Hate communism! ... but what is it? (Mexican, legal, regular, border)

[Pug Life]

Originally Posted by CamaroGuy
Communism killed at least 50 million people in Russia so it can't be all that good.

Originally Posted by MichaelCC
I think communism is evil. Given its false belief that a workers' paradise is on the way, and because it acknowledges no morals outside itself and predicates itself on acts of naked willpower, it tries to stir up as much violence as possible. It claims man can use violence as a tool rather than seeing violence as the undoing of humanity. It boils down to an embrace of certain means in the name of something that cannot happen as a result. So to understand communism in practice you can discard the promise of utopia and look at the political embrace of violence.

Two people who just proved the point the OP was making. Most people don't know what communism is. By definition, a ruthless dictator cannot be part of the Communist ideal because he is someone who is taking the profits of the working class and keeping it for himself and his lackeys. Therefore, Cuba, China, Russia and all those other dictatorships cannot be considered "Communist".

I've been to Cuba and seen many of the benefits of Communism, but the corruption and greed of the ruling class makes the rest of the country suffer. That being said, there is far less abject poverty (homelessness) in Cuba than here in the richest nation in the world and despite the lack of medical technologies and medicines developed in the US, the life expectancy of Cuba is right in line with ours. Communism will never work on a large scale because it's simply too suceptible to corruption and waste, but on a small scale (cities, countries with a few million people) in places with some kind of wealth generating specialty, it can be a very beneficial system.

Communism is not evil, as Marx and Engels were promoting it to give the majority of the people rights that had been taken away by the ruling class.

It's simply a matter of stupidity caused by a blind faith in propaganda. Communism is misunderstood because of the way dictators manipulated it to gain public support before turning on the people that supported them in the first place. Then again, most Americans don't know what Socialism, Fascism, Democracy or Federalism means either.

[GloryB]

I certainly don't have an eloquent description of what Communism is, nor do I care. All I need to know is that from the outside looking in.....it's better on this side.

[Pug Life]

Originally Posted by GloryB

I certainly don't have an eloquent description of what Communism is, nor do I care. All I need to know is that from the outside looking in.....it's better on this side.

So how can you know anything?

How can someone have an opinion on something they know nothing about? Not only is that illogical, it's simply lazy too. "I don't know anything about that, but I'm going to make my opinion based on my knowledge, which is none." What sense does that make?

It's funny how whenever there's a post about the American ignorance of things that are hated, the ignorance gets displayed with pride. At least three people have openly said "I know nothing about it, but I hate it" in some way or another.

[gizmo980]

Originally Posted by HeyHolliday!

So if communism was so great why did he come to the United States? Im not trying to start a debate or anything I am just trying to see the logic in your uncles opinion.

We are Jewish, so his family escaped during the Russian pogroms in the early 1900s. Communism or not, genocide/massacre is a pretty strong deterrent from staying in a country. They went to China after leaving Russia, since the Chinese government was providing safety for Jewish refugees... then he somehow ended up in Cuba, and I don't know why he came here after that. He's been dead for over a decade now, so I can't ask!

Not 100% positive, but I'm pretty sure this is when his family left Russia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Je...pire#1903-1906

[fatchance2005]

Originally Posted by Dopo

I grew up in a different country where the communist party is just another political party and actually, in the US, you can vote for the communist party.

Everybody hates everything that has to do with communism, the communist party, etc.

But what is "communism"?
I bet more than 95% of americans don't even know the actual definition of communism.

According to Marx and Lenin, Communism is a theoretical end-point, a perfect utopian State. Many predominantly Socialist States have striven to achieve this goal but none have achieved it. Those are the states that are commonly but incorrectly called "Communist". It's like Americans calling their country a democracy when in fact its a republic.

The basic idea revolves around the ownership of Capital (Capital= goods and services, or symbols of them such as money). In Marx's time and earlier most countries had an agrarian (farming) economy. The farmers who worked the land did so for little or no pay, similar to "sharecropping" in the US. Profits from the crops went to the land owners, who did little or no work. Marx saw that system as exploitation of the workers. His basic proposition was that the means of production were rightfully owned by those who did the actual producing. You see this same idea in practice in the USA in the form of employee owned businesses. Only a little earlier, workers had been treated as property that went with the land, and forbidden to leave, ever. They were not slaves, in that they were not bought and sold except together with the land. They were called serfs.

This arrangement caused a huge disparity between the "haves" and the "have nots". Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, and Fyodor Doestoyevski among others wrote about this. Marx, an accountant, could see that the total amount of Capital was enough to take care of everybody (at that time), but that most people lived in grinding poverty while a tiny number lived in fabulous luxury. Revolutions in France, and later in Russia sought to correct this imbalance.

Marx proposed that ownership of the workplace should belong to the worker. He thought this would lead to a classless society with an even distribution of wealth. Managers and supervisors would be largely unnecessary, but where they were unavoidable they would be the servants, not the Masters of the workers. His term for the workers was the "Proletariat" and this concept was called "the Dictatorship of the Proletariat". Since there was no longer an Aristocracy, the people of slightly greater rank and position like the managers and supervisors-- anyone who had capital but not directly involved in production-- he called the "bourgesoisie", a word he borrowed from the French, meaning the "Mercantile Class" (merchants, traders, bankers, accountants, etc.) The idea was that the bourgesoisie was undesirable and would wither away over time. When it was entirely gone, the utopian State, Communism, would have been achieved.

The most important thing to know about Communism is "There has Never Been an Exact Blueprint for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat" Marx described his social system only in abstract terms, as an economic system, leaving the design of the political apparatus to the politicians. V. I. Lenin was the first to attempt to establish an actual society based on Marxism, following the overthrow of the Monarchy in Russia in 1918. A number of different models for a Marxist State were being debated when Lenin siezed power. There was strong support for a Parliamentary version. Lenin favored a strong executive with a powerless representative body (the "politburo") similar to the Roman Senate, to provide input from the different districts. Once in power he eliminated advocates of alternative models.

Lenin tried using "Collectives", basically camps where people lived and worked together, similar to the WPA and CCC Camps in 1930's America. These proved less effective than individual farms. At one point children were removed from families to be raised separately in education collectives. None of these social experiments were particularly successful, and all were phased out over time.

Stalin followed Lenin. He strengthened the executive role further. He expanded the role of the Politburo to include management of the bureaucracy. He also greatly expanded the role of the military in domestic affairs, as it had been under the Czar.

The biggest problem in Russian Communism was the lack of adequate distribution infrastructure to get goods from the point of production to the consumer, something that is self-driven under capitalism. Russian Communism was also handicapped by their cumbersome and contentious bureaucracy inherited from the Czar. That proved an impediment to modernization that was never overcome.

China was the only other large scale attempt at a Communist State. China used a more extensive system of collectives, and included ongoing political indoctrination as a basic component of their model. They also tried separating the children from families to be raised separately, and stuck with both of these features longer than other Communist States.

There were around a couple of dozen other Communist States, either through elections, revolution, or conquest by other Communist States. As things worked out, only those who brought back some of the features of Capitalism enjoyed varying degrees of success. With the lessons of history to guide them China and Viet Nam seem to function as well as non-Communist States. China has more social unrest and dissatisfaction but is also more intrusive into the daily lives of its citizens compared to Viet Nam. Viet Nam remains hampered by trade restrictions lingering from its wars with the USA, France, and the Japanese Empire.

Co-ops, Communes, Unions, Group Health Plans, and Social Security are all examples of Communism working on a small but limited scale. The current widespread poverty and famine in the world have renewed interest and may lead to new designs for new planned societies thatavoid some of the past mistakes.

[Dopo]

The problem with not knowing what communism, socialism, capitalism, fascism, etc, etc, etc.
Is that corrupt politicians love ignorant population.

Corrupt politicians don't want the population to be smart and understand the definition of economic models and how the economy really works.
Because in that way, it's easier to manipulate the population.

Why should we know the meaning of those words?
If we knew the definition of those words, we would realize that there's socialist programs all over the US (social security, welfare, etc) and even a communist program (unemployment checks)

By keeping the population ignorant, the government gets away with passing "corporate socialist bills" like Bush's $700 billion bail out to .....ing banks (giving our money to people that will charge us % to use "our money")
And then say that we can't have universal health care like most industrialized countries because "That's socialism/communism"

[fatchance2005]

Originally Posted by Dopo

The problem with not knowing what communism, socialism, capitalism, fascism, etc, etc, etc.
Is that corrupt politicians love ignorant population.

Corrupt politicians don't want the population to be smart and understand the definition of economic models and how the economy really works.
Because in that way, it's easier to manipulate the population.

Why should we know the meaning of those words?
If we knew the definition of those words, we would realize that there's socialist programs all over the US (social security, welfare, etc) and even a communist program (unemployment checks)

By keeping the population ignorant, the government gets away with passing "corporate socialist bills" like Bush's $700 billion bail out to .....ing banks (giving our money to people that will charge us % to use "our money")
And then say that we can't have universal health care like most industrialized countries because "That's socialism/communism"

So what you're saying is that the human factors corrupt Communist governments in the same way they corrupt other systems. I agree wholeheartedly.

[evilnewbie]

There is absolutely NOTHING wrong with communism... if you live in a PERFECT world... problem is as many posters have pointed out... CORRUPTION... an inherent human trait in most people (particularly socialists).... which means communism is one of the WORSE types of government if humans are corruptible... Capitalism is NOT a form of government as many people attribute it to... it is a FORM of bartering (trading) between people... What really annoys me is people who cannot separate "free market" and corporatism... two very distinct entities... we have corporatism for a long time... stop blaming the "free market" it is getting tiresome...

[fatchance2005]

Originally Posted by evilnewbie

There is absolutely NOTHING wrong with communism... if you live in a PERFECT world... problem is as many posters have pointed out... CORRUPTION... an inherent human trait in most people (particularly socialists).... which means communism is one of the WORSE types of government if humans are corruptible... Capitalism is NOT a form of government as many people attribute it to... it is a FORM of bartering (trading) between people... What really annoys me is people who cannot separate "free market" and corporatism... two very distinct entities... we have corporatism for a long time... stop blaming the "free market" it is getting tiresome...

Regardless of what you call them, non-Communist social systems seem to have no special immunty to the kinds of human vice that are mentioned with respect to Communism. It would be nice if they did.

[evilnewbie]

Originally Posted by fatchance2005

Regardless of what you call them, non-Communist social systems seem to have no special immunty to the kinds of human vice that are mentioned with respect to Communism. It would be nice if they did.

Yes, they are not... but Communism is the WORST of them all when it comes to corruption... when you have centralized power like that... its going to be the WORST of all governments.... PERIOD... thus knowing that corruption is inherent in many people, communism is the WORST of all the governments...