[charmcitysking]

Marx’s writings mainly focused on economic themes, that is true, but to say he didn’t study or analyze philosophy is a bit intellectually dishonest. He was a Young Hegelian after all, and was heavily influenced by Kant and a number of other German philosophers of the time. These influences undoubtedly helped shape his economic musings.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economi ... ts_of_1844

[KaiserJeep]

Nor am I saying that the man was entirely wrong or foolish. What I am saying is that he lacked a critical datum, which is that man is a primate who shares primate behaviors. Had he lived a hundred years later than he did, and did he understand the true nature of mankind, then he would not have produced fatally flawed economic analyses. That is unfortunate, but as brilliant as he was, his reasoning was built upon the rotten foundation of the Judeo-Christian human creation mythology. Hegel was every bit as mistaken as Marx, the thesis/antithesis/synthesis thing may or may not be valid, but if one lacks the knowledge of ape behaviors or the evolution of species, you are going to get a lot of stuff wrong.

Capitalism is not anything more than natural primate behaviors, elaborated and extended by human intelligence. This is why Capitalism breaks out in places like the USSR when Marx's bogus theories fail time after time. The USSR had generations of forced education that venerated Marx and Communism. Yet these ape behaviors were still so wrongly described that simple peasants, without bothering to THINK or develope economic theories or silly philosophies of class struggles, did what they had to do when Stalin's collective farms failed to feed the millions of citizens. Their private vegetable patches and hand-milked cattle and free ranging chickens fed the former USSR through a thriving and entirely Capitalistic Black Market distribution and barter system. It was apes doing what apes do, because it felt right, and was right.

If it makes any of you closeted admirers of Karl Marx and Socialism feel better, the Evangelicals of today, as different as they are from rabid Marxists, are just as mistaken as were Marx/Engels, and for the very same reason. Man is an ape, he behaves like an ape, and everywhere at every time, in times of societal collapse, Capitalism saves us again. Just as it will when we painfully rebuild a new energy-efficient civilization after the era of Fossil Fuels ends. Apes behaving as apes behave, as thoughtful thinking people speculate about why they do these things that hundreds of thousands of years, plus the selective interbreeding of the many precursor species of homina that produced the smartest ape with the rightest set of instinctive behaviors, instilled in our very genes.

It's a damned good thing that we have those ape instincts, because if we did not, we'd become extinct in a few hundred years. That set of primate instincts that we share with the other apes, plus human intelligence, plus a high rate of rogue ape behaviors that result in constant inventive innovations, is what causes us to dominate our planet. Until YOU understand and accept this and work within your new knowledge, you will continue to get things wrong.

[Ibon]

Just to interject, is there a compelling contemporary reason at the moment to be dissecting the history and roots of socialism and communism? After all, almost everyone concerned here, including the overwhelming majority of countries on the planet, has come to the conclusion that it has failed as an economic system.

I would think there is a contemporary reason actually. The potential of ignorant and disenfranchised citizens to be persuaded by a populist promoting socialism is something we could easily imagine happening in the USA for example in spite of all the paranoid anti communist propaganda folks have been fed since decades. Especially if we continue to allow corporations to continue to lobby both political parties to game the system.

Does anyone else see this threat?

[KaiserJeep]

I take your point, Ibon. However I have felt my entire life that the real and imminent threat is not from the disenfranchised, who are immersed constantly in the struggle to survive. The problem we have is the educators, the intellectuals, the thoughtfully introspective contemplators of their own belly-buttons.

Western academics for example, exist within a rich tapestry of total and complete BS, built upon that rotten philosophical foundation I mentioned before. Any philosophy that has not been totally deconstructed and then re-interpreted with the knowledge acquired through Anthropology in the Mid 20th Century, is likely flawed and fairly useless.

Then there are the powerful forces at work as humans hybridize in ways never before seen or anticipated with ever-present mobile devices and a world wide network of other human minds. We are immersed in the greatest cultural changes that have occurred in human history, and it goes largely unnoticed - aside from moments such as your rebellion last year when you withdrew voluntarily from network access for a few weeks, after realizing how much you had changed.

Since probate has settled on the MIL's house on Nantucket, we are making plans to make it our own, deciding what furniture to bring and what to keep. One of the first things I will do is to extend the network throughout the house. I have a new cable modem and am building a new and modern PC at the core of the network, intelligent thermostats, security systems, and numerous automata are in the offing. Once upon a time, humans would have sought distance from such pervasive things. I find it difficult to contemplate life without a network. A peaceful home in the woods, my thoughts, and some books to stretch the mind are no longer enough.

BTW, although Trump is a Populist, he's at the other end of the spectrum, the classic robber baron. Bernie Sanders is the committed Socialist at the present time, and he's a much bigger danger than Trump. He's also - again - on the short list of candidates for POTUS.

[evilgenius]

I think the problem with Marx has always been how Marx could see where Capitalism was heading, what its characteristics were and would be, but he didn't have any real solutions to offer. It's not evil that he critiqued Capitalism, and was right about quite a lot. What you get from something like that is pretty much the same thing you get from religion. In religion people go around thinking they know who God is. They interpret everything according to their understanding of God. They don't leave room for who God just happens to be. The same could be said about the efforts to bring about a reaction to Capitalism based upon Marx's writings. They don't see the issues as things which must transpire in history. They don't expect their "Communism" to evolve out of Capitalism. They expect to overthrow Capitalism. I know, there is that famous quote about workers of the world waking up and throwing off their chains, but Marx never really says how. He seems, really, to attempt to negate the Hegelian principles he has been extrapolating toward economics and attempting to encourage the workers to begin something new. He seems to bail on the concept that his system of thought requires an evolution, not a revolution.

[KaiserJeep]

Capitalism is not a "thing", nor an "economic system", nor a form of government. Until you understand that it is prosaic, boring, normal ape behaviors, you are missing the essence. Capitalism is how we behave. It emcompasses within itself the territorial imperitive, the animal desire to reproduce and live in extended family groups, the gluttony that causes heart disease and diabetes, the roving lecherous eyes of the males and the nurturing of young in the females. Synonyms for Capitalism would be "human behavior", "human culture", and "ape instincts".

Socialism, Communism, all forms of Marxism, are fantasies that will NEVER work.

[jedrider]

Capitalism is not a "thing", nor an "economic system", nor a form of government. Until you understand that it is prosaic, boring, normal ape behaviors, you are missing the essence. Capitalism is how we behave. It emcompasses within itself the territorial imperitive, the animal desire to reproduce and live in extended family groups, the gluttony that causes heart disease and diabetes, the roving lecherous eyes of the males and the nurturing of young in the females. Synonyms for Capitalism would be "human behavior", "human culture", and "ape instincts".

Socialism, Communism, all forms of Marxism, are fantasies that will NEVER work.

Capitalism is a fantasy, too: That it can do no harm and doesn't require regulation and oversight. The right-wing has embraced Capitalism just as it has embraced Christianity in the USA. It might as well have been an Eleventh Commandment - Though shall be a Capitalist!

[evilgenius]

Capitalism is not a "thing", nor an "economic system", nor a form of government. Until you understand that it is prosaic, boring, normal ape behaviors, you are missing the essence. Capitalism is how we behave. It emcompasses within itself the territorial imperitive, the animal desire to reproduce and live in extended family groups, the gluttony that causes heart disease and diabetes, the roving lecherous eyes of the males and the nurturing of young in the females. Synonyms for Capitalism would be "human behavior", "human culture", and "ape instincts".

Socialism, Communism, all forms of Marxism, are fantasies that will NEVER work.

Now, wait just a minute. There is a lot to Capitalism that relies upon a legal structure. You know that who gets the gain, who the profits of a corporation feeds, is a result of who took the risk to enter into an enterprise. The legal structure ensures that, to a point. It doesn't entirely. I know that personally because in my own family there is a story of loss (theft if you consult my feelings) on a large scale of something that my own father had as an idea. That does happen, but the people who took it did so under that same legal structure. It does permit a lot of what you're talking about. But it does it legally, which means it has to happen according to steps. My dad engaged in the process like an ape cooperating in a tribe, though. He didn't think like a capitalist. He never insisted upon certain legal things before he offered not only his idea to others, but also his expertise, without which the thing would never have happened for it to be taken anyway. My point is that it being gone devastated our nuclear family. The law made sure we couldn't just have it back. Capitalism is not just people behaving in certain ways. It's more formal and structured than that. That being said, what is the law but a set of rules that change very slowly in reaction to the norms set by the people. Your interpretation is more like one of many "waves" going through what defines Capitalism. It's very important to it. It's not the sole determinant of what it will be within the context of any given time in people's lives. And, like anything so complicated, can exclude that part of its own definition in favor of some combination of the others to succeed.

[KaiserJeep]

jedrider and evilgenius, you are both talking about unnecessary and unneeded elaborations. The pure essence of Capitalism is built into the human animal itself. An animal is a bundle of tissue and bones and instincts. If we lacked intelligence, we would still be Capitalists, as expressed in the behavior of all the great apes.

Laws and legal structures, right vs. left, social interactions in family/public/private, all of these things are elaborations and extensions of a basic set of instincts. Some apes are broken, and either don't have/feel these instincts, or have an incomplete set of such. We drive those apes away from the tribe and force them to live outside of society.

Yet in today's world, we have network relationships. These once were possible only via written prose, and conversations took weeks to complete, and you could see and sense the other party evolving new thoughts and ideas. Today we have instant communications, and ideas evolve rapidly. It is only one way that networked humans differ from the archaeic humans before about 1990.

[Plantagenet]

Now they are running out of water in Venezuela

Hospitals scrap surgeries, Venezuelans forgo showers as taps run dry

Still, not having enough food and running out of water is a small price to pay for the joy of living in a socialist country. its wonderful to see the socialist cooperation between Venezuelans as they dig through garbage with their comrades desperately searching for food, or as they prostitute themselves to try to earn some money, or as they flee en masse the hell that socialism has created in Venezuela.

Isn't it grand to see!

Cheers!

[Ibon]

Isn't it grand to see!

Cheers!

Almost as grand to see as the previous oligarchs before Chavez in how they managed their cartels!

I had a branch office of my company in Caracas for 10 years before Chavez rose to power. I had a first hand experience terminating the representation of an old oligarch who represented the products we were marketing in Venezuela. I ended up starting up a new business with this guys ex employees. He wanted me dead. He traveled to Europe and tried to discredit me and have the manufacturers re instate his representation. Not because of any money lost. It was all status, pride and the principal that his peons as he called his employees would start their own business.

You cannot understand the rise of socialism in Venezuela without understanding the disparity of wealth and the corruption of the oligarchs that was previously present in the country.

It was easy to manipulate the ignorant citizens about the virtues of socialism after having lived under the suppression of the oligarchs. Venezuela had the greatest disparity of wealth after Brazil in those days in Latin America.

Are we planting the seeds today in the USA of a resurgence of socialism?

I see the potential. And this has nothing to do with academics salivating over the virtues of socialism that KJ is concerned about. Remember the common average citizen is very far removed from academia. A populist promoting socialism will never rise in the USA from academia. They will rise from some blue collar union charismatic character.

Trump might very well be the opening chapter of politicians who milk the grievances of the electorate. This form of populism wears no political ideology. It can come from the right or the left.

[KaiserJeep]

Ibon, I just do not see it ever happening here. For one thing, we are not desperate here and probably never will be in the sense that you mean. Instead, this country is the destination for those fleeing the ravages of Socialism on their native countries. Given the experiences under a Socialist country, they willingly undertake a perilous and lengthy and very difficult journey to live in a Capitalist country. They risk all for this goal.

As hard-hearted as it is, we need a wall to control the influx of people to a rate that we can absorb and assimilate. THEY need to stop reproducing and solve their own problems where they live.

[vox_mundi]

Climate Change Is the Inevitable Consequence of Capitalist Privatization

"Capitalism's grow-or-die imperative stands radically at odds with ecology's imperative of interdependence and limit. The two imperatives can no longer coexist with each other; nor can any society founded on the myth that they can be reconciled hope to survive. Either we will establish an ecological society or society will go under for everyone, irrespective of his or her status."
—Murray Bookchin

The notion of the commons refers to shared land, publicly available for all people to access for leisure and when times get tough, for survival. Publicly shared lands have existed since humans first walked the earth but have progressively been enclosed for individual sustenance or for profit. The most profound period of enclosures came with the introduction of European capitalism, and mass displacement of agricultural people to toil in industrial factories.

Throughout European and U.S. colonialism, the genocide, enslavement, and displacement of indigenous people from their lands was “justified” via the pseudo-science concept of Social Darwinism—the notion that humans inherently compete for resources and the most violent and coercive are rightfully in charge. Similarly, the pseudo-science tragedy of the commons was created to justify the privatization of public lands. This “tragedy” was based on the premise that shared resources will inherently be exploited and destroyed by the unruly public. That if left to their own volition people are inherently greedy, they don’t think in the long-term, they don’t communicate, and just like Social Darwinism, they must compete. Economist Elinor Ostrom debunked the tragedy of the commons and in doing so became the first woman to win a Nobel Peace Prize for Economics.

“The assumption that what currently exists must necessarily exist is the acid that corrodes all visionary thinking.”
—Bookchin

Ostrom, who debunked the tragedy of the commons, was a strong advocate for polycentricity, the notion that complex problems require a diverse set of solutions—that sustainable resource management requires a bottom-up approach and that communities must decide how to address these issues themselves. In other words, there is no one solution, and we must embrace a diversity of tactics. This is why, according to Ostrom in a 2017 interview with Big Think, “Any top-down government, whether on the right or the left, is unlikely to be able to solve many of the problems of resource sustainability in the world.”

The late radical social ecologist Murray Bookchin theorized how diverse communities, utilizing diverse tactics, could work together based on shared principles of sustainability, direct democracy, and equality. He coined this “communalism”—and many theorists and activists have further developed these theories and put them into practice. At its core, communalism is about bringing people together into assemblies to discuss the short-term and long-term challenges they face, and democratically decide on how to best address these challenges. This is how successful commons are regulated and maintained via community participation and shared interests, and how our future atmosphere must be maintained. That is, once we as a society recognize our atmosphere as a vital component of our commonly inhabited planet.

“Partial measures are far from sufficient, and approaches to renewable energy development that merely replicate capitalist forms may likely turn out to be a dead end. However, the cumulative impact of [communal] municipal efforts to challenge entrenched interests and actualize living alternatives – combined with coherent revolutionary visions, organizations, and strategies towards a radically transformed society- could perhaps be enough to fend off a dystopian future of deprivation and authoritarianism.”
—Brian Tokar

[Ibon]

Ibon, I just do not see it ever happening here. For one thing, we are not desperate here and probably never will be in the sense that you mean. Instead, this country is the destination for those fleeing the ravages of Socialism on their native countries. Given the experiences under a Socialist country, they willingly undertake a perilous and lengthy and very difficult journey to live in a Capitalist country. They risk all for this goal.

As hard-hearted as it is, we need a wall to control the influx of people to a rate that we can absorb and assimilate. THEY need to stop reproducing and solve their own problems where they live.

You are now mixing the theme of immigration. That is a separate topic. What is interesting at the moment is the dwindling wealth of the middle class in the USA to the point where we have a generation that is not seeing capitalism delivering on its promises, a growing disparity of wealth and a huge disparity between a small elite of extremely wealthy and broad base of declining middle class and poor. There are parallels in Latin American in countries with cartels of oligarchs.

The growing disparity of wealth in America is still a long way from what you see in Latin America as you say but what you have to focus on is not comparing the degree of wealth but rather the grievances this disparity creates. Wealth is relative. Perception of disparity is where the grievances arise and a populist promising equalizing that disparity through socialism becomes very appealing to those with these grievences.

Counter intuitively, or not really all that counter intuitive, the way you head this off in the electorate is to address this disparity and implement certain social services that placate the masses. In this sense the conservative right in the USA has to be careful to what degree they equate health care and social security and expanding medicare etc. as being "socialist"

If you want to prevent a populist getting a food hold with socialism in the USA you need to address the grievances and provide the minimal of social services to prevent the masses becoming enamored of socialism.

Today there is a growing perception the game is rigged. Examine carefully how Trump taps into the grievances.

Don't be complacent that this same force might come from the left and excite the electorate in a similar way. This is not unlikely. And the populist who will emerge will be former blue collar. Not from academia.

The pendulum always swings and it is not broken.

[Cog]

@onlooker

I'm guessing by the time your revolutionary guard figures out which of the eighty-seven genders they belong to, we will have long since thrown all of you out of helicopters.

[KaiserJeep]

There still have only been two revolutions in the USA. We won independance in the first, and denied independance to the Confederacy in the second. Compared to both of those periods, we presently have incredible wealth with LESS disparity and a much larger Middle Class.

The Socialist/Communist countries in the Americas meanwhile sink into powerty and despair, sending refugees our way. To my mind, these facts plus the better-than-ever-before lifestyles and newfound personal wealth in every income bracket, make any form of dramatic change extremely unlikely. Certainly, rabble rousers exist, but you'd have to be seriously stupid to be dissatisfied with life in the USA today.

[ralfy]

Capitalism refers to the use of profit generated from sales of goods and services produced to increase production,which in turn should generate more profit, and thus more production, and so on. Increasing production is necessary for various reasons, including growing population, increasing demand per person, and competition.

Part of socialism (depending on the type) is state capitalism, where the means of production are owned by the public. The opposite is free market capitalism, where they are owned by the private sector. Economies are generally mixed because they combine both, but there are certain economies that are partly socialist in the sense that they have more regulations on businesses and their national economies, and they benefited because they were able to exploit cheap resources through colonization and other means, gained from crises such as world wars, or took advantage of free markets elsewhere. The terms used to describe the phenomenon are "mercantilism" and "protectionism."

The irony is that examples include many European countries from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Britain during the nineteenth, the U.S. during the latter half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth, and Japan, South Korea, and the Asian "tiger" economies during the second half, together with China and Vietnam.

Those who belonged to the second half of the previous centuries are either socialist or employed principles similar to those of socialism, including central planning coupled with export-processing zones, governments forcing local industries to form conglomerates and work with each other (e.g., "zaibatsu" and "chaebol") while weeding out weak companies, and so on. All of these are in contrast to free market capitalism, where competition is supposed to lead to innovation and cheap prices but has not been the case, unsurprisingly, because of concentration of capital among a few coupled with the formation of oligopolies.

The catch is that they depended on markets to buy their goods, and which is what the U.S. did. Due to the use of the dollar as a reserve currency and the Triffin dilemma, the U.S. eventually depended on creating and exporting more dollars and then using that to dominate economically, e.g., the petrodollar and a very expensive military needed to keep that propped up.

Meanwhile, several European countries still emphasize socialist views owing to a previous background where aristocrats, fascists, and bankers controlled economies. This is reminiscent of one comment given in Pilger's documentary "The Coming War on China," where it was pointed out that China is, in a way, not a capitalist country because capitalists don't control its government. The U.S., on the other hand, is essentially controlled by Wall Street, i.e., both the economy and the government.

The implication, then, is that it's not so much socialism that "leads to misery and destitution" but various circumstances that make socialist or free market principles advantageous or otherwise. Thus, while Socialist countries like Cuba and North Korea suffer through economic blockades, countries like China and Vietnam thrive thanks to the opposite. And while the U.S. is perceived as an economy without "misery and destitution," its citizens show otherwise through growing debt, lack of savings, unemployment, and helplessness towards financial oligarchs who are their essential rulers. Meanwhile, countries like Singapore that are considered just as advanced or probably even more are essentially socialist dictatorships with managed markets and crony capitalism, and, like the U.S., reliant on debt. A few hours away, we have countries like the Philippines, which is not only heavily pro-U.S., conservative, and have few debts, but also a neoliberal economy with low government spending and high poverty rates.

Thus, what Yellow Canoe said is right: the only way to deal with matters described in the title thread is to use combinations of principles from various ideologies that work.

Finally, there is one thing that threatens capitalism in various forms, and it's a lack of resources. That includes peak oil, which is part of limits to growth. Environmental damage coupled with the effects of global warming have an amplifying effect on that.

[Ibon]

you'd have to be seriously stupid to be dissatisfied with life in the USA today.

KJ, ranked at position 23 on wellbeing on a global study the USA is not faring as well as you may think when you focus solely on economic statistics. Economically displaced poor people wanting to immigrate to the USA is not a metric that all is well in the USA. obesity, drug abuse, suicide, etc. are indicators that aspects of the social fabric are frayed.

Another point to ask your self if all is doing so well in the USA, then why is 30% of the country responding so passionately when the current president focuses on their grievances?

Take a note at the country ranked NO. 1 on that study. One of those Latin American countries that you so often declare are basket cases of misery and destitution !

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way ... ma-is-no-1

Panama took the top spot for the second straight year in the Gallup-Healthways Country Well-Being report, with Costa Rica second. Switzerland was the top European country, in fourth. At No. 23, the U.S. is one spot behind Israel and one ahead of Canada.

"Latin Americans in particular have higher levels of well-being than any other regional group," the polling firm says. "Residents of many Latin American countries are among the most likely in the world to report daily positive experiences such as smiling and laughing, feeling enjoyment, and feeling treated with respect each day."

[Pops]

Just to interject, is there a compelling contemporary reason at the moment to be dissecting the history and roots of socialism and communism?

To discredit any limit on the ownership?

Saw 2 news items this morning

US bosses now earn 312 times the average worker's wage


Elizabeth Warren unveils bold new plan to reshape American capitalism

Under the legislation, corporations with more than $1bn in annual revenue would be required to obtain a corporate charter from the federal government – and the document would mandate that companies not just consider the financial interests of shareholders.

Instead, businesses would have to consider all major corporate stakeholders – which could include workers, customers, and the cities and towns where those corporations operate.

We've not seen an ad hom politician like the POTUS since Joe McCarthy. I think not coincidentally, the idea then as now was protecting the wealth of the few from the greedy paws of the masses, i.e.: Capitalism v communism. Or, more stirringly, The American Way.

Rule 32
Pearl clutching by the wealthy few trickles down to anti-socialist rants on backwater boards
.

[MD]

pops!