I joined the Communist Party

Originally posted by brukernavn
The workers only get what they produce. Is that not common sense?

Did you produce your computer? No? Then why are you here?

Common sense tells me that everyone is born with the right to food, shelter, warmth, safety, and education. For anything more than this, that's where the work comes in.

Originally posted by Cuervo

Any form of centralized government only works on a small geographic scale.

But communism is not a form of centralized government.

It is not a form of government at all, it is an economic system. It requires no government at all. Some communists are anarchist.

Anarchist communism is a form of anarchism that advocates the abolition of the State and capitalism in favour of a horizontal network of voluntary associations through which everyone will be free to satisfy his or her needs.

Anarchist communism is also known as anarcho-communism, communist anarchism, or, sometimes, libertarian communism. However, while all anarchist communists are libertarian communists, some libertarian communists, such as council communists, are not anarchists. What distinguishes anarchist communism from other variants of libertarian communism is the formers opposition to all forms of political power, hierarchy and domination...

Anarchist communism - an introduction

Originally posted by jiggerj
Did you produce your computer? No? Then why are you here?

Common sense tells me that everyone is born with the right to food, shelter, warmth, safety, and education. For anything more than this, that's where the work comes in.

That's not what he means.

Instead of the worker having to produce more than they are paid for, surplus value/profit, they receive the full worth of the product they produce. So instead of working to support the capitalist class, we work to support only ourselves. The private owner is an unnecessary financial burden on society, much worse than welfare.

Originally posted by ANOK

Originally posted by jiggerj
Did you produce your computer? No? Then why are you here?

Common sense tells me that everyone is born with the right to food, shelter, warmth, safety, and education. For anything more than this, that's where the work comes in.

That's not what he means.

Instead of the worker having to produce more than they are paid for, surplus value/profit, they receive the full worth of the product they produce. So instead of working to support the capitalist class, we work to support only ourselves. The private owner is an unnecessary financial burden on society, much worse than welfare.

In other words the profit goes in the worker's pockets. Well, why didn't he just say that?

Originally posted by hawkiye

Originally posted by something wicked

Originally posted by hawkiye

Originally posted by something wicked

Originally posted by hawkiye

Originally posted by brukernavn
reply to post by hawkiye

 

Yes, the US became prosperous after the raping of Europe and Japan during WWII.

Care to back that up with some hard evidence? Ever heard of the Marshall Plan? America pumped billions into Europe to rebuild after the war and after four years the European economies had surpassed their previous economies and enjoyed unprecedented prosperity in their histories for years to come!

America also pumped billions into rebuilding Japan and it became one of the leading economies of the world and first in Asia.

Please stop repeating ridiculous anti-american propaganda you are embarrassing yourselves! America has plenty of things to be angry at her about but WWII is not one of them!

The Marshall plan wasn't a gift that was pumped in, it was a loan that took the UK for example 50 years to pay off, including the interest. I'm not saying I dispute the need for it, but it was by no means a gift, please don't try and dress it up to look like one.

Of course it was it was both loans and grants to rebuild those countries. America was not obligated to do anything.

I never suggested otherwise. The previous post seemed to suggest it was a gift, if you look at my post first before reacting I didn't suggest there was any obligation.

It was a gift the loans and grants did not have to be offered and Europe would have suffered for decades had they not been given. it helped rebuild Europe's Economies to better then they had ever been how is that not a gift? During WWII America was still in transition from the free markets that made it great to the socialist corporatist mess we have today it did not have deep pockets it was in debt also from the war so it was indeed a gift to do what it did. Geez you act like it was some selfish act or something...

My word, what is up with you? It was a loan, intended to be paid back with interest - that is not a gift!!!! It was given for the best of reasons, Europe was decimated in WW2, America was not, but it was NOT a gift, you do not have to give gifts back (with interest).

It also, for some countries acted as a tie to reduce the risk of them taking up the Soviet banner so arguably it was a financial and political gain, but why are you the only person who does not see this? Read any respectable commentary around post war affairs and you will understand this a little better - why the chip on the shoulder, there isn't a need for one.

Originally posted by jiggerj

In other words the profit goes in the worker's pockets. Well, why didn't he just say that?

I can't answer for the poster, sorry.

But yes the 'profit' goes to the worker. But it's not really 'profit' in the sense it is under capitalism. Profit is surplus value, what is left after wages are paid. If there is no surplus value there is no profit.

The idea of socialism is the ability to produce for our needs, rather than making 'profit'. If we can produce what we need, profit is irrelevant. Profit is only relevant when resources are keep artificially scarce in order to produce demand, and keep prices high. If we have access to the means to produce, we can just produce what we need as a community. Money and profit would become irrelevant, class privilege would become irrelevant.

Capitalism simply monopolizes the means to produce, only a minority class has access, and uses that to exploit those who don't.

Originally posted by ANOK

Originally posted by something wicked

Now that is pushing it a little. The terminology is such that you can only really use the last century and a bit as examples but what about Russia, China and Cambodia as three really easy examples. By proportion, the 'left wing regime' in those countries slaughtered and starved a huge percentage of its population. You may try to twist how you would label the governing party/regime, but to say it was not one that would be considered left wing in its true sense would be naive.

Not at all. Those regimes were not left-wing by any stretch of the definition.

Don't believe that? Then listen to Chomsky explain it. You might not like his political views, but remember he is a linguist professor, he knows language and the meaning of terms.

Sorry, but you are so missing the point. Was Pol Pot the head of the self styled red army which he classed as a communist regime? The answer is yes. You can argue semantics all night for me, I won't be here, but it won't change facts. Do YOU regard him as left wing/communist? It really doesn't matter much does it?

The joke is, I've no issue with communism/socialism as long as those practising it have no issue with holding a mirror to where it has been attempted in the past. You are espousing an ideal which has not been realised in any post industrial revolution country so cannot be tested as a workable theory.

reply to post by ANOK

Instead of the worker having to produce more than they are paid for, surplus value/profit, they receive the full worth of the product they produce. So instead of working to support the capitalist class, we work to support only ourselves. The private owner is an unnecessary financial burden on society, much worse than welfare.

Please walk us through how you would set up this so called non-private enterprise? Where and how would you get the resources to start such a venture? How would you decide what the full worth of each worker is and what if some workers don't agree on what their worth is they think they are worth more how do you resolve that? etc etc. Please these are serious questions that have to be answered if there is any hope for such a system to work.

Edited to add: how do you deal with lazy workers who claim they are hard workers? Who decides of someone is lazy and deserves a cut in pay or fired?

What a joke without profit that things that paves the way for new "stuff" the only thing the "people" end up with is nothing.

As we have seen in North Korea,Russia. and everywhere else communism has been tried, anyone who says communist is the way sorry are clueless.

Now if the argument that "true communism" has never been tried that same argument can be used for capitalism.

There is only one economic model that has lifted billions out of poverty and that is "capitalism" there is nothing out there that comes close to the standard of lving the majority has.

Communism is a lifetime commitment to slavery never will there ever come a day where the people become their own masters.

Originally posted by something wicked
Do YOU regard him as left wing/communist? It really doesn't matter much does it?

No I don't because what he did had nothing to do with traditional socialism/communism. Marx would not have supported such a regime.

Again the terms were used for propaganda reasons, not as a description of their economic systems. These were power seekers simply manipulating the population to gain support.

Didn't you get the memo? Politicians lie.

The joke is, I've no issue with communism/socialism as long as those practising it have no issue with holding a mirror to where it has been attempted in the past. You are espousing an ideal which has not been realised in any post industrial revolution country so cannot be tested as a workable theory.

But what you consider attempts at socialism, were not attempts at all. But regardless this is not about winners and loser, the winner is not always the good guy. Spain did extremely well under true stateless socialism for almost three years, and would have continued doing well if it wasn't for the right-wing, Franco, Mussolini and Hitler, waging war on them to keep the workers from taking the power away from the establishment.

The Revolution in Spain

Originally posted by Citybig

Originally posted by Donkey_Dean
reply to post by Citybig

 

Our representative democracy although far from perfect was a champion of freedom and civil liberties for 200+ years! The degradation of our country seems to go hand and hand with the loss of personal liberty and freedom. It seems fraud controls our electoral process and maybe we are lost. It still is, or at least was a more perfect form of goverment!

If the law was truly accountable to the people of America I can assure you that the wars would end! It seems to me that America serves outside interests at this time. Like a puppet on strings!

edit on 12-6-2012 by Donkey_Dean because: (no reason given)

Oh right, a champion of freedom and civil liberties, you say?

Any black people on these boards who were alive during the 40's/50's/60's want to tell us about how life was like in the "champion of civil liberties and freedom" USA?

Considering both black and WHITE slaves existed during the formation of the colonies and at the time of the adoption of the US Constitution, and considering that that has all changed all due to allowances for amendments to the Constitution, that is a strawman argument that liberals love to bring up. The America hating liberals love to throw that in everybody's face any time we bring up liberty, freedom and the Constitution. Just let us not forget that it was not socialists who got the slaves freed, it was the republican abolitionists who led that charge.

The goal of the abolitionist movement was the immediate emancipation of all slaves and the end of racial discrimination and segregation. Advocating for immediate emancipation distinguished abolitionists from more moderate anti-slavery advocates who argued for gradual emancipation, and from free-soil activists who sought to restrict slavery to existing areas and prevent its spread further west. Radical abolitionism was partly fueled by the religious fervor of the Second Great Awakening, which prompted many people to advocate for emancipation on religious grounds. Abolitionist ideas became increasingly prominent in Northern churches and politics beginning in the 1830s, which contributed to the regional animosity between North and South leading up to the Civil War.

Although abolitionist feelings had been strong during the American Revolution and in the Upper South during the 1820s, the abolitionist movement did not coalesce into a militant crusade until the 1830s. In the previous decade, as much of the North underwent the social disruption associated with the spread of manufacturing and commerce, powerful evangelical religious movements arose to impart spiritual direction to society. By stressing the moral imperative to end sinful practices and each person's responsibility to uphold God's will in society, preachers like Lyman Beecher, Nathaniel Taylor, and Charles G. Finney in what came to be called the Second Great Awakening led massive religious revivals in the 1820s that gave a major impetus to the later emergence of abolitionism

Although Karl Marx reportedly wrote Abraham Lincoln a letter commending him for his purpose of emancipating the slaves, he was not responsible for the upsurge of the abolitionists.

Communism became a later phenominon when, at the turn of the century, the Bolsheviks had their revolution with the support of the financial backing of western industrialists and bankers.
www.history.com...

this thread.

Originally posted by hawkiye

Please walk us through how you would set up this so called non-private enterprise? Where and how would you get the resources to start such a venture? How would you decide what the full worth of each worker is and what if some workers don't agree on what their worth is they think they are worth more how do you resolve that? etc etc. Please these are serious questions that have to be answered if there is any hope for such a system to work.

How do private individuals start businesses?

There is nothing stopping anyone from starting a cooperative worker owned company. All it takes is people to realise that is would benefit all of us, and is the better economic model. But of course people are not even taught that there is an alternative to capitalism.

I would imagine a hundred workers could finance a company as well as any private individual. What is stopping them other than the monopolization of wealth in the hands of the few?

There is also revolution, like in Spain. Once the means to produce are in the hands of the workers there is no need for finance.

Even economists agree that worker owned works...

The words "employee-owned business" once evoked small shops with lofty ideals but sloppy business practices. But today, employee-owned businesses like John Lewis Partnerships deliver impressive results, raising the bar for the rest. They show greater resilience in a recession. They earn loyalty from customers and suppliers. They move nimbly in tough markets. Insights from today's leading employee-owned businesses can be applied broadly, pointing the way toward a more robust and sustainable economy.

Why We Need More Employee-Owned Businesses

There are around 11,000 worker owned companies in the USA. That is socialism, not what your government is doing, or what happened in Russia.

Originally posted by eLPresidente
So you are against freedom...


Maybe thats why all your friends and family abandoned you?

edit on 12-6-2012 by eLPresidente because: (no reason given)

where does this line come from? please tell us all who is "against freedom"...that is such a rediculous statement, that it sounds like it comes from the mouth of a 5 year old, or beck, rush, hannity

reply to post by brukernavn


l.o.l.

Originally posted by ThirdEyeofHorus
The America hating liberals love to throw that in everybody's face any time we bring up liberty, freedom and the Constitution.

I agree. Even though what you bring up is not liberty. Capitalism is not liberty. Just because it is not government ownership it doesn't mean it's liberty. Whether it's private or government owned it is not liberty for the workers, the majority.

Capitalism creates hierarchy and authority just as government does. Without government the capitalists would be the government. There would be nothing stopping them creating another slave trade.

Just let us not forget that it was not socialists who got the slaves freed, it was the republican abolitionists who led that charge.

Liberals are not socialists.

But to say socialists were not part of the abolition of slavery is completely wrong. McCarthyist ideology simply covered that up....

"Thornwell was also an advocate of slavery and in 1850 said: "The parties in this conflict [referring to the conflict over slavery] are not merely Abolitionists and slaveholders - they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, Jacobins on one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battleground -Christianity and atheism the combatants; and the progress of humanity at stake." (Quoted in Labor's Untold Story, Richard O. Boyer and Herbert M. Morais, Cameron Associates, New York, 1955)

It was most definitely not capitalists calling for abolition. Just like they didn't give you weekends, vacations, work safety, 40 hour week etc., nope you have the left-wing to thank for that.

Originally posted by hawkiye

Why don't one of you guys give us a more detailed break down of how you define "true communism" and how it works? I keep hearing its true freedom but I have yet to see how it is structured and how it would be implemented in a nation.

edit on 12-6-2012 by hawkiye because: (no reason given)

I'd also like to see an example of where this mythical "true communism" has EVER worked in the real world. So far, all I see is negative examples of them claiming that this or that communist state isn't "true communism"... so tell us, where IS "true communism"? Where has it been implemented, and where has it worked?

reply to post by hawkiye


Do you really think Madonna, the whore of Babylon contributed 350 million worth to our civilization?

Is the world $350 million dollars better for her being here?

Your answer?

Our values, our priorities and our whole sense of sanity are screwed up in my own opinion.

You have people who do the real work, my husband's heart surgeon isn't worth 350 million and he held my husband's heart in his hands...................now come on.

Entertainers, people who either act out emotional plays or "entertain" us are worth more than people that really contribute to our society...........and please do not say Madonna adds to our civilization what she does is not "art", it's pop and getting raunchier and more satanic year by year.

But then, you have your opinion and value system and I have mine.

You have my respect for your honesty. Willingness to openly self-identify as a Communist requires courage, especially if you have done so in America.

I would, however, very strongly encourage you to conduct your own research into the history of Communism as a movement. Unfortunately, what you will find as you do so, may disturb you.

I am not for one moment suspecting that you have any less than the best of intentions; but that is the nature of the particularly cruel trick that was played on humanity, with specifically Marxist/Leninist/Trotskyite Communism. Essentially, the cabal identified the natural, instinctive (within non-psychopaths) human tendency towards altruism, egalitarianism, and the desire for social justice, blended and falsely associated such with their own psychopathy, and then sold the resulting mixture back to the people as Communism.

I would invite you to read Kropotkin's Mutual Aid, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward and Equality, William Morris' News from Nowhere, Red Symphony, and The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

You can find all of these books online.

Josef, could read "The Revolution Betrayed", by Leon Trotsky.....when consorting with Trotskyists in the early 1970s to the early 1980s, "The Communist Party" was composed of people that occasionally physically attacked us, with no good reason, here in Britain......Trotsky conveys, with as much documentation as possible, that Stalin had repudiated Trotsky and his supporters' good ideas......then during the 1930s Stalin corruptly began to realise Trotsky had been right, therefore attempting to brutally cover his tracks, use Trotsky's ideas without ever mentioning his name.....hence the corruption......
In recent years, "horizontalism" has developed, where the horizontalists sit round in a circle, one guy takes down names of people who want to say something to the group, and it is made sure each person speaks in turn.....no decision is made without everybody agreeing......resulting in a "flat" sort of image of the horizontalists' democratic structure......some Trotskyists in Britain came along and looked at this system, and were just friendly and interested......and those are the more pleasant sides of left-wing activity.
Josef would be better to look at Leon Trotsky's writing, and even better to investigate horizontalist activity, and he'd feel happier. And so would everybody reading this.