-Caveat Lector-
> The differences between capitalism (monopoly or otherwise) and communism
are profound.
Oh they are, huh? Then list these differences, please, so we can have
cogent discourse that rises above the puerile level of "love it or leave
it."
>This "state monopoloy capitalism" is the sort Orwellian wordplay which
seeks to obfuscate the real differences between capitalist economies where
consumer demand, private ownership and profit
incentives guide the economy delivering the society of plenty that most of
us live in,
To confuse "capitalism" with free enterprise is itself an "Orwellian" word
play. Without the armed might of the state to enforce their monopoly the
capitalists are nothing but a pack of cards. This is a fascist economy, by
definition. "Fascism," stated Mussolini so ever concisely, "is
corporatism."
Most of us do not live in a "society of plenty." Half of humanity is
malnourished, That means three billion people went to bed hungry last
night and couldn't do anything about it. Capitalism did that to them. Is
that what you condone? Is this how you want the rest of us to live so that
you personally can wallow in your own creature comforts? If so, sir, you
are morally bankrupt.
You're also not paying attention. Even here in America one out of five,
perhaps even one out of four, children grow up in poverty. The typical
American family needs two, or even three, jobs to break even and is only
a couple of pay checks from being out in the street. Real wages have gone
steadily downward for decades. In 1968, when I was twenty I lived on
Manhattan. I paid $80 a month for a one bedroom apartment. I made $100 a
week working twelve hour shifts in the back office of Walston & Co, 54
Wall St., a brokerage that no longer exists. My wife stayed home with my
infant son. We could afford to eat out a couple times a week. A good steak
cost two bucks. Gasoline was $.29. Try that today.
Society of plenty? Gimme a break. Business may be booming, but labor is
taking it up the butt.
This is a sick society. Paper sleeps in a palace and people sleep in the
street. In a place like that it's immoral to stand around and do nothing
about it. We have a moral duty to change things. To defend such a system
is morally remiss. In Christian terms, it is a "sin."
>and communist economies where state planning, state ownership, and state
direction, delivers shortages, sloth and apathy.
As opposed to what? In a capitalist society poverty delivers the
shortages, only the rich can indulge in "sloth" and apathy is a way of
life.
>Of course, if you think you can convince someone who has lived in a
Communist country that the material reality of their lifestyle was no
different from life in the "state monopoly capitalist" US go ahead.
Well let's see. They had free education, token rent and universal health
care. We graduate functional illiterates, pay through the nose for the
"privilege" of living indoors and forty million of us have no health care
coverage at all while the rest of us are the victims of a corrupt health
care system that has been bought and paid for by the pharmaceutical
industry.
Big deal.
The only real substantive difference between the USA Inc. system and the
USSR Inc. system is one has better pay and the other has better benefits.
In both systems a handful of ruthless villians live in luxury and the rest
of the people work to support them. Both systems corrupt the soul by
commodifying time. Time is the very stuff of life itself. To put a price
on time is to put a price on life. It makes commodities of us all. It
makes human beings, you and I included, into things to be bought and sold
an hour at a time.
>And another thing, the use of the term "state monopoly capitalist" reeks
of the sort of backsliding wordplay one even gets from my favourite
bugbear, Noam Chomsky, who in his socialist idealism, regularly redefines
the former Communist bloc as "state capitalist",
On this point, at least, Chomsky is 100% correct. Where his reasoning
fails is when he discounts the fascist crypto-coup of 1963 as a factor in
shaping American life today. But, hey, nobody's right about everything.
>thus freeing his preferred way of life
This is a gross misrepresentation on your part. I dare you to produce a
single sentence from Chomsky's work in which he says he "prefers" state
monopoly capitalism. Be sure to include the ISBN and the page number.
>from the burden of its profound & demonstrable failure
Seventy five years of embargo, a crippling invasion that destroyed the
best part of the country and killed between twenty and fifty million
people, a burdensome defence budget forced upon them for forty years by
the US, and the disaster at Chernobyl destroyed the Soviet economy. I
sincerely hope that a stunning revelation, typically fifty years late,
wont someday reveal that Chernobyl wasn't the work of a Stealth plane and
a smart bomb. If it was, it was the single most successful sortie in the
history warfare. Either way it was an atrocity, and the fault of
bureaucrats. It doesn't really matter whose.
>and further damning the demonic capitalist society of the US which,
funnily enough, he just can't
bring himself to leave....
"Love it or leave it." Now there's a cogent argument, isn't it? What are
you, a ditto-head or a sophmore?
In point of fact, Chomsky spends a great deal of time out of the country
on his seemingly endless speaking tour. It's his country, I might add,
every bit as much as it is yours or mine. He has just as much right and
just as much responsibility to stay here and reform the place as do you or
I.
>But I digress.
Indeed you do. You were going to explain the differences between working
for a boss called a commissar and working for a boss called a CEO. A boss
is a boss is a boss, I say. What say you, besides "love it or leave it"
(in so many words).
Please get back to the subject and quit with the jingoistic excuses for
the grievous faults of our system. If you are going to tell me I'm wrong
because of reasons that are "profound" and then not list the reasons,
you're not going to convince anybody whose mind is not already made up
that you are even intelligent, let alone that I'm wrong. Personally, I
recommend that you resign graciously before you make an even greater fool
of yourself. As a debater you're greatly outclassed. Besides, you are
defending an untenable position. But if you insist on continuing, at least
do our audience the common courtesy of not insulting their intelligence
with this sophmoric bandwidth waste.
OK, your turn.
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