Just For Grampa, the Karl Marx thread

[regent]

So what nations have in fact practiced Marxian communism?

 

[ilia25]

So what nations have in fact practiced Marxian communism?

No one ever did.

 

[francoHFW]

Modern capitalism derailed communism with the embourgeoisement of the working class. Which Pubs seem to want to undo with Voodoo. And the help of misled dittoheads/haters.

 

[rdean]

Now the discussion is over my head. LOL

I've never studied the subject. Hence I never use the term or participate in said threads.

It hasn't stopped you on other threads.

Hint, Karl Marx is NOT one of these guys:

 

[Steelplate]

Ok... first off... fuck you. You do not understand human nature... which is leaps and bounds more important than which economic system is undertaken. How do I reach Conclusions? Look around you, you pompous dickwad. The Global economy damned near collapsed because of the greed and the lack of accountability of our wealthiest class. But You'd rather discuss a book instead of looking and observing. You'd rather have someone else spoon feed your opinions to you.

Cold War Communism died a horrible death in the Soviet Union and it's annexes, and is being forced out of China by our companies throwing huge sums of money into their economy. Cuba is still being punished for Castro, even though they aren't even close to the same country as during the Cold War.

So yeah... neither seems to all that fucking wonderful in my book. They are two sides of the same damned coin. Just because YOU think your viewpoints and those of people who agree with you are the only valid ones, doesn't mean you are correct.

Well, anyway... I'll just put you down on the side of more Casino Wall Street tactics, Big Conglomerates running the country, and people who have to bust their humps to make ends meet being more and more marginalized and their quality of life increasingly downgraded.

Hanky?

Ahh... the typical response of someone who has no answers, only complaints... Congratulations... your just another pussy who thinks in AM Radio-ese.

 

[JoeB131]

You and Marx share a lot in common. Both of you think capitalism is evil.

Well, that's not really true. Marx didn't think capitalism was evil per se. He thought it was a phase that would eventually and inevitably pass through towards communism.

So congrats. You hate capitalism more than Marx did.



Oh yeah, and you're a Republican.

rofl

Guy, if you get up in the morning and think, "How can I cheat and bully people with less money to make myself richer, even though I already have plenty" - YOU ARE EVIL.

Jesus said so.

The Bible Says so.

Not a religious man, but I always find it amusing that the GOP is this bizarre alliance between working schlubs who call themselves "CHristians" and greedy douchebags who laugh at the Homeless when they pass them in their limos.

I'm a Republican in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who put Americans above profits.

 

[Unkotare]

[

I'm a Republican in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who put Americans above profits.

You are not any kind of Republican and you never were. Stop with this pathetically transparent lie already, you fucking douche.

 

[JoeB131]

[

I'm a Republican in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who put Americans above profits.

You are not any kind of Republican and you never were. Stop with this pathetically transparent lie already, you fucking douche.

ooooh, COrky, you are soooo cute when you are angry....

 

[Unkotare]

[

I'm a Republican in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who put Americans above profits.

You are not any kind of Republican and you never were. Stop with this pathetically transparent lie already, you fucking douche.

ooooh, COrky, you are soooo cute when you are angry....

And you look like a fucking moron ALL the time...liar

 

[Toro]

You and Marx share a lot in common. Both of you think capitalism is evil.

Well, that's not really true. Marx didn't think capitalism was evil per se. He thought it was a phase that would eventually and inevitably pass through towards communism.

So congrats. You hate capitalism more than Marx did.



Oh yeah, and you're a Republican.

rofl

Guy, if you get up in the morning and think, "How can I cheat and bully people with less money to make myself richer, even though I already have plenty" - YOU ARE EVIL.

Jesus said so.

The Bible Says so.

Not a religious man, but I always find it amusing that the GOP is this bizarre alliance between working schlubs who call themselves "CHristians" and greedy douchebags who laugh at the Homeless when they pass them in their limos.

I'm a Republican in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who put Americans above profits.

I know lots of rich people and know no one who thinks like this. But it's the ridiculous stereotype of the hardcore, anti-capitalist Left.

 

[Steelplate]

[

I'm a Republican in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who put Americans above profits.

You are not any kind of Republican and you never were. Stop with this pathetically transparent lie already, you fucking douche.

This is why I LEFT the Republican Party. Because of assholes like you...which seem to be ever-increasing in number. The type that feel if you aren't as far right as you can possibly get, you aren't "worthy" of being a Republican. I was a Republican from the age of 18(1983) until 2008, when I became a Democrat.

The GOP message has been corrupted into Corporatism and one money grab after another. In truth? The Dems aren't much better, but at least they pretend to care about average Americans and occasionally pass legislation that is helpful to us. Which is something that the current mold of the GOP never even considers. It's all about Class Warfare with Conservatives... Class warfare in which the most powerful get the most help and the least powerful get nothing(in their ideological world, anyway).

The GOP has lost all compassion and almost all of it's credibility with the Average Middle of the Road American. They only embrace the far right and their Ideology.

 

[JoeB131]

I know lots of rich people and know no one who thinks like this. But it's the ridiculous stereotype of the hardcore, anti-capitalist Left.

Well, okay, they don't say that out loud, but that's certainly the result of their policies, ain't it?

And the amusing thing is, you jokers are probably making Democratic dominance inevitable. Or the GOP will become like the Democrats economically, and then you'll really be screwed.

Once you destroy the middle class, and make more people dependent on government, you make government more acceptable and people vote for more of it.

And guess who has the big bags of cash to pay for it all?

 

[JoeB131]

[

I'm a Republican in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who put Americans above profits.

You are not any kind of Republican and you never were. Stop with this pathetically transparent lie already, you fucking douche.

This is why I LEFT the Republican Party. Because of assholes like you...which seem to be ever-increasing in number. The type that feel if you aren't as far right as you can possibly get, you aren't "worthy" of being a Republican. I was a Republican from the age of 18(1983) until 2008, when I became a Democrat.

The GOP message has been corrupted into Corporatism and one money grab after another. In truth? The Dems aren't much better, but at least they pretend to care about average Americans and occasionally pass legislation that is helpful to us. Which is something that the current mold of the GOP never even considers. It's all about Class Warfare with Conservatives... Class warfare in which the most powerful get the most help and the least powerful get nothing(in their ideological world, anyway).

The GOP has lost all compassion and almost all of it's credibility with the Average Middle of the Road American. They only embrace the far right and their Ideology.

Well said.

The ironic thing is that as much as Toro will whine about "Socialism", the fact is when a Mitt Romney destroys a good paying union job at AmPad and replaces it with a McJob at Staples, he makes people more dependent on Government.

Their job isn't their beneficiary anymore, the government is. Section 8 housing to put a roof over their heads, food stamps to put food on the table,

and they don't have to work for it, all they have to do is... vote for Democrats. It undermines what we used to call "the Protestant Work Ethic". If you bust your ass and your boss screws you anyway, what was the point of it all?

 

[Unkotare]

[

I'm a Republican in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who put Americans above profits.

You are not any kind of Republican and you never were. Stop with this pathetically transparent lie already, you fucking douche.

This is why I LEFT the Republican Party. .

You never "left" the Republican party, you fucking fraud. Do you girls really think anyone believes such obvious lies?

 

[Steelplate]

You are not any kind of Republican and you never were. Stop with this pathetically transparent lie already, you fucking douche.

This is why I LEFT the Republican Party. .

You never "left" the Republican party, you fucking fraud. Do you girls really think anyone believes such obvious lies?

Fuck dude.. you want me to dig up my old voter registration card or something? Fuck you asshole. You don't know me, yet you can assume bullshit like this? In truth, I don't give a fuck what you believe. You are a goosestepper of the worst kind. It's "your" way or no way at all.

The fact remains that I was a Republican for a long fucking time. I was a believer in Reaganomics until I kept seeing the quality of life for the average person dropping, the cost of living in this ONCE wonderful country increasing, and more and more people dipping into poverty. That's when I realized that Trickle Down Economics is a failed concept... just like Communism. It relies on people to be honest, dependable and do the things that make such an "all or nothing" ideology work.

Unfortunately, humans are just that...human....we tend to be selfish.

That means in a system like Communism... the people tend to skim off the top, work less diligently and is prone to corruption from people that really don't care about the collective. We all know this to be fact, so I won't go into a whole lot about this. I'm more interested in the failure of a system that affects us as a country.

In Supply Side economics(trickle down), all those breaks that are given to Corporations and other business entities are supposed to give the people who run them a sense of obligation to the country. Instead, we've seen them reaping the benefits, but not giving a shit about the country. The mistake is that when Reagan endorsed such a economic system, he was naive to think that the most money driven people of this country would be willing to "trickle down" voluntarily. He put the power of the country into the hands of the greediest people of our country.

Anyway... I lost faith in the GOP and left it. I had lost faith before 2008 in fact, but I was hanging on in the hopes that sensibility and reason would find it's way back into the party.

I know, you don't believe me...and I don't care whether you do or not. The OPINION of me by a right wing freak on an internet message board means very little to me and affects my life in the most insignificant manner possible.

 

[editec]

You know we cannot really have an intellectually rewarding discussion about somebody's IMPRESSION of what Marx said.


If one is serious about discussing Marxism, we must discuss what Marx actually wrote.

I know, I know, that isn't how discussions are typically structured in this place.

Here intellectualy cowards really only like to wrestle with strawmen of their own design.

 

[Uncensored2008]

So what nations have in fact practiced Marxian communism?

The Soviet Union.

After the revolution, Lenin established true dictatorship of the proletariat in St. Petersburg (funny how he didn't choose Moscow, where the elite were.)

What many don't grasp is the meaning of "Soviet." A soviet is a congress or committee. The structure of Lenin's USSR was a series of soviets, from the neighborhood level all the way to the supreme soviet. Lenin's USSR was in fact the most democratic nation in history.

Josef Stalin was a fascist thug, but Lenin was a true believer. Lenin was a stupid man, as well, fanaticism and stupidity often go hand in hand, with Lenin this was very much the case.

In 1921, Lenin outlined the "grand experiment" for St. Petersburg. Neighborhoods elected a soviet to determine the needs and abilities of those within their domain. Uparvdoms were dispatched from the NKVD to enforce the will of the soviets. Those who defied the soviets were summarily shot.

So imagine a group of your neighbors, all voting on where you would sleep - all private property was outlawed as was currency, the soviet in your area assigned quarters. The soviet assigned work duties. Leftism in general is at war against the middle class, Marxism takes this to an extreme. All through the writings of Marx, you will rarely see hatred of the Aristocracy - the left is fine with the rich and the elite, it is the middle class, the bourgeoisie, which the left hates and seeks to destroy. So it was in St. Petersburg - doctors were assigned to dig ditches and factory workers to run hospitals. The word of the soviet was law. The corruption is obvious, people would do anything to sway the soviets to make their lives better. Sexual favors, criminal acts.

As I said, Lenin was a stupid man. All of this defied what Marx had outlined. Lenin tried to force communism on an uneducated and bitter populace. That so many died and it was such a disaster is really not a surprise. Democracy is mob rule, communism is inherently unjust, combine the two, backed by men with guns, and hell on earth is created, as it was in St. Petersburg.

It was real communism in every respect, and with the exception of another real communist regime, the Khmer Rouge, it was perhaps the most wretched chapter in human history.

Ayn Rand wrote of the experience as "the true evil was not that the communists killed so many, but that they denied life to we, the living."

 

[Uncensored2008]

The difference is between Marx saying that in a capitalist society the worker wages always remain at its minimum, and Krugman and other Keynesians who acknowledge that the worker wages do rise, often faster than GDP growth.

Except, of course, that Marx does NOT make that claim. Quite the opposite, in fact.

{But the past labour that is embodied in the labour-power, and the living labour that it can call into action; the daily cost of maintaining it, and its daily expenditure in work, are two totally different things. The former determines the exchange-value of the labour-power, the latter is its use-value. The fact that half a day’s labour is necessary to keep the labourer alive during 24 hours, does not in any way prevent him from working a whole day. Therefore, the value of labour-power, and the value which that labour-power creates in the labour-process, are two entirely different magnitudes; and this difference of the two values was what the capitalist had in view, when he was purchasing the labour-power.}

What you need to understand that Keynes actually showed that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with capitalism ("magneto problem") at the time when many people were losing their faith in it.

Krugman is not Keynes.

Note that I have never called Keynes an idiot, nor will I. Krugman is a fraud and an idiot.

They don't choose anything, they just look at the data -- like the stagnating middle class incomes.

The data does not support your claims.

His phrase could be interpreted as "most likely compared to other developed countries". In any case, he is just reporting the facts in that statement.

His phrase is that of a Marxian. Krugman is making the claim that inheritance is the basis of wealth, which is demonstrably false. But Krugman isn't know for making factual claims.

Good for him -- and I'm pretty sure Marx sad some reasonable things. Agreeing with them does not make you (or even Obama) a Marxist.

Obama and his handlers base their programs on Saul Alinsky. To what extent Alinsky is based on Marx is open for debate. Thus far, Obama's economic policies align very well with those of Benito Mussolini, and not at all with Karl Marx.

They differ from Marx in very fundamental (to Marx) things.

The rhetoric used by Obama in the average speech is extremely Marxist.

{Now, it's a simple theory. And we have to admit, it's one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That's in America's DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. But here's the problem: It doesn't work. It has never worked. It didn't work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It's not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the 50s and 60s. And it didn't work when we tried it during the last decade. I mean, understand, it's not as if we haven't tried this theory.} - Mao Tse Tung

(Or is it Barack Obama?)

Oh boy... Now you really want proving to everyone that YOU are an idiot?

You're lack of education does not make me an idiot. Lenin's USSR was the most democratic country the world has ever seen. If you had the votes in the local soviet, you could literally have your neighbor shot. Majority ruled - without exception.

And the supply-side economics are simply wrong by postulating that less taxes and regulation always lead to a better life for everyone. Becuase that is all that the supply-side economics is about.

I appreciate your straw man, but your attack on supply-side is not germane to the discussion at hand.

It is useful to point out -- again -- that those who you are accusing of being Marxists are in fact supporters of managed markets. You know, those are quite different approaches -- abolishing capitalism, and using it for everyone's benefit.

Definition of SOCIALISM
1
: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods


Hmmm...

The notion that the greedy capitalist pigs will eventually start competing for the workers (which are the source of their profits) is not that complicated. The fact that it never came to his mind makes him quite dim and shortsighted.

This is because you operate from a caricature of Marx rather than from what Marx actually wrote.

{We stated, on a previous page, that in the creation of surplus-value it does not in the least matter, whether the labour appropriated by the capitalist be simple unskilled labour of average quality or more complicated skilled labour. All labour of a higher or more complicated character than average labour is expenditure of labour-power of a more costly kind, labour-power whose production has cost more time and labour, and which therefore has a higher value, than unskilled or simple labour-power. }

Yeah, there are a lot of people trying to take on Krugman.

Krugman is a left-wing pundit.

As an economist, no one bothers with him. He has no credibility at all.

Usually by taking his writing out of context. the article above ignores the main point Krugman makes:
"What Texas shows is that a state offering cheap labor and, less important, weak regulation can attract jobs from other states. I believe that the appropriate response to this insight is “Well, duh.” The point is that arguing from this experience that depressing wages and dismantling regulation in America as a whole would create more jobs — which is, whatever Mr. Perry may say, what Perrynomics amounts to in practice — involves a fallacy of composition: every state can’t lure jobs away from every other state.

In fact, at a national level lower wages would almost certainly lead to fewer jobs — because they would leave working Americans even less able to cope with the overhang of debt left behind by the housing bubble, an overhang that is at the heart of our economic problem."

Also:
PolitiFact Texas | Texas has the highest proportion of workers earning minimum wage or less

 

[Uncensored2008]

Ahh... the typical response of someone who has no answers, only complaints... Congratulations... your just another pussy who thinks in AM Radio-ese.

You were bested in actual debate and responded with a temper tantrum.

 

[Uncensored2008]

ooooh, COrky, you are soooo cute when you are angry....

I don't think you "Noam Chomsky Republicans" really make anyone angry.