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I don't think anyone but HorseLord is going to defend the worst of the gulags. That said, your complaint about the Soviets allowing uranium radiation to hurt their forced labourers is a bit of an odd choice since at the very same time in your glorious free market of America both the federal government and the free market deliberately allowed the Native Americans come to radiation poisoning harm. Oh look, they only passed a compensation act in 1990, just in time for the death of the Soviet Union.
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Feb 15, 2016 23:35
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Crowsbeak posted:Could I interject in here? So I was wondering if I would be considered a Socialist, because I believe an ideal society is where you have competing firms completely owned and operated by their employees, with firms operating through democratic when large enough, committees. Does that make me a socialist? While aslso allowing for healthcare to be covered by the government or through private insurers. Certainly socialist leaning. What you're discussing in terms of firms are co-operatives (which exist in the world right now, just often aren't as big as the megacorps). That can also be referred to as syndicalism, which is part of socialist and anarchist theory. Healthcare provided by the government is socialism, a mixture of public and private is social democracy and is the main form of healthcare provision around the world (the USA being the glaring exception).
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Feb 16, 2016 00:44
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Thug Lessons posted:That's very similar to anarcho-syndicalism, but to a certain extent socialism (as it's understood by Marxists) carries utopian implications that you don't seem to have. Aren't the works of Engels (and later Lenin and to a lesser extent Trotsky) meant to examine a practical application? I've not gotten to Engels after Marx's death but seem to recall he looked at this.
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Feb 16, 2016 13:06
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Uh, Yugoslavia?
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Feb 16, 2016 14:19
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HorseLord posted:They were big on worker's self management. Oh, you meant historically, I thought you meant on-going and was a little bit.  Thug Lessons posted:Have you read Volume 3? No-one reads Volume 3. 
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Feb 16, 2016 16:12
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site posted:Why don't people read capital vol3? It's a bit of a long running joke that Das Kapital is very hard to get through, and it's a slog. There used to be a fantastic chart showing the relative number of purchases on Amazon or somewhere similar and Das Kapital Vol. 1 has loads of buyers, Vol. 2 less than half that and Vol. 3 almost none. Das Kapital is not light reading.
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Feb 16, 2016 21:39
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OwlFancier posted:Speaking of, actually, what's everyone's recommendations for a good print version? I'd like one with modern annotations if possible and preferably not one attempting to demolish the arguments set out in the book. I get Penguin versions of Marx & Engels works by default, mostly because they're cheaper (stereotypes abound) and have all the notes added by Marx and Engels as well as ones by the translator about who Marx is alluding to when talking about whichever 'bourgeois economist' is his subject of ire this paragraph, as well as picking up on references to other literature and languages. Surprisingly decent in my opinion.
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Feb 16, 2016 21:47
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Oh Sheikh, as for your question on Volumes 2 and 3 - I can't really say, I stopped at 1 same as you did, as I didn't feel I had to time to properly invest myself in them. But I doubt they could get any harder to read, really.
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Feb 19, 2016 14:00
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Zodium posted:that's not a very good question. I don't carry around an exhaustive loving list of all conceivable ethical and political problems, now do I, so my answer is going to be contingent on the, unknowable to me, true proportion of "ethical and political problems" I possess accurate knowledge about, out of the entire space of ethical and political problems. so I guess I think that has undefined likelihood and probability. but the fact of the matter is it's not like you needed me to tell you that, is it now? you're obviously not stupid. what gives with the disingenuity? He deliberately turned your own level of vague questioning back on you to show how absurd it is what you're arguing.
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Feb 20, 2016 00:08
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I mean I appreciate that Marx is certainly not infallible but "Marx is a moron" coupled with tacit admittance of never having read anything he did beyond a summary of the Communist Manifesto is... something new.
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Feb 20, 2016 01:33
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Rollofthedice posted:New for this thread, maybe. New in general? Not particularly. Well yes, but normally it's not wrapped up in 'how dare Marx not use philosophy from after he died to bolster his points.'
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Feb 20, 2016 01:41
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You'll feel really loving stupid when I prove freemarketons are not just a theoretical particle that guides freehandian force.
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Feb 20, 2016 01:54
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DeusExMachinima posted:How many millions of Americans have starved in the last 2 years as the government rejects outside food aid? Are you deliberately keeping it outside the time frame where natural disasters have occurred in the US because while Stalin was horrific during the Holodomor he was not the sole factor. Also the fact that a notable class of victim of the Holodomor were the kolkhozs, which were literally communist collectives. Stalin killing communists sure showed us that communism doesn't work!
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May 16, 2016 16:18
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HorseLord posted:Actually the USSR came from a revolution that had majority support. Seriously, what the hell is wrong with you? The February revolution yes, the October revolution led to Rosa Luxemburg's decrying of a revolution betrayed. Not to say that I would have sided with the Mensheviks. (I'd have killed Trotsky and Stalin and taken Russia for myself, mwahahahahaha)
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May 16, 2016 16:22
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Thug Lessons posted:I'd speculate that just getting basic name recognition requires only a small fraction of the cost of the average political campaign. Well yes, but Ol' Jimmy Democrat who's a solid local politician has no hope in hell of beating out the power of the Clinton machine. Name recognition and national prestige are millions apart.
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May 16, 2016 17:09
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Stinky_Pete posted:Because there are always people like Tesseraction, joking or no. Yeah, I mean my whole joke here is that both of them were agitating for power and that's why I wouldn't have trusted either of them. The joke then being as if I was agitating for the power myself.
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May 16, 2016 21:04
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asdf32 posted:Large scale human society requires hierarchy where some individuals have huge amounts of power and/or economic power. On what basis?
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May 17, 2016 00:28
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asdf32 posted:On the basis that marxists don't advocate for libertarian anarchism and require a functioning government structure which involves a hierarchy of institutions with individuals leading them who have outsized economic and/or political power. 'Marxists' don't because Marxism is an analytical school of thought. Anarchism is something Marx himself was sceptical of, but it was Engels who waxed lyrical on the purpose of government towards a socialist/communist goal. I do not fault people for not understanding Marxism/Socialist/Communism but you seem very assured of what you don't seem to have a single understanding of. What have you read to get these wildly inaccurate ideas?
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May 17, 2016 00:38
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Speaking of, you said you'd give me some decent textbooks to promote a pro-Stalin understanding of history but then you seemed to be busy for a few months immediately afterwards. Gimme the titles you jerk!
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May 17, 2016 01:04
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HorseLord posted:I'm lazy as gently caress. Well get around to it.
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May 17, 2016 01:14
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OwlFancier posted:Winning the most you can win at anything ever would have been the successful usurpation of capitalism the world over, not the decline and fall of the USSR within the century. Russia went from backwater failed empire to a nuclear power within a generation. I can criticise their human rights but yeesh, the development of the country was astounding and only matched by China. Both with horrific death tolls but they also managed to make their countries later immune to the same causes of the death tolls.
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May 17, 2016 01:43
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OwlFancier posted:That might be the thing I have been suggesting for the past couple of pages. Being fair you're talking to anti-Trotsky posters. Trotsky specifically criticised Leninism as being exploitable by totalitarianism. Or so I'm told. Some arsehole won't give me the alternative texts to read.
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May 17, 2016 01:57
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Ah yes, noted Marxist Pol Pot, a man unintentionally put in place by Nixon, and later backed politically and financially by Carter, Reagan and Thatcher. The cold war was full of duplicitous assholes. Pol Pot is an interesting one given for all the talk about how moustache-twirlingly evil he was, there's always a drop-off in volume that it was those godless communists from Vietnam who ousted the Khmer Rouge, and it was the Western anti-communist bloc who supported his government-in-exile.
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Dec 30, 2016 01:29
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GunnerJ posted:Thread title should possibly be changed to "Give Me Your Hot Takes About Marxism, Socialism, and Communism" There's so many valid criticisms about all three topics and yet it's always people who have no idea about the topics but read the latest op-ed about some rear end in a top hat who historically waved a red-tinted flag.
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Dec 30, 2016 01:39
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Pol Pot was a racist baby with a severe inferiority complex. Turns out that when such a person gets in charge he then proceeds to be a genocidal baby killing anyone he feels might have wronged him at any point in time. See: his persecution of intellectuals because it's really obvious one of them called him a fuckin' idiot at some point in his formative years. I appreciate to the outsider it sounds like a No True Scotsman issue but he really was just a racist who found that socialist rhetoric got people on side. It's hardly novel - Hitler did the same.
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Dec 30, 2016 02:18
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Philip Rivers posted:Me in 2077: was Trump a communist?? Certain elements of the American voter base in 2016: is Trump the most socialist candidate running?? Me, then, and most likely all the way to my nuclear blast death: hahahahahahaha
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Dec 30, 2016 02:26
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Philip Rivers posted:Atomic hellfire is a good way to cleanse false consciousness I hear Clearly not or Uncle Joe woulda tried it.
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Dec 30, 2016 02:31
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Over in the Dark Enlightenment thread (currently located in PYF due to a comedy of its birth) a man named Phil Sandifer analyses Curtis Yarvin / Mencius Moldbug and concludes that his brand of alt-right thought is basically failed Marxism - he sees the problems with society but instead of realising the contradictions of capitalism or the like, he just blames black people. It comes down that a lot of people resonate with the feelings that something is hosed up in society, but don't necessarily take a communist/socialist outlook from that. Pol Pot felt things were hosed up because his country wasn't great and he wanted to Make Cambodia Great Again, but he wasn't actually interested in examining the problems of the economy or education system, he just tried to take things back to a 'simpler time' and also chose to be a brutal genocidal maniac about it. This would be a worrying snapshot of what to expect from Trump, but frankly while he's awful and will be awful, America's legal institutions are much stronger than bombed-to-gently caress Cambodia.
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Dec 30, 2016 02:45
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-Blackadder- posted:That's an interesting point and one that I also picked up on from my reading. It's very much like the Right's whitewashed "Leave it to Beaver" view of the "idyllic" 1950's, and how if we could just get back to that point, everything would be good again. It seems like there is a strong undercurrent of the Golden Age fallacy and Appealing to Tradition in that line of thinking. Absolutely! And you saw elements of it in Mao apologists who try to downplay the gently caress-ups of the Great Leap Forward. Mao's heart was mostly in the right place but his brain was located somewhere around his left arsecheek. Ultimately if the real world sucks a lot of people assume reverting poo poo like a bad coding experience will solve the bugs.
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Dec 30, 2016 03:30
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