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Jewel Repetition posted:We're not eating cats like Cuba Neither are Cubans, they experienced a food shortage in the 90s as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, but they've long since recovered, despite the embargo. I remember a headline from a few years ago about their eliminating child malnutrition.
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Jan 23, 2016 00:07
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Bryter posted:Neither are Cubans, they experienced a food shortage in the 90s as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, but they've long since recovered, despite the embargo. That's what I was referring to. People in the former USSR aren't starving to death either.
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Jan 23, 2016 00:08
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DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:Yudo is great, tell us more about how communists are trying to immanentize the eschaton, Mr. All-Varsity College Republican Debate & Book Club Is calling someone a conservative the only trick you can do?
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Jan 23, 2016 00:09
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LGD posted:How much do you actually know about this poo poo? Transfer payments is a broad label that covers far more than just food stamps, and they've done actual studies on the impact of food deserts. Most of the evidence points toward them having a negligible influence- I think grocery store location accounts for something like 10% of the difference in eating habits. Never said anything about food deserts, only bringing up the issue of the for-profit system cultivating poor eating habits. You can talk about people being empowered to make their own choices all you like, but without a massive public - dare I say - re-education program, there's no guarantee that they will even make the right ones. Michelle Obama tried guaranteeing access to nutritionally dense foods for schoolchildren, and she was called a Communist Fascist Dictator. You bring up the issue of political will without considering that political resistance to an expansion of the welfare state is being cultivated by the capitalist system. What happens if the welfare state is being undermined gradually over time, and is eventually dismantled because of political forces which are shaped by capital? European countries with strong social welfare programs have been backsliding into Austerity for a decade, often in spite of public opinion. Engaging in constant struggle with the political Right only invites the cyclical declines of public health which are endemic to capitalism. Jewel Repetition posted:That's what I was referring to. People in the former USSR aren't starving to death either. When the Yeltsin regime attempted to sell off all public assets through a share distribution program in the late 90s, millions of Russians immediately sold off their shares just so that they could eat. It was a significant causal factor in the consolidation of oligarchic control over Russian capital, and all fomented by the chaos of a Liberal regime. Pener Kropoopkin fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Jan 23, 2016 |
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Jan 23, 2016 00:13
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Jewel Repetition posted:That's what I was referring to. People in the former USSR aren't starving to death either. If you understand that Cuba's problems with food security in the 90s were down to the loss of their major trading partners and the US embargo, you probably shouldn't imply that they were a result of them being a socialist country.
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Jan 23, 2016 00:15
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Bryter posted:If you understand that Cuba's problems with food security in the 90s were down to the loss of their major trading partners and the US embargo, you probably shouldn't imply that they were a result of them being a socialist country. No, it does go back to their socialism. Their backwards economy necessitated the USSR propping them up, so when it dissolved they were left with a famine and had to institute capitalist reforms.
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Jan 23, 2016 00:21
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Jewel Repetition posted:No, it does go back to their socialism. Their backwards economy necessitated the USSR propping them up, so when it dissolved they were left with a famine and had to institute capitalist reforms. Uh, you do realize how the Foreign Aid system works, right? Billions in small developing countries all rely upon the First World to prop them up.
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Jan 23, 2016 00:23
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"the american people vote against their self-interests because they've been fed misinformation to keep them from doing so. however, other choices they make are not influenced by the bourgeoisie, only voting, because voting is the be-all and end-all of politics in the world." — liberalsJewel Repetition posted:Is calling someone a conservative the only trick you can do? the dude made an incredibly stupid post to end a series of other incredibly stupid posts. he's trying to argue about marxism-leninism despite making comments that show he knows nothing about it
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Jan 23, 2016 00:27
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Never said anything about food deserts, only bringing up the issue of the for-profit system cultivating poor eating habits. Homework Explainer posted:do you know what a food desert is quote:You can talk about people being empowered to make their own choices all you like, but without a massive public - dare I say - re-education program, there's no guarantee that they will even make the right ones. Michelle Obama tried guaranteeing access to nutritionally dense foods for schoolchildren, and she was called a Communist Fascist Dictator. quote:You bring up the issue of political will without considering that political resistance to an expansion of the welfare state is being cultivated by the capitalist system. What happens if the welfare state is being undermined gradually over time, and is eventually dismantled because of political forces which are shaped by capital? European countries with strong social welfare programs have been backsliding into Austerity for a decade, often in spite of public opinion. Engaging in constant struggle with the political Right only invites the cyclical declines of public health which are endemic to capitalism. I mean your central complaint right now is that capitalism is making our poorest too fat. It's true, and a social problem we need to address but lol
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Jan 23, 2016 00:30
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Homework Explainer posted:"the american people vote against their self-interests because they've been fed misinformation to keep them from doing so. however, other choices they make are not influenced by the bourgeoisie, only voting, because voting is the be-all and end-all of politics in the world." — liberals What.
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Jan 23, 2016 00:30
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that's not a response to you the obesity epidemic isn't proof of capitalism's success, holy poo poo lol
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Jan 23, 2016 00:32
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My biggest argument against socialism is that in America, you can always find a party, whereas in Soviet Russia, the party always finds you.
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Jan 23, 2016 00:36
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My second biggest argument, is pizza.
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Jan 23, 2016 00:45
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Homework Explainer posted:that's not a response to you quote:the obesity epidemic isn't proof of capitalism's success, holy poo poo lol it's absolutely a social problem and hardly an unqualified triumph, but I don't really know how you can look at the sweep of human history and all of the varied economic and political systems that have been tried and not consider it a success of a sort LGD fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Jan 23, 2016 |
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Jan 23, 2016 00:47
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Homework Explainer posted:the dude made an incredibly stupid post to end a series of other incredibly stupid posts. he's trying to argue about marxism-leninism despite making comments that show he knows nothing about it So, you got nothing, then?
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Jan 23, 2016 00:47
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I seriously don't even get what point Homework Explainer was trying to make with that thing I quoted.
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Jan 23, 2016 00:48
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LGD posted:I don't really care that people all make the "right" choices, you don't really care that you're advocating a system that produces food that is worse than we feed to our pets. I'm pretty ok with where I stand on this issue. I never advocated for the Soviet system, so congratulations on destroying a straw man. There are as many different forms of Socialism as there are for transfer payments. The problem is developing a system which works within the context of existing society, not to try and develop a one-size-fits-all universal model, which is the purport of capitalism. quote:I mean your central complaint right now is that capitalism is making our poorest too fat. It's true, and a social problem we need to address but lol LOL it's so great to live in a system where people can be nutritionally starved, and yet still grow obese and develop severe health complications. LMAO loving LOOOOOL. LGD posted:it's absolutely a social problem and hardly an unqualified triumph, but I don't really know how you can look at the sweep of human history and all of the varied economic and political systems that have been tried and not consider it a success of a sort It is absolutely not a success, because developmental disorders arising from nutritional deficiency have a tendency to make people stupid. It plagues them all throughout their adult lives. The argument you're making here is that it's ok to compound human misery so long as the death rolls stay low. Pener Kropoopkin fucked around with this message at 00:59 on Jan 23, 2016 |
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Jan 23, 2016 00:56
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:LOL it's so great to live in a system where people can be nutritionally starved, and yet still grow obese and develop severe health complications. LMAO loving LOOOOOL. What nutrients, exactly, are Americans deprived of?
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Jan 23, 2016 01:01
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LGD posted:modern society produces so many excess calories so cheaply that the very poorest members of modern society are in vastly greater danger of developing health problems due to over-consumption of non-staple foods than they are of starving to death capitalism is a global system, and membership of "modern society" is broader than you appear to believe.
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Jan 23, 2016 01:01
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PleasingFungus posted:What nutrients, exactly, are Americans deprived of? Well to be fair there are actually a few things Americans don't get enough of like potassium and omega 3s.
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Jan 23, 2016 01:03
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:I never advocated for the Soviet system, so congratulations on destroying a straw man. There are as many different forms of Socialism as there are for transfer payments. The problem is developing a system which works within the context of existing society, not to try and develop a one-size-fits-all universal model, which is the purport of capitalism. any attempts to bring up examples from the failed real world attempts to implement such a system are clearly straw men to be dismissed out of hand quote:LOL it's so great to live in a system where people can be nutritionally starved, and yet still grow obese and develop severe health complications. LMAO loving LOOOOOL. Pener Kropoopkin posted:It is absolutely not a success, because developmental disorders arising from nutritional deficiency have a tendency to make people stupid. It plagues them all throughout their adult lives. The argument you're making here is that it's ok to compound human misery so long as the death rolls stay low. I also don't think you're being realistic in your appraisal of scope and sweep of the developmental disabilities caused by poor diet in modern societies relative to the issues caused by the diets that human societies have been eating historically Bryter posted:capitalism is a global system, and membership of "modern society" is broader than you appear to believe. LGD fucked around with this message at 01:27 on Jan 23, 2016 |
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Jan 23, 2016 01:04
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I think people would be far skinnier in a communist society.
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Jan 23, 2016 01:21
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Jewel Repetition posted:My second biggest argument, is pizza.
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Jan 23, 2016 01:23
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Jewel Repetition posted:Well to be fair there are actually a few things Americans don't get enough of like potassium and omega 3s. Do you want to argue that shortages of potassium and omega-3 in american diets have a major detrimental effect on the population's health?
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Jan 23, 2016 01:25
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LGD posted:any attempt to bring up examples from the failed real world attempts to implement such a system are straw men to be dismissed And I could just as easily point to the dismissive attitudes with regard to the artificial starvation conditions inflicted on the 3rd World by global capitalism. Socialized agriculture has real success when it comes to creating self-sufficient systems that solve the issue of food insecurity. quote:and the argument you're making is that the current state of affairs is terrible compared to an imagined ideal- I agree, it is! however you really haven't established why we need to radically revise our entire food production system in the (nebulous) way you're suggesting in order to solve this issue (especially since it seems to be highly linked to income) The issues with our agricultural system are multivarious. Not only does it generate an incredible amount of waste, it fails to adequately distribute nutritional foods to the populations which are the most in need. On top of that it engenders a consolidation of power over the production system into an ever smaller circle of private hands, which profit from the labors of farmers due to the excessive demands of capital intensive methods. It also has an incredibly negative environmental impact due to industrialized methods of meat production, which produce an over-abundance of low quality meat, while generating massive amounts of greenhouse gasses and useless biowaste. Being able to adequately address these issues won't be possible while tying ourselves to a for-profit system of agriculture, because these developments were driven with profit in mind. The ability of people to access the food is only one element of the problem, although it is the one most immediately concerning because millions of people are still technically starving, even if their caloric intake is met.
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Jan 23, 2016 01:27
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:The ability of people to access the food is only one element of the problem, although it is the one most immediately concerning because millions of people are still technically starving, even if their caloric intake is met. Technically starving according to who?
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Jan 23, 2016 01:29
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PleasingFungus posted:Do you want to argue that shortages of potassium and omega-3 in american diets have a major detrimental effect on the population's health? That depends on your definition of "major." But no I don't want to have an argument about it, nor do I think this minor issue is an argument against capitalism.
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Jan 23, 2016 01:35
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:And I could just as easily point to the dismissive attitudes with regard to the artificial starvation conditions inflicted on the 3rd World by global capitalism. Socialized agriculture has real success when it comes to creating self-sufficient systems that solve the issue of food insecurity. if you want to argue land reform, protectionism and seed-sharing programs are a better policy than letting wealth concentrate while exposing a country to the full-bore global market I'm not going to argue with you, I'm just going to be really skeptical that it's in any way a good example for the developed world quote:The issues with our agricultural system are multivarious. Not only does it generate an incredible amount of waste, it fails to adequately distribute nutritional foods to the populations which are the most in need. On top of that it engenders a consolidation of power over the production system into an ever smaller circle of private hands, which profit from the labors of farmers due to the excessive demands of capital intensive methods. It also has an incredibly negative environmental impact due to industrialized methods of meat production, which produce an over-abundance of low quality meat, while generating massive amounts of greenhouse gasses and useless biowaste. Being able to adequately address these issues won't be possible while tying ourselves to a for-profit system of agriculture, because these developments were driven with profit in mind. they will, but that's not going to prevent this grand new system from having its own problems (many caused by the different incentives at work) that it will need to address and while it'd be nice to think we could just switch to a command economy and decree these problems out of existence, nearly all of the evidence we have points to command economies loving things up worse for the man on the street than hybrid-market economies tend to given the much better job market economies do generating wealth it seems far better to work to build a system that ameliorates the excesses than to tear everything down in the certain knowledge that we're going to get it right this time LGD fucked around with this message at 01:48 on Jan 23, 2016 |
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Jan 23, 2016 01:45
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:LOL it's so great to live in a system where people can be nutritionally starved, and yet still grow obese and develop severe health complications. LMAO loving LOOOOOL. Contrary to popular complete misunderstanding, very few Americans are simultaneously overweight (or even normal weight) and lacking in any nutrients. Americans with nutritional deficiencies are primarily those who are extremely poor and can't get enough food to become fat, usually due to being barred from food aid systems for one reason or another (typically, homelessness). Other people likely in America to be nutritionally deprived: anorexic people (for obvious reasons) and vegans (almost always because of B12). Good day. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 23, 2016 02:44
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Yudo posted:So, you got nothing, then? marxists do not believe socialism is inevitable or will simply come about due to the flow of progress, nor do we believe it is infinitely sustainable after attainment. dialectical and historical materialism is essential to the theory. counter-revolution in france and imperialist adventurism in the 20th century, culminating in the dismantling of the soviet union, is proof that socialism can and will be assaulted by reactionary forces. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectical_materialism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_materialism Friedrich Engels posted:The Utopians’ mode of thought has for a long time governed the Socialist ideas of the 19th century, and still governs some of them. Until very recently, all French and English Socialists did homage to it. The earlier German Communism, including that of Weitling, was of the same school. To all these, Socialism is the expression of absolute truth, reason and justice, and has only to be discovered to conquer all the world by virtue of its own power. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ Vladimir Lenin posted:Early socialism, however, was utopian socialism. It criticised capitalist society, it condemned and damned it, it dreamed of its destruction, it had visions of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/mar/x01.htm Josef Stalin posted:This, however, does not mean that changes in the relations of production, and the transition from old relations of production to new relations of production proceed smoothly, without conflicts, without upheavals. On the contrary such a transition usually takes place by means of the revolutionary overthrow of the old relations of production and the establishment of new relations of production. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/09.htm Jewel Repetition posted:I seriously don't even get what point Homework Explainer was trying to make with that thing I quoted. i'll unpack it a bit more. governments and economic systems can be defined, theoretically and historically, both by what they do to or for their people and what they prevent their people from doing. politics and economics are omnipresent, they affect every aspect of our lives, both in the things we can and cannot do. capitalism promises the infinite, it promises unlimited freedom of choice and unending possibility when it comes to economics and politics. you made use of this sort of aspirational thinking in your example of the "business owner" who somehow manages to become a member of the bourgeoisie from the very bottom of the economic ladder. every day the working class is bombarded with propaganda of letter and deed that capitalism and liberal democracy is the best possible system, where any change can happen given enough time and popular will. it in many ways is more millenarian than socialism, especially the way liberals tend to look at it in terms of elections and the observable political process. this infinite promise is taken to be true without question for most people, with some questioning for others. but the truth is, there are things that are not possible under capitalism. the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, will never, ever allow the relations of production to change, for one. the more entrenched the capitalist class becomes, and the more superprofits that can be extracted via imperialism from less-developed nations, the less they'll allow, because capitalists become less reliant on domestic labor for surplus value. the best, most socially democratic period in the united states (almost exclusively for whites, of course) was when the strength of the soviet union became a threat to the american imperial ruling class, and so that class gave more in concessions to the proletariat to prevent revolution. now that threat is gone. the people have become less and less class conscious. there's less need for concession. and the real american left, the anti-capitalist left, is practically dead and buried. we're seeing the dissolution of european social democracy now, too, which is what happens when class struggle abates. the failure of barack obama to enact meaningful reforms — which i'm not sure isn't just the system working as intended, considering how quickly he was embraced and enveloped by the capitalist class and its representatives in government — is evidence of this. the failure of a president sanders or a president trump to curtail imperialism will be more evidence if they are elected. the election of hillary clinton will be a really obvious piece of evidence if that happens. mass movements in opposition to capitalist interests are infiltrated, otherwise disrupted, or crushed with state violence. see: the government's response to occupy wall street and black lives matter, the student movements of '68, anti-wto protests, iraq war protests, the list goes on. tiny, tiny left groups get fbi spooks sent in on a regular basis. look up brandon darby. the point being, the wishes of the ruling class infiltrate most things we do. they are the class the state represents. it is, as marx said, a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. liberals acknowledge this when it comes to the voting patterns of the working class, understanding pretty intuitively the way propaganda works via obvious cudgels like fox news, but they don't seem to see it elsewhere, in the way buying decisions, social relations, etc. are also determined by the ruling class. class is all over the place but there are only certain manifestations that are part of mainstream conversation. which is, of course, exactly how the bourgeoisie likes it. boy that was a long post! this, i feel, is a more productive line of discussion instead of "how many million billion trillion people did the ussr kill"
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Jan 23, 2016 06:05
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpNaV2Usxlc
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Jan 23, 2016 07:51
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So, Marxism and Marxist-Leninism is millenarian after all? Also, we keep bringing the pesky millions murdered by the USSR, Democratic Kampuchea, China, DPRK et al. because it evidences that the theory you are espousing is poo poo. e: This is great. Yudo fucked around with this message at 08:02 on Jan 23, 2016 |
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Jan 23, 2016 07:59
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Homework Explainer posted:i'll unpack it a bit more. governments and economic systems can be defined, theoretically and historically, both by what they do to or for their people and what they prevent their people from doing. politics and economics are omnipresent, they affect every aspect of our lives, both in the things we can and cannot do. capitalism promises the infinite, it promises unlimited freedom of choice and unending possibility when it comes to economics and politics. you made use of this sort of aspirational thinking in your example of the "business owner" who somehow manages to become a member of the bourgeoisie from the very bottom of the economic ladder. Learning about a specific business as an employee and going on to become an entrepeneur isn't infinite. It's a finite change. Homework Explainer posted:but the truth is, there are things that are not possible under capitalism. the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, will never, ever allow the relations of production to change, for one. the more entrenched the capitalist class becomes, and the more superprofits that can be extracted via imperialism from less-developed nations, the less they'll allow, because capitalists become less reliant on domestic labor for surplus value. the best, most socially democratic period in the united states (almost exclusively for whites, of course) was when the strength of the soviet union became a threat to the american imperial ruling class, and so that class gave more in concessions to the proletariat to prevent revolution. now that threat is gone. the people have become less and less class conscious. there's less need for concession. and the real american left, the anti-capitalist left, is practically dead and buried. we're seeing the dissolution of european social democracy now, too, which is what happens when class struggle abates. The theory that economic leftism can only flourish when there's fear of revolution doesn't account for Obama's turn left from the Bush years. And it looks like we're gonna go further pretty soon.
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Jan 23, 2016 08:32
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Yudo posted:Also, we keep bringing the pesky millions murdered by the USSR, Democratic Kampuchea, China, DPRK et al. because it evidences that the theory you are espousing is poo poo. The stalinists in the thread have already clearly shown that those tens of millions were killed by natural causes, not manmade ones, and if they were manmade it was an accident, not on purpose, and anyway even if they did it on purpose capitalists did it first. I think the facts are clear, here.
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Jan 23, 2016 08:53
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Yudo posted:Also, we keep bringing the pesky millions murdered by the USSR, Democratic Kampuchea, China, DPRK et al. because it evidences that the theory you are espousing is poo poo. Does this mean that the far greater number of those killed by Capitalism - with even now several million people per year dying from easily preventable causes like starvation, preventable disease, malnutrition, etc, - means you think Capitalism is super poo poo? PleasingFungus posted:The stalinists in the thread have already clearly shown that those tens of millions were killed by natural causes, not manmade ones, and if they were manmade it was an accident, not on purpose, and anyway even if they did it on purpose capitalists did it first. I think the facts are clear, here. Isn't this exactly the case Capitalists are making also though? Jewel Repetition posted:Learning about a specific business as an employee and going on to become an entrepeneur isn't infinite. It's a finite change. I think the point is that if you become a business owner you might make fifty thousand dollars a year. This could grow to fifty million a year.It could grow to fifty billion a year. Even at that point it could grow to fifty billion and one a year. There's no realistic upper limit to how rich a business owner could theoretically become until they literally own all the money in the world, which ain't going to happen. Practically speaking there's effectively infinite room for growth (change) for the purpose of any business owner. No matter how rich they get there has never been a Capitalist who couldn't grow that little bit richer. quote:The theory that economic leftism can only flourish when there's fear of revolution doesn't account for Obama's turn left from the Bush years. And it looks like we're gonna go further pretty soon. Left is relative. From a socialist point of view it's going to be focused on the people as a whole and their relationship to the means of production. Obama's done a few good lefty things that are alright like the treaty with Iran and sticking him thumb up his rear end and doing nothing so as to allow the Supreme Court to make gay marriage legal, but these are changes within what is essentially a very narrow framework. The entire economy is still based on the economic exploitation of the masses by the upper classes vie the creation and extraction of surplus value and even in Capitalist terms Obama hasn't done much to swing it towards a social democratic type of Capitalism.
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Jan 23, 2016 09:37
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team overhead smash posted:Does this mean that the far greater number of those killed by Capitalism - with even now several million people per year dying from easily preventable causes like starvation, preventable disease, malnutrition, etc, - means you think Capitalism is super poo poo? Communism would fix all of those things if someone would just try it!!!!111 Oh right, it was and it didn't: it made things worse, e.g. the 30-45 million starved to death in China from 1958-62 or the disaster the PDRE's agricultural folly exacerbated. Thinking that somehow, someway, now it will be different is a great act of faith; however, we are faithless. Ultimately, you have to sell us on the PSL and all I hear is the fallacious assertion that (a bumbling, facile and canting) criticism of capitalism is proof positive that Leninism/Stalinism isn't terrible.
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Jan 23, 2016 11:43
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Yudo posted:So, Marxism and Marxist-Leninism is millenarian after all? y'know, i think jewel repetition's premises and arguments are flawed, but i will say they're engaging us on merits and not acting in bad faith. you've got multiple marxist-leninists in here telling you why your understanding of the theory we absolutely know better than you is wrong, and i even posted quotes from actual revolutionaries as rebuttal. marxism-leninism is not deterministic and your attempts to link it with apocalyptic christianity are wrong. but you're not interested in talking about that, you'd rather do the posting equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and humming "yankee doodle dandy." not replying to you anymore Jewel Repetition posted:Learning about a specific business as an employee and going on to become an entrepeneur isn't infinite. It's a finite change. that kind of limited social mobility is, in reality, rare. which is my point. capitalism tells us all things are possible when in all likelihood only a very few are. Jewel Repetition posted:The theory that economic leftism can only flourish when there's fear of revolution doesn't account for Obama's turn left from the Bush years. And it looks like we're gonna go further pretty soon. in addition to what the above poster said in response to this, if you're referring to bernie sanders he's basically an eisenhower republican or, at best, a new deal democrat. that's not a left turn, that's gaining back ground won in the middle of the 20th century, the very time i mentioned when the country was at its most socially democratic. this is what frustrates me about bernie. the window of political possibility has narrowed so much that dwight eisenhower with a d next to his name is the great "left" hope. that's not heartening to real leftists, or at least it shouldn't be. that's how effective the ruling class is at shaping the narrative, though! another thing worth mentioning, if the anticoms itt want to have a real discussion about actually existing socialism (they don't, when spouting ad hoc received wisdom is so much more satisfying, with so little effort expended) it's important to keep in mind we haven't seen a socialism not under unflinching attack and encirclement by imperialism. russia is, as always, an excellent example, but cuba works really well for this too. the country was under heavy blockade and sanction from the moment of its marxist turn, yet still managed to keep people housed, educated and healthy. even during the special period social services weren't dismantled or diluted. it's not magical thinking to wonder how much better things could be in socialist nations without the omnipresent threat of subversion or outright military invasion, as with the bay of pigs and the american wars in vietnam and korea. chavez was a moderate left leader and only turned to socialism when the united states coup in 2002 didn't stick. imperialists keep shooting themselves in the foot for a reason: they rightly fear the people their capitalist state doesn't represent. PleasingFungus posted:The stalinists in the thread have already clearly shown that those tens of millions were killed by natural causes, not manmade ones, and if they were manmade it was an accident, not on purpose, and anyway even if they did it on purpose capitalists did it first. I think the facts are clear, here. no one has argued this shaky line of causality. the famines were a massive fuckup that authorities should have responded to more quickly, but they were the last famines in a country that had pre-revolutionary famines every year or two. the same is true of china. life expectancy doubled in socialist countries over their decades of operation, so the "murder factory" line of propaganda just does not work. Josef Stalin was a Good Christian who did Nothing Wrong. R. Guyovich fucked around with this message at 12:17 on Jan 23, 2016 |
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Jan 23, 2016 12:11
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Yudo posted:Communism would fix all of those things if someone would just try it!!!!111 Oh right, it was and it didn't: it made things worse, e.g. the 30-45 million starved to death in China from 1958-62 or the disaster the PDRE's agricultural folly exacerbated. Thinking that somehow, someway, now it will be different is a great act of faith; however, we are faithless. 1) You're assuming that the Soviet and Maoist states are what people want are aiming towards when they want to introduce Communism, which is very much not the case for most people. 2) The Capitalist deathcount from starvation and similar is easily 100+ million which far exceeds all deaths caused by Communism. 3) You also seem to be missing the point that even in hosed up Soviet Russia these were aberrations which were fixed and not repeated and don't represent the norm. Under the Capitalist framework millions of people dying of starvation and preventable medical conditions is the status quo. I mean is your argument really "Well occasionally the worst kind of Communism that we don't want to have and will be trying specifically to avoid can be fractionally as bad as Capitalism"? Long story short you can have a society where people collectively own the means of production, like say in a modern co-operative, without having death on a massive scale. Hell, even the messed up countries like China and the USSR only had these deaths for specific periods of a few years. The deaths aren't a inseparable part of Communism. On the other hand you can't have Capitalism without death on a massive scale. There hasn't been a single day where the Capitalist exploitation of the poor by the rich (and especially the poor in poorer countries) can't resulted in massive amounts of needless and avoidable death. Compare India and China. In the 1950s they were remarkable similar in terms of development. They developed incredibly differently though and China's Communist leadership gave remarkable focus on health, development and and education while India's Capitalist leadership didn't. As Nobel prize winner Amartya Sen explained in Hunger and Public Action China showed that many of these deaths were unnecessary and could easily be prevented with an egalitarian health policy. To quote him: "Finally, it is important to note that despite the gigantic size of excess mortality in the Chinese famine, the extra mortality in India from regular deprivation in normal times vastly overshadows the former. Comparing India's death rate of 12 per thousand with China's of 7 per thousand, and applying that difference to the Indian population of 781 million in 1986, we get an estimate of excess normal mortality in India of 3.9 million per year. This implies that every eight years or so more people die in India because of its higher regular death rate than died in China in the gigantic famine of 1958-61. India seems to manage to fill its cupboards with more skeletons every eight years than China put there in its years of shame." I'll also point out that this means since independence more deaths have been caused by the inequality of India's economic system than by all the deaths attributed to every Communist state in the entire history of the world (Even if you base it on the exaggerated figures of the Black Book of Communism or other sources and include all self-proclaimed socialist/communist states as communist with no critical analysis). Lastly Stalinism is terrible and no-one should try to sell you on it (Most socialist/communists hate Stalinism anyway) and I just wandered into this thread without specifically supporting the PSL to have a look and see what it was about. The PSL completely turned me off with that "Assad is not a butcher" stuff that someone posted. If they're willing to brush away massive killings and oppression, they're not the dudes I want in charge of running my revolution. Socialist Party USA seems like it'd be a safer bet that's more in line with traditional egalitarian and humanitarian beliefs although I don't know too much about them either so sorry if it turns out they support electing Mao's corpse as president for life and want to make him a tomb out of a billion baby corpses or something then sorry for the bad recommendation.
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Jan 23, 2016 13:54
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Part of the problem when considering the failures of socialism versus capitalism, is that socialist failures have more easily identifiable "villains." Those failed policies were directed by individuals, as part of a social program to guide the development of their respective societies. When a socialist system fucks up it's because a person hosed it up. Capitalism by comparison is faceless. Its neglect is systemic, a feature built into the system by virtue of its immoral desire to accumulate more capital by any means necessary. The victims of capitalism exist as statistical outliers - completely disenfranchised from the normal functions of business. Those who carry out the policies that destroy them do so behind the cover of a corporation, or the state. Limited liability translates into limited responsibility, and the aggregate decisions of speculators can end up generating price famines in the developing world. There is no single person or state to bear responsibility, but millions who are invested into the system. It's an entire class of people which continuously perpetuates this suffering, and Liberals absolutely refuse to come to terms with that fact. It becomes very easy for a person living in the First World to ignore the savageries inflicted upon developing nations every year. They do after all, live in countries which accumulated massive amounts of capital over centuries of global theft. The foundation of the social democratic welfare state is based upon colonialism, and it is continually financed through neocolonialism. It's an inescapable fact, even for countries which did not historically participate in foreign imperialism, because the financial system is now global in scope.
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Jan 23, 2016 14:43
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Part of the problem when considering the failures of socialism versus capitalism, is that socialist failures have more easily identifiable "villains." Those failed policies were directed by individuals, as part of a social program to guide the development of their respective societies. When a socialist system fucks up it's because a person hosed it up. i don't agree with this, comrade. individual actors making unilateral choices is great man propaganda that the west pushes in opposition to actually existing socialisms. the way those governments operated, and the way power was diffused among committees, soviets, etc., shows the "dictator theories" of those countries to be a pretty appalling misrepresentation of the way they functioned. gensecs were heads of state for most countries, yes, but there's absolutely no chance they made every political and economic decision for those countries, or even most of them. i'd argue more that because the government takes a larger role in economic planning that the "individual" you refer to is the government itself and not necessarily the head of state or specific central planners. everything else is 100 percent correct. a cool thing on relations of production, governance, etc. another team overhead smash posted:Long story short you can have a society where people collectively own the means of production, like say in a modern co-operative, without having death on a massive scale. Hell, even the messed up countries like China and the USSR only had these deaths for specific periods of a few years. The deaths aren't a inseparable part of Communism. On the other hand you can't have Capitalism without death on a massive scale. There hasn't been a single day where the Capitalist exploitation of the poor by the rich (and especially the poor in poorer countries) can't resulted in massive amounts of needless and avoidable death. while i agree that socialism now doesn't have to take the form of past socialisms, the way firms worked in the soviet union is very much like a cooperative, even more aggressively so since such a large percentage of workers were in the union and had a government guaranteeing their rights, and their participation both in the direction of the firm and the greater political process. from the first book above:  team overhead smash posted:Lastly Stalinism is terrible and no-one should try to sell you on it (Most socialist/communists hate Stalinism anyway) and I just wandered into this thread without specifically supporting the PSL to have a look and see what it was about. The PSL completely turned me off with that "Assad is not a butcher" stuff that someone posted. If they're willing to brush away massive killings and oppression, they're not the dudes I want in charge of running my revolution. Socialist Party USA seems like it'd be a safer bet that's more in line with traditional egalitarian and humanitarian beliefs although I don't know too much about them either so sorry if it turns out they support electing Mao's corpse as president for life and want to make him a tomb out of a billion baby corpses or something then sorry for the bad recommendation. stalinism isn't a real historical category of marxism, imo. stalin himself refused the term and continuously asserted himself a marxist-leninist. "stalinism" is a trotskyist construction that has been used as anti-soviet propaganda to great effect. i'll joke about "the lion assad" on occasion. there are criticisms to be had against him, ones i'll gladly discuss with other anti-imperialists. but man, i gotta tell you, american imperialism is far worse than assad or putin. the us government really does preside over a perpetual death machine and the consequences of this are remote to those of us living here but all too real for the people under attack by imperial power. the entire region has been destabilized by military adventurism and subversion campaigns against unfriendly governments. the overthrow of gaddafi has led to a previously unimaginable drop in quality of life for libyans. libya used to enjoy the highest QoL indexes in all of africa, and since the civil war, those figures have plummeted. whole regions of the country are outside the government's control. many live without electricity or clean drinking water. the same is true of iraq and syria. the war in syria — one which we certainly fomented — has been, as we all know, devastating. arming and training the fsa has been an unmitigated disaster. arms for that force have fallen into the hands of al-nusra and isis, islamist groups that we all recognize as dangerous extremists. we knew this would happen and did it anyway. rebels in madaya are keeping food for themselves and selling some to civilians in the city for exorbitant prices. the people there are starving and the west has decided to pin this on the saa as a huge propaganda push for regime change. assad himself recognized how much destruction was being waged by civil war and was willing to step down but this offer was rejected by the imperial powers, as the assumption had been that assad would be overthrown and a more friendly government put in place. the protracted war strengthened assad's resolve, and now that isn't an option. if your issue is "massive killings and oppression" then assad doesn't even warrant a mention next to the ravages of the imperial bourgeoisie. this is not to say his government is blameless, but there's just no comparison. imperialism is a cancer on the planet and must be stopped. R. Guyovich fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Jan 23, 2016 |
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Jan 23, 2016 17:14
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