Firstly, communism is not about making people equal, it is about making society fairer, stopping exploitation of workers, helping people who have to work all hours of the day and still only have enough money to barely make ends meet. Stopping the inhumane working conditions in , and those earning pittance for their labour. Preventing the countless number of children dying in sweatshops in , for example, etc etc. Capitalism causes all this, communism will prevent this.
The counter argument to the point above is that those born into wealth are those that are best placed to help others. They have the means to help others whilst still having sufficient resources/wealth to survive. That way, everyone in society will benefit. The rich helping the poor and unfortunate, has little effect on the rich, but will greatly benefit the poor, thereby increasing the overall level of benefit to society.
To be honest I was expecting far better than this (Marx anti-Semite allegations etc) on such a staunch free market forum. Is no one able to offer a point by point refutation of what I posted initially? Maybe the reason is that it is not possible.
So is everyone going to ignore the great accomplishments of communism. The fact that communism gave the rapid industrialisation, mass education, job security and huge advances in social and gender equality. What about the fact that Cuba has a higher life expectancy, better literacy rates and health care than in the US? This is indisputable.
So the Russian Mafia didn’t exist from 1917 to 1991? The Soviet cadre were uncorruptable and no one committed a crime?
Shooting teenagers who have starved themselves for several days in protest of the government certainly is effective. And do tell us how drugs, prostitution and pornography are immoral. A proletariat certainly can’t labor to his most effective level if he has boobies in his face.
One might question how that homogeneity came about. Perhaps from the ‘Ayrans’ killing off large sectors of the population and only validating marriages and children who fit their caste system. It is interesting to see you say Europeans are supposedly made for Socialism yet there has not been a pivotal revolution there plus you are contradicting your ideology which looks at the working class en mass as desiring Communism.
I would like to see this documentary that says pre-WWII Germany was a paradise. Perhaps I can get a name.
So you are a Fascist. Why do you say then Communism will work?
The Soviet Winter War with Finland alone disproves this ridiculous statement.
I think going further into this absurd tantrum would be a waste of my time and perhaps I have said enough for you to question what you think.
What is the point of having great literacy rates without being free to choose what to read? What kind of life do you want to live when your civil liberties are so highly constrained? And why would you want better health care, to be a healthy state slave?
Well, it obviously mattered to you, or you wouldn’t have brought it up.
I can and do, the work is an obvious pastiche of Bauer, and others. If you actually read On the Jewish Question, instead of cherry picking decontextualised quotes from the work, you will see that Marx was actually highly critical of anti-semitism, and scorned and lampooned it.
Yeah, sure. Can you explain why it doesn’t work this way in practice? Stalin’s gulag archipeligo, Map’s cultural revolution and Pol Pot’s killing fields all seem quite unfair to me…
You really should’ve google’d Bohm-Bawerk. Exploitation in the Marxist sense relys on a labor theory of value. I.e the amount a worker puts into production determines it’s value. This is not the case. Value, like beauty, is subjective. If a worker agrees to work for wage x that seems low to us he is doing so because this wage represents a betterment of his condition, because it keeps him from starving. He subjectively values getting the money and not starving higher than he values the time/labor he puts into this. As in all market actions, the worker is acting because it profits him. In other words, whilst the employer is not making the worker a millionaire he is improving his condition. Then, overtime competition for workers and increases in investment of capital increase worker wages to x +5 or 2x or whatever. Note: this is why Mao’s collectivization resulted in starvation and death while the post-Mao liberalization is resulting in previously unknown wealth, the creation of a Chinese middle class and greater societal wealth all around.
What would have happened to these people before capitalism? Instead of working for low low pay they would have starved. Period. What happened to these people in Maoist and Soviet society? Either they worked in the same factories for similar hours in order to receive lower quality products (a lower quality of living for the workers) or they died from the starvation brought by central planning of agriculture or they were killed/imprisioned by the Dear Leaders. Seems to me that capitalism offers the best long run prospects for the poor.
Maoist China–>Starvation, death, purging. Great Leaps Backward.
Liberalized China–> Development, wealth, automobiles, increased standards of living.
Taiwan–> Once a marginally successful backwater slowly developing, much like the liberalized/liberalizing China of modern day, now one of the wealthiest places in the world.
Tell me, which is preferable? Which would the average worker prefer-starving in back breaking agricultural work with little chance of advancement or subsisting in the factory and having a chance to do better.
And what will happen to them afterwards? If people are poor enough that they have to send their children to work in sweatshops what is the foreseeable consequence of these children NOT working in sweatshops? Starvation.
Capitalism gives the poor hard jobs for bad pay but gives them the chance to advance and allows wages to grow with capital investment. Communism claims to be for the proletariat then pursues central planning policies that lead to their starvation and limits their ability to advance in society. Which will aid the poor the best in the long run: a completely free market (note: as you said now we have fascism NOT capitalism) or a centrally planned economy?
Markus, I believe the above links have been provided by Nerditarian before your previous posts. Have you read them and addressed their arguments? No? Why should any of us have to rehash for you what is already written in English. The literature is out there. Go read it.
What you have done is post a bunch of statements, none of which have any factual or logical basis. All of this has been done before by Marxists of every flavour, and then disproved by Austrians… in the above links. Why should anyone on this forum go point by point refuting your statements when this has already been done? You have to understand that by being unwilling to read outside of your own literature (assuming you’ve read more than the Communist Manifesto) you’ve basically made it a waste of time for anyone on this forum to argue with you. If you won’t read books or articles, why will you read long forum posts?
If however you were to read an aforementioned book, or any one of a myriad articles on this site about Socialism, and then write a detailed criticism of it, and then post that up, you are likely to get much more of a response.
Edit: And btw, all those books can be accessed for free on this very website.
Communism seemed better than feudalism…until the irrational nature of its system caused it to collapse. But let’s leave that out and praise the Dear Leaders of the past. Yay! The Soviet Union made everyone equally enslaved. Whoopie do! Everyone’s job as Stalin’s slave was secure so long as he did not question him. Oh how great!
You may like your enforced egalitarian society, we don’t. In Cuba you’re not free to read Mises or Rothbard, just to name a few. It’s even forbidden by the constitution. And almost all workers are state workers. Forget about making a better life if you don’t assist to Castro speeches and support him.
Tell me where can I find a copy of The Wealth of Nations in Castro’s Cuba? Can I read Mill? Ricardo? Locke? Nozick? Are you seriously taking the position that the Cuban government does not censor media in it’s walls? Seriously. Show me a State that given the absolute power Castro & Castro have over the Cuban economy and Cuban life in general hasn’t exercised ccensorship and I will send you a check for a million dollars.
The Cuban government controls industry, health care and all elements of life in Cuba. As the individuals Cubans have no choice they are slaves.
See my other post for the allegedly great accomplishments, comrade.
OK, first of all, when you say “communism” are you talking about everybody playing nice and sharing, or are you talking about Uncle Joe and his buddies throwing people in gulags? I am definitely cool with sharing, Gulags not so much. In addition, you use the word “noble”. Now this has two meanings, one meaning virtuous, and the other pertaining to the aristocracy. Its largely an old propaganda term by and for the aristocracy.
So lets restate your argument as “Treating everyone fairly is virtuous”. But you are claiming that liberalism does not treat people fairly, and is therefore not virtuous (or less virtuous). I take issue with that, as not only does liberalism treat people fairly but socialism in fact does not.
The basic gist of socialism is that all the stuff is collectivized, and that people should decide how to allocate resources “democratically”. But what the hell is democracy, and how is it fair? The pioneers of democracy, the Greeks, gave the rich a bigger vote than the poor, and did not allow women, children, or slaves to vote. Is that fair? What about modern “democracies”? Should everyone have an equal vote? What about systematic bias in the electorate (Ex: everyone votes for political parties who are for tariffs, there is no mainstream free trade party)? In democracy the people who are experts on subjects and do more work than others get the same amount of vote as the ignorant and lazy.
Lets say I spend my labor to bake a pizza, and want to split it with my sister. Then two random people come out of nowhere, who contributed nothing towards creating the pizza, and say “We have to eat this pizza democratically, you have to split it evenly among all four of us”. Would that be “fair”? I dont think so. Thats what liberalism is about, giving people property rights over the things they individually create and use, and allowing people to restrict access, and exchange property towards a more efficient ends.
I was born in the CCCP, and I will have to call bullshit on this. In communist countries people do not have the freedom to live a happy life, they are treated as nothing more than factors of production by the corrupt beaurocrats who have no incentive to care about them. That is why people in eastern germany fled to the west side. That is why modern eastern europe is the capital of alcoholism, depression, and suicide.
Somalia is currently much better off than it was under its communist dictatorship, and its economy is by far outperforming that of its neighbors. Another good example of communism ruining things is Cuba, it used to be a first world nation in the 1940s and 1950s. It was more wealthy and more developed than most of Europe was at that time. Now it is a third world nation.
China would still be the same agriciultural backwards place it was before the 1970s if the economic liberalizations were not allowed to happen and the industrial revolution was not allowed to begin. The way a country builds up wealth is through savings, which can be lent out to people willing to take risks to build capital or create inventions. In a country with free trade, even if it has no existing savings, citizens can borrow savings from the citizens of other more developed countries. In the CCCP, the people had no savings and were not allowed to borrow from abroad. So the government had to “force savings” through inflation, taxation, and slave labor in gulags to finance their industrial revolution, this resulted in famine and the death of milions.
Altruism is a false concept, and the people in government are not altruists, they are thieves.
National socialism as practiced in Germany in the 3rd reich worked like a charm because there was a high level of homogeneity, a strong sense of nationhood, and simply because the northern European/Germanic temperament is ideally suited to socialist society. Even today’s anti-nazi documentaries with emotive titles about “the rise of evil” and so on admit that national socialist Germany was a paradise - as long as you were not one of those being hauled away to a concentration camp.
Naziism didnt work “like a charm”, thats why children had to be forced into public schools to be indoctrinated with propganda and taught to fight and kill, and people who engaged in critical thinking were repressed.
Most of the rest of this is garbage so I wont go through it piece by piece. Socialism does not recognize individual self ownership, and does not have the capacity for individuals to make rational economic decisions without a price mechanism. Wealth cannot be created without savings, and socialism demonizes and destroys the incentive to save (the interest rate). Thats why native americans (which are considered by socialists to be the great example of collectivized property) never were able to advance from the bronze age. Socialism leads to people gaming the system and establishing hierarchies through force and fraud, which is why native americans had chiefs and went to war with other tribes.
Fine Lord Shore-Tilly. I’ll stick to the other things I hate about Marx and won’t explore new avenues of things to hate about that hairy squirrelly evil man.
Psst…I make a oint of avoiding government statistics for THAT reason. If I must I only take it with a tablespoon of salt.
They are not working to make a profit, they are working to survive. They HAVE to work in order to pay for food and water.
Are you sure the vast majority of Chinese are benefiting from capitalism? Only the wealthy capitalists have benefitted. Any sources for this OVERALL increased standard of living?
Under communism they would not have to send their children to work in these treacherous conditions. Conditions would be better, and they would be provided for if need be.
An individual cannot use subsistence farming? There is a great deal of that in third world countries. So your conception that ‘wage labor’ is necessary for survivial is a falsehood.
To this I refer to Shu Ting’s Assembly Line Poem. Communism contains the most base contradictions. You supposedly receive the full fruits of your labor and yet there is communal ownership. Children got out of the labor market because wages and productivity increase from captial intensive ventures, not because of pixie dust.