-Caveat Lector-
>>Capitalism: private ownership, supply and demand orientated economy,
private property.
>>Communism: state ownership, state economic planning, centralised political
control, single party state.
>Capitalism: A few people hold the power, make the decisions and live in
luxury. Everybody else works to support them.
>Communism: A few people hold the power, make the decisions and live in
luxury. Everybody else works to support them.
Gross oversimpilification!
>>But if you can't see the differences between the US and the USSR then I'm
stumped.
>Of course I can see the differences. They are glaring and obvious. They
are also superficial. The basic structure of both systems is the same. Both
are
hierarchies, and as such iniquitous. This fundamental similarity is just as
glaring, and ought to be just as obvious, as are the differences. If you
refuse to cease permitting the differences to blind you to the similarity,
then I
can't help you. Sorry, I tried.
And your relentless focus on an oversimplified version of the similarities
blinds you to the more significant differences. Sorry that I tried.
>>Thus far we have according to you: Capitalism=Communism=State Monopoly
Capitalism=Corporatism=Fascism =Crypto-Fascism. The only common thread
seems to be the existence of state power.
>Yup. You got it. Very good. You're not as dumb as I thought you were.
Maybe there's hope for you after all. The state is the enemy, and the people
who
run it, be they the communist party or the corporations. Either way, they
aren't us.
>>You really need to go to college to sort yourself out.
> Iwork for a living all of my life. That's all I need to know this is an
iniquitous system. College teaches the ideology of the ruling class.
Noam teaches at a university does he not? What does that make him? I
encountered heaps of Marxists in my uni days. And not one pro-capitalist...
How can you say this if you haven't been to college/uni? That's prejudiced.
>Ideology is what idiots have instead of ideas. I'd rather think for myself.
And take your queues from the anarchist ideology... Very good.
>If you doubt I can, read <http://www.sfbg.com/nessie/>
>>Prove that statistic.
>That's a WHO stat. I'm fairly skeptical of the WHO, and their ilk, for a
variety of reasons. But, they'll collecting the stats and you're not, so I'm
gonna go with them with this proviso: the real number is probably higher.
That's your bias talking.
>>Prove that "Capitalism did that to them."
>Nobody ever goes hungry for lack of food. This a bountiful planet. There's
plenty of food. They go hungry for lack of money to pay for it.
And not because of drought, floods, shoddy state distribution systems in the
communist remnants, inept economic policies in some states, localist
corruption and thievery?
>>No. I think you're intellectually bankrupt.
>How so?
>>And free speech,
>You can say pretty much anything you want. Try to actually DO something
about the status quo, and just see what happens.
How many people want to live in Nessie in an anarcho-syndicalist states of
America? Hands up? What, hardly anyone?! Oh well. Things stay the same.
>>plenty of food,
>If you have the money to pay for it.
Grow your own then.
>> the right to travel
>If you have the money to pay for it.
Walking is for free.
>>watch they wanted,
>If you have the money to pay for it.
Indeed. But most people have money so they do watch what they want. But in
DPRK and Cuba whether you have enought money or not there's only certain
things you can watch and you risk imprisonment if you watch it. Are you more
likely to be arrested for reading anarchist literature in the US or the DPRK?
Apples and Oranges, maybe, but you said both systems were the same...
>> not to vote,
>If voting could change anything, it would be against the law.
Given your revolutionary inclinations nothing would satisfy you.
>>they don't have to join any political parties if they don't want to,
>Big deal. It doesn't put food on your table or shoes on your kids' feet.
Joining the CPSU once meant that did happen.
>>multi-party elections,
>America is a one party state, the capitalist party. The Reps and the Dems
aren't even wings. Their lines are virtually identical, i.e. they're on the
side
of the bosses, the landlords, and the bankers behind them, and against tenents
and workers.
A bit of an oversimplification Nessie.
>>to own a house, car, various other goods.
>If you suffer from the delusion that you own your house stop paying your
mortgage and see who the cops side with when the bank comes to evict you.
Then don't live beyond your means....
>>>We graduate functional illiterates,
>>You didn't once.
>Irrelevant. It proves nothing about anybody except myself. Besides, that
was 1966. It's much worse now.
Education policy issue.
>>And isn't that limited to the state education system?
>Yes indeed. See, we do agree on something.
Unfortunately.
>>It's a free country. If you want to sleep under the stars it's not
illegal.
>As Voltaire so succinctly put it, "The law, in its magnificent equality
prohibits both the rich and the poor from sleeping under bridges and
begging for bread in the streets."
>Ever done it? No? Then you don't know what you're talking about, do you?
But I have Nessie. But where I was dishonest was my nationality which I offer
for your convencience below.... I believe such things are no problem in
Sweden and parts of the UK where one has tramping rights across private
property.
>>Yes, people used to wax lyrical about how brilliant the Soviet health care
system was. But some people associate the application of such measures to
the US a little too much with state interference and state planning.
>I doubt if any of them are among the forty million Americans who have no
coverage at all. Any society that allows sick people to die from lack of
money to buy medicine is a sick society. Anybody who condones it is evil.
We have state provided medical insurance here in Australia (surprise I'm not
a Yank!) for everybody. It sort of works, but it would be more effective if
they got the rich off it and provided more funds to it.
>>Now that's profound nessie.
>Yer damn tootin it is. How typical of me. Watch closely; you may learn a
thing or two.
Not in a positive sense I can asure you.
>>>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.
>>"State monopoly capitalism"? No, you won't find him saying that.
>Then don't put words in his mouth. It's dishonest. It's rude.
No I didn't. You accused me of putting those words into his mouth. In his
writings Chomsky says he supports "socialism" as realised through
anarcho-syndicalism. He also describes Communist systems as "state
capitalism".
>>But you will find him saying Communism was in fact "state capitalism" and
he supports "socialism", of the "anarcho-syndicalist" variety.
>State-capitalism, state-anything, is fundamentally and diametrically
opposed to anarcho- anything, particularly anarcho-syndicalism.
The point was Chomsky's reluctance to connect the words "state" and
"socialism" together. Better for him to damn capitalism than to dare admit
the statist variety of socialism did not work.
>>So Soviet central-planning would have been a rip-roaring success without
this apparent embargo?
>We'll never know, will we?
Oh yes you do. What about China before Deng Xiaoping's little experiment? And
weren't communist systems supposed to be self-sustaining? Actually there's
evidence that trade between communist & capitalist systems damaged the former
as capitalist inflation upset the fixed price system of the communist
economies.
>And I ask, would America be the wealthy state it is today were it not
built by slaves on stolen land?
An emotive argument. Slave-owning was actually economically unsustainable.
People who work for nothing but the bare essentials & under brutal treatment
with no chance of progress or freedom tend not to work their best unless they
are completely indoctrinated into
>>Now it's the Nazis fault.
>They killed between twenty and fifty million people and trashed the best
part of the country. If that had happened to America, where would we be today?
Probably in a lot better shape than the USSR ever was. Most of Russia was not
overrun by the Nazis. All of Germany was devastated. But even after
reunification Germany is doing better than Russia.
>>But did not the Communists in agreement with the Nazis invade Poland
together?
>Irrelevant. The Nazis laid waste to the Soviet Union. They're still
rebuilding.
The point was one of complicity.
>>And now you say it's America's fault.
>And you're saying it's not? Who then drove them to go hungry to be able to
afford to defend themselves?
I'm sorry, but if the USSR saw itself as the beacon to communist revolution
around the world and thenasty capitalist US as the greatest obstacle and
armed itself accordingly, then its the CPSU Poliburo who must shoulder the
blame. The US didn't "force" the Soviet Union to spend so much on armaments.
The US didn't force the Communist system to fail. A decision was made in
Moscow, not Washington, and the inherent weakness of the system was revealed.
>>And now you still want to believe that it could be America's fault.
>Chernobyl? We'll never know. I never suspected Stealth and a smart bomb
till the Gulf War. Then I saw on CNN buildings with holes in their roofs that
looked exactly like Chernobyl and a bell went off. I only suspect, of course,
but
consider this: if it wasn't a Stealth and a smart bomb, the US military
passed up the opportunity of a lifetime.
But as you can't prove it you must admit that the Chernobyl disaster was the
responsibility and fault of the communist system which created it. Stop
looking for Yanks under the bed.
>>>Either way it was an atrocity, and the fault of bureaucrats. It doesn't
really matter whose.
>>Now it could be anybody's fault.
>That's not what I said. I said it was bureaucrats' fault. To initiate
fission inside the biosphere is an atrocity no matter who does it.
Good try Nessie, but you still can't bring yourself to state Chernobyl
disaster was a symptom of the failures of central planning.
>>Good for him. The point is not that he should leave. I'm not saying that.
But rather that for all his anti-US rhetoric he does not find conditions in
the US so intolerable that he hasn't scooted off to Europe or some other
workers
paradise from where he can attack the US as a dissident-in-exile.
>His "rhetoric," as you call it, isn't anti US, it's anti capitalist.
No, I disagree. I've read a lot of his material. He is quick to blame the US
for every conceivable ill in the world, but strangely silent on the sins of
other countries. As an American he is as entitled as any other American to
criticise what the government does, but he can hardly be expected to be taken
seriously if he holds the US responsible for just about everything. Some of
his recent writings about East Timor, for instance, have left me puzzled by
his willingness to decrease the responsiblity of both Jakarta and Australia
from their mutual complicity in this mess of a few months ago but to play up
the US' role to the extent that if Washington had just given "orders" to
Jakarta that the "game was up" it would have all been resolved just like that.
>Capitalism sucks. Communism sucks. Anarcho-syndicalism is the way to go.
>Read <Collectives in the Spanish Revolution> by Gaston Leval. Leval was a
trained economist from France who toured the workers' (not state)
collectives of Anarchist Spain. They ranged from tiny rural gardening
collectives to
locomotive factories and the telephone exchange. He attended their meetings
and went
over their books. He found that without exception, after a few months of
adjustment, the cost of production went down, the rate of production went up,
the
quality of goods improved, and most important, the quality of life for the
workers
improved. Amazingly, this took place in the midst of a bloody war while the
Anarchists were surrounded and under blockade by the "free" world. In part
this can be attributed to not having to pay the lion's share of profits to the
boss any more. Also, worker owned, worker self managed, collectives are just
plain more efficient. We Anarchists have a saying, "If you want to know how
many
widgets to order for next month, don't ask the boss; he doesn't know. Ask
the widgeteer."
>I belong to a worker owned collective business, Bound Together Anarchist
Collective Book Store, 1369 Haight St, SF CA. We're twenty four years old
and doing just fine, thank you. We belong to a federation of such places
called the Network of Bay Area Worker Collectives, NoBAWC (pronounced
"no-boss"). The smallest has six members and the largest has over a hundred.
We're all
doing just fine without bosses, thank you.
>Then there's Mondragon, a multi-billion dollar, multi-national conglomerate
based in northern Spain, and comprised of enterprises ranging from string
of gas stations, drugstores and department stores to agriculture,
broadcasting and
manufacturing. It is owned by the workers. It is run by the workers.
They're doing just fine without bosses, too, thank you
>State owned "collectives," incidentally, are not collectives. They are
cynically misnomered slave plantations. Screw the state. It sucks on our neck.
>>>Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't realise that state ownership of everything, every
factory, store, and in fact every conceivable component of the economy, was
indistinguishable from capitalist society with all its private ownership.
>>Either way, a handful run everything and live in luxury and the rest of us
work to support them.
A massive overgeneralisation. I think there's a substantial difference
between one system where everything is supposedly publicly owned but actual
control remains in the hands of a the Party hierarchy, and another system
where there is private ownership of the means of production, and while there
is indeed a significant concentration of wealth in our system, there is more
scope for freedom because we can own things.
>>I was also unaware that Washington planned US economic output down to the
nth degree, including determining how much to produce of all product
irrespective of actual demand causing innumerable shortages.
>I didn't say that. Don't put words in my mouth. It's dishonest. It's rude.
No again Nessie. You said the systems were the same. That's what Communism is
like. If you said they were the same then surely one could anticipate that.
>>But you're obviously a lot smarter than me.
>Indeed. More honest and polite, too.
Nope. You're actually quite rude. It was you afterall who resorted to
personal attacks in your first response with your allusions to me being a
"ditto head" and "sophomoric". Charming.
>>My aren't you modest.
>I have cleverly eluded the trap of false modesty and pursued instead a
course of frank honesty. And you?
"Frank honesty" is it? Now I've heard everything!
>> Go to Cuba or North Korea buddy, and tell us all here how much like
capitalism
it is there.
>"Love it or leave it" again? How boring. How shallow.
No Nessie. You seem to want to have your cake and eat it. The point is you
might be in a better position to make your assertions on the essential
"sameness" of the two systems if you actually went to these places and looked
for yourself. Methinks that a bit of first-hand experience may make
reconsider such crude comparisons. It won't make you love capitalism, but
perhaps you will realise that there is a considerable gulf between the way
you live in the US and the way people live in DPRK and Cuba.
OK, your turn.
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