Refuting the Standard Arguments Against Communism and for Capitalism

Correct of course. It may take 2, 3, or even 4 generations to just get to the stable, genuine socialist state and another who knows... 10, 50 generations for the state to "wither away" to communism.

Umm, no. That is short-sighter uninformed capitalist propaganda. It's not your fault. We have been bombarded with it and have had it repeated, "justified", parroted, etc etc for about 90 years. But we need to start seeing through it.

They are? First of all anarchists are not Marxists. But "the dictatorship of the proletariat" must be understood to know what it means. Obvious, right? It is the initial period while socialism is being established and the people, through their organizations and structures which run the life of the country, "dictate" to the capitalists and deny them their "right" to private business, private profits, propaganda, etc. That's all it means and that must happen. It can't be avoided. So I don't know what you mean by "skip the period of the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat." It cannot be skipped any more then you might skip breathing today.

Whoa. You would do well to bone up before you try to be the voice of opposition. You referred to "the dictatorship of the proletariat." That is socialism. Then you mentioned "from each according to their means ("ability" actually) to each according to their needs". That's a description of the economy under stateless communism in about 1000 years. Yet under that system of stateless communism you say "you wind up with a totalitarian regime whose primary concern is retaining power" which indicates a state machine!

See what confused capitalist propaganda does for you?

 

A right wing socialist showcase??? Hell no! Never was, is not, will never be, cannot be. Neither any other nation ever. ... because there's no such thing possible.

 

are you claiming Venezuela is not socialist?

 

No. And I'm not saying it is. This is really confusing, isn't it?

 

You're not.

Name some non OECD darling (tiny, homogenous Scandinavian(ish)) countries that are doing well or have EVER done well for more than a decade or two on the "collective" side of mixed... while funding a material military and while not eradicating millions of people.

Ironically, I just finished reading Koestler's "Darkness at Noon" not 30 minutes ago, and we have even MORE datapoints since that was written in 1941 that socialism eats itself into despotic totalitarianism near instantly, the inevitable consequence of radical outcome egalitarianism... not to mention the utter stifling of innovative intellectual capital. You have it backwards, the -only- way for socialism to compete is to have capitalist foils to steal from via espionage. Without that, they are living in caves, wiping their asses with their hands, all the while waiting for that knock on the door in the night.

You also have it backwards in claiming that capitalism/constitutional republic impeded communism/socialism and it would have done fine otherwise. The opposite is the truth, without Marx's foul, ignorant coda on the Industrial Revolution setting an extreme obstacle for the progress of capitalism (a LW semantic null epithet of "commerce" and "property rights"), we might very well have colonized Mars by now and instead of being the last few generations with under 100 year lifespan, been the first with greater than 200 year lifespan.

Go ahead and list out all the great tech QOL advances brought to us by collectivism. I'll wait... and wait... and wait...

Oh, and you need to go a long way to found the introduction of Christianity as other than an obvious red herring.

 

Are you finished?

 

USSR was a big example.

 

If it was just a matter of one bad apple in a bucket of otherwise good apples, you'd have a point. It's not just one bad apple, though. It's been tried many times, and it always ends up bad. You can point to specific aspects of Russia, but then you'd have to find some other excuse for China under mao zedong, etc. etc. etc. et bloody cetra.

But let's run with your idea. That there is some aspect of all these countries which made communism impossible to implement. What was that? The theory suggests certain things that are required prior to communism managing to grab a foothold which includes wealth inequality, ownership of the businesses and manufacturing facilities by a few, and generally a lot of anger by the locals.

But what is it that poisons communism before it can become that worker's paradise? You mention anti-democratic nature, so we want to stay as far away from communism as we possibly can get in the states.

Again, if it was just Russia, but it had worked out quite nicely in other places like Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, Venezuela, and China, then you could complain about me focusing on the one failure. Since there is nothing to point to except failure on every communist front, you've got a particularly tough row to hoe here.

You brought up christianity, and a bunch of wars that you see as being the result of christianity. If we're talking communism, then we could also talk about the very early christians who did what jesus told them to do which is to sell everything they have and go out and preach the word of jesus. It's been a long time since that particular form of Christianity.

Maybe if I could understand the similarities between christianity and communism, I could figure out what you're on about by comparing them. If they are different, then it's apples and oranges and there is no comparison to make. If they are the same, then you would be arguing against communism by pointing out the "appalling track record of Christianity".

A sense of community and morality is certainly a part of selfishness. I'm very selfish when it comes to who is allowed into my circle of friends, or who is allowed to participate in the society I deem to work with. I'm going to surround myself with other good people, and our combined selfishness results in a lot of good neighbors who understand that we don't pee in the other guy's soup. It's my soup, and everybody I associate with understands this.

This is all much of the same. Selfishness doesn't mean we have to go live on top of some mountain, or refuse to work with our neighbors.

So long as you understand that you're going to have to do this with like-minded people who are free to leave at any time, then knock yourselves out.








I see, you admit the fundamental reality of the socioeconomic division of human beings into classes under capitalism, but then you immediately proceed to pooh pooh a socioeconomic state of affairs which entails a small class of capitalists and capitalist firms (the 1%) controlling most of the economic wealth and power that exists in our society, and the rest of us (the remaining 99% of humanity) being grievously disenfranchised and increasingly pauperised! Well, my conservative friend, the class structure of capitalist society does indeed = the reality of the hegemony of a dominant class, an economic elite, and the only way to genuinely democratize our society is to effect the abolition of the capitalist system of social relations in favor of a more equable and communal socioeconomic organization of society. You seem to say that the goal of the working-class and underclass victims of the capitalist class system should be to work their way up from being victims to being perpetrators of domination, that they should individualistically seek to join the ranks of those who dish out economic inequality and poverty to the multitudes of humanity. You seem to think that one can actually earn the privilige of inflicting want and oppression on the less fortunate or less industrious. This is a kind of Herrenmorality, the Herrenmorality that's at the core of rightism. I.e., the idea that humanity is divided into a minority of superior and a great unwashed mass inferior specimens, and that the elite few should naturally enjoy the privilege of riding roughshod over the mediocre masses, the contemptible hoi polloi. Yes, expressed in the guise of a great deal of highly dishonest libertarian rhetoric, conservatives simply have a social-dominance-oriented mentality that's a throwback to pre-democratic times. Their opposition to the abolition of classes is also an opposition to vision of a more authentically democratic form of society, one in which there would be both a government, and an economy of, by, and for all of the people. In short, my friend, you're another example of a conservative trying to rationalize an essentially anti-democratic mentality. The abolition of class divisions is in fact a sine qua non for the advent of a genuinely democratic form of life.




Well, I've already been quite wordy enough, so in summation I'll simply observe that once again a conservative anti-communist has revealed the decidedly anti-democratic, social-dominance-oriented, elitist psychological profile of those in his camp, their proclivity to rationalize social and economic oppression, and to oppose communism because it promises to liberate us all from the domination of the economic elites with whom conservatives vicariously identify.[/QUOTE]

 

And regarding the stale and uninspired human nature argument, I'll merely add here that the species being or nature of human beings arguably consists not of hardwired and unchanging absolutes, but rather of various self-creative options, different possibilities and ways of being human that members of our species are capable of actualizing, and the ability to consciously and intelligently choose among these different options. And, of course, human nature is profoundly social, the behavior and character of human beings, i.e. which self-creative possibilities they come to embody, is largely shaped by the social setting and context that human beings find themselves in. The upshot of this is that while human nature under capitalism might seem ill-suited for communism, a more pro-social and communist form of life could and would naturally, without employing draconian methods, tap into the fluidity of human nature and conduce to a more social version of Homo sapiens, one that elects to actualize better moral qualities (such as fellowship, compassion, and altruism) and live in a less Darwinian fashion. In other words, under communism there would be a quite different norm to which people would conform.

But then of course you'll probably retort that the culture of the Soviet Union didn't produce a more brotherly and altruistic nature in its citizens. But alas the Soviet system was actually a form of state capitalism, in which members of the nomenklatura, and party leaders assumed the role played by capitalist masters in our society. That is, beneath its ideological veneer it was a stratified and oligarchic social and political system, not one whose leadership was sincerely committed to creating communism. And, it's citizens, being well aware of this disillusioning reality, consequently maintained a healthy cynicism and were not inclined to fully commit to its principles in their heart. Consequently there was no deep or lasting reshaping of human behavior for the better; rather, if anything, people were forced to become more self-interested to survive under Stalinism. In short, it's therefore not at all fair or intellectually honest to use the failure of the Soviet system to produce a "new kind of man" as an empirical refutation of the idea that a communist form of society would turn out human beings who would internalize its norms and spirit, and strive to make it succeed.

At any rate, I'll simply observe that, the skepticism of conservatives notwithstanding, human beings for most of their history have been far more social in their behavior and way of life than the citizens of modern capitalist societies, providing ample evidence that a society that replaced our cultural emphasis on self-interest with a more social and communal ethic could indeed be viable, and would certainly not be unprecedented.

 

What these societies had in common that caused them to become authoritarian nightmares was a long history and tradition of authoritarianism and lack of respect for what today we would call human rights. And no, this isn't a preexisting shortcoming that simply and uniquely "poisons" communism, it could conceivably cause any new form of life to miscarry. For instance, in Germany a long history of authoritarianism caused the attempt to establish democracy known as the Weimar Republic to tragically degenerate into the Third Reich. Does this mean that believers in democracy should therefore give up on the idea and hope of bringing democracy to previously undemocratic societies and allow them to remain in the darkness of authoritarianism? Certainly not, it merely means that advocates of democracy and communism should learn from these experiences, and strive to do a better job of implementing their ideals that takes the historical backstory of a society into account.

At any rate, what you cite as examples of defunct communist systems in various countries were in fact extensions of the authoritarian history of these societies in the guise of communism, and not authentic communist systems that flopped.

Again, you're quite selective about how you use the ole It-failed-everywhere-that-it-was-tried-therefore-it's-empirically-discredited argument. One could likewise cite the fact that everywhere one looks putatively democratic polities are in fact plutocracies, that the proponents of democracy have thus far failed to authentically actualize it in any society, and have shed a lot of blood in the process of creating nothing but faux systems of representative government. That you reserve this argument exclusively for communism, however, makes it facile and illegitimate. In any event, I've already covered why the societies you cite ended up with such dreadful forms of government. To recap, they all shared a history of authoritarian government, and they all attempted to operationalize the authoritarian Soviet model, or variations on it. And what this should inspire is not pessimism about the possibility of creating communist societies, but rather the realization that a different approach, one more tailored to individual societies, needs to be taken.

I cited the historical crimes of Christianity not to indict Christianity and make a case for consigning it to the dustbin of history's bad belief systems, actually I find much value in Christianity (it's merely a part of the slanderous stereotype of communists that we're staunch haters of all forms of spirituality). My point was merely, once again, that conservative anti-communists are a bit too selective about whom they bring the It-historically-produced-a-lot-of-bad-fruit-therefore-it's-discredited argument to bear against. Well, one certainly could quite readily use this argument against Christianity, patriotism, Americanism, etc. But no, anti-communists only deign to employ it to write off communism. Again, this makes it sophistry, and not a legit argument.

What they have in common is that they both have produced a lot of historical bad fruit, but both still have a good deal of value to offer, and should not simplistically be considered discredited by their bad fruit.

This is all just another attempt to rationalize selfishness and elevate it to the stature of some kind of an ethic that human society can be based on. How's that been working out for us thus far, hmm? Arguably not too well, given all of the social ills being suffered by Western societies nowadays. In any event, in their wisdom every other human society throughout history has recognized the need for pro-social values and norms, to abandon rather than conserve this wisdom of the ages is certainly not at all consistent with being a conservative. And genuinely pro-social behavior is certainly possible, human beings have given plenty of evidence that they are in fact capable of transcending egoism. A form of society founded upon an enlightened appreciation of the value of one's fellow human and living beings; and upon what might even be termed a spiritual sense of our interconnectedness with each other, and with other lifeforms, and the ecosystems that we share, is indeed possible.

As if capitalist elites and societies haven't used force and violence to prevent the actualization of communism! Well, when communists no longer have to contend with the active hostility, the aggression of capitalists and pro-capitalists, then perhaps we'll have the luxury of adopting a perfectly easygoing attitude and pacificistic morality.

 

Hmm, it seems that some individuals who’ve responded to my posts in this thread quite naively confuse communism with the negative conservative stereotype of communism. Well, it’s not at all surprising that plenty of folks would do so, would suffer from such naiveté, since in our society we’ve indeed been well programmed for some time now to uncritically buy into the boogeymanification, so to speak, of communism; to dismiss the idea of public ownership of the means of production out of hand and closed-mindedly, and to feel like it’s simply common sense to do so. Yes, given all of the sociocultural conditioning that we’ve received to inoculate us against the enlightenment contained in the Marxian critique of capitalism and the Marxian vision of a better socioeconomic way of life, it’s alas to be expected that many of us will automatically balk at, and not give anything resembling a fair hearing to the kind of anti-capitalist and socialist thinking that I’m advancing here. That is, in this country most of us have had a bias against communism instilled in our thought patterns so thoroughly and deeply that trying to persuade some folks of the sensibility of communism is rather like trying to get through to a cult member and make him realize that he’s been sold an absurdly false bill of goods. Oh well, one mustn’t give up.

(And yes, dear Sanskrit, I'm referring and replying to you, among others)

 

Unresponsive. And you can take your "naïve cult member" twaddle in lieu of answering any of my points and shove it.

Collectivism eats itself, regardless of what semantic lily pad the frogs are hopping to this week, and despotic totalitarianism, mass suffering on a grand scale are the inevitable results. This is the consequence of any mob rule under any abstract theory, from pure democracy to pure collectivism.

Ironically, risk/reward Western finance and strong capital markets, Enlightenment liberalism based on strong property rights, the miracles they have produced, starting with JP Morgan's invention of electricity for the masses, are what allow armchair revolutionaries the luxury to sit on the net that capitalism provided them or wifi that capitalism provided them, the cheap computer that capitalism provided them or the cheap phone that capitalism provided them, often in a retirement enhanced by extra lifespan that capitalism provided them, and tell all of us "naïve cultists" how inferior capitalism is and why their particular strain of "lawnchair Zulu dingleberry" form of collectivism would work if only mean old capitalism didn't prevent it... or any of 100 other rationalizations of the rivers and oceans of BLOOD, DEATH and SUFFERING that inevitably follow from the collectivist state in dozens of REAL datapoints, not abstract pontifications from some hoary, tweeded, unaccomplished assistant professor in a junior college or the ilk.

Anyone who missed this in school (lol...as if in today's indoctrination camps... its place was probably taken by "The Jungle" or other gov-edu-union rot), please read this book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_at_Noon

 

First of all, you're the most pretentious poster on a political Internet forum, ever. Your vocabulary doesn't improve communism's chances. It's will always be contrary to our constitutional rights, which you take over my dead body.

 

You fail to understand because you don't wish to. You've been fed horse dookey and told it was coconut cream pie and you really really want to believe its coconut cream pie. Is or is not the purpose of socialism to make sure that everyone shares equally in the economic pie? or is it to brow beat everyone into conformity. Not that it matters because the end point is the same in either case. You wind up with an entrenched bureaucracy that isn't going anywhere of it's own volition and it's leaders are its leaders to make sure that it doesn't. The problem starts the minute you begin your revolution. Because you can't win without tough minded ruthless leaders. And those leaders shaped by that revolution are going to invariably be the people running your dictatorship of the proletariat because they aren't turning their baby over to someone else. And thus we got Lenin, who starved millions of Ukrainians in order to feed Russians when the first harvest on the farming collectives proved a major disaster, and Mao who killed more Chinese than anyone else ever, Pol Pot who would have left Cambodia an empty wasteland had his rule not been terminated early and others too numerous to mention.

Suffice it to say that current estimates are that something around 11 billion human beings have walked the face of this planet since modern man first came to be. I know of exactly two who have looked the god of power squarely in the eye and told him to eff off. Interestingly enough they are not two people one would normally associate with each other.

 

There is no reliable analysis that backs that up because we have never seen an established, functioning, settled example of socialism or communism. There have been several attempts to work out the strategies and methods of doing so, but none have yet reached the point where the principles of socialism are in full control so we could see how it evolves. Hence your statement is premature and there is no reliable analysis to back it up.

Yes, all that such "revolutionaries" ever have to say is one-sided, ignorant negativity regarding the real history of capitalism, right? Ya think? Really? Such one-sided negative propaganda from the right betrays a deep partisan ignorance of the facts of Marxism. But in fact the Communist Manifesto states: "Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in its turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry, commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the background every class handed down from the Middle Ages."

And that is just the beginning. Marx laid out the enormous revolutionary advantages and power of capitalism, but he recognized what today's right struggles to avoid, which is that all economic systems begin with great and historical benefit and promise, but that all evolve and change as they progress (like everything else). And so each class structure by its nature, be it feudalism or capitalism, eventually and unavoidably changes into a form that delivers less and less on its original promise until it creates more problems than it can solve.

Just the fact of the omission of any mention of Marx's analysis of the positive qualities of capitalism in all right wing (anti-Marxian) literature pretty well proves the less than objective nature of that literature.

- - - Updated - - -

Sorry to break the bad news, but the Constitution says nothing and makes no reference to any sort of economic system that we must have.

 

Neither. But I can't help but notice your unprovoked insulting and belittling language here.

At our local Humane Society I work with troubled dogs. They often come in with significant fear dominating them. What can one expect? They have been removed from their familiar comforts, thrust into a new and unknown environment, penned up alongside many other fearful dogs, and get little human interaction because of demands on the humans to keep it all together.

So I take the dogs out to a play yard to interact with other dogs and people and help them to deal with their fears and get over them. It doesn't take long to notice that a common response to that which is causing them fear (sometimes other dogs mostly; sometimes people mostly) is to attack it. Or they may cower in the back of their kennel snarling and growling when anyone approaches. But their response is show, often false, of strong aggression.

Humans are not so different. They find a concept or statement that they don't well understand but which they have been told for many years is a "bad, bad thing", and they often respond with insulting and belittling language since they have no tools with which to deal intelligently with the new information any more than those dogs do.

And again, my answer is "neither".

That is all very nice anti-communist propaganda but when do you finally become willing to actually learn the facts of history? "Never" I expect.

 

No, it doesn't, but that isn't at all what I wrote.

 

Here is everything you wrote in the post in question:
"First of all, you're the most pretentious poster on a political Internet forum, ever. Your vocabulary doesn't improve communism's chances. It's will always be contrary to our constitutional rights, which you take over my dead body."

 

Except for its legalization of slavery, an evil institution whose legitimacy I suppose "strict constructionist" conservatives who dress their backwardness and benightedness up as a commitment to the original intent of the authors of the Constitution might defend (for instance, Arkansan Republican state representative Loy Mauch: "If slavery were so God-awful, why didn’t Jesus or Paul condemn it, why was it in the Constitution and why wasn’t there a war before 1861?"). Well, the significance of the Constitution's explicit sanctioning of slavery is that it glaringly indicates that the American capitalist system is seriously okay with exploitation (and has been from its very inception) and certainly not about freedom for all.

 

View attachment 46188 This cartoon makes an important point about a cartoonish candidate. (And, btw, it's certainly not a fluky state of affairs that we have a candidate who's a capitalist, and running as the nominee of the staunchly pro-capitalist Republican party, who's a racist/panderer to racist voters. After all, racism is a systemic feature of capitalist society, and we can therefore expect to see it being channelled and manifested by the mentalities of capitalists and their conservative advocates. Say what? Well, socioeconomic inequality, elitism, and domination are indeed patently endemic realities of capitalist society, and vulnerable demographics, i.e. certain races and classes, find themselves especially targeted and downtrodden. Capitalist society then generates racialist and social-Darwinian ideologies to justify said treading down of certain groups, and these ideologies, aka racism and classism, in turn are structured into our system of society and further guarantee and institutionalize the victimization of minorities and working-class/poor whites. Capitalists and their conservative front men then of course body forth and work to uphold the racism and classism that supports the status quo that they have such a vested interest in. Thus and so yes, it's not at all surprising that a card-carrying plutocrat and the candidate of the pro-plutocracy GOP is proposing vilely racist policies. Mm-hmm, it alas all stands to reason.)

 

This pic illustrates an insightful analysis of capitalism quite nicely,

 

How many commie countries have failed over the years, and how many have succeeded?

 

Not all socialist systems end up like Venezuela. Romania is a prime example. People did very well under socialism. Since Capitalism has entered the scene things have gotten arguably worse.

It is true that communism has the potential to turn it's citizens into indentured slaves but, so does Capitalism.

A Black vs White, Good vs Evil, characterization of either is way off the mark.

 

None and none.

 

Sorry. I disagree. Any system that "has the potential to turn it's citizens into indentured slaves" only does so because it is neither socialism nor communism.

The idea of socialism or communism turning against its citizens is like a river being against water.