Biden is no socialist

Discussion in 'Political Opinions & Beliefs' started by Guy Marsh, Dec 12, 2020.

  1. Kode

    Kode Well-Known Member

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    THAT is why Republicans are not socialists.
     
  2. pitbull

    pitbull Banned Donor

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    Socialism is over 80 years old and has always failed. The Anti-socialist propaganda was completely unnecessary. History has shown us that socialism never worked and never will. :(
     
  3. Kode

    Kode Well-Known Member

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    See? That's pure propaganda. The only truth to it is that socialism is over 80 years old, but I didn't say otherwise so I don't know why you raise the point other than to deflect and try to create a debate that you might win.

    More propaganda. History has shown no such thing. All history shows is that the strategies of the past failed BEFORE they ever reached the goal of socialism. The rest of your statement is bullshit propaganda.
     
    Last edited: Dec 30, 2020
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  4. pitbull

    pitbull Banned Donor

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    Then what's the right strategy to establish socialism?

    The people want freedom, not socialism. So you always need force to make a country socialist. A society formed by violence and lies is rotten inside from day one. That society will fall apart immediately when the violence subsides. This happened for example with the Soviet Union.
     
  5. Kode

    Kode Well-Known Member

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    There will be the "right strategy" when a strategy works and socialism is established, but that is a deflection too. My point is that socialism didn't fail.

    So, the current strategy is to do much as capitalism did in its infancy: establish businesses within the existing economic system to embody as many of the principles of a socialist economy in embryonic form as they can. That means worker's co-ops. Then vote in as many sympathetic politicians as possible.

    If people really want freedom AND they understand socialism, they want socialism because it is far more democratic than the capitalist model.. That is why is it gaining popularity.

    LOL!!!! You really think force is necessary to have people accept greater democracy and freedom? You are proving I was right that you don't know what socialism is.

    And that is partly why the US is failing today.

    You continue to prove I was right.
     
  6. Mike12

    Mike12 Well-Known Member

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    and what makes you think US doesn't already have a MASSIVE WELFARE SYSTEM? it already has... maybe you haven't noticed.

    and on #1, here's the problem... the left doesn't have leaders smart enough to implement what Scandavian Countries have. Bernie? He is so misguided that he has praised Cuba before and claims he wants the Nordic model but yet he advocates for policies that aren't part of the nordic model. AOC? She knows nothing, maybe in 10 years she will know enough to set forth reasonable, pragmatic ideas.

    Also, many on the left just don't get it. Government doesn't produce, it is inefficient and the more they control the less productive an economy is. What the nordic model is based on is simple principles of allowing free market capitalism to flourish on it's own (without government sticking it's nose and controlling everything), have workers and employers negotiate wages and then implement generous entitlement offerings for it's citizens. Many on the right wouldn't want this but i would be ok with it. The problem is that today's left wants to control businesses, regulate them to the point where businesses can barely breathe, set min wages etc... This simply doesn't work, it's killing the goose laying the golden egg. Today's socialists want to suffocate business and also want generous entitlements. Maybe Bernie needs to get educated on what the Nordic model is.... he doesn't even know, yet he tells us its what he wants.
     
    Last edited: Dec 30, 2020
  7. Guy Marsh

    Guy Marsh Newly Registered

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    Indeed, Kode, socialism - scientific socialism set forth by Dr. Karl Heinrich Marx and Friedrich Engels is more than 170-years-old.



    *****

    Guy Marsh
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    What is socialism?
    http://www.slp.org/what_is.htm

    www.slp.org/pdf/statements/siu_chart.pdf

    deleonism.org/industrial-government.htm

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    Last edited: Dec 30, 2020
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  8. Borat

    Borat Banned

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    [​IMG]
     
  9. pitbull

    pitbull Banned Donor

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    That's what happens anyway, where people with different views and different abilities live together. You can call it socialism, but it's a social market economy. It's just a concrete form of capitalism. Many countries in Europe have a social market economy.

    Sounds like the new strategy of the socialists is to trick the people into believing that socialism is better democracy. I think that won't work either. :)
     
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  10. pitbull

    pitbull Banned Donor

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    Have you read their "Communist Party Manifesto"? That should scare off anyone who sees socialism as an option.
     
  11. freedom8

    freedom8 Well-Known Member

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    You seem to be a little odsessed by the min wage thing.
    If you find the Nordic system acceptable, you should know that, for the large majority of people, their wages are negotiated, sector by sector, between employers and the unions so that there is a de facto minimum wage for the vast majority.

    In the US, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 is well below the real current average minimum, i.e. $12. Studies show that the federal minimum should be raised to at least $10, and if possible to $12 so that workers would be at least at the level of the poverty line.
     
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  12. crank

    crank Well-Known Member

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    There is very little freedom in collectivism. The two are as good as mutually exclusive. No collective can survive, if its members exercise freedoms by going their own way.
     
  13. Kode

    Kode Well-Known Member

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    If you don't like tricking people, then why do you like capitalism and it's Republican liars and tricksters? And Democrats are barely better.
     
    Last edited: Dec 31, 2020
  14. Kode

    Kode Well-Known Member

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    You're just wrong... VERY wrong. But I know from experience that you won't debate it with facts and principle. So I only say you're wrong.
     
  15. Guy Marsh

    Guy Marsh Newly Registered

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    As a Marxist, I am, of course, not at all supportive of the wage system. Nonetheless, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, had the federal minimum wage kept pace with workers' productivity since 1968, the inflation-adjusted minimum wage would be $24 an hour. American workers are the world's most productive workers, yet they are amongst the Industrialized World's least paid workers. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, "productivity per American worker has increased 400% since 1950." Contrary to capitalist culture's long-standing and oft-stated promise that "worker pay is connected to productivity," however, it is only typically nonproductive capitalists who have enjoyed higher incomes relative to inflation since at least 1973. It is symptomatic of the centuries-old and massive transfer of wealth from the productive working class to the parasitic capitalist class called private profit of "surplus value."

    This is What Minimum Wage Would Be If It Kept Pace with ...

    https://www.cepr.net/this-is-what-minimum-wage...

    *****

    Guy Marsh
    Member (since 1990):
    Socialist Labor Party of America (est. 1890)
    http://www.slp.org/

    What is socialism?
    http://www.slp.org/what_is.htm

    www.slp.org/pdf/statements/siu_chart.pdf

    deleonism.org/industrial-government.htm

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  16. Guy Marsh

    Guy Marsh Newly Registered

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    In response to my writing, "Indeed, Kode, socialism - scientific socialism set forth by Dr. Karl Heinrich Marx and Friedrich Engels is more than 170-years-old."

    Of course I've read The Communist Manifesto, pitpull, and I refer to it quite often. But I don't find it frightening at all; in fact, I find it liberating, or at least potentially so.

    *****

    Guy Marsh
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    Socialist Labor Party of America (est. 1890)
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    What is socialism?
    http://www.slp.org/what_is.htm

    www.slp.org/pdf/statements/siu_chart.pdf

    deleonism.org/industrial-government.htm

    Former member: Peace & Freedom Party (1988-1990)
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  17. crank

    crank Well-Known Member

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    That's fine of course, you can say whatever you need to - to convince yourself that socialism is no different to capitalism .. but it will still be a fantasy.

    In the meantime the basics are worth repeating:

    Socialism is an ECONOMIC model, predicated on nil profit and nil buying/selling labour. It's collective and common purse.

    Capitalism is an ECONOMIC model, predicated on profit raising enterprise and the buying/selling of labour. It's non-collective, and non-common purse.

    Finally .. it's literally impossible to have both collective/common purse AND freedom. Any model you're trucking which allows for 'going your own way' is not in any way, shape, or form .. Socialism.
     
    Last edited: Dec 31, 2020
  18. pitbull

    pitbull Banned Donor

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    In the chapter "The Principles of Communism", under section 18 "What will be the course of this revolution?" they wrote:

    That sounds like part of the constitution of a criminal terrorist state. Nobody would participate voluntarily.

    In fact, real communist states have tried something like that. They didn't do anything wrong conceptually (as user @Kode said). They did exactly what Marx and Engels suggested.

    Such Despotism will never work, as history has shown.
     
    Last edited: Jan 1, 2021
  19. Guy Marsh

    Guy Marsh Newly Registered

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    Upon quoting a portion of The Communist Manifesto's Section II, pitbull wrote:

    First of all, I should mention that Marxism or "scientific socialism" is a social science. And, like any other social science, it is open to changes. As a social scientist myself (sociology), I will say that scientific evidence often changes with new evidence and or reinterpretation of existing evidence. Accordingly, Section II of The Communist Manifesto is a list of demands that soon became outdated by the developments of capitalism and events relative to the class struggle, namely the Paris Commune and the advance of democracy. And both Marx and Engels eventually realized that and, in 1872, they retracted Section II. Just as the science surrounding mask-wearing evolved, so, too, did Marxian social science develop concerning the Manifesto's Chapter II.

    Respecting that retraction, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles wrote: "The Communist Manifesto accounts for the development of capitalism and the class struggle up to 1848 and where they were heading in the historical action from feudalism to capitalism. Any rejection of the historical statements contained in the Manifesto would entail a denial of a theory that what drives a particular society to abandon its social relationships in favor of a more advanced set of social relationships is class struggle." --"Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, June 24, 1872, London"

    Related reading: "The Communist Manifesto and the Last 100 Years." https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlet/communist-manifesto-and-last-100-years

    The above can be related to Marx's and Engles' theory, known as "the dictatorship of the proletariat," which describes the hypothetical seizure of the means of production. It calls for the establishment of direct elections within the governing proletariat state, thereby placing elected delegates into representative workers' councils that nationalize ownership of the means of production from private to collective ownership.

    The dictatorship of the proletariat was supplanted by Daniel De Leon's thesis known as "Socialist Industrial Unionism" www.slp.org/pdf/statements/siu_chart.pdf .

    (In a 1920 interview of Vladamir Lenin by Horace Greely's New-York Tribune, Lenin stated that "De Leon is the only one to add anything to Marxism since Marx and Engles themselves.)

    Finally, all of this shows that, contrary to the Right's desperate assertions, Marxism is no religion, for, unlike religion, scientific socialism is open to change. Like all other sciences, it is constantly evolving.

    *****

    Guy Marsh
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    What is socialism?
    http://www.slp.org/what_is.htm

    www.slp.org/pdf/statements/siu_chart.pdf

    deleonism.org/industrial-government.htm

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  20. 61falcon

    61falcon Well-Known Member

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    EVERY politician is a SOCIALIST who lives off and sucks the life blood out of the taxpayers of the country they practice their profession in.
     
  21. Guy Marsh

    Guy Marsh Newly Registered

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    By that logic, (all) public servants, including cops and firefighters, are socialists, no, 61falcon?
     
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  22. Pred

    Pred Well-Known Member

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    Socialism has always failed because at its root, it’s unsustainable. Look. Chaz was a socialist paradise for a couple weeks until it became the most dangerous few blocks on the planet. THATS socialism. It fails every time.
     
    Last edited: Jan 1, 2021
  23. 61falcon

    61falcon Well-Known Member

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    Compare government PENSIONS to anything offered by companies in the private sector, government pensions on average are 1005 greater than private pensions.In other words they are DOUBLE those offered in the private sector, and that would also include our military pensions.
     
  24. Guy Marsh

    Guy Marsh Newly Registered

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    Unless our right-winger's wish to further promote the race to the bottom, the goal should be to raise
    So, what, to you, 61falcon, would be the solution? To bring government pension down to the level of private-sector pensions, thereby accelerating the race to the bottom? Or would it be to raise private-sector pensions by restoring defined benefit plans and using government-sector pension plans as the bar to which to rise?

    Good evening.
     
  25. Guy Marsh

    Guy Marsh Newly Registered

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    Within this thread's 243rd post, Mike12 wrote:

    I do not think that the capitalist system is, to use Mike12's terminology, "evil." I only believe that said system has outlived its usefulness to humankind. Like mercantilist society, feudal society, and hunter-gatherer society before it, capitalist society once served as a necessary step respecting human social evolution. By developing modern means of production, which enabled urban centers' development, capitalism insulated people from nature's whims. It significantly allowed for the transformation of the proletariat class into the working class, thereby enabling workers to organize themselves toward self-government ( www.slp.org/pdf/statements/siu_chart.pdf ).

    But, in outliving its usefulness to humankind, capitalism increasingly reduces a growing number of people to hand-to-mouth existences. Therefore, capitalist society must soon give way to the next and most logical step of human social evolution - socialist society followed by communist society.

    But to engage in an in-depth study of (original) sources of Marxist literature (the [original] writings of Dr. Karl Hienrich Marx and Friedrich Engles) is to know that socialist society, let alone a communist society has to exist. (I would be happy to expand upon that point should anyone be so interested.) So it isn't the case that "capitalism has liberated us from the 'evils' of socialism and communism."

    As a Marxist of some thirty-three years and a member of the Socialist Labor Party of America since 1990, I know many socialists. Still, I don't know any who present themselves as "saviors" or anything of the sort. And I'm not merely saying that. After all, offering ourselves as "saviors" would stand as a fundamental violation of the rudimentary Marxist principle known as self-emancipation. We, Marxists, are members of the working class first and socialists second. So if we represent ourselves as "saviors," then we are also attempting to save ourselves from the vagaries of the now wholly antisocial capitalist system. But I suppose, with the word "savior" and its religious connotations aside, it does make sense on a certain level.

    I don't know that Fidel Castro or Hugo Chavez ever passed themselves off as "saviors," at least not in the way that, say, Donald Trump has. I have read every book that Castro wrote, and in the totality of those writings, he does not come off in such a manner. Although a nationalist rather than a socialist, Castro was deeply concerned with the betterment of all colonialized peoples and lived his life accordingly. That is why the Cuban people enjoy some of the World's finest medical care and why physicians are Cuba's chief export. Yes, Fidel Castro was a horrible person, at least according to the capitalist media and capitalist culture's indoctrinating ways.
    Neither did Hugo Chavez, a Bolivarian rather than a socialist, purport to be a "savior." Though he tended to gravitate toward the cult of personalities that is Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution, he, too, was an anti-imperialist legitimately concerned for his fellow Venezuelans. But, just as with Allende in Chile, Chevez's efforts were continually undermined by Venezuala's U.S. State Department-backed capitalist class.

    My response: That may be the case respecting Venezuela. After all, the U.S. and other imperialist powers have kept the preponderance of Venezuelan society in a state of poverty for generations, just as they once exploited China and Cuba. But, while there are some 240 million poor Chinese, China's "middle class" consists of approximately 700 million individuals. And "real wages" for China's midlevel workers have increased by some 600 percent since 1990, while U.S. workers haven't seen any increase in such wages since 1973. The reason behind both of those phenomenons is that a large segment of American-manufacturing capitalists has transferred their industrial processes to China.

    As for Cuba, it is true; no Cuban citizen is wealthy. But neither are any Cuban's homeless, illiterate, or devoid of healthcare. It is also the case that Cuba sports one of the World's lowest infant mortality rates and neonatal death rates, even lower than those in the U.S. And when compared to specific places, such as Camden, New Jersey and, say, East St. Louis, Missouri, Cuba's infant mortality rates and neonatal death rates are significantly lower. (Before the Cuban Revolution, the then-U.S. client state of Cuba suffered the second lowest standard of living in the Western Hemisphere. Next to Haiti, another U.S. client state, Cuba had the hemisphere's second-highest rates of poverty, homelessness, illiteracy, and lack of healthcare.)

    Ergo, unless we omit quality of life from the equation, it isn't true that "the average poor person in the U.S. is better off than the average person in China [or Cuba])."

    Although it is good to know that Mike12 understands that Western European and Scandinavian societies are capitalist rather than socialist, Ii will say again that a socialist society - www.slp.org/pdf/statements/siu_chart.pdf - has yet to exist anywhere on Earth. (Please note that I did not state that "a pure socialist government has yet to exist anywhere on Earth." A socialist government has yet to exist, period!

    In reality, most Americans haven't the slightest understanding as to what socialism is, let alone whether they want what they don't even comprehend.

    Finally, I'm wondering as to what causes Mike12 to think that Kamala Harris is a socialist. Most Americans haven't the slightest understanding as to what socialism is, indeed.

    *****

    Guy Marsh
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    Socialist Labor Party of America (est. 1890)
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    What is socialism?
    http://www.slp.org/what_is.htm

    www.slp.org/pdf/statements/siu_chart.pdf

    deleonism.org/industrial-government.htm

    Former member: Peace & Freedom Party (1988-1990)
    Former member: Democratic Party (1982-19-eighty-eight)
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    Last edited: Jan 2, 2021

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