I "personally" am against abortion and I believe in God. Did I say I spoke for everyone or represented all Americans? Please tell me?

 

Yes you did, actually.

 

And you are oh so stupid. I doubt you could even give a decent realistic explanation of Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, etc. And considering the condition our country is in currently, you have to be nearly the most idiotic person on the face of the planet to say it has the best thing going. And you keep dreaming of your imaginary sky fairy in his pink tutu that's going fix everything. In fact, why don't you hold your breath until he shows up. That would go a long way towards actually fixing something.

 

There's proof you have no clue what you're talking about. Capitalism, in it's smallest nutshell, is everyone out for themselves and you succeed or fail completely on your own merits. The problem is that there will always be people who can't succeed, whether it be due to health reasons beyond their control, or financial reasons beyond their control, etc. And the way you would prefer it, they would eventually become homeless, have no help, and die in the streets. Socialism is not "no one working waiting for the government to give them something", it is everyone working together and helping everyone else so we can all succeed together. But because you are stupid, ignorant, pig-headed, stupid, brain-washed, stupid, hypocritical, and oh, did I mention stupid, you have chosen to believe what the right wing propaganda machine has taught you about capitalism and everything else, and never bothered to use your brain for anything other than something to stop the wind noise going through your head. If you had ever bothered to do just the teeniest bit of research you would have found that the ideas that you have based your beliefs on are lies.

 

Some interesting reading:

https://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2008/08/communism-and-free-markets.html

Communism and free markets
I have previously asserted that a truly free market produces an outcome that resembles communism. This conclusion follows from an investigation into how free markets behave, but the connection between free markets and communism can be made more explicit.

A truly free market is a market free of all human coercion, active and passive. Active coercion refers to "gun to the head" coercion: the threat to actually cause suffering or physical harm to another. Passive coercion refers to the "let them starve" coercion, the threat to allow suffering physical harm to come to another.

Passive coercion is still coercion. Every ordinary human being will naturally act to avoid or ameliorate her own suffering or physical harm. To make passive coercion effective, the natural tendency to for a person to ameliorate her own suffering must be actively thwarted by the threat of active coercion. For the passive threat "work [for me] or starve" to be effective, I must also employ active coercion: "try to feed yourself, and I will shoot you."

While it is in some sense physically possible to have a truly free market in reality, such an arrangement is at best only meta-stable and requires continuous teleological adjustment. In 21st century terrestrial society, we must view a truly free market as a purely theoretical construct. Still, even as a theoretical construct, the notion has some value, precisely because of the independent value ordinary people place on freedom in general.

A truly free market is efficient, but efficiency is an equivocal term. Efficiency is some output value divided by some input value, but we must specify less ambiguously what output and input values apply to construct a coherent notion of the efficiency of any process. A bus, for example, is less efficient than an automobile in terms of vehicle miles per gallon of fuel, but it is more efficient in terms of passenger miles per gallon. On the other hand, a bus is less efficient in terms of passenger time per miles traveled.

Efficiency can also have a positive or negative sense, i.e. the "best" system might either be the maximal or minimal value of some ratio. For example, we can talk about about the efficiency of an engine in terms of heat produced divided by fuel consumed: An engine is more efficient to the extent that it minimizes this ratio. Any positive or negative construction of efficiency can, in theory, be transformed into an equation of the opposite sense; in practice, however, it is often the case that one sense is much easier to measure than another. A more heat-efficient engine (negative efficiency) will translate into a more mileage-efficient engine (positive efficiency), but an engineer can easily directly measure the heat-efficiency of an engine without having it travel any miles at all.

It is often supposed that a truly free market is efficient in terms of value produced per cost of production. But this sense of efficiency is not supported, precisely because it is too difficult to measure the actual value (the use value in Marxist terms) of what is produced.

A free market is efficient at setting the exchange value (price) of a commodity to its opportunity-adjusted cost. A free market does not reward the production of commodities of higher use value, regardless of how well we are able to define use value. A free market rewards the identification and exploitation of bottlenecks, i.e. imbalances in supply and demand. But the very nature of the truly free market embodies a negative feedback process: the narrower the bottleneck (the greater the discrepancy between supply and demand), the more that bottleneck attracts additional labor, thus raising the opportunity-adjusted cost of the commodity, until the price and the cost are again in equilibrium.

In a truly free market, then, any excess value (the difference between the use value and the exchange value) accrues to the consumer of a commodity; the consumer is responsible only for replacing the opportunity-adjusted cost of the commodity.

We can correlate this outcome precisely to the canonical (if poorly stated) slogan of communism.

From each according to his ability. Each person is responsible for replacing by productive activities the opportunity-adjusted cost of the commodities she consumes. To each according to his need. Each person receives the full (subjectively-defined) excess value of the commodities she consumes.

Therefore a truly free market is inherently communist.

 

https://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2008/10/communism-and-totalitarianism.html

Communism and totalitarianism
Is communism necessarily or strongly predisposed to totalitarianism? Were the two previous communist governments (and many communists hold that the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China reverted to state capitalism and the bourgeoisie of the party in the middle of the 20th century) totalitarian?

First of all, we have to be a little more precise: totalitarianism is not very well-defined. You could make the case according to Wikipedia's definition that the West, including the United States, is "totalitarian" if you consider the ruling economic class as the government. Mass propaganda? We call them "commercials". Enforcing ideological purity? "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?" Mass imprisonment? The United States has the largest prison population in the world, both in absolute terms and relative to population. Violation of ordinary civil liberties? The War on (some people using some) Drugs, endorsed and enforced by supposedly liberal Democrats as well as Republicans. Genocide, mass murder, imperialist aggression? The American Indians, the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq.

It very much looks like "totalitarian" means "a government I don't like" in just the same sense that "judicial activism" means "a decision I don't like."

We might adopt a weaker standard, and say communist governments in the past have acted specifically in egregiously bad ways.

Are such allegations true? Perhaps, but if you're like me, you're getting all of your information about the history of communist governments from sources massively biased towards capitalism. I'm not saying that such sources are necessarily wrong, but ordinary standards of critical thought demand that you take obviously biased information with a very large grain of salt.

To what extent were egregiously bad actions explained not by communism per se, but by local historical circumstances? It's not like pre-revolutionary Russia or China were magic happy utopias; they were brutal, violent repressive dictatorships resting on de facto slavery. As an analogy, imagine if the South had won the Civil War, and a generation or two later the vastly numerically superior blacks had finally overthrown slavery in a violent revolution. Would you not imagine that — whatever their political or economic ideology — they would have extracted savage vengeance against those who had subjected them to centuries of misery and brutal exploitation? And, as much as we deplore violence, how much could you blame them?

Communists are not stupid, nor are they indifferent to human suffering. The whole point of communism is a reaction to horrors of capitalist exploitation and oppression of the working class; if capitalism worked the way capitalists themselves say it ought to work, communism would be pointless. It's easy for people in the United States to close their eyes to exploitation, because we export most of it, and we've "bought off" a fair portion of working American people. If you want to see the pointy end of American capitalist oppression you have to travel to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua; indeed most of Latin America. Or just Detroit. Live in a lily-white suburb surrounded by other members of the top economic 10%, and it's very easy to convince yourself that everyone lives the same way, just with Target and Wal-Mart crap instead of Williams-Sonoma and Sharper Image crap. Communists are just former capitalists who have rejected the dogmas of the ruling class and opened their eyes to what's really going on in the world.

The next time that someone tells you that communism is totalitarian, ask them: compared to what?

 

https://barefootbum.blogspot.com/2008/11/socialism-is-not-enough.html

Socialism is not enough
Socialism, the idea that the government should control property, especially absentee ownership, is a critical step on the road to communism, a step that cannot be omitted. On the one hand, just about any form of socialism, even regulatory capitalism, would represent a drastic improvement over the present dog-eat-dog, devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism and imperialism that reached its apotheosis in the Bush administration. On the other hand, to a communist, any old form of socialism is not good enough.

There are two ways socialism can go wrong. The first, as we have seen in the US, is the too-weak socialism of regulatory capitalism. While Roosevelt and Johnson did improve the general welfare of a lot of the people, and broadened incredibly access to surplus value relative to the narrow concentration of wealth in laissez faire capitalism, this too-weak socialism leaves capitalists too much power to propagandize and brainwash the masses of people and destroy what little protection they have won by political means, and even convince them to actively support not just laissez faire capitalism but even blatant kleptocracy. As Göring noted,
... it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship. ...voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

The other insufficient kind of socialism is one that does not intentionally perpetuate class struggle. The most important lesson we have learned from both the Soviet Union and China is that socialism, while an important advance over communism, sets up a new ruling class. Socialism does not by itself end class struggle, it changes the class struggle.

It is possible to do worse than capitalism, and it is possible to do worse than capitalism while still maintaining the form and appearance of socialism. It is possible to reestablish feudalism under a nominally socialist society. Feudalism was, after all, in history the control of property by the government: it was explicitly the government of people who owned land, the critical property of that time.

I think this insistence on the right kind of socialism, as well as considerable disagreement on precisely what kind of socialism is truly the right kind, causes some friction between communists and socialists. "If socialism is better than capitalism," argue the socialists, "so shouldn't we get whatever socialism we can?" But socialism isn't necessarily better; some forms of socialism — not just governments such as National "Socialism" that just call themselves socialist — are worse than capitalism.

Even Marx has praise for capitalism. The establishment of "bourgeois right" under capitalism was an important innovation: it gave the bourgeois the power to struggle against feudal aristocracy by economic, political and ideological means rather than exclusively by violent, military means. And the need to first establish economic power independently of the political government (i.e. the proximate commanders of the army and the police) persisted even after the bourgeois won their class struggle, with at least some real separation between government coercion and economic activity. It's interesting to note that no capitalist country has ever created an explicit, direct plutocracy; even under the dictatorship of the bourgeois, the bourgeois still must act indirectly through propaganda and bribes campaign contributions to acquire popular legitimate control over the coercive apparatus of the state. Many capitalist countries — and all of the "advanced" capitalist countries of the West — have resisted for an amazingly long time even too-blatant indirect plutocracy.

This indirection, this institutionalization of political struggle and an external check on government power is one of the best innovations of capitalism and the bourgeois, and must, I think, be preserved and equally institutionalized in a socialist state even as the role of the private bourgeois as the primary opponent is eliminated.

 

https://dbzer0.com/blog/misunderstanding-communism-its-not-ussr

Misunderstanding Communism: It’s not USSR

Overwhelmingly, most people’s understanding of what Communism is, comes from an extremely propagandistic presentation of the Soviet Union, generally by US right-wing sources. This would give you the idea that communism is supposed to be very authoritarian, rigidly collectivistic and anti-democratic.

This misconception is unfortunately so wide-spread that it’s not infrequent to be called a mass murderer wannabe for simply bringing it up and even though it is trivial to find out what Communism really is and how it works, this exasperatingly wrong view of it nevertheless persists in even otherwise brilliant minds.

So let me say this first: Whatever view you may have of the USSR (and there are quite a few supporters of Stalinism out there), it was not Communism.

Now, before you hasten to leave me a comment about Scotsmen and the like, it is important to know that the original thoughts of Marx and Engels were indeed the absolute opposite of Stalinism, Maoism etc. The fact that one can create a system and label it “Communism” does not make it so, anymore than North Korea is a “Democracy” or a “Republic”. Perhaps one can label it “Socialism” but this term is by itself ambiguous and does not necessarily equate to Marxism.

That is not to say that Russia did not really attempt Communism. It did, and it managed to achieve socialism for a very short while immediately after the revolution. But this newly-fledged socialism was defeated in the most humilating way. Not only did the counter-revolution won over the communists but it kept the name and the symbols to the overjoy of the capitalist of the rest of the world. Russian communism ceased to exist as soon as Stalin came to power.

But if USSR was not Communism what was it? Well, by the way it actually worked, the most fitting description for it is State Capitalism. Simply, the state took on the role of the ultimate Capitalist and set about exploiting the workers. Some of the practices it had, like the suppression of individuality, the strict hierarchical spread of power and the like, are identical to the ones within a common Capitalist corporation anyway. Others, like it’s inability to work efficiently or its large bureaucracy are problems that any sufficiently large corporation has as well. There hasn’t been a corporation of the sheer size of the Soviet Union of course so a direct comparison is impossible, but looking at the dinosauric movements of some of the biggest ones certainly points to that direction.

Another common opinion on this Communism = USSR misunderstanding is the claim that Communism has proven to be a failure. This attempts to show that the path Russia took in the early 20th century is the only possible result any attempt for Communism can achieve and thus it is not worth struggling towards it. But this is not simply wrong, it is intellectually dishonest. This assumes that the very unique situation Russia had to struggle is the common situation any communist revolution will have to face which is simply absurd.

Not only was the situation unique but their attempt was doomed from the start. The reason for this is that Communism requires Capitalism to exist before it can take over. It needs the hugely increased level of production achieved with it and the exploitation of the workers is what creates the revolutionary force. Russia attempted to jump directly from Feudalism (with a small growing capitalist class) to Communism while skipping the phase in between and ended up dislocating itself[1]. This is also the case with China as well. An agrarian society simply cannot support Communism, especially not when opposed from the rest of the world.

To extrapolate from these example to anything that may happen during our age is simply disingenuous. Not only do we have the production required to not suffer the same fate but we have many tools in our disposal that the Revolutionaries of last century couldn’t even dream of. The instant, international information exchange we can achieve now can easily be the most important.

It is simply practically impossible at this point for any attempt at communism to take even a similar path to the one of USSR and if it is achieved, it will look nothing like it.

 

https://dbzer0.com/blog/misunderstanding-communism-ii-its-not-a-religion

Misunderstanding Communism: It’s not a religion

One argument that I tend not to hear very often but occasionally stumble onto, is the accusation that Communism or Marxism is akin to a religion, that is, something based on faith.

The reason this is used strikes me more like a way to hit a soft spot on an Atheist or skeptic, rather than an attempt at true argumentation. Indeed, such a claim does not tackle any of the core tenets of Communism such as the labour theory of value, the explanation of capitalist shortcomings etc, but rather takes a generic shallow look at the history of attempted Communism and draws conclusions from that.

So let’s see what the arguments might be.

It is not based on science

Communism as any other socioeconomic system is not based on the scientific method. The scientific method requires an observation to happen before it can create a theory but you cannot observe a system that does not exist yet.

Capitalism is not based on the scientific method either. It did not come about because some scientists sat down and observed the current feudal system and found out that capitalism is a more optimal choice. No. It first came about and then the pseudo-science of economics set out to find out the rules that control it.

If anything else, Marxism is a absolutely materialistic philosophy and considers that only science can discover the truth about the world. In this regard, it is diametrically opposed to any other religion.

It is based on faith

As a completely faithless person, such an accusation seems absurd to me. For something to be based on faith, it needs to be believed regardless of conflicting evidence. But no such evidence exist against Communism.

This is doubtly untrue since things based on faith tend to be hammered onto the minds of children in order to stick. The enemy of faith is reason. Certainly it is possible that someone is brainwashed as a child to be a Communist, but such a person would be a very poor example of one as for Communism to work, it requires conscious, skeptical, critical and active people who can take action into their own hands and be willing to cooperate with others democratically. A passive, brainwashed follower might be fitting for a Stalinist regime but can never be considered a Communist unless he starts accepting the theory based on reason instead of faith.

Personally, I was always very critical of Communism for the same reason everyone else in the world is. Misunderstanding of what it really is. I only started accepting it once I dug a bit deeper and started criticizing my own preconceptions.

It is evangelising

This is the accusation that, like any religion, Communism requires people to spread the knowledge of it to others before they can accept it.

Like any idea before it, there is no way to spread it except through discussion with people who know about it. The idea of Capitalism, markets and merchants did not spread itself. Humanity did not begin with a part of it being merchants or capitalists. These classes of people were created when someone thought of the concept and then started spreading it to others, thought words and actions.

If this is a definition of a religion, then any idea is a religion.

It has a holy book, prophets and apostles.

This is absolutely untrue by the common definition of those terms. The Communist Manifesto is simply the expression of the part of an idea and as such it is subject to improvement as any other idea. It is not a dogma. The people who accepted Communism and spreaded the word can no more be called Prophets than Adam Smith who spread the idea of Capitalism. Nor can leaders who accept one idea over another make that idea a religion.

Finally

It is very easy to stretch the meaning of words in order to make a term less positive to the people who might embrace it. But this is a dishonest tactic. If one wishes to tackle Communism, the best way to do so is through rational dialogue on the actual points it proposes. Like any philosophy and idea, there will certainly be people who are dogmatic about it, but that does not describe the philosophy as a whole.

 

https://dbzer0.com/blog/misunderstanding-communism-its-not-anti-individualism

Misunderstanding Communism: It’s not anti-individualism

The most scary concept for anyone who considers communism seems to be the idea that it requires the total submission of the individual will for the good of the country, the state or the party. This misconception is happily perpetuated by the capitalist propaganda machine who gives you such great images as people having to wear the same clothes, sing the same songs and share the same toothbrush.

Indeed such a thought is terrifying enough that it’s enough for the propaganda machine to label anything it does not wish to happen as communism and start rolling out those images to scare the public to the path they want, as is what happened with the first attempt of US for universal healthcare when Hillary was pushing for it.

But not only is Communism not against the individual but it is the only real celebration of individualism possible and It aims to achieve this through positive freedom. Under communism people are supposed to have the liberty and the capability to do whatever they wish, as long as this does not inhibit the liberty and capability of others to do the same.

Now I can just imagine the anarcho-capitalists (or “libertarians” as the US Americans like to call them) jumping up to cry foul. They consider that true freedom is when one has just the liberty to do something, as long as they do not infringe on the liberty of others. But this is simply the illusion of freedom. Are you free when you can wear any type of cloth you like but you can’t afford anything more than plain brown?

No. Negative freedom is simply the freedom for some to reduce the freedom of others through non-violent means.

Think of the freedom Communism provides as the freedom which exists between a couple. Both have a voluntary relationship within which they agree to limit their freedom in order so that one is not degraded for the benefit of the negative freedom of the other. Thus, while they both have the freedom to wear whatever clothes they want, have their own possessions and totally different taste, they do not have the freedom to avoid doing their share of the chores, for then, the burden falls on the other and the relationship is strained. But no one would ever consider such a limitation as an affront to liberty.

And this is the kind of limitation Communism demands. It requires that people voluntary do their part of societal “chores” simply so that all the burden does not fall to the few unlucky. It requires that people do not take actions which reduce the freedom of everyone else. It only demands that people be equal, not identical.

Other than that, it is of no consequence how each person chooses to live his own life. It is exactly because under communism you do not have to limit yourself in any way in order to survive that people are truly free. Aren’t you jealous of all those small startup companies whos employees get to work whenever and however they want? Imagine that not only every job was like that, but you also had the freedom to do exactly the kind of work you want, without worrying if it’s economically feasible.

Having said all that, it is worth pointing out that there is a system that does restrict your freedom. This system not only requires that you do a kind of work that you do not like in order to survive, but it frequently requires you to conform to the wishes of the company to a large degree. From the demand for a suit&tie, to personal styling to outright uniforms. This is not only demanded in work but can even start as early as school years. Not only that, but it breeds a uniform culture where every artist ends up sounding the same and the only new things to wear are what others tell you in the form of trends.

This system is, of course Capitalism. The system where true freedom is reserved only for the rich.

 

https://dbzer0.com/blog/misunderstanding-communism-its-not-stagnant

Misunderstanding Communism: It’s not stagnant

Communism is frequently accused of having a system which promotes laziness and drudgery. They posit that this happens because as in the system everyone is equal and the incentive of people to compete with their fellow man is not there, nobody feels the need to innovate, be creative or productive. And since the state will reward everyone the same no matter what they do, as in a prisoner’s dillema, people will prefer to “defect” from work.

This problem did seem realistic to me when I knew little about it and before I actually gave more thought to it. How indeed do you make people work if they are not going to be rewarded for their trouble anymore than their lazy ass neighbour who sits and watches television all day?

The answer to this problem lies in understanding that reward does not drop down from the non-existent state but that simply the reward of each worker comes from the work they do. One of the core tenets of communism is that the total value of labour, which includes the surplus value which currently goes to the non-working capitalist, belongs to the worker who produces it.

Lets say that I work in a factory making cars with a thousand other people and we make a 1000 cars, each of us ends up owning one. Once I have a car, either I can keep working in the same factory (say because I like the work or because I do not care to learn anything else) or I can move to another job, say making computers.

But what about the people who don’t want to work in the car factory. Don’t they get a car? Of course they do. It’s very easy for a car factory to give one car to each of its workers and after that, the rest of the cars can be given for free for anyone who requests one. And why not? After all, while working at the car factory, I got to eat food for free from the bakers, got the raw material for free from the steel and plastic workers, got to enjoy culture for free from the artists etc[1].

As such, the incentive of people to be productive lies in the fact that they will get to own the result of their increased productivity. Not only that, but people have a large incentive to be more productive because that way they get to work less hours.

If you think that this is an unrealistic scenario and that this can never work you might be benefit from looking at the free software movement.
Why does a Free Software programmer help coding a program when he’s not getting paid for it? Very often it’s because he needs it to do something he can’t at the moment. But why do it for free instead of selling his labour to the highest bidder? It’s because he knows that he will get to reap the results of his labour. Not only that but once more programmers join, he will get to reap the results of their labour as well, while all of them get to work less hours individually.
Furthermore, the Free software programmer knows that there are other free software programmers out there who do the same thing as he, but in their own projects. He gets to reap the results of their labour and they do the same. Similar to my previous example of cars for food, raw materials and art.

But the free software movement is comprised from generally middle class people who can afford to do it as a hobby, generally middle class people or students. Most cannot concentrate their full potential on it because they must put a good part of it on their normal work or school. Imagine what they would do if they could work totally free without worrying about survival. Imagine what any other worker could do if he had the freedom these renegade programmers do.

‘But what about innovation?’ I hear you ask. What’s the point of someone inventing new gadgets, systems or whatnot? I already mentioned that people have an incentive to be more productive as in that way they will get to work less hours. Well, this is what machines do isn’t it? They make people more productive. The workers have thus an incentive to create new and better machinery in order to reduce the time they have to spend working.

Medicine? Art? As is obvious from even our current culture, people who are inclined to those paths generally provide their own incentive. An artist keeps creating despite the fact that in our capitalist culture he cannot make any money of it. If anything, under Communism instead of the pop-culture we have to endure because it’s the only thing that can bring a profit, artists can follow their own muse and create the new and interesting things they should. Instead of medicine and science being driven by profit, with all the known problems of that, it will be driven by need and creativity. A future Tesla will not have to die poor and starving because his exciting new science could not find sponsors or he did not understand economics, but rather will have the necessities he needs to focus on his work as much as he needs.

Of course, it is conceivable that social parasites will manage to find a way to survive within communism. Perhaps they will prefer to hide how little they work, or they will group together and avoid working, I don’t know. The thing is that it’s much more difficult to hide from the people you have to work with who know they will have to pick up the slack. Where in a capitalist corporation the parasite can simply suck up to the boss and get off lightly, in Communism, there is no boss to speak of and the other workers will quickly put them in their place when they discover them, or at worst, ostracise them.

But lets take the worst case scenario, that somehow these parasites manage to survive and hide within a communist system. What is the difference from our current system? Under capitalism we have parasites who not only don’t need hide but are actually the ones who wield all the power. They’re called Capitalists. The rich do not need to work, their money works for them. All they need to do is sit around all day and give orders to the ones who are not as rich as they. The life of the rich is one who does not contribute anything to society and gets to reap all the benefits. And the worst part is that the overwhelming percentage of them do not even need to work to reach that level. They simply are born into wealth.

 

https://dbzer0.com/blog/misunderstanding-communism-its-not-statist

Misunderstanding Communism: It’s not statist

Whenever most people think of Communism, they assume a big fucking government which is responsible for the central planning and the running of the society as a whole as the benevolent rulers think best. This preconception once again generally comes from the way Socialist regimes of the 20th century have ended up running their shows and as I pointed out in the first part of this series, they do not represent communism.

Indeed a statist Communism is an oxymoron for, by definition, Communism is stateless. There is not central planning commitee, no benevolent leader-for-life, no bureaucracy.

In the original ideas of Karl Marx, Communism was always supposed to be the end result when the state had finally withered away. The only situation where state exists is under socialism which is the stepping stone to Communism. But the state of Socialism is not in any form the state which you are aware now or the one of Stalinist Russia either. Is is a completely new beast.

The state of Socialism is based on the working class and the point of it, as opposed to the current example of state, is to protect the rights of the majority against the assault of the minority.

It is not based on location, it is based on profession.

The elected repressentatives do not simply come from a general location and thus put forward the requests of the workers, farmers, capitalists etc as the current system is. Instead they are the repressentatives of the workers. One for the car workers, one for the computer techs, one for the scientists and the like. As such these repressentatives not only put forward the requests of a group of people who have a very close interest in their actions but they are themselves part of those people.

The current crop of politicians who generally end up being either progeny from rich families or people from professions which make a lot of money (ie lawyers), thus they have no interest or knowledge of the working class situations. If they look elitist, foreign and untouchable, it’s because they are. They have nothing in common with the lower class so how do you expect them to know what is good for you or others like you?

Unlike them, socialist delegates should know exactly what the people they represent want and if they do not, then they cannot hide behind excuses. Everyone of their group will understand their language and failings and they will be recalled and replaced.

It is not supposed to be untouchable

The most important thing that changes in the socialist state is that elections do not happen only infrequently, making it difficult for people to decide if their chosen representatives did their job or not. The members of the state are supposed to be subject to, if not instant, at the least very quick recalls when they do not represent their people anymore.

The state machine is not for the protection of the state

Currently the police and the army are not there to protect the citizens. They are there in order to stop the majority of citizens from fighting with the capitalists. When the poor and homeless rise up and demand to occupy the empty buildings of the rich, it is against them that the army will turn.

In the socialist state there is no army and police force as a separate force from the workers. This is simply part of a societal “chore” that the members of the working class must do in order to protect themselves from outside forces or from people who would destroy them in order to take power. Thus these forces are constantly changing and their members mingle with the working class, insuring that they will be protected from propaganda and not turn against their own people.

The withering of the state

All of these characteristics of the state above, are not about Communism. They are about socialism. This state is not there to control the people but to protect them from those who would use force or intrigue to dismantile the new system. Once this danger has gone away, this state has no reason to exist anymore. There is no need for many people to do the “army chore” when there is no external country ready to invade and enforce capitalism on them, and thus slowly there will be less and less people doing it until the army slowly withers away. Similarly there will be no reason for police or any other state instrument.

Only once the state has withered away can a society be said to be in Communism.

 

https://dbzer0.com/blog/misunderstanding-communism-its-not-violent

Misunderstanding Communism: It’s not violent

Is Communism something violent? Does it inherently require that people start killing those who do not agree with it in order to achieve it? Hearing the propaganda thrown around, one could very well be led to believe that Communists are bloodthirsty demons who will break down your door and take your stuff. That they will force you to sing hymns, and clap for the glorious leader on pain of death etc.

Some of this is patently ridiculous but there is the sliver of truth in that every attempt at communism has gone through a violent struggle which then ended up with a dictatorial state rule. One looking no more than skin-deep at this might indeed get the idea that communists somehow spring out of the ether, kill the resisting peaceful citizens and establish their brutal rule

But when having a deeper look, one easily can find the errors in this image.

The Revolution

If one thing is true about Communism, it’s that it has proven impossible to be achieved without a revolution. The Capitalist system has proven to be very resilient to reformation from inside and instead of it changing, it ends up changing the reformers. Thus there is no alternative that to destroy the flawed system and rebuild from scratch.

But this revolution is not about violence. The people who demands things change do not want to kill their fellow man, they simply wish to stop being exploited. The way they go about it is by ignoring the Capitalist rules and simply starting to live under their own. Thus they ignore the previous agreement about private property. The majority decides that the means of production should belong to the majority who has paid their cost many times over already and they peacefully take them over.

It is at this point that violence occurs. Not from the workers, but from the state machine who steps in to protect the interests of the minority. When the workers are assaulted first by the police and later by the army, it would be foolish to remain peaceful. For peace would only mean the continuation of exploitation. But the workers are not the aggressors. Communism is not the cause of violence.

This assault from the minority towards the majority has always been the case in all revolutions. Accusing the communists of violence is as morally empty as accusing the slaves Rome of being violent when they revolted, or accusing the bourgeois of being violent when they overthrew the monarchies.

Revolutionary violence always comes from the side of the exploiter who has the most to lose and who controls the power of the state.

Imperialism

This is the fear that a communist nation would engage in the classic imperialistic moves. That it will attempt to invade other countries and forcibly turn them “Communist”. This of course is absurd. Communism has no state to wage out the war and the workers of a commune have no incentive to leave their homes and assault other countries.

Certainly, the USSR was guilty of playing the imperialist game (at least as much as the US did when it was making dictators while “spreading democracy”) but as this was a State Capitalism, it should come as no surprise. Indeed they were acting perfectly in the capitalist nature.

But a general fear of communist imperialism can simply be attributed to projection on the Capitalist’s part. If anything, the only form of “imperialism” that can be waged is peacefully cultural, where the workers or the world take the example from the ones who have succeeded and work on their own revolution. But of course, this is why Capitalist nations are so propagandistic against Communism in the first place.

Day to day

So will a communist society breed violence day to day? After all, violence is the norm in a capitalist state which depends on competition and greed. Well, that’s exactly the point. Communism does not depend on those. Why would violent crime happen when people can simply get what they need for free? How could violent suppression happen without a state?

Any system based on cooperation instead of competition can only be peaceful and this is why fears of communist violence are not only unfounded but a telltale sign of propaganda.

 

Well, that was a good laugh.



Meanwhile, in the real world, the social democracy countries you guys seem to value so highly are suffering an even worse recession than the USA is.

 

U.S. economy compared with European economies

Fluctuations in the value of a country's currency relative to the currency of other countries is a good measure of how competitive that country's economy is compared to the other countries. Using the following website's rate tables we can see how the U.S. economy has performed against those of Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the European Union:
http://www.xe.com/ict/

I have chosen Denmark, Norway, and Sweden because they are the three European countries with the most fully developed Social Democratic economies.

In February 2001, which is to say, right after George W. Bush became president of the United States, one U.S. dollar bought 8.12 Danish Kroners, 8.88 Norwegian Kroners, 9.67 Swedish Kroners, and 1.08 Euros.

By December 2008 the U.S. dollar has lost ground to each of these currencies. One U.S. Dollar buys 5.78 Danish Kroners, 7.08 Norwegian Kroners, 8.07 Swedish Kroners, and 0.77 EUROS.

 

Why capitalism became more humane:

Sweatshops, 80 hour work weeks, child labor, and a host of other injustices did not come to an end because of the spontaneous working of the capitalist marketplace. They came to an end because of economic reforms advocated by socialists, opposed by Republicans, and passed into law by Democrats.

These are reforms libertarians would like to repeal.

 

Sorry to hae missed the weekend report on the state of the economic and political shortcomings of capitalism.

There is no economic system that is perfect unto itself. All systems require intervention to correct deviations caused by unforeseen influences. In wartime, capitalism fails to respond to national needs without strong political direction. In peacetime, socialism fails when the GNP falls below what is required to provide work and income for everyone, goods and services need to be distributed in a "capitalistic" way at that point.

Kimi hit the nail on the head when she said:

This is so true, we have had a world economy that expanded astronomicly, driven primarily by capitalism. Socialism really came along for the ride, with fits and starts mainly in Europe. But as Kimi alluded to, European Socialism is really more capitalistic, than it is collective.

The wealth of the worlds industrialised countries was built on capitalism, the bulk of the humanitarian and economic assitance provided to undeveloped nations came from those same countries.

The laws of the countries relating to free markets and collective labor movements and the effects of those laws really illustrate the balance that needs to be maintained. When the labor movement gets too strong, management loses the ability to adjust for economic downturns. When management holds the upper hand, labor suffers during boom times due to a lack of profit sharing.

Our present economic situation has a very unique difference from the recessions and depressions of the past, it has become far more global than national. Today, no nation can survive on isolationism, the degree than we rely on foreign goods and services is unprecidented. Yet the political environment of the developed nations is very diverse, from Representative Republic to Monarchy to Socialist, there is no one dominant system.

IMO, we are going through a period where the political makeup of the world will be changing dramaticly, just as the economic systems of the world depend on a blending of "isms", so do the political systems. Whether we will ever see a one world government or not is arguable, I don't think we can argue that we will see a very strong international movement to center on most political and economic issues.

 

Thank you so much for those mature responses pffag9999. You are will I say... I won't say it. Next time save the drama for your mama you diseased man. Thank You.

 

Man, you guys have been busy since the last time I saw this thread. Unfortunately I was too frozen, beat, beaten and beat up by the capitalist system today to do anything more than read it.

PS pffawg9999 you are a brave, brave man and very enlightening individual.