Marxism for Super-Experts

Congratulation on posting the most meaningless right wing drivel on the thread so far. Taxes fell after Obama took over for one thing. And a lot of the debt was from bailing out capitalism.

 

You seem to be unaware that nearly half of Obama's stimulus 'spending' was in TAX CUTS!

Secondly, do you understand that when you read 'Obama is spending more' it means as a percentage of GDP, and assuming wages of state workers arent cut, as recession his and GDP goes down, the proportion spent by the government goes up RELATIVELY. Federal spending as a percentage of GDP has increased 4%, but if the GDP was growing like it did from 2000 to 2007, the increase would be just 1.75%.



The increase is mostly social security, which simply reflects the fact that the recession threw a lot of people on the dole.

 

You are right, but what it means is self defence. If the Bolsheviks hadn't organised this, they would have all been massacred by the White Armies. Millions would have been killed as the workers and peasants tried to fight without much organisation. In those sort of scenarios, people like GH cant make up their minds which side they are on. They fight for one side and then the other.The Reds had a clear policy, and they were forced to defend it.

 

Just because someone doesn't agree with your conclusion doesn't mean they don't understand something. Just because someone does (supposedly) agree with your conclusion doesn't mean that they're right or even understand something.
A piece of advice to keep in mind.

 

What taxes fell, daft? I have noticed no such effect in my taxes, nor has anyone I know.

In addition, the reason why it is intellectually dishonest to claim that the Dow Jones is falling due to Capitalism is the same reason it is intellectually dishonest for you to claim that the bailout was due to Capitalism.

Crony Capitalism is not Capitalism. What Obama did was bail out Cronies.

 

Are you seriously claiming there have not been tax cuts?

Quoted for the truths.

 

Under Obama? Where?

Which is really the point.

 

It's kind of a fact, a large part of the stimulus was indeed giving tax cuts, I don't know specifically where they were given out.

 

Marx actually hijacked the socialist agenda from anarchists like Bakunin with the help of his attack dog Engels. So there is strong reason to believe what he wanted was some form of strong state.

I regard Hitler and Mussolini as practical Marxists since they actually fulfilled Marx's agenda, worker takeover from bourgeoise democracy and capitalism (also Volkswagen very like Trabant). What the exact system is Marx never detailed. Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh are theoretical Marxists, they led peasant movements against feudalism which is a no-no to Marx. Sure the USSR had some artificial industrialization afterwards but the main thrust was still persecuting landowners and collectivizing agriculture (so they had to import food in the end).

 

Ohhh my god this is going to get very interesting verry quickly.
Marxists Vs. Anarchists: Who Will Prevail???

 

It might be unfair because there are two Marxists and only one anarchist so I might jump in myself as an anarchist (although of a different ilk) myself.
I haven't read Bakunin but I quite liked aspects of the work of Kropotkin (haven't read much of him but enough), Goldman, and Chomsky.

 

What? What he says is

"It means that so long as the other classes, especially the capitalist class, still exists, so long as the proletariat struggles with it (for when it attains government power its enemies and the old organization of society have not yet vanished), it must employ forcible means, hence governmental means. It is itself still a class and the economic conditions from which the class struggle and the existence of classes derive have still not disappeared and must forcibly be either removed out of the way or transformed, this transformation process being forcibly hastened."

Force, government. Government power. A proletarian government. He said this 3 years after the Paris Commune disintegrated.

First you say "The Paris Commune represents a revolutionary affirmation where this did not need to take place."

Then you seem to contradict yourself: "the Paris Commune is a model for other revolutions as its democratic yet forceful siezure of the means of production evicerated the bourgieos in Paris as a empowered economic class."

You complain that the Bolsheviks used force, even though it was in defence, Marx says force is needed, the force of a proletarian government. This means a workers State. Are you saying that the Paris Commune was not like a government? If so, then why does Marx use the word government 3 years later?

So you now agree force is necessary, but you think Marx was wrong about the need for a workers government, is that it? If the Partis Commune had gone national, in what way would it have differed from a soviet government? A soviet government is a democratic workers and peasants government, just as Marx was advocating, and clearly it would have had to defend the revolution from the attacks of the capitalists. Plus of course, Russia happened to be in WW1 when the Bolsheviks took over, so they had to work out a way of pulling out of that. ALL the parties except the Bolsheviks, by the way, including I think anarchists, wanted to stay in WW1.

 

http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/pdf/dec10/Misinformation_Dec10_rpt.pdf

 

I'm not anarchist, maybe independent libertarian leaning if anything. But I did read in a book on the Spanish civil war how the anarchists created a successful economy in Barcelona and Valencia but were squeezed by foreign trade and swept away by the Marxists (not Franco). Also how the Marxist leader got away to Britain were he lived in some palace afterwards.

As for Obama I believe he started out wanting to restore competetiveness through the state (misguided though I believe), it's Krugman who is the fanatical Keynesian. It was Bush who bailed out first.

 

This is incorrect. The anarchists in Barcelona, along with the ex-Trotskyists in the POUM, were attacked by Stalinists. Stalinists are not Marxists. They might claim to be, but clearly they are not. In fact Stalin sabotaged the revolution in Spain. But the anarchist leaders played a (*)(*)(*)(*) poor role, refusing to take power when they could have, on principle, and then joining a government with Stalinists and capitalists!

1936

"Howard : Does this, your statement, mean that the Soviet Union has to any degree abandoned its plans and intentions for bringing about world revolution?

Stalin : We never had such plans and intentions. "

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/03/01.htm

 

Through my interpretation, I honestly beleive Marx was an anarchist at heart, though the path to said Communist Anarchy may be slightly different.

Remember, most ideals,espoused by such writers, about the aftermath of Prolitariat Revolution were similar to the Utopian Socialists that came before them.

Communism was suppose to represent economic & social justice incarnate. Where workers had, for the first time in human history, the freedom to explore and concentrate on their own pursuits, forging new and significant human relationships along the way without the time commitments of wage slavery or rampent consumorism.

I think its really important to find equal ground rather than argue about interpretation.

 

I wholly agree that communism in Marx's vision was meant to be anarchic, but with this being said it was only supposed to be after the readjustment period of the socialist worker's state (I think that Lenin did a better job of describing this period and the reason for it than Marx himself did).
However, at the same time there is something deeply disturbing to me about Marxist anarchism in that in my interpretation it would seem as though the reason that the state had ceased to exist was specifically because of the fact that the individual would cease to exist, in one light it could be looked at as anarchism, and in another way it could be looked at as the total state, total homogeneity in opinion, upbringing, and social status to the point where the only reason no state was needed was because of the fact that there would be no conflicts to ever come into existence as the people were too sheeplike and atomistic to allow them to arise.

 

I dislike how many Marxist try to infiltrate anarchism, anarchy is about tearing down governments, breaking the fabric of law, rid the wealthy, what it's not is constructing more control over regions by the sharing of community like many on Anarchy forums try to opinionate.

 

http://www.isreview.org/issues/53/makhno.shtml

essential reading for the misinformed

"Leon Trotsky, head of the Red Army, wrote of a similar incident:

ince the Makhnovists are sitting on the railway branch-line from Mariupol, they are refusing to allow the coal and grain to leave except in exchange for other supplies. It has come about that, while rejecting the “state power” created by the workers and peasants of the whole country, the Makhnovists leadership has organized its own little semi-piratical power, which dares to bar the way for the Soviet power of the Ukraine and all of Russia. Instead of the country’s economy being properly organized according to a general plan and conception, and instead of a co-operative, socialist and uniform distribution of all the necessary products, the Makhnovists are trying to establish domination by gangs and bands: whoever has grabbed something is its rightful owner, and can then exchange it for whatever he hasn’t got. This is not products-exchange but commodity-stealing.57

In this 1919 document, the Makhnovists seem almost willfully ignorant of the devastation facing Russia after the revolution:

[The supply] issue was particularly easy to resolve at the beginning of the revolution, when life was not yet in complete disarray and when food was available everywhere in more or less adequate supply.58

The reality was quite different. In October 1917, Petrograd was down to less than four days of food.59 Although peasants had access to food, the cities were starving and the war-ravaged economy was in shambles. The Makhnovist solution was unworkable: decentralized anarchy to leap over the real problems of production. In reality, local autonomy would mean no coordinated, centralized plan for war production and defense. If implemented on a wide scale, the Makhnovist approach would have led to a swift White victory with an immediate reversal of all of the peasantry’s gains."

read the full story at the link

 

"Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. "

Engels, 1891
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm

Marx and Engels on Anarchism

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/anarchism/index.htm

"Wanting to abolish authority in large-scale industry is tantamount to wanting to abolish industry itself, to destroy the power loom in order to return to the spinning wheel."

"Why do the anti-authoritarians not confine themselves to crying out against political authority, the state? All Socialists are agreed that the political state, and with it political authority, will disappear as a result of the coming social revolution, that is, that public functions will lose their political character and will be transformed into the simple administrative functions of watching over the true interests of society. But the anti-authoritarians demand that the political state be abolished at one stroke, even before the social conditions that gave birth to it have been destroyed. They demand that the first act of the social revolution shall be the abolition of authority. Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough?

Therefore, either one of two things: either the anti-authoritarians don't know what they're talking about, in which case they are creating nothing but confusion; or they do know, and in that case they are betraying the movement of the proletariat. In either case they serve the reaction."




http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm
Engels, 1872

 

Yeah - and how did that work out?

Show me a committee that can rule and I will show you a monkey that can manage.

 

Marxism/Communism is just as totalitarian as Fascism.

 

More destruction is brought upon when foolish ideology and greed are brought upon in notion. During this time period in Russian history did it have the devastating results of 65 million people being massacred because of a formed community?

Someone who's willing to give their right up as a human being just so someone else can provide for them, when them themselves were design and fully capable on finding any means necessary to feed them self's? Implying man made law through someone else idea's, either they be political, religious, or other is not natural in nature.

If these people had starved to death it was because they didn't want to participate in natures law.

 

what?

What????? What are you talking about?

I vaguely get the gist, I think. Is English your first language? You think it is human nature to fend for yourself. Well the human race evolved through millions of years and it was cooperation that made us develop mentally, for instance we learned sophisticated speech to help cooperation. If we all just operated as individuals we would not have speech, houses, roads, bridges. Our cousin Neanderthals died out for that very reason - lack of social networking. Class society only evolved very recently, a few thousand years ago, when production was high enough to allow a privileged elite, probably the priests at first, to sit on their arses in luxury while the masses toiled. One of the first class societies was overthrown and the people went back to primitive communism for another 1500 years or more. This was during the transition to settling in towns and the dawn of agriculture.

Please explain. You mean the famine in Russia? The 1921 famine was caused by drought, three years of devastation form WW1, the civil war (started by the capitalists), the foreign intervention of 200,000 troops and masses of weapons from capitalist countries, the economic blockade started by the capitalist countries, and the fact that the Bolsheviks were forced to requisition grain from peasants who were hoarding it. This requisitioning tended to make peasants less interested in growing more.

 

Nature created us to be individuals, the logical tools to think for ones self, to give when we want and to take what we will other wise nature would have just made a duplicate copy of insects such as ants, working for a mindless colony as Marxism proposes.

Communism, the notion was created in 1848 so I can't really see how people were living in primitive communism before that.

Society isn't made out of right or wrong, checks and balances, the universe and nature live in chaos and man was created and formed from both. We are the ultimate creation in intelligence and design evolved from anarchy. To deny this is denying our existents that the universe has gifted us.

Nor should a form community have the right to dictate another over individuality like Stalin did and many other communist and capitalist leaders as well around the world, the birth child of Marxism.

Just a bunch of self proclaim leaders who want to control a group of people who will work for them.

Nature has given us the rights to decide to work or not, there are always options, such has looting, stealing, rioting, pillaging, loving, worshipping, donating, healing. We do what we want with those choices as individuals. There is no sense of justice because it doesn't exist. Morales, Morales were created by old men to control the young, just as man made governments have been doing with unnatural laws that go against nature upon the public.