Critique my writing

[Saullos]

My High School here in Texas has a newspaper that gets published by the students around once a month. The past two have had talks about the recent election and results, and I've become infuriated by both staff writers of the newspaper and people writing in and getting published, who are calling Obama a socialist, because his economic policy is socialist, which has to be bad since its socialistic.

In response, I've written an article (which has turned out to probably be too long DX) that I'm going to send to them in a day or two after I proof-read it and get some C&C from you guys.



After reading Letters to the Editors and political commentary by writers for maneEVENTS; I have become quite annoyed by this anti-intellectual argument that has a tendency to exhibit a logical fallacy similar to an argumentum ad populum.

My first complaint pertains to this rather lazy and biased viewpoint taken in regards to our current Presidential-Elect and his economic policy. I am by no means advocating said policy, but I am sure a high percentage of those that take a stance on this issue do not even know and understand said policy, this is apparent on both sides. Instead of calling Presidential Elect Obama a socialist, and thereby assuming his socialist economic policies as being harmful, why can we not examine the policy itself? If Presidential Elect Obama’s economic plans are indeed socialist, then we need to label President Bush socialist too, or at least slightly less.

My second complaint arises from this hatred and bigotry towards socialism that can be seen on a national level. First of all, America is not a purely capitalistic society. We have several services in place that can be described as socialistic, such as our police force, firefighters, and primary and secondary stages of education. Our current law has determined that all United States citizens deserve safety and education, irregardless of other factors; and it works. The only problem that could be brought up is that the system (not the economic system mind you, but the educational system) is slightly flawed in that standardization, teacher requirements, and pay is low. The other problem is inconsistency, in that the United States we have determined that it is more important for our citizens to be able to read and write, but not live. I find that ironic.

Continuing onto the economic side of socialism, I think people have forgotten the wonders it can work. Look at the Soviet Union for example. They experienced the fastest economic growth rate possibly of all time in the world under Joseph Stalin who pulled Russia from last in economic output in Europe, to second in the world; a staggering 13% annual growth, seen by only few other countries in economic history. In fact, it wasn’t until Gorbachev and his capitalist reforms that brought about the economic destruction and subsequent end of the Soviet Union. Socialism has alternatively brought about successful reforms. Mao Zedong in China increased literacy from 20% to 93% and life expectancy from 35 years to over 70. What people forget though, is that economic efficiency is not a justification for an economic system. If it were, then slavery would still be a valid institution today, and we would praise Hitler’s fascist economic plans that eliminated unemployment in Germany. Another complaint made against socialism is that it is not stable (not related to its economic stability). This is based off of many smaller libertarian socialist communes. Some of the most famous appeared in Spain during the 1936 civil war. Many factories were collectivized under worker control, up to 80% in Catalonia, and productivity increased by 20%. Yet this only lasted around few years because the anarchists and socialists gave in to the communists in order to fight the fascists, and were unable to return afterwards. As I said, some people credit this as a reason why socialism is not stable. If we’re going to accept this, than we have to say that feudalism is not a stable economic system since it has been replaced. We also cannot say capitalism is a stable economic system, since it was replaced with socialism by the Soviet Union. Continuing on, no economic system could be considered stable, and so we could just rule this complaint null and void.

The reason why we should accept socialism or any other economic, or political, system is for how just of a system it is. Why should we continue putting up with a capitalistic economy, an economic system that is based off of exploitation of fellow human beings? I hear the argument that humans are naturally greedy and so socialism is not a valid system. So should we just continue on with a system that rewards exploitation!? If so, we should privatize schools and the firefighters. We should furthermore give $100 to anyone who murders another, because this murder simply gives more room to those still alive, those that are more deserving.

[zimmerwald1915]

Personally, and I apologise if I sound like a jerk, but I don't think it's that good a piece of writing, and I highly doubt it will convince anybody. I realize the arguments you can make are restricted to a great degree by the forum in which you hope they'll be published, and I respect that, I really do. That being said, a few pointers:


make it clear right off the bat that you are defending socialism rather than Obama, and that this letter was occasioned by the vulgar conflation: "socialism = bad". You do this to a certain extent, but make the point harder and, if possible, earlier (in the first paragraph rather than the second). An inattentive reader might otherwise dismiss this as just another refutation of the charge "Obama = socialist" rather than a challenge of the underlying assumption.
Define your terms. Your whole letter is attempting to refute a vague and vulgar semi-definition (more like a description) of socialism, and yet you never bother to actually define it. I suspect from the examples you use that your definition might differ from mine, but frankly, it doesn't really matter what definition you use, as long as you include one. It helps to remind the reader what you're talking about, and it helps keep the topic of the letter focused.
Stalin, Mao, and Hitler should be dropped. Whatever argument you are trying to make, mention of any of them, and especially praise, however faint, of the first two, are guaranteed to get your submission edited out.
Slavery isn't an efficient or productive economic system compared to capitalism; that's why capitalism displaced it.

Essentially, and I hate to tell you this, this needs a fairly extensive rewrite.

[Drace]

The major problem that I find is that you switched off from attacking the stupidity of calling Obama socialist to defending socialism in general. I would just talk about him being like any bourgeois and putting side comments attacking capitalism with it.


We should furthermore give $100 to anyone who murders another, because this murder simply gives more room to those still alive, those that are more deserving.

??

[Saullos]

Thanks for the replies so far!

I'm thinking of removing the first paragraph, or otherwise setting the goal of the paper in the defense of socialism, and give a definition.

Daze: I was thinking about that sentence and the one before. I'll probably remove them. Many people won't pick up on the sarcasm as it is in text, and for those that don't know my sense of humor/argument.

Zimmerwald: I wasn't sure about Stalin, Mao, and Hitler. I have some friends that work on the newspaper, so I'm hoping they'll be able to push it through or tell me that it needs to be edited.

As for slavery, I thought that it was economically better. Capitalism means you have to pay workers for their time, whereas in a slave economy you would merely purchase the worker for a one time fee, which would eventually pay itself off in time.

[Drace]

I'm thinking of removing the first paragraph, or otherwise setting the goal of the paper in the defense of socialism, and give a definition.

Problem with that is that there is too much to cover. You'd have to go over to what socialism is. Why its misunderstood; the cold war propaganda, the bourgeoisie. This would change the whole subject of the essay and really wouldn't be much of a response to Obama being called a socialist. Actually, you may want to focus on these points and added with that, talk about how socialism and Obama's policies are very little alike.

[zimmerwald1915]

Zimmerwald: I wasn't sure about Stalin, Mao, and Hitler. I have some friends that work on the newspaper, so I'm hoping they'll be able to push it through or tell me that it needs to be edited.
Obviously I have very little idea of the conditions in which you operate. Generally, I still think my advice is sound. If, however, you think/feel that there are mitigating circumstances in your situation, particularly ones that I don't know about, take them into consideration when planning what you're going to do.


As for slavery, I thought that it was economically better. Capitalism means you have to pay workers for their time, whereas in a slave economy you would merely purchase the worker for a one time fee, which would eventually pay itself off in time.
However, in slavery, there is no incentive for the slave to do all that much work (outside of punishment for downright obvious laziness). The slave master owns the body of the slave, the physical bearer of labor-power, and not the labor-power itself. He thus has little say over how intensely the slave labors. Furthermore, at the level of "what makes a laborer work", there's no prospect for improvement outside the master's capriciousness and whims, therefore there's no reason for the slave to do more than the bare minimum that will save him punishment.

Capitalism is different. The worker is free; his employment, unlike the slave's, is always precarious, and therefore he must make full and exhaustive use of the labor-power which he sells to the capitalist. Furthermore, slaves are not in competition with each other; workers in capitalism are, since their jobs are precarious and any one of them might be fired at any moment to make room for a machine or a new worker. Thus, even though the capitalist pays for a certain amount of labor-power at a certain intensity for a certain time (unlike the slave master, who doesn't have to spend much on the maintenence of the slave outside the initial outlay, and who doesn't have to worry about continually reproducing the slave population from within his existing "stock" as he can always buy more on the market) the capitalist actually gets more and better labor out of his workers than the slave master gets from his slaves.

There's no real reason to go into all this in the essay (there'd be no room for it), but it never helps your case to be wrong, which is why I counseled you to remove the reference to slavery.

[Saullos]

Rewrote it today, but found out I need to get it down to 500 words compared to my current 800. :-(

Not sure if I just want to expand this into a paper, or shorten it down for the publicity in the newspaper, or both.


After reading Letters to the Editors and political commentary by writers for maneEVENTS and of course opinions held by many Americans; I have become quite annoyed by this negativity towards socialism and will attempt to shed some light on this subject.


First however, I want to ask something to those that criticize Presidential-Elect Obama and his economic plans as socialistic. Why can we not examine his actual policy for what it is, rather than applying a label with a negative connotation to it and having that as our main and only argument, which is a commonly known logical fallacy known as an argumentum ad populum?


My main purpose of this writing however, is directed towards this unintelligent hatred towards socialism. One argument that I hear often is that socialism is not economically viable. Let us look at the Soviet Union. They experienced the fastest economic growth rate possibly of all time in the world under Joseph Stalin who pulled Russia from last place in economic output in Europe, to second in the world; this is where we see a staggering 13% annual growth in their economic growth, seen by only few other countries in economic history. In fact, it wasn’t until Gorbachev and his capitalist reforms that brought about the economic destruction and subsequent end of the Soviet Union. What people forget though, is that economic efficiency is not a justification for an economic system. If it were, then slavery would still be a valid institution today, and we would praise Hitler’s fascist economic plans that eliminated unemployment in Germany.


On this subject, people associate socialism with the evil acts committed by people such as Stalin, Zedong, and Pol Pot. That is a horrible argument though. That is like basing Christianity off of Joseph Kony, the leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army whose guerilla army kidnaps children and employs them as soldiers.
Why can we not look at the good people associated with socialism? Our labor history was moved by the socialists and communists in this country which has now given the working class rights not previously held. Frances Bellamy, the author of the United States Pledge of Allegiance, was a socialist. George Orwell, who wrote 1984, was a libertarian socialist, along with Noam Chomsky, the most influential man in linguistics. Martin Luther King advocated America to become a democratic socialist country, like current day Scandinavia. Woody Guthrie, the artist of the patriotic song “This Land Is Your Land” and John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, were associated with socialism. Scientist Albert Einstein and authors Jack London and H.G. Wells are also socialists, but the list could go on and on.


Another complaint made against socialism is that it is not stable (not related to its economic stability). This is based off of the many smaller libertarian socialist communes that often fail within a few years. Some of the most famous appeared in Spain during the 1936 civil war. Many factories were collectivized under worker control, up to 80% in Catalonia, and productivity increased by 20%. Yet this only lasted around few years because the anarchists and socialists gave in to the communists in order to fight the fascists, and were unable to return afterwards. As I said, some people credit this as a reason why socialism is not stable. If we’re going to accept this, than we have to say that feudalism is not a stable economic system since it has been replaced. We also cannot say capitalism is a stable economic system, since it was replaced with socialism by the Soviet Union. Continuing on, no economic system could be considered stable, and so we could just rule this complaint null and void.


The last complaint I will address, and possibly the most common and important to people, is the claim that socialism does not work with human beings because we are naturally greedy. I disagree. Ever since homo erectus, and up until recently in the grand scheme of human history, we humans and our ancestors have been tribal hunter-gatherers, who lived in a simple, communal, socialistic life. In fact, our survival depended on being nice to others, it has been recently called the moral zeitgeist, the evolution of morality that helped humans survive, read up on it. It hasn’t been until relatively recently, as civilizations have been founded and society became more complex, that we’ve been able to shed our roots of niceness. So, yes, we may currently be naturally greedy, but is that something we should merely accept? Do you truly believe that progress to a socially, economically, and politically better place, can truly be made through the exploitation of fellow humans?

[Killer Enigma]

Your writing is seriously pretentious. I would read your article and likely decry any association with your political views on that basis alone. Posing rhetorical questions in the manner you chose casts you as an amateur.


First however, I want to ask something to those that criticize Presidential-Elect Obama and his economic plans as socialistic. Why can we not examine his actual policy for what it is, rather than applying a label with a negative connotation to it and having that as our main and only argument, which is a commonly known logical fallacy known as an argumentum ad populum?
If you're asking a question, you need a colon instead of a period after any kind of preface. Furthermore, your last clause in the final sentence is gratuitous, self-indulgence. No one cares that you can identify a logical fallacy (incorrectly identified, in this case). Moreover, including that will make it appear as though you are trying to prove your intellectual competence, if not outright superiority, to your peers. Both will harm the message you are attempting to convey.

I agree with the above criticism of your passage about slavery and fascism. Slavery is was, by no measurement, more efficient than capitalism. Also, during Nazi rule in Germany, one of the chief critiques of fascism coming from the capitalist class (whom you have to remember opposed the rise of fascism also) was that the system did not allow for the efficiency that a market economy did.

Your paragraph about Pol Pot, which includes an analogy to Christianity, is well-structured and the intent is strong. However, it adds another facet to an already-overloaded essay. You attempt to solve and refute too many arguments in this piece and in the end, the reader is left with a muddled feeling. If you want to write a catechism defending socialism, your introduction, which hints at a broader discussion of Barack Obama's policies, is extremely deceptive.

You bring up a variety of events that leftists may be familiar with but are by no means commonly understood. Most high school students, I would assume, have a meager, if any understanding of the Spanish Civil War. Why bring up Catalonia and attempt to explain it in three sentences in an already-muddled essay? If I was able to trek through your previous paragraphs and follow your thought (quite a task!), you lose any semblance of interest I had right here.

Your last paragraph may be your worst.


The last complaint I will address, and possibly the most common and important to people, is the claim that socialism does not work with human beings because we are naturally greedy. I disagree. Ever since homo erectus, and up until recently in the grand scheme of human history, we humans and our ancestors have been tribal hunter-gatherers, who lived in a simple, communal, socialistic life. In fact, our survival depended on being nice to others, it has been recently called the moral zeitgeist, the evolution of morality that helped humans survive, read up on it. It hasn’t been until relatively recently, as civilizations have been founded and society became more complex, that we’ve been able to shed our roots of niceness. So, yes, we may currently be naturally greedy, but is that something we should merely accept? Do you truly believe that progress to a socially, economically, and politically better place, can truly be made through the exploitation of fellow humans?
Your first mistake is saying "I disagree". My first thought, as will be most people's, is that I don't care if you disagree. Fortunately, you go on to (sort of) support this simplistic declaration but it's a pretentious way of writing. Write humbly.

"Ever since homo erectus..." What does that even mean? You talk as though it was an event. The term 'homo erectus' is used as an indefinite personage noun.

The bold-faced sentence lacks total continuity. It contains about three separate thoughts that are mashed together to form one, disgusting run-on. Don't tell a reader to "read up on it" either. It's pretentious, especially if you are not going to suggest relevant texts for them to consult.

You have no conclusion and instead revert to the crude method of ending essays: Asking a myriad of rhetorical questions. It's a poor way to end your thoughts, and any reader of the English language will recognize your inability to adequately end an essay.

My advice: Cut out a lot of it. Think about what you want this essay to do, but I would encourage you to aim small. Take on what you perceive to be the chief argument against socialism and go all-out. Don't sacrifice analysis for breadth of coverage. Write in a humble manner and think about what key words and phrases would turn you off if another writer used them in a similarly-spirited piece.

[Saullos]

Thanks for being so critical Enigma, I think I will just toss it all and restart.

I'll definitely have to take some time to think about what exactly I want to write and get across, since a whole defense of slavery really can't be done in 500 words, with analysis. -_-

Thanks for noting the 'pretentiousness', I often write like that when angered over a subject due to difference in opinions. I want to become a a better and influential writer, and as you noted, being a pretentious dick won't help.

[Ptah_Khnemu]

I agree with most of what has been said already. I would also urge you to remove the bit about Stalin entirely. I don't think he's a person we want associated with our cause anymore than he already has been. Keep writing, comrade!

[Killer Enigma]

Thanks for being so critical Enigma, I think I will just toss it all and restart.

I'll definitely have to take some time to think about what exactly I want to write and get across, since a whole defense of slavery really can't be done in 500 words, with analysis. -_-

Thanks for noting the 'pretentiousness', I often write like that when angered over a subject due to difference in opinions. I want to become a a better and influential writer, and as you noted, being a pretentious dick won't help.
I would be interested to see your re-draft at some point. Good luck!

[ZeroNowhere]

Slavery isn't an efficient or productive economic system compared to capitalism; that's why capitalism displaced it.
What.
Also, I'll wait to see your new draft. However, it shouldn't be too hard a refutation to make, if you make sure to spell out that socialism is collective ownership of the means of production, thus a classless (and thus stateless) society, and democratic.


Yet this only lasted around few years because the anarchists and socialists gave in to the communists in order to fight the fascists, and were unable to return afterwards.
The anarchists were communists (and thus socialists, since 'socialism' and 'communism' are basically synonyms)... Come on, SPUSA are shaping up on that kind of thing, let's try not to fall back into it.
Also, unable to return afterwards?
However, I do agree with including the Spanish Revolution, since it was an event that not many people know about, and one should try to get people doing some research as well, etc. I believe that the Anarchist FAQ has a fairly good section on this (ignore any references to Marx, as is my usual advice when referencing the FAQ, because they're generally quite silly (Bakunin correctly predicted that Marx's using of the term 'scientific socialism' would lead to an elite taking power... What), and generally an attempt to skew things to make Marx like an authoritarian rather than an anarchist), and why the revolution didn't work out.


Why can we not examine his actual policy for what it is, rather than applying a label with a negative connotation to it and having that as our main and only argument, which is a commonly known logical fallacy known as an argumentum ad populum?
The above is called 'reductio ad wrong fallacium'. Anyways, this kind of thing is fairly pointless.


Martin Luther King advocated America to become a democratic socialist country, like current day Scandinavia.
...I'm trying not to be too harsh, so let me just put it this way: Scandinavia is socialist? What the fuck are you talking about? :)


Let us look at the Soviet Union. They experienced the fastest economic growth rate possibly of all time in the world under Joseph Stalin who pulled Russia from last place in economic output in Europe, to second in the world; this is where we see a staggering 13% annual growth in their economic growth, seen by only few other countries in economic history.
Ugh. No, cut the Stalin.
Alright, firstly, the point of socialism is not, and never has been, to industrialize really quickly. Secondly, I do not care how fast a capitalist country grows. Thirdly, the argument about economic feasibility has nothing at all to do with whether a country industrializes quickly or not.


We also cannot say capitalism is a stable economic system, since it was replaced with socialism by the Soviet Union.
This is wrong is oh so many ways.
A better example would be that it was replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat (socialism is international, the dictatorship of the proletariat is pretty much when the revolution is not yet international, but it is still a classless (thus stateless) and democratic, though the bourgeoisie and capitalism still exist outside it) in... The Spanish Communes. Woah.


Woody Guthrie, the artist of the patriotic song “This Land Is Your Land”
A patriotic socialist? Well, that's original.


The last complaint I will address, and possibly the most common and important to people, is the claim that socialism does not work with human beings because we are naturally greedy.
Well, yes, but please, your addressing of the complaint doesn't really do much to give others confidence in socialism. Firstly, the complaint is unscientific. Secondly... Why will our so-called 'natural greed' make socialism impossible? Thirdly, of course, capitalism breeds greed.