Communism, boiled down.
 

Communism is based in envy.
Keep in mind Marx & Engels did not have the strength of their convictions, did not live by it. They were owners of property and factories and did not share their profits with their workers and renters.
Words written by cowards should be ignored.
Did/do Stalin, Mao, Castro & the party members live as those they oppress? Then we know the truth of their ideals.
Che was just a murderer & busybody.

If Che was alive, and collecting royalties on the tee shirts and posters, he'd be a multi-millionaire. It would be interesting to see what he would do with all that money.

I don't agree that communism, overall, is based on envy. It's a very old idea, and it worked (works) very well in Pueblo communities. It just doesn't work on a large scale.

Under more normal, or more fortunate, circumstances, Mao would have been convicted as a mere felon, and beheaded.

Edwin O. Wilson: "Communism. Interesting idea. Wrong species."

Marx was not a communist.

That's a fact that most right wingers can't seem to grasp Dana. ;)

Not that it matters in light of the half billion untimely killed and the couple billion kept in poverty pursuant to Marx's ideas.

Hmmm...we've got quite a lot of folks in poverty in the good ol' US of A...

Yep. Democracy is working well. :)

Oh no, no.. we're a REPLUBLIC! ;)

democratic republic?

LOL

From Marx himself :

Marxism has only ever really been a idea verging on theory. Is there any community that has really ever put it into practice?

I know of companies that have increased profits through giving staff shares in the company and allowing staff more self determination.

It doesn't always work though.

Nor does democracy.

I guess one day maybe we'll figure out the right way to do things.

Until then, we'll work on the ideas we currently have.

I wonder if we've ever been a democracy, really. There has always been so much manipulation involved in the U.S. political process. There are and have been altruistic elected officials, but the culture of 'pay-to-play' (something that's blamed on city government corruption, but reaches up to the federal level too) seems to prevail too often.

Well the same things that affect elected officials in a democratic government affect communist or socialist governments and would affect a maxist government.

Human nature is greedy.

Oh, and self serving

It does work, to a certain point. The problem is, a business is, legally and accounting-wise, an entity unto itself. It stops working in the best way when those parts tip the seesaw away from the folks that are part of it.

Oh for sure it works sometimes. Usually in small communities. Local co-ops for example.

Eventually when real dollars start being traded someone wants a bigger piece of the pie though.

I think the evidence shows that is not true, or we would be long extinct or not the rulers of this planet... well, the mammal rulers. Some may be that way, but the vast minority. Even they cooperate most of the time and enjoy doing so.
Walk through your town and just observe. Do not judge.
I do this a LOT (actor). Most are kind and cooperative and enjoy being so 99.999% of the time.

In those small communist communities, the inventors, innovators, dreamers and those who excell... leave. (or are crushed)

rkz, you can see what you want. I know what I see.

That was a fun fantasy novel then.

You must not drive very much. :p

Communism/Socialism is not based in envy?
What is it then?
Guy invents something or a way of doing his/her work so that they have more free time to work on other things and are more productive.
They have excess.
Their neighbors say "heeeyyyyy look at what you have and I'm still working".
So person 1 sells excess or invention/method so they can have excess time/work too.
Later they invent more, but the others do not.
Eventually, and this DOES always happen and is when Communism/Socialism happens.
The neighbors say... "wait a min." they have the stuff, their land, just like us, and our money because they keep selling stuff to us... that's not fair!!". (they are incapable of seeing that... no, they refuse to see that they choose to buy the products, inventions, and sell what they do to person one and did so on day 1, have yet to build, invent, etc, anything on their own to reduce their work or create anyting new to open new demand).
Envy, all of it.
BTW... on another point that will come-up.
There is not one nation on this planet that cannot stop buying from the US tomorrow.
Cuba has only two embargoes, none of the other hundreds of nations deal with them because their system is corrupt and sucks, like all of Communism and Socialism. If that was not the case they would be fine without us.

No, it was a political treatise. He was a political/economic philosopher. Are you suggesting philosophers only ever write about what they personally intend to achieve/fight for?


Your description of how communism/socialism works is too simplistic. It does not take into account exploitation by an employer-class, of an employee-class. That is what socialism seeks to redress. It's not about someone being terribly hard working and all those people who aren't as hard working or inventive, wanting to take away the fruits of his hard work.

What a tiny set of spectacles from which to view the world: it's all about the exploitation.

Could it be that in the 150 years since Marx made his point, there has been an industrial revolution and the "end of scarcity", which means it's really, really difficult to exploit someone that way who doesn't want to be exploited?

I think he would shred his original treatise in view of the amount of plain old suffering his school of thought has caused the human race. Even the fucking Chinese are going Capitalist as much as possible, and generating wealth that's pulling them out of poverty.

I actually agree, in part, with this. My point was that Marx's theories and the socialist movements of the mid 19th/early 20th centuries were based on a different paradigm to the one we live in. In some cases people have drawn on those theories and created something as abominable in its own way as the worst ravages of industrial Manchester. In other cases, people have drawn on those theories, to initiate a workers movement and force the pace of change within a broadly capitalist economy, and in doing so won things like employment rights, and fair wages.

Marx was a theorist and philosopher. He did not engineer a revolution. As for Engels, have any of you ever read his descriptions of working and living conditions in the industrial North of England? When Marx and Engels were writing, they were writing primarily with England in mind, as the likely start of anything. At that time, England could, potentially, have been subject to a revolution and the necessity for change was never more apparent than in the great textile towns of North. That was an instance, of a small class of men, who in creating great wealth, exploited a much larger and more vulnerable class, to the point that whole communities of men, women and children were reduced almost to the status of dumb beasts. This wasn't done innocently, the writing of the time show an ideological approach, where the need for workers not to have an opportunity to pace themselves, or work independantly was voiced as a means of preventing moral decline. The use of children, first heavily indoctrinated into the Mill owner's methodism, was widespread and served to further weaken the hand of the working man. All done, with the assistance of employer-weighted legislation from the government.

Marx's theories were appropriate to a time and place. The Bolsheviks and mensheviks in Russia, saw in those theories an answer to a level of oppression that the modern day would see as shameful. Such revolutionary movements, have the misfortune of being made of people. People fall out, disagree on direction and intent, wage petty wars, and are happy to act on theories with a disregard for the individuals concerned. It's part of that revolutionary mindset I think, to stand outside of the society, in order to view the whole thing. Makes, often, for people who care greatly about the overall picture, without true regard for those who live inside it.

So?... that is what it ends-up doing. Unfortunately, many of the things we do with one intent ends up with other consequences.

DanaC, if I were your social sciences teacher I would give that paper a failing grade. Socialism, whether it overtly says so or not, merely replaces an employer-class with the official class, and the exploitation merrily continues otherwise unchanged -- if anything, worse, with Throne and Mammon conjoined, and paying in fiat currency too. Ask anyone with a memory of day to day Soviet life.

You'd protest immediately "But we'd make laws to prevent exploitation!" Oh sure, you could and would. Make laws by the bushel, regulations and policies by the tome until the shelf is full and appendixes, revisions, and addenda are stacking up on the floor at the shelf's end, all to hedge about the actions of the official-employers... and in the process, quietly kill flexibility, creativity and initiative, hardly aware that that is what you're doing in an attempt to craft omnicompetent policy.

This is known as central planning and it actively prevents economic performance. For an exact parallel, see "work rules" -- a body of regulation that prevents work being done. This is why the Soviet Union fell, you know; the belief that Gosplan was something necessary sucked all the vitamins out of the economy, engendered distortions so severe it was rather a wonder the production of Kalashnikovs and missiles wasn't affected. Maybe it was, and we just don't know for sure. State Socialism did not have an economy so much as it had a Frankenstein's monster galvanized into something like motion at every Five Year Plan.

This is why my lifelong advice to any socialist is: dump socialism. Start with a clean sheet and base it all on the individual -- absolutely nothing happens until some individual does something. I'd further tell them there is no such thing as the Collective: the nearest you can come is individual people moving in close coordination towards a desired goal, and you can only expect this to be a temporary thing.

Then it would seem to be about absolutely nothing at all, if you are to be believed. Since big-S Socialism never raised altars to Nothing ("Is Nothing sacred?"), but instead encouraged worship of other things, like Party, I don't see any reason to accept this statement as true either.

The State that flatly refuses to rob Peter to pay Paul, even if it would appreciate the full support of Paul, is a State (in a state) of very little corruption. The usual way a state suffers creeping decay or a collapse of its economy is through some party or another voting itself the treasury or some portion thereof. Forcible seizure of the treasury is also a corrupting option.

Soviets did not enjoy/suffer socialism. That's a cold war misnomer.

I love it... "what you see" really?
What do you see? A flood of innovations, patents and great art coming out of Cuba to enhance mankind?
Cuba on the frontier of medicine, design, production and art?
Please, enlighten us.

What I see, here in FL, is anyone with half a brain in Cuba, doing their damnedest to get to where they can flourish... and I SEE that. Some of my best friends are actual Cuban immigrants that cowered from sharks and their kids.
Communism does one thing, lowers the bar to the lowest common denominator and punishes anyone who pushes past that in any way... envy.


During the Soviet era the top doctors and scientists were watched and under lock and key because they wanted to leave. It was the only way they could get any military work done... even all of that was based on intelligence from the west.
They invented NOTHING.

Yeah, I hear Cuban kids can be really scary... ;)

LOL!!!
Funny!

Fortunately, you are not my teacher. I have excellent teachers. I attend a very good university, with a well respected school of history and am currently on track for a first, with my grades putting me into the top 5% in a school of 260 students. What I am not, is an economist.

As a matter of fact, I agree that in the countries where revolutionary socialism, or soviet style communism has taken root, what has actually resulted, effectively is state-capitalism.

Socialism, in its purist sense, has never actually been put effectively into action; partly because in order for it to truly work it needs to be global. What has been successful in many countries, is the adoption of some of the values of socialism, whilst still harnessing many of the advantages of capitalism.

I would no more wish to live in a state of pure socialism, than I would seek to live under the most extreme form of laissez-faire, free market capitalism. Neither system alone answers all of society's needs/problems, neither system alone truly allows for the realisation of all its citizens' potential. What works, in my opinion, is a balance of the two.

Where that balance lies is a lot to do with cultural norms and assumptions. Your cultural assumptions (right down to the layers of meaning which we attach to words and concepts, despite the fact that we share a base language) are different to my cultural assumptions. You and I are not just on opposite sides of a spectrum, we are almost on different spectrums.

Come on people, who doesn't love the communist party??
http://media.threadless.com//product/383/zoom.gif

Oh, really?
 

And your idea of what they lived under is...?

Bullitt: yup. Party animals. What's even more fun is I can make the same joke in Russian. Is beink Communist Party animals...

DanaC: that little exigesis moves me to paraphrase Edmund O. Wilson, who made this observation re communism, but this serves as well: Socialism: interesting idea, wrong species.

Any time you see a sentence like that about a system, it's a sure sign that that system does not work. That kind of special pleading for other-than-market economy has been going on continuously since 1921 when the Communists actually found themselves in a position of responsibility for the first time, and it's never worked. Capitalism, OTOH, has never needed a syllable of special pleading ever. You could look that up. Big or small, capitalism works, because it works with, not against, human nature. It is in the nature of humans, indeed in a way of all terrestrial life, to require a profit motive.

All you really need are two things: capitalism, and good ethics. You don't need socialism to make ethics -- far from it. Socialism, therefore, is simply an attempt by useless eaters and drones to secure a good income as members of officialdom. Better they should learn the mysteries of the backhoe and go dig ditches. Foundations and groundlevel pools too.

In a related topic, Castro's Cuba is sending cheap doctors to Chavez' Venezuela. The doctors are no doubt pleased to hear they will be paid ten times their US$15/month salary -- until they discover that the Cuban government is taking away eighty percent of it -- so the doctors/med techs are taking home the munificent sum of a dollar a day. The Cuban staffers have already had to resort to extreme measures to keep the medical people confined -- government minders, locked compounds, no one allowed out except in pairs -- and nonetheless, whole piles of Cubans are disappearing into the brush and reemerging in Mexico and the United States. Smart and wealthy Venezuelans are heading out of the country in droves too.

C'mon, you know the horrors of the Soviet Union and Mao's China are nowhere close to socialism. The west's cold war propaganda machine used communism and socialism, interchangeably, to describe what was neither.
Britain is closer than they ever were.

I recognize this kind of thinking in two groups of Americans. The "what could have been" Trotskyites and their neo-con cousins. Memes are funny things.

Bruce, the horrors were part and parcel of the socialist system; it required them because revolutions devour their children, particularly if they are attempted as a comprehensive revision of human nature. Human nature is not malleable enough to be changed by revisions of the political order. These revisions, etcetera, are always about moving the citizens about like chessmen, in accordance with some higher-up's plan.

"Barbed wire always seems necessary to keep the chessmen on their squares." -- P.J. O'Rourke

You mean Sundae Girl was forced to move to London or she climbed the barbed wire to get out of where she was and again to get into where she is?

so·cial·ism (sō'shə-lĭz'əm)
n.
1-Any of various theories or systems of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively or by a centralized government that often plans and controls the economy.
2-The stage in Marxist-Leninist theory intermediate between capitalism and communism, in which collective ownership of the economy under the dictatorship of the proletariat has not yet been successfully achieved.

No, I don't mean that as you know very well, Bruce.

1) None of which work. That dates back to the French physiocrats, about whom P.J. O'Rourke and Adam Smith together had this to say:

"Before totalitarianism had ever been tried, Adam Smith was prescient in his scorn for it:

'The man of system. . . is often so enamored with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. . . He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces on a chessboard.'"

From The Wealth of Nations' chapter in which Smith takes the physiocrats' theory to bits. O'Rourke adds then:

"Barbed wire always seems to be needed to keep the chessmen on their squares."

This is true of the polite variations of socialism as well as of the impolite variety. It doesn't work, people leave, and then coercion is exerted to stem the outflow. Phooey to all that. Voting with their feet, toes pointing away, is the sign your policies aren't working at all well.

2) Marxist-Leninist theory is in any case exploded after a century of trial and struggle. Lenin was seeing the failure of the overall theory to account for macroeconomic phenomena in his time: capitalism kept not impoverishing the proletariat, so they weren't overthrowing the capitalists. Indeed, the contrary was occurring: the proletariat kept getting richer. In puzzlement, Lenin took to attributing this phenomenon to the presence of empire. Since this enrichment also takes place without empire, viz., the United States and its steady enrichment with or without overseas possessions, I'd say this Leninist theory doesn't hold up.

Which comes back to what I said.

Any system that has to restrict internal travel and lock-up their entire population is a failure before it even starts.
That one detail alone is enough to doom the entire system.

I think you'd probably find that more countries restrict travel than don't.

Which of the successful ones do?

Successful by what criteria? If you mean "successful at restricting travel" then they have a better chance...

Exactly.
I can't think of anything that screams "we are a failure" louder than that.

"Successful"... let's just say for argument's sake that "successful" means the nation has both an economy strong enough to feed, clothe, and shelter its people; and a civil society strong enough to provide both effective deed management and policing without torture.

I guess, not that I thought of it that way at the time, but am now; that I am defining captivity as torture.
Comfortable with that.

Communism...Never worked, never will.

Communism...Never tried, never will.

Communism...executing military officials since Marx was a june bug.

Seriously, Communism has never been implemented. Every "Communist" state has been totalitarianism with a touch of Communism. I don't think it will ever work but there has not been a true Communist state yet.

perfect states are easier said than done.

Although I believe when one tries to mold a populace it is ruined.

It's not even that it is imperfect... it's crazy stupid unless you are a termite. Wait... no... they are a totalitarian society... just stupid.

Or people just have different perspectives on what is good...

I encourage everyone to have their own beliefs.

I don't, if they oppress others. Nope.
No reason to respect an opinion that does not make sense and/or harms others.

True.

Aslong as one's not hurting anyone else in the proccess I meant.

That is still an opinion. People don't like capitalism because corporations and the upper class will oppress others. You can call it freedom or whatever but you are still forcing a socio-economic theory on other people. It is a no-win situation.