Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
So, you're saying, the putative "owners", who are the workers, should have no rights other than to be slaughtered? Unless their "Communist" exploiters are the only ones who know what they are doing.
No. Rather, experts should decide on business policies.
Every time I encountered that argument (highlighted) I responded that there is one successful Marxist society in the world, not just in America, and that is monastery which includes the nunnery. And it is not facetious.
Marx said: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Remove Marx from the statement for a moment and insert religious figures like the Buddha or Jesus and the statement would be called 'noble' or 'worthy' of living. In the monastery, everyone is equal in the eyes of God. Everyone contributes his/her maximum but takes only the minimum to live. But the problem with the monastery is that everyone is a volunteer and this is where Leftists have a hard time dealing with. To volunteer mean there are choices and as long as choices exists, there will be many who will chose what Leftists do not approve.
So the problem is HOW to get from A to C, where:
A. From each according to his ability
B. How? Communism is the application of Marxism. Abolish property rights, for one example. Set price controls, another example. Collective farming, another example. And so on and on.
C. to each according to his needs
If you cannot change the people's minds to believe in 'C' via altruism like how monks and nuns chose to serve God, then affect the people's bodies or force 'C' upon them. All communist countries have their own variations of B.
From the scientific perspective, if you have 100 yrs of experimentation and each of them have varying degrees of failure modes until global collapse, and the word 'global' does not mean the world but only the experiment body itself, then it is wise to acknowledge that the idea itself is non-workable and stop further experimentation. The largest experiment to have its global collapse and breakup is the Soviet Union. China smartly avoided their own global collapse by allowing the Chinese people large measures of choices via capitalism and they did just in time. One can even say barely in time for China.
In the US, we have the Intellectual Left, the Political Left, and the Activist Left. What Marx said is religion for the Intellectual Left. Failures in Marxist experimentation do not deter the Intellectual Left. Never have and never will.
Down one level is the Political Left who uses Marxism to satisfy their needs for control. It is never about Marxism but about control. They live in governmental institutions, media, and academia.
Street level is where lies the Activist Left. ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter, and Code Pink are some examples. Their goal is to disrupt the norms that governs daily lives. Make your bodies uncomfortable so that you will look one level up for guidance.
As a refugee from communism, I noticed there is one thing that made the US resistant to successful Marxist experimentation: the US Constitution. Am not saying that from a 'Right' perspective but from an engineer's perspective. There are mechanisms inside the US Constitution that make it difficult to implement communist, not Marxist, ideas on the global scale. That is like designing an experiment that excludes certain variables and/or factors. That certain rights came from God, whether one believes in God or not is not the point, and not from the State, is one such exclusion, so it became up to the Political Left to fiddle with the meanings of words and phrases to control those certain rights. Another mechanism is the separation of powers, so again, it rests on the Political Left to try to blur the lines between the branches of government.
Am not saying that having a constitution is the antibody for Marxism and communism. Many countries have constitutions but many of them failed in spite of having constitutions. The issue for the US is the US Constitution, nothing else should matter.
I agree. With this. Not only that. But united states believes in ideals of liberalism economically and socially and does not believe in collectivism. Communism, nazism even in America your activist left like BLM and antifia are collectivist and so is critical race theory is also collectivist.
Status:
"Moldy Tater Gangrene, even before Moscow Marge."
(set 2 days ago)
Location: Dallas, TX
5,790 posts, read 3,599,675 times
Reputation: 5697
A reminder to the thread.
*Explaining what a system is and what is stands for is NOT the same as supporting it. No conservative here would say that a White Southern conservative explaining how plantation slavery operated means that person supports it. Same thing with a political and/or economic liberal explaining what Communism is all about.
*I backtracked a bit about Communism being not a political system. It is, although only insofar as it's used to enforce economic policies (i.e., socialism with communist aspirations). The 'communist aspirations' being both the withering away of the state and having all property owned in common. What we popularly called "communist countries" were, by their leaders own admission, not communist yet; they were still in the "temporary workers and peasants dictatorship".
*If such and such a political activist group or politician is NOT calling for abolishing private ownership of wealth-generating properties, then they're NOT advocating communism. Even more true if their acts and speeches imply belief in private ownership of said properties (regardless of tax and regulation levels they may call for). I'm looking at you, those in the pro-gun, or anti-abortion, or 'crack down much harder on illegal immigrants' crowds - none of those issues have anything to do with economics and certainly not about who ought to be owning wealth-generating properties.
Future might be imperfect, but perhaps, not so bleak.
Quote:
But consider: According to a Gallup Poll this past year, nearly 50% of millennial and Gen Z respondents held a positive view of socialism. That compares with 39% for Gen Xers and 32% for baby boomers.
Does that mean modern N. European Social Democracy? Or Marxian socialism? Americans tend to have a very overly broad definition of socialism compared to the academic definitions. In any case, that confusion is why I'm skeptical about the poll's ability to capture the actual political sentiments of Americans.
Does that mean modern N. European Social Democracy? Or Marxian socialism? Americans tend to have a very overly broad definition of socialism compared to the academic definitions. In any case, that confusion is why I'm skeptical about the poll's ability to capture the actual political sentiments of Americans.
For some weird reason, many people here in the states talk about euro or sometimes even canuckian socialism but when you talk to the people from their they don't know what the heck that is since they say they too are capitalist.
So no, they can't be used as a role to be modeled after since the people themselves admit it doesn't exist in their societies.
Nor do I think the Soviet strongman or Sino strongman model is the be-all & end-all of the various socialist flavors.
But I understand why the propaganda wing of the globalist plantation system (the cabal of trans-national neo-nazi cartels, fascist/corporatists, nordic north atlantic imperial feudalists & planter/colonial/settler pseudo-nationalists; the descendants of the former & their coloured concubines & the slaver sidekicks from the man-children) keeps focusing on them.
at the end of the day it comes down to one single thing.
"IF everyone will"
Well, EVERYONE WONT.
And that ends in force. Evil vindictive force used to break the will of people who wish to be free.
Communism is never about equity. It is about force. Call it a system. call it a form of government. Call it a philosophy. I don't care what you call it, at the end of the day, it brings force AGAINST the will of people who wish to make their own choices.
People say communism is supposed to be about totalitarian gubbermint, yet fail to remember that communism as a philosophy/ideology doesn't really want or need a state.
And, of course, socialism & communism are not necessarily one and the same.
- Communism doesn't work and always ends up in collapse, or in oppression of citizens to keep them from fleeing.
The end.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
