I can’t find any references on Google to any such thing as the “communism of the early Mekong Delta” during the late 1950s and early 1960s. The country was divided into North and South Vietnam in 1954. The North was Communist, the South was U.S.-supported. The NLF was also known as the Vietcong. The DRV, or Democratic Republic of Vietnam, was North Vietnam, and I think it’s highly questionable whether the NLF and the DRV could be described as “controlling” the Mekong Delta, which is located in South Vietnam, during the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Is that who you’re talking about, the Vietcong? I have heard other journalistic mentions of “how marvelous” their comradely lifestyle was, of how they “took care of each other”, but I don’t think that a band of guerrillas counts as a “successful communist country”.
For one thing, they weren’t a “country” at all. In your OP, you are talking specifically about “successful communist countries”. According to Merriam-Webster, “country” means “a political state or nation or its territory”. The word implies a certain degree of political organization, of political stability, which a mere conglomeration of guerrillas doesn’t have. North Vietnam could be described as a “country”, but I don’t see where the North Vietnamese “controlled” the lifestyles of the people living in the Mekong Delta, imposing their communist regime on them.
Also, the Viet Cong didn’t pursue their “comradely lifestyle” on their own–they were subsidized by China and North Vietnam, so even as a band of communist brothers, they weren’t a viable economic proposition.
No doubt they had genuine concern for every member, but again, they weren’t a “country”.
In 1984 the Sandinista candidate Daniel Ortega was elected president, in what’s referred to as a “disputed” election, in other words, probably not entirely “free”.
And the Sandinistas were ousted in 1990, not by a “military force that came in and set up a dictatorship”, but in Nicaragua’s first free elections, which were internationally supervised to ensure their fairness.
So, how does a government that holds power through a military coup count as a “successful Communist country”? And, it doesn’t look like those oppressed peasants were enjoying the benefits of communism very much, as they seem to have given the Sandinistas the boot at the earliest opportunity.
The reason 400 people have more money than they can spend is because they don’t spend it they invest. They don’t even have the money they own the companies that the 60 million people work for. And the reason that the 60 million have no assets is because they spend all the money that they do get. Without the 400 Billionares they wouldn’t even have any jobs. Then we would have your agarian life wether we want it or not.
As for my self I thank god for rich people, with out them I would have no customers for the top end work that I do. ( I design and install custom shower enclosers.) Other wise I would be makeing minimum wage provideing severices for the masses. I feel that I am better than mose people (but not straight dopers, y’all are above avrage) and diserve more than most, all that I can garn.
Please excuse my spelling, but some times I get so mad at people who think that you can run the world with good feelings rather than reason, that I can’t think straight.
I’m currently reading a biography on
Che Guevara, entitled - wow - Che Guevara - A Revolutionary Life by John Anderson. I don’t know a lot about how commerce is done, or was done, by the Soviet Union, and I’ll bet methods have improved since 1959 (in reference to msmith537’s comment on flawed and delayed information), but they wanted to create a set market for the 8 million tons of sugar they were producing back then, rather than putting it on a global market. The idea was to find a customer who would be willing to buy x tons in advance, then the funds would be kept in an account in that country, where it would be spent to buy goods that country produced well. That’s not really so different from the subsidy system farmers in many countries work under, but it takes away from responsiveness if it’s done a year or even a month in advance and the buyer has less need for the product. That problem might indicate the problem with money more than the with the concept. The other problem with money is that it and I are magnetically opposed.
I do think that the US should consider universal health care though. Though it has more than 10 times the population of Canada, we could definitely learn from them if pride doesn’t get in the way. I don’t know specifics about the health care issue, I just pray I don’t get cancer, and my Cannuck friends seem to think it’s pretty OK.
The best anti-Communist reasoning I’ve ever seen comes from a very surprising source: Captain Correlli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières (for those of you who only know this as a pretty bad movie, I urge you to check out the book, which is very different). Unfortunately I can’t remember the full three-page argument, but it is economic, and touches on lack of sustainability and existence in isolation. Sorry I can’t be more specific - but it’s a huge recommendation.
I take it you aren’t pro-gun, Tedster? Because the same thing you mentioned as wrong with Communism is what many think are wrong with guns: dead people.
Economic allocation and decisions under communism is simply not very efficient. I’m not arguing for unbridled capitalism either. That’s what governments are for, to put some bridles on greed so that society as a whole comes out ahead.
People today are not ready for communism. Either humankind’s competitive nature has to change, toilet cleaners celebrated by society and given a status on par if not above CEO’s, ad nauseum, or it rapidly devolves into totalitarianism and economic inefficiency.
I agree with Duck Duck Goose regarding the North/South Vietnam mix-up. As far as I can remember, it was the North that went commie, not the South.
I also recall reading some literature long ago about the breakdown of Vietnamese society in South, especially along the Mekong Delta. This was attributed to the restructing of traditional Vietnamese villages along the canals, or some such thing; the author argued that this restructuring lead to a collapse of the traditional village structure, and a resulting collapse in the sense of community that had otherwise marked Vietnamese rural livestyles. Take that idea for what it’s worth. Anyway, this particular author argued the exact opposite of your claim: that the Vietnamese in the South had lost their sense of community, especially when compared to the North.
Duck Duck
Well, disputed by the US, who did not like the fact that the freely-elected leader of the country also happened to be a card-carrying commie. In addition, we claimed as part of our rhetoric at the time that the Sandinistas would never allow free elections, since “Marxists” don’t do that sort of thing, do they?
Yes, those crafty commie bastards allowed free elections after all! Not only that, they allowed the elections to be internationally supervised to insure their fairness! I knew we couldn’t trust 'em!
Revise much?
The Sandinistas, if you may recall, rebelled against the corrupt Sumoza military dictatorship, which had never allowed a free election (but sure got a lot of economic and military support from the US, despite its lousy human rights record). Within 6 years, despite incredible pressure from the US, they successfully arranged a “free” election.
I place the word “free” in quotation marks because the US poured millions of dollars of contributions into the campaign of Ortega’s opponent (a lady whose name escapes me now). She eventually won the fairly-even election, thanks in part to massive support from the US. Ortega could have used this as grounds to rule the election invalid, but didn’t.
To put the situation into perspective, imagine how we in the US might feel if we were to discover that a large, foreign nation – say, China – had been giving economic support to a presidential candidate in the hopes of rigging the election so as to favor them in world affairs.
Thanks for the thought erislover. Another great example of the consequences of taking guns away from the people. There are many murders in this country resulting from gun use and many murders prevented due to gun availability (I won’t argue the ratio), but without them mass slaughter results.
Actually, flex, my point was rather that a government is only as good as what it does. People can be killed under a democracy, too. It seems to be the case that the implementation of communism has allowed great injustices to exist, but I don’t think democracy is barbaric because blacks were socially opressed within it for so long.
I think Communism fails for economic and political reasons, not because people happened to be oppressed under it. It wasn’t dead people that brought Communism down.
i find it curious how people can compartmentalize their thinking. if you are talking about COMMUNISM you are talking about a possible socio-economic option of how a society can work. Marx lived in the age of steam and discussed the economic evolution of societies and extrapolated the inevitability of COMMUNISM. the evolution of technology affects societies economic options and therefore what our possible economic futures can be.
whould you prefer i discuss the planned obsolescence of computer software? remember the Y2K bug? companies were using software 20 years old. why has microsoft gone through win95, 98, NT, ME, 2000, XP. plus professional and server versions. is bill gates doing what the automobile industry is doing? is social-psychology more important than ideology and the ideologies are nothing more than rationalizations for the social-psychology? maybe the difference between nazi capitalism and nazi communism isn’t worth talking about. when the germans invaded russia Hitler said “the ukranian people should be treated like the redskins.” what redskins do you think he was talking about?
if you wish to present a rational rebuttal to what i say, i am interested. the sarcasm merely bores me. check the book CULTURAL LITERACY (c)1988. it lists 5000 terms EVERY AMERICAN SHOULD KNOW, planned obsolescence is on the list.
In your implementation of Communism what are you going to do about those of us with property? What happens when I don’t want to turn over my farm to the greater collective? Will I be compensated for surrendering my farm to the collective?
I suppose you could argue that we’d all be englightened and the concepts of personal ownership of property would be obsolete. But I don’t think I buy that one.
eris: the amusing part (or annoying part, depending on how you look at it) of Marxist theory is that it does tend to blame the system for the flaws implementation of said system. Which is why capitalism will break down and whatnot.
Sam Stone: fine points, but they’re already ones I’ve brought up and had answered by the same “ists” I mentioned earlier.
The “different ability” thing gets to (according to Joan Robinson’s analysis of Marxist economics) one of the shortcuts Marxists use, which is to assume a “base level” of skill and work from there. More skillful, efficient workers would cost more of the surplus value to retain; it balances out. Kinda like how we don’t really live in Ricardo’s corn world, but it’s a handy way of explaning things. Or not: therein lies the question. That also gets into the difference between value and price: the price charged for something isn’t its intrinsic value, just whatever the capitalist pig (or his running dog lackey) can get away with on the market. It determines the amount of surplus value in the amount of other labour and capital and goods in can buy, but it does not replace value.
The other point about capital magnifying the value of labour is something I’ve brought up too. Normal response? It’s all labour at some point. Even the stuff that is brought into the equation was originally built, the materials mined, the plans written, etc. Seems to be related back (oddly enough) to the Lockean notion that nothing has worth unless labour has been mixed with it. And all along the chain the surplus value has been yanked off and distributed by those who (supposedly) didn’t work to produce it.
Not saying I buy this stuff (I don’t)… I just want a somewhat better explanation as to why it should bother me. One that preferably doesn’t come with some sort of political message attached.
In 1984 I was in Nicaragua observing those elections. I saw opposition candidates campaigning. I met ordinary people who openly discussed their opposition to the government. I heard radio ads for the opposition which openly called the government a “dictatorship”. (What kind of incompetent dictatorship would allow that kind of talk?) I saw the public-service ads in the papers that instructed people in voting procedures, with helpful pictures. I walked into the polling places and saw people go behind a curtain to mark their ballots, then deposit the folded-up ballots in a wooden box. (The ballots weren’t numbered and the boxes weren’t transparent, as they were in Reagan’s beloved dictatorship of El Salvador.) I saw the daily vote totals in the newspaper. (Still have those newspapers.) I interviewed an official of the Supreme Electoral Council, who explained the use of telexes to tally the votes. (No computers were available then.) There were no signs of Sandinista affiliation at the CSE’s headquarters. No black and red flags, only blue and white ones. Of course, none of that was good enough for the Reagan Administration, which was determined to paint the Nicaraguan government as a freedom-hating dictatorship.
The 1984 elections, won by the Sandinistas, were the first free and fair elections in the history of the country. The 1990 elections were the second.
By my calculations, slightly less than half of all eligible voters in the country voted for the Sandinistas. The opposition parties (one of which was the Communist Party) won plenty of seats in the National Assembly. The Constitution’s “proportional representation” scheme insured that minority parties would win something, as opposed to our “winner take all” elections with our gerrymandered electoral districts.
There were problems with the election. There were mobs, some said orchestrated mobs, that broke up some opposition rallies. There were candidates and parties that dropped out of the race or abstained from entering, claiming persecution. The most comical case was the Independent Liberal Party, which urged people not to vote a few days before the election but got thousands of votes anyway. Their vice-presidential candidate disagreed with the boycott and bought a full-page newspaper ad for himself, in a newspaper that had pro-Sandinista sympathies. (That paper ran many opposition ads, while La Prensa, the “official” opposition paper, did not.) The boycotters looked more like sour-grapes losers than persecuted heroes.
As far as I know, no candidate or party ever “disputed” the results of the voting. There were no allegations of fraudulent counting or stolen ballots. Most of the controversies centered around whether the campaign was free.
All in all, I would say the Nicaraguan elections looked more like elections in the United States than elections in Zimbabwe. Unlike El Salvador, opposition candidates were not in constant danger of being kidnapped and killed. It was better than the US elections of 2000 in some respects. The votes consisted of marks in big circles. No punched-out chads here, and the votes were all counted by hand. People who wanted to vote were not arbitrarily dropped from the rolls or turned back from the polls, like in Florida. And, most importantly, the candidate with the most votes won. Hear that, Dubya?
The Sandinista revolution of 1979 was not a military coup, it was a popular uprising. “Coup” implies a takeover from within, by elements of the army. What actually happened was that Somoza’s army was militarily defeated, by students, workers, peasants and just plain people who were definitely outside the government and poured into the streets to fight it.
By the way, Nicaragua was never a Communist country. (The Communists were in the opposition, and joined an opposition coalition in 1990 to elect Violeta Chamorro.) The Sandinistas always said their economy was “mixed,” with some socialist elements and some capitalist ones. Capitalism and free enterprise always existed in Nicaragua, but it was regulated to insure fairness to workers and consumers, just as it is in the US.
Nope. The “first opportunity” was in 1984, when they elected the Sandinistas. In 1984, on my first visit, agricultural and industrial workers had higher wages and benefits and the right to organize and protection of their rights; more people had access to land, in the form of autonomous (non-governmental) cooperatives; there was more education for all, including adults; and everybody’s standard of living was higher than during the US-backed Somoza dictatorship. As one critic of the government told me five years later, “¿Quién no era Sandinista?” (“Who was not Sandinista [then]?”) In 1989, on my second visit, after eight years of US-backed contra war and unrelenting US hostility, the economy was demonstrably worse, people were struggling with simultaneous inflation and recession, and people resented the enormous toll, in casualties and resources, of the war. I also saw things I had not seen during my previous visit, like crime and drugs. So the people voted for a change, under duress. Second opportunity, not first.
I really resent the canards about Nicaragua that seem to have become the official conventional wisdom. The victors really have rewritten history.
Her husband was Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, assassinated in 1978 by Somoza. One of Violeta’s sons carried on as editor of La Prensa, another son became editor of Barricada, the Sandinista newspaper, and Pedro Joaquín’s brother founded El Nuevo Diario, an independent pro-Sandinista newspaper. After La Prensa turned against the Sandinistas, a significant proportion of their staff left to join El Nuevo Diario.
Violeta was never kicked out, she simply retired after one six-year term.
