Refuting the Standard Arguments Against Communism and for Capitalism

Battle, you have proven to be incapable of civil, meaningful conversation and unworthy of a reply, so I have put you on my "ignore" list. Now we'll see if you are so stuck in your psychology that you continue to talk to yourself.

 

LOL, not responding to you is no loss at all.

 

Yup. You're stuck. How sad.

 

How delightfully intellectually snobbish and condescending of you. However you haven't yet demonstrated the superior cognitive skills that would entitle you to a condescending attitude. One must therefore conclude that you suffer from what psychologists term illusory superiority. I offer this suggestion not to be snide, but rather out of sincere concern for a fellow human being, perhaps you might wish to seek professional help. (Also, a good psychiatrist might even help you overcome your Islamophobia and nutball apocalypticism)

 

Its not snobbish at all, its basic fact. Your level of knowledge is simple to determine, you don't even know the basic definition of capitalism when all you have to do is take 1 minute to look it up.

But it is now condescending because rather than taking the time to educate yourself, you become stubborn and insist in dwelling in ignorance. Such stubbornness deserves scorn.

 

Well all of the "communist states" to date started out as trying to be stateless. But you can't have statelessness. Anarchy never works, because someone always starts standing over everyone else, or has a little more sway. Literally there have never been a single society since the dawn of human existence that hasn't had any form of leadership that has function with the strength of one that does. We need leadership, we crave it. That's why communism never works. Because when you try out a state with no state, someone always wants to have control of the state.

I rest my case, permanent hierarchies will start existing by nature.

 

Lovely idea but can never be accomplished. Because you cannot have a country without a state. You can have a world without a state, but the idea of a communist country is an oxymoron.

 

LOL!!! Not. True. In fact it's complete nonsense.

 

You don't know that. Stop pretending.

 

Ahem, well out of the two of us, which one has solid facts that aren't theoretical. Good sir, please stop pretending.

 

I would beg to disagree, to offer the thought that it's merely a matter of developing authentically and directly democratic forms of social and political organization that can supplant the state as we know it, the state as an instrument of the power of a ruling class.

 

Btw, have you-all noticed something very telling, that the in-vogue nomenclature used to describe Russia’s superrich fat cats is “oligarchs”, but the ultra-piggy capitalist pigs of the West’s unofficial but quite real pigocracy are never referred to by the news readers or talking heads on news programs by that quite accurate and honest label? There seems to be a bit of a double standard here, hmm? But let me be clear, my point isn’t merely that this Russophobic double standard unfairly disfavors Russia’s dominant economic elites, rather it unjustifiably favors the West’s capitalist ruling class. Fancy that, a bias that favors the capitalist ruling class existing in a capitalist society, and promoted by the corporate-owned media. Who’d have thunk it? Marxists who’ve liberated their minds from American ideology, and other critical thinkers, that’s who. But certainly not my naively pro-capitalist friends in this thread.

 

Well yea I mean, in theory it should work. But practically speaking, it is so very difficult to develop authentically that it is almost nie impossible to have a country without a state. Not to mention that, without the state, that country would be consumed by war-mongers within days.

 

This is more than a tad bit pessimistic.

 

Pessimism is more safe than optimism. Which is why Mr. Mussolini's quote in my sig makes some sense. The left is destructive because it tends to assume optimism about the world, communism being one of the theories associated with left wing ideology.

You can assume optimism, in the manner that you propose, but the issue with this is that it is a huge gamble that really should be avoided at all costs; you don't rob a bank without making sure you have a secure getaway car. I suppose that's actually a terrible analogy but it still sorta works.

 

Well, one does have to presume that any change has some possibility of being worse than not changing.

Dumping slavery could have made things worse.

Allowing women and African Americans to vote, even to the point of considering them as equals could have made things worse.

Moving against the trusts that strangled American business could have made things worse.

Deciding that corporations are equivalent to people (people who can live forever, or die and rise from the dead free of their past) could have made things worse.

 

Ahhh but how drastic were those changes, hmm? Communism advocates for a complete tear down of the system.

The system still existed for those changes, we just made changes for the better that improved the system. So we certainly can fix the issues with capitalism, but we don't want to tear it all down.

 

Absolutely.

The idea that change includes some measure of risk can not be allowed to paralyze America in its tracks.

The world is changing. America is changing. Our competitive advantages are changing.

The idea of requiring us to ignore that is just plain ridiculous to the point of being suicide.

 

I prefer a couple of quotes derived from the writings of another eminent, and a considerably more enlightened Italian, Antonio Gramsci (who, btw, was murdered by your dear duce):

"I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will."

"The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned."

In short, a communist is someone who is under no utopian misapprehension about the daunting difficulty of actualizing his/her vision of a more ethically decent, free, and humanistic form of society, but who makes the choice, who musters and sustains the will to not become pessimistic, to not fatalistically resign him/herself to the unjust established order of things, to maintaining the hope that eventually a goodly number of human beings will come to their senses and rise up to bring the capitalist plutocracy down, and to replace it with social, economic, and political structures that are genuinely democratic and communalistic.

 

Yes, change, revolutionary change involves some measure of risk, but so does resigning ourselves to the capitalist status quo, to living under the rule of capitalist elites (such as Mr. Trump, for instance).

 

Close, but no cigar

A communist is someone who views the world idealistically and believes that, at heart, mankind is good, and that there exists no bad seeds; in this belief, communists believe that the world can be a utopia if we all just do it right once, regardless of what the facts point to. In this quest for a utopia, the democratic and communalistic political structures that should have existed are replaced with dictatorships with rulers who are complete fools and care not about the strength of their nation but about the strength of their dominance, which is folly.

I'm not one of those staunch right wingers who refuses to look at facts and just claims things on faith. But economically, you have to understand the complexities of the modern economy. See, maybe this would have worked back in Marx's time. Trusts were just starting to rise up, so we could easily shut them down and establish a true communism. However, nowadays, our economy is ruled by the large trusts and big business, tethered to the State and seeping into our everyday lives. To fight this, we can shift radically to communism. And communism won't exactly be compatible with the lifestyle we live in. Even this computer that I am typing on is the result of global capitalism from big business; to organize that kind of trade under communism is nie impossible. If you simplify society, sure, it works. But society was simple back in 1850, but not today.

I do agree that capitalism has its failings and that we do need to get some of those Donald Trumps out and publically executed (lol , it would be beautiful....) But communism is not the answer. I think we need a different system, sure, but not communism or socialism.

And yes, I know good 'ol Benito was kind of an idiot. I'm sorry, I'm just not a communist and don't agree with communism at all. Unless you can find me a communism that has been proven to work with our modern lifestyle (some call the Amish communist, but they aren't exactly living it up), I won't agree with the ideology.

 

The amish aren't living it up? They have a belief system that has systematically rejected the overstimulation of the youth, rejected the capitalist model of mass communication and connected, rejected the mindless droning about capitalist economics, rejected the GMO-Fast Food-Corporate Obesity Conglomerate endorsed by our government and free market proponents, rejected our societal racism, and rejected our legalese for profit justice system.

The Amish have forged their own destiny. Quite unlike the mindless drones in the ever grinding machine of capitalism, they have determined their own fate.

Capitalism has proven throughout the years to be an inhumane, profiteering, monopoly creating, solidarity destroying beast that reduces PEOPLE to numbers on a budget sheet.

It is the lame cow that needs to be taken out back and a bullet put between its eyes.

 

Your definition of a communist is merely a straw man.

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Well said, thank you.

 

Our population is growing denser and more urban, making us more interdependent. Our technology is advancing more rapidly, and being successful is much more likely to require more education than we provide. Our competitive advantage is in fields requiring higher education. Medical solutions are advancing, but their expense is keeping pace with that, while we are seeing health care growing toward being a right rather than an advantage of being rich - plus, we can not afford having people out of work due to disease.

In the end, any acceptable solution is going to have to take those factors into account.

Without significant regulation, capitalism simply doesn't solve the problems we face.

I am not suggesting we move to socialism. That has serious problems, too. But, the above issues are going to require more regulation and more solutions implemented through government.

One key step is seen in other countries where health care is being provided at lower cost and more evenly across their populations. Our capitalist system costs more and serves fewer - a failure that leads to fewer hours of work and higher rates of bankruptcy, let alone the suffering and inequality.

 

I'm not saying that capitalism is perfect. We seriously do need to fix up our current system. I have a few ideas, but I'm kinda bored of talking about them. One I guess would be to do what Germany did with Volkswagen way back when. Volkswagen was a private company, but it was associated with the German government, making cars affordable for an impoverished German people but not becoming a monopoly trust robber baron US Andrew Carnegie style thing. That's just a general overview, if I feel like talking about it more I may later, but I've fully explained this in other posts.