that you're such an irrelevent minority. Because were you to achieve any real power, I shudder to think of the world you would leave in your wake.

Yes, what a horrible world it would be, people actually surviving instead of dying through starvation despite of there being enough food for them to eat.

Don't be so thankful, the people living in poverty and starvation are the vast majority, you are not.

[Bilan]

Teh evil anarchist communist has come for your thread.



"...and you know it" , I think I introduced that particular trope to this board. I used to use it back in my CUSID debating days. It's an awfully nice little piece of rhetoric that manages to accuse your opponent of being both a liar and an idiot simultaneously, without having to come out and say it.

Self realisation is quite a satisfying thing, no?



If capitalism isn't the only option, what's the alternative? Seriously, right now, what have you got?As an alternative idea to capitalism?
Libertarian communism.

For examples how this could work, see:

- Workers Councils (Pannekoek)
- Anarchy (Malatesta)
- Fields, Factories and Workshops (Kropotokin)

for historical examples of the practice of this, see:

- Free Soviets in Ukraine
- anarcho-syndicalism in the Spanish Revolution (texts: Durruti the people armed [though, this focuses more on Durruti, but does discuss these things, regardless])
- Hungary, 56 (prior to the reactionary turn of events)
- Paris 68 (though, evidently, not practiced long enough!)

What you seem to be looking for is a perfect answer, which is a fundamental flaw, because a perfect approach to organization is developed through practice as only though practice, can we apply the most practical and effective means of post-capitalist organization.



'Cause so far, all I've heard is a lot of vague notions about planned economies (tried and failed), state oligarchies (can you spell Orwellian?), or bizarre delusions (have you spoken to primitivist lately?).:lol: The bracketed examples I commend you on.
As for the first, its a highly simplistic claim on your part, LSD.
Indeed, what constitutes a planned economy is something that is as diverse as the practical application of the dictatorship of the proletariat (of which, in theory, seems very similar [or at least it used too!], but historically, does seem to come off that way!).

Indeed, would you not say, a planned economy, through libertarian communist organization (of which I know you know what is) would be successful?




Then I apologize. That wasn't what I was trying to say at all.

Don't accept, don't conform, don't "deal" with "suffering". When you see injustice fight to remedy it, when you see low wages, fight for union rights. When you see a man fired for being gay or a woman fired for having a child, stand up for them, fight for them. Support laws that will help their lives, protest bigots who would harm them.It's not good enough.
Despite that, I do do alot (or, as much as I can from my position). Trying to work out what I can do at my new place of employment as far as union organization (independent of bureaucratic unions of which are only going to hold us down anyway) to get more, and defend the rights of the workers.

And anyway, union rights means squat now-days. Especially here. Unions have turned into mere tools of the ruling class against us.
There are exceptions, but they make up only minorities of the union 'movement'.
Largely, it is bureaucratic as fuck, capitalist, and so on. Strikes are discouraged, (and in some cases, just don't happen), collective action is hardly existent. They stand between the bosses and the workers, and continuously, bow to the bosses, while betraying the workers.

And why fight just the symptons?
You never defeat a disease by attacking the symptoms. You have to attack the disease itself, the core of the problem.
That is capitalism.

This is just fucking cough medicine for cancer.



You're right, no one should have to suffer. And we should do all we can to minimize suffering, 'cause no one deserves it, no one. But dreams don't knock down pillars and fantasies don't materialize on sheer will alone.No, they don't, but neither does giving up solve shit. It just perpetuates it.

[Demogorgon]

There is an interesting contradiction in capitalism's intellectual armour regarding people being too lazy to work or not and it is one you see glossed over all the time. Let's start with LSD's claim that people are too lazy to work if they can at al avoid it. He says that from his new (reluctantly) pro-capitalist position. Apparently it is a strong argument that Communism can not work, capitalism must be (for the time-being at least inevitable) because people will always choose leisure over work, even to ultimately self destructive levels.

Let's leave that one hanging for now and talk about something else for a bit.

Here is some very basic economics. If you have some kind of technological development that allows goods to be produced more efficiently, you can potentially do two things with it. You can use it to increase your productivity and make more or you can use it to continue to make the same amount you made before but in less time. You can also go for the hybrid of the two, making a bit more and working a bit less. So far, so uncontroversial.

It is fair to say that over the course of the twentieth century rather a lot of technical breakthroughs were made. To illustrate this, in 1998 America had the capacity to produce everything it produced in 1948 with half the amount of Labour time it took then. Had Amrica as a society chosen to take its technological rewards in terms of increased leisure rather than increased consumption, people would have been working a two and a half day week in 1948, or taking every other week off, or retiring at forty or whatever.

Of course if being stuck at 1948 levels of production forever was a bit unappealing they could have decided to go for the trade off, producing more and working less. Not going for quite the level of consumption achieved today, but not working so much either.

Yet they did none of this, it isn't merely that the average working week did not fall between 1948 and 1998, it actually rose! Even though America could produce vastly greater quantities of goods with the same amount of work as it had done fifty years previously, it was not happy with that, it drove people to work even harder.

Why on earth did this happen? Well if you are a commie like me, there is the ready made answer, capitalism seeks profit, drives people to greater and greater work, even at the cost of loss of social life and ultimately environmental destruction. We all know that tune, no need to repeat it. What does the capitalist say to explain this though? Do they have an answer?

As it happens they do. They say that hours of work are determined by the demand for and the supply of labour on the labour market. I take it we all know how this supposedly works and I need not repeat it? In short people work more because they have chosen to do so, preferring increased consumption to increased leisure. If people are working more than they have in the past, then it is because they are choosing to work more. People will at times (nearly all the time in fact!) choose to work more rather than work less.

A formidable answer, but hang on, capitalism also claims that: "people will always choose leisure over work, even to ultimately self destructive levels". How the hell does that square up?

[BurnTheOliveTree]

I will leave the historical debates to people who aren't still doing their A-Levels, I just don't know enough to say anything worth listening to yet. :(


You know how most people still think of communism as oppressive and totalitarian? Well, posts like this kind of explain why. 'Cause when you tell people that if they don't work you're going to lock them up in a mental institution, they're going to universally prefer the system they've got now.


:lol: Agreed. But LZ didn't say that. Look, he didn't. He said, and pretty colloquially by anyone's standards, that people who just sit on their arse have a "mental problem". I doubt he meant that they were literally mentally ill, just that it's a very strange disposition. I think most people want to be constructive in life. Do you think I'll need to impose my "state psychology" with terror and bullying? :) That's just common sense, isn't it? I've never heard an unemployed guy say what fantastic fun it is to just sit around.

It won't be a utopia. Not everyone is going to work hard for a collective, especially at first, when we're all still fresh from having to fight eachother for wealth. I expect some measure of coercion can't be avoided, but I equally expect that people aren't inherently selfish and lazy. Surely you can see that our economic systems have a massive effect on our behaviour? An economic system which thrives on being selfish, like capitalism, will bring out the selfishness in all that participate in it, won't it? An economic system which thrives on co-operation, like socialism, will bring out our brotherhood, won't it?

I don't think anyone seriously advocates this attitude of if someone doesn't work, you beat them until they do. You can say I'm optimistic, but I reckon people could actually be talked to, reasonably, and persuaded to work for common goals. You may say I'm a dreamer...;)


At its heart, your arugment comes down to the following: if everybody wants to work for free ...they'll all work for free. Well, yeah. But that's never going to happen.

It's not just for free, though, is it? You're just ignoring any possible motivation that isn't straight capital gain, which rather misses the point. I mean, let's take a crude example, just to illustrate the point. An old hospital needs regeneration. You don't need any high-minded ideals, no principle of putting in your fair share, no love of your fellow man, no natural inclination to work, to realise that it is in everyone's material interests, including your own, to get the bastard built and start curing people! You can still be selfish and lazy, even when the economic system doesn't promote it, and there remain incentives to work.

And I'd bet that most people do have those principles of fair play and so on. I guess that's hardly a good argument, my betting on it. :lol: But still, in your experience, do you honestly think most people have such low standards? I know I don't.



You can try to "correct" and "re-educate" the flaws and warts of humanity, God knows many have, but be prepared to kill millions in the process, and I do mean that literally.

I'd wish you good luck, but I'm thankful every day that you're such an irrelevent minority. Because were you to achieve any real power, I shudder to think of the world you would leave in your wake.

But this is the thing, it ain't about "correction" or "re-education", that makes it sounds like communism is all about forcing people to conform to some idealised personality that doesn't actually exist. People are basically decent, it is our economic system, as I said earlier, that forces them otherwise, and even then it does not wholly succed in that. If there is a successful revolution, then it must, ipso facto, have come from the majority of people. Anything else is a a hop, skip and a jump from a flat coup, or a power-grab. A benevolent oligarchy is still an oligarchy, and any "revolution" that produces that is one we should fight against. Hence the failure of the bolsheviks, not enough working class, yada yada yada. But this is not always what happens. We have some infamous and grotesque examples of what does happen when a minority power-grab calls itself communism, but it is not always what happens. I think Bolivia and Evo Morales is a nice example of this. No bloodshed there. Mass-backing. What's wrong?

-Alex


P.S - Just noticed that LZ does appear to literally think that aversion to work's a mental illness, which is a bit weird, I don't agree there.

[Led Zeppelin]

P.S - Just noticed that LZ does appear to literally think that aversion to work's a mental illness, which is a bit weird, I don't agree there.

No, I don't, and I never said I did.

You basically agreed with me in the first part of your post, so I'm not sure why you felt the need to add that little bit at the end which is nonsense, because I never voiced such a position.

Actually my opinion was less "strict" than yours, when you said: "I think most people want to be constructive in life. Do you think I'll need to impose my "state psychology" with terror and bullying? That's just common sense, isn't it? I've never heard an unemployed guy say what fantastic fun it is to just sit around."

I wasn't even arguing that people want to be "constructive in life" and that therefore it was an illness if they didn't work. I was saying that if people who are required to work for 10 hours a week by the community do not do so because they'd rather "play Guitar Hero" as LSD was implying, then they would be suffering from a certain mental disorder or illness, which happens to be a fact, because any person who cannot work for 10 hours a week - performing light labor such as sweeping the streets - while getting from society whatever they need, is not sane.

This is all within the context of a post-scarcity communist society of course.

LSD actually supported this claim of mine (in some form anyway) because he endorsed the view that a post-scarcity society would function in such a manner.

I am not interested in being involved in sub-debates in this thread, so please don't misrepresent my views or attempt to "expand" on them.

[careyprice31]

well you can just tell LSD, Led Zeppelin, that the very fact that pure capitalism had to be abandoned and many leftist ideas had to be brought into capitalist countries (we have a lot of them in canada such as welfare system and free medicare) shows that left is very strong and works well actually. It is very much alive and strong in the world. The very fact that capitalist countries are now mixed and not pure capitalist is proof that humanity needs leftist to survive.




by the way, is it just me, or do LSD seem awfully patronizing and condescending to the rest of you as well (reading about how he responds to the rest of us)?

[KC]

The problem with it, though, has always been that it is basically a defense for everything. Fascism didn't work? No problem, liberal revolutions also failed. Stalinism collapsed into a big steaming mess of crap? No worries! Look how long it took for "bourgeois capitalism" to get on its feet!

So basically we're left in a sort of optimistic hell, in which any political theory is workable, just so long as you're willing to abide failure after failure. 'Cause failure, it doesn't mean anything, everything fails at first...

Historical Materialism isn't deterministic.


Only that's not entirely true, is it? I mean, sure, there were a number of failed liberal revolutions over the years. But the United States has been operating under bascially the same set of principles for about 250 years now. The restoration in France put an end to the more idealistic dreams of the Jacobites and sans-cullotes, but feudalism never really came back to France.

In fact nowhere did feudalism manage to reinsert itself following a capitalist transition. Political regimes came and went, but once the market emerged as the cental economic mover, it never went away.

But how did it emerge as the central economic mover?



Largely, of course, that's because so much of capitalism is dependent of development. You need a certain technological and sociological base before you can have a true market exchange. I think pretty much everyone on this board would agree with that. But history shows more than that, not only does sufficient development invariably lead to some form of market economy, but once that transition happens, it can't be reversed.

Once the technology for capitalism exists, feudalism can no longer operate.

This is certainly true on the economic scale, and is completely in line with Marx's theories of historical development.


It's not that the "bourgeois" "overthrew" feudalism, it's that feudalism ceased to be workable in a society that had materially transcended it.

This, however, is where you deviate. The bourgeoisie overthrew the aristocrats because feudalism "ceased to be workable". The political upheaval came as a result of economic transition. The bourgeois revolution was based on the fact that capitalist economic development was becoming a reckoning force, and that it needed to do away with feudal social relations in order to develop.

The political revolution is connected with economic developments. You are mischaracterizing Marxist theories of development if you think it was so deterministic as to say that political revolutions aren't connected to economic developments.


France had a revolution, but England didn't.

And what of the English Civil War of 1640?


Neither did Germany or Japan or a dozen other developed countries around the world. And yet every single one, in remarkably short order, transitioned to capitalism.

Yes, we could go on about the various transitions from feudalism to capitalism in other countries, but your mischaractarization of the materialist conception of history would make it pointless. Because you yourself believed in such a vulgarized version of this theory before, you are now using that conception to criticize the theory itself. Needless to say, my arguments against you then are the same as they are now.

Making the theory so simple, "pure" and "absolute" completely does away with the theory itself. Marx never claimed that all countries would go through the exact same transition, or that they'd do so in the exact same way.


There were no "failed bourgeois revolutions" becaue there were no "bourgeois revolutions at all!

And here you descend into senseless idiocy. Even bourgeois historians recognize bourgeois revolutions. I learned about the "French bourgeois revolution" in 8th grade, ffs.


There were political revolutions, sure, and many of them were instigated by wealthy commoners upset over the lingering influence of the aristocracy. But that's not "class war", it's just good old fashioned social change.

Completely vague, deterministic and doesn't explain anything about the history surrounding any of these revolutions. You speak of these revolutions as if they were random occurrances that happened by chance completely disconnected from the larger picture or from economic and political developments in general.

In short, your theory makes absolutely no sense, and is based more out of ignorance and a need to separate yourself from Marxist theory than it is logic.


There are no "prime movers" in history. Class has always been an important dynamic, and remains so today, but it is not the end of the story. Human beings just aren't that fucking simplistic. Marx wanted to find an easy answer to the problems of politics and history, and he came up with one -- it's all about class.

This really isn't an argument.

"Marx was wrong because he was!":rolleyes:


The problem is he also came up with a lot of things surrounding that notion, like "iron laws" of history that are demonstrably false and a "labour theory" of value that's ludicrous on face.

No, you and your lot came up with these "iron laws" by vulgarizing Marx's actual writings. Marx considered historical materialism to be "a guide from which to study" and not only revised his theory, but he also found plenty of exceptions to it.

As for Marx's economic theories, there's really no point in arguing it, as your argument (the bourgeois argument) is "prices are set subjectively because I say so".


The days of anyone taking Marxism seriously have long since died, and they're not coming back.

Then you must be trying really hard to "not see it".

As for the rest of your post, I'm not going to bother. It's all just rehashed and recycled arguments that I've responded to countless times that have absolutely no validity. You might have "turned into a liberal" but you really haven't changed that much. Your arguments against Lenin and the Bolsheviks are exactly the same, your arguments against Marxism (yes Marxism) are exactly the same, and your views on Marx's theories are the exact same (the only thing that has changed is that you no longer believe in them, but what's the difference if you never understood Marxism in the first place?).

It's absolutely no surprise to me that an armchair ultra-leftist such as yourself would "change" (not really) into a liberal. But, as they say, ignorance is bliss.

[pusher robot]

As it happens they do. They say that hours of work are determined by the demand for and the supply of labour on the labour market. I take it we all know how this supposedly works and I need not repeat it? In short people work more because they have chosen to do so, preferring increased consumption to increased leisure. If people are working more than they have in the past, then it is because they are choosing to work more. People will at times (nearly all the time in fact!) choose to work more rather than work less.

A formidable answer, but hang on, capitalism also claims that: "people will always choose leisure over work, even to ultimately self destructive levels". How the hell does that square up?

The apparent contradiction arises because you are conflating individual and aggregate demand. Obviously any given individual's first preference would be that everybody else do the work while they ride for free. If you had to order most people's preferences, they would be (from most preferred to least preferred):

1. I don't work, others work for me.
2. I do work, for myself.
3. I don't work, nobody works for me.
4. I do work, for others.

Now, the aggregate demand of capitalism results because people prefer option #2 to option #3. And that's as far as it goes, because option #1 is simply not available under capitalism. But if it were available, people would take it. So any communist hypothetical that allows people to select option #1 has to deal with the fact that most people would take option #1. Of course, it's a classic free-rider problem, because if everybody tries to take option #1, you actually end up with option #3. So if communism results in option #3, people would logically stick with capitalism, which gives them option #2.

[Dejavu]

The apparent contradiction arises because you are conflating individual and aggregate demand. Obviously any given individual's first preference would be that everybody else do the work while they ride for free. If you had to order most people's preferences, they would be (from most preferred to least preferred):

1. I don't work, others work for me.
2. I do work, for myself.
3. I don't work, nobody works for me.
4. I do work, for others.

Now, the aggregate demand of capitalism results because people prefer option #2 to option #3. And that's as far as it goes, because option #1 is simply not available under capitalism. But if it were available, people would take it. So any communist hypothetical that allows people to select option #1 has to deal with the fact that most people would take option #1. Of course, it's a classic free-rider problem, because if everybody tries to take option #1, you actually end up with option #3. So if communism results in option #3, people would logically stick with capitalism, which gives them option #2.

Nicely written. And the three options that would be available in capitalism would vary individual to individual. Each individual would do a cost-benefit analysis.

But I'd divide option 2 into a. and b. -

If option 2 a. was taken, it would require less consumption and more saving in the present in order to invest into the future. I.e. your exchanging some present utility for future utility. You're willing to 'advance payment' to people who work for you in the present. You must value future goods over present goods. ( this is typically the entrepreneur, businessman, or 'greedy capitalist')

Option 2 b. Self employment. Your doing the work of both the entrepreneur and laborer. You prefer both present and future goods but vary in how much of each.

If option 4 was taken, you prefer present consumption to future consumption, to be 'advanced' payment for present consumption. You value present goods over future goods. ( this is typically the working class or laborer.)

If option 3 was taken you value uncertainty in amount of consumption by not working over using your time to work. This is typically the non-productive member of society.

[pusher robot]

Option 2 b. Self employment. Your doing the work of both the entrepreneur and laborer. You prefer both present and future goods but vary in how much of each.

If option 4 was taken, you prefer present consumption to future consumption, to be 'advanced' payment for present consumption. You value present goods over future goods. ( this is typically the working class or laborer.)

If option 3 was taken you value uncertainty in amount of consumption by not working over using your time to work. This is typically the non-productive member of society.

That's not really the way I meant it though. Option #2 doesn't literally mean that the work you perform is purely a benefit to you. It means that the purpose ofyou working is to benefit yourself. So whether you are a hermit, self-employed, a business owner, or an assembly worker, you fall under option #2. The reason you get up and go to work is so that you benefit in some way. You either possess the fruits of your labor or are compensated for your labor - otherwise, you wouldn't do it.

Option #4 is work literally solely for the benefit of another, i.e., you receive little to no benefit whatsoever. This would be the life of a slave, or a prisoner. You work without compensation for your labor. Since this is the least preferred choice, it's not surprising that people do not tend to fall into this category unless they have absolutely no other choice.

[Dejavu]

Ok, thanks for the clarity. :D

You are correct then.

[Invader Zim]

that the very fact that pure capitalism had to be abandoned and many leftist ideas had to be brought into capitalist countries (we have a lot of them in canada such as welfare system and free medicare) shows that left is very strong and works well actually.

Hmm, I don't think that one will pull much weight; the simple come back is, all that prove is that libertarianism is a load of shit and capitalism works best with a mixed economy.

[RNK]

That simplistic statement (that the "left is very strong and works well actually") isn't very accurate.

First off, welfare is slowly being eroded, and has been since the Mulrony days -- infact, just last week the 2008 Federal Budget concluded the creation of a private-interest corporation to manage the employment insurance system's funds, and only an idiot would deny that the Conservative government (and quite a lot of Liberals) are promoting the two-tier medicare system -- access to superior medical facilities for the rich, decrease in spending for publically-funded medicare.

Welfare and employment insurance are becoming less and less accessible to Canadian workers, and we're starting to see an all-out assault on public medicare from the priviledged class. So much for the progressive "left" working well.

[careyprice31]

That simplistic statement (that the "left is very strong and works well actually") isn't very accurate.

First off, welfare is slowly being eroded, and has been since the Mulrony days -- infact, just last week the 2008 Federal Budget concluded the creation of a private-interest corporation to manage the employment insurance system's funds, and only an idiot would deny that the Conservative government (and quite a lot of Liberals) are promoting the two-tier medicare system -- access to superior medical facilities for the rich, decrease in spending for publically-funded medicare.

Welfare and employment insurance are becoming less and less accessible to Canadian workers, and we're starting to see an all-out assault on public medicare from the priviledged class. So much for the progressive "left" working well.

yes you're right.

thats true.

Fuck Stephen Harper. I used to be telling my parents for years that he is a loser but my parents helped vote him in anyway. Then inevidably he did something that really ticked my parents off, and now they hate him. And im like I told you so.

but the liberals arent much better. I dont much like Stephane Dionne, and Paul Martin.......what was it, he had people working for him for ten cents an hour or something? Maybe thats not right but i know he definitely exploited people.

I didnt like last years budget, and I dont like this years budget.

[Demogorgon]

The apparent contradiction arises because you are conflating individual and aggregate demand. Obviously any given individual's first preference would be that everybody else do the work while they ride for free. If you had to order most people's preferences, they would be (from most preferred to least preferred):

1. I don't work, others work for me.
2. I do work, for myself.
3. I don't work, nobody works for me.
4. I do work, for others.

Now, the aggregate demand of capitalism results because people prefer option #2 to option #3. And that's as far as it goes, because option #1 is simply not available under capitalism. But if it were available, people would take it. So any communist hypothetical that allows people to select option #1 has to deal with the fact that most people would take option #1. Of course, it's a classic free-rider problem, because if everybody tries to take option #1, you actually end up with option #3. So if communism results in option #3, people would logically stick with capitalism, which gives them option #2.
Except people don't get to choose option 2. Indeed often they won't choose it. Most end up at option 4.

That might not even be a bad thing. Solely working for yourself won't yield much in the way of results anyway. I mean, two generations ago, not so much my Grandparents who had already come to Scotland, but a lot of my friend's Grandparents who were still in Ireland were working for themselves, on subsistence farms and it utterly sucked. I mean there is a genuine preference to work for someone else and take a proportion of what you are producing in a wage, rather than trying to get by on your own. The reason for this of course isn't tat working for an employer yields you more, but rather that pooling your labour with others yields more and even with an employer (or more properly the owners of the land and capital) leaching off a fair proportion of the proceeds, you can still do better.

At this point of course you will perform a set of mental gymnastics and say that working for an employer is what you mean by working for yourself. You will say that people are freely selling their labour and remain self owners and all the romantic bullshit that has no bearing on everyday life. But it isn't the case. Ask someone who they wok for and they will give you their employers name. They won't (unless they are drunk) say "myself! I am a self governor, I merely rent out my labour" (Well the self employed might, but they are a minority). In short one is no more working for themself and in contract with a company than my house is my own little country in contract with the British Government. our stuff looks good on paper or in the minds of those too young to wrk or who otherwise don't have to, but it so profoundly unrealistic.

Anyway, where were we? Yes, realistially people would prefer not to have to do much work of course, most won't chose to do none at all, because that is psychologically unhealthy and it is the reason why even the very rich often work after a fashion (and let you claim that their income is somehow derived from that work), but yes, people aren't massively keen to do excessive work.

However given that we do have to work and the need does not go aay under Communism, what is the ideal? Well under Communism, one enjoys the fruit of ones own labours. Seemingly one will wish to maximise these fruits with respect to amount of time worked. Obviously that means we pool our labour, but this time without the capitalist leaching off a (large) share of the proceeds. What do we arrive at? Good old socialist co-operation.

On a side not, you repeatedly try and say Communism creates a free rider situation. It does not, there is a system where some people are allowed to live off other people's labours and it is called capitalism. Not Communism. A Communist society can not in practice work entirely on the basis of letting people live off the fruits of their own labours, provisions have to be made for the elderly, the young, the sick and the plain unlucky and of course in practice there are various other factors at play. But the core of the theory sure as hell isn't that an able bodied person can expect to do nothing (through their own choice) and still expect full support. The difference is that because wage labour is abolished, people have a greater incentive to work anyway as work yields greater returns.

At the risk of being sectarian. Some (only some) of my anarchist comrades might envisage a society where one can get the same results from doing nothing as they can from working. But I am not an anarchist.

[RNK]

The liberals are no different than the Conservatives. Afterall, after what, a decade and a half of their "leadership" we've seen the implimentation of this bourgeois anti-healthcare crusade. And unanymous liberal support of the conservative's agenda, their co-operation on extending the mission in Afghanistan (the Liberals only arguementation on the extension of the mission was a difference of 6 fucking months!) The Bloc as well is nothing more than a patsy for the ruling party; we can always expect them to support whatever anti-worker acts the conservatives or liberals will try by being tossed a few million dollars for development of capitalism in Quebec. And the NDP, nothing they've ever done has been ground-breaking; they make a bit of hooting and hollaring but as they've shown the numerous times they've won provincial elections they are incapable of exacting any changes. In the last Ontario elections they ran on a platform which consistent of little more than a raise of the minimum wage to $10 -- where the fuck was this initiative when Bob Rae was Premier? As an "opposition" party they make a lot of grandiose claims but the fact that their influence has fallen since Rae days proves that when the ball is in their court, they're capable of fuck all. So Canadians have gone back to what makes them feel warm and fuzzy and secure (only because they're used to it).

Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats, they can all go fuck themselves. They've done nothing but do everything in their power to erode individual progress and try and merge "economic prosperity" with corporate interests.

[Invader Zim]

The liberals are no different than the Conservatives. Afterall, after what, a decade and a half of their "leadership" we've seen the implimentation of this bourgeois anti-healthcare crusade. And unanymous liberal support of the conservative's agenda, their co-operation on extending the mission in Afghanistan (the Liberals only arguementation on the extension of the mission was a difference of 6 fucking months!) The Bloc as well is nothing more than a patsy for the ruling party; we can always expect them to support whatever anti-worker acts the conservatives or liberals will try by being tossed a few million dollars for development of capitalism in Quebec. And the NDP, nothing they've ever done has been ground-breaking; they make a bit of hooting and hollaring but as they've shown the numerous times they've won provincial elections they are incapable of exacting any changes. In the last Ontario elections they ran on a platform which consistent of little more than a raise of the minimum wage to $10 -- where the fuck was this initiative when Bob Rae was Premier? As an "opposition" party they make a lot of grandiose claims but the fact that their influence has fallen since Rae days proves that when the ball is in their court, they're capable of fuck all. So Canadians have gone back to what makes them feel warm and fuzzy and secure (only because they're used to it).

Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats, they can all go fuck themselves. They've done nothing but do everything in their power to erode individual progress and try and merge "economic prosperity" with corporate interests.


Well that is not accurate at all if you step beyond US borders; in a great many countries there is a difference between principal parties; the US just isn't one of them.

[careyprice31]

"The liberals are no different than the Conservatives. Afterall, after what, a decade and a half of their "leadership" we've seen the implimentation of this bourgeois anti-healthcare crusade. And unanymous liberal support of the conservative's agenda, their co-operation on extending the mission in Afghanistan (the Liberals only arguementation on the extension of the mission was a difference of 6 fucking months!) The Bloc as well is nothing more than a patsy for the ruling party; we can always expect them to support whatever anti-worker acts the conservatives or liberals will try by being tossed a few million dollars for development of capitalism in Quebec. And the NDP, nothing they've ever done has been ground-breaking; they make a bit of hooting and hollaring but as they've shown the numerous times they've won provincial elections they are incapable of exacting any changes. In the last Ontario elections they ran on a platform which consistent of little more than a raise of the minimum wage to $10 -- where the fuck was this initiative when Bob Rae was Premier? As an "opposition" party they make a lot of grandiose claims but the fact that their influence has fallen since Rae days proves that when the ball is in their court, they're capable of fuck all. So Canadians have gone back to what makes them feel warm and fuzzy and secure (only because they're used to it).

Conservatives, Liberals, New Democrats, they can all go fuck themselves. They've done nothing but do everything in their power to erode individual progress and try and merge "economic prosperity" with corporate interests."


I know that. I've always known it. But when the elections come, I'm voting ndp anyway. Fact is, our society isnt ready for a transition revolution to communism as of yet, as someone else said u need to have a greater degree of wealth in the country to make such a transition, we need to be stronger than we are. and any marxist who says the revolution should happen now needs to be dragged over the Arctic ice pack on his /her bare tush.

But it does indeed need to happen, the revolution. It just wont be right now.

Its too bad we have to work within the system, but since society hasnt reached the stage for the revolution, do we really have a choice.

I have to choose one reformist group the ndp as the best of a bad choice.

LOL some choice to pick from: Harper, Dion or Jack. I pick Jack, at least he's more left, even if it is reformist and not revolutionary.

The federal governments like to play divide and conquer. That is shown by what they offered to Saskatchewan to try and get them away from the supporting our premier, Danny Williams, in his fight against Ottawa.

And they are centralist as all get out. They care about quebec and ontario because thats where the votes are. They really dont care about Newfoundland (my province)

Canada was built on the basis of population desity, that started with the very first Prime MInister, MacDonald. He said power should rest with the fedral government and the provinces should be little more than municipalities. He also said clout comes from how big your population is. Federal governments have been playing that game ever since. They spend more time on the bigger provinces than on smaller ones which they dont care about very much cause they are small.

Dion said that if he got in as prime minister he won't give Newfoundland anything.

[Demogorgon]

Well that is not accurate at all if you step beyond US borders; in a great many countries there is a difference between principal parties; the US just isn't one of them.

He is referring to Canada though. At any rate it is inevitable that Liberal and Conservative parties will be very similar. Conservative parties are Liberal as well after all, though they are a bit more authoritarian. As a result Conservative and Liberal Parties are able to form coalitions very effectively as we cn see in a lot of European countries.

You could argue that Conservative and Social Democratic parties can be further apart, but I guess that really depends on where you are.

And of course they are all so close together now and swapping about you can hardly tell. Here in Scotland the Tories are Liberal, Labour very Conservative (probably more so than even the UK party) and the Nats Social Democrats. But it was all different twenty years ago and will be different again in another twenty years.

[pusher robot]

Except people don't get to choose option 2. Indeed often they won't choose it. Most end up at option 4.



You're misunderstanding what I wrote. Please read the follow-up where I clarified these categories.

[Demogorgon]

You're misunderstanding what I wrote. Please read the follow-up where I clarified these categories.

I understand perfectly well what you wrote. Read the rest of my post where I at some length pointed out that the notion of people working for themselves is romanticism and that in actual fact most of us work for others

[pusher robot]

I understand perfectly well what you wrote. Read the rest of my post where I at some length pointed out that the notion of people working for themselves is romanticism and that in actual fact most of us work for others

Then you either still misunderstand or are engaging in sheer sophistry. Ask those same people why they go to work and the answer will invariably be some kind of self-interested rationale. That places them in the second category: they work because they realize a personal benefit to doing so.

[Dr Mindbender]

Then you either still misunderstand or are engaging in sheer sophistry. Ask those same people why they go to work and the answer will invariably be some kind of self-interested rationale. That places them in the second category: they work because they realize a personal benefit to doing so.
its not a personal benefit, by in large it's personal necessity. They work beause if they don't they go hungry and their landlord/mortgage broker will evict them.

[pusher robot]

its not a personal benefit, by in large it's personal necessity. They work beause if they don't they go hungry and their landlord/mortgage broker will evict them.

Are you arguing there is no benefit to satisfying a need? A person only benefits from something they never needed in the first place?

[RGacky3]

I'm not sure about taht pusher robot, I have a strong feeling, based on human nature, that people would prefer option 2 to option 1 if they looked at it honestly. Most people are not satisfied being idle.

[pusher robot]

I'm not sure about taht pusher robot, I have a strong feeling, based on human nature, that people would prefer option 2 to option 1 if they looked at it honestly. Most people are not satisfied being idle.

There are other states besides "work" (in the productive sense) and "idle." For example, play. Or leisure activity. Or sport. Or hobby.

True, a little of what is considered "work" nowadays would be performed purely out of intellectual interest. I can certainly imagine research professors, for example, working on their research simply because they enjoy it. I could imagine fighter pilots working simply because they love the thrill of it. But those people - and those occupations - are not anything close to numerous enough to do the labor required to create the society we enjoy today.

[Dr Mindbender]

Are you arguing there is no benefit to satisfying a need? A person only benefits from something they never needed in the first place?
no, I'm arguing that need and benefit are not inherently the same thing. The two should not be confused. Food, water and shelter are not benefits. They are human rights.

'Benefit' implies a want or desire. This is not something which equates to necessity to survival.

[pusher robot]

no, I'm arguing that need and benefit are not inherently the same thing. The two should not be confused. Food, water and shelter are not benefits. They are human rights.

'Benefit' implies a want or desire. This is not something which equates to necessity to survival.

My point still stands, since people go to work so that they can benefit from far more than bare survival. It's possible to survive through the labor of one's own hands.

[Dr Mindbender]

My point still stands, since people go to work so that they can benefit from far more than bare survival. It's possible to survive through the labor of one's own hands.

that depends on your role within the means of production.

By in large, the lower down you are then the less disposable money above unavoidable expenses you have (ie survival essentials). So in those cases, survival is often the best they can hope for bearing in mind the effects of rising costs of living and stagnant wage levels.

[Demogorgon]

Then you either still misunderstand or are engaging in sheer sophistry. Ask those same people why they go to work and the answer will invariably be some kind of self-interested rationale. That places them in the second category: they work because they realize a personal benefit to doing so.

A Roman slave worked because he could see personal benefit in it too (it avoided punishment and would eventually gain him freedom), did he work for himself?

You are trying to bring up the tired old "self-interest" argument where it is not relevant. Communism allows people to gain the full fruits of their labours. Not just whatever amount is left over after bourgeoisie leaching. If we want to play by plain old self interest then for at least 80% of the population Communism is in our self interest.

[pusher robot]

You are trying to bring up the tired old "self-interest" argument where it is not relevant. Communism allows people to gain the full fruits of their labours. Not just whatever amount is left over after bourgeoisie leaching. If we want to play by plain old self interest then for at least 80% of the population Communism is in our self interest.

Of course it is relevant, in the context of my categorization of work which benefits a person vs. work that does not, and for cardinal ordering it is irrelevant whether the benefit is the full value or past necessity or whatever. You are just arguing for the sake of being contrary.

[RNK]

It's completely relevent, because the only reason a person would settle for a smaller return for their hard work than what is technically attained by said labour is due to nothing more than social pressure on the part of the people who have monopolized our resources. Capitalism began as a small group of people were granted the right to hoarde resources and technology by fuedal monarchies (the patent, the birth of capitalism, was first utilized in mainstream economies during the middle ages, where monarchies granted sole rights to certain tools and technologies and commodities to individuals whose products they enjoyed, so that they would be the only ones to own such commodities). This mutated into the beastly society we know and "love" today, where a select number of people believe that have the right to own resources necessary for life and dictate what the rest of society has to do to "deserve" it.

Full value benefit is completely relevant, because it is completely denied to us. Our existence, the existence of our parents, the existents of their parents and generations of our families is dictated by the social conditioning of humanity to accept and expect less than their full capacity would naturally allot them.

From a certain standpoint, I could argue that capitalism is unnatural because of the fact that it prevents a person from reaping the full benefits of their most basic function -- pure, physical human labour.

[Demogorgon]

Of course it is relevant, in the context of my categorization of work which benefits a person vs. work that does not, and for cardinal ordering it is irrelevant whether the benefit is the full value or past necessity or whatever. You are just arguing for the sake of being contrary.I am saying your argument is not relevant, because you are attacking Communism on an issue where t has no case to answer. Communism is in the self interest of the vast majority of us.

Notwithstanding the fact that your ordering is flawed anyway (no work is very rarely preferable to some work, people just aren't wired that way for whatever reason) the fact is that Communism addresses the issue better than capitalism can as it seeks to allow people a much greater proportion of what they produce than capitalism (and as I mentioned on another occasion allows people to take productivity bonuses in terms of increased leisure, something capitalism usually can't manage).

I don't know if you are thrown off by utopian ramblings from a minority of anarchists here, but the Communist movement does not boil down to a quest to be able to sit around smoking Cannabis all day without ever doing anything productive. Attacking my position as if that is what I believed is about as productive or relevant as me attacking you as if your position were to gas Jews.

[palotin]

Why is it so important to address (point by point, no less) the obvious red-baiting of an irrelevant troll who we can only hope is as miserable as he seems to be? The only charitable thing to do is to let the fucker alone in the hopes that he finds something productive to do with his life.

[PRC-UTE]

Hey LSD, here's what I said in the CC. There's nothing sensitive in what I wrote, so it shouldn't be a problem to reproduce here:



This is a completely normal response, LSD. Take some time off. Enjoy your life: it's all you've got, mate.

The only real mistake or flaw I see here is you consider a handful of university students in a room to be a representative of the "left" worldwide. I mean, c'mon. There's very few examples in the English speaking world of proletarian socialist parties engaged in a real struggle against the state. The few that are, like the IRSP, are written off by much of the left cos they aren't steeped in the writings of Trotsky. http://www.revleft.com/vb/open-letter-revolutionaryleft-t71913/revleft/smilies2/lol.gif

There's much more progressive actions being taken by working class people directly then there are by the "left". Most of the "left" are little more than study groups / re-enactment societies - that covers most of it, from the "left communists" to the tankies.



after being informed that you were restricted:


Thanks, mate. Once I went back and read his entire post I can see why. Another liberal posing as a revolutionary has moved on to find a new hobby.

I thought at first you were going through the natural sort of burnout all committed communists must battle with at times. But class partisans don't have the luxury of giving up.

[pusher robot]

I don't know if you are thrown off by utopian ramblings from a minority of anarchists here, but the Communist movement does not boil down to a quest to be able to sit around smoking Cannabis all day without ever doing anything productive.

Well, it must, if the basic necessities of life are to be considered human rights! Right? If I have a human right to food, shelter, and clothing, then you can't deprive me of those things simply because I feel like sitting around smoking Cannabis all day, right? Isn't this what communists believe? I mean, otherwise, what exactly is meant by the constant criticism that one is circumstantially compelled to work under capitalism? To believe you, it sounds like the same would be true under communism as well!

If I accept your premise that communist income (in material resources) is tied to work, then you are asking me to trade a status quo where I have to work for my income but can at least, by saving, build up some wealth that I control, for a situation where I have to work for my income and cannot build up wealth that I control. And you're telling me I have more control over my life in the second situation than the first!

[Dean]

Well, it must, if the basic necessities of life are to be considered human rights! Right? If I have a human right to food, shelter, and clothing, then you can't deprive me of those things simply because I feel like sitting around smoking Cannabis all day, right? Isn't this what communists believe? I mean, otherwise, what exactly is meant by the constant criticism that one is circumstantially compelled to work under capitalism? To believe you, it sounds like the same would be true under communism as well!

Communism seeks to present a reworkig of athe system of right and wrong. When it comes to positive rights it is based on what the conditions allow, just like any other society.


If I accept your premise that communist income (in material resources) is tied to work, then you are asking me to trade a status quo where I have to work for my income but can at least, by saving, build up some wealth that I control, for a situation where I have to work for my income and cannot build up wealth that I control. And you're telling me I have more control over my life in the second situation than the first!
Communism isn't aout endless work. It is about the good of society being held in common, and people being cared for in common. So, if I create a huge supply of grain, I and others who live in my society can live free of fear of a famine so long as the supply is rebuilt, circulated, etc.. from time to time. If all we need is food, we are free to rest. Contrarily, a capitalist supposedly creates wealth and deserves the fruits of productive labor simply by moving money; an act so inanimate and dead that the Bible speaks against it.

[RNK]

First of all, if you're basing your opposition to this movement based on the murky theories of how true communist, classless, stateless society will operate, don't. It's a waste of time. Neither you nor any communist here can tell you what it will look like, because none of us knows. We know what is scientifically possible, and we can make hypothesis, but these hypothesis, at most, have a very fragile sense of educatedness about them.

What's important in the here and now (and what will be the extent of any progressive revolution that you or I or anyone here will ever experience, unless immortality is invented in the next 50 years) is undoing the reign of oppression, tyranny, suffering and death which has followed capitalism around like a sick puppy. We needn't find an absolute diametrically opposed replacement overnight, or by next Tuesday, or in 6-8 weeks. What's important is putting a stop to what is wrong, which will only be possible if the current hegemonic ruling class is ousted and removed. Then we can start analyzing society and the economy without the restraints capitalism, and see what we can do to make things progressively better.

But I have a feeling, based on how you've decided to formulate your arguements against communism, that you need no reminder of what is wrong with capitalism. What you're looking for is reassurance that what we're proposing will work, because it'd be terrible for us to destroy capitalism and replace it with something even worse.

The first step is realizing that capitalism needs to go. The second step is realizing how it must go. The third is realizing what must take its place. I get the feeling that a lot of revolutionaries try to jump from the first to the third step, without taking time to consider the second, and perhaps most important, atleast from our current timeframe.

[Demogorgon]

Well, it must, if the basic necessities of life are to be considered human rights! Right? If I have a human right to food, shelter, and clothing, then you can't deprive me of those things simply because I feel like sitting around smoking Cannabis all day, right? Isn't this what communists believe? I mean, otherwise, what exactly is meant by the constant criticism that one is circumstantially compelled to work under capitalism? To believe you, it sounds like the same would be true under communism as well!

If I accept your premise that communist income (in material resources) is tied to work, then you are asking me to trade a status quo where I have to work for my income but can at least, by saving, build up some wealth that I control, for a situation where I have to work for my income and cannot build up wealth that I control. And you're telling me I have more control over my life in the second situation than the first!
In Western European Social Democracies Food, Shelter and Clothing are all considered Human Rights that can be achieved without working, yet the vast majority of people still work. In this country if I have no home, the Government is compelled to home me and if I am starving I am given money to feed me. It is not a pleasant business, and it is not very dignified, and for some people (particularly those with mental health difficulties) it does not work, but nonetheless we have the basic elements in place that you say will stop working. And we aren't even a Social Democracy any more either, thanks to Thatcher. Having ones needs guaranteed does not prevent or even discourage one from working.

As for your claim that Communism attacks Capitalism because it compels people to work, it does not. It attacks capitalism for compelling people to sell their labour. THere is a difference. When a Communist points out you have to work, he or she does not do so to say that is an injustice in of itself, but to show that there is nothing voluntary about selling your labour when that is the only practical means on offer to work.

And as for your second question, saving is another matter, but Communism renders it unnecessary. Let's tackle another misconception here before we move on. Communism can not abolish money immediately. It can change its nature of course and eventually it goes as the need for it fades away. But in the beginning it is still there. No longer the source of power it is now, but continuing as a means of exchange. (It is important to note that wage Labour is abolished though because people are receiving the full fruit of their labours in income rather than a wage with profit, rent and interest creamed off).

Anyway, given you are being given this income, there is nothing to stop you saving it should you wish, however interest has been abolished so there is less incentive to save and less need to do so anyway, either on the individual level where one need worry much less about financial hardship or on the societal level where private saving is no longer needed to generate investment funds.

As for your assertion that you can no longer "control your own life". Hardly. Your income is now coming directly from your work where you have a democratic stake in running. What you can no longer do is control other people's work.

[STI]

Oh that's brilliant, an economic system predicated on "banging" "cuties".

At least as brilliant as a political philosophy predicated on intentional misunderstanding and logical fallacy.


I don't suppose it ever occured to you that that "cutie" might herself be a "layabout", that like most of the human race, she too didn't particularly feel like working for free?

Maybe she will be, in which case you'd be in luck. Good chance that wouldn't be the case though, since productive labour has intrinsic benefits that she'd want to pursue anyhow. It's about hedging your bets, and it wouldn't be the primary motivator for labour anyhow.


Well not only does that just reiterate my point that people need a reason to labour, but it's a disgustingly sexist notion. You don't want to abolish the wage system, you just want to replace pay in money with pay in sexual services from internet "cuties".

Just like the "new LSD" to misfigure the broader theme, in this case Status & Prestige vs. Ostracism in order to score points.


Somehow you're under the bizarre impression that lazy people don't have sex, also that people would include their "productivity index" on their facebook account.

Not that spending all day eliminates all potential a for sexual encounter, but that it would stand as a roadblock.

And this focus of yours on sex, for which my example is in good part responsible, ignores the underlying point - that status and prestige can serve as motivators for people to engage in productive activities on top of the intrinsic motivation for them as a means of expressing creativity and establishing a bit of self-esteem.

So, why would people sweep the streets? Same reason they mow their lawns.


Mandating what people must include on their web page is an admittedly small intrusion, but I promise you it wouldn't be the end. After all, lots of people don't have facebook accounts, many of us actually meet sexual partners in the real world. In the real world, though, there's no mechanism to stop "layabouts" from "banging" "cuties"! Women will be free to choose partners based on their own criteria! :ohmy:

...Criteria which often include what you do with your time, not least of all because those things are often an expression of the kind of person you are.


I think we should hold a mass meeting to announce these new laws. We've got to find a good venue, however. How's Nuremburg for you? :glare:

Leave it to LSD to conflate crediting people for work done with recognition with Nazi Germany.

Look, you obviously don't want to be a leftist anymore, which is your own call... but that change in desire has really taken its toll on your argument quality.

[LSD]

Hey everybody!

Hope you've all been well. I haven't been around lately, been busy, and so haven't had a chance to respond in this thread. Nice to see, though, that it's continued in my absence.

There does appear to be a certain degree of confusion, however, regarding my positions, so please allow me to clarify. Also, some of the responses have been just so damned ridiculous that I can't resist responding.

(STI, if you're reading this, I addressed your points at the bottom. I made special sure to get to them, 'cause your cybercuties-as-money paradigm is probably the creepiest fucking political notion I've ever read)

So without further ado, I'll try to organize this into some sort of comprehensible order. Starting, of course, with Mr. Zeppelin himself, and the "contradiction" he accuses me of presenting:


You agree with me though, because you said that when scarcity is eliminated, capitalism will "wither away", so what else would the incentives to work be under such a system? It seems to me that you yourself are not quite sure what you are arguing against, and therefore keep making contradictory statements.

I am more than certain what I am arguing against, but clearly I'm doing a very good job of communicating that to you. I thought I was fairly clear in my previous post, but somehow you've managed to misunderstand.

So let me lay it out ...again. capitalism is a finite phenomenon, a tempory solution to a very ephemeral problem, namely scarcity. Absent a pressing limit on productive capacity, capitalism becomes not only anachronistic but inoperable. It wil simply cease to exist.

That is not a "revolution", mind you. It's not the waving of red banners or the marching of army surplus boots. It's the silent and invisible turning of the historical page, and it it will come and go before anyone, least of all the Hegelian mystics, realizes that a great divide has been crossed.

I think, at some level, everyone realizes that eventually we're going to move beyond the market and the drudgery of buying and selling; that in the far too hazzy future, some sort of utopia is in store.

But you ask me what the incentives would be in a post-scarcity world, and I can't help but wonder if you even know what the words mean. Because in a post-scarcity world there are no incentives. That's the whole point. Post-scarcity, no one has to work.

Once everything is freely producible with the literal push of a button, there's no need for incentivizing labour because there's no more need for labour. But as long as uncomfortable and unenjoyable tasks need being done (i.e., for the forseeable future), we're going to need some mechanism to ensure that they be done.

When the technlogy to achieve near-infinite production is achieved, all of this political stuff will become irrelevent. There won't be a need for economics once everyone can have everything. Our job, as a civilization, is to manage ourselves as best as possible in the meantime.

And that's where our disagreement lies, in the present.

'Cause when you're talking about social pressures and "worker control", that's all scarcity economics. Post-scarcity, there are no workers, no pressures to produce.

No, our argument is over whether or not it is possible to run an efficient effective state managed planned economy today right now. And it's in that direction that my comments are addressed. It's in that context that they should be interpreted.

As for the unforseeable, the "communism" or "utopia" or whatever it will be called when science finally cracks the production singularity, none of us can even begin to talk to that subject. That's well enough, however, we have more than enough problems to deal with in the here and now.


As I said, if working 10 hours a week is something you are not willing to do either for taking what you want from the community or for the social standing it gives you, you have a mental disorder or another disease of some sorts and you will be treated for it, while still being fed and still being able to get whatever you need from the community.

Yes, you did say that. And I believe I responded to it rather vociferously. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, we've had a not too dissimilar conversation before. A few years back, on the subject of drugs, you proposed that those who were addicted and refused treatment should be forcibly treated and I was appaled by the suggestion. You never did understand why.

I don't know that I'll be able to enlighten you here, it may honestly come down to some sort of fundamental divergence in paradigms. But I'll do my best to explain just why your proposals -- specifically the thought of their implementation -- are so damn scarry to me.

You are talking about dictating social law via public health initiatives, perhaps the oldest and most insidious route of the cunning tyrant. From Sumeria to Nanching, from Draco to Hitler, so many of the great evils in history have been delivered in the cloak of medicines to heal the "sick".

When you politicize science, when you try to, effectively, bend the universe itself to your ideological agenda, you set down a very dark road. It's a well-traveled road, for sure, and there are all sorts of paths you can follow.

Hitler took the road of the nationalist and the racist and bent the psychological and physiological communities to his Aryan will. Stalin started off on Marx's path, but thought he saw a shortcut throught some deep woods and wound up caught up in a twilight mess of Lysenkoism and collectivizations.

It's no coincidence that the greatest mass murderers in history were also masters of their own particular ideological domain. Genocide reuires a robust philisophical superstructure; and unfortuntately, Marxism has proven good at providing it.

You want people to work because work needs to be done, perfectly reasonble. Unfortunately, people don't particularly like to work. Even more unfortunately, human beings are nototiously three-dimensional beings, meaning we only see the world around us, not the whole picture. Is asking for 10 hours a week of labour excessive? Not in the least. And, indeed, if anyone would actually do it, such a system might just function ....but no one will.

'Cause you see in the real world, communes don't work, not when they consist of more than a couple of buddies. Good friends can get along for a time, but there's a reason that the Kibbutzes collapsed, there's a story behind the Big Funs of the world.

Work isn't fun, it's never going to be, and it's never going to be something we're going to do by choice. So it's about time we gave up this absurd notion of living "free" in a universe that charges us ten million bits of ATP every second just to survive.

And all your social controls, your redefinitions and "mental health" categories, they will only serve as one more tool of oppressive state hierarchy in a system alreadty overrun by monumental government bureaucracy.

You really think that you're going to get volunteers to come collect toxic waste? Or to redraw highway lines? Or were you just planning on Shanghai-ing them -- no consent required, just "approrpiated labour for the revolution", that's what the Bolsheviks did after all. It's what they had to do. Left to their own the workers and peasants had no idea how to reconstruct the country. No, "someone" had to "step up" and "lead them", right?

And I'm sure it wil be the same with you, red flag in hand, mounted on horse, storming the local office of whatever province of whatever country you happen to reside in (I honestly don't remember where you live, LZ). But after the glory is done and the flags put away for next November, what happens with the men you've conscripted into labour?

Why should they work hard every day at some factory or some collection plant if it gets them nothing in return? You're having awful good fun with your bright red flag and nice horse (I do hope it's an arabian), but they're still humming that old Who piece, "meet the new boss, same as the old..." while he silently prays that they can feed his family.

And when they notice that old Fred, who used to wok at the factory, is now spending his days "producing" art, you know 'cause his just loves that creative process (and the not having to go to work part), you don't think he might get a teensy bit pissed?

Don't get me wrong, communism is a great idea, so long as it doesn't involve any work. And that's not me being facetious. There will literally come a day when human society will no longer require labour, and that day will effectively, although certainly not formally, be the achievement of Marx's dream.

But for now, people need to work, they need to get paid for work, and there needs to be a market to manage the whole business. Obviously that market shouldn't be trusted to run itself, that's what governments are for. But replacing the despotism of the market with the despotism of the state is no solution.


The point that I also made in my last post, which you didn't respond to probably because you can't, is that capitalism will never allow itself to be "developed away".

Scarcity exists today only because it is consciously made to. It does not exist today because it has to.

Capitalism isn't a "thing", it doesn't "allow" or "dissallow". And it will be developed away the same way that feudalism was and ancient production was before it.

Scarcity exists because scarcity exists, not because of some grand conspiracy. Resources on this planet are finite and they are extractable and transportable at set rates, meaning that, for reasons having nothing to do with politics or economisc, it's just naturally difficult for a man in the Sahara to eat Penguin meat.

Economics exist to manage scarcity, absent scarcity, we woudln't even be having this debate, there'd be no point, there wouldn't be any question of property: everybody would get everything they wanted. And that will almost certainly happen eventually, once we develop the tools to extract energy much much more efficently.

Until then, however, we're stuck in a world of problems. Until then, we'll have to struggle with how to apportion distinctly unequal resources. And that's where economics come in.

I don't propose that a perfect solution's come out, I'm sure that a better model exists, but I know that it's Marxism is not it. I know that merging the economic and political is a catastrophic mistake that inevitable leads to abuse and disaster.

We need smart people to think of new smart solutions to the very real problems which do exist, but the age of "revolution" is over.


Ah, the good old "you are all irrelevant" line. Can't say I haven't seen that before. How many communists are there globally? How many Nazis are there globally? Which one presents a stronger force politically in the world?

Have you watched the news lately?

I have, actually, and the game's not exactly going your way. I don't know what news reports you've been reading (GNN, perhaps? :rolleyes:), but the far-right is actually making some rather striking gains. Across Europe, radical nationalist parties are starting to see support the likes of which they never could have dreamed of a few decades ago.

And, seriously, aren't you the guys who are so paranoid about "nazis"? There's something wierd in you trying to convince me that the far-right is not a menacing threat. 'Cause I actually agree with you! Many of your "comrades" don't, however. Many of them are still trapped in some pathetic psychodramatical recreation of the battle of Cable Street, and see the "fash" as being around every corner.

The reality, however, as you rightly point out, is that fascism and Nazisim is effectively dead as an ideology. The Nationalists are doing well in Europe, though, and it's important that we keep up with that 'cause, microscopic though they are, they're vociferous motherfuckers and they're fucking geniuses at generating random publicity.

So, yeah, the far-far-right's basically extinct. But, seriously, buddy, I've got news for you, so's your crew.

Talking about "communists, globally" is like talking about Unitarians; everyone knows they're out there, but they don't really do anything and no one really cares.

Are there more "Communists" than "Nazis" (notice the big letters), probably, but that's just 'cause the case against the Nazis was made so much more convincingly. But we're talking specks against specks here.

There are no Nazis and there are no communists. I mean, yeah, there are communists like you obviously, but in terms of massive powerful movements, what have you really got, honestly?

Nepal? A bunch of paranoid xenophobic ex-politicians who decided that "chairman" read just as nice as "King".
Venezuela? A social democracy, at best, with a president who happens to be partial to firery rhetoric. Don't misunderstand me, I've been to Venezuela, it's a great country, with great people and a whole bunch of great political possibilities, but it sure as hell ain't Marxist.
And how about Cuba? Well in recent political news, the very very old dictator has been replaced by his even older brother; so you know democracy is just running fantastically there... :rolleyes:

And as for the rest, they don't even deserve a mention. China? North Korea? Vietnam? I doubt you even want to claim them as yours, in fact I'm certain of it. And yet, I'm equally sure that any success they achieve will be touted by the communist press internationally as a symbol of the "power" of "socialism".

It's truly astonishing how confident you can be of your own supreme importance, despite a universe of evidence pointing to the opposite extreme.



The problem is he also came up with a lot of things surrounding that notion, like "iron laws" of history that are demonstrably false and a "labour theory" of value that's ludicrous on face.

Oh really, it's ludicrous on face? Then I suppose you would have no problem refuting ComradeRed in this thread: Marxist economics versus bourgeois economics

I'm interested to see your arguments against it, since you seem to be so sure of yourself.

:lol:

None of us (including Mr. Red) are experts in economics, and I'm sure that you don't want to turn this into a debate on the merits of the Labour Theory of Value.

Not only because such a prospect would be so boring as to drive both of us to immediate suicide, but also because at some level you must realize that the LTV has always been the weakest link of Marxist theory. That, ultimately, "scientific socialism" is hardly deserving of the label.

But then that was always Marx's selling point. Remember, Marx came out of the 19th century tradition of deterministic Newtonian romanticism. He really believed that he could come up with a set of "iron laws" of socialism with nothing more than his mind and a steady pen.

And good for him, that kind of cocky inflexibility is at the heart of all great innovations. But cockiness is not a substitute for accuracy and Marx's "solution", for all its, um, length, falls far far short of reality.

The fact is labour is not the source of value! It's an element of value, certainly, but all value most certainly does not "flow" out of the semi-devine fingertips of "proletariat". Value is not a property of matter, it is a social attribute and one which is entirely subjective. Which is why, for 150 of trying, Marxist "economists" are still running in circles trying to explain why the pound of dirt I spend three months digging out of the ground isn't worth the sum of my labour expenditures.

I don't profess to know the answers to the great economic questions, but I do know that Marx didn't know them either. And so does everyone else who's picked up an economics textbook in the last hundred years.


This process of change proceeded differently in various nations, though the example of France is brought up the most often because it is there that the process showed itself most clearly. I would like to keep this discussion therefore within the context of France, not only for the reason already mentioned, but also because it is the process I know most of, having read quite a lot about it from both Marxist and non-Marxist historian

The example of France is not brought up a lot because it "shows" Marxist history, but because it is Marxist history! Marxist historiography is basically the hisotry of western Europe, with a few concessions made to the Americas.

That's why Marx had such trouble fitting his "iron laws" with the "oriental despotisms". For some reason those pesky asians just refused to follow his neat line of historical development. In the end, Marxist historians in Asia even began to reinvent words to predend that something approaching fuedalism had actually happened in China, it's just that nobody had noticed.

I guessed the Chinese just weren't as intelligent as old Marx. They just didin't realize that the entire world "must" have followed Europe's developmental pattern, despite the fact that they ...didn't.

Now you can reinterpret and redefine as much as you want, the fact remains there was no "bourgeois revolution" in England, or in Japan, and yet they both developed some very functional capitalist economies. It would appear that the "class war" synthesis didin't quite apply there ...or to Germany, or China, or the rest of Asia really, or Africa of course, or North America actually, or even Europe...

In fact nowhere, was class the single determing factor of human relations. It was often important, sometimes supremely so, but at other times, it was decidely junior.

Unsurprisingly, human beings are a tad more complicated than a one word answer.


What a mess of contradictions you have made for me! It is hard to find my way through it!

Let's go over this point by point.

You say that the USSR was able to outproduce Germany by the end of the war due to massive investments by the United States. Fair enough, though you overestimate the importance of those investments when you say they were "massive". However, when it comes to Germany getting up to the same level as the USSR in terms of production, and eventually overtaking them, you completely ignore the truly massive investments make by the United States in the form of The Marshall Plan.

Contradiction number one.

You say that Germany was able to do that: "By implementing the same kinds of policies that the Nazis had pioneered 20 years earlier".... but you just said that: "a good deal of these policies came out of earlier Socialist Party ideas, and many were actually inspired by early Soviet ideas."

Contradiction number two.

But it's one or the other, LSD, you can't have it both ways.

"Contradiction number one" isn't so much a contradiction as it is an omission; you're right, I didn't mention US investment in western Europe and I should have, no doubt it was important. But it still doesn't explain Germany's economic turn around, especially since the US had pumped almost as much raw materials into the USSR over the previous three years.

And remember, the Marshall plan always favoured the rest of Europe over Germany, and least in its first incarnation. And meanwhile, Stalin was busy strip mining east Germany to plant his own Ruhr valley east of Minsk.

And as for "contradiction two", you seem to be missing the point entirely. It's not a "contradition" that the social-democratic policies adapted heavily from earlier socialist ideas. That was the whole point. What the German economic policies showed in the 1930s was that government control could co-exist with a market.

The USSR thought that it could "transcent" such "temporal" matters and elevtae itself to some sort of Marxist state of grace. All it managed was to accumulate a bureaucratic nightmate. Meanwhile, Germany actually took many of the early Soviet ideas and applied them to a real capitalist mixed economy and proved that compromise really is the better part of valour.

I know, I know, it's not "revolutionary" to take from all sides. It's only sensible. But then sensibility doesn't take you very far in "radical" politics.

No, apparently for that, all one needs are a bandana and sun glasses... :rolleyes:


You did a great job at simplifying to the ridiculous what actually happened during that period. Lenin's idea actually worked; there was a German revolution, two of them in his lifetime, and both of them failed not because of the "brutal dictatorship imposed on the Russian people" (what did you expect in the conditions of a civil war) but because the German ex-Marxists betrayed the working-class and, like you, decided to go for reform instead of revolution.

:lol: Oh, I get it, it wasn't Lenin's fault that the USSR turned to shit, it was mine! Well that seems perfectly reasonable, I cant imagine why I never figured it out sooner.

Seriously, though, it was a monumentally moronic plan and the simplest evidence for that remains how completely and utterly it went to shit. Yeah, there were attempted revolutions in Germany. There have been attempted revolutions in fucking Vermont.

But what Lenin's plan called for wasn't just revolutions, it wasn't even successful revolutions; for Lenin, nothing short of a complete World Revolution would satisfy his egomaniacal lust. I'm sure he would have been satisfied with just a couple of western European countries, but I think he really did expect the whole fucking world to rise up behind him. Such was the scope of this man's astounding arrogance.

And once the world universally announced that they couldn't give two shits for Mr. Ulyanov and his bolsheviks he was left with an actual country to run, full of actual people with actual problems.

And that's when the true callousness of his "great plan" was revealed. 'Cause not only was he prepared to grasp the whole of "mother russia" into his iron fist, but he would squeeze her into a tool of pure ideology. The Soviet Union became not so much a country, but a political vehicle for the ideological convictions of one particularly vain old man.

Lenin did a lot of good things, especially early on, but he was never able to escape from that great steel trap of conviction. He was so absolutely certain in his Marxist(-Leninst?) ideas, that he was literally blind to the real world around him. To adapt a phrase, he couldn't see the factories for the workers.

And so he instead of helping Russia throw off feudalism and enter the rest of Europe in the twentieth century, he set up a monstrocity that would throw off Russian development and political liberties for the next three-quarters of a century.

All because he had a "plan".

In the end, it's the "great men" with "plans" that will destroy us. Shakespear was wrong, first we should drown all the leaders. Lawyers can go second.... ;)


Yes, the USSR did not have to develop at such a pace, and there would not have been as many deaths if they didn't. This is why Trotsky was arguing for practically the same industrialization plan as early as 1925, and why he anticipated many deaths when Stalin decided to takeover his plan and implement within a timeframe of 5 to 10 years.

And you really don't see the irony of, on the one hand, praising the Soviet Union for its rapid industrialization and, on the other, condeming its human cost?

This is the most disturbing aspect of Trotksyism. At least Stalinists are so far gone that they actually believe the Soviet Union was a success. They're nuts, but at least they're consistant in their nuttiness. But you, you realize that the USSR was a mess, you come out and agree that its development was wrongheaded and brutal ...and yet you still hold it up as a "triumph" of "socialism".

But the problem here is that the only "triumph" the Soviet Union accomplished was speed. The development itself was rather inconsistant and, in many areas, incomplete. Take away the rapidity factor, and suddenly the Soviet economy isn't quite so impressive.

So, again, I say that the USSR and her immitators prove that a planned economy can greatly accelerate the time-frame for development. It's really not surprising, a command economy is much more easily pushed in a particular direction than a free one.

But that speed can only be bought with great cost to the actual people (working class mostly) who are forced to suffer through the compression of a hundred years of social turbulance into a few decades.

So is it worth it? Sometimes, maybe. Seems to me, though, that the evidence is pretty conclusive that there's a middle ground available. That while we should do our best to accelerate industrialization in third world countries, a degree of care must still be made for the people who have to live through the transformation.

The Soviets at the very least set up a bare-bones public welfare system, and that's certainly comendable. It's just unfortunate that it came with such political and economic baggage. Like with most "great experiments", there's a great deal we can learn from looking at the mistakes of the USSR's "socialism".

Principally, of course, we can learn that "socialism" in the sense that Marx and Lenin meant it, just doesn't work.


India's main source of economic growth is foreign investment, due to its cheap labor, it is therefore a part of the global capitalist system, and because of this it is growing at the rate it is today, and has been for quite some time.

The Soviet Union did not have this "luxury". It functioned outside the global capitalist system, in isolated from it, and the reason it did so is because it was forced to do so politically.

The Soviet Union didn't have the luxury of foreign investment? What the hell do you call eastern Europe?

Stalin commanded over the largest territorial empire in the history of the world! He didn't need a global capitalist system, he was practically one onto himself. More people lived under Stalin's power than in Europe and North America combined.

And for all the USSR's boasting of being "outside" of capitalism, it actually enjoyed a rather healthy trade relationship with Europe and the United States. Internal politics notwithstanding, the Soviet Union was just as integrated into the world capitalist system as the USA.

And you still haven't answered the original question! Namely, which countries industrialization was more humane, India's or Russia's. No one is disagreeing that they developed differently, indeed that's the point. If they had been the same, there wouldn't be a comparison.

The USSR took the route of "socialist" command, India took the one of social-democratic capitalism. The fact that India was able to get foreign support in so doing is hardly a critisism of their approach. Indeed, it's a vindication.

If socialism truly can't exist in one country, as you Trotskyists are so fond of saying, then it really can't exist anywhere. 'Cause things happen country by country. "World revolutions" just don't occur.


I agree that the Soviet system wasn't perfect, I agree that it was not a socialist economic system, I agree that politically it was authoritarian, oppressive and dictatorial.

However, I also agree that capitalism is just as bad, and even worse, though to the worker both are equally bad, and therefore I don't argue in favor of either, except by pointing out the superiority of the Soviet system in its industrialization era in theoretical debates, because the socialist economic system that I do support has elements of that in it.

No, to the worker both aren't "equally bad". One is bad and one is very bad, and the fact that you miss that critical distinction explains why your political position has no relevence in the real world.

You're looking for a "good" in a world with nothing but "nescessary evils". Yeah, capitalism is "bad", but the point is that it's not as "bad" as Soviet-style "socialism". And, at present, it's the least "bad" option we've got.

You acknowledge that the USSR was "authoritarian, oppressive and dictatorial", but still support those "elements" of its "socialist economic system". In other words, you disavow everything it did wrong and claim only its feats of economic development (except of course that you've already admitted that rapid industrialization was probably wrong).

So what are you really left with? A terrible government that did one or two things right? Well, fuck, Hitler did that. Doesn't make National Socialism any more appealing as a political option.

The ultimate problem with debating history is that things only went one way, we can never say what "would have" happened so, in the end, we can never prove our cases one way or the other.

But the inductive lesson here would clearly seem to be that the attempt of setting up a command economy nescessitates the installation of a supremely powerful bureaucratic class which can be just as bad, if not worse, than the capitlist class it purports to succeed.

You can keep coming up with excuses for the very many Marxist failures, but there's got to be a point where you start to question the validity of the ideology itself. 'Cause the states which are doing the best today are those who have turned away from Marxian analysis, and the best paid working class in the world lives in the capitalist west.


Lenin's idea did not fail because of the idea itself, but because spineless liberal traitors like you decided for the class as a whole that "they weren't ready for socialism". Yes, they weren't ready for socialism, and for it they paid with more revolutions and wars, causing the deaths of over 50 million people in just one war alone.

Wait a minute, so "they weren't ready for rsocialism" but it was "spineless liberal traitors" (like me! :)) who said that "they weren't ready for rsocialism". So ....what's your argument again? That socialism wasn't possible in the 1900s, but if only no one had pointed that out, maybe it could have been? What the fuck? :confused:

Honestly, I have no idea what you're going for here. You can call me names all you want, but if you expect me, or anyone else, to feel bad for proposing that Europe in 1917 could not support a "communist" or "socialist" economy, you'll be waiting a real long fucking time.

No, "they" weren't ready for "revolution" in 1917; "they" weren't ready in 1969; and "they" aren't ready today. "They" don't want your revolution, in fact no one does.

Welcome to the human race.

It always amazes me how truly astonished people like you become when someone dares challenge your convictions. The idea that you might be wrong has never even occured to you, so a disagreement with your conclusions is nothing short of treason. Well, "treason" nescessitates a prior state of conscious allegiance. One must allied before one can be treacherous.

This idea that the "working class" owes some sort of reprical loyalty is nor more absurd than the racialist notion that all "white" or "black" people must "stick together" for the "good of the race". As members of society, we have a fundamental duty to respect one another, but my regard for my fellow human being is not dependent on their "relation to the means of production" any more than it is to their skin colour or race.

In your mind that makes me a "traitor". Not to press the point, but it's woth mentioning that the only other people who use that kind of language to denigrate those who fail to properly categorize their fellow human beings are the extreme rightists.

You see it's not that the far-right and the far-left share ideas, they don't. But far too often they do share an underlying philosophy, a certainty of ideology that breeds this kind of contempt and arrogance.

Notice that moderates and, yes, even "liberals" rarely use words like "traitor" or "enemy". ...although I've noticed that George Bush does a great deal. Now there's a man who doesn't doubt his convictions!

In another life, he'd make an absolutely fantastic communist.


Yes, the struggles of the workers were important, but they were guided by a movement, a theory, an ideology even, and that happened to be Marxism. Before Marxism there were workers' movements, sure, and they fought and struggled, and sometimes they gained something. You are right to point this out, you are however wrong to attach so much importance to this anarchic movement which eventually culminated into a coherent one, in the form of unions in the economic sphere and in the form of Socialist or Social-Democratic parties in the political.

The most important labour movements in history have been those guided by on the ground experience, not ideology. The struggles that come out of workers' flesh-and-blood demands are generally the ones that actually get things done, the ones that are engineered by ivory tower politicos and ideologues generally only manage rhetoric and party politics.

Workers didn't accomplish much before Marx, but they didn't accomplish that much after Marx. In fact, they didn't really start to accomplish things until long after Marx was dead. What you're doing is committing an erro of post hoc ergo procter hoc. Marx lived then workers gained rights, so you assume that Marx was responsible.

Sorry, but that's not how it worked. Marx wrote a lot of books and influenced a lot political minded people, but the workers movement came out of on the job struggle, it came out of organizing committees and wildcat strikes. It came out of demands for a living wage and the right to affordable housing.

The "leaders" who you so love to praise and credit may have been ranting about "revolution", but the workers were striking over far more temporal matters.

The early socialist parties were absolutely Marxist. Once again, "leaders" love ideologies and Marxism was a good standard to rally around at the time. But very quickly even the most ardent Marxist social-democratic parties began to abandon the revolutionary rhetoric. Nobody was buying it.

And so while die-hards like you condemned them as "traitors", they got themselves into politics and actually started to get things done. And we got things like welfare and socialized medicine and the living standards for the working class have improved continuously in the western world ever since.

Is that a "revolutionary" change? No, but somehow I can't help but think if those labour activists of the 1930s could look at the world today they'd be pretty pleased. Not satisfied, of course, because there's always work to be done; but they'd be happy.

And for me, that's enough.


Let's change the context a little however; would you rather live in Cuba or Zimbabwe?

Only a lunatic would prefer Zimbabwe.

Right, 'cause that's a fair comparison. :rolleyes:

You chose to compare Zimbabwe with the DPRK, not me. I'm not denying that command economies sometimes achieve results, it's just that those results are generally costly.

Look, the playing field's already tilted in my favour, most of the world is not Marxist. You've only got about 5 countries to point to. That limits your options in discusssions such as these. You chose Zimbabwe 'cause it's a hellhole and a good example of an ostensibly capitalist country with an entirely fucked up economy. So of course I point out the DPRK as an example of an even worse mess.

Is the very best command economy in the world a better place to live than the very worst "free market", well yeah. So what? I never said that planned economy was hell, just that it's rather corrupt and brutal. Zimbabwe happens to be corrupt and brutal too, a great many capitalist countries are.

But as much as I'd rather live in Cuba than Zimbabwe, there are about a hundred countries I'd move to before I'd even consider living in Cuba.


Why do you think the World Wars happened? Why do you think any war happens at all? Because the capitalists get bored and decided to "have some fun with their slaves"?

The World Wars happened to save capitalism as an economic system. Means of production already developed had to be destroyed, because it was creating an economic system which was unsustainable. Not enough varying commodities were made to keep the flow of profit going - because technology wasn't developed enough at the time and because people couldn't afford the new "gadgets" - and therefore factories and plants had to close down, workers had to be fired, and the system was on the verge of collapse.

:ohmy:

Wow... just.... wow.

I honestly thought I couldn't be shocked anymore on this board, but congratulations, you've managed to not only jump out of the box, but out of the fucking planet.

I've heard far-out theories in my day, but the notion that the World Wars were the result of some cabalistic capitalist conspiracy has got to be the most disturbed paranoid nonsensical idea I've ever heard! It's also entirely unoriginal. Hitler always claimed that the Second World War was a result of secret bankers' designs, so did Stalin. Nice to see what fine company you're keeping.... <_<

World War II happened because of a number of political and economic reasons. It was not "engineered" to "save capitalism". Capitalism runs just fine durring peace time, it runs just fine durring war time too of course. That's the thing about capitalism, so long as there's money to be made, the details don't matter.

World War II helped the US economy greatly, mainly 'cause it created a whole bunch of jobs and eliminated Europe as a competitor. The same was largely true, although to a lesser extent, for World War I. But to suggest that either war was anything short of disasterous for the European or Asian economy is insane.

And that you would seriously suggest that there is some grand conspiracy to "destroy" excess "means of productions" is one of the most ludicrous conspiracy theories I have ever heard.

I honestly don't even know what to say at this point... :unsure:


What I do want to say though, is that life should have a meaning, and it has different meanings to different people. The devoted Christian preacher considers his going to Church and preaching to be an essential part of his life....how many people does he help by converting other people to Christianity, though? Zero. Even if he does help them, he helps them only by giving them false hope in a fake entity.

Contrast this with the Marxist, who wished to alleviate not only the sufferings of humanity, but also to save it, and does so by presenting scientific arguments in favor of it.

Politics shouldn't be about "giving your life meaning", it should be about practical accomplishment.

Fighting for "revolution" may make for a good obituary, but it makes for lousy policy. And in the end, if you really care about helping people, you're gonna have to prioritize their needs above your personal search for meaning.

Hate to say it, but in the real world the two are mutually exclusive.

***

Onto STI, now, and his marvelous plan for cyber-dating as a form of monetary remuneration,


At least as brilliant as a political philosophy predicated on intentional misunderstanding and logical fallacy.

What precisely did I "misunderstand", intentionaly or otherwise. Your proposal was that people (mostly men, as I read it) would work in a communist society in order to impress "cuties" on the interner whom they hoped to impress and subsequently "bang".

That is, sex would act as the material incentive for production. I imagine that any woman who dared to have sex with a "layabout" would be shunned? Afterall, she would be "betraying" her "class" by "slutting" herself out to "parasites".

I mean come on, STI, do you really not see why I find this notion so fucking creepy? It's not different from LZ's "people who don't work are sick" line. You're trying turn every aspect of society into a tool for perpetuating your ideological convictions.

In your mind even dating should be about "serving the common good" and "productivity" and other vaguely Stalinist sounding rhetorical nonsense. As if there wasn't already enough cumbersum cultural bullshit tied around relationships and sex.

I don't want the state forcing me to put a "productivity indicator" on my personal web page, and I can't imagine that you do either. What's next, my fucking credit report? My high school GPA?

You people need to seriously stop trying to rebuild society in your own olympian image. You can't "fix" humanity by implementing these kind of orwellian "innovations".

Seriously, this is why so many people hate leftists. So many of us can come off as such enormous asses.


And this focus of yours on sex, for which my example is in good part responsible, ignores the underlying point - that status and prestige can serve as motivators for people to engage in productive activities on top of the intrinsic motivation for them as a means of expressing creativity and establishing a bit of self-esteem.

Hey, I didn't bring up sex, you did. And out of absolutely nowhere I might add. I was merely asking what incentive there would be for labour in a moneyless society. You were the one who, of your own volition, proposed that money could be replaced by "banging" "cuties".

By the way, have you noticed that I've repeated that phrase of yours ("banging cuties") a few times now? If so, allow me to explain. It's nt just because I find something disgusingly chauvinistic in your language, although I do; but also because I think it highlights the latent sexism underlying the entire suggestion.

'Cause I notice you never mentioned what the "cutie's" "productivity" was. I guess in your hypothetical, the man didn't care? But the woman, course, did. She couldn't care less about looks or personality, she just wanted to make sure that you were a good "producer".

'Cause that's certainly not a chauvinistic stereotype... <_<

It never ceases to amaze me that in the most "progressive" places you can still find the most backwards attitudes. :angry:


Leave it to LSD to conflate crediting people for work done with recognition with Nazi Germany.

I know, I know, it was a tad hyperbolic, but I honestly couldn't resist.

You were seriously suggesting that people be forced to put a measure of their "productivity" on their social networking page. The logical next step would be to make them wear one on their person as well. You know, red start for "producer" and a yellow one for "parasite".

Even you have to admit the symbolism is irresistable! :lol:

[KC]

That is not a "revolution", mind you. It's not the waving of red banners or the marching of army surplus boots. It's the silent and invisible turning of the historical page, and it it will come and go before anyone, least of all the Hegelian mystics, realizes that a great divide has been crossed.

I think, at some level, everyone realizes that eventually we're going to move beyond the market and the drudgery of buying and selling; that in the far too hazzy future, some sort of utopia is in store.

Because history isn't violent and filled with struggle and revolutionary movements.:rolleyes:

It seems that your only support for such an assertion is that "I think it will happen but I can't say how or why but because I think it then it must be right."


Once everything is freely producible with the literal push of a button, there's no need for incentivizing labour because there's no more need for labour. But as long as uncomfortable and unenjoyable tasks need being done (i.e., for the forseeable future), we're going to need some mechanism to ensure that they be done.

Which goes directly against the interests of capitalists. One can't reach a post-scarcity society when the system in which we live requires scarcity. That is yet another contradiction on your part.


Capitalism isn't a "thing", it doesn't "allow" or "dissallow". And it will be developed away the same way that feudalism was and ancient production was before it.

Through class struggle.


Scarcity exists because scarcity exists, not because of some grand conspiracy.

Why are farmers paid by the government to produce less milk and how is that not the artificial creation of scarcity?



So, yeah, the far-far-right's basically extinct. But, seriously, buddy, I've got news for you, so's your crew.

Talking about "communists, globally" is like talking about Unitarians; everyone knows they're out there, but they don't really do anything and no one really cares.

Are there more "Communists" than "Nazis" (notice the big letters), probably, but that's just 'cause the case against the Nazis was made so much more convincingly. But we're talking specks against specks here.

There are no Nazis and there are no communists. I mean, yeah, there are communists like you obviously, but in terms of massive powerful movements, what have you really got, honestly?

This claim is an obvious result of your lack of activity in the movement and lack of interaction with working people on economic and political issues. There isn't even a need to address it.


But then that was always Marx's selling point. Remember, Marx came out of the 19th century tradition of deterministic Newtonian romanticism. He really believed that he could come up with a set of "iron laws" of socialism with nothing more than his mind and a steady pen.

Already addressed. Marx's "iron laws" are really your iron laws. Stop trying to credit that crap to Marx just because you couldn't understand what he was saying.


The fact is labour is not the source of value! It's an element of value, certainly, but all value most certainly does not "flow" out of the semi-devine fingertips of "proletariat". Value is not a property of matter, it is a social attribute and one which is entirely subjective. Which is why, for 150 of trying, Marxist "economists" are still running in circles trying to explain why the pound of dirt I spend three months digging out of the ground isn't worth the sum of my labour expenditures.

Uh that was "solved" when Marx first wrote it down 150 years ago. Nobody's running in circles but you.


The example of France is not brought up a lot because it "shows" Marxist history, but because it is Marxist history! Marxist historiography is basically the hisotry of western Europe, with a few concessions made to the Americas.

That's why Marx had such trouble fitting his "iron laws" with the "oriental despotisms". For some reason those pesky asians just refused to follow his neat line of historical development. In the end, Marxist historians in Asia even began to reinvent words to predend that something approaching fuedalism had actually happened in China, it's just that nobody had noticed.

I guessed the Chinese just weren't as intelligent as old Marx. They just didin't realize that the entire world "must" have followed Europe's developmental pattern, despite the fact that they ...didn't.

Pointless rant already addressed.


Now you can reinterpret and redefine as much as you want, the fact remains there was no "bourgeois revolution" in England, or in Japan, and yet they both developed some very functional capitalist economies. It would appear that the "class war" synthesis didin't quite apply there ...or to Germany, or China, or the rest of Asia really, or Africa of course, or North America actually, or even Europe...

Already addressed. Sorry, but you aren't right just because you "say so".

I could keep going but there's really no point, as you'll just come back with the same tired shit that you think is right "because you say so" or because "books told you".

[Dejavu]

Nice post, LSD. Some of it almost brought me to tears. :laugh:
You certainly realize how things work.

Some of the stuff you mentioned I disagree with still. But thats OK. You just recently came out of the commie closet and just began exploring the economic world known as capitalism. I'm a 'free market radical' so I don't expect you to go entirely to 'this side' yet. lol. And I disagree with you that a mixed economy can sustain in the long run, for me theres only two choices, command market or free market.

Also WW2 didn't help the U.S. despite all the propaganda saying that it did. It goes back to Bastiat's Ol' Broken Window Fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy).