Red Death - The Horrors Of Communism

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I don't know what a collective farm is in North Korea.

Edit from dictionary.com: "a farm, or a number of farms organized as a unit, worked by a community under the supervision of the state."

Thats not how resources were managed in spain. There was no state, or masters.

Last edited by RushKing on 20 Feb 2014, 2:27 am, edited 2 times in total.

Lets be serious, there would not have been a petroleum industry to nationalize if there had been nothing but Chavez style leaders during its development. The real pity in Venezuelan politics is the constant back and forth between extremes. Chavez has made that fundamental flaw, worse. Argentina has suffered from always being behind the ball (http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/ ... ry-decline) but the real successes in Latin America have been Chile and Uruguay. Although both of those states have had extreme governments, they have been less ideological in preserving what works and so they have become much wealthier. Chavez was a despot and is a backward step for the people of his country and chaps like Chomsky really need to stop trying to talk him up. Business makes unfavorable deals that are exploitative and those deals needed to be changed but really takes an extremist to nationalize those assets. In a more rational state, a tax would have been introduced but Chavez played for control... which tells you what he really wanted all along.

If you are a progressive who wants to see things change for the better in Latin America, focus on where the problem really sits and as a clue its not in the US. My view is that the real problem, be it left or right wing politics in Latin America, the involvement of the military in politics is where things go wrong the most. In that both Chavez and Pinochet have a great deal in common. As a variable it cuts across our ideological blind spots. Military governments from the right make bad deals with big business because they can monopolize the kickbacks and in Chavez made bad decisions because he had Bolivarian complex and a penchant for control. Chavez is not a creature produced by the unions, he is an army man, who has more in common with Pinochet and Peron than he does with someone like Lech Wałęsa.

For a left wing government they have behaved in ways that chaps like Chomsky cannot make sense of, because they want to make a broader narrative of him, rather than see him for what he is.... Just another Latin American junta. As for your statistics LKL, they are unremarkable, the decline in the poor of Venezuela cannot be attributed simply to Chavez, as it was a change that occurred more broadly (better or similar results were seen in Brazil, Panama and Peru). Inequality increased in Chile but poverty decreased overall. The oil industry in Venezuela has also become pretty much the only thing they export, inflation is a serious problem and the murder rate has nearly doubled. It has been fairly solidly rubbish government.

So you are quoting a Venezuelan Government page assessing the improvements of the lives of Venezuelan under Chavez's administration...
nice!

The other two articles are criticizing Venezuelan government of using unsustainable practices.

It is funny that right now the bubble bursted. And people in Venezuela are protesting.

And what is the Venezuelan government doing to hear their outcry?

Shut down opposing media

Incarcerate and shoot protestors.

Yeah, let's take a good look at Venezuela.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16K13Wfg7JQ[/youtube]

This is the part when you put another example that is at least comparable to the case you want to expose



Still waiting for that example...



Guess what. Indigenous communities in Mexico have been agrarian for a few centuries now. What do you think they are? Nomads?



What the hell is Venezuala?

And you kind of missed the point, which was. How can I be so sure you know the right way to get communism to work? And even more. How can you?



Alright then, so let's carry on killing people for a couple of centuries more until we get this dang communism thing to work. These Feudal dudes had 400 years before they had to figure out what was wrong with what they were doing. We need at least that much time don't we?



And now for the grand finale let's toss some idealistic poetic sounding phrase so that we don't have to get to disprove any point made.

So yeah, I get it. Communism isn't about big state management of wealth distribution and work enforcement. It is more of a community of people collaborating all amongst themselves towards a collective good. And I guess is alright. The thing is that to enforce that to people who don't agree to the terms of communism you need a state with a disproportionate amount of power (which leads to all the killing we have been taling about) If you actually want to live within a community formed by people who wanted to be there on their own free will and that share collective interests. I really respect that and as long as you are not messing with whatever other people do, you really can be minding your own businees in whatever political system floats your boat and It will be completely ok by me.

My goal isn't to enforce communism. Most human beings like to do things under their own terms, which is why capitalism inevitably leads to conflict.

I accept your premise but reject your conclusion.

If Stalin wasn't a communist dictator, Einstein wasn't a scientist.

Communist and dictator realistically don't belong in the same sentence, as communism negates having a dictatorship and/or ruling class. Stalin was a facist and just used communist ideology to gain support of the people, kind of like Hitler decided to use the term National Socialism for his party as using the term 'socialism' implied a sense of community among Germans as part of his scheme to gain their support., but in reality he was strongly opposed to socialist/communist ideas.

Here in the USA, we have a Republic. This Republic has decided to run on a capitalist economy.

In the Soviet Union, they had a Dictatorship. The economic model they choose was a communist one.

Communism-Capitalism=Socio-Economics

Republic-Democracy-Dictatorship-Ologarchy=Government

A democracy is to power as communism is to wealth.

Stalin was a communist dictator. Communism only eliminates classes outside of Government.

Actually we have a mixed economy, its largely capitalist with a bit of socialism thrown in....the socialism being the regulations that require things like safe working conditions, compensation for injuries on the job, lack of child labor and things like having a social safety network or welfare.

Also communism isn't simply an economic model....and it calls for the community/people having ownership of the means of production and goods as well as a classless society. Not some totalitarian dictatorship that deprives citizens of basic needs while living in much more wealth than the people have.

And since it is still supposed to be a 'classless' society I don't think that excludes government....pretty sure marx didn't envision a class in poverty and a very wealth ruling class oppressing them as communism. Totalitarian Communism is a perversion of communism.

Wow, do you literally have no idea that the CIA was deeply involved with installing right-wing military dictatorships throughout South America? They even tried it with Chavez, but they failed. This isn't even classified information. It's all been documented very thoroughly.

Last edited by TheGoggles on 20 Feb 2014, 12:17 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Hugo Chavez didn't achieve anything that any person couldn't do in a typical oil boom. Even if economic growth was enough to forgive his sins (which it isn't), it would also mean that Augusto Pinochet was a hero.

Stalin did distribute the wealth; everyone, whether lazy or hardworking, were equally miserable, while he and his aquaintances were rich. This is how communism always works.

Stalin's politics were a direct descendant of Lenin's politics, so by denying that he was a communist, you're using the no true Scotsman fallacy again.

Well you are quoting the wrong person, so please correct that, LKL deserves better. Great powers have always played a role in Latin America, perhaps less so there, than in most places. The US cannot be scapegoated for the problems in Venezuela that I listed on the previous page, they were economic and pretty much the fault of the Chavez Government alone. If US involvement was the independent variable in catastrophe that you seem to be advocating, then a broader view does much to undermine your position. As I mentioned in my last post, the wealthiest state in Latin America is Chile, followed closely by Uruguay, both of which have also seen extensive US involvement. The criticism that I offered (but which you mostly ignored) was that in the successful countries there is attention on what works and less so on what is ideological.

The successor state to Pinochet kept policies that worked and removed those that did not, they were realistic. The independent variable for failure that holds up (and your post does nothing to overturn) is military involvement in civilian affairs, Chavez is just another military leader in a long line of Latin American military dictators. It makes no difference what pretext brought him into power, he ascension was a negative and his governance has been mostly rubbish. As for your implication that I have no idea about US involvement, I am not sure how such a view survives a reading of my entire post on the last page.

The mistake of the United States in Latin America was to see all issues through the prism of the Cold War, it obscured the realities of what was going on and driving things. On this, reform movements were Soviet Plots and Socialist Governments were seen as violating the Monroe Doctrine. It seems that by continuing to see things through a simplistic lens, leftists like Chomsky and yourself are repeating the very same mistake that is at the heart of the criticism they level at the feet of US involvement in the region. On such a view Chavez resists imperialism and he is authoritarian because he is resisting creeping interference. However, when one looks at the opposition to Chavez style rule in Venezuela, it becomes clear that much of the opposition he faces is leftist and not sterotypically reactionary. Rather, such rule faces a broad coalition of concern, from Journalists, to socialists and industrialists as well. As such your position does not recommend itself to me and I must reject it. I don't see the US as a universal boogeyman and so things that occur in the world don't have to be smashed to fit my preconceived narratives.

There are examples of communism working on a small scale with no class system. Having a rich ruling class, and poor working class is not communism so how would a rich dictator be a communist exactly? Explain how this is a fallacy, you keep saying it is so explain how? I would think the fallacy would be in wrongly defining communism as totalitarianism yet still claiming it to be communism. I'd say its a difference of opinion on how communism is defined...so quit trying to claim I am being 'illogical' simply because I disagree with your warped definition.

Even if the examples such as the Soviet Union mentioned in this thread where genuine attempts at communism, they never made it there...so not seeing how communism is the correct term for the totalitarian systems that where formed instead.

Only for short time periods. The most famous example would be the Paris Commune, but sooner or later, this commune would have fallen into the hands of a Papa Smurf looking to get rich and powerful.



Call it the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and this problem solves itself.



Read what Marx has written. Tyranny could be unavoidable during the dictatorship of the Proletariat.



The Soviet genocides were done in the name of communism; communism was used to justify these atrocities.