10 Pillars of Communism

[DavidS]

Funny how communism used to be seen as evil...

Number 2, 5, 10 and 6 sound pretty familiar especially if the fairness doctrine goes in...

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc.

I guess we were a communist nation under Richard Nixon when the income tax was over 60 fucking percent. Goddamn fucking idiot.

 

[eots]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubMQkPzc0Fs]YouTube - Animal In Man Dead Prez[/ame]

 

[Vintij]

You fools, the banks are already nationalized. The central bank of the united states is called the FDIC, it has its hands dipped in every major bank and every major company with interest controlled loans and valuable federal reserve notes. Our foreign debt is not even the main issue, nor is our social obligational programs and state budgets.

People talk alot about the "national debt", there is nothing national about it......it is simply the overspending and botched state and federal budgets over the past ten years. In california, our taxes have just been raised across the board and at the same time, our services cut; most importantly our funding for education has been cut by almost ten billion over the next two years. How is this consistent with the stimulus mentality of the Obama administration? Trust me, there is not a single tax hike in the stimulus bill that was not already in place during previous administrations, and I didn't see a cut in federal grants and scholarships for schools

 

[Agnapostate]

In california, our taxes have just been raised across the board

Evidently, John and Ken aren't as powerful as they think they are.

 

[Wolfmoon]

Now, there is strong talk about nationalizing the banks. When they begin they won't stop. The only thing holding them back is the Second Amendment.

I can guarantee you that when they are sitting around talking about whether or not they should nationalize the banks, they aren't worried about Timothy McVeigh wannabes.

That's where you're wrong. The government can't even win a war with Iraq, a country the size of Texas. Can you imagine how they would deal with angry Americans across America. They would be peeing themselves and fearing for their lives. It's a little known fact that Communism thrives in Mexico.

 

[Wolfmoon]

You fools, the banks are already nationalized. The central bank of the united states is called the FDIC, it has its hands dipped in every major bank and every major company with interest controlled loans and valuable federal reserve notes. Our foreign debt is not even the main issue, nor is our social obligational programs and state budgets.

People talk alot about the "national debt", there is nothing national about it......it is simply the overspending and botched state and federal budgets over the past ten years. In california, our taxes have just been raised across the board and at the same time, our services cut; most importantly our funding for education has been cut by almost ten billion over the next two years. How is this consistent with the stimulus mentality of the Obama administration? Trust me, there is not a single tax hike in the stimulus bill that was not already in place during previous administrations, and I didn't see a cut in federal grants and scholarships for schools

You call us fools when the people in your state have literally bankrupted themselves and well on their way to being taxed to death and become part of Mexico. The mainsteam banks are not socialized, yet.

Your quote, "Our foreign debt is not even the main issue, nor is our social obligational programs and state budgets.", are you suggesting the banks did a Ponzi Scheme on us poor taxpayers?

 

[editec]

I keep hearing people complaining that we are nationalizing the banks.

We are?

Seems more like to me that the banks are nationalizing us.

If I go broke will the nation nationalize me to the tune of trillions of dollars for my toxic debts, too?

Because if they do, I just want you ALL to know that for the good of the commonweal I'll accept that pittance $500,000 income, too.

It won't be easy for me to bring my standard of living down to that level, but these are hard times and I understand that they require that we all make sacrifices for the good of the nation..

 

[anewday]

This dissussion is so deep. When I am able to uncover the stinking shit, I will tell u the answer in such simple terms your stupid ass won't understand it.

 

[Agnapostate]

We'll be waiting breathlessly.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Nothng wrong with "communism", it's a natural human state, well, primitive communism anyway.

The communism that provoked Orwell to write about in Animal Farm was Stalinism and Stalinism had been preceeded by Leninism (which is where the application of Marxism in the Soviet Union went right off the rails).

Orwell knew it but the British Left, Orwell's contemporaries, pilloried him and would have none of it.

Orwell may have written Animal Farm as a response, I don't know, I just know the British Left condemned him for his putting down of the Soviet Union.

You have to understand that this was just after WWII when the Soviets had helped the Allies to win WWII by flogging the Germans something chronic. The Brit Left was full of misty-eyed praise for the brave patriots of the Great Soviet Union and of course Comrade General Secretary Stalin, za Stalina! Crap of course, he was a fucking psychopath running an immensely corrupt state and Orwell said so.

I don't think the ideas of Marx and Engels have been applied anywhere in history. So-called Marxists are usually despots and have little relation with Marxism.

Man, the fact that there are still fools defending Communism attests to the fact that some people never learn.

It is significant that today is the anniversary of the first printing of the Manifesto, 1848, and here are some quibbling over abstruse points when recent history shows us that Communism is counter to human nature and is responsible for more deaths than any philosophy or even any disease.

A pity that so many schools and 'elites' still think it marks them as highminded.

"How do you tell a Communist?
Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin.
And how do you tell an anti-Communist?
It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."
Ronald Reagan

 

[editec]

As far as I can tell nobody on this board, not even Agna, is a supporter or defender of classical communism.

So who are these people you see defending commism exactly, Political Chic?

 

[Agnapostate]

Man, the fact that there are still fools defending Communism attests to the fact that some people never learn.

It is significant that today is the anniversary of the first printing of the Manifesto, 1848, and here are some quibbling over abstruse points when recent history shows us that Communism is counter to human nature and is responsible for more deaths than any philosophy or even any disease.

A pity that so many schools and 'elites' still think it marks them as highminded.

A pity that so many fail to understand the nature of communism, and instead conflate it with inappropriate references to Soviet state capitalism. As I've mentioned previously, the Soviet Union was not a socialist country. Socialism necessitates collective ownership and control of the means of production. Now, this collective ownership can theoretically be manifested (to some extent) through the state apparatus, as is the case in Venezuela, but they do not adhere to a "state socialist" model, and instead rely on local collectivization and governance.

The condition of the collective ownership of the means of production was not satisfied in the Soviet Union because the Bolshevik regime was extremely hostile towards the spread of democracy, as indicated by the dispatch of two Cheka agents to assassinate Nestor Makhno, or the Red Army's brutal suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion. Indeed, since it was a rule of the party and the Politburo, no condition of collective governance was satisfied, and a replacement of the tsarist ruling class was instead formed that mirrored the ruling class of Western capitalist nations, and thus formed a state capitalist ruling class.

Hence, Soviet state capitalism is inappropriately conflated with socialism. Noam Chomsky has noted this far too widespread phenomenon, along with the obvious contradictions between socialism and the state capitalism of the Soviet Union in The Soviet Union Versus Socialism.

When the world's two great propaganda systems agree on some doctrine, it requires some intellectual effort to escape its shackles. One such doctrine is that the society created by Lenin and Trotsky and molded further by Stalin and his successors has some relation to socialism in some meaningful or historically accurate sense of this concept. In fact, if there is a relation, it is the relation of contradiction.

Of course, Chomsky's article was written in 1986, so you might be inclined to respond that socialists only rejected the Soviet Union once its numerous failures were apparent. (Thought that would still conflict with your claim that socialists ignore the failures of their ideology.) But this claim applies only to certain classes of socialists, and certainly cannot include all. You might mention failures of the Soviet Union when conversing with a Marxist-Leninist, for instance. (And I have many times.) But that approach will likely do you little good in a discussion with those who espouse more libertarian variants of socialism, such as anarchists.

Indeed, legitimate socialists identified the Soviet Union as anti-socialist once they became aware of its authoritarian and statist nature, which might serve as a response to your possible claim that socialists only condemned the Soviet Union once its failures became apparent. For instance, the anarcho-communist Peter Kropotkin recognized the authoritarian, anti-socialist nature of the Bolshevik regime immediately after the Russian Revolution. In a 1920 letter to Lenin he writes this:

Russia has already become a Soviet Republic only in name. The influx and taking over of the people by the 'party,' that is, predominantly the newcomers (the ideological communists are more in the urban centers), has already destroyed the influence and constructive energy of this promising institution - the soviets. At present, it is the party committees, not the soviets, who rule in Russia. And their organization suffers from the defects of bureaucratic organization. To move away from the current disorder, Russia must return to the creative genius of local forces which, as I see it, can be a factor in the creation of a new life.And the sooner that the necessity of this way is understood, the better. People will then be all the more likely to accept [new] social forms of life. If the present situation continues, the very word 'socialism' will turn into a curse. That is what happened to the conception of equality in France for forty years after the rule of the Jacobins.

Kropotkin quickly recognized the state capitalist nature of the Bolshevik regime and the calamities that socialism would later face if the Soviet Union was identified as "socialist." Hence, it is not only Chomsky, nor even only Kropotkin or other anarchists, but all legitimate socialists who recognize the state capitalist nature of the Soviet Union. Indeed, it could be argued that anarchists recognized the imminent failure of authoritarian varieties of Marxism long before the establishment of the Soviet Union or the Bolshevik party, as evidenced by Bakunin's observations that "If you took the most ardent revolutionary, vested him in absolute power, within a year he would be worse than the Czar himself" and "When the people are being beaten with a stick, they are not much happier if it is called "the People's Stick."

The anti-socialists' desperation to cling to the falsity that the Soviet Union or its state capitalist ideology was socialist reveals the fact that they have no other arguments against socialism to provide.

"How do you tell a Communist?
Well, it's someone who reads Marx and Lenin.
And how do you tell an anti-Communist?
It's someone who understands Marx and Lenin."
Ronald Reagan

I've found that most who regurgitate that quote themselves have a rather shallow understanding of Marx and Engels (writhe with numerous misunderstandings), and indeed, the very act of limiting an analysis of socialism or communism to Marx and Engels is itself a behavior that necessitates a shallow understanding of the topics.

 

[Agnapostate]

Prediction of IdiotSpeak that is to come:

ROFLMNAO...Ain't it PRECIOUS that you LEFTIST NAZIS obfuscate the nature of your flagrantly FAILED THEORIES?! Try again, SIS.

 

[dilloduck]

Prediction of IdiotSpeak that is to come:

ROFLMNAO...Ain't it PRECIOUS that you LEFTIST NAZIS obfuscate the nature of your flagrantly FAILED THEORIES?! Try again, SIS.

Whatever---take your pure socialism or communism and shove it. It's easy to hide in defense of things that don't exist while critizicing others that do.

 

[PoliticalChic]

As far as I can tell nobody on this board, not even Agna, is a supporter or defender of classical communism.

So who are these people you see defending commism exactly, Political Chic?

Quibble and cluck: Anybody who splits hairs, who redefines, who argues over definitions, says things like, "that's not exactly communism." That is a defense. If you don't have the courage or intelligence to call communism what it is, indefensible, than you are defending it.

To believe in any aspect of communism as a form of government, shows an abject lack of understanding of human nature. Review William Bradford of Plymouth, and the Stakanovite Revolution.

 

[PubliusInfinitum]

Those are the ten reforms set out in the Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels. By themselves, they do not constitute a communist society, and many other non-Marxist socialists (anarchists, for instance), would argue that state ownership of the means of production does not even constitute a socialist economic framework. Number 2 is also mistranslated in that the Manifesto does not call for an "income" tax.

To me, continued postings of this indicate a continued ignorance of Marx and Engels, and indeed a continued ignorance of any socialist political philosophy.

Yes, Anachists would tend towards arguing against ownership by the state... Which is why they're not communists... Perhaps that's why Karl and Fried didn't call it the Anarchist Manifesto...

And that 'to you' the posting of these perfectly understandable planks which the two commies felt were necessary to manifest communism indicates an understanding og spcialist philosophy represents ignorance is BECAUSE OF YOUR IGNORANCE. In your mind socialism is all sweetness and light... which contrast with realities version where socialism is tyranny and death; the embodiment of pure evil.

 

[Agnapostate]

Whatever---take your pure socialism or communism and shove it. It's easy to hide in defense of things that don't exist while critizicing others that do.

On the contrary, when it comes to contentions between socialism and capitalism, I always find it necessary to criticize capitalism on the grounds that belief in free markets is utopian and that a capitalist economy does not efficiently allocate goods and resources. Socialism corrects this problem by minimizing agency costs and imperfect information.

Quibble and cluck: Anybody who splits hairs, who redefines, who argues over definitions, says things like, "that's not exactly communism." That is a defense. If you don't have the courage or intelligence to call communism what it is, indefensible, than you are defending it.

Your definitions will obviously be criticized if they're inaccurate.

To believe in any aspect of communism as a form of government, shows an abject lack of understanding of human nature. Review William Bradford of Plymouth, and the Stakanovite Revolution.

You haven't read Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, have you? There's no basis for the traditional rightist monopoly over argument stemming from understanding of "human nature."

 

[Agnapostate]

Yes, Anachists would tend towards arguing against ownership by the state... Which is why they're not communists... Perhaps that's why Karl and Fried didn't call it the Anarchist Manifesto...

First inaccuracy.

Anarchist Communism: Its Basis and Principles

We are communists. But our communism is not that of the authoritarian school: it is anarchist communism, communism without government, free communism. It is a synthesis of the two chief aims pursued by humanity since the dawn of its history—economic freedom and political freedom.

Might want to try again, slappy.

And that 'to you' the posting of these perfectly understandable planks which the two commies felt were necessary to manifest communism indicates an understanding og spcialist philosophy represents ignorance is BECAUSE OF YOUR IGNORANCE. In your mind socialism is all sweetness and light... which contrast with realities version where socialism is tyranny and death; the embodiment of pure evil.

"Sweetness and light"? That would tend to lean to a utopian perspective of political economy, an almost...capitalist perspective on markets, for instance.

 

[PubliusInfinitum]

As far as I can tell nobody on this board, not even Agna, is a supporter or defender of classical communism.

So who are these people you see defending commism exactly, Political Chic?

ROFLMNAO... Oh GOD! Now that's precious...

"Classical Communism".... So no one is advocating for the absolute corruption of governance, where the government is given total power and uses that power to usurp the means of every individual within the sphere of influence fo that government to exercise their inalienable human rights?

WHAT? Huh... I wonder why not?

Of course... There's actually never been much of a crusade behind that... as a general rule, the classic Commies will either intentionally misrepresent their intentions... or they are foolish sychophants, like little aggie over there, and they're ignorant of what Communism actually IS... preferring to spin nicer and gentler versions.

"Classical Communism" is a lie... an untenable fantasy... which is born out in the failure of every would-be experiment, including those presently failing in Europe and right here in the good ol' US of A... That they have not "failed" is merely a facet of 'when'... as 'IF' is an absolute, mathematical certainty.

 

[PoliticalChic]

You haven't read Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, have you? There's no basis for the traditional rightist monopoly over argument stemming from understanding of "human nature."

Tell me, during your residence in which Communist country did you do your reading?