I’ve heard that the true story of Thanksgiving was really thanks to God that their new system (capitalism) was working and producing a surplus (when their old system (communism - basically) failed.
Capitalism motivates people to do their best in a very direct way, commumism motivates people to do the least they can get away with.
wouldnt Cuba qualify?
*Its economy is stable even with vigorous sanctions in place.
*There hasnt been any proof of harboring terrorism.
*Aside from providing a resort-like military base for Soviet navies, Cuba hasnt been a credible threat since after the Cuban Missile crisis.
*Theres no report of blatant human rights violations.
*If the US sanctions were lifted, the majority of the Cubans that are over there would prefer to stay.
*Cuba beats Afghanistan in the happy scale.
Hail Ants, I understand the picture you paint with the personal and overall worlds. But as you mentioned, the capitalist system doesn’t work for everybody. There are approximately 33 million Americans living in poverty, representing almost 12% of the population.
Capitalism richly rewards the people with the means to take advantage of it, but many people fall into poverty. Agreed, the system only works if you get off your butt and work hard, but there isn’t room for everybody on the corporate success ladder, and inevitably some people fall off it.
Does communism provide a safety net for these people? To play devil’s advocate for a second: I could see how one could argue that the poverty rate wouldn’t be so high under a communist system. Realistic or idealistic?
Cites:
Excuse me? A casual search for “cuba human rights abuses” uncovers quite a few “reports”.
Is anyone claiming Afghanistan is or was a capitalist country?
I would argue that most of the people that are in this catagory, though considered living in poverty in the USA are living pretty darn well comapired with the people living in poverty in communist countries. I would wag that a majority of them have TV’s, cars (maybe not a porche, maybe not even a recent model Ford, but a car that actually works and can get them somewhere), several pieces of clothing (several outfits), even anme brand sneakers).
But the biggest difference it that they have opportunity to better themselves. It may be very hard but at the same time very possible.
Wang:
You stole my ideas! When I saw the title of this thread I had a response all figured out, but you beat me to the punch. Good job! I can’t remember who it was, but there is a famous free mkt economist out there who always admitted that his household was run basically on a communist or socialist type system.
Samarm:
Look more closely at “poverty”. Compare the standard of living of a typical “poor” american with that of a “middle class” person in a surviving communist country (maybe N Korea???). Or, for that matter, compare it a middle class std of living in the US 75 yrs ago. You will find that “poverty” is a relative category, not an absolute one.
Cuba is a terrible example. People die by the boatload trying to escape the ‘worker’s paradise’. The list of human rights abuses by the Castro regime is long and disgusting. And it was propped up by the Soviet Union, and suffered a standard of living collapse when the support dried up. It has drastically lagged other latin american countries in economic growth, despite being a tropical paradise with a highly educated population and not having had to go through all the wars and insurrection other countries in the regiion had to. The communist government there has been an incredible failure.
Communism cannot work for the simple reason that the people who make decisions about how to allocate resources can never, ever have all the information they need to make optimum choices. Capitalism, on the other hand, uses the price system as a communications network, carrying the information about the relative scarcity and demand of all products almost instantly throughout the country. It’s a massively parallel system with negative feedback, which makes it fast, efficient, and stable.
It doesn’t matter how benevolent the people running a communist country are. You could put Mother Theresa and Ralph Nader in charge of running the country, and before you know it you’d still have shortages and gluts, crappy goods, and those fine people would have to start using force to make people comply with their plan to even maintain a semblance of control. Because once the communist system starts to fail, a black market will spring up, and all those five-year plans go in the toilet. So maybe for the greater good we’ll just hang a few of those ‘profiteers’. We hate doing it because we’re good people, but the alternative is that the grand experiment will fail…
’
Sam: Totally agree with you. Communism on a larger scale than a few individuals just isn’t compatible with human nature. We are not that kind of animal! Capitalism fits the human condition like a glove.
PS: I’ve been meaning to ask if you’re moniker is John Prine inspired (“There’s a hole in daddy’s arm where all the money goes…”). Gotta love that first album!
Before I get on the soapbox I’d just like to say I agree with WillGolfForFood’s post and think it describes the situation perfectly.
The question I want to ask you all… why the assumption that communism leads to dictatorship? Obviously the two often seem to coexist, but don’t some European countires fit pretty well into the defination of socialist? (a term which seems to be understood as communist sans dictator)
It’s been a good few years since I’ve dusted off the old Marx… but where in the communist theory is voting considered bad?
Seems to me an idology so based on the people would demand the power of the vote to be very powerful… even moreso then in a democratic country.
I would also suggest that the lack of vote power in failed Communist countires is why it’s a joke to think of their idologies as being based on the idology of the proletariat.
As I understand it, yes dogma is an integral part. The way I understand it is that history is alleged to move in a certain way that Marx “scientifically” described. The future movement, from capitalism to communism, is necessary as a result of these so-called scientific principles. Going to communism is the way things have to go; there is no other possible way. This, as I understand it, comes to be an almost quasi-religious belief, and I can see adherents trying to fufill the prophesy by force of will if forces of nature don’t do the job.
Chapman, in his book, The Jungle is Neutral, describes to what extent the communism bug can bend the mind. He states that it is so overpowering that teenage couples on a beautiful moonlit night next to a romantic stream will exchange communist slogans without even a thought to the things we’d normally think of teenage couples doing in such circumstances. Mind you, nothing in the book came across as anti-communist. He did complain that the strict adherence to top-down organization stifled alot of good opportunities, but he never came off as seeing it as being evil. (Excellent book, btw. Check it out. His descriptions of the Chinese communists with whom he lived are hilarious, and his details of jungle warfare are fascinating.)
Would I say it equates to an assault on human rights? I don’t know. Trying to force history to conform to one’s expectations of it probably would, inasmuch as it involves forcing people into lives they don’t want to live. Alot of anti-capitalist types fail to notice the existence of a vigorous and healthy Amish sub-culture here in America. They are free to live their way of live, largely unmolested. You could, if you so chose, start a communist community as well. You would be vilified by the Bill O’Riley types I’m sure, but with a couple of good lawyers and a red-phone to the ACLU you could probably succeed in offering an alternative form of economic organization. The converse, that you could set up a capitalist community in a communist state, is probably not possible. Because of the conception of how value is created in communists economics it is necessarily “true” that the capitalist exploits her workers. The way the theory goes is that labor creates all the value, therefore they should receive all of it. To make her living the capitalist must skim off part of the revenues, and by skim I mean steal. That’s where the class conflict arises. She isn’t a sociopath, she simply must steal to get by. If you set up a capitalist community in a communist state, then I can imagine a public outpouring to free the workers of Samarmville. (Compare this with how the Chinese public reacts to China’s free-enterprise zones to critique the previous assertion–I could very well be wrong.)
Of course the dictatorship of the proletariate stage would be a violation of human rights. But that probably goes without saying.
From what I’ve read it dictates policy quite a bit. By “it” I mean Marxism, Maoism, or whatever branch is the ideology of the state. I have no evidence or argument to back that up. (I think Robert Conquest affirmed it in his book Reflections on a Ravaged Century.) It does seem reasonable, btw. Afterall, “free market” ideology probably plays a pretty strong role in U.S. policy decisions I’d imagine.
That wouldn’t be my guess. It is too inefficient and cumbersome. Consider this mathematical fact. Oh, crap–I don’t know where my copy of the book is. Okay, forgive the ugliness to follow. Sorting n pieces of information, let’s say alphabetizing slips of paper, requires something like n! operations to do it naively. (I’m sure it isn’t n!, but it becomes astronomical as n gets larger.) There is an algorithm one can use to reduce the number to something more manageable. However, for retrieving, no such algorithm exists, so as n increases retrieving becomes vastly more difficult. Imagine you are planning a modern economy with plenty of nice consumer and producer goods for half the world, approx. 3 billion people. The gov’t. has to organize all the production levels, set all the prices, deterime where each item is to be distributed, determine all the stipends (let’s call it instead of wages), etc. That is a massive task. Simply retrieving all the stipends for 3 billion alone is probably a massive task. In a market system, all that information processing is distributed amongst all the individual economic actors. The arbitrage, the Walrasian Tatonnement, the act of each actor working toward her optimum, these all act as a sort of economic computer with the operations spread thin over those 3 billion units, with each unit knowing not only publicly available information but also (and very importantly) her private wants, desires, needs, abilities, and preferences, inter alia. In the communist state, to match the human well-being of the market state, the central planner must juggle and process not only every piece of publicly known information, but also every piece of privately known information as well. Sometimes eliciting private information is possible, and there is a rich economic literature addressing that very issue, but don’t think that it will be easy.
I propose that the communist state would collapse of its own weight before it becomes a world wide entity. And even if it didn’t, the information processing requirements alone will guarantee that human well-being will be greatly reduced compared to a market system.
Gosh, I don’t know. Not in people’s hearts and minds–mostly because people just don’t understand economics. Alot of people see the the bad side of market economies and say, “There’s got to be a better way.” Well, it can be proven mathematically: there isn’t. As long as that fact is ununderstood and unappreciated, communism will have adherents.
Unfortunately, most free-marketeers are solely motivated by ideology as well and simply don’t understand the limits and inherent difficulties that lie in the market, so that many problems that don’t need to exist will do so anyway. And many problems simply cannot be avoided. There’s only so much stuff and not nearly enough of it. Trade-offs must be made and people will get the short end of the stick. Communism hopes, sincerely in my opinion, to end that sad state of affairs but it cannot because it is flawed.
Will communism in practice survive? I could’t even hazard a guess. China is the last big holdout. I guess it depends on how well the free-enterprise zones do. I’ve spoken to some Chinese who value consistency over change, because in Chinese history change generally means millions of deaths. So maybe it will survive.
Yes and yes. To the first question let me put it this way: I honestly believe that Pol Pot genuinely thought that killing everybody old enough to remember the old way of life was a reasonable price to pay to achieve utopia. I have no evidence to back that up, but if you thought you could obtain a thousand generations of utopia at the expense of one generation of slaughter, would you take the deal? It’s a tempting offer.
To the second question, there are many causes of war and not all dictatorial. The Second Punic War could probably have been avoided if republican Rome cooled its jets. The wars between Athens and Sparta were not dictatorial in origin. We’re on the brink of war with Iraq, would you consider bringing democracy to a state that has been under the thumb of a rather brutal leader to be an act of “dictatorial imposition of a belief system”? Maybe you would…I wouldn’t.
I’ve replied to too many posts and now my mailbox is jammed. I’m going to submit this sans editing. Please forgive me for that. 
Communism is bad because like its cousin, fascism, everything must be for the good of the state, not the good of the individual. This creates a tyrany of the majority that does not tolerate dissention.
Fascism is a cousin of communism? A distant cousin at best, I would say…
Definitions from http://www.dictionary.com:
Communism: A theoretical economic system characterized by the collective ownership of property and by the organization of labor for the common advantage of all members.
Fascism: A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
Point taken. For sure, the poverty stricken people of thrid world countries such as Bangladesh are desperately worse off compared with people living in so-called poverty in the US.
The question I guess I was trying to get at was: do you think, by it’s very nature, communism is inherently flawed? By your illustration I guess the answer would be yes, at least from the point of view of the working man or woman.
js_africanus: Your post makes interesting reading. I am learning a lot from this, and will return with comments / questions anon.
Samarm, I’m sorry to jump the gun on you, but this remark, and the remark that prompted it, reminded me of a great book. I’ve mentioned it on the SDMB before, because it is relevant to many discussions. It is, IMO, arguably the best book that I have ever read. It is called www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0198288352/qid=1042525338/sr=1-7/ref=sr_1_7/002-1368333-7819261?v=glance&s=books]An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution by Partha Dasgupta. I’m not going to kid anybody, it’s a heavy duty book. I definately advise going to the library on this one. However, it is a fairly comprehensive exploration into the economics (and sociology and nutritional science) of serious third-world poverty. For a book so analytically minded, it really brought to bear the weight of the life of the truly poor. One section discusses, IIRC, the different strategies for choosing which child to starve to death when famine obtains–based on real world experience. IIRC, in some societies, the youngest daughter is the first to die, the logic being that she has the least invested in her and the oldest daughter can provide more income.
In another section he models how the lack of markets for capital and risk force families to use children as capital goods. Fatten 'em up during the good times and hope they survive the bad because first, there is no insurance to cover for things like flood and draught, and second, because there is no viable form of social security.
Anyway, I wanted to get that out of my head, thanks for listening.
Best regards,
jsh
Yes, Communism is inherently flawed. A top-down command society just does not function efficiently. It is more suited to tribes and small groups than to a government, because it doesn’t scale well. The information requirements increase geometrically with population, and rapidly swamp any central authority. Capitalism avoids this by allowing information directly from consumers to producers through the price system.
This holds true even if it is a utopia and every single citizen and government official wants nothing but the best of society. It is simply an extremely inefficient way to organize an economy.
**
Certainly opposite sides of the same coin. No matter how many times you flip it and no matter which side comes up you’ll end up the loser.
Marc
Another definition of Fascism from www.m-w.com
1 a political philosophy, movement, or regime (as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
IMHO, it’s easy to see how communism, a system where labor is organized for the common advantage of all members can (and does) become a facist state. Everything is for the good of the party. The party has total control over all aspects of economic life.
Just had to jump in and address the perception that even poor people in ‘capitalist’ countries are better off than middle-class in ‘poor’ countries …
I will ask you for a cite for that. How do you define ‘better off’? If it has to do with, say, making sure your children are fed, educated, and immunized, then sorry, no go.
If it means everyone has a place to live, then sorry again.
Or that people have enough to eat.
Or that they’re not as vulnerable to AIDS
Or that here, at least, they are happier? Please see the work of Alan Durning, who has done some interesting work in this area. He cites a study (not available online, I’m afraid) where they asked people in America, and people in very poor parts of the world, to self-rate how ‘happy’ they are. In the fifties, the responses were about the same; in the 90s, Americans happiness had declined, and in the poor places it stayed the same [ie people in rural India described themselves as ‘happier’ than people in the USA did]. A study not without methodological difficulties, to be sure, but it demonstrates that it’s not so easy to say that we’re better off than they are.
I’m not saying that this means Americans are worse off than communists. But please remember that your assumptions that things are better for everyone under capitalism are questionable, at best. Do not try to pass them off as widely accepted truth.
My own opinion: capitalism is very good for people who succeed in it: once you are poor, you are in trouble. Granted, communism, the way it has been tried already, isn’t too much better. But I’m not ready to grant Capitalism the victory yet.
Sigh, X~Slayer there’s so much wrong with this post I hardly know where to begin. In fact I won’t begin, but if you’re interested I could start a thread titled, Ask the Cuban-who-grew-up-under-communism. Let me know.
I fail to see the relevance of the data cowgirl presents. I think everyone here will stipulate that the USA has its share of social problems. Her data is domestic only, and with the exception of dubious happiness studies, doesn’t compare data for America with that of the rest of the world.
All I can say is that I would rather live in New York City than in Lagos.
Cowgirl, your cites completely fail to justify your case. Yes, you showed that there are poor people in America. What you did NOT show was that poor people in Nigeria, Guatemala, Cuba, or North Korea are better off than poor people in America.