Communism, boiled down.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Which comes back to what I said.

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

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

[Undertoad]

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.

[DanaC]

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 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.

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.

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by rkzenrage

actual Cuban immigrants that cowered from sharks and their kids.

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

LOL!!!
Funny!

[DanaC]

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.

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.

[Bullitt]

Come on people, who doesn't love the communist party??

[Griff]

Originally Posted by DanaC

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.

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.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

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

[xoxoxoBruce]

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.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

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.

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.

[DanaC]

Any system that has to restrict internal travel and lock-up their entire population is a failure before it even starts.

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

[Undertoad]

Which of the successful ones do?