I'm kind of back but kind of...meh, screw it

Hoosier8 · Feb 8, 2016

If you are over 50 socialism is an old failed idea, if you are 25 it is a nice new idea. What the young fail to realize is that socialism killed 110 million people in the 20th century. Education has failed our young by failing to teach them the true consequences of socialism.

Strangelove · Feb 8, 2016

Le Chef said: ↑

Yes, I am indeed. I've been hearing it and reading it for over 20 years, and now I've even got Preteen impatiently "explain[ing] the reasons why these societies never became communist countless times in this thread."

I know that young commies don't, in many cases, actively desire mass starvation and gulags, though there are those among you who lionize Stalin and Felix Dzerzhinsky and yearn to see my head on a stake: "We represent in ourselves organized terrorthis must be said very clearly ...." But starvation, privation, scarcity, and oppression all happen. Inevitably. Repeatedly. Everywhere. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and Castro were all Marxists of one flavor or another. Sure, I'll admit that they didn't achieve communism as you and Preteen define it. And you will I hope admit that they were all Marxists, and not of the theoretical or armchair variety.
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You only mention Lenin, Pol Pot, Mao, and Stalin, but there were plenty of other flavours of communism and/or socialism which you still fail to realize. Of course the aforementioned were Marxists, but pro primo they all drifted away from Marxism at some point (and not just in nuances but in its basic tenets) and pro secundo Tito, Kádár, Dubcek, or maybe even Cardenas or Arbenz were socialist too, and yet they weren't mass murderers. What you say about oppression and starvation happening everywhere and inevitably is just utter demagogy.The Soviet Union and many other communist states utilized terror, but again, no one here denies this. I'm probably just as against what they did like you are. Let me have the right to condemnd the Soviet Union and Bolsheviks from a left-communist viewpoint, please. Various historical and contemporary examples show us that the tertium non datur formula used by proponents of capitalism and Leninist branches of socialism alike is false, and that communism can come in many flavours. The fact that Bolshevik-type communist systems are the most widely known of all is really not my fault. And still people act like libertarian communists are advocates of such communism, when in reality we are opposed to it.

Le Chef said: ↑

It's always someone else's fault that these operational Marxists, the ones that go for genuine revolution, turn into monsters, amirite? Or it's imperialism's fault. Or that of the CIA. Or it's a lack of class consciousness, which a few years in the countryside planting rice by hand will correct, along with some lessons broadcast 24/7 over cheap loudspeakers. That's the reality of what communism becomes. There's never, ever anything wrong with the ideology itself, right?
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Always is a strong word again. In most cases, yes, but not always. When the army, a group of insurgents, or bureucrats take the lead of a communist uprising or revolution, it will become a state socialist dictatorship. There's nothing new in that. Hiding behind a comfortable wall of irony, you still can't deny that most of non-Leninist left-wing revolutions were defeated by outer forces (not unusually by authoritarian communists, actually) and were violently suppressed. And one doesn't even need to be a communist in the strict sense to get inconvenient in the eyes of capitalism. Arbenz, for example, was actually unseated by USA and CIA.

Woolley · Feb 19, 2016

PreteenCommunist said: ↑

That's precisely why capitalism doesn't work. If value was determined by supply and demand, prices (which are of course expressions of value on the market) would fluctuate wildly depending on individual desires and business decisions. But outside of capitalists' abstract models, that doesn't happen. Prices fluctuate around a certain level: a level based on socially necessary labour-time. I'm just going to plagiarise one of my previous articles here to argue why this is a problem for capitalism, because obviously I haven't been properly incentivised to work harder (and it's 11pm):

Meh, not really. I've always been on ok terms with my parents and right-wing peers, and most of the time we just agree to disagree. I don't really feel any desire to rebel against them. But I do see flaws in capitalism, and I think communism would correct them pretty well. If that counts as rebelling, then yeah, that's what I'm doing.

I would agree with much of this. Leftist/social democratic governments are generally (*)(*)(*)(*)ty at managing economies; with the exception of the governments of the immediate post-war era and of a few small, resource-rich Scandinavian countries, such administrations have never failed to cause debt, bureaucracy and economic crisis, as exemplified perfectly by much of Latin America. But these governments do ease inequality, improve public services and generally help most people more than right-wing governments tend to (see Brazil, South Africa, the UK etc. etc.). One of capitalism's problems is that you can either have a strong economy with bad public services, inequality and the consequent social ills, or you can have equality and good public services but have to deal with the often disastrous consequences of overspending and capital flight. It's impossible to have both.

Also, a mixed economy is still capitalism since it still involves private enterprise, wage labour and markets, and I highly doubt that proponents of such an economy want people to see capitalism as ineffective. That isn't what Keynes et al. wanted, and most people who advocate more governmental economic intervention are inspired to some degree by Keynesianism.

Because old people still believe, uncritically, that voting is going to change something, whereas young people - the ones who do care about politics and don't just sit at home getting stoned and playing Xbox - see through that. Sometimes people do have undeniable prejudice against certain groups (racial minorities, women, LGBT+ people and so on), and these people are generally older. And sure, some change can be bad, but hostility to change on principle is not a good idea.

Ah, the no true Scotsman. For one thing, that's an informal fallacy, and for another, words have meanings. I'm sure you'd object if Freedom House or one of those organisations started labelling North Korea as democratic because that's what it calls itself, and quite rightly, since North Korea is not truly democratic as it doesn't fit the definition of the term. Similarly, you can't go calling countries socialist just because they called themselves that when said countries don't meet the criteria in the definition. That wouldn't make any sense.

Actually, Marx and Engels used the two terms "socialism" and "communism" interchangeably when applied to a society. They both referred to the stateless, classless society corresponding to a mode of production in which the means of production are socialised. The differentiation of the terms originated in the Second International (I believe it was Kautsky who differentiated them first?) and became commonplace after Lenin adopted it. I tend to use the terms interchangeably because that makes more sense, given that the "stepping stone" phase retains some features of capitalism rather than being a totally new mode of production, as Lenin himself acknowledged in State and Revolution.

But even if I was using "socialism" to refer to the transition phase, it wouldn't make sense to say that young people are socialist because they want some kind of paternalistic government, since obviously the transition phase won't last forever and when it ends the government will be gone. And the transitional government would not be nice to anyone with a desire to freeload; as Lenin said (paraphrased), in this phase, the principle of "he who does not work, shall not eat," shall be applied.

Socialism has nothing to do with freeloading, but I've addressed that. Doesn't this imply an emotional approach to politics? I think basing one's politics on objective, external reasoning, theoretical knowledge and the experiences of others can often be more reliable than basing it on one's own experiences, simply because there is thus a lower chance of being blighted by emotions.

Of course capitalism is better than other systems, but that's because socialism has never existed and everything else is even more outdated than capitalism. Historical materialism 101. Given how much we have produced, it's amazing that anyone is still in poverty - but they are, and a lot of them too. Inequality is forecast to keep on increasing, with no end in sight. That is a heck of a lot of lost potential right there.

Lolwut? It's not like refugees are listening to what politicians say before entering Europe or the States. Nor is it just leftists who are letting in refugees - Angela Merkel has been the most pro-refugee leader in Europe, and she's a centre-rightist. Refugees come because they are desperate. And why are they desperate? Because their homes have been torn apart by imperialism, because purchasing-power disparities mean that their demand doesn't matter, because their countries are still reeling from the impacts of colonialism, because their national resources have been plundered by foreigners. If labour and the division of labour didn't exist and the education system was drastically different from the archaic, exclusive Prussian-style model we have today, the "permanent underclass" issue would not exist either. So literally all of these problems can be traced back to capitalism, and the fact that it no longer works.

- - - Updated - - -

According to the necessity of profit-making under capitalism (see my quotation of myself in the previous post).
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Very impressive kid, very impressive.

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I'm kind of back but kind of...meh, screw it

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I'm kind of back but kind of...meh, screw it

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