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Marx May Have Had a Point
Hitting the mainpage for the first time, Black Sabbath writes "While communism has been declared dead and buried (with a few stubborn exceptions), Karl Marx's diagnosis of capitalism's ills seem quite bang on the money. Harvard Business Review blogger Umair Haque lists where Marx may have been right."
It's a pretty good read once you get past the author's three paragraph disclaimer that he is not a communist. The MIT news also ran a short interview discussing the economic trends in August this morning.
Banks fail, then they are bailed out like socialism so you retroactively apply socialism to the reason they are a failure?
And yet under communist rule there are still wealthy power brokers who know how to game the system for their own profit.
Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail which resulted in making the financial crisis much worst. It was a test of pure capitalism that failed.
In Capitalism, Man exploits Man.
In Communism, it's the other way around.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
That's because communism has never been tried. A communist regime in the model that Marx was pushing hasn't ever been implemented. Marx wanted a state like the US, except where the people owned all of the shares of the companies they worked for rather than random investors. And where there was only one class.
To date there has been precisely zero countries where they did away with class and where the workers truly owned the means of production.
The level of ignorance that people express about how it's been tried and failed just boggles my mind, when it hasn't even been tried once.
And yet under communist rule there are still wealthy power brokers who know how to game the system for their own profit.
Corruption is corruption, no matter what "wrapper" we put around it. Greed (whether personal or financial) always has been and always will be the Achilles heel of ANY model. Every model will fail if greed and corruption are left unchecked. Again, this should come as no surprise to anyone.
It's been tried and failed because Marx made the critical mistake of assuming you could remove greed from the human condition, it can't be done.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Regulations, schmegulations. The reason small businesses can't compete is because big business has rigged the game to their favor, and the playing field is no longer level.
"Slow down, Cowboy! It has been 3 years, 7 months and 26 days since you last successfully posted a comment."
It has been tried but not under the term Communism. There was a form of primitive Communism in the Bible read the book of Acts. So yes Christianity and socialism are very compatible.
Acts 2
44: And all that believed were together, and had all things common; 45: And sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need.
Acts 4
32: And the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common. 33: And with great power gave the apostles witness of the resurrection of the Lord Jesus: and great grace was upon them all. 34: Neither was there any among them that lacked: for as many as were possessors of lands or houses sold them, and brought the prices of the things that were sold, 35: And laid them down at the apostles' feet: and distribution was made unto every man according as he had need. 36: And Joses, who by the apostles was surnamed Barnabas, (which is, being interpreted, The son of consolation,) a Levite, and of the country of Cyprus, 37: Having land, sold it, and brought the money, and laid it at the apostles' feet.
---- GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
--John Kenneth Galbraith
I wish I could mod you up right now...
I'm so sick and fucking tired of the Communist bashing that goes on even to this damn day in the US. Communism hasn't failed mankind, mankind has always failed Communism. The true question is whether or not a society will mature enough that it's people do not constantly want to posses more of whatever goddamn thing they see than their neighbor. As long as there is that one selfish dickface that just has to hoard bread, or money, or whatever else he gets his hands on, Communism fails. It depends on people acting honorably.
I have faith in humanity that eventually we will get to that point, but I'm not gonna sit here and say it will never happen as a justification for my own greed. We get enough of that as it is. Enough with the Randian bullshit. Just say "I want more than your neighbor because fuck him" and be honest with yourself and others. At least we'll know who not to piss on when they're on fire...
Yes, but capitalism glorifies it, lionizes, and justifies it. It puts greed at the top of human motivators and forbids us to censure the greediest amongst us. I'm sorry, but when you create a system built on the notion of competition, "every man for himself", and self-involvement, youmetaprogramming are pandering to the worst in human nature. You are saying the bullies aren't just usually going to win, but that it is right that they win. How can we expect any other outcome than the one we have gotten? We made sociopaths into heroes and now lament that they run the show? Seems a bit disingenuous to me.
"We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be." - Joss Whedon via Angel
The flaws in Marxism were all figured out in the 1920s. Here, let me explain:
If you have goods that are directly consumable like bread or cheese you can divide them up among people evenly. That works. What doesn't work and is essentially an NP hard problem without money is how goods that are used to make other goods are used. Let's take an example of a freight railroad. What do you ship on the railroad? Shoes, fuel, tiny sub-assemblies of combine harvesters? If you have a piece of construction equipment, what do you build with it? A school, a factory, a playground, a road? In a modern economy all this creates an astonishing amount of complexity that is intractable from a central planning point of view.
How does this work in a capitalist system? Simple : Prices. The price of everything determines what the railroad ships, what the construction equipment builds, etc. In a complex investment decision, such as where to build a factory and what to produce in it, the managers use estimations based on prices of the factors of production and how much they can get for the goods produced to determine whether to build a factory, and where to build it. Prices are a distributed highly multi-threaded information system that tells people what is scarce and what is plentiful from moment to moment and thus directs production.
Prices are somewhat distorted by bank credit money creation and the associated credit cycles, which is what causes the booms and busts in capitalism. That can be fixed, but that's a topic for another day.
The history of the Soviet Union is full of massive planning errors. They built many towns in the middle of Siberia that they abandoned once the Soviet Union fell because the production output was minimal, they cost an enormous amount to heat and deliver supplies to and nobody wanted to live there. They didn't know this until they knew the real prices for running these cities. No communist government, except for the psychopathic regieme of Pol Pot ever dared to completely get rid of money, and even he admitted it was his biggest mistake!
If you want to dig into the theory of the planning problem in capitalism, I'd recommend Mises "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth"
http://mises.org/resources.aspx?Id=71e20725-ee72-4adb-ade2-34dfdabf7755
It expects people to be people, not ants.
No. It expects people to be able to act rationally and in their long-term best interest. That's still not how people work.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
In the same way that capitalism has been tried and failed because you can't remove greed from the human condition.
In capitalism the greed is meant to be used as a balancing factor. Sure one man is a greedy fucker who will abuse all of his workers to death ... but ... there are 1000 greedy workers with less 'power' but just as much greed, and they'll do things to balance it out ... like vote.
Communism pretends humans aren't humans.
Capitalism uses human nature against human nature as a moderator.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
You're trying to argue that gravity falls up. It's a nice attempt, but ultimately moot, because employee owned companies do exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_employee-owned_companies
Perhaps you should consider that the challenges you mention are not insurmountable.
Please don't invent new definitions for socialism. There is absolutely nothing in that economic structure that requires it to be a democracy. You're blending and confusing economic systems with political systems. The USSR's economic system was quite socialist, even if their government system was a totalitarian, single-party limited republic. The key hallmarks of socialism are a command economy in which the government owns the means of production.
Actually, capitalism, in the laissez-faire austrian school, has never been tried either. Everything we have today that approximates or is considered capitalist is actually the bastard child mixed economy with both socialist and capitalist features. I posit that either extreme is complete fantasy and the fanboys of both have elevated their respective economic hypothesis' to religion.
If you were me, you'd be good lookin'. - six string samurai
I agree with this and will add a bit. The failing of capitalism is not in accounting for greed. For capitalism to work you need an educated consumer base. This is where capitalism fails in reality. Marketers intentionally deceive consumers which wouldn't be a problem with an educated consumer base (they would be able to catch the deception). The problem is that it's literally impossible to be educated about all products on the market so you simply can't have the educated consumer base necessary for free markets to operate as theories would indicate.
Sounds like some kind of cult.
Yep. In fact many modern intentional communities work this way. It can work because you aren't going to screw your neighbors when you live, work and sleep all within a few blocks. Many of these communities are also run by consensus instead of having a hierarchy or authority figure. The problems you see with "communism" at the state level don't emerge until you have a community large enough so that there are "strangers". People will willingly screw a stranger. I've heard that this starts to happen when you get 150 people in the community. In other words, communism doesn't scale.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Marx's analysis of the flaws of capitalism is generally considered to be reasonable. His solutions are now known not to work too well. (On the other hand, in the last century Russia has tried monarchy, democratic communism, dictatorial communism, democratic anarchy, capitalist oligarchy, and the current capitalist semi-dictatorship. None worked all that well for them.)
Marx was quite right about a key point - if capitalism is allowed to use competition between workers to drive wages down, buying power drops and the system stalls, or stabilizes with most people just above some minimum survival level. That's where we are now. (Wal-Mart has a useful way to measure this. They look at weekly store-to-store sales over each month, and observe that their customer base is presently running out of money before the end of each month, and they then stop buying until their next paycheck.)
Unions were developed to beat that problem. The purpose of unions is to force employers to pay employees more than they are economically worth. This helps both union and non-union workers; in a society where a sizable fraction of workers belong to unions, non-union employers have to pay wages competitive with union shops to avoid unionization. This was well understood in the 1930s through the 1970s. The phrase used back then was "labour should not be regarded merely as a commodity or article of commerce." That sounds strange today. Which is part of the problem.
After a slow decade in the 1970s, we got Reagan, the "great communicator", who sold America on "unfettered" capitalism. US median per-capita real income hasn't gone up much since, after a huge rise in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. The US peak was in 1973.
Government is not neutral in this. Deregulation, free trade, weak antitrust and labor law enforcement, anti-union state policies, and tax cuts for the rich all helped to reduce US wages.
The point here is that the economy has more than one stable state. One stable state looks like a third-world country - wages are at poverty levels, a few people have most of the money, disposable income is low, and production is limited by available disposable income. Another stable state has much higher wages and consumption levels. The US has seen both, and has chosen the former.
This is technically true, but scale matters. A lot. For someone earning minimum wage, how long will it take them to save enough money to, say, open their own business? Compare that to someone who is earning millions each year.
Even your examples of how to save money reveal your flaws. You mention living with your parents, but what about people whose parents are absent from their lives? You mention giving up some free time to collect cans, but what about those who are already working multiple, minimum wage jobs and don't have any free time to give up? From the sounds of it, you come from a place of privilege (as do I - my family helped pay for college, among other things), and I think that it would do you well to remember that there are some places in the US where people live in abject poverty and have very minimal options.
The blog that you reference makes some interesting points about the merits of spending vs. saving, but trying to cram all of history and economics into this simple divide is naive at best and dangerously foolish at worst. The danger comes from the inherent assumption that all people in poverty are there through their own laziness and "debtor" mentality.