Is Communism misunderstood?

This is a very biased thinking. Anecdotal evidence isn't very convincing. The M1 doesn't even have an autoloader. Not suprised one of the first tanks to have an autoloader would have problems with it. In some technology fields, Russia is behind, but they are far ahead in others. Maybe you might convince me that the Soviet Union was a (*)(*)(*)(*) hole if your facts were atually true.

 

They are. The only area in which Russian tech is even remotely better than ours is in the area of anti aircraft fire and that is largely because they figure to lose the air war fairly shortly in any set to with the US because we have better aircraft and much better tactical doctrine. We figure to control the skies and so don't really need it.The M-1 doesn't have one because it doesn't need one. They are essentially redundant as was made obvious by the Gulf War.

 

Russian tech wasn't uniformly bad, it was mostly the consumer products the suffered from poor quality. They couldn't afford to put up with design flaws like the one you described for long. We both know that tech in capitalist countries has often failed catastrophically in the first generations, and you've got to give a country coming out of semi-feudalism some slack. A lot of old Russian industrial equipment is reliable, you can still find some USSR-imported gear being used in Canada.

 

Soviet consumer products were not made for luxury but to last forever, there are people still having electric devices made in the 70's that work perfectly.
When i visited USSR back in the 70's they had colour TVs everywhere, there were no colour TVs in Greece but there wasn't a single calculator in their 2nd biggest port
A local businessman offered to exchange three jeans with a piano, they didn't had any jeans but they did have loads of pianos .
Not to speak about toys for kids... beyond any imagination , now that i am thinking of it the biggest stores in Odessa were selling toys.

Sovietia was not communist at all .

 

Kind of ironic how Russian consumer goods were made to last but not for luxury, whereas western goods are made for relative luxury and deliberatly designed to wear out to ensure sales.

 

And when it failed other better products took it place, but not in the SU.

 

Please. You broadcast your ignorance of economic issues as soon as you started talking about the market economy. It's obvious that you have no rebuttal to my previous post. No one knows how a true command economy would work for the reasons that I wrote about above. The centralized system is entirely arbitrary both in the producers and consumers markets, and insofar as it has any semblance of rationality and capability for calculation is its pale attempts to emulate the market economy. When you answer the question of how quality leaders will be chosen with "pick me", and answer the question of how we know central planners will preserve resources by saying that it's the role of the state to help people, ignoring millennia of political theory that attempts to answer whether or not this is the case and if so how we can actually make this happen, it's obvious that you have no real answers to provide.

So please, I beg you, I'm all ears to hear how you've solved the answer of how a centrally planned economy solves the problems of what, how, and where after the best that a century of Marxists have been able to come up with is "supercomputers b****es" and "Market Socialism", the former of which would directly contradict your stated reasons for supporting central planning.

So let me lay this out for you: The market economy is a decentralized system in which consumers ultimately determine what is produced. Businesses can only attain profits insofar as they outperform all other firms in providing for their fellow men. Through the voluntary process of buying and selling a general social value is attributed to all resources in society that generally reflect the values of individuals within society. It provides a means for thorough calculation of general (imperfect) utility calculation that means individuals can decide between different production methods so that society is generally at "full employment", it also gives incentives to efficiently implement new ideas, productive arrangements, and allocate existing resources, as well as providing for a means of dealing with new societal evaluation and preserving resources and accumulating capital.

The extent to which the market system is arbitrary is the extent to which government infiltrates it and provides baseless demand for its various projects, whether these projects be military or welfare programs, it is providing consumer demand where consumer demand (the utility) cannot actually be determined. The only exception to this are public goods, which are generally few and far between, and even then it's very hard to tell what level of provision is optimal and what people would really demand. At very least the government can calculate the opportunity cost of its spending through market prices, even though calculation becomes more arbitrary and chaotic wherever it spends money. Doing away with the market economy removes any semblance of utility calculation and makes the entire system arbitrary and without any means of calculation. This leads to calculational chaos and perfectly arbitrary production. Not even the Soviet Union was ever fully centrally planned, it always looked abroad to production structures and prices, as well as attempting to implement a vague price system on its own shores. A pale imitation of the market mechanism that admits the failure of the whole system.

The Soviet System didn't fail because of the lack of availability to outside trade. Even if the roles of the United States and the Soviet Union had been reversed, the more capitalistic system would still have prevailed. How do we know? Because there was no realistic alternative.

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Epic.

Also an example of what I explained above.

 

I think that Communism sound GREAT (and IS great maybe) ....UNTIL you start trying to get human beings to go along with it.

I love the idea of everyone going naked and living off of just the grass. But humanity isn't cut out for that right now. And in order to get everyone to do that, you'd have to apply the same thing as Communism always seems to need for its acceptance - force.

Communism is so far left it needs force to get acceptance.
Liberalism being not quite so far left, only needs lying to get acceptance.

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You get it.

 

Why is the Right against a secular and temporal Commune of Heaven on Earth where we can be better Angels who have not the need for the expense of Government?

 

Because 8,000 years of recorded history reveals that the alst think sane people should expect is that human beings will be any more angelic than absolutely necessary to survive.

Governments are necessary because a certain percentage of human beings are horses butts.

 

How can we ever aspire to a divine Commune of Heaven if we cannot be moral enough to establish a secular and temporal commune of Heaven on Earth in modern times?

 

Grace and grace alone.

 

Look i 'd hate to go into essay long posts and replies but why you assume that modern Marxists advocate central planned economy?
Nobody wishes a sovietia and the word is about locally decided economies rather than central planned.
No realistic alternative to this (*)(*)(*)(*)e ? oh please , I had to reach the age of 43 to see someone claiming that the constant printing of fiat money and a hot air market 10 times the global gross product is "realistic" .

 

The fact that I've seen some advocate it and some have historically advocated for it. However, as directly I stated in my post, many Marxist now advocate for either centralized or decentralized market socialism.

 

The real problem with communism is that you can do from each according to his means to each according to hs needs without a large intrusive government. To ascertain what those means and needs are.

 

How is that a problem?

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You seem reasonable. I don't care about their opinion. What do you think?

 

I believe they could have given us a better run for our tax money.

 

Shame, I thought thought you were going to teach my about centrally planned economy and how it could actually work. I was looking forward to hearing your expert opinion, but it looks like you decided from something that you refuse to understand. It's also great that the only reasonable person is someone whose opinion doesn't contradict your own worldview

 

No one really questions central forms of planning, but central forms of planning in, allegedly, truer forms of democracies.

Any Firm must rely on central forms of planning.

 

To talk about central planning in the way that you appear to be doing in this post appears to remove all need for the qualification of "central". In a basic sense all planning is central, since every human being is the central planner of his own actions. However, when we're talking about the market economy as a whole there need not be a central planner, and indeed the idea is ridiculous within the market economy itself, and any sort of attempt at rational economic production within a centrally planned economy is ultimately futile as I have shown repeatedly above.

Such a distinction is irrelevant for the reason that I just showed. Nonetheless, even if you do buy into this worldview, the central planning done by firms on the market and the types which are done by central planners are entirely dissimilar because the firm has a clear goal that aligns to the needs of others, and its success and failure can be quantified both through internal and external information sources (that is to say both implicit and explicit profits and losses). The central planner of the whole economy has none of these things. He has no clear goal, he has no way to quantify results or to test success or failure, and he need not serve anyone but himself.

Not only is the central planner blind, but he need not stumble in the right direction.

 

If you don't distinguish or complain about that form of central planning, it is disingenuous to complain about other forms of central planning.

 

Central planning doesn't exist

 

Communism leads to dictatorship, it is really about dictatorship.

 

So is capitalism.

 

Lets just finish the CONFUSION,shall we ,Communism as the political and cultural expression of the coming on the scene of history of a new class the Proletariet ,has nothing to hide and has a spotless banner.

a spotless democratic Banner of unification of humanity against the murderous system of wage slavery forced and maintained by the mass slaughter of 100's of millions of Workers,so that the capitialists and their hangeroners in the Middle Classes can have priviledge and wealth ad infinitum .

Lets go to source so as to show what is and what is NOT ,scientific Communism or Marxism against all pretenders and decievers .

There have been 2 schools of histroical falsification on this question ,the Capitilist School of historical falsification ,and the Stalinist School of historical falsification.

the first and oldest ,is well pretty obvious with the Class intrest involved ,in defence of the capitialist sytem after its progressive stage of development in order to maintain in the form of ideology and distortion and rewriting of History by the Ruling Class and diseminated in 'places of learning' by the Petty-Bourgois Intelligensia .

The second ,was to rewrite the history of Marxism in the 20th century to coverup the Betrayals of a priviledged Bureaucracy that usurped Political power and based itself like a parasite on the first Workers state of the USSR .Centering its falsification on the rewriting of history to expunge the figure of Leon Trotsky eventually with the GPU-KGB assassination of Trotsky in Mexico 1940[the greatest single crime against the working Class in the 20th century]Stalinism was based on the systematic murder of all those that oposed the regime from a Marxist Internationalist position .

And with the false ,and Anti-communist Perspective of 'socialism in one country ' and 'peacefull co-existance with Imperialism 'irrevocably broke with the Internationalist and Revolutionary tradition and perspective of Communism [Marxism]

so let us see what the co-leader of the russian Revolution with Trotsky ,one V.I Lenin had to say on the Question?

Of What is Communism ,scientific socialism ,Marxism ?

[h=2]Vladimir Ilyich Lenin[/h][h=3]The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism[/h][HR][/HR]Published: Prosveshcheniye No 3., March 1913. Signed: V. I.. Published according to the Prosveshcheniye text.
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1977, Moscow, Volume 19, pages 21-28.
Translated: The Late George Hanna
Original Transcription: Lee Joon Koo and Marc Luzietti
Re-Marked up by: K. Goins (200
Public Domain: Lenin Internet Archive (1996). You may freely copy, distribute, display and perform this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit “Marxists Internet Archive” as your source.
[HR][/HR]This article was published in 1913 in Prosveshcheniye No. 3, dedicated to the Thirtieth Anniversary of Marx’s death.
Prosveshcheniye (Enlightenment) was a Bolshevik social, political and literary monthly published legally in St. Petersburg from December 1911 onwards. Its inauguration was proposed by Lenin to replace the Bolshevik journal Mysl (Thought), a Moscow publication banned by the tsarist government. Lenin directed the work of the journal from abroad and wrote the following articles for it: “Fundamental Problems of the Election Campaign”, “Results of the Election”, “Critical Remarks on the National Question”, “The Right of Nations to Self-Determination”, and others.
The journal was suppressed by the tsarist government in June 1914, on the eve of the First World War. Publication was resumed in the autumn of 1917 but only one double number appeared; this number contained two articles by Lenin: “Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?” and “A Review of the Party Programme”.
Throughout the civilised world the teachings of Marx evoke the utmost hostility and hatred of all bourgeois science (both official and liberal), which regards Marxism as a kind of “pernicious sect”. And no other attitude is to be expected, for there can be no “impartial” social science in a society based on class struggle. In one way or another, all official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery. To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.
But this is not all. The history of philosophy and the history of social science show with perfect clarity that there is nothing resembling “sectarianism” in Marxism, in the sense of its being a hidebound, petrified doctrine, a doctrine which arose away from the high road of the development of world civilisation. On the contrary, the genius of Marx consists precisely in his having furnished answers to questions already raised by the foremost minds of mankind. His doctrine emerged as the direct and immediate continuation of the teachings of the greatest representatives of philosophy, political economy and socialism.
The Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides men with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that man produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.
It is these three sources of Marxism, which are also its component parts that we shall outline in brief.
[h=4]I[/h]The philosophy of Marxism is materialism. Throughout the modern history of Europe, and especially at the end of the eighteenth century in France, where a resolute struggle was conducted against every kind of medieval rubbish, against serfdom in institutions and ideas, materialism has proved to be the only philosophy that is consistent, true to all the teachings of natural science and hostile to superstition, cant and so forth. The enemies of democracy have, therefore, always exerted all their efforts to “refute”, under mine and defame materialism, and have advocated various forms of philosophical idealism, which always, in one way or another, amounts to the defence or support of religion.
Marx and Engels defended philosophical materialism in the most determined manner and repeatedly explained how profoundly erroneous is every deviation from this basis. Their views are most clearly and fully expounded in the works of Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and Anti-Dühring, which, like the Communist Manifesto, are handbooks for every class-conscious worker.
But Marx did not stop at eighteenth-century materialism: he developed philosophy to a higher level, he enriched it with the achievements of German classical philosophy, especially of Hegel’s system, which in its turn had led to the materialism of Feuerbach. The main achievement was dialectics, i.e., the doctrine of development in its fullest, deepest and most comprehensive form, the doctrine of the relativity of the human knowledge that provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter. The latest discoveries of natural science—radium, electrons, the transmutation of elements—have been a remarkable confirmation of Marx’s dialectical materialism despite the teachings of the bourgeois philosophers with their “new” reversions to old and decadent idealism.
Marx deepened and developed philosophical materialism to the full, and extended the cognition of nature to include the cognition of human society. His historical materialism was a great achievement in scientific thinking. The chaos and arbitrariness that had previously reigned in views on history and politics were replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth of productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops—how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism.
Just as man’s knowledge reflects nature (i.e., developing matter), which exists independently of him, so man’s social knowledge (i.e., his various views and doctrines—philosophical, religious, political and so forth) reflects the economic system of society. Political institutions are a superstructure on the economic foundation. We see, for example, that the various political forms of the modern European states serve to strengthen the domination of the bourgeoisie over the proletariat.
Marx’s philosophy is a consummate philosophical materialism which has provided mankind, and especially the working class, with powerful instruments of knowledge.
[h=4]II[/h]Having recognised that the economic system is the foundation on which the political superstructure is erected, Marx devoted his greatest attention to the study of this economic system. Marx’s principal work, Capital, is devoted to a study of the economic system of modern, i.e., capitalist, society.
Classical political economy, before Marx, evolved in England, the most developed of the capitalist countries. Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by their investigations of the economic system, laid the foundations of the labour theory of value. Marx continued their work; he provided a proof of the theory and developed it consistently. He showed that the value of every commodity is determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time spent on its production.
Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people. The exchange of commodities expresses the connection between individual producers through the market. Money signifies that the connection is becoming closer and closer, inseparably uniting the entire economic life of the individual producers into one whole. Capital signifies a further development of this connection: man’s labour-power becomes a commodity. The wage-worker sells his labour-power to the owner of land, factories and instruments of labour. The worker spends one part of the day covering the cost of maintaining himself and his family (wages), while the other part of the day he works without remuneration, creating for the capitalist surplus-value, the source of profit, the source of the wealth of the capitalist class.
The doctrine of surplus-value is the corner-stone of Marx’s economic theory.
Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed. In industry, the victory of large-scale production is immediately apparent, but the same phenomenon is also to be observed in agriculture, where the superiority of large-scale capitalist agriculture is enhanced, the use of machinery increases and the peasant economy, trapped by money-capital, declines and falls into ruin under the burden of its backward technique. The decline of small-scale production assumes different forms in agriculture, but the decline itself is an indisputable fact.
By destroying small-scale production, capital leads to an increase in productivity of labour and to the creation of a monopoly position for the associations of big capitalists. Production itself becomes more and more social—hundreds of thousands and millions of workers become bound together in a regular economic organism—but the product of this collective labour is appropriated by a handful of capitalists. Anarchy of production, crises, the furious chase after markets and the insecurity of existence of the mass of the population are intensified.
By increasing the dependence of the workers on capital, the capitalist system creates the great power of united labour.
Marx traced the development of capitalism from embryonic commodity economy, from simple exchange, to its highest forms, to large-scale production.
And the experience of all capitalist countries, old and new, year by year demonstrates clearly the truth of this Marxian doctrine to increasing numbers of workers.
Capitalism has triumphed all over the world, but this triumph is only the prelude to the triumph of labour over capital.
[h=4]III[/h]When feudalism was overthrown and “free” capitalist society appeared in the world, it at once became apparent that this freedom meant a new system of oppression and exploitation of the working people. Various socialist doctrines immediately emerged as a reflection of and protest against this oppression. Early socialism, however, was utopian socialism. It criticised capitalist society, it condemned and damned it, it dreamed of its destruction, it had visions of a better order and endeavoured to convince the rich of the immorality of exploitation.
But utopian socialism could not indicate the real solution. It could not explain the real nature of wage-slavery under capitalism, it could not reveal the laws of capitalist development, or show what social force is capable of becoming the creator of a new society.
Meanwhile, the stormy revolutions which everywhere in Europe, and especially in France, accompanied the fall of feudalism, of serfdom, more and more clearly revealed the struggle of classes as the basis and the driving force of all development.
Not a single victory of political freedom over the feudal class was won except against desperate resistance. Not a single capitalist country evolved on a more or less free and democratic basis except by a life-and-death struggle between the various classes of capitalist society.
The genius of Marx lies in his having been the first to deduce from this the lesson world history teaches and to apply that lesson consistently. The deduction he made is the doctrine of the class struggle.
People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises. Champions of reforms and improvements will always be fooled by the defenders of the old order until they realise that every old institution, how ever barbarous and rotten it may appear to be, is kept going by the forces of certain ruling classes. And there is only one way of smashing the resistance of those classes, and that is to find, in the very society which surrounds us, the forces which can—and, owing to their social position, must—constitute the power capable of sweeping away the old and creating the new, and to enlighten and organise those forces for the struggle.
Marx’s philosophical materialism alone has shown the proletariat the way out of the spiritual slavery in which all oppressed classes have hitherto languished. Marx’s economic theory alone has explained the true position of the proletariat in the general system of capitalism.
Independent organisations of the proletariat are multi plying all over the world, from America to Japan and from Sweden to South Africa. The proletariat is becoming enlightened and educated by waging its class struggle; it is ridding itself of the prejudices of bourgeois society; it is rallying its ranks ever more closely and is learning to gauge the measure of its successes; it is steeling its forces and is growing irresistibly.

100 years later and nothing has changed ,as if written yesterday!

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