Since this is interesting…

[Guest]

Communism is an ideal system of government…
for a community of about 200. Too many people is a major factor in the flaws of every government. It simply isn’t possible to have a good system (passable yes, even better than average, but not good) with millions of individuals to cater to. With a small community it would be possible to insure that everyone either contributed to the whole or did not undeservedly (is that a word?) benefit from the labors of the others. With larger populations it becomes impossible to monitor individuals…
oh, never mind, I could go on all day.

[HortenFlyingWing]

smaller community as in the Amish, sure. peer pressure controls a small amount of people. code and ethic cannot control 6 billion.

remember, communism is the perfect system in theory…as long as you are willing to work as much as I!

[Guest]

I agree. I was simply defending the idea of communism. It may not be practical for a country with a population in the millions, but it would be a beautiful system if it worked. Of course capitalism is not a perfect system either, again a good idea, but it does seem to work much better than communism on a large scale. I just wish that a system based on something other than greed could be made to work.

[TG Moses VI]

Question: Globalization poses major problem to communism. The globalization of economies makes a plan like the controlling of businesses by a less educated/ leaderless class difficult.

Answer: The most difficult part of this plan is keeping the working class’s standard of living equal, or higher than it was before the revolution. Without capital, and with the extreme dependency on international trade to maintain the standard of living, it will be impossible to maintain a socialist society. The Workers Pary must ITSELF generate education equal to that of the Capitalists. I see no other way of keeping the Capitalists down after the revolution than to simply do as well or better financially than they did. Without funding, The movement would stagnate do to lost support by a now poorer working class. Business would crumble as would hopes to stay in power.

The masses as a whole will certainly support anything which betters their daily lives. In order to keep their support they must believe that just that is happening. No matter who you are or what your beliefs, you know that this will take capital of some sort. Unless the new “workers nation” wishes to become isolationist, it must produce at an equal or higher rate in a very short period of time. That is why communism must first be self-sufficient and on a GLOBAL BASIS. Communism is the universal revolution.

Does socialism mean equal shares for everyone?

No. People are different and have different needs. Some needs will be more expensive (in terms of resources and labour needed to satisfy them) than others.

[HortenFlyingWing]

exactly, communism cannot exist most effectively next to capitalism. capitalism is currently working to an extent, so why change our system of living if it does long term economic damage? I would like to believe I am a realist, and the reason I oppose Communism is because it simply would not work in the real world. When it comes down to it, political systems don’t have to change, people on the whole do. Man is the problem, not the governing system he creates (most of the time.)

[Guest]

I totally agree HFW.

[TG Moses VI]

Well before Communism (or any revolutionary movement can take ground) it must be supported by the majority of the masses. It doesn’t have to be the majority movement though (the American Revolution, War 1812 were two examples of minority movements). Right now things are going pretty good, but what’s to say this movement will last forever? As we speak the upper class is consolidating more of the economies wealth and power, meaning we might be setting ourself for another depression.

[Mr Ghoul]

Communism is crap!

K, take a sales business that offers a team reward for overall sales. Everyone in the company receives a equal commission, regardless of how much each individual actually sells.

Then take a other sales company thats has individual commission based on that persons sales. The more on person sells the more commission they receive.

Which Company is going to succeed, over a extended period of time?

What Companys empolyees are motivated to sell more?

What inspires the working person most?

Communism is crap!

[HortenFlyingWing]

which business is going to rip off its customers? you see, greed is the problem, and i’m sorry i repeat that so much.

Moses, this might do nothing with communism, but i want to comment on the American Revolution and War of 1812. The American Revolution was crap, and i hate to say it, i love america, but our revolution isn’t so glorious. Americans had the highest standard of living, ate the most food, and had the lowest taxes on Earth (i guess that is because they could get free money by stealing indian land.) Rich people did not want to pay taxes, some people wanted to seize more political power, and they rallied the masses saying they weren’t being represented for a tax that paid for judges in the colonies! I wonder why things turned out the way they did, the best i can come up with is that America is endowed with much land and natural resources. Even today, America has 14% of the worlds oil production. I guess the system American revolutionaires put in place went hand and hand with capitalism, giving the americans great prosperity for their time to today. Well, the end justifies the means and this time that applies.

So if a communist revolution occurred, you could say that communism is the wanted end, but the truth is that (In My Opinion) it would only cause more problems.

now i’m just ranting! I’ll shut up now :smile:

[Mr Ghoul]

Rip off the customer???
I think your iusses lie with Human nature, not greed or Communism

[HortenFlyingWing]

yes, that is true. i have a friend that works in circuit city, and he sees people that do that. in a “communist” store, the people would be as lazy as a waitress in friendly’s.

[TG Moses VI]

Whether you like the American Revolution or not, there’s not discrediting that the Revolution was actually fought on a minority basis. A lot of Americans fled or deserted after they were defeated by the British on several occassions or just left due to the fact that they had to tend their farms.

As for capitalism providing an immediate benefit to the laborer, that’s mostly lies. If you compare real wages and working conditions during the industrial revolution, then capitalism was far worse then any existing government system. Same thing goes with communism. It won’t immediately take capitalism right away but will be accomplished in several generations.

[Guest]

Greed is part of human nature, not a seperate entity. There are other parts of human nature that are actually good, but this is really only evident in individuals. The human race as a whole is immoral, greedy, and just plain mean.
I’ve seen so many examples of customers being screwed over in many different types of business. And it is the people who have no problem with screwing them over who usually get ahead. I’ve also seen some decent people have some success but more of the former.

[TG Moses VI]

Q: Aren’t people greedy by nature?

A: No. For example, in capitalist countries, little children quickly learn to share and cooperate, but they are later taught to take more than they need to compete viciously in “the real world.”

An alternate view has also emerged, both from religious and secular sources. For the former it holds that having original sin doesn’t mean we are all base or lowly, only that we are capable of going bad, of getting corrupted. Young ones aren’t evil but they can become such, as well as good – it is a matter of our God-given free will. St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas taught roughly this idea, as did Aristotle in ancient Greece.

For the secularists it is a similar story: we are born innocent enough, by no means inclined toward evil or good, but as we grow up our choices can guide us toward one or the other, more or less. It is up to us but we aren’t hard wired either way.

[Yanny]

Let me just say something… There is no such thing as Evil or Good, its all perspective.

[Guest]

I’ve seen plenty of children willing to share. Many of them after being asked by a parent “what did I tell you about sharing?” People are not automatically going to share barring an outside influence, both sharing and hoarding are learned behaviors. The fact that a human baby cannot live without assistance means that they are influenced by those that care for them. So how can it be proven that humans will by nature be generous, giving, and generally what we would call good? Besides that I was refering to human nature as an average if it is easier we can refer to it as the nature of society.
I don’t believe that children in capitalist countries would be any more inclined to learn at an early age to share and cooperate than any others. At least not on their own. Perhaps in some situations they are more likely to be taught to share than others, but I have a hard time believing that we as capitalists are that much better than any other classification of people.

[ This Message was edited by: Tal on 2002-04-05 19:42 ]

[TG Moses VI]

Well that’s the problem. We’re all born in capitalistic societies. Heck we all know that communism has never existing in this world. Nowhere. Communism, in the scientific sense of a classless society, that has no being with the USSR or China. And socialism has only existed in the Paris Commune of 1871 or the early period of the 1917 revolution in Russia.

As for the story of right and wrong. I agree. People from different cultures believe in different moral and ethical values. However we all agree that there are such things as absolute truths?

[bossk]

ha, absolute truths! I think that’s perposterous. To quote a very wise man from a groovy film, “many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of veiw.” I think this can be applied to just about everything, including so called absolute truths. We each veiw the world through the filters of our various experiences, simply because many people have had similar experiences, relatively speaking, doesn’t make any sort of truth existant.

[TG Moses VI]

So in your opinion it is all right for another culture to enjoy to throwing babbies up in the air and then catching them with bayonets?

I think if you buy into the whole relativism ideals then you would be forced to accept the German defense for the War Crimes committed during WWII. For instance let me give you an example:

During the prosecutions of German doctors involved in the death of millions of Jews and other ethnic races, one of the main defences was cultural relativism.

As impossible as it might seem, the Holocaust and the final solution were legal. According to Browder, this mass murder of millions was sanctioned by the government under Hitler’s rule. However, when the Allies broke the Nazi regime, they declared that there was a higher law: to murder, to maim, and to torture is criminal under all modern systems of law (an absolute truth?).
These defendants did not kill in hot blood, nor for personal enrichment. Some of them may be sadists who killed and tortured for sport, but they are not all perverts. They are not ignorant men. Most of them are trained physicians and some of them are distinguished scientists. Yet these defendants, all of whom were fully able to comprehend the nature of their acts, and most of whom were exceptionally qualified to form a moral and professional judgment in this respect, are responsible for wholesale murder and unspeakably cruel tortures.

The Nuremberg trials set an international precedent: War criminals, such as Hermann Goering and Rudolf Hess, were held accountable for crimes against humanity. Now do you refute or agree with his arguement?

[bossk]

I admit that there are certain things that we as humans that were raised under relatively similar circumstances consider right. This is not to say that all things that people tend to consider right are. Humans have developed in such a way that we have morals and most of them are fairly similar; there is a differance between what seem to be basic human morals and absolute truth.