Why is it despite the failure of the Soviet Union, leftwing Politics is still popular

True, and still a belief among the immature.

 

Maybe you answer the question yourself ,maybe the USSR wasn't the ultimate expression of leftwing political activism ,maybe the political tendency that created the USSR is ?

The USSR may not be with us but we are still here.Internationalist political tandency do not set their ultimate goal as socialism in a single country ,its the get rid of capitialism globally and for all time that is.

Oh well your miseducation about what is and isn't socialism is not your fault its the propaganda of Imperialism on one side and stalinism on the other .BOTH called the USSR socialism which it was not ,the first shot in the world socialist revolution is how both Lenin and trotsky described it ,except for the betrayal of that revolution by Stalinism ,we would be living in a Communist society by now ,the 1929 depression wouldn't have happened as wouldn't have WW2.

Nationalism has a lot to answer for.

Whether in its Imperialist Natiional form or its Stalinist National form.

 

LOL What?..

Let me remind you some little things.
First and a main one for the beginning of that topic. Soviet Union fallen, it's true. Now could anyone tell us about any capitalist revolutions in Europe which didn't fall into feudal reaction again? Capitalist revolutions in Netherlands, England, France - all of them "finally" were beaten by feudalism. And where is European feudalism now? So, falling of the bourgeois states in Europe wasn't "final" at all. Why do you believe it was "final" for Soviet Union?

Second, tell us please when and under what conditions West capitalist countries established so-called "Welfare state" model? Wasn't it after rising of Socialist Camp superpower as the world competitor, huh? Weren't your capitalist elites just scared to chill by socialist revolutions and Red Army's destroying of nazi Wehrmacht? Weren't they just trying to bribe West proletariat to make their rule more safe?

Third, what happens to this "Welfare state" SUDDENLY? Are there over 9000 cursed commies who round American houses with "Foreclosed" tape? Are there awful red barbarians who make cuts against youth education in Great Britain, who liquidated free high education in Chile, who make anti-workers cuts in Greece and other countries?

Fourth, visit Russia please. Not Moscow elite glass-shining boutiques but Russia itself. You'll see how a few decades ago whole country was built by terrible commies and how now it is ruined to the ground by so-called "democrats" who have established here a true oligarch dictatorship. And then ask some people in Russian province why Soviet ideas are popular.

Fifth, learn History please. Not with propaganda movies but better with real documents. You then will know how commie bastards established first in the Europe election rights for women, how they supplied peasants with high agricultural technologies, how they eliminated some danger diseases in Central Asia (which are returning there now), how they created the best education system of the whole Russian history and maybe in the World. How they created lots of absolutely new industries, towns, institutions of science, culture, health care and education.
You just don't know _anything_ about Soviet Union except antisoviet propaganda. But some people here do know. Some people lived there and they are able to compare.

Well, the main point of my post is actually that capitalism doesn't work well with creating a good life for common people. In was just a moment of competition with the Socialist camp. USSR ruined, capitalist Welfare state is ruining now.

P.S.: and could you please tell me why Russia and United States are cutting their space programs? They aren't providing lots of money, are they?..

PPS: oh, of course, I forgot about "human nature" LOL Could you please explain me why native Americans couldn't understand "natural" capitalist values of individualism, competition and private property? There are only two variants. Either you don't respect them as humans, or you have to admit that these values are by no means "human natural" but pure products of class society.

 

And the last PPPS:
On the issue of human rights and human dignity look at that:
http://www.adme.ru/zapret/25-staryh-reklam-kotorye-by-segodnya-zapretili-340105/

Such *self-censored* just wasn't possible in the Soviet Union. If you tried sexist or racist propaganda there it was better to emigrate as fast as you could. I'm not sure if you got a jail sentence for these slogans but fact is that you got contempt from all the Soviet society as inadequate antidemocratic moron. Why were all these things normal for capitalism?

 

Because left-wing politics are a whole world away from socialism. 'Left-wingers' simply want more restricted capitalism. As well as more protections for the poor or disadvantaged.

Nobody with 2 brain cells to rub together supports socialism nowadays..

 

There's a lot of marxist revolutionaries today. Perhaps from your point of view ther aren's leftists. Then ok, let's call them (i.e. us) just marxists.

Yeah, this is true. With 2 brain cells you couldn't support even your breathing, needless to say about supporting socialism

 

Luckily, a lot of countries that have excellent healthcare -- like France, The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, etc. -- don't have that kind of a system.

No,... that's just ridiculous. And that doesn't make any sense at all either. To use government to take it over?

Hello?

You seem to have problems with the leglistative branch of government.

You are not the "warrior against communnism" you think you are -- you are just a undemocratic person in nature. Truely sad.

 

Live expectancy has plummeted since the fall of the Soviet Union and the same thing is happening in China thanks to free market "reforms" The Soviet Union failed because it was a dictatorship but democratic socialism has been extremely successful in Scandinavia. Despite it's failure the Soviet Union did manage to survive for 60 years. Naked Capitalism has never succeeded anywhere and has wrecked and is wrecking the economies in every country its been forced on, either by gunpoint, the World Bank or the European Union. Or in the US where politicians took bribes from bankers to repeal Glass-Steagle and regulation of the financial sector. When left to their own devices free market capitalism, as it did in the 20s and as it has always done, fell on their asses and went crying to the government for a bailout on their terms which includes getting loans from the government for virtually zero interest, and which they received in two seconds. The price is being paid for by working people who are being told to accept austerity to pay for the bankers criminality and stupidity. While all this has been going on the Tea Party is whining about Mexicans crossing the border to work at slave wages and a black man in the White House.

 

this thread is a little bit like saying: "Why is it despite the failure of the Dan Marino and Miami Dolphins, passing still seems popular in the NFL?"

You cite one example, which failed far more because of other issues than their economic model, and then attempt to apply it to the whole ideology.

If that's not a textbook case of limited thinking, I'm not sure what is.

Shall we review all the nations of capitalism that have failed and are currently failing, and then ask why debt-based, free market oligarchy is still popular?

 

Those who support Free Enterprise and Constitutionally protected pursuits of life, liberty and happiness actually have a period in history to point to which created exponential expansion of the abilities to do just that. It was a period where the US grew to become the primary superpower in the world.

After that, the effort was co-opted by central banks via the FED, Federal Income Tax, and the New Deal.

But people who laud liberalism in a large scale culturally heterogenous economy have no such successes at which to point.

In fact, you'd be extremely hard pressed to distinguish for us notable differences in Putin's (for example) ideology, and the ideology of liberals.

And what Putin has been a part of has failed miserably. Note the thread in this forum which explains just how bad the economy of Russia has become under this 'liberal' leadership.

 

I guess if you watch FOX long enough you begin to believe everything they say. This goes to the paucity of education we have today, a whole generation believes being a Liberal means Communism. Forget the Democrats that led the nation in the Cold War fighting it's expansion, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson. I doubt if 99% of the right could even accurately define Communism, let alone Nazism. No, they just bandy the terms about in a blind trust to all the pundits they worship rather than than understand a fundamental truth, any ideology shares some relationships with all other ideologies-but not necessarily motivation or implementation.

 

Let me stop you here. A whole lot of Conservatives (including me) believe that liberalism leads to Communism. That isn't the same thing as you said.

And here, you attempt to call these Democrats 'liberal'. They weren't. They weren't even moderate. They were conservative Democrats, or what would have been called 'blue dog' Democrats.

Why don't we get your definition first? I can assure you that I do not suffer fools lightly, particularly the type which obtusely denies the road to Communism by consistently pointing to letters of definitions and a reality which doesn't fit the definition, but ignores the qualifier of the word yet.

My grandparents could see the seeds of Communism being planted in American politics decades ago. Could you? Call them nuts: I dare you. They lived it. They - far more than you, or just about anyone else - are the ultimate authority when it comes to warning a public about the dangers of Communism.

And they taught me well.

Fantastic. Let me be the first to say that all ideologies but Constitutional Free Enterprise/Capitalism suck ass, and I freely and willingly throw them into the same pile of dung.

 

Wonderful for your parents. In the same logic one could say right wing conservatism leads to Nazism. I'm just going with what the thread starter said. The Democrats mentioned were fiscal conservatives like Clinton. The GOP handed that title over with Bush II. In another thread I decried the loss of integrity of the GOP and the conservative right. At one time the debate was intellectual and a clear distinction between the Democrats and their loyal opposition. Now look at the debate, birth certificates, birth control, gay rights, porn, death squads-geeze. Common guys, there are compelling arguments to the GOP issues like smaller gov., fiscal conservatism, individual responsibility and tax reform, quit it with the "Obama is a Muslim" BS and grow up.

 

Progressive ideology, in the form of the American progressive, results in totalitarian democracy. We aren't there yet but we are going there. Example? Government dictating you have to purchase a product, or illegal force if I were to do it to you.

 

You are correct, SiliconMagician.

The leftists who supported communism in this country during the heyday of the Soviet Union have morphed into the "Occupy Wall Street" crowd and the "warmies" to want to bring down and punish the big oil companies for their financial success andtheir wonderful contributions to America’s greatness.

This video by CBS News was a very good review aboult America's future by the way.

The Jobs Czar: General Electric's Jeffrey Immelt

Can General Electric Chairman Jeffrey Immelt, whose company has been racking up big profits overseas, help create jobs in America? Lesley Stahl interviews the man President Obama chose to lead the crucial quest for more American jobs

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7384062n&tag=contentMain;contentAux

 

You are correct, SiliconMagician.

The leftists who supported communism in this country during the heyday of the Soviet Union have morphed into the "Occupy Wall Street" crowd and the "warmies" to want to bring down and punish the big oil companies for their financial success and their wonderful contributions to America’s greatness.

This video by CBS News was a very good review about America's future by the way.

The Jobs Czar: General Electric's Jeffrey Immelt

Can General Electric Chairman Jeffrey Immelt, whose company has been racking up big profits overseas, help create jobs in America? Lesley Stahl interviews the man President Obama chose to lead the crucial quest for more American jobs

http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7384062n&tag=contentMain;contentAux

 

You live in an alternate reality!! The period prior to the creation of the Fed, the New Deal, etc was a TERRIBLE period in US history!! It is not until after the New Deal, and really after WWII when American prosperity was at it's height. Your lack of understanding of history is the only thing leading you to those conclusions, because anyone who knows anything about Gilded Age American history, understands that using it as an ideal is idiotically absurd.

 

What every attempt at revolutionary socialism has proved is the superiority of market economies. However, it has proved nothing about the relation of workers to capital. There are market socialists in the world, whose ideas are anything but discredited. However the Soviet Union is NOT the only example of failed planned economies. They have all failed, because it is a terribly inefficient way of distributing goods, labor, resources, materials, etc.

 

Wow, you believe something with absolutely NO historical precedence?? How brilliant of you. The center-left is the reason the far left has been so largely discredited. The successes of the center left between 1945 to present have created a system that makes capitalism more stable, and creates less extreme levels of inequality. Only the neo-liberal revolution of the 1980s to present day, which have chipped away at that center-left foundation, have destroyed a large part of that prosperity.

PS. It was the failures of free market capitalism which allowed communism and fascism to arise, not because they naturally lead into one another because of similarities, but because the ideology is so bankrupt it leads people to look towards extreme alternatives!!

 

The original thought was to force personal responsibility on the individual. Everybody doesn't want to purchase insurance, but no body turns down health care when they need it. So all of the responsible people end up paying for those who are not. Under your plan they would just not get care or we would continue the way things are. You are forced to purchase auto insurance, same thing. No matter which way our ideology leans, we lean toward the extreme, but it doesn't mean we will go there.

 

Driving is a privileged, not a right. To exercise your privilege, you are required to purchase insurance. You still have a choice not to drive or purchase insurance. Even then, it is a State issue. I know people that have designed their lives around not owning a car.

Forcing someone to purchase a product simply because they are alive is something different altogether unless you are suggesting that people can commit suicide as a choice not to participate.

 

Yes.. this is the sort of drivel we get from America's kiddiecons: the chairman of GE is a communist!

It's about time "moderate" conservatives did today what decent, humanist socialists did fifty years ago, and started to clearly differentiate themselves from the moronic idiots who peddle this kind of ignorance and deceit. The Left in the 20th century clearly split between those who would acquiesce lazily to Stalinism and those - like George Orwell for example - who made Stalinists their bitterest enemies.

This kind of integrity is lacking from conservatives. There is no conservative Orwell. Conservatives lack courage. On the whole conservatives - the vast and overwhleming majority of them - are unprincipled and dishonest people. Otherwise why do they give this faeces - posted above - a free ride? And they do. How can a liberal, like Romney, who believes in free market capitalism, consort with feudal theocrats like Santorum, who condemn aspects of capitalism to pump up a populist, anti-reason, anti-market, message? Yes, he is a flip flopper. But more, he resembles most conservative "moderates" in that he is an unprincipled coward.

Conservatives are happy - in their collective lack of principle - to continue to share a bed with some very unsavoury types. So we get conservatives who supposedly believe in the free market and international capitalism (from which the USA has benefited enormously), give this kind a protectionist, neo-fascist nonsense written above, a free ride. Elsewhere, we get xenophobia, racism, theocracy, superstition, denunciation of science in favour of the hurdy gurdy man, economic illiteracy which posits that an economy can be run like a shop, anarchism, feted ignorance and all the lies, deceit and malice that goes with it...all given a free pass too by "reasonable conservatives".
By your friends you will be known. You want guilt by association for leftists, then you "conservatives" deserve quite a bit of guilt by association with some failry moronic and evil types yourselves.

This is all in great contrast to those socialists who stood up strongly against the USSR, often to their great personal disadvantage and sometimes giving their lives in so doing. The overwhelming majority of people who fought stalinism were leftists. This is a fact. Many of the opposition movements that brought down communism - as Reagan was uttering little boy "let's bomb Russia" infantile gibberish, which lying conservatives would later build into a claim that he single handedly defeated communism - were about socialists DYING and BEING IMPRISONED to fight Stalinists. Rightists slaughtered and raped nuns in central America in their bravery to defeat Stalinism. Anti-Stalinist leftists died in gulags and laogai. There is the difference.

It is interesting today, that those on the Left who were driven by Stalinism, and who would champion protectionism, are now joined by the direputable elements of the Right. Protectionism is now a common cause between the "old Left" (shorthand for Stalinism) and the Tea Party. Those illiberal Stalinists in the Trades Union movements, who would dismiss the internationalism of socialist ideology with withering contempt, are now joined in the cause by the Tea Party right. Leftist and rightist reactionaries together, railing against modernity and the bourgeois capitalist global system that has brought prosperity and deliverance from feudal brutality and darkness.

Kiddiecons in America, with their grunting slogans and easily learned political lines, resemble Stalinists far more in their stuttering ignorance, and mental atrophy, than socialists like Orwell, or leftists like Hitchens Or Bernard Henri Levy, or Gore Vidal and the like. To those of us who have argued with Stalinists, and actually know how to recognize them - that is those of us who really truly appreciate the evil of Marxist Leninism - to us, the kiddie-cons of America are really just another variant of such totalitarians, wallowing in ignorance and celebrating their own limited cognitive powers as much as the shrivelled aparatchiks and their grey supporters of the USSR ever did.

And when we hear the arrant nonsense that liberal capitalists are some sort of communist menace, we know really that we are in Salem, amongst the ju-ju men, the swivel eyed magicians who defy reason and argument to infer and insinuate evil where none exists. These are the shrunken, twisted souls, witch-hunters, whose leading characteristic is their own mental and moral inadequacy, afraid to step out of their sad limited little worlds into the sunshine. Theirs is a world of darkness, prejudice and superstition on a par with that of medieval Europe, today's counter-revolution to British, French and American nineteenth century Enlightenment. Like early American settlers, pursuing "liberty" and "freedom", they soon turn into inolerant bigots who respect no-one's freedom but their own, like the monochrome bigoted Puritans in Boston who hanged the Quaker Mary Dyer in 1660. These are the new American kiddiecons. This is the Tea Party of today.

Otherwise, where are the "conservatives" today, those who believe in liberty, capitalism, reason and civilization? Why do they not stand up and loudly expose the evil in their own midst, as socialists did in yesteryear to the evil in theirs? The moral and political cowardice of "mainstream conservatives" and their tolerance of the liars and snake oil salesmen in their midst, is the truly frightening aspect of politics today. Where are you, good conservatives? You are condemned by your own cowardly silence!

 

Actually, it was our abundant natural resources and our ability to create incalculable derivitives and the illusion of capital growth based on those resources that enabled us to become the primary superpower in the world. But now that the world is finally enduring the same peak in production that we did 40 years ago, the bill is now coming due.

But, ah well. YAY Ayn Rand! Infinite growth for everyone!

My, aren't you the arch-conservative caricature. The New Deal compromised America's greatness? I love that argument.

LOL... large-scale and culturally heterogenous, even? Gosh, why not qualify that ever further so as to fit your argument better? How many nations even fit that description in the first place? A sample size of one - the U.S.

Anyhoo, Australia, the Netherlands and the Scandinavian countries swiftly come to mind as liberal successes. I can think of a few others, if someone doesn't pigeon-hole the criteria.

Clever false dichotomy. Mussolini called fascism the perfect merger of the state and the corporation. See what I did there?

So the $15 trillion in corporate bailouts the past 4 years isn't the result of Friedmanist failure, but instead the blame of leftist regulations and liberal spending that FORCED the banks to systematically become over-leveraged. LOL!

Does your brain even ALLOW you objective thought? Or does the partisan blockage only allow you to champion epistemic closure?

As for Putin's Russia -- which is far better off than when the West pilfered and bilked that nation to the tune of hundreds of billions throughout the late 80s and 90s through the Harvard Foundation and other organizations -- I'm sure being such a catastrophic failure like he is is precisely what made the people re-elect him this year.

Oh, I know... It was "rigged."

 

But "planned economies" often work at the level of smaller units (not entire countries), such as "that factory," "that bank," "that chain of restaurants," "that railroad," etc. etc.--but not for an infinitely long time.
.

 

That is a good point, also your early view to the gilded age of america. Which is failing now. As happens to all great nations. They can't continue the uphill climb then stagnation sets in, slow to change. In americas case, they by and large view socialism with such hate they can't learn from it.

Instead of using the positives, it is shunned for political/idealogical reasons and in such negative views it is dragging the usa downward on the eventually spiral.