Why Socialism can never die

[hoosierdaddy]

Sorry guys, the quote function sure doesn't work here the way I'm used to it. I'll go back and bold what I said in those posts.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

Of course I'm not giving away every penny to those less fortunate than me.  But I pay my taxes, which everyone else should do as well.  And I believe if someone wants to live in this country they should pay their taxes without complaining about where they go to (as in the health care system).  There is no need for me to revisit the word "obligation" but maybe you could meditate on the words "love your neighbour as yourself"?

Now, that IS a RIGHT. The RIGHT to vote for the representative I choose, along with the RIGHT to voice my opinion to him/ her and petition them where to spend my taxes and on what.

As I also have the RIGHT to choose my own moral/ religious path, within legal bounds, without having to deal with anyone haranguing me to 'love my neighbor' or 'be a good Samaritan' or 'render unto Caesar that which is his'. Part of the separation of Church and State, is to ensure religious zealots don't rise to a position of political power and enforce their particular belief on the rest of society, a la Taliban.

 

[Brad Sallows]

Since you're a Christian, you must understand the concept of free will and understand that it is every person's decision to accept Christ as saviour, not to mention every person's decision when choosing between all the lesser alternatives in life.  By your own system of beliefs, you must respect those who would be miserly and niggardly among us: it would be their choice, albeit not one with which you agree.

Furthermore, it would be wrong to compel a person to act against his freely chosen will, because it is not given to you to visit consequences on others - not you, and not any tyrannical majority of like-minded thinkers you can gather, no matter how large.  I'm pretty sure that the Lord reserves that to Himself.  Broadly, I suppose that taxation without consent, or tolerated begrudgingly, must be immoral in every belief or moral philosophical system which endeavours to support and promote the good, with the exception of a rule of faith (which is by definition inarguable).

The most you can in good moral conscience do is restrain a person from visiting harm against on others in violation of their essential rights, or entitlements under religious or secular law.

Secular socialism is not compatible with Christianity, because the former erodes responsibility for self and consideration of others.  I base this hypothesis purely on my own observations: as people expect "Government" to do more, they do less for themselves and others and assume the problem is being dealt with elsewhere.  Often it is not.

Obviously in a social and political organization of any mixture of faiths and cultures in which the rules aren't laid down by religious decree, there is going to be a system of taxation.  However, it should not be assumed that privileges provided at the expense of others are qualitatively the same as essential rights of the person.

 

[TCBF]

"yes. Yes, we are. In fact, if we have our way we will hav seven year-olds working in coal mines again."

- There we go: Six years of productivity - lost.

Tom

 

[couchcommander]

Well I'm not going to get into "why socialism will never die", just like I won't get into "Capitalism is for fools"... on this thread

Re: the health care.

Para and others, that's a really slippery slop. People can't be allowed to selectively opt out of the tax system, the result would be anarchy.

Take for example someone who:

Doesn't support the army - they think their gun will do just fine thank you
Doesn't support the police - see above
Doesn't support the judicial system - see above
Doesn't support roads or infrastructure development - they live in the country and have all that they think they'll need
etc. etc. etc.

Some of you are probably thinking, well yea, they should be able to. Two reasons why this is not good: a) the poor suckers that do need to use all of these systems, ie victims of crime, working people, etc. b) in all likelihood the guy who decided to "opt out" will, in fact, at some point need to use the system or will benefit from it's continued existence.

It's like you with your HMO. Really I am tempted to say go ahead - but don't come whining to me when the doctor that you are FORCED to go to decides that you don't in fact have crippling arthritis because he's over his quota for the month, or when you are injured, sent to a hospital, and then die when they decide the CAT scan will cost too much.

Think I'm making this up?

http://www.kaiserpapers.org/horror.html

That's about ONE HMO.

Yes yes, there are problems with our system. But please, take a few hours and read those.

As well, by allowing "opt out's" of the health care system, the inevitable result will be those that can afford to purchase what they think will be better care will opt out, ie the more wealthy; unfortunately they also happen to pay most of the taxes in the country.

For those who think that doesn't matter, I'd point out that these people rarely make this money by going out and doing all the work themselves but rather they earn it off of the backs of people less fortunate than them. They do, in fact, OWE IT to the rest of the nation, just like we owe our peace, stability, and prosperity to the society around us.

Disagree with that? Go live in Mogadishu for a few years, then come back and tell me you aren't grateful for our institutions (and I know some of you may have been to somalia, I mean go try and make a living as an average joe there).

And the challenge I issued last year still stands - find me one piece of hard, valid, peer reviewed reputable evidence that a for profit hospital will in fact be more efficient overall and we can get into that conversation again (and no, once again Frasier institute wishful thinking does not count, I'm talking a methodologically sound, cross sectional, analytical comparison of real world situations published in a reputable scientific or medical journal).

 

[Brad Sallows]

>Para and others, that's a really slippery slop. People can't be allowed to selectively opt out of the tax system, the result would be anarchy.

Let's consider the other direction.  What happens when people selectively keep adding to the pile of things that have to be paid out of the revenues of the tax system?  At what point might a taxpayer just throw up his hands and say, "You people simply don't know when to quit.  I might as well be speaking to a wall."  What should a person do to free himself from the burden of spenders who lack self control?

 

[couchcommander]

Vote for a different party and hope the rest of the country agrees? It's the same thing we all have to do whenever we disagree with something that's happening in our puesdo democratic society.

 

[Brad Sallows]

You're suggesting that the terms of civil debate should be restricted only to the question of "how much".  I would rather revisit the constitution to set firm boundaries on the responsibilities of federal and provincial governments and then hold them to those limits.

 

[couchcommander]

Well the boundardies between federal and provicial governments already exist - they've just become muddled.

As for exactly what areas these governments will choose to fund and not fund, i really do see that as area for the government of the day to decide. The constitution is rather inflexible and not prone to reacting to situations. If taxes get too high, the economy will suffer, and the populace should put in another government.

Overall though, the Liberals have been lowering taxes since 2000 - it's only since these conservatives have come in that we see the net take home pay actually going down for a lot of people but I still don't think we're in any danger of taxes running up again like they did under the previous conservative government ()

But seriously, I mean if you want to start a party or join one that says "no taxes", or even advocates "really small government" by all means go ahead, I just wouldn't expect it to win the next election.

 

[a_majoor]

This is a difficult question to answer, since the historical record is quite poor in this regard.

The Athenian Democracy could be swayed by clever demegogues, which eventually led to the assembly voting for the disasterous Sicilian expedition and Athens loosing the flower of her Fleet and Army, and eventually the Peloponnesian War. The Res Publica Roma was rocked by dissent and eventually civil war over the divisions of powers between the landed aristocracy and the growing class of free citizens (farmers, merchants, tradesmen), while under the Empire, citizens discovered they could treat themselves to bread and circus' at the taxpayer's expense. The radicals of the French Revolution drenched the streets with blood during the Terror, and eventually they got tired of bloodshed and elected Napoleon as First Council (only to discover they had created an even bigger bloodbath, involving all Europe).

Even the carefully limited Republic the Founding Fathers sought to create in the United States has been largely undone, through a combination of politics and the activities of the Supreme Court, which have extended the powers of the Congress far beyond anything imagined by the Founding Fathers. In this regard, revisiting the Consitution would have little effect, since much of what has been done was through fairly creative interpretation of what is already there. The Civil Rights act was passed and enforced mostly through provisions of the Congress having power to regulate interstate commerce, and this was the wedge which was used to enact many other "Great Society" bills and expand the governmet since the 1960s.

In our own case, we have a bizzare combination of a Westminister parliament, provinces which have a great deal of potential political power, an ill informed and apathetic citizen base, and an entrenched bureacracy in multiple layers of government. Sad to say, but incrimental change will not save the day, but who would want to suggest violent revolution to clear the decks and enact changes?

 

[couchcommander]

Sad to say, but incrimental change will not save the day, but who would want to suggest violent revolution to clear the decks and enact changes?

Agreed, peaceful democratic revolution in the spirit of "couchism" it is!

 

[a_majoor]

Agreed, peaceful democratic revolution in the spirit of "couchism" it is!

So, how do you suggest this gets done? Don't forget, "Socialism" as an ideology has a religious hold on people, and we have some first hand knowledge what societies run by religious zealots are like (and what it takes to remove them). 

 

[vangemeren]

Read this recently on BBC news:

Calcutta takes cue from China
By Humphrey Hawksley
BBC News, Calcutta 


After seven consecutive election victories, the Indian state government in West Bengal is taking tips from China on how to improve people's lives.
The walls of the ruling party's headquarters in one of Calcutta's poorer districts are decorated with iconic portraits of Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

From the building where policies were once drawn up to try to turn India into a one-party state, communist leaders are devising a new plan, neither looking west towards Moscow or Wall Street, but east towards Beijing.

"Chinese government has initiated new programmes," says the West Bengal Chief Minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharya.

"They say the socialist economy should also allow different types of ownership - state ownership and private ownership and foreign investment."

Capitalism v communism

While Lenin's statue presides in a central Calcutta park, skyscrapers, flyovers and consumer billboards mark the real city landscape and its aspirations.


They are bargaining from a position of strength. We cannot compete with China
Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, West Bengal Chief Minister 

It is at least a generation behind China, but the idea is to woo the growing middle-class which will, in turn, give confidence to foreign investors.

"Previously what happened was that the communists had a very strong rural base so they used to keep winning in the villages," explains 25-year-old IT consultant Ruhin Chatterjee, one among millions of young middle-class voters who support the communists. "But in the cities they never won. This latest election has seen a change in that."

One of the marks of increased wealth is the creation of shopping malls with advertising hoardings for high-rise dream homes, designer labels and massage therapy.

But the truth is that they are a rarity.

About 80% of Indians still live on less than $2 a day, whereas in China that figure has dropped to less than 50%.

While mobile phones seem to abound in Calcutta, 13 Chinese have one to every one Indian.

The statistics in other areas bear out the same story - China has outpaced India in just about every level of development.

And in the crucial area of direct foreign investment, China receives almost $60bn a year compared to just $5bn for the whole of India.

"Chinese economy has an inner strength," admits Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, whose plan for development depends on attracting billions of dollars in foreign investment.

"They are bargaining from a position of strength. We cannot compete with China."

Fierce competition


Central to the debate is the Chinese argument that democracy stops development.

But a straw poll in the middle-class Calcutta mall brings out a definitive response.

"China does not practice human rights," said a middle-aged woman, to which a young man next to her added, "We are not ready to sacrifice our human rights to get people out of poverty. No."

Thirty miles outside of Calcutta, in a village where 90% of the people voted for the communists, the response is the same.

"Vote," says one farmer. "Vote is best."

West Bengal has been in a 30-year experiment in running a communist administration within a democracy.

It is way behind China and has not delivered much more than any other Indian state.

Its literacy rate of just under 70% is about mid-way among all the Indian states.

If the state's ruling communists do begin to follow China as they once followed the Soviet Union, their supporters - rich or poor - would draw a line on the Chinese formula of curtailing rights in order to create wealth.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/south_asia/5012946.stm

Published: 2006/05/24 14:52:30 GMT

 

[exsemjingo]

Ignorance is strength.
War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.

Sound familiar?

That's the tricky thing.  Orwell already wrote a book about the Soviet Union with Animal Farm.  1984 on the other hand was more general, and the reader is meant to find strains of that society in his own.

I could say more on Socialism, but many economists have already written better material.  The best arguments against Socialism are it's own results.

 

[Cliff]

After seven consecutive election victories, the Indian state government in West Bengal is taking tips from China on how to improve people's lives.

I needed a good laugh

 

[exsemjingo]

I just got a good lesson in the importacne of reading threads closely.  I did not realize most of this thread agreed with my political sensibilities and that there was no need for over-the-top, inflammatory rhetoric.

That said, the BBC article on Calcutta neglected to mention one important fact: India was closed to outside investment and foreign trade until 1990.
Calcutta really did take a page from relative Chinese prosperity.  The state had been Communist in earnest. 

 

[a_majoor]

The link is to the full article, which political junkies can read at their leisure, but the excerpts should whet your appetite:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19302

Kolakowski's thesis, driven through 1,200 pages of exposition, is straightforward and unambiguous. Marxism, in his view, should be taken seriously: not for its propositions about class struggle (which were sometimes true but never news); nor for its promise of the inevitable collapse of capitalism and a proletarian-led transition to socialism (which failed entirely as prediction); but because Marxism delivered a unique —and truly original—blend of promethean Romantic illusion and uncompromising historical determinism.

The attraction of Marxism thus understood is obvious. It offered an explanation of how the world works—the economic analysis of capitalism and of social class relations. It proposed a way in which the world ought to work—an ethics of human relations as suggested in Marx's youthful, idealistic speculations (and in György Lukács's interpretation of him, with which Kolakowski, for all his disdain for Lukács's own compromised career, largely concurs[6] ). And it announced incontrovertible grounds for believing that things will work that way in the future, thanks to a set of assertions about historical necessity derived by Marx's Russian disciples from his (and Engels's) own writings. This combination of economic description, moral prescription, and political prediction proved intensely seductive—and serviceable. As Kolakowski has observed, Marx is still worth reading—if only to help us understand the sheer versatility of his theories when invoked by others to justify the political systems to which they gave rise.[7]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Main Currents of Marxism is not the only first-rate account of Marxism, though it is by far the most ambitious.[10] What distinguishes it is Kolakowski's Polish perspective. This probably explains the emphasis in his account on Marxism as an eschatology —"a modern variant of apocalyptic expectations which have been continuous in European history." And it licenses an uncompromisingly moral, even religious reading of twentieth-century history:

The Devil is part of our experience. Our generation has seen enough of it for the message to be taken extremely seriously. Evil, I contend, is not contingent, it is not the absence, or deformation, or the subversion of virtue (or whatever else we may think of as its opposite), but a stubborn and unredeemable fact.[11]
No Western commentator on Marxism, however critical, ever wrote like that.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the causes of the popularity of Marxism among educated people was the fact that in its simple form it was very easy; even [sic] Sartre noticed that Marxists are lazy....[Marxism was] an instrument that made it possible to master all of history and economics without actually having to study either.[13]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
As the example of the fiercely independent Aron suggests, the attraction of Marxism goes well beyond the familiar story, from ancient Rome to contemporary Washington, of scribblers and flatterers drawn to despots. There are three reasons why Marxism lasted so long and exerted such magnetism upon the best and the brightest. In the first place, Marxism is a very big idea. Its sheer epistemological cheek —its Promethean commitment to understanding and explaining everything —appeals to those who deal in ideas, just as it appealed for that reason to Marx himself. Moreover, once you substitute for the proletariat a party that promises to think in its name, then you have created a collective organic intellectual (in the sense coined by Gramsci) which aspires not just to speak for the revolutionary class but to replace the old ruling class as well. In such a universe, ideas are not merely instrumental: they exercise a kind of institutional control. They are deployed for the purpose of rescripting reality on approved lines. Ideas, in Kolakowski's words, are communism's "respiratory system" (which, incidentally, is what distinguishes it from otherwise similar tyrannies of fascist origin which have no comparable need of intelligent-sounding dogmatic fictions). In such circumstances, intellectuals— Communist intellectuals—are no longer confined to speaking truth to power. They have power—or at least, in the words of one Hungarian account of this process, they are on the road to power. This is an intoxicating notion.[16]

The second source of Marxism's appeal is that Marx and his Communist progeny were not a historical aberration, Clio's genetic error. The Marxist project, like the older socialist dream which it displaced and absorbed, was one strand in the great progressive narrative of our time: it shares with classical liberalism, its antithetical historical twin, that narrative's optimistic, rationalistic account of modern society and its possibilities. Marxism's distinctive twist—the assertion that the good society to come would be a classless, post-capitalist product of economic processes and social upheaval—was already hard to credit by 1920. But social movements deriving from the initial Marxian analytical impulse continued for many decades to talk and behave as though they still believed in the transformative project.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
But there was a third reason why Marxism had appeal, and those who in recent years have been quick to pounce upon its corpse and proclaim the "end of History," or the final victory of peace, democracy, and the free market, might be wise to reflect upon it. If generations of intelligent men and women of good faith were willing to throw in their lot with the Communist project, it was not just because they were lulled into an ideological stupor by a seductive tale of revolution and redemption. It was because they were irresistibly drawn to the underlying ethical message: to the power of an idea and a movement uncompromisingly attached to representing and defending the interests of the wretched of the earth. From first to last, Marxism's strongest suit was what one of Marx's biographers calls "the moral seriousness of Marx's conviction that the destiny of our world as a whole is tied up with the condition of its poorest and most disadvantaged members."[17]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Today, however, things are changing once again. What Marx's nineteenth-century contemporaries called the "Social Question"—how to address and overcome huge disparities of wealth and poverty, and shameful inequalities of health, education, and opportunity—may have been answered in the West (though the gulf between poor and rich, which seemed once to be steadily closing, has for some years been opening again, in Britain and above all in the US). But the Social Question is back on the international agenda with a vengeance. What appears to its prosperous beneficiaries as worldwide economic growth and the opening of national and international markets to investment and trade is increasingly perceived and resented by millions of others as the redistribution of global wealth for the benefit of a handful of corporations and holders of capital.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
In recent years respectable critics have been dusting off nineteenth-century radical language and applying it with disturbing success to twenty-first-century social relations. One hardly needs to be a Marxist to recognize that what Marx and others called a "reserve army of labor" is now resurfacing, not in the back streets of European industrial towns but worldwide. By holding down the cost of labor—thanks to the threat of outsourcing, factory relocation, or disinvestment[18] —this global pool of cheap workers helps maintain profits and promote growth: just as it did in nineteenth-century industrial Europe, at least until organized trade unions and mass labor parties were powerful enough to bring about improved wages, redistributive taxation, and a decisive twentieth-century shift in the balance of political power—thereby confounding the revolutionary predictions of their own leaders.

Read the rest

 

[-Marauder-]

I hope socialism (or Marxisant theories of the global political economy) never dies.  While I disagree with so many of their assumtions, ideals and conclusions I do find it useful, from time to time, to try and look at a situation through their lenses or 'eyes'.  When I do, I find that some of what they have to say on subjects such as captialism, imperialism, globalization, East/West/North/South relations and/or hegemony to be insightful and sometimes instructive.   

Most modern Marxisant theories do not advocate the type of traditional revolution that classical Marxists do, rather they offer unique alternatives, some of which are very much in effect through out the world (West and East, North and South).  Some of the most benign of which, are represented in social, liberal democracies like Canada, where the emphasis is not only on democracy and liberal tenets but also social responsibility(ies) to the citizenry.  Depending on your bent, this may swing too far to the left but it is interesting in that it is something that a democracy selected and was not imposed, as it often appears to be in recent 'socialist' states.

Anyway, I like to think of it as a tool in my toobox (or lense) that I can take out and use to question some of my own assumptions and perspectives.

Cheers,

Mike

Edit - spelling :-[

 

[exsemjingo]

Yeah, I like to hold onto old tools too: dull chisels, ratchets that don't turn anymore, phillips screwdrivers with the corners rounded off...
Marxism did not work for a while and then loose relevance; it never worked in the first place.  Even the economic examples listed in the Communist Manifesto do not last past the first few generations.

I've taken a job at a Union shop, and from time to time I talk with my co-workers about paying the bills, making ends meet, etc.  I find myself having to argue (nicely) over elementry concepts, like the existence of inflation.
How could any ideology to the left of union ideas ever be useful?

 

[TCBF]

"The Civil Rights act was passed and enforced mostly through provisions of the Congress having power to regulate interstate commerce, and this was the wedge which was used to enact many other "Great Society" bills and expand the governmet since the 1960s."

- A good point.  The Gun Control Act of 1934 was "Taxation" legislation: placing a $200 USD transfer fee on silencers, full-autos and 'short' firearms.

- In Canada, the REAL money out of the taxpayers arcs is commited to government funded 'foundations' which are beyond the vision and control of Parliament - and thus: the Auditor General.

You can bet a list of contracts to suppliers and consultants is a veritable 'who's-who' of the 'progressive elite ' of Canada.