Why not Socialism?

[verybdog]

couldn't find a socialism one

You are a victim of propaganda without realizing it.

[Mel Brennan]

i mean an actual picture

I mean that it's ironic that you mention MONOPOLY at all, let alone mention the fact that you could not find an image representing a socialist "take" on it, given the fact that the game started out and propagated as an anti-monopolistic, socialist experience, and was co-opted, capitalistically, into a commodity producing a commodofying game experience (the perfect opposite of the creators' intent, but perfectly reflective of the corporate engine that ate the game up and spat out what you know as MONOPOLY).

[furie]

You are a victim of propaganda without realizing it.

the picture was a joke.
lighten up, Francis.

[Shurik]

Not really, and I find the individual characters more descriptive of a failed morality than of an economic system, but, see above; I'm out of my mind.

Well, if this statement had sprung from a condition of having read the book carefully, you wouldn't have made it. Actually, Volka goes into great detail explaining the venerable Hassan Abdurrahman the advantages of the socialist system over the blood-sucking capitalist one. Mr. Khottabych is finally convinced when he sees the moral downfall of Mr. American Man.

But fine, if you want me to actually seriously discuss a book of satirical fiction that I last read 15 years ago, its last sentence actually is directly in line with my point. The Soviet system had nothing to do with Communism. It started with a leftist philosophy and quickly devolved into a hardline right wing tyranny.

[Mel Brennan]

...Mr. Khottabych is finally convinced when he sees the moral downfall of Mr. American Man...

That's my point, actually, but whatever; this sideshow is not central to much I'm posting.

[Shurik]

Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned. Socialism surpresses the individual in favor of the state.

no thank you.

Can I try my hand at spewing statements based on erroneous third-hand propaganda about issues I have a very vague understanding of?

Cybernetics is a pseudo-science, used by capitalist states to suppress the initiative of the working masses. The so-called "binary logic" contradicts the Marxist philosophy of dialectic materialism and therefore cannot be either right or useable. The influence of this newest invention of reactionary ruling classes of imperialist nations would be to undermine the class struggle, robbing the proletariat of its theoretical basis.
The future of humankind clearly lies with analog technologies.

[Smiley321]

Can I try my hand at spewing statements based on erroneous third-hand propaganda about issues I have a very vague understanding of?
.

You already did that with your first post in this thread, claiming that the USSR was a right-wing government

The willful ignorance displayed with that claim is breathtaking.

[ratdog]

You already did that with your first post in this thread, claiming that the USSR was a right-wing government

The willful ignorance displayed with that claim is breathtaking.

I love when people who are ignorant about socialist ideas and history feel free to display their ignorance to the world. OK, no I don't. I wish they'd shut up until they know something about the topic first.

Stalin was a good old fashioned right-wing dictator who siezed power in a counter-revolution and immediately started liquidating anyone from the real Left as quickly as he could catch them. It was Old Bolsheviks, anarchists and other leftists who first filled Stalin's gulags. Sure, he gussied up his rule in twisted pseudo-Marxist rhetoric, but that rhetoric was as empty as Dan Quayle's head and there was little about the Soviet Union after Stalin that was genuinely "socialist". Even the economic system was a variant of 'state capitalism'.

Both the Stalinists and the U.S. had a stake in perpetuating the lie that the Soviet Union was socialist. The Stalinists got to use Marx and Lenin to legitimize their rule and the U.S. got to point at Stalininst regimes and say "See? See? That's what socialism is! Isn't it horrible?". Any real socialists who pointed this out were marginalized by both sides.

[Mel Brennan]

You already did that with your first post in this thread, claiming that the USSR was a right-wing government

The willful ignorance displayed with that claim is breathtaking.

Your refutation that praxis-achieving governments like the USSR under Stalin were typically - typically - defined as "FAR-right wing" takes MY breath away.

But you'd have to actually KNOW something about that, and then post what you know, to make sense here. God forbid.

Have some Grace Family Vineyards (http://www.gracefamilyvineyards.com/rams/CATALYST1.ram)...you'll post better, I promise.

[Matt in the Hat]

The trouble is that capitalism is inherently actively anti-democratic and democracy is inherently anti-capitalist. The results thus far of the "American experiment" suggest that you can have a strong democracy with limited capitalism or strong capitalism with a weak or nonexistent democracy. The American power structure has opted for strong capitalism and a weak democracy.

BS. Capitalism and Democracy are the same activity. Plus, we are not a democracy.

Can you post anything other than easily disprovable talking points.

Kiss my Dick

France's economic growth in 2004 came in at about 2.3%. This is above the 2.2% expected by most economists.

It is true that French companies complained that the strength of the euro against other currencies was making export business difficult. Still, despite the strong currency, French exports rose 5.6%.

Imports did jump 8.6% due to both the strength of the Euro and the dramatic rise in oil prices. This disproves the right-wing argument that there is no domestic demand in France.

Several sources indicate that France will enjoy good growth in 2005. Industrial output in December, 2004 rose 0.7% over November, well in excess of the 0.3% forecast by economists.

A recent survey of France's dominant service sector showed activity hit a seven-month high in January, 2005. The bad news is that, like in the U.S., the rate of growth isn't creating any substantial increase in employment.

Oh, and btw, France is tied with the UK for 6th largest economy in the world and they're ahead of the UK (and far, far ahead of the US) in GDP per capita in 2002, according to the most recent data I could find.

So why did France expand its workweek?

[Matt in the Hat]

And yet, we have the "USA Patriot Act", thus proving that America is, by your definition, UnAmerican. Quelle irony, n'est-ce pas?
Certainly, The PATRIOT act sucks balls

[Mel Brennan]

BS. Capitalism and Democracy are the same activity...

This is so untrue as to be laughable. Have you ever left the country?

[Shurik]

BS. Capitalism and Democracy are the same activity.

Unless you are ready to either proclaim Ancient Greece a capitalist country or argue the same point about marine biology and "waxing the dolphin", you are going to have to explain further.

Plus, we are not a democracy.

Yes we are. A republican representative democracy. But I am eager to hear your examples.

[Matt in the Hat]

This is so untrue as to be laughable. Have you ever left the country?
Absolutely

Here it is.
Capitalism is voting with your dollar
Democracy is voting with your ballot
Same thing.

[Matt in the Hat]

Unless you are ready to either proclaim Ancient Greece a capitalist country or argue the same point about marine biology and "waxing the dolphin", you are going to have to explain further.



Yes we are. A republican representative democracy. But I am eager to hear your examples.
Our supreme court certainly isn't a function of democracy. Neither is our president.
Democracy is mob rule. If 3 men and 2 women are in a room and the men vote to rape the women, that is democracy.

[Shurik]

Absolutely

Here it is.
Capitalism is voting with your dollar
Democracy is voting with your ballot
Same thing.

Ah. So, soccer is kicking a ball to a teammate and avoiding date rape is kicking a mate in the balls. Same thing, right?

Our supreme court certainly isn't a function of democracy. Neither is our president.
Democracy is mob rule. If 3 men and 2 women are in a room and the men vote to rape the women, that is democracy

Is this what you and your buddies from the lacrosse team did to your Politics and Economics high school teachers?

[Greywacke]

Absolutely

Here it is.
Capitalism is voting with your dollar
Democracy is voting with your ballot
Same thing.
However, the number of votes controlled by an individual are quite different, no?

[Mel Brennan]

Absolutely

Here it is.
Capitalism is voting with your dollar
Democracy is voting with your ballot
Same thing.

This is why citizenship, and citizens actually getting the fullest fruits of the trillions they put into the Shared Experiment, is still a MLK-esque Dream.

Democracy, for it to work, can NEVER, EVER be reduced to just voting. That's Bush-speak. Democracy includes all KINDS of things fundamental to manifesting government by of and for the people (including but not exclusive to things like transparency, freedom of information, security of person from the state/privacy, truthseeking media, freedom from abject poverty, rights to education, to health care, etc.), the end of ONE strand of which you find, as a result of participation in/access to most other aspects, voting as a substantively meaningful activity reflective of immersion in the aforementioned.

Likewise, capitalism is far more than the reduction of humans into consumers, informed or no, "voting" with their dollar.

Capitalism employs private ownership and markets. It remunerates property, power, and output, and, as a result, has produced some of the widest disparities of income and wealth found in human history. The division of labor within capitalism is hierarchical. Capitalists rule workers while coordinators occupy the terrain between labor and capital, partly administering on behalf of capitalists [partly dreaming of becoming a member of the owner "class," and thus often working harder than owners themselves to maintain and perpetuate such systems of dominance in the hope of eventually, ultimately escaping the "dominated" side of the equation and being able to "dominate" themsevles] and partly trying to enlarge their own interests at the expense of both capitalists above and workers below.

Within this broad rubric there is certainly variation. Workers may or may not have unions and other forms of organization to aid in manifesting their preferences—and the same can be true for the coordinator class that may have amassed greater or lesser means of accruing wealth and power unto itself at the expense of either capitalists or workers. At its most oppressive, there is the cut-throat capitalism of robber barons with gigantic, unrestrained corporate power dominating all social choices and options. At its least oppressive, there is an ameliorated system of capitalism called social democracy in which laborers and consumers have considerable local and state power and use it to ward off the worst outcomes of markets and private ownership.

In any case, the basic model called capitalism because of its intrinsic tendencies of private ownership of means of production, hierarchical corporate divisions of labor, and competitive markets, not only doesn’t facilitate solidarity, diversity, equity, and participatory self-management, it violates each of these values producing virtually the exact opposite. As the tremendously influential British Nobel economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) put it:

[Capitalism] is not a success. It is not intelligent, it is not beau- tiful, it is not just, it is not virtuous—and it doesn’t deliver the goods. In short, we dislike it, and we are beginning to despise it. But when we wonder what to put in its place, we are extremely perplexed.

Globally, benefits go disproportionately to the stronger traders who thereby increase their relative dominance.

Opportunist rhetoric aside, capitalist globalization’s flow of resources, assets, outputs, cash, capital, and harmful by-products primarily further empowers the already powerful and further enriches the already rich at the expense of the weak and poor. The result is that at the turn of the twenty-first century of the 100 largest economies in the world, almost exactly half are not countries but are private, profit-seeking corporations.

Similarly, market competition for resources, revenues, and audience is nearly always a zero-sum game. Each actor advances at the expense of others so that capitalist globalization promotes a self-interested “me-first” logic that generates hostility and destroys solidarity between actors. This dynamic occurs from individuals through industries and states. Collectively beneficial public and social goods like parks, health-care, education, and social infra- structure are downplayed while individually enjoyed private goods are prioritized. Businesses and nations augment their own profits and simultaneously impose harsh losses on weak constituencies. Humanity’s well-being doesn’t guide the process but is instead sacrificed on behalf of private profit. Against capitalist globalization solidarity fights a rearguard battle even to exist, much less to predominate.

Moreover, cultural communities’ values disperse only as widely as their megaphones permit, and worse, are frequently drowned out by communities with larger megaphones impinging on them. Thus capitalist globalization swamps quality with quantity. It creates cultural homogenization not cultural diversity. Not only do McDonald’s and Starbucks proliferate, so do Hollywood images and Madison Avenue styles. The indigenous and non-commercial suffer. Diversity declines.

At the same time, only political and corporate elites inhabit the decision making halls of the capitalist globalizers. The idea that the broad public of working people, consumers, farmers, the poor, and the disenfranchised should have proportionate say is considered ludicrous. Capitalist globalization’s agenda is precisely to reduce the influence of whole populations to the advantage of Western corporate and political rule. Capitalist globalization imposes hierarchy not only in economies, but also in politics where it fosters authoritarian state structures. It steadily reduces the number of people who have any say over their own communities, much less over nations, or the planet. And as the financiers in corporate headquarters extend their shareholders’ powers, the earth beneath our feet is dug, drowned, and paved with no attention to species, ecology, or humanity. Profit and power drive all calculations.

In sum, capitalist globalization produces poverty, ill health, shortened life spans, reduced quality of life, and ecological collapse.*

It is not the answer. Now I'm not here to tell you that socialism, or any ism, is either; what I am here to submit is that I like the simple acknowledgment of reality with which socialism begins: we are all in this together.

Local to global, that is a practical truth that capitalism always fails to recognize; while, admittedly affirming that within every person that must come forth when the body with which each person IS in, "all together," is wrong, capitalism today, again, forgets the underpinnings that Smith affirms in works like A Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which he makes clear that systems like capitalism are not fundamental in and of themselves, but rather are applied within fundamental frameworks consisting of VALUES (trust, loyalty, community), values only expressed when one acknowledges in a living way:

We are all in this together.

-----

*Parecon: Life After Capitalism, MICHAEL ALBERT, which draws upon these sources among many others:

R. C. D'Arge and E. K. Hunt, "Environmental Pollution, Externalities and Conventional Economic Wisdom: A Critique" (Environmental Affairs no. 1, 1971)
Sam Bowles, “What Markets Can and Cannot Do” (Challenge Magazine, July 1991)
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital (Monthly Review, 1974)
Pat Devine, Democracy and Economic Planning (Cambridge, 1988)
Herb Gintis, "Alienation and Power: Towards a Radical Welfare Economics" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard, May 1969)
Daniel Guerin, Anarchism (Monthly Review, 1966)
E. K. Hunt and R. C. D'Arge, "On Lemmings and Other Acquisitive Animals: Propositions on Consumption" (Journal of Economic Issues 7, no. 2, June 1973)
E. K. Hunt, "A Radical Critique of Welfare Economics," in Ed Nell ed. Growth, Profits, and Property (Cambridge, 1980)
Peter Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (New York University, 1972)
Oscar Lange and Frederick Taylor, On the Economic Theory of Socialism (Monthly Review, 1964)
Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed (Harper and Row, 1974)
Stephen Marglin, "What Do Bosses Do?" (Review of Radical Political Economics, 1974)
Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (George Allen and Unwin, 1983)
Anton Pannekoek, Workers Councils (Southem Advocate for Workers’ Councils, Melbouren, 1951)
Rudolf Rocker, Anarcho Syndicalism (http:// flag.blackened.net /rocker/works.htm #Anarchism%20and% 20Anarcho-Syndicalism)
Stephen Shalom, Socialist Visions (SEP, 1983)
Jaroslav Vanek, The General Theory of Labor Self-Managed Economies (Cornell University, 1970)
Pat Walker, ed. Between Labor and Capital (SEP, 1979)

[quentinc]

You already did that with your first post in this thread, claiming that the USSR was a right-wing government

The willful ignorance displayed with that claim is breathtaking.
The USSR was right-wing. An ideal communist society would be as far left-wing as you could go. The USSR was anything but an ideal communist society. It was run by a dictator, which is the most extreme measure of right-wing rule. Anarchy is another story, since that implies no government at all.

[ratdog]

BS. Capitalism and Democracy are the same activity.

You gotta lay off reading Uncle Miltie's empty-headed political burpings. They're rotting your brain, son.

Plus, we are not a democracy.

I love it when the Ridiculous Right squeals long and loud that we're "spreading democracy around the globe" and how we need to educate everyone to become agreat democracy like us. Until... Someone reminds them what democracy really is and tries to get them to bring democracy into the economic realm. Then they can't disavow the idea that America is a democracy fast enough. What a bunch of idiotic hypocrites.

Anyway, the inner war they experience regarding their feelings towrds capitalism and democracy is just one more proof of how incompatible those two things are.

Kiss my Dick

Sorry, I don't swing that way. You must have me confused with Mr. Bush. But your response just proves that you recognize the truth of my accusation. Thank you for that acknowledgement.

So why did France expand its workweek?

Because employers refused to hire more workers. They refused to hire more workers in part because Bush is irresponsibly letting the value of the dollar decline in a desperate attempt to boost our lacklustre economy and in part because after the Japanese began eating our lunch the American ruling class (both Dem and Reep) has spent the last 25 years leading the "race to the bottom" by simply cutting the poor and middle class loose and Brasilifying the US. At any rate, the French will do what they do regardless of what we want them to do - and that's what realy pisses off the Ridiculous Right. The Right here hates any people who can think for themselves and whose continued refusal to roll over and die due to their failure to follow the Right's wrong-headed diktats just shows how wrong headed the diktate are.

Now, you answer me a question: Why is it that those areas on whom the Washington Consensus "free market" model you espouse has been imposed (Russia, Central America, much of Africa, etc.) have all failed to reap the promised benefits while those countries that have done virtually the opposite (Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, China, etc.) have been the only areas to enjoy superior economic growth as long as they were allowed to keep up their government-led programs?

Really, MITH, you need to read about economics so you can stop repeating the same old refuted talking points and begin to think for yourself.