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 sebster wrote:

D) once the dictactorship gets power, it never gives up power.

THe USSR gave up power. For Christ's sake, just enough already. Stop making stuff up in your head.

The reason why the USSR gave up power is long and complicated.

Gorbachev, by the 90s, was not well liked by the party.

He refused to help the Eastern European governments, telling them that they'd have to listen to the people.

The Eastern European governments feel by 1989, leaving the USSR without its allies.

He liberalised some areas of the government, and allowed more press freedom.

This meant that people were not only aware of what was going on, people were aware that there was a better system outside their country.

But that wasn't new, the USSR had been playing cultural catch-up to the west earlier. For example, they released a version of Let It Be with Russian lyrics. Cool, eh?

But anyway.

The reforms of Gorbachev were not designed to weaken the USSR. They were designed to strengthen it and prevent a collapse. By allowing the setting up of private business, he hoped to modernise the economy. By liberalising the press, he hoped that people would be more content with the government as they would respond to the people's demands. Instead, it only served to weaken the government and result in a coup by government hardliners, which in turn was defeated by Yeltsin, which caused Gorbachev to lose support, which caused the collapse of the USSR.

There's more reasons, they're just a few.

So no, the USSR didn't choose to give up power.

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 ExNoctemNacimur wrote:
The world, at the moment, is massively overpopulated (in my view anyway, have you tried getting through Dubai Mall on a Friday afternoon?). As a result, there's great competition to gain resources among people and countries. This is demonstrated by the world's inequality.

fething seriously, I'm not saying this because I like typing the word - communism does not attempt absolute equality. Dear Party Leader gets more than his secretary. Doctors get more than labourers.

There remains competition and reward for greater skill and greater effort.

All the system lacks, compared to capitalism, is markets and the profit motive.

Where did you get that idea?

Engels and Marx demanded in the Manisfesto is:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralisation of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralisation of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, &c, &c.

You can see from these is that equality is demanded from point 2. Yeah, a doctor will get more than the labourer (in the short run that is) but according to the principles of Das Kapital, Marx's sequel, this won't be for long.

Communism ultimately promotes total equality between classes. The should be no leader. There should be no reason why someone will not work to the best of their ability. There should be wealth redistribution between classes.

No amount of technology will prevent scarcity, especially now, where there are billions of people in the world who have the greed of Mr Smith.

Now, sure. 1,000 years from now, with tech that can capture energy straight from the sun, and replicators that can transform that into whatever we want, not so much.

One thing I learnt in my science lessons (I'm currently at GCSE level, I'm taking Additional Science at the end of this year) is that you cannot create things from nothing.

You can't just magically make something appear without something else disappearing.

And sometimes when there is stuff somewhere, it's not practical to extract it.

Let's take Uranium. It literally is everywhere. If there're rocks (everywhere there are rocks) or bricks, then there will be uranium.

Why doesn't Iran start extracting it from their mountains? Why don't they start levelling their mountains to get some uranium to prove that it's a big boy? One reason is that it's not economical to extract the tiny, tiny bits of uranium from the rocks.

So there may be an abundance of a lot of things. But will it be practical to extract it all? Will it be practical to send explorers to Venus to mine their Venus rocks? Or to Ceres to mine Ceresian rocks? Unless people actually live on Venus or Ceres, I doubt it. And that doesn't really solve the scarcity issue either because you've got burgeoning populations on new areas that are using resources that may have been used for Earth.

There will always be scarcity. No sci-fi mumbo-jumbo is ever going to change that. Evolution is based on scarcity (Mesozoic economics, woo-hoo!). There isn't enough food for everything in the area, so the animals with less advantageous characteristics die. It will always happen.

THe USSR gave up power. For Christ's sake, just enough already. Stop making stuff up in your head.

1. You missed a couple of attempted coups there Finklestein, or did you forget those nice scenes with Yeltsin surrounded by tanks and wearing a bullet proof vest.
2. In the end the communists didn't give up power. They became billionaire oligarchs

 Sturmtruppen wrote:
A concept tarnished by those who have claimed to be working towards its ends, or evil in its purest form? What do the people of Dakka Dakka think?

From the OP's sig and avatar, I cannot take this thread seriously


edit: Thread is a good read

 ExNoctemNacimur wrote:
Yes, but things that are thrown out have a tendency to get thrown in a landfill. Who wants to open up a landfill, climb in there and collect the plastic?

Wait until the price of petroleum gets high enough. Someone will start mining landfills for discared petrochemicals like plastics, because it's cheaper than buying petroleum.

 Vulcan wrote:

 ExNoctemNacimur wrote:
Yes, but things that are thrown out have a tendency to get thrown in a landfill. Who wants to open up a landfill, climb in there and collect the plastic?

Wait until the price of petroleum gets high enough. Someone will start mining landfills for discared petrochemicals like plastics, because it's cheaper than buying petroleum.

Again why? If everyone gets paid the same why would they do that?

 Frazzled wrote:

 Vulcan wrote:

 ExNoctemNacimur wrote:
Yes, but things that are thrown out have a tendency to get thrown in a landfill. Who wants to open up a landfill, climb in there and collect the plastic?

Wait until the price of petroleum gets high enough. Someone will start mining landfills for discared petrochemicals like plastics, because it's cheaper than buying petroleum.

Again why? If everyone gets paid the same why would they do that?

Because I was refering to our reality, not some theoretical one where everyone gets paid the same regardless. Even in Soviet Russia, some people got paid more than others.

Of course. Some animals are more equal than others.

 d-usa wrote:
And capitalism turns to passive letting people die unless they pay. It can go both ways.

Again, not saying communism is the answer. Just saying that pure unregulated capitalism isn't the answer either.

Yes, and I just explained that while regulated capitalism is a thing that exists and functions fairly well, regulated communism is quite the failure.


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 ExNoctemNacimur wrote:
The reforms of Gorbachev were not designed to weaken the USSR. They were designed to strengthen it and prevent a collapse. By allowing the setting up of private business, he hoped to modernise the economy. By liberalising the press, he hoped that people would be more content with the government as they would respond to the people's demands. Instead, it only served to weaken the government and result in a coup by government hardliners, which in turn was defeated by Yeltsin, which caused Gorbachev to lose support, which caused the collapse of the USSR.

Yes, the reasons for which power was given up are long and complicated... but that doesn't mean power wasn't given up.

So no, the USSR didn't choose to give up power.

Giving up power is what liberalisation is.

And while you can argue that political and economic forces drove their decision making (and I'd agree) it's completely nutbar to pretend there weren't other options. They could have reversed their reforms, and re-instated political oppression and economic control (after all, they'd done that before). Maybe that might have re-secured power, or maybe they'd have gone down in drowned in blood and the vengeance of the common folk. But they didn't, instead they chose more open-ness and greater liberalisation.

They did this because there was, according to direct statements by many prominent persons, a broad recognition that the communist experiment had failed.

 ExNoctemNacimur wrote:

Where did you get that idea?

Engels and Marx demanded in the Manisfesto is:

You can see from these is that equality is demanded from point 2. Yeah, a doctor will get more than the labourer (in the short run that is) but according to the principles of Das Kapital, Marx's sequel, this won't be for long.

Marx's sequel? Sequel? Have you actually read these books? It's not Communist Manifesto 2, Rise of the Das Kapital. He had about a dozen publications between the two, and they're massively different works, in scope, in size and in intent.

But more seriously, you're confusing equality of pay with equality of class. If your neighbour makes 10% more pay than you do, we're still equal in class.

And it is a big, big mistake to confuse Marx' writings with what communism meant in any country it was attempted. The guy has been dead 130 years, and was dead more than 30 years by the time of the November Revolution. The world has experienced a hell of a lot he was never privy to. I mean, it'd be as silly as quoting Smith's The Wealth of Nations as the absolute truth of what capitalism is.

Communism ultimately promotes total equality between classes. The should be no leader. There should be no reason why someone will not work to the best of their ability. There should be wealth redistribution between classes.

Yes, sure, but none of that means you can't pay a doctor more than a farm labourer. Communism is idealistic, but it isn't stupid.

There will always be scarcity. No sci-fi mumbo-jumbo is ever going to change that. Evolution is based on scarcity (Mesozoic economics, woo-hoo!). There isn't enough food for everything in the area, so the animals with less advantageous characteristics die. It will always happen.

Once again, because repeating myself seems to be what this thread is here for... this has nothing to do with the idea that despite the vast supply of energy released by the sun every second it is still finite, but with the idea that the economic assumption of infinite wants likely only works when specific economic and social effects are in place. The mistake you are making is to assume that the economy you've grown up with is the economy humanity will always have, while the most basic reading of economic history will tell you that is complete claptrap. In the last few thousand years the economy has changed entirely at least three times, and the scope of change is increasing. There's no reason not to think that at some point in the next 1,000 or 10,000 years our basic economic behaviour will be completely different once again.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Frazzled wrote:
1. You missed a couple of attempted coups there Finklestein, or did you forget those nice scenes with Yeltsin surrounded by tanks and wearing a bullet proof vest.
2. In the end the communists didn't give up power. They became billionaire oligarchs

Yeah, there was an attempted coup. Which, as we know, failed, and it failed because most of the government was not behind it. At which point we're looking at you trying to claim that the Soviets didn't give up power because a small minority tried to stop the process of giving up power and failed because they were a minority. Which is stupid.

But more importantly, when you have a totalitarian regime, and that regime chooses to undergo reform to become a democracy, the old regime has given up power. By fething definition that's just how it fething is. That the old guard managed to leverage their connections in the old system into private wealth in the new system doesn't change the fact that they don't have the absolute power over the country they used to have... and that's because they gave up that power.

I mean, from the depths of the bowels of Christ, it really can't be more fething obvious. Consider your country, right now, which has a lot of rich people running it (both in and out of government). If those people announced tomorrow that there weren't going to be elections anymore and they were just going to run things without any input from the population at large, you wouldn't be sitting there saying 'oh but they were the rich ones anyway so they haven't given up any power'... because that'd be crazy ass nonsense.

And yet swap that around, and you're trying to claim that bringing in democracy doesn't count as the surrender of power because the old elite scored loads of cash. I mean, fething hell... you're a grown man. Do better.

@Sebster: saying that you can fix capitalism and not fix communism doesn't matter. It still means that capitalism doesn't work since you have to make it "not-pure-capitalism" for it to actually be workable.

 d-usa wrote:
@Sebster: saying that you can fix capitalism and not fix communism doesn't matter. It still means that capitalism doesn't work since you have to make it "not-pure-capitalism" for it to actually be workable.

The 'purity' of things means half of nothing in the real world. 'Can this be made to work?' is a real and meaningful question.

With capitalism, we tinkered with it and found we got it working fairly well. With communism... no such luck, the problem is fundamental, and the only way to fix it is to make it into something that isn't communism.

Sebster , since you make quite good arguments and seem to get fired up about commmunism i have a question.

Do you think the best antidote for despotism/communism ( democratic peoples republic) is the exposure to markets?

I know North Korea isn't a communist structure strictly, but seems to share a few characteristics with certain eastern european states under the USSR. I've been thinking about it and i think the best solution for north Korea atm is to drop all sanctions and open up the markets of the world to them. Do you think that that would be effective in generating leadership changes?

Bullockist wrote:
Sebster , since you make quite good arguments and seem to get fired up about commmunism i have a question.

I know I've been pretty heated in this thread, and it probably isn't a good thing, but honestly it isn't communism. What actually gets me going is people thinking forums are just places where they log on to skim past all the other posts so they can tell everyone the one thing they learned about the subject years ago, probably in highschool. With communism it'll be one of a few things, 'communism doesn't work because people are selfish' or 'there's never been a real communist nation'.

Honestly, you should see me when people try to talk about how America defeated the Nazis in WWII, I'm twice as bad

Do you think the best antidote for despotism/communism ( democratic peoples republic) is the exposure to markets?

I know North Korea isn't a communist structure strictly, but seems to share a few characteristics with certain eastern european states under the USSR. I've been thinking about it and i think the best solution for north Korea atm is to drop all sanctions and open up the markets of the world to them. Do you think that that would be effective in generating leadership changes?

There's an interesting theory called the J curve, that argues just that. It makes that countries can be very stable because they are open (both to the rest of the world and also to their own people), other countries are quite stable because they are almost entirely closed. In between you have the maximum level of instability.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_J_Curve:_A_New_Way_to_Understand_Why_Nations_Rise_and_Fall

I think it's a pretty powerful theory and one worth embracing in a lot of situations. It'd certainly be a much better solution to the Cuba problem than the current US trade ban. In other cases, I'm not so sure - with Iran for example, the current model of conditional trade seems a fairly effective way of being able to punish them for doing stupid things (like chasing nukes), but push that too far and the cosmopolitan, educated core that's needed to drive progressive reform will like disappear.

Interesting read, on the subject of irans nukes , i think they should have one, it might stop countries being so belligerent towards them.

If Pakistan and India can have nukes (two states engaged in hostile behavior almost continiously) , I don't see why Iran can't. I think Iran is close to large scale change atm, and i don't think being aggressive towards them is helping this change. In effect it's doing more harm than good since the nationalistic government is given an enemy which they use to "unite the people". Without an external enemy they would probably invent an internal enemy though .

Personally, i think Iran is blown all out of proportion as an "evil state" or whatever they get called. They have had a very raw deal in regard to western countries in the past and i think they have a right to be angry, continually trying to bully them, is not helping the situation.

The whole situation Iran is involved in makes me uneasy. Threatening them continuously, invading their airspace with drones , assassinating people does nothing but make them hostile. Worse, having them under economic sanctions hurts the common people and makes them hostile as well.

Bullockist wrote:
Interesting read, on the subject of irans nukes , i think they should have one, it might stop countries being so belligerent towards them.

If Pakistan and India can have nukes (two states engaged in hostile behavior almost continiously) , I don't see why Iran can't. I think Iran is close to large scale change atm, and i don't think being aggressive towards them is helping this change. In effect it's doing more harm than good since the nationalistic government is given an enemy which they use to "unite the people". Without an external enemy they would probably invent an internal enemy though .

Personally, i think Iran is blown all out of proportion as an "evil state" or whatever they get called. They have had a very raw deal in regard to western countries in the past and i think they have a right to be angry, continually trying to bully them, is not helping the situation.

The whole situation Iran is involved in makes me uneasy. Threatening them continuously, invading their airspace with drones , assassinating people does nothing but make them hostile. Worse, having them under economic sanctions hurts the common people and makes them hostile as well.

Who's belligerent towards Iran? What the hell are you smoking?

Bullockist wrote:
Interesting read, on the subject of irans nukes , i think they should have one, it might stop countries being so belligerent towards them.

If Pakistan and India can have nukes (two states engaged in hostile behavior almost continiously) , I don't see why Iran can't. I think Iran is close to large scale change atm, and i don't think being aggressive towards them is helping this change. In effect it's doing more harm than good since the nationalistic government is given an enemy which they use to "unite the people". Without an external enemy they would probably invent an internal enemy though .

Personally, i think Iran is blown all out of proportion as an "evil state" or whatever they get called. They have had a very raw deal in regard to western countries in the past and i think they have a right to be angry, continually trying to bully them, is not helping the situation.

The whole situation Iran is involved in makes me uneasy. Threatening them continuously, invading their airspace with drones , assassinating people does nothing but make them hostile. Worse, having them under economic sanctions hurts the common people and makes them hostile as well.

You are making me agree with Frazzled, I don't like it when people make me agree with Frazzled since everybody knows that Cats rule and Dogs drool, but WTH are you talking about? Iran is currently the nr.1 sponsor of international terrorism and you are complaining that people are belligerent TOWARDS them?!

It seems to me they are sponsoring militias in countries around them. Is this much different to a certain country installing and supporting juntas in south american countries , causing revolutions to happen in others? Personally i think those actions are reprehensable but , if it's ok for one country to do it you surely cannot villify another for doing the same.
Just because one set of actions are labelled terrorist does not make the results any different to the actions of another that aren't, I'd like all of these kind of actions to stop, whilst they aren't stopped I'd just like the actions to be viewed on equal footing. In international politics there are no goodies and baddies just countries trying to influence others (normally to the detriment of the said others).

and frazzled violating someone elses airspace is belligerant, you cannot get much more threatening in behavior toward another country. Holding military exersizes in waters right next to a countries waters is also aggressive. If these kind of things happened over florida or in the bay of mexico (respectively) how would the US react?

Also the language used by the US in diplomatic press releases (you know the ones where the foreign secretary reads a speech) is exceedingly threatening and bombastic, I don't know they know any other way other than gunboat diplomacy. Perhaps you should watch these speeches again and look at them as though they are given to your country. They seems to mainly end up as "do what we say or we will thump you". That is not diplomatic, nor is it diplomacy. Personally everytime i hear one of these i think "why are they trying to drag us into another war".

Bullockist wrote:
and frazzled violating someone elses airspace is belligerant, you cannot get much more threatening in behavior toward another country. Holding military exersizes in waters right next to a countries waters is also aggressive. If these kind of things happened over florida or in the bay of mexico (respectively) how would the US react?

We don't violate their airspace.
You cannot get more threatening - how about threatenting to nuke Israel, nuke us, kidnap our hostages, send military arms to the guys killing our troops, supporting terrorists around the world etc. etc. etc.

Military exercises occur all the time. The Bay of Mexico? Are you talking about the Gulf of Mexico? There were Soviet exercises there in the past. Cuba is there. Iran said it would put ships there - since none appeared evidently they all sank on the way.

Don't know what you're smoking, but I want some.

Sending drones into another countries airspace is violating their airspace.

Was it considered threatening when russia did exersizes with cuba? I'm assuming they were in the cold war.

You can have some of what I'm smoking only if i can swap you for your simplistic world view.

Bullockist wrote:
Sending drones into another countries airspace is violating their airspace.

Please provide proof they’ve intentionally sent drones into Iranian airspace. Then we can play with the stories noting Iranian arms and captured Iranian fighters in Iraq. Also Iran’s kidnapping of US hikers on the border. We used to blow countries to hell for that. Still should.

Was it considered threatening when russia did exersizes with cuba? I'm assuming they were in the cold war.

Don’t know about Russia. USSR exercises were time honored Cold War tradition.

You can have some of what I'm smoking only if i can swap you for your simplistic world view.

Strangely most of the world disagrees with you. ..

First the hikers. U.S. private citizens go hiking in a war torn country in what i assume was a "red zone" it certainly wasn't a "green zone", I'd like to believe it was just for sight seeing :/. Who gave them clearance and what for the love of god were they doing there?

Russia, USSR, you know i meant USSR frazzled. If the bay of pigs was considered threatening, surely having a few air craft carriers and supporting fleet doing exersises right next door to your country is considered threatening.

Bullockist wrote:
First the hikers. U.S. private citizens go hiking in a war torn country in what i assume was a "red zone" it certainly wasn't a "green zone", I'd like to believe it was just for sight seeing :/. Who gave them clearance and what for the love of god were they doing there?

Irrelevant. They are still US citizens. Should have bombed Tehran every day with B-52s until they were released.
Now I see you're not discussing the Iranian arms going into Iraq to kill US and UK troops, the Iranian advisors from the Republican Guard who went as well, Iran's support for Hamas and Hezzbullah, and cheerful statements about wiping other countries off the map.

Russia, USSR, you know i meant USSR frazzled. If the bay of pigs was considered threatening, surely having a few air craft carriers and supporting fleet doing exersises right next door to your country is considered threatening.

Now you're just revealing ignorance. Bay of Pigs was not a military exercise. AND IT WAS A US BACKED EVENT.
Please, read a god damned book.

I have read many books, in fact i read 1-2 a week,of many types and have a very wide range of interests. History, religious books, fiction of most kinds, autobiographies (interestingly richards nixons book on post war leaders is good) , but I don't read technical manuals. I don't agree with everything i read but it's all good to know . I've even slogged through a few feminist books in my time (some of them are good , others are just ridiculous) , once resulting in a 16 year old boy pointing at the book and saying "gay" (i think the book was called "the backlash against women" and to his mind was not something a man should be reading) anyways enough about me.

I view the bay of pigs as leading directly to the cuban missile crisis so I tend to lump them into the one event even though they were a few months apart.

cheerful statements about wiping countries off the map are reprehensible but unfortunately if a right wing govt is starting to lose power it is the type of tactic they resort to keep control. It is threatening behavior.

Hamas was created to get an occupying force out of thier country which is still there. Let's not forget israel occupied palestinian territory. Hezbullah was created to try and get israel out of lebanon after their occupation of part of lebanon. One mans freedom fighter is another mans terrorist. I don't know about you but if another country occupied mine, I'd be signing up for a similar group. Though saying that i do not excuse all of their actions, nor even most of their actions, I also cannot justify israels occupation.
Quite simply, occupy another country and similar organisations will spring up.

Iran and Israel have a terrible relationship so although i don't agree with, i can understand their support of those 2 organisations.

The thing is frazzled the US has done ALL of these activities in the past, arms and support in afganistan,kidnapping people , advisors to vietnam, and instead of cheerful statements have nuked countries.

All I'm saying is not what the US does is bad (except their diplomacy) I also am not saying what Iran does is good.

Having an idea that A is bad and B is good is nonsensical. Everyone in international politics does vile things. What worries me most about the US is their seemingly endless need to go to war. Just finishing up in afganistan and iraq, and looking prospectively at north Korea and Iran (wonder if we'll go looking for WMD again) whilst beginning to rattle the sabre at Syria.
On a purely logical level a broke country does not need another war, then again i suppose without communists anymore the US needs an external enemy.

You read a lot yet you mistook the Bay of Pigs as
1. a Soviet action
2. a military exercise.

when in reality it was
2. A US action.
3. A failed invasion. You know, a shooting war.

Read more.
Meanwhile the rest of the world views Iran as a Pariah nation.

Communism depends on the persons definition of communism. Some people like me completely agree with Marx and to a certain extent with Lenin, however i am the polar opposite of Stalin and Gorbachov.

In addition communism can only work in practice, right now. However it is an inevitablity, the banking crisis has shown us this. But i can see why people dislike the idea, because they automatically think of a dictatorship, when in actuall fact a communist dictatorship is a controdiction in itself.


Long story short, some people like me agree, some people disagree, in the end we currently live good lives compared to others in other places so lets be thankful for what we have and try to improve the lives of others.

What if we'd rather just have their stuff too?

 Frazzled wrote:
What if we'd rather just have their stuff too?

I understand that you'r probebly not speaking to me, and double apologies if i misunderstand you, but you just can't take someones stuff, that's stealing.

 strybjorn Grimskull wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
What if we'd rather just have their stuff too?

I understand that you'r probebly not speaking to me, and double apologies if i misunderstand you, but you just can't take someones stuff, that's stealing.

But if the government sanctions it... then it's legal!

 strybjorn Grimskull wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
What if we'd rather just have their stuff too?

I understand that you'r probebly not speaking to me, and double apologies if i misunderstand you, but you just can't take someones stuff, that's stealing.

But what if I really really wants it for reals, and I have a flamethrower, or just a really pissed off wiener dog?

 Frazzled wrote:

 strybjorn Grimskull wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
What if we'd rather just have their stuff too?

I understand that you'r probebly not speaking to me, and double apologies if i misunderstand you, but you just can't take someones stuff, that's stealing.

But what if I really really wants it for reals, and I have a flamethrower, or just a really pissed off wiener dog?

I suggest you call them a pariah first frazzled that way less people will care.

 strybjorn Grimskull wrote:

 Frazzled wrote:
What if we'd rather just have their stuff too?

I understand that you'r probebly not speaking to me, and double apologies if i misunderstand you, but you just can't take someones stuff, that's stealing.

Or you buy it! Capitalism!