| Posted: 16 February 2019 at 8:46am | IP Logged | 1
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It just magically happens that people who follow his ideas out into reality (or at least pretend to) end up there, and fairly quickly too! Even the Asians whom Marx wrote were good only for manual labor, and yet they still have statues of him up. The fact that he writes off an entire race like that should've put huge holes through any of the compasionate argument of the ideal of communism as espoused by Marx/Engels. I'd say stick with Groucho, but then look at all he lost in the stock market that one time! :^) ---------------------------------------------------- Right, this is because they weren't following Marx. Marx believed that the workers' revolution would take place worldwide at the end of the arc of capitalism. Russia in 1917 wasn't even industrialized, let alone capitalist, and the worldwide revolution never happened. So Lenin changed the script to try to do Communism in one country. His change of Marxist theory was bringing in a totalitarian state to seize everything for 'eventual redistribution' following forced industrialization. Of course, that redistribution never seemed to really happen. Maoism is a further development of Marxist-Leninism with further transformations.
But socialism is an economic system in which workers control the means of production. In capitalist systems, capital controls the means of production. You'll notice that there's no form of government expressed or implied by either. There are libertarian socialists. There are democratic socialists. There are totalitarian socialists like Leninists and Maoists. So also there are libertarian capitalists, democratic capitalists, and totalitarian capitalists.
Socialism is not a system in which the government owns everything. Welfare and food stamps are not 'socialist'. Socialism does two things when it comes into being:
1) It removes ownership of the means of production from capital whom it perceives as a leech class which enriches itself from the labor of others and gives that ownership to the workers. So, right now, there are owners who own your local Wal-Mart and your local McDonald's. They don't work at the store or the restaurant. People who work at those establishments generate value with their labor. Ownership gives them a portion of that value in the form of wages, and keeps the rest. That amount that they keep compared to the total is the exploitation gap, which is large or small based on the goodwill of the owners. Socialism would give ownership of stores and restaurants directly to the workers so that they would receive the full value of their work. This lack of exploitation would encourage people to work harder and better for their own benefit while allowing them to lead happier and more productive lives. The people currently getting rich off of moving money around in the markets or the labor of others would have to go out and work for a living.
2) Capitalism by its nature commoditizes everything. From labor to health care to education to religion to people themselves. Everything becomes something to be bought and sold. Socialism seeks to de-commoditize everything. Like education. Like health care. Obamacare is not socialist. At all. It is pure corporate capitalism. It funnels billions of government dollars into private insurance companies where executives reap huge profits based on not providing services. 'Socialized medicine' involves removing the consumer money from the situation altogether, the way its been removed with public education.
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