Why Socialism (and Communism) Fails and why our society is being destroyed

Its still socialism and its still going to provide you with less food and less enjoyment and less free time than capitalism.

WHY DOES EVERYONE HATE CAPITALISM

ARE YOU ALL FREAKING INSANE?

Are you?
Are you?


These are the 10 planks of communism, as per the communism manifesto:
1. Abolition of private property and the 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. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communications and transportation 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 labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of population over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children's factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.


You sick commie bastards have destroyed our first world countries. Now we rot in economic decay. Your insane ignorance to economic reality has lead to you to forfeit your own children's future. I hope you're fucking happy.

 

I'm amazed you advocate communism if you consider yourself so well educated my stupid friend.

I suppose you think private property is invalid and that the means of production should be transfered to the state so that the labourers can get the full value for their labour?

Explain your position and I'll explain why you are wrong. We'll see exactly who is ignorant.

 

Ok, how are they transfered to the workers? Who facilitates this transaction? Do the workers just 'seize control' of the factories? What would stop the new owners just resuming production as before? What would stop the factories going bankrupt and ceasing production?

Send me a link to your original posts. I am yet to see them.

Haha. My gosh, what country did you grow up in. School doesn't teach politics, not in Australia at least. Hell it doesn't even teach spelling. I went to a socialist public school, and I learned most everything I know on my own, outside of school hours, reading books.

I think you are probably the one who is ignorant to the scope and detail of your own political position. You may have adopted some flavour of socialism which you believe is modern communism, but you don't understand the roots or details of the economic theory. Thus you are confused when I talk about the goals of communism.

 

Ok here we go. Luckily I am reading a book by the orginial Austrian economist - Ludwig von Mises, at this very moment entitled "Socialism - An economic and sociological analysis."

So you're a socialist and not a Marxist.

Well the socialization of industry amounts to the same thing as your more strict academic definition of socialism. If the government owns the entire industry then the means of production are public... are they not? The public industries run at a loss and its workers are paid more than the value which they produce.

You are forced to work as a wage slave because you pay a heavy progressive income tax which prevents you from saving enough money to start your own business. Your own socialistic policies which require such a huge tax have lead you to a dead end in which you are forced to work for existing companies because you are chained to the state!

In a free market every man is free to start his own business. Because of this skilled labour is in high demand all the time. Thus there is competition between businesses to get the most skilled labourers to do their work for their business, and thus wages and working conditions rise as each company competes to offer better incentives to work for them.

The poverty traps of which you speak are not a result of capitalism, but of socialism, which we are already in. Australians pay about 70% tax. How is anyone ever to get a leg up when they can't save enough to pay off their house, let alone start a business. The poor stay poor precisely because it isn't capitalism.

You all want to redistribute wealth. You advocate that the labourers own the means of production. This is everyone owning everything, is it not? Everything except consumer once-off goods. Land is a means of production. Cars are a means of production. Factories are a means of production.

Marxism and socialism are different things. Perhaps you don't understand this. You are offering a criticism of my statement of what communism is, while assuming it is socialism. Pretty silly.

Again, you are talking about socialism and not Marxism, to which I was referring. But regardless you are wrong in assuming this would work.

For the workers to seize control of the means of production would result in a severe decrease in wages and standard of living. It is only through capitalism that goods become progressively cheaper and easier to mass manufacture. The entrepreneur, the capitalist, the management, and the skilled labourer unite to supply demand that exists on the free market. Where there is no demand the enterprise will fold (go bankrupt) freeing up land, resources, labour, management, and capital for another enterprise.

To advocate that the labourers should steal the means of production (provided by the capital and invented by the entrepreneur) is to advocate the abolition of capital and entrepreneurs in the market. You would quickly discover that no one was building new factories or inventing new products. And when machines broke, they would stay broken, and the manufacture process would become less and less efficient until the means of production was nothing more than the hands of those who produced.

They are only divergent from the achievement model because the society we live in is socialistic and not capitalistic. Those who would otherwise achieve great things in the market are unable to due to government intervention, labour laws, zoning laws and taxation.

It is socialism which has put you in this position to begin with, and your solution to the problem of socialism is more socialism?

No, SOCIALISM rejects the majority of people's ability to contribute to the ownership of land, factories etc. Only capitalism supports the free market, the exchange of securities (like stocks and bonds) and the ability to purchase private property and use it to one's own ends.

You don't even know what capitalism is, do you? You think what we currently have is capitalism? Check the 10 planks of communism. The first world is living in a marxist-socialist mercantilist totalitarian society. No one can do what they need or want to do, because the government stands in the way at every turn.

Read it.

Once again you fail to understand that what I was describing was Marxism, which is different in ideology to socialism.

Modern context indeed.

You'll never succeed in your unrealistic ideal of utopian "workers seizing control" and if you do then you'll quickly discover that you needed capitalists to fund ventures, and entrepreneurs to invent ventures, and competition to lower prices and raise wages.

The socialist model is a perversion of economic theory. You assume it would work but you assume, unknowingly, that the economy would still be capitalistic. You do not realize that if there could be no private property in the means of production then there could be no prices for property of the means of production.

If you need a generator to generate power for the clothing factory down the road. How do you get a generator? Do you go down to the generator plant and pick one up? How much do you pay for it? Who do you pay? But wait... you are buying a generator... and the generator is part of the means of production and therefore cannot be privately owned. You have no way to determine what the value of the generator is, as you cannot own it, and there is no market value to associate with it.

How would new factories be built? It wouldn't be your factory, it would be the public's factory. Who would build it? How would you decide how much they are paid? but wait... again, you cannot pay them, because they are building publicly owned assets. So why would they build the new infrastructure, and not be paid, when they could operate existing machinery to create consumables which they can at least trade for food?

As you can see the concept of public ownership of the means of production is utterly absurd. There is no way to know what it costs to produce something, and there is no reason anyone would build new factories or maintain existing ones.

I've got a 500 page book of counterarguments to modern socialistic theory in front of me. If you want to take a shot at von Mises then go for your life.

 

Well hes got a point. I didn't directly address the academic theory behind socialism; only the effects we see today. I consider the socialization of industry to be socialism.

A public transport system for example; the means of production is "publicly owned" and the labourers get paid "the full value of their labour" -- usually more.

In case anyone failed to notice, government services tend to be hideously expensive to maintain (in terms of taxes) because they are hideously inefficient, because there is no competition, because people are forced to purchase the monopoly service through their taxes. They also tend to be substandard in terms of quality and quantity. Ie not enough buses, water rationing, public school standards.

 

Well I'm going to bed. If ism wants to reply he can suck it up his craphole (his mouth). I may not get back to this thread for quite some time.

 

Exactly!

Capitalism advances all social classes together because they all must unite to produce, and in doing so they actually produce new ways of producing, which were better than the ways previously known. Workers are paid more because the effort of their labour produces more. The man who can produce one car door every year through manual labour is obviously going to earn far less than the man who can produce 10 car doors every minute by operating a machine. Earnings are naturally based on the revenue of the business and the competition businesses face in acquiring skilled labourers. If there is high competition for labour (as there always is in a free market) then wages will rise while prices fall.

Further, this is not a limited economic system; it is an unlimited economic system. If capitalism were allowed to continue unchecked indefinitely things would become infinitely cheap and wages infinitely high. One year of work would support you for the rest of your life because you would produce so much with that one year that you would take the rest of your life to consume your earnings.

Theoretically when we have Artificial Intelligence capitalism will evolve to the next stage. We have been through automation, and computerization, and now we await AI.

To be opposed to capitalism is madness. To it we owe everything we enjoy, and to it we hope that in the future life will be much, much easier.