Refuting the Standard Arguments Against Communism and for Capitalism

A certain eructative poster at this forum has recently belched forth some familiar and peakedly tired old arguments against communism and for capitalism. As he did this in another thread where it was a bit of a digression, I thought that I should post the brief replies that I've just dashed off in a separate thread. This of course is not a private conversation, anyone is quite welcome to share his/her input.

Well, you're tritely equating communism with the ersatz socialism of the Soviet Union, and with systems based upon the Soviet model. Those systems, their anti-democratic nature and other significant flaws, we're in fact more a product of the history of the societies in which they existed than of an adherence to the ideals of communism. And of course the militarism and police state character of these societies was in large measure a result of, a response to being under siege by the capitalist powers bent on their destruction. Well, being under attack (as the Soviet Union of course was from the get-go) doesn't exactly bring out the best in human beings or their societies. At any rate, arguing that the Soviet model of communism isn't viable or desirable is tantamount to a kind of straw-maning. That is, you simply make the argument against communism a matter of arguing against Stalinism, which is quite easy to do, and then declare that you've discredited the whole idea of communism. This is of course a rather facile move, but interestingly it's the one that anti-communists always resort to, because apparently they can't come up with an argument against authentic communism. They seem to be admitting, by omission of an argument refuting the desirability of authentic communism, that the actual actualization of the idea of communism would not be such a dreadful thing.

You seem to miss my point, that anti-communists use the supposed history of communism to empirically discredit it, but don't concern themselves with the appalling track record of Christianity. This selective use of what I'll term the empirical argument makes anti-communists guilty of intellectual dishonesty, and seriously calls the credibility of anti-communism into question.

Ah, the essentialist human nature argument! As if free-market fundamentalists are more realistic in believing that a society that eschews pro-social values and instead openly bases itself on selfishness, on economic egoism, on the idea that "greed is good" is viable, that such a society won't end up suffering from a host of sociological ills, from poor social cohesion, anomie, social and moral decay, and corruption that threatens the survival of its body politic! There's a good reason why no human civilization in history has so unabashedly founded itself upon the principle of self-interest, why all previous societies have promoted some form of pro-social values; well, they all had enough good horse sense to realize that a sense of community is what makes a society viable, not a sense of entitlement to only look out for #1. You conservatives paradoxically advocate the appreciation of traditional values, but are willing to junk the traditional wisdom that self-interest is no proper or practicable foundation for a society. Mm-hmm, rather than be consistent about being traditionalists, in your dedication to being boosters of capitalism you-all prefer to embrace the ideology of a historically fairly new, upstart form of society whose ethos flies in the face of a traditional social ethic, and whose moral fitness and practical sustainability is now fairly well discredited! So much for conservative integrity.

As for your suggestion about how to go about building communism, well, thanks for the advice, but I would hope you realize that communists today are certainly not intellectually locked into the Stalinist model of how to go about creating a socialist society. Yes, current-day communists are not your grandfather's communists, shall we say. No, we're not the Stalinist bogeyman/straw man whom you prefer to argue against.

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.

 

You want to see the results of socialism and Marxism taken to their logical conclusion? Venezuela. It's a topic that the leftist media and leftist posters have avoided like the plague because it SHOWS what the Left will ultimately do to this nation given enough time and enough freedom to implement their various pie-in-the-sky social and economic dreams and schemes.

 

And behold the not so lovely and quite direct results of the implementation of neoliberalism all over the globe! At any rate, once again you're resorting to the rather lame tactic of uncritically attributing a society's problems to its efforts to actualize socialism, as if other factors couldn't possibly be at play.

 

We know the factors at play; ruthless and ultimately incompetent leftists and their screw-lose ideology -- and . . . no . . . limits.

 

Hmm, what a sophisticated comeback. You're quite the formidable intellectual foe.

 

Gonna follow along, Charles.

When a far righter like Gatewood talks about leftists being "ruthless and ultimately incompetent"and calls their ideology "screw-loose"...no telling where that conversation is going.


Should be interesting, though.

 

Thanks for your interest.

 

Really??? Ya think?

In reality, Venezuelans have seen their living conditions vastly improved by socialism. Their economic problems are not due to some inherent fault in socialism, but to artificially low oil prices and sabotage by forces hostile to socialism.

Starting in 2014, Saudi Arabia flooded the market with cheap oil in a calculated move coordinated with U.S. and Israeli foreign policy goals. Despite actually falling deep into debt as a result, the Saudi monarchy continues to expand its oil production, resulting in the price of oil being driven down from $110 per barrel, to as low as $28. The goal is to weaken these opponents of Wall Street, London, and Tel Aviv, whose economies are centered around oil and natural gas exports.

And Venezuela is one of those countries. Saudi efforts to drive down oil prices have greatly reduced Venezuela’s state budget and led to enormous negative consequences for the Venezuelan economy.

At the same time, private food processing and importing corporations have launched a coordinated campaign of sabotage against Venezuela. This, coupled with the weakening of a vitally important state sector of the economy, has resulted in inflation and food shortages. The artificially low oil prices have left the Venezuelan state cash-starved, prompting a crisis in the funding of the social programs that were key to strengthening the country.

What were free market policies prior to Chavez doing to Venezuela? Chavez was elected president of Venezuela in 1999. His election was viewed as a referendum on the extreme free market policies enacted in Venezuela during the 1990s. It is a known history in Venezuela how the privatizations mandated by the International Monetary Fund made life in Venezuela almost unlivable during the 1990s. Garbage wasn’t being collected. Electricity would go off for weeks. Haido Ortega, a member of a local governing body in Venezuela, said: “Under previous governments we had to burn tires and go on strike just to get electricity, have the streets fixed, or get any investment.”

The argument that socialism has bred corruption also ignores facts revealed by several empirical studies of Venezuela's 2012 currency-corruption scandal. According to those probes, traditional economic groups, multinational corporations and emerging businesspeople were all guilty parties in the $20 billion dollar rip off.

But one of the studies, by political analyst and activist Luis Enrique Gavazut, concluded that “the lion's share of the fraud in 2012 was perpetrated by large multinational corporations that have subsidiaries in the nation”. Gavazut said that some of the illicit activity (involving dollars) could not have been carried out had US authorities monitored shady operations in Florida and other states where the dollars were eventually deposited or invested.

So, far from Venezuela’s slide into difficulties being the result of socialism, it turns out that it is the forces of entrenched international opposition with international banks, foreign oil, and U.S. corporations playing major roles that are the real cause of Venezuela’s troubles.

 

Can you believe these diehard true believers in capitalism?! Everywhere we witness the abundant evidence of the unsustainability of capitalist societies, the multitude of ways in which capitalism is threatening to bring about the decline and fall of western civilization. Let me count them.

1) There's of course the mass production of human beings who suffer from a free-floating unhappiness because they're programmed by a consumerist-capitalist culture to futilely seek fulfilment from the accumulation of material wealth and possessions, rather than from the more spiritual pursuit of creative self-actualization; and because they're alienated from their own creative nature, being forced, as they are, to submit to the commodification and objectification of their creativity, aka their labor, and to sell it away to capitalists.

2) And of course there's the societal drug problem that results from individuals trying to self-medicate these adverse existential consequences of the capitalist form of life. And I'll simply observe that there are of course a host of other sociological ills that supervene from masses of individuals being profoundly dissatisfied with their lives under capitalism.

3) There's our crumbling social structures, crumbling thanks to the fact that capitalism dispenses with pro-social values in favor of the profit motive and so-called enlightened self-interest, and because human beings come to only relate to each other in and as the roles that they play in economic transactions, rather than as full human persons.

4) Let's not forget about the subversion of the dream of a society governed by all of its citizens, and the socially and politically dangerous apathy that results from people realizing that our democracy is a fraud, and that they aren't really in any position to exercise any power.

5) The wars that are motivated by the interests of capitalist elites, and that take such an economic, moral, and human toll.

6) The inherent proneness to recurrent economic crises which is a consequence of the insatiable drive for the overaccumulation of capital, overproduction, and overgrowth. And then of course there's the way that it causes us to be constantly bombarded by Schumpeter's gale.

7) The ecologically destructive impact of this out-of-control drive of capitalists for production and accumulation.

8 ) The false consciousness that capitalist societies promote in order to disguise all of the above bad points of their economic system, and the potentially disgruntling reality that it's the interests of capitalists that take precedence and account for our society keeping us trapped in the insanity of capitalism — a false consciousness that keeps us separated from the truth, which is the most fundamental danger to the survival of any society. That is, when a civilization lives a lie (or a pack of lies), as does a capitalist civilization, it gives itself a death sentence, because to ensure one's survival one must deal with reality.

Yes, capitalism is doing in our civilization in these, and various other ways, and yet pro-capitalist, anti-communist conservatives try to claim that it's communists who wrongheadedly believe in an unworkable form of society! It might seem a petty reaction, but one can't help but say look who's talking! Authentic communism, however, would be the remedy for the above list of capitalism's pathologies. Recognizing this in fact makes communists far more sensible than their conservative detractors.

 

Well said.

And all of your 8 categories could be illustrated by countless examples.

 

Thank you.

 

Btw, if there's anyone reading this thread who wonders what authentic communism is, what a fully materialized communist society might actually look like, well, it would simply be a form of society geared to make for a state of affairs that is very much the opposite of all of the above enumerated pathologies of capitalism. As for the nitty-gritty details, well, they would be worked out by the people living in a communist polity, as a communist form of political organization would genuinely be a people's republic.

 

Holy crap; leftists honestly believe that garbage? Wow! No point in arguing with you then. You literally live in a different mental world.

 

Oh, that's right. Why didn't I realize that it just goes without saying that socialism is a bad thing! Capitalism is utopia. Let's not look too deeply though.

Unlike knee-jerk naysayers, I've studied into the history and nature of socialism and so there are a few things I can say about it.

 

If one refuse to look at the old Soviet Union or the fact that China is deep-sixing Marxism for capitalism and want to blame Venezuela on everything but the leftists that turned it into a hellhole then let's not talk about 'thought'.

 

some on the left claim, it is merely lousy social management. socializing costs is what socialism is always good for.

here is what supply side economics should be doing for Venezuela:

[video=youtube;rTsH7B1H11k]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTsH7B1H11k[/video]

Why do you believe that command economy could not deploy, a corp of agricultural engineers, to develop best practices for the locals?

 

Socialism has built entire cities that are still empty.

Even Capitalism has not found, AnCappers that are "brave enough" to actually "practice what they preach, with their Capital".

 

You think that is bad, AnCappers even have the advantage of having, "off the shelf" cities for them to practice with; if Only, they were Venturesome enough.

 

Sounds like a cop-out to me. Apparently it would be too challenging to explain away the pathologies of capitalism that I touched upon in my last prolix post.

 

What you mean is that if someone disagrees with your views on this, they're deluded. --not that you seems to have any actual data or analysis.

Being a willing product of the capitalist culture and propaganda, you wouldn't possess the understanding of class struggle that those who are not such willing products have. Hence I fully expect you have no understanding of who and why the USSR failed, when or why China reversed to capitalism, or WTF is going on in Venezuela.

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Because of very strong ideological fears.

 

like what? socializing costs is what socialism is always good for.

 

Maybe I misunderstood your question. You asked "Why do you believe that command economy could not deploy, a corp of agricultural engineers, to develop best practices for the locals?"

I thought to myself, "what 'command economy' would be deploying engineers to develop Venezuelan farming practices". And that would be an economy that already has such farming practices and advanced equipment like the combine in your photo. And that would be the U.S. I assume. So your question was (to my mind) "Why do you believe the U.S. could not deploy, a corp of agricultural engineers, to develop best practices for the locals?"

My answer was to say that the U.S. and other advanced capitalist nations are not interested in helping a socialist nation due to strong ideological fears that their anti-socialist position might be weakened if we help. Rather, capitalists are only interested in exploiting and undermining socialism wherever it occurs.

 

There is no plausible defense of communism as practiced in the Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cuba, etc.

Those are/were brutal regimes dedicated to perfecting communism.

 

Intriguing. You hit the obvious right on the head. There has never been a truly communist country on the face of the planet. What you over look is that there is almost certainly never going to be one either. You simply can't get there from here with your starting material being human beings.

There is a reason most of the later communist/ anarchist theorists are trying to skip the period of the so-called dictatorship of the proletariat. That's because once you create an entity whose primary job is to make sure from each according to their means to each according to their needs happens, you wind up with a totalitarian regime whose primary concern is retaining power and whatever perks they deem necessary to go along with it. That much has become obvious even to many communist theoreticians. It is at this point that communist theory begins to run of the rails.

 

socializing costs is what socialism is always good for. is Venezuela, a right wing socialist "show case" or not?