[larrydallas]

When he said capitalism would fail becasue of greed and lack of conservation.

Well, we never had pure capitalism anyway. Case in point the guy that buys a Hummer and writes it off as a business expense farm vehicle when he lives in the city. The govt. can't help you there if you don't make enough to where you pay 100 grand in taxes which is like over 90% of the population.

That said, he was on to something as we have seen with peak oil. the ideal govt would be a blend of capitalism and socialism. The govt. should handle things like schools, healthcare, and municipal utilities like water and power. All of this should be done for ZERO profit. My God even the justice system has been privatized with prisons run for profit by Wackenhut which does security for like every airport in the nation. Geee I wonder how they got every contract in every market.

The energy department should also look out for the public interest and have strict gas mileage requirements and safety regualtion for vehicles and business.

I mean we could go a million ways with this and say it goes to campaign finance reform/soft money or whatever it can be traced back to.

Before we used to have the govt represent the people. Then the govt. represented the corporation. Now the govt. is the corporation.

[RIPSmithianEconomics]

He was also correct in his decision to live in serendipity rather than doing any productive for society. "Those who do not work do not deserve to eat, except me, thank you very much."

[_sluimers_]

LarryDallas,

Karl Marx didn't say capatalism would fail becuse of lack of conversation.
Karl Marx said that capatalism would fail because it pursues maximum profit and in order to do that you would have to destroy all of your competitors. That way, you can set the price.

I'll give an example. Microsoft's xbox. They sell it at a way to low price in order to destroy sony and nintendo, only to sell them at a much higher price later, or so I've heard. So according to Marx once Microsoft owns the video game engine industry, they will start to move on and use their new profits in order to destroy the entire video game industry and once that is out of the way, they'll move on to the entire game industry and once they've got that..... I think you get the picture.
So in the end Microsoft owns everything. And since they own everything, the only way to make even more profit is to lower the wages.So in the end there wouldn't be any consumers and Microsoft would destroy itself. In the end everyone would be poor. And then the labourers start to build utopia. A place where everyone gets a fair, almost equal wage and have no boss.

This utopia is impossible imo, unless done on a very small scale. Because someone has to be in charge of distributing all this money and make sure not one of the millions of people somehow manages to get much richer than the rest. So it was decided in the SU that the state should look after every company, to see they were equally distributing their wages. They also got to say what and how much the company should build in order to statisfy the peoples needs. In other words, the state secretly owned every single company in the Soviet Union. So according to me, this would mean that Marx was right. If there's only one company left (the state) it would collapse and so they did, eventually.


Your concerns about are also my concerns. For me, pure capatalism is the corporation owning the government, communism the other way around.
I was shocked when I saw on television that the United States had privatized their prison industry. For me that's the same as those oil companies, like Pemex, owned by the government.

[Guest]

Marx was Right yes.

If you look at the Soviet Union, it was never true communism but it was the closest most have ever managed to get.

The Government owned all the companies and supplied what was needed to the people. in all they consumed less than western world ecconomies, so they thought of themselves as less well off and wanted to emulate the west.

Had there been no west, the SU would not have had to build anywhere near the military it did. It would not have had to waste so many resources on that and could have put that energy into developing technology for the people to use and making food stuffs more plentiful etc.

Also if there were no west to envy, they would have been happy with their slower, more gradual developement, with less consumption and less waste of resources.

The Soviets originally surveyed their oil reserves like a geologist would. reported reserve finds when they happened, and knew when they would peak and what to do with the resource. Unlike the west who reported their discoveries to suit the stock market, and so give the illusion that we have more reserves now than ever before.

Communism failed because it had to compete with Capitalism. And Capitalism looks better in the short term, while Communism is the more obvious choice for the long term.

The Trouble is, mosty Humans think in the Short Term.

[goldfishbowl42]

That was me above, sorry, it normally logs me in automatically when I come to the site. Odd that it didn't this time.

[gnm]

if thats close to true communism I want nothing to do with it.. more like a brutal dictatorship if you ask me. How many did Stalin kill? 50 million or so of his own countrymen? I wouldn't blame thier collapse on competiton with thte west, more like internal corruption. Elite party members lived like kings.

-G

[The_Virginian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'H')ad there been no west, the SU would not have had to build anywhere near the military it did.

[goldfishbowl42]

You guys wouldn't know the meaning of Biased if you just read it it a Dictionary.


$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')f they had not been so intent of "spreading th revolution" to eastern Europe , Asia, Africa, South America...then there would have been no "Cold War", and thus no need for such a huge military on either side.

[larrydallas]

Just to clarify, Marx did imply lack of conservation when he said competition would be so cut throat. I don't think Ford cared how much gasoline burned in Expeditions as long as it was bigger than a Suburban.
AT&T did not care how much paper it wasted when trying to out do Sprint. That sort of destructive and wasteful behaior that comes of the out of control capitalism.

That said, capitalism is great for the extreme rich and and extreme poor. The govt. will not tax you and you are above the law if you have mega bucks. If you are dirt poor you pay few taxes, you might get SSI and do get EIC, and you will likely get a roof over your head, a fast food meal, and laid once in a while.

It is the middle working class that toil in this system. Taxation is out of control and you are so busy making a living that you really can not follow what is going on with the system at a proper level.

Communism you fudge for the govt.
Capitalism you get fudged by the govt.

Granted communists have done some horrible things but so have capitalists. Just to name a few:

atomic bombing
syphillis experiments on men w/o conscent
Vietnam
Iraqnam
depleted uranium use
etc....

I think as students in our country we just are spoon fed things from the corporate point of view so much that our history lessons are edited to demonize and villify "them".

I can not recall ever reading about things like the Rape of Naking, the 1953 coup in Iran, or even the 30 million Russians dead in WW2 at the hands of Bolshevics.

Karl Marx might have dissapeared from history books used in schools these days. Otherwise, he would sound pretty smart and heaven forbid a commie is right.

[goldfishbowl42]

I love the way lots of Americans love Star Trek, but how many realise that it has communism as its future government system. lol

the world they have in star trek is true communism. but their world is saved from our current problems by the infinate energy of a warp core and the infinate food supplies of the replicator.


Back to the point. Its not the system that is bad, its the implementation. In an ideal world Marx had some amazing ideas. The Problem is, realising them.

In America in the 50's you had McCartheism which was effectively witch hunting for commies. They were not even willing to accept the debate as a concept.

[PhilBiker]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 't')he world they have in star trek is true communism. but their world is saved from our current problems by the infinate energy of a warp core and the infinate food supplies of the replicator.

[OilBurner]

If you're interested in the area of communist utopias in science fiction, then this page on Iain M Banks' Culture novels is very interesting. Written by the man himself, here's a snippet:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Iain M Banks', ' ')Let me state here a personal conviction that appears, right now, to be profoundly unfashionable; which is that a planned economy can be more productive - and more morally desirable - than one left to market forces. The market is a good example of evolution in action; the try-everything-and-see-what-works approach. This might provide a perfectly morally satisfactory resource-management system so long as there was absolutely no question of any sentient creature ever being treated purely as one of those resources. The market, for all its (profoundly inelegant) complexities, remains a crude and essentially blind system, and is - without the sort of drastic amendments liable to cripple the economic efficacy which is its greatest claimed asset - intrinsically incapable of distinguishing between simple non-use of matter resulting from processal superfluity and the acute, prolonged and wide-spread suffering of conscious beings.

It is, arguably, in the elevation of this profoundly mechanistic (and in that sense perversely innocent) system to a position above all other moral, philosophical and political values and considerations that humankind displays most convincingly both its present intellectual [immaturity and] - through grossly pursued selfishness rather than the applied hatred of others - a kind of synthetic evil.

[The_Virginian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') love the way lots of Americans love Star Trek, but how many realise that it has communism as its future government system. lol

[Leanan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I') love the way lots of Americans love Star Trek, but how many realise that it has communism as its future government system.

[Chichis]

I prefer the Matrix way of "government". Have humans not actually accomplishing anything of consequence, and let dispassionate, logical robots figure out the details.

[Soft_Landing]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')ll I was saying was, if you could put capitalism on one planet, and communism/ socialism on another, one would advnce quicker at first, but the other would last the distance. And I think you know which it would be.

The Tortoise and the Hare guys.

[Chichis]

Communism works if you have robots as the government.

[buster]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'Y')et way before Truman, the Russians were working on spreading the revolution... Communist agents based themselves in Russia and worked to infiltrate all aspects of most countries on this planet.

[k_semler]

There are no commies in America? I beg to differ. Check out this site: http://www.cpusa.org

Better Dead Then Red.
America: Love It or Leave It.

[buster]

There's a big difference between ideological communists, and "sleeper" agents infiltrating society.

Members of the communist party join up, just like republicans and democrats. No conspiracy required.