Who ya voting for?

[Lone Wolf]

Even when it comes to health care reform, single payer is socialism, but forcing everyone to buy an insurance policy is pretty solidly capitalist, I would say.

But surely not free-market capitalism.  I'd call Obamacare an example of "corporatism" or "crony capitalism".  Obamacare is shot through with central planning and coercion, which is the opposite of true free market capitalism.

First I will admit that my blood boils when I see people quote Marx. His ideas resulted in the deaths of millions of people around the world, impoverishment of many more, and even today he is quoted in academia as a hero.  

For real.  To be an admirer of Marxist thought, one has to remain willfully blind about the unimaginable human suffering it has caused in practice.  Unfortunately, that urge to put on the Commissar's cap and move other people like pieces on a chessboard is too powerful for many idealists to resist.

[doodle]

For real.  To be an admirer of Marxist thought, one has to remain willfully blind about the unimaginable human suffering it has caused in practice.  Unfortunately, that urge to put on the Commissar's cap and move other people like pieces on a chessboard is too powerful for many idealists to resist.

And we should condemn Jesus for the atrocities of the Christian religion? How familiar are you with Marx? Most Americans exposure to him and his philosophical criticisms of capitalism comes from old government propaganda movies made during the cold war.

I'm not saying Marx had the answer, but rather his criticisms of capitalism as a system merit consideration. Capitalism throws off a lot of negative externalities along with the great innovation and material wealth it creates. These externalities need to be considered and addressed as well as longer term issues that arise with exponential growth. To not evaluate, criticize and look for ways to tweak any system is un-capitalistic! Capitalism should have to compete in the world of ideas.....it isn't a universal law that should be blindly adhered to.

[doodle]

I proposed before the idea that we create a reading and discussion group based around some of the most important political economists that are frequently quoted but little read....Marxs Capital, Smiths Wealth of Nations,....we could throw in Von Mises, Keynes, Ricardo, Freidman...etc etc. the idea would be essentially an online book club of sorts where we could break the works into manageable chunks and debate and clarify them together chapter by chapter. If anyone is game, I would love to go through some of these works with the people here. I think the educational insights from this experience would rival that of any Ivy League school program. :-)

[Reub]

Romney gets a bounce in the polls.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/blog/ins ... a-ohio-va/

Leno says that "the only person who didn't tune in was Obama"

+1

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-shepp ... z28SwLa4VM

[Pointedstick]

Reub, I don't think it really helps the discussion to post all these articles showing that your favorite candidate is doing well today. There's not really any substance there, and it seems to just inflame the people who don't like your candidate.

We can have a substantive discussion about why you like Romney, but we can't really have much of a discussion over articles in right-wing publications showing he has a boost in the polls.

[MachineGhost]

I proposed before the idea that we create a reading and discussion group based around some of the most important political economists that are frequently quoted but little read....Marxs Capital, Smiths Wealth of Nations,....we could throw in Von Mises, Keynes, Ricardo, Freidman...etc etc. the idea would be essentially an online book club of sorts where we could break the works into manageable chunks and debate and clarify them together chapter by chapter. If anyone is game, I would love to go through some of these works with the people here. I think the educational insights from this experience would rival that of any Ivy League school program. :-)

This isn't a bad idea, but it seems like we're all too busy and from the vantage point of the Now, IMO there seems very little that would be learned that hasn't already been expounded upon in endless white papers and media articles to formulate the most just economic arrangement.  Assuming you're not dogmatic, of course.

[Storm]

Me, I'm voting for Giant Douche - at least a douche is clean:



South park reference: 

http://www.southparkstudios.com/clips/1 ... ebate-2004

[Coffee]

Where can I buy one of those?

[Side note: A girl I went to Berkeley with (who 20 years later, still lives in Berkeley) got all bent out of shape when I called another guy we knew, a douche bag.  LOL.  She said that term was offensive to women.  I said: Shut up and go make me a sandwich.]

[stone]

Doodle, I've got very little knowledge of Marxism but one thing that seems clear to me is that whilst he may have been good at spotting some problems with capitalism, his suggested fixes were basically dumb. I think Machine Ghost's link to a criticism of Marxism by someone who knew Marx at the time spells it out  perfectly : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakunin

He also developed a (resultantly prescient)[26] critique of Marxism, predicting that if the Marxists were successful in seizing power, they would create a party dictatorship "all the more dangerous because it appears as a sham expression of the people's will."[27]
........Although Bakunin accepted Marx’s class analysis and economic theories regarding capitalism, acknowledging "Marx’s genius", he thought Marx was arrogant, and that his methods would compromise the social revolution. More importantly, Bakunin criticized "authoritarian socialism" (which he associated with Marxism) and the concept of dictatorship of the proletariat which he adamantly refused.
"If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Tsar himself.[24]"

I'm not so sure that our current finacialized, global system won't in hindsight be viewed as also causing pointless millions of deaths by starvation and dirty water etc. The price spike in grains in 2009 was our version of Mao's famines I guess. That speculative price spike in agricultural commodities caused a lot of starvation.

I am shocked though by hearing that in communist Bulgaria, they used to make factory workers work 8hrs on, 8hrs off, 8hrs on etc. They had to work at constantly rotating hours and were constantly sleep deprived. Apparently it was used as a way to crush all human spirit.

[l82start]

I'm not so sure that our current finacialized, global system won't in hindsight be viewed as also causing pointless millions of deaths by starvation and dirty water etc. The price spike in grains in 2009 was our version of Mao's famines I guess. That speculative price spike in agricultural commodities caused a lot of starvation.

I am shocked though by hearing that in communist Bulgaria, they used to make factory workers work 8hrs on, 8hrs off, 8hrs on etc. They had to work at constantly rotating hours and were constantly sleep deprived. Apparently it was used as a way to crush all human spirit.

you may want to fact check the part of the quote in bold, i know someone who is Bulgarian whose relatives worked in factory's at that time, and they say it wasn't done that way, perhaps it is specific to some region or specific factory??

[stone]

182start, its good to hear that I was mistaken about communist Bulgarian working times. I was shocked by that and if it isn't true, then that's great. It was based on my recollection of a BBC Radio4 interview I heard with I think Kapka_Kassabova http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kapka_Kassabova . I was driving at the time, my hearing isn't great, my car is noisy and I tend to put 2 plus 2 together and come up with 42 (the answer to life the universe and everything) so I might well have got it totally muddled- sorry.

[l82start]

no problem..
i would lean toward thinking it probably isn't true, there may be specific instances where it was done but i couldn't find any with a quick Google search,

this doesn't make what the Communists did in Bulgaria any less horrific however, while Bulgaria was able to maintain some level of separation from Russia the communists still managed to do plenty of harm in countless ways.. 

[doodle]

This discussion on "communism" I think would be a lot better if people would actually take the time to read Marx so that they had a bit of a better idea what Marx actually said. Using examples from what happened in Bulgarian factories to attempt to negate Marx's critique of capitalism is absurd.

Hegel (who influenced Marx's thinking a great deal) thought that history proceeded according to a dialectic. Every system contained within it certain contradictions. These contradictions are what would drive history forward as societies sought to address the problems inherent in the system. The present system or "thesis" would clash with a countervailing view called the "antithesis" and out of this conflict would emerge a "synthesis". This "synthesis" would then become the new thesis and the process would repeat. My question to those who think Marxist thought to be so wrong would be, "are we at the end of history?" Is our present system so perfect that we have reached the end of the dialectic process?

I think that Marx would be as shocked to see what was done in his name as Jesus would have been with the Crusades or Inquisition. Just because they were misinterpreted and misapplied throughout history doesn't mean that they are wrong.



 

[Pointedstick]

i read Marx a long time ago, my memory of it is probably to rusty to debate the finer points, but i wasn't convinced by it even at a young and impressionable age...

having heard personal 1st hand story's since then about those that lived through it hasn't helped improve my opinion of the philosophy in any way either.

doodle, what makes you so sure people haven't read their Marx? I sure have. It did not convince me that capitalism is evil and will be replaced with socialism and then communism, or that private property is immoral, or that capital's contribution to the productive process is essentially valueless.

[doodle]

I think Marx composed one of the most thorough studies of the system of capitalism that has been done to this day. His insights into the way the capitalist system came about and how it functions give one a new perspective. I think his critiques of certain aspects of capitalism such as the tendency towards concentration of wealth, commodity fetishism, or worker alienation are still relevant to this day. I'm not an expert on Marx, but after actively trying to understand his work for the last few months I can firmly state that 90 percent of what you hear attributed to Marx has nothing to do with what the man actually said....anymore than the propaganda in the film Reefer Madness has anything to do with the true effects of smoking marijuana.

[doodle]

In fact the commodity fetishism of money in our country today is one of the central issues that surrounds a lot of the nonsense that MMT is trying to dispel. In other words the issue has become "do we have enough money to pay for social security" rather than " do we have a productive enough labor force to take take of our old people" precisely because of this commodity fetishism. We attribute to money a power that really belongs to our labor. That idea is Marx.

[stone]

doodle, I've never read any Marx. I've also never read anything by Hitler but I don't think that I need to before being wary of Nazism. Like I said, Marx was undoubtedly great at spotting  flaws in capitalism but that doesn't mean his suggestions for how to run society have any merit. Recognizing the flaws he spotted and also the flaws in communism seems sensible to me.

Is the "dictatorship of the proletariat " not a key part of what Marx proposed?

The quotes shown in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto make it clear that massive centralized state control is central to communism. If someone is against massive centralized state control I'm not sure that it is fair to say that they are simply misunderstanding Marxist thought

[doodle]

Stone,

I'm no expert in Marxism so I can't speak as to the correct context or meaning of all of his work.

I also don't think that Marx's philosophy favored the model of state-socialism that came about at the turn of the 20th century. Here is an article that reveals the fallacy of the connection between Marx and the statist model that came about in the Soviet Union. http://socialistworker.org/2009/03/06/m ... -the-state

Chomsky (a noted libertarian intellectual) said the following regarding Marx's theories on communism...which seem to be rather non-existant. Instead it seems the west has incorrectly attributed Lenin and Stalin's atrocious actions to Marx.  

If you read Marx for example, I discovered that he says almost nothing about a post capitalist society, a few remarks here or there. But he didn’t say anything about post capitalist society for a reason: he thought post capitalist society would have to be determined by the working class after they had assumed control over the society. I assume the background thinking is that this is too much to understand, and that answers would have to be discovered by trying to organize participatory systems, which can be done right now. You all know that it’s possible for information about production to be made available to the democratically functioning workforce in realtime, so they can make sensible decisions. That doesn’t have to be associated with control or renumeration. But what’s the answer? Nobody knows, you have to try out and see. And that’s true of other forms of social organization as well.

-Chomsky March 11th 2011, Cardiff, England

[doodle]

Another good quote from Chomsky regarding this topic:

When the world's two great propaganda systems (He is referring to US and ex-Soviet Union at the time) agree on some doctrine, it requires some intellectual effort to escape its shackles. One such doctrine is that the society created by Lenin and Trotsky and molded further by Stalin and his successors has some relation to socialism in some meaningful or historically accurate sense of this concept. In fact, if there is a relation, it is the relation of contradiction.

The Soviet leadership thus portrays itself as socialist to protect its right to wield the club, and Western ideologists adopt the same pretense in order to forestall the threat of a more free and just society. This joint attack on socialism has been highly effective in undermining it in the modern period.

[stone]

doodle, I guess when I look at  quotes from the Communist Manifesto that is what puts me off Marx's suggestions for how government should be organized. Isn't the Communist Manifesto the key "I have a dream" bit from Marx whilst the stuff about capitalism is his "I have a complaint" bit?

First off, the Communist Manifesto is straight from the horses mouth and so can't be put down to a misguided interpretation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Communist_Manifesto

Engels, in the preface introduction to the 1883 German edition of the Manifesto, said that the Manifesto was "essentially Marx's work" and that "the basic thought... belongs solely and exclusively to Marx."[5]

The section ends by outlining a set of short-term demands:

  1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
  2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
  3. Abolition of all right of inheritance.
  4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
  5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
  6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
  7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
  8. Equal liability of all to labour. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
  9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of the population over the country.
  10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labour in its present form and combination of education with industrial production.[14]

The implementation of these policies would, as believed by Marx and Engels, be a precursor to the stateless and classless society.[13] In a controversial passage they suggested that the "proletariat" might in competition with the bourgeoisie be compelled to organise as a class, form a revolution, make itself a ruling class, sweep away the old conditions of production, and in that step have abolished its own supremacy as a class.[13] This account of the transition from socialism to communism was criticised particularly during and after the Soviet era.

[doodle]

Stone,

I need to do some more reading in that area. I've mostly been focused on Capital.

What do you think about the points made in the opening of this video that suggest that Marx has given us a useful tool to evaluate and understand our present system. And that we must always be engaged in a process of critiquing ourselves.

http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?feature=re ... GT-hygPqUM

[Pointedstick]

Believe it or not, I don't think that all of Marx's critiques are without merit, especially on the subjects of consumerism, commodity fetishism, and alienation. However, I profoundly disagree with him and his intellectual successors who claim that increased state control is the solution.

[doodle]

That's the thing, PS. I don't think Marx advocated for state control. I'm trying to research this now. In any event, just because he might have been mistaken on one issue doesn't mean the entirety of his work is invalidated. His insights into how the capitalist system functions are worth understanding.

[Pointedstick]

Sure he did. He just believed that eventually human nature would advance past the point where government was needed. His end goal was a world where both private property and government were unnecessary because everyone was sufficiently ethically advanced that they derived pleasure from work and did not aspire to excess. But he advocated plenty of government action to get there. He just saw it as a precursor to people wanting to do those things themselves without the government needing to force it on them.

[doodle]

I don't think he did, PS. I think that government action and statist control is misatributed to Marx. I need to research more. I'm in over my head at the moment.