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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (151128)	9/9/2002 2:28:29 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1586583

Ted the USSR was socialist both according to common definition and according to Marxist theories. To pretend otherwise is to ignore reality. Tim, first that's your reality, not mine. Secondly, you may think Russians were socialists but they did not think they were......they called themselves communists and said they practiced communism. Thirdly, look carefully at the definitions you provide. They called what went on in Russia "the Marxist Leninism version of the Communist doctrine". What that tells you first is that this is a bastardization of communism and not socialism. And it tells you that the operative word is the noun, Leninism. Marxist is the adjective, implying a peripheral effect on the central subject again which is Leninism. Leninism was the basis for what developed in Russia. Lenin and Trotsky perverted Marxist teachings so that they could gain and maintain control over the state. They called for the rising of a state dictatorship [instead of one by the proletariat] that would exist briefly to set up an army, navy and some other institutions, and then would disappear as a communist democracy took over where power flowed from the bottom [the workers] and not from the top down. The confusion, abbreviation of and the perversion of Marxist doctrine is discussed in the the linked article. bari.iww.org And Lenin and Trotsky never intended to hand over their power to the workers and create a communist democracy. Power corrupts. Fourthly, Karl Marx called for a dictatorship of the proletariat, not the nobles or the elite or the oligarchs. In Russia it was the latter two groups that headed the dictatorship and not the workers. And any dictatorship was to be a temporary setup......in Russia, had the money held out, their dictatorship would have run forever. Fifthly, I read the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx in school.......it was horrible reading. I have forgotten a lot of it and I could be wrong. However, if you want to continue this discussion, you can't do so without knowing it........its the 'bible. So when you finish reading it, provide me the pages or the links that support your position and I will go dig up my copy from school and see if you are correct. Otherwise, we will continue to go back and forth, getting no where on this subject. philosophypages.com Karl Marx (1818-1883) Karl Marx was born and educated in Prussia, where he fell under the influence of Ludwig Feuerbach and other radical Hegelians. Although he shared Hegel's belief in dialectical structure and historical inevitability, Marx held that the foundations of reality lay in the material base of economics rather than in the abstract thought of idealistic philosophy. He earned a doctorate at Jena in 1841, writing on the materialism and atheism of Greek atomists, then moved to Köln, where he founded and edited a radical newspaper, Rheinische Zeitung. Although he also attempted to earn a living as a journalist in Paris and Brussels, Marx's participation in unpopular political movements made it difficult to support his growing family. He finally settled in London in 1849, where he lived in poverty while studying and developing his economic and political theories. Above all else, Marx believed that philosophy ought to be employed in practice to change the world. The core of Marx's economic analysis found early expression in the Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844 (Economic and Political Manuscripts of 1844) (1844). There, Marx argued that the conditions of modern industrial societies invariably result in the estrangement (or alienation) of workers from their own labor. In his review of a Bruno Baier book, On the Jewish Question (1844), Marx decried the lingering influence of religion over politics and proposed a revolutionary re-structuring of European society. Much later, Marx undertook a systematic explanation of his economic theories in Das Capital (Capital) (1867-95) and Theorien Über den Mehrwert (Theory of Surplus Value) (1862). Marx and his colleague Friedrich Engels issued the Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (Communist Manifesto) (1848) in the explicit hope of precipitating social revolution. This work describes the class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie, distinguishes communism from other socialist movements, proposes a list of specific social reforms, and urges all workers to unite in revolution against existing regimes. (You may wish to compare this prophetic document with the later exposition of similar principles in Lenin's State and Revolution (1919).)

To: TimF who wrote (151128)	9/9/2002 3:09:08 AM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1586583

Why not a communistic dictatorship? Because even in the opinion of the progpagandists for the old USSR they didn't yet meet Marx's definition of communism. The USSR never met any of the definitions Marx had for communism. It was neither communistic nor even socialistic in nature but a good old fashion dictatorship. Its time has to come........the capitalist system can only be an intermediary phase in human development. Capitalism is too exploitive of people, natural resources, the environment. Marx's theories were better but I don't think it will be the end result either......something else..maybe something in between....maybe socialism or something else. Again I am left without much to say except you could turn around almost every sentance of phrase and get my opinion. Capitalism is the only way to efficently create wealth and cause production to meet demand for a complex economy. Its not efficient. That wont change unless human nature changes. Its not just a matter of people needing to be more noble of spirit, or motivated easier, or more concerned for their fellow man. They would also have to have simplier wants and needs that didn't change as often or quickly. If the economy was static then you could take the time, decades if that was what it took, to plan the perfect economy, but the economy is not static because life is not static. I suspect we will be forced into it a different system. Capitalism is too wasteful for a world rapidly filling up and depleting its resources. Capitalism is not explotive of anything. (althoug capitalists, like people in any system, can be) It is a free market system. Like any other freedom it can be abused. And one of its abuses is to be exploitive. You defend this system like you defend corporations. They both are developed by man so its not surprising that they are flawed. Nothing wrong with that but lets stick with the facts and not the myths. When you have more freedom you have more power to abuse others, but in reality the abuse most often comes when the free market is not allowed. Either the government is abusive, or it supports the private sector in being abusive. Most monopolies exist because of the government not in spite of it. Sometimes the government would have to step in to actually keep a free makret going. It has to keep the peace and provide a court system and prevent fraud and perhaps abusive monopolies. But it's action should be maintain the system rather then to interfere with the system to help those it favors (which happens all too often) Once again you want to make the gov't the bad guy. No question the gov't is flawed and has its own list of abuses. However, a student of American history will quickly see that the corporation has been much more exploitive over time.........at least that's the picture the textbooks from which I studied in middle school and hi school presented. I don't criticize corporations because they are corporations, I criticize them because they have been very exploitive at times in our past. However, as we evolve, they evolve too and become more benign. Demand wasn't relevant under the Russian system. Production was diverted from consumer products to WMD. The consumer demand was there; the Russian leaders simply ignored it. Consumer demand became irrelevant and the people dared not object. Demand was relevant even though it was ignored. It was relevant in the sense that the fact that it was ignored meant people suffered and the economy fell apart eventually. If it totally irrelevant it would not matter if it was ignored. Relevance implies necessity.......Russia would not have been able to ignore demand for 70+ years had that demand been relevant to life in Russia. "Prices are important to communicate the relative level of supply and demand." In a capitalist and socialistic system.......not in a communistic system. Something has to communicate information that is required to determine what goods and services to produce, how much of them, and where to send them. Shifting prices in a free market are the only efficent mechanism to do this that anyone has ever come up with. If you are going to remove prices and other mechanisms something will have to replace them. Even in a system of real Marxist communism this information would still be needed because decisions about what to produce and consume would still have to be made by someone. No, they [prices] don't.......the free system is very inefficient. You don't have to look any further than the recent tech boom and bust. Trust me, we have yet to find the holy grail.........a better system is out there If you can come up with any system, (even an fantastic or imaginary one that for some reason was impposible) that would work better then prices floating in a free market to communicate this information I would be amazed. The only one I could think of is to have all humans share a communal super mind, and I'm not sure I would like that system (though my reasons would not be because it was economically inefficent but rather desire not to lose my individuality). Its a system from which everyone would have to benefit fairly equally......and I don't think it can be done on a national level but rather a global level. And prices would have little to do with reason for being. Global resources would have to determine the level of global production after the basic needs of all peoples' have been met. The surplus products could then be introduced into a system who's main component is capitalistic and there is an interplay between price and demand. But I think the numbers of products available in this interplay would be small relative to world production. I don't have a economic construct for this model. I just think eventually the world will not be able to afford capitalist excesses and inefficiencies. I am sure we won't see this happen in our lifetimes........so there is a silver lining to death. ;~(( A kibbutz is very different than a company......its made up of individuals who each have a proprietary interest in the kibbutz and must agree on what the common good is before they can move forward. Your analogy would be apt if the company was owned by the workers as Marx proposed Fine if it makes you happy make it a worker owned company, but its irrelevant to the point. Worker owned or not the company and the Kibbutz are similar in the way I said they are. They are not internally capitalist but what they produce for the outside worlddd is determined by market incentives. The decision making in the Kibbutz is different then the decision making in most comapnies but if the Kibbutz ignores what the market demands when it is trying to produce things for sale then it won't sell to much or make any profit (and before they can all share the profit they have to make a profit). That's only true if the kibbutz sells to the outside markets.......I am not sure but I don't think all of them do. And I must add that the way a company determines what products to make and sell and the way a kibbutz makes the same decisions are two very different approaches and processes. "Socialism works" is not a theory; its fact Your mistaking my comment that it is not a fact to mean that it isn't true. Of course I think it isn't true, but even if it was it still would not be a fact. A fact is a particular detail. A theory is the framework that you fit the facts in to. Evolution as the main reason for the diversity of species on earth is a theory. Relativity is a theory. If Newton's ideas came out now we would call them Newton's theories, not Newton's laws. Saying something is a theory doesn't mean it is false or even uncertain. Of course I think its almost indisputable that the idea "socialism works" is at least uncertain, and also I think it is actually wrong but even if it is right it is still a theory. I think you are making this too complicated. Socialism is the theory. The fact is that it works. Its also true that it works. The fact is supported by socialist countries like Sweden. The fact is invalid or not true if you think that Sweden does not work. I believe Sweden works and therefore, that supports my fact that I think socialism works. ted