Is Communism misunderstood?

And once again, thanks for proving my point. All can do is offer up excuses why a fundamentally flawed ideology never once succeeded.

 

Paul Johnson-(*)(*)
If you depart from moral absolutes, you go into a bottomless pit. Communism and Nazism were catastrophic evils which both derived from moral relativism. Their differences were minor compared to their similarities.

 

So here we have someone start a thread with a sincere question and it is hijacked by conservatives who are scared to talk about an ideological boogieman they don't understand.

 

So you give a can of beans to a native who ignores the existence of can openers and your explanation for his inability to access the content is that the can is flawed .....

.... i am very tempted to make a comment about conservative 's capacity for critical thinking......

 

I think there are three phases to understanding communism:

1) The knee-jerk opposition we've all been conditioned to experience in the U.S.

2) Learning what it actually is and pondering all of its utopian ideals

3) Realizing why it can never work and recognizing why phase one was the proper response

 

It's not evolution. It's just an endless cycle. The part on the right is the ascent toward capitalism. And the part on the left is the descent back into collectivism.

 

Prosperity and abundance precede private interest groups in your diagram.

 

Any time you try and label someone a "communist" or "socialist" etc., there is the instant objection that they don't meet all the criterea. This is because, for the most part, those associated with communism like Stalin or Mao, are inherently evil human beings, so those that try to defend a particular ideaology try and distance themselves from the history of such ideologies put into practice. Another one I enjoy is Hitler. Both the right and left try to portray him as both left and right because no one wants to claim him. However, looking at all of these characters they have all have one characteristic, they are all collectivists.

I started a thread on the ideology of collectivism. It seems to me that as a society we have no collectivist rights, only individual rights. However, as collectivism grows, are indivdual freedoms iherently wane. What ends up happening are people surrendering their individual rights for the "good of society". Then we end up with is some centralized Bond villan sitting in his chair petting his white cat giving orders to the collective as to what is "good" for the collective. In fact, President Obama is also a collectivist. He is constantly using terminology about our "collective salvation", whatever the hell that means.

FDR tried to come up with our collective rights. He wrote a second bill of rights that collectivists in the US have been working on ever since. These were the right to retirement, health care, a "fair wage", a right to work, etc, etc. However, what rights to these really give us? Today, Social Security is not owed to us. They simply do not have to pay anything, in fact, they steal from it. There is not a dime left in it, aside from trillions of dollars in IOU's. The kicker is, even though people have been brainwashed into thinking that we cannot live without Social Security, even though at the time of passing the legislation, FDR had a hard time selling it to the American public, much like how Obamacare was unpopular with the public when it was shoved down our collective throats. People can't even live on it but continue to defend it as a sacred cow. Then there is Medicare. Medicare turns down more people every year than private insurance regarding treatments and procedures. In truth, our only right to health care is what some bureaucrat in Washington thinks is OK.

I could go on but why? We are collectively giving away or freedom economically to the collective Leviathan. In fact, most on the left seem to only care about freedom when it comes to certain sex acts and the freedom to kill off their offspring or take drugs. Outside of that, they could care less about their freedoms. Just have the state take whatever is "their fair share" and tell them what a "fair wage is" and what are "fair hours to work" and what kind of vehicle to drive and what size house they should live in and what size soda they should be drinking etc, and they could not be happier.

I often hear the left complain about SCOTUS giving corporate America "rights", as if the collective should be afforded the same individual rights as the citizens of the country. But then, this is how the collective thinks. Corporations are nothing more than mini governments who collude with government to help run our lives. Throw out the "right" and "left" terminology, it is all about our collective utopia.

Of course, there is no reaching the collective utopia. As hard as we may try, there will always be "social injustice". There will always be "economic inequality" etc. This means that the ever expansive collective will have no end. Taxes will always be raised. Rights will continue to wane, and society will eventually be introduced to a hard tyranny.

 

This is pointless , you are making assumptions over a subject you don't understand while showing no will to understand it.

Yes communism is misunderstood by those who have never study it and only listen to communism's polemics , same thing as say physics , if you only listen to the catholic church you would defend the assumption that earth is the center of the universe.

 

Ok, you still haven't provided one single example of communism ever succeeding once. Thanks for playing.

 

The only chance I will give them is the chance to run.

 

A long time ago, when I was maybe 12-years-old, I told my father, "It's wrong to kill people, but for Communists we must make an exception."

And I still believe that.

If there was ever a time when Communists seriously were a threat to take over the United States of America, I would feel no moral compunction against doing cold-blooded murder against them.

And anyone who knows about Communism would have to agree.

 

Because there was never a communist entity . The application of communism requires the abolition of the state , do you know any area without a state that survived inside the 20th century ?

 

And, why does communism never make it to the point where the state is abolished?
There's been some many countless examples of communist revolutions taking place, and then turning into totalitarian nightmares. So please explain where they keep going wrong, I'll wait.

 

Is it misunderstood. Yep, definitely. Is the general understanding of it a misunderstanding? Nope.

The main defense that modern Communists make is that "it's never been tried," meaning that none of the Communist countries followed their Communist ideals. But Communism is generally well understood, in reference to it's governments.

 

Communism applies when societies are ready and this means passing trough industrialisation and capitalism , Russia and China were almost feudal and you can not jump over evolutionary steps.

Everything turns into a totalitarian nightmare , i see you are American so i will skip talking about Europe, how do you think your founding fathers would feel about the martial law in Boston , drones flying targeting civilians, abolition of privacy and the rat king of lobbyists in the capital ?

 

You can try, with highly amusing results.

 

That's easy, they all go wrong as soon as the leaders realize exactly how stupid the adherents are and simply stop the process and oppress them...

 

Communism never existed aside from primitive communism and brief instances like anarchist Catalonia, the USSR was state capitalist.

 

So, how long do these evolutionary steps take?

You are going out on a limb here. Is there a possibility of totalitarianism coming to America, of course. And, there is already a element of corruption at the federal level of our government. There is a creeping statism, that seems to be imposed upon us by the extremes of the left and right. As for our founding fathers go, their opinions greatly varied just as politicians of today, there where federalist like Hamilton and anti-federalist like Jefferson, so who knows how they would feel about issues we face today. I'm sure they would be alarmed, just as people are today. But, if you're saying that we have totalitarianism here, you are greatly overstating your case.

 

Probably a long time , there are different schools of thought on this , you can either sit back and wait for reform space to run out , speed up capitalist process in order to accelerate the downfall or prepare for a revolution. In my opinion patience is a virtue.
You are an old forum member and you see conservatives and reactionaries every day , they all have to move forward . Communism as i see it is a "none left behind" kind of thing because evolution does not proceed with kicks , threats , marginalisation and violence .
We will all have to agree on it.

Look i strongly believe that Obama administration is a soft handed fascist one , of course if you are okay with that it is none of my business .
Freedom can not be "measured" on how the state treats law abiding, docile citizens but how they treat dissent , OWS were labelled as terrorists and the Tea party as idiots, why? because they dare express an argument .
After 11/9/2001 draconian laws came into act and today more than 10 years later you are still not secure and the state will make even more authoritarian decisions, you don't see a pattern ?

Thank you for the lecture over your funding fathers.

 

Any and all creeping statism is a by-product of leftism, progressivism, liberalism, socialism, communism and or totatlitarianism. So don't try to feebly pass statism off as having any association with any policy or ideology coming from the right.

 

Well, as Reagan said

"How do you tell a Communist?
Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin.
And how do you tell an anti-Communist?
It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."

 

We had decades of watching Communism in operation.

I think we understand it quite well.

It isn't workable at all without a draconian police state.

 

I view it like this. Communism is the extreme opposite of Austrian economics. Instead of assuming the market can take care of everything, it assumes a labor collective can. Ironically, both ideologies are in favor of abolishing government, but they aim for very different goals.

Communism as it was practiced by Stalin and Mao is quite different from what Marx intended. They were both statists who simply wanted to consolidate power.

Actually following Marx's ideas would lead to a labor collective controlling things, which would have democratic components to it, but like Austrian economics, it is very idealistic.

Communism assumes that the state won't retain its power over production after seizing private assets and will hand them over to the labor collective. This was shown to be very naive in how Stalin and Mao oppressed their respective societies. A new elite formed to replace the preceding ones.

Austrian economics falsely assumes that the market can take care of everything without government getting involved and without abuse of power arising among a capitalist elite.

In short, neither extreme is realistic, but we can implement elements of each for a functioning society (socialism and capitalism).