Communism. Good or bad. What do you really know about Communism?

[Arturo2nd]

Originally Posted by bowlinggreen

Where IS xyzde69 anyway, he hasn't been bothering us lately.

My money is on the Swiss bankers and wives. He has utterly failed to adapt to the Swiss way of life and is a social cancer. Likely, they have placed him in a remedial education center, are force feeding him hamburgers and subjecting him to a steady dose of American action movies and Fox News. He will be released once he has gained 20 kg and his IQ drops 20 points.

[Starkos]

Originally Posted by bowlinggreen

Where IS xyzde69 anyway, he hasn't been bothering us lately

He might have been sent to a Gulag camp for tax evasion...

[Brecht]

He's either taking a break or has left for good. A couple of weeks back, I got a PM from xyzde69 in which he complained about the bullying and trolling in this thread. The only advice I could give him was to stop wasting his time as I'm not doing it either and that reading books is more educating than reading forum posts. Now I don't know when his last log-in was (he made it invisible but mods can see it) but there was no farewell or anything of that kind.

[Estreeter]

Originally Posted by Brecht

I got a PM from xyzde69 in which he complained about the bullying and trolling in this thread.

Bullying and Trolling it isn't, You know what I'm like behind the scenes, very very fair, to both sides of politics.

Have warned members on both sides of politics, as you've seen.
That said, if xyz started a thread like this he should have expected no love or support from those who despise Communism, he also could not accept the fact that many many times when his hypocrisy was exposed and pressed for an answer he could not handle answering it, speaking for myself I openly admitted my hypocrisy and even mentioned during posts I am contradicting myself.

I found one post if his here utterly offensive when I mentioned the murder of my cousin and he had the gall to reply with .. ""

So, with that, I really don't care if he comes back or not, he's welcome back for sure as has created a lot of posts and a lot of real discussion here along with poking fun which he's quite welcome to do back to his opposition, but it's never been abuse.

[Brecht]

Granted, he's been making himself an easy target on quite a few occasions but that's hardly an excuse for the ostensible absence of a sober and factual discussion. There's too much emotion involved and the understanding of Communism is mostly based on what some thread participants read in this or that paper during the Cold War era.

You'd have to read many books to even get the slightest idea of what Communism is about and how it was presented and misrepresented throughout the 20th century. This, again, requires an understanding of global history in that century. Things cannot be taken out of a context as policies and decisions were reciprocal. Many acts of the USSR were the result of US pressure and vice versa. You can say the policy of one side or the other was largely dictated by the enemy.

When the Soviets shot the first artificial satellite into our planet's orbit and subsequently the first man, the US panicked and it wasn't long before Kennedy made his famous speech in which he announced the ambition to go to the moon by the end of the decade. And thus the space race began.

I don't know if I've provided a good example but the point remains that both sides did things they probably wouldn't under non-hostile circumstances but the worst of them cannot be excused or even justified. However, there's no point in making accusations from a strictly moral point of view and that's where xyzde69 made a mistake.

[Estreeter]

Originally Posted by Brecht

I don't know if I've provided a good example but the point remains that both sides did things they probably wouldn't under non-hostile circumstances but the worst of them cannot be excused or even justified. However, there's no point in making accusations from a strictly moral point of view and that's where xyzde69 made a mistake.

Everything you say is true, I cannot dispute that, but one hard fact remains, one Communists just cannot seem to grasp, no matter what one read in the books of Marx, everything starts from them yet every time it ends in disaster and many cases blood shed, that all stem from one thing , human nature and how things evolve, and with Communism it's always evolved with the same outcome. Human nature is what determines everything. That's where it will always fail for our current world of the last 2 centuries, a few hundred for now things will without doubt be different and maybe Communism of a different style would suit, but in our world right now, it's doomed for failure.

[Arturo2nd]

Originally Posted by Brecht

He's either taking a break or has left for good. A couple of weeks back, I got a PM from xyzde69 in which he complained about the bullying and trolling in this thread. The only advice I could give him was to stop wasting his time as I'm not doing it either and that reading books is more educating than reading forum posts. Now I don't know when his last log-in was (he made it invisible but mods can see it) but there was no farewell or anything of that kind.

It really is setting one's self up for failure to have an expectation that it is possible to have an intelligent debate with a bunch of half educated perverts on a porn site.

One member stopped arguing with me when I pointed out that a person who hangs around the porn conventions arranging to shoot nude spreads of the ladies really has no basis to be claiming any kind of traditional religious moral high ground.

It happens that I have a degree in philosophy and have made a study of ethics. It was my conclusion that atheists have no ultimate moral authority to invoke. The religious folk have the Deity and scriptures, but if you look around it seems that pretty much anything goes as far as the Big Guy is concerned. So, it seems to me that our ethics and morals are grounded in having right relations with each other and maintaining peace within our communities.

I am suspicious of much of our present "morals" which seem to be geared towards maintaining the claims of those who currently hold property (and women are still classed as such) regardless of whatever dubious means were used to acquire that property. Ultimately,we fall back on custom to maintain social peace. But we do know that social arrangements can be changed and have done so several times in recorded history as well in the prehistoric period. Anthropologists and other social scientists are just beginning to realize that much of our social structure appears to have originated with our homo erectus ancestors or even before.

Communism is the extreme pole where the community is all and individuals rights are a non sequitur. Libertarianism is the opposite pole where individual rights supersede those of the community. The latter position is not sustainable for a social species like ourselves. Where the lines of compromise are to be drawn is yet to be determined. But I suspect that we have not heard the last from communist ideology.

[bowlinggreen]

Originally Posted by Brian249x

It really is setting one's self up for failure to have an expectation that it is possible to have an intelligent debate with a bunch of half educated perverts on a porn site.

At least on the internet, the worst that comes from the sacred cow wars is excessive wear and tear on computer keyboards.

If E and xyz met in real life, and E demanded to have his cousin's death explained and xyz said it was for the good of the people and Communist society then I expect that particular conversation would end with a bout of fisticuffs.

[Estreeter]

Originally Posted by bowlinggreen

If E and xyz met in real life, and E demanded to have his cousin's death explained

I wouldn't bother actually I don't need to see or hear bullshit, again reason being my cousin died in a Communist State, read here time and time again when the thread drifted from Communism, to Socialism then Anarchism and any and all combinations of those and the contradictions that come with the posts, yet I cast my mind back to the opening post of this thread and have a good look at which country is mentioned and it's form of Government The thread became an excuse for why Communism didn't work, apologetic for it's real life working and dreams of how it could yet truth couldn't be accepted.

Opening post in thread, just read it.

[Brecht]

Originally Posted by Estreeter

Everything you say is true, I cannot dispute that, but one hard fact remains, one Communists just cannot seem to grasp, no matter what one read in the books of Marx, everything starts from them yet every time it ends in disaster and many cases blood shed, that all stem from one thing , human nature and how things evolve, and with Communism it's always evolved with the same outcome. Human nature is what determines everything. That's where it will always fail for our current world of the last 2 centuries, a few hundred for now things will without doubt be different and maybe Communism of a different style would suit, but in our world right now, it's doomed for failure.

It's very difficult, perhaps even impossible, to build socialism in a country that lacks the necessary material conditions for that stage of human development. The conditions required for a transition to socialism are created in capitalism because it is here that industrialization really sets in. This gives rise to a whole new class of people, the proletariat. Given the oppressive and exploitative nature of the capitalist greed for profit, workers are forced to organize themselves and this is where socialism in action is born.

The working class is no longer limited to the industrial proletariat. Our economies are dominated by the service sector today but that doesn't mean the working class no longer exists. The terms of exploitation are still the same, whether you're welding in a factory or sitting behind a computer.

October 4th marked 25 years since the end of the so-called constitutional crisis in Russia. Boris Yeltsin, practically backed by the entire west, began to implement harsh economic reforms that would escalate in a predatory capitalism unseen in Europe. But his plan was rejected by the Russian parliament, so Yeltsin ordered the military to shell the parliament building. Western leaders were celebrating Yeltsin as a rising star of democracy. Imagine Putin doing the same today.

Yeltsin emerged from the Soviet nomenklatura, the ruling bureaucracy. People like this used to run the USSR for most of its history. They treated Marx like some sort of saint whose name could be used in silly speeches. His ideas were not so important. Even Lenin, who was a great theoretician, had to twist many Marxist principles to make them apply to Russia because Marxism expects socialism to arise from an advanced capitalist society, not in a country that barely overcame serfdom.

The question of so-called human nature is one of the most commonly raised arguments against socialism. It's one of those illusory categories like free will. Human consciousness and society are always in a state of change. The way we think is determined by our social environment. If there was something like an objective human nature, what would be the point of fighting for a better world? The entire history of mankind is a history of permanent change. If the way people think didn't change, most of us would still be feudal serfs or worse because that would be considered as a natural order of things which you may call "human nature".