stoney <stoney@the.net> wrote in
news:6t3ao0ti9onp5kgeeup4fdq498oc3a9f9p@4ax.com:

On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 19:22:36 GMT, Enkidu <enkidu@leaddogs.org> wrote:

Daniel Kolle <DKolle@hotmail.com> wrote in
news:iao7o0pn5k7k8mkrqn5k04fdbmjhhnpn16@4ax.com:

On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 02:25:02 GMT, Enkidu <enkidu@leaddogs.org>
thought hard and said:

Daniel Kolle <DKolle@hotmail.com> wrote in
news:eqs5o0duo8g3dkcr9f52v1spgidqhn6sch@4ax.com:

On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 02:07:32 GMT,

Seriously, what do you mean when you speak of "Communism"?

An ecomonic theory that wishes to abolish the State and place the
means of production into the hands of the people. There are many
variations on this theory, of course; the principal remains the
same.

Communism as you defined it has never been tried on a large scale.
The means of production have been place into the hands of the
thuggish dictatorship.

Of course. It also goes without saying that communism cannot work.

Small scale communes have worked well, though never for an extended
period. They usually fail when the idealistic founding population
meets the second generation.

Can there be a social organization that would be communist and that
would last? Yes. Termites do very well. With humans? You'd have to
find a way to see that politics never arose. Once a skilled political
starts playing one group against another, any commune is done for.

The Guns of Terra 10 by Don Pendleton. (1970)
World is corporate (singular).

I'll look for that.

Mark K. Bilbo wrote:

In our last episode <41859D3E.60304@svnspamsomeoneelse.net>, Nivlem lept
out of the bushes shouting:

Mark K. Bilbo wrote:

In our last episode <MPG.1becbf69670b1d90989a54@news.individual.net>,
quibbler lept out of the bushes shouting:

In article <eqs5o0duo8g3dkcr9f52v1spgidqhn6sch@4ax.com>,
DKolle@hotmail.com says...

On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 02:07:32 GMT,

Seriously, what do you mean when you speak of "Communism"?

An ecomonic theory that wishes to abolish the State

Not so. It predicts that, at a point, the state will no longer be
necessary and will be able to "wither away". However, it doesn't say
that the state has to be abolished and, in fact, feels that the state
will be quite necessary for a long time to come.

Well, that was Marx. He simply could not go of feudalism. A lot of
folks were against his belief in the need for "temporary" state
socialism and that ****** about the state "withering away" (yeah,
states are *so in the habit of doing *that). But we can see who got the
upper hand.

Not to mention how it turned out in the end...

The whole problem with Marx's system, it seems to me, is that it could
never work with the petty, greedy, lying, cheating, thieving chimps that
people actually are.

You know, people say that kind of thing without ever stopping to realize
that if true, it means *no* system can work.

No system of total ideological purity imposed by radicals ever does. I'm
equally critical of the Libertarian program for much the same reasons.

Which isn't much of a criticism of any one system.

It certainly is. Dreamworlds with no room for how people actually behave
are absurd, and it is a great human tragedy when some coalition of fools
and blackguards manage to impose systems based on them.

He seemed to think that human nature would be pemanently correctable by
state coercion, which is absurd.

Actually, that's not what he was saying. The power of the state was, in
his view, to exist under the control of the workers for the period
necessary to destroy the old system. His fatal flaw was in believing any
state would give up power willingly.

He appeared to me to be suggesting a gradual transition to this peaceful
anarchist egalitarian utopia. Would never work, even if the state turned
loose of the reins voluntarily. There are just too many people who would
steal everything that wasn't nailed down unless there was a gun pointed at
their head.

People keep
insisting that conditions for those on the bottom improved under
"Communist" regimes, but short-term they didn't. Far worse famine
resulted under the Bolsheviks than had under the Czars, and the standard
of living probably didn't improve as fast as it could have, long term,
if the political system had simply been left alone.

Well, to be fair, in the short term, any radical transition is going to
be hard. Modern Russia had a *very hard time making the transition to a
(somewhat) market system. Things were worse initially.

Well, when the only people who understood capitalism were the mafia who'd
been covertly functioning in a market economy for years...However, that
doesn't address the problem of top-down, centralized decisions about
production. Things were done for political reasons, rather than for their
liklihood of producing food, shelter, or competitive products. A market
system can be mismanaged, as Russia's was, and probably still is. What the
Bolsheviks did didn't work, and couldn't have. When Mao tried the same
crap about 30 years later, he got the same result.

Actually, nothing much changed there. One oligarchy was exchanged for
another. Marx couldn't give up his authoritarian streak and gave birth
to a monster...

Marx ignored human nature, and the resulting monster was inevitable.

Enkidu wrote:


Far worse famine

resulted under the Bolsheviks than had under the Czars, and the
standard of living probably didn't improve as fast as it could have,
long term, if the political system had simply been left alone.

Is that true of Cuba? Their infant mortality rate is as low as ours in
the US.

How do you know that? There isn't even the neutered shadow of a free
press that we have in America in Cuba. Remember, the claim is that
Mussolini made the trains run on time. He didn't. He merely prevented
the papers from reporting the ongoing frequent lateness.

Are their shortages a result of communism, Castro's brand of

communism, or of our attemt to strangle them?

*****, given what we do to the economies of our third-world trading
partners often as not, they may be better off without us.

I don't know. I do know

that I'd rather have lived in Cuba under Castro than in El Salvador under
an American backed anti-communist government.

As far as I'm concerned, it'd be a coin-flip. I'd never be able to keep
my mouth shut, and I'm equally capable of upsetting Maoists and Nazis.
Under either regime, I'd get jail or death.

And when Chile VOTED in a

socialist government, who were we to overthrow it?

None of our fucking business, that. Why hasn't Kissinger been extradited
to Chile to face charges yet?

The US needs to learn to keep it's fingers out of other peoples'
business, and let them manage their own affairs, even if they manage them
poorly.