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The USSR's actions were basically genocide even if technically it can be argued they weren't but really the USSR was as usual getting poo poo for being a few decades behind the cultural curve and its actions are easily comparable to the UK's actions in India at the end of the 19th century as well as other countries like Brazil, Ethiopia, China, etc. It was awful, but it's hardly uniquely awful in the historical context.
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Jan 22, 2016 22:52
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Jewel Repetition posted:Has anyone ever denied a genocide/atrocity happened and been on the right side of history? Well the Nazis denied their involvement in the Katyn Forest massacre and were proven right. Wait, poo poo, bad example. team overhead smash fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Jan 23, 2016 |
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Jan 23, 2016 00:02
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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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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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Homework Explainer posted: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. I don't think you're getting his point. It's the fact that there are identifiable moustache twirling villains on the Soviet side. Millions died in the holodomor? It's Stalin's fault. millions more in the Chinese famines? It's that crazy Mao. The millions that die each year from a golbal capitalist system that doesn't deliver food and healthcare to those most in need? There's no one main identifiable culprit. The point is about narrative, not objectivity or morality. quote: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. I feel this is a very lopsided view where you're not considering what makes the socialist ideal of co-operatives good and what made the workplaces of the USSR bad. You mention Trade Unions and government guaranteed rights, but not their toothlessness, the illegality of them performing core actions like strikes and the ability of the government to inflict astounding atrocities against its civilians for little cause. Not to mention that trade unions are a good thing because they protect and empower workers so when there is a varietyof disempowerment and abuse aimed at workers which happens regardless of trade unions then that doesn't really cut it as an acceptable rationale. If a worker is killed for trying to follow a non-party line, then his wife is sent to a labour camp for being a member of the family of a traitor to the Motherland while his and his child is impoverished and find it hard to work because he is officially labelled a "child of an enemy of the people" then that is not a good place for labour rights regardless of the number of people in sidelined trade unions. You need to take an overall holistic look at labour rights. Your focus on a few details reminds me of the way pharmaceutical companies will justify drugs on the basis of some change in a correlatorary effect even when it shows no signs of actually curing the disease. quote: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. Seeing as Lenin's dying wishes involved removing Stalin (which Stalin kept hidden) and Stalin lacked the theoretical underpinnings of contemporaries I don't really agree with or care for what he said or thought. Stalin was about the self-perpetuation of the Bolsheviks and lacked the ideological underpinnings and convictions of others. Stalinism is a recognised political trend that differs from the Leninism that preceded it. If you want to call it "Marxism-Leninism with less respect for human rights as Practiced by the USSR during approximately the 1930's to 1950's (possibly longer)" then you can but we all know you just mean Stalinism. quote: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. You seem to be skipping past the point. The issue is defending Assad as "not a butcher". I detest imperialism plenty but that doesn't make the domestic butchery of a middle-eastern dictator somehow acceptable.
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Jan 23, 2016 23:58
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Jewel Repetition posted:Another difference is that people starving today usually aren't doing so because of capitalism. Yeah, they clearly are. Each year several million people will needlessly die from a combination of starvation, malnutrition and preventable disease. We have the resources to stop these deaths, but the global system of commodity distribution does not give them what they need and prioritises making people fat in Western countries and producing medicine at a profit for investors. This global system of commodity distribution is called 'Capitalism'. quote:Source? Explained further below in my previous post in a bit of detail, the work of Amartya Sen and specifically Hunger and Public Action quote:This doesn't even make sense. First off millions of people dying of starvation and preventable medical conditions is not the capitalist status quo. In capitalist Canada for example, last year there were zero deaths from starvation and less than a hundred deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases. Millions of people dying of starvation and preventable medical conditions every single year is very much the capitalist status quo, it just happens in poor African countries as opposed to the richest countries on earth. It's a global market and the poor in the poor countries are the ones who suffer the most for it. It's an exploitative connected system where the people of Canada benefit at the expense of others. If you want to know more, I'd recommend checking out my homeboy Lenin's Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism quote:Second, if more people have died for economic reasons in capitalist countries, it's because there have been way, way more capitalist countries historically, because it's a system that works much better. Source? I've already backed up the contrary point of view, that Capitalism causes far more deaths even when the populations are taken into account. Also I'm guessing that even putting that aside your claim would still rely on the idea that things like the Chinese 59-61 famine are repeatable and at some point soon China is going to go bug-gently caress crazy and starve 50 million people to death. quote:An egalitarian health policy is not mutually exclusive with capitalism. An egalitarian health policy for everyone that doesn't result in millions of needless deaths each year is mutually exclusive though, or is at least so incompatible that it has never been achieved or been close to having been achieved at any point in the history of Capitalism - even though it's something that the hosed up authoritarian socialist countries managed to achieve pretty quickly. quote:Anyway these posts are getting too long for me to read but I wanted to say this. I live in a food desert. And I would rather wait 20 minutes for a bus so I can go to a grocery store to choose from a wide variety of delicious food, or go to a cheaper grocery store nearby if I want to save, or go to the Korean one a block away for some bean curd and durian juice, than wait in line for an hour for a suicidal guy to give me a jar of cat food. This guy disagrees but I supposed your needs take precedence over his  
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Jan 25, 2016 00:54
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Jewel Repetition posted:Okay, but most capitalist economies don't have any starving people, so how is it a necessary feature of capitalism? They're arguing that my ability to buy a frozen pizza is causing African children to starve, and I want to know all the steps of the Rube Goldberg machine that goes from my grocer's freezer to their stomachs. Capitalism is a global system that does not just take place within a country but also between countries, happening in a global market with countries with very uneven levels of development and power forced to compete and interact. Since the development of Capitalism alongside the industrial revolution, there has not been a single day where powerful nations have not exploited under-developed nations and left masses of people dying needlessly. The market is what decides how much your pizza costs, yes? And it's also what decides how much is earned by children in Malawi for a days work harvesting tobacco to sell to major international companies, yeah? And the market that decides the need for people to be employed at all, leaving 200 million people worldwide out of work - many in countries with awful social safety nets due to the country's extreme poverty (again due to the market), right? This is all so basic and widely accepted by any economic ideology I don't see what the problem is here where you think international trade is a "Rube Goldberg machine". Then again perhaps that's actually very prescient insight from you that accurately describes the arbitrary, crazy and impractical ways that the Capitalist system leaves millions to die each year. quote:What I'm saying about that is socialism isn't the only solution and capitalism isn't the only cause. Nah, when starvation happens under a Capitalist system, it is going to be down to Capitalism. Famine isn't a case of "there's a drought, people die". They die because of the system they're in and the position in it do not allow them to eat and live, which happens frequently under Capitalism even when there are no droughts. Let me quote from "Late Victorian Holocausts" a book which looks into tens of millions of people killed even beyond the norm in the late 19th century/early 20th century by the Capitalist system's misallocation of food. At the beginning it explains a basic modern definition of famine that I'll type out below. Emphasis in bold is mine.: 'Famine (causality)' 'Whether or not crop failure leads to starvation, and who in the event of famine, starves, depends on a host of non-linear social factors. Simple FAD (food availability decline), as Nobel laureate Amartya Sen calls it, may directly lead to famine in isolated hunter-gatherer ecologies, but it is unlikely to do so in any large-scale society. Although distant observers of the famines described in this book, including government ministers and great metropolitan papers, regularly described millions killed off by drought or crop failure, those on the scene always knew differently. From the 1860's, or even earlier, it was generally recognised in India, both by British administrators and Indian nationalists, that the famines were not food shortages per se, but complex economic crises induced by the market impacts of drought and crop failure.' 'The celebrated famine commissions were particularly emphatic in rejecting FAD as an explanation of mass mortality. Thus in the aftermath of the 1988-1902 catastrophe, the official Report on famine in the Bombay presidency underlined that "supplies of food were at all times sufficient, and it cannot be too frequently repeated that severe privation was chiefly due to the dearth of employment in agriculture [arising from the drought]." Commissioners in neighbouring Berar likewise concluded that "the famine was one of high prices rather than scarcity of food." Chinese official discourse also treated famine as primarily a market perturbation, although giving considerable attention as well to the corruption of local granary officials and the dilapidation of the transport infrastructure.' 'In recent years, Anartya Sen and Meghnad Desai have meticulously formalised this Victorian common sense in the language of welfare economics. Famine in their view is a crisis of "exchange entitlements" (defined as "legal, economically operative rights of access to resources that give control of food.") that may or may not have anything to do with crop yields. "Famine," emphases Sen, "is the characteristic of some people not having enough food to eat. It is not the characteristic of their not being enough good to eat". In theoretical jargon, the "endowments" of different groups (ownership of land, labour, power and so on.) "map" to alternative "entitlement sets" of goods and services. People starve in a Senyan world when their endowments, for whatever reason, cannot command or be exchanged for minimal calories to subsist, or, alternatively, when their entitlement mappings shift disastrously against them. Famine is thus a catostrophic social relation between unequally endowed groups that may be activated by war, depression or even something called "Development" as well as by extreme climate events. Most likely it is a conjuncture of different factors.' There may be various things that cause deprivation, but the only reason they cause needless death is due to the system they operate in. It is the Capitalist system which results in the deaths because in modern society it is not about there not being enough food, but rather how it is allocated. The system which results in millions of deaths each year, far outstripping Communism, is a Capitalist one.
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Jan 25, 2016 12:28
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PleasingFungus posted:Here's a softball: what's your take on the mid-80s famines in the communist countries of Mozambique and Ethiopia? The latter of which, notoriously, involved the central government intentionally starving recalcitrant provinces. Would you argue that those countries would be better off if they were still under communist rule? Putting aside the difference between communism, socialism, actually existing socialism and capitalism as practised by Marxists and just going ahead on the basis of these being so-called Communist countries, three key things spring to mind: 1) I don't really care in the context of this topic because we're talking about alternatives for Western nations. No-one is advocating an Ethiopian style communism as an alternative for the US and other Western nations in the same way no-one is advocating Burundi style Capitalism, which is to say none of us are loving stupid. If your only point is that Ethiopia and a proposed communist alternative can be described in the same word while ignoring all the qualitative differences, you don't really have a point. 2) Due the lack of an international socialist revolution in industrialised countries, Capitalism has always been the dominant global force and the 'communist' states existed within a Capitalist system. Both were snowed under by debt and stripped of their ability to generate income at the same time as the famines hit (because they're of course primarily agrarian countries). 3) Yup it was awful and just goes to show that the times when Communism doesn't work are on par with Capitalism when it is working.
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Jan 25, 2016 20:03
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PleasingFungus posted:It seems like the endpoint of this argument is that any and all of communist states' failings can be blamed on capitalism. A hypothetical global communist regime would be so different from recorded history as to be incomparable, so really, we can't say anything about communism at all. No, you can't blame all of Communism's failings on Capitalism. Like it wasn't inevitable that the USSR would go Stalinist and kill millions of people. There were factors pushing it that way (The strong authoritarian tendencies from the Tsarist regime, the weakness and perceived weakness of the Bolsheviks, entrenched class interests, etc) but there were powerful actors who had agency to choose how to respond and could have stopped it from happening. In fact if Lenin had been healthy for another few years, it might have ended very differently as it seemed he'd just cottoned on to Stalin and power of the General Secretary position when he got struck down with his illness. Also as I mentioned in point number 3 the governments of Ethiopia and the like still have to hold their hand up. Despite being in a Capitalist system which encourages starvation, their actions encouraged it too. About the second part though, yeah, it would obviously be radically different. Hell, even communism in a single Western country would be different seeing as it wouldn't be in an underdeveloped country with little to no history of democracy. Also the conception of how to reach communism has drastically changed over the years in response to Marxists seeing what happened in places like Russia and going "Yeah, let's not do that when we get the chance because that's messed up". We can still make logical and educated guesses about a communist state though, just like we can about any social or economic policy change that hasn't been tried before, and can make even more accurate ones about a socialist state that would be an intermediary stage as it's closer to our own current set-up. What we can't do though is say "Well two radically different systems and approaches can both inaccurately be described as communism, so therefore they're the same" which is the approach you were going for in your previous post. team overhead smash fucked around with this message at 21:20 on Jan 25, 2016 |
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Jan 25, 2016 21:11
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Jewel Repetition posted:IMO developing countries should just get themselves some protectionist pro-agriculture policies. Like, get their countries to stop letting the global market exploit them so bad. Not by glorious revolution, just sensible trade and subsidies. What the gently caress is a protectionist pro-agriculture policy? Like if you'd said protectionist industrial policy that would make sense, but I'm not sure of your meaning here. The developing countries already have agriculture out the rear end, there's nothing to protect and develop. What they need is to use the money made from agriculture to generate a surplus of capital that they can invest in industry and then it's that infant industry that they need to be protectionist about. Being protectionist about agriculture doesn't make any sense. Of course that doesn't happen because trade is bi-lateral and the problem is that the developed countries like the USA are protectionist about the poo poo the developing countries actually produce while stopping the developing countries from being protectionist about the things that would actually help them. In the EU for instance we give farmers $2 per cow per day, which is the World Bank measure of poverty. Roughly half the people in sub-saharan Africa earn below this in terms of their entire daily wage. On what possible basis can they compete? It's better to be a European cow than an African human in terms of the money you earn. The reason it's done is because if a European farmer had to compete fairly with an African farmer, they'd be massively undercut and unable to make a living. Free trade agreements are unfairly stacked and will be made to exclude the areas that developing countries may actually be able to compete in due to its competitive advantages in unskilled labour. In the WTO talks in 2005 for instance the USA generously opened up it's market to some of the worst off developing nations to 97% of all types of goods. That 3% though was carefully calibrated to exclude all the goods these developing countries actually produced, like Bangladesh textiles and apparel. The USA is completely fine with Bangladesh exporting jet engines and other items like that, not that Bangladesh does so or is able to, but stops them from competing on a level playing field with the poo poo they actually do. Honestly I wish that the developing countries were able to be more protectionist with the things that matter. It's help them develop through Capitalist to a stage where they're ready for socialism in the future, while getting rid of the Imperialist advantage the developed nations have had - causing more pressure on the working class to work against the system as they're no longer subsidised by the exploitation of under-developed countries. Jewel Repetition posted:I'm just not going to accept any ideology that says I can't eat what I want, no matter how much good it does for people I'll never meet (probably none tbh but I'm humoring you here). And I think most Americans are the same way. Why do you support Capitalism then? Even excluding the selfish piece of poo poo factor of you putting you having a nice selection of food over people dying, under Capitalism you can only eat what you can afford based on market decided factors of the value of your labour (minus the surplus value) versus the cost of the food based on the demand for the product and the desire for bourgeois to make money. You very much can't eat what you want. If you're just trying to come up with some wording that fits "Argh, I just want what capitalism offers, stop making me try to define it because I keep on getting it wrong and making no sense" without explicitly saying so, then socialism can offer the same variety of food as Capitalism as there are various types of socialism that different socialist pursue and see as preferable. Market socialism would keep the market based system of capitalism but with ownership of firms by labourers rather than capitalists. All the pizza companies would still be there, just owned by the workers who would then benefit from their labour without the parasitism of capitalists. From socialism we'd eventually be able to move to communism which is the closest to "eat what I want" that you'll actually get.
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Jan 26, 2016 09:30
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Jewel Repetition posted:Well I can eat most of the things I want. It's still way more options than socialism, as defined by people in this thread, is my point. Covered how you're wrong in the paragraph below the one you responded to, but you ignored it. quote:What, no it isn't. Yeah, it is.
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Jan 26, 2016 09:49
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The Saurus posted:Okay let's assume There's just been a communist revolution There's just been a Capitalist revolution. Where do I get my ingredients from? You don't know because Capitalism is really broad and you don't know the specifics of your situation or what's available to me. Do you get what I'm saying. Also way too early to worry about Communism. Socialist revolution first to create the preconditions necessary for communism. Then the question answers itself depending on the type. to keep thigns simple let's say market socialism, so the answer is you get them from wherever you get them from at the moment. Nice and simple. The Saurus posted:theres this italian guy who owns a pizza restaurant 30 seconds away from my apt and he charges high prices and he always burns the loving pies then pretends its legit. dude I know you're meant to have a little char but your poo poo is loving BURNT bro There wouldn't be prices for things like pizza in a Communist society. To each according to their need. Free pizza bro. Also it's a trick question because come the revolution you'd have been killed as a class traitor. team overhead smash fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Jan 28, 2016 |
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Jan 28, 2016 03:08
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:Groceries and farms are already the most common forms of Cooperatives, so it's pretty silly how many people can't conceive of a socialist supply chain for a 3-cheese Supreme. Nah, it's totally easily to conceive of one, like I literally did it in the post you're responding to. The only thing is that there are like a dozen variations of socialism so that's not the one true version of socialism or anything and someone else could come along and give a different answer that was also totally legitimate.
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Jan 28, 2016 10:38
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Jewel Repetition posted:I'm being intellectually honest. You saying someone needs to read Marx before they can criticize communism is exactly the same as a white nationalist saying someone needs to read Mein Kampf before casting any stones. Is that comparison unfair somehow? Yes, it's stupid. You can tell Hitler is bad because he killed millions of people. You can white supremacists are bad because their argument is one of racial purity and supremacy. Marx was a cool dude with a bear who wrote books.You can see socialists are good people because their arguments are in favour of equality and egalitarianism. With the former they're loving Nazi shits so their argument doesn't matter because to a reasonable person their beliefs cannot possible be justified on moral grounds. Like even if they had a mathematical formula which objectively and objectively proved slaughtering the Jews or kicking out all non-whites would improve the economy, it wouldn't loving matter because it isn't acceptable no matter what. With the latter the goal (egalitarianism, making sure everyone has enough to lead good happy lives, etc) and so we don't reject it out of hand. You actually have to perform some critical analysis to see if it's viable, what it would actually achieve, how that stacks up against the status quo and other alternatives etc, in which case you need to have a clue what you're talking about. TL:DR; Yes it helps to actually have an idea of what you're talking about and strangely we don't treat everyone in history who had an idea like Hitler they're Hitler.
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Jan 28, 2016 11:28
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Ormi posted:pragmatism means taking everything lenin and the bolsheviks said at face value and never demanding their claims be demonstrated If the Kronstadt rebels hadn't broken poor Comrade Lenin's heart through their evil bourgeois reactionary ways then he would have lived to 120 and ushered in a bright new era where everyone lived in peace and harmony. Jewel Repetition posted:So white supremacists are bad because their extreme ideas are harmful and not based in reality, and because their most powerful leader ever killed millions of people? Yes just like Capitalism is bad for those exact same reasons, yet being reasonable most of us don't just go "bluh bluh blubh Capitalism like Nazis" but rather use critical reason to analyse Capitalism and criticise it on its actual performance; to whit millions needlessly dead each year constituting the ideology with the largest body-count ever in the history of the world.
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Jan 29, 2016 01:04
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Jewel Repetition posted:That's only true because capitalism has been used far and away more in modernity than communism or fascism. If you look at it per capita they're both much higher. I asked you to back this up before and you didn't, while on the other hand I've used the work of a Nobel Laureate academic to show that with the same population and in the same conditions Capitalism kills waaaay more people than Communism (which you ignored).
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Jan 29, 2016 03:31
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Jewel Repetition posted:I would agree but, I don't have anything against anyone in this thread in particular, just the ideology of communism. The ideology of communism is imagined by you with no actual knowledge of it. Homework Explainer posted:i like "citizen" a la the french first republic but whatever floats your boat mate I think we should go with "Blood" or "Cuz" depending on gang affiliation preference. Both are gender and status neutral.
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Jan 30, 2016 12:21
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rudatron posted:Does that actually matter though? Who cares at this point, this is a real awakening, quibbling over jargon is idiotic. Win or lose, it's a sea change in how the relationship between politics and the economy is viewed, a sea change that's been needed for a long rear end time. I don't know, aren't you the one quibbling over jargon? His policies aren't socialist. Why should people care just because of the name he calls it, the label he sticks on? If the policies he wants to enact are just a softer form of capitalism which, while admirable in isolation, do nothing to support socialism then there is no more reason for socialists to vote for him than any leftist capitalist.
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Jan 30, 2016 14:11
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The Saurus posted:Why do modern leftists support mass immigration of unskilled labour, a policy created by and for the ruling class in order to undercut the economic position and solidarity of the native working class? If they think they have better prospects emigrating to a different country, who am I to tell someone that they have to continue to live in a lovely poor rear end country that my nation and other western nations exploited for a few hundreds years directly through imperialism and colonialism and now continues to exploit through the disproportionate power we wields in world trade? Some marxists might have beliefs about how immigration can effect the struggle for socialism. Some might see it as raising dissatisfaction amongst workers and therefore a step towards a break from the current Capitalist system. Others might see it as raising friction and conflict within the working class itself, distracting forom the economic struggle and therefore making the prospects of a socialist system coming about that much more unlikely. While I have my thoughts on the matter, I'm not confident enough about them to say "gently caress you guys, stay in your dirt poor country and suffer because I, expert marxist philosopher team overhead smash, have decided that you doing so raises the chances of a socialist revolution from 0.0001% to 0.0003%. Enjoy your lovely standard of living for the rest of your life, lol."
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Feb 10, 2016 16:44
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