Refuting the Standard Arguments Against Communism and for Capitalism

You're very welcome.

 

Communism is the opposite of capitalism and freedom. Communism is the Berlin Wall, border guards in all the Eastern Bloc countries, secret police monitoring their own people, gulags, everyone being forced to present their papers, all designed to subdue the people the communists are supposedly trying to help.

The reality is that totalitarianism under any name (including communism, oligarchy, cronyism) is murderous and hurts people all so a small group can live in vast wealth and power.

 

Communalism might be fine, I don't see much of an economic future for an area governed by it, but communism, & the stifling of the human spirit, & poverty inherent to it, IMO, make it the least desirable form of governance known to man.

At least Socialism allows for more freedoms, & basic human rights.

 

not opposite to freedom.

what your beef about Berlin wall?

so you expect a country to have no border guards?

ever heard about the FBI or MI5 for example?

abolished in the 1960s.

not as many papers as you have to under Capitalism.

sounds like Capitalism to me.

let's not make up stories, okay?

 

Another weakness in your argument is that capitalist countries and communist countries can have good or bad leadership. The Berlin wall and closed borders aren't required features of communism.

And, the right wing in the US has long pushed for capitalism, freedom, AND national ID.

Plus, we ourselves have gigantic differences in wealth and income, with laws protecting that advantage.


I believe in our system, which is a combination of various solutions that features capitalism and free markets rather strongly, but certainly not totally. We would be FAR WORSE than who we are if we chose to be purely free market capitalist.

This is really important, as we've tried to make other nations in our own image, with multiple failures at stupendous expense. Our system is complex and depends on our people believing it works and knowing how to make it work. It's far more than what could be given to someone in a box with a bow on it, regardless of the number of trillions of dollars we add.

 

So you're saying that a political party is, itself, "communism"?
Communism is not a party. And in fact, it has never existed. So I don't know how you can pretend to speak of its "evils."

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By definition, communism has no government or "state" apparatus.

 

Communism only works for ants or bees, not greedy, self-centered humans OP.

 

I think there is an anarchist variant of communism, but in general communism absolutely does not mean there is no government.

And, the very thought of anarchy is just plain ridiculous.

 

Communism has a 100% rate of failure. Case closed.

 

Then you know nothing about Marx, Engels, and Lenin... especially Marx. You're shooting from your hip.... in the dark.

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Impossible. Case closed.

 

We in America believe that Capitalism is a failure, too, unless we have a large body of corrective laws that have come from wise prediction and bad experience.

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If true, you would have been able to cite something.

 

For days now I have been repeating the implied answer in two main threads here. Find any two of my posts and one of them will have the answer.

Let me do it this way: You say communism has a government. What example can you cite and what did Marx say about this? DO YOU KNOW?

 

Yes, our dear dense anti-communist friends are quite stubbornly set on misinterpreting communism as a philosophy and movement whose ultimate goal is the establishment of a utopian nanny state, when in fact it's a vision of a form of directly democratic people's society, so to speak, that evolves to the point that a withering away of the state (to use the classic choice of words) can take place.

 

History. Case closed.

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Who is this "we" you're talking about?

 

You assume the USA is a free capitalist nation, it is not. It used to be, not today, and it has not been since the late 1930's.

The USA rose to its position of dominance because it was free and capitalist. It is in its current relatively prosperous state because it is living off the gains of yesterday, not because it is a vibrant nation generating new wealth.

 

A Briton, a Frenchman, and a Russian are standing and staring at a portrait of Adam and Eve.

"Look at their calm, their reserve" says the Briton. "Surely they must be British!"

"Nonsense!" Replies the Frenchman. "They are beautiful. Surely they must be French!"

The Russian finally speaks, "they have no clothes, no shelter, only an apple to eat, and are being told this is paradise. They are Russian."

 

And then an astute fellow, whose nationality is irrelevant, pipes up and points out that their lack of clothing, shelter, and good nutrition remind him of the squalor inflicted on billions of human beings in the Third World by the capitalist world system and its elites, who nevertheless are told that capitalism is the best system possible. They are starkly immiserated members of the working class or underclass under capitalism.

 

More lousy "libertarian" revisionist history.

 

Prove its revisionist history.

 

I mean any American who has given it serious thought.

 

America thrived after trust busting - which is a significant mod to capitalism.

 

A little history is required here:

From the 1820s to the1970s the working class gained in income, with a few ups and downs along the way. But overall, the average direction was upward. This was achieved by capitalism actually having room to grow. There was demand. And capitalism met that demand profitably. Production increased to meet it. As production grew and grew, workers were more and more needed. The South deal with this need by buying people from Africa. The North dealt with it by paying workers more. They were paid enough to attract farmers from Europe to a new life here, and enough to keep them from continuing westward to resume farming. Capitalism thrived in the North.

But in 1970 capitalism was able to produce enough goods to supply the market with some left over. So not so many workers were needed for the first time, as a trend, since the 1820s. With a more stable need for workers, wage growth slowed. With a reduced increase in wages, and eventually a flattening of wage growth to about nothing, workers had less real buying power and consumption began to slow. Hence demand slowed. And this left the capitalist with a stagnant economy and lack of needed growth in markets, consumption, production, and profits.

The sluggish economy and lack of needed growth was a death knell for capitalism. So to solve their problem, government and industry began promoting consumer debt as "acceptable" and even desirable. It funded the American Dream. We began buying more and more goods and services on credit. Everyone had the supplies and the trinkets capitalism offered, and everyone had a level of debt that was previously unknown.

Capitalism had become dependent on consumer debt, and then government debt, to survive and prosper.

Debt reached a record level with many worrying about it and its implications for us. Then the crash of 2008 happened and many people learned a hard lesson about consumer debt. We became more reluctant to accumulate debt due to the personal damage experienced by so many during the crash. Unemployment rose. Incomes were so harmed by the crash that they actually fell. Consumption also fell as a consequence. And that meant that demand fell. And that left business with plenty of inventory, inability to sell it, and costs that meant that this situation was not only causing capitalism to stagnate, but actually threatened capitalism's existence.

In response to this, American capitalism, which had grown to the largest, most profitable, richest, most advanced economy in the world due to a partnership with the American workers, decided to abandon these workers, leaving us "high and dry" to fend for ourselves, and move operations to foreign countries where labor was very, very cheap. That cut costs for them and that let to better prospects for profitability.

This is the story of the evolution of capitalism. This is how it grows.

So Battle3 and anyone else who cares to answer, tell us all the solution to this. Obviously all the calls for "returning to better times" when regulations were fewer is not the answer.

 

What about it?

 

Capitalism is fundamentally antithetical to, and capitalist elites are deeply antipathetic to authentic democracy and freedom for the many, a free capitalist society is indeed a serious contradiction in terms. That is, to state the obvious, under capitalism the license of capitalists to be capitalists, to practice a MO conducive to the socio-economico-political disempowerment of the working class, adversely affects the freedom and rights of the majority of the members of society, big-time. No, not a very democratic state of affairs at all.

 

Actually, capitalism is an irremediably crisis-prone, socio-morally pathological, antithetical-to-democracy system, it can't be legislatively reformed into being a nice system that won't continue to disempower and precarize the majority of those living under it.