Why do people still blame communism?

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Their politics are still heavily based on the works of Karl Marx and thus they're communistic. Plenty of changes were made to the Quake engine before Valve made Half-Life, but it still runs on the Quake engine.



And some of these branches are Juche, Maoism, Stalinism, Titoism and Leninism.



Compare the salary of someone who has a master's degree in engineering versus someone who sweeps the floor at McDonald's. The former worked his ass of for 60 hrs. a day with very little money ot get where he is; the latter has never had a single thing to worry about after graduating middle school and made his own money while the former lived as if he was in prison.



Only sons of wealthy socialist leaders (Uday Hussein. Fidelito, Kim Jong-un etc.) can do this. If the heirs to Walt Disney were lazy and incompetent, they'd have to file for bankrupcy ages ago.



Have you ever worked next to people in low status jobs? I worked in a storeroom one summer as a forklift operator. 90% of all the Norwegians didn't do a damn if they didn't have to and the middle management leaders were perfectly content with mediocrity. The Norwegians were typically 15 minutes late for work, took smoke breaks for 20 minutes every two hours and spent more time talking to each other rather than actually doing what they were supposedly payed for. Omly the immigrants actually did anything.

Most low payed workers in the US and EU would have starved to death ages ago in poorer countries because they're so f@cking lazy.



Thank God.



Explain. Why would you want to do any services for a mechanic who could only repay you with car services when you don't own a car?

I think most people would be more satisfied if they were able to keep their autonomy without the threat of starvation rooted in subordinative property relations.

Fine. Propose a -practical working- alternative to the current system. Collectivist socialism has been an abject failure. The only socialist systems that work are -mixed economies-. In order to work an economy needs something resembling a market.

ruveyn

Communism has never actually been tried, apparently neither has Sharia.

The good news for both - they can be tried inexhaustibly without ever claiming responsibility for inherent deficiency or shortcoming.

This is a result of compulsory labor, if people were allowed do what they want with there lives free from major economic coercion, people who wanted to be there would be there, the people who don't would simply be somewhere else. It turns out most people are not passionate about working 6 hours for bosses they were compelled to work for. We don't need to work as much as we do today. A lot of work is destructive to the environment.

In any Western liberal democracy, no one is legally permitted to coerce another or breach contracts. No one is preventing these workers from leaving to find other work, or to start a business. Slavery and indentured bondage have been practically universally abolished.

And some environmental disruption is implicitly accepted by society due to the marginal benefit of the added social products being higher than that of the marginal cost of cleaning or preventing a given amount of degradation. People work as much as they do because they want the products and benefits of modern society, and pay according to supply and demand. As with anything it's a matter of degree and expressed societal consensus. Crack open any textbook on basic economics made in the last century and you'll find marginal analysis explained quite well.

Last edited by drh1138 on 16 May 2013, 7:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Western liberal "democracy" is no where near non coercive. First off we have to make the assumption that the assertion of private property justifys the use of force. Prisoners have voluntary actions, but that doesn't make them free. I believe in voluntary lack of hierarchy as opposed to despotism.

I would like to start a worker cooperative but I can't because I am required to accumulate the cash necessary to buy the resources necessary to do so.

Last edited by RushKing on 16 May 2013, 9:08 pm, edited 2 times in total.

To be fair most of "basic economics" is BS.

Even if one accepts that pure communism hasn't killed millions, attempts to get there have, and those attempts have pretty conclusively demonstrated that, in the real word as opposed to on paper, communism cannot be achieved on a large scale without some combination of the following:

1. Mass imprisonment of dissenting segments of the population
2. Mass murder of the same
3. Expulsion of same
4. Total state control of information dissemination
5. A pervasive internal security operation (read: police state) to effect #s 1-3 on any person who misbehaves

Human nature being what it is, those people in charge of such an apparatus will be the most opportunistic and ruthless elements of society and will thus be exceedingly disinclined to voluntarily surrender their power even if the masses they rule are at last compliant & ready for 'true' communism.

The quest for perfect communism is a 'you can't get there from here' situation. At least, you can't reach it except by egregious brutality and total dehumanization of the very people that the new order is supposed to help.

/\ /\ /\
Precisely!
They'll never comprehend that, though.

Why it that the same people that say 'you can't blame communism for what happens in the real world because this is not what comes in the textbook' don't care about what say in the textbook about capitalism and blame it for how it applies to the real world?

Since the end of the USSR though and the end of the Communist Menace suddenly the class warfare has intensified as has the social stratification and the "contradictions of capitalism" have returned with a vengeance. In short, people fought for a better deal and with the threat of communism, the elite made concessions. No more communism, the concessions are being rolled back and we are returning to Victorian times.

My reason for once accepting that line of argument was because I hated the world as it was, and fervently wished that there was a workable alternative. Can't speak for anyone else, tho.

I've read Wealth of Nations. I've read the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital. There's nothing wrong with either worldview in the textbook. It's the application to the real world that causes problems. It's the fact that things don't play out in the real world like they do in the texts.

Also... Throughout this thread most of us have been equally critical of Capitalism and Communism.

I think it can be safely said that Communism is to be credited with the improvements we have had particularly since World War II and the one-sided class war that followed the end of the east bloc and the rolling back of those improvements provides proof of that.

It certainly is true that US society has turned on itself in the wake of the collapse of Soviet communism. I see this as the tendency of this society to need an enemy to unite against. In the absence of an external enemy, societal elements turn against each other, or build upon previously-existing divisions. Somewhat the same thing as what you're saying about the class war, since class is one of those internal divisions.

I'm curious why you think communism is responsible for improvements since WWII, since many major elements of the progressive state were already in place before WWII, like Social Security, a 40 hour work week, better workplace safety, a progressive income tax, the vote for women, and antitrust legislation.