Good stuff except for the bit about a dollar in one person's pocket equalling a dollar out of someone else's pocket. We don't live in a zero-sum economy and that simply isn't true.
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Short answers to dumb questions:I'm a Marxist in highschool (going into my junior year) and I've pretty much hit a snag.
I go to school with a LOT of rich kids, who naturally are always reading books on
business and how to get rich fast.
Problems, of course, come up all the time between myself (the only Marxist in school!and the hordes of righties I confront sporadically in debates.
The usual lines I get?
-Anyone can get rich if they work hard enough!
-Do you think it's fair for a doctor to be paid the same as a janitor?
-We should have the freedom to get as rich as we want to.
-Communism is dead!
-If communism and socialism is so great, then why are all socialist countries living
in dire poverty?
You get the idea. I was thinking, instead of EVERY SINGLE TIME someone brought this
up in a debate, and me debunking it through a long explanation, that there should
be quick, 'snappy' answers to ignorant statements and questions like these.
My REQUEST, really, is that you perhaps give a go at writing some kind of 'guideline'
for us younger Marxists who have to deal with this kind of bullshit every day.
Just thought you might want to consider it.
-Snitz
Anyone can get rich if they work hard enough!
Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, "worked hard" and "got rich". Then he died. His three kids are now worth over 12 billion dollars each!
How hard did they work, climbing out of their mama's birth canal and all?
The Walton family need never lift a finger again...their fortune will grow inevitably.
When her parents die, Bill and Melinda Gates' little girl is going to be one of the richest individuals on the planet...did she work really hard for that money?
There are now hundreds of members of the Rockefeller family...all of whom are wealthier than 99% of all Americans...did they work "really hard" for their inheritances?
Capitalism is a big casino; for every huge winner there are tens of millions of losers...and work (hard, easy, or non-existent) has very little to do with it.
Do you think it's fair for a doctor to be paid the same as a janitor?
Why not? If there were no janitors, housekeepers, sanitation workers, what would happen? You'd either have to do all that clean-up yourself or things would get filthy, germs would breed, you'd get sick and die.
As a matter of fact, death rates started to decline in the second half of the 19th century...when medicine was still mostly quackery. Why? Because major European cities started building sewer systems and people stopped living in their own shit.
Every person who makes a genuine contribution to society deserves a living wage...an income sufficient to live with dignity.
We should have the freedom to get as rich as we want to.
Where do you think riches come from? Do they fall out of the sky?
You cannot create wealth out of thin air. The wealth that society as a whole produces is finite...a dollar in your pocket means a dollar less in someone else's pocket. Behind every rich person stand hundreds or thousands or even millions of poor people...losers in the capitalist casino.
So you are in the same ethical position as the old Confederate slave-owner...who thought he should have the "freedom" to buy as many slaves as he wanted to.
Are you willing to fight, kill, and even give up your own life for that "freedom"?
Communism is dead!
So why are you talking to me? If communism were really dead, you wouldn't waste a second of your time talking to a total nutball.
What you're really saying is that you hope that communism will "stay dead".
We'll see.
If communism and socialism are so great, then why are all socialist countries living in dire poverty?
They were even worse off before they had socialism. Places like Russia and China were shitholes still living in the middle ages before their revolutions; socialism created their modern economies out of nothing.
There's really only one semi-socialist country left -- Cuba -- and if you want to compare it with some place, compare it to Jamaica or the Dominican Republic or even Costa Rica...places where many (most?) people still live like it was 1850!
It's true that capitalism has been restored in Russia and China -- which is where that "communism is dead" stuff comes from. But that didn't happen because people wanted it to...there were objective material conditions that caused that to happen.
It's a complicated question; but the short version is that communism can only come into existence after a capitalist economy has developed as far as it can. Thus the people in Russia, China, etc. never had communism even though the ruling parties called themselves "communists". What they really had in those places was something they called "socialism"...but which was actually a kind of capitalism without capitalists. Eventually, the party bosses donated their red flags and membership cards to a museum and became openly capitalist themselves.
In the real world, things are not always what they seem.
The Redstar2000 Papers
A site about communist ideas
Good stuff except for the bit about a dollar in one person's pocket equalling a dollar out of someone else's pocket. We don't live in a zero-sum economy and that simply isn't true.
this land is our land
Nice work Redstar, although most high school students I come across do not even know what Capitalism is, let alone Communism. There is no economics class and the History class deals mainly with irrelevent crap.
The most common arguments that i recieve are:
Well, Human nature is not something that you can define easily, it changes according to a society's material conditions.
Also "Human nature", which im sure you basically equate to Greed only exists as long as the insentive for it exists, if money does not exist, what is there to be greedy over?
There is no such thing as a "Communist state", it is a contradiction in terms.
Communism means a classless stateless society and as such the states which existed in the USSR and China were not communist, but rather a version of state capitalism not altogether different to the west.
Hopefully this thread will be able to help other socialist struggling through the High School "education" system.
Hasta la victoria siempre!
Until the Victory always!
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Resistance Socialist Youth-Green Left Weekly-Venezuela Solidarity
What the fuck?
Surely thats wrong, surely each should get a wage in proportion to the labour they put in, and the value of their work.
The doctors work is clearly more valuable, therefore should receive a higher wage.
ITs a bullshit capitalist myth that says everyone gets a same wage
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I am in the equivalent of high school in the UK and I find that whenever people come out with anti communist stuff I just ask them if they know who Karl Marx was and what he wrote about.
No-one knows so I say how can they put down communism if they have no idea about the basics of it.
Metal up your ass
A true zero-sum economy would be frozen in space-time; as a "snapshot" of things as they are in any given moment, it seems adequate.
Over time, wealth is created; economies grow (or sometimes shrink). As wealth is created, it is distributed disproportionately.
Thus, if you "freeze-frame" any given moment, it looks just like a zero-sum economy.
Ah, but who decides those things?
Under capitalism, the market decides...with disastrous consequences for most people.
Presumably under a Leninist-Trotskyist version of "socialism", the party would decide...and, naturally, it would reward itself most generously.
As long as money exists at all after the revolution (hopefully a very brief period), it is prudent to pay everyone pretty close to the same amount; little harm would be done (people would still want to be doctors) and much evil averted (wage inequality generates a psychology of elitism...and, if continued long enough, will lead to a new ruling class).
I have the impression more and more that all pro-capitalist arguments reduce to this assertion in one form or another.
The fact that there's very little scientific knowledge of "human nature" or that such a thing even exists suggests the following reply:
There's no such thing as human nature!
And if the cappie disputes that assertion, invite him to prove it. (He can't!
"Human nature" in the sense that they use the word must mean something common to all humans at all times...as, for example, the "stalk & pounce" impulse is common to all felines at all times.
But the insatiable greed that they posit at the heart of "human nature" is clearly not common to all humans at all times...and even when present, has taken many different forms, by no means all of them purely materialistic.
Once you have all that you can use, "greed", if still present, becomes pathological. In capitalist society, one in which uncertainty about the future is always present, you have to keep trying to accumulate more because of the risk of losing what you have. So it makes "rational sense" to be greedy under capitalism, to always want more.
In an egalitarian society (communism) where you would always be secure against sudden destitution, greed for more than you can use would be, literally, crazy.
Sort of like the Mormons who keep a year's supply of canned food in their basements...simply wacko.
The Redstar2000 Papers
A site about communist ideas
There are some good answers there. When I am told that anyone who works hard enough can get rich, well, I work very hard but I am not rich and I doubt I ever will be.
Formerly known as Chairman Mao
Between the people and their enemies there can be nothing in common but the sword; we must govern by iron those who cannot be governed by justice
~Saint-Just
I condemn the dust of which I am made, this dust that speaks to you now. It can be persecuted, it can be brought to death. But I challenge the world to take from me that part of me which will live through the centuries and survive in the skies.
~Saint-Just
oooh I think I will use the print function for the first time in a long time. I've never really gotten into a debate with anybody from school about communism and stuff but yeah that's still a good post. Nice short answer to the first dumb question.
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Nice posts RedStar.
Kez, how can you ever abolish classes when you don't have equal wages?
Uh...sorry Redstar but we don't analyze economics by using snapshots, we look at the longterm. Your argument is simply wrong.
this land is our land
Classes arise from being able to purchase and own means of production.
If labor is indeed the source of value, and someone exerts more labor than average and is commensurately rewarded, no one was exploited in the process. If someone's job is extremely dangerous or stressful, maybe they should be paid higher wages. It would have to be decided democratically though.
"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard the revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish the dictatorship." - George Owell, 1984
"I read all about the scourging and the crowning with thorns, and I could viddy myself helping in and even taking charge of the tolchocking and the nailing in, being dressed in the height of Roman fashion. I didn't so much like the latter part of the book, which is more like all preachy talking than fighting and the old in-out. I liked the parts where these old yahoodies tolchock each other and then drink their Hebrew vino, and getting into the bed with their wives' handmaidens. That kept me going."
If you take a picture of a moving car, it looks like it's standing still. That doesn't necessarilly make it so.
Wealth is at all times being created by workers, and expropriated by capitalists. But they (the capitalists) are, in a twisted way, creating wealth when they invest their money.
"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard the revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish the dictatorship." - George Owell, 1984
"I read all about the scourging and the crowning with thorns, and I could viddy myself helping in and even taking charge of the tolchocking and the nailing in, being dressed in the height of Roman fashion. I didn't so much like the latter part of the book, which is more like all preachy talking than fighting and the old in-out. I liked the parts where these old yahoodies tolchock each other and then drink their Hebrew vino, and getting into the bed with their wives' handmaidens. That kept me going."
Very well, if you wish to stand there and explain commodity circulation to some high school cappie, please be my guest. Actually, you might want to sit down...especially if you're going to explain the labor theory of value, how exploitation arises, etc.
"Zero-sum" is a good "short answer"...even though it technically is wrong.
The Redstar2000 Papers
A site about communist ideas
The Labor theory of value wouldnt be that horribly hard to explain..how bout this..
"The Labor theory of value arises from the fact that all value inherited in commodities stems from labor, as opposed to capital. i.e. if one were left to his whims in the wilderness with only his labor to live by, he would be able to forge tools to create capital with, and thus and endless supply of wealth. If this man were a capitalist on the other hand, and tried to survive without working, he would be dead in a matter of days. Because capital alone is not enough to create wealth, you can see that labor alone IS enough to create wealth."
yikes. Very good guide Redstar. I'm saving this, seeing as how i'm in a similar situation as the high school student in the first post. (only most people in my school don't give a fuck about politics. they just think "capitalism good, communism bad.")
"An invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come."
- Victor Hugo -
It takes courage to stand up for what you know is right, but it takes more courage to be the only one standing.
The arguments I commonly get are historical ones, not theoretical ones; plus, the theoretical ones I get are not quite as beginner as the questions you provided.. But, nice guide anyway.
Now that is a really good explanation of the LTV, I've been looking for one to use in debates for awhile now, one that didn't have the complicated exploitation explanation like I get from Marx.
These forums look strikingly similar to the albinoblacksheep forums...
Maybe sticky this? Good work comrade!
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Itemise loathing and feed yourself smiles
Organise your safe tribal war
Hurt maim kill and enslave the ghetto</span>
<span style=\'color:red\'>Life lies a slow suicide
Orthodox dreams and symbolic myths
From feudal serf to spender
This wonderful world of purchase power</span>
If im not mistaken Norway and Sweeden are socialist. Finland and Denmark too possibly. The UK is a mixture of Capitalism and Socialism and its doing quite well.
The Russians destroyed over 500 German aircraft by ramming them in midair (they also sometimes cleared minefields by marching over them). “It takes a brave man not to be a hero in the Red Army”. - Joseph Stalin
I would consider Noway and Sweeden as putting "a human face" on Capitilism!
The workers don't own the means of production in any of those countrys! Which is what I would consider the basis of Socialism. I don't know much else I can't really criticize anymore!
<span style=\'color:black\'>Culture sucks down words
Itemise loathing and feed yourself smiles
Organise your safe tribal war
Hurt maim kill and enslave the ghetto</span>
<span style=\'color:red\'>Life lies a slow suicide
Orthodox dreams and symbolic myths
From feudal serf to spender
This wonderful world of purchase power</span>
None of the scadinavian countries are socialist. Even though I know some people belive that myth.
Anyway Digital Nirvana has already explained why.
In Defence Of Marxism
Hands Off Venezuela
An idiot can ask so many questions it will take years to reply. So if I don't reply to your posts it's probably why
