I like my capitalism with a dash of socialism.
Communism fails because I can’t buy a decent plasma TV on a worker’s salary but my god worshipping capitalist friends have one in the dunny!
It is the politics of EMFHS.
Bloody commies shuld just pay for it like everyone else.
Society is a balancing act, any …ism is flawed in it’s ultimate execution. It is the balance of state and individual powers/freedoms that allows us all enough room to live the way we wish.
With no central government and a lack of private ownership? How exactly does one get a dash of that?
The word “socialism” has been stretched out to mean so many things from its inception to modern day that it’s a useless term. “Safety net” is a much better term for what you mean.
yeah I prefer the term social conscious, anything with ..ism gets corrupted.
Self-discipline is not punishment. Remember the Russian Revolution was made by the working class in its own interests, not by a party or elite group on behalf of the working class. The slogan came from the workers themselves as they understood that given the beyond piss-poor economic conditions they’d inherited from tsarism and three years of devastating war, they needed to bust some serious hump to try to improve things while waiting and hoping for the revolution to spread.
Of course, in countries with a stronger infrastructure like here in Europe or the US, there won’t need to be such strenuous effort to get things going again, but effort will still be needed. A working class that is strong enough and conscious enough to make a revolution will be strong enough and conscious enough to fully realize what they need to do and find ways to discipline themselves enough to do it.
And that rosy tradition will evaporate the minute someone from the working class gets power. First they’ll exploit the former aristocrats, then the middle-class kulaks, then anyone from the working class who seems less-than-dedicated to the communist ideal (i.e. grumbling too much)…
In other words, I call bullshit.
And your examples are…? Where else besides Russia (and that only briefly) has the working class taken power?
So the one known example ended badly, there are no known examples of it ending well, and you’re still promoting it.
I stand by my earlier call.
Well let’s start with China.
Communist ideology – check
Peasants’ revolt and civil war, aka revoluton – check
Strong leader emerges out of the original leadership – check
Regime carrys out purges – check
Tens of millions are killed – check
Famine kills more millions – check
That’s garden variety communism at work.
[QUOTE=Olentzero]
This is not to say that there was no exploitation in Stalin’s USSR or Eastern Europe or Vietnam or Cambodia or that there is no exploitation in Cuba or China or North Korea; this is to say that the exploitation anyone with half a braincell can point to in those countries is a clear indication that the systems in question are/were not socialism or communism.
[/quote]
Ah, there’s that damned Scotsman again.
All right. I’ve just about had it with the abuse of the “no true Scotsman” fallacy here. The fallacy comes into play when an original statement is modified to reject a specific counterexample for no reason other than it apparently contradicts the original statement. The NTS does not come into play when the counterexample is denied for reasons other than its contradiction of the original statement.
In layman’s terms, if I simply said “No true communist society would do X” when presented with an example of North Korea doing X, that’s the NTS. If, on the other hand - and anyone who could be halfway bothered to pay attention to my arguments couldn’t miss this - I provide an analysis of why North Korea isn’t communist based on historical and political reasons, that is NOT the bloody “No True Scotsman” fallacy. I can see how someone who has only read the one statement LonesomePolecat responded to might interpret that as an NTS, but anyone who - as I’ve said - has paid anything remotely approaching attention to my posts would be well aware that I’ve come up with plenty of arguments why countries like North Korea and Cuba and China aren’t socialist or communist beyond simply asserting they aren’t because that’s not what real communists do. Really, the only reason it gets trotted out in these kind of threads is because the people who use it are too damned lazy to actually try to think up effective counterarguments. Up yer kilts tae tha lot o’ ye.
BG, the Spanish Civil War was an attempt by the working class to take power which, much like the Paris Commune, took hold in a city or two briefly before being crushed by a vicious counterrevolution. It’s much like sneering at a farmer for envisioning lush green fields on the site of a former North Carolina pork plant the day after he bought it. He’s knee deep in pig shit, but that doesn’t mean he thinks that’s how he should live the rest of his life.
Why’d it end badly? You and I have been over this. Not because of a flaw in the theory or improper application, but external circumstances have so far prevented it from being applied at all. As I said in another thread, blaming communism for the disaster in Russia is like saying you’re a lousy chef because a wiring fault in your stove set your kitchen on fire.
Heck, I’ll stipulate that anyone even vaguely Scottish qualifies as a Scotsman. So who’s the Scotsman here, i.e. the nation that ran a communist system without brutalities?
So it’s always someone else’s fault with tens of millions of your citizens starve to death? When Secret Police organizations quietly “disappear” people? When trying to leave means punishment?
You’ll notice that they said “If you don’t work, you don’t eat” and not “If I don’t work, I don’t eat”. That’s not self-discipline, that’s discipline by the community. And if the community decides to kill me because I don’t comply with their decisions, then that seems like punishment to me.
So you’re saying the Bolsheviks didn’t have a leading role in the Revolution?
Right, and we have a criterion for who’s a Scotsman - more rigorously put, anyone with Scottish ancestry. So - we can point to someone, say, like the Emperor Pu Yi* and say that since we know his ancestry for a thousand years or so and not a one of them ever went anywhere near Scotland, he’s clearly not a Scotsman. Is it not therefore logical to assume that we can thus establish a set of criteria for what is and is not communist - say, using the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky, the foremost proponents of the system? And judge countries and systems accordingly? Where is the ‘one true Scotsman’ fallacy here?
Oh no, everything you point out here is Stalin’s fault. But the system he headed wasn’t communism, and I’ve given numerous arguments on this board as to exactly why it wasn’t - the very thing the “no true Scotsman” deliberately avoids doing.
Well if you want to get down to it the slogan was actually “He who does not work does not eat”. I honestly didn’t think I’d need to point out the difference between the impartial and personal ‘you’ in this thread, but I suppose I hardly find it surprising I had to.
Self-discipline can extend to groups as well as individuals. Again, your neat semantic game depends on ignoring the reflexive meaning of ‘self’ and focusing only on the individualistic meaning. A community disciplining themselves is self-discipline.
Go back and read my original post in this thread, and stop wasting my time with things like this.
*Or, for a better example, King Tutankhamen, who was born and died before Scotland even existed.
Nitpick: The Spanish Revolution was that. The Spanish Civil War was a contemporaneous phenomenon; the Revolution was related to it but distinct. It is important to note that the Revolution was crushed by the pro-Soviet Republican government, not by Franco.
Accurate as your correction is, my point still stands. You can’t point to a worker’s government holding on to power by its fingernails in the middle of a nasty civil war and claim that as proof that communism doesn’t work.
But you see, it’s not enough to come up with explanations for all those failures, it’s also necessary to explain why the philosophy keeps failing so horribly over and over again. It isn’t that some specific examples of attempts to implement communism have failed, it is that all such attempts have not only failed miserably but have given us some of the world’s worst mass murders as well. One has to wonder how often and how badly the philosophy has to crash and burn before you’d stop blaming “circumstances beyond our control” and admit that it just won’t fly. An evangelical Protestant might tell you that the Inquisition was not the work of Christians and trot out a bunch of reasons why Catholics should not be considered Christians. And he’d be just as wrong as you are.
So, yes, you did commit the “no true Scotsman” fallacy; you were merely awfully wordy about it.
You’ve already killed a hundred million people in pursuit of your Utopian fantasy. When do the rest of get to say “enough is enough?”