Communism, boiled down.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by DanaC
Marx was not a communist.

That was a fun fantasy novel then.

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.

Originally Posted by DanaC

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.

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

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by DanaC

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.

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.

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.

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.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Ask anyone with a memory of day to day Soviet life.

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

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

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

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.

Socialism, in its purist sense [sic], has never actually been put effectively into action; partly because in order for it to truly work it needs to be global.

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.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

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

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.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Which comes back to what I said.

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

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