Forum Post: Communist threat
Posted 12 years ago on Jan. 20, 2012, 7:42 p.m. EST by leandroBR
(24)
from São José dos Campos, São Paulo
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
I was reading one of the articles on this site about how the american rulers control the public by telling them they need to consent with an action because of a "Great Evil" which had many faces along history. One of them is about communism. IN MY OPINION, communism was always a threat to Americans because of years of rulers telling them it was simply the worst evil possible. Stalin's Soviet Union was really on of the worst organizations to be part of, specially if you complained about it. BUT communism as planned by Karl Marx wasn't that way. Lets see some basic principles, no commitment, ok? -Everyone would have the right to a job and the rulers would be the working class itself, not their representatives ( Karl Marx was really futuristic on this one, we can do it now with internet, like we just did with SOPA) -Everyone would have right to free education, health care and security.
So, i normally hear the common "It steals your property" reply when i talk about communism. In a country like America, where the 1% earns what? 20 times? maybe a little more... than the common worker, i guess that 99% or 98% would have nothing to lose.
No, i don't defend communism (Yeah right, i didn't believe myself now...) But, the message i intend to pass is that communism sounds like a nightmare because your rulers( i'm Brazilian), corrupted by big corporations that could lose everything with communism, almost brainwashed everyone with that same excuse that communism steals your property. Another thing i hear a lot is that communism isn't democratic. USA was so worried with the lack of democracy in a possibly communist Latin America that they encouraged years of military dictatorship, wish was ahhh? Quite worse than a communist government would be... Detail: Allende's communist government was democratically elected and yet, USA acted against it, did ya know it?
So, i think this catches everything i had to say to my fellow Americans. Don't be mad at me because i said these things. Don't even consider that america has to be communist to grow up. Just think that maybe borrowing on or two of Marx's principles, like his theory of Surplus Value, can be a start into creating a great country.
P.S. OWS wants to end with economical and social injustices. In the capitalist system i learned at school, there is no such thing as economical injustices, just profit for those who know how to fool others and sweat for those who accept being fools.
Communism is generally abhorred in the U.S. I think that it is a correct stance although it may not have been adopted with as much rational thought as one would have liked. There are many beautiful sounding attributes to Communism as purported by Karl Marx but actual implementations of Communism around the world showed that the ideology had major if not fatal flaws. There always seemed to be an elite group who ended up ruling in the people's name and it curtailed various freedoms (especially the freedom of speech and freedom of the press) of the people to allow the group to continue to rule. This problem is NOT unique to Communist countries but I could not find Communist countries that were exceptions. It is probably because Communism played on the emotions of the working class which envy the wealth and privileges of the bourgeoisie in order to get into power. Capitalism for all its blemishes IS responsible for lifting huge number of people out of poverty. It has the advantage of organizing vast number of people through the rather simply understood concept of price to myriad ends. This may also be its defect because NOT everything is reducible to a single monetary number and striving for that is plain stupid. As for surplus value, it does NOT come from the exploitation of the workers. It actually comes from the trust and cooperation that the customers, employers, and employees exhibited in achieving desirable ends. What is garbage for some can be treasures for others so the real trick is to give the "garbage" to the correct people. Excess production can produce huge amount of garbage but for the correct people it can have the effect of great treasures. Also Capitalism's competitions drive improving quality of goods much faster than Communism does. Some pets in capitalistic countries live much better than many human beings in poorer parts of the world. I am saying for all its warts and all, Capitalism has its advantages so we should be careful in performing surgery on it. Yes, I think that Capitalism has to be amended when the number of people in the world has become huge relative to resources. Overproduction and overconsumption only produce big piles of real garbage to everyone in the end when all is said and done. There is no such thing as infinite unlimited "growth." There is VAST possibility of increased trust and cooperation to harness capitalistic energy to desirable social ends but we should not be so heavy-handed that it sputters.
I'm glad we can talk about this subject without start shouting "This one's better than that one!" and especially happy that someone didn't call me troll for posting this (so far). If I were to raise a country, i'd try to incorporate the Surplus Value. I read grapes' commentaries about it not being about exploitation, but I still think that maybe the workers could have a bigger cut of the profit, since their job is as much important as ruling a corporation. It works fine in some corporations, since getting a share makes you want to work more. If I must sell 500Xs to stay on my job, fine i'll do it, but what if i sell more than that and earn half of the extra money i generated for my boss? I'd be quite happy and motivated to work. I don't know if that is already used in USA corporations, but here it's quite good.
That IS what I would call a capitalistic incentive that works. China's opening up in 1979 started the same process when shortly thereafter the excess production of peasants became salable in the market. That was explicitly forbidden by the Communists before but the leader saw the light and changed that. Now we can all see the China Miracle and rejoice in how much Capitalism helped the Chinese to raise their standards of living.
The challenge to us is how to make equity more widely available to people so that they have a STAKE in the operations to achieve desirable ends. I feel that aiming only for quantities is too narrow-minded (1000Xs are better than 500Xs...) and bad for the Earth that we all share. We must steer towards better qualities because if you look at the most expensive things in the world that the rich are willing to pay for; they do NOT want a million paintings by a run-of-the-mill artist -- they want the masterpieces that somehow invoke the very special feelings and prestige, the something extras that communicate the meanings. They want clean air, water, food, and beautiful environments. Do we not all want the same things ultimately if anything is possible? Why should we not try to make our WHOLE Earth into such a paradise? Maybe not everywhere but we can at least try to make most places just that. To begin with, we must think of alternate ways of preventing pollution of our environment. The rich have ways now to escape environmentally polluted areas but that cannot go on forever -- not with overconsumption growing exponentially. Shall we begin now?
Indeed, we should have started at the same time we started the industrial revolution. For what its worth, i'd say you are quite right, i wish there were more people like you. I feel deeply sorry for being Brazilian nowadays, people are cutting and burning Amazonian forests just to get wood or fields for cattle, just in the country were everyone should be aware of what that forest means to the world... Truly disappointing...
Yes, it can be disappointing but it is not hopeless. You can perhaps adopt a different way of looking at things and tell people just that. There were people who saw the same thing from different approaches and came up with opposite conclusions. Who is right and who is wrong? Neither and both! Some saw the existing bad things but others saw the vast potential for IMPROVEMENTS! The viewpoints do matter very much in the long term because there IS very real difference between the results obtained by these people.
I appreciate your posts here and especially your raising the matter of "Surplus Value" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_value ) and submit for your information : http://occupywallst.org/forum/in-defence-of-the-broad-church-of-socialism-from-t/ .
Obrigado e Cumprimentos ;-)
I think America could benefit from a bit of happy socialism.
Take that crap to Europe
It depends. America has clearly been inspired by Europe in many ways over the centuries. First it was its excess population, then its imperial attitudes, then its slavery, racism, architecture, technology, fart problems and its languages (I admit that part is a twisted simplification.) So why not a little bit of socialism too? Life's no fun when you're competing solely for your own survival in an social darwinist crucible 24/7.
There are things that our U.S. government can do better than the private sector and vice versa. There are desirable social ends that our U.S. government can strive to achieve without apologies, such as effective and efficient national health care (e.g., public option piggybacking on Medicare) and public educational system that works (i.e., producing a citizenry befitting a functioning democracy that does not suffer from innumeracy and immune to Karl-Rove-/Fox-News-/Rupert-Murdoch-type propaganda). The goal is to have a dual-tracked society in which the well-off are not restricted to services that they deem beneath themselves but the less-well-off have the public option of decent service. No service is free but we can at least strive for some semblance of greater good for greater numbers while keeping efficiency in mind.
America has constantly removed itself from Europe. Remember the Monroe Doctrine? If you ever go there we do things a lot different, I personally believe better. Now we do have strong connections to England. They are very much like us, which is awesome. What we should do is take Ideas from Europe then make them a million times better. That is the American way of doing things.
;-) & FYI : http://occupywallst.org/forum/in-defence-of-the-broad-church-of-socialism-from-t/ , pax et lux !!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surplus_value Ya might wanna check.
I posted above but now see, that you posted the same link already !!! Ditto !! Mais uma vez, Obrigado !
Americans hate Communism because we spent 40 years fighting the spread of it and challenging the biggest Communist state this world has ever seen. The world was nearly, on multiple occasions, destroyed because of this. Plus I have read the communist manifesto, I see one massive problem with it: It does not account for the human condition. Being that it does not offer reward for hard work. When people work hard and see some loser not working at all, and yet they are paid the same, that alone drives people insane. There was a funny Top Gear episode where they try to find out if Communism ever created a good car, the answer of course is no. Secondly Communist states are anti-religion, which is another reason why it would work in the U.S.
Those are just some of the reasons why Communism will never be allowed in the U.S.
America921, first I am an American, I do not "hate" Communism. Do not paint all Americans as supporting the dictates of the Corporate Capitalism ruling class. I do not.
Second, the Communist Manifesto is a call to arms, it was not written as an economic treatise on working.
Third, most of us, who do work hard, and I do, I work very hard, are not rewarded under capitalism for our back breaking work. The people who make money under capitalism rarely work hard, if they work at all. Most people want to be rich so they do not have to work at all. When you are rich, you can hire people to work for you.
If people made money by working hard, why then do not rich people, who do not have to work, work as little as possible? Your argument makes no sense, at least to me. I have a few very wealth relatives, they sleep in on workdays and do not have to work at all. Their money makes them money. With all the free time they have, they are not going out applying for jobs digging ditches or pumping gas.
As someone who uses to work in the financial industry, I never met wealthy people who were doing back breaking work, or had that as their goal. I also never met a client doing back breaking work who was rich.
Four, the Communists in Nicaragua, the Sandinistas, are Catholic. The terrorists who Reagan was illegally funded to fight them, the Contras, where Protestant. Believe me, my family, who are Italian and Irish Catholic sent money to help the Sandinistas, not because they supported Communism, but because they were Catholics. The Jesuit Order in NYC sent millions to help the Sandinistas.
Also, as far as anti-religious states are concerned, I think it is safe to argue the US Government Founding Fathers, as a group, were anti-religion as it applies to involvement in government. In the famous exchange between Jefferson and Adams, by letter, in which Adams, 20 years after Jefferson legislative proposal in Virgina to keep government out of religion and religion out of government, Jefferson explained to Adams that he "...sought to create an unbreachable wall of separation between Church and State."
In my opinion, there is far to much involvement of religion in our government and public sphere today. As an American, I want religion to be rarely seen, in only few, very few, instances, and not heard.
America921, I agree with tbuontempo in almost everything that he said, and i also tell you that i don't support communism the way it was implanted so far, but like every experiment, we can learn from it. Don't you think we would be better with free colleges? (That is one of my main concerns, knowledge should be free to all) As tbuontempo just said, there are people earning millions just to sign a contract or attending to a meeting. Those millions they get are mainly because there are donkeys sweating blood doing the hard job. Its quite like taking a cut on your work, you earn 10.000$ for your corporation but you only receive 7500$ at the end of the month. If there are 100 employees earning 7500$, guess how much is the salary of you boss? And you said communist states were anti-religion. Doesn't mean America has to be anti religion, we can borrow one or two ideas, not the whole package. Also, Brazil(half-communist, BTW) is anti-religion, but there is a huge statue of Jesus at Rio de Janeiro, city wish is also known for having many churches of african origins. In case you want to check: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rio_de_Janeiro#Religion
healthcare in Europe is great. The US does all the research on the tax payer dole developing medicine. And they have cost controle in place. Don't get deathly ill there unless you can live while waiting months for treatment. Unfortunately they only net about 45% of their gross pay. And gas costs about $8 a gallon. Why did Russia fail again? Everyone had a job. Although it don't take 10 people to dig one hole.
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